Issue 12

A CAPPELLA ZOO ISSUE 12 路 SPRING 2014 EDITOR Colin Meldrum POETRY EDITOR Lisa McCool-Grime ASSISTANT EDITOR Andrew Henderson

READERS Jonathan Bruns Charlene Logan Burnett Zach Buscher Adam Charpentier Sonia Christensen Amanda Lyn DiSanto Emily J. Lawrence Micah Unice

A cappella Zoo (ISSN: 1945-7480): an independent publication of magic realism and slipstream stories. Founded in 2008. Published semiannually in spring and fall.

Support A cappella Zoo and its contributors by sharing your favorite works with friends and colleagues. Enjoy.

Copyright 漏 2014 All rights retained by authors/artists of respective works.

Cover art by ERICK LAUBACH: Lil Wayne, acrylic on wood.

Turtle dragon logo by ANNA BRON. APOSPECIMEN AWARD WINNERS Selected as especially noteworthy contributions to this issue: Fiction: Phantoms, KATE VELGUTH Poetry: Eohippus in the White Cube, MEGAN BOATRIGHT www.acappellazoo.com

I don’t know if they care whether or not they’re used.

Since they vanish afterwards, I like to think so.

—Portals

Whenever you pass through a doorway, a tree pops out from your body.

—Threshold

Almost constantly, the head feels as though he has a body.

—Phantoms

The first whispering came through the pipes, hidden in the water.

—Wants and Hungers

“Here.” Ramona tapped her bared forearm with a dessert fork.

“Stab me here.” This by way of making a point.

—Automata

We are not liable for this. Grooming itself under a pure art light.

—Eohippus in the White Cube

my teacher kept a house of plastic dolls that held a lamb’s brain floating in a jar —Childhood Offering

Last night I imagined my eyes fell from their sockets

like acorns from an oak.

—A Reason to Bend

FICTION

4

Wants and Hungers JASON R. POOLE

10

Phantoms KATE VELGUTH

16

POETRY

The Rabbit Feast

Eohippus in the White Cube

LESLEE RENE WRIGHT

23

Holy Flesh

Considering Various Shades of Red

LOUISE FABIANI

27

22

MEGAN BOATRIGHT

26

C.J. OPPERTHAUSER

Bears AMANDA LYELL

29

Candy AMANDA LYELL

32

Captain Barks JEFFREY DAVID GREENE

48

Paquita’s Gumballs HANK KIRTON

Snow

31

AMANDA LYELL

The Plasticity of Fred Schmidt

45

KATHERINE SWETT

From Our Staircase We Welcomed the Miracle

51

BENJAMIN GOLDBERG

52

Automata ERIC SCHALLER

67

A Reason to Bend KATIE BICKELL

Threshold

66

SARA BACKER

Why I Check on You Before You Fall Asleep

70

CHRISTOPHER MORGAN

71

Zoomorphism, or the Fur Hat IVY GOODMAN

75

The Fox Girl Revival JAN STINCHCOMB

85

The Minotaur RUSSELL BRADBURY-CARLIN

Childhood Offering Love Lesson #2014 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer LISA CHEBY

93

Portals TAMARA WALKER

84

JUSTIN ROBINSON

91

Wants and Hungers JASON R. POOLE

T

he first whispering came through the pipes, hidden in the water. The early words were subtle, spoken in the same shuddering copper groans any older house generates, and so slipped past. Papa was without work, and we spent most days laboring outdoors, doing what we could to squeeze a living from a dried up town. It was high summer, days when the sun lingered over our shoulders and felt like something we carried. This provided access. Cold water brought it to our throats, where it collected sway. Cunning of it, to approach in such a season of need. I think it knew our thirst, and wanted to feel welcomed.

It whispered, and deeply we drank.

Once soaked through, we received proper introductions. We were brought still when it rose in us, and our voices came only in little exhalations, words that died and fell away before born to the air. Delicate cracks of breath pushed by impatient lungs. We caught one another with mouths poised, but only those abortive clicks issuing forth, feeling stories well up in our eyes. I remember looking at my brother Oscar, the treeclimber who never walked where he could run, when he was momentarily frozen by the urge to speak. I could swear something else lived behind his eyes while the words stalled.

The moment would pass, and he would say, “Rogelio, there was something to tell you, but I can’t remember…”

It was our ancient abuelita who first arrived at understanding. She was born into a time when the world itself was still and quiet, and therefore knew these qualities. She heard in our silences something under, and would search our eyes for the thing-not-being-said. Like a gathering bee she would go from me to Oscar to Papa to lonely Aunt Ines, who never married or started a family of her own; wherever among the four of us the wordless gaze struck, she was there, learning its alphabet.

As her comprehension grew, she tried to educate us. “Here,” she would say, pulling me to her, “Do you see? In your father’s eyes?” I would squint and search the glistening sclera for what she saw, trace the winding of capillaries for the calligraphy she read. For me, the quiet was not as articulate. Sometimes in the pupil I thought I saw something, maybe.

Something that breached shallow and sunk again and left me wondering if a bird had flown past the window behind us, briefly interrupting the light.

I didn’t hear its full voice until her method changed. She had been sitting on the swing all morning, waving to everyone who walked by and

4

collecting yesterday’s gossip from those who paused at the yard’s edge. I had been rendered speechless while crossing the doorway to the front porch.

When she saw I was locked in the gaze she came over in her small way, pulled my head down with a soft hand on the back of my neck until our faces were level and her eyes filled my vision. In a voice confidential she said, “I see you.”

I stared into those rheumy eyes, jaw fixed, throat wavering on the edge of a sheer drop into a sea of words, and for the first time, I heard.

Very good, it said.

It had the voice of a finger running along the fine hairs of my skin. I felt the blood in my body rush away from the place in my mind where the words had bloomed, the way rain puddles would scatter when Oscar jumped into them with both feet.

I searched my abuelita for confirmation that she had heard, too. I saw the wrinkles gather around her moon-like cheeks in a complicit and selfsatisfied smile.

“Finally, you hear?” she asked, raising the wiry grays of an eyebrow.

I tried to answer, but all I managed was a moan, low in the throat.

She laughed to herself and nodded. “You hear.”

Oscar was next. His fear was violent and honest. I held him down until his little body tired of bucking and clawing. He cried his eyes dry, and when we brought him cool water to soothe his throat, he heard it singing in the glass.

When Papa heard it he cast an uneasy glance at our abuelita who made a reassuring gesture with the palm of her hand. He grunted in acceptance and mild curiosity before returning to his search of the local paper for work.

Aunt Ines made the sign of the cross and said that it was the Holy Ghost, and we were a family of saints destined not to die, but to be taken up into the Kingdom by the loving arms of the Lord himself, and people would light candles in our names, even the Sandovals, who always looked down their noses at our hand-me-down church clothes. I asked our abuelita what she thought it was. She just said, “Something old.”

After the first time, it was easy to hear. Its call populated the hush of our house. It spoke to us from everywhere, in the creak of the steps and floorboards, in the old spring of the screen door, in the hum of the electricity. In the dark, all the noises that Father used to pronounce as “the house settling” were revealed as voice, always speaking.

It told stories. Hundreds of them. Stories about the earth, the epochs, the cataclysms and upheavals. There were stories about animals: the heroic coyote guiding its pack to safety during the wildfire, the lovesick scorpions, the boastful gull, and of course, the desert fox who led an insurrection against the Rattlesnake King who lived in the trunk of the last real tree to grow in our corner of the world.

There were stories of people, too. People older than the habit of assigning names. The Man Who Lived Under a Rock. The Woman Who

Jason R. Poole | 5

Could Fly When the Moon Was Full. The Boy Who Was a Girl and Then a Three-Eyed Toad. The tales were in the very air we breathed. We were inundated and found ourselves happy to float in its stream of secret histories.

Over time, the moments of paralysis ceased and the fear went away.

Even for Oscar. It somehow became normal, just another presence in the house. I guess that’s the thing about repetition. We adapted, and easily.

We’d been living with it for so long already.

It began to ask a question after each story. Always the same question: What is most wanted? It became a punctuation, a measurement of the intervals of our intoxication. We lived with that question regular in our thoughts like a heartbeat. Even in sleep, we were asked in our dreams, What is most wanted? It lulled, like the clack of railroad underneath as we stared out our window like good passengers, placidly waiting to arrive wherever it was taking us.

Our abuelita came to us one morning, emerging from the cellar in as much a hurry as she could manage.

“Something has changed,” she said. She pointed to the open cellar door.

We followed her into the cool underground air, where the smell of exposed earth under our feet dominated. The only light in the cellar came from a bare overhead bulb and a handful of homemade candles trembling on the family altar. Photographs of our dearly departed stared out over the candleglow, our sweet, sickly mother and our abuelita’s husband, who had died in a war no longer spoken of. As a child, I had been afraid of spending any time down there: the change in the air, the sight of our mother’s face in the dim, flickering light, the sound of our abuelita’s weathered voice delivering up the old prayers. Despite the things I was now willing to live with, it remained an uncomfortable space. I kept my eyes from falling on the altar, and focused on our abuelita, who gestured for us to listen.

It was there, of course, as it was everywhere. But the stories were replaced by commands. Bring diggers of earth. Bring walkers of four and crawlers of belly. Uncover. What is most wanted?

As long as we listened, it repeated. What is most wanted? There was no discussion. We just turned around, went up the steps, and left the house, searching for any animal that might scratch and claw and nose at the ground in our cellar. Oscar returned first with one of the neighbor’s dogs, one we knew. It would often run alongside us when we played football in the street.

Oscar carried it in a bear hug, hind legs dangling and tail thumping a patient wag. He set it down at the top of the steps and when it looked into the cellar its ears went back. It didn’t want to cross over, so Oscar nudged it with his foot. Our abuelita closed the door behind it, and we heard a few whimpers before the sound of loose dirt hitting the wall told us it also had understanding.

6 | Wants and Hungers

Aunt Ines came back with a couple of rabbits, Papa with a skinny squirrel, and I had a box of feed mice from the man down the street who kept a python. He parted with them in trade for my jacket, wanting to know what kind of snake I’d got. “I’m not really sure,” I told him, “Never seen one like it before.” We set these creatures loose at the top of the stairs, and the sound of their work grew. We weren’t sure if they were enough, so we listened to the hum of the refrigerator.

Bring diggers of earth, it said.

In and out of the house we went, each time with a new animal in tow, like we were building some kind of sad ark that would save any ragged collection of beasts, two by two or not. We added neighborhood strays, rodents of all shapes and sizes, a slow-moving bird or two, lizards from the back patio (which our abuelita had an unsurpassed skill for snatching up), a fox and two raccoons that our father brought back in official-looking cages which he told us not to ask about, and, after dark, the python from down the street, which took both Oscar and I to carry. We kept gathering. Because it insisted. Because there was some nebulous want driving us to do so. We added and added, until it seemed that the animals should be spilling from the cellar and into the rest of the house. We expected to hear violence, so many sworn enemies trapped down there together, but all we heard was the earth moving.

And then we didn’t.

When the floorboards began to tell again of The Man Who Swallowed the Firstborn Stars we abandoned our hunt and went cautiously down the cellar steps. Gaping darker than any dark I’ve known was a hole, a chasm, encompassing most of what had been the cellar floor. None of the animals were in sight. We crept close to the edge, tried to see through the black mouth of the thing, listening for a burrowing zoo beneath our feet. But there was nothing. Papa walked around the hole and picked up a candle from the altar, which he let fall into the pit. It gave up its flame the second it was swallowed, and we never did hear it land.

“What now?” Oscar asked.

“We’re going to need wood. And a lot of rope,” Papa said.

We had the contraption built in a few hours. A simple pulley and frame, like you’d see over any well, built from pieces we’d scavenged and torn from elsewhere in the house, as well as an axle we stripped from the derelict truck our next-door neighbors kept in the back yard. Aunt Ines took all our savings to the hardware store and returned with four hundred feet of rope.

The old stories accompanied our work, broken into intervals by the question. What is most wanted?

Papa tested the strength of our structure by hanging with his full weight over the hole. Satisfied, he motioned for me to tie the rope around myself.

Our abuelita snatched it away before I was able.

“The first to hear…is the first to see,” she said. Papa tried to protest, but she shushed him with a crooked finger to his lips, just as she probably

Jason R. Poole | 7

had when he was Oscar’s age. She tied the rope around her waist and went to the altar. She picked up the photograph of her long-dead husband, wiping away the bits of dirt kicked up by the making of the hole, and pressed her lips to the frame before clutching it to her chest. Papa motioned for Oscar and me to take up the rope behind him. Our abuelita sat down on the edge of the hole, and scooted off. Aunt Ines held out a flashlight to take down, but it was refused. “Tug once when you are ready to come up,” Papa said.

We began to lower her, foot by foot. She was light, but after half the rope’s length, my arms grew sore. The hole was impossibly deep. Endless.

Hand over hand we fed her into the earth, two hundred and fifty, three hundred feet. We went until Oscar called from behind that he was out of rope.

Then we felt the line go taut.

When we pulled, the weight was different, sickeningly light. We pulled fast, until the other end of the rope leapt into sight. It wasn’t cut or broken.

Perfectly good, except that it no longer held our abuelita. Aunt Ines began to weep. Oscar went to the edge on his knees and called down for her. I looked at Papa, whose wet eyes were on the altar, where his father’s photograph had been.

“What she wanted most,” he said.

The lines go around the corner now. It seems like the entire town is outside, waiting to get in. At first, we only had a few people a day, drunks that Papa was able to lure with wagers. But Aunt Ines planted the seeds of gossip among the churchwomen at Mass, telling them that we had a God-given miracle, right under our humble roof. They came out with their families, partially curious, partially hungry for something to ridicule. It grew the way any small business does, by word of mouth.

We made a sign. Hand-painted letters that read: What is most wanted?

Desires made real! Five dollars admission.

Papa grins with new teeth while he counts the money. Aunt Ines studies the men in line, as though something she’d lost was to be found in their faces. Oscar brings the patrons cold water from the sink, and entertains them with stories to distract them from the heat. They praise his skill as being beyond his years. I stand by the hole, greeting people as they come down the cellar steps, with their hats in their hands or making the sign of the cross. I slip the harness onto them, adjust it to their dimensions, and tell them to tug the line once when they are ready to come up. I knock the lever of the winch we bought into the position that will lower them, with a mechanical whine, into the black mouth.

Some don’t return, others do. Those that do don’t speak. At least, not to me, frozen as they are, throats clicking. But they must tell others when they leave, because the line is longer every day. The look on their faces when they emerge…like something has come into view in the distance and they are watching it grow as it moves toward them.

8 | Wants and Hungers

At first it bothered me, knowing that mine could be the last earthly face they saw. But whenever I complained to Papa, he paused from arranging the paper bills into neat stacks and laid his hands on my shoulders, telling me whatever happened when they went down there was up to them, that it must be the desires carried in their hearts that determine their fates, and it wasn’t for us to feel one way or another about, who were we to question it, we should just be thankful for this opportunity, imagine if it had come to some other family too ignorant to hear in the first place.

Eventually I stopped complaining.

Even with the winch every customer is slow progress. I mostly occupy myself thinking about what it is I want most. I can dream up an endless line of wants, from food to fame, but can never name just one thing, and it scares me because I start to wonder if I’m nothing but wants. And that question keeps coming back around, so insistent.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re getting it wrong. Maybe it has never asked what we want most, but instead is asking if we know what it wants most. These thoughts are always shaken from me by an involuntary tremor, and I return to my duties.

Oscar likes to call it the ghost system, because of the way that it seems like a part of the house, built in like the wiring and plumbing. To me it feels like something else, something even more familiar that’s been calling from underfoot since before the house ever stood. To me it feels like a hunger, with us always. I think maybe from hunger comes all want, cascading down from heights of greed and lust to the gentle tugging of shop windows and magazines, and it will tell us anything we want to hear, as long as we keep listening.

And feeding.

Hunger, the first lesson learned. Hunger the Mother, the Father, Holy Ghost. Hunger the loving hand at our backs pushing us from one day to the next until we are no longer strong enough to answer. Maybe that’s all there is out there. Maybe it’s an engine that keeps going, and when we die, maybe even then we don’t stop wanting.

Jason R. Poole | 9

Phantoms KATE VELGUTH

A

lmost constantly, the head feels as though he has a body. His knees ache. His feet cramp. An itch tickles the back of one hand. The head likes these sensations, sometimes, his brain firing neurons with information about body parts that are no longer there. He closes his eyes and feels every part of himself beneath him, an invisible body from his neck to the soles of his feet. He hates to open his eyes: it is the same loss over again, every time.

The head has not told the woman about this. He does not want to make this real by saying it, this thing he does, this wanting more.

The shaving cream smells of orange soap, orange soap and cinnamon. The scent fills the kitchen every morning, along with the summer light that makes every one of the head’s hairs glow golden like wire.

In the mornings before she goes to work at the grocery store the woman shaves the head’s face. She sits on a kitchen chair, the head cradled on her lap. He drips blood into a plastic bag the woman lays over her legs. Neither speaks at this time; the scrape of the razor is the only sound. The woman tilts the razor at an angle to shave the head’s upper lip. A frothy dollop of shaving cream slides down his cheek and onto her pant leg. The head winces as the razor nicks his chin. A sense of profound powerlessness washes over him. He is entirely at the woman’s mercy. Perhaps this is why they have always been careful with each other. There could be comfort, familiarity, if their power was equal. As it is, the woman could leave him in a gutter. She could throw him, hard, against the wall. She could feed him to another tenant’s dog. She does not want to do any of these things but the possibility is there and it hangs over them. Lucky she loves him. Lucky.

Lucky.

I’m sorry, says the woman, wiping away the spot of dark blood with the tip of her finger.

It’s okay, says the head.

The head could not leave the woman if he wanted to. This scares him. The woman could not leave the head if she wanted to. This scares her. The two of them are tied together by mutual dependence, by obligation and physical inability. And love. Perhaps love.

The woman loves the head because he is the only constant in her life.

Every night when she comes home from class or from the grocery store he is there, exactly where he was when she left.

10 | APOSPECIMEN AWARD FOR FICTION

The head loves the woman because she is the only inconstant in his life.

All day he sits, able only to look at one page of a book or one view of the road. Cars rush by as they always rush by, but the unpredictability of the woman is infatuating. He loves her mannerisms, the way she flicks her hair when her bangs get too long, their little daily rituals.

The woman pauses for a moment and pulls her right arm across her chest, stretching. She likes the way her shoulders ache after shelving box after heavy box. This time it is soda, and the cans all face the same way in neat satisfying rows. They glint dully under the fluorescent lights. The woman stretches her left arm. She has beautiful shoulders.

The woman’s supervisor walks over. Hi, the supervisor says. In five minutes Jackson’s taking his break and you’ll be at the register.

Okay, says the woman. She waves a hand in front of her face. A few bluish flies buzz in lazy avoidance.

All these goddamn flies, the supervisor says. It’s getting to be a real problem. We’ll have to set up those sticky traps. The supervisor plucks a fly out of the air. He puts it in his mouth and chews slowly for a moment, savoring the texture of its ricepaper wings.

Any plans for tomorrow? asks the supervisor, swallowing.

Tomorrow?

Thanksgiving.

Oh. No. Not really.

Well, enjoy, says the supervisor. Now: cash register.

The woman works the cash register for the last two hours of her shift.

She’s older than most of the other staff. Probably some of them go to the community college. They might even be her classmates. The woman’s mind wanders as she scans each customer’s purchases. She likes to look at what people are buying, as though this says something about them. Toilet paper, sliced turkey, strawberry-flavored toothpaste. The woman thinks of her first attempt at college, wonders whether she regrets dropping out. Currently, the woman is studying accounting. She has a natural aptitude for it and finds the cash register’s automatic maths insulting on some level.

The woman finds herself staring at other men’s bodies. Not sexually, but amazed by the thereness of them. Mobile fleshy pendulums below their heads and necks. She has lain awake at night, looking in wonder at the thing that is a hand, a hip, a knee, a toe.

A man holding a baby with a quivering stalklike neck. A woman with yellow half-circles under her arms. A man with his sweatshirt hood pulled up so that the woman cannot see his face, if indeed he has one. She is afraid of this looking. She’s afraid it’s shallow of her; she’s afraid of wanting more than she has.

The woman fits her key into the door of the apartment building. The stairs are covered in stiff loops of carpeting and as the woman goes up them she

Kate Velguth | 11

glances out of the window on each landing. They all look out onto the fire escape, an elegant rusting skeleton.

The door closes with a click behind her. The woman takes off her shoes, tosses them out of the way.

Hello, she calls as she goes into the kitchen.

Hello, the head calls back. How was your day?

The usual, says the woman, not because it was but because she is tired and does not feel like talking.

She lifts the head off of the wide soap ledge at the back of the kitchen sink overlooking the window and turns him to face her. She kisses him gently. His lips are rubbery. Happy Thanksgiving, she says. I’m going to cook for us tonight. The head smiles.

The head does not need to eat but likes to, for old times’ sake. He is not certain what old times he is referring to when he thinks the phrase, but deep inside him he is certain that at one point eating was a regular part of his life.

Which means he must have had a body once. Which means he has lost something.

Most days, the woman makes food only for herself. She does not like to cook and microwaves most of her meals. Occasionally, however, she cooks for the two of them. These are the head’s favorite days because when they eat together it feels as though they are sharing something. The head would ask the woman to feed him more often but he doesn’t want to feel like a burden.

The turkey comes out blackened on the outside and squishy and raw on the inside. The woman throws it out and arranges the surviving parts of the meal on plates. Clusters of mushrooms, buttery stalks of asparagus. Liquid leeches out of the red dollop of cranberry sauce and tints the edge of the mashed potatoes pink.

When the meal is ready the woman flicks off the light switch and lights a few candles. Their flames flicker blue and beautiful over the table. The woman sets down the two food-laden plates, and a third with the head on it next to them. This is because there is nowhere for the food to go but out the base of the head’s neck. The woman spears a stalk of asparagus, dips it in the yellowish pool of butter, and feeds it to the head. On the plate, in the candlelight, the head looks like some sort of offering. He shuts his eyes, savoring the food.

The mushrooms are sour and the asparagus makes the woman think of shriveled fingers. The mashed potatoes, though, are heavenly. The woman and the head talk and laugh and eat clouds until they are gasping. The woman feeds the head another mouthful and tries not to look at the grey drippings on the plate on which he sits.

The next day at the grocery store, the woman shelves again. Produce, next to the meat counter. She arranges big leafy handfuls of cilantro as the supervisor looks on from behind the counter. It is a small grocery store, the

12 | Phantoms

kind in which the supervisor is also the owner is also the butcher. The woman’s fingers are damp with vegetable juice, and the air is permeated with a carroty scent.

A mother with a toddler in a stroller steps up to the meat counter. She orders a cut of ham and the supervisor slices it and puts it in butcher paper for her. He wraps twine around it, over and over and over again. The tight webbing of the twine cuts into the meat. As he ties the ends into a knot he stares at the toddler in the stroller and smiles.

