Belmont Story Review: Out of Place (Volume 4) by Belmont Story Review

VOLUME IV 2019

A national magazine of literary arts, faith, and culture

OUT OF PLACE

VOLUME IV 2019

Managing Editors: Lauren Ash, Macey Howell Poetry Editors: Gabriela Gonzales, Joe Vitagliano Advisors: Grace Carey-Hill, Ashley Harris, Nicole Jones, Megan Leahy, Olivia Long, Emma Schneider, Hanna Smithson, Caroline Vaught VOLUME II AND III 2018

Advisors: Lauren Ash, Sydney Bozeman, Dale Chapman, Macey Howell, Rachel Hutchings, Sean McGibany, Reagan Prather, Audrey Fernstermaker, Macy Schreiber, Naomi Weigand PREMIERE ISSUE, VOLUME I 2016

Advisors: Alivia Baker, Meg Bruce, Arah Hans-Majors, Vanessa Keiper, Emily Lewis, Erin Ogilvie, Maela Oldham, Gloria Smith, Jacob Stovall, Kassandra Tidland FOUNDING EDITORS

Sam Denlinger, Krista, Walsh, Ethan Blackbird, Jennifer Cantrell, Caroline George, Katherine Puckett EDITOR

Richard Sowienski DESIGN

Mark McManus, Avery Kiker Cover illustration: 43, Rubén Torres Nameplate design: Journey Group Belmont Story Review is produced through Belmont University's Publishing Program CONTACT

TABLE of CONTENTS FICTION

Tsipi Keller 36 Ranjan Adiga 56 Christine Canady 72 Chris Helvey 92 Daniel Davis 118 David E. Yee 136

The Horse Bombay Curry Kitchen The Exhibitionist A Portage The Dreams You Dream Must Be Your Own Fontanelle

ESSAY

Sarah Courteau David Armand John Backman Kim McFarden

7 15 44 86

Toilet-Paper Rose Mirrors A Reluctant Ecstasy Faking It in Seven Disciplines

POETRY

Kelli Russell Agodon 50 51 52 54

For a Moment You’re Wonderful What Little Things We Are Thankful For Explanations of Travel Other Side of Midnight

Cara Losier Chanoine

80 Welcome to Civilization 82 Break, Definition of 84 Our Lady of Libations

Whitney Rio-Ross

108 The Kissing Tree 110 After the Homily

FOREWORD

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[ FOREWORD]

OTHER LIVES he issue’s theme, Out of Place, was suggested by John Backman’s essay “A Reluctant Ecstasy.” The word ecstasy, as the author points out, has layers of meaning. “The original Greek can translate as ‘out of one’s mind,’ as in insanity, but it can also mean ‘out of one’s place,’ like a zebra among a hundred horses....Or an unknown tongue in a rational mind.” The subject of glossolalia, or an “unknown tongue in a rational mind,” brought back memories of my first encounter with the phenomenon. For one summer break during college, I went door-to-door selling Bible books in Chattanooga, Tennessee. After a long week of frequent rejection, my two roommates and I would embrace our day of rest by randomly selecting a church to attend, often with little knowledge of what to expect. On any given Sunday, we could be worshipping with a congregation that sang acapella hymns only, and the next we could be celebrating with music more akin to Motown soul. Church services could be liturgically sedate or disordered mayhem. One Sunday, early in the service, the preacher called us to pray, and I bowed my head. Instead of a pastor-led invocation, I heard a stirring of people around me. Everyone in the sanctuary (a large, plain room with rows of folding metal chairs) had shifted to kneel on the wooden floor. And each person began praying out loud, each praying something different, some praying in sounds not recognized as speech. I slid to my knees in confusion and faced the back of my chair in imitation. I don’t remember if I mumbled a prayer or not, but I do remember feeling out of place, dropped into a foreign world or worship. And so it is for our narrators and main characters in this issue, strangers in a strange world. Some are immigrants, others estranged sons or fathers, and others simply out of the expected order.

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In our opening essay, “Toilet-Paper Rose,” author Sarah Courteau presents a portrait of “Booger County” in the heart of the Ozarks, demonstrating that setting does indeed form character. In the midst of the region’s growth—with the corporate success of J. B. Hunt Trucking, Tyson Foods, and Walmart—those citizens of the hills left out of the boom “cobble together incomes as cashiers, chicken plant workers, and manual laborers.” And bootleggers now sell meth and OxyContin pills instead of moonshine. It is the story of out-of-place people in a prospering economy and out-of-place people in a social justice system. What would it be like to find out, in your thirties, that the man who you thought was your father was not? In the essay, “Mirrors,” David Armand writes of his attempt to find his biological father, exploring what it means to feel unconnected, genetically out of place, in a family. We round out our nonfiction with Kim McFarden’s “Faking It in Seven Disciplines.” Here, the narrator confesses that she is “an insightful imposter.” With light touches of humor, she tells of her journey from mathematical abstractions to imaginative parenting. Interspersed between the essays and short stories, luxuriate in the poetry of Kelli Russell Agodon, Cara Losier Chanoine, and Whitney Rio-Ross. “The Horse,” by Tsipi Keller, opens our short stories. It’s a tale of community and family during the settlement of Jaffa not many years after the Declaration of Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Even when bound by a common religion and national identity, one can still be an outof-place immigrant. “Bombay Curry Kitchen” by Ranjan Adiga, tells the story of Nepal immigrant Sameer and Somali immigrant Ali, both working at a failing Indian restaurant, navigating a sea of stereotypes and mistrust. Our next story, “The Exhibitionist,” takes us not only out of place but out of time as well. Author Christine Canady depicts a man who dances down the street in the nude, a routine that bridges decades, from the bomb that ends World War II to the near future of hover chairs. In the end, the neighbors (who aren’t as free-spirited or imaginative as the Exhibitionist), transcend their time-locked reality to confront puzzling events. “Portages,” by Chris Helvey, features a narrator whose life, for various reasons, unraveled following the Great Depression. A self-described hobo, he cannot find a permanent place of belonging. He likens his life to the early fur traders traversing the rivers of Canada: “Making portages. Going from one thing to the next. Drifting in and out of other people’s lives.”

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Daniel Davis, in “The Dreams You Dream Must Be Your Own,” brings us the story of a man whose only daughter was killed during a mugging. Out of his mind with grief and the imponderable questions of loss, Stan, the narrator, attempts to seek solace with another parent whose daughter was also murdered during a robbery. Ultimately, Stan plunges us into his world of misunderstanding, loneliness, and brokenness. The issue wraps up with “Fontanelle,” by David E. Yee. The narrator, nicknamed ’rillo, addresses his story to Carl, the son of an ex-girlfriend. He tells Carl about the first time he saw him as a baby, the things they did together like a father and son would do, and of his love for his mother and their intermittent relationship. His failed and failing relationships, if they were poetry, would be near-rhymes. In these stories, we may see ourselves as the immigrant, the griefstricken, the heartbroken, the wayfaring stranger. I think again of my church experiences in the South. As a young, small-town Iowan, I was perhaps as different to many of those congregations as they were to me. Yet I was always welcomed, accepted—we shared commonalities beyond our faith. Philip Lopate, in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, touches on that idea. He writes that “at the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience.” Quoting Montaigne, he continues, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Because there is a unity of experience that crosses time and boundaries and cultures, we would do well to remember this great truth practiced by the congregants I met: to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Their face is my face; their hand, my hand; their hurt, my hurt.

Richard Sowienski Editor

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TOILET-PAPER ROSE Sarah Courteau

[ ESSAY] fficially, my native county was named after James Madison, the Founding Father who died the year it was established. Unofficially, these eight hundred square miles of the Ozarks are known as Booger County. No one seems to know for sure where the nickname came from, but, like its eponym, it has stuck—to be used when someone wants to call its denizens out for being ignorant, backward, or so damned remote that they’re crazy to live there. Like most epithets, some adopted it with pride. Almost anything can become a badge of honor if it’s said with enough defiance. Booger County is all mountains without dignity. The geologists call them hills, because technically they aren’t high enough to qualify for grandeur. Yet few who’ve driven over the area’s

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dirt roads—some of which are impassable by a low-bellied car after a hard rain—or tried to build fence down its gnarled slopes would wish for more challenging terrain. The land is scruffy with rocks and brush, green briars and varicose grapevines, and streaked with orange clay that slicks car tires and shoe soles when it rains. Of course, mountains can’t exist without valleys, but those who dwell within them are considered a different breed than those who latch onto the hillsides like cockle burrs. There is a cussedness to the land that makes its beauty feel personal— earned through private struggle. The county is cross-hatched with creeks and streams, many of which only run in wet weather, and is blessed with two legitimate rivers. One figured in a presidential scandal not so many years ago. After a wet spell, it is full of the manure that runs off the chicken farms that feed the processing lines at Tyson and George’s and Butterball. The people who gather on the riverbanks in the summer to fish, swim, drink, and screw don’t pay much mind to the taint of politics or pollution. In 1931, folklorist Randall Vance marveled at how little the twentieth century had touched the place, whose eccentricities he found charming. Writing in The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society, he observed, “One has only to leave the broad auto roads and go back a few miles into the hills to find himself in a different environment, among people who have until very recently been curiously isolated from the outside world, and whose way of life has changed very little since their sturdy forebears wandered west from the southern Appalachians more than a century ago.” Time stands still no longer. If you drive the roads of Booger County, you’ll pass some neat houses where the firewood has been split and stacked on the porch, the fences are high and tight, and the vehicles in the yard are modest in number and bear the current year’s license plate sticker. But you’ll see other homes, among them the trailer houses that have replaced log cabins as the edifice of sudden settlement, where time and poverty have accreted monuments of trash. Old vehicles up on blocks or sinking into the weeds. Rusty appliances. Household garbage spilling out of plastic bags ripped open by dogs or possums or coons. Evidence that whoever lives inside has partaken of the American dream enough to produce a plume of refuse. Behold, all ye who pass by. Logging has sheered giant bald spots into the forests that clothe the mountains. Often, the last thing people do when they sell a piece of

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land or the first thing they do when they buy one is to contract with a logging company, for that old saying about money growing on trees happens to be true if those trees are hardwoods with a diameter of at least twelve inches. In the Ozarks, oak and hickory predominate, though other hardwoods—including sycamore, walnut, and maple—are common, too. Slopes that have been logged in a so-called responsible way, which means that after being denuded they were sprinkled with scrubby pine seedlings, look as if they’ve developed mange. The counties around Booger County have seen a boom. People say, “Arkansas’s time has finally come.” The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, in neighboring Washington County, has grown from an agriculture school that sprouted in 1871, during the hard years of Reconstruction, into a juggernaut of higher ed. The stadium fills for football games, and window-tiled buildings expand around the campus like annual tree rings. With the growth of companies like J. B. Hunt Trucking, Tyson Foods, and, most of all, Walmart, all of which have built their headquarters in northwest Arkansas, money has washed through the gully that is Interstate 49, connecting the region’s cities of commerce. The companies that sell to Walmart value their shelf space enough that they’ve built satellite offices near the corporate headquarters and hired marketers and sales reps to run them. Some of these workers move from elsewhere; others graduate from the local university with provincial ambition and maybe a business degree, the ultimate credential to grab the twenty-first century’s brass ring. The University of Arkansas’s school of business bears the name of Walmart founder Sam Walton. To house these up-and-comers, developments with names like Creekstone Estates and Beau Chalet have been built on old pastures off the highways in Washington and Benton counties. To feed them, restaurants that serve herb-infused cocktails and artisanal cuisine boast of being headed by a chef who has a name. At land zoning meetings, the word “progress” crops up as reverently as “amen” at a gospel service. Over dinner at the Bonefish Grill in the Pinnacle Hills Promenade, developers complain about worsening traffic or the rising cost of a ticket to a U of A football game. They deplore the loss of the area’s character—character being a thing peculiarly prized by those who have little role in its creation. Booger County abuts all this activity, like a younger sibling watching his older brother take the basketball team to state. Gosh, it’s

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exciting. Residents travel across the county line to work or shop or marvel. Until 2012, they had to make that journey to buy booze, too, but Booger County’s citizens finally voted to convert to wet from dry, which the county had been since 1946. They’ve seen gravel and then pavement cover roads that were once bare dirt. City water lines inch further and further out, and pieces of tin and plywood cover over abandoned wells. Huntsville, the county seat, got the county’s first traffic light a couple of years ago. While some Booger County residents have found jobs in the shiny economy that’s grown up around them, many cobble together incomes as cashiers, chicken plant workers, and manual laborers. The Huntsville School District’s enrollment has dropped by 200 students in the last ten years—no small loss when the total number is just above 2,200—as residents move away in search of opportunities they can’t find at home.

There will be jail time, outrageous commissary payments for peanut butter and ramen noodles, outrageous phone card charges, outrageous lawyer fees or else an indifferent public defender who has seen it all before. Bootleggers once sold moonshine out of stills in these hills. Now they sell meth and pimp Oxycontin pills. No one who starts taking dope plans on being a meth head. But meth addiction is a disease as endemic as coal miner’s cough. The mug shots of those arrested show disheveled hair, bloodshot eyes, scabbed faces. These pictures depict the bitter end—or the long, sad middle—not the beginning. They don’t show those faces when they were truly young, reckoning with a world of baffling complexity that seemed little inclined to invite them in, just drying their wings from turbulent childhoods. When that mug shot is of one of your own, viewed on a website of jailed county offenders, you note the new marks on the familiar face. Where did he get that cut over his eye? The hair buzzed too short or grown shaggy and long. Most of all, you look at the eyes. Is he still high? Has he been crying? Is he afraid? In pain? Ashamed? Angry? Or is something else there, an emotion you can’t understand—the thing that can momentarily render him a stranger?

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You are afraid of what is to come. A mug shot is only the beginning. There will be jail time, outrageous commissary payments for peanut butter and ramen noodles, outrageous phone card charges, outrageous lawyer fees or else an indifferent public defender who has seen it all before. (But of course he hasn’t. Because he hasn’t seen your brother or your son or your elementary classmate. You aren’t yet ready to absorb that your loved one fits every cliché of addiction, the biggest one being that it won’t happen to you.) Once your loved one is convicted, you are sentenced as well. To visit him in his Department of Corrections facility, you must drive for hours, sleeping in your car or staying overnight in motels you can’t afford, hoping your old car will make it. Perhaps you have the kids with you this time. You leave behind the mountains and Interstate 49 to cover empty, flat miles on Interstate 40, sandwiched between the semi-trucks that are bearing the burdens of commerce on their metal backs. Finally, you arrive at a brick compound in miles of fields lined with chain-link and razor wire.

When it is time to leave, you may break down between the exit door and the car. You may cry most of the way home. You may say an awkward little prayer, not sure what kind of grace to ask for. You have filled out the provided forms and cleared the background check, sweating over old convictions for shoplifting or hot checks. After putting money in your loved one’s account for the phone call—eight dollars for thirty minutes—you spoke with him ahead of time to make sure he could accept visitors. You can’t see him if he’s in the hole for getting a homemade tattoo or being accused of smoking after ducking behind the prison greenhouse to eat a jalapeno pepper. You check to make sure that everything you and your kids or grandkids are wearing falls within the dress code parameters—no bare shoulders, mini-skirts or dresses, hats, shorts, see-through clothing, leggings, camouflage attire, or underwire bras. You leave your purses and phones in the car. You have brought one-dollar bills and change in a plastic baggy to use at the food vending machines. Your loved one isn’t fed well in prison. He hasn’t eaten a banana in four years.

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You stand in the security line with other mothers, fathers, girlfriends, wives, kids, black and white and brown, big and small. The common denominator is that most don’t have two nickels to rub together. You take off your shoes for inspection. The guards search all visitors, including children, their fingers patting private places. Then you go to a machine and put a finger on it. That fingerprint brings up your information in the computer. A guard gives you a piece of paper that says you are approved. You pass through the visiting gate. It slams shut behind you. You traverse a walkway to a room furnished with metal chairs that resembles an elementary cafeteria, though it lacks tables. They were removed to prevent inmates from getting hand jobs or receiving contraband under the tabletops. A guy with a computer takes the piece of paper each visitor clutches to certify that they’ve been OK’d. When your loved one arrives, he is in a white uniform with his name on it. This is the uniform he wears on visiting days and for court appearances and parole hearings. The other two uniforms he’s been issued are what he works in. Underneath his uniform he wears a new white T-shirt that you put money in his commissary account to pay for. Your loved one is glad to see you. The younger kids hang on their dad for a while then wander off to a TV the prison guards have set up that is playing an animated movie. Older kids sit the whole time by their father. A couple guards patrol the room. Cameras record from above. Some inmates offer things they’ve made for sale—leather, woodwork, art. Perhaps your loved one sells paper roses made from toilet paper and dyed with Skittles. He gives you one to take home. There are no glass partitions here. Visitors are allowed to hug and kiss inmates when they arrive and depart. But after years in here, your loved one doesn’t know how to be touched anymore. He has confided during a phone call that he trusts nobody except for a guy who’s a convicted murderer. After being a person people fear, it’s hard for him to be someone they can love. Visiting hours are noon to four. When it is time to leave, you may break down between the exit door and the car. You may cry most of the way home. You may say an awkward little prayer, not sure what kind of grace to ask for. You may yell at the kids because they are upset, too. Then you feel bad about losing your temper. You ask God for forgiveness. At least that’s a supplication you know how to make.

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Somewhere along I-40, you stop and eat. You would like to stay in a motel again, because it’s a long trip home at the end of a long day, but you can’t afford to. The trip to the prison requires a full tank of gas. So does the trip home. The motel the night before was at least seventy-five dollars. You’ve already forked over money for breakfast and snacks and now this dinner. Besides, you have to get back for work. The kids have school. When you climb out of the flats and hit I-49, the pitch and roll of the mountains soothes you. It’s already dark, but you’ve driven this journey enough times to know what the daylight would reveal: the swooping majesty of this interstate built in the 1990s—a quarter century ago, though it will always feel new to you. I-49’s engineered curves, easily navigated at 80 miles per hour, revealed your hills to visitors and economic prospectors. They saw the same beauty you do. They just draw things forth from this land that you and yours never could. Once home, you place the paper rose your loved one gave you in a vase by the window, where it joins the other flowers he has made over the past four years, some light pink, some with petals edged in red, some tight, flesh-colored buds that still need time to open. He will be eligible for parole in one more year.

SARAH COURTEAU’s essays and stories have appeared in the Oxford American, The New York Times, and Witness, among many other publications, and she is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. She’s currently at work on a crime novel about a murder in the rural Ozarks perpetrated by four brothers.

MIRRORS David Armand

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[ ESSAY] y wife and kids and I have just gotten home from spending the afternoon at the St. Tammany Parish Fair in Covington, Louisiana. I sit down at my computer with a cup of coffee and open my email. I’m tired, and I still have work to do, but I’m glad I’ve been able to do something fun with my family today. I’ve been going to this same fair ever since I was a kid. And not much about it has changed in these thirty-odd years either. There’s still the Gravitron, a saucer-shaped ride that spins and creates a powerful centrifugal force with its movement, causing its riders to stick to the plastic pads that line its curved walls like a bunch of mattresses leaning on the inside of a furniture store. People maneuver themselves against the generated pressure in order to turn their bodies

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horizontally, diagonally, or even head-down as the ride spins and spins around its creaking axis, pressing them against the wall. At least this is what I’ve been told. I’ve never actually ridden it myself. I’m not much on rides or carnivals or fairs. I never really was. But I went to them as a kid, and so now I go out of a sense of nostalgia, a desperate sort of longing for my past, and maybe even for the spectacle of it, if I’m being completely honest. But most importantly I go for my kids. I go so they can have their own set of memories and stories to tell one day. It’s one of the most important things I can think of to give them. My favorite part of going to the fair when I was younger was walking down the midway at night: the smells of food being fried, cotton candy, cigarette smoke, sweat, dust, hay, and grass, all mingling together into one, a conglomeration of smells—along with the sounds of people screaming and laughing as the rides whorled and creaked on their rusty tracks and around their axes; country music playing from cheap radios hanging from bungee cords behind the prize booths; horses, chickens and sheep making their own noises from the livestock barns in the distance. I would step over the orange and black extension cords that snaked across the dusty patches of grass and which disappeared under idling RVs or semi-trailers, or beneath the myriad wooden booths where you could win prizes for knocking over metal milk jugs with a baseball or tossing rings around the neck of a rubber duck bobbing in a plastic pool filled with murky gray water. You could throw a dart to pop half-inflated balloons tacked to a corkboard behind some leather-skinned dude holding a cigarette between his lips, or you could use a water pistol to knock over a taunting, tiny metal clown—something ominous and almost threatening in his painted grin and cheeks as the water cascades down them like tears and then lands in a steel trough below where it’s collected and then siphoned back into the long rubber hoses for the water guns. The prizes you got were never much, never near what you spent to get them, but one year I remember I was lucky enough to win a pocketknife. It had a wooden handle and a blade that folded out, and my stepdad had even carved my initials into it with a wood-burning tool, its metal tip bright orange with heat as he tattooed the letters DA onto the soft tan wood.

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Another year I won a small glass plaque with the cover of Mötley Crüe’s latest album, Dr. Feelgood, embossed on its smudged and shiny surface. I kept it in my room in the trailer where I grew up, on the thin wall next to pictures I had cut out from Mad magazine or the comics section in the Sunday Times-Picayune. I remember my stepdad would usually drink as we walked around those crowded fairgrounds, his hand gripping a can of Budweiser wrapped in a damp brown paper bag. This would usually put him in a good, often generous mood. He would buy my stepbrother, stepsister, and me all caramel corn and Barq’s root beer in glass bottles and let us ride the bumper cars or get tickets to walk through the fun house, its maze of mirrors bending and distorting your image so that you hardly recognized yourself in that strange and smoky darkness.

He would...let us ride the bumper cars or get tickets to walk through the fun house, its maze of mirrors bending and distorting your image so that you hardly recognized yourself in that strange and smoky darkness. Once he even convinced me to get on the Scrambler with my older stepsister, even though I hated rides and was scared of all the things I imagined going wrong on them: a loose screw, a broken chain, people getting maimed as a result of these mechanical imperfections. Even before I read about things like this actually happening, my imagination would conjure horrors such as razor blades being stuck in the cracks of the seats, just waiting for someone to slide over them as they eased themselves into the ride. But despite this, and since I was even more afraid of my stepdad thinking I was a coward, I climbed into the sticky silver car next to my stepsister as she pulled the metal safety bar over our legs and we waited for the ride to start. It spun us backwards and sideways, it jerked left and right and up and down as we were tossed around like a handful of gravel in a clothes dryer. It was awful. The last thing I remember before throwing up all over my tennis shoes—as well as my stepsister’s and on the people sitting next to us—was the line of spectators on the other side of the steel barricades surrounding the ride watching us spin and whorl, their faces becoming distorted and blurry as we circled errati-

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cally like I was back inside of that fun house, unsure of what was real and what wasn’t. I never rode on a ride like that again. And so, I’m thinking about all of these things after having spent the afternoon at the fair with my own family, as I come inside now and sit down at the computer to check my email. How much my life has changed since then, back when I was just a kid at the fair with my stepdad and stepsiblings, most of them gone from my life now for one reason or another, and me with my own kids, my own life carved out in this world. It’s hard not to mull over your past. Especially because today, when I open my email, I discover that I’ve been sent the results from a DNA paternity test that I had taken last month, one that will hopefully determine after all these years, and without any more doubt, who my biological father is.

I probably should’ve started all of this off by saying that I was adopted, that an aunt and uncle took me in when I was around two years old, that the “stepdad” I mentioned earlier was my uncle. That his other kids, whom I called my siblings, were my cousins. Or maybe I should have begun all of this by saying that for my whole life, I also thought I knew who my biological father was even though I had been adopted, and it wasn’t until I was in my late thirties and took a DNA test that I learned what I had believed for so long to be true was, in fact, not. But beginnings are difficult, and so are endings. So people often start their stories in the middle, from some liminal place, like that fun house at the parish fair, all those mirrors and twisted walls disorienting you and making it hard to find your way out. So let me try it this way: I sip from my coffee, watch for a minute the steam as it wisps from my cup, then I lean forward and click open the message, download the PDF attachment, and slowly start to read that there is a greater than 99.99 percent probability that a man whom I’ve never met, who lives over a thousand miles away from me and in a city and state where I’ve never been—and, until just recently, has a name I’ve never heard before in my entire life—is my father.

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My hands are shaking so badly that I take them away from the keyboard and just stare at the screen, reading the same words over and over again, as though maybe I’ve missed something in the way they are written.

And here’s yet another way I could have started this: My mother wasn’t married when I was born and so in the space on my birth certificate where it had the word “FATHER,” the letters “N/A” were typed beneath it. But my mother had told her family who she believed my father was, and everyone just accepted that as the truth. His name was Lonnie, she had told them. She had known him since they were kids. Lonnie’s father was friends with my grandfather. And even though my mother was somewhat promiscuous around the time I was conceived, no one in my family ever questioned my paternal roots—at least not that I know of. They later passed that information on to me as I grew up and started asking about where I came from. I had no real reason to question it either.

I had spent a lot of time thinking about his alcoholism, his depression, his loneliness, and what those things meant for me as a man and as a father. But I’ve written about all these things before. My mother’s schizophrenia, her inability to take care of me, my adoption, my search for Lonnie, the man who I had always been told was my father. I have written about finding and eventually meeting him when I was in my late-twenties, just before my own kids were born. I have also written about the disappointment I felt, the emptiness, but also about the hope I found in becoming a father myself, and about what I thought of as my chance to absolve my children from what I saw as Lonnie’s dark past. But what I haven’t written about yet is that this man Lonnie, who I had believed my whole life was my father, was actually not related to me at all. I had met him and had visited him at his house on several occasions. I had brought my wife and kids along with me a couple of those times. I

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had talked with him on the phone and via email before eventually losing touch with him altogether. I even met his family several years after that when one of his sisters found out about me on Facebook and invited me to a reunion; I took pictures with all of them. Hugged them, kissed them, and loved them like the relatives I thought they were. I cried with them about what we had all thought was a shared connection, a lost past. I wrote stories and poems about Lonnie—a whole novel, as a matter of fact—as I tried for most of my adult life to assimilate my biological connection to him (and all the implications of that connection) into my existence. I kept pictures of him in a red Wolverine boot box on the top shelf of my closet, right along with all the other family pictures I keep there. I had felt sadness and guilt when I learned of his death from throat cancer, remorse that I hadn’t even found out until many months after it happened. I had spent a lot of time thinking about his alcoholism, his depression, his loneliness, and what those things meant for me as a man and as a father. And all of this to ultimately learn that he had no biological connection to me whatsoever. It’s the kind of thing that changes your life in ways you can’t even number, the kind of thing that makes you question who you are and who you’ve always been. Should I have been angry at my mother for this? For not even knowing the man who fathered me, her only child, her only son? Or did she know but didn’t want to tell me? Was she trying to protect me from something? But as all these questions were forming in my mind, my mother passed away. I would never get the chance to ask her these things. I still wonder if she died with a different truth in her mind, one that she just couldn’t bring herself to share. But like so many other things in my life, I’ll never have that answer. Now I have a new answer, though, sitting here in front of my computer screen, my hands still shaking. I somehow manage to forward the email to the man who I now know is my father. I don’t tell him what the results are in the message, just that they are attached—in case he doesn’t want to know right away, in case he wants time to think about the implications of the results before he opens them: that he has a son, a thirty-eight-year old man with a wife and two children, a person whom he has never laid eyes on until recently—and even then, only through pictures posted on Facebook. A person he has never known about until he received a text message one Saturday morning just two

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months ago, asking if he ever knew a woman with my mother’s name or if he was, by any chance, in Louisiana during the late 1970s when I would have been conceived.

