FALLEN MONUMENT

Aspen Schuyler

I want to break— I want to shatter at the seams Of my perpetual dreams. A small fissure in time, Bleeding like ink, like wine In relentless memories.

Pain has a way of hurting Just right; Effervescent, always present, Always waiting For the wrong time. I wish to tear myself apart, Like I could burn every piece of you From me, Like I could take out the rot That destroyed the whole And start anew With pieces I’ve foraged myself.

How satisfying the shatter, the collapse, How much like a war cry, The sound of falling apart. All that is broken in me— Is you.

I am the rubble Of a rotten pillar that was once A formidable tree— The same rot that lives in you

Lives in me…

On The Origin Of My Brother

Yvonne Higgins Leach for Tim

In the collision of sperm and egg, a Creator said, Let him become. A bright mind, a storyteller, a lover of language, my brother is an ecosystem of contrasts. The pleasantries of life—an evening with family, a job well done, and the good storm of children—clash with the cement forests of too much drink, the oil spills of overeating, and the wildfires of gambling. He lives in a genetic landscape of addictions.

A life spent wanting another life.

When finally the seasons added up and the mountain breathed, he found a way beyond the dark and tired nights, beyond being the helpless animal forced from home. He planted a garden inside himself. He lives.

Alive And Alone

John Tustin

I am alive and I am alone, No longer beaten with fists or words, Now suffering in the silence of four walls With just one heart beating within.

Rain falls and the sky makes mud. I am alive and alone In this place where the air breathes stillness Into the grass that cannot stir.

I open a can and dump the contents Into a bowl and begin to eat. I am alive and alone, Watching television in the dark.

Outside a cat’s footsteps make noises In the wet night and she trods on unconcerned. I lie in bed, fat and older, limp and wiser, Alive and alone and the rain whispers the names

Of the living and the dead.

I am alive and alone, fat and older in the dark. I know this bed and these walls.

I close my eyes, reciting the names of the living and the dead.

I lie as still as the stillness of the air. I am alive and alone, The bed is a dead thing

Bloated and floating frowzily on a river of melted wax.

I am alive and alone.

I am alone and alive.

The rain leaves for a little while. The breeze does not return.

BLUE PLATE SPECIAL Russell Thayer

Maggie could almost hear the unlubricated gears screeching against each other inside Eve’s brain as the girl began to speak.

“Mrs. Bragana says y’all was a Jap prisoner.”

After rolling her eyes to their full extent, Maggie steered them toward Eve. The new waitress didn’t speak to her very often, but the gooey drawl of her hillbilly tongue, and the idiotic things she said when she did open her ugly mouth, encouraged Maggie to drive the tip of a long knife into the well-oiled board upon which she was chopping celery into fine bits for soup. She ground the tip slowly, turning the blade side to side until a rough shard of wood cleaved off.

“As you can plainly see, Eve, I do not possess an Oriental face. In fact, I am as pale as you are, with red hair and blue eyes. I fear we’re both drawn from the same European stock. However, since you brought up this painful topic from my recent history, I will tell you that I was a prisoner of the Japanese for a few years, if that’s what you meant to ask, and I wasn’t raped by any of their soldiers, if that’s what you’re going to ask me next.” That question often came right away, pouring out of curious strangers once they got wind of her past in the Philippines.

“I weren’t gonna ask that. That ain’t my business.” Eve took a cigarette from behind her ear, lighting it with the remains of the previous one. “You sure like to talk above me.”

It wasn’t hard. And was Eve judging her? Good heavens! Eve with her moldy teeth, still bright at the tips but an earthy shade of brown near the festering gums. Maggie imagined herself pushing them over one by one with her finger, like rotting fence posts. It didn’t help that Eve stood with her mouth open most of the time, breathing in raspy gusts, her breath as foul as the gas oozing from a bloated corpse disturbed at the side of a hot jungle road.

“Is it even possible for you to breathe around your septum?” Maggie asked. The stupid girl would have no idea.

“I dunno.”

“Through your nose,” said Maggie, with a smirk.

“No, ma’am, not much anyhow. Done been broke too many times.” Eve smiled for some reason.

“Don’t call me ma’am,” said Maggie. “I’m younger than you are, in case you hadn’t noticed, and we’re both waitresses here, making the same wages, as galling as that sounds.”