The mother thanks the supervisor and turns to look at cereal, leaving the stroller at the end of the aisle. The little girl inside stares around with milky brown eyes. The supervisor steps around the meat counter. He leans over the toddler, his sluglike lips peeling back as he coos to her. He tickles the toddler and she is not laughing. The woman tries not to look. She forces herself not to think of all the times the supervisor has touched her, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. She reminds herself of how badly she needs this job. As the supervisor’s spidery hands brush over the buds of the toddler’s undeveloped breasts the woman’s mind is screaming in her head but her body is frozen. In the few seconds before the toddler’s mother turns back around, cereal in hand, the supervisor steps back behind the meat counter. The woman looks away and buries her hands in a box of packaged lettuce.

Most often the head used to spend his days on the soap ledge at the back of the kitchen sink, looking out over the street far below. He used to count the cars that went by. The blue one day, the green the next. He memorized the way the light flashed off of their beetle-bodies, and how the sun burned its daily track across the sky. The head tried not to watch the people on the sidewalks.

The head is superstitious. He is not certain whether this neurosis came from long hours spent alone and still, counting cars and the veins in houseplant leaves or whether this has always been part of his personality.

The head likes even numbers. Multiples of four are best. He could not have said why they were safe, the sets of two-times-two and two-plus-two. Once when the woman was at work the head felt a great fear come over him. The cars ticking by below were blurred smears and the air was thick and hot.

The head was afraid that the woman would not come back, that he would sit on the soap ledge for the rest of his lifetime. Though he had no need to breathe he took heavy gulps of air, his mouth working like a fish’s. He counted the cars on the street below and when he reached 444 he shut his eyes tightly. Blue veins stood out from his temples, and if he had had fingers he would have crossed them.

Lately the head has asked the woman to put him in a box during the day. The box used to hold a set of pots and pans, and still carries in its cardboard a little of their metallic scent. There is a slick of blood at the bottom of the box. The head does not know why he perpetually bleeds,

Kate Velguth | 13

wonders how there can be any blood left in him. No matter. Some things will not be known. The head is okay with that. He accepts it. He likes being in the box because in it he thinks of nothing. There are only the close brown walls and the smell of metal and the warm wetness beneath him. There is darkness, darkness such that there is no difference with his eyes closed.

Coming out of the cardboard box is like a rebirth.

Well, said the woman, swinging her bag on to the counter. Well. Then she remembers that the head is in the box today and she gets it from the bedroom and brings it into the kitchen and lifts him out. Hello, says the woman.

Hello, says the head. Bad day?

Bad day, says the woman. She’s shaking. I don’t want to talk about it, she says.

Okay, says the head.

That night the woman makes dinner for both of them. Microwave noodles.

She adds too much salt by mistake but they taste good anyway. She and the head laugh when she spills while feeding him, noodles trailing down his chin. They kiss, and the head’s lips are warm and familiar.

After dinner the woman and the head sit on the fire escape. The woman had put a pot of some viny plant on the landing when she first moved in, and now the pot is overgrown. Tendrils twine up the ribbing of the stairs and drip off the edge. The woman and the head watch as the sky turns to darkness, then as the stars prick out like so many opening eyes. Something streaks downwards in the blackness, a little dying scrap of sky.

Make a wish, says the woman.

What?

You know, like when you were a kid. The woman nods at the skyless place, the place where something has been ripped away and now there is only blackness. Make a wish on something dying, she said. Never wish on something real. You remember.

I do, said the head. Of course I remember.

Well? She runs her finger down the back of his ear.

You know what I wish for.

I know. I know. The woman rests her hand on top of the head, amidst the curls of his hair, because she means to be comforting and it is the only thing she can think of to do.

The head looks up at the sky.

The sex is one-sided. The woman holds the head between her legs. He’s heavy and drips of dark blood sprinkle the carpeting. The head’s tongue flickers in and out of his mouth. His stubble scratches against the insides of her thighs.

14 | Phantoms

At his request, the woman lays the head next to her in bed, the covers pulled up to his chin, as though he has a body under the blankets, as though a day goes by when he isn’t aware of the sheer enormity of what he is missing.

The woman falls asleep quickly but the head does not. He brushes a strand of hair away from her face with his phantom fingers.

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The Rabbit Feast LESLEE RENE WRIGHT

I

t is the summer of the umpteenth annual Rabbit Feast, and we will soon gather at the park in the flower of the city, which is a flower because it’s the center of where all activity blooms, the hustle and bustle pinwheeling toward the fast-asleep burgs. We live in the tower opposite the park in the flower of the city. Once they called it Parkview Tower, but the word Parkview has long since fallen off, too obvious to exist. So now it’s known simply as the tower, but losing a name and some capitals hasn’t decreased its stature or size. Towers have legacies, and Grand-mère cares deeply about legacies. Because she cares, so then must we.

Given enough time, a tower will always fall, and that is why we live here, daring to press our faces against God’s windows, our sour smiles fogging the glass. No others will invade our habitat on the top floor, nor will they huddle in the tower’s long shadow; it’s a heavy, blunt ax that splits the park. When others cross the park in the flower of the city, they tiptoe the long way around to avoid treading at our feet. Some don’t cross the park at all, too afraid of hurtling stones and the second coming of Babel. At every year’s Rabbit Feast, we climb down from the tower and take the park for our own.

Preparations for the Rabbit Feast begin after the snow hatches, sliding off the roof of the tower in big, billowing pieces. I know when the Feast beckons because I no longer wake up with a start, spooked by the cloudy shapes of my own breath, and the tower no longer sways in the bullying gale. The aunts and the uncles gather the baskets, mending the worn ones with rags and string, and the cousins practice their rabbit-snatching by chasing rats in the hallway where the elevator shaft yawns, a black throat that we pour full of garbage and the rest of what we want to forget.

I don’t like the elevator shaft. When I was younger and dumped our bucket of slops, the air that belched out was so putrid I was sure it would peel the skin from my face and leave me in tatters. I haven’t dumped slops in years, but I still catch the scent on my little sister when she comes back with her bucket, her lips gone grayer than ash.

Don’t worry, I tell her. This year you will be Queen of the Rabbit Feast, and you won’t ever have to dump your own slops again.

It’s a half-truth that hangs entirely on who becomes her Uncle, on who wins the rabbit snatch. My own Uncle was just fourteen—all cousins have to be fourteen before they can snatch—and I was twelve and it was the year I was Queen of the Rabbit Feast. Even so, he was shorter, and I had to hinge

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myself at the knees when he wreathed me in the rabbit cloak. From the way his hands quaked, knuckle-white from the heft of the cloak, I knew he would be a soft, easy Uncle, and in the five years since that’s what he’s been. The only thing hard about him is his shadow, which is as hard as the tower’s, and always pressing upon me as he orbits nearby, waiting to be sent out on his next impossible errand.

Are you cold? he asks. Are you hungry? What can I bring you? What will make you happy?

I am never not cold and never not hungry, so my Uncle gives me his blanket and a bowl of rabbit stew, or a bite of rabbit surprise. On lucky days there are rabbit rolls, the meat stuffed into a mound of Grand-mère’s famous pastry, so flakey that it leaves my mouth dusted with crumbs. I can’t imagine what will make me happy, so I tell him to bring me all the things I’ve imagined but never seen. I want a book with a pressed rose. I want a pair of slippers made of velvet. I want a bird that remembers how to sing.

They are all fancies from my mother’s stories, poured into my ears during the long nights of winters past. He hasn’t brought me anything I haven’t seen before, but each day he searches, climbing up and down the tower until he’s leaner than a tinder stick.

Mother never wanted me to be Queen of the Rabbit Feast. She had been Queen of the Rabbit Feast once, and I suppose she found the title wanting.

In truth, there is nothing very special about the Queen of the Rabbit Feast.

Almost half of all aunts have worn the cloak. Sometimes there are even two or three Queens in one year, but this year, because she is especially pretty and prized, my little sister is the only Queen. There are more cousins than ever, all of them stinking of elevator air. Snatching practice has made them caged and testy; they gnash their yellow teeth and erupt with primal growls over nothing. Some have been snatching for years, and they’re men now, lurching over the others. The tallest cousin is one the others call Fistful, because he can snatch a dozen rats in a single, squeezing fist. Over a decade of snatching, and he’s at last favored to win. He’d be pathetic if he weren’t so big.

On the day of the Rabbit Feast, we gather in Grand-mère’s parlor to hear her eulogy. She is ancient, as brittle as her famous pastry, and unable to descend the tower on her own. Four of the Uncles will carry her chair down the stairs, ushering the true Queen on her litter. But first they circle her chair around the parlor and she gives the cousin their baskets, gifting each with the boon of her toothless smile. In her eulogy she tells of how the Rabbit Feast was a legacy from before, when towers and parks were plentiful. It was a tradition for spring renewal, when plucking the rabbits from the hills and meadows ensured that the green grass would bristle and fur over the earth before the rabbits could gnaw it away. While she gives her eulogy the cousins warm up, cracking their knuckles and flexing their calves; they’ve heard this speech before, we all have.

Leslee Rene Wright | 17

In the long nights of winters past, my mother whispered her fancies, curled around me in our bed with her cold hands over my eyes. Grand-mère had the legacy wrong, she said. Back when towers and parks were plentiful, back when there were velveteen slippers and singing birds, the ones who came before us would gather in the parks to collect eggs—gifts left by a rabbit. Except, Mother said, the rabbit wasn’t real, just another of their imagined saviors. They had their legacies, just as we have ours, and if we put too much faith in them they’ll swallow us whole, just as they swallowed the ones who came before us.

I twisted against her words to keep them from getting in me, wishing her hands were over my ears instead of my eyes. It was a wish I would come to regret, because ever since I wished it, I can’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice as she whispered those fancies, and all but a few of the fancies are gone, dropped down the elevator shaft with the rest of her.

After Grand-mère’s eulogy, we begin the procession. Grand-mère’s litter journeys the stairs first, followed by the cousins, clutching their baskets and lashing at each other’s heels. The aunts and the uncles follow, the ones who can still make the trek, and the Queen of the Rabbit Feast brings up the end. Because she’s my little sister, she has me at her side.

Being behind the others means we take the stairs at an achingly slow pace, our ankles and knees grinding with each step.

I don’t want to be Queen of the Rabbit Feast, she says. It’s been her refrain ever since the snow hatched.

I tell her it doesn’t matter what she wants—a refrain of my own.

Mother doesn’t want it, either, she says, and it seems she’s always done this, has claimed to know what Mother wants and doesn’t. I find I can’t fully doubt her. Mother’s voice still rings clear in her memories, and I am the one who’s forgotten.

To distract myself from what she remembers, I reacquaint myself with the walls of the stairwell. The fire urns on the landings are lit, casting an anxious, jittery glow that greets the dripping ceiling. Wallpaper hangs in strips—bone-colored, elderly skin that’s peeled away to show the old paper beneath. The old paper is blue with gold flowers, and looks newer than the new paper that was pasted over it.

I wonder why the old paper had to be covered, what sort of offense it committed. Perhaps the people just tired of looking at it, the way I sometimes tire of eating rabbit, no matter if it’s served in a roll or as a surprise. I wonder if they knew that when they covered the old paper up, they were burying it away like a treasure.

When I tire of looking at the paper, I listen to the rhythm of all the aunts and uncles stretched below me, some feet shuffling, others stumping along with purpose. Climbing to the bottom of the tower takes a long time, though it isn’t right to call it climbing when we’re all going down. Yet even as my legs churn me closer to the bottom, it feels as if I’m moving upward, clambering into the high, barely-navigated scaffolding of my mind.

18 | The Rabbit Feast

Memories I once thought out of reach almost wash into view. We turn on the landing of the forty-third floor and I feel my mother’s hands, hot over my eyes. On the thirty-fifth, I think I see her, smiling through the cracked glass that leads to one of the rat-thick hallways. On the twenty-second, I hear her, calling out for me from the elevator’s reeking maw. The further down we go, the higher I am, and there is a window cranking open at the top of my head.

Mother doesn’t want me to be Queen, little sister says.

That’s right, Mother says, her breath ghosting my ear. Down below us the aunts and uncles trudge on, unaware.

Her whispers follow me all the way to the bottom. Maybe little sister hears her, too. Her hand goes slack in my hand, and she hums to herself in a contented way—one of the old songs from Mother’s fancies. It’s only when we emerge into the light, blinking and staggering, that she grips my hand hard. The door to the tower slams shut behind us and, along with it, so does the window at the top of my head. Mother’s whispers are gone, and my relief is something sad.

We follow the others through the tower’s blunt shadow and enter the park in the flower of the city. The searing sun will soon drop behind the mountains, and when that happens, rabbits will pour out from the underbrush, but for now they are hiding, keeping cool in their burrows. In the center of the park’s flower there is a lake, and we gather at its shore in front of Grand-mère, who is propped high in her litter. She is draped in the rabbit cloak, which over the years has grown in size and length so much that it appears to squash her flat. Only her eyes, nested in wrinkles, show from beneath the hood.

Behind her, the surface of the lake squirms and heaves, not with wind but with the millions of fish that pack it tighter than a cook pot. Every so often, a bird shrieks and swoops down, thrashing up a fish and flying away.

Both the fish and the lake’s water are poison, and the reason the birds have forgotten how to sing. The stench that hangs over the water is blacker than the elevator shaft on a hot summer day.

When the sun finally hides behind the mountain, we hear them before we see them—a reckoning of rabbits, rustling underfoot. Led by their tiny, twitchy noses, they lope out from the bushes, first one or two, then a swift, shocking wave. They scamper and gambol over our feet, racing each other for what’s left of the grass.

Even I must admit that they might eat it all, every last spindly stalk, if we don’t do something. Some legacies are practical and necessary.

Not all of them, someone says. I look down at my little sister, but she is silent, her eyes pinned to Grand-mère on her throne. Then Grand-mère raises her gnarled arms and the cloak falls to the ground. The rabbit-snatch begins.

The cousins run and lunge. The rabbits are struck dumb at first; they are much slower than our rats, who have learned to be cautious and sneaky.

Leslee Rene Wright | 19

Perhaps it’s the sight of their brothers and sisters being shoved into baskets that makes their old instincts kick in to send them fleeing, heading for crevices and ravines.

It’s the fastest snatch anyone’s ever seen, even the oldest aunts and uncles agree. Fistful lives up to his name, his arms pumping in an efficient rhythm as he scoops the rabbits up and plunges them down, into his basket.

A scant handful of minutes pass and then he raises his basket high, shouting in triumph. The basket is heaped, tipsy with rabbits.

Beside me, I feel my little sister tremble. She doesn’t want to be Queen.

But Queen she is, and Grand-mère gestures her closer, calling her to the foot of the litter. The other cousins, the losers, look on with longing in their eyes, shifting from foot to foot as they struggle to balance their halffull baskets. When she reaches Grand-mère’s feet she looks small, my little sister, as small as we all must look at the base of the tower.

She looks smaller still when Fistful approaches, the rabbit cloak gripped in his now-famous fists. He’s no soft, eager-to-please Uncle. He’s hard and he’s hungry. As hard as my mother’s Uncle, the one she saved for her darkest fancies? I don’t know, but it feels crucial that I be able to ask her.

Fistful swathes my little sister in the cloak, and it drags for acres behind her. It’s been cobbled together with furs and pelts from hundreds of different rabbits that appear, on first glance, to be the same shade of sickly tan. Only when you wear the cloak and see it up close, surrounding your own face, do you notice the tints of yolky yellow and faint lavender and how pretty they are. My little sister’s eyes blink out at me and I can see what she sees because I’ve seen it before. I don’t have to imagine.

Then Fistful lifts her in the air, high over his head, shaking her like his basket of rabbits. Everyone claps and laughs except for me and my sister.

I must be unsteady, because someone takes me by the arm and hauls me up. It’s my Uncle, back from his errand with his hands empty.

What do you need? What will make you happy? His voice almost disappears into the rallying cheer.

I bear up against him. His body is ropey and strong, but he’s still too soft. I want to ask him for what I’ve imagined but never seen—my mother, hauled up from the muck of the elevator shaft, her beauty and fancies preserved despite all the slops that have rained down on top of her. But once something is forgotten it can only be imagined, it can never be seen. The sky over the lake is thick with birds that can’t—not won’t—remember how to sing.

So here’s what I imagine: how I will wait in the hallway that leads to the elevator shaft, a bucket of slops at my feet. I will be so still that even the rats will brave my toes, their whiskers tickling my ankles. The air will be riotous with the stench of decay, strong enough to usher tears to my eyes, and Fistful will see me as nothing but another silly aunt, too weak to heave

20 | The Rabbit Feast

her slops over the edge. He won’t just offer to help, he’ll insist, and he’ll let out a sneering laugh when he hoists up my bucket.

I imagine the sound will still be stampeding out of his mouth when I push him into the shaft, and even though it will be dark I will be able to watch the panicked light in his eyes snuff out when he hits the bottom, where the bile churns. There, my mother will clutch him tight to her chest and wear him like a cloak. She’ll be Queen of the Rabbit Feast so that my little sister won’t have to. I imagine that Mother will whisper her fancies to him as they swim down there together, forever—or at least until the tower falls. I can imagine it so well that I can already see it.

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Eohippus in the White Cube MEGAN BOATRIGHT

We are not liable for this. Grooming itself under a pure art light. The things we will bring back, massaging their crumbling legs with horse marrow, touching them like children, bathing their eyes and breathing over them our wishes for absent humanity. Dogs whine on their chains, it is not enough, love us more, love us like some vanishing dead thing under your muzzle.

Read to it, jiggle science and fable into its rotting head: if it fails, if a cramped gallery of Eohippus, of mammoth, of Tasmanian tiger is emptied of longing in our perfect shapes, if they fall over with the cart, if they won’t pull for us: our prehistoric fault, gaping in naïve majesty, rubbing together bits of thin clay, and even as we watch their heavy breath movements, a tentative hoof imagining concrete instead of our own spruce bodies, we miss them.

22 | APOSPECIMEN AWARD FOR POETRY

Holy Flesh LOUISE FABIANI

“I

s there no better way of appeasing the ocean than this?” said Fr. Pius, mere seconds after slicing off Galen’s tail. With a slither and a thump, the large, gleaming caudal fin slid down the sloping altar edge and hit the basin below. The fish’s head, along with several others, lay in a separate tray nearby. Pius immediately regretted his selfish remark.

“Now, now,” said Fr. Maximus, always ready to admonish. Distracted, he wiped his face with the back of his hand, smearing it with silvery scales and pale blood. His sigh turned into a tiny cloud in the elegant but cold chamber. “You know very well it must be thus. We must never forget what an honor this is. Keep your mind on the task.”

Pius nodded, eager to reassure his brother of his devotion, though something nagged at him. He had been part of the marine priesthood since the age of 16, following his older brother, Maximus, into the same vocation.

That was 17 years ago. Some things still managed to puzzle him, as if a step had been left out of his education. Or was he allowing his own physical discomfort to drive out his devotion? Perhaps it was only human to reduce an entire ideological system to its individual, ritualistic steps, and to turn those steps into a gauge of one’s own pleasure or pain. In any case, the devil had visited him in the guise of doubt.

That did not mean, however, that he would ruin the day’s ceremony.

With head bowed over clasped hands, Pius stopped momentarily to consider the life of the fish. The wonder of that gesture never ceased to affect him.

Food is life, life is food. “Thank you, Galen, for your flesh,” he said again, though this time the fish could not hear. He straightened, then slid his knife into Galen’s belly. Pius filleted him with a few deft flicks of his wrist and placed the thick slabs into an immaculate basin to his right.

The brothers said a separate prayer as the next fish—Hector—arrived, tenderly carried in by a priestess. “Thank you, O Hector, for your life, your flesh.” With a bow and a Latin verse, Maximus ended Hector’s life. Pius took the headless body into his cold hands with reverence.

They would leave only when the twenty-sixth fish had been killed and filleted. Pius tried not to think of how his joints and lumbar muscles were already seizing up in the gelid damp. Yet, that pain paled by comparison to the sadness he always felt for each fish. He had been a devoted student of the ritual, and was now a devoted priest. He took each death to heart.

Some ancients believed that noble suffering provided the truest path to exaltation, but suffering in itself insufficiently explained the order and its

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rituals. Pius found comfort in knowing that nearly everyone now alive respected the marine priesthood, even if they were not aware of the full story behind its founding. The world had changed for the good, in some ways. He reminded himself that his pain had many rewards and purposes— if only in the human realm.

The brothers had been born too late to know the final years of the wild sea in the dark times. They had had to depend on their elderly father for eye-witness accounts. In his youth, the sea was thick with fishes and other marine creatures. A skilled, well-equipped fisher could ensnare thousands in a single flip of a widely flung net—and even afford to throw away the less desirables caught among them. No one but the most jaded heathen could hear these tales now without either scoffing incredulously, or weeping at the loss of so much abundance. How sacrilegious the fishers had been back then! How was it possible that they had not known the folly of their ways?

“I think all persons are the same in at least one regard,” Maximus once said, in his typically lofty manner. “They cannot love what they do not notice, and they cannot notice what they do not count.”

Now each fish, carefully removed from its home, was named, thanked, then ritually killed and dismembered. Not a morsel went to the fish-flesh temple without being itemized lovingly. The wholly edible sections became prized food stuffs. The rest became soup. No one thundered about “quotas” or “sustainable yields” anymore (though, as archaisms, the terms were still bandied about like curse words). Waste, as such, existed no longer.

Today, the brothers had chosen Greek names for 26 fishes from the species science once called Gadus morhua: Atlantic cod. When they at last reached “Zeno,” the machine conveyed the tray of plump fillets to the second icy gastronomic chamber. The two priests rinsed their titanium knives, and returned them to their antiseptic sheathes. They bathed their chaffed hands in the anointing fountain, praying as the water, scales, and microscopic particles of holy flesh disappeared down the drain. Further down the line, priestesses consigned it all to an amazingly sweet-smelling composting facility. Rich, black soil nourished plants, which became pellets fed to herbivorous fishes. They, in turn, fed the carnivores—such as cod— thus completing the circle.

Their work done for the week, the brothers repaired to the relatively warm meditation room, where they doffed their sacramental garments and knelt for an hour of reflection.

Before Pius’s mind would clear on any given working day, he had to do more than soothe the pain in his limbs. Cogitation, usually about how the world had changed, would run at a steady but low level while he participated in ritual sacrifice. Memories seemed to come from the fishes’ bodies—cold flesh in an even colder room—not from his own mind at all.

Depending on his mood and the extent of his pain on a particular day, contemplation of history either pulled him into a dark melancholia or filled him with inarticulate rage.

24 | Holy Flesh

Maximus had told him that all priests reacted similarly, from time to time. Indeed, only men with such sensitivity could be priests in the first place. The pondering and reflection added to their skill and delicacy while handling both living creatures and the dead.

But, after ritualizing the cod with the Ancient Greek names, heavier questions weighed on Pius’s mind. Why does it hurt so much to think of something I wasn’t around to witness? Does empathy benefit a single longdead fish? Can anyone’s pain atone for the heedless deaths of millions in the dark times?

When the opportunity to speak his mind presented itself at a holy day meal weeks later, Pius sought out Fr. Petros, an ancient priest given to such philosophical matters. He nodded, smiled, and tablet-copied a virtual conference to Pius about that very topic. The arguments had been there from the very beginning. Sensitivity did more than steady the priests’ knives and deepen their prayers. If properly intoned, prayers could transcend time, reaching backwards to the ravaged seas and their threatened denizens. They, in turn, spoke through blood lines to the present. “All is connected—across space, across time,” said the tablet, like a disembodied spirit.