Still, maybe even after all these things I’ve just said, this story really starts here: It was early summer, and I was getting ready to go to a meeting for work. On a whim, I logged in to Ancestry.com to view my DNA matches from a test I had taken and sent in a couple of years earlier. A friend had bought the kit for me after he had read one of my novels and I told him the story about Lonnie—that the book was based on my meeting him. This friend told me that he had actually worked for Lonnie’s father years before, and so he took great interest in my history. Anyway, every so often a new distant cousin would pop up or maybe some other family member I hadn’t thought about in a while. Interestingly, nothing there ever connected me to Lonnie, though, but I just wrote it off. It was possible that none of his relatives had ever taken the test. I never thought to even question that. It was all just for fun at that point.

I noticed a new result, right beneath a first cousin on my maternal side. It was a name I had never seen before, had never even heard of. I had mostly lost interest in the site by then anyway after having never gleaned anything new about my family or my ancestry to keep me going back to it. But for some reason, I logged in on that particular morning. I don’t know why. It was just something to look at until I had to leave for work. As I clicked my name to pull up my DNA matches, I noticed a new result, right beneath a first cousin on my maternal side. It was a name I had never seen before, had never even heard of. The shared DNA indicated that this person was either another first cousin or perhaps a half-uncle. I knew that my mother’s sisters or brother hadn’t had any other children—not to mention the fact that I didn’t share this connec-

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tion with my maternal cousin anyway—so the only possibility I could determine was that one of Lonnie’s sisters had a child whom I hadn’t heard of before. I Googled the name and found someone a little bit older than me who lived about two hours away. He had brown hair, blue eyes. It was a cousin. Had to be. I mentioned all of this to my wife as I was walking out the door. “That’s weird,” was all she said. I agreed that it was. Then I left for work. During breaks in the meeting, I used my laptop to find out more information about this new relative. Fortunately, there was a lot online, but I still wasn’t sure who he was, or exactly how we were connected. I texted a picture of him to my wife. “Lol. You’re crazy,” she texted back. Maybe I was. Most likely this was all just a mistake. After all, the friend who had ordered the DNA kit for me was letting me use his account on Ancestry, so maybe our results had gotten mixed up somehow. I emailed him to ask if he had heard of this person, if he had any relatives with that last name. “No,” he told me. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about this person. I messaged some people on Lonnie’s side of the family, people whom I had just recently met, and asked them if one of Lonnie’s sisters—or if their grandfather— had any children no one knew about. “No,” they all said. “That would be impossible.” “But then again,” one of them said, “we didn’t know about you until recently, so I guess it’s not completely out of the question. Keep us updated.” I told them I would. Coincidentally, one of Lonnie’s sisters had recently taken the DNA test on Ancestry too, but as far as I knew, she was still waiting for her results to come back. Before this, I had no doubt that it would link me to her as a nephew. Now I was starting to wonder if it actually would. There were still a lot of possibilities and I was already like someone who was drowning in information and potential outcomes. It was maddening, to say the least. I kept searching names and pictures for the rest of the day when I got home. Finally, I messaged the person directly through Ancestry’s email service. He responded but was just as confused by this possible connection as I was. Thankfully, like me, he at least seemed curious to

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find out more. But after that first contact, we lost touch altogether. I’m not sure why. I wondered if he had found out something he didn’t want to tell me.

During this time my mother was in hospice care, dying of cancer. I hadn’t spoken to her in several years, but after receiving a text a couple of days before my birthday earlier that year, informing me about her illness, I went with my wife and children to visit her at a hospital in Meridian, Mississippi. When we were on our way there, I got another text saying that my mother found out I was coming and wanted me to bring her two fish sandwiches from McDonald’s. So when we got to Meridian, I pulled into the drive-thru to get them for her. It was as though no time had passed at all between us in the years since I’d last spoken to her. Still, I was terrified about how she would react when she saw me, heard my voice. I had written a memoir about my life with her and could only hope she hadn’t seen it. She would have been mortified by its existence if she had. But when my family and I walked into the room that morning, my mother just looked up at me and smiled. Roseanne was playing on the little TV hanging from the wall, the sound low. “Hey, David,” was all she said. “I guess you heard I’m dying, huh?” “Yeah, Susie. I heard. Are you feeling all right?” “Yeah,” she said. “For now.” Then she pointed at the McDonald’s bag in my hand. “Thanks for getting those. Is that the fish sandwiches?” “Yeah,” I told her. “Good. Thank you, David. You can just put it on the table over there if you want. The food’s terrible in this place, man.” Nothing had changed. It really was as though I had just seen her the day before.

My wife and kids and I spent several hours with my mother that day. At some point, I reminded her that it was my birthday. I don’t know why. I just wanted to tell her that.

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“Yeah, I know that, David,” she said. “Thirty-eight years old. Damn. That’s somethin’. You better take care of yourself so you don’t end up like me.” Then she said that she wanted me to take a picture with her. “This might be the last one you ever get,” she said. “I’m finished, man.” I’ll never forget how she said it like that. Anyway, despite a grim prognosis, my mother lived another six months, and I found myself suddenly thrust back into her life. I kept in touch with her as much as I could, making the drive to where she eventually ended up in a nursing home in Diamondhead, Mississippi, right down the road from where one of Lonnie’s sisters lived. I told my mother about that coincidence—one in a series of many others that were starting to happen then. This was even before I had discovered anything on Ancestry, though. At that time, I still thought Lonnie was my father. I had had no reason not to.

I would see pictures online of people I now knew were my relatives and notice those same features on them. My mother would just say, “Don’t worry about Lonnie. He was a deadbeat. I should’ve picked a different father for you.” She said this as though it were that easy. Maybe it was. I don’t know. But now I wonder if she knew, even then, that Lonnie wasn’t my father. Had she been trying to tell me that in her own bizarre way? In the past, depending on her mood, my mother would mention names of other people she thought might have been my father. She mentioned a musician once. Someone she met in a bar, I think. Until then, I never knew there was any question in her mind about it. Then I just thought she was trying to make me feel better about Lonnie. I still don’t know what she was thinking when she told me those things. I later spent my mother’s birthday with her that year, on what would turn out to be her last. I brought her a slice of cheesecake from Rouse’s and a card and a potted plant for her room at the nursing home, where hospice would come to care for her. She had some sort of catheter in her back, draining fluid from her kidneys, and she was in a lot of pain. I remember she kept a picture of me and my family tacked onto a corkboard in her room, the image of my face completely rubbed out from her thumb constantly going over it again and again. She did things like that.

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On one visit not long after her birthday, just when I discovered this new match on Ancestry, I asked my mother if she had ever heard of this person who was suddenly showing up as my first cousin or half-uncle. She leaned against the bed from where she had been sitting in a wheelchair, hunched over in pain, then looked at the wall as she seemed to think about what I had just asked her. After a good twenty seconds, she just said, “No, David. Lonnie’s your father.” I never brought it up again. And when I finally did learn that what she told me wasn’t true, it was too late. She had finally succumbed to her illness after six long and painful months.

Before I took the official paternity test with the man who I would ultimately discover is my father, I spent countless hours online that summer researching newspaper archives, census records, obituaries, marriage licenses, military documents, high school yearbooks, basically anything that was in the public domain that might help me find out who this man was. It was all I could do. Based on the Ancestry connection I had learned about, I was able to narrow the possibilities down a good bit, but still hadn’t discovered anything conclusive yet. I would look at pictures from Facebook profiles and compare them to pictures of myself. When I saw my reflection in the mirror, I would notice features I hadn’t seen before, things I had attributed all these years to my mother, since, save for my fair skin and blue eyes, I shared very little resemblance with Lonnie.

I still cry when I think about that, and I hoped that I could possibly have a connection like that with my own father one day. But I would have to find out who he was first. Now I noticed the curve of my mouth, the color of my lips, the creases at the corners of my eyes. I saw all of these features in a different way, as being part of a genetic pool I hadn’t known existed before. I would see pictures online of people I now knew were my relatives and notice those same features on them. But these people were all from a

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different part of the country, places I’ve never even been, so I went back and forth between thinking this was all still just some crazy mistake, to wondering what my mother had been hiding from everyone all these years, and why. Around this same time, Lonnie’s sister finally received her own DNA test results on Ancestry. They indicated that we shared no biological connection, meaning that there was no possible way Lonnie was my father. My life was changing very quickly, like I was back on the Scrambler at the parish fair as a kid. I knew I just had to keep holding on as best I could. And now, in addition to everything else, I started to feel guilty about Lonnie’s family who had all just recently accepted me as one of their own. I worried that they might have thought I had been lying to them to get attention. I also kept wondering what Lonnie would think now if he were still alive—that he had invested spending his time and emotional energy on me, only to discover that he wasn’t my father after all. I even remember him expressing his doubts to me once—on the day my son was born, of all times—asking if I’d be willing to take a DNA test, but I had been so offended that he had even asked me that, and by the way he had asked it, that I never agreed to do it. I was that convinced he was my father, that what my mother had said all those years was true. Now I wonder how differently my life would have unfolded had I taken that test back then in 2008, when he was still alive. The thought of it keeps me awake at night. Around this time, I started watching a show on TLC called Long Lost Family, in which parents are reunited with their children after many years. Sometimes the child never knew they were adopted until they came across a birth certificate by mistake, wandering around in an attic or a basement one day, looking through old boxes of photographs and newspapers, throwing their entire existence into question. I could relate. I would lay in bed and sob when the adult children on the show were reunited with their parents—the often instant connection they had, how much they looked alike sometimes, how similar their interests were. There was one episode I remember in which a woman had been looking for her father and, like me, had run into roadblock after roadblock in her unsuccessful search. All she had was a first name. Her mother had told her that she was a product of a one-night stand and that she had

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met the girl’s father in a pizza parlor in Seattle where she had worked as a waitress. The man in question never even knew he had a child. But when they were finally connected after the daughter’s longdrawn-out efforts to find him, they not only looked alike, but both had the same careers working with animal sanctuaries in Oregon. I still cry when I think about that, and I hoped that I could possibly have a connection like that with my own father one day. But I would have to find out who he was first.

A few days after my mother died, my wife and kids and I drove to Gulfport, Mississippi, to pick up her ashes. We were gone all day, I remember, having stopped first at the nursing home in Diamondhead where she had spent her last days in hospice care. We picked up her belongings, which had been placed in several large black plastic yard bags, put them in our trunk, then headed down the interstate toward Gulfport. At some point we almost had to pull over when two large dogs that had apparently fallen out from the bed of a pickup truck, and which had been since mutilated by passing cars and semis, were lying in the middle of the road, getting hit again and again by speeding vehicles—some of the cars swerving off onto the shoulder, running over the sleeper lines and causing the air around us to rumble as if a cluster of jets was flying overhead. I looked back in the rearview mirror to see the poor dogs’ bodies tumbling around on the asphalt like the yard bags we had in our trunk. They were bloody and torn and mangled. I checked to make sure my children hadn’t seen them, but they both were looking peacefully at their phones—one of the rare moments when I was happy for those electronic distractions.

But the house had been broken into, the door torn from its frame, everything my mother kept inside tossed around on the floor and counters of her dirty kitchen as though a strong storm had blown through there. After that, when we finally got to Gulfport, almost the entire downtown area was blocked off in places, the roads torn apart, PVC pipes

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stacked on side of the streets, orange-and-white barricades keeping us from getting to the funeral home where my mother’s ashes were. Construction workers directed us down a circuitous path that just kept putting us in the same place where we had started. It was like something out of As I Lay Dying. Eventually, I had to just park our car and we all walked to the funeral home, which was an old house with creaky floors and musty furniture. The lady who greeted us at the door knew who I was as soon as we got inside; I guess because of the resemblance between my face and that of my mother’s in the picture I had sent them the day before, which was her senior picture from when she was in high school. It was the most beautiful picture of her I had, and as weird as it might sound—especially to someone who was actually raised by their mother—I used to keep it in my wallet when I was a kid, take it out and look at it sometimes when I missed her, which happened often in my life growing up. The lady went into a room toward the back of the house, the floor creaking under her high heels as she walked away, then came back and handed me a wooden box with my mother’s name on it. She explained to me how the bodies were cremated and the measures they took to ensure that the remains belonged to the person whose name was listed on the box. Then she told me about some of the options for how to preserve the ashes: there were glass-blown pendants, she said, in which your loved one’s remains could be blown directly into the glass and then you could wear it around your neck; they also offered fancy urns and other types of jewelry. I just listened to her as she handed me a catalog, placing it atop the wooden box that held my mother’s ashes. After we left the funeral home, the traffic was so bad that we decided to stop at the beach. We rolled up our pants and walked through the warm, shallow brown water of the Gulf of Mexico, the oil platforms in the hazy distance like the skeletons of so many time-ravaged buildings in some city that had been flooded and destroyed. We walked through the water, finding seashells and animal bones and glass bottles as a cluster of Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornets flew overhead, thundering the sky around us. Some people passing by told us that the jets were practicing for an air show that weekend. “Are y’all going?” they asked. “No, we’re just passing through,” I told them.

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“Well, that might be for the best,” they said, looking up at the graying sky and the vee of jets cutting a path through the dark clouds above us. “Looks like we’re in for some pretty bad weather this afternoon.” Almost as soon as they said that, the sky seemed to unload itself. The rain came down hard and in big, heavy drops. It pocked the sand as though someone were dropping marbles from the roof of a skyscraper. My wife and kids and I ran back to the car, nearly covered in water and wet, sticky sand. It rained the whole way back, a line of dark clouds coming right toward us from the west. Still, we stopped at my mother’s house in Waveland to check on her property before we went home. It was the first time I had been there in years, since I left my mother standing in the overgrown yard one afternoon, never to speak to her again for a long, long time. But the house had been broken into, the door torn from its frame, everything my mother kept inside tossed around on the floor and counters of her dirty kitchen as though a strong storm had blown through there. Since my mother was a severe hoarder, it was hard to tell what was trash and what wasn’t. There were at least twenty or thirty empty boxes of Honey-Nut Cheerios on the ground outside, some of them damp and sun-bleached, trails of ants crawling out from their bent lids. Seeing these things brought back too many painful memories of my mother’s illness, not to mention my being afraid that whoever had broken in and vandalized the place might still be there, or otherwise be on their way back. I thought about calling the police, but I knew that any chance of saving what was left here was gone now anyway. So we left.

He sounded like the kind of person anyone would want for a father. When we finally got home later that evening, there was a letter in the mail from a woman who said she had been friends with my mother when they were kids, that they had stayed in touch into early adulthood, just as my mother’s illness became too great for her to deal with. She told me how gifted my mother had always been, but that she had so much trouble functioning in day-to-day life. Of course, I knew these things, but it was nice to hear them from someone else.

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She also said she had remembered meeting me once when I was a baby when my mother still had custody of me, and that even though they had lost touch over the years, she had followed the progress of my life and had hoped I would receive her note in the spirit with which it was intended: being that of someone who had concern for me and my family and our well-being. I didn’t think it would have been possible to cry any more than I had in the past six months—learning of my mother’s sickness, watching her die slowly and in pain, being uprooted by this new mystery surrounding the identity of my biological father—but as I tried to read the note aloud to my wife that late afternoon, I finally just had to hand it over to her so she could read it herself. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was completely choked up. Part of me felt as though my mother was still communicating with me in some strange way. All the odd occurrences on the trip to get her ashes, then coming home to find this letter. What was she trying to tell me, though? The morning I got the call saying that my mother had passed, I remember I opened the blinds to my bedroom window and saw a large butterfly just sitting there on a tiny branch, its wing lightly wisping against the glass. I swear it sat there for a full minute. I stared at it, took in its myriad colors, its slow and peaceful movements. There was something reassuring about its presence, as though my mother was saying she was finally all right. I believed her. When my wife was finished reading the letter, I responded to it via email, thanking this woman for her sympathies about my mother and mentioning to her my recent search for my father. I asked her if she knew anyone my mother might have dated around the time I was conceived. She wrote me back and said that she didn’t know too many of the men my mother was involved with, but she did remember my mother living with a man whom she had met while staying at River Oaks, the psychiatric hospital she had been committed to after her first husband left her. Could that person have been my father, I wondered. It almost made a strange sort of sense. But it still wasn’t the definitive answer I was looking for. My mother’s friend also told me that she had known Lonnie, and that when she asked him about me once in the early 1980s, he denied

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having anything to do with my existence. She hadn’t wanted to mention that to me, she said, but since I brought it up, she told me that she had always doubted Lonnie’s being my father as well. There was just so much new information coming at me all at once, I hardly knew how I would process it. Or if I ever would be able to at all.

After several months of searching online and contacting as many people as I could find, the man who I would later find out is my biological father called me on the phone. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was in the carpool line with my wife so that we could pick up our kids from school. I had already saved his number in my phone from the time several weeks earlier when I had sent him a text message asking if he knew my mother, so I knew who it was as soon as the phone started ringing. I showed the phone to my wife, the name blinking on its screen, then let it go to voicemail. There were strict rules prohibiting cell phone use in the carpool line, not to mention how nervous I was. Why was he calling me? What would we say? We hadn’t taken the paternity test yet, though he had already agreed to via email. Had he called to tell me he had changed his mind? Had he remembered some detail about my mother that I would want to know? When we got home, I returned his call. I tried not to think too much about how the conversation would go. I just dialed his number. He answered on the second or third ring, and I heard his voice for the first time uttering my name, this man who would one day turn out to be my father. As we talked, I paced around outside in our driveway and in the one-lane road fronting our house. The asphalt was warm against my bare feet. We talked for about fifteen minutes, and I was happy to hear that this man sounded kind, sensitive, intelligent. He sounded like the kind of person anyone would want for a father. He shared with me a little bit about his own life, then we discussed the specifics of how we would proceed with the paternity test. We would both receive a swab in the mail, follow the instructions for collecting our respective samples, then send them back in to be processed. Then we’d both just wait for the results.

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I mentioned before that beginnings and endings are hard, and I think I meant that to be about life as well as about writing stories. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll say that I don’t really know how to end this, just like I wasn’t sure about where to start. It’s like I’m standing in that fun house all over again, a child trying to find his way around in a maze of darkness and mirrors. So I’ll end it this way, even though this is really just another beginning: In less than two weeks from now, as I sit here writing all of this in a journal that my father sent to me just this past Christmas, I will meet him in person for the first time in my life—he’ll fly in the day before my thirty-ninth birthday, almost one year to the day after I received a text message telling me that my mother was dying from cancer. He and I will spend my birthday together, at my house. He will meet my kids, his grandchildren. I like to think of all this as my mother’s last gift to me, especially since after she died, I would ask her every day to help me find out who my father was. Maybe she really didn’t know the answer when she was alive, and maybe she would have been embarrassed if she had known it wasn’t Lonnie, the man whom she had insisted it had been all those years. I will never know the answer to that. But after communicating with my father these past couple of months—ever since we received the paternity results the day I got home from the fair that day, talking via Skype and email and on the phone, learning about him and his life, looking at pictures of him (we look almost identical at certain stages of our lives)—I am grateful he and my mother met, however briefly that may have been. All I can say is that I’m here as a result of that meeting. And that now there’s a sense of a new life being breathed into mine, not incredibly different or any less magical than when my own two children were born. Or maybe this is a better place to end: When I was a kid, we used to go this place called The Pizza Man in Covington, right across from the fairgrounds I mentioned earlier. Each October, you could see the rides from the parking lot, lit up and spin-

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ning in the night sky. You could even hear all the sounds from it across the street. The Pizza Man was one of about three restaurants where you could eat back then, and so we went there all the time. After we ate, we would all walk around the corner to Video Co-Op, a movie rental store where we rented VHS tapes and Nintendo games. And we always had a good time too. My stepdad would drink beer, the jukebox would play old songs from the sixties and seventies: Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, The Mamas & the Papas. As you waited for your food, you could watch the guy flipping pizza dough into saucers through the finger-printed glass that looked into the kitchen. I still go there on my birthday almost every year when I can, even though my stepdad’s dead now and everyone else has all gone their own way. Married, moved, etc. But like so much else in my life, this place hasn’t really changed at all in thirty years. They still have the same folded paper menu, the same songs on the jukebox, skein of flour on the floor, the same pictures on the wall: pizza boxes with funny drawings on the covers, framed puzzles of the Sistine Chapel, and the Last Supper, all under the same dim lighting. But lately I go with my wife and my own two kids. Just to remember the good things about my life—like when we all go to the fair each year—to share these things with my family so they’ll hopefully have something good, like I do, to remember one day.

It’s like I’m standing in that fun house all over again, a child trying to find his way around in a maze of darkness and mirrors.

how little this place had changed since then. And I would have likely been just about the age he is now. Suddenly, his face started becoming my face, his hands my hands. He was becoming me. And maybe, in turn, becoming my father, whose face I see now every single time I look in the mirror. It’s a simple thing most people probably take for granted—who they resemble, where their features come from. They see it when they look in a mirror or at pictures of themselves. I thought about that fun house again. How the mirrors in there are curved and refract light in such a way that you can hardly recognize yourself in their warped perimeters. But now I’m watching my own son look into a mirror, one through which he can see himself clearly, can know who he is, will hopefully never have to question that fact like I’ve had to do. Then I thought about how incredible it is when things barrel at you like that. Unexpectedly. Like a gift. When time folds in on itself so that your past meets the present in one fluid motion. Like the ends of a sheet of paper—or like one of those folding pictures from Mad magazine like I used to tack onto my wall as a kid—the ones that when you bend them in such a way, what once seemed muddled now reveals something entirely new and surprising.

DAVID ARMAND is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also serves as associate editor for Louisiana Literature Press. In 2010, he won the George Garrett Fiction Prize for his first novel, The Pugilist’s Wife, and has since published two more novels, two poetry chapbooks, and a memoir. David has recently finished his fourth novel and is currently working on a collection of essays.