Eve just stood there, stupid, on the opposite side of the steel table, assembling salads in the kitchen before the dinner rush claimed their time, making eyes at the new dishwasher, a muscular Italian boy bent over the deep sink, his thick black hair shiny with grease or sweat.

“Ain’t he cute?” said Eve in her strident voice, knowing the boy could hear her. He moved his broad shoulders unnecessarily as he scrubbed at a pot with steel wool and cleansing powder.

Maggie flicked her cigarette into a garbage pail.

“Yes, and he looks quite capable of breaking your nose again, if that’s what interests you.”

Eve turned her enormous green eyes toward Maggie.

“What y’all talkin’ ’bout?” The curve of her high, pale cheeks seemed to darken, and Maggie almost felt mean for hating her.

“Never mind.”

Eve came from Tennessee, another dumb hick left behind in San Francisco after the long war detonated to a fiery end in the skies above Nagasaki. She’d worked in a munitions factory before peacetime set her free, and she couldn’t find her way back to Tennessee because she probably couldn’t read a map, if she could read at all. Her nose leaned to one side, giving her a thrown-away quality that most likely wasn’t far off the mark. Her teeth rotted in her head, her breath like poison, but Maggie could see from the rest of the tall girl, by the way she wore her yellow uniform, the buttons straining at her chest like the painted women on the covers of the pulp novels Maggie sometimes took off the rack at the back of the pharmacy, by the wide curve of her hips, the soft lemon curls, that for all her observable faults, she had a carnal effect on men that Maggie never would possess. Her own uniform, the color of mustard, hung limply over a thin frame that had been compared more than once to that of a young boy. The owner of narrow sarcastic lips, Maggie marveled at Eve’s heavy pair, lips men would ache to kiss, to feel on their bodies. Movie-star lips. Maggie scrubbed her pits and crotch every morning in an attempt to smell fresh when she came to work, and she’d tried to cut down on the cigarettes, but that didn’t mean much to a world in heat. Being refined didn’t matter at all. No one cared what clever thing she said or how well she played the piano. Personal evaluation was rendered now by the amount of tingle one felt between the legs. It was that kind of a world.

And Maggie knew Eve earned better tips.

“You are the stupidest girl I’ve ever known,” Maggie said, her finger in Eve’s face. “Can’t you even add up two lines of a check properly? Why do I have to do all your thinking for you? That bowl of minestrone soup has more intellect. OW. GOD DAMN IT.”

The sudden jolt of pain made Maggie snap her head around. Mrs. Bragana had flicked the back of her ear with one of her muscular fingers.

“You leave-a dat girl alone. She have a hard life. As hard as you, you proud thing.”

Maggie thought about rolling her eyes, which she often did with great exaggeration, but Mrs. Bragana held a ladle in her hand, and that could sting Maggie’s bony arms.

Rubbing the throbbing cartilage at the side of her head, she decided she’d start wearing her hair down over her ears if the woman was going to appear behind her back every time she rebuked an incompetent fellow worker.

“You apologize to Eve. You be nice to her or I kick-a you out on the street.”

“I really doubt she’s had a harder time of it than I have.”

“You go make-a nice or I kick-a you out.”

Maggie rolled her eyes finally.

“Please don’t kick-a me out. Jesus Christ.”

She shared the apartment above the restaurant with Mrs. Bragana, working nearly every hour of every day for the old thing. They tended to treat each other like mother and daughter, which meant they often bickered out of love. Eve lived in a rough boardinghouse on Van Ness, but had struck the restaurant owner in a profound way, almost as much as Maggie had. Maggie knew that Mrs. Bragana would never kick her back out onto the street, that the restaurant would cease to function if the woman fired her smartest waitress, but she turned up her nose and marched over to where Eve now stood facing a wall by the toilet, out of earshot, her head down, cigarette burning in her fingers. Maggie tapped a shoulder, and when Eve turned to pout down at the freckled face, Maggie whispered a filthy joke she’d learned from a man standing over her as she sat at the bar of the Can-Do Club one evening, cadging drinks while waiting for the music to start. She figured Eve would understand the joke because it was crudely graphic in the description of a man’s genitalia, and Eve must have seen a lot of that. Maggie was hardly surprised when the tall woman guffawed, laying an arm across Maggie’s shoulders while coughing out an atomic cloud of cigarette smoke.