That was the only way to continue a relationship with the several remaining edible species. No longer truly wild, those fishes’ lives and deaths were entirely in the hands of humanity. They accepted these conditions—thriving and breeding—only as long as human beings could kill and eat them with love in their hearts.

The next yield came two months later. By that point, Pius had put behind him both personal discomfort and existential doubt about retroactive atonement. The priestesses carried in 52 adult dorado fish, one by one, for the brothers to dispatch and fillet. They started with the 26 females. Pius chose Ancient Roman names this time.

Resting Achillea on the altar, Maximus murmured the exquisite Mare Nostrum and raised his knife.

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Considering Various Shades of Red C.J. OPPERTHAUSER

From the swamps hearing something like a bullfight; think a voodoo doll and stick in horns made from antlers made from body made from weather made from weather made from mountainclouds; the voodoobull cries in whatever way a fake monster might: an answer for which I turn to werewolves and boxing; the voodoobull cries but somewhere else according to the formula a real bull cries and mathematics never lie; somewhere a real bull cries and somewhere too a matador moves air in confusion and there’s red; somewhere there’s always red; the voodoobull is still in my pocket; the voodoobull is caught on thread; from the swamps I stick in more horns where horns aren’t made from antlers made from coffee after movies; from the swamps I find piles of rocks and move them; define night-terror versus night-error versus whole-truth; define hole; define redness and bone and consider the witchcraft;

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Bears AMANDA LYELL

1. (Little) e scorned the hurts of others, from whom she’d taken less. But when they said he was only pouting for a little loss of sleep, leisure, appetite—he coughed, turned back to the illustrations in his books.

What ruined him—what continued to interrupt his sleep, his leisure, his appetite—was his absence from her crime. While she stole from him, he had no face; there was no him for her. There was only the empty bowl on the table. The broken dowels of the chair. The rumpling of his 1000-threadcount sheets.

He was said to have whined. “She took my… And my… And my…!”

He laughed at the gossip. They said, “You laugh ‘cause it’s true!” He pulled a blond hair from his pillow, an eye toward the window. A luna moth fluttered from the sill toward dusk.

And because it wasn’t true, and because that was no answer, he shrugged.

H

2. (Mama) She wasn’t bothered so much by the transgression, her home entered like a lending library. Nor was it her boy’s brooding in the days that followed, his sudden philosophy books, cigarettes behind the shed. Boys were inclined to drama.

Rather, it was what she’d glimpsed as the girl woke, sleep-images washing from her eyes. In there was clarity; all choices open. Apprehension filtered in—not of her, the housewife hand-wringing at the bed’s foot, but of him. Looming in the doorway. Father of the boy whose bed the girl had fallen into. The volume that rose to his throat.

Now her husband scowled, teased their son, pounded his slim shoulders. At twilight she saw him pissing from the edge of the garden.

Later, hunched over his dinner, he asked if she meant to scald his poor kisser. Still, she cooked, cleaned. She double-checked that the windows were locked.

At night she dreamed of the girl in the woods. Bathing naked in the river, yellow curls spiraling on the surface. Or bound to a sycamore tree and abandoned, wrists raw under bristled rope. In the last dream, she found the

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girl mending a kite. She sat in the grass, and they worked together, winding twine around the crux, their hands brushing.

3. (Papa) Maybe she was just a girl who had come from a girl who had come from a girl; stray chattel. His wife thought so. He tapped his pipe against his chin, looked at the fire. What could be extracted? Wildcat eyes, lips drawing back from a row of tiny teeth. Fear? Fear, of course. Fear. He nodded. Fear.

But… Revulsion, maybe? It troubled him. Recognition? Absurd. It was useless, trying to un-riddle a moment so brief. Before he could blink the girl was out the window, tripping over her skirt as she fled toward the pines.

Could it have been recognition?

He’d been raised in Uncle’s house, taken Uncle’s path—not his father’s, not his father’s father’s. Uncle believed in home, family, community. His father, the firstborn, had taken the low road so Uncle could take the high. “I am no monster,” Uncle had said. “And, neither, Son, are you.” He’d held these words close, a talisman coiled in the rug of his own burly chest. He’d lived by them. The fire snapped. The wife’s knitting needles clicked.

Folklore described she-creatures, sorceresses, hiding in the woods, waiting to slip inside. His wife had left open the sash.

Whatever she was, she’d wrecked their sissy-boy. Before the incident, he’d humored his dad, tossed a ball on occasion. Now the little intellectual frowned and read black-spined books at night. Yesterday his son caught him squinting at one of those Russian plays, trying to pronounce the title.

What flickered across the boy’s face—loathing veiled in tolerance—roused his yearning for the days he’d tackled the muscled bodies of his brothers (cousins, really) on a long-ago lawn, chasing a long-ago pigskin as he crushed toes under his sneakers.

The lip rising over the pearly teeth. Harridan? Charmer? It was said the she-creatures were ageless. Ridiculous. What could he make of this dislocation?

Nature, nurture; nurture, nature. He was bigger than his brother/ cousins. Hadn’t he wanted to rip those teeth from her pink lips? To smell her witch blood, battle her? His father had battled her mothers. Smoke coiled upward from the hearth; the chimney pressed it from their living room toward the sky. Outside the glass, a holly bush rustled.

When was choosing lying? Where was she now?

28 | Bears

Candy AMANDA LYELL

e were yesterday’s news. We took a box of crackers, a granola bar, and an old slide-wrench. Traipsed about gray sidewalks asking for dimes. A little mutt followed us awhile. My brother fed him crackercrumbs. At the edge of town, I pointed forward. The city gave us bupkiss; time to learn if wilderness was kinder.

That afternoon—for a moment? I felt like it would be alright. The air was breezy, and—okay, I felt like shit, but also? Grass so lush and clouds making puffy animal shapes in the sky—a manatee, like, swimming, a skinny fox—It was like: “Maybe we’ll be alright.” At least I wouldn’t have to worry about my brother having to defend my honor or some shit. Again.

First night, we found this kinda tarp and propped it up. And in the morning? It was like a whole different world settled around us while we slept; couldn’t even see back to where we’d come from. We headed toward mountains. If people in stories could, we could figure out how to live. My brother—more an athlete than a philosopher—just nodded and did as I said.

We crossed roads now and then; now and then we saw somebody.

There was this one guy set up under a tree in the middle of a field with a jug of water and this big pad of paper. He was tracing maps in thick blue ink.

Didn’t even look up till we said hey. Then he just nodded, all serious. “Be safe.” Handed us the jug to drink from, went back to tracing.

We took a long shortcut through woods. Because that was a great idea, city kids in the brambles. All these new sounds: finches and warblers and some kind of mammal keening-calling. Weeds crunching underfoot. The more I looked ahead, the more I could see dimension in the brush, welcoming me forward, telling me, “You know what’s what. Come on, girl.” But the fucking hunger. It was the worst. Like, here’s all this life blooming exotic colors, catching flecks of sun around you, and you’re dying! We sucked on leaves to trick our stomachs. What did we know about hunting, gathering? Vision blurring, branches morphing into shapes that crouched with big claws, hungry teeth.

I knew we were tripping when a house appeared. Cottage built of sugary things. What? The fuck? Sweet-bread bricks. Crystal-ginger flourishes. I’d starved already. Beside me, my brother flew. No time to think twice, so hungry. Once I had a mouthful of almond sweetness, I was grateful I had broken. No time to lament the poor choices we had littered behind us like so many pebbles in our path. I could just be crazy, and that was that.

W

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Nibble, nibble, gnaw, she said, from behind a candy curtain.

And we? Were fucked.

She drew us inside, told our fortunes. My brother welcomed her flirtations, hardly flinched when she locked the door behind him. She made me her slave, and I did the only thing I could think of—I played dumb.

Cleaned the way she taught me, never quite believing the place. Every surface smooth as marble: countertops, tables and chairs, a grandfather clock—even the walls were pure sweetness, sticky if you licked them. And no cockroaches. Well, maybe just the one.

What would I build if I had magic? Not candy. Something sturdy and safe, on the mountain, with clean water always coming through, a warm fire, bread and meat to eat, beds with soft down comforters, and the whole world to consider from a high rock. An animals-in-the-clouds kind of place.

Maybe I’d draw maps, like that dude in the meadow. Maybe I’d just write out my thoughts.

Whoever says I hurt a harmless old woman never saw a place like that.

My brother lay back and surrendered. I made her trust me, then took the chance I got. Popped her with the slide-wrench, threw her in the fire she was gonna cook us in. The whole place crashed around our ears, a sweet mess.

All I could hear was one long, furious witch-wail. I can still hear it, ringing through my skull every night. That’s part of the magic. Her screams never fade.

30 | Candy

Snow AMANDA LYELL

Bite.

Prism.

The rainbow.

She’d seen one.

After the woman touched her.

On her tongue, the taste of sweet apple.

Lingering, as if one mouthful could nourish her, as if it pardoned her.

Thereafter, she’d lost the thread, kept thinking she’d remember—what was I about to say?—and mislaid it again every time.

She could almost believe in the cider-scented, revised world, where objects around her seemed fragile, as if someone had replaced each pillow, each globe, each fork and knife, with an equivalent blown of glass.

Yet a shuddering unfamiliarity, a misalignment of light alerted her, began to wake her—not the hoofs clattering against the road or the man bending down; it wasn’t his arousal that stirred her, but the hint of menace, like the tap of a knife’s tip against her uppermost vertebra, reminding her: she had an enemy.

She allowed him to believe he had saved her with his stolen kiss; he was handsome, after all, and he was as kind as all the little men who had loved her so well.

His tendency toward impulse (risking the many consequences of her surprise) would have occasion to thrill her as they traveled on.

He spoke of first-sight love, of a girl with poison on her breath.

Nodding, she wondered how long she would stay.

There was a woman, still.

An unsettled score.

The bitch.

Blood.

Bite.

31

Captain Barks JEFFREY DAVID GREENE

M

y sister and I sat at the kitchen table, watching our father carefully select four Eggo waffles from the package. He popped them into the toaster in two volleys and while they cooked he hummed a few bars of Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.” Finally when he thought the waffles were done—somewhere between chargrilled and charcoal—he loaded them up onto a Joanie Loves Chachi commemorative plate and then slid the entire blackened waffle-mass across the table towards us.

“Eat,” he said, plopping down in the seat across from me. “Go ahead.

Take one.”

I took two for myself, which when removed from the plate revealed one of Scott Baio’s eyes, and Dad looked at me for a long moment, obviously waiting for an appreciative response.

“Thanks for making these,” I said, finally, prodding one of the waffles with a fork.

“I’m happy when you’re happy,” Dad said, clearing his throat while I poured syrup onto the waffles, and then he hit me with it—the purpose of all this: “So, Chris, when’re you going to go upstairs and talk to Barks?”

I nearly threw my fork down in protest.

“Never,” I said. “It’s pointless. He doesn’t listen to me. You know that.”

“You’ve just got to be firmer with him,” Dad said. “We’ve been too soft and he knows it. Use a deep voice. Be tougher, be stronger. It’ll work.

You’ll see.”

I didn’t say anything, just struggled to cut one of the waffles with a dull butter knife.

“You go right upstairs after breakfast and talk to him, okay?” Dad said.

“If you want to talk to him so badly, why don’t you go talk to him?”

“I would, damn it, but he only listens to you.”

“This is crap.”

My sister hadn’t said anything yet. Just blinked her mascara laden lashes and looked between my father and me—following our argument like a tennis match.

“Chris, this is serious.” Dad folded his arms. “You have to get through to Barks. No more of this novel bullshit. I’m not screwing around. The Times wants that automated investing thing by Friday, and Tom Delakye needs that Vioxx article, ASAP.” “I’m not doing it.”

32

“I don’t think you get it: We’re broke. The editors won’t advance me anything this time.” Dad picked up the racing forms, slapping them with his kielbasa-shaped fingers. “I’m already missing out on a great trifecta today.

Glory Glory and Rumplestilts-In-The-Bag are a ten-to-one—” I couldn’t take it anymore. I flung my fork at the wall, and it deflected off our kitchen corkboard, bringing a year old copy of the New Bedford Community Bulletin to the ground. “No more gambling! That’s why we’re in trouble in the first place.”

“Listen, it’s not just me. I’m not the only one who needs money,” he said, leaning back in one of the misshapen ceramic stools my mother had sculpted before her cancer. Just before the end she’d started working fanatically with ceramics. It was as if she’d been possessed by some demented artist’s spirit. But still, part of her had to be practical—she refused to make sculptures simply for artistic merit; no, instead, she felt it would be more useful to make furniture for the house. So now we had a home full of monstrous, crippled looking chairs and tables that we’d never be able to get rid of.

“She needs money too.” Dad looked over at my sister Cynthia. “You tell him, honey.”

Cynthia was busy fiddling with the silver ankh that dangled around her pale neck.

“Todd Schillinger asked me to prom,” she said, and the next volley of words came out in a rapid-fire stream: “And I really, really, really want to go. That means I need a dress and I’m not going to some stupid store in the mall. But there’s this amazing dressmaker on Etsy who is located in like Germany, or whatever, and she makes these awesome gowns out of latex rubber and meat hooks. It’d be soooo perfect—” While Cynthia prattled on, Dad just smiled, nodding to her words, one of his gold bicuspids glinting under the kitchen track lighting.

He knew I didn’t give a shit if he couldn’t gamble, but Cynthia was a different story. She was looking at me now with those big eyes that were both manipulative and sympathetic all at once. She knew I didn’t want to be involved in my father’s ever escalating feud with Barks, but she wanted her dress.

Six months ago this would’ve been settled quickly.

Mom would’ve settled it, somehow. But not me.

“Listen,” Dad said, licking his fingers clean and then running them over his bushy eyebrows, straightening them. “If you don’t want to go up there, that’s fine. Just help out around here—maybe give us some of that bar mitzvah money you’ve been hoarding.”

“That’s my money,” I said. “It’s for college.”

And it wasn’t simply bar mitzvah money anymore. My savings had grown substantially. It was now every birthday dollar, every summer-job nickel, every Hanukah-gift cent I’d ever received, and it was all piled up in a black dress sock, then stuffed into an empty coffee can, and then the

Jeffrey David Greene | 33

whole bundle was hidden, carefully, under a pile of old Tonka trucks in my bedroom closet. It amounted to five thousand dollars even, and it was the beginning of my nest egg towards college, and then medical school, and then a reliable, debt-free future without exactas or superfectas, or horses with stupid names, or fear and worry of the lights being turned off at just about any moment. The practical part of me knew that the money should be in a bank, but the rest of me needed it close by to keep the fear away. I was only sixteen and already full of fear.

Dad ran a hand under his tanktop, rubbing his distended, waffle-stuffed belly. “It was only a suggestion.”

Finally, I felt Cynthia’s clammy hand on my forearm. “Listen, Chris, if I don’t go to prom, I’ll just die. Please go talk to Barks, okay?”

An hour later I was outside Captain Barks’ writing room, my ear pressed to the mahogany door, listening to him write. He always typed fast, those paws trying to keep pace with his peanut-sized brain. The continual click-clickclick of his wild keyboarding ripped through the air. He paused for a moment and chewed his squeaky bee, mulling over his work. Finally the typing resumed and it quickly reached a crescendo; and just as I was sure he couldn’t possibly be writing anything—no one could type that fast and produce anything more than gibberish—I remembered that this was the Captain we were talking about. And today he was clearly motivated, passionate, involved, and in love with his writing.

He was working on his novel again.

My mother was the first one to discover that Barks had a gift.

He always seemed to have an interest in the written word: as a puppy we’d catch him sniffing the bindings of paperbacks along the low bookshelf in the living room, or dragging newspapers across the kitchen floor, piling them in a space behind the stove. It just seemed like normal puppy stuff, but then over time my mother realized that Barks wasn’t just aimlessly licking the pages of phone books and encyclopedias; he was actually reading them.

From then on Mom tried various experiments on Barks.

We all thought she was crazy, giving him newspapers, her macroeconomics text books, and even glossy issues of Better Homes and Gardens. And one day Mom even sat Barks down in front of an old CompuTek word processor where he wrote his first business article “Taste That Dot-com Marrow,” an opinion piece detailing the rise and fall of an imaginary internet startup. After much family discussion, we agreed to keep Barks’s abilities secret. My father had insisted that PETA or somebody would take him away if we revealed him to the public.

Little did we know that dad had other plans for Barks; he started submitting the articles himself, sending off small business trend pieces to the Globe under the pseudonym Leonard J. Suggs. Suggs’s acidic humor, liberal activism, and pointed business criticism created a stir.

34 | Captain Barks

Someone at Forbes wanted a twelve-hundred word opinion piece on Halliburton. That article was a big hit. Soon after came a call from Tom Delakye at the Wall Street Journal, and the rest was history. My father accepted the column for Barks and then quit his job at the quarry, claiming a dubious back injury. Mom didn’t want Barks writing for money, and my parents fought bitterly over it—but my father eventually won out, insisting that Barks liked writing the articles.

“You can tell by how excited he gets with each new assignment,” Dad would say. “Look at that tail wag!”

To seal the deal, my father promised that we’d save the money Barks earned for a house and college tuition for my sister and me.

That was a long time ago.

I waited for another pause in the typing and pushed the door open a crack.

“Captain?” I said.

I heard him shimmy in his chair, and then he barked once, sharply. I opened the door wide and there he was, sitting in the massive hand-shaped chair my mother had sculpted for him. He was perched high atop a pile of bright blue pillows, just so he could reach the laptop. His ceramic desk overflowed with newspapers, business magazines, and the used books we’d bought him. I could see a moldering copy of James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, right next to a coverless copy of The Sun Also Rises and a yellow-spined pamphlet of Emily Dickinson poems.

The air was heavy with the scent of dry milkbones and Snausages.

“Captain, dad wants to know if you’re working on that article. I can’t cover for you anymore. If you’re working on that book, you’ve got to stop.

If you don’t, Dad’s going to freak.”

He looked at me with those brown, watery eyes. His squeaky bee was in his mouth and every time he chewed, even just a little bit, it let out a throaty wine.

“Some of your editors are really putting the pressure on, especially over that Vioxx thing,” I said. I crept a little closer. I asked the new question even though I already knew the answer: “What’re you working on, anyway?”

He sniffled. The squeaky bee was coated in thick drool and its eyes were partially punctured. I tried to lean in and get a view of the Captain’s laptop screen. He growled, his lips curling, showing the tips of sharp canines, but I ignored him and tried to get even a little closer. A little closer.

My dad was taking a shit with the door open again, so I couldn’t wash off my bloody hand. Instead I sat at the top of the stairs and listened to him grunt and moan and flip through the sports section.

“So what was he working on anyway?” My father said, flushing the toilet once. Even though he’d flushed, he wasn’t finished. The first flush

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was always seated—a courtesy flush/intermission—just a futile attempt to clear the air.

“I couldn’t see because he bit me.”

“What’re you talking about? Why did he bite you?”

“Because I tried to look at his screen. You know how he gets,” I said, looking at my hand. Barks had caught me with a good snap, teeth raking the space between my index and middle finger. The blood was still dripping down my palm.

“That little bastard.” My father groaned once more. He had terrible lactose intolerance, yet insisted on eating a dairy product with every meal, saying that it was good for his bones. “I’ll kill him!”

“You’re not going to do anything like that. I deserved it. It’s disrespectful for me to be peeking at his work.”

“Disrespectful?” Dad flushed again and stood. He turned on the faucet, ran his hands briskly under the water, and then walked out into the hallway wearing plaid boxer shorts and a t-shirt with “Too Sexy For These Pants” printed on it in block lettering. “I’ll show you disrespectful. He shouldn’t be biting anybody. We feed that little ingrate and we keep him warm. He doesn’t know how good he’s got it. Tell me he was writing the articles at least?”

I didn’t answer my father’s question. Instead, I moved past him and grabbed a bottle of Neosporin from the medicine cabinet, administering uneven gobs to my hand.

Cynthia poked her head out of her room and I could hear the sounds of chainsaws and over-produced industro-gothic-fusion music rumbling behind her. She was reapplying overwrought mascara to her lashes with a thick pen. She clearly wanted to hear the result of my conversation with Barks.

“Chris,” my dad said, turning me around, straightening the lapels of my shirt. He had a hard look in his eye. “If he’s still doing that novel thing, I’m going to have to do something drastic. Just tell me: What was he working on in there?”

“The article.” I lied. I couldn’t help it. Part of me was screaming that Barks’s problems weren’t mine. That if he and my father wanted to have some sort of brutal contest of wills, that it was their deal. But then I also knew that if Mom were around, she’d hate this. And she’d do something about it. “That’s what he was working on, Dad. Don’t worry about it. Those articles will get done.”

Dad cooked franks and beans for dinner, his favorite meal. We headed to the living room to eat, dragging folded TV trays behind us. We sat on the ceramic settee that my mom had made, the one shaped like a naked man on all fours, and we watched Married with Children as we ate. I bit into a harder than normal frank, chewing around its leathery carapace to the soft innards.

36 | Captain Barks

The episode on TV was a re-run of a Christmas special, “a very Bundy Christmas,” and Al was trying to get into the Big’Uns magazine promo party by dressing up as Santa Claus. My father couldn’t stop laughing. At every crass joke he snarfed franks and spat bean gravy all over the carpet, his face turning purple while the thick, reddish veins pulsed in his neck.

Cynthia stood, wiping her chin with a paper napkin. “Can I be excused?”

My father shuddered off a guffaw, licking his lips. “Why? Are the franks no good?”

“No, I’m just not hungry.”

That’s when I heard it. The distant, ragged sqeaking of Barks’s squeaky bee. Then the tapping of his clawed feet as he scampered down the hallway towards us. And then there he was—in the flesh—his terrier body swaggering into the living room, the squeaky bee wedged firmly between his teeth. My sister gasped and my father’s mouth fell open. It was the first time since my mother’s death that Barks had come to visit us in the living room. In the good old days we used to all spend a lot of time there together—Mom just flipping through the TV Guide while Cynthia made gimp bracelets, and I’d probably be on the floor, tooling around with a Coloforms Spiderman set or an Etch-A-Sketch, while Dad played fetch with Barks for hours—the squeaky bee flying across the room over and over, only to be retrieved yet again. There wasn’t any ceramic furniture. Just a shaggy, old brown couch that smelled like Mom’s cinnamon perfume.

“Hey, Barks,” Dad said, dipping a cut-up frank into a shallow pool of ketchup on his plate, before popping it into his mouth. “You’re here for the hot dogs, huh? You smelled them, right?”

Barks trotted a step forward, peering up at my father with wide eyes.

My dad reached down, ruffling the Captain’s fluffy ear, and for a moment I almost couldn’t breathe. I thought this might actually be it. A breakthrough—the beginning of the end. Maybe Barks could just go back to being a dog again, and my father could go back to work, and we could all be a family. But then my stomach curdled as Dad nudged Barks away with a slippered foot. “No hot dogs for you, little buddy. Not ‘til we get those articles.”

Barks turned around and advanced again. He dropped the squeaky bee at my father’s feet.

“Dad, I don’t think he wants the franks,” Cynthia said.

Barks yipped, wagging his tail.

“He wants to play, Dad,” I said. “Throw the squeaky bee.”

