I'm not supposed by Bud Smith

“Len Kuntz excavates the underside of humanity through fevered, lyrical language. He evokes vital wounds and resilience of childhood translated into the scarred psyche of adulthood, relationships, survival or not. Kuntz is a phenomenon. His work is unforgettable. Get a copy!”—Meg Tuite, author of Lined Up Like Scars

“In this electrifying collection, Kuntz examines the complicated nature of what it means to be alive. His characters are beautifully flawed and his prose is simultaneously honest, elegant, and savage. These stories are fierce and they promise to stay with you, lingering, haunting you for days. Truly some of the best fiction I’ve ever read.”—Karen Stefano, author of The Secret Games of Words

“Len Kuntz is a fearless writer with a big, stirring heart. He will eviscerate you with a line, then throw his arms around you. The characters in this minimalist collection loom large with ache and alienation as they struggle to repair nerves rubbed raw from irrevocable damage, stumbling along the terrifying path to survival exquisitely - if darkly - lit by human connection.”—Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace

"Len Kuntz has been writing precise, powerful short stories for some time now, and it's a great pleasure to see these packed into a book. These stories are razor-edged, language-driven, and brutally lovely - while also exposing the hard hurts in the world for the observant soul."—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World

“Len Kuntz writes stories that are often funny and heartbreaking but always shine with precision and grace. His characters, through their wit and charm, evoke a deeply profound glimpse into the human spirit.”—Brandon Hobson, author of Deep Ellum

"Great stories told with compassion and humor, maximum power, no fat. Len Kuntz does everything right.”—Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

“The winds may roar full-throated, but Kuntz chooses a diﬀerent course, selecting precise details (augmented by the occasional trope) to lead his readers into the heart of achingly human situations: coping with death and regret, children converting food scavenging into a game, the trauma of babies nobody wants. Don't be afraid to dip in: Kuntz isn't going to waste your time.”— Cooper Renner, Founder of Elimae Magazine

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither Are You

Len Kuntz

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All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction, all resemblances to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. Nothing may be reproduced without permission of the writer or publisher unless the work is being quoted in short critical reviews or interviews.

Edited by Robert Vaughan Front and Back Cover Art by Emily Linstrom Book Design / Bud Smith

www.unknowneverything.com

Contents

11 13 15 18 21 23 25 27 30 32 35 37 38 40 42 44 46 47 50 55 59 60 62 67 70 72 73

My Mother, Marilyn Monroe Missing Chance You Summer Scalping; Scarecrows Facts about the Moon Relative The Hard Dance Mockingbird Song of Infinity The Launcher Like This Castaways Skin Terminal My Father’s Workshop See Through The Repairman Soup The Exchange Student My Life in Black and White Veteran Quicksand Room Service Mother of Pearl Coﬀee Stains Lens Black Diamonds

74 76 78 82 85 86 87 91 94 96 99 100 104 106 108 110 113 114 117 119 121 123 124 126 127 129 132 134 136 137 139 141 143 145 147 148 149 151

Not So Close, Not So Far Insomnia Candy Hearts Waterfall Timing Moving Day New Gray Grace The Sound of the Cars on the Bridge Just As You Are Center and Fringe It Wasn’t Meant to be Found Crescent Gone A Lover of Beautiful Things The Right Cut So Clean Early Improvised What Became of the Clouds Stems Up On a High Shelf, the Living and the Dead Normal Doppelganger Little Holocausts At the Water’s Edge Thoroughfare Two and a Half I Like You The Wages of Hunger Bananagrams Up High in the Trees All I Ever Wanted The Spiders in My Room Mermaid Daughter Press Rewind Ruthless Trust

154 155 156 157 158 160 164 167 169 171 178 179 181 184 186 190 191

In Flight Starling Scoliosis Locked In Hunger Strike Burial Music The Musketeers Stones Someone Else’s Wife Soul Patch Shiny Black Pieces Black Box The Landing Black Magic One Out of Two Wicked Water I’m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither Are You

“No, no. Stories are a diﬀerent kind of true.” — Emma Donoghue, Room

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.” — Ernest Hemingway

My Mother, Marilyn Monroe

She said, “It’s about time you get off your knees and learn how to fly.” My mother was always speaking nonsense. Another time she told my sister to stop hiding behind her auto-tuned words. How she came up with this stuff, I’ll never know. Or maybe I do. Mother started dressing in cheerleading outfits at dinner. Once a pompom caught on fire when it got too close to the stove. Rather than put it out right away, Mom’s regret was that we were out of marshmallows. “We could have had S’mores,” she said. Dad had been an alcoholic surgeon who hung himself after botching a surgery while tipsy. He never got the chance to see this new side of mom--nutty but fun. Maybe it would have made him less uptight, more hopeful. My sister kept saying we should do something, put her in a home. “She could really hurt herself,” she said. That was the night Mom did three cartwheels successively but crashed on top of the coffee table while trying a handstand. Another time I found Mom in the laundry room folding towels while wearing a safari outfit. Another time she was a policewoman. Then Snow White, Lucille Ball and Cleopatra. “I don’t think it’s Alzheimer’s,” I said. “I think this is Mom trying to find herself, the moth getting out of the jar, so to speak.” “You and your ‘so to speak’,” my sister said, sounding a bit like Mother herself.

But Sis had always been more like Dad. I was most like Mother. Instead of being a teacher, like I’d always wanted, I became an attorney because the money was better. I led a trapped existence, yet, seeing Mom having so much fun had started to make me rethink my choice, made me take an honest appraisal of my life. “Can you imagine what the neighbors say?” my sister asked. “It’s a wonder they haven’t called the police or the men with white uniforms.” I do admit that I got a little worried when Mom started dressing as Marilyn Monroe, replete with the white wig, fake face mole, glittery dresses and airhead speech. She enjoyed being MM so much that it became the sole identity she maintained until the end. In front of the oval mirror in the living room she’d pout her cherry lips and practice singing, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” a hundred times a day. She read Arthur Miller plays and kept claiming Joe DiMaggio would be over for dinner. She beamed when she said it. My sister labeled me an enabler, said that by not intervening I was actually encouraging Mom to stay crazy. I said she should try to lighten up, have a little fun, where’s the harm? She said that was my problem right there-other people’s happiness was my drug. Once Mom said she had a secret to share. “It’s a little naughty.” The secret was a man named Hugh Hefner was starting a men’s magazine and he wanted her to pose nude for the inaugural issue. “This is going to end badly,” my sister said. “Just watch.” Sis could not have known how correct she’d be, even though it for the reasons she’d predicted. Mom got hit by a train late one night while I was at a concert (I’d moved into the old place when Mom started to get wacky.) We’ll never know if that was Mom’s way of committing suicide. I doubt it. Once Dad was gone, she’d started enjoying life far too much, even if it hers was mostly make-believe.

Against my sister’s wishes, we buried Mom in one of the Marilyn costumes. The train had hit her car from the passenger side, and except for some minor wear and tear, her body had been left in reasonably good condition. At the funeral, I blew her coffin a kiss and quoted Simon and Garfunkel: “Here’s to you, Joe DiMaggio,” thinking she’d get a kick out of that. My sister scowled at me and said, maybe what Mom had was contagious and I’d caught it. Now what I teach my students is this: don’t lose yourself to life. Don’t choke on life’s hard edges. Instead, hold on loosely. Each New Year I see their strained expressions when I start out this way. But then I tell them zany stories about a wonderful woman who waited until the last years of her life to actually enjoy it. They always think I’m making the stories up, even as they cackle and hoot. “If she’s a real person,” someone eventually says, “bring her in as guest lecturer so we can meet her.” I don’t want them to know she’s dead because to me, she’s still very much alive. I’ve been putting together a video slideshow of some of Mom’s different identities and was surprised to see she’d donned twenty-nine different personas during those last two years. I showed it to my daughter last night for a preview. She made me replay it a half dozen times, crying and laughing in the same spots with each viewing. “Is that why you named me Marilyn?” she asked. “Of course.” She tugged my earlobe, our code for “I love you.” We were quiet for a while. We could be that way with each other and not have to worry. I thought she’d fallen asleep, but then she said, “Dad?” “Hmm?” “I want to be just like her.” “The costumes you mean?” “No,” she said, yawning in my ear. “Happy.”

Missing Chance

Here’s what she says, my mother says, “Get over it. People are replaceable.” Chance is a card in Monopoly. It’s a probability. Once it was even a boy. “Don’t give me that attitude,” she says. “Go ask your sister.” My mother wears a diamond bezel watch that looks dusted with pie crust flakes. The second hand sweeps. It’s fake like her hair, her teeth. Like the swollen moons rising and falling beneath her sheer, see-through blouse. My stepfather is passed out on the lawn. He was sober once last year. He’ll be a sunburned old bastard tomorrow. For dinner he spits sunflower seeds onto the piles of other shredded sunflower seeds beneath his chair. I always think it’s his teeth he’s spitting out. He has a tattoo of Satan on his shoulder from his navy days. You should see the left hook he throws. Everything we own is out there on the lawn. Amy says we should blow up pages of our diaries and sell those, too. I tell her I don’t have one, a diary, she says, “Sure you do. Don’t be a stupid asshole,” and punches my chest so hard I cough. Someone pounds on the screen door. It’s an Asian lady in a red outfit that looks as if it was just painted. Her hat has a flippy thing, like on a graduation hat, a tassel that swivels around her bowl cut hairdo. Her teeth are long and smoky and sharp. I squeal. I think: Jason from Friday the 13th only Asian and female.

I give her everything she wants for whatever price she’ll pay. “Here,” I say, stacking a barbeque atop her load, “Take this too. Gift with purchase.” At dusk a car full of gangbangers pulls up. I dare them to shoot me. I beg them to bludgeon me. “Shoot me, motherfuckers!” They laugh. They don’t even bother getting out of the car which is bouncing, exhaling and inhaling, taking a bong hit, breathing and hiccupping bass notes so low they’re under the buckled pavement. Then I scream, “People are replaceable!” and they drive off terrified, no different than if a police siren had sounded. My brother was there one day and not the next. Who decides these things? I suppose you’d say God or fate or no one, but that’s not a satisfactory answer. I saw him kiss a girl once back by the tetherball pole. She had kinky blonde hair and her hands looked like they were holding batons as she reached up and gave her lips away. Afterward, he whispered something in her ear and she ran off. I never asked him and I wished I had. Of course I wish that now. The winds came later, clever and full-throated. Detritus, twigs and wilted flowers, insect husks and lies: I watched all of it swirl. I opened my mouth and swallowed the gritty air. I laid down on the ground and let it roll over me.

You

She says, “When I kiss you I can feel how much your teeth ache.” I kiss her again and she tells me that’s more like it. We sleep in. All day we lay in bed like lumps, like lonesome cats and dogs. Pillows become our neighbors. When she asks me if I’m hungry, we kiss again. She only has seven toes. I knew this when I first met her. She was helping out with lawn-mowing as a little girl. I say, “But seven is a lucky number,” and she takes my chin and wags it in her palm. “You,” she says, using her nickname for me. “Oh, You.” The last time she tried it, the doctor said it was a cry for attention. “It’s hard to drown yourself in the bathtub,” he said. Which made sense. Which was true. But this time she let the bath overflow and used a blade. Two blunt swipes across the wrist. She needs stitches, but for now the gauze and ice will have to do. She’s not ready for the hospital, and, to tell the truth, neither am I. I have a book light that I blink oﬀ and on beneath the sheets. “This reminds me of summer camp,” she says. “I was happy before then.” I let her tell me the story. I don’t say a word. His name was Ben, a redhead with angry acne. He said she was dirty. There was an owl in the tree above them when he did it. Since then, she sees that owl once a day, if not more. The bird stares at her, mocks and accuses.

I hold her hand and put my lips on her fingers. Her pulse throbs through a wide green vein. She says, “You know, it might not ever go away,” and I tell her, that’s okay, just don’t leave me. She says, “I don’t get you.” I say I don’t either. She kisses me again, soft like Cool Whip, calls me, “You,” and adds “I love.”

Summer Scalping; Scarecrows

Mother teaches us how to steal. We start with Henderson’s corn field, undercover of the night, our station wagon skulking down the dusty aisle ends like a muttering alligator. She throws us out, tosses us the gunnies and we scamper through the rows and I start ripping oﬀ ears as fast as I can. It feels like cheap murder or beating up a kid, someone helpless and smaller than me. When I pull them from the stalk, they make a scratching noise similar to Mother’s fingernails on the armrest or the sketchy rumble of her cigarette cough. The corn leaves are ridged and sweaty and the corn hair tickles my neck, but just for a moment until Davey jams his elbow into my rib. “Stop fucking around,” he says. His eyes are electric brown, Mexican jumping beans. Black smears of grease sit below them. Davey takes this shit seriously. He looks like a resentful quarterback or a warrior looking for a scalp. When I still don’t get it, he slugs me in the gut. “Don’t be stupid. We work in the middle.” He hisses, flops down and slides in the dirt on his belly, an iguana now, a combat soldier. He motions that I should follow and I do because I am scared and confused and dizzy. Old Man Henderson is who we work for during the day, and here we are robbing him at night. I know these fields as well as I know the twelve-by-twelve bedroom that I share with Davey. We shouldn’t be here. We’re poor but we’re not starving.

In the center of the field the stalks sway with the breeze, their tops tipping and dipping, brushing our shoulders as we work, whispering conspiratorially. I can’t stop shivering even though it’s a hot, humid summer night. Davey has a flashlight. One end is stuﬀed in his mouth. Light comes out the other end in swaths and cones. Davey’s face glows menacing lavender. He sees me staring and thwacks me across the forehead with the flashlight. He calls me a stupid fag as I finger the new bruise and rub his saliva from my eye. I helped Mr. Henderson put up the new set of scarecrows that stand at the sides of the field, arms outstretched as if crucified. It was a lazy job, given to me, I presumed, as a kindly favor. Usually I was charged with moving the twenty foot long irrigation pipes and shoring up rows or pruning, which is the same as prison work when the temperature gets past a hundred. Anyway, Mrs. Henderson gave him half a dozen Albertson grocery bags stuﬀed with all sorts of clothing articles and Mr. Henderson said, “Go to it.” As a test run for bringing up the news to Mother, I’d once confessed to Mr. Henderson that I wanted to be a fashion designer when I grew up. His eyes worked over my statement and out of his shirt pocket he pulled a piece of straw the size of a pencil. He chewed it for a while. It took him so long to answer that I thought my shame might burn me to death, but then he showed me a grin. It was wide and toothy and real. “That’s wonderful, son.” No one had ever called me that. “It’s important to have large-sized dreams.” So I figured there was a tie to me confiding in Mr. Henderson that day and him wanting me to put together a collection of scarecrows. I did as I was told. I would have, no matter the request, since I was getting paid cash money and, as anybody can tell you, that’s a hard thing to come by. When I was finished I had six fairly realistic men. They were skinny things because the straw kept slipping down their drawers or out of their sleeves. But they looked fine, stylish even. Afterward there were a few garments left over, one being a sky blue turtleneck that didn’t make sense on a scarecrow. Mr. Henderson said, “You like it?” I lied and said, “No,” because even 19

though the color was blue, it was too light, pastel, bordering on effeminate, and I didn’t want him or anyone else getting ideas. “Take it,” he said. “Go on.” And I did. After I got home, I stuck it between the box springs and the mattress I share with Davey. One of these days I plan on showing him, but that might not be for a while. When our gunny sacks are full of corn we stagger in the dark toward the lurking station wagon. Mother sits smoking with the dome light on. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t say a word, just starts the engine and pulls the silver stick shift on the side of the steering wheel and we drive off. The next morning Mr. Henderson calls me to his office which is a trailer sunk into the sun-baked mud northeast of where some broke-down combines slumber. His golden lab, Leroy, scents me, sneezes, and scampers off. A crow caws. He shouts to come on in when I knock. I hesitate and try to measure the tone of his voice, sift through it like a gold miner, for evidence of a mood. The door catches and won’t open. “Kick it at the bottom!” he tells me. I wonder why he doesn’t just open the thing for me. “You gotta kick it!” he says. I still can’t tell if there’s anything to learn from his tone, but by now I’m running and his voice isn’t very loud. Stalks slap me because I’m off balance. My feet burn, my eyes sting. It’s not even noon yet. I sweat. I run through the corn row and don’t stop.

Facts about the Moon

He wanted to tell me facts about the moon. When I didn’t have time, he wrote them down for me on sky blue construction paper using chalk and diagramming solar systems that had once looked familiar but now seemed bizarre, like a picture of one’s self in the distant future when they are saggy-skinned and brown-spotted. We were young then, my boy and I, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. Still, now I remember once we ate bananas and stuﬀed our gums with large chunks of the fruit and something got into me because I made shrieking monkey sounds and scratched my arm pits and hopped all over the couch dancing. My boy, my boy he laughed so hard he almost choked to death. When he finally caught his breath, he said, “That would have been a fun way to go,” and I think he meant it. Tonight when I pulled into our development and saw the long limos and the strapless gowned teens with their wrist corsages and spearmint smiles I wondered what he might have looked like wearing a tux, a rash of acne on his cheek, nervous as all hell but handsome I bet. She’d have been blonde like Mary, sweet yet sassy, too. And I would have liked her. Now I’ve got a drink in my hand and I keep studying my son’s galaxy picture. There are spindly stars, rockets and oval planets, but the moon dominates. Luna is a warbled jawbreaker hovering in space, yet drawn with curved edges so that it appears to be spinning right out of its own orbit, its trapped dimension. I don’t

know what any of it means. I should have asked when I had the chance. Right as I’m folding the paper up, I notice on the backside something he’s written in pencil at the base, the font a nine year old’s unsteady scrawl. The lead is faint and smeared. I hold it up close enough that I can smell the dusty wheat smell. “Facts about the Moon,” it says. “Fact One: even when you’re not aware of it, the moon is always there, waiting for you to look up over your head and notice it.” That’s all it says. I get up and walk to the window, draw back one of the blinds. It’s been clear all week but now the night is so stuﬀed with clouds that nothing else is visible. I stand like that, looking, waiting for the light to break through, not worried about how long it will take, just waiting.

Relative

People say it’s strange what I did, but isn’t strange a relative term? Before Bobby left me I was a masseuse. Temptations come with a job such as that, on both ends. I’ve read about Jesus being left alone with the devil in the wilderness for forty days and coming out a stronger, better man. Frankly, I’m impressed as hell. It was Twain or somebody who said, “The only thing I can’t resist is temptation,” and that’s a lot like me. Bobby’s coke habit was just a little thing but then he got into horse and all bets were off, as they say. He started hanging out with shady characters—Rudy and Antonio, Lorenzo, Blaze—and after a spell they started to seem normal to me, as if they were cousins visiting a little longer than you wished. People on heroin are pretty much ghosts, even to themselves. The only time they come back to life is on the slide down, and then it’s just Satan (funny, that’s the second time he’s come up) needling you to get your drug back on. In order to be a successful addict, you basically have to be a millionaire. Our bills piled up. We sold off appliances, a car, then the other, and I’d have to take the bus to work. I didn’t mind because that’s how deep my love was for Bobby. When he suggested I take it further, accurately pointing out that all the other girls did, it hurt initially, but then he explained how love and sex were different entities, and even though I already knew that, his careful articulation was so poignant I cried afterward and hugged him so hard my jawbone nearly cracked.

Once I’d agreed, what had seemed so easy became a scary proposition (no pun meant here). It was as if men saw me as cheap prey, hustling elsewhere, searching for a real challenge. In time I landed a few fish, then a school of them, but still we were always broke, Bobby and I. The fellow that changed everything was a dentist. Starting oﬀ, he was nice enough, sort of kinky with the outfits he’d bring for me, until one day he brought along this girl he called, “Sierra.” The going rate for what he wanted was top dollar and I did it not only once but several times. One day Sierra showed up by herself and explained how she was Mr. Dentist’s daughter. I didn’t believe her but the pictures she produced were undeniable. People don’t know the whole story because I never gave it until now. The newspapers just described my wicked sinfulness, how I plunged that hypodermic needle into his neck like I knew where to aim, which I did. Bobby found someone else naturally, but Sierra, she comes to visit me once a week. In many respects, she’s like the daughter I never had.

The Hard Dance

Before she leaves for the weekend, my daughter asks me if I’ll teach her how to slow dance. When she was young she took hip hop classes, so chubby with all the other blades. The following year, chubby gave way to fat. She wore sweats and only continued for my wife’s sake, for mine. In those outfits the spandex looked like a mudslide and I found myself looking away at the other girls who were more fit and prettier, blonder, with clean teeth. When I put my hands on her hips now, she winces. I yell, “Damn it!” She says it’s okay, it’s just a few small bruises, it’s not what I think, Russell wasn’t even around when it happened, he was in Chicago, he was, he was. I pull her close. Her pulse throbs through her wrist. He’ll be holding her like this, I think. In the ceiling I see a new crack, a gray streak of crooked lightning from where the house has settled. Then I notice others a few feet away. Those’ll need to be fixed, I tell myself. When we put the sign in the yard my daughter went berserk, tossed the toaster through the kitchen window. “I know why you’re doing this!” she screamed. “You two can go ahead and move if you want, but I’m staying.” Now we sway, our shoe tips brushing. We cut odd concentric paths round and round right there in the living room where I watched her take her first step.

