Bryant Literary Review Volume 25 (2024)

EDITOR: Tom Roach

POETRY EDITOR: Eric Paul

FICTION/CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR: Tom Roach

STUDENT FICTION EDITORS: Audrey Jones (Class of 2024) and Olivia Soffey (Class of 2026)

STUDENT POETRY EDITORS: Sarah Lostowski (Class of 2025) and Christy Mak (Class of 2025)

MANAGING EDITORS: Rebeca Marcus and Adriana Minacapilli

DESIGN & LAYOUT: Rebecca Chandler, beccachandler67@gmail.com

COVER ART: “Speechless” by Liam Dubeau (Class of 2026)

MISSION STATEMENT: The Bryant Literary Review is an international journal of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction housed in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University in Smithfield, RI. Since our first issue in 2000, we have published original and thought-provoking creative work from a wide array of established and emerging authors. We see our purpose to be the cultivation of an active and growing connection between the Bryant University campus community and the larger literary culture.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Authors can submit their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction work here: https://bryantliteraryreview.submittable.com/submit. Limit one submission per author: one fiction or creative nonfiction piece and up to three poems. Fiction and creative nonfiction pieces should not exceed 5,000 words (give or take). We do not accept previously published work. Our reading period is September 1 to December 1.

Copyright reverts to author upon publication. For samples of previously published work see https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/blr/. Any questions can be directed to Professor Tom Roach at troach@bryant.edu.

Visit our website at https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/blr/ © 2024 Bryant Literary Review

Editor’s note

The Tortured Poets Department is the title of Taylor Swift’s next album, and the irony is not lost on me. Or for that matter on any faculty member of a college Humanities department these days. In the face of gale-force headwinds, Humanities programs around the country are dealing with shrinking enrollments and dwindling budgets. Literary journals spring up & then die. They come and go with the seasons, rarely lasting more than a couple of years. I started the Bryant Literary Review back at the turn of the millennium. The fact that it has thrived for a full quarter of a century is simply astonishing. Congratulations!—Here’s to 25 more years!

On one particular day when I taught at Bryant, I was having a tough time starting up discussion and so said to my class “OK, I’m just going to step outside, then come back in and we’ll begin all over again fresh.” Exasperated, I closed the door behind me, only to hear it click shut and lock me out in the corridor. Is there a metaphor here? Probably not, but when my students let me back in the room, our talk was lively, because the ice was now broken—and because, given the opportunity, people really are actually, truly interested in trading stories about human situations, their stories, the Humanities.

In this 25th Anniversary Edition, you will find carefully curated work that has been culled from hundreds of submissions from around the planet. These poets (and fiction writers) may or may not feel tortured, but they are all talented. Find a comfortable chair and some good reading light. Then turn down the outside world for a while. I promise you will be glad.

Tom Chandler Tortured Poet Emeritus

Black Cherry

DARIA ROSE

June, 2022

Dnipro, Ukraine

Lilia

“Baby girl, time for breakfast!”

Mom’s OCD about making me eat every four hours. When I come down to the kitchen, she’s rubbing a grease stain off her blue Atlanta ‘96 tracksuit. “Now our poor yellow trident is gray from the oil.” The dining table greets me with four eggs, bread with butter, sautéed spinach, and Functional Training Anatomy from her Olympic days. I must read two pages with breakfast.

Our team didn’t qualify for Tokyo, so mom wants us at peak performance for Paris. She gives up on the stains and hands me a printout. I know what it is without looking at it. The last thing I need is another lecture on vertical pull exercises during the warmup. I beat her to it, “I’ll give it to the coach.”

Despite mother’s insistence, the coach refuses to train every girl on the team to perform fifteen pull-ups. I would do twenty myself to avoid another confrontation between the coach and my mother. I grab my duffel bag, pull my Adidas sweats on, drop the printout in the dumpster outside our house, off to practice.

Since March, the rowing team dwindled from twelve to four. Our class lost three students each week. Then teachers started to disappear too. The physicist Arkadiy Anatolievich had to teach math. Next, the principal Larisa Illivna canceled “non-essential” classes, like computer science. Alfisa Mikolaivna became a software engineer in Warsaw.

By the end of April the three remaining teachers taught math, Ukrainian, and domestic labor, where the girls sewed and the boys sawed. School disbanded at the beginning of May, four weeks ahead of schedule. I still attended the rowing practice daily, 6 am sharp. Our coach Mikhail Afanasiyevich said he’d rather die in an air-raid than leave Dnipro.

What did we train for? The Ukrainian leagues dissolved. To attend the European championship we’d have to travel through Lviv, which was too risky for a field trip. No teacher would take responsibility for twenty girls at the border, where we’d wait in line for weeks with thousands of others leaving the country. I’ve seen it on Telegram: moms holding up two toddlers each, kids wrapped in ten layers of jackets mid-summer to save space in the carry-on suitcases, crates with wailing cats and howling dogs, grim Polish border guards in yellow vests. It’s not a place you’d want to be.

I pass by my school. The windows are boarded up. The soccer field outside turned into a nesting ground for some large birds, gray and ugly-looking. They shriek louder than Doja Cat in my AirPods. Teachers promised us a real graduation next year. When I can’t sleep at night, I dream of the principal handing me a diploma in a sweaty orange-walled auditorium. As I walk the stage, mom applauds and beams with pride. I couldn’t care less about the piece of paper. The ceremony would mean that everything had fallen back into place in the world. I’d already spent half of high school stuck at home, Zooming in for classes or suffocating under a mask. Mom didn’t let me hang out with friends for two years. They’ll report it in the news, she said, if the senator’s daughter breaks official protocol. At least she let me continue rowing. Coach Mikhail Afanasievich had said he’d rather die from covid than stop the daily practice.

Now I feel like a brat complaining about covid. I’d attend Zoom classes forever if things could return to normal.

Was there ever a “normal” in our corner of the world? First came the Soviet Union, which, as my grandparents recounted, spanned the best time of their lives. (Mom thinks they’re just old and senile.) Dad said that perestroika was really dangerous. Mafia ran everything, and stores sold no food. Mom asked dad, “Why would you tell her about this?” After that, I’m not sure. Maybe that’s when things were “normal”? I was too young to know. When I was in second grade my mother brought me to the demonstrations. That was the first time I understood what a “country” meant: Ukraine, which is us, Russia, which is them, and that mom was upset that they tried telling us what to do. Someone shouted, the crowd roared, then a large boom, and mom put me under her armpit like a handbag and ran. It was 2014. Then my mother joined the parliament. Things were definitely not “normal” by then.

I turn the corner and walk into the gymnasium through the basement. They first closed the main entrance in February for glass repairs, providing the principal with a perfect pretext to keep it permanently closed without announcing the real, sadder reason.

When I return from practice, mother is standing by the window in my room. “Lilia, dear. We need to talk about leaving.”

I throw my duffel bag down, shoulders sore. Mikhail Afanasievich took mom’s advice—I suspect she called him—and at practice we competed for the most pull-ups. I posted the clip of my victory (17) on TikTok. It’s going viral. I scroll through the list of my new followers (+541) and mumble: “Leaving where? You said your job wouldn’t let you? And grandpa is too weak?” I scoop the chocolate whey powder and shake the bottle with my bruised right arm.

Mother’s eyes water, like an aerosol can. She wipes the tears with the back of her hand, “You leaving, Lilia. They let eighteen-year-olds leave without a guardian. The border is so crowded, nobody will recognize you as my daughter. We’ll ask Uncle Vanya in Warsaw to take you in for a while.” How can we have this conversation now? School just ended. I planned to sleep in and catch up with friends who still stuck around.

“Vanya is not even my real uncle! He’s just your friend. I won’t go without you. They might not let me back in. And grandpa ... No, I won’t go. Also, I’m tired from practice. Let’s not talk about this now.” Mother still sobs. I hate seeing her like this. What did I do wrong? She never used to cry, before this year. The first female parliament member from Dnipro. An Olympic champion. Two-time! Until this year I’d only seen my father cry, when grandma died from covid. Not mother. Now she cries all the time. Every day she returns from work sadder than before. Is she still my mother?

She wants us to separate. What kind of mother does that? Of course I’ll stay where my parents are. I crack open the window. The moon is hung by a string, like a 15kg plate rolled into a corner.

I fold my training gear and three pairs of Nikes into the duffel bag that I take to practice. What else do you bring when you’re fleeing the war? Mother managed to secure train tickets through someone at work. The trip normally takes a day. In recent months it

has extended to anywhere from four days to three weeks. They had to reroute the rails through the south to avoid coming close to Kyiv. The bombings make the trains stop every few hours. I’m scared. I don’t want to go. I hope that mom or dad join me last minute. I know it’s impossible. If mother is caught at the border it amounts to treason. They would throw her in jail, remove her from her position, revoke the medals. Dad won’t leave without her. I still hope.

Grandpa is worse every week. I won’t go while he’s still with us. Most of my classmates have already departed; our family is the exception. Some packed up for their second homes in Europe as soon as the war broke. Many deserted to Poland, where their parents found new jobs. I FaceTimed my friend Masha who now lives in Krakow. She said they call the city Little Kyiv. She already met a new boyfriend from Vinnytsia. But she also has to live in a one-bedroom apartment with her mom, dad, and brother Artem, who is kind of annoying. In Dnipro their red-brick house had a gate and a jacuzzi. Her parents nag her to find a job, which sucks. Masha wants to learn Polish but she hasn’t started yet. She hopes they’ll come back home soon.

Other people from my school moved to their grandparents’ houses in the countryside. They think it’s safer outside the city. I asked my mom if we could live in grandpa’s garden for the summer. We could pick strawberries and pluck plums from the tree. When I brought it up, mom cried and retreated to her room. Is she still my mother?

Thirty minutes later, mom knocks on my bedroom door again: “Lilia, my baby, we need to talk.” I know it’s about tomorrow, but I don’t want to think about it. When she opens the door, the Timotheé Chalamet poster falls off. Mom wouldn’t let me fasten it with real nails, only duct tape. Before I can respond, mother sits on the edge of my bed where I’m lounging in my Aviator Nation sweats. My friend Oksana mailed them to me from California for my birthday. Her father works at the parliament too. Mom said that they paid a lot of money to leave on a “work trip” in early March of 2022. She still posts selfies from her runs along the Santa Monica boardwalk.

Mom fights back tears. I can tell by the clench in her jaw. I pretend to read something on my phone until she calms down. It’s better for both of us if she doesn’t cry. “Lilia, I’ll write everything down for you, but you still need to listen. You’ll board the train to Lviv.

It might take days, maybe weeks, depending on where they bomb. In Lviv you’ll find the bus to the Polish border, where you’ll see thousands of people attempting to cross. But you won’t get lost. Everyone will be heading the same way…” I’m suddenly tired. Wish mom didn’t lecture me so much. I pull the shag throw over my head. No way I’m leaving alone, it won’t happen. She goes on, “…don’t listen to anyone. If you’re lost, ask mothers with young children for help. Don’t talk to men. Do not talk to any men. If somebody promises a faster way to cross the border, don’t engage. Wear a hat and sunglasses. You can’t let anyone see that you’re a beautiful young girl, alone. Or that you’re my daughter. Are you listening? Lilia, this is really important.” She unpeels me from the blanket.

I pretend to be annoyed and put my phone down, “Yes, yes, mom. I know. I’m not an idiot.”

Mother draws in a deep breath, “Okay. You’ll update me every few hours. Even if you are stuck on the train for days without moving. Lilia, I need to know where you are. You understand?” I can’t let myself cry either. I still can’t fathom that I’m leaving. It won’t happen. Tomorrow will be a normal day. I’ll watch some reels, maybe tidy my room, post my outfit on TikTok, talk to friends. A normal day.

Just for now, I play along: “Yes, okay. I will.”

Mom takes another deep breath, “In case the cell service stops working: once you pass the border with Poland they’ll place you in a hotel in Zamość. Uncle Vanya will drive from Warsaw to pick you up. You must not accept a ride from anyone else. People will offer to put you up in a nicer hotel. Just stay inside until Uncle Vanya arrives. The volunteers will provide you with food. Keep me updated at every step, I need to feel like I’m there with you.”

A weight presses down on my chest, like I’m sleepy, “Yes, mom. I’m not ten years old. I’ve gone on many trips without you.”

Mom grabs the collar of my sweater, “Lilia, this is not a rowing competition. Your coach won’t be there. I wish you took this more seriously.” I wish she didn’t yell. If she’s freaking out then I should definitely freak out too. One of us has to remain calm for the other, and I’d rather not shoulder that weight.

Mom and dad will drive me to the train station. I hear the 3 AM alarm blare in their bedroom. They went to bed at nine to attempt to feel rested for the drive. I decided it was easier to stay awake. My parents sit on my rolling suitcase while I crouch down on my duffel bag. It’s good luck to sit on your luggage before a trip. Except my parents aren’t actually leaving, so I’m not sure how that works. Dad sips his thick black coffee. Mom throws on a hoodie and covers her head with a hat and sunglasses. I laugh, “Nobody will recognize you in the middle of the night.”

Father smiles, “Sunglasses at three in the morning surely won’t make you more suspicious.”

Mother takes them off and taps her eyes, “It’s to cover the puffiness. Not for disguise.” We let it go. Too painful to see. I hope that when I leave she will feel a little less sad. That’s my main motive for doing it.

I also secretly hope that she’ll miss me too much and ask me to return. Her friends in the government found a way to leave, but she has too much integrity for that. “Reputation is everything in my line of work, Lilia.” I’m not sure if she means sports or politics. They seem pretty similar anyway. I hope that I’ll qualify for the Olympics too. I need to win, like mother did. Count me out on politics though. Too upsetting. I’d rather travel, live in New York, and have a million TikTok followers.

We climb into the SUV, and mom sits in the back with me. She hugs me so hard that my shoulder is sore. Her shirt is damp from crying. I’m slightly not there. Like I’m halfasleep.

My mind flashes to the TikTok dance I watched last night. Ksyusha, who I usually learn dance routines with, moved to Warsaw. I keep wanting to text her but can’t find the right words. I try to remember the arm movements and rehearse them from the back seat. Mom takes my hand, “Lilia, are you okay? What is happening?”

I wave helicopter hands, “Oh, nothing, just trying to remember a dance.”

Mom continues to stare at me. A few seconds later she bursts into laughter. Finally, I cheered her up.

As she laughs, she starts crying. Loud, heavy sobs. I’m not here. I’m watching the scene from outside the car, like a large bird that races the SUV in its flight, peeks into the

window. Mom squeezes my shoulders. I can’t exhale. It doesn’t matter. I’m already gone, so I don’t need to breathe.

Mom hands me my pink Lululemon sweatshirt. It feels bulkier than it should be. “I sewed Euros into the lining. It’s only so you can get to Poland. Once you meet Uncle Vanya he’ll give you more money. Don’t spend it unless it’s an emergency. Don’t tell anybody you have this. Lilia, do you hear me?” ***

For the past three days we’ve been stuck at three hundred kilometers away from Lviv. The train can’t move because they’ve been bombing the railroad. My friends have bombarded me with TikTok links and Instagram stories. They ask why I haven’t posted in a week. I’ve only responded to my mom. In seventy-two hours the texts have progressively shrunk from: “I’m doing ok. Still under Lviv. Ate the bublik you baked,” to three hours ago: “under lviv.”

Somehow the words don’t come. They stayed at home. In our SUV. On my bed. The words didn’t board the train. They didn’t try to fall asleep on the bottom bunk under the scratchy green-checkered blanket, while the engine whir-r-r-s on and off. Other people’s words flow across the invisible lines of the electric current. They touch me but bounce back, hitting a cube of transparent glass. There’s nothing there. My words are sealed tightly shut, a thousand kilometers away.

Red hand towels with gilded tassels hang on the hook by the door. I pour boiling water for tea. The train’s quiver swirls the porcelain cup into a mini-tornado. We traveled the same route two years ago to visit mom’s aunt in Rivne. Feels odd to take a luxury train to flee from the war. My legs ache with restlessness. I hadn’t missed a week of practice since I broke my wrist when I was thirteen. Even during covid I rowed at the lake every day. My body doesn’t know how to stay still. If I’m not moving it means I’m not there. My shoulders bear the weight of an invisible two-hundred-pound barbell, as if bracing for a deep squat. But the drop doesn’t come, and the weight disappears. Gasp. Mom is so far away.

I grasp for a word that would reach her across the tracks. The mental distance narrows, but the words stretch further away from her. I crack the window and stick my nose out. It smells like diesel and dead fowl. I ate all the food that mom packed in takeout containers.

Only a few bags of nuts and dried fruit left. Three times a day I buy baked goods from grandmothers who knock on my window. They live in the village where we’re stopped. They yell out, “pirogi, pirogi, pirogi,” like a piercing wail of a seagull in pain.

I’ll buy something out of pity. I eat. It’s mostly fried dough with a hint of leek and potato. We’re the ones trapped on a train, who knows where, for who knows how long. The grandmothers return home after they sell out the pirogi. Who should pity whom?

The greasy dough makes me sleepy. I doze off in my bed halfway through Chapter 30 of Anna Karenina. She’s on a train too. No point to slog through last summer’s reading list. Mother secured me a coupé, so at least I have some privacy. Closer to Kyiv, a mother with two kids joins me in the cabin. I have the bottom bunk facing the front of the train. Above me lies the woman’s son, probably seven or eight years old. The mother rests on the lower bunk across from me, and a little girl, maybe five, sleeps above her. Three tickets for a coupé—she must be the wife of someone important. I don’t know because we haven’t spoken. Last night the mom waved at me and gestured toward their cherry juice. I drank a cup. Over the past four days they hardly said ten words to each other. Only, “Slava, eat,” and “Ulya, time for bed.” The quietest children I have ever met. They just practice letters and numbers on their iPads or nap. Maybe their mother gave them something to keep them asleep all day (wish I had some too), or she frightened them to death before they got on. Maybe something else did. No shortage of terrors here.

At the border solo travelers are guided to a separate line. At first I hesitate to separate from the mother and the two children, but soon realize that we have no choice. Ulya waves her rooster lollipop at me from the family line. Only three other women with camping backpacks stand in front of me. When it’s my turn the blond man hands me a piece of paper with a stamp on it without asking a single question. It says something in Polish. I flip it over to English. I’m hereby granted temporary asylum in the European Union due to the urgent circumstances of the war. The war. The war. I need to call mom. I don’t want to think about mom not being here.

I text her. “got the documents. they’re taking us to the hotel.”

Ten seconds later mom responds, “thank god.” Then, a flurry of heart emojis. Then, “i love you. everything will be ok stay at the hotel until uncle vanya arrives tomorrow”

I know she needs to reassure herself more than me. My body sleeps at home. Soon I’ll wake up in my own bed. Mom will steam buckwheat kasha in the kitchen. Dad will be watching the morning news until I join them for breakfast. He’ll switch off the TV; my mother will put on her brave face. Normal day. I will pour a glass of orange juice and retreat to my bedroom, squandering the time I could have spent with them.

Thirty minutes of a bumpy bus ride later we arrive at Hostel Starówka. The Red Cross staff hands us the keys and bags with food. I’m worried they’ll make us share rooms. As I open the door, the wood bumps against the edge of a twin bed with beige bedsheets. I guess not. I hope not. Do they make people sleep on the floor? The shades are drawn, and an acid-yellow glow from the bathroom spills into a two-meter strip of light between the door and the bed frame. I throw my bags on the bed. Let’s see the food bag. I haven’t felt hunger since leaving home, but as an athlete I know I should force myself to eat. Guess I’m likely stressed. And sleep-deprived. Half-viscid chicken soup jiggles in a plastic container. A metal tray encases something sludgy like mashed potatoes, a chicken cutlet, and a vegetable stew that smells of dill and yogurt. In a gilded wrapper glints a package with a half-crushed Napoleon. I lick the custard and set aside the rest. I lie down on the floor. The bathroom light brushes my feet. It’s nice to be alone. In the past three days I’ve seen thousands of people. I text mom, “at the hotel. going to .”

When his blue Prius pulls over outside Hostel Starówka, Uncle Vanya resembles a young man, someone I could be friends with. His Air Force 1’s and a black crew neck feel out of place in the mid-July heat. His disheveled hair and dark sunglasses make him look both younger and older than I remember. As if he partied ten nights in a row. Doubt that’s what happened. More likely the opposite: he slept too little and worked too much.

I last saw him during a New Year’s party at our house. He brought his new girlfriend, the founder of a popular brand of fisherman sandals made of sustainable leather. Anita smelled expensive and wore a beige cashmere tunic three sizes too big. Vanya and Auntie Bohdana divorced five years ago when their son Alik and I attended seventh grade. Alik

seemed thrilled by the divorce. Until then he kept falling asleep in class because their shouting matches kept him awake at night. He’d been begging them to separate since he was five.

Uncle Vanya left in February, among the first. For months mom mumbled, “Vanya knew.” and later, “Should have listened to Vanya.” When he departed, he invited us to join him. Something about it felt odd—he wanted mom and me to come, but what about dad? As if Uncle Vanya had asked something mom wasn’t willing to grant. Mom didn’t believe that the war would break so soon or at all. Government officials could still leave on a “vacation” abroad, though mom thinks that the highest echelons concealed how much they knew from the rest of the cabinet. The border guards couldn’t prevent people from traveling, or it would have triggered a chaotic exodus. You can’t seal the borders unless you openly admit that Russia’s campaign is imminent. When mom told dad about another chinovnik’s kids vanishing from school mid-year, she looked at me and cried. Now that I’m gone, I hope she cries less.

“Look who it is, Her Majesty Lilia herself.” Uncle Vanya is ever the joker. I pick up my duffel and suitcase from the curb and approach his Prius. The rear seats are replaced by a mattress that stretches from the edge of the front into the trunk. I hesitate to place my bags there. Uncle Vanya preempts my question, “Oh, just put your stuff on the bed, don’t worry about it.” I pile the duffel atop the suitcase, unsure if I’m anxious that my belongings could stain the bed or vice versa. I seatbelt in the front seat. Vanya reaches over me to lock my door, “I borrowed the car from a guy I work with. Think he might live in it too. Just ignore that. Crazy things happening these days. Have you eaten?”

I point to the bag of food they provided. Since checking in yesterday I only ate half the soup and still had the chicken and questionable veggies. The Red Cross staff served hot porridge this morning, but I didn’t go because I wanted to enjoy my last hours alone. I’m worried that I’ll spend all of my time with Uncle Vanya. Although I already regret skipping breakfast.

It hits me. How long is this drive to Warsaw? Where will I live? In a car too? I’m in Poland with this man with a week-old stubble, like he’s the one who sleeps in the trunk. I should be thrilled to reunite with my classmates who moved to Warsaw, but right now

I can’t feel anything. Mom and dad are in Dnipro. Will they find a way to join me? And if they do, would grandpa have to die first? Mom said she wouldn’t leave him even if politicians were free to cross the border.

An hour later we stop for gas at a small grocery store. A grandma cracks sunflower seeds on the stoop. When I step inside, she says something in Polish, which I take to mean, “Holler if you want to buy something.” The store sells toiletries and cosmetics in singleuse packages. A lot of refugees must come through. Four aisles filled with fruit juices, flavors I’d never seen before—black cherry, black velvet gooseberry, black currant. By the cash register I spot neat rows of pastries that I want to believe were baked by the smiling babushka. I grab a roll of fried dough stuffed with cottage cheese and one of the blacksomething juices. As I hand her five Euros from my wallet, I think of the stacks of cash in my sweatshirt on the back seat of Uncle Vanya’s car. He could just drive off.

On the road again. The car unwinds the fields into a swerving ribbon of green. Geometrically perfect barns frame a single oak tree, like a counting book illustration. If I squint, the tiny black birds disappear from the sky. I hadn’t spent much time in Poland. Whenever we had a Schengen we traveled to Paris or Venice, or at least Vienna or Prague. Three years ago Mikhail Afanasievich drove us to Poznan for a competition, but we only left the hotel to row on the Warta. I must have gone through Zamość, the border town I passed through yesterday, when I took a bus tour across Europe in seventh grade, but I don’t recall stopping anywhere in Poland. Poland is not a place to stop. It’s the kind of Eastern European country that you know exists but don’t feel the need to visit. That is, until over a million Ukrainians had moved in this year. But even then, those with enough money see it as a stepping stone to more prosperous parts of Europe. My stern pair partner moved to Paris with her parents, where she posts selfies savoring croissants on white porcelain saucers, as her lilac ballet flats flash under the wrought iron table.

Mom has won the Olympics and serves as a member of the parliament, and dad works as a civil rights lawyer. How come we lived in a two-bedroom in Dnipro all these years without secret backup houses in Europe?

“…just moved to London. I expect your mother told you?” Uncle Vanya’s voice unspins my thought spiral.

I roll up my window to hear him better, “Sorry? No, I haven’t talked to mom, only told her I crossed into Poland. She said you would know what to do.”

Uncle Vanya turns to look at me. It feels dangerous while he’s driving. “I said, Alik, my son. He just found a job in London, so you can take his room. Do you know if your mom found you something to do?” A cold shiver crawls up the back of my head. Was mom supposed to find me a job? Wouldn’t that be up to me? We hadn’t talked about it. What about the secret money she gave me? Does Uncle Vanya know about it?

I decide not to mention it. He is there to help but not to rely on. As soon as I find me a job—having never worked a day in my life—I’ll rent my own apartment. And my classmates with their fancy Paris lofts, I’ll show them. My Instagram photo will caption, “all a bad bitch need is money ” I don’t need any aunts or uncles or even moms or grandpas.

I watch the moment hover still in the air, seven feet above the ground, wings astride. From the height, the blue Prius floats along the highway, Uncle Vanya and the girl shelter inside. I see her, who left her family and hometown, eighteen years old, with a stack of money sewn into the seam of her sweatshirt in a duffel bag. Her family stayed far away when a place called home turned into a warzone. It’s a terrifying thrill to glide in the air. When she needs help, where will it come from? To cross the border alone takes two weeks. The bird yearns for a familial flock. Will Warsaw be a rest stop on a greater migratory journey? Will the bird build a new nest? All I know is that the gull-girl soars on her own now. For the first time, no one will come to the rescue. n

Old Man

JOSHUA KULSETH

I’m wondering for the first time in who-knows-how-long at my father’s barrel-chested posture, his widow’s peak, his strong jaw pitched forward into frame— dead now only a few-years-shy of two decades,

and on the occasion of what would have been his sixty-ninth birthday, he still baffles me.

How are there no pictures online, when everything’s up for grabs, to be searched and looked over?

Not a single one, from his obituary even; only a tombstone and picture

of his nearly-equally-long dead mother. And why do I call him old man

when I only ever called him dad, and he stopped aging at least ten years

before anyone could call him old?