Barks yapped again, this time pushing the squeaky bee with his nose, rolling it onto my father’s slipper. Dad looked at me and pursed his lips. He pushed the TV tray away, reaching down between his legs, and for a second I thought he was going to pick up the bee and they were going to play. But instead he reached down and grabbed his racing forms and sighed. “C’mon,

Jeffrey David Greene | 37

Barks. We don’t have time for this. You should be hard at work—you’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

Captain Barks growled, nudging the squeaky bee with his nose.

“Dad,” I said, “just play with him, what’s the big deal?”

My father leapt to his feet and grabbed the squeaky bee, hurling it roughly down the hallway. Barks scampered after it, disappearing into the blackness outside the room, returning moments later with the bee clenched between his teeth. My father sat back down on the settee and pretended to be reading his racing forms, chewing his lower lip. Barks stood in the center of the room, the bee in his mouth, saliva bubbling on his muzzle. I looked over at Cynthia. She covered her eyes.

Barks stood for a moment longer before slinking away. I heard the creak of his office door and then all was quiet.

Usually at night our house was remarkably loud. You could always hear the intermittent groans of my father’s TV on a cop show or some midnight infomercial or the constant click-click-clicking of Barks working away at his trade, and sometimes you’d even hear my sister’s industrial music or the rapid firing of her sewing machine.

But that night it was quieter than usual, and I still couldn’t sleep.

Instead I lay in bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers that I’d stuck to my ceiling in sixth grade. I took a deep breath. My heart was burping uncomfortably and no matter how hard I shut my eyes and tried to imagine myself away from here—to a distant starry galaxy with ringed planets or a stone castle in the clouds above a medieval village—I just couldn’t calm myself.

In fact, my heart beat even harder. As a last resort I hopped out of bed in pursuit of the one thing that could make me feel better: my bar mitzvah money.

I opened my closet and tore through the piles of old Erector Sets and Tonka trucks, finally pulling out the rusty Folgers coffee can which held thick wads of dollar bills and fistfuls of loose change. The can smelled like rank coffee and mildew, but I held it close to my face.

I’m a nervous person.

Always have been, always will be; and it’s not like my father ever made my life any more stable. But when my mother was alive I never needed the money to calm down. Mom knew what to do with me. Some nights, when I was particularly frantic, she’d take me downstairs to the kitchen and pour me orange juice and make me microwave popcorn, and then afterwards we’d sit on the couch and watch old Twilight Zone episodes until I felt like the world was settling and my heart would eventually resume a regular swagger, like a derailed train somehow hopping back onto the tracks.

But after she died all I had was the money. Usually it made me feel a little better—the weight of all those dollars and coins, the smell of all that

38 | Captain Barks

currency. But even that wasn’t working anymore. I stuffed the cash back into the can, and then tucked it all away in its usual spot. I headed downstairs, seeking fresh air. On my way down, I heard a scratching sound from the kitchen. Nails being raked against wood. Was it a burglar?

Not like we had that much to steal.

I crept to the doorway of the kitchen and stopped at the frame. I could see Captain Barks inside standing by the front door. It was strange because you rarely saw him outside of his office, except to use the dog-run connected to the garage to piss or shit, yet here he was scratching at the front door. A thought occurred to me: he was trying to run away.

Once he noticed me, he perked up, and then pointed his nose toward the ceiling and with a singular bark of warning, he skittered away.

The last piece of furniture my mom sculpted was a ceramic bed. It was a four poster with an awning shaped like the mouth of a venus fly trap. No one had ever slept in it. We never even understood who it was going to be for, so we just put it in the garage. And there it stayed, covered in boxes of Fruit Loops, stacks of moldy racing forms, and my mother’s old yellow raincoat.

She loved the rain. She used to dance in it.

After seeing me in the kitchen, Captain Barks had scurried to the garage and under the bed, and now all I could of him was his fuzzy, grey behind.

“Barks,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you’ve gotta stop acting crazy. Dad’s going to kill you if you don’t get to work on those articles.”

I heard the pat-pat-pat of his wagging tail thumping the ground.

“Do you want us to get in trouble?”

He let out a low whine. Then I heard him lapping at something, dragging something metal against the concrete floor.

“What is it? What’ve you got down there? You got the squeaky bee caught on something?”

I knelt, reaching my hand underneath. He snarled, and I retracted my hand. Then he hauled a shiny square out, nudging it out into the open with his nose. It was a framed picture of my mother, standing in weedy grass in Nantucket. I squinted. There was something small and wriggling in her arms. Was it me, as a baby? No, actually it was a baby Barks—a diminutive furball with flashy white teeth. Barks released a strangled wail.

“I miss her too, buddy.” I passed the picture back underneath. “But she’s gone.”

I awoke the following morning to my sister screaming for me, the acrid smell of smoke, and Barks’s continuous whining. I was still groggy and fumbled down the stairs. All the way I was wrapping my bathrobe around myself, trying to tie the belt. My sister met me at the bottom step. “Chris,

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you’ve got to stop Dad. He found Barks working on that novel again and now he’s going psycho. He’s burning all sorts of shit in the backyard.”

I sprinted through the kitchen, past Captain Barks who was up on the kitchen table, barking at my father through the open window. Outside, Dad was in checkered pajamas, collecting Barks’ books, papers, chew toys, and memorabilia into a small pile and dousing it with a rusty can of lighter fluid.

“Dad,” I said, pushing my way through the backdoor and into the yard.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Dad waved the can around, squirting long streams of lighter fluid in a criss-cross pattern over the pile. “I’m setting some ground rules for that dog of ours. Things are going to be different from now on. No more pussyfooting around him like he’s some great artiste—like he’s a little Doggy Vonnegut. He’s writing those goddamn articles and that’s that.”

I could hear the Captain barking shrilly from the house.

“Dad, you’re making a scene.” The Federman’s green shingled house was just next door. They could probably hear us. Maybe the Millers across the road could too. “Someone’s going to call the cops.”

Dad shook his head. “No, they’re not. This’ll be a little fire. Like we’re burning friggin’ leaves in October.”

“No one’s going to buy that. It’s the middle of the summer.”

“Shut up. Just shut up. I’m doing this for a good reason. That dog has got to get his head straight. If he won’t perform, then we don’t have to give him all the things he likes so much.” My dad kicked a book of Rilke poems into the pile, followed by a thick, paperback collection of T.C. Boyle stories. “He’s just a dog, Chris. Dogs are supposed to obey their masters.”

“But this isn’t the way,” I grabbed my father’s arm. He shrugged me off, dropping some twigs and a large branch atop the pile. “Mom wouldn’t like this.”

He glared at me, pointing a finger in my face, the can of lighter fluid tucked under his arm like a bible. “Your mother’s dead, Chris. I’m left trying to save this family now.”

“How is this going to save anything? You really think this is going to make Barks write what you want?”

“We’ve all got to do things around here that we don’t enjoy. For example: you’ve got garbage day tomorrow. I know you hate dragging those bags outside, but you’re going to do it. Same with Barks. He’s got a job to do.” He kicked a big, red copy of Satanic Verses into the pile. There must’ve been a hundred books there. All of Barks’s favorites. It was a biblio-mountain, coated in glistening liquid. “And if he can’t do his job then there’s got to be some consequences.”

“This is insane. Let’s just say that Barks even writes those articles.

Let’s say the newspaper sends you more money. What then? You’re just going to gamble it away again—” “You don’t get it.” Dad groaned and turned to me, licking his lips. “I just need one shot, Chris. Just one good shot. If I can win big, everything

40 | Captain Barks

will be perfect. You and Cynthia could have everything you’ve ever wanted. Barks can take time off, work on that stupid book. Whatever.” He reached into one of his pockets, pulling out Barks’s squeaky bee. The Captain howled in the background and his paws clattered against the glass window. Dad squirted some lighter fluid onto the rubbery face of the squeaky bee, and then he lofted it onto the pile, the cherry atop a humungous, literary cake. “But until then, Chris—” “Don’t do this.” I stepped forward, mesmerized. “Please.”

Dad lit an entire matchbook and tossed it onto the pile. The flames brewed up and spat in all directions. Pages of literature curled to neon embers, spines of books were ablaze with orange light, and the squeaky bee melted last, its squeaker popping with a noisy, final screech.

Barks let out a long, loathsome howl.

“Barks will write those articles.” Dad gazed back towards the house.

“He’s just got to learn who is boss.”

I found Barks later on in his writing room, moping on a grey beanbag chair.

When I came inside, he didn’t even look up. Instead he covered his face with his paws. Without all his books and toys his room was completely empty, except for the laptop and his ceramic desk. They stood prominently in the center.

“Barks, are you okay?” I said. He didn’t make a sound. I could see the screen of his laptop flickering, glowing with words. It was his novel. I took a step towards it. He didn’t move. “Y’mind if I look at this?”

He let out a quiet sigh. I read the words aloud off the screen: Dempsey had lost the woman, the love of his life, and now he was hollow shell of a man. His enemies surrounded him, stealing his air and crushing him under their weight. He knew that they needed what he had, the magic in his bones and mind. They wouldn’t stop coming at him day and night with complaints, counter-grievances, offers, messages in bottles, jars, bowls, tubes.

He knew what he needed to do. Dempsey took the streets, leaving them all behind. Just a glimmer in the night-heat. Another star added to the moonlight.

I stood there, staring at the screen, and wondered what my mother would say. She’d probably march back to Dad and tell him what’s what.

She’d set him straight and then she’d order a family Parcheezi game or a full family outing to the movies.

“Barks,” I said. He didn’t look up. “Barks.” He snorted. “Barks!” I clapped my hands and he looked over at me with a lazy, forlorn eye. “You need to trust me like you’ve never trusted me before. I’m getting you out of here. I know you’ve got to have your novel backed up on disk somewhere.

You’re going to need to get that. You’re leaving tonight. But first, I need

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you to write me a really good first page of your Vioxx article. I promise this is the last business article you’re ever going to have to write.”

His cocked his head, looking at me for a long moment. Then he barked once and leapt to his feet, his tail wagging like the mast of a ship in a wild storm.

My father was in the living room, laughing at an episode of Three’s Company. My sister was on the floor, cross legged, flipping through an issue of Spin featuring the “100 Most Goth Moments in History.” I crept up, my arms folded on the first page of the Captain’s Vioxx article.

“Barks is finally writing the article. It’s really great.” I passed my father the freshly printed page. “This is just the first page of it. Take a look.”

Dad looked it over and smiled, his brows sitting high on his forehead.

“Christ. This is amazing. It’s as good as some of his earlier stuff.”

“Barks’ needs one thing, though. Remember that op-ed piece he wrote on Rambus a few months ago? He thinks there’s probably some relation between the two.”

“Oh. Okay,” he said. “I get it. Past research. Sure. It’s all in my drawer in my bedroom. That’s where all the galleys, addresses, and stuff are.”

I nodded. “Thanks. After I get that old article to Barks I think I’m going to get a head start on trash day.”

With Tom Delakye’s office address scribbled on a napkin, my bar mitzvah money cooling in my pocket, and the rest of my preparations in a garbage bag poked with air holes: I was ready to put my plan into action.

I put a call through to Red Cab and waited around in Cynthia’s bedroom to catch her alone and let her know what was going on. After ten minutes she came in, dropping a corset that she’d been sewing in the kitchen. She clapped a hand to her chest.

“Jesus! You scared the shit out of me,” she said, taking a deep breath.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” My trash-bag shimmied as Barks vied for a comfortable space between his laptop and his books. “How much do you need for your prom dress and everything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cynthia, how much?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen-hundred would definitely do it.”

I counted her out fifteen hundred-dollar-bills from my coffee can of riches. That left me with about thirty-five hundred more. I passed the bills to her.

“Holy shit,” she said. “What’re you doing? That’s your money, Chris. I don’t want it.” The contents of my bag sniffled. “Have you got Barksy in there?”

I nodded. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Where are you going? Dad’s going to flip.”

42 | Captain Barks

“We’re going to New York.”

“Why?” She touched my shoulder.

I paused, trying to put it into words. “I’m getting us all a new start.”

I needed a good jump on the cab once it arrived—needed to see it from the road before Dad could spot it—so I alternated between bringing bags of garbage out to the curb while making sure to keep the Barks-bag on my shoulder. Barks was being a good dog; remarkably quiet. After twenty minutes I ran out of actual garbage and started throwing some of our silverware and tin foil into trash bags and hauling them out too, prolonging my ruse.

At one point Dad caught me bringing an almost empty garbage bag outside, and he shot me a queer look from the living room.

“That trashbag doesn’t look full,” he said. “Stick it back in the garbage.

Those bags don’t grow on trees, y’know.”

“I know,” I said, quickly struggling to think up an excuse. “But I broke a glass and just wanted to get rid of the pieces. I don’t want anyone to step on it.”

“Funny, I didn’t hear you break anything.” Then he leaned back further on the couch, trying to get comfortable despite the hard ceramic backing.

I started to sweat.

Every few moments I glanced toward the window and then brought out another trashbag. At one point Dad came to the kitchen to grab a beer. He stopped at the kitchen counter, taking a long swig from a can of Natty Light while peering at me. Seeing nothing outwardly strange, he retreated back to the living room.

Then I looked toward the window again and saw the bright red taxicab hurtling up our street.

That’s when I got sloppy: excitement took over and I ran to the door, Barks in the bag bouncing against my back. I sprinted across our lawn and hopped into the back seat of the cab, unveiling Barks.

The cabby was an old, balding guy with a faded Red Sox hat and small spectacles. He turned to us and grinned. “Oh, what a cute dog. Where to, kid?”

“New York City. Fast. Get out of here, I’ll tell you the exact address on the way.”

“Whoa, whoa. That’s a lot of money. A drive from Bedford to New York City might cost a bundle.”

I showed him a messy handful of hundreds. “I can pay you whatever you want. Just go.”

The door to my house flew open and Dad came charging out across the lawn. “Go!” I said. “Drive! Dammit, drive! I’ve got three grand, if you get me to New York, I’ll give you plenty of money!” The cabbie peeled out into the road, kicking up gravel. My father ran out behind us, waving his hands

Jeffrey David Greene | 43

in a windmill motion. He looked like a madman in maroon pajamas, doing some stupid dance in the middle of the road.

The cabbie fixed the rear view mirror with his left hand, looking behind us.

“Kid, was that your father?” the cabbie said.

I didn’t answer, instead just looked behind us.

Dad was growing smaller as we fled into the horizon. Pretty soon he was just a miniature man and then he was gone.

“No,” I said. “That’s not my dad.”

Barks was sitting on my lap, looking up at me with big eyes.

“He’s just some crazy guy from the neighborhood,” I said. “We sometimes look after him when his family goes out of town.”

The cabbie shrugged. Barks stood up on his hind legs, propping his paws against the window. He looked out at the neighborhood as it spun past and let out a little whine; he then let me pet him for the first time in months.

I stroked his head with my hands, scratched behind his ears, and leaned down to whisper softly to him: “We’re going to New York. We’re going to meet with your editor, Tom Delakye. And once he knows the truth and sees what you can do, he’ll hook you up with the right people.”

I took a deep breath and then continued: “I’m going with you to make sure it works out all right. You’re going to get to be a great artist. You’re going to have a new life. You need this. Dad needs this. We’ll all be fine.”

Barks seemed to like that.

He settled down on my lap, laid his head down on his paws, and closed his eyes.

44 | Captain Barks

The Plasticity of Fred Schmidt KATHERINE SWETT

1. Fred Schmidt learns CPR It is with an ambiguous discomfort that he meets the plastic man again— surprising, but four years have passed— and the naked, concave chest still gives under the slight pressure of the instructor’s palm. Fred thinks how inconvenient it would be to choke while lying in such a white, stale room as this— how uncomfortable to be held down slightly above the nerve bundles of the solar plexus, esophagus a hallowed line fragment, with a man such as Fred staring into one bored, pink, plexiglass eye. Fred adjusts his shirt sleeves. The only other student, Roger the Life Guard, squeezes his fingers against his closed lids, while across the room hangs a picture of an elderly man looking relieved that Cynthia Martin was CPR-certified in Botello’s that night. When the instructor asks Roger to crouch by the albino man, he rushes out through the wooden door. Supposing it’s now his turn, Fred kneels, but hesitates to straighten the throat. He remembers, now, how this will go. The rubbery skin will surprise him. The space within the torso will fill with a constrained amount of air. And he will suddenly feel he has forgotten something— his jacket, maybe, or an umbrella depending on the weather— this indistinct absence causing the walls to grow infinitely whiter. He recalls now how they reflect out from the dull, pink iris like a geometric wing until there is nothing left to his vision but the wide parking lot.

45

2. Fred Schmidt goes to the dentist He attributes his disquiet to the small, cold woman in floral scrubs who pries his mouth open and keeps it ajar with a small, cold object that is, itself, much like a mouth. Fred calls her Jeannie, the sound of his suctioned spit making him feel empty as his arms stick to the green cushioned table.

Fred imagines his teeth like waiting room chairs, one holding a toddler with two even, white incisors— they pulse out of her gums as she looks at magazines of smiling, omnivorous people. Fred considers the dental implications of cannibalism, and Jeannie re-attaches the suction tube to the left side of his tongue. He has never seen the lower half of her face, though today, his seafood lunch affords sufficient justification for her green surgical mask. Fred dreams that despite the razor line of her bangs, Jeannie has a mouth like the mouthpiece of a tuba. Later, there will be an x-ray, because there is always an x-ray, and Jeannie will instruct him to bite something too-big and plastic, then bite, then bite, each bite somehow less adequate than the first. Fred prepares his excuses. It hurts when he flosses, mouthwash reminds him of his grandfather’s liver spots, he grows disoriented when he holds any implement of habit. But regardless of preparation, Fred will stand staring at the half-submerged, ground-level window as Jeannie, forehead perspiring with delight, points to the shadows on each tooth, the weak filling in the furthest molar, the distorted roots fused into the jaw, and finally the empty mass of his throat.

46 | The Plasticity of Fred Schmidt

3. Fred Schmidt goes to the beach On the sand, an uncomfortable grit in his bottoms. There is water, sure, and bodies next to sharp spikes driven in, and the commandeered shadow. The people on the sand glow all the way to the end in patriotic swimwear, the inert fish washed back out at high tide. Fred doesn’t know why he’s here.

He’s never known why he comes, or how he’s gotten there. His bottoms suction uncomfortably around his legs. He has chest hair, but not nearly enough. His skin is plastic white, and Fred imagines a blimp above him, a radial darkness, another smaller, night-time sea surrounding his temporary real estate of sand. From there he moves his legs freely, shakes his feet, shedding them. A woman with large breasts and a man with a lump of belly watch him with the black of their glasses. The woman has a kid with a towel draped over its head, and while the man scratches his belly button, Fred imagines dropping one large, haired hand down to sand, then staring into the dense weight of blue. This before the barely perceptible roar. Fred looking up, the umbrellas slipping out of the holes, jerking into blank, infinite helicopters.

Katherine Swett | 47

Paquita’s Gumballs HANK KIRTON

T

he party was over, the gumballs gone, and scraps of Paquita’s childhood littered the floor like spent confetti. Some of the scraps rustled when she moved as if trying to grab her attention, others just sat, waiting to be discovered. These were the patches of the past that attracted her most—the cool, still memories. The gumball memories...

Paquita had wandered herself lost. She’d been holding her father’s hand with a slipping grip, navigating through the loud, crowded marketplace.

And then suddenly she was alone in a bustling forest of strangers. She searched for her father with rising panic. All the faces around her were wrong, grotesque. And just as she started to cry, she spotted the gumball machine.

Paquita, eight years old, sat on the kitchen floor, arranging her Fluorescent, multi-colored gumballs in the symbol for infinity (∞). Her uncle had built their house on a steep hillside, giving a crooked slope to their world, but she kept her gumballs from rolling away by thinking about frozen chicken stock. Or was it the gumballs that put that thought into her head? As she stared at the symbol, the frozen stock began to melt and run swirling into a drain and the gumballs rolled across the floor, coming to rest against the wall. On the other side of the kitchen sat the refrigerator that Paquita’s uncle Bruno had lashed to the wall. Everything inside it had to be secured with string. When fixing a sandwich, Paquita and her family had to untie (for example) the cheese and ham and milk and mayonnaise and then retie the ingredients into place after the sandwich was made and the milk poured.

Nobody complained about this. Nobody complained about the furniture nailed to the floor, or the fact that they had to hang onto ropes just to move through the rooms.

Paquita chewed her first gumball at the top of the blue carpet stairs on a temperate Sunday afternoon while listening to her parents argue about her.

She felt guilty, heavy, like a burden. But she also felt a whisker of satisfaction at the fact that they were finally discussing her. Her, Paquita. As the bitter truth filled the house, the carpet came alive with fibers, waving like a seabed, the stucco walls were filled with strange faces, grimaces.

Then Paquita popped the red cherry bubble she’d been exhaling into life and everything changed. The gumball had released her clenched fist.

48

Standing at the edge of the ocean, cold foam frothing around her ankles, Paquita popped the hard black gumball into her mouth, chewing with a tense, rigid jaw. It tasted of mothballs and loam and she retched more than once. When the terrible flavor faded, Paquita’s mind began to dribble into the sea, the raw saltwater shocking her thoughts with floating, blue-green visions.

Paquita drifted in her delirium to the town square, a calm eye in the middle of vertiginous territory. The nice bulimic man who’d claimed to carry the screaming spirit of Sharon Tate had been pinned to a wall by a gang of Webbjacks, who were assaulting him with sharp, declarative sentences.

Paquita fingered the gumballs in her pocket and reached for her slingshot.

Paquita was ordered to the principal’s office. She sat upon a wooden bench, chewing and musing for ten minutes. When she was seated before the principal, she swallowed her gum.

“Do you know why you’re here, young lady?” he asked.

Paquita regurgitated the gum and started to blow a bubble and the principal saw his entire life reflected in the soft pink pillow expanding with her breath.

When the bubble burst, he said, “Go,” and let her leave without another word.

“Do you know where you are?” asked the llama with a muscled tongue.

Shiny strands of saliva hung from the llama’s quivering black lips, catching the thick amber light oozing from the rising sun.

“Yes,” answered Paquita, chewing a green gumball. The gum had gone flavorless already, her caustic morning enzymes breaking down the sugars, the molecular integrity of the polymers. “Do you know where you are?”

“I am on a plain,” the llama told her.

“No,” Paquita said. “You are in a pen.” She removed an orange gumball and tossed it into the llama’s mouth. “Here, see for yourself.”

The llama chewed the gumball. As the citric flavor seeped down its long, woolly neck, its eyes widened and darkened.

“You see?” said Paquita. “A pen.”

“I see,” said the llama. “I see... too much.”

Paquita watched the llama walk away, head down, its gait strained. She had made the llama unhappy forever.

She spit her gum into the dirt.

Paquita stood bored by the jukebox. Jeffrey was playing Rumble by Link Wray again. Paquita was sick of that song. The sound of the guitar jangled her nerves.

Hank Kirton | 49

She held her tired, unfocussed eyes on the thick banks of smoke hovering like molten ghosts above the tables; the drunken din of the bar had been muted by the gumball, as if heard through cotton. If only it had muted the jukebox.

When the song ended, Jeffrey approached Paquita.

“Hello,” he said.

She didn’t answer him, but when he looked at the jukebox, she said, “Don’t play that song again.”