She squeezes my hand. She leans in and tells me she loves him. She says he makes her happy.

Mockingbird

My father made me sleep with snakes. They were mutt snakes he’d captured in a spring-loaded Folgers coﬀee can out back of our trailer where the tawny grass grew patchy and bug-infested. That first night I ran around the bed screaming until both my throat and pupils bled. Dad banged the door. He said he’d kill me if I didn’t shut up. He said he meant it. The next night Dad removed the mattress and bed frame but left the blankets and snakes. When a beer bottle exploded against the outside of my door, a quilt twisted and shimmied as the reptiles squirmed. “This should teach you how to be a man,” he said. I was twelve. There were twelve snakes, too. Some had pus-yellow eyes, others slate or onyx or violet eyes. After a few days I learned to treat the creatures like any other sinner or orphan. I gave them love. I even coaxed them into doing favors for me. I’d lower my little boy voice and pick a marching band cadence and I’d recite old nursery rhymes and in a manner of minutes the snakes curled into my belly like flaccid phalluses and slept. In the dark, the lyrics echoed and boomeranged, taunting me with their sarcasm, as if they meant something too slippery for me to get my mind all the way around. “Hush little baby don’t say a word, Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. If that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

When Dad let me out, the first thing he did was toss me a pair of boxing gloves. They felt like beach balls on my hands. I blocked one punch but his uppercut caught me blinking. He might have had a rock or a blade in his glove because he sliced my chin open and that sucker blew a gusher. Instead of stitches, my Dad tossed a roll of toilet paper at me and said, “Plug it up.” We walked up to Hayman’s Hill. The deer there were numerous and beautiful and stupid. With a rifle tucked under his armpit, my father walked right up to a buck and oﬀered it a palm full of oatmeal sprinkled with brown sugar. He gave me the gun and said, “Shoot that sonofabitch.” When I didn’t, he took a syrupy swig from a bottle and wrinkled his nose as if to sneeze. My fingertips burned. They skirted the curl of the rifle trigger, trembling. I caressed the gun metal like it was a woman’s skin and swallowed and sure enough Dad closed his eyes, and I thought to myself that God was giving me the chance get this over with, giving me a way out. The sound exploded without me expecting it. Squirrels scrabbled up the bark-bellied trees. A few pine cones fell around us like hollow bombs. He sneezed a second time, less loud, and my fingers stilled. He looked at the unfired rifle. He looked at me, his grin a mere thin-lipped slit. “I knew it,” he said. “Once a coward, always a coward.” At home that night he held my head under the bathwater. I kept opening my mouth instead of holding my breath. He must have known that because he’d yank me out by the hair and he’d slap me and call me a Silly Bitch. “This isn’t my idea,” he said. I knew what he meant. Mother had left him for a mechanic. The week before, my dad’s brother swallowed a pistol and blew his brains out. So in Dad’s mind, the world was a jagged tangle of barbed wire and he was showing me how to clip through it. We got into the pickup and he handed me a device in the shape of a house phone. Little bb lights blinked. There was a thimble-sized plastic funnel at one end. He told me to blow in it 28

and hum and keep doing that until the beep announced PASS. When I got a FAIL and then another, he punched me in the chest. He said, “Hum while you blow, you idiot.” I tried, but my air was wrong and the device came up FAIL a third time. Now he swung his head like a drunken wolf, whiskey breath washing over the dash. He looked at me panicked. “If you don’t get it right this time, the cops’ll come and take me to jail.” He’d been there before, after killing that granny and her dog in a car wreck. I looked in his eyes. The white parts were milky with bits of grit burnt into them. I searched for myself and got lost. He gave me another practice blow-and-hum to work with. It sounded as if he were playing a kazoo. He looked girlish and vulnerable, frightened even. “Here it comes. Get ready. Blow and hum. Hum high. Blow and hum and hold it.” *** I’m older now. A lot of people assume I’m a stroke victim because of the way I talk. If I’d had insurance or a steady job I would have seen about getting my jaw fixed, but just like with those snakes, a person can get used to anything. You don’t have to tell me about forgiveness, or that I’m my father’s son. I’m still not visiting and I won’t write. My wife thinks I keep things from her. She imagines I was in the military, that I saw action because she can’t make sense of the way I wake up screaming most nights. The other evening she found me hunched in the corner next to the crib, practicing nursery songs for when the baby arrives, only she said I was like a zombie, unresponsive to her voice, not blinking, staring into the dark as if something, or someone, was there.

Song of Infinity

Fat. Fattie. Fattie Mattie. That’s what she calls herself, what her mother calls her, too. One says it out loud and the other writes it on her thigh with the metal tooth of a hair brush. For Mattie’s birthday she gets to pick the cake flavor but someone has misspelled Happy and her name, so Mattie’s mother makes a joke, says that money can’t buy happiness but it should at least be able to aﬀord Happy. That night Mattie dreams of porcupines. She wakes and remembers two porcupines having sex and thinks to herself, how clever that neither one gets hurt in the process. Her next dream is about Uncle Ernesto, his fang teeth and yellow eyes. He smells like venom and spits peanut shells in her ear. His whiskers are prickly against her skin, same as a porcupine. In the morning, as a diversion, Mattie takes up singing. Instead of speaking or communicating she sings. All the time, there is a song on her lips. Now she no longer stutters. On the bus there are 18 x’s 2 places to sit. Mattie takes the entire back row. Everyone leaves her alone. She’s already ruled out suicide but just to see what it might be like she stabs a butcher knife through the vinyl seat, the blade nicking her nylons. Nachotinged laughter rattles around the bus cab like lost hubcaps down the street. Next, someone tosses a condom water balloon, and when it bursts perfectly in Mattie’s lap, there’s a tornado of squeals and giggles. It doesn’t matter now, so Mattie presses her

palm into her pelvis, where a squiggling baby would be if she were pregnant. She uses so much pressure that pee shoots through her skirt and down her ankles and into her shoes, and even though no one’s watching or listening she takes up an aria by the great Malena Ernman. When she’s at the pool that weekend Mattie closes her eyes and studies the muﬄed blanket noises of people spending their lives. What she hears seems impossible to her, so she hums a tune, but humming is not the same as singing, just as living is not the same as filling out the moments of a life. Mattie stands up and arches her back. She hears her mother’s voice warning her about posture, about getting osteoporosis and how it’s more slimming if you don’t hunch your shoulders. People stare and jeer and jab fingers in the air at her. Mattie doesn’t care. She sings a song, the one about the silken feel of a lover’s skin and his lips tasting like candied roses. She walks to the diving board, the high dive, steps across the plank and sits on the edge, and when the ones on the ladder behind her start to scream for her to jump, Mattie removes the knife from her suit bottoms and holds it like a torch, same as Lady Liberty. They scream for her, “Don’t do it!” Some scream that she should. Some beg, “Please, please, do it!” No one’s ever wanted anything from her that Mattie can remember and so she obliges, jams the blade all the way through her thigh, and it would still be stuck to the diving board but the tip breaks oﬀ as Mattie’s weight crumbles like a mountain, heaving forward. She somersaults. She smiles. The pain is electric and overwhelming. Mattie hadn’t thought it would hurt so much, or even, that such a thing was possible. The gusting air is a chorus of screams gift-wrapped as a song. The last thing she sees is the little girl with the pink snow cone standing under a shade umbrella. Their eyes meet. The girl holds the cone skyward, a proud statue saluting, and opens her mouth to sing.  31

The Launcher

That summer we were bored or stoned when we could afford to be. It was Barry’s brilliant notion to build the thing but I didn’t have any ideas of my own so I went with his, which was the start of our trouble. It looked like a homemade bazooka, made of plastic and duct tape, because that’s what it was, more or less. “Do these things have a name?” “Hell if I know. What’s it matter?” So we called it The Launcher and started off with spuds. Barry’s mom had a twenty pound bag of them. They looked like aborted infants, only solid and heavy. They sailed into the sky, hung there for an astounding thirty seconds before landing in a violent splatter. It felt like discounted murder without any of the consequences. When we ran out of potatoes we used every other vegetable we could find—tomatoes and squash, zucchini, cabbage. We moved onto solids out of necessity. First it was soda cans, then soda bottles. The shattered glass sizzled, hissing at us like pissed off snakes. Looking back I suppose those potatoes were something of a gateway drug because we got over them real quick, yet their minor thrill left us wanting more, a different fix that might kickstart some sedentary neuron in our brains. We went to the pet store and bought two litters of mice. I can still recall their furious scratching in the bag behind my car seat.

Their breathing was husky. I found it fascinating that they never squeaked because in every mouse story I’d ever read there always seemed to be a lot of squeaking or squealing. Barry’s house was a dilapidated cabin that his grandfather had built a hundred years ago. It leaned eastward, toward the rising sun, and from a certain angle you might have thought it had lost balance and was about to fall into the water. Chain Lake was no more than two blocks long and maybe one wide. I never thought we’d hit the guy’s house. If I’d believed we could, if Barry had, we would have tried first thing. As it happened, the third mouse landed on the old geezer’s roof. It surprised me how dull and empty the resonance of death could be—nothing but a thud and short skid sound. It depressed and disappointed me. I thought of my parents and wondered if they had gasped or screamed before that car hit them. We shot two mice at a time. I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps I thought of my cartoon watching days and that they’d clasp their furry paws like a varmint couple desperate to enter the afterlife conjoined. But they just flew apart and landed apart, two separate thud-and-skid noises. Uncle Rory says things happen. It can be fate or it can be God’s busy. When I broke his windshield with a bat he didn’t seem such a believer in fate. Or the time I lit the drapes on fire and almost burned the house down. His notion of fate was dropping me off at juvie and letting some other sucker adopt me. When they arrest you they put your wrists in handcuffs. Feels like glass cutting into your skin. Feels like chains and you feel like a slave or the very criminal you were meant to be. Ha, so maybe that is fate. Across the lake, the old man came out of the house around the time we were nearly finished. Barry took off, dust vapors rising up where he had been. I watched the guy sight me with his rifle, heard him yell, “One more time. Go ahead. I ain’t afraid to shoot.”

It felt like someone had given me a belated birthday present. I loaded the launcher, pulled the makeshift trigger, puďŹ&#x20AC;ed out my chest and waited.

Like This

Dad brings the women home for me to audition with my ears because I keep my eyes averted most of the time or else I hide in my room upstairs, a mere wall away from where he and Mom used to sleep, so quiet when they made love, not at all like the new ones with their S and M manners, their palm-stomping theatrics. They don’t tell me they want to take the place of my dead mother. Instead, each in their own way explains how they just want to be my friend. They’ll say anything. They say, “Flatchested is the style right now.” They say, “Don’t worry about it, I flunked seventh grade, too.” They say, “Well, you’re pretty to me.” I placed Rudolph Valentino in one’s handbag. Rudy was a garden snake, the color of an icicle, shimmery like snot. I put canola oil on the toilet seat so when this skinny one used it she slipped inside the oval and got stuck with her private parts smothered in a pool of her own poo. One was my teacher, so I just stopped going. On a lunch break I paid a boy to break into her house and write STOP DATING DOUGLAS NELSON OR ELSE!!! in catsup across her bed sheets. “Go ahead,” Dad said. “Keep this up and we’ll both live alone the rest of our lives.” The shrink told me her mother killed herself, too, as if that’s supposed to make us girls kindred spirits. She says it was the same method, only she wasn’t the one to find the body like I did.

But my shrink doesn’t let me oﬀ the hook. Without really saying these precise words, she tells me there are worse things. What’s worse is wishing I had better memories. It’s hard to find ones I want to revisit, ones that mean something. I think you can love a memory if it’s true enough, precious, if there’s light in it. I’ve held infants before and felt that sort of sharp surprise, that funny bone tingle. I have scraps: “Like this,” Mother would say when she taught me how to shave my legs for the first time. My attempt looked like a migraine, a dozen jagged spots of red. “You’ll find the right pressure eventually.” She combed my hair standing in back, over my shoulder, staring into the vanity mirror, saying the alphabet backward, counting backward from one thousand. “Don’t you think time is God’s cruelest trick?” she asked. She ate orange peels but not the fruit. She liked silent movies best, the kind with the fluttery pictures and featuring exotic sheiks. *** The boy who likes me now says I’m fascinating. But he’s no diﬀerent than Dad’s girlfriends. This boy, I catch him kissing me with his eyes open. He says it’s because I’ve made him a voyeur. One night Mr. Hamid, who sells me cigarettes illegally at the AM/PM, asks me, “Why you always moping?” When I tell him about Mom, he doesn’t flinch or miss a beat. “Grow up,” he says. “Go on, get out of here now!” The thing is I don’t want to grow up. I go out to the parking lot back by the dumpster that smells so bad I have to breathe through my mouth. I know a girl my age who was raped here but I sit down anyway. The night is black black black. I take a deep breath and count. I start at one thousand.

Castaways

Our neighbor’s basement was filled with them, dozens and dozens of gravestones, tall as toddlers, stacked like a macabre museum for the dead. My brother dated the girl’s father, and on a lost dare, I had to take the creaking wooden steps down there by myself. I was twelve at the time. I’d just started to sprout a few pubic hairs and I felt them bristle inside my pants with each stair I took. The girl’s father had died several weeks before, but her mother hadn’t started sorting through his possessions, let alone dealing with the shop. The girl explained that these were the castaways, the mistakes —names spelled incorrectly, dates written down wrong. A few of the tombstones had lightning-shaped cracks cutting across them. They were all grey, some with slick, shiny fronts, others gruﬀ and unvarnished. A chisel and hammer lay askew on the workbench as if dropped there, and, of course, I wondered if the man had had his heart attack here. Just as I braved to touch one of the tombstones, the room went black. I felt the musty air swirl around me. Then something brushed my shoulder. I thought I would collapse. I told myself not to panic, but I reached out in the darkness anyway. I felt around on the bench. Found the hammer. Swung hard. When the lights flicked on, the girl screamed. But it was all too late. My brother’s life was gone, and mine was changed forever.

Skin

She wanted to be skin, to be empty, wise, satisfied and sanitized, purged. However, she took it too far and became bones instead. Looking completely at home, she walked through graveyards where jealous ghosts coaxed her into reading them nighttime stories, news clippings with current events. Around the headstones the needy, greedy crowds elbowed each other for position, stabbing the air with their invisible limbs, one demanding a certain voice inflection, another a military cadence. It became so pathetic and demoralizing that the girl excused herself to pee and ditched the short-sheeted specters with their reckless lust for life. Before dawn, she heard a garbage truck shudder and rumble. She saw it belch greasy black wigs of exhaust into the purplebruised sky. The driver of the truck was a beady-eyed raccoon with foam in his beard and the other worker was a mangled possum, his head hanging loose by a jugular cord. They smelled of whiskey and grilled cheese sandwiches, barrooms and insecticide. She’d been taught not to take candy from strangers and not to hitchhike but here she was all the way across town and the pair of rodent men seemed dull enough. One called her “Soup Bones.” The other called her, “Skinny Minnie.” They tried to rape her anyway. Now that she was a skeleton wrapped in a baggy of epidermis, the girl struggled to resist, but she discovered a can

opener among the empty beers on the truckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s floorboard, and she made mincemeat, made hay, made a merry mess of her attackers. The entire enterprise took two minutes. After her pulse returned, she collected the bloody remains in a giant garbage bag. She built a fire right there on the side of the road. She cooked the coon first, then the possum. They tasted pungently exotic, like homemade deliverance. She ate until she was full, her belly button taut as in yester years. Later she laid back and watched the sun come up, hand on stomach as if she was pregnant. She burped. She cleaned her teeth with a toothpick and clicked her tongue, thinking: thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a diďŹ&#x20AC;erence between being skin and being alive, and now I know.

Terminal

One of my brothers went to Viet Nam, the other to prison. My brother mailed sample rations across the country, or at least that’s what we were told. We had them for dinner one night, each of us kids taking a portion. It was pasty and dry, like mayonnaise-coated cardboard. I did my best not to gag. “See, how’d you like to live on this?” Mother asked. Because I’d seen it on the news, I knew soldiers died but I did not believe my brother could be killed. When I pictured him over there I saw him lying on the ground, a sandbag for a pillow, helmet tipped for shade, smoking a cigarette and ordering privates and sergeants around. When I saw an actual photograph of him, he was holding a gigantic bullet in both hands, the same way you’d hold a King salmon. Behind him was a pyramid of identical shells, tall as a person. In ink at the bottom of the photo it said: D.M.Z. Nam, 1970. When he returned he was sullen and odd. My father told me not to ask any questions. “It’s not easy being a man,” he said, and in bed that night and most nights that have followed, I wondered about such a statement. We met my other brother at the bus station upon his release from prison. While we were waiting, I got the word terminal stuck in my head because of the greyhound logo on the outside of the building. I’d known him when I was a baby, but now I was nine, so it took my sister’s cackling to point him out.

His hands were huge, thick and leathery. He tousled my hair and squeezed the back of my neck too hard. When I said, “Ouch,” he slapped me on the head and called me, “Pussy” and my dad chuckled. *** We were pouring cement for the foundation of a new garage. Ours had burned down. Arson, the inspectors said. My brothers and I were father’s helpers. My brothers actually knew what they were doing. Me, I sat in the dirt, drawing shapes with a broken tree limb. When my father asked for a tool or for a board to be held while he sawed, I assisted. For just an instant, I found myself alone with him. My stomach juices sluiced, reminding me—as if I needed proof--that I wasn’t brave. Still Dad and I were by ourselves, so I spat the words out the way you would if you’d just bitten into something spoiled or still alive. He stopped what he was doing and gawked. The sun was out, a boiling hoop. Grime rimmed my father’s eye sockets. “Stop your fucking dreaming,” he told me. That was thirty years ago. My brothers live in other places now. Sometimes I call. My father lives with a new wife. Mine tells me to forget. She says there’s still time to be a writer if I want.

My Father’s Workshop

My brother found the snake in a field behind our house. It was a blue-tailed racer, about the length of a boot lace and not much thicker. I didn’t dare tell him how much snakes frightened me. We named it Abraham, then just Abe. To my brother the moniker had biblical overtones, for me it meant freedom. We kept Abe in a Folgers Coﬀee can. We hammered nails into the plastic lid for air holes. We filled the base with fistfuls of plucked grass, and seeing that lustrous green color rimmed in shiny silver reminded me of Easter baskets, and then of Easter this year when Dad was drunk by four. He shot an arrow through the kitchen window; chunks of glass exploding once the arrow broke through it and then again as the glass shattered along with most of those unwashed dishes in the sink. He turned to us, looped and goofy, with licorice-black eyes and an open, darkpitted mouth. He snarled and laughed and beat his chest twice, expecting returned laughter from his boys since it had all been for our benefit. A week later mom left. That was five months ago. How Abe escaped remains an unsolved mystery. He ended up curled over one of the rusty-colored water pipes that ran across the ceiling in Dad’s workshop where his tooling and tanning supplies were, where he spent all his free time making leather

goods—coin purses and wallets, and western-styled belts with cactus, spurs, rifle and cowboy hat imprints. He pinched an ear in each hand and dragged us downstairs to the workshop to show us where the snake had hung, how it had nearly given him a heart-attack. He pulled us upstairs to his bedroom closet which was empty with mother gone except for a few stray shirts. He drew back a hidden panel, revealing a nook filled with dozens and dozens of leather belts, stiﬀ and twisted like dead snakes themselves. “Pick,” he told us. He took us outside into the backyard beneath the clothesline. Tammy Gueverre lived next door. My brother and I were both in love with her, so we took the beating like men, grunting and moaning, but mostly silent, like men, even though our pants and underwear were pulled down, even like that. When Mother showed up in the middle of the night, same as any ordinary thief, she held a finger to her lips and mouthed, “Come with me.” Her face glowed pale yellow from flashlight glare. My brother trundled down from the upper bunk and smacked me on the chest, saying, “Come on, Nimrod.” Now it’s just me and him. Call me stupid, a coward or even brave if you want to. The truth is I’m his son.