Why (I could probably guess this one)

after so long does his friend, my godfather, still message me every January 28th—

“Happy Birthday Bill Kulseth”—a man

I wouldn’t wish alive again even if I could.

More questions: why is it a memory seems to age when the one we’re remembering hasn’t

been around for years? Is it as we grow we remember differently, maybe nurturing some new sympathy or hatred, aging past the lived memory into something else, some vision we make for ourselves? Maybe that’s it. Don’t get me wrong,

I don’t hate the old man anymore, only, I know if he were alive to meet his sixty-ninth birthday,

I wouldn’t have remembered still, and there’d be nothing

prompting these questions leading nowhere, that don’t matter anyway,

but which offer a break from maybe what’s saddest: how like a thing he’s become for me, like a numbered square on the calendar. Battle of Waterloo, June 18th;

first public radio broadcast, December 24th; invention of the fountain pen, May 25th;

the Old Man’s birthday, January 28th, followed hard by the anniversary of his death, February 20th

facts of history, casually recalled, agreed upon, and forgotten once again.

Concrete

JOSHUA KULSETH

after C.K. Williams

On the hundred-degree summer days we hauled bags of concrete up six flights of stairs; with the buckets, tools, and heavy mixer made heavier by the caked-on concrete hardening faster than we could scrape it off.

Even the most level headed of us held nothing back, spraying the place with curses, and each other with the concrete—tools and buckets, bottles thrown across the room: none of us free from the choking strain of heat

except the boss, thirty-something, veteran of Iraq: three years a Marine, three on an aircraft carrier reading every book in the library. I asked him once how he kept it together: when you’ve seen men vaporized by IEDs, nothing else bothers you.

He said it simply, like a child, his simplicity splintering on me like a light-struck prism, in the pickup truck now impossibly fleeced with a million grey specks, shedding from our shirts, spreading over every surface. I was suddenly afraid

that whatever it was I was, it wasn’t enough; that I would at any moment be revealed for what it was I was. And what was that? The old question: something now sunk, deep in my seat, hardening between cushions, indistinguishable as the grey chips

sloughed in the mess of the car: the space between what is ordered, known, imperceptible in the dark. It seemed easy to him, to know and live his role, the job a kind of calling, lost on me.

At The Stockyard

JOSHUA KULSETH

The best come first: females numbered for age, pregnant, graffiti drooling down their flanks. The old and worthless follow, numberless: sad and dirty, skulking heads low, needing no prodding. My mother leans in, your grandfather used to say you can tell

a lot about a farmer by how their cows look. And these, shrunken, skittish, do tell. They’ll fetch a few hundred bucks: good for ground beef. Bad for breeding.

The bulls come last: knocking at the cage, a few still with horns grown long, most with only stubs barely visible above tufts of hair. They fight

bewildered in the arena, pacing, snorting, shaking great black heads. Goaded they enter, the silver prod threatening. Made to prance, present now rump, flanks, breasting now the crowd, pristine, strutting slowly and taking a beating for it. Most barely notice, blasting back at the cage making

the one with the whip jump back. Almost on their own time they finally move into the long hall where waiting trailers will take them away.

Even these will be broken, the wild auctioneer’s voice fluttering over loud speakers, incomprehensible; acknowledging raised hands from standing farmers who spit now and then brown gobs in bottles or on the floor next to slumped wives whose faces vaguely fix somewhere in space, beyond.

Once, we sat on the first row and a bull shit all over us my mother says, you get used to it. And you do, the ceremony almost necessary.

Leftovers

JAMES MAGRUDER

The blast of hot, muggy air when Chip Poulos reached street level from the Camden Town tube station made him glad he had stowed his luggage at Heathrow for the days he’d be in London. To kill the half hour before his meet-up with Ward and Garry for Sunday roast at a pub, Chip headed north on Kentish Town Road. His work had given him an eye for foreign street life. With the exception of money wiring and chip shops, most of the businesses were closed, but there were plenty of raffish sidewalk vendors selling “essential oils” and incense sticks, wellingtons and rain ponchos, sets of wrenches, used CDs and VHS cassettes, flyblown House of Windsor souvenirs, and filmy football jerseys. Chip looked in vain for storefront churches—maybe that was only an American thing.

He headed back down the west side of the street. Slouched in a doorway, a blond skater boy asked for a light. “I’m sorry,” said Chip. “I don’t smoke.” The boy shifted his legs provocatively. “A great shame that, mate” he replied. His smile lacked an incisor. Chip returned the smile but kept moving. He guessed that his pricey linen sport coat prompted the not unwelcome proposition.

Chip could admit to some nerves before seeing Ward for the first time in seven years. (Also, the last time they’d slept together.) Everyone in Chip’s orbit was aware of Ward’s position in the narrative. His Homeric epithet was My-First-Great-Love-Ward-Macfie. Their college drama at Cornell, and then after, when Ward was at NYU Law, had been tremendous. In the years since Ward had left his white shoe firm in New York, moved laterally to London, and finally came out of the closet, they had only spoken by phone. Calling from his gig in Glasgow, Chip had hoped that Ward might make some time for him after his business trip. Indeed: Ward wanted him to meet Garry Tevdadze, a refugee from Georgia whom he had just made his legal domestic partner. This was major news.

Ward had paid for sex when he first moved to England. Chip would hear about it in lengthy, drunken calls. Hiring escorts was, above all, an efficient solution to ninety-hour workweeks. No time wasted eyeing strangers in the bars. No breakfasts to rustle up. No

emotional outlay. If Ward was too exhausted, he’d sometimes play rummy five hundred just for the chat until he conked out. Things had gotten expensive when he’d fallen for a Romanian who may or may not have been a medical student. Then there had been a teenaged French runaway. Ward kept Denys and his stuffed animal collection until he’d overstayed his visa.

Had Garry Tevdadze been a prostitute? Would that present itself? Approaching the Camden Head at the corner of Camden High Street and Delancey, Chip spotted his Great Love smoking upright outside the pub, his left palm propping up, as ever, his right elbow. He vowed to behave himself and not play up their past in front of Garry. Chip traded hands with his weekender and called out to him.

Ward dropped and extinguished his butt, then turned to say something to a pair of men seated at an outdoor table. Closing the distance, Chip suppressed the thought that wooing two strangers at once felt too much like work. He sold space in Scientific American, settling down six weeks at a time in second-tier European cities (like Glasgow) to convince their science and technology ministries to buy eight, twelve, or sixteen-page advertising inserts for a future issue. It was cold-call, lone-gun, top-flight, non-stop salesmanship, exhausting but lucrative for a man with despotic tendencies.

Despite having shared his narrow single bed in college, slotted sideways like bread slices in a toaster, Ward had never been completely at ease with another body pressed against him. At one pace, Chip curled a hand around Ward’s neck to pull him close. Ward stiffened, but Chip moved further in anyway, and managed to brush Ward’s right cheek with his lips. It was awkward, graceless, but Chip caught Ward’s scent for one breath before they broke the embrace: tobacco, talc, and celery seed. In years past, when they were trying one more time to make things work, or just wrecking the sheets on a no-strings weekend, the whiff of recognition would make Chip want to weep inside with happiness.

The younger of the other men—Garry, clearly, but how old was this creature? took Chip’s bag and pulled out the empty chair. Ward poured Guinness and made introductions. Garry’s long, brown ringlets were as much a surprise as the visible navel pucker below the red T-shirt stretched across a pudgy stomach. Wiping foam from his mustache with the back of a hairy hand, Garry presented more like a jolly rock band roadie than a rent boy.

The fourth at the table, hands crossed at the wrist in his lap, was the bespectacled, ginger Cornelius Kidder, Ward’s poshest British friend, who greeted Chip with a bemused “I have always wanted to meet you.” Cornelius had carried an unrequited torch for Ward since a gap year they’d spent at Oxford. Chip once asked Ward if he’d emigrated to set up house with Cornelius.

“I hope I won’t prove a disappointment,” said Chip.

“That wouldn’t be remotely possible,” said Cornelius, with a wry lift of an eyebrow.

They laughed, then spent the meal in flirtatious one-upmanship, first trading travel aperçus about the cities Chip had done business with. The performative rat-a-tat excluded Garry, who busied himself with the ashtrays, the pile-up of plates, and the pitchers of stout. Chip explained that every five-color insert fanned out on the coffee table in his Philadelphia condominium distilled hundreds of hours of complex interactions, with selfimportant foreigners, often in their own languages, and then with balky design associates. Then, remembering that high-born Brits were gold medalists in small talk, and genetically uninterested in American occupations, he changed the subject by mouthing “How old is he?”—meaning Garry, whose back was turned. Cornelius traced a two and a seven on his trouser leg, then rolled his eyes.

One might have expected that the object of not one, not two, but three romantic vectors would enjoy entertaining his harem, but Ward sat in near silence, his head hangdog over plates of prime rib too bloody and fatty for anyone but Garry to do more than pick at. Their table looked like a battle scene. Time had not diminished Ward’s thirst; Chip, unable to suppress an old reflex, kept tally of his seven beers and twelve cigarettes. How could the man possibly function in a law office?

Chip picked up the check inside at the bar. “You should take the leftovers, Garry,” said Cornelius as they stood to go—one beat ahead of the woozier Chip. There was a quick play of glances among the Londoners that Chip couldn’t interpret, then Garry threw his open napkin over his plate and seemed almost to shove Cornelius’s umbrella into his chest. No doggy bag, then.

Horned up at dinner by Ward’s presence but prevented by circumstance from rubbing his crotch under the table with a foot, Chip decided that he’d like to go home

with Cornelius. He’d be a switch from married men on the down low. Nothing compared to setting a man in a suit free with the things his wife wouldn’t do. Chip seemed to spot one in every Acela train car and sporting goods store. The hunger in their tales was devastating; Chip’s ability to sate them made him feel munificent in a way that the rest of his life pursuits did not. He kept mum when they fantasized afterwards of chucking the wife and kids to be with him, just him, and he also refrained from suggesting they leave the closet, which had been a losing argument with Ward for so many years.

A spectacular fan window surmounted the canary-colored front door to Ward’s townhouse on Delancey Street. The ripples in the panes signaled original, 18th century glass. The oversized brass knocker, cast in the shape of a leaping dolphin, reminded Chip of a murder weapon he’d seen on an old episode of “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Ward switched on a hall light. “We’re in a state of general upheaval,” he said. “We had the foolish idea to redo both downstairs parlors at the same time.”

“Is my fault, Cheep,” said Garry, who had insisted at the pub that his accent was Georgian. Hatred for the Russians was universal.

Late the next morning, Chip drank coffee and watched Garry prepare a moussaka in the basement kitchen. His deflections of all personal queries vexed Chip, whose bread and butter was drawing out foreigners. Beyond emigrating from Batumi, along the Eastern shore of the Black Sea, and a vague interest in acting, Garry’s life before meeting Ward in a Covent Garden disco seemed unknowable. Zipped into Chip’s weekender were two Scientific American inserts, Kraców and Toulouse, for potential show-and-tell, but Garry, uneasy perhaps in the presence of an ex-lover who’d meant so much to Ward, asked him nothing. This left them the weather, British politics, and Ward’s workaholic nature. Garry groomed dogs two days a week in a shop near the Amy Winehouse memorial. The late chanteuse, a Camden Town denizen and booster, was worth fifteen minutes of chat. Garry and Ward had seen her three times in concert.

Chip did learn that Ward had paid 850 thousand pounds for the townhouse. “No one should know,” said Garry.

“I won’t let on,” said Chip, flabbergasted by the price, a cool million in dollars. That

this had been the first night he’d slept in a house with Ward beyond reach was not lost on him. Nor was the fact that he had never cooked Ward anything more elaborate than a scrambled egg and bacon sandwich. Or sent him off to work with a lingering kiss in the front hall and an umbrella hand-off, which he’d spied Garry doing in corduroy house slippers and a short paisley robe.

The robe fell open while Garry salted discs of eggplant. His chest and frankly jiggling stomach were coated with black fur, which made his large nipples stand out like two crushed strawberries. Chip Poulos was Greek, but not hairy. Was this—pelt—a turn-on? How could it not scuff Ward’s freckled Scottish skin? And wouldn’t Garry’s long curls, tied back now for cooking, interfere in bed? (Chip never forgot the time he’d accidentally kneeled on a woman’s hair during sex.) And why couldn’t Ward have taken a day off from work to spend some time with him?

Three gas burners were going on the stove. Water on the boil to skin tomatoes. Lamb mince sizzled next to it. In the third pan, the roux needed a stir. Searching the spice cabinet, Garry’s apparent indifference to the chaos behind him both appalled and impressed the tidy Chip, whose job was also one of ceaseless triage.

“What are you looking for?” asked Chip.

“Nutmeg. In balls.”

“Can I help?”

Garry shrugged.

Chip handed over a rattling jar of whole nutmeg, then looked for celery seed to wave under Garry’s nose for a reaction. If the kitchen lacked it, then that was another kind of sign.

No celery seed. Chip selected a tin of smoked paprika, a spice with a frankly animal odor, and held it out. “Smells like you, I’ll bet,” he thought. Garry’s robe was blotched with sweat from the burners and the summer heat.

Garry wrinkled his nose. “Not for moussaka.”

As Garry assembled the dish—enough to serve ten—he did offer snarky comments about Cornelius Kidder. “Big snob.” “Every time I turn, he is here.” “He does not appreciate.” “He needs boyfriend big-time.”

“Is he coming to dinner tonight?”

Garry slit his eyes—an insufficient answer for Chip, who belled the cat by confessing he had a thing for gingers.

When it dawned at last on Chip that Garry’s incuriosity meant but one galling thing, he broke his promise to help wash up and fled Delancey Street. He tried walking off his anger in Regent’s Park, then further north in Hampstead Heath, but only got sunburned for his pains. For Garry Tevdadze, Cheep Poulos was merely an old college buddy of Ward’s, no more and no less, passing through London. ***

After a copious dinner with three bottles of Georgian red, the men strolled in the twilight to Stables Market. Garry had to collect his wages at Prince Harry Groomers, and re-stock for breakfast. But first they stood in a scrum of pilgrims waiting to take selfies with the lifesized statue of Amy Winehouse. Her random placement reminded Chip of the afternoon in Toulouse when he’d stumbled by chance on the tomb of St. Thomas Aquinas in a side chapel in the Church of the Jacobins. Lord, the strange places people ended up!

Taking their turn at the shrine, Chip and Ward put Amy between them, and Garry snapped away. Then they switched positions.

“Mabedniereb,” said Garry, with a quick hug to Ward before he headed off. “Here wait.”

“Me sheni var,” said Ward.

Chip asked for a translation.

“He said, ‘You make me happy.’”

“And what did you say back?”

“Me sheni var.”

“Which means?”

Ward’s reach for his smokes was an historic stalling maneuver. “I am yours.”

The sincerity stung Chip. “He’s sweet.” Ward nodded. “Very dear, and an excellent cook.”

“I’ve gained twelve pounds,” said Ward.

“I hadn’t noticed,” lied Chip. “He’s crazy about you.”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

This oddly mopey remark was interrupted by the wail of an acolyte who had

thrown herself to the ground to clutch Amy’s bronze ankles. Soothing efforts from her companions yielded even more violent sobs.

Ward turned away. “Yes, I’ve been black…” he said.

“But when I come back, you’ll know, know, know,” answered Chip.

They shared a genuine smile. In their salad days, it had been one of their things to flip song lyrics back and forth constantly. The rise of the Internet had solved two perennial cruxes: “Go Ask Alice” ends with “Feed your head, (Ward) not feed your hare (Chip).” “Diamonds and Rust” ends with “I’ve already paid (Chip), not I’ve already bathed. (Ward)”

In the distance Garry was headed in the direction of the greengrocer.

“Why didn’t you tell Garry that we were lovers?”

Habituated to whipsaw segues from his ex, Ward first took some time with his cigarette. “It never came up, I guess.”

“You guess? You and I were together for six years, practically.”

“Decades ago,” said Ward. “Off and on.”

That was no excuse for this sin of omission. “So, things that happened before Garry was born don’t count.”

“Oh please. Garry was alive when we were in college.”

“Only just barely.”

To steady himself, Chip counted beehive tributes to Amy in the crowd. By number nine, he’d found a new line of attack.

“You mean to say that this man, this—Your domestic partner—nineteen years your junior—doesn’t know about your romantic past?”

Ward’s shrug was a double squirt of kerosene on the blaze.

“Do you know anything about his romantic past?”

“Not much. Being gay is a crime in Georgia. I was his first serious boyfriend.”

“Was he one of your call boys?” sneered Chip.

“That is so absolutely none of your goddamned business.”

“I just. It’s just…”

It was just what? Someone sent up a flare, screaming, “We love you, Amy!” There were cheers. Lighters clicked on all over the plaza. The remains of St. Thomas of Aquinas were

lucky to get two visitors a week who knew what they were looking at, but the modern world would always love Amy Winehouse, alive for eternity on YouTube. Chip pressed his fingers to his skull. That Ward had been his best and brightest past was too humiliating to disclose.

“It just makes me sad to think you wouldn’t have told Garry about us.”

Ward’s laugh was like a bark. “Would you want me to tell him about the time you broke up with me when I tried ‘shrooms? Would you want me to tell him about the time you broke up with me because I’d pissed in a sink? Or the time you broke up with me because my parents got me brandy snifters for Christmas? Or how insane you got when I went to My Beautiful Launderette without you? Should I tally the number of my beer bottles you threw into the street? Should I share with him how you once wrote in your journal that I was ‘pitifully ordinary’?”

“I loved you, Ward.”

“Yeah, me too, but you were too much.”

“You were a drunk.”

“Who never went to rehab.”

“I never asked you to go to rehab.”

“Rehab wasn’t on anyone’s radar back in the day.”

Ward lit another cigarette. His deep drag produced a cough that Chip could identify on an audiotape of a thousand different sounds. “In the worst of our knock-down dragouts, you used to say that you would never live with a drunk.”

“NO!” corrected Chip. “No. I said I would never live with a drunk who was still in the closet.”

Ward smiled. “Right, right.” He moved his palm to prop up his elbow. “I used to wonder that if I had ever managed to clear those two bars, what the next one you’d put up for me would be.”

Garry turned up just then. Ward pulled him close.

“Watch eggs, baby,” said Garry.

Sleep didn’t come easy for Chip. Clearly, Ward only remembered the shit, and his last statement sounded like something he’d learned in therapy, another thing he’d never submit to in their past. Had their lopsided power dynamic, Chip at the levers, led to his jones for husbands? The habit wasn’t healthy, but Chip figured there would be time enough to get domestic once he was finished with all the travel for Scientific America.

After too much breakfast, Garry wanted decorating advice. He led Chip to one of the unfinished drawing rooms, whose walls were a palimpsest of faded stenciled papers, and hues from every spoke on the color wheel. Beneath sections of missing plaster, Chip spotted ancient furring strips and clumps of what looked like seaweed. Spread over a tarp on a table were catalogs of architectural finish pieces: cornices, chandelier medallions, columns and half-columns, chair rails, mantels, wainscoting, etc. Chip expressed surprise that such things were for sale.

“Old is expensive,” said Garry, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.

Chip scanned a page of dentil moldings—all dozens of pounds per yard. “New is expensive too.”

“Ward can pay for fiberglass.”

“Fiberglass?” Closer inspection showed that the inventory was made of molded plastics, or fiberglass, or other non-plaster or wood hybrids.

Chip didn’t approve of mixing the fake with the real, but he supposed that new-tomoney Georgians—and obviously, all the peoples of the liberated Soviet republics—had had no experience of luxury. A Pole he’d met on assignment had revealed an unscrupulous side to the antiquities trade. The further east into Europe the broker or dealer, the higher the odds of chicanery. An original Biedermeier chair coming to market in Kraców would have first been broken into three—legs, seat, and back—before being reassembled and put at auction as three separate Biedermeier chairs. Caveat emptor.

The time had come for Chip, who needed to be known as at least one genuine leg in the composite of Ward Macfie, to reveal his prior claim.

“Ward and I were lovers, Garry. For many years.”

Garry didn’t respond.

“In college and afterwards. It was a very important affair for both of us.”

Garry wet a finger and turned a catalog page.

“Sometimes—many times in fact—Ward said that he thought he would die because of me.”

Garry found this oath, so opposite to Ward’s me sheni var the night before, amusing. “Obvious he was drunk.”

Instead of striking him, Chip gathered a bundle of catalogs and evened out their edges on the table. “Yes.”

“And you, Cheep,” said Garry. “You believed.”

The casual exposition of this truth stopped Chip’s breath. He pressed the catalogs to his chest. Ward’s “I love yous” had been most convincing when he was soused. That they might dry up along with him was why Chip had never insisted that his Great Love seek help. His need had outweighed Ward’s health.

In a charged silence, Chip asked Garry whether he thought Ward should stop drinking.

“One day, sure,” said Garry, with a Slavic shrug. “Why not?”

Chip’s mood lifted eventually. Having spent time in old Philadelphia homes, he steered Garry away from ostentation. A proper English drawing room must contain nothing French or Italian. One avoided “putting a hat on a hat,” an image Garry committed to memory. They were close to costing the master of the house seven thousand pounds in fiberglass crown molding when Ward texted Garry that he wouldn’t be able to make it home for lunch—work work work—but to tell Chip that he would try to look him up the next time he visited the States.

Chip had hours before his flight, but there was no reason to stay. He stripped his bed, then decided against leaving his Kraców and Toulouse inserts on the nightstand. After a brisk goodbye hug with Garry, he made his way back to Stables Market. Rain was imminent; for now, the late morning heat had made Amy Winehouse’s pilgrims cluster around her on the paving stones. Some napped, using their backpacks and bedrolls as pillows. It was too hot to do anything but keep vigil.

Chip approached the youngest, most bedraggled couple he could find. The boy lay curled on his side, eyes closed, head on hands; his girlfriend, whose hair was covered with a paisley scarf, was sitting up with her back against his chest, playing some kind of solitaire. He asked her if she might be hungry, first in English, then French, Italian, German, and

Spanish. She looked wary, bewildered even, until he rubbed his stomach, widened his eyes, and nodded his head. She nodded back, said “Yes, yes,” then something in a language he didn’t understand. He lowered the Tesco bag containing the plastic tub of Garry’s moussaka into her hands. “You’ll have to share the fork and the napkin,” he said, more to himself than to the girl, then sped away.

The sky opened up when he was two blocks from the tube station. Before Chip pressed his umbrella into service, the rain felt sweet on his face.

Ward Macfie occupies deep grooves in Chip Poulos’ hippocampus. Between spells of sleep and trips to the bathroom on his aging bladder, Chip often reviews an insert of five-color memories: Ward’s first orgasm, a miracle three weeks in the making. Climaxes of his own so intense Chip feared that he was ejaculating blood. The eight-limbed, two-headed tangle of their bodies as they watched the sun set over Cayuga Lake from a bench in East Shore Park. The accidental glory of Chip’s emerald t-shirt riding up his flanks while he changed a flat on a road trip to Provincetown. Most precious of all: on the Saturday of the fifth week of their longest breakup, in the middle of a February blizzard, Ward called at one a.m. and asked to come over. The wait had felt eternal. Chip, his gaze trained out the window above the kitchen sink on the front path to his apartment building, stamped the cold from his feet in two pairs of thermal socks and fretted, not without cause, that the drunken Ward, crossing a mile of campus in the dark, might blunder into a snowbank and freeze to death.

When Ward lay dying last spring of a failed liver transplant, Garry emailed that Ward did not want Chip to fly to London to say goodbye. At the time of this writing, Chip Poulos wishes he might have extended their last hello at the corner of Camden High Street and Delancey Road, lips to cheek, right ear to right ear. Had he been permitted, or allowed himself, to take hold a bit longer, he might be able to carry that tobacco, talc, and celery seed scent—history, continuity, balm—until the moment his own time on earth would be cut in twain. Really, what would an extra breath or two have cost either one of them?

Sometimes Chip hopes that, with enough concentration, other recollections might be mined from the bedrock. Conversely, he sometimes wonders whether fresh memories might resurface were he to simply relax and roam their past on the tail of a kite. What he is

most certain of is that he loved Ward Macfie most and best in those few seconds that cold February morning, before possession replaced anticipation, when Ward had shucked his boots at the door, thrown off his parka and gloves and hat and scarf, followed Chip to his bed, and fallen into his arms. n

The Crazy Dog Lady Tries To Say What She Feels

RENÉE ASHLEY

Now she can go out again, but won’t (she will, but not without some misery)—nothing’s gotten better since she backed out of society. She knows she’s old & cranky, her confidence is gone, she lacks couth, she spends too much time with dogs, alone. She remembers feeling self-esteem (much less than people thought) but now she’s really panicking (though she wouldn’t call it that). She’s a fool, a crazily self-conscious one (always was, but nowadays it’s multiplied times ten), and now she’s a scared child again, a scabby, nervous, laughless wreck. Her own anger at her weakness makes it worse. Her dreams are wholly different now, but all the same—she no longer has to run away (she just might do that anyway), no snake will show up in her bed, she doesn’t have to fly or fall. She won’t dazzle a celebrity, have sex, or win the lottery. No vampires, no specters, no open graves, no ghouls; she won’t be naked at the mall. What she dreams of now is perfidy in human guise, a kind of nightly scamming of the sort that breaks one’s only heart, that makes her wary, and defensive, and ashamed—how did she keep believing all that crap that she’d been sold? She’s tired as hell of trying to forget, move on, yet keep in mind: She can’t do that to herself again. She’s tired of her shame at being needy and deceived. She’s tired of her nightly dreams. In sum: She’s tired of her tiredness. She’s been tired (not this tired) her entire life—and, if her past holds true (it always has) she’ll be tired in the goddamn life to come.

