Attic Door Press - Winter 2018

Attic Door Press Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

Masthead Publisher/Editor-in-Chief: Editor, Fiction: Editor, Fiction:

Michael Guendelsberger Julie Hill Matthew Riffle

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Art & Photography: Editor, Poetry: Editor, Poetry:

Joe Devine Erin Guendelsberger Zackary Hill

Attic Door Press Attic Door Press

Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

Table of Contents My Apple Tree, My Brightness ..................................................................................................................... 2 Joe P. Squance Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #100 .......................................................................................................... 8 Darren C. Demaree I Read the News Today, Oh Boy! ................................................................................................................. 9 Billy Simms Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #101 ........................................................................................................ 10 Darren C. Demaree Before and Beneath, Above and Beyond ................................................................................................... 11 Matthew Riffle Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #102 ........................................................................................................ 13 Darren C. Demaree Time Bomb ................................................................................................................................................. 14 Billy Simms Breaking ...................................................................................................................................................... 15 Erin Guendelsberger Thirty Years In One Place .......................................................................................................................... 16 M. Guendelsberger Death in Spring .......................................................................................................................................... 26 Erin Guendelsberger Rich Bitch ................................................................................................................................................... 27 Billy Simms Trash ........................................................................................................................................................... 28 Theresa Williams Contributors: .............................................................................................................................................. 33

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My Apple Tree, My Brightness Joe P. Squance

I spotted him as I was leaving the bar. He was leaning hard on the rim of a Rubbermaid trashcan, mouth open and lips glazed, a thick shoelace of mucus dangling from his nostril.

One of the bartenders was standing over him, leaning in, one hand wrapped around his bicep, keeping an eye on that pendulating snot string, telling him something important that he was clearly not hearing. They’d just turned on all the lights.

I didn’t recognize him at first—he looked like a sweating cadaver in cargo shorts—and when I realized who it was, and that I hadn’t been seen, I nearly put my head down and walked right by. I just wasn’t in the mood. It hadn’t exactly been a great night for me.

Anyway, we’d only met once or twice before and, frankly, I wasn’t very impressed. He was tall and broad and handsome like a rock climber, but fuck him. He was pushy. I knew she could do better.

As I got closer I could see that the bartender was reaching the end of his patience and I hung back to see how the scene might play out. I didn’t know much about this guy, but I knew that he’d had some problems with alcohol, that he’d spent a couple nights in the ER eating charcoal, one or two more barfing into a drain on the drunk tank floor, and that not too long ago he’d wrecked his car then borrowed hers and wrecked it too. And that since then he’d been making what was described to me as “a sincere effort.” This was months ago I’d heard all this, and not from her but from a mutual friend.

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“Who’d you come here with,” the bartender was saying to him. I’d been wondering the same thing myself. I looked around but didn’t see anyone I recognized.

“Listen, pal,” the bartender said. “You need to get it together and get home. I’m gonna bring you some water.” This was the wrong thing to say. He squeezed the rim of the garbage can until his arms shook, then reared back and screamed vomit into the trash. Everyone walking past jumped. His whole head swelled with hot blood and the tendons in his neck got hard and quivered. He made a horrible, guttural noise impossible to reproduce.

The bartender pulled away, looking disappointed more than anything. They weren’t going to bounce him, I knew. They were calling the cops.

“Hang on,” I said to the bartender. “I know this guy. I know where he lives. I’ll walk him home.”

The bartender sized me up. The way his face was moving he must have been sucking on a tongue stud. “Fine-o,” he said at last. “He’s all yours. Take him away.”

I stepped up to the trashcan but also kept some distance. “Troy,” I said. I gave the sleeve of his t-shirt a tug. “Troy. You remember me?”

His eyes were like filthy wet nickels. He spit in a way that scared me. I looked around and thought about bolting, but when his eyes started to close I wrapped his arm around my shoulders like a stole and guided him towards the door. His weight was a shock. I could feel his every sinew and muscle where our bodies came together, breathed in his thick, masculine stink.

The curled edges of a tattoo like a dragon’s tongue peeked out from his collar, his sleeve. I hugged him close. Tucked up together like this, Page |2

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my calves already burning, we stepped out onto the dark street.

• By the time Tori opened her front door for us it was nearly 3 am. She was wearing cut off pajama pants and a man’s flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. Her hair was nuts, and she held a long, thin paintbrush like an old-fashioned cigarette holder. At first she said nothing, simply gaped at us. But when she got a look at Troy and the shape he was in her whole face sagged. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said. She stepped aside and I carried him in.

I made it as close to the couch as I could before I dropped him. My arms had become the ghosts of arms and he passed right through them. The dead weight of his upper body hit the cushions like a sack full of bowling balls. He bounced at an unexpected angle and slid gracelessly to the floor. Tori knelt, wiped the hair out of his eyes. I knelt too and we stared at him with not much to say. He looked awful, and not in a good way.

Tori turned to me. “So how’ve you been?” she said brightly. “Shit.” She smiled, revealing that one crooked tooth. She pinched my rib.

“Been a while, yeah?”

I said, “Yeah.”

She gave me a coy look with her eyes and chuckled, but when she turned back to Troy her face became troubled and grave. She shook her head.

We carried him as best we could to the futon in her spare bedroom. She was not wearing a bra under her flannel shirt and I concentrated very hard on not looking there.

We laid him down as gently as we could. We both had a good sweat going. She was about to turn off the light when Troy started fidgeting and then stood straight up. He wavered like a Attic Door Press

flagpole but his eyes stayed shut. We were watching him to see what he would do next when he lurched and swung out with his arm, catching Tori on the cheek with his big ropy knuckle. It made a sound like flapping wet skin.

She didn’t flinch or recoil but wrapped her arms around his torso and kept him from collapsing into the wall. I put my hands out like a buttress to steady them both, not quite sure of what I just witnessed.

“Owie,” she said, working her jaw around.

“He tapped me there a little bit.”

“You okay?” I asked. She seemed not to hear.

Troy verbalized something gurgley and urgent, started swallowing what seemed like an excessive amount of spit.

“He’s gonna retch,” Tori said. “Listen. I’m gonna get him settled. Wait for me in the living room. Give me like five. Have a beer or something and I’ll be out.” I started to help her move him but she shook me off. They took big awkward steps into the bathroom and Tori shut the door with her foot.

• It was pretty slim pickings in the refrigerator—a nearly empty jug of cran-apple juice, a stick of butter on a plate. There were 9volt batteries where eggs should have been. I wanted to take her grocery shopping, stock her up on all the staples, fill her fridge to bursting with fresh vegetables and multi-grain breads. I took the cap off some milk and sniffed it.

Through the wall I heard a thump that shook the studs and voices that did not sound particularly harmonious. I froze and listened for more, but that seemed to be all. After a second I heard the toilet flush.

I found beers in the crisper and took two into the living room, which was small and dark Page | 3

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and smelled like old carpet. Next to the TV was a painting on an easel and I went over to look at it. It was a mash of wet blues and grays, drippy smears that slashed from one side of the canvas to the other. Here and there little white specks bit like teeth through the murk, sharply pearlescent. I touched one, wanted to read the paint like Braille, to scan it like a diary. It was wet and came off on the tip of my finger.

“Shit,” I said quietly, and looked around for somewhere to wipe it. From the bathroom came the resonant sound of slapped flesh followed by silence. I listened. I took one step towards the door when it opened and Tori came out alone, wiping her hands on a towel. She did not seem the least bit flustered.

“He’s passed out in the dry tub,” she said.

“He seems cozy there, whatever.” She went into the kitchen and pulled a wine glass from the cupboard. “Have a seat,” she said. “Stay a while.”

“I got you a beer,” I said, eying her carefully.

“Ech,” she said, and poured a glass of wine. I sat down on the couch; she sat on the recliner next to it. “So, you,” she said, poking me with her big toe. “How’d you know I lived here?”

I felt busted. I hadn’t anticipated having to account for that kind of information. Several possible explanations stumbled through my brain with such cacophony I couldn’t distinguish which was the lie. “Troy brought us here,” I said.

“Ah,” she said, seeming to believe it.

“Troy. Thanks for shepherding him here, by the way. Fucking asshole.” She touched the wine to her lips. “I hope he wasn’t too difficult.” I told her he wasn’t but that was not exactly accurate.

He’d pulled like a dog tied to a tree, screaming at cars, his chin frothy with spit. We lost both Page | 4

his flip-flops. More than once I thought he’d topple, driving my face into the sidewalk.