See Through

I loved the boy across the street whose blinds were always pulled, the boy with the rare aﬄiction who could not come out during the day because the sun would set his skin on fire. Sight unseen, I made him into a perfect mate who would protect me from the scorn of school bullies, who would make me blush and giggle, question and reconsider. I deconstructed the mystery that enamored others and it was in fact because I did not know him, had never even glimpsed him once, that the boy became who I molded him to be: an untarnished tin, an edgeless embrace, the perfect pudding kiss. From a distance of scorched lawns and chalk-marked pavement I loved him savage and strong, like a lioness. I wrote him my young girl sentiments in sonnets. I penned frail words dressed up as tuxedoed escorts, lifeguard observant, sometimes sharing secrets that left me as naked as an orchid. One brave day I selected a length of rhubarb tulle and tied a bow across those pages and opened the door to deliver them to the boy’s mailbox. The sun was a festering yawn, a white egg blister that I believed capable of making me hallucinate. “Mother?” I called. “Why is there a moving van at the neighbors?” She pulled me inside. “But why?” I asked.

“Poor thing,” she said. “That poor family has been through so much.” *** Years later I thought I had dreamed it all--the boy with the one-in-a-billion disease, his sudden disappearance from my life, the ropy strength of love I’d felt. But I found a marker. And on the way back from the trip that was meant to save us, you asked, “What’re we stopping for?” I mumbled my answer, and in keeping with our inevitability, you didn’t try to decipher. You thought it was just the grave of some Midwestern relative of mine. “Want to come with?” I asked, but you said to go ahead and so I did, taking long slow stiﬀ strides. The sky showed mercy and the clouds wore hoods that day, in homage to the incompatible boy who battled the sun. When I knelt down, however, my eyes stung and I saw the egg shell flecks of broken oﬀ-sunlight. Then I saw through the granite and the etchings and the weed grass and worms, the cool stones slumbering in musty darkness beneath the earth, and I saw not my soul mate but a version of my very own soul, buried and entrapped. Back inside the car, you were listening to baseball. You must have seen, but if you had you didn’t say. We drove through clouds and sun. We drove so far.

The Repairman

Both fathers—step and biological—were mechanics, could tear apart an engine and put it back together blindfolded. Both smelled like axle grease and soap that was sharp but not strong enough to disintegrate the oil stains beneath their cuticles, their fingertips which would rub my cheek and pinch my neck when they’d say, “You’re gonna be someone someday, I know it.” And here I am, a surgeon. Inside opened-up chests, I put down my hands and I hold my weapons. I can fix everyone else’s heart, it seems, but my own.

Soup

It’s not the only thing she possesses, this crust of bread in her hand, but it feels as if it is. The girl holds it like an apple or a snow globe needing to be shaken, like a magic cue ball filled with inky black liquid ready to grant blunt answers to your questions. She scrunches the bread and watches crumbs sprinkle her shoes with a dozen tawny-colored freckles. Her mother asks what’s wrong with her, is she nuts? Her mother thinks she is, and her mother might be right. The girl is dizzy and confused most of the time. She has no name or she takes the name they give her if they want her to have one. She has been Amy, Mandy, Little Sue, Big Red, Tokyo Rose, Momma, Mrs. Schweitzer, Beth. The girl has exactly two mix-and-match outfits, but she has clean underwear: white with red lace and diﬀerent sized lady bugs. She hates that pair because the insects sometimes come to life and crawl around her private parts and when she scratches she gets screamed at and made fun of or called crazy. Yes, now that she thinks of it, the girl is certain that she is insane. The girl is thin, bony. She can count her ribs without stretching or sucking in her belly because she has no belly. “All this talk of food is overrated,” her mother says. “Same as television. Same as Obama.” The girl’s favorite part about this is watching the cars go by, imagining what the automobiles smell like inside, what the people are discussing and thinking, the song on the radio, or

maybe it’s a smart person talking about wars overseas. The inside of a car is like being inside a hut, a tent. You can tell secrets there, or ghost stories. You can snore if you want to because it’ll only be the bears that hear. Usually there are three men a day. On occasion there are three at once. One time there was a line stretching around the alley and the girl did what she had to do but while she did it she looked at the column of paying customers, their faces eaten away by shame, their steaming eyes and sweaty mouths the only signal they were alive. The scene reminded her of a photograph she’d seen from olden days when it was in fashion to dress formal and wear hats, and in the picture she recalls that most of these men were looking for employment but some were merely seeking soup, sustenance, something warm to fill their bellies. She is slender and skinny. She wonders: If I can get thin enough, can I be soup? There is no business to be had on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so they go to see her mother’s boyfriend, James who works at the store called Video & Pawn. She has to wait outside. She doesn’t mind. It stinks of fresh vomit and baby diapers outside but it smells worse in Video & Pawn. The girl looks at the sky. It’s as gray as a donkey, yet one disintegrating cloud limps along. She fixes it in her mind, adds a few appendages, and then the cloud becomes a kangaroo and it bounces away from here, on its way back to Australia or heaven. Inside the store a television show plays. The actress is her age only she’s beautiful, so gorgeous and clean, with berry-colored lipstick and shimmering skin. But the actress wags her finger the same way the girl’s mother does. The actress’s mouth moves so quickly the girl thinks it must be a trick or fast motion. The actress has had it. She’s fed up. Her boyfriend isn’t good enough for her. She deserves better. The girl hears all this or imagines she does. The actress slaps the boy and shoves him down on the couch and runs out the door, slamming it so hard the screen shakes. The boy actor starts to cry. 48

The girl has never seen a male person cry. She leans forward, and even though the glass is smudged and dusted with dirt and grime, she closes her eyes and presses her lips to the glass. She holds steady and strong. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been kissed before, but sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s never kissed.

The Exchange Student

Her name means miracle in Spanish. I mean, B.F.D., right? On the way to the airport my dad sings an old Tommy James and The Shondells song, hitting the falsetto so perfect I feel as if I’m going to vomit. “Children behave. That’s what they say when we’re together. And watch how you play-aye.” I used to love that song, love hearing him sing it with his cover band, but that was before mother died. Since then he and I have been through some real muddy shit you wouldn’t even believe. In fact, it’s enough to make you wonder what type of screening these agencies use. *** Of course she’s exotic. It’ll need a stitch where I’ve stabbed my palm with a fingernail. Bitch, bitch, bitch. My thighs twitch and a fissure spasms squirting pee down my nylons. “I forgot something in the car!” I yell so loud that a grandmother stops getting a hug and stops crying to be able to watch me sprint past Gate 13, back the way I came. She won’t sit in passenger and it becomes a big deal and she comes out looking like the gracious one when she gets into the back. “Stop screwing with the rearview,” Dad says. I want to jab my thumb into a lung and hear his rib cage gasp.

This Mireya is from Spain and she’s fucking gorgeous in a dark-skinned, dark-haired moody sort of way. It sucks royally. Right away I hate her more than anyone I know, which is saying a lot, let me tell you. Mireya should pluck her eyebrows. I suggest that. I say, “Your eyebrows look like a fucking arboretum.” We’re at home by this point. My father’s left us in the living room while he makes dinner a few yards away, humming like a corny jackass. Mireya smiles at me, her eyes narrowing and glittering a purple that would make Elizabeth Taylor jealous. “Are you wearing tinted contacts?” I ask. “Don’t lie. I bet you are.” *** “I can’t believe you’re letting her sleep IN THERE!” I halfscream, because it’s late and Dad’s told me to keep my voice down at least forty-seven times already. “It’s not a mausoleum.” He thinks I don’t know that word, but I do. I know a lot of words. “Fuck you!” “Hey, that’s not cool!” He grabs my wrist and I make a move as if I’m going to kick him in the nuts and when he flinches he releases his grip and that’s the end of that, only it’s not, because I spend the rest of the evening with my face pressed to the wall, same as I used to do when mother was sick, listening for the sound of breathing, hoping for snores, anything but wheezing. *** “You should go swimming,” he tells me the next afternoon. “ “Yeah, well you should go kiss—“ “Watch it young lady. I’m still your father.” “Ain’t that a shame?”

But I take his advice because it’s too perfect to do anything else, the weather a preposterous eighty-five degrees. Besides, she’s in the backyard by the pool, sunbathing. “You can’t fucking lay around naked. America is not a third world country,” I say, heavily leaning into the first consonant of the last word of that sentence. When she leans up to shield her eyes, Mireya’s breasts roll across her chest like clumps of pizza dough before any of the real work has started. Her skin glistens topaz. The worst thing though is her nipples, the size of them, twice my own, hers as large as cocktail parachutes. I take the lounge chair next to her. “Stop fucking grinning. What are you always so fucking happy about?” She lets me simmer some. The she flutters her hand. “You like to, how you say, swear?” “You never plucked your eyebrows.” “Whoa!” My cousin, Travis, is easy to hate. I could give you five million essential reasons, but just take my word for it, okay? When he shows up with his Emo Goya friend in trunks I feel like screaming. “You’re the new girl,” Travis says, his voice as polite and tucked in as a limo driver. He even sticks out his hand! “You’ve gotta be kidding me?” “Hey, crab face. See you got a new zit on your forehead. This one might just grow up to become a mango someday.” “Go stroke yourself.” “You wish.” Bottleneck—I don’t know his real name. We only call him Bottleneck because he has one that’s absurdly long—reaches out his hand and Mireya takes it although even she appears a bit squeamish. “Nice to meet you, too,” Travis says, his eyes not even bothering to look elsewhere. “Mucho gusto!” Bottleneck says.

Mireya goes all epileptic then, rattling off more Spanish than I’ve heard my entire life, Taco Time commercials included. “Sorry,” Bottleneck says, palms up. “I’m just taking Spanish now. First year. All I know is ‘Mucho gusto’ and some numbers.” “If I’d a known, I’d a worn a Speedo,” Travis says regarding Mireya’s discarded biking top and her shining, buttered-up bosoms. I’m not the best at eye-rolling. Usually it makes me dizzy and because of that I can’t understand why more women don’t just go with adoption. “You’re disgusting,” I say, feeling disgusted myself for not being able to extrapolate anything more cutting. The truth is Travis intimidates me and he’s aware of it. “You know what,” I say, “if this is how you’re going to behave, I’m leaving.” “Mother Teresa.” “Cocksucker.” “Fine then.” “Fine.” “Fine.” The plastic strips stick to the back of my thigh, the entire chair clinging when I stand and step. Before it has the chance to peel free, the chaise swings stiffly, crane-like, and cracks Mireya on the nose. I’ve never seen sprouting blood before. It hits me in both eyes. *** “Listen, El, if you can’t learn to lighten up and live with Mireya, this is going to be a long summer for everyone involved.” “I already told you, it was an accident.” “That’s not what I mean and you know it.” I did. “At your age you should have lots of friends.” “I’ve got enough.” I hate that expression of his when he’s trying to swallow but comes off looking panicked instead, like he’s pooed when he 53

meant to fart. “I’m not going to lay a guilt trip on you. That’s not what I’m intending at all, so hear this how I mean it: I brought Mireya here for you.” Some people have a gag reflex, but I have a slap reflex, and right then it takes extraordinary, superhuman, Jesus of Nazareth type willpower not to knock my dad to east Texas. “You aren’t going to say anything, not going to respond?” “Why bother?” I say, swinging my head idiotically, “you’re the one calling the shots, making all these grand plans.” “It’s not healthy,” he says leaning forward, his hand on my knee. “Don’t give me that shit, you’re not a damn doctor, I don’t care what they say.” “El?” “A PhD is just a piece of paper. Paper burns!” “What’s that supposed to mean?” But I am running up the stairs by the time I hear the question. Two hours later there’s a knock at the door and I tell him to come in, only it’s HER. She saunters in and sits on the edge of the bed and has the audacity to put her palm on my back, so I consider strangling her right then and there because her hand started to move and her fingers drew swirl patterns on either side of my spinal column the same way Mother did. “It’s okay,” she says, her voice hushed yet purposeful. My face is buried in the mattress. I can barely breathe. Without adjusting, I ask, “What?” because I need to hear it again. “It’s okay,” she says. And I believe her.

My Life in Black and White

Momma says she likes her coﬀee the same way she likes her men: black, strong and steamy. She says this with a cup of bourbon in her hand, when it’s just the two of us and the morning’s bleak and blue-streaked from all this Seattle rain. Momma says things like that to be funny, because she doesn’t know how to make an eight year old laugh. Before she leaves, Momma smokes two more cigarettes and does her lipstick and dumps her cup in the sink with the rest of the dishes. She grabs her purse and says, “I gotta work late tonight,” even though I already know this. Next she says, “Find something to do.” She means go outside and play. I tell her I’m fine and she says, “Ta hell,” and hikes up her boobs and bra so the lacy pink rises over her blouse. Her skirt pulls around her thighs, her shoes are towers, and as she steps down the hall her heels clatter like a goat. I listen and wait. Then I step up on the kitchen counter, open a cupboard, go through the shoebox of old letters and yellowed bill statements until I find it. After I do, I step oﬀ carefully because there’s egg yolk on one side of the Formica and a spilled ash tray on the other. I kneel down on the gold shag rug, a little spur of something blooming inside of me, and open the envelope. Here’s a picture of Douglas. That thing he’s holding is actually a strip of hose. He puts it against this curvy carafe and lights the thing on fire and sucks the flame through the hose until it makes

smoke and then Momma will often sidle off the loveseat and lightly punch his puffed-out cheeks and—Whoosh! —I’ll get smoldered and smothered and Momma will cackle and say, “But damn, don’t he look just like Puff the Magic Dragon when he do that?” This one’s Daddy. The photograph has rippled edges and the face of the paper stock is cracked. On the back it says Lou 12/25/196? This was before he and Mother met up, probably before either Kennedy brother got shot. I know it’s just a bus driver uniform that Daddy’s wearing but I used to pretend different, that he was an army officer. I pictured him like that drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” barking orders, a person with power, in charge of others. One thing I’ve learned is that a little bit of anger isn’t so bad. It’s better than what I see, which is a lot of nothing going on, all Momma’s friends stoned to the wind, laying around like a pile of jacked-up mummies, stiff as store window mannequins. Great Grandma Faith came from the North Country where it was always frozen. You can see that much here, in the way she’s pinching her lips all walnuty crinkled, her eyes black as jet. Some say I got my imagination from Grandma Faith and since she died a century or so ago, I’ll have to take their word for it. If you ask me, she looks mighty mean. This is my dog Doogan. Some boys in our old neighborhood took up with the rock—that’s what Momma calls crack—and they made a firecracker necklace to tie around Doogan’s head. He didn’t die from that but Doogan did go deaf and then that’s why he didn’t hear the cab that ran over him. I miss him fierce but the place we’re in now don’t allow pets, so Momma says it’s just as well. I don’t get all these pictures of the same convertible and no people in it. Must have been something special about it. What I notice is how clean the streets around it are, how the stoops are clear of sleeping bodies and how, in one, a girl about my age is drawing a chalk flower. Sometimes I’ll pretend she’s my best

friend and I’ll give her beautiful names like Bethany or Alexandra. Here’s me, the only film picture in existence as far as I know. What’s strange is I’ve never seen myself look like this before-pretty. Not in mirrors or reflected glass. Hey, but I realize a camera can be a darn good liar most of the time without even meaning to. I’m an ugly runt. I know what I am. Still, something about the graininess of the photo makes me appear mysterious, or better yet, lucky. Whoever took this Polaroid had the shakes because I’m a blur more than a living person. The last one in the envelope is Little Louis. Double L, Momma always says when she refers to my brother. He could have been the first President from the projects. He would have been a famous poet or a singer or surgeon, Momma was sure of it. As a sort of insurance policy, she read his palm when he took sick so young. My Momma can be cruel but she’s a smart woman. I ask her about Little Lou all the time. Sometimes she’ll tell me stories, some repeats, once in a grand while a fresh one. But even a future president doesn’t accumulate a lot of stories before the age of five so mostly she’ll say for me to keep my mind on my own self. Tomorrow will begin year nine of my life. The way I look at it, anything can happen. It’s going to be Christmas in a week. This time, same as the others, I asked for a camera. I know how crazy that is and if I didn’t Momma is always there to remind me. Her boyfriend, Lester, got me a plastic one that clicks when you punch the taking button. He thought buying me that toy would get him special access into my underwear, but Lester’s a dumb ass. If he tries anything, I’ll slice him frontwards and backwards. Right now I spend most of my afternoons here, climbed up over the back of the couch that’s butted up to the window. We live in 9D on the sixth floor of this building. There’s a view of things. Momma says I’m a strange kid cause where’s all my friends? The deal is I don’t need any, don’t want any. There’s stuﬀ that goes on around here I’d rather not have anybody else know.

Besides, I got plenty to do. I got this window and that whole world outside it. Some parts are repulsive, sure. There’s dumpsters and people digging through them. Real catfights where animals rip each other’s eyes out of the socket. I seen a man beat up a girl. I seen a lot of things. But no one and nothing’s perfect. God filled the world with all kinds. That’s what makes being a photographer so interesting. Even what’s old can be new. What’s ugly can be beautiful from a certain angle. What’s dark, what’s absolutely, one hundred percent, hopelessly black can bear light.

Veteran

His brother took him to a pool hall, bought him tequila and beer chasers, farted out loud and commented over the texture and vibrato of each. His brother laughed at anything, his own jokes, the old geezer with a chin stuck inside his mug, the skipping juke box—“You give love a bad naye-naye-naye-name.” This place had the classic arcade games—Pac Man and Space Invaders. Around two am Stucky threw them the keys and said to close up, as if it was something he’d done a lot of times before. He studied the homemade tattoos on his brother’s forearms. Everything was short, choppy and to the point, no word or ink mark wasting time on being clever: NAM R.I.P. JAYDED OLD GLORY HOLE The little gray bug men marched across the screen in neat rows. His brother shot them down with his finger beating the sweaty red button. He killed as many as he could. He seemed happy.

Quicksand

Lately is cheap, lately is not worth it. She decides that she loathes the word lately, yet the truth is she gives it away on discount now. She’s willing to bargain and barter, consider whatever’s oﬀered. She remembers a bible verse, a proverb. “Pride cometh before the fall.” She’s no longer a working girl but more a donor, not desperate just derelict. She thinks she will sell everything and start anew. Yes. This decision makes her feel triumphant in a muted, minimal way. Lately her losing streak has had razor teeth and brass knuckles and loud repeating voices. This is not a world a country a sin city for losers. It’s humiliating to read the happy people ads beckoning more and more winners its way. She packages her life. She stuﬀs it into a viral suitcase—every single thing including her dog, hamster, bank account, mortgage, bikes, blender, black book and relatives. YOU CAN HAVE MY LIFE the title line says. When she was young, she spent most nights in parking lots. Strained lamplight would wash down from telephone poles, streaking the windshield and fluttering the skins of rain-filled potholes so that they took on the appearance of faces, monster faces—Uncle Troy and Grandpa, her father who was at that moment getting fixed and high as Jupiter. In one particular lot she always saw the same pickup lurking near a bank, buried to its axles in weed grass. The truck had large rusted sections that looked like gigantic scabs, but its paint coat was a soothing baby

blanket blue. Propped up on the inside dash was a cardboard sign with a handwritten note saying: $850 O.B.O. When her dad stumbled into the car he smelled like shoe polish and lighter fluid, like a fire about to combust. His face was cherry. His eyes were sloppy grapes. She asked what O.B.O. meant and he shook his head as if he’d just swallowed a mouthful of wasps and said, “Why you asking stupid things like that? Whyn’t you just ask me what in all hell the universe is supposed to mean?” He didn’t hit her that time. He passed out. She listened to him snoring and after awhile she figured it out for herself. Or Best Offer. Her life sells for $1,019.67. The EBay men tell her the sale is irrevocable. “But it was worth more,” she says to the computer screen. She’s kept fifty dollars for herself. She calls a cab and directs the driver to the edge of town. “Pull over.” “But there’s nothing here,” the driver says. “It’s just an abandoned gravel pit.” She pays and gets out. “This ain’t no place for a living female.” His word choice surprises her. She smiles. “I know.” she says. She jumps in the rain puddles. She kicks muddy slush in the air. The moon is fat and judgmental, nestled between two flimsy clouds. Her feet sink an inch or two then settle. She wishes it were quicksand. Something scurries across the bridge of her submerged foot. The trees rustle off to the side. The moon winks. The rainwater slap-gurgles. “Go on,” she says, “make me an offer.”

Room Service

That summer I missed the keggars, moonlight bowling and skinny dipping to work nights as a busboy. My friends tagged me a hermit. Some said it gently because of what had happened, but others mocked me with raw, blistered teenage angst. Still, none of their words or anyone’s brought me back to them. Amir, the waiter, was a preposterously handsome Muslim with sheen-wicked hair, steel wool stubble and strange wolf-white eyes that made women gawk open-mouthed. Amir gave me ten percent of his tips, or claimed he did. The real money came from room service. I’d get three to four calls a night, usually from solo businessmen already drunk but willing to overpay for a cheap bottle of Cabernet or a half dozen Tanqueray and Tonics. One night this guy called for a magnum of Dom Perignon and strawberries. “A mountain of berries, not just a couple piddly things. And bring a whole can of whip cream, too.” Because we made ours fresh, I had to jump across the street to the convenience store by Circus Circus to pick up a can. Inside room 1805 they were going at it. The doors were not so thick as to block out those kinds of sounds. I considered my options--waiting, coming back another time, leaving the cart— and decided to knock. “Room Service!” It took some time for him to get to the door. He looked halfhuman half-bear, his striped dress shirt open where his hairy, laundry bag belly greeted me.