The Crazy Dog Lady Sees a Rat Snake in the Compost Bin

RENÉE ASHLEY

She has nowhere to go and no one to see and way too much time to think, so she’s taking the compost out—though she hasn’t turned it since, not very long ago (and it took a while for her eyes to make it out), there was a black snake coiled, partly camouflaged in the dark, rich filth (for the warmth of the rot, she supposed). If she’d been in a hurry, she would have missed him altogether or even pierced him with the compost crank—that frightens her. What she could see of him (she assumed it was a he) was damn near as thick as a Coke can is round, and it moved only slightly, as if adjusting to the light, but she knew for sure he’d seen her too—the fright of her face in a black snake’s eyes! The kind of fear to make her stare, then run. She’d started shaking and she shook for far too long. She knows what her fears are (the list is longer than she’d like, and snakes are on it somewhere), but death by drowning, death by fire, those two top it—and it’s less the death than the struggling, it’s less the struggling than the endless lightning-strike of panic when you’re trying to stay alive. And, so, the snake’s fired up a wondering in her—what else in her long life has she passed by without thinking: There, it’s there, I see it. Too much, she’s sure. Is this what age is? Perseveration on the mortal and the nonsense—what’s that worth? Her life’s on the right margin now—she’s constantly aware of this—she’s slow to rise and quick to not quite fall or fall. She’s blaming evolution for her senseless fear. She’s aware she’s never been this old before—what from hell will come up next? There’s a veil over everything (it’s always been there), and, now, one more thing to worry on. She keeps watching for some sign, a word, some thing that might seem answer-like (though she knows there is no answer; she’s barely found the question). So, to keep her on top of ground not under it, she’s keeping track of smaller things: the water level in the reservoir, how much blue she can see in the sky, and even better: Will she grow tomatoes? Is her rocky soil ready for her seeds? A clematis? More moonflowers? Another day, she’ll start another compost dump but farther down: First she’ll lift the hollow-bottomed bin and watch the compost take its angle of repose. The snake, if it’s still there can make its way elsewhere. Then

she’ll scoop it all up again and toss it in. No harm done. Silly gesture, but it’ll make her feel better. She reiterates what she’s always known in one form or another: We’re just another animal, unreliable, feckless, weak, and way too grabby. Is that what she’s been saying all these years? There’re so many people to be angry at (that’s why she doesn’t keep a gun); there’s so much news, so many men with guns who are crazier than her. Oprah says, What we dwell on we become. It could be true; she hopes it’s not, and throws her scraps into the bin; she doesn’t look. There’s rain predicted for the evening, so she leaves the cover off and goes back in. But the sky is blue, her house stands relatively firm, she’s appreciative of that. For now, the universe inside her’s nearly still. She’ll do what just comes naturally: She’ll feed the dogs their usual repast (she’ll wash their dishes, put all that away, draw the blinds, and think: There, it’s there, I can see it). Then she’ll eat hers.

The Crazy Dog Lady Sees the Light

RENÉE ASHLEY

She’s eating ice cream with a knife. That torpor’s settling in again. She can’t get off the couch or read a book or wash a dish or get the broom to mitigate the dog hair in the corners of the room. The world inside accumulates. The world outside is dangerous and suicidal—the lines get blurred. The husbands die or choose to leave. The women friends go barking mad—she knows her lonelinesses vein by vein. But change? A dirty word too difficult to navigate. She thinks: We’re all the same. Each thin-skinned. Tender-fleshed. A mackerel on the grill. And for companionship? There was a woman once she thought was part of her. It turned out there was not. There’d been nothing for the body but for the heart so many common consummations and for the whole: just utter trust. So damned naïve. Her trust-neck’s snapped. Astonished into grief she’s come through such undoing that now she lives in one dark room. Windowless. Doorless. She cannot trust her molecules of star so casts her own bleak shadows at the ghost inside—what choice has she but fall through the floor, crawl out, begin again in the devastating light? The sun’s in full-force detonation so she goes out, slinking. Her compass has been shattered. She says she’d rather get another dog or six to keep her mind too occupied to ponder what she’s missing. She bores herself to death except when gripped by some perseveration that makes its way to paper: She’s a case of lacking narrative. Still the drama out there doesn’t stop: “Man in Bed Consumed by Earth,” the dresser with his clothes unscathed; “Woman Beaten Black and Blue by Sulfur-Scented Rock from Space!” How precise such horrors are. How unexpected. Surgical! Which way to turn? There’re endings everywhere. Everywhere else beginnings. The middles go unrecognized. She’s said this part before: The head’s a sealed vessel. The seas cough up some shocking things: oarfish, who belong so deep she’s never had to think of them, and dugongs’ shredded carcasses. And rubber ducks. And Easter eggs! Things fall from skies. Earth opens up. And love? Don’t hold your breath. Love says, Just look at you! Which is funny when she thinks of it: She sees only from the inside out not outside in—a brindle dog, she thinks, bowed beneath her doggish dreams dreaming.

Weather-Wise, It’s Such a Lovely Day

HARRISON MONARTH

No one would say otherwise. Certainly not Jack, who’s grinning ear to ear and whose thick Irish hair’s filtering the wind just right, a gentle breeze constantly rearranging the copper-brown sparkle of sunshine ricocheting off his handsome head. Nor would his wife, who’s all smiles herself and who keeps putting on sunglasses, only to take them off a minute later, only to put them back on a minute after that. The sun is directly above them, getting in her eyes, but really, it’s just too lovely with the roof off. Unheard of for late November. A gift of a day for an open-air car ride. You can tell everyone else is in a lovely mood too. The other important couple with them, for instance. Nellie and John. Smiling and chatting. Delighted to be there, Nellie saying as much to Jack. People in the street delighted too. Some smiling at them as their car passes at a leisurely pace. In no rush. The day didn’t start out this way. Nervous skies initially, a cool drizzle when they landed by plane before breakfast, looming clouds directing plans on the ground. And then, just as they all start driving—luck of the Irish?—the heavens transforming to a bright crystalblue dome with nary a blemish, something Cartier might custom-make for the very rich. One of their friends, very rich, is singing on the radio. A tune perfectly in tune with this kind of weather, almost seventy degrees now, maybe making them think of a vacation, a quick getaway, especially on a day like this, a workday after all. Maybe Mexico, who knows. Acapulco? Like a second honeymoon? Who knows what anyone is thinking. Nothing bad, that’s for sure, not on such an unexpectedly—

It really was a lovely day weather-wise, which, ironically, became the very reason that it wasn’t, otherwise. Because had it not turned so unexpectedly lovely, so surprisingly bright and sunny, the people in charge of matters such as the nation’s security wouldn’t have decided, on a whim, to remove the protective plexiglass dome from the presidential limousine, and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t have ended up with her husband’s brain-matter

in her eyes and skull fragments with bushels of Irish hair in her lap as their Lincoln Continental sped toward Dallas Memorial and their friend’s song faded on the radio:

Weather-wise, it’s such a lovely day

Just say the words and we’ll beat the birds

Down to Acapulco Bay

It’s perfect for a flying honeymoon, they say

Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.

Standards

ELEANOR ELI MOSS

see me hoist the severed head of a fanciful romance & candy pops out this is sure to give someone the entirely wrong impression & unfortunately for you i think i’m someone i’m noticing a pattern here things are happening, you know or so i hear there’s always someone swooning over the pit vibrating is quite literally all the rage in a world absurdly full of psychic shrapnel and technology it turns out i am just a little guy my ungodliness like a supernova my disappointment like a distant tuba sound

please don’t stare at my anxieties that glimmer in my eyes is secretly the worst one wrong step & i could get myself extremely into minimalism in an exceedingly bad way i know that about myself when it comes to connecting the dots, well… i’m honestly not quite sure i have it in me i’m not one of those people

who just hangs out by the printer

i have standards the kind of heat exhaustion that’s impossible to overcome now i’ve gone & thought well of myself on accident here, have an ultimatum: i won’t tell if you won’t

i’ve thought about flipping out every once in a while of course i have in winter, perhaps, when i’m hungry for daylight i’ll walk out on a limb & then dance swaying into view of the devil

i’m going to dress my death up in satin i’m going to show it a good time so don’t hold my hand unless you want to break up with me it doesn’t matter that you mean well if you don’t even know what well means

Don’t Make Me Destroy You

ELEANOR ELI MOSS

not enough art involves swords well, i’ll see to that

i’ve come to you today to write like a dog there’s blood in all of my groceries

i might like to break my jaw, as an experiment it’s that kind of day/life/house/etc

i like to tell myself i know what i’m doing but if i really did, i probably wouldn’t have to these days, i need to prepare my body for practically everything too many people who always must needs take a shower inside of my heart fine, just be over here

come & crawl into my attic of spilt affections take off that wretched old jacket and give me your hand but just be aware if you ever love me & accept me for the person that i am it’s on sight

i’ve been thinking of getting into loitering i’m not as sad as i was but still sad enough to be almost interesting mentally destitute & thriving

i look quite good in a darkened theater people flock from miles around to gawk into my cavity of longing oh sure, let me just whip up a couple of dollars

like some kind of charlatan a chorus of wailing ensues a symphony will blossom out of nowhere! as i scatter my vexations to the wind! mosh pit at the opera house heavy breathing in the presence of a field guide idle fluttering mistaken for conviction a quick search of the bloody horizon then back to work

sometimes i read all my poems & think well, i am either the worst or the greatest i know which one i’d be most proud of hey, what would you say to some callous disregard of my wants & needs? say, next weekend?

i could use some new material let us limber up this wine i’ve had to thaw out my unendingness just to love you

loving in the way that is not like emotion but a raw unfiltered cutting edge in a bowl of fruit & jewels the difference between feeling prepared & being prepared now there’s a collision i can get behind a doom that resonates so, how about it? wouldn’t you like to be worshipped? well?

babe, wake up you’re missing the best part of the poem

Suburban Guerilla

BY E.H. JACOBS

We were discussing the merits of button-down collars versus point collars—me, my neighbor Ray, and this guy whose name I forgot as soon as I heard it, a guy with a face like a slab of meat that’d been hanging on a hook for a month outside the freezer compartment. Meat-face had advised his son to wear a point collar at his first post-college job interviews to give him that polished, professional appearance. I just hope that his son wasn’t trying to dress up a face like his father’s, ‘cause that would be difficult. I heartily agreed, though I really didn’t give a shit; I was just glad that the subject had changed from their golf tournament in Florida as soon as Karl left after describing in excruciating detail his missed putt on the 18th hole last Sunday that caused him to blow the lead for his team, if that’s the right term for a group of golfers. I was going to suggest that, maybe, his putter needed work, but I knew the humor would be lost on all of them before I even opened my mouth. I actually did try golf once—or was it twice?—after moving to the suburbs—my wife’s idea. You know what they say: happy wife, happy life—as if that’s all there is—but golf was so suburban, if you know what I mean, and being a Brooklyn boy, well, let’s just say that those goofy shoes clashed with my Ramones t-shirt collection.

It’s two months after Christmas and the house still has the decorations up. Karl, our host, is wearing a red cardigan (Mr. Rogers, anyone?), and his wife, Marie, is topping off everyone’s glasses with punch whenever she spots one half-empty. Marie is the type who flits around the room making sure everyone is having a good time. She incessantly asks: Are you having fun? Do you have enough to drink? Isn’t this darling? How great is it to be together? with an exclamation and raised volume at the end of each sentence, turning each interrogatory into a command. With her sunny disposition and her frenetic flitting style, it would be impossible for anyone who was not having fun to be honest about it. The women in the kitchen (always in the kitchen!) are still talking about the cookies they had baked for the holidays and, oh, how lovely you look, and, of course you don’t look like you gained weight, don’t be silly! After the pre-holiday “gatherings,” cookie swaps and Yankee swaps and then,

of course, the holiday parties, the season wouldn’t be complete without some post-holiday festivities, so we wouldn’t forget the reasons for the season: golf, Florida and shirt collars.

I wave to my wife. She catches my eye and smiles. I know that smile, that I know you’re bored but you can at least make an effort smile. There she is, maybe enjoying herself, maybe just making an effort, maybe some of each. Her effort to be a good neighbor. You never know when you might need them.

At this point in the party, I don’t foresee a conversation taking an unusual direction. Maybe someone will bring up an idiotic political point and I will have to decide whether to bite my tongue, leave the room, or engage, and that would be stimulating, but hardly unique, and would just invite reprobation from my wife, so I express my gratitude to my hosts, tell them I have some work I have to catch up on, nod to my wife who probably anticipated this, and exit through the garage before anyone can walk me to the front door. I know Karl keeps his golf clubs in the garage.

The white golf bag sits along the far wall, an overstuffed sock puppet bulging with clubs, balls and tees, with knitted, tasseled Scottish tartan covers for his drivers that make them look like a family of miniature bagpipe players huddled together. I poke around for his five-iron, slip it up my shirt and down my pant leg, and hit the automatic garage door button. My place is two houses down and I walk slowly, so my stiff-leggedness won’t be too obvious to anyone looking out the window. Unfortunately, it’s raining, and now I try to run the distance to my house, but the best I can do is hobble like I’m dragging a bum leg. My neighbor on the other side of me passes in his Mercedes and looks concerned. I wave cheerfully. Nothing to see here!

The metal is cold against my skin, and my wet pants press it closer. Back in my house, I slide the club out of my pants and shirt and unlock the closet in my study. Getting a lock for the closet was a stroke of genius. Honey, I have so much confidential stuff that I bring home; I wouldn’t want the kids to get access to it. I survey my stash. Jim and Doreen’s glass figurine, Rachel and Tom’s Elsa Peretti bowl, Fred and Wilma’s (yes, those are their real names) Florida! coffee mug, Monique and Boris’s soup ladle, and a bunch of other things that I have vowed (to myself) to return someday when I can do so unobtrusively. I will have to start doing that soon, so I don’t forget what belongs to whom. I remember each boring

social event associated with each object. Some would think this is perverse, cementing each unpleasant experience in memory with a tangible object rather than letting it fade into oblivion. But, I believe that, if I forget each tiresome encounter with my neighbors, if I fail to account for them, if I let them lose their individuality, they will accumulate in my unconscious, accreting like barnacles on the hull of a ship, and eventually wear me down. Maybe it’s some form of revenge. I don’t take things when I have a good time—only when I’m bored, when I feel my precious time has been stolen, or lost, or frittered away for nothing. And I guess I blame them for being who they are. Or, maybe, it’s self-punishment. It’s nobody’s fault but my own that I ended up here.

Maybe I’ll return an item each time one of them hosts something stimulating, entertaining or enriching, like a reward, but I’ll probably be dead before even a fraction of the stuff is returned on those terms. And who knows how much more of my neighbors’ junk I will have accumulated by then. No, I need a better plan, as I’m running out of space and, anyway, my custody of this stuff was meant to be temporary.

Although I never get the pleasure of seeing my neighbors discover that something is missing, I imagine their conversations, like, Honey, have you seen the… or, Now, where did I put that…as they frantically search the house, turn over throw pillows or get on their hands and knees to look under their cabinets, shelves or bed. Maybe they argue about who has been careless or who was the last one to use it. I can imagine.

I’m puttering around the kitchen when I hear my wife come through the front door a few hours later. It’s starting to get dark, but it’s stopped raining.

“You left early,” she says.

I nod.

“I heard the garage door open and close. Why’d you leave through the garage?”

“I…uh…it was raining. It was a shorter walk home.”

She gives me that look. I can’t really describe that look, but it’s a look to which there is no adequate way to respond. So, I don’t.

“Karl brought some of the guys into the garage to show them his car and his new golf clubs. He seemed to be missing something from his golf bag. Would you know anything about it?”

“About what exactly?”

“What was missing.”

“What was missing?”

“I don’t know. Something having to do with golf, I suppose.”

“I don’t know anything about golf.”

She gives me that look again. “You’re just full of non-sequiturs today, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

She stares at me blankly. “Well, I’m sorry you were bored.”

“Par for the course,” I say flatly.

“I thought you didn’t know anything about golf!” she says, smiling. I must look puzzled.

“It’s a golf metaphor. How do you not know that?”

“Idioms tend to lose their original meaning over time.”

She touches my back. “You really should try to get to know them and have a good t---”

“I know, I know. I just can’t forgive them for being so insipid.”

“Think of small talk as social glue. It holds us together, and we need that. Besides, you can’t have deep, intellectual conversations with everyone all the time.”

“With someone once in a while would be nice. Then I wouldn’t feel like I had to—” Now, I’ve gone too far. My confessional need has disrupted my instinct for safety. I’m really not good at this cloak and dagger stuff. I could never get away with anything as a kid, because my mother was so good at engaging and listening to me that I ended up telling her everything eventually. She should have been one of those police interrogators who they put into those gray, metallic rooms and watch behind one-way mirrors. They would never need the bad cop part of the act if she were there.

I hope the moment passes, but no such luck. She looks at me and, before she speaks, I blurt out: “I don’t know what I meant by that, Renee (I know that using her name communicates sincerity rather than caginess). I just feel so much resentment at my time being wasted that sometimes I fantasize about getting some sort of revenge.”

“Really?” she says with a leading tone, which reminds me of my mother. “Like what?”

“Oh, y’know, just childish stuff.”

She gives me another look. Not that look, but close.

“Like calling their house and hanging up or moving some of their deck furniture. Stupid stuff.”

“Or taking something out of Karl’s golf bag?” Jeez, she is my mother!

“You’re scaring me,” I say, though she probably doesn’t know what I meant by that.

“You’re scaring me!” She laughs and goes to change out of her post-holiday holiday party at the neighbors’ clothes.

The kids come home from their play dates and want to know if I saw Mr. Guralnick’s new sports car. I realize that I had gone through the garage without looking at anything but the golf bag. I tell them No, and they can’t believe how dense I am. That’s all Karl’s kids could talk about at the Caseys. I can hardly wait for my kids to take up golf. I feel like I’m losing them already.

I tell the kids to wash up and change for dinner, and I check the chicken in the oven and make a dinner salad. I take out the Samuelsons’ salad utensils that I removed from the closet, humming as I toss the vegetables. I know what I’m doing. Every criminal longs to get caught and always leaves clues. Or, maybe, I’m trying to outsmart my mother. Better yet, maybe I need to recreate the emotional safety of being found out by her. The suburbs are where people go to feel safe. Well, most people, anyway.

I pass the salad around the table. As she takes the bowl from my son, my wife looks at me quizzically. “Where’d you get these?” she asks.

I’m not surprised. What better cure for boredom than flirting with danger, skating on proverbial thin ice? “Oh, just picked them up,” true, “was in the mood.”

She picks up the utensils and examines them like they’re some interesting archaeological find. “Hm,” she says as she loads salad onto her plate and passes the bowl to my daughter.

“Well,” I say, staying on the ice, “do you like them?”

She finishes chewing and says, “I can see why you do.”

“Non-sequitur?” I say.

“What’s a nonsquitor?” asks my daughter.

“It’s when you say something that does not really mean anything,” I respond.

“Oh, like your jokes?’ says my son.

My wife laughs. The detective work passes too easily. I guess the Samuelsons’ utensils will now take up residence in the kitchen until I’m ready to return them.

Early spring in suburbia. Time for lawn care, power washing decks and planting flowers. Lucy Samuelson had this brilliant idea of having a pre-planting party to celebrate the arrival of spring after the long, cold, dark New Hampshire winter. So, she invited the neighborhood women to discuss flower selection and maybe get everyone in her cul-de-sac to coordinate their plantings to the greatest aesthetic effect. And (groan), the husbands are invited, too. Lucy’s serving finger sandwiches. I think they’re watercress and mayonnaise. What the fuck is watercress anyway? And do they have to put mayonnaise on everything? Whatever happened to mustard? Lucy’s got this feathered, curled bleached blond thing going on, the same “do” you can see in her old photos of her stint as a New England Patriots cheerleader. She has a narrow chin with a wide forehead and a stitched-on smile that makes her look like a grinning light bulb.

There’s a buzz coming from the kitchen and I hear, over some guy sitting on the couch droning on about the new country club he belongs to and how he’s required to spend some minimum amount on their mediocre dinners every month, one of my neighbors—I think it’s Emma Pistorius with her high-pitched nasal squeal that sounds like a jet engine warming up—say: “Yeah, one of my ceramic bowls is missing, you know, the ones I keep on the shelf that everyone admires, one of the ones I got at Macy’s, paid full price for them, too.”

Then I hear Lucy chime in: “I’ve been missing my salad spoon and fork. It’s the oddest thing.”

“And I dunnuh what happened to muh crystal salt and pepper shaker,” I hear someone else say, in what sounds like a Southern accent softened by too many frozen New England winters. I don’t remember a salt and pepper shaker, and that scares me. I’m losing track of this stuff. Unless there’s someone else playing this game too.

I hear Emma’s jet engine squeal again. “Hey, don’t we all have the same cleaning lady?”

Lucy says; “Yeah, I referred both of you to her.”

The conversation pauses, and I think, Shit! I didn’t count on some innocent marginal worker taking the fall for this. I’d better start returning things pronto.

I see Marie walk into the kitchen. “Karl’s golf club is missing. I don’t think our cleaning lady goes into the garage.”

The voice I couldn’t place says, “Yah nevah know.”

Renee comes out of the kitchen holding a platter that she’s drying with a dish towel. She freezes when she sees me. I give her a blank look and shrug, pointing my chin toward Mr. Country Club Complainer, and roll my eyes. Her hard look softens, and I am safe again…for now. But, I know, like poison ivy, we get only so many exposures until our immunity wears off. We just don’t know how many, and I’m afraid of pushing my luck. That’s when I start formulating my plan to start returning my pilfered items… after I figure out what to take from the Samuelsons this time around for inviting me to this agonizingly unbearable time sink. My reverie is interrupted by Tom asking Harlan Samuelson about his autographed sports memorabilia. Harlan takes this opportunity to invite all the guys to follow him up to the loft. As Harlan is complying with a request from his guest, and he is doing so in an oh-so-humble manner, he could not remotely be accused of showing off. Harlan is, indeed, the Master of Matter-of-Factness. He’s not bragging, he’s sharing. The exclamation marks are unstated, but we’re supposed to feel them. (There it is! The autographed jersey of the Patriots star quarterback! And look who’s in that signed photo! Why, it’s Harlan and the championship-winning coach together at a golf tournament!) This is how alpha males do it in the suburbs. ***

I’m walking with my friend Greg on my street, enjoying a mild spring day. I point out the coordinated plantings on the cul-de-sac. Greg laughs. “I guess you can go for the melting-pot look or for diversity, and I guess individualism lost out.” Greg is one of the few neighbors from whom I have not taken anything, because he usually has something interesting to say or at least asks questions that get you to reveal something interesting about yourself. He and his wife, Marla, are therapists, which might lead you to expect them to be self-consciously probing and intellectually reflective in an annoying, self-helpbestseller kind of way. But they’re not. Lucy Samuelson approaches from the opposite direction in her Lululemon athletic gear, though she is nowhere near breaking a sweat in her saunter through the neighborhood.

“Hey Lucy, what’s new?” says Greg.

To my chagrin, Lucy stops. “Well, the strangest thing. Harlan and I found our missing salad utensils!” She flicks her hair with a quick jerk of her head.

“That’s great!” I say, a little too excitedly.

“I’ll say! They were on a crowded shelf in the garage. I don’t know how they ended up there. I feel bad for suspecting my cleaning lady. She has no idea why I’ve been so cold to her.”

I say, “Glad to hear it,” and start to walk away, but Greg has stopped to chat. The conversation turns to all the neighbors’ missing items.

It is then that Lucy puts some things together and says, “That’s strange. It seems that a lot of these things went missing after some party at someone’s house.” She looks at me, but only a paranoic would read anything meaningful in her look. Greg politely shrugs and says he’s glad her salad utensils turned up and walks on with me.

“Jeez, what passes for conversation here,” he says.

I’m standing in front of my open closet, frantically making a list of all the items in there, who they belong to, and when and how I can surreptitiously return them. I asked Renee for a full run-down of all of our neighborhood social plans so far, and I’m cross-referencing that list with my inventory to effect the quickest return in the most unobtrusive way. I feel like the fugitive criminal in a police drama who’s watching TV and aware that the dragnet is closing in on him. He can’t run anymore and has to get rid of the evidence. The only problem is that, for me to get rid of the evidence, I have to return to the scene of each crime. And I can’t just leave the stuff on their doorsteps, because everyone has those damn cameras now. So, not only will it involve exposing myself—showing up at my neighbors’ homes somehow carrying yet hiding their belongings on my person and putting them in a place they won’t immediately notice but will eventually find, but also accepting more invitations than I would like, and resisting the temptation to take one more thing for each lifeless monotony I have to endure. It worked once with the Samuelsons, but that only makes me feel that I’d be pressing my luck to do it again…and again.

The next social gathering is at the Flintstones. Fred and Wilma’s real last name is Javanovich, but Flintstones is so much more fun to say. And they don’t seem to mind.

It’s an obvious, mindless joke. Anything more sophisticated would probably be lost on most of these people. I’m wearing a pair of cargo pants which, although hopelessly out of style, have large pockets, into one of which I have sequestered the Florida! mug. I’m wearing a black and white Ramones t-shirt to make the retro-ness of my pants less obvious. The windows are open, and I smell their fresh-cut grass and new mulch. Fred is a bit obsessive about his lawn, and I don’t see a single weed or blade of crabgrass. And there he is, in the corner, trading lawn care tips with our neighbors. I’m on the periphery of this group, so I can get away with nodding without contributing to the discussion. They’re comparing blade sharpening services (Fred insists he knows the best), discussing which fertilizer spreaders do the most even job (Fred’s offers the most options), and debating which manure yields the maximum growth with the lowest risk of lawn burn (of course, Fred has the right formula). I see Greg and Marla walk in and am relieved that, with them here, I might be able to make this gathering interesting enough to resist the temptation to take something else after I return the mug. I lower my head and walk out of the room and pretend I’m looking for the bathroom. I nod quickly to Greg and Marla and hurry out before getting trapped in a conversation. I walk past the bathroom and, when I’m sure no one is looking, I open the door to the garage a crack, just enough for me to sidle through the door. My pant leg hits the door frame and I hear a crack. I freeze and I can feel in my pocket that the mug is now in two pieces. I look up in time to see Renee come out of the kitchen and walk past the hallway. She sees me and looks confused, but she’s carrying two trays and has to set them down somewhere, so she keeps going into the living room. I rush into the garage, find the metal shelving that every garage seems to house, and place the mug on its side with a heavy hammer on top of it, like it just fell and broke off the handle. Then I go back in the house and approach the bathroom, only it’s occupied. That’s when I notice Renee standing at the end of the hallway staring at me. I wave and smile, and she scowls. I shrug and raise my hands in a submissive pose, nonverbally signaling What? She shakes her head and walks away.

By the time I’m finished with the bathroom, everyone is in the living room listening to Rachel and Tom (the Peretti bowl people) talk about their Nantucket vacation and how pricey all the clothing stores are on the island—with everything costing at least twice what

you would pay on the mainland because, of course, everything has to be shipped over, and because most of the people there are rich, so they willingly pay such high prices—and that they bought a few things anyway because, what the heck, vacation, y’know. My eyes are glazing over and I’m looking around for something I can take, but I’m saved by Greg who sits next to me and asks if I’ve seen the latest film at the arts cinema that we occasionally go to in Boston.