“He called your name a lot,” I said, which was true. He’d gagged on it like blood in his throat.

“He does that,” she said. She put her head back and closed her eyes, and in the stillness I was finally able to get a good look at her. I admired all the clean angles of her face—her jaw below the ears, the twist of her bottom lip like the crest of a wave—and scanned the geography of her skin for nicks or bumps or any sign of a bruise, finding nothing except a crescent of redness under her eye that was already starting to fade. And then I noticed that her eyes were open, that she was looking at me. She grinned and again I saw the crooked tooth. We both chuckled, and we both drank.

“So,” she said, and I knew what was next.

“How’s Whitney?”

I put my beer to my lips and considered how to answer. Whitney had just left six days ago for Florence, to study architecture for a year.

It was an opportunity, she’d said, too good to pass up, which made me wonder what kind of opportunity I’d been for her. Neither of us had declared it over but it certainly felt like it was ending, a feeling that sat like rot in my guts.

We’d made tentative plans for me to visit, a trip for which I’d made not a single arrangement.

“Whitney,” I said. “Yeah, she’s fine. No, she’s good.”

“Well good then,” Tori said. “I’m glad for you.”

I smiled, though I suddenly felt discarded and alone. “I like your painting,” I said.

“Oh that.” She shrugged. “It’s a distraction. I’m trying to give up some vices.

Cheers to that.” She held up her glass and drained it. Then she came and sat next to me on Attic Door Press

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the couch so we could look at her painting from the same angle. She sat cross-legged, her knee coming to rest on my thigh, our elbows touching. We regarded the thing silently.

“I like the colors,” I said after a while.

“I hate the colors. But that’s kind of the point.”

“It’s very violent.”

“Is it,” she said.

I suddenly became aware of my breathing, my heartbeat, and tried not to control them. “It looks like abuse,” I said.

“That’s because I abused it,” she said with a smirk, still looking straight ahead.

“Did you?”

“Oh, I wailed on that fucker.” She smiled broadly and turned to me. “Bitch just wouldn’t listen.”

“That’s not funny,” I said, but she was laughing and it didn’t register. “That’s serious business.” She leaned away from me and swung back, slamming her shoulder into mine, then leaned away and did it again. “That hurts,” I said.

“Then I must be doing it right.”

“I’m serious.”

She fixed her shiny eyes on me, her mouth twisted with a memory. “I forget how soft and delicate you are,” she said. She smiled warmly. “Like a girl.”

I nodded. It wasn’t perfect, but I would take it.

• She decided to change. She told me to sit tight while she put on some clothes that didn’t make her feel like a lumberjack’s gay son. She dropped her wine glass off on the kitchen counter and went back into her bedroom. The door was open and stayed that way. I stood and could see the skin of her back, the very edge of Attic Door Press

it, could see it stretch and move as she did, the shadows and indentations, the curve of it into her shoulder and the back of her neck. She leaned forward and out of sight. Was maybe stepping out of her shorts.

“Drink that other beer,” she said. She stepped into view again and in her movements I could make out the cage of ribs along her side, a constellation of bruises. In another scene I walked back to her bedroom—steady and with purpose, noiselessly, harmlessly––and pressed myself gently into her back, enveloped and coated her like warm wax. In this one I did nothing. I turned away, wondering how I’d arrived here, how my footsteps could possibly have brought me to this place.

I busied myself with her CD collection, which she’d stacked in tall crooked towers on a desk. “What time is it,” I asked.

“Oh, I think we’re beyond that by now,” she said. “It’s either late or it’s early.”

I wanted to glance back but kept my eyes on the cases. Browsing the titles I could trace our history, which stretched back like nerves.

They were stacked in no discernable order but I started organizing them in my mind, finding all the points of intersection where our lives had overlapped and all the giant gaps in between where we’d drifted out of sight. I ran my fingers over the spines, tapping each disc I recognized, marking them with invisible white dots. This one tasted like cigarettes and barf. This one felt like the worn cushion of a couch against my back in an un-air-conditioned apartment. This one was cold outside, and wet, and perfectly dark. This one had her fingers in my hair as I drifted near sleep. I turned around but Tori was nowhere to be seen.

At the bottom of one stack, pinned like a fossil under the strata, was I Do Not Want What I Page | 5

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Haven’t Got. It took some doing, but I wedged it free. The case had a busted hinge and came apart in my hand, and suddenly Tori was standing next to me, her arm a vine around mine, her cheek on my shoulder. She’d put on old jeans and a tank top and had gathered her hair back in a messy bunch. She looked very tired.

“Aw lookit,” she said. “Look what you dug up.” She took the half of the jewel case that held the liner notes and started flipping through them. She burrowed her hand in mine, took it out again. “Oh man,” she said. She rubbed her eye on my sleeve, tossed the liner notes down and walked away. I plucked out the disc, examined it for scratches. It was in pretty good shape.

“Don’t play that,” she said from the couch. She had the paintbrush I’d seen her holding when I first came in and a small jar of paint. She dipped the brush and started painting her toenails white. “I don’t want to hear that voice tonight. It’s too perfect.”

The voice was everything. I’d said as much years ago when I first played Tori the album. I liked the softness of it, she liked the spit. It was the only time our tastes in music had so perfectly overlapped. This one was a bone-cold winter and a week under heavy blankets, when we sucked each other’s breath and lay together with our clothes on, when we put vodka in spaghetti sauce, when we sat shivering on her roof and I flicked the cigarettes out of her mouth if she didn’t smoke them fast enough, when we watched the first and last fifteen minutes of “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” when she pressed her nose to my temple and cradled my head in her arms.

It had been the voice—that voice which was strength and an ache, both delicate and Page | 6

jagged. I’d played her “Three Babies” and said, “Doesn’t this song just make you want to weep?”

She gave me a withering look, played “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” and said, “Doesn’t this song just make you want to fuck?” She played it over and over, that rhythmic and pulsating outro, each time with a different look in her eye that I could never quite seem to translate quickly enough. And at the end of that week her father got sick and she’d gone home. I didn’t see her again for eight months.

I looked at her now, with her heel dug into the couch, staring emptily at her toes, and wondered if she was waiting for me to leave.

From the bathroom came a thud that rattled the light fixtures. We both pricked our ears but neither of us moved.

“Maybe I should go,” I said. She looked at me but didn’t say anything. Her face was unreadable. “Should I go?” I asked, but got no answer. For a second I thought she might cry, though I’d never seen that before and would have no idea what it might look like. She finished one foot, brought the other up and started in on it.

I set the CD in its case and put the two parts carefully back together. I thought about wedging it back into the bottom of the stack but then just left it where it was, sitting out separate from the others, figuring she could put it where she liked. There was another thump against the wall, but this time she did not look up.

I fidgeted, looked around. I thought she might be waiting for me to say something. “You want me to stay?” I asked.

She snorted. “Yeah. The three of us could have brunch together.” She leaned in close for the smaller toes. She was doing a pretty haphazard job, though she was staring intently.

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“No, I mean.” I put my hands in my pockets, took them out again. “Tori, do you want me to stay?” I didn’t want to look at the painting but did, and she caught me doing it.

She laughed but it didn’t last, and when it was over her face went dim. Her mouth opened and closed and I could see her swallow. If there was something she was waiting to hear, this was as close as I would get to saying it. From the bathroom came a moan and a series of poundings so violent I half expected a bare foot, a bloody elbow, to come bursting through the plaster. Tori looked at me and smiled.

“No,” she said. “Nope, I don’t.” She set down her paint and brush and stood up. We looked at each other over this long gulch.

Neither of us moved.

• Out on the street I expected it to be morning but the light still hadn’t come up.

There was only a single streak of orange in the dark, dark blue. The air was warm and heavy.

There was nobody out. My footsteps resonated everywhere: off of houses and cars, off the buzzing streetlamps.

My thoughts grew like tendrils in all directions at once. I thought of Italy but abstractly—what was happening there I couldn’t begin to construct. I pictured Whitney but the thought was elusive and degraded before my eyes. My arms and back were starting to ache.

My contacts needed to come out. I thought about my own dark apartment, about the bed I’d made ages ago, twenty some hours ago, the sheets pulled tight as cardstock.

I thought about Tori, wondered what was happening in her apartment. I wondered if I had read the signs correctly. It was not something I was particularly good at. I stopped walking and Attic Door Press

turned around; her apartment was blocks away, too far to be able to see. Still I looked.