And it always hits me right in the gut, the memory of it all, like a different life I’m watching on TV. But nothing like this: last week we went there, sort of on a whim, and I took my son to the bathroom after we had all finished eating. My wife and daughter stayed at the table, watching the pizza man flip pizzas behind the glass window looking into the kitchen, “California Dreamin’” playing on the jukebox. I was already full of nostalgia and longing, so when I saw my son looking in the mirror while he was washing his hands, it occurred to me that I had probably looked in that exact same mirror thirty years ago—that’s

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y father leads us up the hill. It is Saturday, a day off for the Jews, and my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s horse is with us. This horse and my father work hard all week and on Saturdays they go for a walk, with me and my sister and our friends tagging along. We are serious children, though we do not know it. We are serious and determined because we are new to our parents, and our parents are new to the landscape and climate. But my sister, I think, is too serious; she is a year younger than me, and she hardly ever smiles or talks. She only

THE HORSE Tsipi Keller

listens. It is bare and dusty up the dirt road, and the prevalent color is the color of ash. Small stones fly into our sandals and land between our toes, but we do not stop. We shake our feet and

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

continue, watching how our sandals and skin change color where the dust settles. We are a sight. First is this man, my father, tall and muscular, his skin rough and brown from the sun. Then there is this horse, also brown, and then nine or ten children marching behind. My father is in charge of the horse, and I am in charge of the children. We are five or six years old, but because the horse belongs to my father, they concede leadership to me, his eldest daughter. Busy climbing, we are silent, but not unhappy. We all live in the same house on the main street of a neighborhood called The Great Zone. During the day we are allowed to go beyond the gate of our courtyard, but not too far. During the night our parents lock the gate and we are not allowed to go out because at night the bad people come, they do bad things, especially the women whom all the parents call kurvë, when they sit and talk in the courtyard and forget that we are there. Kurvë are bad because kurvë do bad things with their bodies for money. Even our parents do not go out at night, except on Friday nights when the men have to go to the synagogue to pray, and the mothers light the candles and set the table for the Shabbat meal. During the day it is very exciting on our street, and very noisy. There are merchants and street vendors, and all sorts of Arabs and Jews, and carts pulled by horses, and carts pulled by donkeys, and the porous smell of manure is everywhere. The horses neigh, impatiently stomping their front hooves, but the donkeys, as ever, seem resigned to their fate. They remind me of my sister, they have the same long ears, and the same quiet, downcast look in their dark brown eyes. My sister’s ears, in fact, are the joke of the family. The Arabs wear their long white robes and they tie keffiyehs around their heads. They are loud; they shout and yell in Arabic, waving their arms. The Jews, like my father, wear shirts and pants, short or long, depending if it is hot or cold. The Jews are also loud; they yell in Yiddish and other languages, like Romanian and Hungarian and Polish. My parents and our neighbors speak all the languages, but life for the adults, I am thinking, is hot and hectic, and they seem to burn with their troubles even when they laugh. Once in a while, strange looking children come to our street. When my friends and I come face to face with a group of them, the air intensifies and there is great defiance on both sides, and hostility. They are the

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Israeli ones; they speak Hebrew, and we know they mock us from the way they point at us and twist their bodies in funny ways, ridiculing our clothes and our Yiddish. There is not much we can do to stop them. We look them up and down, but our lips remain tight. They may be older than us, but in our eyes they are nothing but hoodlums. The truth is, they scare us. They look alien and aloof in their khaki shorts and shirts: they are the enemy; they were born here; they are called Sabra. We and our parents are newcomers. We came from Europa, and we are called Olim Hadashim in that Hebrew language. Life is exciting and chaotic on our street, but as soon as we step through the gate inside our walled-in courtyard, it is safe and quiet. We live in an old stone house that was once an Arab school, before we and our neighbors moved in. It is a long, one-story building that was converted by the Jewish Agency into one-room flats for new immigrants like us. A corridor connects all the flats, about ten of them, and this is where we play when it rains, with the doors to the flats open. But most of the time it is hot and dry, and we play in the courtyard or run around on the street. My father says our family is lucky because our flat is at the end of the corridor, and our window faces the sea, which is right below us, down the hill. The salt of the sea is good for us, my father says. Everything is either good or bad for us, and my father and my mother will tell us which is which. My sister and I listen to every word they say because they are our parents and we love them. Both of them have a blue tattoo on their forearms: It is a series of wobbly, crooked numbers, amateurishly carved under the skin. It is a number they got from the Nazis, and I ask them if it hurt when the Nazis did this to them. They say, yes, it hurt, it hurt very much, and they tell me more about the Nazis and what they did, and about how God finally punished them and all Germans. When my parents and our neighbors mention the Nazis, the men spit on the ground and curse yimach shmam v’zichram. Some of them, and also my father, spit into their hands and rub their palms very fast and hard, and for a while nobody talks, and even we, the children, turn quiet, and then one of the parents says something, and everybody laughs, and we, the children, laugh with them. Our family is small and brand new. It is just my father, my mother, my sister, and I, and we all sleep in the one room with the window that faces the sea. The horse sleeps outside, tied to a tree near our window. Except for our neighbors, no one comes to see us, but one night, when

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

I was still a baby, we did have a guest who came from afar to visit us. He was my father’s cousin, he lived in a kibbutz, and he had come to town on some kibbutz business. He arrived late. I had already been put to bed, but when he bent down to have a look at me, I opened my eyes, and how dark and handsome his face looked in the moonlight! How beautiful his smile! How I fluttered with excitement and joy all over and fell in love maybe for the first time. We reach the top of the hill, and now it is flat land and we can relax our pace. Everybody senses this, even the horse, and soon the single file breaks up, and we walk in a dense, large group, following my father and the horse who are a few steps ahead of us. We can talk now, discuss whatever it is we need to discuss, but I am thinking about what my father told me the night before: Beginning tomorrow, Sunday evening, the horse will be moving to a stable where he will be living with other horses and will be able to sleep more comfortably. When my father tells me this, of course I am against it because we will never see the horse again, and we will miss him, and he will miss us, and my father says that yes, it is true, it will not be the same, but the stable is not very far and we can go visit the horse, and even take him out for a walk on Saturdays. I think about this, and then I ask him if it will cost us money, and my father laughs; it amuses him no end that I worry about money. But everything costs money, and we do not have much. Yet, there is always enough for me and my sister to run out through the gate with a coin in one sweaty palm and a glass and a spoon in the other and buy sahlab from the Arab vendor who comes around with his donkey and cart. The sahlab is white and thick and hot, and even my father and mother like it. It smells sweet, and it is sweet, and my father says it is good for us: it is made with milk and corn flour. The Arab fills our glasses from a spigot, sprinkles cinnamon and grated coconut on top, and we mix it with the spoon and eat it, right there on the street. Another prominent Arab on our street is Derby, and sometimes my father borrows the name when he wants to play “crazy” to amuse us. Derby wears a long white robe and is the exclusive and certified “loony” on our street. He talks to himself; he shouts and gestures and also hurls stones at us when we manage to get his attention. One day, it was just me and my sister, and Derby saw us on the street. Even though we said nothing to him, he started to chase us, and we ran and ran, and then finally reached our gate and ran deep into the courtyard, and we stopped

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

and turned and looked at Derby who remained outside the gate, and as we watched him, feeling safe and beyond his reach, he raised his hand and threw a rock in our direction. It was bigger than a normal stone, and we looked at the stone flying in the air for a long time until it landed and rolled and stopped at our feet. I do not know where our parents are when such things are happening to us, even when it is not our fault; the stones could be dangerous; our street is dangerous. My mother, like my sister, does not say much; she is quiet. But with the other women in the house she talks and laughs and blushes a lot. I think she is the youngest, or at least the prettiest. She is slim, and she wears nice clothes my father bought for her when they lived in Prague, before they came here and brought me with them. Some of my mother’s dresses have the first letter of her name embroidered on the left side under the collarbone, and I pray that one day she will let me wear them. My mother has a beautiful voice, and she likes to sing sad Yiddish songs her mother used to sing, and when she is done singing, she tells me that sorrow is a gift, because sorrow helps people to find one another.

They are the Israeli ones, they speak Hebrew, and we know they mock us from the way they point at us and laugh, ridiculing our clothes and our Yiddish. When my mother talks to me like this, I look into her eyes and think how beautiful her eyes are; they are clear and blue like the sea below our window. She is the only one in the family who has blue eyes, all of us have brown eyes, and when I ask her why I did not get her blue eyes, she smiles and says that brown eyes are just as beautiful, and that maybe, when the time comes, my daughter will have blue eyes. I just have to be patient; it is all in God’s hands. There are all sorts of Jews, and the Jews we live with are good Jews: They are our neighbors, and they, too, came from Europa where it was not so hot and where big fat trees grew out of the snow and where every morning my father bundled me up and put me in my carriage and took me for a walk until the Communists came. Then we came here and my sister was born, which, my mother says, was an accident. Now we walk with the horse along the dirt road, and I watch the muscles of his behind bounce from side to side. I know that horses do not have

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

to stop when they have to pooh: They just keep on walking and the stuff pours out of them, steaming hot and yellow, like mashed straw. We are used to the smell because Jaffa has many horses, and our horse sometimes goes in the yard. Our neighbors do not mind it even though the courtyard is our shared living room and bathroom and sometimes kitchen. Every morning the mothers bring out round tin pails and, with a long hose, fill them with water. The sun heats up the water, and we, the children, plunge in for our daily bath while our mothers stand under the trees, their arms bare and pink. They tell each other stories and laugh. All the other mothers are kind of big and their hair is pulled back under a kerchief. In the afternoons we come out again with small tables and chairs and slices of fruit on a plate and mixed raisins and nuts in bowls. Our mothers drink lemonade and talk some more, once in a while reaching for the plate or the bowls. We, the children, have no interest in the fruit and nuts: We are busy chasing each other or teasing the black ants out of their holes. Then the fathers come home from work, and my mother and my sister and I go to the gate to welcome my father and the horse. My mother brings with her a glass of tea and we stand and watch my father drink it, while my mother tells him all that has happened during the day. While we walk, I suddenly notice that my father no longer holds onto the rope tied to the horse’s neck. Instead, he has allowed himself to linger behind the horse and join us, the children. Instantly anxious, I warn him: “The horse will run away!” I wag my index finger at him, as my mother sometimes does, but he does not listen. He laughs and tells me not to worry, the horse will not run away. I know that he loves to listen to children as they twist their tongues in Yiddish. Still, I tell him again to go back to his horse, and again he laughs. There is nothing else I can do but watch the horse and wait for him to take off. And all at once he does. He charges ahead and we all freeze and watch him disappear. Then my father calls after him and begins running. I run after my father, calling him. Behind me my sister is running, also calling. We run and run but suddenly there is nothing and no one in sight, not my father, not the horse. Now it is only me and my sister, looking for my father. “I knew it,” I tell her. “I knew it.” We arrive at a wide dirt road lined with a few low houses. A group of men and women is seated on the stoop of one of the houses, and they watch us with the mild interest of adults with a few hours of leisure on

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

their hands. They are Jews, I think, those Israeli Jews. I go over to them and ask if they saw a man running after a horse. They are merry, they laugh, they think it is funny. They gesticulate and they talk, but it is Hebrew they are speaking, and I do not understand a word. My sister kicks some dirt at them, and I take her by the hand and leave them to their mirth, my eyes filling with tears as I dare repeat the only curse I know, in a language I do not know, yimach shmam v’zichram. In the end, my father did find the horse and the two of them came home together, and we kissed and hugged the horse because we knew that starting tomorrow he would be moving to a stable, and that every evening my father would come home without him, and that he would walk through the gate into the courtyard, which meant that my sister and I and my mother would not be going out to the street to meet my father and the horse as they arrived home from work, and we would not bring my father his tea and watch him drink it while my mother told him everything that had happened during the day. And so, other than that, life went back to normal: life in the courtyard, life in the streets, running with my sister and our friends, and Derby in his long white robe, and the sahlab vendor with his donkey and cart. All is normal except that sometimes I catch my father and my mother looking at me and smiling, and I look at them, waiting for them to say something, but they say nothing. They just look and smile, so I finally say, “Why are you smiling at me?” And they shrug, like it is nothing. They are just looking, and when I persist and say that I want to know why they are smiling, they say that everyone is allowed to smile once in a while, and I say, “For no reason?” And they say, “Yes, for no reason,” but I have a feeling that they have been talking about the horse just before I started to pay attention and noticed that they were smiling. They have been talking about the horse and about my father not listening to me when he should have, and I am sure that that was what their smile was all about, about the horse and me and my father. Novelist and translator and the author of thirteen books, TSIPI KELLER is the recipient of several literary awards, including New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Grants and National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships. Her novels have been compared with the work of Jean Rhys, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Patricia Highsmith, among others. Her latest novel, Nadja on Nadja, was published by Underground Voices (2019).

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

[ ESSAY]

bba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can, I perform my little ritual,

I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.” —adapted from Sayings of the Desert Fathers The room was quiet and settled like you’d expect a prayer circle to be. A dozen of us in

A RELUCTANT ECSTASY John Backman

a world-weary dorm room, all faded blue walls and particleboard desks and scuffed linoleum. I loved these people, and they felt like home.

And the words took shape in my mind. I’d sat through enough prayer meetings and

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praise services to know what was happening. Under my breath — I was shy then — I let the words come to my lips. So this was speaking in tongues. A form of ecstasy. I hadn’t expected it to come so quietly.

Certain scholars would take issue with me. In the Christian church’s earliest days, they say, speaking in tongues wasn’t ecstatic, because ecstatic meant out of control. Glossolalia was, or was supposed to be, an orderly affair. But ecstasy can mean different things. The original Greek can translate as “out of one’s mind,” as in insanity, but it can also mean “out of one’s place,” like a zebra among a hundred horses, or a single red splash on an all-black painting. Or an unknown tongue in a rational mind.

Out of place happens to me sometimes, and sometimes is enough, because my appetite for it is finite. A few years ago, an old friend offered me one-sixth of a cookie laced with weed, which for reasons that still baffle me I accepted. The next day, after the hallucinations had died down, he asked me what I thought, and I told him I hated it because it disconnected me from reality and I love reality. I’m not the only ambivalent one. Out of place left the ancient Hebrews on edge in their trek across Sinai, especially when God thundered the first 10 commandments from a thick darkness upon the holy mountain. The people saw it all — “the thunder and the lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking” — and took the sensible alternative. “You speak to us, and we will listen,” they said to Moses. “But do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Give us God, but at a distance, in his place.

But God doesn’t seem thrilled with distance or staying in place. Instead God barges in, and funny things happen, and we act funny too. Like Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic. God treated her to a tor-

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rent of visions and inner voices in public places, leaving her in trances for hours or levitating above the convent choir. Mortified, she asked God to stop the public displays of affection. They were, she implied, out of place. They stopped. Centuries before that, Peter the disciple of Jesus babbled his way through the Transfiguration, an ecstatic vision if there ever was one. While Moses and Elijah (both long dead) chat with Jesus, Peter interrupts to say how wonderful it is to be there and how they should build booths in honor of the heroes of Israel and he would have gone on except God comes in a cloud and basically tells him to shut up and listen. There are other examples too. Moses coming away from God’s presence with his face aglow. The ecstatic encounters that moved John Coltrane to play in tongues. You may wonder why I’m telling you this. Actually, I’m telling me this. I’m telling me this because it’s strange and unprovable and I need to know that I’m not insane, or not alone.

But ecstasy can mean different things. The original Greek can translate as “out of one’s mind,” as in insanity, but it can also mean “out of one’s place.” I think it started in puberty. My early encounters with girls baffled me: I crushed on anything female, tangled my relationships beyond repair, and felt like a cheat and a liar. I was agnostic at the time, but on one cloudy day in an urban park, among my closest friends, the strain got the better of me. I looked at the leaden sky and exclaimed, “Am I a fraud?” I wasn’t expecting an answer. I got one. No. Your feelings are confused, that’s all. The aftermath is fuzzy, but it involved dancing and bowing in worship to, well, I didn’t know — the answer, if nothing else. Then, just a few years ago, a spiritual director visited our class — we were training to become spiritual directors ourselves — to listen to our stories one by one. She radiated welcome, and I couldn’t help but respond. Halfway through our conversation, she asked me about my relationship with God. I have no idea what I said. I only remember what she told me later: before I uttered a word, my eyes were dancing. B

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But like I said, my appetite is finite. I found that out early too. An old movie theater housed the Pentecostal congregation. The ghostly light, fold-down movie seats and expectant buzz combined to leave me in a squirm. I was new here, with my ill-fitting clothes and my high school insecurity, and didn’t know what was coming. The preacher looked normal enough: the standard big man with the two-piece cream suit, jacket open, tie clipped, one hand raised to proclaim the Word of God while the other cradled an open Bible. A fleshy Billy Graham, as it were, or an archetype of the pastors I’d seen at other churches. His volume was low; he hadn’t gotten rolling yet. I’d expected all that. I hadn’t expected the wiry man who sprinted across the stage, thumped his hand on the preacher’s shoulder in mid-sentence, and shouted in tongues. He may have been ecstatic, whatever that means, but he sounded angry. Fear sliced through me with each unutterable word. Do not let God speak to us, or we will die.

Maybe longing is what kept nudging me toward out of place. Or it was the voice, or the call. Whatever the case, it led me to the place where out of place took over my life. I’ve heard the warnings. The voice of the Holy Spirit is always crazy, M. Scott Peck said once. The call of compassion is sometimes an unsettling downward pull, wrote John Neafsey, a psychologist. Oh, and this from James Finley, sage and former monk: the coming and going of our moments of awakening began to graze our hearts with longing. Maybe longing is what kept nudging me toward out of place. Or it was the voice, or the call. Whatever the case, it led me to the place where out of place took over my life — where it scuttled my career and my thriving business and replaced them with scribblings like this, with seeing all of three people for spiritual direction, with little money and less purpose. No one in their right mind would follow this. And maybe that’s the point. Once out of place grabs you, you’re out of mind from then on.

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

That could be the way it worked with Shouting Guy. I didn’t know him, so I couldn’t tell what blend of ecstasy and insanity drove him. And I couldn’t see his life afterward, so I don’t know if it changed him. Because that’s what ecstasy does. Not at first, mind you. Peter walked back down the mountain to do what he always did. I prayed in tongues and then discussed it with my mentor and went on shirking my studies. But ecstasy keeps coming. Eventually, Peter saw the risen Christ and had visions, and he went from fishing in a backwater to leading a movement. I am no leader, but I am quieter, calmer, more caring than before I first found myself out of place. It might all be easier if I knew where ecstasy was taking me. But ecstasy guards her secrets. Even weirder, ecstasy adjusts on the fly. God tried a few things to get through to me, like Shouting Guy, but settled on quiet because quiet drew me in. God tried magic with Teresa and got pushback and changed course. That’s a kind of love, if you think about it: taking the care to draw us in the way each of us responds best. Like buying your lover daisies instead of roses because that’s what captures her heart. It seems funny putting ecstasy and love in the same sentence. But there’s nothing funny about it, really. Both hold you tight. Both make your eyes dance. Both converge when you become all flame.

A spiritual director and monastic associate, JOHN BACKMAN writes about ancient spirituality and the unexpected ways it can affect modern life. This includes a book, Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart, and essays in such places as Tiferet Journal and Amethyst Review.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

[ POETRY]

KELLI RUSSELL AGODON For a Moment You’re Wonderful we’re waiting at the airport of unfamiliar accidents runway lights as unbeating hearts death lands without ego white clouds write confessional poems about thirst overflowing notes in envelopes of fog let’s emerge from the tsunami in flip-fliops and cocktail jackets let’s fly over the earth and see how peaceful it is from the sky we’re right in our needto love gentle in what we aim for a little sandspit on the ocean’s shoes still we cry for the loss of a shadow and while death is never expected it’s the stranger we know will arrive unscheduled a night sky dotted with incoming flights

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

What Little Things We Are Thankful For Thank sorrow for showing up in a multicolor vest and satin shirt—depression is harder when your sadness dresses like it’s 1982 and in a pararallel universe someone plays “Come on Eileen” for the very first time. Thank the sliver in my finger for reminding me I can still find my way to a ragged dock and like a child lay on my back and watch the sky pattern itself, a slow melt into the sacred world of cloud watching. Thank the seagulls for standing on the pilings keeping watch for the sparkle of fish, for the tides to leave the shoreline and reveal the shells. Thank the sea for swallowing my phone, loose in my pocket it was ready to leave, the swish of the waves sucking it under and how for a moment, I felt loss until I heard a train across the water and I imagined commuters heading to work as I, with the murmer of the sea as a lullaby, closed my eyes and fell asleep.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

Explanations of Travel

litter my kitchen, but my fruit bowl overflows with Italian plums. Bite the deep purple flesh

Sometimes it’s better to be lost in Humptulips than to know where you are in Hollywood.

and taste the success of a tree, the mountains like the bulls of capsized ships, and thank the mason bee

Sometimes the map interferes with the journey, the destination becomes the seashore,

at your next award cermony. The world is buzzing outside. I know you hear it.

not the sea monsters, but the time we lost track of summer days. We sat in the sand reading Elizabeth Bishop and trying to memorize her poem about the waterfall. Who cares you named your first child Pulitzer, there’s a killdeer building a nest in a prize-winning dune. I’m praising the sandpipers, the rose and amethyst of where I want to be. At home, I’ve fallen in love with the fig tree outside my bedroom window. Some nights, I wake to the scent of sugar and pluck figs from my bed. You want to sleep over, you want to know if you can touch what grows, have sweetness so close you can reach for it with your head on your pillow. In Humptulips, we pick chamomile and make our own herbal tea. If I never make it to New York, then I’ve never made it to New York. Plane tickets

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

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Other Side of Midnight Forget the patio where the rain slid into your bedroom, an aquarium of new carpeting, a sea floor of slippers, your suitcase floating across the room. Forget how buttons fall off in the summertime, someone’s guest room where you sat alone eating French fries and dreaming of more French fries, because what is the alternative? A life of tarts or tarter sauce, a life of tarnished silver, a woman’s hands on your silver hips after a night of martinis with someone you didn’t know, didn’t mean to know. All weekend people had been dying from a list of ailments —aneurysm, cancer, car accident—and the cabbage sits on the counter uncut. Instead of stars there were fireflies, instead of fireflies, your neighbor lighting sparklers with Kidd Rock on repeat, and your history of not being able to shout at God for stealing all the good people and that patio you worried about —it’s still stronger than most patios and will hold us all under a ribbon moon, where we toast the dead and all we didn’t do.

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KELLI RUSSELL AGODON is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her most recent book, Hourglass Museum, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, was the winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for poetry and was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. She also co-authored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice with poet Martha Silano. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State where she is an avid paddleboarder. You can find her at www.agodon.com or www.twosylviaspress.com

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BOMBAY CURRY KITCHEN Ranjan Adiga

[ FICTION] li wears a crisply ironed shirt with formal trousers, which are out of sync with his red headphones and Air Jordan sneakers. It’s the look of a new immigrant, caught between modesty and swag. He’s a refugee from Somalia who came to Utah with his mother and sisters several months ago—barely eighteen and already a survivor of war. But in this country, Ali has privileges that I can’t even dream of. “If I had the legal papers to work off campus, I’d be looking at Best Buy, not a fucking dishwashing job,” I say as we wait for the bus to take us to Bombay Curry Kitchen. Ali’s family was handed work permits with resettlement funds from the state—before the wheels even touched the tarmac—but he works as a dishwasher at the same restaurant where I wait tables.

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“I’m new in this country, Sameer,” he says. The only other person at the bus stop is a white woman standing a few feet from us. Mountains rise behind, and a little farther down the road, cows graze in an open field. It’s eighty-seven degrees in Cedar City. The woman is busy on the phone. Every now and then she cranes her neck to check for the bus. “Why did I come to Utah?” I say. “Why did you?” Ali asks. “They said, ‘Go where the mountains are. You’ll feel less homesick.’ But the mountains here are different. You can see the cracks on their faces.” “Best to be positive,” Ali says. I’m stressing out. If I don’t pay off my tuition balance at the end of this semester, I won’t be allowed to register for classes next spring. I could get deported back to Nepal. “You should apply for an asylum visa. You’ll be eligible for student loans,” Ali says, reading my thoughts. “Go ahead, rub it in.” He’s right, though. Someone in Nepal could forge papers claiming that I’m a political refugee, but my parents can’t bribe the fixers and lawyers. The old Western Union receipts that I’ve saved in a shoe box are a reminder that they’ve done their part. During weekly phone calls, they ask me if I can graduate sooner and get a job so I can send some money home. The woman walks towards us. “About time,” she says, rolling her eyes . “Is it here finally?” I ask. My accent can leak out like a bad smell. It turns some people off, but she smiles cheerfully. “Where are you guys from?” she asks. “I go to SUU,” I say. “But where are you really from?” “I’m from Nepal. He’s from Somalia.” Her reaction is a blend of amazement and disbelief. “That’s great!” she says, and we wait in the awkward silence for the bus to stop and open its doors with a hiss. It takes an hour to ride the ten miles to Bombay Curry Kitchen. The few people on the bus look poor and depressed, and the smell of unwashed clothes linger on the seat. “So, how will you pay your college fees?” Ali asks me, the shiny headphones emblazoned with the letter b hanging on his neck. “Rob a gas station, I guess. What else can a Sociology major with a 3.8 GPA do, anyway?”

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“They’ll deport you even faster,” Ali says, smiling. I hate that smile. It’s a politer way of thumbing your nose at someone. The dude has a work permit, a green card, and an apartment that the state pays for his family, while I’m allowed to work only on campus for twenty hours a week, shelving books at the library every morning before class. The college pays for my meal plan and dorm, and I still have partial scholarship, but a scholarship for minorities that I relied on was defunded last year and my tuition balance has been piling up. If I don’t pay eight hundred dollars by the end of this semester, I won’t be allowed to register for classes in the spring. If I don’t register, I’ll be out of status, meaning undocumented. It’s scary how quickly things can turn around. “Eight hundred dollars—that’s eighty thousand Nepali rupees,” I say. If I turn to my parents for help, they’ll need to ask for another loan from a relative and lose face in the bargain. Ali puts his headphones back on. “What the fuck? I’m talking to you,” I say. “Stop cursing, man. It gets old,” he says. “Frequently saying ‘fuck’ is an important step toward assimilation. You’ll get there soon. Why don’t you check your iPhone 8 and tell me how Pats did last night?” Ali hasn’t quite gotten the hang of football yet, but he lets me watch game highlights on his phone because I have a flip phone. “I’m in the zone,” he says. “What are you listening to?” “Maryam Mursal. She’s a Somali singer.” “Can I listen?” “Like I said, I’m in the zone.” I punch his shoulder. “Show off.” He removes the headphones. “Don’t ever do that. Don’t hit me,” he says, the corners of his eyes straining. “I’m just playing with you, bro. It’s okay,” I say, landing another sharp hook on his shoulder. “This is not nice, Sameer,” he says looking at me wide-eyed. “What if I punch you back? Do you know what that’s like?” I pull down the visor of my cap, pretending to sleep. We get off the bus and walk to the restaurant in the middle of nowhere. I don’t feel guilty for bugging Ali, and then I feel bad for not feeling guilty. The permanent halo of calmness that reigns over his head doesn’t help. “Sorry man, I wasn’t trying to be an asshole,” I say.

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“Sometimes you act very immature, Sameer,” he says. The kid is an old soul trapped in a teenager’s body, but I’ve noticed a change in him. He walks with the upright posture of an American, not with the usual downcast eyes, as if he was hurting under the load of his thoughts. On the restaurant’s rooftop stands a cut-out board of a turbaned, mustachioed mascot holding a sign that proclaims Bombay Curry Kitchen in bright red letters. On weekends, I pull double shifts, but business couldn’t be worse. In a town where Bahn Mi is labeled “exotic” at Jimmy Johns complete with chili pepper warnings, one can’t expect much. Still, a college town could do better. Bombay Curry Kitchen has three Yelp reviews with one star each. Someone wrote that our restrooms don’t have hand soaps. Not true. A comment like that can put a death knell for an Indian restaurant in a small town. Then Madam wrote five glowing reviews using fake accounts, but you can tell it’s the same person because the spelling errors are consistent.

The Madam wrote five glowing reviews using fake accounts, but you can tell it’s the same person because the spelling errors are consistent. When we enter, Madam is on the phone with her cousin in California whom she complains to at least a few times a day. “We’re so delighted to finally hire someone from our part of the world,” she had said when I showed up asking for work at Bombay Curry Kitchen. For six dollars an hour in cash and free food, I can’t complain. I’ve been working here for eight months. This one time, two police officers came in for lunch. I sneaked past them and hid in the bathroom stall, worried that sitting there for so long might give me away. Even my student visa can’t protect me from ICE officers if they swoop down on the restaurant, but the owners take the risk because they pay me below minimum wage. Some days I think, what’s the worst that could happen if ICE comes after people like me? International students, legally in the country with no criminal record, trying to make an extra buck? Then I think, I’m brown, I have a beard and an accent, and I’m breaking the law. If I’m packed away without a college degree, I’ll be that person in Nepal who couldn’t “make it” abroad, constantly peppered with sympathy smiles from friends and family.

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“We didn’t get the loan from American Credit Union,” Madam is saying on the phone. She didn’t mean for me to hear that, so she signals with her hand to suggest I should vacuum the floor. “Good luck,” Ali says, heading into the kitchen. “Did you brainstorm any marketing ideas?” Madam later asks me. “What are some trendy food apps?” I’m pulling the dusty bag out of the vacuum cleaner. “This restaurant needs to be on Instagram. I’ve been saying that for a long time.” “And why haven’t you created a page? This is what I get for hiring a college student. I can’t trust you to complete any assignment.” I go outside and slam the bag at the dumpster to blow away the dust. “At least someone here makes an attempt to go to college,” I say when I come back. I pretend like I’m muttering, but it’s loud enough for her to hear.