Renee interrupts and asks what I was doing in the garage, and I tell her that I was looking for the bathroom and got confused. She gives me that look—the one I mentioned before—when Marla taps her on the shoulder and rescues me. Fortunately, Greg is so hyped about the movie that he ignores the interruption.

By now, I’ve managed to return the Peretti bowl, the glass figurine and most of the other items without adding more than five additional items to my collection. I haven’t figured out yet what to do about Karl’s five iron, as it’s the largest thing I’ve taken and, therefore, the hardest to sneak back in. I’ve thought of volunteering to take in his trash bins when he goes away for a long weekend and, therefore, needing his garage code, but then finding his golf club in the right place would be too obvious a coincidence. Karl might be boring, but he’s not stupid. Even if I did the stiff-legged limp thing (I fell moving my deck furniture. I’ll be all right, don’t worry.) and managed to sneak the club back into the house, where would I leave it? Karl finding it exactly where it was taken from would be just too weird: he knows it hasn’t been there. And it’s not the kind of thing that you move around between different rooms like your keys or your eyeglasses. Maybe the trunk of his car? But how would I get in there? Maybe Marie’s golf bag? I don’t know if their relationship could gently absorb that. This was a big mistake. Maybe the five iron will just have to remain missing. But how much damage have I caused? I find out that a high end five iron can sell for up to $300, and I know Karl doesn’t skimp when it comes to his golf game. Maybe I should come clean and tell him. What a terrible idea! I don’t think he would react the way my mother would. Maybe Renee would have a solution to this. Another terrible idea. I’m thinking that I will have to hold onto the club and just go out to an expensive restaurant with them and pick up the tab. Yes, that’s it.

I start waking up in the middle of the night and staying awake until morning, leaving me exhausted for work. I hadn’t broached the subject of planning a dinner out with Karl and Marie. Renee might like the idea, but it would make her suspicious and then I would have to soft shoe my explanation of one more thing. In my desperation, I decide that Greg is the only one I can possibly talk to.

I meet Greg at a local coffee shop during a weekday so it won’t be too crowded. I had told him that I needed to discuss something personal, that I wanted him to treat me like I was one of his patients in that he would not judge me and that he would keep it confidential. He agreed. My leg is shaking, I start to perspire as I fumble over my words and Greg calmly eyes me over the rim of his coffee cup.

“I hope you’re drinking decaf,” he says.

I let out a slow breath, close my eyes, and unload my saga. When I open my eyes, Greg is staring at me. He puts down his cup and chuckles. “You’re like a suburban guerilla.” Then, he smiles, spreads his hands apart and says, “Look, you’ve got to return the golf club. Do you really want to suffer through a long, expensive evening with Karl and Marie?” And that’s settled.

I’m sitting in Karl and Marie’s living room talking to Marie with Karl in the kitchen pouring the alcohol. Renee is on her way home from a dentist appointment. We were invited for 2 p.m. which, to Karl, is a decent hour to start drinking. Happiest Hour, he calls it. I’m trapped. My leg is shaking involuntarily, and I am hoping that Karl and Marie will be too intoxicated to notice. This is not what I envisioned after talking to Greg. I walked into the house and headed straight to the bathroom, acting like it was urgent. The club was in my pant leg and, since the bathroom is next to the garage, I figured I would take a quick detour into the garage when no one was looking and lean Karl’s iron somewhere against the wall. Except, when I walked past the bathroom door, Marie was passing by the hallway and laughed. I turned around quickly like a thief caught in the act (though I don’t know how many thieves are caught in the act of returning what they’ve stolen). Marie said, “Did you forget where the bathroom was? How much have you had to drink?” I slinked into the bathroom and figured I would have a second chance when I came out. But, when I came out, as soon as I turned to the garage, Karl was there grinning.

“Oh…er…I was just hoping to get a look at your new car.”

“I’ll show you it later. There’s a more important matter. Rocks or straight up?”

So, now I’m trying not to sit too upright as the club is concealed on the inside of my pant leg and then up the front of my shirt. I’m wearing the baggiest clothes I could find; stuff I have left over from before I lost weight. Karl comes in with the drinks and freezes. He stares at my pants.

“What the…?”

Marie looks at him puzzled.

“Did you get an erection talking to my wife?” he says loudly.

Marie looks flustered and blushes.

“No, I…” and I don’t know what to say. I start again. “It’s not what it looks like, Karl, it’s…” and I freeze again. Next thing I know, Marie has left the room and I’m being shown the door.

I’m waiting at home for Renee, sitting on a barstool at the kitchen counter cupping the shaft of Karl’s five iron with the palm of my hand while the clubhead rests on the floor. I’m out of options. Renee registers surprise but her face quickly morphs into her What did you do now? mode. I go into a needlessly lengthy and verbose history of my idiocy, but it comes out more easily than it did with Greg, as this is my second go-round. Renee listens, but her shock and dismay register on her face. If there were such a thing as a visual bullhorn, her face would be it.

I close my eyes and I am back in fifth grade. I have taken a snow globe off my teacher’s desk and brought it home. I confess to my mother, and she asks me why, but I don’t have an answer. I just liked it, and I was mad because my teacher had called on Philip when I had the right answer. She picks up the snow globe and admires the detail in how the small New England town is rendered with the church steeple, the sleighs and the horses. We turn it over a few times and my mother smiles. “It is lovely,” she says. “I can see why you like it.” Then she gently instructs me in right and wrong, and we work out a way of getting it back to my teacher.

If only everyone were my mother. n

Nate’s Mom Wasn’t Home

KEITH KOPKA

so his father put us to work in his garden after our little league game. He needed our help attaching what he called a Tiger Trap to the springs he’d installed on the edge of the birdbath, an anniversary gift for Nate’s mom. The squirrels were scaring off house finches, and Nate’s dad was determined to make an example of at least one. My job: to tension back a strip of thin plastic, with a dozen or so nails tacked through it, while Nate held another, so his father could slide a linchpin into the trigger mechanism. Now, as a grown man myself, I understand we were just a sweaty hand slip away from a trip to the ER, but back then I wasn’t burdened with safety. It was just fun playing Wile E. Coyote, knotting old shoelaces into a trip rope threaded through the bushes to the back porch where Nate and I, tasked with the honor of springing the device, drank Kool-Aid and took turns testing the slack of our line while Nate’s father lectured us on the virtues of patience, and we insisted we understood.

Zombie Double Feature

KEITH KOPKA

Before the first farmer’s skin is pulled back, I watch Harry crumple in a methadone sleep, bawl into my popcorn bucket, then reach across to hold a finger under his nose. The last terrified soul eaten, we leave the theatre, but only make it to the bathroom where I blast the sink over sounds of vomiting, and lock the door just when the light beneath the jamb goes dark. We’re getting out of here, I say, over and over, lifting him to his feet. We lurch past a ticket taker sweeping popcorn from the lobby and out into the street where Harry wanders the ellipses of traffic until I tackle him in a bus stop. People swarm us, and I wrap my arms around his head, build a chamber to bury their threats under the sound of our breath.

Do You Want to Do Bad Things to Me?

KEITH KOPKA

is less a question than a ritual. You toss your head back, letting your tongue skim the crest of your cupid’s bow, and we’re sexy. But only in the indefinite way people in shampoo commercials are sexy. You discard your clothes in one quick tug like the foil top from a pack of cigarettes. And because I’ve watched so many music videos that I’ve boiled courtship down to its essence: the industrial fan-blasted dance routine; I pick up your dress, slip my naked body into it, and dance for you the dance of the Curlew or the Peacock Spider. I dance my acknowledgement that you and I are unfastened shutters in a biological hurricane. I dance not because I think you like it, but because you are laughing at me.

Almost There

PATRICIA SCHULTHEIS

On the corner of Baltimore’s St. Paul Street and North Avenue a man waits for the light to change. It is Friday night and very cold. Traffic is light. Above the man hangs a clock that once marked the entrance to a savings and loan association. Neither the savings and loan nor its clock have worked for decades, so the man checks his phone for the time: 10:11.

He’s been sober for one hour and sixteen minutes. There were times he’d been sober much longer, once for eighteen months, three weeks, and two and a half days, but that was a while ago. His name is Teddy Holbrook, and he teaches at Putnam Academy, his old prep school.

A bus with two passengers and a poster advertising Les Miserable on its side drives by, and the haunting eyes of a Parisian waif remind him of his daughter Amy. He had been grading papers and working his way through his usual Friday-night bottle of rye, when she called. He’s divorced and worries about each of his three children for different reasons: Amy because she armors herself in a protective, almost willful, childlike innocence.

“Daddy, guess what?”

“What?”

“You’re not going to believe it ... I made ‘The Jungle Book. They had tryouts and I made it. I’m playing Bzagheera.”

Amy’s fifteen but sounded twelve.

“It’s the last week of April, so mark your calendar, Dad.”

Beneath that remark, Teddy heard the same silent questions his kids have been asking for years: “You won’t screw up again, will you Dad? You’ll remember the date, won’t you, Dad? You’ll be sober, right, Dad?”

The rye had fogged his brain, and Teddy couldn’t risk any slurred words, so he silently rehearsed them before letting his tongue shape them. “Entering the date into my phone right now, Kiddo.”

“Great ... and Daddy?”

“What?”

“Have you heard? It’s going to snow.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard. So be careful if you go out, Kiddo.”

“You, too, Daddy.”

When she hung up, Teddy was still gripping his tumbler with Holbrook Marine inscribed around its rim. Gripped it so tightly his fist felt fused to the glass. He set the tumbler beside the open rye on his scruffy coffee table and kept his gaze fastened on them, afraid to raise his eyes. Afraid to see the paucity of his life. Five years in this boxy one-bedroom. Five years, but never home. Other than the tumbler the only thing he truly cherished was the painted clock from the office of the grandfather he once adored. He needed to get out. Needed to walk to the harbor’s dark water. Something was drawing him. He bundled up and left.

The little white walking figure in the signal on the corner across North Avenue flashes, and he crosses the street. But he still feels the pull of the Parisian waif’s sad eyes. All those lost years—he once had dreams of being a writer—all those years. He walks down a canyon of four-story brownstones, the former homes of Baltimore’s merchant elite, but divided decades ago into apartments for workers the city’s industries demanded. Now the merchant elite and the industries are gone, and Teddy imagines the apartments housing isolates like himself.

A drink. God, he wants a drink.

At the canyon’s end, the street splits, and he takes the left, more dangerous fork. It tunnels under an overpass where Baltimore’s desperate homeless shelter, especially when a snowstorm is predicted.

He takes out his wallet, stuffs two five-dollar bills into his jacket’s right outer pocket and zips his wallet into the inner pocket over his heart. He wants to be ready if any tunneldweller reaches out a hand. But none does. Instead, Teddy walks past a row of lumpy sleeping bags pressed against the tunnel’s wall and stretching head to toe to its end.

Out of the tunnel, he checks his phone: Two hours and fourteen minutes. The image of his Holbrook Marine tumbler flashes into his mind. He could Uber and be at his apartment in half an hour. But he keeps going.

At Baltimore Street, the lights of the city’s notorious “Block” blink at him. On “The Block” no one ever sleeps; the booze never runs dry; and a fifteen-year-old is never carded.

Spring break of his sophomore year, when most of his Putnam friends were sunning themselves somewhere, Teddy worked on the tugboats owned by Holbrook Marine, the family firm run by his grandfather. It was late March and still cold on the Chesapeake, and he and crew of the Lady Bay Good had spent six rainy hours nosing an Ecuadorian tanker to its berth. When the ship was finally secure, two deckhands said they were headed for the block—did he want to come? For their own amusement, they’d set him on a tightrope: “No” and he’d have fallen on the side of being the boss’s prissy grandson; “Yes” and they’d goad him into matching them beer for beer, shot for shot. He said Yes. They went to The Sassy Tassel where he drank and listened to the deckhands’ comments about the strippers’ hawser holes and what they wanted to stick in them. At fifteen, he knew he was being groomed to take over Holbrook Marine, but something had happened the previous summer that made him think of being a writer, instead. So, in the bar, he tried stuffing his mind with the deckhands’ gross, colorful remarks for future stories. But a muzzy, boozy haze crammed his head, and his mind retained nothing. That was twenty-eight years ago.

The door to The Hickory Dickory is open and the languid longing of “Time after Time” puddles out. The club’s barker lounges in the entrance and grins at Teddy. “Sweet meat inside. Inside, sweet meat.” The barker has high, cavernous cheekbones, a thin, dark goatee, and a large, gold crucifix dangling from his left ear. “The sweetest meat, inside.” Teddy inhales and the aroma of bar’s booze blends with the scent of oncoming snow. Together, they smell as sweet as his ex-wife’s perfume.

He isn’t going to make it. He’d left his apartment with some vague, hopeful notion of quitting. But now he knows he’s not going to make it. He’s tried and failed, and lately, even when he’s drunk, he wants another drink. And if he goes four, five hours without one, he feels microscopic crabs crawling under his skin.

Flakes as fine as twice-ground sugar begin falling, and he takes a step toward the doorway. Then he notices the Christ figure on the barker’s crucifix. “That’s some earring you have there.”

“Thanks. I wear it to honor my little girl ... she has a heart thing. It can get bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, she was born with it ... no one knows why. They operated, but you know how it goes.”

“How old is she?”

“Three ... want to see a picture?” From the barker’s phone a somber, pale little girl with thin blond hair and the weighted stare of a child who’s endured too much, looks at Teddy.

“Pretty. What’s her name?”

“Mariam.”

“Nice ... don’t hear it much anymore.”

“I know ... old fashioned.”

“But very pretty.”

A desperate pleading has settled into the man’s eyes, as if he wants Teddy to give him some reassurance about his little girl. “Sorta a big name for such a little person,” he says, “but my girlfriend wanted her named for her grandmother. Maybe she’ll get to grow into it ... that’s what we’re praying for, anyway.” The barker looks up at the snow. “Maybe we’ll get to take her for a sled ride. Last year she was in the hospital.”

A man exiting the club stumbles over the threshold, and the barker catches him. “Whoa! Whoa there, Padre, easy does it.”

The stumbling man has a pink, cherubic face and a natural tonsure encircled by closely cut gray hair. “Thanks, Paul. Thanks.” He straightens himself and looks up. “Snow! Well, doesn’t that beat all!”

The barker slips his phone into his pocket. “They’ve been predicting it for days now.”

“Have they?” The man wears rimless eyeglasses and a good, black overcoat. “By any chance, Paul, you didn’t happen to notice where I parked my car, did you?”

“Sorry, Padre, no I didn’t.”

“Didn’t think so ... oh, well.” The man takes out his keys and presses the “Unlock” button. But nothing beeps back. “Oh, well, it’s gotta be somewhere. One thing’s for certain ... I sure didn’t fly here.” He chuckles to himself and starts walking down The Block. Teddy and the barker watch him grow dimmer and dimmer in the snow.

“A priest” ... the barker shakes his head. “Can you believe it? ... a fucking priest?”

“Takes all kinds, I guess.” Teddy says. Three times he’d tried AA, and priests were not that unusual. Nor, ministers. Once, even a rabbi. He remembered the rabbi saying, “In a way, I found living in a booze bubble safe. The challenge came when the bubble burst, and I realized how much time drinking took. And how hard filling up that time was, especially with something worth doing.”

The music switches, and “Unchained Melody” drifts from the Hickory Dickory’s doorway—“Time goes by so slowly.” Teddy glimpses the hunched shoulders of men on stools, their elbows on the bar and their eyes fixed on lithe female bodies making love to brass poles. If he steps inside, he’d never leave. Not to see Amy in “The Jungle Book.” Not for anything. He might walk out. But he’d never leave.

“Well, I got to get going.”

“They’re predicting at least a foot. Maybe more.” The barker’s cross dangles against his jaw. “Watch out ... you never know.”

“You, too.” Teddy pulls up his hood and heads in the direction the priest took. He thinks that maybe his idea of walking to the harbor is melodramatic, histrionic. Toward their marriage’s end, his wife had accused him of as much. “You create chaos, Teddy. Then dress it up as drama, so you can have an excuse to drink.” Maybe she’d been right. Maybe his walking through the cold and snow is just a form of self-aggrandizing martyrdom. But, still, he feels he has to do it.

The snow is fine and powder-dry and eddies in little wavelets over the sidewalk. He is about six blocks from the harbor and the Oh, Bay-Bee, the old tug his grandfather had insisted the family donate to the city as a tourist attraction. He has to see it.

He turns up an alley, then left into another. At the end, a man is bracing one arm against a brick wall and with the other trying to keep the vomit spewing from his mouth from splattering his good, black coat. Teddy walks toward him. “You okay, Father?”

The priest straightens up, fishes a handkerchief from a pocket and wipes his mouth. His eyeglasses are askew, and he sets them before looking at Teddy.

Teddy realizes the priest doesn’t recognize him. “I saw you at The Hickory Dickory.”

“Oh, right ... The Hickory Dickory. Paul ... good man ... always asking me to pray for his little girl.”

“You okay, then?”

“Oh, yeah ... fine, fine, never better.”

“Found your car?”

“What? Oh, right, my car. It’s right there.” The priest waves toward the alley’s end and Teddy walks with him.

When the priest beeps his key, for brief seconds individual flakes dance though the answering high beams, then vanish into the darkness. “There I am,” the priest says.

At the car Teddy says good-bye and keeps walking toward the harbor. He feels shaky and beneath his hood sweat prickles his scalp—a drink would cure that—just one. He has the ten dollars in his outer pocket and more over his heart. The Hickory Dickory isn’t far. He turns back.

And sees the priest coming toward him. “Buddy, hey, buddy.” By the time the priest reaches Teddy, the man is panting, and his vomitous breath blasts out. “Buddy, I’m wondering if you can do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Well, see, I really shouldn’t be driving ... and on a night like this, with the roads being slick ...”

“Sorry, I can’t give you a ride ... I’m walking. Want me to call you an Uber?”

“No ... no ... see, I have to get the car back. It’s not really mine. You could say I borrowed it from one of my brothers in the cloth at the seminary up thataway.” The priest swings an arm northward. “Come on, Buddy, help a fella out.”

“Sure you can’t drive?”

“It helps to not have lost your license.”

Teddy stares at the man’s silly, cherubic face, and pathetic, pleading eyes—he’s seen that look at AA meetings, even in his own reflected face in various mirrors over various bars. So desperate for someone who’s not himself to rescue him. He wants to get to the Oh, Bay-Bee, but somehow the snow has isolated him, and he’s alone in a landscape gently transforming from tawdry to enchanting, with a drunken priest as his only fellow witness.

“Okay.”

He knocks off his hood and gets behind the wheel. The dash is unfamiliar, the wipers slow, and the high beams, useless against the snow. Plus, the car’s weight compresses the

scant accumulation into a sleek white sheet, so whenever he brakes, the car fishtails a bit. God, he needs a drink.

The priest remains largely silent, until about five blocks from the seminary. “The Church authorities thought I’d get my act together if I had ‘light duties,’ but let me tell you, the seminary has a thousand places to hide a bottle, and I know five hundred. How about joining me for a nightcap, Buddy?”

Teddy knows how that will go. He’s drunk with the priest’s type before: intellectuals who camouflage their cravings with conversation—the state of the world, the shallowness of modern life, the idiocy of Chat-GPT. And all the while, the booze: “Another? ... Thanks. Top you off? ... Sure. Wadda ya say we finish this up? ... Why not?”

A bus with no passengers passes and again the pitiful eyes of the waif from Les Miserable look into his. Teddy stops the car. “Thanks for the offer, Father, but I’m going pass. I think I’ll get out here.”

“But ... ”

’You’ll be fine. It’s only a few blocks ... you’ll be fine.”

The priest looks in the direction of the seminary, then says, “You don’t know what it’s like. You on the outside. You have it so easy.”

“Easy? How’s that?”

“You’ve got everything ... wives, kids, ... everything. What do we poor suckers have? Our so-called brothers in Christ? ... God help me.”

“You’ll be fine, Father.”

“Right ... sure I will.”

“You’ll do okay.”

“Right ... I’ll say three Hail Maries and four Our Fathers and I’ll be just ducky.”

Teddy pulls up his hood and walks away. His apartment is near, but Putnam Academy, nearer. He cuts across the campus to the football field, where he played quarterback. And where his grandfather would watch him as though nothing had happened.

He had worshipped his grandfather, the way the old man commanded whatever space surrounded him and whatever job lay before him. “Like to keep my hand on the wheel... get outta that fuckin’ office,” he said the morning he jumped aboard the Oh, Bay-Bee,

barely acknowledging Teddy—their unspoken code—grandson or not, on a tug, Teddy was just another deckhand.

It was late August, and a flotilla of recreational craft clogged the bay, paying no attention to the shipping lanes. By midmorning the air was a blast furnace burning the sky white hot. They were supposed to meet a Norwegian tanker, but there was some problem. On deck Teddy could hear his grandfather’s growing impatience in the wheelhouse as he and the tanker’s pilot radioed back and forth.

“Here, kid, cool yourself down.” Falon, one of the deckhands, produced a cold beer and Teddy drank it. He’d just finished his second when an erratic chop sprang up on the bay’s surface, and the sky’s white scrim fell away, exposing a dark underbelly. Then, as swift as an eagle snatching a perch from the water, a blinding storm fell upon them, glazing the deck. And suddenly a massive form, more shadow than ship, loomed over them.

“The hawser! Get the fucking hawser,” his grandfather barked. Along with Falon, Teddy started the winch, but even someone as inexperienced as he was could see the towline was frayed.

“What should we do?” he asked Falon.

“Keep goin’. Christ, just keep goin’.”

But he’d heard how a snapping towline could slap a man overboard. Or worse, decapitate him. “Grandpa, this hawser is ... ”

“Christ, kid, keep goin’.”

But he thought his grandfather would be proud that he’d spotted potential trouble ... “Grandpa this hawser ... ”

“Kid, I’m tellin’ you, shut up.”

“Grandpa, this hawser ... ”

His grandfather burst from the wheelhouse. “What the fuck are you whining about? You little pissass.”

His grandfather pushed him aside, and Teddy slipped, falling onto the hatch, where his grandfather took the time to kick him before working the winch with Falon—love to hate in one hot afternoon.

At the Putnam goalpost, he stops and checks his phone: 12:43. In less than an hour he’ll reach his apartment with its pile of ungraded papers, bottle of rye, and Holbrook

Marine tumbler. And the clock from his grandfather’s office. He thinks about something else the rabbi said: “Once you stop, you can never not be not drinking. At first, that’s what filled my time, not drinking. But gradually other things came ... richer things.”

The snow lays on the goalpost’s crossbar like white grace. So many games played. So many won. Or lost. By himself and others. He’s never felt so alone. But also so aware of himself. How the air smells like ozone, and alpenglow tinges the atmosphere faint rose.

Snow ... what a generous gift. The way it falls equally everywhere. On the bleak and the beautiful, the mundane and the mysterious, the workaday and the wondrous, all worthy of transformation.

Teddy walks on; he’s almost there. n

vigil

BRENDA BEARDSLEY

for j.w. we were there, in that room, leaves blowing beyond and the air was crisping maples, calling them to winter. sidewalks were barren then, suddenly, a rush of students. the lake was distant, untouchable in its muteness. the pier unable to be imagined. night sighed then exited, and came the glaring brightness of day. you lingered between where you needed to go and how you were held in life. there was wind, i thought it was spirit, insistent, at your window. at dusk, while i soothed you, the groundskeepers came, eerie light of leaf blowers igniting the almost-night erasing leaves while you hesitated to breathe. by then, the sky was a scrim of grey covering where I could not imagine blue and i was without compass, while you drifted, and i sat small, still.

the swallows

BRENDA BEARDSLEY

long after my mother passed, i saw her in the other lane, rushing the light, like me, eager for her pilled sweats, sweet tea, one more errand checked off the to do list. why couldn't i stop seeing her; i missed & i could only speak of this missing as a contraction, how i imploded, those months clotted, chilled, un-bright; un-done. i barely cooked, except macaroni with, i thought, ample cheese but, it wasn't enough for my daughter, who missed as well. missing gripped us; we opened our mouths, like swallows darting to claim gnats or flies yet our want wouldn't & couldn't be assuaged.

Lessons From My Mother

CLAIRE RUBIN

Did I learn it from you, my mother how to jab the softest spot maybe between the collar bone and throat or right below the atrium how to make someone feel small and worthless as dust mites hiding in pillows and mattresses how to hurt and walk away like a well-mannered murderer

Don’t you remember? over and over when I know he no longer can commenting with menacing cheerfulness on how slowly he walks taking an hour to shuffle around the block how he leaves spots of soup and sauce on the barely washed bowls how he forgets to pay the water bill punishing him for being eighty-six

It is I who should remember the times he held my tears treating them as precious pearls from the Sea of Cortez the time he brought me a dozen lilies when I drove through the garage door memories still alive despite being stored in dusty files on basement shelves hoping to be remembered

I think of your mocking comments words curled into a fist telling me I didn’t deserve first place saying I was the fattest and ugliest duckling

I think of you wobbling unsteadily clutching your bottle of scotch shouting you had never wanted children

I learned well, didn’t I always first, straight A’s but mother I don’t want anyone to hurt the way I did

At Beaver Pond, Singing Whispered Songs

MARK STROHSCHEIN

With every step sounds of temporary thaw as boughs release moisture. Pine needles swirl like snow. Short sun hangs low.

Snow shelters on moss-covered stumps beside the muddy trail or in any dark crevasse to remain crystalline.

Water lily tubes trapped below frozen sheets of ice lie suspended, dormant, the pads dead remnants of summer’s glory.

Frost on standing pond trees— shells of vibrancy— becomes sunlight’s steam as if trees exhale ancient mist, singing only whispered songs now.

One tree’s breath expires— this anthropomorphic act a sign to all who believe we are entitled, deserve to take further steps along fragile winter paths.

So Much for the Habits of Bees

DAWN GOULET

“It is appointed unto man once to die, but after this: the judgment.” The sign is sturdy and simple, made of black-painted plywood with letters blocked out in white painter’s tape. It is the size of the thing that draws the eye, hoisted precariously above the crowd by a thin man in a sweat-drenched suit. Roy almost offers to take a turn—let me shoulder your burden, brother—but their eyes meet, and the man has the face of a martyr. He will not be denied the bearing of this cross. Roy walks on, pressing his Bible against his leg.

The heat and noise and crush of people suddenly overpower Roy, and he stumbles. There are broken strands of beads and condom wrappers lying in puddles of rancid beer. A woman in pink spandex bends to help him, her long false eyelashes resting on her cheeks. There is water in the heels of her platform shoes; and in the water, Roy sees, tiny floating words calling out to him to “LIVE.” He feels suddenly conspicuous in his dress pants and shoes, his short-sleeve button-down shirt.