I remembered the white paint on the tip of my finger and was surprised to find it still there. It had dried and was beginning to flake away. I picked at the loose bits with my thumbnail and thought about what Tori had done as I’d stood in her doorway. Troy had started whimpering by then and screaming her name. She pulled her painting off the easel and set it on the floor, then drizzled the white paint on it like syrup from a jar and smeared it all around with the palm of her hand. The whole thing went muddy with goop. She stayed perfectly still for a suspended moment, sitting on her knees, hunched over her ruined painting.

Her body shuddered. Then she raised her hand to me and smiled, looking delighted, and waved goodbye. w

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Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #100 Darren C. Demaree I am rooting now, more so than ever for a confluence of my ultimate loves, to get to witness one consume the other.

The odds are Ohio will take Katie into this terrible flow, but what if she, what if she can swallow Ohio whole?

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I Read the News Today, Oh Boy! Billy Simms

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Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #101 Darren C. Demaree I have given serious thought to digging up our fields to ensure that none of my children can bury their talents. If they want to give up the spark they will have to walk to the river & drown them.

That is why we bought a house near shallow water.

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Before and Beneath, Above and Beyond Matthew Riffle

In ancient times, we were called mermaids.

Sirens of the sea.

As humanity spread, using our waterways to colonize all corners of ill-defined maps, we took on new forms. New shapes. Shades of these new lands.

As ghosts, we appeared. Creatures in the forest.

Night and that held within the night.

We were reflections of belief. Things of fantasy.

Never real to those that named us. Not really.

Now, in a hospital, and now, as it has been since they pulled me from the river, they have given me another name; it’s ‘Matthew’.

The tile is cold on my feet and everyone calls me ‘Matthew’.

The air scratches at my lungs and she calls me ‘Matthew’.

Her embrace is warm and I am finding that I am somehow ‘Matthew’.

Each day, I learn. I feel and become more of this world. I also forget what it is that I once was.

We started as water things, my kind.

Amorphous, unnamed, afraid. Reflections of the surface. As real as any that conceived of seeing us.

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To the heart broken, we were loved ones passed.

To lustful youth, we were visions of fantasy.

To the curious, a curiosity. Which those without imagination saw as a dangerous thing.

The ‘Matthew’ of before was curious. Before and above, below and more, and after and less, but also the same. We saw the other. And so it was.

Somewhere above, I heard a sound. They named it laughter. Children playing in the frozen rain at the river’s edge.

The ice was not so solid. And one fell. Beneath and below.

‘Matthew’. I heard from above for the first time.

I went to him as he thrashed. Then he stopped, full with water. Still as the depths.

Above, I saw the others on the surface. I heard their sounds. Their sadness.

He was loved. He once belonged somewhere.

And now was not there. Never to be there.

I knew what they wanted to find. I could give it to them. If they were curious, they would see. I could be.

And then, I was pulled onto the ice, and then, I was lovingly embraced by a mother I had never known. Born into a world that had chosen to believe in me. And then I slept. It was too much.

I could die.

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When I woke, they talked of miracles. Of hope and promise.

Of memories forever lost to the water, of buried thoughts, of time that might remember what was that could never be again.

I saw the smile on the mother’s face. Now, my mother. She says she will remember for us both.

In her eyes, I see his eyes, I see my own eyes reflected.

She says ‘Matthew’.

The name fills me with purpose. And love.

I feel warm.

I am not afraid.

Her love gives me shape.

I am Matthew. w

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Poem for Katie, Queen of Ohio #102 Darren C. Demaree This will disrupt the blossom.

This will discard a few bones.

This will ensure we stay animal enough for the moon to matter.

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Time Bomb Billy Simms

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Breaking Erin Guendelsberger Twigs snap under the weight of shoes Ants crunch Beetles scatter Rushing water hits rock and splits Half going one way Half another The moon disappears to nothing each cycle Before it comes back strong And foxes pace And owls spread wings to hunt Each new breath A tiny death There is no growth without howling For everything Left behind

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Thirty Years In One Place M. Guendelsberger

You’d

think that with a significant layoff looming, as the rumors suggested, there wouldn’t be much cause for celebration but it is Jim Frederick’s thirtieth anniversary with the company and they want to do something. Thirty years in one place is a long time, they say, and so a lot of people turn up in the break room Tuesday morning to share their congratulations.

A lot of big-wigs come down from the executive floor and the rest of us stand around unsure how to talk in their presence. The people who had been around longer probably have questions they want to ask, but it isn’t about us or them.

This is about Jim, but even he looks awkward and out of place, but he has always kind of kept to himself and doesn’t really talk to those of us who have been with the company under five years. We don’t interact on a daily basis; there is no need to say hello. But here we are in the break room, clutching our paper cups of lemonade or punch, amused that Peg Westhill has positioned herself near the cookie platter and has already slipped three in the front of pocket of her denim jumper. Other members of the editorial staff, the production team, designers, and even some folks from marketing tore themselves away from their tasks to come down, shake hands with Jim, and listen to some other people say a few words. “Doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Ben Higgins whispers this to Tina Mellas, both of whom sit in my row. Most people know they are probably sleeping together and plan their business travel so they overlap in the same cities. Tina looks back at him and Ben says, “Doesn’t seem possible that he’s been here thirty years, does it?” It’s this question, I think, Page | 16

that gets most of us wondering because Jim Frederick, on his thirty year anniversary, doesn’t look much older than forty-five.

The speeches go on and Jim stands up there by the snack tables and the poster-boards which display photos of him throughout his tenure. He looks at the floor and shuffles his feet as people talk about his work ethic, all those times he really went above and beyond, how he talked the talk and walked the walk. He’s always been a guy you can count on, they say. He is a guy who’s going to get it done, they say. “And a lot sooner than you’d expect,” someone in the back says and we all want to roll our eyes but we clap instead because it’s like they say: thirty years in one place just doesn’t happen anymore. He’s a guy, they say, we’re proud to have on our team and we clap again and someone hands Jim a plaque and people like Tina and Ben start to sneak away. I go with them because we’re young and new at this and afraid for our jobs. We feel the need to look busy even though the work has started to dry up. Our row consists of six cubicles: There’s Tina and Ben, Raj (who went to college in India and has always been overly excited about this job), Kelly, who is newest and just out of school, and Brandon, who has been here longer than the rest of us. Brandon is roughly the same age as us, but we see him as wiser because he’s indifferent and has learned how to get away with more. “Did you guys see those posters?” Brandon asks, when we all gather outside hiss cube. Raj asks him what he means.

“Guy hasn’t aged a bit in thirty years,” and Tina and Ben nod.

“I said the same thing,” Ben replies, “right when we were in there.” Tina nods to confirm this.

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Issue No. 1 “Kind of strange, don’t you think?”

Brandon looks at the rest of us before going back to his computer.

Gradually we drift back to our own desks.

We each face the same problem: the layoff is coming and everyone knows it. We scour our inboxes for something to attach ourselves, but there isn’t much. An email from a production vendor but it’s an invoice and not something that takes any amount of time. Raj emails a link to a video he found and it’s funny. Laughter comes from Kelly’s cube. From Ben’s. I watch it twice but that only takes five minutes. The sounds from the break room carry out to us and the party goes on for at least another hour, which is much longer than the parties we have when there’s a promotion or it’s someone’s birthday. We haven’t had either in a while. We hear the voices and the laughing and we secretly wonder if we’ll ever celebrate thirty years somewhere.

The party breaks up sometime before lunch. We go about our day and eventually so do the others: they leave the break room and take their plastic cups and slices of cake back to their desks and the fact that Jim Frederick has celebrated this milestone is practically forgotten as soon as the cake is eaten. The office goes back to its normal sounds: low cubicle voices, ringing telephones, fingers on keyboards, footsteps on the carpet. It’s almost three when Brandon rounds us up. “Come on,” he says and offers nothing else. We follow him to the break room and the remains of the cake are still there, stabbed at and picked over. The big posters, the ones with photos of Jim, are still present and Brandon guides us to them. “Look,” he says.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” but we don’t say anything.

Ben leans in (he’s much taller than Kelly and Tina) and examines the posters. “I told you,” Attic Door Press

Winter 2018 Brandon says. “Look at this one from the day he started. And look at this one from the sales meeting a couple months ago. He doesn’t look any different.” We keep looking.