“Coming to this country was a mistake,” he says. “Look at the murder rates. Everyone is busy killing each other. No wonder we don’t get customers.” “I run my own business without student loans,” she says. She’s from Delhi, and she reminds me that most servants in Delhi are from Nepal. “You’re the Mexicans of India, na?” she likes to say, but I’m in possession of the one thing she secretly wishes she had—an American college education, and I flaunt it like an ego. It’s a strange way to bond, putting each other down like that. “I’m reading Orientalism by Edward Said. You should read it,” I tell her. “It’s about European colonialism dating back to the Renaissance.” “Interesting. Is the carpet clean, yet?” she asks. She’s counting cash in the register, wetting her thumb in the yellow sponge. She rearranges the cash and rolls of coins several times each day as if that softens the blow of bad business. Her husband comes out of the kitchen and walks toward the window. We call him Chef. He has a brooding nature and constantly complains about this and that, going outside every hour for a smoke. Presently, he stares out the window. “Coming to this country was a mistake,” he says. “Look at the murder rates. Everyone is busy killing each other. No wonder we don’t get customers.”

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Madam rolls her eyes, throwing a quick glance at me. She says her husband’s gloom is un-American. She says, “You can learn something from anything.” On slow days, which is every day, Madam sits at a table by herself and reads self-help books. When she’s lost in concentration, she plays with her earlobe. She once caught me looking at her. She held her gaze for a moment before her eyes fell back on the book. Then she looked at me again, and I looked away. Sometimes I hear her arguing with Chef behind a closed door. And sometimes that’s followed by a long silence that lingers under the door. On days like that, I wish she’d draw me into her confidence, share her fears, her secrets. “Why do you think they don’t have kids?” I ask Ali in the bathroom. He’s wiping down the sink and I’m scrubbing the toilet. The owners don’t like to see us doing nothing, so we spend a lot of time in the bathroom shooting the breeze. “Maybe it’s their choice,” he says. Sometimes Madam comes on weekend mornings straight from Costco, wearing tight yoga pants. I help her unload stuff from her truck—frozen vegetables, meat, eggs. She’s brisk, always on the phone making “business calls” as she puts it, but I think she really just talks to her cousins. And then I’ll find her sitting by herself, playing with her earlobe and staring at the carpet for a long time as if she forgot how to be a businesswoman. “What’s your biggest fear?” Ali asks out of nowhere. “Rancid milk.” “For real?” “I have a whole story about it. I’ll tell you someday.” “You’re a strange man,” Ali says, shaking his head. His ironed shirt is draped over a hanger hooked onto a peg on the wall, and his white undershirt is spotless and wrinkle-free. I wonder if his formal attire is his way of reminding others that he is not the refugee they might imagine him to be—poor and dusty with matted hair. “What about you? You can’t work here forever,” I say. “I’ll open my own servicing garage one day.” He sprays Clorox on the mirror above the sink. “My father owned one in Mogadishu. We are Majeerteen, from a good family.” “Spray. Scrub. Flush. You sure are taking your family legacy forward.” “At least you folks are good company. Did I tell you I applied for a job at Whole Foods, but they said I didn’t have experience? I think they were

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scared that I would steal their organic, vegan, gluten-free spinach quinoa.” He kisses his fingers like an Italian chef and we both laugh. “Why is your father not with you?” I ask. Ali dunks a mop into a bucket, then lifts the mop, letting the solution drip on the floor. As he starts mopping, the smell of chlorine fills up the room. He’s quiet long enough for me to think this might not be a good time. “I’ll handle this,” I say, taking the mop from him. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“Did I tell you I applied for a job at Whole Foods but they said I didn’t have experience? I think they were scared that I would steal their organic vegan, gluten-free spinach quinoa.” “At first, I got tired of telling my story to the immigration officers, but now no one asks, so I don’t mind talking to you. It helps me remember. Long story short, we owned a servicing garage in Mogadishu. On the side, Baba taught sign language to deaf children. He always thought about the poor. We were rich, mind you. We had a house, a car. I went to a nice school. When Al-Shabab came to our town, they demanded money from contractors and business owners. Baba didn’t give in, so they killed him as a friendly warning to others. We fled to Kenya—me, my mother and sisters—in a private taxi in the middle of the night.” Ali slowly puts on his shirt. The silence weighs down on us. As I’m mopping, I’m thinking, we don’t choose life. Life chooses us. “I’ll protect you, man,” I end up saying. “You’re like a brother.” “Thanks, brother. I know I can count on you until you are deported,” he says with a wink. “At least you got here right before Trump’s ban.” I slap his head in a friendly way. He takes a swing at me. I jerk my head back, saved by a split second. Chef barges in and asks us to get back to work. Ali leaves. Chef senses something. He watches me as I wring out the water from the mop with my hands and toss the dirty water from the bucket into the toilet. Although I’m shaking, I don’t show it. “Why do you waste so much time with that African?” Chef asks me. I ask him to step to the side, using a wet paper towel to wipe his footprint from the mopped floor. Then I stand up and look straight into his eyes. “In

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this country, what you just said is called racism,” I say, throwing up a made up stat. “According to the New York Times, a college education is known to cure eighty percent of racism. It’s never too late.” I don’t know where I get the guts from, but I’m overcome with a sense of righteousness. “I’ll fucking fire you and keep him,” he says without any expression on his face. “You can’t because your wife makes all the decisions,” I say. The air is sucked out of his face. “Fucking Nepali,” he whispers in foul-smelling breath. Even after he leaves, I can’t shake off Ali’s story. I want to pry out a moral, a higher truth, while wondering at the same time how he managed to keep it to himself all these months. I send him a text. Sorry, bro, I write, wishing I could send a thumbs-up emoji with a flip phone. I slapped his head without thinking. It just happened, like an uncontrollable itch. And I insulted my employer. I know I’ll be twisting and turning all night, imagining the worst. Later, surly for our own reasons, the four of us are in different corners. I’m trying to read Nesa Carey’s The Epigenetics Revolution for a computer science class. When I go out for a breath of air, I find Madam talking on her phone. She’s wearing a black shirt with the top two buttons left open, the split of her breasts faintly visible. Her hair is tied back to reveal the long Indian earrings. She hangs up, taking note of my book. “Saturday night and you’re reading a book?” “I have a boring job if you didn’t notice,” I say. “When will you introduce me to your girlfriend? Or will that be a boyfriend?” She winks. “Girlfriend, thank you. I’m working on it.” “Typical Indian male. Waiting for the day your mama will fix a match for you. Is that right?” Her attentiveness is on full display, but not knowing when she’ll turn is difficult. “I’m not Indian.” “Close enough.” What I really want to ask her is how she ended up with a grouch like Chef. Instead, I say, “I’m saving every penny I make here. Hopefully next summer I can work here fulltime?” “We need to do something about this restaurant, Sameer. I’m counting on you. I wish you were just a little more pro-active, you know.”

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“I work really hard. Maybe more so than Ali.” “Ali is quietly reliable,” she says, gazing pensively at the mountains. “You know what scares me?” “Yes?” “We’re in debt, Sameer. The cracks have been showing for a while. I do a good job of covering them up like scars, but you know what happens to an untended scar, right? It bursts open.” At first I don’t respond, but then I break the silence. “You’re an extraordinary person. I know you’ll turn it around.” “Really?” She looks at me almost slyly, as if reading my eyes for a note of deception. “That’s sweet of you,” she says, smiling. “I heard a shocking thing today. Did you know Ali’s father was killed?” “Really? Just a sec…” she says, taking a call. I decide not to wait for her but go back in and walk straight to Chef who’s nibbling on a stale samosa. I pour him a glass of water. “Sorry, boss, you know I didn’t mean it,” I say, adding, “What’s the cricket score?” trying to coax him out of his sullenness. “Don’t even bother,” he says. Around seven, as if by miracle, an old white couple walks in. The man is so old I can see the veins on his scalp, but he has a set of full white teeth like Joe Biden. Chef and Ali go into the kitchen as Madam turns on the TV that’s screwed to the wall. A Bollywood song bursts out like a harsh glare, and Madam fumbles with the remote control to lower the volume. I sit the guests down. The woman has frizzy white hair and bright eyes. They’re inquisitive about the menu and ask questions about different dishes. I do my best to impress. “In ancient India, the local sages would spread tiny bits of turmeric on their bedsheets to ward off evil spirits,” I say. “To this day turmeric is a cure for arthritis. Here we use in in most of our curries, but I would recommend Chicken Jalfrezi.” “That’s what we’ll get.” “How spicy?” “All the way to Bombay,” the man says with a laugh. “We’ll stay in Utah,” his wife whispers. They also order two glasses of Argentinian Malbec. In the kitchen, Chef turns on the oven ventilation and clanks the big frying pan with a spatula asking Ali for this and that spice. Ali isn’t smiling. I light a candle for the guests and make a show of pouring the wine into their glasses, unscrewing the cork, making the wine flow carefully, the

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label facing the guests. I’ve read that even with a twenty-dollar bottle of wine, indulging them in the ritual usually guarantees at least one more order of the drink. They eat quietly and slowly, the occasional laughter rising over the raga music which Madam has decided is apt for the moment. When I see Ali hovering around, I tell him, “Look, I’m really sorry. I’ll apologize to you a thousand times. But you shouldn’t look like you have no work. Why don’t you fill their water glasses?” “You can’t treat me like that, Sameer,” he says. He goes to their table with a jug of water. Madam comes out to say thank you to the old folks. “What a lovely evening,” they say, waving as they leave. The overall mood has turned light. Chef keeps saying that he should have added a splash of lime in the chicken. It feels like we just entertained some guests in our private house. But just as soon, the woman is back.

Did you see a small black purse with a Saint-Laurent monogram? I swear I brought it with me,” she says. “Did you see a small black purse with a Saint Laurent monogram? I swear I brought it with me,” she says. We bend over and look under the table, remove the chairs. All of us start frantically searching. The woman stands with a tense expression. “It was not a big deal if my phone wasn’t in it,” she keeps saying. “You can leave a number with us. We’ll give you a call if we find it,” Madam says. “Would you mind calling the police?” the woman asks abruptly. “Why?” Madam asks. “My purse hasn’t left this room. I have a sixth sense about these things.” She throws a glance at Ali and narrows her eyes, making it clear to everyone where her suspicion lay. Ali looks nervous. “You can check me,” he says, throwing both hands in the air. Madam and Chef exchange glances. When he looks at me, Ali’s eyes are saying say something. It’s strange how the human mind works, but in that moment, I decide that not intervening would be the best move. Ali’s eyes are fixed on my face. He knows I’m the only one who can come to his defense. As he realizes that I’m not going to say anything, his face muscles tense up. “He didn’t do it,” I shout. “I can vouch for him.”

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“This is a mess,” the woman says, rubbing her temples with her fingers. “It was under the car seat.” It’s the husband, waving the purse as he walks in. “Ugh,” the woman says. “I’m so sorry.” The silence is awkward. “It’s that headache that’s been driving me crazy.” “Not the first time.” The husband gives us a wink. “Please don’t come back again,” Madam says. The woman looks offended. An embarrassed smile creeps up her face. She pulls out two twenty-dollar bills from her purse and leaves them on the table. “I meant no disrespect.” She lowers her voice when she says this. They leave quickly. I stare at the crisp forty dollars! “Give it back to them,” Madam tells me. I grab the money and head out. They’re walking toward the car. The sky is a tinge of orange, warning against the approaching dark. I’m following them slowly. They turn their heads, stepping up their pace. Pretty sure that Madam is watching me from the window, I call out. They stop and turn around. The woman has a surprised smile. “Don’t ever do that again,” I say, then quickly turn around and walk back, sliding the money into my trouser pocket. Later, Madam and I are sitting under dimmed lights. Chef is in the kitchen tossing up dinner with Ali’s help. The lipstick is drained from Madam’s lips. She looks at me. “You’re okay?” she asks. “I’m fine. How about you?” “Tired.” I tell her what Ali told me. She listens the whole time, caressing her earring with her fingers. “It’s not fair,” she finally says, leaving me to contemplate the intent of her words. Did she mean not fair to Ali, or not fair to us all considering all the shit that just went down? I start wondering if sharing Ali’s revelation was the right thing to do. Was it right ethically since Ali never gave me permission to share? Well, right and wrong are relative terms, and as my professor says, experiences are like collectibles, meant to be traded with others. So, I did Ali a favor by raising awareness about his past, but it was probably the wrong move to save my own fucking job if sympathizing with him comes at the cost of snubbing me. “I need to call my cousin,” Madam says, turning away. She has a lengthy conversation on the phone, the words of which I can’t really make out.

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Surprisingly, Chef serves a rather sumptuous meal, asking all four of us to sit around the table. Our microwave dinner is usually rice with the time-saving curry stored in the fridge for the whole week. “White people are like Indian politicians. They beat you down when they want,” Chef says, radiating strange goodwill though he continues to give me the cold shoulder. I try not to notice as I indulge in coconut fish curry sprinkled with cinnamon sticks and Naan so soft you could peel off the skin. When did Chef and Ali do all this? “Eat, eat,” Chef says to Ali, serving second and third helpings. There’s still a silence hanging over the boy, but he’s wolfing down the rice like I’ve never seen him do before.

I know that deep inside that the word “police” has scared her. Her cousin must have put a fear in her chest. I feel a sudden hatred towards Ali. After closing Chef offers us a ride, but Madam clears her throat. Chef says, “Some other time.” So Ali and I walk to the bus stop along a narrow street with unkempt lawns. I take out the money from the pocket and offer him twenty dollars. “You stole it?” he says. “They fucking gave it to us,” I remind him. “Keep it. You need it more than I do.” “Are you sure? Thanks man.” “Thanks for your support,” he says, after a while. “You mean after I offended you?” I try to lighten the mood, but he puts on his headphones, so we walk quietly. This is not a neighborhood where houses are turned into homes. There are no potted plants hanging on porches. Insects scream from their trees, and occasionally I hear the sound of wind chimes. It’s the kind of a neighborhood where it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that a man with a chainsaw might be quietly following us, so I’m thankful to receive a text message. It’s from Madam. We need to talk. I can’t keep you both. I’m unable to look away from these words. Without the human voice, the text message is cold and cutting, delivered with a sharp blow. I know that deep inside that the word “police” has scared her. Her cousin must have put a fear in her chest. I feel a sudden hatred towards Ali. It’s like a neediness that jabs at me.

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“Hey, can you hear me?” I ask. “They’ll fire one of us. I’m sure it’ll be me since you have the papers.” Ali doesn’t respond. The headphones are meant to shut me out. My mind starts racing. I’ll beg Madam, even take a pay cut. I’ll look for other jobs. Gas station? Car wash? There was an ICE raid at a 7-11 recently and a Mexican who had lived in the country for decades was deported. The newscaster was caught during commercial break saying, “Fucking immigrants.” I’m so anxious that I have to hold myself from asking Ali for his phone just to go online and see what’s out there. Maybe go to Craig’s List, but he’s walking with his head down, uncommunicative. A plastic bag dangles from his hand. In it are carefully wrapped pieces of Naan that he takes home for his family. I keep walking, working out options. Let’s face it. I’ll probably end up asking my parents for help. In their eyes, I’m already a success story. They won’t show their disappointment, which won’t help my anxiety. One thing’s for sure, though. I’ll be twitching in my sleep tonight. When I’m hit by pangs of anxiety, I have strange dreams. Mostly, I dream of an outbreak of dysentery. It’s always the same story. Someone sells bad milk in the neighborhood and all the children die, their tummies bursting like fucking balloons. My eyes will suddenly open, relieved that it was only a dream. Then I’ll look out the window for a long time, listening to the scream of cicadas, thinking there has to be a way out. There always is.

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RANJAN ADIGA’s works have appeared in Story Quarterly, Packingtown Review, The Salt Lake Tribune, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Born and raised in Nepal, his works focus on the immigrant experience. He currently teaches creative writing at Westminster College, Salt Lake City.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

THE EXHIBITIONIST Christine Canady

[ FICTION] ome folks on the old downtown block are regulars and watch out their window every night. Other folks on the block watch when they cannot sleep. There are those who’ve swallowed a bad day and watch just for the night. To seek comfort, to lasso the haze of this dreamy spectacle to hang around their own neck and cinch their souls. And then those who watch by accident, their goodnight eyes wandering towards the ephemeral activity just licking the light under the street lamps below. The movement like a father’s finger striking through a flame, without a flinch, without the patina of carbon residue on his skin, to show a child a trick: a father that cannot burn. Even though it is past midnight, the folks on the block hug their windowsill until it finishes,

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their day’s exhaust tinting the glass panes, because the spectacle below is magical. The widow waits for it every night. She rolls up her strawberry-white hair with fat pink curlers, then wraps her head in a satin scarf. A habit decades old. She has several nightgowns spotted with patterns of Tinkerbell, Stars of David, oversized snowflakes and the like, presents from her twelve grandchildren, half having moved cross-country to California suburbs. Winter infiltrates the apartment through a gap along the water-damaged window frames that she cannot detect with her old eyes, and so, she wears a poufy magenta robe wrapped over her broad chest. The color is as comforting as the warmth. Her toes are mashed into slippers that peek out from under her swollen knees, like a bunny’s tail peeking out of a bush. The melodic radiator is hiccupping. The kettle is harmonizing. She brews a decaffeinated tea and coddles the steaming mug with both hands as she perches on her petite café chair pulled from her breakfast nook that now permanently faces the north window overlooking the street. Often, she sits at the café chair before midnight. The Power of Positive Thinking, which she’s never thumbed through, is wedged under the wicker chair leg missing its foot. There is nothing much to do late at night since her husband passed many years ago, shot down by the Luftwaffe during the invasion of northwest Africa. So, she idly watches the tube, not more than twelve inches long and nestled in the kitchen corner on her yellow laminate countertop, and at this hour, typically showing Tonight Starring Jack Paar. Her tea often becomes cold, but her belly warms in anticipation. She’s been peeping for almost two decades. She looks up from the tube when the porch light across the street flicks on. Spring dusts the windowsills with gold pollen and needles its way into noses. The little sisters are wide awake on the top floor of the brick colonial townhouse. This happens rarely, but chances when the girls are whispering about a daily trouble in the dark, when reading their Kindles under their sheets or when playing with fidget spinners in the LED nightlight long after their tiger mom has tucked them asleep. The oldest is thirteen with long, immaculately brushed hair, lotion-smooth skin, and long fingernails that tap-tap the E-paper of her YA adventure books. She picks out her outfit the night before classes from a digital folder filled with photos of all her clothing items sorted according to category and color. If no one will notice her face, maybe they will notice her clothes. The youngest, who is eight, has a head capped with frizzled hair from tossing in bed, cheeks

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tanned from playing outside and toes calloused from running barefoot. She checks her backpack five times for her homework the night before classes, because she already knows she cannot mess up. When the alarm clock glows 12:00 a.m. and the girls are still up, they crawl out of bed to the window bench facing the street. Pansies and geraniums blooming in the flowerbox are incandescent in the moonlight. The oldest ties some found string around her fingers to play cat’s cradle with her sister; they’d rather be watching the latest videos uploaded by their favorite YouTube stars, but the iPads are charging under parental supervision two floors down. The string drops, and they giggle with sillies when below it finally begins.

The working-class immigrants, who traded in their couch for an Emerson radio, consume three hours a night of programming from soap operas to news broadcasts while they go about their chores. The old, debt-ridden, Catholic couple (the husband spent from tiresome days working at the shipyard, the wife withering at a tailor shop) return home after sunset and strip to their undergarments. The working-class immigrants, who traded in their couch for an Emerson radio, consume three hours a night of programming from soap operas to news broadcasts while they go about their chores. Fanning their wilting faces, they tune into The Shadow, a pulp drama about a superhero detective. The narrator signs off the air each episode with the tagline: “The weed of the crime bears bitter fruit! Crime does not pay…The Shadow knows!” For supper, the wife boils chicken broth with either potatoes or leftover vegetables. Sweat glistens on their brows in the stagnant summer heat as they pray at the dinner table. It’s as if they can smell the metallic roast of the dwindling war swirling around their food: the war having blown defeat across the blistering Pacific and having fled with fatigue across the burnt Atlantic. For dessert, the husband pulls out a fruit he bought on his walk home, and his wife smiles, taking it from his hand to peel and split for two. Whenever it’s the rare mango, she tears up. He wipes the table after and scrubs the pots or pans and porcelain top of their Tappan stove. It’s August, and the wife fiddles her knitting, a jump start on Christmas presents she must finish for their nieces and nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews. And one pair of blue baby socks for their son who would be 43-years-old this year. Born still. The unmother’s

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hands are arthritic, and when she pauses, her husband gets up from his worn armchair, kneels in front of her and kneads her fingers between his tough hands. When it gets close to time, they turn off the radio and wait at the window, his arms around the wife’s sagging shoulder, her arm around his broad waist. Something has happened on the street this month. It’s only by accident when the banker watches. He stops abruptly, minimizing the screen projected into the air by a miniscule desk Kiko with the whoosh of his fingers across the apparition. He has heard a sound. He can’t tell whether it’s the cry of children in distress, the squeal of a dysfunctioning self-driving car, or perhaps, Susan, producing a foreign noise by trying something new in the house. When he swivels around in his hover chair, Susan is waiting patiently by the bathroom with a cup of water and his toothbrush with vitamin paste squirted onto the brush’s electric bristles. Her expression screen shows the outline of two closed ultramarine eyelids; she is in hibernate-mode till his movement awakens her. The cawing sound comes from outside. He stands. Through the window, he looks up and sees dozens of white amoebas arranged in a V shape soaring across the night ceiling. At first it’s surreal, what new delivery drone has iFederate come up with? He half expects a helium package to sink to his doorstep. He is hypnotized, forgetting his taxing day of virtual meetings, transactions and cyber calls. Then he sees the amoebas for what they are. Geese. Migrating south before the winter comes. Their white bellies lit by the street orbs, their black bodies camouflaged against the night sky. Satisfied with his discovery, he plants his hands in the pockets of his pinstriped pajamas, shifts his weight onto his heels and casually looks down at the street below. Susan stirs on and reminds him it’s after midnight. The autumn leaves whisper across the archaic curbs and gutter ruins as the wind entices the dead foliage to fly. Then, the banker is acutely startled for a second time this night. His jaw drops in disbelief. But why is there a naked man in the street? At 12:17 a.m. Monday through Thursday—he has a three-day weekend—the exhibitionist waltzes out of his apartment entrance at 610 West Princess Anne Road almost entirely in the nude. What he does wear is immaculately crafted and impeccably curated: a velvet top hat the hue of eggplant with one Ostrich feather flagging off the back, a silver sequined bow-tie, a pair of lustrous black flats and satin ivory gloves. Oh, and he carries a cane. Apart from his flamboyant attire, he is just a lanky beanpole of a man with a rather extensive gray beard and a charming pot belly. Sometimes, he forgets his cane.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

The exhibitionist, whom the naïve may call a crazed nudist, is an amateur ballerino. He strolls down the block and back—that’s it—performing fabulously grand yet graceful movements. The elegant sweep of his arm like the sun rising and setting across the Great Plains. Then, the breathtaking flapping of his elbows like an eagle taking flight over the Sierra Nevada, his neck hunched as if carrying a cumbersome marmot captive in his beak. And, the high extension of his scrawny leg and the pointed knobby toe like a flamingo testing the shallow water for alligators in the Everglades. It’s showy, but certainly nothing that an ordinary man couldn’t do.

The exhibitionist has become more experimental and modern with his choreography, his dance evolving towards the most performative and emotionally curious. Only a few lifetime voyeurs on the block can ascertain that in his old age, the exhibitionist has become more experimental and modern with his choreography, his dance evolving towards the more performative and emotionally curious. The lifetimers can recall that long ago when he first set out (remember that he is perpetually amateur), he danced more classically with a disciplined technique: his footwork precise, his posture superb, his expression stoic. Over time, his rigor evaporated and his heart overpowered. One feature continues to remain constant; he is always in the nude. Inspiring, sorrowful. Peaceful, provocative. Magical and utterly raw. Returning each night more vulnerable. Like the way the ocean’s waves steal seashells only to return them moments later slightly more worn. When winter returns, and the snow falls from high up in the sky, and it looks like the stars themselves are falling, turning into white ash when reaching the earth, and the ash turning to nothing when hitting the ground, the exhibitionist does one final pirouette in the slush. In front of 610 West Princess Anne Road, he takes off his hat, bows to the air, replaces his hat and unfastens his bowtie as he does after each dance. From unknown origin, a gunshot splits the night. The pop and echo tears into two sounds. The bullet hits the exhibitionist in the abdomen. His mouth unlocks with surprise. The cane topples out of his hand. He crumbles to the pavement and slips into the thin layer of soppy snow on the street, a basin holding the winter sky’s wreckage.

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

The old downtown block is always quiet at this weeknight hour. No one wishing to step outside unless the dog needs to pee, the body needs a narcotic, or the trash needs to be taken out. But tonight, a door whips open on the block. A blinding rectangle of yellow light blasts from the hall of an apartment building. In the door, a woman in a poufy magenta robe appears amid the radiation. She runs down her stoop in slippers, across the tiny lawn, down the street and towards the fallen exhibitionist. Another door opens, another rectangle of light. An older couple wobbles out, the wife with her knitting, but each with a vigor and anxiety not seen in their step for years. Then another door. And another. It is a banker; it is an arithmetic teacher; it is a blacksmith, a health insurance agent, a mother of eight, an app developer, a lamplighter, an air traffic controller, a watchmaker, two sisters still in school. Time had cracked when the gun went off. The fission breaking the passage of time into fragments, the years colliding without notice. All the folks on the block crowd around the exhibitionist. Blood quietly slips from his belly onto the fallen stars coating the street. The widow squeezes his hand, not ready to lose her night companion. The old couple takes their neighbors’ hands in prayer and recites aloud, “Have mercy on us, and those who are dying.” In vain, the banker presses his palm against the wound to stop the bleeding, but blood still mushrooms between his fingers. He’s dumbfounded, unable to stop what’s beyond his control. The exhibitionist releases his last breath and abandons his eyes. The sister with bed-frizzled hair picks up a cracked pocket watch from the ashen snow. It seems to have fallen from the exhibitionist with no pockets. Instead of hours, circled around the clock face in atomically small numbers are the years 1945 to 2045. She shakes the watch. The singular clock hand rattles in its casing, unhinged from its screw. She says to her older sister, “Do you think someone can fix this?”

CHRISTINE CANADY recently graduated from New York University with an MFA and is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. She lives, writes, and hustles for ice cream money in Norfolk, Virginia, in a 1920s craftsman bungalow near the Elizabeth River. An apprentice under her father, she is learning carpentry and home construction as they renovate the almost-habitable abode. She may not have HVAC or hot water yet, but she has two semi-supportive roommates, as well as a codependent hound and an elitist tabby cat, who cannot read but believe in her writing regardless.