And just like that, they are gone. Brother Scott and the younger boys, Miranda, Callie. He’s lost them.

Roy was hanging back, uncomfortable with the way the girls hovered around the traveling preacher. Brother Scott was not quite handsome, but he was trim and hale, a few years older than them, and a college man, which counted for a lot. He’d arrived in May to lead their summer youth group and been fêted, seated at the place of honor, in each of their homes in turn. Roy had watched as Brother Scott swallowed his own mother’s instant mashed potatoes and chewed her crinkle-cut carrots, gave thanks for the undercooked pork chops as if they were manna from Heaven.

The sun is setting. People who can’t be much older than Roy—Callie says you can order a drink here if you are 18 and someone vouches for you—are streaming out of bars with names like “The Dungeon” and “Saints and Sinners”—frat boys in trucker hats and bridesmaids in sashes and tight shirts, their stomachs and chests exposed. They jostle him, the juices from fried oysters and slabs of sticky ribs dripping down their chins. They gulp

hurricanes, yard-glasses of beer, and daiquiris with sliced fruit as big as sails. Tourists stop with their children in the cool doorsteps of strip clubs.

The girls. From their perspective, Brother Scott is worldly, exotic even. He has ministered all throughout the Gulf States, spent summers at a soup kitchen in New York City and in Polynesia with honest to goodness savages, facts evidenced by a Moleskine journal filled with shiny pencil sketches. Roy has seen those pictures the girls swoon over: a homeless man on the subway, a dead pigeon, women in grass headdresses with babies at their breasts. The girls clamor for Brother Scott’s attention. But there is something about him—lanky, aloof, by turns amused and then sternly disapproving—that makes Roy uneasy.

An old woman spins into Roy with her eyes closed, a boombox on her shoulder. A girl with enlarged earlobes shouts at him, her hot breath buzzing in his ear, asking if he’s there for her Haunted Bourbon Street tour. He backs away from her, shaking his head, as a man in an alien costume lunges by on stilts, his dirty yellow bellbottoms skimming the street. Little kids line the gutter, tap-dancing for coins and beating plastic buckets with drumsticks. Roy looks away. He wants to put money in their cups, but he has none. They turned over their wallets and cell phones before setting out. Distractions of the devil, Brother Scott said.

These are the people they have come to carry God’s word to.

The church group drove overnight from their small town outside of Shreveport, in the half-sized white school bus the church used to transport old ladies to services. There was a prayer breakfast organized by one of Brother Scott’s old classmates—a man with girlish lips and a prepubescent moustache—then they busied themselves unpacking their few things. All of the drawers at the guesthouse were warped and out of flush; they jammed at odd angles and made sounds like nails on a chalkboard when forced.

A space of hours trickled by. There was no one right thing to do besides read the Bible or pray. A few of the boys went on an excursion with Brother Scott, but Roy pleaded a headache and retreated to his room to lie in front of the oscillating fan.

Through the window he watched Miranda sipping Diet Coke on the balcony and

twirling her hair. It was piled on top of her head and crisscrossed with elastic headbands, and Roy was careful to keep his eyes there, on those headbands, because Miranda’s body, bursting indecently from even the most modest of cardigans and skirts, was a throbbing temptation to him, a vision with a pulse of its own, thumping wildly behind his eyes long after she was safe from view.

Down the hall, Callie, coltish and awkward, tried to straighten her own hair in the humid prison cell that was their shared bathroom. She gave up and, to compensate for the failed attempt, told Miranda her headbands were a sin. Callie, who puffed her flat chest out when she passed the boys and who had once, during a retelling of Samson and Delilah, stared at Roy across the Sunday School classroom and licked her lips.

Roy dozed, sleeping later than he meant to, but not allowing himself to hurry. He tied his brown Oxfords tight, brushed the lint from his pants, and combed his hair with the black plastic comb from the drugstore travel kit. He took up his good Bible, with the red satin ribbon, and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked just like his father.

Roy’s father kept bees. He zipped himself each morning into gray canvas coveralls and pulled on long chamois leather gloves. He walked across the yard to the hives, a mesh beekeeper’s hood under one arm, the spatula-shaped tool he used to pry apart the waxy frames swinging by a string from his other hand. But on church days he wore brown or gray dress pants with matching shoes and shirts with ironed-in creases.

Dinner that night was pasta and iceberg lettuce at a local homeless shelter. They served first and ate last, ladling the dredges of meat-specked sauce onto cheap spaghetti glued in starchy heaps, stacking their Styrofoam plates in the trash. On the bus, the girls sang “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “Down by the Riverside,” as Brother Scott’s friend drove them through the French Quarter to Bourbon Street. Roy clenched his feet inside his shoes, waiting. He knew that if the home of sin was this 300-year-old city by the river, then the epicenter of sin, the very bullseye of the target, was Bourbon Street.

This was his first time.

Born eight years after his next oldest sibling, Roy was the product of a rare instance of lust between his aging parents. To compensate for this embarrassment, his mother had embraced religion fiercely upon his arrival, and his father had capitulated to her wishes.

As a result, Roy experienced none of the joyful chaos his older siblings recalled from their own childhoods; no road trips or family vacations. One week each summer Roy was bundled off to vacation bible school, to participate in wholesome outdoor activities, fellowship, and prayer. He spent that week in a trance, daydreaming of a furtive romance with one of the girls, towels wrapped tightly over their modest bathing suits, that he and the other boys passed on the way to their separate swimming hour in the algae-slick lake.

Stepping down from the bus at Canal Street, Roy found himself in a river of flesh, black and brown and pale white skin shaded with tattoos roiled beneath feather boas and bulged from sequined waistbands. Hands sloshed cups of foaming beer, flung beads, flailed, groped, reached—for him—for whatever could be had. From the wrought-iron balconies fell red lace panties, plastic shot glasses, masks smeared with lipstick and glitter.

They marched, defiant, holding signs aloft or clutching bibles to their chests. And then, the man with the sign. The stumble. The filthy ground.

Roy walks for hours. What feels like hours. He sees his own people, here and there in the crowd. Not Brother Scott and the others, but his own sort of people. The pure of heart. The redeemers. They carry signs saying “Repent,” and “Hell is Forever,” and “Hear the Word of God.” They are there to remind the world, with their stoic silence and with their hungry rage, that “Jesus Saves,” that “Hell Awaits All Sinners,” that “The Price of Sin is Great.”

He is never going to find them. Roy is angry at Brother Scott for taking their phones and not picking a meeting spot. At the girls for distracting him. He turns down the next street he comes to and walks toward the river.

A line of people waits outside a shoddy stucco building. The whispers of paint clinging to the streaked façade might be a hundred years old; they might have been applied that morning. The neighboring buildings, in on the joke, are all fresh red stucco and gleaming green French doors.

A skirmish breaks out at the front of the line. A man is being turned away but won’t go quietly. His friends are inside, he insists. He just needs to use the bathroom. His brother is a city councilman. He’ll have them shut down. The bouncer, lost in time in a crushed

fedora and suspenders, puts his hand on the man’s chest and says: “Walk on, now. Walk on.” The gesture, or maybe just the man’s voice, is like a spell; the drunk grows quiet and staggers off. A slip of paper flutters from his hand into the gutter.

“Gonna nab that now, or what?” the bouncer asks. Roy looks up. He picks the ticket up and hands it over. The bouncer motions for him to follow the others inside. He can’t, he explains, he has to find his friends. But the guy isn’t having it. “Why deny yourself, man? You got somewhere to be?”

Roy has no answer.

“Uh huh.” The man punches the ticket and hands it back. “Live a little, kid.”

Roy is swept inside by the closing door. Darkness. Stairs leading down. Lacquered posters on the walls announce artists with names like Tiny and Squig, a woman called Mama Freight Train in a floor-length gown. “Live Jazz in the Crescent City,” they scream in ten-inch letters, “Music from Noon to Midnight.” Another step down and sunlight from the street-level windows obscures it all in a flash.

Roy is five or six years old, crouching unseen at the top of the cellar steps, the sun cutting trapezoids in the dust-filled air as his father walks the aisles of honey. He tilts a jar, releasing a slowtraveling bubble, then turns another a quarter of a turn.

Roy’s father used to read to him from Aristotle’s The History of Animals—that tedious but hypnotic chronicle of living things. At the end of each section the old philosopher wrote “So much for the habits of birds” or “So much for the habits of wood lice.” Roy’s father always let him read those parts.

The music starts: a tin cup on a washboard, the snicker and hiss of a match as the bass player lights his cigarette.

Roy’s father rinses his coffee cup at the pump and hangs it on a hook above the sink in the barn. He lights a cigarette, his only one of the day, and blows the smoke in lazy rings above his head.

Because of a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old Greek philosopher, Roy’s father knew to plant almond and pear trees around the hives, beans, poppies, and creeping thyme. He knew that when harvesting the honey, you must always leave an honest portion behind. With no sweetness left to them, he explained, the bees’ work becomes spiritless, and they suffer; the whole hive suffers.

Soon the music is a wall of sound, at war with itself, falling apart and coming together again. A calculated confusion of drums and brass. The crowd is shouting, stomping and swaying. It’s the waggle dance of bees drunk on nectar, Roy thinks, full of that same urgency and joy.

When the show is over, the crowd flows out onto the street, mellow and sated.

And of course, it is in that moment that Roy’s church group walks by, dragging their signs and hugging their Bibles. They won’t think to look for him here. They will return to the guesthouse and sleep, ready to board the bus for another overnight drive. There will be hymns and prayers and somber meals.

Roy almost calls out to them.

He almost runs to them.

In a moment they will turn the corner. n

The Feast of Saint Thomas Tastes Like a Lucid Dream of Her, Stretched on a Beach in Saugatuck

BY SARAH SORENSON for J

Somewhere in Manhattan, she verges. An unknowable practice in a place I’ve never met. Thomas was once the same, I’m told. An un-imaginer. The verge I know is proximity, the pull of unbearable closeness. Desire and likelihood combined. Tipped close to an edge, the ridge of her tongue at the entrance of my sex. We verge, transitioning to distance, absence. My fingers have maps traced through the streets of her hair. My soul has maps, traipsed across minor keys as I write to her on Sundays. Tell me again that everything’s fine. Her photo before me on the internet, an intimacy I resent sharing-- though I love the ease with which my fingers can raise her again and again.

At the Hilt of All My Desires is a Lie and It Heals Me Up Like a Brawler’s Suture

SARAH SORENSON

I want to wrestle Courtney Love on a cold, snowy night. I want to share a joint and look at the flakes falling into water, ash and lace. I want the beaded dazzle of blood drops—scratches like a skipped stone down my sides, along my throat. Give me an uneven bed that dips us together, a comforter full of seeds, and a loose window rattling like a gossipy tooth. Courtney, I’d pin you in the small mauve hours when you aren’t more than you and I am more than me. Give me the white wet spark of one night. I sit askew in the world, your bruised thighs a star map in violet. My girlhood, a star map in tears I lit up in the dark. I lit up in the dark. Still do.

In the Time of Grunge I Was a Soft Queer Girl with Dreams Like a Neil Diamond Banger

SARAH SORENSON for B

In 1994, I wasn’t cool enough to be the dyke I was, wasn’t hip and hard and filled with braggadocio. I was fucking sensitive with my hair in my mother’s pink foam curlers. I was anxious about the dimples in my thighs and shy about the dimples in my cheeks. In 1994, I was falling in love differently than the way I’d love a half-nude celebrity in the 13inch blue glow of my bedroom, splayed hot summer night in white baby doll pajamas. In 1994, I wasn’t boyishly built with a face like a smirk—wasn’t sidling and chin-rubbing and pushing my hips at the straight girls. I wasn’t pushing the limits and demanding to play football and smoking weed and puking beer. I wasn’t anybody’s bro. Didn’t wear big Docs and pierce my own tongue and nipples. In 1994, I wanted to kiss the girl in the prairie skirt, hold her down in the pink of my bed and dream of how we could tear away in the night in a raunchy Cadillac and sip Italian sodas on California beaches and buy cute clothes from the Deb in the mall. I wanted to bite her Janie’s cookies and write her name on a balloon and send it up to Jesus like a thank you note. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t. So I wanted.

He is Mine

SUMMER

HAMMOND

Carolina Beach, North Carolina, 2023

George swings in right around 3. The cake door chimes clink and jingle. I’m thinking about brokenness.

In the quiet following the noontime rush, I’m making cake decoration flags. Happy Birthday! Congratulations!—and I’m fumbling terribly. The flags are crooked, and the sticks break, a tiny yet sickening crack, baby bird bones snapping. I hide the broken sticks in the trash, beneath the crumpled receipts and sample napkins, like I’m a kid, trying to hide a dish I broke, one of mom’s favorites, in pieces.

I kneel for a moment by the trash and breathe, listen to the girls in the back chatter about classes and exams, their love lives, where they’re going out tonight.

“Alexa!” one calls. “Play Good as Hell!”

“I do my hair toss, check my nails!” They all scream-sing.

The owner isn’t here. I’m just as relieved and happy as they are, in my own quiet way. When Barb’s around, she treats me like I’m one of the girls. Seventeen instead of fortythree. She throws an apron at me, wagging her finger, if she catches me not wearing one. She adjusts my top. Fawns, fusses, baby talks me, very nearly pinches my cheek. Barb’s only fifteen years older than me. What I hate most is, when customers ask (and it happens daily), “Are you the owner?” Because they expect someone my age to be an owner, not a clerk. Sometimes they lean in, whisper, “What are you doing here?”

It’s scorching because—it is an echo of my own question.

My grief counselor, Eleanor, in our last session, wondered the same. “You talk about your current job as a source of pain and shame. I’m curious, Rosie. Why do you stay there?”

I’d shrugged, though flinching within. “Apparently, Master’s degrees aren’t the golden key I thought they were.” I tell her that Sister and I—though we aren’t speaking—we’re

both of us first generation college graduates. And we both earned our Master’s. “I came here to rise, and instead, I’ve tripped over the cracks. There’s no getting up.”

At this, Eleanor had grown thoughtful, looking through her notes. “You haven’t mentioned it, but my instincts compel me to ask. Were one or both of your parents— addicts?”

“No,” recoiling. “Absolutely not. Why would you –”

“I’m sorry, I just –”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Some of what you’ve told me. Family estrangement. People-pleasing. Haunting fears.” She’d met my eyes. “The troubling belief that you don’t deserve, aren’t good enough to succeed. That failed efforts spell doom. Adult children of addicts often endure these things.”

I’d erupted. “My mother wouldn’t even touch a glass of wine!”

Startled, Eleanor had tilted her head. I saw the question rising.

Just stick to your job and talk to me about my father’s death! I’d screamed in my head, too scared of getting in trouble to actually scream. But I had grabbed my purse and walked out, breaking a nail, which now, captures my gaze. I stare at the fracture, the split, think of how to fix it, hide it, escape, as the girls hoot and clap at the finale of the song, the same instant the chimes clink and jingle and George arrives.

I rise from my crouch by the garbage can. George salutes. “Oh hey! There you are! I’ve got stories!”

George, wearing a coffee colored newsboy cap over his rambunctious gray curls, has just returned from a trip, back to our shared hometown. When George and I discovered this odd connection, two Iowa castaways landed here on the coast of North Carolina, he was purchasing a dozen of the trendy overpriced cakes this popular bakery chain sells, more frosting than cake, and something so weirdly elating about the cake itself, I’d often wondered if it were laced with some illicit drug.

“Where you taking all this cake?” I’d asked him.

“A little trip to the Midwest. Figured I’d bring something for my fishing buddies. Show a little love. Get ‘em hooked on this evil…”

I’d smiled. George sauntered into the shop at least once a week, protesting that he shouldn’t be there, had no business what with his blood sugar, then peering in the cake case, eyes on the prowl for the latest flavor—Strawberries and cream, Snickerdoodle, or Lemon Raspberry. “Dang it, why,” he’d say, smacking his knee, “why do they all have to be so good?”

“Where in the Midwest?” I’d asked, sliding over a copy of his receipt to sign.

Leaning over, pen in hand, he’d chuckled. “Oh, a nowhere town in Iowa, just a dot on the bend of the Mississippi, a sidewalk, couple of bars, a post office. More train tracks than town.”

My throat had gone numb and prickly because, as I’ve been saying for years, my throat is psychic. It knows things before I do.

“Princeton,” I said, and George said, at the same time.

His hand, holding out the signed receipt, hung suspended, our eyes locked.

Then, after a moment of perfect stillness, he’d let out a squawk, grabbed my arm and shook it. “Well, I’ll be!” He’d cried. “I’ll be damned!!” And then, lighting up as he collected his cakes, “Say, who are your people? What name? Why, look here, I’ll go ask around. See what I can find out.”

Now I can tell—he’s done just that.

Swaggering up to the register, he brings his hand down, smack! Onto the countertop. “Oh yes!” George says. “I know all about you!”

Princeton, Iowa, 1992

Sister and I leave the house while the grownups—Grandma Lucy, mom, dad, Aunt Beck— are still talking. They huddle around grandma’s teeny tiny kitchen table. Grandma made a box cake, which isn’t a fancy kind of cake, but simply Duncan Hines. She calls it box cake, and no one makes a box cake like Grandma Lucy. She bakes them in a long metal sheet pan. She slathers them with frosting, covers them with plastic wrap, then slides them in the fridge. She makes two or three box cakes at a time. She says, in an important way, they’re for company.

We’re company, even though we live only five miles down the road.

Sister and I would like to stay for the cake, but not the conversation, which involves Grandma Lucy weeping. You can’t tell she’s weeping unless you look very closely. She doesn’t make sounds when she cries. She just brings her crumpled up napkin to her eyes, and gently presses. And mom sets her elbow on the table, pushes her fist to her forehead, and forks cake to her lips, shaking and shaking her head. Aunt Beck makes scoffing sounds, like sandpaper in her throat, before unleashing her scary, chain-smoking cough. While dad continues to murmur his counsel because he’s the one we all look to for answers.

They are talking about the Old Man.

Some people have Grandpas, Grandads, Grandfathers.

Sister and I have the Old Man.

That’s what they call him. Everyone. Except the bartenders at Kernan’s and Bridge’s. They call him—good business.

Sister and I pick our way down grandma’s front porch steps, black iron, so wobbly and jittery they might as well be made of jello. Sister and I clasp the hand rails with both hands, like old women, guiding ourselves down, step by step. Across the street, a speedboat charges down the Mississippi, fire engine red and glittery, thump thump thump, bucking against the waves, throwing off bright shocks of splintered light. Sister and I, stepping onto firm ground, shield our eyes. A train horn pierces and we hear it coming, clack-a-clack-aclack. The train will rattle Grandma Lucy’s walls, knocking knick-knacks off her shelves. If you’re using her bathroom, and you forget to lower the blinds, the train roars by so close, you can look the conductor in the eyes while your pee unleashes.

“I wish we could get some cake,” I say. “It’s coconut. My favorite. You think they’ll eat it all?”

“If they do, she’s got another one in the fridge. I saw it.”

“What kind?”

“Yellow.”

“Yellow!”

“With chocolate frosting.”

“Oh. That’s your favorite.”

“Nuh uh! Mine’s confetti.”

“It is?”

“Yes. Duh, Rosie! For two months now, I’ve loved it best. Don’t you pay attention?”

Sister accuses me a lot of not paying attention. Lately, she gets mad at me for it.

Across the street, Arwen waves as he ducks back into his garage. He’s decked out in camouflage coveralls and duck boots, his signature fashion. He’s famous for the fish shop he runs out of his house. He also sells bait. He makes it, there in his garage, lures in the shapes of small fish painted neon, flashy feathers and twisters, like something out of a “fish disco nightmare”, Grandma Lucy says.

Arwen is Grandma’s ex-lover. He built her house, right across from his.

This is something of a scandal, I know that much.

Grandma was having shenanigans with Arwen, before she’d divorced the Old Man.

I know because mom told us, groaning, covering her face.

Sister and I wave at Arwen, then walk. “Never mind about cake,” Sister says. “We’ll get ice-cream at Boll’s.”

We stop talking because the train is too close. After years of experience, we know the precise moment to shut up. The horn blows, a long, wild cry that ripples our hair, lifts our skin.

The train rips past, juddering our jaws, shaking our ribs, rattling our bones right out from under us. The air saturates with creosote and diesel and it infuses us the way cigarettes infuse Aunt Beck. It is like there is no space between us and the train. None at all. The train roars and clatters and reeks through our lungs and blood. We smoke the train. We are possessed by the train.

A caboose man waves at us from his seat by the window and we stand nearly on tiptoe, Sister and I, in unison, waving back.

Then, we pick back up. “What were they talking about?”

“The Old Man,” Sister says.

“Yes, but what’s he done now?”

“He’s living with that woman.”

“Which woman?”

“Jonalyn!”

“Oh, Jonalyn.” In sandals that slap our heels, we’ve been walking down the road, but now, together, side by side, our feet find and step up onto the sidewalk. “There’s a woman named Jonalyn?”

Sister’s hand flies to her forehead. “You don’t pay attention. You really don’t.”

I should’ve known better than to betray my ignorance. Nonetheless, I dig myself in deeper. “Why is Grandma crying?”

And Sister, huffy as we skip over all the cracks in the sidewalk, grass shooting through, fills me in. Jonalyn manipulated the Old Man to sign over Grandma Lucy’s part of his pension—to her. She didn’t raise his five kids, put up with his benders and abuse, but now, somehow, this Jonalyn’s got Grandma’s money. And Grandma’s already poor, already scraping by, in the house Arwen built for her, with the Jello Jiggler porch steps, a leaking furnace that gives her migraines, practically sitting on top of the railroad tracks.

“How did this Jonalyn finagle that?”

“Who knows. She used her wiles. She’s a younger woman. Like fifty-something. And he was probably drunk.”

I can’t imagine a part of the world that doesn’t know the Old Man’s claim to fame. My classmates at school know. They’ve grown up making fun of him. Throwing things at him when they find him passed out, once in our school playground, just up the street. I’ve stood by, a silent witness, watching them whip sticks and apples at his legs, chest, and face. “Wake up, crazy old drunk! Hahaha! Get outta here!”

Didn’t want them to know he was mine.

He was a tornado.

Sister and I, growing up in the cornfields of tornado alley, had more than once paused kickball games to watch funnel clouds churn in wild, grimy menace, straight over our heads. We’d never had to use the storm cellar behind our trailer, but I was ready. I’d practiced, running when the winds kicked up, one cat tucked under each arm. I’d set the cats down, swing open the rotted wood doors, wrangle the two cats all over again, and stare down into the spidery depths I wasn’t brave enough to brave, until a real tornado.

Tornados could rip your house out by the roots and throw it into the sky, pieces falling into the trees.

Tornados could tear everything you ever loved out of your arms and destroy it, then spear you with the remains.

Shredded fields, twisted up tree trunks, piles of bricks and concrete, silence beneath.

No one ever said that people could be tornados, mangling the family tree.

A newborn, climbing out of the shelter, straight into the wreckage.

I turn to Sister. “You know our storm cellar?”

“What storm cellar?”

“The one in our backyard!”

“Are you nuts? We don’t have a storm cellar.”

Sister and I stride past Bruce’s Barbershop, the swirling pole, which I believed as a little girl was Christmas ribbon candy, and I’d plotted ways to steal it, while waiting for dad to get his haircut. “We do too have a storm cellar! You know, the wooden doors, like trap doors, and the cement stairs, down to the bottom…” I know for a fact. Every summer, we’ve opened it up, the two of us, and crouched low, breathing in the dark, dank cool air, in the middle of a blazing hot summer drenched in the dizzying aroma of roasting pine needles. Together, we’ve closed our eyes, and together we’ve reveled in the pure cement cold, not daring to go down, because of the spiders, but treating it like our own personal AC unit, which we didn’t have in the trailer.

“Dear God, are you talking about the root cellar?” Sister asks.

“Root cellar,” I repeat.

“Don’t tell me, Rosie. All this time, you thought that was for storms?”

Limp with defeat, I say nothing.

Yet Sister is off and running. “Of course you did! Because you think anyone gives a crap about people who live in trailers! They care so much they give us storm cellars out back! Save the poor! Save the trailer trash! Give ‘em all storm cellars! Don’t you know those doors are wood and rotting, falling apart? Haven’t you seen, every time we open them, more wood falls off? Those doors are like zombie flesh. Those doors, a tornado would rip them off in a blink, and you and me, out we’d fly, two nothing nobodies, sucked

up like ants by a vacuum, whirling and swirling helpless through the air. No one would care. Because that’s a root cellar, dumbass.”

The air is sucked out of the space between us.

That’s the word mom calls us.

Other words, as well, but that’s the one, breaks us, snaps us in two, like twigs.

That word, flying out of Sister’s own mouth, when she’s been brought to her knees by that word, same as me.

I never thought she would.

We reach Boll’s, climb the wide cement steps, and Sister pushes through ahead of me. I take a minute, standing just outside the door. I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and breathe through the pain of that word, the way I do bad cramps, the kind that bowl you over.

When I step into Boll’s, the anguish eases, just slightly. Old wood floors that creak. The piquant perfume of varnish and newsprint and bread. Sister and I, planting our hands side by side on the freezer lid, lifting it together, and choosing our Fudgesicles. “See?”

Sister says, glancing at me. “Who needs cake?”

I try to smile, past the ache.

Merlin greets us at the register. This was his father’s store, and Merlin is sixty. Sweet as he is, he never looks at us. He’s too shy. Grandma Lucy says, his father was the same way. Nonetheless, Merlin knows who we are. We are Lucy’s granddaughters. We’ve been buying Fudgesicles at his store, all our lives. He says, “This going on Grandma’s tab?” And we say, “Yes!” And he smiles, licking his finger, flipping pages in a pad, writing. We are Lucy’s granddaughter’s and we are known, treated like royalty at Boll’s. Not nothing.

Yet for the first time, ripping off the wrapper and tasting, as we push through the doors outside, the river breeze lifting and dancing our hair, that Fudgsicle does not taste sweet. It’s bitter, tastes terrible. I toss it in the trash. I don’t think Sister notices. If she does, she doesn’t say.

We head, as tradition dictates, across the street, to the park, the swings, on the edge of the Mississippi. First though, we check the bench beneath the weeping willow. We check to make sure it’s empty. To make sure, the Old Man is not passed out on it, the way he was once before, when we came here, and we had to back up, on tiptoe, not to wake him, not to meet his eyes.

Not that he’d know who we were.

We check, find the bench empty, then scramble, climb into the swings.

We don’t speak. The old chains moan and creak. They sing.

The old chains bite into my flesh but they are warm, and familiar.

No one ever says, there will come a day, when you will never swing with Sister again.