“How do you explain it?” Ben asks and we all turn to Brandon. He shrugs. He has led us here to look but has no answer. Instead a possible solution comes from Raj, standing at the back of our group. Usually he is quiet and uncertain, but he says, “Maybe it’s something else.” We stare at him. “Maybe,” he says, “he has found a fountain of youth. Maybe he’s immortal.” Raj stares at us and then grins and we laugh because it’s an obvious joke. We go back to our cubicles but Raj’s joke is still on our minds when we drive home that night.

In the morning, the cake has been cleared away. The posters are gone.

Kelly and Tina talk outside their cubes.

Brandon, Ben, and Raj have not yet arrived. “I walked by his office,” Kelly says.

“And?” Tina asks.

“He’s not in yet.”

Tina frowns, disappointed that there is nothing more, nothing further to digest. She stares at Kelly because there has to be more, but there isn’t and their conversation turns to meetings and schedules. It’s boring talk, standard talk, and not at all interesting. We want to find out more or we at least want Brandon to show up so he can tell us what to do. We don’t want to fall back into normalcy.

When Brandon does arrive forty minutes later, he has no new information. Raj has planted this seed and even though we know it can’t be true there’s really no harm in double-checking. “I was only joking,” Raj insists when we press him for more details. “That sort of thing isn’t possible.”

We look at him and wonder why he’s holding out on us.

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Issue No. 1 We’re in the break room for lunch that afternoon when Jim Fredrick comes in. We can’t talk about it or point at him but we all tense.

Conversation stops. We nudge elbows, kick feet, and nod toward the refrigerator where Jim is looking at the vast, multi-colored lunch bags.

We pretend to eat but really we watch, not knowing what we expect to see. Jim pulls his lunch bag—a grey vinyl sack that the company passed out in a quarterly meeting a few years ago. There are at least six other lunch bags in that refrigerator that look the same. Even Kelly has one, open in front of her. Jim sets his on the counter, unzips it, looks inside, and closes it again. He replaces the ones he has removed and closes the door. Nobody but us seems interested in him but we are being nonchalant about it and he doesn’t notice. Jim goes out of the room without saying anything.

Brandon leans in to us. “Maybe it’s something he eats.”

We look at Raj. “Is that possible?” Kelly asks.

“It’s not possible at all. It’s coincidence.

You’re not thinking.”

“How do you explain it?” Ben puts down a slice of reheated pizza. “How does a man work for a company thirty years and look exactly the same as he did the day he started? How is that possible?”

“I don’t have the answer you want,” Raj says. He looks to us and we stare him down. “I was only joking.”

Brandon comes to us at 3:30 that afternoon. It’s been another slow day. He has reserved one of the conference rooms at the far end of our floor and we meet there. Raj comes in last, looking around at each one of us. He takes a seat at the far end of the table, away from the rest of us, and says nothing.

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Winter 2018 “We’re going to come up with a plan,” Ben says and looks at Brandon. “Right?”

“Yes,” Brandon says. “If it’s something in his lunch bag, something he eats, we’ve got to figure that out. And if it’s not that, then we need to look in his office. And if it’s not there, we’ll explore some other options.”

“What are we looking for?” Kelly asks.

“How will we know what to find?”

“I think we’ll know. It’s got to be something different, something just out of place.

And I would guess it’s something he has to do every day.”

“Like a pill or something?” Kelly offers.

“Yeah!” Tina says. “That’s exactly what it could be.”

Raj shakes his head. “No. Stop. You’re not thinking about this.” We ignore him. He started this and now he wants to take it back.

The first thing, we decide, is to figure out Jim’s schedule. We know he comes in around 8:45 because that’s also about the time Brandon arrives and he tells us they’ve shared the elevator multiple times in the past. What about business trips? Are there any coming up soon? Tina knows someone who works in the administrative group and can easily find out his travel schedule.

Kelly, whose lunch bag is similar to Jim’s, agrees to look through his. “I’ll just ‘confuse’ it with mine,” she says, quoting the word with her fingers. “Remember,” Tina says, “anything that looks out of the ordinary.” We look at Raj, who looks trapped down at his end of the table. Does he want to check out Jim’s office? “No,” Raj says, standing up. “Please. Think about this.” Before Raj leaves the room, Ben agrees to take a look.

He lives nearby, can easily come in on a Saturday and take a look. We break, our tasks now assigned.

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Issue No. 1 We work through the remainder of the day but no one can focus. There is no news about the layoff but we barely notice. Tina starts an email thread between the five of us, making her the first to exclude Raj. No one says anything about this. We can hear him at his desk, typing away at something. Sometimes his phone rings and we wonder who he talks to in such low, almost whispered tones. Is he keeping something from us, Ben writes. What does he know? Brandon suggests that he is ratting us out to Human Resources and that we should keep an eye on him. How can he not be curious about this? Why does he want to be left out, to not know?

The next morning, Thursday, Tina tells us that she knows of no work trips on the horizon for Jim. Her friend, the administrative assistant, is clueless (“About this and everything else,” Tina says, rolling her eyes). “She tells me that Jim isn’t going anywhere for a few more months and even then it’s just some trip to a vendor.”

We are disappointed.

Brandon stakes out the break room when he gets in. He sips water and pretends to look at the sports section of someone’s discarded newspaper. He makes small talk with the assistants, most of them girls, cute, young, and dressed smartly because they know it will help their careers. Brandon flirts and they do too and before long he’s holding court over four of them and that’s when Jim comes in, places his lunch bag in the refrigerator, gets a mug of hot water, and leaves again. Brandon wants to stay, to keep talking to these girls, but he breaks off, mentioning (he tells us later) some meeting he overlooked. He returns to our row and when Brandon tells her about the lunch bag, Kelly gets up. We like Kelly and we know she’ll succeed.

It’s a good plan. In the break room, she finds Attic Door Press

Winter 2018 the bag easy enough: it’s at the front of the refrigerator and she brings it back to our row.

Ben keeps watch because he’s tall. He looks down at the desk, then over the cubicle walls, then down to the desk again. It’s as if he’s nodding in slow motion. Raj, still judging, watches us for a moment before putting on his big headphones and going back to his monitor.

Somebody should say something but we don’t bother. We hate him. He is abandoning this idea for work? We don’t need him. We set the lunch bag on Brandon’s desk and Kelly slowly unzips it and there is almost something erotic in her slow, careful pull. We hold our breath as she takes out each item and places it on the desk.

An apple. A can of V8 juice. It’s a big can—the twelve ounce variety. Low sodium. There’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread. Carrot slices in a blue plastic container. A baggie of pretzel nuggets. . . . and that is it. We exhale and Kelly puts the items back in the bag before closing it. “You know,” Tina says, “if it is something he has to eat, why would he keep it in a lunch bag where someone could find it? There a bunch of those same bags floating around the building. It would be easy to get it confused and then someone would know. It’s more likely that he keeps it in his office.”

We look at Ben. “Maybe in his briefcase?” he says. He is not looking at us. His eyes scan the tops of the cubicle walls. So far, it has been a quiet morning.

“We have to get in there,” Kelly says but Ben doesn’t look at us. It’s his turn now and he knows what is expected of him. Kelly takes the lunch bag back to kitchen and five minutes later, we’re all back to work and bored. There has to be something, Ben says in a new email thread, Page | 19

Issue No. 1 which again does not include Raj. We agree, but there is no life in the conversation.

The big news comes that afternoon and Tina can hardly breath. “I just asked him,” she gushes when we meet in Brandon’s cubicle. “I don’t know how or why but it just came out.”

She ran into him in the hallway just after lunch, she tells us, and almost seized up. But then he smiled at her, said hello, and addressed her by name. “So I stopped and asked him how it felt to have thirty years in one company and how I thought it was quite an achievement and he thanked me and said it felt good and that’s when it just came out.” What, we ask her, what just came out? “I said, get this, I said, ‘But how do you look so young? You don’t look old enough to be here thirty years. What’s your secret?’ And then he kind of smiles and looks at me funny and just says there’s no secret, it’s just luck.”

“Bullshit,” Brandon says.

“It’s true,” Tina says. “That’s what he told me. He had this look on his face, kind of smug, so I swear he has to know something.” She waits for a moment. “Guess what I did next?”

“What?” Ben says.

“I winked at him.”

“You winked?”

“Yes. I wanted to let him know that if he wanted to take me into his confidence, he could.

He just kind of stood there looking at me for a second with this little half smile on his face and then we said goodbye and that was it.”