As I wheeled the cart inside I saw her squirm larva-like beneath the blue felt blanket. Bear Man ripped a strawberry in two with a meaty butchering sound and smacked his lips and said, “Juicy. Ah, good, you brought the whip. Open up the champagne and we’re set.” I wheedled the gold tin foil oﬀ and untwined the metal netting and pulled on the cork and twisted and pried my thumbnail between it and the bottle glass, but it would not budge. I bent over for a butter knife and, as I did, the cork exploded. It hit me in the right eye and I wheeled around, blinded, and fell onto the bed as the woman shrieked. In a second The Bear pulled me up by the shirt collar, saying, “What the hell?” I couldn’t see for several minutes. I wondered if I’d be blind, what it’d be like to have a glass eye, wear a monocle. Two hours later the phone by the dishwasher rang and I picked it up and said, “Room Service.” “Hey,” a woman said. “Yeah?” “It’s me. Room 1805. I was hiding under the covers.” “Okay.” “I knew your brother.” “Kenny?” “We went to prom together.” “Kim? No, Cathy? Cathy…” “Bigelow. But it’s not Bigelow anymore.” Through the phone receiver I heard sheets whisper as she moved against them, and a ripple of electricity stung my earlobes. “Come see me,” she said. “What? I’m working.” “Fine. Then bring me up some toast and jam.” She opened the door wearing a blanket toga esque, her sandy hair big, beautifully lopsided and mussed, way too sexy. “Where is he?” I asked of The Bear. “Playing Craps. Running a marathon. Who knows?” 63

I pushed the cart beside the table and lifted a silver heating dome and, out of habit, started to unwrap the napkin containing the silverware. “What’re you doing?” she asked. I didn’t know, I really didn’t, so I slumped. Cathy patted the end of the mattress until I sat down beside her. My eye throbbed and a billion locusts flapped their wings inside my eardrums. I expected Cathy to comment on my injury, but instead she said, “I’m sorry about your mom.” “That was a while ago.” “Sure. Sure it was.” But I still missed her, Mother. Every message left on my cell phone I expected to be from her. I saw Mother’s face in the bedroom window each night before nodding oﬀ. She still controlled the majority of my dreams, real and not. “Kenny and I almost got married.” “I know. What happened?” “Your Mom.” “What?” Cathy inhaled deep, still holding the blanket seam over her bosom. “He never cried, never brought up the subject unless it was an ‘I have to.’ ‘I have to visit Mom again.’ ‘I can’t make the movie because I have to take Mom in for tests.’” I choked down a web of sticky, dried-up mouth goo. “It went on for a long time,” I said. “Years. Something like that, it’s hard to deal with. You might as well be the one with the cancer.” “Exactly. That’s what I was expecting from Kenny.” As Cathy stared ahead, I sneaked a look at her cheek and the swirl of blonde hairs rounding her jaw, downy puppy fur. “So, this guy now—“ “Skeeter.” “—Skeeter. So, he’s the one?” She tottered her head and shrugged. “Nah, I don’t think so.” “That must suck, being with the wrong one.” “It does.” 64

I held my breath. Ants skittered inside my clothing, prickling my skin. I turned, anticipating Cathy’s mouth, her kiss, and, sure enough, she moved as I’d thought, her rhythm a twin to mine. The blanket drooped to her ribs as her arms came up like pulleys to enwrap me. I did not exhale. If not on my mouth, I at least expected her lips on my neck, her tongue in my ear, drowning all those noisy grasshoppers. My heartbeat arced, but after resting awhile against Cathy’s chest, it flattened and slowed. I was nearly asleep when she said, “It’s kind of silly.” “What?” “To keep looking for Mr. Right. For all I know, you could be the one, but it’s not like I can do anything about it now, you know what I mean?” I did. I didn’t. I fingered her hair and brought it to my nose. “Don’t do that,” she whispered. “Why?” “Okay, look,” she said. “How much money do you have?” “What?” “I charge four hundred. I could do three hundred for you, because you’re sort of a friend and all.” *** I called her in the morning but she’d checked out. I phoned Kenny next. When he answered, I started crying. I despised myself—for blathering on, for hating Mom while she was sick, for letting Kenny be the one to take care of her while I got stoned or rode around with friends. I hated that I’d paid to sleep with Catherine and the fact that I wanted her again, the urge an endless slither now knotting my wretched heart. “Hey, man,” Kenny said. “What is it?” “I miss her,” I said. “So do I.”

He didn’t know what I meant, who I meant, and so shame sluiced through me, a wild stream of frigid water. “I’m sorry.” “It’s about time you let loose.” “I’m sorry,” I said again. I shouted the words and kept shouting them even as the drapes danced from my breath, even as Kenny yelled to, “Hold on,” that he was on his way and would be here soon.

Mother of Pearl

Sometimes I think I am impossible, indecent, dead, holding my breath so long like this under the tub, my husband coming into use the toilet one last time, to pluck an errant whisker whirling high up on his cheek, maybe casting a glance down at me on his way out, maybe not, who knows, I don’t, he doesn’t, no one does. When I was a girl I used to dream I could swim underwater for hours, gliding all reptilian in my slime-skinned suit. Or I would dream I could fly, start of flapping first, hit the roof edge and stumble a bit but catch a burst of staccato wind and be cast heavenward. When the baby suckled my breasts I told her these type of tales, my dreams which were void of nightmares then, and she would gurgle and coo, and her warm bun of a body pressed against mine made me weak-kneed and pale, such a torture this generosity in my arms, a burden to raise it right and unmolested in a world so broken, frail and untoward. As it turned out, I worried for nothing. After. After the first time I took one, my husband shattered the vanity mirror and screamed , “Why the bath!? Why that!?” He has not been home in several weeks and is here only now to collect his things. I am stone to him. Worse, I am a leper. I am too-strong stench. The lawyers come around, never together though. I have three of them. “Why so many?” my mother asks. “Because.” “How will you aﬀord this?”

“You don’t understand,” I say, and she leaves it at that, because Mother knows this is one thing I’m correct about. She will no longer meet my eyes in full and instead we move doe-sidoe, toy parts to a rickety crib mobile. They say addictions are meant as shovels, filling up the void that is empty. Before I knew it, I was swimming in drink, floating, paddling, stroking, going under and up, chin turned in a river of topaz whiskey that would shrivel my guts, my taste buds, corrode my throat and thoughts until bliss and bloat became pagan ordeals. I did not mean to kill anyone but myself. What do I think? If I can hold my breath long enough, will I dissolve? Will I slide through the drain like strands of hair or worms and serpents? I will not die, because that would not be fair. I have to survive so I can suﬀer. A hand grabs my throat and pulls my head, dripping and gasping, from the air. Mother’s face is rash red. “For Pete’s sake, it was an accident,” she says. But she doesn’t believe that load of crap any more than I do. I towel oﬀ. Even my body is betraying me, deserting me. My ribs are a xylophone, my breasts are pocket flaps with faded mother of pearl buttons, puckered and unused, unwanted, wasted, worthless. The smell of dinner wafts into the room and assaults my stomach but when I go to heave, all that comes out is foulsmelling breath, not even air so much as toxic gas. In the morning I drive. Miles and miles, blurs and trees and trucks and trains. I stop at the old house on the hill. I knock on the door. The grandmother living there now seems startled and suspicious, but I tell her I won’t take long. It’s a shock to see the tree fort standing because I really didn’t expect it. A pang, a penny-nicking-a-kettle pang, reverberates in me and I recognize it the way you do a fraud, this pang of hope. 68

Rainfall makes footing slippery so I’m cautious as I take my way up. Inside the fort, it smells like waterlogged wood, pine, sap. I can see the ground through the slits in the boards. In the corner is where I would imagine and invent. My dad called me a tomboy, a rare compliment. He said I would never make much of myself because I was too greedy, which is why I was fat. But I’m not fat now. Haven’t been for years. Even pregnant, I kept most of my figure. Despite lapses I’ve made, I’m smart enough to know what greedy really means. I listen as limbs brush against the fort like they are sharing secrets or performing a séance. I realize there’s no going back and I understand that people can’t fly, but for one last time I close my eyes and I let myself believe otherwise.

Coﬀee Stains

They stand in line zombie-pale and stiff, some yawning, texting, staring at anything but the person in front or behind them, and I try to identify which ones might have mated this morning, which are on the verge of destruction, if any have by chance killed someone ever, or recently, and if so what type of weapon was used, if fear-of-getting-caught is the reason for their shifty eyes. I wonder who’s a racist and which of these might have been the one to chuck that trash can through the storefront window. I wonder how long the dentist will persist in flirting with the new girl who’s wiping down his table, wonder if he’ll give up fast, like he did with me. The maw of machinery and the rumble of whispered voices puts me into a trance as I work, and I wonder. I wonder and wonder. I wonder who would think it odd, who titillating, if I was to leave my phone number on their cup, right below the felt tip markings for what drink it is. I’d write my number in different colored ink, pink perhaps. For effect, I’d add: “Call me. I mean business.” I wonder if any of the women in line have ever been raped like me, which ones have fathers they love, who’s considering an upgrade. I wonder how many of these people pray. The lady and small girl are of interest to me because the kid has to do all the work, lifting her chubby doll arm so high to hold the tall woman’s hand, not smiling at all this little girl, her lips just making wave motions, worm squiggles, as if she’s trying to swallow a hive of hornets. I wonder if the girl will become famous

someday. I wonder if she’ll have an eating disorder and how long she’ll stay a virgin. I wonder if she’s anything at all like me. Right then and there I want to stab the air with my fist, punch out my encouragement and shout, “Stay strong!” but of course I don’t. Instead I rip off a scrap of napkin and write down three words: “Hold on loosely.” I fold the paper until it’s a tiny white aspirin, and then I toss the message over the bean crusher where it slips between a crack. The man with the too big eyes sees me. He makes a sniffing movement, widening his nostril tunnels. At the counter, he speaks to the teller while I scribble his preferences on the drink cup. Hair of a second later I go to retrieve the message, but he gets there first. He waits until the crowd thins before approaching. The lenses magnify his pupils. They’re scored brown, the color of macadamias, like they belong to frogs or ghouls. When he asks what time my shift’s done, I gurgle saliva and make nonsense signs and symbols with my fingers. “Oh,” he says, thinking I’m deaf. “I get it.” He gives my wrist a gentle squeeze and then walks out a heavier man. I remove my apron and rinse my hands. I push the bar soap into the new steam burns around my wrists, into the places where the jagged plastic lids have sliced my fingers. I hear myself hiss and sigh no different than these espresso machines themselves. Clean. I sing the word. To myself, I create the stanza, “I want to be clean. I need to be clean. I must be clean.” He’s waiting for me outside, Mr. Too Big Eyes is. He’s leaning on my car, driver’s side door. “How did you know?” He grins, a sheriff who's caught his man. “Let’s go grab a cup of coffee,” he says. My father liked his steaming black, no cream, sugarless. “I’m not going to bite,” the man says. I stall. After what happened, Mother said not to trust too easily, especially men, especially strangers. This one reads me. “You can tell me about it,” he says. “I’ll listen.

Lens

If you look close, you can see me in her photo—I am the elongated stain in the northeast section of her mirrored sunglass frame. It’s our anniversary and I should be smiling but she is— after a summer of murder, she’s the one smiling--and since I’ve never seen her oﬀer an expression like this before I’m mostly stumped, car-struck and nervous, but you’d never know because the lens blocks my face, and anyway, as I said, I’m simply a spot on the glass, a smudge, a smear, a white-crusted bird dropping. Yesterday she stuﬀed the roses I bought down the disposal. I came back in to retrieve my forgotten wallet and found her feeding limbs into the manic metal mouth. A motor tore up the stems and stamens, the thorns and chlorophyll. She stood over the sink watching. She ran water. She might have been weeping, I’m not sure, but I do know for a fact that she was laughing. She couldn’t see me, didn’t realize I was there, but I had a feeling we were both wondering over the same thing, the ease of destruction, how simple it is to kill a living thing, unborn child or store-bought bouquet.

Black Diamonds

As they walk, the wet pavement sparkles black and diamondy. Overhead streetlights shine down on them their blessings, his new wife clamped inside his right arm, his daughter hooked against the left, this merry, makeshift family. They laugh. It was a stupid movie. Why do they even make them? As a car leaps the stoplight, he reacts blink-fast. He has time but to save one. At the funeral, dirt clods pound the mahogany lid like infant fists. On knees, he shudders. His wife bends down. “Shhh,” she says. “It wasn’t your fault.” At night he never sleeps. Instead he counts stars and slivers of light. He remembers the stories his mother read him, the tales of fairies and angel dust, the ones of angels safeguarding on windowsills. He watches the drapes dance, their sheer cloth gauzy, ghostly. The window is closed but then he hears it, mercy, the heater kicking oﬀ, and he lets his breathing resume.

Not So Close, Not So Far

It did not start then, but it was the summer they burned the black churches. Mom was a young girl and saw one go up herself. They were driving down Potter’s Hill, stopped at Robards Street when the sonic boom came, space burping and a ball of heat blowing their faces back against the headrests. “Look at that,” my Grandfather said. Flames of cinnamon and blood orange lashed the building like thirsty dogs from Hell. The ground broiled. Timber crackled and the tar-smoked sky cursed the day. Uncle Stu had dinner with them that night. Stu was my mother’s older brother. Mom said he arrived grinning and left the same way. At the table his skin glistened, greasy from buttered corn on the cob and, when he talked, you could see white nuggets of mashed corn meat stuck like buckshot between his teeth. When Granddad asked him why he was so happy, Uncle Stu tapped his foot and wrapped a fork on the table and said, “I like this song,” even though my mom had turned the stereo oﬀ before serving. *** The high school had a total of twelve black kids who must have lived this side of Chester. Mom went right up to their huddle beneath the tented branches of a hemlock tree. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, being sure to keep eye contact. “Why?” “The fire.” “You do it?” Mother found a sun-scorched patch of grass to study and shook her head. “Then get your stupid ass out of here.” In all, eight churches burned that year. No one got arrested. Granddad’s car got hit by a freight train two nights before Christmas Eve. Uncle Stu died of an aneurism. By the next decade, when I was born, the churches were all rebuilt, most bigger than before. *** On TV now, I watch the streets smolder. Car carcasses fume. Outside of the collapsed mosque, sirens squall and women wail. Next, they show a photo of the man with the vest full of explosives when he was just any other man. His skin is shiny, caramel corn brown. His hair is black like his countrymen. He wears a beard, same as them. He is not so tall and not so short. His lack of a smile is ordinary, customary even. But his eyes, if you look close, these are not vague at all. In them something burns. When my son comes home his lip is torn and his forehead is bleeding. He wants to tell me all about it, the other boy’s name and the gay slurs he used, but I take my son quick to my chest and hold him there, even though he is too big for me and we have not touched like this in years. He fidgets. He starts to speak again but I shush him. I say, “Listen.” I lean in further, our ears pressed and crisscrossed against each other’s chests so that what we hear is the full import of our hearts pumping, pouring, pumping.

Insomnia

He calls her his bad dream. He says it’s funny, a nickname, and right there’s the tale of the tape. He buys a parrot because he says he’s lonely and wants someone to talk to. He says it’s like an ulcer eating him inside out, how hollow their space has become, how it echoes and cusses. He takes up painting. He always wanted to be an artist and now he can be. He uses garish hues. He mixes them into a psychedelic goop and the canvas looks assaulted. She knows the feeling. For their Anniversary he brings home a sheet cake seamed with lavender frosting. He retells the story of how they met so many years ago at the hospital café when he’d asked where the soup crackers were and she’d told him and then they’d talked and she’d said she was a nurse because she couldn’t be anything else. He cuts her a small piece, knowing she’ll never eat it. He asks her questions, knowing she won’t answer. She hasn’t spoken since that night in the parking lot at the hospital. “We can’t help you if you don’t tell us,” the female oﬃcer said, angry and oﬀended instead of gentle and kind. After he’s gone to bed, she sits in the darkness. When she was a girl she had to sleep with the light on. Her imagination was brave and brilliant then, capable of conjuring up the most horrendous creatures that lurked in the hall and breathed through the slits of bedroom door. The truth is so much like a lie, she thinks.

Her husband doesn’t paint anymore. It lasted two days. He said it was a stupid idea. Now he does crossword puzzles. She misses the colors so she clicks the little white spin dial on the cord and waits for the bulb to heat the viscous glob sitting in the water like a headless bullfrog. Beside the cake, he’d given her the lava lamp as a gift and now she wants to see what shapes it will make, if there’s anything worth staying up for.

Candy Hearts

We were the fat kids, Gordie and I, hunched beneath the musty-smelling table cloth, passing miniature candy hearts back and forth, a flashlight for our guide. A few days earlier there had been a funeral in this chapel and for all I knew the casket might have sat where we were now hiding. It certainly smelled of formaldehyde, of bug collections and Bactine, but it might have just been bad perfume. Above us new arrivals signed the guest book. We could hear them scribbling their names, could hear their growling stomachs and whispers. “I can’t believe this is actually going to happen.” “I know. How many guys do you imagine she’s slept with?” “Has to be hundreds. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did the priest.” They were talking about the bride-to-be, my sister and, to his credit, Gordie didn’t say a word, he just nibbled on his candy like a dutiful rodent. The flashlight bisected his face, showing swirls of peach fuzz, flabby cheeks and a dimple burrowed to China. We were careful to whisper when we spoke. “This one says, ‘U R My Sunshine,’ but it’s pink.” “So?” “The sun’s not pink.” I wanted to slug him but there wasn’t room for proper leverage, plus we’d be found out, plus there was the issue of Ms. Colson, my therapist. Ms. Colson favored soft shades of purple

and she surrounded herself in it—lipstick, eye shadow, nail polish, handbag, shoes, cushions and drapes. She kept a color wheel in her lap as she quizzed me, twirling it absent mindedly. She always wanted information about the latest hole in my bedroom wall and when I wouldn’t give it, she’d say things like, “If your fist weren’t a fist, Jeffrey, what would you imagine it as? Hmm? What other appendage?” When I said, “A penis,” she stiffened and began to weep, which was when I knew she was the real crackpot. “You think she’ll be wearing white?” “Hopefully off-white. Like, off-off-white. Something in the very not-quite-right-white shade.” “I hear she’s pregnant.” “I hear it might be her father’s.” “What? Really?” You pee on a stick and it turns either one of two colors. My sister’s stick turned pink. At the top was a smiley face and I wondered if it had always been there, before the splash of urine, or if not, then how did the stick know she was pregnant and why in the world would it think she’d be happy, carrying a mutant baby like that? As far as I could tell, my sister was miserable. She always had been, but now she was the kind of miserable that is contagious, that runs into everyone else’s laundry bleeding like madras. Gordie, shifted his thick thighs and winced. “My kneecap’s asleep.” “Shhh, not so loud,” I said. “These are my brother’s dress pants. They feel like pantyhose, they’re so tight.” “Suck it up.” “Hey, this one says, ‘Merry XMas.’ They got the wrong holiday. How about that?” “Are you retarded?” “I don’t think so.”

I heard an organ strike a sonorous note, heard door hinges squeal closed, and the stilted sound of a hundred shoe heels taking a stand in the pew aisles. I heard my step brother, Rogan, yell my name a half dozen times as he scoured the vestibule area. After a brief search, he dropped a fat F-bomb about me and said, “You ruin everything. I hope you die.” Gordie’s head twitched, his eyes, too. He was getting all this. He wasn’t so dumb. “This is a good one,” he said, holding up a lime-colored heart, ‘Have My Baby.’” “That’s ‘Be My Baby.’” “Nah huh, look. It’s ‘Have—“ Then I did hit him, probably too hard. He rubbed his arm and mumbled something. I told him I was sorry. “I mean. I am,” I said. “It’s okay.” “Forgive and forget?” “Sure.” I recognized the song that played. It was the same creepy, Phantom of the Opera-type number that old lady had played two nights prior at the rehearsal dinner. “You think you’ll ever get married?” Gordie asked. “Are you nuts?” Gordie thought for a moment. He took every one of my questions seriously. “I don’t think I am. I’m weird and a little chubby, but not crazy.” “Let’s go,” I said, pushing my head through the table covering. A cramp bit my calf like a crocodile. Gordie swore, “Damn.” The crystal dish that had contained all the candy hearts was empty. He licked his thumb and dragged it across the thin coating of pastel sugar dust, then sucked it oﬀ. “Come on. What’re you going do, eat that glass bowl?” “Where’re we going?” “Somewhere.” “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you miss your sister’s wedding.” 80

I hobbled a few steps, working the horse bite out of my leg. “You don’t have to come.” I punched the door open so hard it echoed across the vestibule. I thought about my sister and Terry exchanging their handwritten vows and how pretty my sister would look, how Terry’s knees would wobble, him nervous as hell, chewing on the consequences. I left the church and said a vow myself—that I wouldn’t permit myself to think about love, or if I did it couldn’t be anything angry or negative. I was of course distrustful of love, how it proposed to be the truth but was more or less the shield people through around themselves when they were lonely or in trouble. What I did respect, however was the silken paleness of the sky overhead, blue bordering on periwinkle. “Isn’t that something?” I said to myself. “Here’s one, says, ‘Keep it real,” Gordie said. As I turned, he was pulling fabric from his groin. “What?” he asked. “Why’re you smiling?” “I wish I knew,” I said. But I did know. Or so I thought.