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[ POETRY]

CARA LOSIER CHANOINE

Later, I stretch out on a thin mattress in a twin bed frame, draped in a clean but threadbare quilt. The power lines sing like sirens, like the keening of a bereft mother who has born her grief to a higher altitude, who finds something bearable in the rarified air.

Welcome to Civilization At night, it’s quiet enough to hear the humming of the power lines. It’s why she lives on this mountain. This is what she tells me, while we sit outside in the viscous dark. She says nothing of the buried child, tucked beneath the sod in a cemetery three states away. Behind us, her house rises like something that has always been here, tucked into the grade and weathered like the trunks of the surrounding trees. Inside, the pale, unfinished woodwork looks raw, like the sap might still be fresh in its grain. The floorboards have been sanded by the grit of other people’s boots, relics of nights spent elbow-to-elbow around the kitchen table, drinking whiskey and trying to remember old card games.

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

Break, Definition Of 1. verbto sharply rupture, detach crudely from the whole; to separate into pieces that can or cannot be reunited Example: When I receive the news, filtered through the telephone receiver, I dropped a full glass of water, cringed in anticipation, but somehow, it didn’t break. 2. verbto violate the integrity of; to invalidate, through transgression, something that was once impermeable; to destroy the boundaries that keep one thing from bleeding into all others Example: It was a collection of moments that made my illusion of safety break: when the headlights spilled like theater spots onto the sidewalk, when my leg was pinned beneath a tire, when I opened my eyes again, when he did not open his.

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3. nouna discontinutation of the usual; a suspension of effort; a reprieve Example: Since the moment of the unshattered water glass, there has been no break in the ferocity of my grief. 4. verbto ameliorate the intensity of; to hinder in speed or force; to fight against, like stream-swimming salmon Example: There is no forest of platitudes dense enough to break the impact of a single person’s absence. 5. verbto render ineffective; to disarm; to dispatch with claw, and tooth, and venom Example: One cannot veto the necessity of mourning, of being disemboweled by the moving hands on a clock. This is how we atone for allowing ourselves to forget the mutability of our species, but like everything that belongs to us, this, too, is transient. Our mercy will rise against our penance, will break it, so that what’s left of us can survive.

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Our Lady of Libations The windows rise in rows above the dive on the ground floor, relics of a time when this used to be a low-rent hotel. I can imagine the windows lit, like the glow of a hundred mismatched candles, the vitality of a hundred different hard-knock lives. Tonight, they are all dark, the promise of their intrigue long since snuffed out. The whole building could be mistaken for condemned, except for the erratic, neon sign that burns brightly against the grey, and draws us like moths.

CARA LOSIER CHANOINE is an English professor, writer, and literature scholar from New England. She is the author of the poetry collections How a Bullet Behaves and Bowetry: Found Poetry from David Bowie Lyrics. She likes bad horror movies and rollerskating.

It is a place choked by the ghosts of so many things that didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t last, and to last is the grail we quest for every day. When we have spent our ambition, we return here, to the gut of an old hotel, to the only part of the building where the lights show no sign of burning out.

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

[ ESSAY] here’s a chance that I’m dim, that I am an insightful imposter. I swell with pride as the true minds take my morsel of thought and prepare a feast, insisting that that was surely what I meant. They speak of the countries and cultures they’ve experienced, the literary masterpieces they’ve had time to read, and the quiet contemplative evenings they’ve had to explore their own minds. Whereas, last night I read Dr. Seuss’ ABC book twice, then three times, applauding after each page my five-yearold managed to read, even though I knew he’d simply memorized it, but I admired his feigned

FAKING IT IN SEVEN DISCIPLINES Kim McFarden

struggle. I’m told he has my mind. I’ve only recently come to the conclusion that I’m not dim, but rather broadly-educated. I dabbled in biology, intrigued by the concept of

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RNA polymerase transcribing the building blocks of life, which gave way to a fascination of how molecular combinations construct happiness, and even direct the imagination. I followed an engineer to the dark-side of mathematics, but quickly lost interest when the universal language started speaking in imaginary tongues. “How the hell can numbers be imaginary, if it’s the only certain thing other than death?” This question created an insurmountable obstacle between us. I abandoned mathematics for interior design which the instructor insisted was the source of order. I wanted order. I put the couch on the wrong wall, so I moved outdoors to landscape architecture and the realm of terraces and boxwoods. I tied a tire swing up in the most perfect twisted oak. “How unsightly.” I saved face by assuring myself that I didn’t need a degree to garden and mow. Perhaps, I reasoned, college was not for me. After leaving with a hodgepodge of knowledge, I found a job as a ten-cents-over-minimum-wage bridal consultant. I had never studied that. I would wager that I know more about love than the average person. Though adamantly against the institution of marriage, I had no qualms about selling rehearsal dinner dresses, wedding dresses, reception dresses, and get-away dresses, as well as mothers’ dresses and flower girl dresses and bridesmaid dresses. “I just don’t know if I can afford a $2,500 dress,” the bride would say, fighting to keep her voice steady. By the time she would look to me, I would have a hand clapped over my mouth, my cheek stained with a thin wet line, and a perfect teardrop resting atop my finger and catching the light. That’s what they wanted to see. “You’re right,” she would say, “this is the one.” I can tear on command. That particular skill could possibly be attributed to acting lessons, but I claim this development as my own, as used masterfully in the manipulation of police officers, my parents, and on dates. I’ve been accused of having no soul when my deception is discovered. We discuss the soul and the basic laws of physics and thermodynamics over double pours of wine and glasses of scotch. After years of not mentioning the rationality of numbers, and the agreement to avoid the topic at all costs, I eloped with the engineer. He’s intelligent, but not when it comes to romance. He tells me stories through algorithms, and I ogle at the way blood rushes to his face and neck in a fit of passion that is only accessible in these late-night moments when he reflects on theories. He convinces me to return to school. He thinks I’m brilliant.

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

“Energy can neither be created nor destroyed,” he says, thinking he’s informing me of some fascinating new thing as he swirls whiskey in his glass. I refuse to encourage him to go on, because he expects it. I can feel his eyes boring into my temple as I stare down at my wine. I may not be good for answers, but I have a knack for theoretical questions. “If energy can neither be created nor destroyed,” I sniff at my wine to build the tension, the acting lessons working their way to the front, “how did the Big Bang happen? How could there have been such an infinitesimally condensed pinpoint of origin that housed all the mass in the universe: galaxies, stars, planetary systems, rogue planets, asteroids, space dust, and even life itself ? And—” I pause for effect noticing that he has ceased blinking, “what initiated the rapid expansion of the universe? And if, in fact, the soul does exist, where does it go after death, the great separator of energies?” I take a hearty drink of wine and hold it in my mouth, numbing my tongue.

After years of not mentioning the rationality of numbers, and the agreement to avoid the topic at all costs, I eloped with the engineer. Desire flickers in his eyes. Sometimes, I’m very confused by our relationship. He sets his glass on the table next to him, repositioning it in the exact center of a coaster before he leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasping—his power position. He is a man of theories and equations, and his position suggests I’m in for the extended version. At the very first mention of “a factor that can only be described as [nj1],” I mentally swim to my deserted island where I think by myself. I think in pictures. A notable lack of tangential threads between point A and point B could account for my inability to express abstract conclusions. For example, I think of the universe. It expands, an inflating balloon on the cusp of exploding, the center void enlarging as all mass moves away. A black hole, acting as a counter-force, pulls the universe back in, even if at small pinpoints where tiny universes are compounding and possibly exploding outward at the other end. The multiverse beating like a living entity, expanding and contracting. A pulsing heart rendered suddenly still. A picture of a memory: myself, shock paddles to my exposed chest in a stark white-washed room, my mother unable to

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

look at me as she presses herself wailing into the obscurity of the corner. Will I be able to look at her as she dies? She expects a mausoleum. I can’t afford that. I’m house-poor. There are moments when the house breathes out at the end of the day, when my son and I lay on our backs in the middle of his room and stare up at the slow-turning ceiling fan. His walls are blanketed in crayoned pictures on construction paper that ripple in the breeze, creating the illusion that we may be submerged in the mind of a fiveyear-old. My five-year-old. There are pictures of friendly monsters, our stick-family, geometrically sound houses, pets, stars and planets, what I assume are dragons, and broken hearts that look nothing like hearts, but he assures me they are because he was sad when he drew them. However, there is one picture that cannot be ignored, and I find myself pondering it every time I enter the room. A small red circle the size of a dime in the lower right, is surrounded corner to corner by hard-pressed black crayon. I ask him if he can explain it to me. Any other picture and his arms would have animated his words as he excitedly pointed to his favorite components of his work, but when approached about this one, he reaches up and begins to caress his chin as I’ve seen his father do on too many occasions. “I dunno.” He shrugs. “It’s just what I think.” He thinks in pictures, too. I want to tell him that it isn’t going to be easy conveying his thoughts, that people will mistake him for dim, that the term “please explain” will strike fear into his core. But he’s just a kid who draws what he thinks, feels, dreams: his failures, his family. For a moment, I pity him. Why can’t he have his father’s mind? Why can’t he think in nonsensical algorithms? He doesn’t need to know how difficult learning will be, or how some will try and take him out at the knees. To pity him, would be to pity myself. He has my mind after all. And if he truly does think in the same manner as I do, he only needs to know how I feel about him. “I think you’re brilliant,” I say, watching the corners of his mouth slowly turn upward as he rolls his head to the side looking me in the eyes. He flops his arm over, resting the back of his hand over my heart. “I think you are, too.”

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

KIM MCFARDEN is an emerging author who actively seeks to expose the humor embedded in the mundane moments of life through her writing. She received her BA from the University of Houston in 2018 and is currently an MFA student in Texas State University’s esteemed fiction program. This is her first publication.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

[ FICTION] t was April and it had been raining for two days. Steady and heavy and anything out-ofdoors was soaked. The train was chugging up a long grade just south of Springfield, Missouri, and I leaned against the wall of the boxcar and watched the land slide by. We were between towns, in farming country, and a few of the fields had already been turned. Most, though, were covered in last fallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sagebrush and brambles. Sassafras thickets grew in the abandoned places and sagging fencing partitioned the fields. Cedars and black locusts grew along the fences. Bare-branched walnut trees stood in fence corners, and once I saw a

A PORTAGE Chris Helvey

persimmon tree and tried to remember the last time Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d eaten a ripe persimmon. A creek ran between the tracks and the

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

fields. Much of the time, it was hidden by the sycamore and willow branches, but when there was a clearing along the bank you could see the shimmer of the water and the raindrops striking the surface and making ripples. A raw wind was blowing, and I looked at the water standing in the muddy fields and the cattle standing out in that rain trying to find new grass and getting soaked, and I shivered and wished for a blanket. Still, when you ride around the country in boxcars you learn to count your blessings. And I was dry and headed south and had a can a beans and a day-old biscuit wrapped up in my bedroll and all that signified. There were five other men in the car. Two I knew—Jim from Oklahoma and Sonny Ray, who sometimes claimed to be from Kansas and sometimes Texas. The other three had slipped in the boxcar during the night in St. Louis. One, a tallish fellow with a thick mane of wild black hair, put me in mind of an Osage Indian. The other two, a bald-headed man who was middle-aged and a younger fellow, who had an overbite and a case of nerves, seemed to be traveling together. I wasn’t interested enough to ask. Jim stretched out his legs and rubbed both his knees. “Damned arthritis,” he said. “Always acts up in weather like this.” Baldy nodded and leaned forward out of the corner he’d claimed that morning. “Anybody know where we are?” “Still in Missouri, I think,” Jim said. “Somewheres south of Springfield.” He peered out into the rain like he could see through it all the way to Egypt. “Should hit Arkansas before dark, lessen this train is slated for the sidings.” Sonny Ray leaned forward and peered out the open door. All you could see now was rain and muddy fields and off in the distance the blurry white of a church spire. “Do believe I’ve traveled this country. Must have been five, six years ago. Used to be a roundhouse in these parts.” Jim nodded, “Yep, there was one just outside of Slate.” He nodded at the creek that had just flashed into view. “That’s Slate Creek. Normally she’s not much, but she’ll be coming up fast with this rain.” Baldy started to say something, only the engineer hammered on the whistle and we were all deafened for the moment. I felt the grade change and the train slowing, and I figured we were going to stop. I didn’t say anything, just started getting to my feet. I bent and grabbed my bedroll and slung it over one shoulder.

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

“You getting out, Ace?” “Yeah, think I’ll stretch my legs awhile. You, Jim?” He grinned up at me. “Nope. These old bones are tired. Think I’ll ride on south. Besides, I feel good about this car.” He turned his head and looked at Sonny Ray, “How about you?” “No, I’m staying. Got me that good feeling, too, like I’m gonna go all the way to the Gulf. Ain’t seen the Gulf since I was a kid, and I want to see it once more before I die.” The train jerked and slung me up against a wall. Metal screeched, and the train began to grind to a halt. I looked around at the faces. “Anybody else?” The train bucked to a stop and I started for the door. No good waiting when you wanted to get off. Railroad cops weren’t plentiful like they had been a few years ago, but you still saw one now and then and he sure didn’t hesitate to use his billy club. Anyway, every station had a station master and sometimes a security guard they’d hired to keep an eye on things. Generally, their guys weren’t much trouble. But lately I’d seen a couple with pistols hanging from their belts. I hopped off while the train was still coming to a halt and didn’t look back. Either the others were coming or they weren’t. That didn’t make one iota of difference to me. My feet slipped in the gravel, but I windmilled my arms and got straightened up. Fifty yards down the line was the depot, and there was a fistful of people on the platform. A small rectangular sign read Slate, Missouri, Pop. 996. A larger white and red sign next to it read, Slate, Missouri, Broiler Capital of the World. Whatever the hell that meant. I cut right and went around a whitewashed shed where they kept equipment. Through one dusty window I could see shovels, rakes, tarps, paint cans, and a half-dozen of the iron bars they worked on the rails with. Footsteps thudded behind me and I turned. The Osage, Baldy, and the kid were all traipsing along after me, single file, like we were an Army patrol. Twenty yards ahead was another building, whitewashed too, but about twice the side of the tool shed. Cheeping sounds drifted on the wind. My curiosity was up, and I walked on down and peered in through another dusty window. It was dusky dark inside that little building, and at first I couldn’t see anything. Then my eyes adjusted and I could see chickens. Baby chick-

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ens. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of baby chickens, all yellow and feathery and cute. Only after a minute I could see that they weren’t all that cute. In fact, every one of them had something wrong with it—broken leg, twisted wing, bare spot where feathers should have been, intestines hanging out like that picador’s horse Hemingway had written about. I felt warm breath on the back of my neck. “This town is a chicken town. That is, they raise chickens to slaughter for the meat markets and grocery stores. Lots of towns like this down here in the Ozarks. Cassville’s one, and so is Pea Ridge. I’ve been through this country before, back when I was selling door-to-door.” Baldy reached out a finger and tapped on the glass. Big farm operations ship baby chicks into these towns by the thousands. Those in there didn’t pass inspection.” He elbowed me in the ribs and I decided to ditch him the first chance I got. I don’t care for men poking on me.

Railroad cops aren’t plentiful like they had been a few years ago, but you still saw one now and then and he sure didn’t hesitate to use his billyclub. “Sort of like we wouldn’t pass inspection,” he said and then laughed like he thought he was the second coming of Will Rogers. I stepped around him and took off down the rails. I didn’t care whether any of them followed. We didn’t mean anything to each other. We were nothing more than strangers crossing a strange land together. Having someone watch your back was good, but it was better not to have to rely on anyone else. Maybe a quarter mile down the line there was a grove of oaks, and the grass looked soft and green there. The sun was starting to ease down the sky and I started working my way down the bank. I could hear the rest of them coming on after me, slipping in the gravel and cussing. Inside the tree ring it was already starting to go dark, but I pushed on and came out into a clearing. A single line of abandoned track split the clearing in two, and off in the distance I could see what looked like the ruins of a castle. The rain had eased some, but I always prefer to sleep dry, and I bent to it. The whistle blew then, three long and two short, and I heard the cars clank as they jolted into motion. Well, I thought, so long to Jim

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

and Sonny Ray. That was the way hoboing was. You rode with a man for weeks, maybe months, and then, for no particular reason, they rode right on out of your life, or you rode out of theirs. Early on I’d learned it felt safer that way, like a man was less likely to get his mind hurt. Fact was, I’d grown to like the impermanence, or at least to find a certain comfort in it.

Just before hard dark, the rain had stopped although water still dripped from the sodden branches. But the four of us were dry, huddled up inside the shell of a building where years before men had worked on railroad engines. Massive iron wheels and gears and strips of twisted metal were strewn about the long room, rusting, coated in dust, like so many dinosaur bones. Half the roof had fallen in and most of the windows were missing glass. We were in the one dry corner, our backs against what remained of a brick wall, staring into the remnant of the fire the Osage and the kid had made. Most of the wood had come from a maple that had fallen across the far end of the room. Kindling had come from pages torn out of a stack of ancient railroad timetables they’d found inside a filing cabinet lying on its side like a Medieval knight fallen in battle. The fire had warmed our beans and now the remnants toasted the bottoms of our feet. Nobody had a watch, and if there had ever been a clock in the room it was gone now. The night had that midnight feel. I stifled a yawn and looked around. The kid’s head hung between his legs. Now and then it jerked as though triggered by dreams. The Osage sat back in the deeper shadows, his face unreadable. He hadn’t said a word since supper, but then he never said much. You meet men like that on the road. They keep their thoughts to themselves. Sometimes I try to follow their lead. Tonight, though, I’d been talking some to the bald-headed man. He claimed to be a school teacher who’d been let go the year before when his small school in Indiana closed and he, unable to find another position, had gone on the road. He claimed the boy was his nephew. We were talking about how we’d ended up riding the rails. Every hobo has this conversation at one point or another. Most of us have it more than once, especially with ourselves.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

Riding in boxcars and tramping along the steel rails, I studied on that some, trying to figure out why we try to burrow into the past and understand what triggered us to take this path and what had kept us on it. Near as I could figure, it was a mixture of man’s inherent desire to make some sense of his life and whatever drives us to pick at our scabs. Baldy rolled over and faced the fire. I was glad it was almost dark. He had a soft, moist look about him. Looking at him made me think of bread dough rising. He had a balloon of a belly, and the flesh on his face and arms looked soft. Like you could poke through it with your finger. He scratched his scalp, gave the kid a quick glance, and turned his head toward me. “And how did you end up on the road, mister?” For a minute I wasn’t going to answer, and then I did. “I’ve been hoboing for a spell. Lost my job of course, like you. That was the start of it.” I quit talking then. There were some things a man just didn’t like to talk about. I glanced over at the man, but it was so nearly dark in the old workshop that it was like speaking to a ghost. “What happened? Depression get you?” For a moment I didn’t answer. Then I figured I’d better answer some way, or he’d just keep on aggravating me about it. “No, I just hit a bad patch. Things fell apart for a while.” I could hear the rain starting up again, and I closed my eyes and watched images flow across my mind. Pictures of my wife and little boy. Looking back I couldn’t see how our lives had unraveled so quickly. Maybe, for a while, between the Depression and the drinking, my mind had cracked. For sure I’d done some crazy things. Unforgiveable things. Going back was not an option—she’d made that clear. I thought about all I’d left behind and wondered who they were with tonight. Sharon would have made it fine; she always did. But the boy, well, that was a deeper regret. Baldy’s clothes rustled as he shifted position. “It happens. Happened to my cousin back in thirty-four. Left to hunt work one morning, and no one’s seen or heard from him since. Did you try to start over? Say in another state?” A small creature scurried through the darkness. Chipmunk maybe, or a mouse. Judging by the sound, nothing larger than that. Some animals are more active at night. So are some humans. Both those facts I’d learned the hard way. “Never tried. Depression was full on, so I did a tour in the army. When I got out, I just kept moving, one lousy job to the next. Was a cowboy in New Mexico, farmhand in Nebraska, worked on a trawler

BELMONT STORY REVIEW | SPRING 2019

out of Seattle, then drifted back east. Ended up in Chicago for a couple of years. Sold newspapers on a corner, hacked a cab, finally worked as a short order cook at a counter café just west of Michigan Avenue. Owner was a great guy. Little Polack out of Warsaw. He was the best to work for, spot you a dollar when you ran short, give you a ten at Christmas, and have you out to his place for Sunday dinner once a month. Pay wasn’t much, but I was getting by.”

“Sort of like we wouldn’t pass inspection,” he said and then laughed like he thought he was the second coming of Will Rogers. An owl started hooting then, his voice low and hollow in the rainy night. He called again, but no one answered. I closed my eyes and I could see old Jaworski’s face plain—the battered nose, droopy ears, eyes the color of Harlan County coal. “What happened? Why didn’t you stay with him?” “The old one, two.” “The old one, two?” “Yeah, like in boxing. Left hook and right cross and you’re off to la-la-land. First the old man took sick and died. Cancer. Doctor said his stomach was eaten up with it. But the old boy never let on. Worked right on up until about a week before. Then he took to his bed and was gone before the week was out. Didn’t come in to open up the day after Christmas and passed New Year’s Day.” “What was the right cross?” “The right cross was his kid took over and he couldn’t manage a bowel movement. We didn’t stay open six months. By then I was tired of Chicago, anyway. Caught a freight headed west and been hoboing ever since, except for ten months I worked in a defense plant in St. Louis. My part of the war effort, you might say. That and sixty days in the Platte County, Missouri jail.” “What was that all about?” “A bum rap,” I said and we both laughed. The Osage got up and tossed a couple more branches onto the fire. The flames blazed and I looked around at the faces. What a sorry bunch. A fat man, a scared kid, an Indian who didn’t speak, and me.

SPRING 2019 | BELMONT STORY REVIEW

What was I? That was a damn good question. I pulled the pitiful excuse of a blanket I had up over my legs and turned my face toward the fire and thought about it. Just as I was starting to drift off, the answer occurred to me. I raised myself up on one elbow and looked through the dying flames at Baldy. He had one eye open. “You ever read in school about the fur traders? The Frenchmen up in Canada who couldn’t settle down, only trapped beaver and such and traded with the Indians?” “Sure. What about them?” “Well, when I was a kid I read about those men, and I was fascinated by how they lived out in the forests and hunted and fished and intermingled with the Indians. One thing that always stuck with me was the portages they had to make.” “The what?” “Portages. Where they’d be going down the river in their canoes and come to a shallows or a falls and have to carry their boats and furs and supplies around. Well, when they did that it was a portage. Reckon that’s what I’ve been doing, one way or another, all my life. Making portages. Going from one thing to the next. Drifting in and out of other people’s lives. Just drifting.” I quit looking into the fire then and shut my eyes and tugged the blanket higher. I could hear the Osage snoring and the crackle of the fading fire and the scurrying of the wild creatures. As I waited for sleep, I tried not to think about all I’d left behind in my portages. Like those old fur trappers, portages were all I had left. Men make mistakes—I know that—but sometimes the price they have to pay seems too high. Way too high. I shut my eyes tighter. The last sound I heard was the long, low moaning of the midnight freight whistle as it cleared the station, heading into the greater darkness.

By morning the rain had stopped, and when I walked to the doorway of the crumbling roundhouse early sunlight was glittering off water still clinging to the oak and hickory leaves and the shallow puddles and the few panes of glass that still hung in the narrow windows on the front of the building. The earth had a fresh, clean, new look, like it had just been born. Birds were singing in the trees and a pair of rabbits hopped idly in

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the light green grass that grows only in the spring. It seemed like a day when something good could happen. At least I liked to let myself think so. For some time I stood in the doorway, feeling the sun on my face, listening to the birds, and to my stomach growling, wishing I had a cup of coffee and a cigarette. After a bit I heard the sounds of men getting up. I’d heard the sound before, back when I’d been in the army and before that in juvie and even further back in the orphanage outside Ames. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant sound, but there was a certain comfort in the familiarity of the vibrations. Baldy stepped into the doorway, blinking at the sunlight. He yawned and stretched. “Damn, what a wrecking yard,” he said. The old boy was right. Daylight laid bare the abandoned engines and cabooses, the broken, rusty tools, the odd bits of lumber and ball bearings, oil cans, shards of glass. A lunch pail rested on top of an overturned wheelbarrow. The lunch pail looked clean and undented, as some workman had brought it to the roundhouse one morning and then inexplicably left it. Sunlight glittered off its metal sides.

He had a soft, moist look about him. Looking at him made me think of bread dough rising. He had a balloon of a belly and the flesh on his face and arms looked soft. When I first started bumming around, I was amazed at what I saw in ditches and fields and lying along the side of the tracks or abandoned in railway stations: chairs, china cups, hats, boots, photographs, a pillow with a picture of the Grand Canyon embroidered on one side, a trundle bed, and, in a park in Moline, a family Bible. It was simply lying on a bench beside a pond where mallards swam. I knew it was a family Bible because it had two dozen names written down, every one of them an Alexander. They all had at least one date written beside the name. I figured those for births. Those that had two dates I guessed covered the lifespan of a person. One of them, a man named Horace, who was listed at the top of the page, had been born before the Revolutionary War. For months I’d carried that Bible with me, sort of hoping I’d come across somebody named Alexander who would want it, always wondering why anyone would take the family Bible to a little park in the middle

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of Illinois and then abandon it. But then people were always abandoning things: dogs, cats, jobs, wives, sons. I’d left the Bible in Topeka, Kansas, when the bulls surprised us one Sunday morning. He nudged me with an elbow and nodded at the litter. “That’s depressing as hell.” “Yeah,” I said, “it is.” Rusting metal and forgotten men—that was all that was here. And maybe a ghost or two. But if there were two things that didn’t count for much in the world it was ghosts and hobos. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. I jerked my head at the building behind us. “You wanna holler at them?” “Sure,” Baldy said and turned toward the old roundhouse. I counted to fifty and started walking.

By the time we got to town, the sun was above the tree canopy, dodging in and out of the swirling clouds, and thin daylight dappled the courthouse square and the ball park down by the creek and the cemetery on the hill. A light breeze had sprung up out of the south, and you could feel spring coming on. In an alley, two boys passed a battered baseball. I wondered if my boy was passing a baseball somewhere. My Jimmy. I shook my head. By now he might be Jim, or even James. Like leaves blowing in the wind, the years have flown away. I gnawed on my lip and turned my head. Men in light jackets and women in hats paraded along the sidewalks and boys were throwing stones and sticks off the bridge. We leaned on the concrete railing on the other side and watched them. Below, water the color of adulterated coffee was already climbing the banks. After a few minutes, you could hear our guts growling and we all headed toward downtown. Breakfast would have to be on the bum. We agreed to separate and then meet on the creek bank as soon as we had scored some grub. Rarely does anyone give a hobo a full meal. Usually it’s only an orange or an apple a day past ripe, maybe a sandwich or a piece of pie. Sometimes we only get a can of beans or tomatoes, or maybe we lift an onion or potato. Most days we toss all our gifts into a big pot of hobo stew.