We talk at once. No one can decide what this means or if it was a good idea. Raj turns and watches us. We stop talking when Brandon holds up a hand. “Maybe it’s okay,” he says.

“Maybe he’ll say something to Tina. But it’s more likely that he won’t, so we can’t give up our search because if he isn’t going to tell Tina Page | 20

Winter 2018 or if he thinks she’s on to him, he’s going to be very careful. And that won’t help our case at all.”

Brandon looks at Ben. “Can you get in here this weekend? Take a look around the office?”

“You bet,” Ben says. “I can do it.”

We take lunch together that afternoon.

For the first time, Raj doesn’t join us. He takes his food back to his desk and eats alone. Nobody says anything about this except Brandon, who says, “He better not turn us in.” When Jim enters the break room, Kelly nudges Tina, who kicks Ben, who nods to Brandon, and so on. Jim looks at us and we look at him, then Tina, then Jim again. She smiles and nods. Jim also smiles.

He goes to the refrigerator and takes out his lunch bag. On his way out, he pauses at our table and opens his mouth to say something to Tina, but looks at the rest of us, and smiles instead. He nods once as if to confirm something and leaves.

“He has to know,” Kelly says. “He has to.”

“He was going to confront us,” Brandon says and points at Tina. “But he thinks maybe you haven’t told us anything yet. That’s good.

That’s good for us.”

We finish our lunches and wait for him to come back but he does not and eventually we get up and go back to our desks. We are anxious and can’t focus. Ben drums his fingers on his desk and pumps his left leg up and down to some frantic beat coming through his headphones. There is no news from the company on the layoff situation either. It’s getting later in the week; it has to happen soon.

Kelly gets up every so often and walks the floor.

At ten past four she comes back and tells us Jim has gone but it’s too risky to look in his office.

People are still at work in the offices around his.

We have to reason to be in his office looking for anything. We go home that night frustrated and Attic Door Press

Issue No. 1 Friday morning there’s a note on Jim’s office that he is working from home. “Can we?” Be asks when we all arrive. “He’s out and it’s still early.” Brandon thinks it’s still too risky; there are just too many people around. We spend the rest of the day sulking over our work.

The weekend is too long. I find out later that everyone had trouble sleeping. Nobody asks Raj. He has been spending less and less time in his cubicle but we don’t know where he goes.

Ben is the last to arrive Monday morning and we suspect he does this on purpose because he knows we’re waiting for him. He grins his way down the aisle to Brandon’s cube. “Well?” we ask him.

“I found this Saturday morning.” Ben produces a small white bottle. “It was in the trash can, but it was empty.”

“What is it?” Tina asks and Ben hands it over to her. She looks over the label and we all see it at once. Chewable Vitamin C with artificial orange flavoring and coloring. We look at Ben. “It’s empty,” he repeats and pops his eyebrows at us. His grin has gotten bigger.

“Well? That’s probably it, right?”

“But,” Kelly replies, looking at all of us, “it’s empty.”

“So? Why would he have chewable Vitamin C tablets at work? Why not just eat those at home? Don’t you see? He dumped out the tablets and put his pills in there. Open the lid. Take a sniff.” The bottle is passed around. It smells like plastic. “See what I mean?” Ben continues. “Do you smell anything at all?”

We are forced to admit we do not.

“Where’s the citrus smell?” Ben asks. “It’s Vitamin C. That bottle should smell like oranges.”

“But maybe he washed it,” Tina offers.

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Winter 2018 “Why?” Brandon says, and he is nodding.

He rubs his chin. “If he’s just going to throw it out, why bother cleaning it?” Tina does not disagree. She looks at Raj’s cubicle, which is still empty. To Ben, Brandon says, “This was all you found?”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“And you think this could be the thing?”

“Sure. What else could it be? It all adds up, doesn’t it?”

Brandon thinks about this for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he says. “If he’s on to us, maybe he planted this to throw us off. But then again, maybe not.”

At lunch, Brandon has a more solid opinion. “It’s not enough. There has to be something more than the bottle. Something we’re not seeing.”

“What?” Kelly asks.

“I don’t know. If he’d only left a pill in there.”

“If he planted it,” Ben says, “then he knew we’d look in his office. So where wouldn’t we look? Where is it safe for him?”

“His house,” Brandon says and we look at him.

Jim enters a moment later. He gets his lunch and leaves. “He thinks he’s won,” Brandon says.

That afternoon, Brandon invites us to one of the conference rooms. “We’ve got to find out where he lives.” We look at him. To Tina, he says, “Can we get his address from that assistant friend of yours?”

“No, I doubt it. She isn’t going to cough up that kind of information. She’d definitely know we were on to something and would probably tell him.”

“That leaves one other option,” Brandons says. “We’ve got to follow him home.”

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Issue No. 1 Surely someone wants to counter this because there’s no way we’re going to take it to this level. But no one says anything. Brandon scratches out a quick plan on a white board and we set it into action the next morning. We don’t question him. We erase the evidence on the board before we leave.

Tuesday morning, Ben plants himself in the break room and Tina and Kelly position themselves by the bank of elevators. Brandon and I go to the door that leads to the stairwell.

“We need to know how he’s getting in and out of the building. And then we can figure out where he leaves. Once we know that, we can follow him down to the parking garage and see which car he drives. Then we just need to know when he leaves. It’s simple.”

As it turns out, Jim Fredrick uses the elevator and not the stairs. The doors open and Kelly and Tina pretend to talk, chatting about production schedules or a design delay. Tina turns to Jim and says hello. When he is gone, she texts Brandon and we get Ben and we meet in our row again. Raj is not around. Now, what time does he leave? We’ve determined that he arrives at 8:30, so (as Brandon explains) it seems likely that he would leave around 4:30 or 5:00.

At 4:15 Ben starts taking strolls around the floor. Each lap takes about two minutes. When he comes back to our row at 4:39, he tells us he came around the corner by Jim’s office just in time to see the man shut off his light and head to the elevators. Ben followed him but did not get in with him. Brandon thinks this was a good decision. “We just want times,” he says. “We just want to know when he’s coming and leaving.”

It’s Kelly’s turn on Wednesday. At 4:30 she gets out her keys and peeks into the aisle. To get to the elevators, it is most likely that Jim will pass our row. At 4:38 (which Ben notes in a Page | 22

Winter 2018 small notebook he keeps in his back pocket), Jim passes and Kelly is up, grabbing her jacket, and following him down to the vestibule to the elevators. They make small talk in the car down to the lobby. She follows him out into the parking garage, says goodbye, and gets in her car.

Kelly waits. She tells us all about this Thursday morning. Jim drives a red Honda Accord, she says, and hands over the license number which Ben records in his notebook. “Tonight,” Brandon smiles, “we’ll figure out the rest of it.”

At 4:35 on Thursday, Brandon is already waiting down in his own car in the garage.

During lunch, when many of the staff left to eat, he went and moved his own vehicle so it was in the row just across from Jim’s Accord. He has a perfect view and when Jim leaves at 4:40, Brandon pulls out after him. He follows him onto the highway. On Friday morning, Brandon shares his findings with us in one of the conference rooms. He has Jim’s address, written on the back of a take-out pizza menu. “It’s not far from here. Maybe ten minutes down the highway.” Jim lives in a sizable house (Brandon shows us some grainy photos on his phone) in an old neighborhood with tall trees, sidewalks, and lamp posts. People walk their dogs at night.

How long did he stay there, we ask Brandon.

“Long enough. He’s got a wife. A couple of kids.”

“Do they look older than him?” Tina asks.

Brandon thinks about this for a moment.

“I don’t know. I was watching them from across the street in my car.” The children, both girls, looked to be in their mid to late teens. The family eats together in the dining room but Brandon isn’t sure what they had. Something out of a big pot. Bread. His wife opened a bottle of red wine and everybody had some, even the girls. “Could that be it?” Kelly asks and Brandon Attic Door Press

Issue No. 1 shows us his notes, which are written on another take out menu. It says Wine? and is circled once and underlined three times. Next to this, he has written: What are they celebrating? Why are the girls drinking wine? What about dessert? “Ice cream,” Brandon tells us, “but not until later. The girls cleared away the dishes and he and his wife sat talking, finishing their wine. They laughed a lot and everyone seemed happy.”

“How much did they drink?” Ben asks.

“One bottle.”

“They finished it?”

“Yes. Jim and his wife drank most of it.”

“How much did the girls have?” Kelly asks.

“One glass each.”