He looked at her, fished a coin from his shirt pocket and dropped it into the machine with arrogant defiance. The same song. Rumble.

Paquita took his hand. “Come with me,” she told him and pulled him toward one of the back rooms.

“What, you want to do this now?” Jeffrey asked.

“No talking. Just come on.”

She led him into the dark room and pulled the curtain shut. She lit the lantern. The room was small and barely furnished: a worn table supporting the lantern, an ashtray, a bottle of Listerine and a box of Kleenex; a creaky cot against the wall, a torn poster depicting burlesque strippers, and a wastepaper basket overflowing with damp tissues and used condoms.

Jeffrey slipped his hands over Paquita’s shoulders. She placed her hand on his chest to slow him. “Wait,” she said. “Chew this first.”

She handed him a transparent gumball. In its center was a tiny red dot, like a spot of blood.

“You and your gum. What’s it going to do to me this time?”

“Chew it and see.”

She placed the gumball on his outstretched tongue.

She watched his face as he chewed, watched it change as the unbounded flavor filled his mouth.

“Ahg...” he said.

His face had become that of a fat, unshaven man, a raised scar on his left cheek. The strange visage lasted only a brief moment before it softened into the countenance of a woman. She had red hair and green eyes. And then he had the face of a boy.

And then the confused, frightened face of an ape.

“Ahg...”

And then a fat, greasy larva writhed from the grubby collar of his shirt.

The room smelled of brown fat and rotted food.

Paquita lit a cigarette, watching.

The larva began to vomit a green cream that ran down the front of his shirt and slopped onto the black, lacquered dirt floor.

It was the end. Jeffrey collapsed to the ground.

Paquita took a drag on her cigarette as Jeffrey’s body fell still.

“Goodbye,” she said and then walked out of the room.

50 | Paquita’s Gumballs

From Our Staircase We Welcomed the Miracle after Paul Klee BENJAMIN GOLDBERG

In the house of a fevered eyelid, I am vision vivisected by lashes. Under this roof, I watch as people I love are pressed into their limbs with the weight of a sky brushed out of a burning skull.

My mother, the kaleidoscope, whose pink and green triangles seal my body.

My father, the staircase, his ribs a burnt-sienna banister.

We were born to wait forever like this— air yellowing with salvations we must balance on our fingertips to keep from tottering out of our bodies.

The sky, too, is a body, standing on the shoulders of other bodies about to flee their bodies.

Long ago, bristles left their wet kiss on walls in which I once dreamt my head floated so high above my body my vision grazed the bottom of the interminable pink my father’s chest caged me from.

I woke so jealous of the green balloon I thought I saw drifting from his fingers I ripped off my head. And when my face asked the ocean in our attic will I ever fly from my palm, the rusted horizon answered by not filling my hand with ribbon.

51

Automata ERIC SCHALLER

“H

ere.” Ramona tapped her bared forearm with a dessert fork. “Stab me here.”

This by way of making a point.

Something about definitions: the living, and the dead, and the dead that approximate the living.

Richard’s recollections were sketchy on some of the specifics because Ramona and he had drunk a fair quantity of red wine with dinner. He didn’t remember the name of the wine or even the exact variety, a merlot or perhaps a cabernet sauvignon. The label suggested, if only because of its lack of decoration, a certain importance to the vintage, the sort of selfsatisfied smugness that assumes familiarity. He had in fact bought the bottle precisely because the label projected these qualities. Ramona and he were not intimidated, however, and polished the bottle off with sufficient alacrity to make him wish that he had brought two bottles instead of the one.

Luckily, Ramona was prepared for such a possibility and sacrificed a bottle of her own, one whose label displayed a goat wreathed in grape vines.

Dinner, to fill in the details, was a spinach salad topped with shrimp and sea scallops, squash soup, and fresh crusty bread from Ramona’s electronic breadmaker. It was a light meal, high on protein and low on carbohydrates, just the food to inspire conversation rather than sleep. More importantly, it was the breadmaker that inspired their conversation on automata. Unless this subject was already waiting in the back of Ramona’s mind, the breadmaker simply an impetus, a launchpad for a rocket she had previously armed.

Richard was sure, in retrospect, that Ramona had invited him to dinner because of her thesis. Ramona, dear sweet unattainable Ramona, was working on her graduate degree in English Literature at Columbia and writing her thesis on Automata in Western Literature as Symbol and Subject. Or something like that. She knew of Richard’s background in engineering and of his occasional forays into science fiction. He liked to think some of his stories might work their way into her thesis, although he was not egotistical enough to assume this would be the case. But at the time she simply said they should get together because she now lived in New York City. She said she always remembered his visits to her family in Connecticut with fondness, that in some ways she saw him as an uncle.

How could anyone resist such an invitation?

52

And so dinner, his hostess a woman young enough to be his daughter, but who was not his daughter. Ramona’s hair shadowed one eye with the broad sweep of a raven’s wing. She smiled enigmatically as a sphinx.

“Could you have even imagined an electronic breadmaker thirty, forty years ago?”

She spoke plainly, but when Richard thought about what she said it seemed a riddle of a depth he could not fathom. “I just wrote about robots,” he said. “About as simple as it got was the vacuum cleaner robot in the Jetsons. Not that I wrote the Jetsons.”

“You can’t get much simpler than making bread.”

After dinner, Ramona cleared away the plates over Richard’s protestations that, because she had prepared the meal, he should now clear and wash. She busied herself in the kitchen and returned with two wedges of chocolate cheesecake topped with raspberries and mint leaves.

At some point she mentioned her thesis.

At some point they debated definitions for the term automata.

Did Richard say “The dead that approximate the living?” He was sure he said something like that during his conversation with Ramona. But he was equally sure he corrected himself, no doubt in response to a raised eyebrow that communicated derision more expressively than words. Let him correct himself now as he did then. Death has nothing to do with it.

Automata are non-biological, and thus neither dead nor alive, but assume aspects that we associate with the living.

Another raised eyebrow. A further refinement. There needs of course to be a maker with intent: a creator. Furthermore, the automata besides having the appearance of life, such as would be found with a doll, must also be capable of movement. And so: the non-biological fashioned to assume aspects of the living, with appearance and movement both being necessary aspects.

“Does this definition seem reasonable?” he asked.

Ramona nodded. “For the sake of argument, provisionally, yes.”

Argument did naturally ensue, sporadically over the next couple of hours between mouthfuls of dessert, and sips of wine or coffee, the greatest heat being reserved for what might seem the most minor details. But it was at this point, before they began to cut and splice wires as it were to create a more perfect monster, a Rube Goldberg-like definition that would run on for pages of text, that Richard remembered an episode from his childhood.

Truth be told, although he had used the conventions of science fiction in his stories, he had not given them much thought, employing robots and spaceships as one might the words and grammar of one’s native language.

Now, he saw connections he had never seen before.

He remembered lying in bed as a boy, the covers pulled up around his neck, the top sheet folded over so the blue woolen blanket would not scratch his face. He remembered his mother sitting beside the bed, with the lights out, telling him the stories she knew by heart, stories passed down to

Eric Schaller | 53

her from her mother, and so on back who knew how many generations.

Some of the stories he later discovered in books when he began to read to himself, others he never found and these may have existed only in the oral tradition of his family.

“Do you mind,” he asked Ramona, “if I tell you a story I learned from my mother?”

“Of course not,” she said, shaving off a thin forkful of cheesecake.

So he told her the tale of the boy Levi, who lived in Egypt during the time of Moses, and who created a Golem of blue clay. He told her of the adventures these two friends shared, how once they sealed the temple cats in earthen jugs so their shrieks drowned out the priests’ incantations, how another time they floated a burning man of reeds down the river so the fishermen fled to shore crying that the spirits of the underworld were loosed, and how yet another time they paraded an old blind crocodile among the market stalls and took donations in the name of Sobek, the longjawed god of the Pharaohs.

Ramona clapped her hands. “Why that’s wonderful,” she said. “You say it was your mother who told you this story? But tell me what happened to the Golem. In all the stories I know, they are destroyed.”

Richard nodded, impressed that she had seen where the story was headed. He had considered leaving off the ending, which touched on troubling aspects of Levi’s character, but now felt compelled to continue.

He told Ramona how Levi fled with Moses and the Israelites from the Pharaoh’s army, but surrendered to fear and attempted to swim the Red Sea. The Golem, ever at Levi’s side, bore him on the waters when the boy’s strength failed. But the Golem was only as strong as the materials from which it was made…

Richard paused, letting the implications of clay and water sink in.

Ramona closed her eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling as if the story carried a scent, a combination of smoky desert fires, spice-impregnated clothing, brackish water, and acrid fear. “So it ends.”

“No!” He had been afraid she might think so. “Levi lived. When Moses led the Israelites between the parted waters of the Red Sea, he discovered Levi kneeling in the silt among the stranded fish and aquatic monsters. The boy was weeping, scooping up handfuls of mud and attempting to mold it as if dough, but it would not hold shape and trickled between his fingers.

Moses lifted the boy onto his shoulders and told him to dry his eyes, he said the day was not one for tears but for rejoicing because on this day Levi was free.”

Ramona nodded. Richard’s words appeared to confirm, even strengthen her previous assessment of the story. “But Moses was right,” Richard said.

“There was cause for celebration. Levi crossed the Red Sea carried first by the Golem and then by Moses. My mother said Levi survived to father many children and, in later years, told them that during the Exodus he crossed the Red Sea in just two steps, only once touching the bottom of the

54 | Automata

sea. When his children asked how this was possible, he then told them this same tale.”

Ramona and Richard did not argue further, if in fact they had been arguing, about the relative measures of pleasure and sorrow to be found in Levi’s story. Instead they turned their attentions again to the definition of automata, elaborating and refining it in terms of the materials for their construction. The conversation became heated and, in his excitement, Richard forgot himself. He reached across the table to seize Ramona’s hand, confusing the passions of intellectual discourse with those of desire.

Ramona stiffened. She sprang from the table, her chair squealing across the floor and her fork clattering on her dessert plate, calling attention to the fact that, as yet, she had barely nibbled at her cheesecake. “Hold on a second. I’ve got something you might like.” She opened the door to what Richard assumed was her bedroom, although his brief glimpse inside revealed just the corner of a roll-top desk overburdened with books and papers and, on the wall above, the framed cover of a pulp magazine that depicted a woman, her blouse hanging in rags from her bosom, shrinking in terror from a towering robot.

Ramona returned waving a tattered green hardcover, the pages liberally marked with torn scraps of paper. “The seventeenth volume of Burton’s The Thousand Nights and One Night, originally published as one of the unexpurgated supplements in 1888. This is a reprint of course.”

Ah, Richard thought, remembering the story of a flying horse, fabricated by a magician, that the rider controlled by manipulating pins on its neck. But Ramona surprised him and read a tale with which he had no familiarity. “King Saleh of ancient times valued his daughter Farasche more than any treasure in his kingdom,” she began, and then told of how the king’s daughter took a giant Blackamoor as her lover. The king, upon discovering Farasche naked in her lover’s arms, beheaded the man, chopping his body into pieces small enough to pass through the ring of his pinky finger.

Ramona did not read the story straight through but skipped from section to section, picking out the “good parts” as she called them, which Richard took to be those most relevant to her thesis. It soon became apparent that this was a tale of revenge, for the Blackamoor’s father was a king in his own right and loved his son with an intensity equal to that borne

by King Saleh for his own daughter. The agent of the Moorish king’s revenge was a golden falcon, so realistic that it might have hatched from a golden egg, delivered to King Saleh as a gift. But concealed behind the breast feathers of the falcon were twelve tiny golden men and, each night, these marched forth into the darkness of King Saleh’s treasure room then returned to their safe haven, arms loaded with stolen gemstones. And each day, when the golden falcon was released into mechanical flight, it delivered the stolen gems to the Moorish king who now lurked by the castle gates in the disguise of a beggar.

Eric Schaller | 55

This thievery went on for months, King Saleh all the time becoming more distraught at his inability to discover the culprit. Eventually, to protect his prized golden falcon, he brought it into his own bedroom. Richard knew from the way Ramona’s voice rose that they were reaching the climax to the tale. “Hardly had the king’s eyelids closed,” she read, her own eyes widening, her cheeks glowing, “but the falcon’s metal breast feathers parted and the troop of tiny golden men departed their barracks. The tiny men did not search for treasure this time. They each took up stations next to the sleeping king and, with one uniform motion, drew forth twelve tiny swords and raised them high. Then, as if they were not twelve men but one with but one thought in mind, they let fall their blades. In a single instant, King Saleh lost an eye, both ears, his nose, two fingers from his left hand, three from his right, two toes, and his organ for procreation.”

Richard found this last part discomforting, as would any male, and crossed his legs and covered his lap with his hands. As a result, he almost missed hearing how the falcon hopped down from its perch and with one strike punctured the king’s ribcage and retreated with his bloody heart in its beak.

Richard felt his own heart pound and, more disturbingly, a vague sense of embarrassment. He wondered if the story was intended for his benefit, a pointed reminder of his own earlier indiscretion.

Ramona looked at him expectantly, unaware of his discomfort.

“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” he said, thinking it appropriate to the circumstances of the tale, and added that this was a Klingon proverb he had learned from an episode of Star Trek.

Ramona corrected him, pointing out that the correct attribution for the proverb was to the French novel, Les Liasons Dangereuses. She then said that although the Moorish king of the tale had taken his revenge, still he had lost his son and now he had nothing, not even his revenge, to sustain him.

He was, in effect, as dead to life as the enemy whose life he had stolen. He had become an automaton.

Richard decided that he had been utterly mistaken as to Ramona’s intent. If anything, she intended him to understand that passion is what makes us human. He chastised himself for his cowardliness and reached again across the table to where Ramona’s hand rested upon her placemat.

But before his action was half completed, as if Ramona anticipated just such an expression on his part, she pushed herself to her feet and excused herself from the table. Richard made to rise as well, but she held out her hand. “Relax. I just remembered another story that you must hear. Back in a moment.”

Richard wondered, while staring at her still unfinished wedge of cheesecake, how often she shared the results of her studies with her parents, how sympathetic they were to her research. He then downed the remainder of his wine and refilled the glass, topping off Ramona’s glass as well. The

56 | Automata

goat on the bottle’s label regarded him with a lecherous eye and he turned the bottle ninety degrees to the left.

Ramona returned with a sheaf of papers, a draft of her actual thesis.

“It’s in here somewhere,” she said, shuffling the sheets like an unwieldy deck of cards. By this point in the evening Richard’s mind was swimming with so many ideas, not to mention wine, that he could scarcely follow the tale once she began. Her tale ebbed and flowed like the sea, following the changing fortunes of a watchmaker who achieved fame from the innovative dioramas he built for the clock towers of his alpine home, but who then accepted a commission from an unnamed benefactor. Richard understood Ramona’s interests better now and was not surprised when the commission was revealed to be for a mechanical Venus, a woman automaton perfect down to the smallest detail, from the arch of her backbone to the downy hairs on her arms. Such an enterprise was doomed, Richard knew, to spectacular failure.

It may have been during this tale, or another of remarkable similarity, that Richard remembered a scrap of story from his mother’s measureless horde. He interrupted Ramona, perhaps rudely, but for once his enthusiasm matched hers. He told her of a Christmas gift, a masterpiece of the Nuremberg toy-makers art that, to his mind, seemed a strange reflection of their own evening meal. The toy featured a well-to-do family of mechanical dolls—a father, mother, and boy in short pants—assembled beside an outdoor picnic table. When the mechanism was wound, the already seated grandmother waved her hand, calling the rest of the family to sit down and say grace. The little family was then served lunch by a bandy-legged chimpanzee dressed in the uniform of a butler. Meanwhile, high above the feast, shadowy forms swung among the leaves of a great spreading plane tree. These spies were first glimpsed as a pair of eyes here, a waving arm there, until being revealed as a mischievous band of wild chimps, which then disrupted the picnic by throwing bananas down upon the diners.

But if Richard had been impolite for interrupting Ramona, she now fully repaid the favor, exclaiming, “Why I know this story! The Darkling Feast, right?”

He stared at her, knowing nothing of its provenance outside of his mother’s voice.

“The boy who receives the gift at first finds great pleasure in it,” Ramona said. “But then abruptly refuses to play with it any further. His parents do not understand this change in his affections. The automaton is, after all, an expensive present. A doctor, an old family friend, is brought in to examine the child but finds no defect in his body or mind. But the boy implores the doctor to stay the night and this he agrees to do.”

Ramona raised her small chin and rested it in the cup of her hand. “Is this the same story you remember?” she asked, “There are, as you say, interesting similarities to our own evening. A doctor and his young charge, alone together.”

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Richard nodded, although he felt uncomfortable agreeing, as she now seemed to read more into the story than he intended.

“Together that night,” Ramona continued, “the boy in his bed and the doctor seated beside him, with no illumination but moonlight reflected off the snow, together they watch the automaton while the clocks of the city slowly tick off the hours. The chimes of midnight pass. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four. They fall asleep, but then start into wakefulness at a small scraping sound that emanates from the automaton. It is the chimp, the one dressed as the family’s butler. The chimp is in motion although the automaton has not been wound. He removes his jacket, his vest, his ruffled shirt, and then, hopping first on one leg and then the other, he strips off his breeches and drops these to the ground. Now naked but for his natural suit of hair, he climbs up into the tree to rejoin his cousins, who greet him and pull him into the darkened interior of the foliage.”

“And the boy. Let’s not forget the boy,” Richard said. “He takes the doctor’s hand and says ‘In the dark, he is free.’”

“In the dark, we are all free,” Ramona said, smiling that same enigmatic and infuriating smile. “Speaking of which, don’t you think candlelight would be more appropriate for this time of night?” She winked and then, without waiting for an answer, retreated again to the kitchen. She returned with a candlestick holder and two white candles. The candlestick holder was thickly coated with wax drippings but it took only a little imagination for Richard to discern the shapes of two twined bodies joined in either passion or anger.

“A gift,” Ramona said, as if this explained everything. She screwed the candles into the waiting arms of the recipients. “Would you do the honors?”

She passed a matchbook to Richard.

Richard succeeded after only three matches and one burnt finger. In spite of the romantic shadows flickering about the ceiling and on Ramona’s face, he was still miffed. Not only had he discovering his family story was written by a stranger, but it had somehow been hijacked that evening by Ramona. And Ramona, dear sweet Ramona, who he had known since before she could read, did nothing but communicate in riddles. “What exactly is your thesis about?” he asked. His smile could not mask his petulant tone.

“Power.”

“Power? Surely that’s not all.”

“Power comes in many forms.” Ramona’s voice changed into the parody of some foreign accent and she added “political, economical, and sexual.” She emphasized each word by thumping her fork on her placemat.

Richard asked why she spoke in the funny voice, and she laughed.

“Sorry, I didn’t notice,” she said. “There’s a radio show that comes on in the evening. I think the DJ is from the Caribbean, maybe Jamaica, and he repeated that phrase three or four times during a single broadcast. It’s become part of the common vernacular among my circle of friends. I’m

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most interested in the sexual dimensions of power, as you might guess, although they all become intertwined.”

She then began a dry discourse on power structures of which all Richard would later remember is her saying how automata can either represent the current power structure, thereby reinforcing it, or they can stand in opposition to it, in that case being an example of wish-fulfillment by the dispossessed. Richard breathed deeply to avoid yawning, then raised a hand to hide a yawn that could not be prevented. He tried to focus on her eyes, her lips, the way her tongue flickered outside the cage of her mouth.

He nodded at what he thought were appropriate times.

Perhaps Richard’s gaze inadvertently drifted toward Ramona’s breasts, or maybe what she next said had nothing to do with any particular action of his, but was the natural progression of a line of argument that he had missed.

“Have you ever thought about your power?” she said, the sudden intensity of her voice shocking him into alertness. “Your power here tonight. You a man. I a woman. A woman who invited you, an old friend, into her apartment. A woman with whom you shared dinner and wine. How much wine have we had? One bottle, two bottles? Now let’s say something happened, something you wanted but I did not. What would you call that?”

He knew the word she was looking for, although he was uncomfortable saying it aloud. Nevertheless he answered her, framing the word with his lips although he did not truly speak it, merely mouthed it. “Rape,” he said.

“Yes. Of course. It would be rape.” She did not have any trouble speaking, pausing only long enough to give her subject an additional emphasis. “But, given the situation, given your power in the situation, you would not be found guilty by a jury of your peers. Let us not forget that your peers would be men. Your peers would excuse you. They would point to the invitation. They would point to the wine.”

Richard did not know how the conversation had so quickly changed from something light and fanciful to its antithesis. Perhaps, he wondered, he had been mistaken about the conversation all along. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Let me show you,” she said. She lifted her fork and licked it to remove the last few crumbs from the tines. “A simple fork. Hardly in the same category as a knife. But an instrument nevertheless capable of inflicting damage.”

Ramona wore a long-sleeved purple dress that buttoned at the wrists.

The dress was vaguely Japanese in its severity and contrasted so sharply with the cut-off shorts and pink T-shirts she wore as a child that Richard could scarcely believe this was the same person. She now shifted the fork from right hand to left and, without releasing it, unbuttoned the two buttons that cinched her right cuff and rolled the sleeve up to expose her naked forearm. She rested her arm upon the table, elbow braced against the wood, pale interior upturned and glowing orange in the candlelight.

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“What I want you to do,” she said, so matter-of-factly that she might have asked Richard to pass the salt, “is to stab me with this fork. Stab me here.” She tapped her bared forearm with the desert fork.

Richard laughed. A little nervously, but laughter nevertheless. The request was too ludicrous to entertain.

Ramona smiled, and her smile was cold as winter dawn. “Of course you laugh,” she said. “Of course you refuse, even though you are a man and have the power in the situation. You see me as the weaker sex. To attack me offends your sense of self.” She put down the fork and settled back into her chair. She fingered the coral necklace at her throat. “You do not want to see my blood.”

Richard nodded, knowing that some response was called for but feeling, deep down, that he had been put into a position where he affirmed more than he believed.

Ramona sensed this. “Oh, but I’ve confused you,” she said. “Worried you. Really, I was just trying to make a point. We were talking about power and what it means to be human.” She reached across the distance that separated them, taking his hand in her own and running her thumb back and forth across its veined back. She used the same arm she had so recently asked Richard to mutilate, and this gesture, this choice of which arm to use, he found strangely erotic. His breath quickened and his skin pimpled with gooseflesh. Without releasing his hand, Ramona said, “Look closely at my arm. What do you see?”

“It’s very pretty,” he said.

“Look more closely.” She squeezed his hand.

He shrugged, smiled a little. “Like the arm of a goddess,” he said, trying to be poetic.

Her grip became almost painful.

“You must work out,” he said, making light of his discomfort. He pulled back, testing her grip, but her fingers did not budge.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Ramona suddenly released him so he flopped backward into the wooden arms of his chair. “Can’t you see? There are no freckles. No scars. No hair.” She thrust her arm out again for his inspection. “It’s not real.”

She was right of course. In spite of the fact that her arm had the feel of flesh and her palm was marked with the creases and lines so beloved by fortunetellers, her skin was unblemished. Richard flexed his bruised fingers.

“That explains a lot,” he said. He was tempted to disbelieve her but, now that he knew what to look for, he could detect a hair-thin line that ran from the bunched up cloth of her sleeve down to her wrist, which it circled like a scribed meridian.