When Maggie turned, looking for approval, Mrs. Bragana nodded, the apology acknowledged. Maggie then made a slight curtsy toward the woman, who groaned as she returned to the dining room.

“Cain’t we be friends?” Eve asked, smiling down at Maggie. “I can look after y’all. And y’all can look after me.”

“I can’t imagine the circumstances where I’d need your looking after,” said Maggie with a sigh, “but it’s a deal, as long as my ears are left in peace by the both of you.”

Mr. Mancini winked at Maggie as she set a plate of veal in front of him. She didn’t mind the customers flirting with her, especially the ones who tipped like Mr. Mancini. The man liked her for some reason, though he only winked, never touching her bottom, which was something the other waitresses often complained about. He probably couldn’t spot her rump under the limp folds of her uniform.

Suddenly, Maggie had an idea. Mr. Mancini had mentioned once that he made his money while bent over a dentist’s chair. Maggie dropped into the seat opposite him, a bold move in Mrs. Bragana’s highly respectable establishment, looking over her shoulder with mock jumpiness, to show Mr. Mancini that this was a moment of major significance. The man appeared to be in his late thirties, thin, with dark hair just turning to gray over his ears. He had once mentioned to Maggie quite pointedly that he was unmarried, though she wasn’t sure she believed him. He didn’t really want her, but she never fought back when he made off-color suggestions. Tips were tips.

“Mr. Mancini, sir, you’re a dentist if I remember correctly. Is this true?”

“Why yes, my dear. I didn’t think you cared.”

“I’ve just begun to.” Maggie studied his face. “You don’t look like the sort of man who would hit a woman out of frustration with her blind stupidity.”

“What does a man like that look like, I wonder?”

“He looks like the sort of man who would have to deal with me.”

“I see,” said Mr. Mancini. “What are you getting at? And I would never hit a charming girl like you if we become friends.”

“I’m much more interested in whether there’s anything that can be done for teeth that seem to be rotten at the roots?”

Mr. Mancini stared back at Maggie with confusion.

“Your teeth look healthy to me. Is the crookedness affecting your bite? I could recommend a man to help you straighten them with wire bands. I have to warn you, though, that the treatment is an expensive and somewhat uncomfortable ordeal.”

“Thanks for your professional observations, but I wasn’t talking about my mouth.”

“Who then, my dear?” Mr. Mancini smiled.

Eve hovered over two elderly women at the next table. Maggie pointed her eyebrows toward the waitress, turning to watch Eve walk away, hips rolling like the swells off the beach at Sunset Park.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The new girl. Magnetic physical appearance. Pity about her teeth.”

“Could you do anything for her?”

“I suppose so. It may be costly. Especially if we have to consider false teeth. Can she pay for it?”

Maggie leaned forward in the chair, putting her hands on the dentist’s thighs under the table. He twitched, his eyes growing wide with attention, but didn’t push her hands away.

“May I tell you something, sir?” she whispered.

Mr. Mancini wiped his lips with the red-and-white checkered napkin from his lap, then nodded.

“She likes men a whole lot more than I do.”

“I see. What exactly are you proposing?”

“I’m not proposing,” said Maggie. “I’m promoting, if you get my drift.”

“Are you her manager?”

“Let’s just say I have all of our interests at heart.”

Mr. Mancini swallowed awkwardly. “How old are you, if I may ask?”

“I’ll be nineteen in four months.”

Though Maggie did not believe in miracles, certain that everything in her life happened for a discoverable reason, she clasped her hands together in mock piety when she discovered, while looking at the restaurant work schedule one afternoon, that she and Eve both had the day off on the Friday following Thanksgiving. The reason for this miracle was that Mrs. Bragana had decided to close the restaurant in order to visit a sister in Oakland.

It wasn’t hard to convince Eve, who appeared to have no friends or family, to come out shopping with her best girlfriend that Friday afternoon, though neither of them had money to squander on new things.

After pawing through the stockings and pocketbooks at the City of Paris department store on Union Square, Maggie suggested they take a bus west to Fillmore Street and grab some lunch at the Balboa Cafe. She offered to pay for Eve’s meal, which made the girl smile and nod with excitement. Eve admitted that she hadn’t been out to lunch with anyone female in years.

“Are you seeing someone?” Maggie asked casually after the two of them were seated in a booth by the front window of the Balboa, then offered menus and a plate of cut bread with butter pats.