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I struck out that morning, but Baldy managed a loaf of bread just this side of stale. The overbite kid came back with two cans of beans, and the Osage snared two potatoes and an onion. We wandered down the creek bank until we found part of a sandbar still above the water. Slate Creek was coming up fast and the bare spots on the bank were as slick as dark ice. I got a fire going, and we tossed the beans, potatoes, and the onion in the pot and let them simmer till our hunger got the best of us and we scooped out our breakfast. When he’s on the bum, a man uses whatever he has—a chipped cup, a spoon he’d found somewhere, a tin can he’d rinsed out. A hungry man isn’t real particular.

Reckon that’s what I’ve been doing, one way or another, all my life. Making portages. Going from one thing to the next. Tree trunks were still dark from the rain and water dripped slowly off the big sycamore leaves. The grass, what there was of it, was still wet and the bushes were wet, and the creek bank was mostly one long ribbon of mud. A handful of kids had left the ballfield and come down to the creek. You could hear them talking and laughing; now and then there was a splash, and I figured one of them had thrown a rock. Baldy was blowing windy about one time when he had to teach a science class and the kid was staring into the dark water. I wondered if he was thinking of home. In the feeble sunlight that drifted through the low-slung clouds, he surely looked young. The Osage was humming to himself, whittling on a stick. I eased up against the trunk of a big sycamore and closed my eyes and listened to birds and the rushing water and laughter of the kids and tried not to think of what I’d left behind or what might lie ahead. A faint breeze drifted along the bank, and the feeble strands of sunlight were warm against my chest, and the night before had been too short. My mind started to slow down.

I was dreaming. Dreaming about being in school and all the kids yelling at me for being afraid of the teacher. Their voices cutting like knives. I came awake shouting. Only I wasn’t in school. I was on a muddy creek bank outside some nowhere town with three other nowhere guys. But the yelling

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was real. The voices were loud and young, and I could hear splashing. Footsteps pounded our way and a cardinal came swirling up out of a willow and then there was more splashing, and I looked at the Osage and he looked at me. His eyes widened and I pushed up off the ground and started running. Twenty yards up the bank, the river curled to the north and bramble bushes grew down to the water’s edge. Thorns jabbed like ice picks as I forced my way through. Blood started to trickle down the left side of my face. Then I was through and out in the open, and I got a good look at the creek. In normal times there probably was only a quiet little blue pool here. But today the water was brown and deep and swift. Tree limbs and bottles and unidentifiable dark clumps raced along the surface of the water. Then I caught a glimpse of a patch of yellow.

I couldn’t see the kid anymore, not even his blonde hair, and I figured he was a goner. But I coughed and sucked in air and started swimming anyway. “Help!” The voice was high and echoing, and it took me a moment before I could tell where it was coming from. “Help me!” Suddenly half a dozen boys came running down the bank. The tallest one ran up and grabbed my left arm. His eyes were wet, and he was trembling. He panted like a hard-run dog. “Help him, Mister. Teddy fell in and he can’t hardly swim none.” I wasn’t much of a swimmer, but I couldn’t see these kids being able to fight that water. The boy yanked on my arm again, but I wasn’t listening. The water was rolling dirty brown, and I couldn’t see the kid. Then I saw a flash of yellow and started kicking off my shoes and running for the creek. I wasn’t thinking straight. If I had been, I might have done things different, but my brain had slipped another gear. The water was colder than I’d expected, and I went under and came up spitting. I couldn’t see the kid anymore, not even his blond hair, and I figured he was a goner. But I coughed and sucked in air and started swimming anyway. Just in case. You never know what life is going to dish up. For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything but dirty water and an old rusty oil can floating on the surface. Then, just as I hit the main current,

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I caught a glimpse of the kid’s face, white and sick-looking. He was twenty yards downstream, and I twisted my body and started kicking like the devil was after me. Like I said, Johnny Weissmuller I’m not, but I must have been more in the strong current than the kid, and about the time we passed by Baldy, I started coming up fast on the kid and took a deep breath and grabbed for an arm. All I got was a hand, and that was wet and slick, and he started sliding away from me, going down. I thought, “Not this time,” and kicked harder and grabbed again and got a good grip on an arm and started pulling the kid to me. Swimming with the current had been hard enough, but trying to cross it was really tough, especially dragging a dead-weight kid along. Best I could do was float with the current, trying to keep a good grip on the boy and make sure his head was up and stoke with one arm when I was able. We must have floated a hundred yards before the land began to flatten and the water started slowing as it spread out. Only by then I was so tired it was all I could do to twist us more toward the bank and kick a little now and then. The muscles in my arms throbbed, and my legs felt like concrete, and my lungs burned for a good breath, and I was seeing tiny black specks. But I wasn’t letting go of that kid. Not now. Not this time. Not even if my mind was sort of flickering on and off like a lightbulb going bad. Someway I got my head up and sucked in one big gulp of air, and then I kicked with all I had left and started praying. Now, I’m not going to claim it was the prayer. I’m still not sure what I believe about that. But I’ll tell it for the truth how good it felt when that big Osage got a grip on my free arm and started pulling us toward the shore. He told me later, one snowy night outside of Galena, Kansas, that he couldn’t swim a stroke to save his life. But he’d seen what was happening and ran down the bank and, knowing we’d float that way, looked for a bend where the water shallowed enough for him to wade out and make a grab for us as we floated by. Only he said he figured he’d be bringing in corpses. Then he laughed. In the three or four years we bummed around together, that was the only time I heard him laugh and one of the few times he ever spoke.

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Last I saw of him, he was waving to me from the crest of one of the Bitterroots, heading west. By then I’d broken my ankle jumping off a Southern Pacific and was thinking seriously of settling down. Of all the men I hoboed with over all those days, he’s the one I think about most when the wind is up and the land is dark and sleep won’t come. Anyway, the big bum grabbed hold of my arm and drug me and the kid to the bank. Between us, we got the little fella out of the water and pumped his chest and pounded on his back and blew breath down his throat. I thought he was drowned and got this sick feeling in my gut. Then he coughed and vomited dirty water and his eyes rolled open in his head, and I knew we were home free.

The citizens of Slate surely did treat us fine that day. They shook our hands and pounded on our backs, and the mother of the little blond boy cried and cried and cried. Somebody put a silver dollar in my hand, and the boy’s daddy bought all four of us fried chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans. The cook threw in apple pie and vanilla ice cream. The mayor made a rambling speech and gave me the key to Slate. Of course, it wouldn’t unlock anything, and after a couple of hours when the doc had said the boy was gonna be fine, the citizens started drifting away. As the daylight was starting to fade, a man in a uniform and widebrimmed hat sauntered over and told us how grateful the town was and all, but that it might just be best if we moved on right soon. I’d had that figured all along. People don’t like to feel beholden. Certainly not to vagrants. Down at the depot, a freight was rumbling. I tossed the key to Slate in the fountain on the square, and we started stepping lively. By dawn we were in Oklahoma headed for Beaumont, and I sat with my feet dangling out of the boxcar, watching sunlight spread across the flat red earth and thinking about what had happened at Slate, and after a while I laughed at myself a little. All that excitement, saving the kid and getting a free dinner and the key to the city and now, less than twenty-four hours later, I was back to riding the rails. Saving that kid, well, that had been good. But it wasn’t anything lasting. In a week they’d have forgotten what I looked like, and I’d be

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planting wheat or doing ten days for vagrancy or lying dead somewhere in a ditch. I wasn’t anything special. Anybody who could swim could have done what I did. Saving that kid had been just another portage. Now, like those fur traders I’d read about back in grade school, I had new country to see, and rivers to cross, and journeys to make. Just another portage—that was all it had been. And, for me, there always seemed to be one more portage to make. Going home wasn’t an option. I had myself to thank for that. I leaned back against the rough wood of the box and watched another morning being born.

CHRIS HELVEY’s short stories have been published by numerous reviews and journals, including Kudzu, The Chaffin Journal, Best New Writing, New Southerner, Modern Mountain magazine, Bayou, Dos Passos Review, and Coal City Review. He is the author of the novel Snapshot (Livingston Press), the novel Whose Name I Did Not Know (Hopewell Publications), and the short story collection Claw Hammer (Hopewell Publications). Helvey currently serves as Editor in Chief of Trajectory Journal.

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[ POETRY]

WHITNEY RIO-ROSS The Kissing Tree

Here, I like to imagine I am a woman who hoists herself into ghosted limbs, clutching whatever version of love she can hold today. But the girl who braved those heights to capture a kiss is past my reach. She was not afraid to fall. She was not my inheritance.

In the golden hour, light glories weed patches shot through cracked asphalt, a road nearly gone to gravel. Here lies the abandon—razed homes, barren gardens now graced by sunset-glimmered cobwebs. Fifty years’ forgetfulness sprouted trees who have outgrown themselves, roots stretched past the edges of beginnings. There—the one whose branches brush the earth—it shades someone’s secrets. I like to imagine it has always been this way, the one I call the kissing tree, keeper of a lost world’s young lovers dressed like the blooming couple in photos my grandfather can’t take off his bookshelf.

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After the Homily In the hush of sleeplessness, you whispered me your doubts, familiar as the tongue that shaped them. I rendered them into prayers, then offered you the words of the Lord or whoever I thought you’d listen to.

WHITNEY RIO-ROSS has poems published or forthcoming in Gravel, Saint Katherine Review, Rock & Sling, Waccamaw, Letters Journal, and elsewhere. She holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she works as an adjunct English instructor at Trevecca Nazarene University.

Now I speak to a stranger in an echoing sanctuary. A voice I recall asks me questions I pretend to understand, and I tell him things he pretends not to hear— a reunion in Babel. I only recognize you in the silences.

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THE DREAMS YOU DREAM MUST BE YOUR OWN Daniel Davis

[ FICTION] he is floating in darkness. There is no ground, but if there were, her feet would not be on it. A breeze, soft and warm, slips through her hair—translucent blonde, the color so light it could blow away. She wears a white nightgown; it flutters off her slender frame. Her eyes are the pale blue of the sky just after sunrise. Her skin smells of lilac, her favorite scent ever since we planted the tree in the backyard when she was seven. Her hand reaches out and lands on my own. Her fingers slip into mine. I had forgotten how small her hands are. Her skin, smooth and cool. She says something to me—her mouth moves, but no sounds come out. I cannot hear you, I say, and realize that I am not speaking, either. She doesn’t hear me. Her lips move again. I wish

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I could read the words. I love you. I miss you. But I have no idea what she is trying to say. There is something in the darkness with us. Somewhere behind her. And she knows. Maybe she is telling me what it is; maybe she is telling me not to be afraid. But I am. Because it is something to fear, whatever is waiting for her. It’s waiting for me, too. Maybe it has decided not to wait; maybe it is drawing nearer. I become cold, as cold as her; I can see my breath drift between us, and her beautiful face is momentarily obscured. Something shifts. Something is wrong. I can feel a weight in my stomach; gravity is returning, but only to me. I am sinking, and because I am sinking, so is she. Or maybe I am being pulled down; I glance at my feet, but I have no feet. There is nothing but more darkness. I am becoming a part of it—I am not sinking, I am melting. And this is natural, and I let it happen. But she cannot. She must not. She knows this, but she is coming with me anyway. I shake my head. I scream inside. “Rachel,” I say, and my voice comes out harsh and wet, thick with time. “Rachel,” I say again, but it is not her name, and she lets go of my hand and disappears above me. All that is left, as I succumb to the numbing cold, is the smell of her skin and the touch of her hand on mine.

Dr. Thorne told me that it was normal; dreams are part of the grieving process. You lose someone, you think about them; even when you consciously put their image out of your mind—which I had not yet managed to do, nor did I want to—your subconscious lingers. Your subconscious, he said, will never let go. It cannot. She will always be there. Take comfort in that, Stanley. She will always be with you. I believed him. Thorne had more degrees than I even knew existed; I would’ve been a fool not to trust him. But I stopped seeing him after that session. I could think of what Rachel would say: You’re spending two hundred bucks an hour for some quack to tell you what you already know? Jesus, Pops. Just sign over your checking account to him, while you’re at it. Kyle, who had gone to see Thorne after his first divorce, had a different idea.

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“It’s his job to say those things. That’s why you’re paying him. Who else is gonna say it? Me? You’d punch me in the fucking face. You need someone like that, with degrees on his walls and a plaid couch in the corner. Trust me, if you quit seeing him, you’ll regret it. The dreams will get worse.” Kyle was right. They got worse. “I told you so,” he said a month after I’d paid the last of Thorne’s bills. He hefted his mug in my direction. “Didn’t I tell him, Larry? I fucking told him.” “You told him,” Larry said. Larry was older than us by at least fifteen years. We’d met when he used to own Sixers Bar; since he’d sold the place, he could get us all free drinks. It was the only reason to go. That, and the jukebox that nobody ever used. All the other bars in the area had given way to college students and raucous beats. Not Sixers. Larry had given the bar its name after the six women in his life: his wife, four daughters, and one granddaughter. His youngest, Lindsey, had been Rachel’s age. Not a friend, per se, but more a high school acquaintance. She’d been at the funeral, but probably because Larry had gone. Larry had been my shoulder to lean on. Kyle, in his grief, had been too drunk. Out of respect for my daughter, I waited until everyone left before starting the first fifth of vodka. It was Larry, too, who had called me repeatedly over the next few days, then rushed me to the hospital when he found me lying in my own filth. They tell me I died twice. Rachel, I’d told them, died only once, and it had been enough. That was when Kyle suggested I see Thorne. You’re dealing with a double threat. The death of your wife three years ago, and now your daughter. With Rachel’s passing, you are experiencing your wife’s death all over again, because Rachel was as much a part of Veronica as she was of you. You are being attacked on two fronts, and you don’t even know one of the fronts exists. You cannot stand up to such an onslaught, and you feel guilty. But no man could take something like this, Stanley. No man can go through such hell alone. If he could, mankind would not be such a social animal. Larry got us another pitcher. It was our third. He spent his time flirting with the bartender, a coed Biology major. Girls liked to flirt with Larry; he was old and harmless. Guys like Kyle and myself weren’t. Not only were we single, but we were also damaged. Women find young damaged guys attractive, but by middle age, men are supposed to be able

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to heal their wounds, erase their scars. We can perform magic, do the impossible. And we fail, every time, to suggest that we are anything but mortal beings incapable of rising above our self-inflicted chains. “He’s slipping,” Kyle said. He refilled my glass. “Dammit, Stan. You work tomorrow, for Christ’s sake.” Kyle worked with me at the school, running the networks and making sure the computers stayed virus-free. It wasn’t a job that required much concentration, or sobriety. At least not anymore. We’d both been relegated to the basement of a forgotten red-brick building—not one of the rustic ones with white trim, but the one with obvious mold on its door frames. It was late August and we had no air-conditioning. If we were caught with our hangovers, which we never were, we could blame the heat. “It’s your turn to do everything,” I said. “I worked yesterday.” Kyle had succeeded in bringing me back across the brink. But barely. Just a step away from the edge. The cliff could erode beneath my feet any instant. Alcohol worked as a stabilizer, a foundation—it made my footing surer. Never solid, but firmer. You’ll have to settle. Thorne was a man of compromises—if not for himself, then for others. You cannot have everything that you want, not any longer, because what you want is impossible. You want Rachel to be alive, and we both know that is not going to happen. You can turn to religion if you want; it can help you. Surround yourself with people who care. But don’t expect miracles. They do not exist. You want them, but you will never have them. This is what you are going to have to settle for. You cannot have what you want, but you can still have something worth keeping.

Not Rachel, I told myself, staring at her picture that first morning. Front page, bold headlines. Just like my daughter. But not Rachel. Not her. Not Rachel. Jessica Gladden. That was her name. Never Jess, never Jessie. Loving daughter, granddaughter, niece, and fiancée. A devoted student, Dean’s List material, studying on scholarship. “When was the last time,” I asked an empty room, “you heard about a scholarship that wasn’t for sports?” She was beloved, as all the departed are immediately after death, but she

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had been cherished in life as well. You could tell from her picture. That smile, those eyes, the way her hair fell casually across her shoulders. Her photograph was staged—senior portrait, high school—but the casualness was not. She wasn’t that kind of girl. You took the picture and the printed words, mixed them together, and found your truth. She was the kind of girl that people would miss. She liked art. Watercolors mainly. When she was eight she drew a detailed family portrait. When she was in high school she won a regional award. No one doubted what her college major would be. Most were surprised that she chose the University of Illinois, right in her hometown. She could’ve tried New York or Los Angeles. She could’ve tried going where the artists were, where people with talent congregated. Maybe she was afraid of being told that she wasn’t as good as everyone said she was. It’s a fear we all have, this deep dread that we aren’t who we think we are. We feel we matter—to friends, family, even the community at large. We feel we have something to offer. But not everyone does. It’s statistics. The man on the street corner, begging for an extra nickel, doesn’t matter to society. Whether he should or not isn’t the issue. He simply doesn’t. He exists in a world where people like himself are pushed to the fringes. It happens to most of us. How many of us truly matter to the world? How many of us actually make a difference? She knew this. She chose her school because it was near her friends and family. In a world where the individual doesn’t matter, this is perhaps the wisest choice. Surround yourself with the ones who appreciate you; don’t throw yourself into a world full of people who don’t give a damn if you can paint in watercolors. I think Dr. Thorne would’ve agreed. She did what was instinctive to her, and those who acted surprised were deceiving themselves. She, at least, was honest with herself. She knew that she wasn’t a famous artist. Perhaps she had the talent; such a thing is subjective, and who can ever say? Success depends on time and place, coincidence. She had the desire, but passion will only get you so far, searching for the bottom of an endless hole. She knew that she was best suited as a teacher, an instructor to others like herself. She wanted to create, but she also wanted to help. Her mother said something to this, after the fact. She wanted to help the children. Who doesn’t? Or maybe it was all self-deception. I’ll get to New York one of these days. This is just a stepping-block on the road to greatness. I like to

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think not. I like to think that she knew herself better than anyone else, and that she embraced who she was. Not her parents, not her friends, not even her killer knew who she really was. Only she did. And she was okay with it. Not happy—none of us are truly happy with who we are—but content. She accepted it. She embraced it. She learned to live with her potential. It was not a contributing factor in her death—it was the reason for her life. Maybe, if she’d been in denial, she would’ve moved to New York. In theory, she wouldn’t have died then, though the statistics say otherwise. But she proved the statistics inaccurate. She, and my daughter. I put the paper away and went to work, then took sick leave around noon and went back home. Pulled the paper out, stared. I wonder if Jessica’s parents had stared at Rachel’s picture that way. Probably not. My daughter was dead; at the time, theirs had not been. I was able to see the connections because death is the great equalizer; it enables us to draw parallels we otherwise never could. This is its curse. She didn’t look exactly like Rachel. Her eyes were a little wider, her nose a little more pointed. But her hair was the same, color and style. Her smile was almost the same—a little less pouty, a couple more teeth showing. But the resemblance was there. More than that. It was like looking at an image of Rachel from a different life—if she’d had a different father, maybe, or if she’d been raised in a different part of the world. Something missing—not my Rachel, not quite, but most of the pieces were there. As though whoever molded her had based her off my daughter, then made a few subtle rearrangements to avoid copyright infringement. Even her death was similar. A mugging gone wrong, trauma to the head from a blunt instrument. With Rachel, it had been the butt of a pistol; they’d found it next to the kid, the murderer, the fucking bastard. In Jessica’s case, they didn’t know. A blow across her forehead, another to the back of her skull. Her purse was found several yards away, her billfold gone. Rachel’s purse had been found in the murderer’s apartment. He’d had it in his lap when he blew his brains out. Sitting in the chair he used to play video games. It vibrated. Jessica, I told myself. This is Jessica. Staring into her eyes, Rachel’s eyes. Reading about Jessica’s death, thinking of Rachel’s. So many similarities. Out at night when she shouldn’t have been. Alone. Walking home along a familiar route. A false sense of security—just because

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you’re used to something doesn’t mean it’s safe. No witnesses, no suspects. The police at a loss. We’ll find whoever did this, and bring him to justice. Even the gender was an assumption, though they were probably right. Rachel’s killer had been male. A classmate, actually. ACC 3800: Federal Income Taxation I. Rachel had been an Accounting major. There were no connections. The paper didn’t even reference my daughter. Rachel’s killer had been dead for five weeks. The investigation was done; no one had any doubts or suspicions. My daughter’s killer had been proven guilty posthumously, beyond any doubt. He’d convicted himself by putting a nine-millimeter round through the back of his skull. Case closed. Jessica was two years younger than Rachel and had attended a different high school. They’d gone to the same university, but they probably hadn’t known each other. Maybe they’d met at a party or a bar. What would they have thought, glancing across the room and seeing someone who looked so like them? Would they have even noticed? The article gave a few details concerning Jessica’s personal life, most of them quoted by her mother: “A beautiful person, inside and out. She was the light of our life, and now she’s extinguished.” The mother, it turned out, had recently published a small book of poems. Even in the blank, emotionless coverage, it showed. The father, too, was artistic—a photographer who had his own studio in downtown Champaign. Veronica and I had raised Rachel to be practical, so she could compete in a male-dominated world. Perhaps as a consequence, Rachel had never shown much interest in the arts. She liked movies and television, but no more than anybody else. She read magazines, not books. She played sports, and she liked to compete. These were all things that Jessica Gladden would’ve abhorred if her mother’s description was to be believed. But then, postmortem parental praises are rarely accurate. During my first interview after my daughter’s death, I’d described Rachel as “my angel,” which I hadn’t called her since she was old enough to ask me to stop. Their similarities lay only in their appearance and deaths. But that was enough. I called in sick to work the next day, too. The grieving process continued. No one asked any questions. No one called to check on me, not even Kyle. I was left alone with the two girls. I got online and found every article I could, hoping to learn something new. I didn’t know what I wanted to find. There were still no leads, and my daughter remained dead. Jessica, too.

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I watched the news for a week, read the local papers. No solid leads emerged. A beige sedan was spotted near the alley where Jessica was killed, but no one knew if it was suspicious or not. Robberies around the U of I campus are numerous; they rarely end so violently, but they happen. There is often little premeditation. Any violence perpetrated is often accidental and untraceable. A random punch or shove. Whoever had robbed Jessica had carried a weapon, though it was probably for intimidation purposes only. Blood was not the motive—money was. This was the general assumption by Detective Lieutenant Timothy England, Homicide. He was the man featured in most of the television coverage. I hadn’t met him before—Rachel’s case had been too brief— but I’d seen him at the station. A stern man, tanned and toned, maybe mid-forties. You could tell he’d worked hard for his job, and he knew it. His sentences were clipped and precise, and he spoke without even a flicker of doubt. The detective I’d talked to most, Chelsea Peters, had been less confident. Open to doubt, interpretation. Human. She’d given me a hug when she sensed I needed it. Lieutenant England wasn’t a man for hugs. I wondered if he had a family. Probably. Men in that position usually do—it’s a prerequisite for the job. Jessica’s parents were always shown sitting in their house, arms around each other. At first, the mother cried; later, she just looked into the camera. She did not rant that the man responsible for their daughter’s death should be punished. She pleaded with him to turn himself in, “to avoid extending your stress any further.” The father never cried, or begged, or spoke; I sensed rage boiling within him, but maybe I was just projecting myself onto him. He and I looked nothing alike. The mother and Veronica looked nothing alike. I tried to see the similarities, but I couldn’t. Larry and Kyle knew what was going through my head. Neither of them said anything specific, except to make passing references to the incident. “Christ,” Larry said. “What’s this world coming to, you know? Kids are getting meaner. This happened back in my day, but not so damn much. Nowadays, you turn on the news, and someone you know, or someone you could’ve known, is dead.” You’ll search for someone to blame, Thorne had said. But the only man to blame is Benjamin McDowell, and he’s dead. You’ll view his

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suicide as cowardly; you’ll think that he should’ve paid for what he did. But he did pay. Suicide is not easily achieved. It’s the end of a long, difficult road. I am not telling you not to hate him; you’ll hate him, and it’s natural for you to do so. But blame him, and only him. You can hate a dead man. You can also forgive a dead man; that may come later.’ I almost commented on the resemblance between Jessica and my daughter. I opened my mouth to say something, but then I closed it. It was too obvious. I instead made a comment about how the beer seemed flat. Larry took it up with the bartender, flirting again. Kyle leaned forward across the table and said, “We need to take a day off together sometime, go golfing or gambling or something.” “We do,” I said, not sure what I was agreeing to. I was thinking of Jessica’s picture, which had just flashed across the TV. Cut back to the anchorwoman, smiling. The channel changed. Dirt bike racing. Larry came back and sat down. “I thought we could do with a new change of scenery,” he said. “Weren’t there any girls on?” Kyle asked. “Or at least a fight?” “Fight’s tomorrow. And we don’t get Pay-Per-View here.” We. As though he stilled owned the place. Larry came even the nights that Kyle and I didn’t. He complained about retirement, about having nothing to do, but he came to the bar and talked with the new managers and the bartenders. It wasn’t much of a life, but he had himself fooled. He thought he was having fun. Maybe, even, he was. You’ll look to fill your time. You won’t be able to, but you need to try. Try as hard as you can. Find something to preoccupy yourself with. Have you ever wanted to read Don Quixote? Moby Dick? Now would be the time. Find a nonviolent television show and stick with it. Resume a hobby you had as a child. Even better, find something social, like a bowling league. No matter how terrible it may sound, do it. Even if you don’t enjoy it. It’ll be better, safer, than sitting around your house alone. I went out and drank almost every night with Kyle and Larry. Problem solved. “Well,” Kyle said, “maybe we could go somewhere they do have the fight. Watch a couple guys get their asses kicked.” He shrugged. “It’ll be fun.” B

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I dreamed. I woke up sweating, my daughter’s name on my lips. But it wasn’t my daughter I saw, not always.