Ramona caught the movement of his eyes. “That’s better,” she said.

She slid the fingernails of her left hand into this thin crevice and rolled back her skin to expose the plastic and metal armature beneath. In some places the plastic was the pink of a naked Barbie doll, in others the black of old

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licorice. The metal supports shone with the pure silver-white of aluminum.

The skin flap was supported by a flexible black mesh.

Her arm no longer looked in the least bit human.

Richard must have gasped, because Ramona immediately said, “It’s just my arm. My forearm. The rest is still me.” She raised her left arm: “This is me.” She placed her palm between her breasts in the vicinity of her heart: “This.” She tapped her forehead: “And this.”

“How did it happen? No one told me.” He flushed. It had been years, many years, since he had sent her family a Christmas card.

“It’s not the sort of thing you advertise. Do you really want to hear the gruesome details?”

Her sarcasm set him more at ease. “Sure.”

“This was about seven years ago, back while I was in high school. I didn’t go to many parties then. I had friends but they weren’t in the right groups, if you know what I mean. We might get together to study, to talk about this and that, for dinner or a sleepover, but nothing too wild. Parties seemed an excuse for drinking and letting pimply-faced boys grope under your sweater.” Ramona lifted a coffee mug and took a sip. At some point, Richard realized, although he was not sure when, Ramona had removed the emptied wine glasses and brought coffee to the table. “I’m sure I gave off an aura that said I had better things to do.”

He tasted his own coffee, glad for the warmth, glad to have something to do with his hands.

“During my senior year” Ramona said, “I became friends with a girl who moved in the circles that had parties and I ended up going to a party with her that winter. There were more familiar faces than I had expected, familiar as in comfortable, people that I could relax and be myself with. I even ended up talking with people that I didn’t talk with much at school. I enjoyed myself more than I would have guessed.”

Something about the look on Richard’s face must have given away his thoughts. “It’s not one of those stories,” Ramona said. “Not where a bunch of snobs pretend to be friends only to play a trick on the odd-girl-out. There were cliques, sure, and I am sure that they followed various socio-economic patterns. Political, economical, sexual.” Ramona smiled again at her joke, and Richard now smiled also, recognizing it as such. “But there wasn’t a concerted attempt to reinforce these structures. Such structures tend to reinforce themselves anyway. Although, that said, I am sure that I was uncomfortable interacting in a novel situation with people that were not part of my group, even if I did not consciously recognize the fact at the time.

“When I left the party, a bit on the early side, but I was certainly not the first to leave, I found my car had a flat tire. My parents’ car, I should say, that I had borrowed to drive to the party.

“I had never had a flat tire before.

“I stared at it. I pressed the toe of my shoe against the bulging rubber. I tried to see if there was something stuck in the tire, but this was difficult at

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night with only the porch and garage lights and strange shadows everywhere.

“I reached what seemed the only conclusion possible and stormed back into the party. ‘Who let the air out of my tire?’ I cried. ‘My tire’s flat. Did someone let the air out?’

“In memory, I see everyone within earshot looking at me as if I had gone off my rocker. Of course no one had let the air out. Sometimes a flat tire is just a flat tire.

“Two of the boys came out with me, set their beers down in a snow bank, and changed the tire. They used the spare from the trunk and showed such proficiency with the jack that I was astonished. Their breath puffed like smoke in the cold. The spinning tire iron flickered like a strobe. When they were done, they clanked beer bottles together. One said ‘How about a kiss?’ I said ‘Okay,’ and gave them each a kiss. I walked with them back into the party, found the friend who I had come with and told her everything was all right, and then left.

“I got into my car and tried to turn it around in the driveway, but there were too many other parked cars. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by going back into the party again to ask people to move their cars, so I backed down the driveway.

“It was night. It was winter. The driveway was steep and slick with ice.

I hadn’t had my driver’s license very long. Maybe I had drunk too much alcohol, but I don’t think so. I am sure that my mind was a whirl what with my stupid accusation at the party and because I had just kissed two boys.

“To make a long story short, I got stuck in a snow bank part way down the driveway. I tried to go forward, then switched into reverse. My wheels spun but the car did not move. I pressed down harder on the accelerator.

Then suddenly I was loose and speeding backward down the driveway.

Then, instead of hitting the brake as I intended, I stomped down on the accelerator again.

“The car shot down the driveway, crossed the road, plowed through a snow bank, and slid down the hillside. Backward. I hit a tree. Next thing I knew, I was lying on my back in the snow. People were helping me up.

Trying to get me out of the snow. I tried to move my arm but I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel it. I’m lucky that someone tied a tourniquet around it.

Otherwise I might have bled to death. My forearm was nearly severed at the elbow.”

Ramona raised her arm, the motion smooth and unhurried, so that the loose coil of rubbery skin barely shifted. She held her palm out vertically and bent each finger in turn first downward to touch her palm then back up to its original position. She then separated the second from the third fingers in the time-honored “Live long and prosper” Vulcan greeting of Star Trek.

“Pretty good, really,” she said.

Like a well-oiled machine, Richard could not avoid thinking.

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“I’ve also got scars all over the top of my head but those don’t show.”

Ramona shook her dark hair so it slithered across her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Richard said. He was fascinated by the arm’s mechanism from an engineering perspective and wished he could examine it in more detail. But to voice these thoughts seemed an invasion of her privacy.

Ramona picked up her fork again and held it out to Richard. “Here,” she said, placing her hand over his and prying apart his fingers with her own. “Take it.” Richard had no choice. To not respond would have been to let the fork fall.

Richard’s stomach lurched. He had thought the fork episode over.

“Knowing what you now know, could you stab me?” She pulled aside the skin flap so the plastic and metal underneath were clearly visible. “I would not feel it. Nor could you hurt or damage the arm. So what is there to stop you?” She raised her voice. “Stab me now.” No longer a question, but an order.

Richard stared at his fist and the protruding fork. There were hairs on the back of his hand and on the areas between his knuckles. His skin was dry and crinkled, crowned with the gray remnant of scab from a week-old scrape. His hand trembled. The fork, jutting from his fist at the same awkward angle he used as a kid to spear green beans off his plate, also trembled.

He looked at Ramona, hoping her face, her eyes, might give away her thoughts. She stared back at him. Her lower lip protruded and her breath came in short angry bursts through her nose.

“Stab me. It’s very simple.”

Richard grimaced. He shook his head. “You know I can’t do that. It’s too much a part of you.”

He thought he had made the correct decision. He thought perhaps this was another test and maybe she now approved of his answer. But then she grabbed the fork from him, as if he might fight her for its possession, and jabbed it hard against her forearm. The fork glanced off. She stabbed at her arm again. And again. Three times in all, each time brutally direct, without the hesitation one might expect in an attack on one’s own body. She then laid the fork with its bent tines very carefully beside her plate. She extended her artificial arm for Richard’s inspection, rotating it back and forth at the elbow. “See, you cannot hurt it.”

Richard nodded. He said nothing about the pockmarks he now noticed in the plastic, the shiny scratches in the metal. There were many more than she could have made just then. “I’m sorry,” Richard said. He didn’t know what else to say.

“Sorry?” Ramona snorted. “Sorry? This was the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s the new improved me. The stain-free, accept-nosubstitutes, every-day’s-like-Sunday, bionic super me. And, do you want to know what?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. “If I had my choice, if I had the money—the economical power—every bit of me would be like

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this. This would be me.” She swiveled the fingers and thumb of her false hand and formed a fist.

Dinner might as well have ended at that point, but it went on for another half hour.

Ramona got up to clear the table and, while her back was turned, Richard stole the mangled fork from her placemat and slipped it into his pants pocket. She must have noticed but, thankfully, she said nothing. She just carried the stacked saucers, the rattling coffee cups, and the plate with its crumbled wedge of cheesecake into the kitchen.

When she returned, the right sleeve of her dress was once again buttoned at her wrist. She and Richard sat on opposite sides of the empty table and conversed like wary strangers. Richard asked Ramona about her parents and her sister, about any bit of personal information he could dredge from memory. But he did not hear her answers. Instead he watched her arm, the gestures she made, trying to detect the movements by which he might differentiate the real from the fake. Each time she actually moved her right arm, he shrank into his chair. He was convinced that at any moment, in spite of his preventative measures, she would again strip back her sleeve and force him to participate in a violent demonstration.

After a suitable length of time had passed, so that his leaving could not be ascribed to aversion, Richard stretched, yawned, and said it was well past the hour he usually turned in. Ramona saw him to the door of her apartment. She hugged him goodbye after a fashion, circling him with her arms although her body did not press against his, and gave him a peck on the cheek. Out of politeness, he said how much he had enjoyed the evening.

She suggested they get together again. He said that would be nice.

Richard didn’t take a cab, preferring the bustle of late-night pedestrians along Broadway, the sense of connectedness to the human horde. He walked, hands thrust into his pockets, fabric tight against his knuckles, and thought about how, somewhere along the path between childhood and adulthood, he had lost Ramona. Or maybe she had lost herself. The little girl who sat in his lap at Christmas and tied ribbons in his hair was long gone, replaced by... Maybe he should have asked her more about her arm, about why she would, if given a choice, replace herself with a manufactured creature of plastic and metal. But he knew what Ramona would have said in response. The same thing she always said: something about power, about the relations between men and women, about matters political, economical, and sexual.

“Political, economical, and sexual.” Richard spoke these words aloud, unconsciously aping the accent Ramona had employed, and elicited a puzzled glance from a passing co-ed.

Richard found it hard to believe Ramona would reject her own body all because of politics, because of a misplaced idea about oppression. He told himself that she was just young. Foolishly idealistic. He considered calling her parents. He considered searching online to see if this was the

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manifestation of some crazed urban subculture. He wondered what he would do if, in spite of their rather ambivalent parting, she should phone.

He turned the ideas, the possibilities over in his mind in much the same way he fingered the bent fork in his pocket as he walked along. He explored the fork’s blade-like handle with its faint decorative scrollwork, the smooth flare of metal at its working end, and the three misshapen tines. He pressed the sharp points against his finger pads. The sensation was not pleasurable, but it assured him that he was alive.

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Threshold for Michael Garcia Spring SARA BACKER

Whenever you pass through a doorway, a tree pops out from your body.

I’ve seen you rub your shoulder before spruce needles push through.

Sucker branches sprout from your ankles and wrap around your calves.

Once, a bonsai maple, fully pruned, sprang from your stomach, ripping your shirt.

You are used to this. You carry clippers and a hand saw. I watched you drag an oak trunk out of the coffee shop, limping in pain. I don’t know how to help you.

Let’s linger on the stoop this warm spring evening, and study the river where ash and dogwood thrive.

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A Reason to Bend KATIE BICKELL

L

ast night I imagined my eyes fell from their sockets like acorns from an oak. They caught in my throat and I whistled while tilling the empty spaces with my thumb.

This morning I tear at my eyelids, fingers pinching, sliding, pinching again, pulling splinters from my pupils. I blink twice, wince, push the heel of my hand against the sting. His frown in the mirror is as familiar as the shaving cream he forgets to wash from under his ear.

“I think my contacts are stuck.” I say.

He moves me aside with two fingers and points. The case sits on the counter, sticky with dust, lenses inside, unused. I swallow, remembering the woody thickness of my dream. Outside, daisies are dried fists. The days are shortening; the season is fleeting.

There was a time when my stubbornness and bad dreams and forgetfulness intrigued him, the costs of loving a woman as scattered as the wildflowers. Now, every yawn, every nightmare, every patch of dry skin: all are symptoms, preludes to an upcoming failure.

“Remember that first summer, when my hair got caught in the spruce?” I offer him this to make him smile, this, the moment that we first met. Just two kids, underpaid laborers on a Christmas tree farm. “I stood there for hours! Thank God you checked the grounds. You’ve always been my hero.”

“I don’t know what to do.” His chin twitches. “Tell me what to do.”

No one needs landscaping in the autumn. He passes his days counting seeds into packets the same way we count the dollars that slip through our fingers. It’s too much. He needs to dig into the soil, to dirty his hands. He’s going to plant tulip bulbs along our driveway; they’ll make a beautiful homecoming, later.

“I’ll drop you at Nuella’s,” he says.

I tell him we’re fine, that he can leave us at home, but he insists.

“You could use the company, Dar. Besides, Chloe loves Nue.” Over coffee, Nuella tells me not to worry, that people change. “I used to be a fish, after all,” she says, her hands wrapping and spreading like restless fins around her cup. “A kiss a day keeps me from swimming away.”

“But that’s the problem,” I say, “I never stop changing.” I think of April, of robin, of sweet peas on windowsills. “Only months ago I was green. Sweet and cool, remember?”

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“You’re still sweet.” she says, “Not so cool, though. Shady as fuck, really.” It’s a cheap laugh, but welcome.

“You know, it used to be just a bit of fatigue and depression as it got colder out. Seasonal Affective Disorder, they said. And the berries in my hair, still, nothing we couldn’t manage. But this, this cycle…” I look away.

“It’s killing us.”

She slides her hand, cool, over mine. “There’s nothing you can do?”

She pauses, picking words like apples. “Aidan mentioned a prescription…”

I nod. Just six feet away my daughter rubs crayons over maple leaves.

She’ll tack those pictures to her bedroom walls later, adding to the evergrowing collection. She won’t be able to see the pink I painted on for so many tacked pictures, soon. Only the spindly hands of trees, veins exposed.

“It’s not that easy. If I don’t take the pills, I miss six months. If I do take them, I miss everything. I’m just empty, foggy, gone. It was the same for my mom, after.” The acorns build in my throat. “I can’t live like that.

She can’t live like that.” I say.

“Who? Chloe? You think she might…?”

“Who knows?” Tears drop from my nose now. “My mom didn’t think it would happen to me.” I brush them away with my sleeve. “But, maybe, maybe if it just happens, they can figure it out. Do something. Maybe if I just don’t suppress it… well.”

Nuella sighs, tightens her fingers around my fist. “I’m here. Whatever you need, ok?”

It’s worse by dinner. I scoop chunks of rot from my belly with a pasta fork, twirling wet fibers around its prongs, dropping the sog onto my daughter’s plate. I swat at termites on my abdomen, scurrying to reclaim their home.

“Not this again.” She pushes her plate away. “I hate this.”

She leaves to her room and I hear the flutter of leaf rubbings before the slam of her door.

“She hates me.” I say. The insects burrow deeper, their long white bodies like pellets of glass. They could be beautiful, maybe, if not so frantic, so destructive.

“She just misses you,” he says, “It’s hard when you’re gone. Someday she’ll understand.” His tongue trips and tries to grab back its words.

“Let’s hope not.”

At midnight I dream she’s taken from me and I scream until my tongue shreds. My cries whip my hair hard enough to scar my face before strands fall from my head in clumps on my pillowcase. He wakes me and tries to stop my hands while I strip layers of new bark from my shins.

“Think of spring,” he says, rocking me. “Just try. Just try think of spring.” I try to picture a hundred springs: Chloe’s rubber boots and floral skirts, Aidan’s kisses like raindrops, the smell of rhubarb pie. I think of my mother, the way she breathed the fullness of the seasons, her laughter rich with life and growth and the buzzing of bees.

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The cold moves in overnight, sweeping summer into ditches. The day is bare and grey, the kind it must be, quiet with annual disappointment. We wait for the dog to clean herself before we leave, her haunches trembling as she squats on frosted grass.

“Pick at it and it will only get bigger,” he says to our daughter. Chloe fiddles with a hole in her jacket pocket, her pink fingertips poking out between worn threads. It should have been mended. I should have mended it. Her hands will freeze, now, when the winds blow. There are so many things I should have done, so many ways I could have made this easier for her. But time runs like sap from where I carved his name on my thigh and my mind begins to slow.

It’s a long drive. “What if I stayed home this time?” I ask, “It’s never more than a few months.”

He stares ahead, knuckles like bone as he grips the wheel. “And, what?

Sit out by the porch? Watch the snow pile? You know it’s not that easy.”

He doesn’t bring up the time I snapped, the time she broke her arm. He doesn’t remind me how morbid it is, a silent mother shading her child’s play. He doesn’t wonder at how someone so still can be so cruel. He doesn’t need to, anymore.

Hedges sit in front of the hospital smoking cigarettes. Moss grows from their exposed roots like hair bushing from the ears of old men. Nearby, saplings shiver between the cracks of the asphalt. Just babies, he shakes his head.

He reaches for me, squeezes my hand. “We’ll visit,” he says, “every second Saturday. More, if we can. I promise.” My fingers dry into crisps of red and orange under his grip, littering the cup holder between us when he lets go. My feet take root around the passenger’s side floor mat and I cry a last time, please don’t leave me here.

But they dig me out and cover me with burlap. They hoist me onto a trolley and plant me under fluorescent lamps, tapping intravenous needles into my limbs, tubes dangling like vines. I am the tree from which I’d hang if given the chance, but they come, stringing lights from my branches and adding new baubles on every visit, and I have reason to bend while we wait for spring.

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Why I Check on You Before You Fall Asleep CHRISTOPHER MORGAN

The pain you never wanted came from an empty part of the woods—we found it. First all was quiet outside. Then night. Something like a violin made a cautious sound. Giant pupils divided us while we shook in our sleeping bags. I tried later to hold your hand, but you dangled your lantern, sorting tarot cards. I suggested an ancient fable to make you laugh. You said only half the cards worked that way. I pretended to understand.

There was a growl outside the tent. Then a whisper.

I made my outline very large. For you I do this.

There was a hush.

It remained that way for a very long time.

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Zoomorphism, or the Fur Hat IVY GOODMAN

I

t happened downtown in December, the cold shopping season. At the entrance to Palmer’s, glass doors fanned shoppers inward to the bright perfumes and out again, into the traffic exhaust. On the sidewalk, a volunteer in red rang a maddening bell, swinging his forearm, urging passersby to fill his kettle with coins. The city’s steam heat rose through the sidewalk grates as if from kettles boiling underground, and I was almost hot, standing there in my winter coat and arguing with Joanne. People bumped us with boxy shopping bags and scowled. “Girls! You’re in the way!” But we weren’t girls.

I was twelve, she was sixteen, and she was wearing the fur hat she had just bought.

“Let me see it.”

“I said no.”

“Aren’t you sweating?”

“Not at all.” She raised her chin and preened, stroking the fur on the side of her head.

You can’t change back, but I didn’t know that then. I was changing, too. The process doesn’t happen all at once, like defloration. It’s more like puberty, with which it coincides. It’s also lifelong, intensifying, concentrating, until at your peak, in middle age, you have never been more like yourself. You are. Ferocious, let’s say. Or terrified. But that December afternoon, I thought I saw Joanne changing right in front of me.

“You’re just jealous,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Right. Save up and buy your own.”

At Palmer’s hat counter, I should have discouraged her when she admired herself. But I had turned away from the display case and Joanne’s dizzying reflection in the swinging oval frame. The elegant clerks said, “Oh, that one suits you. Very becoming.” Afterwards, hadn’t they snickered together at the cash drawer? Wasn’t the man in a topcoat who angled past us just then also laughing behind his hand? The hat was a thick hood, padded inside, covering her ears and tying beneath her chin in a ribbon bow.

On the outside, every hair in the coarse brown fur stood outstretched, as if hypnotized by a static charge. She looked like an animal with a naked human face.

“Please, Joanne, take it back. Get a refund now.” I couldn’t tell her what I saw. She wouldn’t have believed me if I did. I would have just hurt

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her doubly with an insult she would have accused me of making up. “Don’t prance like that. Don’t pretend.”

“Pretend what?”

I couldn’t explain. Pretend to be pretty when you’re grotesque? Not that I was pretty, either. But I already knew that being visible was my greatest vulnerability. How different we were and are. And yet we share a resemblance. In the style of rudimentary cartooning, an inverted triangle can be used to represent us both: sharp chin, breadth across the eyes and forehead, ears more prominent than most people’s. But we were also different, of the genus Canis and the genus Mus. Dogs, mice, and Homo sapiens share many of the same genes. I guess that’s why, when our mother deflected us, we easily found other creatures.

Our father vanished when we were very young. In my clearest memory of him, he’s frowning at Joanne and me as if we were specimens under glass.

He didn’t seem to realize we were sentient and staring back.

“It isn’t dog fur, is it?”

“What? Of course not!” She twisted her lips and made them thinner.

Her human hair, which might have had a softening effect, was hidden, and there was fury in her fur-framed face. I had broken the rules. She must never be offended or opposed.

“Joanne, no, I didn’t mean it.” I reached out, but she shrugged backward. “I’m sorry. Please, forgive me.”

She reared up in her haughty way. “I’m going home.”

“Wait, Joanne!”

I suppose I spoiled her with my appeasements. But anyone who came to know her would soon learn that she attacked in rage when threatened and attacked joyously in jest. You had better appease her or give in and play dead.

I hurried after her, slipping between adults in their bulky shouldered coats and running faster through the pockets of fusty heat because the clattering grates below frightened me. Her hat bobbed on, up ahead. At the Market Street crosswalk, where she had to stop, I caught up with her.

“Joanne?” Out of breath, I was at her elbow. “Please, Joanne. I’m sorry.

Just listen.” I tugged her coat sleeve. “Remember that cabled knit hat? You almost bought it, right? Didn’t you like it?”

She deigned to turn her head. “Wool? You’re such an idiot on fashion.”

Mocking me, she was always happier. She had a special mocking pursed smile, as if she were hiding a morsel in her mouth. She would have laughed harder if I’d explained I was trying to save her. She was the carnivore who’d had me in her jaws countless times and by her grace alone let me live. After all, the Greek root of “sarcasm” means to tear flesh like dogs. Dominate, dominate, dominate must have sounded in her head like that awful handbell, ringing near the door to Palmer’s, the same bell that made me more and more afraid.

“But your hat is dangerous.”

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“You really are crazy. It’s a hat.”

I thought I loved her. I was bound to her in the backwards sense of a child’s forever, back before I remembered. She cared for me, I know she did. When Mother left us so often alone, Joanne had nurtured me, though understandably, at times, with a rival’s malice and impatience.

Other pedestrians had gathered near, also waiting for the signal to walk.

Below the curb, in the street, I saw a trickle darkly pulsing toward the storm drain beneath a whiter layer of ice. Could I grab the hat and stuff it down the drain? Even if Joanne grabbed it back in time, she wouldn’t want it, wet and bedraggled from the gutter. I reached up. The fur, unexpectedly soft, confused me for a moment, as if I shouldn’t hurt it, as if it were already rooted in her scalp. But I was rougher than I realized. Joanne’s head jerked sideways, and she jerked it back, shouting, hitting me, bending near, her asymmetric nostrils breathing on me when I fell. To the people pushing past, what a pair we must have been, the angry one with a fur head and the other crying on the sidewalk with her skirt rucked up and a naked tail almost visible under her clothes.

It was already twilight. Joanne had run ahead and left me. Oh, I knew the way. I wasn’t afraid of that. I was afraid of the dark, as I’m still afraid, not of the dark comfort behind walls or obsessively near the baseboards but the infinite-seeming dark, out in the open. I didn’t know yet that darkness flatters me. Against the dark pavement, my tail, if noticeable at all, is no more remarkable than a torn shoelace or a bit of twine. The intense inner vibration of my fear camouflages me as a moving blur, invisibly pulled along, like a ball of fuzzy dark gray angora yarn.