Waterfall

My wife sleeps, she’s always sleeping it seems, and she’s snoring now as I rise from the mattress and stand by the window and watch this new one drop my daughter oﬀ. The angle isn’t the best. I can see a hand on my daughter’s shoulder, fingers moving on fabric. Most of them drive the same type of car, foreign jobs that ride so low it’s a wonder how they make it over speed bumps. Most of these guys are ROTC types, not really angry but bored enough to be dangerous. I make my way down the kitchen and pour some into a tumbler, let it splash as I pour, expecting it to burn when it hits my skin. The door opens an hour later. “You’re waiting up for me now?” she says. “I was thinking about the time we went to that animal place. It wasn’t really a zoo, because they’d let you do more than watch, and you rode an elephant.” “Why the hell would you be thinking something like that?” When she should have been, when she first walked inside and saw me, she wasn’t, but now that she’s hearing what’s on my mind, my daughter looks frightened. She lets go of the knob slowly, as if she might run back outside but that second an engine bombs alive and the car drives oﬀ, so she punches the door closed with the back of her combat boot, staying put. “You want a drink?” I ask.

“Are you kidding?” I get her one and she takes it, now seated on the sofa. “What’s going on?” she asks. “Do you ever wonder why things end up the way they do?” She swallows, ice cubes bumping up against her nose, her eyes stuck on me. She doesn’t wince when she gulps. She says, “I gotta say you how much you’re freaking me out right now.” “Tell me something about this one. Anything. Give me a reason why you like him.” “We’re not getting married, if that’s what you’re hung up about.” “Of course not. There are others, so many.” “So? It’s my life.” “Yeah, it is.” I get up and pour myself another and her, too. She holds the glass out and shimmies her body away from me. I recognize the odors, all of them but the brand of this new boy’s cologne. “Go on, tell me something.” “He has a tat of swastika that covers his entire back. His genitals are pierced.” I know she’s expecting to shock me, and I can also tell from the way her eyes hold that she’s told me the truth. “How come I don’t ever get to meet these guys?” She reaches inside her boot and pulls out a flattened pack of cigarettes that makes a candy wrapper sound as she withdraws one. She holds it out, oﬀering me a cig, then laughs when I don’t budge. “So here’s the deal--” she says.” “What are you good at?” I interrupt. “What do you want to be?” “I’m not good at anything.” “Everyone is, at something.” She rocks her boot, inhales and then sends a smoke tornado straight at me. “Okay,” she says, “sex. I’m good at that. Happy?” The alcohol slugs away inside me, a tugboat pulling glaciers through the fog. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. 83

“Thanks, Ms. P.” Ms. P., Ms. Perkins, was my daughter’s therapist, the one we handpicked after her last suicide attempt. “It’s not your fault,” Ms. Perkins said that first meeting we were all together, and I remember how guilty I felt when I looked up from the carpet and saw that she’d meant me. “You were so afraid of falling oﬀ that elephant.” “I don’t remember any elephant.” “You held on like we were going to drop down a waterfall.” “You’re so weird.” “You didn’t let go.”

Timing

Sometimes it happens this way, with him driving 1-90 to work, seeing a plane floating low over Union Bay, toggling between buildings and it’ll catch him unaware and he’ll remember stopping at Starbucks that September morning, the newscaster’s baritone tremulous and uncertain, him and everyone thinking hoax, thinking Orson Wells, and then later that night, thinking Armageddon and Satan. Many days afterward there was a Robert De Niro documentary and he thought this could be a teaching moment for Hailey, his young daughter, with whom he had custody on weekends. He made cocoa with mini marshmallows and once they became soupy Lilly pads Hailey plucked their white guts with her little girl fingers and drew letters across his cheeks. On the television the buildings simmered and smoldered, sirens shrieked, people leapt and bodies thumped. They’d left none of the horror or death out, and while he knew he should have switched the channel, he couldn’t, riveted as he was. When the program finished, his daughter turned to him with a yawn and asked if he could read her a story.

Moving Day

The box smells musty but after I shift some contents, it doesn’t. Maybe twenty-five years have passed since I’ve seen this; brittle now but still bearing the faintest sweet scent, still blushing berry hues in the bed of its pedals. I carry it down the steps like a trophy, a gift, a caught butterfly, and I imagine time as things were when you held one side of your gowned chest to me, so clear-skinned and optimistic you were then, me pimpled and nervous that I’d stab you with the corsage pin. I reenact it all, right down to the part where I hear your insistent voice say, “If we don’t get going pretty soon, we’ll never make it.”

New Gray

My father came home on a Tuesday. As a ruse I stayed late to watch the cheerleaders practice even though I hated six of the nine girls on the squad. While he’d been gone I’d got my first period, hardly a gusher, but still. Since he’d been away, my brother had been stopped for shoplifting a nail gun at McDaniel’s Hardware. Vice President Agnew resigned. Then Nixon. During that time someone killed our cat, Dolly Parton, by putting glass shards inside a chunk of tuna. Also during that time Mother stayed put in Florida with her boyfriend, Fausta, the Cuban or Spaniard or whatever he was. What was supposed to be three months turned into a year and I thought I’d become used to my father being gone. If this was what it’d be like with him dead, it wouldn’t be that bad, I told myself. I was fourteen now, too old to really be an orphan. Plus we had Gran to watch us. The new dad looked like a criminal, sleek bordering on gaunt, his hair and face damp and beaded up in a way that would always make me think of whiskey. My tongue felt like a dead fish sleeping in the gully of my gums and when I asked, “What’s new?” the words caught on the roof of my sticky mouth. His smile trickled loose, sort of pathetic-looking. Still, I kept expecting him to leap out of the recliner and grab me, strangle me, crush a rib or black an eye. I remembered him as a snake, venomous and that quick.

But then I recalled what Gran had said. “It’s like a fat farm where he went.” I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to listen to anything she told me. I said, “Fat farm? What a load of crap.” “Will you just work with me for once? You remember your Aunt Frida, how she left and lost all those pounds? For your father, it’s the same only he’ll lose his lust for booze, God help us.” My father grinned at me now, thin-lipped. I wanted to slap that smile off his face, drag my fingernails across his cheek and gouge his eye out. “You’ve turned into a lady,” he said. There was new gray in the middle bed of his moustache. I wish I’d worn jeans instead of this skirt. But that morning, I changed outfits so many times I’d almost missed the bus. Josh came in then, letting the screen door slam behind him. “Hey, Pops,” he said. Hey Pops, as if a year had never gone by. Josh wore a striped soccer jersey, grass-stained and torn around the armpit. My brother got down on one knee, the same as he’d done as Homecoming King. He leaned forward and hugged my dad, softly, absently patting my father’s shoulder the way Gran always did when Mother would hug her and bawl against Gran’s big bosom. “Glad you’re home,” Josh said, and bounced to his feet. “I’m gonna grab a shower.” “You do that,” I said, sneering hard at him. My brother was so handsome it masked other things, such as what a selfish dick he could be. Dad stared. Mr. Jefferies, fourth period Pre-Calculus, gawked like that. I’d look up from a pop quiz and his little acorn eyes would be lasering my clothes off. “Has Gran been by?” I asked. “She picked me up and dropped me off. Went to get pizza. Thought you and I might want to talk” “Okay,” I said. “Then I’m going to go do homework.” “Hey,” he said. But he had nothing else to offer and so we were quiet for a few long minutes. 88

I hated being nice, but sometimes oﬀering kindness was really just a selfish gesture, so I asked, “You happy to be home?” He nodded with his answer. “I suppose.” “How was it?” “The facility? Not too bad. It smelled like poopy diapers, but it was okay.” “So, you don’t drink anymore?” His lips went doe-si-doe. “I’m not sure. We’ll see.” “If you do, I’m gone.” “I know,” he said, tapping his knee cap. My father’s fingers were the same fingers, thick and bent, the right one scarred rhubarb around the knuckle. “I’m sorry about what happened.” “Yeah? Well, that makes two of us.” Barry Jarvis wanted me last Friday. His friends had told him. He put his hand in my shirt after our third kiss hit the five minute mark. I must have been daydreaming of Seward Park again, of Mom and us when I was six and how all those swans would float up to the bank, a million of them it seemed, crowding for bread parts or Mother’s singing. I must have instinctively pushed Barry’s hand away because he bit my ear like one of those swans had done once when I held out the bread crust instead of tossing it. I punched Barry in the chest and he grinned and breathed hot through his nose and said, “Hell, yes. That’s what I’m talking about.” “You don’t know what it’s like,” my father said. I stood close to the piano mother used to play. Her black folder, usually fat with sheet music, sat on top, deflated, a blob of rubber. But the lamp was still there and I gripped it around the base. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t judge me so quickly,” my father said, twirling his fingers. His eyes were pinned on mine. I expected them to move to my hand. I had the lamp raised in the air by now. “People can change,” he said.

The lamp cord dangled beige and stiﬀ, brushing up against my thigh. The plug-in, with its two prongs, looked like fangs. I expected it to hiss, to be bitten. When nothing happened, a warm current hummed inside my bones: disappointment or calm, I wasn’t sure which. “Can you forgive me?” he asked. I let sail the lamp. It flew. The window crunched, then shattered. Glass chunks split around us like a burst of heavy hail. He started shaking. His shoulder bones poked through a flannel shirt. I knelt down on the carpet before his chair. “Don’t,” he said. But I knew what I was doing. I bent my head. I cleared my thoughts of everything but forgiveness and said a prayer.

Grace

The kid in line looks broken, bent at the hip like a less than mark, as if he’s missing ribs on that side. He walks with a looping gait, ratchety, and kicks a stanchion so that it whirls before bouncing oﬀ the wall of glass and hitting me in the knee. He doesn’t look up. He finds his wallet and buys his movie ticket just like anyone. In grade school I wore Army Surplus clothes. I kept my bangs so long they’d curl at the ends, any way to hide myself, to camouflage the rash of angry acne craters. The only one who talked to me had a body like this boy, but her chest was set up high, a stack of too many hard back books, swallowing her neck until it seemed she was nothing more than head and ribs and bird legs. She never said it, but she loved me. When the new kid moved to our town he didn’t know any better. He wore puka shells and polo-shirts and cologne that smelled like forests. He took me as a friend before the others could warn him, and then they quickly fell in line, too, acquiescing, because that’s how staying popular works. A week into summer, she moved away, proof to me of God’s existence, his mercy and his grace.

The Sound of the Cars on the Bridge

Overhead, vehicles cross the great bridge at astonishing speeds, racecar fast. Their collective echo shrieks like audible horror trapped in a jar, the noise bouncing between girders. The concrete joists shudder as if the bridge itself is suﬀering a seizure, convulsing weak-kneed. He’s late but not really. He’s been watching her for half an hour from the west end while his conscience battles a flight impulse, a survivor reflex. He’s not a brave man and he knows it. She’s as pretty as in newspaper photographs. Her hair is wavy, marmalade-orange, same as her brother’s. She’s been sitting near the river’s edge, oblivious to the sound of the cars on the bridge. She’s hunched over, clutching her knees like a shivering child, a nervous date. She stares at the pockets of light hitting the green water and wafting away. He can imagine some of the things she’s thinking but not all of them, of course. He stumbles down the slope of the riverbank. Stumbles, not staggers. There is a diﬀerence. The ground is filled with tall scratchy weeds. They’re brittle and toast-colored and the earth is uneven and soft from recent rains and his shoes get sucked down and he thinks of quicksand and rescue scenes from old Tarzan movies he’d watched when he was a boy and not yet a murderer.

She hears the soupy sound his shoes make and turns, using a hand to shield her eyes from the glare breaking across his shoulders. “You came.” He nods. There’s a fist stuck in his throat and its knuckles ram his neck bones and he gags and swallows with a combustive cough. They shake hands and exchange names, his fictitious. She pats the ground. “Sit.” She has her brother’s heart-shaped face, his eyes. “This is where his car landed after he swerved,” she says. That night is a blur. He’s tried to recall details but he can only get as far as the edge of a memory. “The other driver was going a hundred in the wrong lane, Sean’s lane.” He nods again. It’s easier this way but he realizes he’ll have to come clean soon and he wonders what that will feel like. “Our parents were killed by drunk drivers, too,” she says. He tries to steady his eyes. His mouth tastes like bleach. “I know,” he says. “There was a story on the news.” Again he recalls being a boy: his first drink at age thirteen, Uncle Roy egging him on, claiming it would free him, make him a man, and so he drank and when it didn’t deliver he took another and another, but all these years later he’s still searching for that release, the freedom Uncle Roy had promised, only what he feels now is ensnared and shackled, taken to the same damp cell, night after night, even when it’s day, the cave barren of sun, void of any tactile reference save for the gassy fumes of whiskey and sound of the cars on the bridge screaming hostilities. She tosses a twig. It wobbles in the air, landing shoreline. Together they watch it swivel and sway against the foamy skirt of a jutting boulder before it sinks and disappears. “Anyone you know ever get killed?” He shakes his head. “Good for you.”

When she begins to study his face and take in his features, he turns away. “It was impossible after Mom and Dad died, so I don’t know how I’m going to be able to survive this.” He wants to say, “You will.” It seems appropriate and necessary, but he can’t. “Sean wasn’t just my brother, he was my best friend.” He feels his mouth shaping a supportive smile, showing no teeth, his lips on fire. “I never dated. Sean did--now and then anyway--but he was moody and sucked as a conversationalist.” Her laugh is frail, breathy and without lilt. “Whenever one of his dates would find out about our parents and the accident, she’d split. It was as if they thought death could be, you know, contagious. Does that make any sense?” Nod of the head again. “Not that it mattered terribly, because I was always there for him. We had each other. And the cool thing was, lately Sean seemed to be making progress, as if he’d found a way to put some of the sadness behind him.” She uses the tip of her worn boot to loosen a stone from the soil, and once it’s freed she bats it back and forth soccer style. She watches him watching her and stops. “So, you said you had some information about the accident.” He reads her mind. She’s thinking: stalker, maybe psycho. His conscience falters for a moment. He thinks: I have options. I can lie. I can run. She doesn’t know my name, doesn’t have my number. As he stands and pats the back of his pants, a shredded ghostpattern of dust slides into a slanted breeze and dissipates. He takes the stone from between her boots and rubs it clean. It’s as flat as a cookie, so he sidearms hard and the rock skips one… two…three…four… “Hey,” she says. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but this meeting was your idea. If you don’t have any information, then stop screwing around and say so.” 94

He listens to the final plops of the skipping stone. It takes a second for him to realize that—however briefly—he has successfully drowned out the sound of the cars on the bridge. He turns to the girl, facing her sorrow flush. “I do,” he says. “I do have something to tell you.” In the distance the sun is a flame of infinity.

Just As You Are

Though I was thirty-two, he liked me better this way: hair in pigtails, with white knee-highs and a tartan skirt, oxford-cloth shirt no starch, chewing gum, pouting. It worried me how much he enjoyed the look, but nevertheless I’d cook for him in such outfits, I’d dust and vacuum, unpack groceries and deliver Stoli, on-the-rocks, to the corduroy chair where he slumped and burped and farted. One time Mother came by unannounced, her face pressed to the window glass like a geriatric ghoul. “You scared the crap out of me,” I said, more nervous than frightened. “What’re you doing, looking like that?” I waved my hand as if shooing away a bee or bad odor. I told her Halloween, but she said that was last month, and right away we got into it. Mom had no right instructing me about love, her on Husband #5. I never told her how I had caught #1, my father, watching me make out with my first boyfriend. Dad was up on the landing looking down. I didn’t want him to know I’d spotted him, so I kept kissing Jimmy, me becoming anxious and afraid, using my fingers on Jimmy’s face, his chest hair, worming my tongue across his molars all the way to the gluey tonsil bell. When I looked up a few minutes later, Dad was still there, his forehead glinting sweat blisters from the glare of the chandelier.

He left Mom about a week later, no note, nothing. That first day, she kept mumbling, “Fine. Fine. Fine,” but then she got to work. She took in men fast, a smorgasbord of them, though none stuck for long. They were like dirty water; the silty kind at the beach that you think won’t slip through your fingers because it’s so chunky, milkshake-thick, and yet it does, slyly through the spaces in between. Out of the blue the other night, Bobby said we should think about taking our relationship to another level, which is what I’ve been dying to hear for going on three years now. I’m eager to be a good wife, a mom. But then he went on and explained, so I put on the outfit again and at the door, on the way to the restaurant, he stopped me, said, “Uh uh.” I asked, “What?” his fingers hot on my wrist. “Just as you are,” he said, “no coat.” At the diner, I stared into the window reflection, stared back at the patrons staring at me from their booths. Zenith, our waitress, wasn’t wearing any uniform other than that name tag. When she asked which hospital I was a nurse for, I heard chuckles from across the room where two men in fatigues and orange hunting vests sat. Then she asked if we were headed to a costume party, even though Bobby was dressed normal in a jeans jacket and flannel. On her return, she asked me, “More coﬀee?” and I smirked because I knew what she really meant, which was, Are you all right, do you need me to get somebody? After she’d gone to fetch the bill, Bobby reached across and shackled my wrist again, then my finger, the one where a ring should have been. He rubbed for a genie. His eyes slid halflidded. He grinned at me, Good doggie. When we got home that night there were only fireworks for one, and thankfully these sputtered out in less time than it takes to peel an onion. While Bobby snored, I thought about layers and costumes, hypocrites and survivors. I questioned my obsession with needing to be loved and the extent to which I’d sacrifice. I 97

considered Mother, how those men came and went while she remained unflappable. One of us was braver, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell which. What I did know was that Bobby had been the only man to say he loved me, to use that particular four letter word. Sometimes it came after a strange engagement or after I’d agreed to a certain garment request, but nevertheless, it was the very word. I lay on the mattress now, but pulled the blankets off me. I fingered the stretch marks guarding my belly button like jail bars. The scarred skin was textured differently, felt slicker, like the Slip ‘n Slide I had flopped down on all those years ago, back when I didn’t realize that I wasn’t pretty or how much that mattered. Now I closed my eyes for just a minute. I imagined a sheik bending down to kiss me. I pictured him all cocoa-skinned with thick black brows and lashes long like a girl’s, telling me I was beautiful, saying it in a foreign language only the two of us understood. Afterward I slipped off the bed and stepped into the bathroom without bothering to robe myself. I stared at my naked body and, oddly enough, nothing stirred in me, not repulsion or shame. What I saw was simply somebody’s dull history. And I liked it. I reached in the comb drawer and pulled out a nub of lipstick with which to write Bobby a note across the mirror. I was brief but honest. Then I tip-toed downstairs. I found the keys lumped next to an ash tray. In the coat closet I found a jacket. I put it on without worry. He could have the rest. I had all I needed.

Center and Fringe

I want you to lie to me. I want you to pull my hair and threaten to leave me again, tell me every soiled thing you loathe about me but, later, do a paintby-numbers watercolor on my chest, inserting a subliminal message between the stripes of a rainbow. I want to cuddle with you on this bed of pine needles so scratchy we’d never be able to sleep, the frosty air cold enough to make our noses bleed, dribbling down our chins like scarlet fondue. I want the taillights glowing rat-eyed across the lake to be your eyes, fascinated by me on this winter’s night. I want the cones of light reflected on the wafting water to be a cloud that morphs in undulation so that we can find new characters and objects in its wake, its center and fringes. I want you to see what I see, the people who own that light and the house where that light glows, the ones that have been together since before the war against Germany. I saw them at Safeway yesterday. She was testing a melon with her gnarled thumb while the brittle little guy manned the cart, hunched, grinning like a very happy gnome. I want our skins to spot and sag together. I want us to molt and refute what happened last weekend. I want magical powers, the ability to make you stay put, to cause that car to miss you, take a diﬀerent corner, let you live. I want to take it all back.