“Probably a good idea,” Tina says and we look at her. “It’s got to be a smaller dose.

Otherwise they’d be kids forever. That’s not practical. Think of all the stuff you’d miss.” For a moment, we do.

“But after the ice cream,” Kelly says.

“Then what?”

“Nothing.” Brandon shrugs. “The lights went out in the dining room and I guess they went and watched television for a while. The curtains had been pulled shut in the living room so I couldn’t see anything else. So I went home.”

We press him with more questions. Was there anything, other than the girls drinking wine, out of the ordinary? Did they put any special toppings on the ice cream? How much did they eat? Brandon has no more answers. We have to find something else.

We come back to our desks a little after 10:30 and Raj’s desk is empty. It’s unusual for him to miss a day. No one has really talked to him in the past few days but there has been an unspoken understanding between all of us that he probably knows too much; he could rat us Attic Door Press

Winter 2018 out to Human Resources whenever he wants.

How could he abandon this idea so easily? He has made himself our enemy by trying to back out, by trying to say he isn’t involved. It was his idea, wasn’t it? He’s the one who put this in our heads, who suggested it in the first place. Tina frowns at his empty desk and looks as if she wants to say something but does not. She goes to her cube and picks up the phone and talks in a low voice.

The Word goes out at 11:17—it’s what we’ve all been expecting: the layoff has arrived.

People are called down to Human Resources.

Most of the design department is cut.

Production will be outsourced. In forty-five minutes, thirty-eight people lose their jobs. We find out through Tina, who found out through her administrative assistant friend, that Jim Frederick is one of them. Like all the others, he has one week to finish out his work and then he’ll be gone. There’s something else, the assistant tells Tina. Jim has saved his vacation.

He’s not going to bother with another week.

Today will be his last day. He’s happy, says Tina, and after thirty years the company took damn good care of him. They told him a few days early, the assistant tells Tina, because they figured he might want to do just that. Maybe he’ll take some time for himself before he looks for another job. Maybe he’ll take the family on a nice vacation overseas. He thanks the assistant, appreciates all her work these last few years, and wishes her good luck in her future endeavors.

And with that, he’s gone.

Tina doesn’t know what else to say and Brandon is furious. “He knew about us. That’s the only reason he’s cutting out of here early. He knows we’re close.”

“Do we search his office again?” Ben wonders.

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Issue No. 1 “No.” Brandon rubs his chin and stares at his desk. “He would have taken everything.

We’ll come up with something. No way I’m letting him get away with this.”

At 1:30, Raj appears. We had forgotten he was missing. Dan, this guy everybody knows from the IT department, follows him with a four-wheeled cart. Dan loads Raj’s monitor, his computer, and phone and pushes the cart away.

Raj puts his personal items into a cardboard box.

“You get the axe?” Ben asks.

“I’m moving,” Raj says and looks at us.

“They’re putting me on the other side of the floor because I’ll be closer to some of my other project teams. That’s what they tell me.”

“Good luck,” Kelly says but nobody else adds anything. We watch him go. We don’t plan to talk to him anymore.

The day drags. Jim is gone. Raj is gone.

We have given up hope that we will find any sort of answer. We do our actual work—the emails, forms, and spreadsheets we’ve been neglecting.

In a way it’s nice to be focused again, to see results, and have a purpose. Then Brandon sends an email and we’re off and running again.

Meet at the McDonald’s parking lot Sunday night, the email says. Wear dark clothes. 9:30.

We don’t question it. We nod to one another, delete the email, and go back to the mundane tasks of work.

Everyone shows up in the parking lot.

We’re dressed in black pants and black shirts.

We don’t discuss our weekends. In fact, we barely say anything to one another. Brandon has an SUV that we’ve never seen before. He rented it, he explains, specifically for this endeavor.

Once we’re inside, Brandon explains. “I did some checking. Garbage gets picked up Monday mornings in their neighborhood, which means Page | 24

Winter 2018 they’re setting that stuff out tonight. We’ll find it, whatever it is.”

“How will we know?” Kelly asks but Brandon doesn’t answer. He starts the big vehicle and we head out into the night.

The Frederick house is dark when we arrive and Brandon slows the SUV. “They must go to bed kind of early,” Ben says but nobody replies. We go down two more blocks, park the car under a tree, and out of the yellow halos of the street lamps. Brandon tells us to wait a while and we do. The SUV ticks as the motor cools.

At ten past ten, Brandon opens his door and we follow him out into the night. To avoid suspicion, we split up into two groups. Tina and Ben run across the street and make their way toward the house. The rest of us stay on our side of the street. At the Fredrick driveway, Brandon pauses and looks up at the dark building. He waves to Tina and Ben across the street and then goes up the driveway, hugging the shadows created by the walls. We find the trashcans in a neat row back by the garage. It’s almost surprising that no motion lights snap on to flood the driveway in yellow light. Brandon gets to the trashcans first and he is not taking his time. He’s not being quiet about it. The rest of us exchange looks as he tosses the first metal lid aside. He roots the trash and the rest of us aren’t sure what to do. Ben pulls a wine bottle from the recycle bin and offers it to Brandon. “It’s too obvious,” he says, apparently forgetting the word he circled and underlined on the take-out menu.

Brandon moves on to the next can, the metal lid clanging to the ground. We watch him, backing down the driveway, and Ben still holds the wine bottle by its neck. Lights are coming on in houses. Another lid is tossed aside. He’s on the last trash can, but a light comes on up on the second floor of the Frederick house. “It has to Attic Door Press

Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

be here,” Brandon says, looking for an answer we know doesn’t exist. He’s not bothering to whisper. Brandon sees us and runs down the driveway toward us. “It’s in the house. They’ll throw it out in the morning. They have to. We can all call in sick tomorrow. We’ll follow the truck to the dump and then we’ll know.” He takes off down the street and we follow him, if only because he is our ride home. w

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Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

Death in Spring Erin Guendelsberger Every year they show up Like a parade On the patio Mouse Rabbit Squirrel Opossum joey Norman knows no Age restrictions Knows only the chase Whiskers tingling Tail twitching

Rabbits are rare They know enough to Stay away Squirrels are the enemy They’re left headless at least Often as nothing more than bushy tail Attached to hind legs The possum is new, today Norman leaves the corpse intact Bats at it when he walks by As if beckoning a playmate I imagine this to be remorse Though I know better

Stalking Pouncing Winning The creatures cry For mercy A chorus of family From the tree line Or the bush line Passionately scold Norman doesn’t care Tomcats must do What tomcats do Mice are too easy But all right to Alleviate boredom

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Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

Rich Bitch Billy Simms

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Issue No. 1

Winter 2018

Trash Theresa Williams

My mother’s name was Jesse Mae Parker. Her married name was Futrell, but Bill Futrell wasn’t my father. My father was a beach bum my mother never married, and I never knew him. Bill married my mother when she was only fifteen and pregnant with me. He was pale and slight, a quiet, worried-looking man who loved to hold hands with her. He worked for the Highway Patrol, and when I was nine he was struck and killed along Highway 17 while writing out a speeding ticket. For years my mother cried every time she passed that spot in the northbound lane, just before the New River Bridge.

Bill Futrell’s parents never forgave him for marrying my mother. My mother’s parents never forgave her for getting pregnant in high school. Nobody in either family would talk to us. So my mother and I were on our own, and this was fine with me. It made us closer.

In the summer of 1971, my mother was thirty and I was fifteen. We lived in North Carolina and rented a trailer in a field owned by Miss Lottie Bird and Mr. Tommy Bird. In back of the field was the Bird graveyard, which was surrounded by trees and covered in clover and vines. Some of the markers were so old they were made of wood. In summer the bees were thick in the clover, and if you lay on the ground, the bees would land on your face and crawl over your mouth. I’d heard once that bees built their hives in dead things, and I used to think maybe the bees came out of the graves. I went to the Bird graveyard to read and think. Sometimes I’d just lie very still and shut my eyes and wait for the bees to walk across my lips. If you were very still, they wouldn’t sting you.

The Birds didn’t have much money, but they didn’t seem to need more. Miss Lottie had three, maybe four thin print dresses, all wash and wear — mostly wear, for they were oftentimes sweaty and stained. She kept a vegetable garden and a yard full of brown chickens, which she called “reds.” They laid eggs with rich, golden yolks, the kind not found in supermarket eggs. For meat she threw a little fatback into the vegetables or sometimes killed one of the chickens. They were beautiful animals, especially the roosters, which had large, showy tails that

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reminded me of the rooster on the cornflakes box. The roosters were always fighting each other for the right to mate with the hens. Miss Lottie called this her “barnyard drama.” She said sometimes one rooster would kill another, but that was nature’s way. Only the strong survive to make more chickens.