It was a mistake. If I’d still been seeing Thorne, I would’ve told him that up front: It was a mistake, and I knew it. But I did it anyways. A week and a half went by. Nothing. I thought of calling, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak. My voice would freeze and I would hang up. It had to be in person. I had no idea what I wanted to say, what I wanted to gain. But I needed something. They needed something. The police were providing no answers, no comfort. I had no answers, and I felt I had little comfort to give, but maybe I could offer a familiar face: the face of grief. The face of my daughter. I took another day off work, and I could tell by my boss’s voice that I was pushing it. I didn’t care. Work had long ago become something disinteresting, a menial task I did between waking up and going to bed. I would’ve quit, except with Rachel in school, I needed the extra income. I stayed at work, and as a bonus, Rachel occasionally visited me during the day. Maybe just once or twice a month—and I got to see her elsewhere as well—but at least she made the effort. I think she knew how little my job meant to me anymore. Pops, she’d say, you look like you could use a margarita. At two in the afternoon. I always took her up on it. The Gladden house wasn’t hard to find; it had been shown on all the local news stations. A small one-story ranch house on the northwest side of Champaign, a neighborhood I’d never visited before. The Champaign/Urbana metro area isn’t large by most standards—perhaps a couple hundred thousand residents all together—but it’s big enough so that you can grow up there and never see all of it. It took me an hour to find the street; the house was easy to spot once I was in the right area. White picket fence out front, pale yellow paneling, white trim around the windows. The grass was thick and green, despite the dry spell we’d been having. I knew, instinctively, that the father had submitted a photograph of his home to a magazine, and the photo had been rejected. Too unrealistic. No one actually lived in a house like that, except people who took pictures of houses like that. There were no cars in the driveway, though they could’ve been in the garage. I parked out front and waited. I watched the picture window

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for movement. The cops and reporters had left—this wasn’t the scene of the crime, anyways—and, in the humid stillness of the August afternoon, the street was deserted. I got out and stood, not moving. When I shut my door, the clang jarred me into motion. The only other sounds were birds chirping lazily, and a dog barking a few houses down. There was a cobblestone path leading up to the front door. I took it one stone at a time, meticulously, as though if my foot were to land between the stones, I would sink into the earth. At the door, I pushed the buzzer and waited. I could hear it chiming from inside, a sharp insistent sound designed to provoke, startle. The door opened quickly, as though she had been waiting for me. I recognized her from television, but without the extra makeup, she seemed withdrawn, inferior. Melissa Gladden, a foot shorter than I, shoulder-length blond hair, dark circles beneath her eyes. Her face was pale and sunken, her lips almost blue. She looked like someone had been holding her underwater. She wore a loose t-shirt and sweatpants, and no jewelry or makeup to speak of. This was a woman who hadn’t expected company. Melissa Gladden had no idea who I was. I barely existed to her, at least in that first instance—her eyes lit on me, drifted away, and came back. When they focused, I saw nothing in them but confusion and despair. She could lay out poetry in a mournful ode to her daughter, but inside she was as empty as me. She hid behind words; my shelter was alcohol and a therapist I’d stopped seeing. “Who are you?” she asked, and her voice was steady but faint. She’d done her crying, she’d done her begging and praying and screaming. All that was left was acceptance—things were the way they were, and the best she could hope for was to move on. You have to accept what has happened. You cannot change the past. Whatever crutch you use, you exist in a world where your daughter has already died, and there is no other world for you to inhabit. This is one of the truths you must face. It will, I expect, be the hardest truth for you to overcome. “My name,” I said. When I realized I was going to lie to her, because I couldn’t tell her who I was, not yet. I said, “My name is Kyle Davenport, and I’m a reporter.” I didn’t tell her what paper. I couldn’t think of the name of any papers.

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She could’ve asked for identification. She could’ve asked me why I was there, when no new leads had been established, when the last reporter had left days before. If she had, I would’ve turned and walked away. I didn’t know why I was there any more than she did. In fact, with the lie, she understood me better than I ever could. She had something to believe and understand. I had nothing but jumbled thoughts and the picture of a girl who could’ve been my daughter but wasn’t. Perhaps it was her grief, or perhaps she’d dealt with so many reporters recently that she was too trusting. But she nodded and stepped away from the door, motioning me inside. I hesitated on the porch; I had never expected to go inside. I knew what the house would look like: neat, well kempt, as though their daughter would come back any day. And there would be a shrine, a memorial, an array of pictures and flowers, some left by friends but most bought by the parents. The one acknowledgement of death, and even that was a hopeful one, a beautiful one. But I went inside, and she shut the door behind me. It was cool, and my sweat dried instantly. I looked at the floor to avoid looking at the walls. She led me into a living room and sat me down on a floral couch. She was speaking. I shook my head assuming she was offering me a drink. She sat down in an easy chair opposite me and waited. I opened my mouth but nothing came out except wet sounds. Mrs. Gladden watched me patiently. I was a distraction—something to take her away from her grief. I’d felt much the same when interviewed about Rachel, though that had only lasted a couple days, until her killer’s body was found. Two days of distraction, then nothing but cold and loneliness. “Mr. Davenport,” she said. I realized I had been quiet too long. I said, “Did your daughter live here?” I should’ve asked if she was all right; that was what reporters did, they asked you what they already knew, as though to emphasize that they were different than you, incapable of putting themselves in your shoes even though they easily could. This was what Melissa Gladden was used to, and her eyes widened in surprise at my question. After a moment, she said, “No. Jessica lived in the dorms.” Jessica. I tried to remember that. “I…” I met her eyes briefly; she looked away first. “I know it must be hard for you. I’ve lost someone too.”

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She nodded. “Jessica was everything to Richard and me. Our only child, the only one we ever wanted. We were so proud of her.” Her voice faded, and she cleared her throat. “She was so talented. You wouldn’t believe.” “I’m sure,” I said, thinking of Rachel, whose talents lay in practical areas, numbers and calculations. She’d wanted to wear a suit to senior prom, not out of some feminist statement, but to show her classmates how she would look in five years. “Mr. Davenport.” I was staring at the coffee table, an arrangement of red and yellow flowers, probably fake. The room smelled of old incense, with a trace of cigarette smoke. No doubt Richard Gladden was a smoker, but was forced to do it outside. I’d been that way. Veronica had even gotten me to quit. Rachel, when she was old enough to hear the story, was proud of me. Even if you didn’t get everything out of it, Pops, at least you got your health. “Mr. Davenport, aren’t you going to take notes?” I made the mistake of looking up, not at Mrs. Gladden but at the wall. This wasn’t the shrine—that was probably in Jessica’s old room, a gym or study ever since she started college, but which, recently, had been transformed back the way it used to be. What I was looking at was just an ordinary wall, you find them in thousands of households, pictures of a child from infancy to the present. Always smiling, well-dressed, beautiful. Not the Jessica they saw every day, but the child they wanted posterity to remember, the perfect version of their daughter, the one without flaws or stains or frowns or tears. I could see the resemblance in some of the older photos. A certain twitch in her cheek, the way her eyes shied just to the side of the picture, as though sneaking a last peek at the photographer. The similarities became more obvious as time progressed. By the final picture, the one used in the newspaper, I wasn’t looking at Jessica but at my daughter. Rachel. “Mr. Davenport, I need to see some identification, please.” She was standing now. I looked up at her. Panic in her eyes, her fists clenched at her side. “No,” I said, knowing what she was thinking. “No,” but I couldn’t say anything else, because to even acknowledge the thoughts that were going through her mind were too much. “Please leave, Mr. Davenport. Now, before I call the cops.” “Rachel,” I said, and she ran into the kitchen. I don’t remember leaving the house, or driving away. I remember running through a red light,

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but only because the honking of the other cars awakened me to the wind on my face. Sticky, humid. It reminded me of a night years past, teaching Rachel to catch fireflies. She killed the first few, squashed them between her fingers, but she was too young to understand the significance, and laughed as she rubbed their fluorescent corpses on her skirt. I’d had no choice but to laugh with her. How could I explain?

I had two visitors. The first came later that evening. A uniformed cop. I answered the door mechanically, and his presence took my breath away. The last time a cop had shown up on my doorstep, it had been to tell me that Benjamin McDowell had killed himself, just like that, not even explaining whom the deceased was. It’d taken me a minute to figure it out, and when I made the connections, I cried. The cop had shifted his feet, uncomfortably waiting until he could finish what he’d come to say. Then he’d left. I almost asked if there were any leads. I wasn’t thinking of the newest one, the other one. Did they find something new? Was Rachel’s killer still out there? Then I remembered my visit to the Gladden house. It was a slow realization, the kind that sneaks up on you: yes, I did do that, didn’t I? It came without feeling. It was just a fact, something I’d done. No emotional connection to why this man would be standing at my door. “I remember you, Mr. Collins,” the officer said. “I didn’t handle your case personally, but I remember seeing you at the precinct. It was a real tragedy; I’m sorry for your loss. I truly am.” He was young, not much older than Rachel had been. The only thing he had ever lost was his innocence. Recently. “That’s why I wanted to come here,” he said. “Personally and unofficially. Do you understand?” He was being polite, but I could tell his shoulders were tense, ready to grab me if I tried to run. Training, surely. Instinct. “You see, Mr. Collins, there are two ways to view your going over there. There’s the way that Mr. and Mrs. Gladden initially took it, and then there’s the way that I convinced them it was. Now, just because it’s the second way, that doesn’t mean you were right to go there, to frighten Mrs. Gladden like that. You should’ve known

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she would automatically think it was the first way. You were in her position yourself, once.” No, I wasn’t. Rachel’s killer was dead just days later; I’d still been in shock, according to the doctors. I hadn’t had someone to hate, to fear. Grief needs to be shared, Thorne had said. Mankind is a social animal, and no more so than when he is grieving. We cannot suffer alone. We cannot bear it. But we must, because in the end, our pain is our own. Each loss belongs to the individual. Each twinge of regret, remorse, fear, hatred, longing, bitterness, anger—each emotion you feel is unique to you, Stanley. No one else, not even I, can ever know what it is like for you. You’ll live with this. It won’t be easy. The second visitor appeared the following evening. I’d gone to work, suffered through it. He must’ve been waiting for me to return; he rang my doorbell not three minutes after I walked through the door. I knew who he was from the news. But even if he’d never had his picture taken or appeared on television, I would’ve recognized him. A father wears his pain different than a mother. We feel more protective, and when our protection has failed, we doubt everything. I could see that doubt in his eyes. It was like an abyss, a spiraling descent into nothingness. It was like the darkness that appeared in my dreams, haunting and forever. “Goddamn you,” he said, and punched me in the jaw before I could say anything. Not that I could’ve. My knees buckled, but I didn’t fall. He turned from me and went back to his car. I watched his face as he pulled away. He didn’t look back at me. I wondered what he would’ve seen had he done so.

I knew before I went to Sixers; it had happened early enough to make the five o’clock news. But Larry and Kyle either hadn’t heard, or were pretending for my benefit. When the story came on, Larry slapped the table and said, “Thank God. Thank the Lord.” He was Jessica’s age, but by all accounts a total stranger. Money for drugs, they said. With Rachel, it had just been money, as though that had been motive enough. What these newscasters were really saying, then, was that Jessica wasn’t a victim of greed, but of narcotics. Somehow, that made her death seem grander than my daughter’s, and I fought the urge to throw my mug through the screen. “I don’t know what this world’s coming to,” Larry said, “but I don’t like it.” “You don’t like anything,” Kyle told him. “When was the last time you liked something?” I couldn’t get over his face. How young it looked. Young and broken, pained. As though he were hurting, too. As though he could. “What we need,” Kyle said, “is a fucking fight. Right, Stan? We need some action in here.” In the end, it is up to you. No one else can do this. No human being can. It is up to you, but you are not alone. You’ll feel like you are, but you aren’t. I promise. “I tell you,” Larry said, as we watched the footage. “I tell you.” But he never did.

DANIEL DAVIS is a native of rural East-Central Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at Facebook.com/DanielDavis05 or @dan_davis86 on Twitter.

Darkness. Always. Sometimes I tire of it, but I never want it to go away. I think it’s the contrast between her pale skin and the nothingness behind her that makes her seem so real. But I would never say this to her. Instead, I let her take my hand, and I say her name, always hoping it will be the right one. B

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[ FICTION] ummer before I went to college, I worked at

FONTANELLE David E. Yee

a scrapyard tucked along that stretch of 270 where the cars come screaming past Gaithersburg, fleeing DCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s endless rush hour. I was a spot-filler, helping different sections when they were short-staffed. This meant stripping industrial cables for copper or hosing down the halfmile track of dirt road that circled the administrative building, wetting the dust to keep it from billowing up as the trucks came through. The day I met you was my last shift. Since dawn, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been stationed on the aluminum compactor, dumping cans onto the conveyor belt until the trap was full, and Sweet closed the gate and threw the switch. We stood there, tan arms folded, watching the piston drive the plate into the body of the machine, the crackle of

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aluminum compressing before the catch hissed and the flattened metal emptied into a shipping container. Sweet usually helped me level out the refuse, but his Nextel was chirping, so he flipped it open and whispered. That’s how I knew he was talking to his girlfriend—the low tones. Last batch had been three bins of ancient Coors Banquet cans stained tobacco brown at the rim. I was used to pinching my nose while I pushed the discs deeper into the container—the saccharin odor of soda and liquor turned my stomach—but these had been rinsed out, the only smell being that same toxic rust that perfumed from the stacks of junk metal. Sweet kicked at the gravel with the toe of his boot. He had his hand tucked into his armpit, a smile upturning his black mustache. When I’d started working there a couple months earlier, he’d told me he was “dumb in love.” I wasn’t sure how to take that, whether he meant being in a relationship made him stupid or if he was simply not good with women. He’d moved from El Salvador a few years earlier, and his accent was thick in the vowels. Told me that he’d gotten his nickname because he used to be a junior Olympic boxer—that he’d mastered the sweet science—but I figured it was from the lightness of his tone, how he never said a word that didn’t sound cheerful. That alone made him difficult to read—couldn’t tell if he was being ironic, sarcastic, sincere. I understood, now, that he meant “dumb in love” to mean he pushed his common sense aside at the first word of his girlfriend, like when I was coming off the ladder, and he was talking on his phone—a code of conduct violation. Three of those and you were fired, no pleas, no mercy. Sweet knew I would play lookout. I’d only gotten the job because my mom was still going to church. Half the managerial staff was in the priesthood, and even though I hadn’t attended in years, they hired me as a favor. The men in the yard didn’t trust my company, thought I might be spying for management, wouldn’t exchange anything except gruff nods on their way into the fields. They could tell I wouldn’t be here for any real length. Sweet wasn’t cold to me. And he knew I was grateful that he let me follow him around, that he showed me how to make it through a day. Sweet shut his phone, adjusted the fit of his cap, showing the sweatcleaned skin the brim had protected from the yard’s grime. I grabbed another bin of those vintage Coors cans, lifted one out to inspect it. I said, “You think these could be worth something?”

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“As what, a collector’s item?” He let out a cackle and punched me on the shoulder as he grabbed the next bin. “Come on, ’rillo, cans are all peddlers. People trying to find a few dollars in their junk.” We hefted the bins, the maroon and navy script blurring as the aluminum spilled onto the conveyer. When we went for the next load, he reconsidered, said, “Though, if anyone found some money in all this trash, it would be you.” The yard’s business focused on bulk shipments, picking up a semi’s worth of unsorted scrap metal and refining it for sale. But, along the south end of the admin building, near the front gate, there was a row of scales for walk-ups. Junkers and contractors could bring radiators pulled from dumpsters or piping leftover from a build, and we’d trade it for cash. This was the year before bright copper skyrocketed from one-fifty a pound to three times that, right before copper theft from construction sites became an epidemic. Sweet ran the scales because, as our boss, Arnie, said, “He can speak well and knows how not to get ripped off.” Arnie was the head bursar, balanced the sales tickets at the end of the day, running the tellers who sat behind the windows, punching timecards and exchanging receipts.

When I’d start started working there a couple months earlier, he’d told me he was “dumb in love.” I wasn’t sure how to take that, whether he meant being in a relationship made him stupid or if he was simply not good with women. At lunch, Sweet went with the forklift drivers to a bodega down the way. Arnie let me eat in his office so that he could try and convert me back to Mormonism. We’d eat with our hardhats in our laps, talking about work, then he’d bend the conversation to all the events for youth going on at the ward. That day, he’d asked if I wanted to join their intermural basketball league playing against other church teams in the area. I’d enjoyed it when I was younger but didn’t miss the hours I’d spent in seminary, in Sunday school. I had no nostalgia for the gospel. We worked seven-to-three shifts, so lunch ran before eleven. A lot of the guys didn’t eat that early, choosing instead to smoke cigarettes and drink cups of sugared coffee on the ramp to the main garage. Past the cable stripper and the rows of upturned spools, Uncle Tad had his

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confection stand. Today, Tad is probably dead. He was old back then— seventy or seventy-five. He managed the worker supplies, everything but hardhats. If you needed a new pair of gloves, you brought your old ones to Tad and exchanged them. But if you lost something or forgot it at home, you couldn’t get a replacement without being reprimanded. Tad called them demerits, you either owed the lost item or had to pay the list price, otherwise supplies were closed to you. I’d seen guys driving forklifts through the stacks of twisted steel signage with no masks, breathing in the dust kicked up by the wheels. This exile included Tad’s side business selling dollar coffee and Little Debbies for a quarter. Arnie told me that the yard funded it all, they just let Tad think it was his. Tad wasn’t all there, so to speak. He was a member of the ward, so Arnie found work for him. They said the empowerment was good for his state of mind. Sweet lost shit all the time—a glove in the parking lot, a mask on his way to the bathroom. Told me shifts were easier if you had a routine, to keep you focused. He said, “This work is mindless. It’s too easy to go somewhere else in your head.” He beat an unmatched glove against his thigh. “So, you leave yourself moments to look forward to, those little things throughout the day that aren’t so bad, and just focus on that plan. When you don’t have a plan, you lose shit.”

Arnie let me eat in his office so that he could try and convert me back to Mormonism...I had no nostalgia for the gospel. My routine featured an ice cream bar after lunch, then a cup of coffee with cream, the burnt roast swirling with the aftertaste of the sugar. Sometimes, when I drink cheap coffee, I remember how standing in the middle of all that refuse made it impossible to picture the world moving beyond the property fence. And there was relief in that seclusion. My girlfriend and I had broken up just before the summer began. She was off to Elon, and I was going to Scranton to live at my grandfather’s and start college—major undecided. At the start of the summer, we’d sat in the parking lot outside my mom’s apartment, throats raw from arguing. She kept saying, “What’s the point?” I got out of her car and climbed the fire escape to my bedroom window. Now, at work, I left my cellphone in the glove box of my ’86 Corolla, didn’t have to worry about missing messages from anyone. We’d dated since sophomore year, and

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that change seemed, at first, indigestible. In the beginning of August, as I crumpled the paper cup in my fist and dropped it into the trash, I was relieved to be free of our rhythm— how she’d reveal all the nasty things her parents said about me, then bickering, a make-up handjob. “To the scales, ’rillo,” Sweet said. I followed him through the piles of steel appliances that the crane operators sorted between the garage and the admin building. The sun hit the glass of an oven door, threw glare into my safety goggles. Sweet kept looking at text messages on his phone, singing that McDonald’s jingle—ba da da da dahhh, I’m loving it. He said, “Life is strange, huh? Sometimes you’re stuck in the mud. Then a little heat frees you.” He punctuated himself with a wink. I was too young back then to be anything but wordless when the conversation hinted at sex, so I adjusted the strap on my hardhat and refit it over my hair. It was pay-Friday. At three, we lined up at the teller windows to cash out. In the crowd with other workers, Sweet spoke Spanish, and I stood behind him, not too close to appear desperate for attention. The yard was paying me under the table with cash from the scale clerks. Depending on the day, I might get a stack of fives and tens instead of big bills. The other men checked their hours against their punch cards. One man said something to the circle of us, nodding at the cash I’d been counting. When the laughter died down, Sweet gestured at my envelope, told me that I needed to get my papers. I waited for Sweet to grab his things from his locker, the other men filing out past me into the parking lot. He emerged from the backroom rolling curses under his breath, said he’d hoped his other glove would be in his bag. “What’s five more dollars for Tad, right?” I handed him my pair, told him I had backups at home. He asked if I was sure, and I waved him off, said of course. We walked out through the front gate, the security guard closing it behind us. The end of work reminded me of the afternoons school let out—the way the men blasted music through open car windows, peeling out of the parking lot and up the narrow strip of road to the highway. That feeling of being uncaged, of racing into the moments of freedom that were already ticking away toward the next morning’s shift even as you buckled your seatbelt and started home—I spent this time alone. When my friends texted, I didn’t answer, unwilling to discuss the breakup, my new job. I wanted to make some money and move as quickly as possible. And I did, and we lost

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touch, and I could never really exert enough effort to get them back. That was the summer when I became obsessed with Blockbuster’s DVD mailer program, watching movies until I fell asleep. I was comfortable at home, my mother locked in her office on conference calls. If she or I didn’t make dinner, I’d grab a sub from the corner market and eat it on the fire escape, watching the sun go down between the two high rises across the way, sinking into a canopy of trees. The bruised orange light flooded the branches, didn’t quite mask the cable-linked towers leading to the electric substation. Sweet and I had just cleared the property fence that first time I saw you, clutched to your mother’s chest as she shut her Volvo door. I didn’t see you at first, distracted by Lane’s features—they’ve always been startling in their sharpness—cheekbones cutting a triangle to her chin. You were just a little spot of bare skin puddled in cloth, barely old enough to support the weight of your head. Lane looked around the lot, not expectantly, just tucking her limp black hair behind her ear and heading toward the yard. Sweet folded his three gloves in the back pocket of his jeans, asked her if she needed help. She looked past me, toward the gate. A thin layer of sweat coated her pale skin. She said, “Maybe. I—uh. I need to buy something back.” I came alongside Sweet, saying, “You’ll have to come tomorrow. We’re closed.” “Have some manners, ’rillo.” Sweet nudged my hardhat with his fist, knocking the sun flap over my eyes. I wanted to push him back but realized that this sort of physicality was improper, suddenly aware of how you occupied the gap between us, a pale face swaddled in a paisley scarf. He said, “What is it you needed back?” She brought her purse to her hip, produced a manila envelope and receipt. She said she’d sold some scrap yesterday, but she shouldn’t have. It wasn’t hers to sell. Sweet told her there might still be a manager in the office, turning to me, his moustache fingering over his lips. The way he prodded me with his eyes, I knew he wanted me to run and check, but I was annoyed with him for the previous emasculating shove. When I didn’t offer, Sweet said, “I’ll go find out.” I turned to watch him plod down the gravel parking lot to the fence, knocking on the security window. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Lane, I was too uncomfortable to make eye contact, unsure how to be in her

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presence, the presence of a baby. I looked at the toes of my boots, water-stained and scuffed. I said, “What’d you sell?” Her voice was underlined by an eagerness that she suppressed, saying, “I came by in the morning with a bunch of beer cans. Really old ones.” I said, “They’re probably in the refinery by now.” “All of them?”

I didn’t see you at first, distracted by Lane’s features— they’ve always been startling in their sharpness— cheekbones cutting a triangle to her chin. You were just a little spot of bare skin puddled in cloth, barely old enough to support the weight of your head. When I didn’t speak, she exhaled, her shoulders sagging. I said I was sorry, then turned toward my Corolla a ways off in the lot, waiting for Sweet to return before I left as a matter of politeness. When I turned back, Lane was facing me, and I could see you for the first time, button nose and blue eyes. You looked too clean and white for the gravel, the dirt, and roughage that bordered us. She said your name was Carl, an old name, but it belonged to your father. There was a warmth in my throat as your toothless mouth curled into a smile, your hands reaching for her hair. She asked if my name was “’rillo,” and I laughed. Told her it’s short for amarillo—yellow. “Your name is Yellow?” “It’s an Asian joke. My father is Chinese.” “Is that it? I couldn’t place it.” She bounced you in her arms as she spoke, said, “It’s a handsome combination.” The tall sun leaned toward the highway. Beyond the fence, the occasional rattle of metal against metal sounded as the cranes sorted into the evening. Pillars of smoke rose out of the furnace stacks. I didn’t feel the gravity of my home pulling me, no urge to rush back to my routine of movies and a full night’s sleep. We waited for Sweet to get back, made small talk. Lane lived North in Frederick where she worked remotely for a web design firm. The longer we spoke, the more aware of our eight-year age difference I became, and I wanted, suddenly, to be where she was, grounded in something certain. A career job. A child. Sweet

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emerged from the fence, and as he approached, she looked up from you, seemed to reconsider me for a moment. “Let me give you my number, in case something turns up.” Told her my cell was in my car, but I copied her phone number onto a dollar bill and folded it in my fist. I knew that by tomorrow’s shift, there wouldn’t be anything left to return, but it felt easier to relent in this moment. When Sweet was within talking distance, he said, “Arnie closed the tills for the day. I’m sorry. We open at seven-thirty tomorrow.” Lane said, “Well, what I was looking for might already be gone, apparently. Thank you for checking.” Sweet lifted the brim of his hat, said it was nothing. When she was in her Volvo and heading to the through-way, Sweet stuck his chin toward the dollar I’d folded in my hand, said, “You got her number, ’rillo?” “She brought all those beer cans. I said I’d let her know if any were left.” He scoffed and started up the lot toward his Tercel. My car was on the way to his, and I asked what was up. His black hair curled under the snapback of his cap, lifting as he shrugged his shoulders. He said, “You really going to call her if we find some of those shit beer cans? Or did you just want her number?” “She gave it to me. I didn’t ask.”