It Wasn’t Meant to be Found

We were there for a funeral. The land was long and unending, a blonde ocean of wheat woven into the wind. My wife was a nervous new bride meeting more of my side of the family, yet she was the same crass woman. Her mouth ran ahead of her. “How do people live like this? I thought farming was dead? What do the kids do for fun, there’s nothing here but wheat?” Her hand had been sweaty but as we walked it got dusted with chaﬀ and became chalky. Her grip remained. “I’m so glad we live in the city,” she said. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you glad you got out of this place?” We stopped under it, I did, to look. One side of the tree fort had become disbanded and a board hung oﬀ like a broken wing. A breeze slow-danced with what was left of the structure and as it did nails long-rusted moaned. “Just look at that thing. This whole place, nothing but junk metal and then all that wheat.” I kissed Amy Gardner up there when I was thirteen. It was her idea. She said she wanted to try things, experiment. She said the worst predicament she could imagine was being normal. And now I wasn’t really looking for the ring. The sun settled low between a hump of hills, so there was little means of locating it anyway. Like finding a needle in a haystack. When I’d asked her to go steady, Amy laughed so hard she nearly choked to death. Then she said, “Let me see that thing,” 100

and threw the ring as far as she could. “I’m never getting handcuﬀed.” My eyes skirted the ground out of habit. My wife didn’t notice. We walked back to the house which was just as well because the ring wasn’t meant to be found. On the way, the setting sun winked over a pine-hooded hill. In the morning we had breakfast before leaving. My parents and brother couldn’t stop staring at my wife because she wouldn’t stop talking. Dad winced as if he had chest pains or gas and Danny just grinned, astonished, shaking his head. I tried tapping on my wife’s knee but she went on and on anyway. Our meal was chicken-fried chicken, hash browns and wheat biscuits slathered with hunks of dairy butter, then drowned in gravy. My wife wouldn’t touch the meat, instead she poked it with her fork, cringing, perhaps expecting it to still be alive. She pulled a potato sprig loose to use as a pointer when she spoke. After a while Mom said, “Aren’t you going to eat?” so my wife pried the biscuit free of its sopping pile with the intensity of someone disarming a bomb. She sliced it in half, separating wet part from dry. I had my own plate, but this maneuver of hers sent an aroma wafting, smell of milled grain, of the very earth itself. I remembered having dirt clod fights with my brother and Amy. Amy had a pitcher’s arm and jet speed. The mud grenades would explode and granules would find their way into my scalp, my ear runnels, shoot up my nose while Amy grinned and slung another so that I’d end up wiping chunks of tangy dirt oﬀ my teeth. Now my wife leaned her large head into my vision. “Isn’t that right?” she asked. I stared at her, blinked. To get her to look away, I said, “Of course.” She said something else and then took a bite of her biscuit, jerking violently at once and grabbing her jaw. Mom asked what was wrong before I thought to do so. 101

“There’s a rock, a nugget in my biscuit.” Mother blinked like a stumped hen, flushing. “Why, there’s no such thing.” “It was a stone. I think it broke my crown.” She dug into her mouth, knuckles-deep, searching. “I’ve been making biscuits longer than you’ve been alive, and we sift our wheat three times over. We’ve never had a complaint in forty years.” “I don’t care. It was—“ I pinched my wife under the table so hard she kneed it and plates bounced and she asked what did I do that for. Before loading into the car, we got our parting hugs. Even my wife got them, nothing firm, the kind of embrace bludgeoned boxers might impart after a bout. I road down the driveway doing twenty at best, watching the tawny fields wave to me. A wind gust swirled S’s at the slope of the hill where Amy and I once fell down in a fit of gut-ripping laughter. This was prior to the ring, when we were just starting out, and Amy made me promise we’d always be friends. I said, “Sure. Of course we will,” although I knew that was a lie one way or another. Amy smiled and pulled my arm so it rested under her neck, and soon she dozed with the sun stuttering through the swaying stalks. In fifteen minutes, my arm had fallen asleep. It was more than numb. It felt like razors stabbing every nerve, yet I didn’t move. I didn’t want to wake Amy because she’d get up and say she had to go and more than anything, I didn’t want to be alone. Now I looked over at my wife on the passenger side, jabbering, making circles with her arms. I had learned to love her. “Are you even listening to me?” she asked. Next she said she was certain there’d been a pebble in her biscuit. “It was about the size of a pea,” she said. “Or a diamond. It was that hard anyway.”

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I laughed, laughed so deep my eyes watered and I had to slow the car. In the rearview the wheat fields had disappeared, but that was okay. At least I wasn’t alone. “What?” my wife asked. “Nothing,” I said, punching the accelerator. “Nothing.”

103

Crescent

I was late picking him up. When I pulled into the school lot, I saw him oﬀ near the soccer field, a pack of kids clustered around him in a semi-circle. There was another boy with my son, a small kid, Jack something or other. I knew his name because Jack always walked around town wearing headphones, jumpy with the music, as if electrified, slamming his fists into the air or spinning around while cars honked or flashed their brights. When my son slapped him, Jack staggered but took a swing of his own. My son hardly had to move out of the way. He could be lazy about it. This was Jack. My son dodged. He leaned back. He yawned. He grinned. I had seen this grin before, but now it was like seeing an Indian scalp and not recognizing the head it went with. I rolled the window down. The others egged him on, the falcate of onlookers closing in. I saw a flash of knuckle hover, then dive. Then repeat. Then a flurry of the same. I pulled out of the lot. I thought about myself; how in middle school Jimmy Kennedy beat me up because I wrote his girlfriend a poem declaring my love for her. We did it on the pitcher's mound. There was a crowd of kids then, too. He said, “No hard feelings,” and extended his hand and when I went to shake it he launched his boot into my crotch and that started things.

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As I drove away, the crowd was a maw of limbs and motion. I couldn’t see Jack. My son caught a ride home. I told him I was sorry, that there was last minute stuﬀ at work and he told me no big deal. I asked how school was and he said, “Okay. Okay.” Then he said he felt really tired and went to his room, the spare I made into his when he visited every third week. That Friday I dropped him at his mother’s. I gave him a hug. I made him hold me back or at least remain inside my embrace for more than a second. I told him I loved him no matter what. Later, in the car, I wondered about that, about myself, the man and the father. On the way home, I saw him on 2nd and Avenue D. Jack bobbled an arrow-shaped board sign that said, “Don’t Stress. Let us tackle your taxes!” It was April 12. I was late. Jack dipped and weaved spastically to the music he was hearing through the headphones. When I rolled down the window, I saw that he had a shiner under the right eye, a purpleblack crescent. I called him over, but he just danced. He stared at me a little longer, but when I pulled away he gave me the thumbs up sign.

105

Gone

Pop says we’ve been living in this abandoned rail car since before the dawn of mankind. My father’s a person of contradictions because he also says our race is not merely human, our race is always moving, evolving, that it’s stupid to even use the label race at all. He claims we were once tadpoles then apes, pharaohs then gunslingers, rum runners then executives, and now we just happen to be vagrants. When I look around me, if I holler or run miles in any direction, I come back without much reason to doubt him. It’s just snow-covered nothingness. The nearest town is three hours over rugged terrain. On the top of Ivory Hill, I can shout and whatever message I yell tumbles down the snow-encrusted valley and boomerangs back to me, frozen and husky, my words the same, only oldersounding. Still I don’t like knowing there’s nothing else, no God, no chance of me ever meeting my mother. It’s sickening to think this is all there is. Pop says my mother died when I was a tot, that she stepped on a rusty nail and her leg swelled up and then the rest of her, too, and that was the end. Sometimes I think: well, if a person can die from a piece of dirty metal, anything must be possible, the truth is untrustworthy, and God can’t be real because he would

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never be so petty or cruel, and when I share this, Pops says, “That’s right, son. Now you get it.” On occasion visitors show up, usually people who’ve fallen oﬀ course or else drifters who know exactly where they are and what they’re doing, but not necessarily why. A few days ago Mel and Robby arrived out of nowhere, acting like they knew us, like they were relatives. Robby is part Eskimo, part Native American Indian, but mostly he’s made of whiskey. His sweat and breath reek of booze. Even his eyes have a topaz tint to them. Mel is all Indian. She’s a nice lady, slow moving and gentle, the way the infirm are. She showed me how to braid my hair and gave me a turquoise clip to use and keep. Yesterday we walked out to Ivory Hill together and I held her hand and pretended she was Mother. Mel might have suspected what I was doing because she drew me into her chest and squeezed until I could hear our two hearts bumping against each other. When I asked her about God, Mel said she knew about my mother’s death and Pop’s ideology. “But is he real?” I asked. She said, “Close your eyes and ask.” So I did. I shouted, “Are you there God?” and as in past times my words flew but bounced back and hit my lips like a blunt kiss. When I opened my eyes, Mel was gone. She was gone but her prints were there and her heart still beat next to mine.

107

A Lover of Beautiful Things

I was spooked. He’d been following me for the last two hours, through both levels of the mall, the food court, waiting outside of Macy’s with a magazine curled in his palm like a baton or a sledge hammer. I admit I led him on a bit. At Victoria’s Secret I paused, feigning a do-check in front of the display window that featured a trio of mannequins whose cleavage, G-strings, and vapid, heroin stares were impossible not to envy. I flipped my hair and reapplied some lip gloss. He was twenty feet behind me. Still, I caught his reflection in the glass and glare. He might not even have noticed my little maneuver, yet it seemed as if he did. In fact it seemed as if I was the reason he existed. I had very little money. However, I bought a pair or cheetahprint thong panties that were half-oﬀ. I wanted to be carrying the Vickie Secret bag through the rest of my excursion and I wanted him to be wondering about the contents. I even asked for a larger sack than was necessary. I was ill-prepared when he came running up to the car. I mean, I hadn’t expected that at all. Part of me thought I’d imagined the whole surveillance thing. But no, he came at me like an assailant with marching orders. I reached for pepper spray I didn’t have. I cupped a car key between my fingers, ready to gouge his eye out. He was panting. And cute--in a sweaty, mocha-skinned hirsute way. 108

He said he was a photographer. I said, “Sure you are.” He said, “No, really.” He told me I could be a model, said that I had the look they were after. I got smart-ass on him, said, “ W h o’s they?” He gave me the card I still have to this day. He said, “Call me. Check out my website, I’m legit.” All those girls on his site were something, so exotic or pale, most with stunned expressions not dissimilar from the Vickie Secret mannequins. Could I help myself from wanting to be featured like those others? Of course not. My mother wanted to go with me to Raul’s studio. (Raul was his name.) I told her what she knew already, that I wasn’t six years old anymore. I was that plus ten, sixteen. “Call me when you get there,” she said, making me pinkiepromise, which I hated. I surprised myself. After a couple of minutes I lost all inhibition. I was naked before I knew it. He said he’d pay me, but I just laughed. He took stills and video. I’ve been back a few times, whenever I need a confidence boost. I know now that those girls on his site are just stock photos from someplace else. But it doesn’t matter. He tells me he’s a lover of beautiful things. He’s never actually said that I’m beautiful, but that doesn’t matter either.

109

The Right Cut

She cuts my hair with her eye first, squinting against the wispy smoke tendrils. “You got a problem with combs? A hairbrush? Hygiene?” We girls should stick together, I think. Anyway, she’s a big woman and could be a lot more judicious who she asks about their issues. She looks away and coughs at another beautician bent over a customer in the chair next to where I’ll be. She likes hockey, the Everett Silvertips. I want to ask her what kind of name Silvertips is, tell her it sounds like a ballet troupe, but there are all these autographed portraits of the players plastered like a garden arch on her mirror. My own chubby face feels claustrophobic in the glass, as if I’m about to get gangbanged. She’s got a tattoo that says Tommy in some sort of barbed wire font. I can’t take my eyes oﬀ it and she notices and gives my head a shove forward to work on the back of my hair. Looking down I see tufts of other people’s shorn manes, as if someone exploded a multi-colored Chewbacca. Then I notice my own fulsome calves and realize I forgot to shave my legs, that it’s maybe been a week or two. “We’re moving to California tomorrow,” is what I think about saying to the stylist, but I just sort of say it in my head so it hangs their real, even if unheard by anyone but me. “Yeah, Mom’s new boyfriend is taking his real estate test. He has a place with a pool,

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even though it’s a prefabricated home. A mobile home. Hell, okay, a trailer. We’ll be living in another trailer.” Her name is Deanne Tilburg and she’s not very photogenic, as far as I can tell. Her certification copy is mug shot-serious and I can’t help but wonder what kind of mother she is, about the dreams she had that might still have a chance to bloom if she’d ever unpack them. She wets my hair depending on the section she’s cutting. She uses a spray bottle that once contained Windex glass cleaner, according to the label. I figure it’s a joke, something to help her get her jollies off, but then this woman doesn’t really seem the prankster type. She stops every few minutes. She’s always the one to answer the phone, and she does it in a rush even if it’s never for her. “Donna!” “Patricia!” “Sandy!” These other women have people who want them, brothers and boyfriends, bill collectors. I’ve never been to church but I know about priests because they’re often in the movies. I used to imagine giving my confession. The priest in my imagination always looked like Bela Lugosi, though, so I clammed right up. Now I start telling my stylist all about my failings, and not just the ones she can see. I tell her about the fire I set, the windshields I busted up with a bat, the things that happened in Principal Lowry’s office. I get pretty explicit because that’s the kind of movie my life’s been so far, vivid and sweaty. The beautician doesn’t respond, of course, since it’s me and her conversing in the garage called my skull. The music they play in this place isn’t too bad. People pick on Barry Manilow and the Bee Gee’s but there’s an easy vibe inside their pudding, something to cozy up with and not feel threatened by. Mom’s last boyfriend was a meth head with a portrait of Hitler in his hall closet. He liked metal. Preferred it loud so the walls and floors would shake, an earthquake to muffle all the sins that took place while Mom was working at IHOP. Now that the stylist is doing the finishing bang trim, I’m seated upright, all head and no body, a bust of some fat girl with a 111

Dutch boy. I don’t really care about how my hair looks, but then you knew that. This is a good position to see Deanne Tilburg fullon, without her being able to stop me. But I’m shy at first and so I study the black combs bleeding in the murky, medicinal water. I wonder how soaking everyone’s sweat in the same glass container is considered sanitary, yet I know as well as anyone that getting clean is sometimes harder than you imagine. I look at her and she’s looking at me. She has Mom’s nose with the big black pits for nostrils. Her eyebrows are plucked severely and one of the millipedes is missing part of its tail. “It’s all right,” I say, “at least you tried.” I think she smiles, but then the stink wafts up from behind me and I know she’s just needing a Tums. That’s okay, too, I tell her. I’m constipated nearly every day. “Well?” she says, oﬀering me a hand mirror but not swiveling me or giving any instructions. I struggle to get out of the chair, the thing’s so sunken it’s like a seat in a space rocket. I tip her thirty percent. While I sign, the phone rings and she grabs it as if it’s a snake. “About time you called,” she says. Her lips are twitchy and her eyes shoo me goodbye. For a moment I consider hugging her, saying it’ll be okay, everything works out the way it’s supposed to, there’s still time—all that crap I’ve always wanted people to dump on me. But I don’t. The miniature bell lets out a cheerful, Holiday sound when I open the door. “Christmas is going to be diﬀerent,” I tell the beautician. “It’s going to be better, for both of us.” With nowhere to go, the words bounce around my skull dumb as lemmings. It isn’t until I’m on the bus and see my new self in the side mirror that I recognize it’s a pretty good look on me. And then I realize, too, that the beautician never even asked me how I wanted it cut, styled. Somehow she just knew.

112

So Clean

Even with the meds, she still had to tell herself not to be sad. Each day, she said, each day the dark thoughts smoldered sooty even as she smiled demure and rubbed his earlobe between her fingers, careful not to scratch him with one of the splintered, teeth bitten nails. Soaking all that time in the bath she drowned herself countless times yet always stepped out robed and very clean. Here in this photo she is a girl so tiny and frail on the piano bench, her head caught cocked in motion, her fingers a blur trilling. Six years old, maybe seven. She appears determined and focused. I get a magnifying glass and split her lips as wide as the lens will make them and still I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell if that is a true smile. In the picture that hangs over the mantle she is lying down, flat hands meeting as if in prayer aside her cheek. This is the one that started her career as a model and took her away from music and us, even though we, her children were not yet born. I tape the last box with the roller. My siblings, honking from the curb outside, have had it with me. Even though I look not a thing like her, they worry Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve caught what mother had, that I might be just this much cracked and broken. I pull out the dresser drawers. A stray marble rolls diagonally from one corner to another. I dump the wooded drawers on the bed upside down. I shake them, thinking there has to be something left behind: a clue, a hieroglyphic, but all there is that marble and a dull dust cloud thick enough to make me cough.

113

Early

She me took into the back room where the mouse-eating snakes were. In frail light the glass aquariums glowed radioactive-green. All I saw at first was tawny straw and clumps of fake rock. “Isn’t that one something?” she asked. “Where?” She tapped the glass and I held my breath but nothing moved. Her name was Roberta but I called her Bobby. Bobby wore boots and jeans like mine, boy’s styles. She knew curse words I’d never heard. Bobby’s Dad owned the pet store but they had just sold it in order to move to California. “When are you going?” I asked above a blanket of electrical hum. My hairless armpits were clammy and I hoped I didn’t stink. “Next Tuesday.” “You glad about it?” “What do you think? It’s California.” “Yeah,” I said, not knowing. Bobby stared at me, her eyes pinched and sizzling with a mix of one thing true and another struggling. “You want to kiss me, don’t you?” “I guess I do,” I said. “Yeah.” “It’s gonna cost you then.” “I ain’t got nothing.”

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“That right?” “It is. If I had anything, I’d give it to you kiss or no kiss, if you asked.” She leaned across and stabbed me with her lips, then mashed them up against mine. My teeth hurt from the pressure but I didn’t dare say so. When she pulled away, Bobby wiped her mouth and said, “I don’t much like boys,” and I said I knew that. “Early Prescott,” she said, using her nickname for my real one, Earl, “you are in love with me, aren’t you?” She was moving on Tuesday and it was an honest fact she’d spoken, so I nodded as hard as when Mother sent us to confession. Bobby clucked her tongue and said, “You’d better get some sense into your head before it’s too late.” I had questions, but Bobby started to fumble with the gunny sack. Inside it, squirming commenced but no squealing, nothing audible. The bag kept leaping at me, and in response I jumped a few times, embarrassed. There was no way that the mouse could sense my fear or sympathy. Bobby tipped the sack upside down over the aquarium and unknotted the brittle strand of rope that was in some ways like a snake itself. I waited for the mouse to drop out and when it didn’t, Bobby held the bag up high and poked her face inside, same as a mechanic, and when the mouse fell it scampered first across her face, ripping licorice red lines in Bobby’s skin before skidding and slipping and thudding with a soft cloud of dust. The snake crushed the mouse between its jaws. I looked away. Bobby punched me in the ribs. “Sissy Boy,” she said. When I turned back Bobby wiped the last of the blood oﬀ her cheek as if it was no more than rain or spittle. Her eyes were riveted. A potato-sized lump caught a few inches down the snake’s throat. “Can you imagine being able to do that?” Bobby asked. 115

I shook my head. “Why would you want to?” She snorted and I could tell from the defeated twinge of that sound it was time to go. I watched their pickup and van pull away. Bobby never wrote back, but I guess that’s California for you. In his first year, the new owner had a fire and many of the pets and animals went up in flames. People were sick about it for a while, but then all sorts of jokes started around about barbequed this and smoked that. I went to college in Oregon. My dorm was cold and smelly. The other day I heard a rat or mouse, something scratching inside the heat vent overhead. It struggled, seemed about to tumble. I folded my hands behind my neck, unable to sleep, listening. I kept my eyes open.

116

Improvised for Eric Ward

We took turns stealing, little things at first, then larger items as the day progressed. “I think I can get the cooler,” Clay said. “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “You’ll get busted. We’ll get busted.” When he came out of the 7/11 he not only had a cooler but two six packs of light beer and a bag of crushed ice. I expected him to be grinning but he looked disappointed. My brothers kept dying. That’s the way my mom put it when she described her half dozen miscarriages. “God takes care of his mistakes,” she said. I wondered about that, questions springing up like leaks. “But I got you,” she said. “You’re more than enough for any mother. And you, you’ve got Clay.” Clay lived next door to us. His dad sold life insurance and had tried to kill himself twice. Clay never talked about his mother and she was not around. He liked to hunt and used just a bow and arrow. He got elk and could skin and gut them himself. He got a black bear once. He got a dean’s wife, too. He was blonde and tan with eyes the color of sea glass. He drove an old Willy’s Jeep and wore ratty shirts and puka shells. He liked to start fires for no reason other than boredom. Once a field fire got away from him and we spent two hours hopping on weed flames until our tennis shoes melted into fondue. He never apologized because we never got caught.