We swing, and twist around, and lean, all the way, legs kicked out, heads back, our curls tickling the earth. A barge thrums, heavy, and I feel it in my hands, the vibration of the chains.

It’s a shame, isn’t it, we have to check that bench, every time.

It’s a shame we can never walk to the end of the road. Because that’s where he lives. The opposite end of the same road as Grandma Lucy. It’s a shame that, when we cross the railroad tracks to visit, we always turn right, and never turn left.

Well—once. One time we turned left.

The Old Man lives in a strange house that floats on the Mississippi.

I might have imagined that. Because sitting on a couch in darkness was my only other memory. Not total darkness, but getting there. I don’t remember him, his face. Not even his voice. Only his hands, reaching out, holding a Sir Walter Raleigh cigar box, filled with pennies. His hands shook, and his hands were nut brown, emerging from the dark like they belonged to it.

I don’t know about the floating house, but the Sir Walter Raleigh cigar box is real. I still have it, under my bed. The pennies were not dingy and dirt-encrusted, as you might expect. As I certainly had, inspecting them closely in the quiet of my own room. They were beautiful copper suns, bright and shiny, and, from different years, so it wasn’t as though he’d cheated, gotten them brand new in rolls from the bank. Rather, it was easy to think, he’d gone to great lengths, to find and pick up the best pennies, lodged in the cracks of the sidewalks, during his daily wanderings from bar to bar.

It was a shame, wasn’t it, to not remember his face, to know only his shaking hands.

A shame, a shame, a shame.

“What song is that?” Sister eyes me, dragging her sneakers through the trench the kids have carved out, year after year.

“Song?”

“The one you’re singing!”

“I’m not singing.”

We are still now, cradled in our swings, facing each other. “Were, too,” she says.

“Okay.” I shrug, look closely at her. Her face, these days, looks hunkered down. Like it is ready to fight, or hide. I am trying to pay attention. I see the freckle on her face that is shaped like a small lake on a map. She used to tell me, when I asked about it, that mom had hit her there with a hairbrush. After the hit, instead of a bruise, a freckle had bloomed. I had believed her. I was little. I had marched off to find mom, and, indignant on Sister’s behalf, ready to accuse her. “Why did you hit Sister with a hairbrush?” Shock covered mom’s face, pulling her jaw down like a weight. “Did she tell you that? Did she? I never!”

Just recently, we were all in the kitchen, cleaning up, when mom started sniffling over the kitchen sink, washing out her coffee cup. She switched off the faucet, turned to us and said, “Girls, I watched Phil this morning, and I know something now. I know that I am the Adult Child of an Alcoholic.”

Phil was Phil Donohue, the talk show host. She called him Phil, tenderly.

She called him her free therapist.

Sometimes, watching one of his shows, her hands hugging her coffee cup, she called him—the father she’d never had.

That day, she’d turned to us with the gravity of a fork in the road. She’d confided how the Old Man belt whipped her and her brothers, savagely. She’d described how he’d flung his fists at Grandma, a torrent of hits, and how she, our mother, only five-years-old, had stepped between, using her child body as a buffer. She’d told us that, every once in a while, he’d disappear on a bender. But he’d always return, hang dog and repentant, showering them with gifts.

I stare at Sister’s lake-shaped freckle. Of course a freckle didn’t bloom from a hit. Of course it was a tall tale. But why had she told me that? A hairbrush, she’d said. Smack!

Mom did not drink. Would not even touch a glass of wine.

When she raged, though, she blacked out.

She grabbed our arms, her fingernails biting like rabid animals.

She twisted our lips into ugly catfish puckers between her fingers.

She called us names. Left us shivering.

Showed up the next day, with earrings. “Look, look what I got for you.”

Like the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka.

Is it raining, is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing…Are the fires of Hell a-glowing? Is the grisly Reaper mowing?

Sometimes, I wished she’d drink.

Always be bad, or mostly bad.

So we wouldn’t have to wake up each day, and guess.

Sister’s freckle blurs beneath my gaze, I am paying such hard and close attention.

“Let’s go get grandma’s mail.” She hops from her swing, brushing off the back of her shorts.

I follow, hopping, brushing off the back of my shorts.

Picking up grandma’s mail is the last leg of our journey. We never venture any further down the sidewalk.

We walk, and I think about mom, our age, walking these same sidewalks, skipping over the same cracks. It’s a kind of poetry to think that my feet might fall into her own steps, shadow steps from thirty years back, and I see her beside me, shadow mom, our feet rising and falling together.

And Sister says, “Who’s that?”

She stops so fast I bump into her.

I peer around her. I see the post office, a compact square of a building, freshly painted brown. The same color as the vast mud puddle that’s collected in the pothole outside.

And in the mud puddle, a man.

“Who’s that?” I say, an echo.

My throat, I’m convinced, is psychic. It prickles and goes numb.

It knows things, before I do.

Even before Sister and I approach, and stand together, and stare. Even before Sister reaches for my hand, twines her fingers with mine. My throat knows who he is.

“I’ll call 911.” Sister races inside. The door chimes jangle.

While I stand there, keeping watch.

He sits, up to his chest in mud puddle. He must have fallen in. Because he is covered in mud, dripping in long filthy streaks, from his hair, down his face. His eyes glazed, unfocused, his head wobbles, he mumbles, fights to stay upright.

Grandma said he started drinking at sixteen, after his older brother, Robert, died. She said, the Old Man blamed himself. One time, he’d accidentally shot Robert in the leg while they were out hunting. That had nothing to do with the leukemia that killed Robert a few years later. But in the Old Man’s head, the cancer was his fault, his doing. Plus, he’d never recovered from his mother’s death. He’d adored her. She’d wasted away at the tuberculosis sanitarium. The Old Man was only six-years-old. His mother, his brother. Grandma was eighteen when she married the Old Man. She confessed to Sister and me, over cake, she’d really been in love with Robert. The Old Man was second skimmings. Babies arrived, one after another. Five of them. Mom, smack in the middle. The Old Man didn’t drive a car. He hitched a ride every day, with a coworker, to the Alcoa Plant on the Mississippi. He worked with aluminum, doing what, I had no clue. He knew he couldn’t be trusted to drive. After work, he hit up the taverns, the bars. He’d stumble home, just in time for dinner. He’d pick on his kids at the dinner table. Told his sons they were weaklings. Sissies. He could beat them to a pulp with his pinkie finger. He could take them all at once, they were such cowardly, good for nothing shits. The boys, my uncles, had to focus like Zen masters on the food grandma had made, each bite of meatloaf, each forkful of cake. Because if they talked back, said one wrong word, looked cross-eyed, why, quick as a wink, the Old man would shove out of his chair, get around that table with breathtaking speed, grab them by the ear, and drunk as he was, he knew the way down the steps of that basement, wrenching out his belt. Mom was Sister back then. She wanted to save her baby brothers, but couldn’t. She stood at the top of the stairs and listened to them scream and cry and curse and beg as the belt whooshed down, lash after lash. Drunk as he was, his aim was good. Mother’s baby brother, the youngest, grew up, grew big, a champion body builder, told Sister and I once, over cake, the trophies meant shit, he did it so that one day he could take on the Old Man—and win. The other brother charged off fast as he could to ‘Nam, still a kid, just a baby with freckles and sticking out ears, trading in one hell for another, just another

battleground, what’s the difference between a belt and an M-16, and what do you do with all your pent up rage, from the dinner table and the basement, straight to Hamburger Hill, and he’d come back, mortally wounded mind, never the same. And mom became mom.

Who never drinks.

You are a tornado, I think, staring the words into his mud splattered eyes.

His head bobs. He grins. Even his teeth are brown with mud. Jonalyn has gotten him to sign over grandma’s money, and down the street, grandma is crying, and here he sits, the Old Man, in a mud puddle, bones swimming oblivious in whiskey.

Sister runs back out. “The ambulance is coming.” She stands beside me.

Across the street, a yell. “Hey, Willard! Willard!”

Sister and I turn. A tall man with a beard swaggers out of Kernan’s, and he’s pointing. He’s laughing. “Haha, Willard,” he calls. “Haha, look at you! Take a fall, old friend? Take a spill? Go for a dive? A mud bath! Spa day! Hahaha!”

Beside me, Sister rises. I feel her, rising up on her feet.

Sister points. Sister screams, across the street.

“You shut your damn mouth! Shut it now! He’s my Grandpa!”

The man falls back against the wall. He goes quiet, looks away.

Sister sinks back to her feet.

The ambulance arrives, we answer questions, then leave.

When we return, and tell the story, Grandma Lucy calls the hospital.

“Three broken ribs,” she reports. “Could’ve been worse. Could’ve drowned, they said.” She’s quiet a minute. Her hand hugs the phone. “Good thing you girls were there.”

Then she serves Sister and I, the last slices of box cake.

Carolina Beach, North Carolina, 2023

“Oh yes!” George says. “I know all about you!”

“You do, eh?” A teasing tone belies my terror.

In the back, the music stops. The girls step out, curious.

“I asked around,” he says. “Your grandma was a bombshell! Lucinda.”

“Lucy. She was beautiful.”

“So I hear, so I hear.” He rocks back and forth on his heels. “She got around a bit. Had herself a good time.” He winks.

“That right?” I wipe down the countertop.

George laughs. “They called your uncle Mr. Hollywood. Blond guy with big muscles? Pro bodybuilder. Mr. Midwest, 1981.”

“Yep.” His bear hugs. Suffocating, though he meant them to be kind.

“Your mother was a looker, too. Spitting image of Marilyn Monroe.”

“Natural blondes, she and my uncle.” I scrub that countertop.

“Small town Iowa movie stars.”

“For sure.” My mind is running away.

“…lived on a houseboat, a pontoon!”

“What?” My attention snaps into focus.

George repeats, “He lived on a pontoon. Fifty gallon oil drums, keeping his house afloat!”

I look down at my hand, gripping the cleaning cloth. So it was real. Real as the pennies, I still have.

“Quite a character. Everyone knew him. Wore bibs to all the bars. Bibs! You know who it is I’m talking about, right?” George is straight up cackling now.

The split in my fingernail.

The cracks I take with me.

Broken, the sidewalk that carries me.

I feel myself rise a little, on my feet.

“I know him,” I say.

Behind me, the girls watch, hushed.

In the gentle afternoon light, I look George in the eye.

“He’s my Grandpa.”

I hold George’s gaze. Until his laughter fades.

Until he nods.

Until he doesn’t have another word to say.

Then, I serve him a slice of cake. n

Somedays Barbie

RIKKI SANTER

You favored tender leaves and petals in your summer borsht and tried to sip strawberry milk through a paper straw of swirling pink stripes that tickled your perfectly sealed lips. And sometimes when my index finger and thumb rubbed into your waist, I dissolved into a field of stunted wishes. I loved you stupid when you sat on the wrong side of synagogue taunting all the yarmulke men and puberty boys who admired you awkward. And you always forgave me for the dark quiet of your shoe box bed with thrift-store hankies and cotton ball pillows because my father wouldn’t justify a dream house. Some days I wanted to break your shicksa face open and bury you out back in the soft earth of my mother’s rock garden where the sun didn’t always know the right amount of warm. Yet there were days when your story was a song of deep, low sounds from where you lingered on the far side of mother star. Under my pillow, o magic sister of fashion prowess, o forecast whisperer, you made sure I received your dreams filled with liminal ideas of kiss and matched accessory. And sometimes we would stretch out on our backs under oaks, humming to the soft beat of acorns falling near our heads and the ants dancing between our fingers and we were blissful as fellow princesses floating down from the clouds. Some days my brother and I would stuff you into his toy army jeep and speed you into kitchen walls for the delight of your wig wardrobes catapulting like drunken bats.

Mr. Truhart

Jimmy Truhart knelt down in his father’s office. Beside him, on white wool carpeting, lay James Truhart, Senior, whose eyes were fixed on a chandelier overhead. Jimmy was trying hard to revive the old man, hammering on his frail chest and exhaling deeply into his cool violet mouth. It was almost dark outside, and the figure on the floor became gradually lit by a sign glowing through the window: “James Truhart and Son, Funeral Directors Since 1939.”

“Is this even my dad anymore?” Jimmy thought to himself. His father’s body no longer possessed its hallmark velocity; how could it possess Mr. Truhart either? Jimmy picked up the phone receiver and, after thumbing through the Rolodex, slowly dialed their doctor’s home number, noticing that Mr. Truhart had rubbed away the numerals over the years. Unlike James Senior, Jimmy had thin fingers, and he didn’t have to use the end of a pencil to make the rotary spin. Jimmy wondered if his father would have wanted him to call a hospital instead, though by now a hospital was of no use.

He knew what paramedics, or worse, a surgeon, could do to a body. He did not want his father’s chest to be bruised or singed by their equipment. When he had tried to start his father’s heart, he knew it was just an exercise in confirmation, helping Jimmy to believe the truth.

“Yes, it’s Jim Truhart. Listen, this is kind of an emergency. It’s my dad ... .No, he’s not okay. He’s not breathing. I think ... I’m sure, really ... yes. I think he’s been like that for a while. I just found him. All right. Yes, I’ll wait right here. Yes, thanks. Okay.”

Recoiling in the window seat, Jimmy sank into a velour cushion that was the color of gold costume jewelry. Arms crossed tightly, he wondered out loud this time: “Where are you, Dad?” The question involved a matter of spiritual geography that both men had pretended to solve for thousands of bleary customers, week after week. It was a question they personally believed could never be accurately answered by any living human being.

Mr. Truhart’s reassuring smile, generally toothless because he tried to hide his cigarette

stains by pulling his lips over his teeth, had collapsed with a startled gasp. His slightly hooked shoulders, always stooped while leaning closer to everyone who was shorter than his six-foot frame, were pressed open and flat against the wall-to-wall shag flooring that had been installed only last week. His kind gray eyes, almost always teary from cedar fever, seemed scared.

Jimmy observed his father’s suit: navy blue, double-breasted, worsted wool. Looking more closely, he corrected himself. It wasn’t a suit, actually. The trousers were in fact Sansa-Belt, chosen not because Mr. Truhart objected to belts but because he enjoyed elasticity. The pants were mostly polyester, ideal for a widower since they never needing ironing. He did not wear black. The mourning color, he felt, was inappropriate on anyone but his clients.

Mr. Truhart’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses, with lenses tinted the color of salmon because he had grown sensitive to light, had been crushed when he fell. Jimmy noticed them lying just a few inches from his father’s head. One of the earpieces had snapped off, but the adhesive nose pads were still attached. Mr. Truhart rarely changed the pads. They looked flat and discolored. His necktie, a paisley clip-on, was at his fingertips, where Jimmy had placed it when he first tried to resuscitate him. He had also taken off his father’s shoes, though he wasn’t sure why, tossing the mammoth pair beneath a delicate settee. He could hear a soloist rehearsing for a service down the hall. She was missing most notes of “I Need Thee Every Hour.” He knew that this was the last chance he would ever have to gather an accurate memory of his father. The staff would come in soon, offering polite recollections and not addressing Mr. Truhart directly anymore. Local relatives, and the far-away ones who were not too cheap to buy bus tickets, would begin to characterize him. They would distort things with well-intentioned fallacies or self-serving rumors, or accidental projections of their own preferences (“He was just like me, the only one in the family who couldn’t get enough mincemeat pie at Thanksgiving”).

Jimmy spoke out loud, but softly. “You would have helped me through this, Dad.” And then, “Please help me.” Jimmy hardly looked old enough for the draft, but he was pushing thirty. He had perfect skin that didn’t need to be shaved daily. His hands were free of hangnails. His mind exuded clarity—a gift from his father, who had deprived his son of

responsibility. Now Jimmy felt all of the connections to his father, his only genuine friend really, fading to nothing like the sky outside. It reminded him of the final evening of a beach trip, when the scalding daylight became gentle and he craved just one more day near the ocean.

Jimmy eventually returned to the floor, leaning forward to remove his father’s silverplated cufflinks. They were engraved with a capital “T,” set in a typeface of rigid serifs and enveloped by a fluid half-circle that had always reminded Jimmy of buttery crescent rolls. Now he pressed them between his cupped hands, feeling the cufflinks begin to warm against his palm and jab him slightly. Then he sat in the window seat a little while longer. It was the tail end of rush hour, and a centipede of headlights lit up the lane.

Jimmy shuddered when the front door slammed shut. There was a clatter of high heels on the porch, and two women began growling at each other.

That was the world Mr. Truhart had kept Jimmy from ever having to face. Jimmy tried to decide which sight was worse—the body at his feet, or the anger building outside. His father had always been a gentle but efficient person. He would have calmly intervened out front, particularly when there was so much slow traffic. On a nice night like that, everyone had their windows rolled down, tuning in to the scene at Truhart and Son as if it were a radio show.

“I’ve had it with you,” one woman said to the other. They wore larger-than-stylish bouffants and eye shadow in blues and greens that made them look more like car-wreck victims than fashion plates. Jimmy recognized their voices; they were Audrey and Emily, sisters who had been in his graduating class during high school. They had tried to browbeat him into choosing between them for a date until they grew bored by his polite sweetness. Audrey puckered up her lips and took a long cigarette drag before continuing. They were the first of his many difficult entanglements with women, who left him feeling bewildered and exhausted. “You let Mother lie in that room full of dirty cat pans for a whole week. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was when they came to get her, with you and the whole house smelling like a litter box?”

“At least I was there. Do you have any idea how much work it is? Do you? Did you ever have to change the diaper of a grown woman?”

“How am I supposed to help her if you won’t even let me in the house?” Audrey wanted to know. “You’ve always had to control everything. everything.”

“This is the limit. You’re the one who’s always got to be in charge. You won’t even let us sing any of the hymns I asked for. I know the one that was Mother’s favorite, and now it’s not even on the program. But you hide and watch, Audrey. I’m going to stand up and sing it myself tomorrow. ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful.’ I know it by heart.”

“Oh, you’ve got everybody fooled. They all think you’re such a good girl. Straight-A Emily. But who is it that’s always out there picking up your shit.”

“Sure. Go on kidding yourself. You’ve been evil from Day One, and I’ve got it on film.”

“What film?”

Their handbags, dangling off their elbows, banged into each other slightly as the sisters got close enough to blow smoke and spittle at each other.

“Marcy Thorne’s birthday party. 1951.”

“Who’s Marcy Thorne?”

“You knocked over my ice-cream cone. You snuck up behind me and jabbed me in the neck. Daddy was recording the whole thing with his movie camera. You know it, too. You’ve always been a bully. You’ve always tried to come between me and Mother. All your lies. And now you can’t even try to compose yourself and act like a lady for just once, not even the night before her funeral.”

Jimmy stood up and smoothed his hair. He didn’t have any ideas about what to say to silence them. Then two men who looked like husbands or coaches (or, Jimmy hoped, were psychiatrists), crept up and pulled them off each other. There was no sound after that, other than the rattling of skinny shoes on asphalt as the women staggered to their separate cars.

Jimmy dreaded the family reunion that was implied by his father’s death. He knew the consequences of losing the last peacemaker. His father never forced him to participate in any activities with their hostile second cousins from out of town, a group of adults and kids alike who would cheat and bawl during their visits, which sometimes ended with an unexplained fire.

“It’s all right, son,” Mr. Truhart would say, patting Jimmy on the shoulders. “Here’s a

little change. Why don’t you just skip all this and go over to the picture show?”

Jimmy sat down in the well-oiled leather chair at his father’s desk. For a moment, but only a brief one, he considered asking one of the other morticians to handle his father’s case. But all he could think of was spending as many minutes as possible with what was left of his dad. He understood that once Mr. Truhart was buried, there would be no turning back. At least, right then, he had something tangible.

He soon heard the doctor’s fast gait stirring the shrubs along the sidewalk. He lived only a few blocks away and drove as seldom as possible. He reminded Jimmy of his father, especially the way he rushed through doorways.

Had he tried artificial respiration? Jimmy nodded yes. How did James seem that morning? They went through a hushed series of questions as the staff gathered in the hallway to eavesdrop.

The doctor had looked after Mr. Truhart since the 1940s and said that there had always been problems with Mr. Truhart’s blood pressure, plus he’d had symptoms of mitral valve prolapse.

“When did you last see him alive, Jimmy?”

“Right after lunch. We always have pimento-cheese sandwiches together in here. I brought him another glass of iced tea at about two o’clock. Then I left him alone to go over some receipts I’d brought him.”

The doctor was crouched on the carpet, scanning Mr. Truhart’s sternum with a stethoscope.

“All right. Well I’m going to call this for three p.m., based on the condition and temperature of his skin. I’ll have to record that as an estimated time of death, though.” He jotted a few notes on a steno pad. “Are you all right, son?”

“I’m okay.”

“I always admired your dad. Calm in the storm, that’s for sure. You and I can do the paperwork easily, natural causes and all. It’s my duty, really, as his personal doc all these years. Hard to believe, though. He hadn’t complained of pain recently.”

“He never complained of anything. As long as I knew him he never complained.”

“And if he didn’t call out for help, or try to get to the phone himself ... ”

“I still wish I’d gotten to him sooner. If I’d come back for the iced-tea glass. Anything. This has been such a slow day. I didn’t have any reason to bother him this afternoon.”

“There’s no one to blame, son. Just let it go.”

Then their conversation dwindled to farewells, and Jimmy approached the front desk to tell the receptionist what had happened. She nodded, moving her head in a delicate wave of understanding that was required for her job. She offered to call Mr. Truhart’s sister, who would in turn call each and every family member. One of the drivers and a pony-tailed embalmer stood against a wall, not speaking. They were not used to taking orders from anyone except Truhart Senior. The driver asked Jimmy if he would like them to move his father from the office. “We’ll take him together,” Jimmy said.

“You sure you’re up for this, man?” the embalmer asked. Jimmy nodded yes.

They placed their hands on the body’s outstretched limbs, lifting wordlessly and positioning it on the cart. Jimmy placed a hand over his father’s forehead and pressed his eyelids down.

“Don’t need the head block, I guess?” asked the driver, emitting mumbled syllables slowly from his mustached mouth.

“No, it’s all right,” Jimmy said. “I’ll just hold him in place, like this. We don’t have far to go.”

They draped a small blue sheet over the gurney and then made sure that there were no customers nearby. They passed through a pair of swinging doors, which the embalmer had once said were like the dividing line between a restaurant’s kitchen and the dining room. “Front of the house, and the back. Got it,” he had proclaimed on his first day of work. With every shiver of the lightweight cart, Mr. Truhart’s head rolled back and forth between Jimmy’s palms underneath the sheet.

Behind the doors there was no chaotic shuffle of people, no view of a busy street. The only sound came from customers on the other side of the wall. Jimmy could hear a man on the phone with a close relative.

“OK, honey!” he said as zealously as if they were planning a vacation. “I went with the ebony one,” he shouted into the receiver. “Now, what I need to know is how many cars to ask for. Yes, I have to take care of everything—it’s part of this package, and if I sign tonight,

I can lock in the price. I know, I know, but it’s their risk, isn’t it? Well, I doubt it, but they’d be stuck with the deal. No one’s ever beat this thing, honey. Medical miracles don’t run in our family. You know that. Look, I’m just saving you the trouble. So do you think you and my mother can stand to ride in the same limo, or do I need to spring for two?”

The embalming table was metal, matching the swinging doors. At one end of the table was a small drain. Jimmy flipped a switch, and the room lit up with a white light that always made his pupils shrink to pinpricks. Everyone in the room was silent today; usually they chatted about something they had seen on television.

As they used another blue sheet to move the body from the cart, the driver said, “There you go, Mr. Truhart.”

“Jimmy, you know, another one came in about an hour ago,” the driver told him. “That service is set for day after tomorrow.”

Jimmy was picturing the way his father would look in two days, when everyone would gather together and the reality would be hidden by a casket. He could see it solemnly sliding past the hearse’s rear door, which would be swung open wide like half of a wing.

“Oh, I didn’t realize,” Jimmy whispered. “Well, this won’t take me long. It should be very straightforward.” He turned to the embalmer. “Would you mind staying late? Taking care of the other one after I’m finished in here?” Jimmy was starting to take charge, a little.

“Hey, no problem. You’re sure you want to do this?”

Jimmy nodded and said, “I promised Dad I would.”

On the other side of the wall was the sound of the terminally ill client winding up his phone call. “Fine, honey, fine. Home in fifteen. I’ll bring the brochures. Love you too. Byebye.”

Then the building was quieter. The soloist had gone home. The driver asked if he could do anything to help.

“Actually, yes, I need my dad’s tux,” Jimmy told him.

“OK, sure. Anything.”

“I’m just not sure I can go back into his room tonight, you know?”

“Right, I got you. So, you want to give me the keys?” the driver asked, hiding his disdain for the fact that Jimmy still lived with his father.

Jimmy reached into his pocket, feeling the cufflinks scraping against his key ring. “This is for both locks. It shouldn’t be hard to find. The tux. His room has the double bed, so just look in the closet in that room. And his dress shoes; they’re wingtips. The only ones that lace up. You can’t miss them, on the floor of the closet. And I guess some, you know, briefs; there’s a small drawer at the top of the bureau for that. Dress socks too. Black silk. That’s in the other drawer, next to the one with the underwear. I think that’s all.”

“What about the tie, Jimmy?”

“Oh. Well, those are hanging on a rack inside the closet door. There’s only one tux tie. It’ll be obvious.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” the embalmer drawled, joining the conversation, “whose idea is the tux thing? You know, usually it’s just Sunday clothes.”

“It’s what Dad wanted,” Jimmy lied. The truth was that Jimmy admired his father most on the nights when Mr. Truhart dressed up for special parties.

Then he was by himself in the room. He slipped on a lab coat and started removing his father’s clothes, folding each item loosely, building a precarious pile of dark fabric on top of a vinyl-covered stool. As he lifted and rolled various sections of the body, he noticed how dry the skin felt in his hands, as if Mr. Truhart had never discovered lotion, or just wasn’t able to reach certain parts of himself alone. When Jimmy slipped the withered Fruit of the Looms down past Mr. Truhart’s ankles, he pressed a trash can open with his foot, choosing the basket for things destined to go in the incinerator. He stepped back to observe the table.

He realized that his father was physically his opposite. Mr. Truhart looked weary and damaged. Even where there was muscle, he appeared limp. And in spite of being such a tall man, he still looked like a remnant, dwarfed by an aura of what he used to be. Every one of his hairs was white. Most of his body was scattered with oversize freckles, a few of them inflated. His toenails had apparently not been trimmed for a long while, and they curled inward at the ends. Jimmy sprayed every crevice of the body with a disinfectant. But as he lifted his father’s torso, he discovered a labyrinth of scorched flesh. The sight made him flinch.