Mr. Tommy couldn’t walk, because he’d tipped his tractor over in a ditch, damaging several of his organs. He stayed in his bed all the time. Miss Lottie tended him while tipsy on cheap wine she bought at Shelby’s Variety Store, right beside her property.

My mother had once been a party girl, but that was all over now, she used to say. She was a high-school dropout and had never liked school. Now she worked six days a week at Shelby’s, the evening shift. During the school year, before she went to Shelby’s, she sat with me while I did my homework. She continued doing this even after the assignments became too advanced for her. I worked at Shelby’s, too, a couple of hours on weekday afternoons. I wasn’t old enough to be legally employed, but nobody cared. I never worked weekends. There would be plenty of time to work on the weekends when I was grown, my mother said. So I spent my weekends however I wished.

I wasn’t a party girl like my mother had been. I spent the money I earned on movie magazines. I liked actors, but not the most popular ones. In the summer of 1971 my favorite actor was Pete Duel, who was in a weekly TV western called Alias Smith and Jones with Ben Murphy.

Pete was the dark one. I always liked the dark ones. Pete Duel needed my adoration, and I needed to be needed, so it all worked out. I’d buy any magazine that had an article about him, and I taped pictures of him on the knotty-pine paneling of my bedroom walls. He said he wanted to fight pollution, injustice, and war. He also drank too much and was slightly obsessed with guns. So he had a unique combination of positive and negative traits. He was imperfect, and his imperfections fueled my Pygmalion dreams of making him a better man.

I didn’t take down my pictures of Pete Duel for a long time after he shot himself. I’d look at the pictures and wonder what had made him stop wanting to be a survivor, like the character he played on TV. It had to have had something to do with love, I decided. Didn’t everything?

I missed my mother when she was working. I always

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Issue No. 1 stayed up late, waiting for her to return home. I imagined every tick of the clock brought her closer to me. I’d visualize her moving toward me in jerky, mechanical motions: tick, tick, tick, nearer, nearer, nearer. As soon as she got off work, we made Jolly Time popcorn and watched Johnny Carson. On Fridays we watched Red-Eye Cinema all night and laughed and cried until we heard Miss Lottie’s roosters crowing just before dawn. Their ancient sound coming to us through the darkness was sad, like an ending.

In was early June when Al MacAlister started working at Shelby’s. Al was a Northerner, and he fascinated me. I had little interest in Southern boys who’d end up being auto mechanics and farmers like their fathers. Al had been in the army two years but had somehow avoided being sent to Vietnam, getting stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, instead, which was not so far from us.

He rode to work on a black Yamaha motorcycle with scratches and dents on the gas tank.

He looked like Pete Duel.

Al wasn’t much taller than me. I wondered what it would be like to kiss a man without having to tilt my face up. The only men I had ever imagined kissing were tall leading men in the movies. I considered Al’s stature for a couple of days, deciding at last that kissing him would be more intimate than kissing a tall man. For one thing, all our body parts would be aligned.

On his first day at work, Al told me he liked North Carolina because of the beaches.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Don’t you have beaches up north?”

He said where he was from, the beaches were crowded, trashy, and old.

“How can a beach be old?” I asked.

He smiled and studied me. I thought maybe he was flirting. I hoped he was.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Merry,” I told him.

“Mary? Like in the Virgin Mary?”

“No, Merry, like in Christmas.”

“Really? Or are you just kidding?”

No, I wasn’t kidding, I said, and I told him everybody always asked me that. I was slightly disappointed he was so unoriginal, but I decided to look past it. One needed to be flexible in one’s expectations, I thought.

He asked how old I was, and I told him, hastening to

Attic Door Press

Winter 2018 add that I would be sixteen in January.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, like one would say, Holy Toledo, “and sweet sixteen, too!”

Al said that in North Carolina, the beaches were pure and untouched, just like the women. Just like Christmas.

He winked at me.

It was the same wink he’d give me many times, whenever he’d sneak packs of Lucky Strikes out of the cartons while sweeping behind the counter. He would put the Luckys into the chest pocket of his long-sleeved paisley shirt, the sleeves folded up so that they fell just below the elbow. All his shirts fit snugly. You could see the lines of his body.

Al had nice muscles in his arms that hardened even when he made small moves, like pocketing a pack of Luckys or pushing his dark hair behind his pretty ears, which were shiny and clean. He took karate lessons, but he wasn’t obsessive about it. He wasn’t obsessive about anything. He was a beautiful loafer, with no plans and no direction. I looked for a Pete Duel kind of social consciousness in him, but never found it. That didn’t keep me from dreaming about his winks, though, and searching for their hidden meanings.

There was one other trailer next to ours in Miss Lottie’s field, and it belonged to Porter Deets and his mother. My mother and I used to sit in Porter’s little trailer and listen to his stories. Porter had been a master sergeant in the marines and once asked my mother to marry him. I think she considered it. She wanted somebody to protect her, somebody older and in uniform, like Bill Futrell. But my mother never married again.

Porter Deets was the only one on the Bird property who owned a car, a Cadillac in a peculiar color called “wisteria.” It had to be special ordered, he said. He got it because he wanted to drive his mother around in style, even though Old Mother hated cars. Porter called her “Old Mother,” so that’s what we called her, too. The way Porter said “Old Mother” was sweet and fine, in a voice that crumbled around the edges like good fudge. Old Mother lived her life “inwardly,” she used to say. The only place she really liked to go was crabbing in the New River. She and Porter would load buckets and an ice chest into the Cadillac’s trunk, which Porter first carefully lined with plastic and newspapers. They would spend all day out on a rotten dock, crabbing with chicken

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Issue No. 1 scraps tied to strings.

Old Mother had survived two Oklahoma tornadoes, which had destroyed two different houses she’d lived in.

Her treadle sewing machine was all she had salvaged from the last one, and her foot pumped the machine’s pedal several hours a day. She often sorted through the trash outside Shelby’s, looking for discarded clothes to cut apart for her projects. Porter had newspaper clippings about the two tornadoes, and he showed them to my mother and me. Both Porter and Old Mother liked to tell about the saddle Old Mother had placed on a porch banister just before one of the tornadoes. One of the stirrups flew up and broke a window, causing the suction that flattened Old Mother’s house. At the end of each telling, Old Mother would repeat the lesson she’d learned: that you should put things away properly after you have used them; that if she’d put the saddle into the barn like she should have, then her house might still be standing today, and she wouldn’t be a homeless old woman trespassing in her son’s life. I’d be disappointed by the lesson each time, because I thought you should learn something more important from a tornado than to put up your things. Old Mother had a drab way of looking at the world, and so did Porter, and I never wanted to be like them.

I say Porter Deets and Old Mother were drab, but they loved each other with a fierce love. Porter Deets kissed Old Mother on the lips whenever he left her. It didn’t seem strange for him to do this. He and his mother protected each other from a world that didn’t understand them.

On the Fourth of July a customer at Shelby’s asked for help retrieving a pair of flip-flops from a high shelf.

My mother got a ladder and was standing on it when Al, materializing from one of his many smoke breaks, saw her and called out, “Let me, Jesse Mae.” But she wouldn’t come down from the ladder, so he went over and held her legs as though to steady her, and when she stepped down with the flip-flops, Al’s hands followed the curves of her body. She didn’t stop him. I knew then that he’d touched her this way before.

My mother was pretty, small and blond, a tight package of muscle and tawny skin. She wore her hair in a pixie cut, and she was bright like a pixie, with lively green eyes. I looked more like my father, she said, brown haired and freckled, loose, like a fragment of string.

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Winter 2018 Not long after I saw Al help my mother with the flipflops, I noticed the two of them walking toward the Birds’ graveyard, and I knew my mother went there to lie with him in the clover. She went there to close her eyes while purple-tufted flowers trembled around her, while bees trembled on her lips.

One day my mother asked me if I still had a “crush” on Al, and I knew then they’d talked about me. I lied and told her I didn’t care about Al. He was a friend; that’s all. She acted relieved, but at the same time I don’t think she believed me. I couldn’t hide anything from her.

We both knew I was too young for what Al MacAlister wanted, but I still wished he’d seen something beautiful in me.