Down the blocks of narrow houses, closer to home, I was both less and more afraid. But no one saw me, and I was spared the queries, the curiosity and distaste of any neighbors. As usual, Mother would be very late. So I only had to answer to Joanne. She had left the kitchen door unlatched. In the alcove, I hung my coat beside hers. I could see her through the kitchen doorway, standing at the counter, peeling off the foil on that night’s food.

Her back was to me, and the back of her furry head. “Joanne?” But she refused to speak to me for days.

With every offense, I had to make things all right again because the disequilibrium was like a frenzy inside me. Back and forth, back and forth, I ran after her through those few small rooms where she would locate me precisely, in order to glance away, over my head. I pleaded, I flattered, I declared love. “You’re beautiful and so is your hat.” Was she fooled? I quivered, watching her. “You’re so good, Joanne. Why can’t you forgive me?” Her chin was up, but at last she tipped it sideways, made a kissy mouth, and pitied me with soft, forgiving eyes. She, too, played the trick of “love.”

The problem was, I couldn’t endlessly spin that wheel. I grew up. We both grew up. By nature I am wild and foul. I tear cellophane with my teeth and scatter droppings and grain behind cupboard doors. In attics or

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basements, where loose bits of yellow fluff suspiciously blow about, a homeowner might lift a length of batting, tucked for insulation between the joists, and find the underside all roughed up, soiled, curdled, burrowed in, kicked and scratched by tiny paws. That is evidence of a mouse enraged.

We both are mortal, but I am more mortal. A mouse can be stomped, beaten with a broom, baited, snared and starved in glue, or killed traditionally by the wire, as if by guillotine or garrote. Let’s say the trap flips, catapulted by the energy of the spring. Up close, the overturned oblong of wood is like a miniature fallen door, knocked off its hinges during an earthquake or an explosion. In the aftermath, the mouse lies in shadow, propping up the door. Its body can’t be seen. All that’s visible is one extended tiny pink naked nearly human foot.

“Give me the hat!” I’d said. But I couldn’t save her. Because she didn’t need to be saved.

At night in a distant suburb where half acre lots border the woods, she emerges from around the back of a big dark house and descends the steep bank of the front yard, scuffling for balance. She has the ribs of a whippet, unless she’s hungry. Her muzzle has whitened, and bits of dirt and leaves dangle from her legs and underside in tufts. But she’s alert. She twitches her ears and turns to stare, unafraid.

A couple out walking has stopped in the middle of the road. There are no other people around, no cars, no street lamps, but at this distance from the city’s haze, the sky is lit by the constellations. The woman says, “See that dog? Oh, she’s been neglected.” She crouches forward. “Here, girl.

Aren’t you a girl?”

Roughly, the man grabs the woman back. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t know what she’ll do.”

The dog lifts her chin and looks away. The couple yield to her; she makes them wait for her to cross. Her high haunches swagger slowly, slowly, and then she vanishes between the trees.

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The Fox Girl Revival JAN STINCHCOMB

I

n the morning we stood around in a circle in the woods. It felt like the first day of school, each girl checking out the others while pretending not to care, but unlike any school I had ever been to, we were all dressed in long white T-shirts, nothing else. I couldn’t help staring at the other girls’ bare legs, shimmering in the breeze. We all looked alike, dark-haired and skinny, but I had no idea how alike we were.

“So,” a pretty girl with good eyebrows said, “we don’t have to go to school, right?”

She was right. I thought of my history test and how weird it was not to worry about it. Somewhere my class was taking it but it didn’t exist for me.

And then I thought about my mom but I didn’t really feel anything. Not yet.

“I miss my phone,” said a girl so skinny that I was sure she had an eating disorder.

Then a tall girl with a sharply angled bob spoke up. She seemed to be in the know. “That’s right. No cell phones.”

“What are we supposed to do?” I asked. Stupid question, but it’s hard when all the rules suddenly change. And we always had to follow rules before.

“I’ve been wandering around for a while. I’m Madison,” the last girl said, the only one who hadn’t spoken yet. It seemed normal for her to introduce herself, but then she solidified and became a dead body at our feet.

We all took a giant step back and looked down at her. She was suddenly wearing her real clothes: flannel shirt, leggings, Doc Martens.

Bruises on her arms and throat. No blood, but a face so pale it was shocking. Dead leaves swirled around her.

That was when I understood: if we say our names aloud, we’re dead.

Not that we aren’t already, but this is something different, some kind of grace period.

“What do you want us to call you?” the tall girl asked me.

I knew better than to tell her who I was, so I said Fox Girl. And then I named the others, out loud, pointing to each girl in turn: Skin and Bones, Tall One, Good Eyebrows. Nobody was offended by the names I made up because things are different in this part of the woods. Everything is happening right now. No time to argue. No point in making a big deal of a name. My mom would be so pleased that I’m finally embracing her stupid Zen beliefs.

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There were dead leaves sticking to Madison’s clothes. I wanted to brush them off but I knew I couldn’t touch her. And then, before I could do anything, she disappeared.

It was obvious that Peter Schilling liked me. He liked skinny young girls.

He has them in all his work. There’s a whole series of photographs of naked girls in cages. They had a show for Peter at the gallery where my mom works, but she would never allow him to photograph me.

Flirting with Peter was just for practice. I wasn’t going to sleep with him. He noticed things, though, like the mark on my arm.

“What is that, Sadie? A birthmark?”

I pulled my sleeve down to cover the scar and shut Peter up. If my mom had discovered any of the marks on my body, she would have called the police.

My boyfriend, Nick, had given me the marks. They were on places that I could hide easily: my inner thighs and ass, my back, my stomach, my ribcage, my breasts. Nobody knew about Nick or the marks, not even my friends. Sometimes I would burn with the desire to tell them that I had a secret life. I belonged to someone. I wanted to take off my clothes and reveal myself, but I knew I couldn’t.

Nick never hit me. He bit me, leaving purple imprints that took weeks to fade completely. He never broke the skin. I learned to stay still and endure the pain. My mind would float off somewhere and I would grow lightheaded. It was almost better than drugs. I was proud of myself: I was changing, mastering new things.

I went to Nick’s place the first time because I had nothing else to do, but then I kept coming back because of the fox. Nick had a kind of pet, a fox who came by every day, an animal so tame that I could touch it.

Seriously. I went to this loser’s apartment, knowing fully what we would be doing and that it was illegal, because he told me that he had a fox.

I wasn’t sure I believed him at first. I thought it was some really innovative, stoner version of that famous line about the etchings. This was after school.

Nobody was waiting for me at home but that didn’t matter anyway. I was used to blowing off my mom.

I was surprised, entering Nick’s filthy lair that first time, when he grabbed a bag of cat food and went over to the sliding glass door. I watched him squat and tell me to be quiet. By the time the fresh air hit my face I was squatting too, holding my breath, staring at a little creature emerging from the woods. So the fox wasn’t a lie, or a line. It wasn’t a druggie fantasy.

Nick really had bonded with this little gray fox, who would come over every afternoon and let us pet him. Even that first time Fox—our very creative name for him—sniffed my hand and let me scratch his ears. Score.

I had found a boyfriend with a cool pet.

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I had to pay for it, of course. We had sex. It was my first time. I was unprotected in every way, but I had reached a place where I truly did not care if I lived or died, and it was a relief to let go.

What Nick really wanted, the biting, took me by surprise. I thought we were done when he came. I thought I had paid, fair and square. What he wanted both surprised me and turned me on. It woke me up, every time.

Pain is always a lesson. It teaches you something about yourself. I was so proud of myself, that first time, when I didn’t scream. I gasped. One little intake of breath. And then Nick made a gentle shushing sound, and I understood right away that this was the most tenderness I would ever get out of him.

Peter was the only one to notice that one mark on the underside of my wrist, a mark that, unlike the others, never completely healed. I usually tried to cover it up with long sleeves or bracelets. My mom never saw it. She had stopped seeing me, I realize now.

While we are walking along a riverbank I suddenly know who Good Eyebrows is. It comes to me in a flash of black and white, a photograph I saw. “You were in Peter Schilling’s last show, weren’t you?” I ask her.

She’s a little bit defensive but it’s not because of Peter. She tells us about modeling. I can tell she has some anxiety about her overall portfolio, her life’s work, which cannot be changed now. It will never get better. She won’t be famous, at least not for modeling, which is a shame. “No, I wasn’t in Peter’s show,” she insists. “I was on the other wall. There was just the one shot of my face, looking up.”

“I remember,” I tell her. “It was beautiful.”

Good Eyebrows speaks like someone giving a statement to the press.

“That wasn’t Peter Schilling—that was a different artist. But then Peter saw me and told me he thought we should work together. That’s why I went to his studio. I didn’t tell anyone. I was embarrassed, you know? I wasn’t sure what I thought of his work.”

Tall One and Skin and Bones stare at us. Finally Tall One says, “This is not productive.”

“What?” I ask her.

“Talking about it,” Skin and Bones explains.

Good Eyebrows is confused and angry. “What are we supposed to be doing?”

Tall One turns her back and walks away, but I hear her say something about how we need to move on.

“Really?” I ask. I laugh and the sound that comes out is a series of creepy echoes. “Come on. We can’t say our names. What about their names? Can we talk about it at all?”

Tall One spins around to face us and shrugs her empty shoulders. “I never knew the name of my killer. He was just this guy who would come

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into the bookstore where I worked. And then one night, after we had closed, he was waiting for me in the parking lot.”

This is a simple fact but it lands like an enormous stone in the quiet woods. One time a guy was waiting for Tall One in a parking lot. We all know what happened next.

I suspect that Peter is the reason I am in these woods, with these girls.

But he didn’t kill me. He never had the chance because my mother wouldn’t let him. I wish I could let her know she was right.

Skin and Bones says, almost to herself, “I don’t like to be photographed. I destroyed all my childhood pictures.”

That is weird. I’ll bet her family really misses those pictures now. We all stare at Skin and Bones; we can tell that she has suffered more than the rest of us. Her pain started before her murder. I want to ask her about her killer but I can’t. I’m afraid that might violate her even further. And then, while I am staring at Tall One, I realize that she was not in high school like the rest of us—or maybe not at the same time as the rest of us.

“What?” she asks me.

“Nothing,” I say. Everything goes black for a second.

The wind blows but we don’t feel it. I have lost track of time, or forgotten to think about it, or something. If I’m not careful, this could go on forever. So I finally ask Tall One, “Okay, how long have you been out here?”

“How should I know?” she says. She sounds angry. “How long have you been out here, Fox Girl?”

She’s right. I have no idea. And my made-up name sounds dumb when Tall One says it. I didn’t die the same way they did, so I don’t even know why I’m in this group. Is it just because I knew Peter? He had his eye on me, that much is certain.

But Peter’s attention always felt too easy, like cheating, and gross, like incest. We did not belong together, yet Peter was always so pleased to touch me in public. He would kiss me on both cheeks. Squeeze my body against his. He was handsome and a lot of women were attracted to him. And he was successful, which meant something, though now more than ever I can see that it doesn’t mean anything.

One time he raised my wrist to his lips and kissed me on my mark.

Totally inappropriate. “Did you ever read Turgenev’s ‘First Love’, Sadie?” he asked me.

“No. I never heard of it.”

“I’m going to give you my copy the next time I see you.”

“I don’t think I’ll have time to read it,” I told him. I don’t like it when old people tell me what to read. It always turns out to be something I can’t get through.

He shook his head, exposing his face to the light, and I was reminded of how much older he was, how much longer he had lived. “Sometimes, Sadie, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

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I knew he wanted to sleep with me, but that didn’t matter because I belonged to Nick. I was marked. I did not understand that Peter could have really hurt me. I missed this somehow. Maybe I was too wrapped up in Nick. All that secrecy, all that lying, took a lot of time and energy.

Fox was there, of course, always. I felt really close to him and I would worry about him whenever we were apart. It is torture to be in love with a wild animal, much worse than trying to keep an indoor-outdoor cat. Imagine the risk of loving a fox who has the whole woods to play in. Every time he appeared was a miracle. I was so grateful. And every time he left my heart would sink. Nick didn’t feel the same connection to Fox. Mostly Nick rambled on about music and his big plans and someone he called The Man. I remember when he accused me of loving Fox more than I loved him and how much it scared me.

It was the first time I understood that Nick was dangerous.

I felt like I had to please him in order to keep things as they were. I couldn’t say no to anything. So when he told me to arrange things so that I could sleep over one Friday night, I did what he said. He told me he had a surprise for me. We were going to try something different.

I wasn’t afraid. I had done drugs harder than the ones Nick gave me. I hadn’t had sex with anyone else, though. Imagining what more Nick might want from my body made me a little nervous.

When I came over Friday after school, we smoked pot that was laced with something. I could tell something was wrong right away, and right away I regretted it. I felt sick, poisoned. Nick passed out fast—we didn’t even have sex. I covered him with a blanket. We were shivering and it seemed like the right thing to do. And then, because I thought we were both going to die, I opened the sliding glass door. I wanted Fox to find us, to be with us. But that was all I could do. I could not even manage to crawl back to the disgusting old futon where Nick lay. I fell asleep on the floor, shaking, as cold air poured in from the open door.

And then, sometime later, I got what I wanted, for a change.

I was awake and it was dark, but there was a moon and Fox was standing at the door. He looked so beautiful. I saw, as if for the first time, that his fur was not really gray at all. It was the color of a latté, a silvertipped latté, but with red: the back of his head was almost entirely red. How had I not seen that before? I knew that the trick was to be patient and let him come to me. And he came right up to my face and sniffed. Then he started talking.

He asked me about the bites. But you of all creatures should know about bites, I said. Did you get in some kind of fight, Fox wanted to know.

Did someone try to hurt you? Yes, but it’s complicated. I looked over at Nick. Fox wanted clarification.

I remember not wanting to have that conversation, especially not with Fox. There were so many things I wanted to ask him, but Fox wouldn’t let

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my marks go. I don't bite my mate, he said. Oh, are you married? I asked.

And do you love her? Is it working out for you two? My parents are divorced.

If someone tries to bite me, Fox began. He never finished that sentence but I knew what he was saying. Fox would never have stood for biting. And he was an expert. He was a biting creature. He had a better idea of the etiquette involved here, the customs. I imagined him biting his mate, but just for fun. And then I stroked his lovely face, which transformed to pure mask under my fingertips. I was persistent. Tell me about your mate. How did you two meet?

But Fox had finished talking. He settled down beside me. He was so warm, so beautiful. I drifted and prayed that he wouldn’t ever leave. It was the best day of my life, more real than real.

When I finally came to, much later, I was ice cold. Fox was gone. My head hurt so badly that I had to hold it in my hands. Then I had to stay perfectly still and wait for the nausea to pass. There was a gray mist outside and I realized that I had never been at Nick’s place so early in the morning.

Slowly I stood and reached for the sliding glass door.

That was it. I couldn’t touch anything. No contact. I fell.

At first I thought I was still stoned, really gone. And then I knew. Nick was asleep on the futon: he had made it through and I hadn’t. For a long time I stayed in his apartment. My body was right there on the floor, after all.

I regretted how terrible I looked.

Fox came back, as I had hoped. He was just an animal looking for his treat. I understood that he hadn’t really loved me like I wanted him to, not like a human, and not even as much as a dog. But he did his best. He sniffed my body. And then he tried to rouse Nick by biting his arm, which he marked with a jagged curve of red and purple.

I was pleased.

Skin and Bones is really losing it. She keeps talking about how her killer stole her childhood locket before he strangled her, as if that makes a difference. Good Eyebrows is standing away from all the excitement. She died the most recently, I think, so she’s still taking it all in. Tall One looks like she wants to help, but what can she do? We can’t even touch each other. All she can do is stand close to Skin and Bones and listen.

“All right, all right,” she finally says. “Stop. We get it. You know, you can make it all go away by saying your name. You’ve known this for a while now.”

Skin and Bones falls silent. Her lifetime disappearing act has caught up with her. She likes to be in control, so it makes sense that she doesn’t want to let go of this one last thing. “Why don’t you say your name?” she asks Tall One. “Or you two,” she says, turning around to look at Good Eyebrows and me. “I know you just got here, but there’s no reason why you can’t.”

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“For God’s sake,” Good Eyebrows cries. “I’m still remembering appointments and shit. I have goals.”

“Had,” Tall One says in the gentlest of voices.

Everyone looks at me and I feel like I have been called on in class.

Decision time. I know that I owe them an explanation. “I’ll go. Soon. But I wanted to see if I could find someone first.”

“That doesn’t usually work,” Tall One warns me. “Especially once you’ve come this far. You have to understand: these aren’t real woods. You can’t stay here.”

“But it’s not a person. It’s an animal. A fox.”

“So that’s where your name comes from,” Skin and Bones says. Her little voice sounds like it is far away.

“Yeah.” Now I’m upset, knowing that I won’t be able to find Fox out here. I don’t have much left to hang onto. “I need to explain something. I wasn’t murdered. I’m not exactly sure why I’m here.”

The three of them stare at me with blank, pale faces. I glance down at myself because I can’t hold their gaze, but all I can see is that damn T-shirt.

The day I died I was wearing a short dress and flats, my last outfit.

And then the T-shirts on all of them, on Good Eyebrows and Skin and Bones and Tall One, start to dance around like ghosts. They rise, exposing breasts and privates. It’s hard to ignore everybody’s pubic hair, or lack thereof. Tall One has all of hers.

My T-shirt stays still.

“So how did you die?” Good Eyebrows asks, polite but direct.

“I smoked something that killed me,” I confess. “Something my boyfriend gave me. He was kind of a loser.”

My words, hanging in the woods, sound beyond stupid. Tragic, certainly, but dumb as well. I made one bad mistake. Okay, maybe a string of mistakes. But still. I keep talking because I feel like I owe them something: “I knew Peter, Good Eyebrows’ killer. He worked with my mom. I swear I didn’t know he was dangerous—not like this. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Fox Girl,” Skin and Bones says. “And for what it’s worth, you kind of were murdered.”

For a second I am speechless. The woods flicker around me. “No! You don’t understand. He wasn’t trying to kill me. It was an accident. That’s why it’s so fucked up.”

“And don’t you think your parents are busy pressing charges?” Skin and Bones asks. “Don’t you think that they’re calling it murder?”

“Manslaughter, at least,” Tall One says.

I am really angry right now. What the hell do these girls know? They weren’t even there. Nick is innocent of my death, I am sure of that.

“Wait a minute,” Good Eyebrows says, panicking. “I’m still trying to understand. What about our bodies? Our dead bodies, I mean. Did they find us? Do they know what happened to us?”

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“Don’t worry,” Tall One says. “The body isn’t important—oh, to your parents, maybe, to the police. All you have to do now is say your name.”

She waits, frustrated, for us to catch up. “Don’t you get it? It’s because of the way you died. You have to reclaim your soul. Name yourself. You saw what happened to Madison.”

I remember the sight of Madison’s recently strangled body and wonder how that’s supposed to reassure us. But it does, strangely.

Good Eyebrows steps forward, taking us all by surprise. “Good luck then, everyone. I’m going to leave before I can talk myself out of it.” Then she holds her arms up to the sky—I can tell she has taken acting classes— and cries, “I am Emma Rose Winslow!”

In the moment before she drops to the ground, her life rushes over me in a wave, residing briefly in my heart, and I spasm with joy and pain all at once. It’s like a spectacular orgasm, a shooting star, something rare and sacred.

“Did you guys feel that?” I ask when I recover.

Skin and Bones nods and smiles for the first time.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Tall One says.

Now I understand what she’s doing out here. She isn’t ever leaving.

“Tall One, you have to tell me: how long have you been here?”

“Since 2001.”

“Holy shit.” I still know what that number means though time is changing with every second.

“Yes. It was a while ago.”

“That’s why you look different. Your hair—” “Don’t overthink it, Fox Girl. None of that matters now. I know it’s harsh, but everything you cared about is over for you.”

“What about you? Are you going to be stuck out here forever?” I ask her.

“Only until new girls stop showing up.”

I think that might mean forever. I’m trying to ignore Good Eyebrows’ dead body but we can all see that she is completely naked. Peter didn’t even let her keep her clothes. Her disappearance is a relief.

I can tell by the trees that there is a wind blowing but I feel nothing.

Skin and Bones stands up and says simply, “I’m sorry for everything I did wrong. I am Elizabeth Parker.”

Lying on the ground, she looks skinnier than ever, all bones. Her throat is cut. There wasn’t much joy in her life. I feel bad for feeling so little. It’s even more upsetting to see her clothing, a dress that looks like it belongs on a little girl. I turn away.

I am almost done, really. I want to ask what happens next but Tall One won’t answer me anyway. I can feel her waiting. I walk ahead and stare into the woods.

I have lost some time between dying at Nick’s and arriving in these woods, but I know that I saw Nick calling Animal Control. Apparently he

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wasn’t too crazy about being bitten. I was so worried. I tried to scare Fox away but he was completely unaware of me, as if I had never existed. I still feel some responsibility for him. I want to protect him—I can’t help it. I don’t want Fox to die too.

My heart gets this quivery feeling as I think of my mom.

“All these feelings,” Tall One says, appearing at my side. “They’re really lovely and they’re really important.”

I know she is trying to say that my feelings, no offense, simply don’t matter. They’re the last link but they can’t take me back or undo anything.

They don’t help me. I stare into the woods for so long that I think I can see animals moving around. The trees are swaying. I want one last glimpse of Fox in flight. But if I can’t find him in these woods, does that mean that he survived?

Maybe he can still be my hero.

I could tell my story forever. That’s the hardest thing to let go of, I understand, as I close my eyes and say my name.

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Childhood Offering JUSTIN ROBINSON

my teacher kept a house of plastic dolls that held a lamb’s brain floating in a jar I placed the dolls on a plate & offered them to the brain cracked mirror they cried slipping into the water —my reflection split into a thousand faces swallowed by each fold

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The Minotaur RUSSELL BRADBURY-CARLIN

T

he Minotaur was in my class in fourth grade. He sat in the back of the room and only spoke when asked a direct question. His voice was gravelly and deep as if his lungs were a cave and his throat was filled with sharp rocks. Still, if you listened closely, he sounded like a nine year old, too. Maybe it was the way he paused between some words—like he was embarrassed to speak out loud.

One time I was in a reading group with him. We each went around and read a chapter of a book aloud. Our group was reading a story about a farmer during a drought and how he managed to make a living. The Minotaur was a bad reader. He mispronounced words all the time, calling “fertilizer,” “fer-til-zer.” And “combine harvester,” “com-bin harv-ster.”

The idea behind a reading group was that we learned to be better readers by correcting each other. No one said anything about the Minotaur’s mistakes.

Everyone was too afraid.

As he read this particular story, he kept stumbling over the word “aquifer.” He would start to say the word quickly, like he was making a running leap, but then stumble and stammer in the middle: “Aaaa-qwee…

Aaaa-qwiii…” Finally I grew frustrated, since the word came up about twenty times in the chapters he read. I leaned toward him and hissed the correct pronunciation. He glanced at me with his naturally deep-furrowed brow. For a moment I wasn’t sure if he was going to snarl at me or threaten to take a bite out of my arm. Then he turned back to the book and continued reading, pronouncing “aquifer” correctly. When he finished his chapter, he leaned toward me and whispered “thank you.” And at that volume, the raspiness of his voice disappeared. He sounded exactly like any other boy in my class.

