Editor: Amanda Lewis The following stories have been previously published, some in different forms: “The Window is a Mirror” in Fifth Wednesday Journal “Edwin Floating” in Pif Magazine “Stump” in Avalon Literary Review “The Devil-Ape of Goma” in Calliope “Fifteen Tops” in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change “Soft Power” in Euphony “Tea Party” in The Writing Disorder “Drambuie Tam” in Whisperings “Julian’s Crunchy Apotheosis” in Total Quality Reading
the window is a mirror Copyright © 2018 Michael Andreoni All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by BHC Press under the Gelan imprint Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930625 ISBN: 978-1-947727-38-0 (Softcover) ISBN: 978-1-948540-38-4 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-948540-39-1 (Ebook) Visit the publisher: www.bhcpress.com
table of contents 9
stump 14
the window is a mirror 26
edwin floating 47
drambuie tam 59
julian’s crunchy apotheosis 78
pastoral 85
possum haw 96
moving day 108
brown black no ink 120
the devil-ape of goma
129
consolidated freight 139
fifteen tops 148
soft power 153
the symmetry of children 159
tea party 167
the approach to the bridge
stump
THE KEFTS were on the right, and their windows documented everything. On the other side Craig and Jada Appelton practically lived on their deck, smirking into lemonades as he, Gordon Ing, finance guy, city lover, chopped tree roots outside his new house in this wasteland between city and country. The horrible compromise Sheri stuck him with. Which was unfair both to him and her, but marital compromises ran that way, and now he had this three-foot-wide sprouting stump Craig Appelton called a birch, as though defining it revealed anything useful. Too bad no one said anything useful back in May before Gordon felled the overgrown tree with the brand-new $400 chainsaw he’d never in his life desired. Less than a month later the stump rose again like an arboreal vampire. A foot-long tangle of green shoots waved from the top. He cut them off—they came back thicker. “Don’t you know birch regenerate?” Ed Keft shouted from his lawn tractor, rumbling past on his weekly ten-minute conquest of the one-sixteenth-acre Keft Estate. The stump grinder guy (what did a stump grinder look like?) said no. The utility lines were buried too close. If he called Miss Dig, maybe then, though only if Gordon agreed to pay extra, because it was ~ 9 ~
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more time getting the equipment in and out when the houses were so close together, and I’m really busy right now, the guy said, and it’s a big stump, and, and, and finally, and. Gordon already had paid what he considered a ridiculous amount to have the tree carcass hauled away, so the first lost summer Saturday had been framed by shelling out for an axe, two shovels, a pair of heavy gloves, plus something that looked like a pick but was called a mattock. “Do you want me to help?” Sheri offered when he came in before lunch to lie on the couch and rest his aching back. She hit exactly the same tone as the two previous Saturdays, leaning against the wingback, watching him with both hands supporting that enormous belly. Gordon flipped onto his side with his face pressed into the back cushions to consider if this was her reproach. He could just imagine the neighbors getting an eyeful of very pregnant Sheri ponderously clambering down the hole he’d excavated around the stump.
THE PRINCIPAL lesson Gordon had taken from a big-city internship was the importance of scale. Big-city banks were bigger. The happy harvest of that simple datum—the larger salaries—was chaff under Sheri’s feet. Nothing in their marriage had so shocked Gordon as her pronouncing “We’re not raising kids in the city” in the midtown cafe he remembered as the last place they had eaten good bread. It was as though she saw no connection between his assistant vice presidency at tiny Redfield Savings and the gooey tuna salad on supermarket squish-bread sandwiches they chewed for lunch. Linoleum floor tract homes on postage stamp lots had not figured in their discussions of the future. The assumption he had once thought mutual, of artisanal foods, a nanny, and the ability to hire any service needed, now belonged to another couple. He began digging in June. By mid-August the stump was almost completely undermined yet wouldn’t budge. Ed Keft came over on his ~ 10 ~
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tractor dragging a chain one Saturday, and Craig and Jada Appelton descended from their deck to shout encouragement as he spun his wheels smoking hot. The irresistible whine of tortured machinery drew neighbors from up and down the street, prompting Sheri to tote out their entire supply of discount Merlot. Everyone stood around marveling at how tenaciously this hunk of wood and root clung to its native soil. They held paper cups bled through with purple stigmata, spoke of gorgeous weather, the ruinous cost of swim camp—kids whooped through the maze of adults ringing the stump. Gordon periodically snuck in the house to nip from the bottle of Absolut which clung less tenaciously to its native shelf in the freezer. Later on, he jumped into the hole to pantomime painful weekends severing roots and trenching. Explosions of mirth greeted his demonstration of the disinterment and subsequent escape from a nest of stinging ants. He’d never been funnier, except