“Huh?”

Maggie finished chewing a bite of bread, then swallowed, then took a sip from her water glass, then coughed delicately into her fist.

“Is there a man in your life?”

“You mean like a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” said Maggie. “Congratulations. That’s exactly what I mean.”

Eve made a cheerless face, turning it toward the window. “Naw. My last man run out on me three months ago. I ain’t had a tumble since.”

“That’s a very sad story. You’re a pretty girl. You should grab every opportunity for love.”

“Anybody ballin’ you regular, Miss Maggie?”

“That’s none of your business, Eve.”

“Sorry.”

They picked up their menus at this awkward point and became interested in the wide assortment of non-Italian dishes on display. Maggie was grateful that she didn’t have to embarrass Eve by telling her to turn the menu right side up.

Growing a little anxious about the timed arrival of Mr. Mancini, Maggie scanned the restaurant around the sides of her menu. The man was a dentist. He ought to respect the concept of keeping an appointment.

A middle-aged waitress stood with her hand on her hip, glaring out the front window, tapping her pencil on the table as she waited for Maggie to order. Maggie slowly read each item on the menu out loud, one eye cocked for the appearance of Mr. Mancini, who arrived just in time to save her the four dollars she would otherwise have to spend on lunch for herself, and of all people, Eve. Mr. Mancini soon spotted Maggie, waving like an idiot before ambling toward the table with exaggerated nonchalance.

“Mr. Mancini? Is that you?” Maggie snagged his passing wrist. “What a surprise. Would you join us for lunch?” She giggled. “Every time we see you, it’s in a restaurant.”

“Why, hello, Maggie. Good heavens! And Eve. You’re both looking very pretty today. Certainly, I’ll join you, if I’m not interrupting your silly girl talk.”

Maggie slid out, letting Mr. Mancini squeeze in on her side of the booth.

“Are you folks ever gonna order?” asked the waitress.

“Give us a few minutes, please,” Maggie said as she took a seat next to Mr. Mancini, dismissing the waitress with a wave of her fingers. The waitress stormed away, incensed, unlikely to return any time soon.

“What brings you young ladies out on the town?” asked Mr. Mancini. “Am I tipping you too much?” He laughed. Maggie rolled her eyes. Eve looked frightened.

“We’re not slaves,” said Maggie. “We have lives, as simple as they may seem to you.”

“Ah, the noble waitress.”

“I won the Far East Chopin Piano Competition in Shanghai when I was just thirteen.”

Mr. Mancini glanced at Eve.

“What are you going to order, my dear, now that it’s your turn to be waited on?”

Eve picked up her menu, every thought probably gone from her head. She stared at Mr. Mancini. Then she smiled. It was done.

“My goodness.” Maggie rubbed her temples. “A severe headache has come upon me rather quickly. I think I’m going to trot home to my bed.” She sighed as she stood, watching Eve’s face grow fearful again. “Mr. Mancini, can I trust you to get Eve home safely?”

“Of course, you can. We’ll have a nice lunch here, and then maybe Eve will agree to take a walk with me up Telegraph Hill.”

Maggie intended to kill a few hours playing the piano in the apartment before making a little dinner for herself in the deserted kitchen.

“Oh, I think Eve would love a walk,” she said. “She has very strong legs.”

On a slow spring afternoon, in a corner of the quiet kitchen, Maggie leaned against the dish caddy, holding a heavy white coffee mug in both hands, staring at the wall.

Mrs. Bragana breezed into the room, tying an apron behind her back.

“Eve just telephone, tell-a me she quit. She pregnant. She getting-a married to that dentist what fix-a her teeth. Mr. Mancini. I no believe it.”

Maggie took a long sip, then set the mug on the metal counter.

“I hope it lasts, I really do, but girls like Eve are the Blue Plate Special of love.”

“Eh? Sometimes you make-a no sense. No wonder you got-a no husband.”

“A cheap meal changed daily,” said Maggie, feeling her tart analogy turning into weak tea.

Mrs. Bragana sighed with impatience, shaking her head. “And when-a you done with your daydream, you put-a the WANT HELP sign in window. We need a new girl. Pronto.”

“Why don’t we just forget the sign, Mrs. B.,” said Maggie, giving the coffee mug a little spin. “I’m the only help you’ll ever need.”