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Another time we ate mushrooms and went to the Asotin County Fair. The colors were liquid and streaky like squirt gun sprays of neon shooting through my corneas. Then everything was funny, even the sad, overweight ticket taker with mustard on the knees of his pants. There was a bluﬀ where the end of the Fair trailed oﬀ into field and we climbed it. A few times I thought I’d fall and for some reason the idea didn’t scare me at all. I expected to fly or be caught by the ever-present hand of God. I had a lot of thoughts. At the top we gasped, my lungs blazing, thirstier than I’d ever been in my life. We spotted a couple rolling around on top of each other beneath a tree. They were all skin and hair and limbs and sounds. It felt wrong to look, to listen. Clay couldn’t get enough of the pair, only he was crying. I’d never seen that before. It made me queasy. “Hey, what’s going on?” I asked, but he didn’t say. *** I was pretty angry that he’d joined up without telling me. When I asked why, his dad shrugged through the phone, saying “It’s just something he had to do.” I hoped I’d be a stronger man than Clay’s father when I had a kid of my own, but I wasn’t sure. Like everybody else, I forgot about the wars. They were starting to put out movies about the conflicts, none of them really blockbusters. I went to one by myself. It felt so real, which is how I knew the director had made it all up. They call them I.E.D.’s, Improvised Explosive Devices. They’re homemade bombs, booby traps. Your boot heel catches on a wire in the dirt and you end up a mush of dust and blood. So I’m not sure what they buried in his casket, maybe mementoes—his puka shells, yearbook photos. After the funeral I drove to the old store and parked in the lot and sat there wishing I smoked. I tried to conjure up a spark of nostalgic fear but my nerves had short circuited. Instead I thought about the things we’d stole, forgetting where we’d put them.  118

What Became of the Clouds

They caught the man who raped our neighbor. Tried him, sent him to jail, but Mother was right. That wasn’t enough. The woman’s name was Shirley Watson. I knew her better than most adults because I was in love with her daughter but had never said so to anyone. Lynn was too pretty for me. I was a pal, a friend. She might have even thought me gay. This in the year of our Lord, 1976. That fall the winds came and the cedar seedlings coated the sidewalks a sooty rust color and clogged up the gutters. Windows shuddered and garbage cans rattled down the pavement. The power winked off and on. Any day that I looked into the sky it appeared coffee-stained, smudged, and it seemed the clouds became sheets of ragged, dirty laundry floating. Mrs. Watson still made us Kool-Aid and cinnamon rolls. She still let us listen to Sherry’s record collection. She hummed and smiled the same amount as she had before. The weather was different, but for some reason Mrs. Watson wasn’t. So it came as a shock when she went ahead and killed herself. Tony, my best friend for a while, he said Mrs. Watson hung herself using several pair of nylons. I didn’t know how that could be, how they’d possibly be strong enough, but I didn’t share my thoughts. Instead I slugged Tony in the jaw and walked away even while he screamed every curse word I knew at the time.

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Lynn’s older sister, Sherry, most resembled their mother. Even my own heart crashed into a million jagged fragments every time I saw her. After a few months, it didn’t matter anymore. Lynn’s Dad moved them to Canada, someplace in Manitoba. I looked for Lynn on Facebook the other day. It felt sinful and creepy, yet my pulse raced and my fingers couldn’t stop scrolling. In her photo, Lynn’s head was tilted, gazing northward, and I could tell she’d taken it herself. All her information was locked. In order to gain access, it said I needed to ask her to be my friend.

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Stems

When I pick her up from school my daughter says, “Mom always takes us to Chili’s.” I wonder who else goes with, then realize “us” just means them. After we’ve eaten we get back into the car and I don’t start it. I angle the rearview so I can see my daughter, see how she has my ex’s nose and her cleft chin. My daughter works her jaw, frowning, straining. “What’re you eating?” She slurs the word, “Nothing” but I can see it there between her tongue and gums, what looks like a piece of leather shoe lace. “What is that thing in your mouth?” She spits it into her palm and slips it into her pocket like a church oﬀering. “It’s nothing, just a cherry stem.” “You’re still hungry?” “No.” I haven’t started the engine yet. I’m waiting for an answer, plus I’m nervous myself. I paid a maid to clean my apartment, but I realize there will be comparisons. My daughter looks panicked. “Aren’t we going to go?” I turn on the radio. Some band called Everclear sings about still dreaming of the west coast. My daughter shifts, knees folded toward me as a buﬀer. “Okay,” she says, “so if you can tie a knot with your tongue it’s supposed to mean something.”

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“Mean what?” She blushes so that her cheeks match her lipstick. “Can we just go? Please?” Today Doug from work had me go to Human Resources. Some coworkers said they smelled alcohol on my breath, though I proved it was just a new brand of cologne. “Okay,” Doug said, “but you’ve changed, and that’s not a compliment.” When we get to the apartment my daughter and I watch a movie, a documentary about the slaughter of an entire African village. The whole time my daughter texts her friends, sometimes giggling at a response. In the morning I take her to school and drop her off in the same spot I picked her up yesterday. I’m late but I drive back to the apartment anyway. The maid must have moved the bottle from where I keep it under the bathroom sink. I search everywhere. I punch a wall. The mirror wobbles and glass chinks like sleigh bells. I remove a tub of Scope and drink from the spout without breathing, gulping, wishing it didn’t burn so much, wishing it burned differently. My daughter’s sweatshirt is left on the couch. When I pick it up, a skein of a hundred cherry stems falls out. I pick a stray off the floor. It tastes earthy and raw, used. I work with my tongue until sweat drips down my nose and into my mouth. After a while, I use my fingers and it’s it like diapering a fly, but I get the knot made, I do, heart-shaped with a twist. Then I put it back in my mouth and swallow.

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Up On a High Shelf, the Living and the Dead

All her wigs are lined up by hue, each nestled atop a torso-less mannequin, just heads, and of course a sight like that can frighten anybody, especially a kid as young as me, yet I find a footstool from her closet to get a closer look where they sit like glass-eyed zombies, freaky, ghostly, these facsimiles of women who are not my mother. I recognize nothing but the tinny odor of her hairspray, remembering how that was always the last application after her shower and wardrobing, accessorizing, checking makeup in the mirror. I am strong but I admit to missing her, to needing the warm wind of my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breath down my neck as she napped. That time seems not so long ago, like night which was up and then gone, a curtain drawn then opened. So now I do the damndest thing. I close my eyes and rifle my fingers across the plastic cheeks of each mannequin. I picture skin and a face, pretty. I touch there but not the hair, the wigs which are styled perfectly.

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Normal

After twenty-two weeks of pregnancy, our friends lose their baby one day but they are not bitter. They give her a name, Rose. Later, they celebrate Rose’s birthday with a cake, the same as if she’s alive, right there with them, gurgling and maybe assaulting the frosting and ice cream, eyes mesmerized by the solitary flame signifying a year, while squealing parents and friends huddle around, saying, “Make a wish!” as someone leans over and blows the candle out and the crowd claps and life goes on as normal. In bed that night my wife leaves her novel on the stand and curls into me, her skin dryer-warm and supple. I say, “Hey, what’s this?” but she doesn’t speak. Our hearts hurdle over each other and it’s to their persistent rumble that my thoughts align with the stillborn baby and the one we lost ourselves, and after an eternity of reflection, I tumble into a dark funnel and sleep. In the morning my wife is gone. I go to the bathroom and pee first thing as usual, come out scratching my head and find her message written with lipstick across the mirror: I’M GOING TO FIND NORMAL I don’t dress. I get in the car wearing what I’ve had on in bed: a tee shirt and boxers. I cruise the development and circle cul-de-

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sacs. Neighbors I do not know well eye me through their windows with suspicion. I drive like this for hours. Around noon, as I’m on the way to the police station, my cell rings and it’s Christina telling me my wife is at their house and she’s asking for Rose, she wants to play with Rose, she’s brought Rose a present, a doll, a used one, the doll her own mother gave her. When I arrive, Christina leads me upstairs to the nursery. My wife is kneeling in front of the crib and she’s reading a rhyme about magical kangaroos. She smiles as I sit down. I take her hand. I’m about to say, “I’m sorry,” but she touches her fingertip to my lips and shushes me. “Let’s take turns reading,” she says, and we do. *** Later, in bed, I think: maybe we should have done what Christina and her husband did, acted as if everything was normal even though it wasn’t, even though our baby died while getting a bath. My wife blames herself, but I don’t. The doctors said it was SIDS, that the baby died unexpectedly, not of drowning, but for no reason, just stopped breathing. It can happen in a crib, in a person’s arms, or, apparently, a tub. Beside me, my wife stirs. “Do you hear that?” she asks “What?” “The baby. He’s crying.” “Honey—”, I start. But she’s up, moving down the hall toward the bedroom with the new crib. She’ll be there a few hours, same as the nights before. She’ll read a book and hum a few tunes in the soulless room, but she’ll be back. After a while, she will.

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Doppelganger

She wakes in breaks, in pieces of light, with the night tattered by tight little pulls. She was dreaming something, a reverie of purpose and aim. What was it? Running, chasing, being chased? Her life is a race. She wishes she had better lung capacity. Her breasts are so large, her nipples lovely tan pucks, but her rib cage is hollow and cracked in hard-to-reach places. She wonders if her life is a lie. At the most, it feels like a sham. If she looked into a mirror she would see two new wives, brides, neither one so pretty or thin, but still young, yes, their skin cookie sheet-smooth. She has this to oďŹ&#x20AC;er him, just this, her corporeal self, and so she rolls into the warm, bent cave of his spine. She tents the blanket with an elbow working, traces the bumps, the kite-tail bone that holds him in place. If she removes a disc, would he crumble? Has he ever? She bites her lip. Ripe. She will not cry, there are no tears for this sort of thing, yet she needs him to wake and to take her in his arms, and she needs someone, you perhaps, to understand why she cannot be brave.

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Little Holocausts

Everyone else is weighted down by gloom, and while it feels strange to covet their sadness, that’s what I do. Someone has died, a celebrity I’m unfamiliar with. If I admit my ignorance there will be a deeper chasm and I can’t allow that to happen because the strangest things frighten me: gaps, ellipses, distance and dirt, echoes. On the bus people are living. I watch a woman bury her ruddy face inside a bible and gasp with eyes closed. A teen with hair shorn to bristles and skin drawn taut around his temples grins like a starving skull, bobbing to inaudible music. The little girl in the back sits alone and gauges everyone else’s reaction by angling their reflections in the window glass. That child is me but no one realizes it. Sometimes I’m not even sure. When I told my teacher my life was boring, that I have nothing to write about, she said, “What about your mother who killed herself?” I wish she hadn’t said that out loud in class. Although she may have wanted to die, Mother never committed suicide. The reason I’m on this bus is I need to go somewhere. It’s hard not to envy people with a destination in mind. I’ve gone to all sorts of diﬀerent places. I’ve walked the cemetery until I found Mother’s tombstone and I’ve also visited my father in prison. Sometimes I’ll ride the bus for hours and never get oﬀ until it’s late evening, and then when I do step into the street, I hold my head high like a proud statue and never look back.

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I have a collection of found articles, mostly torn ticket stubs, but some others-- change, a set of car keys, a syringe, condom wrappers, cherry-flavored cough drops, and a crucifix. I found a wallet once. The owner was handsome with hair as black as crow plumage. The man had three children. Not one of them resembled me or anyone I know, but something hinted familiar. In any event, I immediately fell in the love with the son whose name I pretend is Edgar. Now when I ride, I take Edgar with me or I imagine I am on the way to a rendezvous. I’ve read in a magazine how romance is dead, but I don’t believe it. Sometimes it’s good to make up your own truth, facts and conditions. My chest does a war dance every time I hear the vehicle approach. Today the bus is airplane-loud, gassy stinky, dustcoated from the drought the city’s been slapped with. The driver knows me well. Buck is his name, which is just another irony since his sunken eyes are as green and untrustworthy as a dollar bill. His hands are girl-smooth, his fingers sharp and spindly. He always winks when I get on, but that’s okay, because even later, after all the passengers have disappeared and it’s just him and me, it’s an easy exercise to conjure Edgar. Here’s what I do: I close my eyes, hold my breath and speak a silent prayer, then I picture Edgar and I riding in an old-fashioned carriage or coach. In my mind, I take Edgar’s hand and he kisses my knuckles and everything is perfect. You can call me silly or crazy, I don’t care because I’m a romantic as well as a survivor. I’m convinced that love’s what we need in order to endure life’s little holocausts. But this is just me thinking, my belief, another one of the laws I’ve created to get me past this place and onto the next.

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At the Water’s Edge

The frogs are frightening, scummy gray-green, huge, the size of calzones. Where they came from is anyone’s guess. The manmade lake that sits between the strip mall and industrial park where I work used to be blue and clean-scented, not like a shower, but at least similar to day-after rainfall. Now cattails have sprouted up unruly, dirty bruise-colored, and there’s a silty web over what was once topaz beach sand brought in by truck. And of course there are those frogs. One swivels its head. I knew owls could do that, not frogs. It looks at me with its independent eye bugged out, a pimple needing popping, and opens its jaws and burps. A shredded napkin of air-breath floats from its mouth, invisible yet broiling rotten. I usually eat my lunch at the water’s edge, by the crosswalk bridge, between a hunchbacked boulder. I’m shy that way. On this afternoon the sky is patched with drifty clouds and it’s humid out which is rare, so I’ve got my hoodie oﬀ and I’m on a tarp of grass in my tank top and I’m still sweating when I hear someone come up from behind me and before I can swallow a bite of pesto-cucumber sandwich he’s aside me, saying, “Mind?” and sitting down a few feet from my knee. “Those frogs are something else.” I nod. The bread and food have congealed and golf-balled back by my molars, a gooey hairball impossible to swallow.

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“You all right?” I nod. His nose is flat, lumpy in the middle, twisted to one side. I want to ask if he was once a boxer, but of course I don’t. My eyes water and it’s all I can do to shield my heat-embarrassed face. “It says not to feed the ducks, but people never listen.” When I do finally manage to down the hunk of food, I gasp and jump right into the conversation because it seems the mannerly thing. “Do you think those frogs are eating the ducks?” He chuckles. It’s a confident, breathy laugh, with eyes that flutter right along. “You’re different,” he says. I remember Ronnie Millstone accusing me of kissing like a German Sheppard, all foam, tongue and teeth. I remember Mrs. Eastern, third grade, asking was there something I needed to share about my home life. I recall The subject was Object Civility not Japanese Calligraphy being written atop a term paper next to a red F-. I remember “Nut Job” being spray painted on the curb outside our house. Last night I stared at myself in the mirror. I alternated positions frequently. I modeled and held my head high, cocked my chin, pivoted, pirouetted, flipped my hand all traffic policewoman-like and said, “Gotcha!” I stripped naked and charted the moles on my chest, studying those encircling my nipples, the ones that reminded me of timid satellites. I also counted seven black-armed hairs in need of plucking. “I guess I am,” I said. He was staring at me and I realized then that I’d lost track of time and did not know how long of a lapse there had been from his question to my answer, so I added, “I am different.” His name was Jerry David. He had a surname but I just called him JD. We were married a year ago January. We both have different jobs now, JD one at Costco and me nursing this tyke that could rip the roof off the Vatican, he’s got such suction power with those six month old lips of his.

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Last night we lay in bed and because I thought JD was asleep I said, “Sometimes I think back about those frogs,” and JD surprised me by saying, “Me, too.” I waited awhile longer. “They weren’t really that ugly,” I said, and I think I meant it. He took my hand and we struggled a bit that way beneath the sheet, but he persisted and brought my fingers up to his face so that I could feel his breath washing over them. “You’re silly,” I said, even though I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “All right then,” I said. “Go ahead.” So he did. He kissed each and every knuckle.

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Thoroughfare

In the morning the sky smoldered inky plum, the darkest bruise, and we thought it was over, this world of ours gone up in plumes of missile smoke. This was before the internet or iPhones, when the war we fought was called Cold, and so not knowing what to do we got into the Chevy Nova and headed back to college, our good friend married off the day before, him looking so old and sullen on such a happy day. In the car we drank the beer we had. We told old stories we’d all heard a hundred times. We tried to be funny and witty as we picked apart the intentions of our newly married friend, us no different than buzzards. The ash began as a kind of gray snow, falling like tiny rodent mittens, just a smattering at first, then thick and heavy and blinding. Soon the windshield wipers strained to clear the bulk of it and we had to reach out the window and scoop away the flakey charcoal residue. On the radio they spoke of the volcanic eruption, how winds were carrying the mountain’s cinders as far as Richland, two hundred miles east. I sat in the backseat. “Why you so quiet?” they asked. After the grizzly way he’d killed himself, Mother had little choice but to have my Dad cremated. She kept him in what looked like a sleek flower vase and I used to feel guilty whenever I walked into that room. I imagined him stuffed and stuck inside, trapped without air, not ash at all but flesh and bone.

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Now I tried to find the road ahead—anything to dislodge my thoughts--but the windshield was coated. “You think we should pull over until this stops?” somebody said. But we didn’t. We drove on. At our married friend’s wedding reception, I had watched the new couple feed each other cake and smear their noses with globs of frosting. When he took the floor to dance with his mother, the bride bit her lip as she watched, soulful, expecting nothing yet.

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Two and a Half

When I arrived she was out of her wheelchair and seated on a gold sofa, so old now, so brittle-looking yet giggling like a child into her fist while watching a sitcom. A clear globe of snot filled her nostril, then burst and I remembered days of summer when she and I would have a bucket of soapy dishwater, homemade slush from which to blow bubbles using for a tool an old pair of eye glasses with the lenses popped out. In the raw sunshine, we blew and grinned. We hummed Partridge Family songs—“Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque” and “I Can Hear Your Heartbeat.” We liked the same things but would never admit it because we were twins. From the upstairs sundeck that one summer day we watched the bubbles glide windswept. Some caught on the old maple and stuck there like crystal balls. Others wobbled away, taking their sweet time before disappearing into a great skein of clouds. Below Dad loped across our sun-scorched lawn and ambled over the curb, holding his lower back and stretching before stepping inside the white Caddie. “I bet that lady makes him feel younger,” my sis said. Momma was inside the house and even though she couldn’t hear us way up there, even though she had no idea, I punched my sister harder than I meant to. She flew back. Hit the top porch rail mid-spine. I watched her eyes crack like white lightning, never again to be so lively or disgusted.

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Now she jerks when she senses my presence at the door frame, me having not knocked loud enough. “You scared me,” she says. On TV there are two men and a young boy, a laugh track. “You really scared me,” she says.

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I Like You

I am not a stalker, but I like you. Who wouldn’t? Your choices are often odd but seldom wrong. If there’s soup in summer, you’ll have it, slurping like a porpoise with that trilling giggle of yours. You have a list of eight things you can never have too much of. Seven of them make me quiver. You do not like animals other than stuﬀed ones, yet you pretend when your cousin, Pete, brings by his lab. You are strong yet lithe and unmuscled. I have posters of women with your shape of legs and the same small hands, though not one of the models can match you whole. Your eyes are ceramic blue. I have made many attempts, some quite despicable. Sometimes I hold my breath. A climax can be gory or glorious, both bliss and release, but it’s not pity I want, or even forgiveness. You should know that you are a permanent stain, a scar, a sickle cell, a long-worn smoke smell on my skin which soap cannot conquer or rid. This is not enough but it’ll have to do. I watch you from a safe perch, knowing where you are and what you’re doing, full of joy and promise in a life where I have left one foot in, and one foot out, of the picture.

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The Wages of Hunger

Playing backgammon made me hungry, the little pucks resembling Spree candies, though not as colorful. “You’re always starving,” my little brother said. After fifteen games, he’d lost everyone but I wouldn’t let him leave. The betting started then. He figured the odds had to be on his side, and honestly I did, too. Still I won his baseball card collection, his ten-speed, an autographed Joe Montana jersey and his allowance for the next several months. So we rolled and belt and ferried our pieces across the felt and I took the next ten games, which amounted to his allowance for one point five years. That was then. Tonight we’re having Thanksgiving at our place and we’re all soused. It’s not just the holiday, but we’re trying to get over Mom’s passing. When my wife says, “It was probably a relief,” the room goes silent, split down the middle, some thinking one thing, some another because while Mother’s illness was lengthy and savage, her husband was no picnic either. When someone puts on a Nat King Cole song, my brother’s new girlfriend holds a cocktail glass above her head as if to make a toast but she burps instead and then the next moment she’s swaying in front of a fire blazing so orange and liquid it seems to shimmy up her thighs and devour her dress. I watch her. I steal furtive glances. Sweat pearls trundle across my ribs as my stomach snarls.