“It’s too hard to make a family, you know? I mean, it’s too hard to become someone’s family. Think about it.” He passed in front of my Corolla, picked at the broken plastic of the headlight with his middle finger. “I saw how you looked at her, ’rillo,” he said, his voice low, thawing with concern. “She’s pretty, sure. But she’s got a kid. You really want to get involved with that?” I opened my car door, tossed my hardhat into the passenger seat. I said it wasn’t like that, it was just a nicety, to put her at ease. I said, “What should I have done, told her that I compacted all of her shit this morning? Told her not to get her hopes up?” “That would have been kinder.” My window rattled as I shut the door. Sitting there, Sweet framed by the windshield ahead of me, I couldn’t recall, exactly, Lane’s face, but I remembered the itch I felt as I skimmed the angles of her profile, the soft crook in her nose, the bower of her clavicle. There was a certain

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grace to the way she held you, a confidence in the striped muscle of her forearm, gripping you to her. Sweet knocked on my window, and I waited a moment before I cranked it down. He put his arm on the doorframe, held himself up as he bent at the waist, head level with mine. He told me a story about growing up after his father died of a poor heart. Sweet was ten, and a year later, his mother got this boyfriend who was young, maybe mid-twenties. He helped out with the bills, sure, but he was still wild with youth—came over late at night on the weekends, banging on the door. One morning, Sweet was brushing his teeth, and the boyfriend came into the bathroom, stinking of Guaro, and relieved himself in the toilet. Sweet said, “I look over at him, give him this look like Hey, I’m in here, can’t you wait? and this fool asks me if I’m trying to peek at his junk. I just want him to leave so I can get ready for church, and I don’t know, I guess since he mentioned it, I looked down. I was just a kid. I didn’t know how to handle myself. He’s holding his junk, and, I mean—I don’t know if it’s ’cause I was so little back then, but it looked fucking huge.” His face contorted into a sneer. Laughing once, he said, “Biggest dick I’ve ever seen. To this day. It was gross. Then he shakes it once and tells me to take a good look. He says I’ll never be that much of a man.” For a moment, neither of us spoke, and I became aware of the sweat and dirt caked into the ditches of my elbows, the back of my neck. Sweet said, “I’m telling you, ’rillo. I think about that shit every day.” “I’m not that kind of person.” Sweet pushed off the doorframe, stood next to the car, his shadow cast across the hood. He spoke slower, said, “You’d be that. Maybe some other way, but you would still be just that. It’s too hard to make family, you know? I mean, it’s too hard to become someone’s family. Think about it.” “I’ll see you Monday.” “Do me a favor, okay? Spend that dollar.” The gravel crunched under his boots as he walked off. I started my car and rolled through the lot, my tires kicking up a pallid dust that lapped at my open window. As I moved past him, Sweet called out, “Hey, ’rillo, ’rillo!” holding the gloves above his head. From my driver’s seat, the folds of plastic-coated cloth blocked the sun, turned him to a silhouette in the shape of a wave, a goodbye. He said, “Listen, I wasn’t trying to scold you. I’m just trying to look out for you, man.”

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“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you Monday.” “Sure, sure. Cuidado, hombre.” He let his arm drop—the falling hand struck his thigh with a clap. “Take care.”

Lane named you Carl after your father, but since she kicked him out, she liked to think of it in the context of the dad in Family Matters, that she’d always admired how he wanted ease but couldn’t bring himself to admit Urkle’s accidents gave his life an unfamiliar purpose. She said that’s what she wanted for you—a certain excitement, an attention, even if you are unwilling to greet it. She said, “I just don’t want him to be alone.” This was halfway through my second Guinness in that bar across the tracks in Old Towne, the one with the Christmas bulbs hung from the gutter, half burnt out and faded piss-yellow. I’d been only two blocks from the scrapyard before I texted her, and she said she was going to get an early dinner before she got back on the road, asked me if I wanted to join. We decided on that bar because it didn’t card—Sweet took me there my first Friday, said I should celebrate surviving my week. Your mother got pastrami, said she had gotten hooked on it while she was pregnant. She lifted the bread from a pool of oil stained scarlet on the plate and shrugged, said, “I thought blood would be good for the baby.” Lane was smart in a way that made me feel, suddenly, like I was seeing life from the bottom of a well. When I showed up at the bar, I went to the bathroom and washed my face in the sink, cupping water in my hands and clearing the soot. The overhead light in our booth lit you stark white and poured shadows from the tops of Lane’s cheekbones. She asked me what I was going to study at school and was gentle when I told her I didn’t know. She always spoke to me in a tone that welcomed me even when it scolded, like she was trying to draw up the better version of me, and maybe that was why I believed, from this beginning, that your mother could do no wrong. “Those cans were half shot with rust,” I said. “Least you got some money for them.” “They weren’t mine to sell.” Your father had collected them, and when she’d kicked him out a few months before, he couldn’t find a place to store them while he looked for a new place to live. She told me they’d met when she was sixteen and

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started her Bachelor’s at UMD. He was much older—twice her age— taught classes in radio production and thought she was so beautiful. I said, “That didn’t strike you as weird? I mean, you were a teenager.” “Well, how old are you now?” she said. “You’re still a person, right?” At eighteen, the dark beer was strange on my tongue, had to work to keep a straight face with every sip. Lane was good at teasing out any discomforts I kept hidden. She said, “I’m kidding. He had no way of knowing I wasn’t of age. We were just friends at first. He was with someone until I was, like, twenty.” Over the years, I learned your father loved T. Rex and gas station fruit pies, the ones filled with jelly that come wrapped in wax paper. Lane said he was stick-thin, drawn out by cigarettes and years of heroin. From the pictures, I can see the roots of your complexion, your square brow. She never told me the reason for their break, but it had to do with his sobriety. In the bar, she asked about my family, propping her chin on her fist. When she narrowed her eyes, I could feel myself losing grip on the aspects of my upbringing I refrained from talking about. Told her that my father had been a sheet metal mechanic for the Marines. In Vietnam, he patched helicopters, but spending his days on an island waiting for the birds to come back from combat was too boring for him, so he got moved to gunner. He was one of those men whose PTSD slipped through undiagnosed into the ’90s. My mother was unhappy, and when he sensed it, his temper boiled over. They divorced when I was in elementary school. Lane buoyed me along by offering sympathy—her hand, briefly, atop mine—asking questions about my wellbeing, and I wanted to be coddled in that way, thought that her compassion was a sign of her interest in me. I fed into it, said, “My dad was obsessed with video games. A week before I was born, he dragged my mom two hours to Philly to buy a Nintendo when it came out. I’d gotten in the habit of avoiding him— playing outside, hanging out at friends’ houses. I’d only ever get to play it when he was at work. So, when I was nine, I accidentally saved over his Zelda file. I don’t know. It got out of control.” “Over a video game?” “He had a lot of hours in it.” Our server cleared the plates. The happy hour crowd that had gathered at the bar thickened the room with noise. I ordered my third drink, and Lane got another serving of fries to split. She’d been rocking your

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carrier with her elbow. I’d almost forgotten you were there, so still in your half-sleep. I said, “Do you miss any of it? The freedom? Drinking?” “Sure, sometimes,” she smoothed her eyebrow with the pad of her thumb. “But don’t change the subject—what happened?” It’s a funny thing, those memories we avoid retelling out of the fear that they can’t be conveyed clearly, that there isn’t enough time in a conversation to convince someone of the events while also reconstructing your own person in light of them. To say, this is something that happened to me, but I’m okay. I said, “He hardly ever hit me with a fist. It was just a lot of shoving, grabbing my shoulders. When he screamed, his voice cracked. It was such a hideous sound, now that I think about it. So, it wasn’t anything special. He pushed me, and I fell into our coffee table. The way I landed, I broke my arm.” I pointed to the spot below my elbow where the bone had fractured. I finished the dregs of my drink, and we split the check. “I think the three of us could sense it was over after that.”

Lane was smart in a way that made me feel, suddenly, like I was seeing life from the bottom of a well. Lane said I shouldn’t drive, asked me if I wanted to come back to her place and listen to some music. She used to rent a rowhome in the historic downtown part of Frederick. The lilac paint on the siding looked like velvet reflecting the honey-colored light from the streetlamps. For a couple hours, before she put you down for the night, we took turns dancing with you in the living room. Lane played Joy Division, then the Strokes, and holding you to my chest, I slid in gentle circles on the hardwood. She said, “He loves the movement, it makes him giddy, and then he passes out.” You had this dollop of chocolate hair on your crown, and when Lane held you, she cupped your head in her palm, covering it, saying, “I’m terrified of his soft spot. I’m not clumsy, but with my luck, I’d find a way to hit it.” She was petting you, looking directly into your eyes now heavy with sleep. She said, “I’m always thinking about failing him.” As the song ended, her dance slowed to a stop. Lane’s posture—her neck craned over you, her arms curled beneath the rounded corners of your body—was so gentle it looked severe in the muscles of her body. I knew that moment couldn’t be unseen, and in the smallest way, I felt myself age. When the next track started, I stood behind her, looking

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over her shoulder at your face set in sleep. I put my hand on her back, got us swaying with the rhythm of the music. I never told Lane that I hadn’t had sex until that night, but I think, in my ineptness, she could tell. Lying in her bed after, naked but covered at the waist by her comforter, she said, “Do you feel any better?” then laughed, and I didn’t understand the joke, but she held me around my ribs. I felt coveted. She strummed the hairs growing out of the scar on my forearm, and I told her that the worst thing about it was the men in my church knew my dad had done it, knew he was violent. All they did was shake their heads at my cast when they thought I couldn’t see. Lane said, “Some men are weak.” I didn’t feel any different having told her. In her bed, I realized that my hesitation was not about my own perception of strength—I didn’t want people to vilify my father. We didn’t leave her apartment that weekend. I left Monday morning to pick up my car so that I wouldn’t get a ticket. I never went back to the scrapyard. She’d ask me to spend my last few weeks in Maryland with her, or maybe it had been my idea, wanting so helplessly to feel grounded. As I drove to my mother’s to pick up more clothing, the hard hat in the passenger seat rattled with the bumps in the highway. For a moment, with the thin, warm air of that August morning drifting through the body of my car, I could hear Sweet singing a jingle under his breath as I followed him through the stacks of refuse, disappearing into that walled-off world in which I let life slip through me, unnoticed.

When I moved back from Pennsylvania, you were already talking. I’d just finished my Associates, and Lane was speaking with me again. She’d asked me not to be in touch, said our lives were both in transition and that made for the worst kind of relationship. But sometimes, over the course of those two years, after I drank a six-pack and the beer propelled me to risk her anger, I’d send her a message, and sometimes, in the morning, she would answer. I guess her resolve had worn thin once I got back home. When she answered the door—chambray slacks belted high on her waist, her blouse unbuttoned—there was something drawnout to her that struck me, in my middle, as handsome. You were on her hip, wrapping your fists in her hair. The natural brown was showing in

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her roots, and with the early summer strangling the day with humidity, her grown-out bob clung to her neck. I didn’t know if you recognized me, couldn’t tell if your grin was particular to my company. She invited me in, and as I stood in her living room that was so much the same as the month I lived there except the pile of laundry on the ottoman and the toys littered across the hardwood, she thrust you into my arms. Yours was a good weight. You liked to be held, were decisive in that, and while she put a pot of coffee on to brew, you fiddled with the buttons on my flannel. Lane said, “I don’t have any cream.” “Black is fine.” She rolled out an Oh sound, said, “Well look at you, all grown up.” “I’ve been trying.” Cracking her knuckles, she said, “Better hurry.” I held my breath in the second before she let slip a smile, saying, “Calm down.”

I knew that moment couldn’t be unseen, and in the smallest way, I felt myself age. We sat at her breakfast bar, the steam from our mugs drifting to the ceiling. I told her about Scranton, about the cold, tree-thick valley my grandfather’s rambler was harbored in. I used to do my homework while sitting in the sunroom off the back of the house, looking through the screened windows up the side of a petite mountain. I bounced you on my denim knee as you picked apart a store-bought California roll, a speck of seaweed laminated in the spit on your lip. You’d always been an adventurous eater, trying, with fervor, every dish I put in front of you, and later, in those afternoons we spent together while your mother worked, we made a game of trying new foods. We’d walk up the tapered streets of HDF and stop into restaurants to split something. Your favorite was the Devils on Horseback from Izzy’s, used to pop the date free from the bacon and eat them individually, made your hands a mess. This was when you were five, and I picked you up from kindergarten. Lane had been promoted to the head of her department, and since my classes were all finished by noon, I’d watch you. You were never afraid to eat anything I ordered. Yet, you wouldn’t walk near any street without holding a hand. Lane and I got by for years chasing the idea that what we’d created in her rowhome could be maintained simply by believing in it. At first,

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she’d call me after she put you to bed, and we’d sit in her living room drinking Pinot Noir. No matter how awake we might be, she sounded exhausted when she asked me to come to bed. I could tell she was more interested in the attention than me, but I didn’t mind providing it. If I knew, was it still unhealthy? The night I moved in, after I got my clothes situated in the basement, Lane had reclined on the couch with an Auden collection propped on her stomach. She’d wanted me to read it to her—it was her favorite book. But I knew your father bought it for her, and so I couldn’t take part. I busied myself gathering your toys in their designated play-bins, moving about the room like I wanted to leave and staying so that we wouldn’t fight before bed. Mine was a small rebellion. She read aloud to me— Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon

I hadn’t been listening. Or I had, but I didn’t get it, so I said, “That’s pretty.” “Which part?” I’d just turned twenty—in arguments, she challenged my maturity as a means to back me down from a fight, and the years that followed, it was successful. I said, “The language. The language is pretty.” She nodded and turned the page to another poem, reading under her breath. Then another. Then she flipped back and muttered a line, over and over. In their ordinary swoon. Tomorrow, it would rain. I’d felt the heavy atmosphere with my hand stretched out my car window, drifting home through traffic. I gathered your vinyl rain boots, your clear umbrella, placed them by the door. Lane said, “What do you think that means?” I didn’t know, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I didn’t know. As I sat at her feet, she closed the book. Looking back, that sort of give-and-get was how we functioned. Or maybe that’s what I told myself about it—what we had wasn’t necessarily special, or passionate, but it was comfortable, and that comfort had worth. When it was over,

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some years after that night, she said, “He’s been clean for three years. I have to give him another chance.” I’d be lying if I said I didn’t cry, that I told her that I loved her in that way people do that sounds like they are begging for their life. Lane said real love is wanting the best for someone, even when that precludes yourself. I didn’t want change, to be expendable. Through the night, our argument grounded itself in Lane’s words, like a mantra—“He’s Carl’s father.”

I don’t think of my dad. By the time he came back around, I was sixteen and had grown enough without him. We’d get dinner every few months—the distant way we spoke to each other, it was like we were old friends held together strictly by the duty of having known each other once. He’d been in therapy for his anger but had developed arthritis in the discs in his back. The VA gave him morphine to cope. Every conversation was a string of things that he was going to do, but nothing followed, leashed by the strength of his high, and he cherished that high, seduced by the complacency it allowed him—the VA disability pay, the days hidden away in his apartment with his cat. When I think about calling him, I get distracted by the idea that he is my father—if he wants to be close, it’s his role to chase me, to care for me. We are strangers to each other, and in this same way, you won’t know me. There is kindness in that, small and unnecessary. You won’t know that after I left, I spent five years ignoring myself, working two jobs to pay for grad school, moving back home with my mother. Then, I met June at a conference in Boston. We’d exchanged hundreds of work emails over the years. As she shook my hand, she looked at me as though I’d returned from the dead—her pale lips pulling into a smirk, a touch of rouge blooming on her cheekbones. We were low-tier analysts at different branches of the same company. After a dinner with our colleagues, we got lost looking for the Subway. A storm had blanketed the city in a thick, wet snow. As the two of us trekked ankle-deep in the slush, I pulled the pack of cheap cigarettes from my too-thin coat, handed her one, apologizing for the quality. She said, “Oh, it’s fine—I only smoke when I’m away from home.” We wandered off the busier stretches back into a neighborhood where the cars hadn’t been dug out. The porch lights fixed along the rowhomes’ front doors turned the snow

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to amber and her cropped hair from brown to gold. We’d been trading pained stories as a way of getting to know each other. I said, “The house I grew up in had lanterns just like that on the stoop. My mom used to turn them on when it was safe to come home.” “And what if she didn’t?” My shivering hid a shrug. We waited at a crosswalk, followed a cab toward a busier street, laughed as the tires from passing cars flung water at us. I said, “I should’ve walked you back this morning.” Her lips smiled around the filter. “I made it just fine.” I rubbed my ungloved hands together, missing the warmth of the bar—our mutual acquaintances huddled in a booth near the kitchen, the two of us seated by the pool table. I’d been rolling the base of a pint glass in circles on the oak. June took my wrist and held it, knuckles to the wood. She drew letters on my palm like she was sending me a hidden message, but the words were upside down. “My dad told me that my mother was a palm reader,” she said. Under the table, she closed her knees around mine. A boxing match was playing on the TV over my shoulder. I could see the jabs of the red gloves reflected in her eyes. She said, “I never met her.”

Looking back, that sort of give-and-get was how we functioned. Or maybe that’s what I told myself about it— what we had wasn’t necessarily special, or passionate, but it was comfortable, and that comfort had worth. When we finally made it to the stop, we missed the first train, had to wait for the next. We sat in the joint of it where the cab bent with each turn of the rail carrying us toward my room. On the plastic bench, June tipped her head to my shoulder as if we’d been here before, and she knew this was the part of our trip she could put her weight on me. Straightening my posture, I cherished that moment of support. It wasn’t the last train, but it felt like it—the handful of passengers flirting with sleep, streetlights dragging lines across the black windows. The shins of my jeans were damp, her boots spotted with melting snow. I said, “When my dad was gone, we were broke. No food. Church clothes in trash bags. Dollar store Christmas. I remember asking my mom for seconds, how her voice pinched when she said No, baby.” “Your poor mother,” June said, “That would’ve killed me.”

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“I hated her for it.” Her right hand was engulfed between my palms as I tried to rub warmth into it. She told me I’d been too young to know better, but remembering it sat heavy in me. Work had put the analysts from my branch up in a hotel in the Financial District, the kind of place where the doorman removed his flat cap as he pulled back the handle of the entry, saying, “Welcome home.” In the elevator, she kissed me on my Adam’s apple. “My father left me in a hotel bar once,” she said. “He’d hit it off with the waitress and figured I’d be okay watching the Ray’s game while he went up to the room.” “Beer and a ballgame isn’t so bad.” “I was eight.” She raised a fist to me playfully, and I flinched.

The night before had been earnest—two strangers waiting for something to go wrong. When it didn’t, the very success of it had been exhilarating. The night before had been earnest—two strangers waiting for something to go wrong. When it didn’t, the very success of it had been exhilarating. She’d said, “Where’ve you been hiding?” I held her, wrapped in the sheet, feeling, in that moment, unafraid. Tonight, she dropped her coat on my suitcase, sat at the foot of my bed, and let me remove her boots. Sitting on the white comforter, the way her freckles decorated her pale skin, it felt like I was witnessing my own, personal sky. I skinned her jeans from her legs, bit her on the curve of flesh above her knee. She said, “It’s been so long since someone was hungry for me.” Her cesarean scar was hidden in the folds of skin indented by her waistband. I kissed that ruddy line, the swell of her hips, wanting to leave an impression pleasing enough that maybe, one day, she might allow me to retrace it. When we were done, I opened my eyes to the now-dark room. She became an arrangement of small points gathering the ambient light—a white tooth, a steel nose ring, her blue eyes wet, reminded me of the color of raven’s wings in the predawn sky, how they gathered around the dumpster behind the grocer as I dug through discarded produce, looking for something edible to bring to school. My ear to

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her collarbone, I could hear her heartbeat slowing. I said, “What’s it like to be with you? I mean to really be with you.” “It’s a lot of obligations,” she said. “I’m no fun.” I said fun was overrated, that being boring is better with company, and June grinned—cheeks creasing to make way for her lips, her teeth. She said, “It would be.” I woke when she asked me how much later my flight was, the sun still low in the curtains. She was already dressed, and I felt self-conscious as the fabric of her attire rubbed against my naked body. I’m not someone who attracts people. I’m not magnetic. I’ve had to chase every relationship in my life. Yet, I tire so quickly. It’s easy to look back and see the worth of the moments I no longer have access to, but to feel the value of something while contained by it—I was blind. I thought of you when I lied to June, when I said my flight was soon, that we should split a cab. Standing in the airport, she slipped my boarding pass from my pocket, saw that I wouldn’t depart for another six hours. I said, “What’s the harm?” Later, before she boarded, June said, “It’s not crazy to think it could work, is it?” “Would you wait?” “Where am I going to go?” She hefted the strap of her duffle bag over her shoulder. Her eyes edged with red, and in them, I saw a fear that resonated in me. She stepped toward the line, and said it again, trying to lift her tone with a lilt that sat strangely in her throat. “Where am I going to go?”

It’s hard to think that the last time I saw you, you didn’t know I was leaving. We were at Izzy’s, had just eaten duck hearts pan-seared in butter and thyme, served on toothpicks. Our homework was spread on the checkered tablecloth, and after I helped you with your spelling, you started drawing birds in a field. When Izzy wasn’t cooking, he’d come out and chat with us. He’d grown fond of your appetite and my willingness to bring you there. That day, you asked him if we could buy hearts from the market so we could make the dish ourselves, and he said of course not—they don’t sell duck hearts at the grocery store. He put his hand on my shoulder blade, grinning, said, “Besides, I can’t afford to lose my best customers.”

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Your voice pitched as if you didn’t believe him. You said, “Sure we can; they have all kinds of meat at Giant.” Izzy said, “Just the hearts? You go ahead and try, mister.” You lined up your colored pencils in front of you, said, “Where do you get them?” I said, “He buys whole ducks, Carl.” You picked up a pencil, started drawing the sun over your landscape. “They’re so small. You buy a whole duck just to get that little bit?” Izzy had a laugh like a car starting. He said, “What do you think goes into those ravioli your mom likes so much? What do you think was in that terrine you ate last week?” “I don’t know,” you shrugged. “Chicken?”

She hefted the strap of her duffle bag over her shoulder. Her eyes edged with red, and in them, I saw a fear that resonated in me. She stepped toward the line, and said it again, trying to lift her tone with a lilt that sat strangely in her throat. “Where am I going to go?” We laughed, and Izzy mussed your hair. You put your brown curls back in order. As he headed back to the kitchen, he cleaned his fingers on the towel tucked in his apron strap. We came out of Izzy’s, and you stuck your hand out, instinctively, waiting for me to take it before you stepped off the stoop. Your hand was cold and damp, felt like a ball of metal against my palm. We got in my old Toyota that your mother couldn’t believe was still running. I’d dropped a grand into the transmission, but everything else worked fine, and you liked it because the rear window went high enough that you could see the sky from your car seat. I kept a bottle of hand sanitizer in my cup holder, would clean my hands before I drove. If I’m being honest, the thin film of food and spit that constantly lined your hands bothered me, and I used to dread the moment you reached out. That morning, while you were at school, I loaded my clothing into the trunk. I didn’t know I could fit the mass of my possessions in the trunk of a two-door. I helped you get your backpack straps over your shoulders and walked you across the street. On your stoop, you yanked your hand free from mine, and I said that I was going to run some errands, that I’d see

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you later. I’d never lied to you before, but I needed the mercy of that escape. You didn’t notice—your mind on home, your video games, the chili that Lane was making. I could smell the cayenne pepper from the front step, and when you opened the door and passed over the threshold, a whisper of her crept out, maybe in the dining room setting the table, or in the bathroom washing her hands. At once, the choreography of movements through your home was familiar and fleeting—slowly, a step will change, and then another, and the only thing I’ll know of it is a memory, and can you hold a memory? Can you raise it up?

It took seven months and a pay cut, but I got transferred to June’s division in Tampa. In that time, we emailed through the day, spoke on the phone when she could find time after she put her son to bed. Twice, I flew to Florida to spend a day with her while her ex-husband had visitation. She was waist-deep in her divorce, had so little time between adjusting to full custody and getting her son into pre-K that, the months before my move, we spoke less and less. My last visit, she’d said I shouldn’t resettle for her alone, but I told her that I needed a change in setting, that I felt stuck in DC, that the vestiges of older lives were too heavy. We’d gone to the Dali museum in St. Pete, spent the afternoon walking along the water, drank Modelos at a corner bar. I’d told her about you before, that my ex had a son whom I spent years with. Sitting on the patio, looking across the beach to the thin strip of opaque blue water that underlined a blood-red sky, she said, “It wasn’t a relief to you?” “Sure. Not at first, but a while later,” I said, peeling the gold foil off the neck of the bottle. “It never felt like work. Or maybe it did. It’s easy to forget inconveniences. How they felt.” “That’s definitely a luxury,” June said. “We’re going to have to pull over on the way back. Clear beer makes me piss a lot.” When we got in the rental car, she put her hand on top of mine. I said, “I think I’ve just always been so willing,” and she leaned across the console and rested her temple on my shoulder. For forty minutes, we drove in a silence that became the purpose I’d been missing since those afternoons with you. A few months later, my first day in her office, she met me in the stairs on the way to our floor. It had been ten days since we spoke, but I was propelled by the memory of that quiet. June started

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a dozen different conversations, leaning off her perch on the step above me. When I put my hand on her waist to steady her, I felt her flinch at my touch—a slight, electric pulse from her hipbone, through her belt loop, into my palm. “I should have told you sooner,” she said. The air in the stairwell was strange and warm. “I’m sorry—I didn’t think it was going to last. But he lives down the street.” After work, I drove to my two-bedroom and parked in the space designated for my address. Evening descended with the pulse of car horns from the neighboring highway and the grating sound of planes cutting toward TPA somewhere distant on the naked horizon. I’d wanted to be angry, but I understood June was protecting herself, her family, knew it in the same way that I know I’ll disappear into my too-big condo and wait for a small change to unbuild me. Sitting in the car, it’s hard to know I won’t be anything for you. I’ll just be someone who held your hand once while you were afraid. Cuiadado. Take care. The streetlamps in the corners of the lot bring light to the night encroaching on my car. And though I know that no one is waiting, I can’t bring myself to linger.

DAVID E. YEE is an Asian American writer whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI Online, Seneca Review, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. In 2017, he won the New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, judged by Colm Tóibín, as well as the Press 53 Flash Contest judged by Jeffrey Condran. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Ohio State University, where he was associate editor of The Journal. He’s a bartender in Columbus, Ohio.

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SHORT STORIES | Tsipi Keller, “The Horse”

Ranjan Adiga, “Bombay Curry Kitchen” | Christine Canady, “The Exhibitionist” Chris Helvey, “A Portage” | David E. Yee, “Fontanelle” Daniel Davis, “The Dreams You Dream Must Be Your Own”

ESSAY | Sarah Courteau, “Toilet-Paper Rose”

David Armand, “Mirrors” | John Backman, “A Reluctant Ecstasy” Kim McFarden, “Faking It in Seven Disciplines”

POETRY | Kelli Russell Agodon | Cara Losier Chanoine | Whitney Rio-Ross

COVER ART | 43: Faces of Ayotzinapa Rubén Torres is a Mexican-born, self-taught artist. He began his artistic career when he was only eight years old. He mastered various art techniques ranging from oils to fresco, charcoal to acrylic, among others. The work of Maestro Rubén Torres is in public and private collections in Mexico and the United States. He has had numerous exhibitions in both countries, both solo and collective. His current project, 43, memorializes the forty-three college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, who in 2014 were on their way to a political demonstration. Their buses were stopped and students were reportedly placed in police cars. They have not been seen since.