That was last year, though. The Minotaur isn’t in my class now. So, I only see him in passing as he scuttles down the edge of the halls on the way to lunch or on his way to the buses at the end of school. As soon as the reading group broke apart on that day in fourth grade, the Minotaur returned to ignoring me. And I never said anything or made eye-contact with him.

We both acted as if we had never had that moment of direct communication. But I hadn’t forgotten it.

Some kids say that they dream of the Minotaur. And in their dreams he is much larger than he really is. In reality, he is only a head taller than the tallest kid in the school—Mike Duncan—but he is thick and wide. He

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seems to almost spill over the edge of his desk. Chairs threaten to crack into splinters under him. But in their dreams, they say, he is even larger, like a buffalo. And he charges. He runs at them with hot furious steam trailing from his wide round nostrils. Strings of spittle slip from the corner of his mouth and soaks the fur that runs down his back. And then he stops right in front of them. The kids say they are too paralyzed with fear to move. They just stand there while this enormous boy—more like a man in their dreams—with a bull’s head towers over them, his eyes ablaze with menace.

Many kids, perhaps all of them, have had the same exact dream. Except me.

I crossed the basketball court at recess on a spring morning to find the Minotaur amongst The Boulders. The Boulders are a bunch of large rocks at the back of the school. The Minotaur spends all of his time there during recess. None of the other kids go there.

I am sure my face was flushed red with the effort to hold back the pain in my stomach. And holding back tears, too. Tim Skane had punched me in the gut. Hard. Tim seemed to enjoy leaving his mark on kids. He usually picked on one or two random kids at a time. Then, he would hurt them whenever the opportunity came along. If you were walking near him and the recess teacher had his or her back turned, he would pounce—almost always one solid stone-fisted punch. He often tried for an eye or the jaw.

His pleasure seemed to be tattooing kids with black and blue marks.

Sometimes you could make out the outline of his knuckles in the different tones of dried blood below the surface of your skin. Today, I saw it coming.

I wasn’t even near Tim. He saw Mr. Harrington move to break-up a pushing fight between some sixth graders near the parking lot. Tim raced at me like a shark. I brought my hands up to my face and he saw the opening I left. His fist slammed into my belly full-force. Every ounce of breath was expelled from my lungs. I fell to the ground and sipped in small nibbles of air as my diaphragm felt crushed.

“More soon, runt,” he hissed.

Then Tim turned and left, speeding back to his lurch with his three minions to act as if nothing had happened.

I wanted to call out to him, “Why me?” But I knew why. I was small. I was vulnerable. I was an easy target.

As I approached The Boulders, I saw the Minotaur’s hunched back peek up from behind one of the rocks. He was wearing a tightly stretched tshirt—they probably didn’t make any that would fit him loosely. Brown curly fur spilled out from the neck of the shirt and from the back of his thick arms. My body was still as hairless as a baby’s. His body was smeared with brown wiry hair that resembled steel wool.

I was cautious as I approached the Minotaur. I had never seen him talk to any other kid except for me that one time. And I had never seen him harm or threaten anyone. But, his sheer size and the shape of his face made him look ready to kill: his broad heavy nose, deep-set eyes that were large

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and round, his eyebrows—arched downward in a constant look of anger.

And his hot breath. I remember, when the class was silent during a test in fourth grade, that I could hear his heavy breathing.

I was determined, though. I needed the Minotaur’s help.

My foot must have kicked a small rock by mistake. Or I coughed or was breathing too heavy. But as I came closer, there was a sound and the Minotaur’s head popped up and he stared at me. The pace of his breathing increased. I could see myself in his wet wide eyes standing on the other side of the rock between us. I couldn’t tell if he was startled or furious. I thought about lifting the back of my hand up, the way I would to a cautious dog who I wasn’t sure was going to try and attack me or not.

Instead, I found myself speaking. I hadn’t planned what I was going to say. The words just seemed to drop from my mouth.

“Kind of hot out, huh?”

That’s when I noticed that he had a huge clump of soil in his hand, and his thick lips were caked with moist dirt.

“So,” he said in that deep cavernous voice.

I didn’t know what to say after that.

The Minotaur stared at me. He chewed the dirt in his mouth. I could hear the cracking and scrapping of small pebbles and grit in his teeth. His nostrils flared and contracted as he breathed.

“Tim Skane just punched me in the stomach. I think he’s out to get me.

I’m wondering if you’d be a kind of bodyguard for me. You know, hang around with me in the halls so Tim will know not to pick on me. We don’t have to talk or anything. Just walk beside me.”

The Minotaur scooped up another handful of dirt and shoved it into his mouth without dropping his stare. He wiped his moist, muddy lips on his hairy arm.

“Sure,” he said.

The next afternoon, I ran up to the Minotaur as soon as school ended. Our classrooms were close together, so we had to walk in the same direction to get to the buses. I sidled up beside him and we walked as if we were buddies.

Many of the other students watched us as we ambled down the halls— they kept their eyes partially averted—looking, but not too directly, like glancing up at the sun.

Then I saw Tim, plowing his way down the hall with his buddies. He was a battleship that split through the students like the ocean. He kept an even, unwavering pace—until he caught sight of me and the Minotaur. Tim slowed a bit, but kept moving. The constant sneer on his face faded for a second, then returned.

This was all I wanted: for Tim to see me and the Minotaur together. For him to remember that image every time he considered marking me with his fist. I underestimated Tim, though. I thought he was going to make a wide-

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arc around us, like most kids did around the Minotaur. Instead, Tim set his gaze forward to the end of the hall and plowed forward—right between me and the Minotaur. And the Minotaur stepped aside, letting Tim and the wake of his buddies pass. I wasn’t expecting this to say the least, so Tim brushed right passed me—making sure to swing his elbow, hard, against my arm. I fell backward and slammed into the lockers along the wall. I could feel the throb of a bruise settling under my skin. Tim let out a quiet chuckle as he cruised down the hall.

I turned to the Minotaur. “What happened?” I hissed. “I thought you were going to help me. Why did you move out of the way?”

The Minotaur kept walking to the buses parked at the front of the school. He didn’t even look down at me. “Because,” he grunted. Then he jumped up onto the bottom step of the bus. I stopped in the doorway and watched him lumber to the back corner and squeeze himself into the toosmall seat.

Then something odd happened.

I expected, of course, that I would remain Tim’s punching bag for a long time. He had broken my plan, and now he would teach me to never try to plot against him again.

Two or three days after Tim’s victory, my best friend Peter and I were hanging out by the swing sets talking about this new horror movie that neither of our parents would let us see.

One of the things that made Peter my best friend was that he said nothing about what had happened with the Minotaur. Some kids made fun of me—yelled “dead man walking” as I passed them. I knew some were also amazed that I had even stood near the Minotaur. Peter must have known that I was embarrassed that my plan had not worked, and that I was afraid of Tim’s revenge. I knew he desperately wanted to ask me about the Minotaur. But he just acted like nothing had ever happened.

Tim was standing around the basement door of the school with his friends at recess. I could see him talking and gesturing with his hands. His buddies were laughing. But every once in a while, I saw him glance over at me. He’d look and then turn away—as if he was afraid to stare too long.

Tim never approached me. He never elbowed me in the hall, again. He didn’t wait for me near the buses at the end of the day. It seemed as if Tim was trying to purposely avoid me.

Then, Tim wasn’t in school for a few days. This wasn’t uncommon because he would often skip school. But the rumor that rippled amongst the students was that he had gone crazy. That he was in a hospital. No one was sure when he was going to come back.

The days turned into weeks. The school seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Tim’s friends kept to themselves—hid in corners and avoided others. None of them rose up to take his place.

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And during this time, I hung out a lot after school with Peter and our other friend, Eric. Neither of them ever asked me about that day with the Minotaur. They did speculate endlessly about Tim, though. They spun tales of lobotomies and electro-shock treatments. I just listened and laughed in the places where they expected me to laugh. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Tim, but somehow I felt kind of responsible.

Also during this time, I ignored the Minotaur. He didn’t seem to notice.

The Minotaur walked to classes with his eyes down and spent recesses up in The Boulders, and treated me like he treated any other kid in the school.

It was about a month later that Tim Skane returned to school. He was a different kid. His face was pale and slack. His eyes, which used to be dark and piercing, were now clouded. He walked down the hall slumped over and was visibly skittish. He seemed broken.

Finally, one day, Peter whispered to me at lunch that he had heard Tim’s buddy, Mike Sawyer, talking to one of the older kids.

“The Minotaur infected Tim’s dreams,” Peter told me. “For a couple of weeks, he attacked him in his sleep.”

Peter glanced around.

“The Minotaur ripped Tim to shreds and devoured him every night,” he continued. “Tim said he could feel every claw tear at him and the Minotaur’s teeth dig deep into his flesh. Tim didn’t sleep for weeks. He was too afraid.”

Tim did, it turns out, go crazy.

The next day at recess I made my way up to The Boulders. I heard the Minotaur snuffling and chomping as he ate handfuls of soil.

“You did help me,” I said.

The Minotaur lifted his large head up from behind a rock and he glared at me. “Yes. It seems I did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that? Why’d you let me think you weren’t going to help me?”

The Minotaur snorted. Puffs of moist breath expelled from his nostrils.

“What do you think I am?” He asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Am I kid who is a monster? Or, a monster who is a kid?”

I scratched my head. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”

“You may believe that, but I don’t think that is really true.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Was he right?

“And why do you think you don’t dream about me?” He asked.

I shrugged.

Then the Minotaur turned his back to me and leaned down. He flicked away some stones with his huge thick fingers until he cleared a patch of dirt. Then he sank all of his fingers in and pulled up a hunk of soil, which he

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placed in his mouth. Long threads of dust-covered drool stretched down from his lips.

The next night I dreamed about the Minotaur for the first time. In my dream, though, he was actually smaller than he really is. He was just about my size. He was standing on a hill of tall grass. It was a brightly colored spring day. A warm breeze ran through my hair. I ran up to the Minotaur, who stood and waited for me. His head and shoulders were less heavy. His thick coarse hair was thinner and more matted. His eyes and brow protruded less. He looked, actually, more like a boy.

When I reached him, a kind of smile seemed to stray over his lips. He leaned toward me and tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

“Tag!” His voice was still gravelly, but lighter. Then the Minotaur turned and ran toward a patch of trees at the bottom of the hill.

I paused for a moment, at first unsure what to do. Then I saw him glance back at me with an arch in his eyebrow.

I took off and chased after him.

He wasn’t going to get away—untagged—if I could help it.

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Love Lesson #2014 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer LISA CHEBY

This message is not for me: “Just thinking of you and hope things will go smoother for you and love you.”

A slayer with family and friends wasn’t in the brochure: “sorry, off by one digit, please delete me” Without a slayer, you are just pretty much watching And without a spinster and Halloween cats, the matchmakers are pretty much on a rant, no room for logic: on New Year’s Eve someone’s mother called me by mistake I remembered my mother is dead when there was no one to make me tea or bury me in the crypt of his body “You can’t keep trying to make everything work with one big gesture or by publishing a book of poems to distract from this:”

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“Thanks, but who is this?”

“Tragedy?

I am no longer in love with you.”

You no longer turn me on this old mattress -all I need: an unbudger of support

I’m five by five

and know the soul is not all about moonbeams and penny whistles: it’s about selfloathing.

But someone I don’t know loves me.

I have a text that says so.

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Portals TAMARA WALKER

t feels wrong to call them vortexes. They don’t swirl. Watery purple holographic circles, my portals shimmer softly with the serene gaze of patient elephants. Watching? Waiting? I don’t know if they care whether or not they’re used. Since they vanish afterwards, I like to think so.

I

I’m waiting for my aunt, who I’ve never actually met, at her mountain home. She insistently claims to have babysat me exactly thrice. I’m here to set the record straight. No: I’m here to show her that I exist. I: dimensional person, adult, woman, anything other than the meek little boy she supposedly remembers me as. Best raspberry blouse, hair done up, tied in a bow of its own at the back of my neck. My no-nonsense working-class unmet aunt doesn’t care about such things. Neither do I, in my own way, but efficacious presentation is integral to my image itself. On the phone, my mother tells me: 1. Relax.

1.5. Just be yourself.

1.75. You’ll be fine.

2. But for god’s sake don’t comment on her hideous décor, 2.25. or tell her anything about me in the last decade.

My mother also warns me that she’s blunt, in-your-face, not the most ‘politically correct’ of her sisters. I sigh, promise to abide advice #1-2 on her list, and hang up.

Portaling comes easy. My uncle, who I’ve just met, shows me how to do it.

Contrary to my expectations, you don’t have to have a great imagination for detail. In fact, my uncle tells me, the more detailed the mental picture of your destination, the more likely you are to fuck it up. You don’t want to fuck it up. Imagine a place, he tells me, without all the little elements that make it truly unique. Just the essence. Don’t envision a photograph; nothing fancy. I trust him. His beard is scraggly at the ends and far too long for his face, but he’s extremely calm and exudes patient wisdom.

I portal in and out of a test zone a few times: blank white space, just to get the feel of it and practice the vagueness of setting my uncle advised. To get there I imagine margins and focus on them too intently the first few times, ending up in a frightening nether-realm in which inky shapes flit in and out of existence intermittently on the horizon. · · ·

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The first actual place I portal to is a burnt-out city. I have speculations as to its exact location, though I simply cannot know that and it doesn’t matter.

When I arrive I’m in a short above-ground tunnel made of an abandoned concrete pipe. The sun is still high in the sky and contrasts eerily with the dark conduit. I freeze for three seconds and just breathe. Portaling feels like that pins-and-needles sensation of your arm falling asleep, except it washes indiscriminately through your entire body. It isn’t long before I know why I’m here. A small black bear is at the end of the tunnel, glaring menacingly at nothing in particular. Fortunately, the tunnel is too narrow for it to get through. I scuttle quickly out the other end and try to climb atop the pipe.

Slipping several times I finally ascend it at the expense of my palms. The bear disappears and I scratch my shoulders in bafflement. When it reemerges on the side I deftly tranquilize it and empathize as I succumb to the sedative effects of the violet visual gel.

7 pm. My aunt still isn’t off work. My stepbrother joins us and wants to try portaling from here too. I know this is a mistake but chalk the feeling up to older sibling arrogance. Confiding in him as I always have, I describe my excursion, which he unwisely decides to replicate. My uncle gives him a similar crash-course and he brings his friend, who has inexplicably accompanied him to my aunt’s. When they get to the tunnel it’s midmorning and an irate rooster is there. It bites and pecks at their cocks. They portal out, shrug and give up. My aunt arrives and is more perplexed by me than anything.

Reportaling to clean up my stepbrother’s mess. I’m more skilled at minimal visualization now. Same tunnel, different area. Not necessarily a city.

Rhino. I try to save her life by gently shaving her horn.

The girl takes off running. Seeing no one behind her and feeling like a bloated superfluity, she slows mirthlessly to a stumbling amble. Recently, she yearned achingly to be seen, for recognition as herself, but now she would give anything to just be invisible, to be an unsuffering, imperceptible lacuna between the plastic piano keys of adolescence and spacetime.

Though headed down the west hallway she can’t see any of the classrooms.

Everything resembles a giant aquarium into which someone is dropping viscous fluid. Her mascara runs much as she ran. Black streaks stain her teal sleeve. She dashes into the women’s bathroom—risky, but she doesn’t care doesn’t care doesn’t care—into a stall without bothering to lock the door, throws an old compact mirror over the partition, and holds her head in her hands.

My aunt excuses herself immediately after my introduction, her beige chalky skin having predictably gone an even paler shade. I can hear incredulous muttering from the next room containing my mother’s name.

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She emerges to stare at me with dish-plate eyes and a false smile that looks more maniacal than friendly, awkwardly asking a few perfunctory questions and mumbling some thick soup of words containing the phrase ‘…live and let live…’ My uncle announces “Dinnertime!” with equally artificial but less creepy cheeriness after a nebulous pause, and my aunt uncovers a baking dish on the stove. She shoves some sort of potato casserole dish at me that is simultaneously far too bland and burning of cinnamon.

I land in a carpeted hallway. A school. I know this without any other details, just by staring at the crushed multicolored tapestry beneath my feet, so many flecks of crayon wax on a charcoal canvas. Two doors are ahead, side by side, marked by signs that I barely catch a glimpse of before everything fuses into one entrance. Bathrooms? I tentatively enter the mono-door and hear glockenspiel notes. One of the stall doors is slightly ajar and swinging limply on its hinges. Gently pressing it with my fingertips, I see the girl and wordlessly ask her consent to enter. Perched above the toilet, she looks up at me with a distorted expression of fear that turns with a blink to fatalistic resignation devoid of embarrassment. We need each other. I lock the stall door behind us. Her short black hair in a cut I’m fairly sure she didn’t choose looks like it feels like it smells softly of detergent. I don’t tell her of the sour trade-off she’ll likely make as she and the world mature. As the glistening iris portal hovers above us and the blinding linoleum, I simply hold her close.

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CONTRIBUTORS Sara Backer (“Threshold”) is enjoying a banner year in publication with poems appearing in Wolf Willow Journal, Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, Arc Poetry, The Rialto, Turtle Island Quarterly, Gargoyle, and Carve. She won prizes in the 2014 Gemini Open and Avalon Literary Review contests. For links to her work published online, visit www.sarabacker.com.

Katie Bickell (“A Reason to Bend”) lives in Alberta, Canada with her husband and young daughters. Her publication credits Eunoia Review, Gravel, Bare Fiction Magazine, Punchnel’s, and Tahoma Literary Review. “A Reason to Bend” is one in a collection of linked short stories currently seeking representation. Read more of Katie’s work at www.katiebickell.com.

Megan Boatright (“Eohippus in the White Cube”) is a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in ditch, Word For/Word, MGv2datura, and Apeiron Review, among others. Her nonpoetry work has appeared in delirious hem’s chick flix series and multiple conferences on animals in contemporary visual culture, including a talk presented at Berkeley titled “Americat in the Garden of Eating” and available on YouTube.

Russell Bradbury-Carlin (“The Minotaur”) lives with his wife and son in Massachusetts, where he writes and photographs: www.russellbradburycarlin.com.

Lisa Cheby (“Love Lesson #2014 from Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) is a poet and librarian. She has poems and reviews in journals such as The Rumpus, The Mom Egg, and The Citron Review, and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel and The Burden of Light. Her first chapbook, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She often finds herself in graduate school, most recently earning an MFA from Antioch University. She also has a website: http://lisacheby.wordpress.com.

Louise Fabiani (“Holy Flesh”) is a Montreal science writer. Her journalism, poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in Canada, the US, and the UK, and she is the author of two poetry collections. By September, she hopes to begin the long process of finding a publisher for her speculative novel and to have written lots more flash fiction in the same vein. Read her musings on human behavior at omnivorebrain.blogspot.ca.

Benjamin Goldberg’s (“From Our Staircase We Welcomed the Miracle”) poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2014, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, The Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an award from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a finalist for the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, the 2013 Third Coast Poetry Prize, the 2013 New Millennium Writings Award for Poetry, and the 2012 Gearhart Poetry Prize. He lives outside Washington, D.C. with his wife and will begin his MFA at Johns Hopkins University this fall. His website is benrgold.com.

Ivy Goodman’s (“Zoomorphism, or the Fur Hat”) fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.

She has also published two collections of stories, Heart Failure (University of Iowa

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CONTRIBUTORS

Press) and A Chapter from Her Upbringing (Carnegie Mellon University Press). In 2013, new work came out in The Fiddleback, ARDOR, and Hobart.

Jeffrey David Greene (“Captain Barks”) writes his fiction at a small desk covered in action figures. Sometimes he discusses his story ideas with a chorus of noisy and opinionated Chihuahuas. He lives in Smyrna, Georgia with his wife and many pets. Currently, he is at work on a YA urban fantasy novel.

Hank Kirton (“Paquita’s Gumballs”) is the author of two short story collections, The Membranous Lounge and Bleak Holiday, as well as a morbid pulp novel, Conservatory of Death. He lives and works in Massachusetts.

Visit Erick Laubach’s (“Lil Wayne,” cover art) work at www.saatchiart.com/erick.

Hailing originally from Virginia, Amanda Lyell (“Bears,” “Candy,” and “Snow”) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Third Wednesday, Battered Suitcase, Sunken Lines, and Grasslimb. Her short story “Translations” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has taught writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, volunteered at 826NYC, and participated in the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2007 and 2010.

Christopher Morgan (“Why I Check on You Before You Fall Asleep”) is the Editor for Arroyo Literary Review, growing up in Michigan, Georgia, and California. He has an M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing, and has been published in Gargoyle, Permafrost, Bartleby Snopes, theNewerYork, Voicemail Poems, DOGZPLOT, Little River, and Clade Song, among others. Sometimes he sits at his keyboard, banging on it like a child on a piano; other times, he’s in bed, not sleeping. He blogs at http://andlohespoke.tumblr.com.

C.J. Opperthauser (“Considering Various Shades of Red”) co-edits Threadcount, a curator of hybrid prose, and blogs at http://thicketsandthings.tumblr.com. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Jason R. Poole (“Wants and Hungers”) is a Western Maryland native. He lives with his wife and cat in Columbus, OH, where he works as a graphic designer to support his writing habit. This is his first published story.

Justin Robinson (“Childhood Offering”) is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University, where he works as a solicitation editor for 14 Hills. His recent poems are forthcoming in comma, poetry.

Eric Schaller’s (“Automata”) fiction has appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. His story “The Watchmaker” appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of A cappella Zoo and was later selected for the Bestiary issue.

Other stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best of the Rest, and Fantasy: Best of the Year. He illustrated Hal Duncan’s wonderful An A to Z of the Fantastic City (http://smallbeerpress.com/books/2012) and is co-editor of The Revelator (www.revelatormagazine.com).

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CONTRIBUTORS Jan Stinchcomb’s (“The Fox Girl Revival”) work has appeared in Happily Never After, Bohemia, Rose Red Review, Luna Station Quarterly, The Red Penny Papers, and PANK online, among other places. She reviews fairytale-inspired works for Luna Station Quarterly. Her novella, Find the Girl, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press. A recent transplant from Austin, she lives in Southern California with her husband and daughters. Visit her at http://www.janstinchcomb.com or at http://janstinchcomb.tumblr.com.

Katherine Swett (“The Plasticity of Fred Schmidt”) received her BS in Math and English from Virginia Tech in 2009, and an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University in 2012. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University, where she studies language and reading processes in the brain using MRI. Kate Velguth (“Phantoms”) lives in the middle of Michigan, where she is a senior in high school. She has been previously published in Menacing Hedge and has work forthcoming in The Washington Square Review.

Tamara Walker (“Portals”) lives in Colorado with her beloved primary partner and blogs irregularly about writing and lit at http://tamarakwalker.wordpress.com. She may also be found online at http://about.me/tamara.kwalker. She’s an existentialist with a passionate penchant for the irreal and wants you to know it. Her writing has appeared in Identity Theory, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Gay Flash Fiction, the themed poetry anthology Tic Toc from Kind of a Hurricane Press, and a smattering of poetry zines.

Leslee Rene Wright (“The Rabbit Feast”) lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.

Her stories and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, Necessary Fiction, Blue Mesa Review, and many others. She has a rather unexciting website at www.lesleerenewright.com.

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