It didn’t occur to me until recently that if I’d seen my mother and Al going to the graveyard, then Miss Lottie had seen them too. Anyway, it wasn’t long afterward that Miss Lottie called me “trash.” I was ringing up her wine, Mogen David 20/20. People call it Mad Dog. It’s cheap and strong, and Miss Lottie bought it at least three times a week. She called me “trash,” and then she gave me her money, pulling bills out of a worn government envelope she kept stuffed down the front of her dress. Her fingernails were long, yellowed, and dirty from digging in her garden. She was smiling in a way that frightened me..

Miss Lottie was a snuff-dipper, and when she smiled her mouth looked soft and brown, like decomposing fruit.

She might have been an old drunk, but she was our landlady, and she dangled her power over me like a sword.

Miss Lottie stared at me silently while I counted out her change. She was never much for conversation.

Sometimes, if you caught her in the right mood, she’d tell you how she and Mr. Tommy met, how she’d competed for Mr. Tommy against prettier, richer girls.

While she talked, Mr. Tommy would lie in bed like a neatly dressed corpse, his hollow eyes taking it all in. But if you got interested in her story, if you asked any questions, she went silent and kept the best parts of the story to herself.

I handed Miss Lottie her change. She put the coins into the envelope, folded it along a dirty crease, and stuffed it back into her dress. Then she took the wine bottle and laid it across her arm as if it were a baby, a gesture that made her seem less like the drunk she was.

She went out the door that way.

“What did she call me?” I asked no one in particular.

Attic Door Press

Issue No. 1 “I wouldn’t worry about it, Merry Christmas,” Al said, coming by with his push broom, his eye on a carton of Luckys.

My mother didn’t seem bothered, either. She said that was how people talked when they drank.

Summers accelerate life. Whole generations of creatures are born and die. Feelings are heightened, and disappointments are worse, because you realize how temporary everything is.

By August, Al had quit his job at Shelby’s and moved to the beach with a woman who was younger than my mother, but older than me. My mother took up smoking for a time. Luckys, of course. And she experimented with cosmetics. She’d never worn makeup before — didn’t need it — but now she’d paint her face and ask me how I thought she looked. Once, I told her the makeup was a waste of time, and she burst out crying and called me a liar. After that I wouldn’t talk to her about it anymore. I started going to bed early, before she came home from work, and I’d lie in the dark wondering what exactly had changed.

Just before the new school year started, Al showed up in a red Volkswagen Beetle. My mother and I stepped outside as soon as we heard the horn. He got out of the car wearing flowered bathing trunks and a Surf City Tshirt, a pack of Luckys in the breast pocket. I wondered where he was getting his cigarettes now.

My mother’s eyes went dark when she looked at him, as if a light inside her had gone out. “A bug,” she said.

“Hello, Jesse Mae,” he said. “Hello, Merry Christmas.”

My mother and I didn’t say anything. I looked at the Beetle.

“Do you like it?” he said. He was standing in his bare feet, which I’d never seen before. They were handsome, not especially large, but wider than normal, and very tan, so that the arch was delicate and white. “They’re fun cars,” Al said. “It’s esay to drive one.”

Everything was easy for Al MacAlister, and he probably couldn’t understand why my mother was making things so hard.

“What do you want?” my mother said.

Al squinted at the sky. The clouds were high and motionless. It wasn’t like a real sky at all, just a picture plastered above us. “I thought we’d go to the beach,” he said.

Attic Door Press

Winter 2018 “The beach!” my mother said, as if she couldn’t believe it.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s all go to Fort Macon.”

Fort Macon was a Civil War fort at Atlantic Beach, sixty or so miles from us. My mother and I had never been there. Al had always told us he’d take us as soon as he could borrow a car, but he’d never gotten his hands on one, until now.

Al leaned against the Beetle. “How about it, Merry?” he said.

“You’re kidding,” my mother said.

“Come on, Jesse Mae.” Al lifted his weight from the car, as if buoyed by my mother’s voice, and winked at me.

Then he opened the door on the driver’s side, gesturing for my mother and me to get in. “Let’s go!” he said.

“To look at a fort?” my mother said. “Someplace where people murdered each other?”

“Oh, it’s not like that,” Al said. “There’s also a restaurant I want to take you to. You and Merry. It’s the best seafood in the state.”

“Everybody says that,” my mother said.

“Naw,” Al drawled. “I doubt that.”

My mother’s arms, which had been crossed defensively across her chest, now went to her hips: her most defiant gesture. “The point is,” my mother said, “everybody lies.”

Al leaned confidently on the hood of the Beetle. “It’s not a lie if it’s the truth,” he said, grinning.

I sat in the front seat, because my mother wouldn’t.

So there wasn’t anything to obscure my view as we drove up to the fort. It sat on a high dune — or rather was sunk into the dune, hiding. My mother wasn’t impressed. Al told her to wait, that we weren’t even out of the car yet.

Beyond the dunes, the ocean looked rough. Gray water shot between a crude wall of rocks on the shore, then got sucked back through the barrier, back into the ocean. My mother spread out a towel and sat. She wouldn’t go inside the fort but said I should, because it might be educational.

“What are you going to do, Jesse Mae?” Al asked.

“I’m going to sit here and think,” my mother said.

“Think?”

“Maybe you should try it sometime,” she said, turning away from him. She held one arm in front of her face, the palm flat against the wind. “I’m not mad at you anymore,” she said unconvincingly. “I’m glad it worked

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Winter 2018

out this way. I don’t want Merry thinking she’s being raised by trash.”

I knew my mother made this comment about trash for my benefit. Al couldn’t have understood what it meant for a woman to be called trash, how the allegation is impossible to deny, how it won’t wash off in a lifetime.

He wouldn’t have cared if he did. So I knew my mother didn’t say it for him but for me, because she wanted me to feel good about myself. Her words had the opposite effect though. Until then I’d never thought of us as being trash, but now I saw how others might think that. I thought about trash, about how Old Mother salvaged scraps from the trash, but she was odd, and now the thought of her embarrassed me and also the thought of her strange son, who kissed her — his own mother — on the lips.

Walking toward the fort with Al, I pictured a wave raking my mother into the ocean. That sort of thing happened all the time. The earth slides and buckles. The water acts as it must. It was nothing personal.

The underground rooms of the fort were cool and dark, like catacombs. I walked through them with Al, shivering and thinking of bees: bees filling the rooms, climbing over us, building homes inside our heads, making honey until it flowed from our ears and mouths and covered the floor. The honey completely filled the spaces. We floated in amber. Far into the future, we would be found just this way.

(Originally published in The Sun – 2007)

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Winter 2018

Contributors: Darren C. Demaree is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently A Fire Without Light (2017, Nixes Mate Books). His eighth collection, Two Towns Over, was selected as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award by Trio House Press and is scheduled to be released in March, 2018. Demaree is also the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Erin Guendelsberger writes stories and poems and her work has appeared in magazines. She studied writing at Hamline University and Bowling Green State University. She now pursues adventures in Ohio with her husband, daughters, and cat.

M. Guendelsberger is a novelist and short story writer. His first novel, An End to Something, was published in 2014 and his short fiction has appeared most recently in Oxford Magazine. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, the writer Erin Guendelsberger, and their two daughters.

Matthew Riffle is a screenwriter and the cofounder of DandDscreenwriting Studios. Accolades include a Quarterfinal finish in the Nicholl Fellowship (Academy Awards), Quarter and Semifinal finishes in the American Zoetrope Screenwriting Competition (Francis Ford Coppola) and Winner of Best Adapted Screenplay Competition (Rebel Seed Entertainment). As part of DandDscreenwriting Studios, he recently completed work on his first feature length film, The Missing. Matthew resides just outside Cincinnati, Ohio in a rural patch of land overlooking a horse farm with his beautiful wife and two amazing children.

Billy Simms is an artist and educator. He is delighted to be in the inaugural issue of Attic Door Press. He lives in Hamilton, OH with his wife and four cats.

Joe P. Squance is a writer and teacher in Oxford, Ohio. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Lost Balloon, Cease Cows, Juked, Monkeybicycle, Everyday Fiction and elsewhere. He has written essays for Salon, Runner’s World, Organic Life, and Serious Eats. Find him on Twitter @JoeSquance.

Theresa Williams is a two-time recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her works have appeared in Gaygoyle, Hunger Mountain, The Sun, and other magazines. She is currently working on a project, which she calls a Sketchbook Novel.

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Attic Door Press