the laughter quickly became cloying; the sun and the booze had given him a headache. “I’m sick of it,” he said, gesturing at the stump, but he was a little drunk, and his hand betrayed him in encompassing the neighbors, Sheri, their unborn child, and all the little houses in their open-plan development. A root plunged deep under the house out to the street. It went left at the stop sign and ran a hundred miles alongside the Amtrak Commuter into the city. Gordon never found out where it ended because the Appeltons appeared with Ed Keft in tow. They were grossly pregnant and floated just above his nose, chanting, Nobody put a gun to your head. He woke sweating an acrid vodka redistillation that had Sheri shifting uncomfortably until her belly pronged him. And that, whatever else had been cut away, still left him a stump on another tinny tuna Saturday. He sat hunched over the new secondhand kitchen table, watching Sheri load leftovers into a plastic container. “Plenty left for dinner,” he could almost hear her thinking, but more to the point, could he imagine anyone worse than him? The cards dealt,
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the game just beginning, and he was ready to cash out. “Are you going back out to work?” she asked. He instantly calculated in the cant of her eyes, the set of her jaw, if she meant it as a test. But the dishrag was in her hand. She wanted to wipe the table. “I suppose I must.” A forearm hid his face in classic imitation of an overemoting actor. He got the voice just right: the patient acquiesces to another unpromising biopsy. Sheri tittered obligingly while decrumbing, and Gordon slipped out to consider the plan of attack. Craig Appelton had dropped a word at the “party” as though bestowing a magic talisman. Taproot: A large root running straight down from the middle. Cut that and the stump would roll over and die, ol’ Craig promised. Crouched on all fours with his head pressed into the dirt—Gordon could see it, gnarled and thick, yet oddly vulnerable with the other roots and the dirt removed. This was the secret heart exposed. This was the mouse squirming in the trap. He choked up on the axe, tapped the root as a test. It was tough, though just another root after all. A dozen strokes would kill it. He already thought of it in past tense. A hunk of wood weighing three, maybe four hundred pounds, needed to be disposed of. Gordon was pretty sure the Tuesday trash service wouldn’t take it, even if he got Ed and Craig to help with humping it from the backyard out to the street. The dirt pile as tall as him needed shifting back, smoothing, grass seeding—Christ, and watering every day. Gordon sat on the stump and had a look at his house and yard. It was indistinguishable from any other in the complex but for the stump. That they could end up staying here long enough to raise children seemed weirdly possible. That he might die in this house, with this tiny yard, was awful.
THE TRICKY part was grading the dirt around the mound so the lawn mower could roll over it cleanly. He’d get enough jokes from the neighbors about his “hill” without the added embarrassment ~ 12 ~
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of scalping the grass. Late afternoon thunderclouds were massing by the time Gordon called it finished. The rake fell from his hand as he collapsed onto the mound. He saw lightning scythe a promise to the seed buried under him. The grass would soon cover the bare mound, and maybe something buried deeper would sprout with it. He’d mow it down every week, the grass, and the other. All the hopeful little shoots poking up in search of larger destinies, for years, decades—Gordon felt he could bear it for as long as the stump remained rooted. It, he, would abide, and do everything expected, until he appeared as featureless as the houses. Fat drops smacked the mound with the pop of a boxer punching a bag. The soil darkened under questing trickles that quickened the grass seed before sinking deeper. Gordon got up to a thunderous fanfare just in time to see the rain drive Craig Appelton off his deck. He smiled and wondered if ol’ Craig had a secret like him. Maybe everyone in every house had a secret, and that’s how you did it, day by day, that’s how you slept at night, with your backyard dreams buried deep. Sheri was bent over the bed folding laundry when he came in to strip off his filthy clothes. She straightened carefully. Her weary smile was a hundred miles off. “Did you finish your project?” He traveled at least that far in kissing her. “No more stump.” She passed him something from the basket, an impossibly small white top trimmed in pink. Her smile came closer, turned impish. “Just in time.” Rain promised the roof while they folded and stacked.
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about the author
For nearly ten years Michael Andreoni lived as an itinerant farm laborer throughout Michigan. At times residing in barns, he nevertheless dreamt of a larger destiny, and behold! He became a janitorial contractor. Twenty years later he began writing. No one knows why. Instructed to write what you know, he found that tricky indeed when you’re a janitorial contractor. Better, he thought, to write something up-market, with highly educated characters habitually sore from working out with their personal trainers. He is convinced he will someday accomplish such a story. Until then he writes the life he knows.