“Keloid scars,” he murmured, “and hypertrophics.” He traced the thick rope of wrecked tissue that began at the center of Mr. Truhart’s spine and curled its way outward, with tentacles that sputtered just as they reached each shoulder.

Jimmy had never seen his father shirtless, or in short sleeves. He pulled the skin taut, thinking he had misinterpreted what he was seeing. Perhaps it was not from a wound. Perhaps it was actually a botched, oversize tattoo, with the initials of Jimmy’s mother fossilized in epidermis. She had died young and slowly, from disease. But there had been peace throughout the process. Mr. Truhart had created an oasis for his tiny family, keeping the evils of the world at bay, even as he and his son made their living by erasing the dread of death from the minds of mourning families.

Jimmy filled the sink with warm water and made it sudsy with an abrasive soap. He wrung out a yellow sponge, and starting with the feet began scrubbing all traces of this earth from Mr. Truhart. He did not scrub harshly, just thoroughly, swishing back and forth between all ten toes. “Who did this to you, Dad?” It couldn’t have been an accident. The pattern was too perfect. “Did this happen when you were a little boy? Or after I came along?” He pictured a superhero. “Were you defending someone, Dad?”

There were no grandparents on that side of the family. Mr. Truhart and his sister had been raised by no one in particular, propelled into the Midwest on a train whose passengers were orphans. Some were never adopted but were shared by a multitude of families wherever the demand for free labor was greatest.

The scars were not those of a veteran; Mr. Truhart had never been to war. He had come of age in peacetime. Soon Jimmy realized that the list of things he knew about his father was much shorter than his list of questions. He never asked about the past because it might create turbulence, and his one taste of turbulence—his mother’s death—had been enough to last a lifetime. But if he had dared to ask? Can we be sad together, Dad? Do you want to tell me about the day you met Mom? Do you want to tell me about the day you decided to apprentice for the undertaker? The day you bought a house with running water? The day someone decided to initiate you into something horrible, or teach you a horrible lesson? I would have taken care of you. I would have rushed you to a hospital, and changed your bandages, and helped you through the pain. When did this happen, Dad? And how? And why? And who? That question made him tremble with a new feeling, which was rage, and he was unaccustomed to it.

If Jimmy’s aunt had the answers, she would never share them. She was emotionally underwater at a depth from which she could never be retrieved. Mr. Truhart used to smile

and say, “Her best friends are named Gin and Tonic,” and shake his head, and Jimmy never thought to ask what memories she might be so frantic to drown out. Jimmy’s rage deflated slowly as he reminded himself that he and his father were peacemakers. Yes, that would be their inseverable connection to each other. To endure without a fight.

He no longer spoke to his father under his breath, puzzling over the revelations out loud while he finished his work in a room that echoed with each action.

To clean the torso, Jimmy pressed the body against his shoulder, as if he were burping a baby. The more he mopped the grim spiral, the more brightly it shone. At first, it had been the color of weak tea. Now it was almost ruddy. Jimmy tenderly stroked his father’s back, following the outline of each rib and then resting the body flat again. He said, “Now you’re all cleaned up, Dad,” and placed a cushioned support behind his father’s neck, covering him with a crisp sheet that he folded gently beneath the chin, the way Mr. Truhart had done when tucking in his child at bedtime.

Jimmy felt a lump of loneliness and tried to massage it out of himself by rubbing his temples. He opened one of the cabinets and found a bottle of aspirin. He swallowed two, choking a little and running to the water cooler in the hallway. He downed one paper cupful and told the receptionist good night as she tottered toward the parking lot.

He returned to his task. Mr. Truhart looked like someone who’d simply been anesthetized and would surely make a full recovery. He used a small sprayer hose to rinse the table completely, as if trying to wash away the damage of that image. A little bit of the mist coated his eyeglasses, so he paused to wipe them with a handkerchief.

He disinfected a small scalpel and lifted the lower part of the sheet so that he could make a tiny incision on his father’s abdomen, picking a spot near where there was already an appendix scar. That scar was no surprise; the five-hour appendectomy had happened not long ago. He kept pressing the area and suctioning with a rubber syringe. Then he drained some of his father’s blood, opening one of the many veins clearly displayed through his filmy skin. After that, Jimmy found an artery near his father’s neck and began running pints of watered-down formaldehyde through Mr. Truhart’s circulatory system, every capillary soon brimming with a substance that ensured the defiance of decay.

As he watched the skin plump slightly, Jimmy wondered if he’d released enough blood, then dropped the thought because he heard the driver return through the back

door. He knocked lightly and told Jimmy that he had the tux all ready; it had been no trouble to find. Jimmy opened the door halfway. “Thanks a lot,” he said before passing him a ten-dollar bill. “I know it was a long day for you. You should go home now. I’m really going to need you tomorrow.”

He wondered whether his father’s face looked too thin. He decided to pack a small wad of cotton in one of the cheeks and then removed it, deciding to offset the thin face by doing a good job with the mouth. Jimmy subtly curved it into an expression of sincere amusement, as if they were sharing a private joke. The others liked to insert wire in the lips, but his father had taught him how to use careful stitches to more precisely manipulate facial expressions.

“That’s what everyone looks for, Jimmy,” he had said. “That’s why they come to the viewing. They want to make sure that Uncle John looks happy to be wherever he has gone to.”

Jimmy walked over to a laminated floor plan that was mounted to a wall. He checked for an available viewing room that he could reserve for the next two days. He marked himself down for the gray parlor. It was being used tonight, but the family was having the funeral and burial in the morning. Jimmy could have it by noon, and all of the Truharts could start trooping in after lunchtime. Jimmy preferred the gray parlor because it was the only one that seemed to acknowledge why it was there. The others were done in pinks and yellows, but the gray room made customers feel as if they were stepping into a sad cloud. Jimmy passed by it, just to make sure that it was the right one for his father, and he caught sight of a sunburned teenage girl leaning into a coffin.

“Daddy, I hate your casket,” she said as if she were delivering the evening news. Daddy was lying in a model the Truharts tried to avoid selling, the notorious pine box, reminiscent of a container built for pencil storage. The Truharts at least offered a version that was covered in felt, and in this case the felt matched the gray walls of the room. The girl stroked her father’s face. “I thought you’d have picked out a pretty one. It’s hard to look at you in this old thing.”

As part of his business model, Mr. Truhart offered deep discounts to anyone willing to pre-pay. But he personally didn’t believe in choosing the details of your own funeral. “It’s

not for the dead, son,” he had said. “We do this for the survivors, so they really should be the ones to select the things that will comfort them most.”

Jimmy padded softly to the embalming room again, disconnected his father’s tubes, and began drying the table. He would need help wheeling the casket in. He knew exactly what he wanted his father to be buried in: black lacquer, with a pristine interior, white and angelic.

He set his father’s garments on the counter and approached the table, lacing his fingers through Mr. Truhart’s cold hands. They were no longer bony and now looked like a waterlogged pair of gloves. As he pressed his fingerprints against his dad’s, he whispered his fear. “I’m not sure who this man is, but I know who my father was.”

He looked down at the natural outline of his father’s body. Mr. Truhart seemed to lie before him frankly, honestly. Jimmy raised the table a few inches and placed his head on his father’s chest. Images of childhood games and late-night Johnny Carson strolled by, Mr. Truhart laughing from his recliner, munching a midnight snack of peanut butter on rye toast. Explaining to Jimmy how to live, and how to make a living off the dead. He lifted his father’s body once more and saw that the vermilion scar was darkening to maroon, almost purple: the postmortem stain.

As Jimmy’s tears began to soak his father’s sheet, it started to faintly rain. Stroking the glass of a half-open window, the weather made a fragile sound that helped him stop shaking. As the trickle slipped from the eaves, it gave voice to Jimmy’s mind. Then it occurred to him that his parents might have made it rain and, for the moment, they were the rain, speaking to him in a language that articulated something much more comforting than answers, drawing him into a chilly, uncomplicated stream of fresh air that lashed at him and made him pure. n

Givers

ANNA ELKINS

Why are we holding our stories inside like knives— handing them handleforward to those who ask for a word?

When we fall, it’s our own fault and cut.

Roadside Memorials

KAREN GUZMAN

Twig turns the pickup onto the state road, a two-lane ribbon of dark asphalt that winds above the lake and the clusters of vacation homes and stands of deep green forest that ring it. In the distance, folds of bristling mountains roll into the horizon. The truck’s tires hiss over the pavement, as the soft air of late summer blows through the open windows. Twig rounds a corner, and Matt spots a half-hidden white cross planted at the edge of the road.

“There, on the shoulder.” Matt points. The cross is obscured by underbrush, but he detects the telltale flash of white. The pickup draws near, and he can make out the t-shape rising among weeds.

Twig taps the brake pedal. “You’ve got a good eye, papa bear.” He guides the pickup to the side of the road. “Somebody probably took the corner too fast. Wasn’t it on the news? A few months back. Car versus tree above the lake?”

“Think I heard something about it.” Matt doesn’t remember hearing anything. He’s been preoccupied with the baby coming. But a few months back could mean ninety days, which by law is when maintenance road crew workers, like Twig and him, are authorized to remove fatal accident memorials from New Hampshire’s state roads.

The truck comes to a stop, and Matt says, “I’ll get it.” He’s made a point lately of beating Twig out of the truck to get to the memorials first. Twig has a way of tearing them from the ground and tossing them into the pickup bed that makes Matt wince.

This cross is stuck in the earth near the broad trunk of a towering white ash tree. No tire tracks or skid marks, no shards of glass or twisted metal scraps. This crash happened a while ago. All traces have been erased. Matt squats down next to the cross. Whoever placed it probably left flowers, too. That’s a popular combination, flowers and a cross. Sometimes there’s a candle or balloons, or what creeps out Matt the most these days, a stuffed animal—a hapless teddy bear or plush puppy, the kind that fill a shelf in the spare bedroom that his wife, Melodie, is now calling the nursery.

Matt eases the cross from the ground. It slips from the cool soil and is in his hands.

And as always, he feels that drop inside, like an organ in his chest—his heart? a lung?— has fallen into a position where it’s never been and from which it may not rebound. This didn’t used to happen. Matt’s been with the state road crew for twelve years, since right out of high school. He’s removed a lot of memorials. The drop inside started when Melodie got pregnant and is getting worse as she grows more pregnant.

Twig toots the horn. Matt stands, brushes the soil from the base of the cross. He looks at the tree and notices a scar, a slash of missing bark, where the car made contact. Moss is already creeping across the wound, blending it into the trunk. That’s how easy, Matt thinks. That’s how fast we disappear.

He lays the cross in the pickup bed and throws the brown tarp they use to keep things from rattling around over it.

“I’ll drop it off at the garage,” he says, climbing into the passenger seat. “I’ve got to take the truck home. Mel’s car is in the shop, so she’s borrowing my Jeep tonight.”

Twig nods. “Anything you say, papa bear.”

Matt shoots Twig a look. “Can we stop with the ‘papa bear’ already?”

Twig laughs. “I’m busting on you.” He’s still wearing his orange hardhat. They spent the afternoon installing rumble stripping along a deceivingly sharp highway entrance ramp connecting a two-lane town road to the interstate. “Yahoos keep flying around the bend and kissing the guardrail,” Gil, the road maintenance supervisor, told them. “Let’s wake them up.” The hat makes Twig look younger. It’s too big and gives him an air of blockheaded innocence that goes perfectly with his large guileless brown eyes. Twig’s twenty-eight, but he seems younger to Matt lately. Twig’s living in the “before zone,” the before marriage, before mortgage on a lakeside ranch house that you paid way too much for, and most of all, before pregnant wife and baby boy on the way. At thirty, Matt has managed to accrue all these things.

“Hey, it’s cool you’re gonna be a dad. Two months left?” Twig guides the pickup along a flat stretch of road. The drop-off is steep here, the ground rolling down to the lake, studded with chunks of rock and hardwood saplings and clumps of forest fern.

“Unless something happens,” Matt says.

Twig shakes his head. “Nothing’s gonna happen.”

“Right.” With Twig, it’s sometimes best to give in. He can go on for hours. When he found out Mel was pregnant, he ran baby names past Matt for an entire afternoon while they installed a guardrail. Alphabetically, boys and girls, every name he could conjure.

“Look at it this way,” Twig says now, “I’ll be an uncle.” He laughs and starts down the ridge. At the bottom, they merge onto the road that leads past the trendy bistros and lakeside hotels, out to the open highway. ***

Matt doesn’t leave the cross in the designated recycling bin at the DOT garage. He reaches to drop it in, but something stops him. The thing in his chest drops. Someone died crashing into that tree, and someone else set up the cross. Trashing it is like erasing what has happened. It’s sacrilege—a good word from his long-ago church days, though Matt isn’t sure it’s the right word.

The garage is empty. Some of the guys are laughing around back, packing up for the night. Matt tucks the cross into his backpack and hustles out to his red Jeep Wrangler at the edge of the employee lot.

Melodie looks the same as she did when he kissed her goodbye that morning. Her stomach seems to be growing by the day. Maybe she’s hit her limit. Matt tries not to notice, because it sends his heart racing, and he cannot tell her any of this. She is in the spotlight. His job is to stand by, ever supportive and at-the-ready.

“Try to stay off your feet,” he says in their kitchen where she’s filling a thermos with penne and meatballs, her dinner in the nurses’ lounge tonight.

She throws him a sideways smile. “Like that’s even possible.” Her long dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She’s wearing her blue scrubs and white sneakers. She looks invincible to him in her work clothes. Competent and knowledgeable. She’s an emergency room nurse. She stares down disaster every day, crazy stuff regular people can’t imagine. He fills potholes. He sometimes wonders how he got so lucky marrying her.

“Gotta run,” she says, waddling over to kiss his cheek. “Hey, we’ve got a check-up with Cheery-O Friday morning. Don’t forget.”

The obstetrician. He hasn’t forgotten. From the living room window, he watches Melodie drive away. He follows his Jeep’s glowing taillights until they disappear. Then he

goes to the laundry room, where he left his backpack. He unzips the bag and pulls out the cross. It looks larger than it did on the road, glowing and otherworldly, next to the washing machine.

He walks to the basement door across the hall, snaps on the light and starts down the wooden stairs. A bare light bulb dangles in the center of the open space. The wooden beams that support the kitchen and living room run across the ceiling. Three hopper windows at the top of the cement foundation walls let in daylight, but they are dark rectangles now. Matt sniffs. The air is dry. The sump pump and dehumidifier Twig and he installed last year are working.

The cross is light in his hand. He scans the metal shelving along a wall. The plastic storage boxes where they keep the Christmas decorations are stacked on one shelf, but there’s an empty shelf above. He could tuck the cross there, lay it flat, and Melodie would never notice. Or would she? She’s been banging around the house lately, cleaning and rearranging spaces that don’t need it. “Nesting,” she calls it.

Matt crosses the basement. There’s a cardboard box tucked behind the stairs, not visible unless you walk around. Where did it come from? The water softening pellets. He’d bought a case of ten-pound bags at Home Depot. It was cheaper to buy in bulk. He opens the box. Empty. He places the cross in and closes the flaps. There’s no drop in his chest. Instead, he feels a ping of buoyancy. The cross is at least safe here, not rotting in a landfill or smashed to bits in a recycling compactor.

He thinks of a memorial they removed last month—a waist-high pile of stones topped with a blooming potted Easter Lily, its white flowers opening like blasting trumpets. A note taped to the flowerpot read, “Always in our hearts, now in a better place.” Twig searched up the accident on his phone. An eighteen-year-old boy and his girlfriend had rolled their car on the spot, coming home from a party. The girl had died. The boy sustained a serious head injury. “The kid may end up a vegetable,” Twig had said.

The doctor is always happy. She is quick to smile, to nod, quick to throw back her head and laugh. It’s a bit much. Mel and he have dubbed this warm, homespun obstetrician with her sweater vests and ponytail “Dr. Cheery-O.” Sitting in the exam room now, as the

doctor runs the ultrasound wand over Melodie’s bulging mid-section, Matt thinks again how fitting the name is.

Baby snapshots fill the wall facing him. They’re infants Cheery-O has delivered. This parade of moon-faced newborns, all out in the world somewhere now, watches over every appointment.

“We are looking good in there,” Cheery-O coos, as the smoky, streaky image of Mel’s and his baby appears on the screen. The image looks like a night of bad reception on his grandmother’s old rabbit-ears television. It looks like a flickering ghost party caught in a strobe light. It doesn’t look like a baby.

“What do you think, Dad?” Cheery-O turns her high beam smile on him.

Matt gives her a thumbs-up. “Ten fingers and ten toes, right?”

Cheery-O squints at the screen. “Can’t see his hands today but,” she snaps off the monitor, “we have no reason to assume anything but the best.”

The thing in Matt’s chest sinks in smug insistence. “There are actually a lot of reasons to not assume the best,” he says. Cheery-O freezes. Matt’s words hang in the air. Melodie turns to him.

“What I mean is there are all sorts of things going wrong everywhere, every day, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it,” he says.

Cheery-O studies him. “That is true.” She pauses to let her words sink in. Then she gives him a smile. “But your baby isn’t likely to be one of them.”

Melodie clears her throat.

Matt wants to tell Cheery-O, “There is no way you can know what will happen to our baby. Not while he’s in there, not while he’s out walking around in the world.” But it’s time to turn this around, so he laughs. “Okay,” he says, “from your lips to ... ”

“ ... God’s ears,” Melodie chimes in. ***

The memorials were just part of his job. Matt had always noticed them the way you notice cemeteries, something there, part of the landscape but nothing to linger over. It was after Mel’s first trimester, when the glow of accomplishment had worn off, that the memorials took on this new power.

Dr. Cheery-O’s baby snapshot wall was a sort of memorial, too, he supposed. Only it was to new life instead of accidental death. Why couldn’t he focus on the positive?

“I don’t know if I’d like all those baby faces staring at me either,” Twig says, shifting the truck into low gear as they start up a hill. The sun is high, filtering through the treetops in splashy bursts.

“So, you’re afraid of babies?” Matt says. “We may need to rethink this ‘Uncle Twig’ thing.” Twig takes one hand off the wheel and sticks out his palm like a traffic cop. “Hear me out. I’ve been reading up. Babies’ brains—there’s not much in them when they’re born. They’re brand new. Nothing has happened to them yet. So, what are they thinking about? What goes through a mind when there’s nothing in it?”

Matt has to think about this for a minute. He doesn’t know which is stranger—Twig’s concern about what babies think or the fact that Twig is apparently researching infant cognition. The baby really is a big deal for Twig. He’s glomming on, but it makes sense. Twig still lives in the mobile home park beyond the outer lakes where he grew up. His mother moved down to Portsmouth last year. His father died in a prison fight when Twig was ten. His father landed in prison after a bungled convenience store hold-up that left the store owner holding Twig’s father and an accomplice at gunpoint—with their gun. Twig let that story slip back in high school. He also told Matt how he got his nickname. “I was a preemie baby, born way too soon. I wasn’t supposed to survive. My grandmother took one look at me and said, ‘Skinny as a twig.’ It stuck.”

Matt laughs now. “A mind with nothing in it. You tell me.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Twig snorts. “I’d rather have nothing in my mind than the poison you’ve got swirling around in yours.”

Matt looks out the window. “Look, this stuff is real—diseases, tumors that paralyze you, kids born with half a brain, stupid random accidents.” The thing drops with a sharp tug in Matt’s chest. “Kids taken by perverts, trafficked, or ... ” he can hardly get the words out, “worse.”

They pass an open meadow, dotted with white and yellow wildflowers. In a place like this, it is hard to believe any of those things is possible. Twig is maybe thinking the same thing because he says, “Not gonna happen. You dwell on the wrong stuff.”

“Thanks, Dr. Freud.”

Twig peers at Matt. “Dr. Who?” He points out the windshield. “Hey, right there, at two o’clock.” Another cross, this one with two red mylar balloon hearts tied to it and a bundle of dried flowers on the ground. “I’ll get it.” Twig parks and pulls on the emergency break.

Matt holds still as Twig hops out of the truck and walks to the memorial. It’s at the edge of a culvert. A car probably flew in, nose first, right in front of this beautiful meadow.

Twig lifts the flowers. Dead petals drift to the ground. He pulls up the cross, and carries it, balloons trailing, to the truck. Matt hears it land in the bed with a thud.

Twig opens the driver’s door. “I hate the heart ones,” he says, climbing into the cab. A whiff of summer afternoon comes in with him, the sunny damp of the forest, the cool of the lake rising through the trees.

Matt closes his eyes. “Why?”

“You oughta know.” Twig starts the engine. “Just too damn sad.”

Once he had a hiding spot, he saw no reason to stop. Matt added a second box, then a third—stuffed with crosses and half-burned candles, wooden doves, plastic flower bouquets, a bundle of handheld American flags (must have been a military veteran crash,) and a macabre parade of stuffed toys: sweet-faced puppies and kittens and dolls.

The thing that Matt couldn’t shake, even when the boxes were hidden away, was the outrage. The disbelief that such things were permitted. This was the world his baby was coming into. His father’s old hard nose, “life is tough” shtick didn’t begin to cover it. Nor did his mother with her “energy” beliefs. She loved tarot cards and palm readers. Energy has to go somewhere, she liked to say. We may not recognize its manifestation, but if you peel back the layers, you will find it at work. The things that have happened, the responses to them, echo on. And people who set evil in motion, it will manifest down the line.

That part of his mother’s hodge-podge sounded kind of true, but it didn’t help. And to make matters worse, people lie. Everywhere you look, there is someone lying about something, covering up, gaslighting, warping what’s real. And sometimes Matt thinks, he does this, too. Every time Mel asks if anything is wrong, and he says, “No.” Every time he smuggles a memorial down the basement steps and yells up to her that he’s checking the furnace.

The rain starts Friday morning. The guys at the garage follow the weather forecasts closely. Lots of rain means flooded roads. High winds lead to downed branches and power outages. Snow and ice mean idiots who can’t drive spinning out, and ski tourists skidding off the road, leaving hubcaps and tires, and sometimes mufflers, behind. Somebody has to clean it up. And that somebody is Twig and him.

On Friday night, Matt checks the basement. He also smuggles down a wreath of plastic flowers that Twig said reminded him of Hawaiian hula girls when they lifted it from a granite outcropping along a mountain road. Had the driver swerved to avoid a moose? Twig had heard something about it.

Matt slides the wreath into one of the partially opened boxes. He should tape the boxes shut. Sealed up, the things inside might recede. He hears the creaking of Melodie walking across the kitchen floor. She’s so big now, it looks like she is going to explode.

Rain bounces off the metal bulkhead doors, a steady drumbeat. There are bound to be crashes tonight. Someone will toss back a few too many at a lakeside bar and drive home too fast. Cops step up the DUI patrols, but people always slip through. There is no way to keep them safe from themselves.

Matt wakes in the night. The rain is falling in gusty sheets over the roof and against the windows. A nightlight across the room casts a quiet glow. Melodie sleeps next to him, her upper body propped on pillows to fight the acid reflux of late pregnancy. Matt places his hand over her arm, her skinny little arm unaffected by the ballooning belly. A passing car’s headlights float across the wall. He should bring Mel something to make her more comfortable. She likes to keep her water bottle on the nightstand. She forgot tonight.

He gets out of bed and walks the dark hall, barefoot, to the kitchen. Mel’s bottle is in the refrigerator, top shelf. He takes it out. Isn’t this supposed to be worse for mothers?

Didn’t he read somewhere that being a mother is like having a piece of your heart out and walking around in the world? Beyond your reach?

He shivers. The rain must be driving down the temperature. He goes to the thermostat on the wall and fiddles with it. The whir of the sump pump motor drifts up from the

basement. As long as they don’t lose power, they’ll be fine. Morning will come, and they’ll be fine.

They don’t lose power. By morning, the rain has stopped, and when he enters the kitchen, Melodie is sitting at the table, sipping coffee and scrolling through email on her phone.

“Look who’s up,” she says.

He bends to kiss the top of her head. “How are you feeling?”

“Meh.” She puts down her cup. “Like I swallowed a watermelon.”

He pours himself coffee. “At least the rain stopped.”

Melodie sets down her phone. “I thought the windows were going to blow in. You check the pump?”

Matt sits down with her. “I heard it running last night.”

“I just don’t want any mold. Remember last summer when ... ”

“Mold, no.” Not with the baby coming. He doesn’t want to mess up the kid’s lungs or give him allergies. “I’ll check the pump.”

Melodie’s face brightens. “Hey, let’s walk around the lake and get breakfast. It’s Saturday.”

This is exactly what he needs to hear. A walk in the sun, an omelet and some sizzling bacon. A long lazy day with nothing to accomplish or figure out. It’s the kind of thing they did every weekend before Mel got pregnant.

Matt squeezes Melodie’s hand and sees her face relax, the lines on her forehead softening. “You got it,” he says. “Why don’t you get dressed? I’ll check the pump. Twig is gonna drop off the truck here this morning. He’s not in on Monday, so I’m bringing it to the garage.”

He places their coffee cups in the sink, glad to have something helpful to do. People have babies every day. Mel and he will be excellent at it. The baby will be healthy and will live long. He is just “pissing all over things” as Twig puts it.

He snaps on the light at the top of the basement stairs and starts down. The sump pump is silent. Job done. The thing is more efficient than he’d hoped and worth every dollar of the $1,500 he paid. Maybe Mel and he should drive up one of the mountains and

do a trail walk if she’s up for it. It will be quiet in the woods. The lakes don’t settle down until the tourists depart.

Halfway down the stairs, Matt stops. There must be six inches of water covering the basement floor. The sump pump died in the night? His mind races. They didn’t lose power. Something else went wrong, something he didn’t anticipate. And now there is a dank sheet of liquid failure bathing everything like a subterranean swamp. “Mel,” he calls up the stairs because he suddenly doesn’t want to be alone. “We got flooded.”

He clomps down the last few steps and splashes into the water. So much for omelets and lakeside strolls. He wades toward the pump. Is it still under warranty? Melodie is going to freak out. Mold is probably already growing on the sheetrock.

Something winks in the water. A string of multicolored Mardi Gras beads floats between his legs. Matt stares at them. He glances around. Three white crosses bob near the far wall. A wreath of yellow plastic roses bumps against the bulkhead door. A buzzing fills Matt’s ears. He sloshes behind the stairs. The soaked cardboard boxes have collapsed. Soggy teddy bears spill from one, and a doll with long blonde hair trailing, medusa-like, behind her from another. It’s like a floating armada of grief.

The thing in Matt’s chest drops. He closes his eyes. Lights flash behind his lids. There is no denying it. We are hunted down. In the end, we are. All of us, in one way or another.

Overhead, he hears footsteps, voices. Melodie and someone else coming down.

“What’s shaking?” Twig’s booming voice. The footsteps stop. “What the hell? Ah, man, you got flooded. What a mess.”

Melodie breaks in, “What happened?” Her voice sounds small, shaken. Matt can’t have her scared. She’s the mother. If she falls apart, he surely will.

“It’s nothing,” he says. “Everyone calm down.”

“The pump died?” Twig asks. “And you bought one of the good ones, too, remember?” He steps into the water and wades out.

“Wait.” Matt catches him in one stride, but it’s too late.

Twig’s mouth opens. “Memorials?”

Matt glances at Melodie, who is standing on the last step. The room closes in. The cement walls, the murky water glinting in the dull light, press closer.

Melodie frowns. “You brought them here?”

“They were going to the landfill.”

Twig circles the staircase. “You’ve got boxes. How long you been doing this?”

Matt shrugs.

Melodie sits down. “Backache.” She rests her elbows on the step behind her. She has that neutral placid look on her face, the just-tell-me-and-we’ll-deal-with-it expression that Matt imagines she uses with patients. She can summon this look in an instant. It has always impressed him. “You took these from the roads? From accident sites?” she asks.

“I didn’t want to throw them out.”

“Why not?”

The water swirls around his legs. “It bothers me. It didn’t used to, but it does now.” From the corner of his eye, he sees a cross stuck in the corner. “These things get destroyed, and it’s like the accidents mean nothing. The people are erased.” He draws a breath. “And it’s unacceptable. The whole thing is just unacceptable.”

Twig shakes his head. “Shit happens, man. It happens.”

Matt sighs. “I know it happens, but what ... what are we supposed to do about it?” He is surprised to see a softness in Melodie’s face.

“Baby,” she says, “that’s a question I ask myself just about every day.”

And he thinks, of course she does. In Melodie’s job, people come in busted up—or worse—every day, and she’s on the front lines dealing with it. Melodie is the one he should have been talking to all this time. But before he can say another word, Twig sloshes over.

“What do we do?” He glances at Melodie. “We bury the dead. I saw a thing about this on National Geographic the other night, a documentary.”

“Oh?” Melodie says, and in her voice, Matt hears a note of anticipation. Twig is going to clear things up. This morning could not get any weirder.

“The show was about how humans have, you know, evolved since cavemen times, how ancient tribes got more advanced over like millions of years. These researchers, or scientists ... ”

“Anthropologists?” Mel says.

“…they’ve traced out all this history. And I’ve got to tell you, it was pretty interesting.

It turns out that one of the big signs of progress, showing that a tribe has advanced, is they bury their dead.” Twig stops to let the words sink in. “They don’t just leave them out to rot, like animals do. They bury them. That’s a big deal.”

“They care for the fallen,” Mel says.

“Then they move on.” Twig nods. “The whole tribe keeps going.”

They are silent for a minute. Matt can’t fathom a response, and then Twig says, “It’s funny, me seeing that show while you were grabbing up these memorials. The timing, I mean. It’s funny when things turn out like this, isn’t it?”

Matt manages a nod.

Melodie tips her head to the side and catches his gaze in the way that shows she understands. This is no big deal. People sometimes need to do these things. And Matt remembers why he married her.

The sun is coming through the squat windows at a higher angle now, lighting up the dank water.

“Clean-up’s gonna be a big job,” Mel says. “I think you better count me out.” She stands and heads up the stairs.

Twig raises his arms. “Don’t forget Uncle Twig here, ready to go.”

Melodie smiles. “How could we ever forget you?”

Matt knows it will take all day to clean this up and dry the floor. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Yeah, you do,” Twig says. “This is our job.” He turns to the bulkhead door and pulls it open. “We clean up the mess.” He climbs the stone steps and pushes open the external steel doors. Cool air wafts in.

Matt gets a plastic trash barrel from the garage, brings it to the basement, and they place the dripping memorials, one by one, inside. He tries not to look at them. Twig is chattering about ancient Egyptians and pyramids and mummified cats. His voice, a familiar background hum, seems to normalize what they’re doing. They’re clearing out memorials.

When everything is off the floor, they drive the pickup truck to Home Depot and rent a portable water pump. In the basement it runs, humming and gurgling, while Twig and Matt join Melodie for late-morning omelets upstairs.

When the pump has finished, they use push brooms to sweep the remaining puddles into the sump pump hole. They set up fans in the corners and turn them on high to dry the floor. Mold can’t get a foothold without moisture. Melodie will hear the fans whirring. They will comfort her.

In the afternoon, they carry the trash barrel up the bulkhead stairs and into a spotlight of sun in the backyard. They stand on the patchy lawn, as Twig eyes the memorials, a jumble of cross arms, tangled metallic beads, and dead flowers sticking out of the barrel “You wanna toss these?”

“No, hang on.” Matt goes to the garage and gets the white tarp that Melodie and he used to cover the floor a couple of years back when they painted the living room walls. He spreads the tarp on the lawn. “Let’s dry them out.”

Twig shoots him a sideways glance. “What for?”

“You’ll see.”

They dig into the barrel and lay the memorials across the tarp. It looks like a cemetery tag sale in the middle of his backyard, but that’s okay. “Let’s put a few of my split logs in the firepit.” Matt nods at the woodshed at the edge of the yard.

“Ah.” Twig nods. “Cremation.”

Matt claps him on the shoulder. “Minus the body.”

“Yeah.” Twig shudders. “I don’t think cavemen burned the dead. Fire was probably too hard to come by. That was another big thing for them, creating fire…”

“And then one day, the Bic lighter.” Matt laughs, and Twig does, too, relieved to have inspired a joke in this uncertain atmosphere.

By early evening, everything is dry, and the fire catches quickly. Twig carries the memorials from the tarp and hands them to Matt who feeds them into the pit. The crosses turn gray, and the dried flowers crumble to dust. The flames whistle and pop. When the stuffed bears catch, the thing in Matt’s chest drops. But it is still better this way. At least Twig and he are not dismissing them. They are bearing witness.

“Guess it beats the dumpster,” Twig says, as if reading Matt’s thoughts.

“Thanks for helping,” Matt says. “You killed your Saturday, huh?”

“Nah.” Twig gives a sly grin, the one he uses when he thinks he’s about to land a zinger.

“You killed it.”

Smoke drifts into the tree branches. Matt turns to sees Melodie watching from the kitchen window. She waves, and he thinks she looks relieved. She makes a walking motion with her hand, scissoring her fingers like tiny legs. She still wants to go to a walk. She gives him the emergency room nurse nod. It’s like a secret sign language. Matt nods. The fire pops, as a smoldering cross collapses. Sparks rise and blow across the yard like a trail of flitting beacons. n

the field excerpt

SARA SHEINER

[the first preface]

Eventually we called upon the hallows— Once we had relearned their language, remembered how they prefered to be spoken to.

It takes a while, some patience, a willingness to stick in slowness to savor repetition, the time spent whispering into holes in the dark.

Dear hallow of the thin light through the door—

And how to give them offerings: In bowls or in basins,

Which of our depressions?

Please, speak to me, hallow of the bent nail.

But only one of us wanted her—the-one-who-left—to return, And so our pleas were half-hearted.

How far did she go, toward where,

Oh, tell us, hallow of the empty drawer— [one]

Here the land lies unfolded, unfolding, ever-opening, without a center to touch, to come near to; for any center, if there is one, is continuously renewed & renewing.

The field is movement if movement could be embodied, seen floating above the ground, as if there is no ground (though something must be rooted) (but if the ground cannot be seen, can it exist?)

unless it is the tips of the grain, overlapping, lazy against each other, leaning this way for a moment then that way so that it seems as if the field creates the wind, or that the wind is an extension of the field, like,

a child who loves to play with its mother’s hair, and the mother, with infinite benevolence, permits the child to do this, in any kind of temperament, raging or gentle, persistent or fickle; the field is present even if the wind is not—if the wind is, ever, not. The field knows, is aware of the wind, always is aware of the clouds, is a living

mirror of the sky, easily as infinite & vast – is not the sea, (though such comparisons have been made between them) unless it is a sea one can wade into, wanting to fall, but never drowning.

The field cannot consume, cannot suffocate, would not desire to— instead allows itself to be trodden, trailed through, lain down in. The field is not a maze, it is an expanse, it is access, an excess,

& peripheral, an endless sightline; what is hidden is what is just before the roots, what is at the feet, what might be behind or ahead. The sightline deceives. The field draws the eyes beyond, one

blade of grass, impossible to pick out, leads to, encompasses, the next to the next to the next. You might as well be floating here, if only you could. How else to not destroy what you enter into? Not leave

a trace? How to un-seam as the field does? Though it is open to harm, too giving, presenting itself as an open hand, taking anything given, giving up anything taken, susceptible to fire or flood, any body

– animal or other –that walks through: kills there, sleeps there, gives birth ...

Into the field she flees

Looking back as she goes once twice three times

Her head spinning, Her hair tangling about her neck, Her long dress about her feet

Almost tripping, frantic.

She’s forgotten from what she runs.

Looking back until she doesn’t Look back anymore, she slows.

Like the last sequence

Of a movie she Disappears into the grasses, but This is only the beginning.

She looks back until she doesn’t Look back anymore—and she slows Realizing no one is chasing her.

But there the house still stands, behind her, A little before where the field began, or so she seems to remember.

She falls, lets her body fall.

She wants to crawl Wants to be down

Her back on the ground. To be still.

She didn’t want to be A mother like this, a woman Like this, a widow, a coroner, A crone.

The crone: its etymology literally means carrion, what vultures eat, circle, call to each other for, then fight over; dead flesh; rotting; putrid skin; an insult, sp—

(She spits into the bubbling cauldron, the black pot, over the fire, the electric stove. The mixture hisses. She is making soup for her children. She has had a bad day. Let them have a taste of it, she thinks. She laughs at herself, revealing the tooth that still needs fixing, (but who has time for the dentist?), spits a little more. Then, reaching for the ladle, she scoops the spit back out. I’m not a monster, she thinks. Dumps the stuff into the sink.)

The crone: welcomes you into the story; is either a help or a hindrance, a harbinger, though one should be wary of what she brings. Walk backward from her, don’t turn away; you’ll want to see her when she goes; want her to go—even if she has given you guidance, you won’t want her for your guide—she is haggard; grown beyond time; gargling; may remind you of gargoyles, or she is the daguerreotype, what most suspect lives under her skin: stone, fang, nail, gnarly wing.

The crone: the sirens, the cyclops, the corpse bride.

She didn’t want To be a mother

Like this, A woman like this, A widow, A coroner, A crone. No one Had ever asked her. Being No one, she Never asked herself.

Now, lying on a flattened piece of field, she has weighed the grasses down.

“Or did they bring me down?” she asks herself.

The grasses twist around her arms.

The grass peeking up through her lace, her gauze dress.

(Or did she imagine it?)

She had to move. Yes. Her body—

Isn’t this what she had come To this field for?

On a Flattened Piece of Field. She has Weighed the grasses down.

She pushes up onto her hands and knees, still her sightline is under the grasses.

The grasses green, the grasses yellowing, the grasses wet where they are close and to the ground.

The ground, yes, is moist, she feels it seeping into her knees, her toes stick in a little, her hands make mud.

She uses a hand to brush the tips of blades from her lips, so fine and crisp, they cut.

Her tongue licks for blood, to calm her nerves, to stop from almost smiling from the touch.

Mother! she hears. Come back!

Her hands make mud as if to move.

Has she always had to look away Or look straight-at?

A hand plucking at a blade of grass is a man grabbing at a woman’s hand. ][

She wants to unbend all the grasses she has lain down upon. How to do this?

How to undo?

How to be there and not be there /

How to speed or slow time/

How to not feel guilt for leaving traces/

How to mark, mar, make, carve, cut, crave/

No/

How to become a marsh? ][

Unbend all the grasses— the woman remembers her youngest perched on a rock in the midst of young trees growing up around her.

The distance between a mother and her daughters–Innate, inert, ingrained.

Grains of wheat, flowers, herbs.

Dying gardens, no matter how much they are tended.

The woman remembers: over and over again, mowing over what was left.

What if nothing had ever actually been planted?

The seeds imaginary.

The hands never actually dig–ging in.

The body just limply sitting at the spot, staring into the dirt, or—

What if it is the hand that is infertile, infirm, rendering the seeds into pieces of sand;

What if there was never any chance anything would grow? ][

Innate, inert, ingrained/grains of wheat, flowers, herbs/ Inside the field she feels different/finds she’s been crawling/ Slinking through like some large snake, slow/her scales ticking

Against each striated blade/it tickles and shivers her/until it is A vibration that reverberates continuously and outward through the field/

Now she is no longer in time or space/

Now she is neither both nor in the field or of it/

Until it is a vibration that reverberates, continuously, and outward, through the field. An at-one-ment, a disintegration, a decomposition, and a deconstruction at once.

She isn’t sure what she is trying to access; what she is trying to bury; or is it that she wants a berry, a mad bunch in her mouth, tearing with teeth, bursting, not using her hands; or using her hands, she digs; it isn’t her own grave.

She doesn’t want to die; or she wants to be present in death, presented death, re-discover it. She’s hidden it, she knows. Here, she can admit to this. He is buried, she knows.

She has never visited him; this is right. Why visit a man despised? A man who (perhaps) you wanted dead. Whose death made a scene of itself: ostentatious, undeserving.

She worries that the more she digs, the more will return.

How to remain associated with nothing, no one, nowhere, no-when? The desire to dig and find nothing, that there was never anything to hide , never everything. ][

She’s hidden it, she knows. Here, she can admit to this and not feel ashamed.

In a sun-spot she stops, turns, onto her back, stretches out, first, with her arms above her head, then, with arms reaching, out from each side, her legs, too, spread, as if some static, angel without snow. She imagines what she must look like, an aerial view, a plane, a bird, though neither would notice.

Motes, pollen, seeds, lift above. She listens for movement in the grasses. Little creatures, crawling. Her ears, tickle. Her skin, pricks. Strands of hair have begun, to root themselves in the ground. She can hear them, digging, a tingling at her scalp, the pulling. She sits up, quickly, feels the little snaps. Again, she can see over the grass. Behind her, she can still make out the house, a gray box. ][

The word Mother resounds in her head, across the field, turning the sky dark, the field as slate; the wind stops; everything grows still from the roots of the grasses to their very tops; each strand stands straight up all around her.

She feels the snap which sends her to her feet.

Then, just as swiftly, all the blades lay down, all is flattened, pressed down by an invisible weight; she feels herself anchored, revealed; the grasses no longer reaching to her waist; the field spread before her like a floor; the house closer, loomed larger; her own body felt very, very large.

One by one she watches as the windows of the house turn on an amber light. She can see the silhouettes of her daughters, looking out.

A breeze picks up. Her hair, dress, all begins to swirl toward the house.

As if flattened, pressed down by an invisible weight; she feels herself anchored, revealed.

She feels now as if she were standing in the middle of a canyon; she perceives walls that are not there though she feels them; the breeze like a handkerchief over her mouth.

Looking at the house, she fears the door will open and her daughters come out—

To stay them off, she starts to whisper a story that they all already know:

On another night, the same house, police lights can be seen shining as bright as Christmas lights through the trees.

The interior scene is like this: mother, daughter, another daughter in the kitchen, standing next to the warped chopping block worn down by the passage of hands, fingers, and, at one time, meat.

The block of wood gleamed like a small sun the mother could lean against.

On the other side, the officers asked questions.

The mother’s voice travelled in and out of the children’s ears.

No other lights on in the house.

The house asleep, a dense static.

The children feel the house the most and they lean deeper into the warm block.

The mother imagines each of them as deer in headlights.

A family, all does, no buck. Something she has never seen.

This is how she imagines it:

headlights unexpectedly pulling back the darkness like a blanket.

She pauses, watches as one of them pulls down the shades of the windows, as if closing their eyes.

The breeze shifts, drops down, and the grass, like feathers, is loosed, returns to its green-black-gold.

She remembers when she was young outside her own mother’s house, away from her two sisters, in the field that was there, behind. Her father somewhere out there too, the both of them seeking something, in or of the earth, away. She remembers walking past the bee boxes, watching her father lift the lid, stick his hand in, emerge with a slide of honeycomb, the bees riotous, swirling, raising themselves almost as high as the birds, who could swoop to eat them.

This – both then and now –makes her think of things wild and dangerous to the touch, their swirling sharp sting, the lesson of restriction: what cannot be held, not known, without pain.

She, one of the mother’s daughters, remembers, too, walking past the bee boxes, listening to a story of bears. Of deer. She remembers though she cannot see it.

The air, everything, leans toward her mother, the woman who left. None of the summoning back has brought her back. From the porch, this daughter watches her mother walking backward, with the grasses tall as if the field is swallowing her. The tendrils of her hair reaching down to the feathered grasses and, they, tip their heads to meet them. The house had begun disintegrating without her. Birds nested in every corner of rooms. A few were speckled and pecked the wood, gradually turning many small holes into bigger ones. Her closet door had always looked like this to her. In the dark, as a young girl, she imagined it filled with tiny, hungry insects.

Now the cold air entered. She and Sister were becoming colder and colder. They had started to burn things within the house. First, whatever they didn’t love. Soon, there wouldn’t be a choice. And what did they love now? Not even a memory of her. ][

Tipping her head, she watches her mother from the doorframe. Her shoulder leans into the gnarly wood. She rubs it back and forth, searching for a splinter.

Her housedress snags, pulls, breaks off a piece of the wood. The sound (though it couldn’t have been) makes her mother stop for a moment, almost turn, but then she continues, slowly. The daughter pinches the splinter from her sleeve, drops it, slaps her own thigh to a slow melody she can’t remember ever having been sung.

The field is golden now: metaled milk, feather-dusted, cradled in the lap of every tell-told fairy princess, the willows of Utopia, the weeping of angels in a cup that was once silver, varnished, fitted, halo-round as a cusp, she almost brinks over. She thinks about tripping, heel on top of toes; her chin nicking the porch, spray-painting the lawn like an overgrown clown.

Sister says something behind her, garbled, lofty, something about laundry, up the stairs, down the hall, over the portico, the bridge, through the tall wooden intricate bird cages, and the marble fountain that drips.

It’s safest in the doorway. Think: tornado. Think: ashen, angry sky.

Think: not leaving. Having not left yet. Think the house still whole.

Think not of its now slow disintegration.

The dishes in the sink left to clatter as they shift, the dissipation of time.

How many lifetimes has the daughter stood there, waiting. The darkness and the trees.

Now the trees have been cleared, or they have removed themselves. The hill reaches higher,

all other houses pull away; the roads overgrow with fallow, the sky widens. There is no periphery to what she can see,

standing in the doorway, leaning. Smoking a cigarette now. Blowing out smoke.

No signals.

I’m going to follow her.

“Why?”

I said it after dinner; slipped my plate into the soapy bathwater. ‘

She read this as a shrug.

“You’d leave me alone here then?”

In my mind I slid my belly on the floor.

In action I laid my body down on the chaise.

I think of how she used to be a teenager, her bedroom in the basement, music slipping up through the boards. Our bedrooms far apart from when we used to share one as small children–the cracks in the window.

“What if I were to bring her back?”

“You wouldn’t.”

I start to graze my fingertips along the wooden floorboards as if they were water. Connecting the knots.

“What if I were to come back?”

“No,” she asked. “Don’t lie.”

[the second preface]

there is, we discovered a hallow of time she the most trickly of hallows elusive, particular it took one of our lifetimes to decipher her one of our lifetimes devoted offered given as token we had to give her memories for our wishes, for our time spent looking through her folds we exchanged old time for new, creating holes for us to slip through more than a muse for one of us she became our home

Sometimes I think I can read without her. More than often I do.

I make my own narrative.

I go off on my own.

When I do this, my spells are dirty. My incantations, off.

I lose myself, there’s nothing for me to read.

I go to the city, I get a job, I forget.

I call Sister on the telephone and she lies.

I fear the telephone.

I wake up the fear is still real I wake up it’s still real

I die, I wake up.

I will make the same mistakes.

In one of our lifetimes there must have been a harmony. There are suggestions of such in The Book –references to a return, (that The Book exists at all). Figures of people dancing, holding cups up high

I see a resemblance in them, in their quickly drawn faces the arches of their feet.

But who are the women? Who began this Book?

I feel as if I belong to it, not that it belongs to me (that there is no ownership at all).

][

We sat holding The Book, watching as it shifted, first to leather then to glass. As if The Book were in a glass box & then as if The Book were glass itself. We knew if The Book did not stop shifting soon we were (doing) something wrong.

Our hearts were too quick. The something stuck in our throats. I could feel it in Sister’s like I could feel it in my own. We were like two pillars or drops of water. But The Book was a grail. We needed to approach it correctly.

I looked at her, at Sister. She wore different shades of black, as she always did. Her eyes were closed. What was she humming?

Was she humming?

Hey, I said, hey.

Her smile turned into a grin.

What are we doing wrong, Sister?

Her smile grew. She bit her lip to stop it.

Her body tilted from side to side, she was smiling. I wanted to smile.

I don’t think you actually want to know, she said, still smiling. I think The Book knows you don’t want to know.

Her lower lip emitted the tiniest drop of blood.

What if it tells us nothing?

What if it hides?

The Book is the Book, S—r.

The Book is the Book.

Sister opened her eyes: You aren’t ready, S—r. This isn’t what you want now.

It isn’t?

I watched her get up, walk away, take The Book with her, carrying it back to the fruitbearing tree. She placed The Book in its branches like putting away a clean dinner plate.

What do I want, Sister?

A dip in the pool? she asked, as she pulled back the curtain and stepped outside. n

Author Bios

RENÉE ASHLEY is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and educator. Ashley is the author of five collections of poetry, two chapbooks and a novel. Her work has garnered several honors including the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships granted by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts. Several of her poems have been published in noted literary journals and magazines, including Poetry, American Voice, Bellevue Literary Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and The Literary Review. She lives in New Jersey with her two dogs.

BRENDA BEARDSLEY’S work is forthcoming in The Seneca Review, Paterson Literary Review, Tupelo Press’s The Last Milkweed anthology, Soundings East, DASH, Permafrost, december, Fence, and The Examined Life. A 2022 december poetry prize finalist, Honorable Mention in 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, Beardsley was nominated for Best New Poets 2023. brendabeardsley.org

AMY CLEMENTS chairs the Department of Literature, Writing, and Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. She earned her MFA in fiction at The New School. Her previous work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Litro, and other publications, and she is the author of The Art of Prestige: The Formative Years at Knopf.

ANNA ELKINS has written, painted, and taught on six continents, exhibiting paintings and publishing books along the way—including her poetry collection, Hope of Stones, which won an Oregon Book Award. After many travels, Anna now enjoys living in a small town on a big river with her husband. annaelkins.com

DAWN GOULET is a Chicago-area writer who drafts legal opinions by day and fiction in spare moments between making soup, observing rabbits, going on adventures with her family, and taking Jim the Dog to visit his dog park fan club. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Review.

KAREN GUZMAN is a fiction writer and essayist. Her published novels include Arborview and Homing Instincts. Karen’s short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Variant Literature and Gargoyle magazine. Karen has received a Writing Fellowship at the Collegeville Institute and a Writing Residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

SUMMER HAMMOND grew up in Iowa, near the bend of the Mississippi. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, StoryQuarterly, and Moon City Review. She is the winner of New Letter’s 2023 Conger Beasley Jr. Prize in Nonfiction.

E.H. JACOBS is a psychologist and writer whose work has appeared in Glacial Hills Review, The Best of Choeofpleirn Press, Abandoned Mine, Coneflower Café, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Storgy Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Aji Magazine, Bryant Literary Review, The Bluebird Word, and Smoky Quartz. He has several professional publications and served on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was a nominee for the Derick Burleson and Nina Riggs Poetry Awards.

KEITH KOPKA received the 2019 Tampa Review Prize for his collection of poems, Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020). His poetry and criticism have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, The International Journal of the Book, and many others. He is also the author of the critical text, Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry (GRL, 2018). Kopka is a Senior Editor at Narrative magazine and the Director of the low-res MFA at Holy Family University in Philadelphia.

JOSHUA KULSETH earned his BA in English from Clemson University, his MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and his PhD in poetry from Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, The Emerson Review, The Worcester Review, Rappahannock Review, The Windhover, and others. His poetry manuscript, “Leaving Troy,” was shortlisted for the Cider Press Review Publication Competition.

JAMES MAGRUDER has published four books of fiction: Sugarless, Let Me See It, Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, and Vamp Until Ready. He also wrote the books for the Broadway

musicals Triumph of Love and Head Over Heels. A five-time MacDowell Fellow, he lives in Baltimore.

HARRISON MONARTH is the author of five books on communication, influence, and leadership, including the New York Times bestseller The Confident Speaker, and the international bestseller Executive Presence. His essays have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Fast Company, among other publications. He resides in Manhattan, New York City.

ELEANOR ELI MOSS is an obscure cryptid who has no idea what’s good for them. They can be found at fanghoneyy.substack.com, mostly, sometimes.

DARIA ROSE is a writer based in Cambridge, MA and a PhD student in the History of Art at Harvard. Her writing has appeared in Verdigris, Asterisk, Memento, and others.

In 2023, RIKKI SANTER was named Ohio Poet of the Year. Her twelfth and most recent poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Please contact her through her website, https:// rikkisanter.com.

PATRICIA SCHULTHEIS is the author of an award-winning short story collection St. Bart’s Way (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2015), a historical work, Baltimore’s Lexington Market (Arcadia Publishing, 2007), and a memoir, A Balanced Life (All Things That Matter Press, 2018).

CLAIRE SCOTT is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and The Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t.

SARA SLINGERLAND SHEINER is a poet and writer from Shawangunk, New York. Her first poetry manuscript “Of Lack,” has been a runner-up for Tupelo’s Berkshire Prize, a finalist in the 2020 Essay Press Book Contest, and a semi-finalist in the Wisconsin Poetry Series’

prizes. She is currently working on a ‘contraepic’ titled “The Field” and a scholarly project that investigates the work of modernist writers through an astrological lens. More of her work can be found at www.sarasheiner.com.

SARAH SORENSEN (she/her), MA, MLIS is a queer writer based in the Metro Detroit area. She has been published over fifty times in small presses and is now working on a novel. Her work is forthcoming from Allegheny and The Closed Eye Open, so stay tuned!

MARK STROHSCHEIN is a Washington state poet who lives on beautiful Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Red Fern Review and Main Street Rag. His poems have also appeared in Flint Hills Review, Lips Poetry Magazine, The Milk House, In Parentheses and Caustic Frolic, among others. n