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In the study the tang of nutmeg and wood polish fills the air but escapes in a cool rush as my brother closes the door behind him. He tells me his troubles with a straight face. I know a man with those same expressions. Well, I don’t know him, but he’s familiar, that slick-haired foreigner on the soap opera Ellen watches, yeah, him, he’s my brother’s twin. A slow tear stitches down my brother’s cheek. The track it leaves reminds me our tug-o-war games and then I recall the ditch where we tossed The Spadoni’s cocker spaniel when my brother accidentally ran over it a week upon getting his driver’s license. Now it’s something different. “I’m begging you,” he says. If Dad were alive to see this, I think, but don’t say. Dad was a bull, a mountain, a panther that could shred you with either claws or pupils. I open a drawer and take out a pen and we make arrangements. “Sure,” my brother says. His lower lip quivers. He’s hedging, yet the case is closed and he’s seen the scoreboard on this one, so he adds, “It’s only fair” to make it definitive. Two days later a nor’easter hits. People leave their cars where they will on the sides of the road rather than risk being stranded. Outside my hotel window the plows sound like airplanes that cannot achieve liftoff. I don’t expect her to show, but when knuckles rap on the door I’m up and off the mattress before I know it. She looks small and scrawny through the peephole, not really sexy at all. What was I thinking? Still I open the door and let her come to me. My brother’s girlfriend is not nervous in the slightest. Famished, her arms are open and her mouth is, too. She knows a winner when she sees one.

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Bananagrams

When her kisses become clipped, she says it’s because the cat hair is distracting. All the animal fur. I tell her they died years and years ago and she says, “See, right there’s the problem.” My mother coached me on love. She said it was a wretched thing, to be avoided at every cost. She said pets make the best lovers and you aren’t required to mate with them. My girlfriend says she’s recently gotten into Bananagrams and Mojitos. She’s not as exotic as she sounds. She wears flouncy hats that make her look like a gardener or hillbilly, but I don’t think I could do much better. In my performance evaluation, my boss said I can be neurotic but otherwise I show potential. I am good at math. I keep a clean work space. Still he sat behind a wide desk while he read to me from a print out. He kept skirting the top of the paper to see how I was reacting to his mundane news, wary, like a hopeless kidnap victim. On Dr. Phil the other day some social worker talked about classroom crime, bullying and brutal beatings done right in front of ogling teachers and superintendents. The expert said all animals have an innate instinct to protect their young. I wonder how many viewers watch Dr. Phil. Besides, it’s diﬃcult to know how much information to share with people. I’ve been burned.

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When my girlfriend leans over, I think she’s going to kiss me but instead it’s just the remote she wants. And that’s fine with me. I enjoy a good infomercial as much as the next guy.

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Up High in the Trees

In the tree fort, they share secrets and tell their made up stories. If it’s especially windy they will stand center floor, goofing, arms outstretched, until a gust throws one of them off balance. Other times Peter will hold Molly’s hand and she’ll let him until her palm gets sweaty. “Do you think you could ever marry me?” Peter asks. His throat stings like a scab that’s been pulled off too early. “I don’t think that’s the answer.” It unnerves him how smart Molly is, how much more mature than nine she sounds. Molly reads her older sister’s novels and already knows how sex works. Being with Molly is a sharp stabbing needle for Peter. His body and brain are race cars shooting sparks through his veins. He concentrates on relaxing. Even though she’s sitting right beside him, Peter closes his eyes, pulls up her face from memory, and does a speedy census of the freckles on Molly’s face. He gets to forty-two and recounts. “They say there’s nothing in Montana but trees and bears.” “Don’t worry,” Molly says, “It’s not as if I’m going to prison.” Molly rocks her legs and sighs. “On the map it looks long, like a diving board.” “Florida’s the same way, just angled different.” “But it’s warm in Florida and I’ve never seen a bear.”

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She kisses him, this time fluttering her lips instead of ironing them over his. When she’s finished he’s surprised that they’re both a little out of breath. “What’ll your dad do?” Peter asks. “Visit when he feels like it. Mom’s boyfriend is a cowboy, not a gunslinger.” Peter’s confused because in every western he’s ever watched the men wear holsters with six-shooters. They kill each other for any old reason, over spilled whiskey or bad cards. “I sort of hate divorce,” Peter says. His eyes burn. He wants to be strong for her so he looks up at the sagging roof. Some boards have water marks and others spools of algae. In the corner is a spider’s web woven thick as a hair ball. Molly takes Peter’s hand and squeezes his fingers. The pressure frightens him with its desperate urgency. “You got through it all right.” “I guess I did,” he says. Peter’s parents divorced a year ago. If they would have stayed together then his mother never would have moved to Florida and he would never have met Molly. Peter feels like puking. “Do you think life will make more sense when we’re older?” he asks. Molly clutches him to her chest, her rabbit heart thumping hard. Tears dribble into his hair. After a while, she asks what he’s thinking. “I was going to ask a favor.” “Okay,” she says. Molly sits up and brushes her face with the back of her hand. She puts her hands in her lap and twirls her fingers. She looks Peter in the eye. “When you find someone,” Peter says, “promise me you won’t give up.”

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All I Ever Wanted

Everything seems wrong, especially the music, a-ha on the radio singing, “Take On Me.” My daughter has her own music and earphones and cell phone. She has her new boyfriend whose fetus she has not yet been aborted. But we aren’t going there. Not yet. We drive. I check the rearview every few moments, worried that my daughter’s ramshackle furniture will come loose from the back of the truck. I was never a boy scout. Instead I stole things. I had a bug collection. I never learned how to tie a proper knot. The university is ninety more miles over the pass, across a road that winds like a very long eel. I pick up speed five mph at a time. My daughter’s mother said it’d be good if I were the one to get our girl situated. “You need to talk,” she said. She was always telling me that, in one form or another. Before we signed the divorce papers, she and I attended a pair of counseling sessions. “All I ever wanted was for you to talk to me, to tell me what goes on in that mind of yours,” my wife said. But by then she had a boyfriend herself and she spoke the words to the counselor instead of me, her face stricken and desperate. “That’s all it would have taken.” At the summit slope I round the corners sharp and fast. There it goes: a bean bag chair shooting free. Then an armoire

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whose landing is catastrophic, planks breaking like bones. My daughter looks up at me with her ear buds still stuﬀed. I give her a thumb’s up. When she eye-rolls, there’s not the slightest trace of irony or charm in her expression. The flat screen goes next. It catches a swig of wind and flies like a sleek chrome sled over the mountainside, downward and away. I think of words. I resort them, mix and matching sentences in my head, practicing what I will say.

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The Spiders in My Room

That night he stared at the ceiling waiting for the hairy spider to appear. He knew spiders weren’t nocturnal, but this one was. Half past midnight the gray coat arachnid appeared, his spiked fingers already busy weaving the same designs in the same corner. What an industrious fellow, thought Dave. “Fellow” was not a word Dave used, yet soon enough he’d be trying many new things, so why not start with vocabulary? For twelve nights running Dave had knocked the hell out of that furry spider, using a broom to whisk him and his handiwork to the floor in a mini, gauzy ball. Still, the goddamn creature kept coming back for more. A girl that persistent worked at the bookstore for a spell. Kinsey was her name, Kinsey with jet-black hair in a fishbowl shape with a door cutout where her pretty face sat. She wasn’t much for small talk. She moved quickly, even though her limbs were short and chubby. She’s onto college now, taking creative courses no doubt. Dave had every intention of being a writer himself. That’s how he could explain working at the bookstore for so long. “Free research,” he’d say, but then they’d look at him sideways, thinking, Dave realized later, “Internet, you idiot.” The truth was Dave loved books--their cauliflower smell, their covers glossy and provocative; tr ying almost pornographically to catch anyone’s attention, even a child’s. It started with a book, too.

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On break, Dave enjoyed reading in the café area. Bosses never minded because Dave was careful not to spill or drool while he snacked. In fact, no one noticed him while he read. One day Dave only got to the juicy middle of a Poe story—“The Fall of the House of Usher”, so he took the book home meaning to return it in the morning, but after he’d finished the tale there were others in the volume just as eager to be consumed, so Dave held onto it. Done, Dave set the paperback on the make-shift shelf and saw how lonely it looked. The next day he brought home a few hardbacks, and then added an assortment in the following weeks. He told Laurel he’d been promoted, that his raise came in the form of an enlarged discount equaling one hundred percent. And that might have been enough, but it never is, is it? There were only so many crafty ways to reconcile the registers. Doesn’t matter if it’s a chain you work for or a Mom and Pop--the higher-ups are going to catch on sooner or later. Funny thing was Dave knew it, too. “Look at that damn spider,” he whispered. “Oh, to hell with you.” Laurel was asleep beside him. The mattress rumbled. He couldn’t tell if it was gas or the baby rummaging, already so eager to escape the womb and enjoy freedom. If only Dave could warn the fetus, if only he could take it all back.

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Mermaid

You swim with the other orange fish, flapping, splashing in a man-made koi pond outside the Bank of America building just after noon on a hot Friday. I say, “Honey, how did you get here?” You giggle and gurgle, such a slippery young thing. “Come on,” I say, “what’re you doing?” Around me people come and go in a hurry. Darrell saunters over, gives me a head tilt and asks if everything’s okay, his Security badge glinting furious from sun glare. I hear your rippled laughter, high pitched and juvenile, lovely. It’s been so long, since that day on the boat, when you were angry. You said you didn’t need swimming lessons. Mermaids are waterborn. And when I said I’d teach you soon as the cruise was over, after we got back to the states, you threw a rare tantrum. I heard your mother’s voice say, “Just let her blow it oﬀ.” And though we were over by then, me and my ex-wife, I took her advice this once and didn’t chase after my little girl. “So what’s up, partner?” Darrell asks, his thick thumbs hooked through belt loops. He doesn’t see you because you’ve gone under, deep below the surface the way you must have after jumping overboard, hiding behind some slime-slickened boulder, blending in with the willowy seaweed or swimming to the far ends of the water the way mermaids do when they’re curious and bold.

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Daughter

I drove to LA to find my baby girl. A few times I thought I saw her on the 405 sporting new hair color and diﬀerent clothes, adjusting the lay of her bangs in the rearview. But when I finally found her she was naked except for a pair of stilettos and a g string. I should have looked away from the stage. I tried, I did, but some kind of rigor mortis set in. She slid across the spot lit floor. Her eyes were sharp and focused, and in them I saw murder and vengeance, ambition and renewal. I saw myself and every single sin. She arched her back like an acrobat, her spine as pliant as rubber. She wanted me to see the bills stuck inside her waistband, none under twenty, two or three Franklins. When she flipped forward I expected—I don’t know what I expected actually—but I didn’t anticipate her looking so much like her mother all those years ago, a virgin then, us unwed and me unraveled. I didn’t expect that, nor did I didn’t expect my baby girl to grab my neck tie, twist it and say, “What now, old man?”

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Press Rewind

Doug left me this morning. I searched the entire apartment for a note and found his message on the answering machine, Doug’s voice hoarse and whispery, yielding nothing but facts. I pushed rewind and got Carly instead, from a year ago, toddler gibberish really, the only recognizable word being “Mommy.” I replayed it nine times, my eyes burning as I tried to recall what life was like before the accident, the kind of mother I’d been. I knew the answer to that one, because I was the type of mother that drove drunk, the very kind to get smashed with her two-year old in the backseat. Right there in the kitchen I had it out with shame again. Leaning over the sink I tried to focus on the neighbor’s dog across the street, chasing its tail, spinning in a lopsided circle. A rancid odor, sharp and tangy rose up and I noticed a mildewed dishrag below. Next to my shoulder was the cupboard with a Smirnoﬀ bottle stashed behind the wedding china we’d never used. There was another pint at the back of the spice rack. The fridge hummed, hollowed-out but busy-sounding, like locusts descending on a petal-perfect meadow. I picked up a saucer and dropped it just to hear the thing shatter. A sliver stabbed my hand, and though I waited for the blood to bead up, none came. When I turned around, the wooden cupboard began to breathe. The bronze door knob winked at me.

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We have a fickle union with life and death. Doug and I hadn’t even been trying to get pregnant. So Carly had started out as an accident, even before the one she and I had together. I went to her room and stood staring at the Little Bo Peep stencils and the colorings she’d done on notebook paper—bright mishmashes of grass-green and pineapple yellow, mango, berry. “She’s going to be an artist just like you,” Doug said. We were on the porch, the night sticky, crickets bleating. I still remember the taste of his kiss, peppery with licorice, when he reached across. At the bedroom door I saw the cuﬀ of Carly’s sweater coat sticking out from under the crib. It was the one with the snowman pattern and wooden buttons. I pressed my face into it, inhaling long and deep, but the only scent was the barnyard odor of raw wool. I forced my hands through the tiny arm holes and wore it backwards against my chest as if it were a shrunken apron. I imagined her in my arms, the two of us dancing. I swayed. I hummed, “Mockingbird.” I made new promises I would keep this time and I spoke them aloud. As I came down the stairs, Doug was just closing the door. Carly shot free of his grip and ran, clutching my knees. “Second?” she asked, “Second?” This was her word for hug. She had a habit of wanting one when I was in the middle of something, and invariably I’d say, “In a second, Honey.” In a second. Her face was furnace-warm against my cheek, and I fingered her chin, searching out the tiny scar from the accident. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” Doug’s arms came around us. “She can’t live without you.” “Thank you.” “I can’t either,” he said. I held on. I let the room spin. I kept my eyes open.

150

Ruthless Trust

My wife says I’ve been sleepwalking again. Next she asks, “When’s Ben coming?” Sunlight splits the seams of our bedroom window shades. Jody’s elbow is propped over a pillow. When she sighs, a warm gust of breath—smelling like the soles of old shoes—washes over my face. She’s pretty, however, even with her hair misshapen from slumber. “How’d you know?” I ask. “When, and for how long, is he staying?” “A few days, a week maybe, I don’t know. He’ll be here this afternoon.” She punches the pillow and curses while a dingy gray feather floats in the hazy brightness. I lay there listening to her ritualized shower and grooming. She’s not gentle with the dresser drawers. She’s ready in record time. The suitcase looks natural in her hand even if it is scarred and battered, a relic from my days as a dress shirt vendor. “I’ll call your cell,” I say. “You do that.” ***

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He and I, my son and me, we go to a bar first thing after he arrives. It’s Ben’s idea, and for me it’s a safe venue. The only thing I worry about is what will happen later. He looks like a moody grizzly, bearded, long hair, tufts curling out of his shirt collar. He slumps across the counter, hands clamped around the throat of a glass as if he’s strangling it. “You miss me?” he asks, and when I hesitate Ben cackles while a memory of breaking furniture plays. The label in front of me says that my whisky is the byproduct of rare malt and grains, that prior to being bottled it has spent twelve years maturing in oak casket. “How long you here for?” I ask a few moments later, this being the bravest thing I’ve said so far. “Don’t wet yourself, I’ll be gone tomorrow.” He holds a shot glass up for Phil to take note of, and as Phil does his bartender eyes zigzag from Ben to me. After we’ve been there a few hours the predictable happens and Ben is recognized. The guy motions, “Watch me,” to his friends and then collides, spilling half his beer across Ben’s back. “Oops, sorry there, partner.” “Asshole.” “Kid killer.” I leap oﬀ my stool and get between them in time. “Lou, you gotta go,” Phil says to me. To my son he says, “You deaf?” *** Ben waits until we’re home. The first blow catches me unaware. The next barrage lands everywhere but above my shoulders. Ben knows what he’s doing, has done this before. He knows how to keep the evidence out of view. “You wouldn’t defend me!” he screams, his fists a blur. “Not even your own son.”

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Years ago, the girl’s name was Holly. She was six. Ben used to babysit. There were many obvious linkages but nothing they could make stick. “That wife of yours has poisoned you,” my son screams, a chair leg in his hand now, forgetting he was the one.

153

In Flight

The Captain looks like you, a spiral notebook man, loose blonde curls and self-tanner. He asks if anyone has questions and I ask back, “How much does a Vodka Collins cost?” There’s turbulence rumbling thunder in my stomach, working its way to my throat. The clouds spell a name in Spanish. Through a crease of light I see Brazil and what our unborn child would have looked like.

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Starling

In the northeast corner of my window a spider knits furiously. A fluttering bird like a blurry ball watches for a second before pecking. The lake is plain and murky, camouflage patterns waving on its skin. The creature swirls and swoops, cutting kerns across the waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reflection. Any time now he will digest. In a moment, gasping bass will leap.

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Scoliosis

When I answered the door there was a blind man hunched over. He asked for someone I’d never heard of. He coughed and fiddled with the ratty cuﬀs of his cardigan. Now he comes over several times a week. He never tells a story. All he does is stare at me with milk-blue eyes and says, “I think you will grow up with a crooked spine.” Each time, he tells me straight-faced.

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Locked In

My phone blinks at me. I try to pretend it winks but I am not easily fooled nor is the phone which has a diďŹ&#x20AC;erent brain than me, garden variety circuitry, wires to light up this dull room where I sit waiting for your call. In another space I hear clawing on a wall, a mournful wail, the demons itchy to get me. I should call 911, but Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll give you one more minute.

157

Hunger Strike

Nightly my grandfather drank tumblers of rye while watching Lawrence Welk. When it was time for bed, he’d rinse the glass, fill it with water and something that fizzed like Alka-Seltzer, then plop his teeth in. I’d wait until he’d gone to bed. Then, like being bewitched by a marine aquarium, I’d stare at the floating dentures, the rows of straight yet yellowed teeth, the pink plastic gums attached, the tiny air bubbles zigzagging up the surface. In the mornings, my grandfather took us to the fields and we’d plow or bale or hoe. At lunch we’d have clammy bologna sandwiches that tasted like dirt and chaﬀ, and my grandfather, in his thick German accent, would tell us about “hard times.” He said people were starving then. He said we didn’t know how lucky we were to have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies. He claimed the world would never see such ruin again. Now I watch my own son sleep. His mother has left him with me for the weekend. Each time we talk on the phone, she asks the same thing--if I’ve found a job yet--and every time it’s like taking an ice pick through the eye. Last Thursday I stopped eating. At first, it was only because I’d forgotten lunch, then dinner, and then it was the next day and I thought I’d see how far I could take this self-styled starvation. My boy is sleeping on the couch, the game control still grasped in one hand, blanket over him dusted with orange-yellow shavings. When I spot the Cheetos bag by his socks, my stomach

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kicks. I swallow bile and the burn is like a scalding iron jammed down my throat. I bought this apartment after the divorce. Our house had been stucco, nice, upscale. Now I’m in arrears and I’ll be moving out soon. I know how that’ll make me look to the kid and the ex. Of course, there are some jobs I could get--high school things at fast food restaurants--but a man my age has to keep some pride. It’s been four days since I’ve eaten. I look thinner, sure, but not haggard. I’ve been out of work 422 days. It’s hardly a record, from what everyone tells me. But I’ve pledged not to have so much as a snack until I’m hired. I boot the computer and check the job postings. Pop-ups show me ads for resume writing courses, college applications. All the models are beautiful and twenty. A couple of weeks ago I was driving late at night. The thought just blipped out: how easy it would be to plunge the car oﬀ the cliﬀ and be done with it all. But I figure this is a fair fight. If I get a job soon, I’ll be able to repair some of the devastation. If I don’t, well, there’ll be no need for a messy crash--I’ll be bones. Tit for tat, as Granddad would say.

159

Burial Music

The police show up at my apartment because this is the address they have. They are men with short-sheeted smiles and irritable bowels and they do not accept my offer of coffee or soda because what they want is you. For a minute I consider lying, creating a ruse, a stall tactic. I could say you are dead and have been for months now, and then by the time they’d discovered the truth I could check their claims out for myself, but I’m a bit of a coward, aren’t I, Mother? I was the daughter who disappointed you when my knees turned to fluid on the high dive. Neither could I go on roller coasters or The Space Needle because I’m afraid of heights, which is why I take trains to conferences instead of flying. I let you down so many times, in so many different fashions, but you got even, didn’t you? Big time even. Sergeants Hennessey and Miller let me ride shotgun and while I’m grateful for this dutiful courtesy, I can’t help but think I should be in back, handcuffed or hogtied. In this car with its dormant silence I feel guilty for every sin of my life. I am like the character in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.” My thighs itch but after a while I have to bite my lip to stop myself from scratching because Hennessey, the one with the jawbreaker boil on his neck, keeps flashing excited pupils whenever I move the hem of my skirt in order to get at the offending patch of skin. When we pull up, the old elm trees seem to recognize me. A breeze catches their underbellies, tossing their leafy arms, waving hello, welcoming me with a curious hiss. 160

The front lawn is scorched but for where blackberry bushes have ravaged a few begonias and started in on the porch, knitting the posts with their thorny grasp. I knock. I knock and knock. When you do not answer, I reach atop the door frame and retrieve a key and Hennessey looks at me, fed up, thinking, What was all that knocking for? I am a poor hostess and tour guide. Mostly I watch them search the house. As a surprise, they are mostly gentle and discriminate. This is nothing like the ransackings I’ve seen on television where pillowcases are sliced open and gutted, bureau drawers flung across, cabinets destroyed. When they’re done with the house, Hennessey’s partner catches me exhaling and a worm arches its back where his lip would be. “Mind if we have a look outside?” he asks, his eyes on the screen door. He’s not asking, he’s telling me this is their next step. “Sure,” I say. “But you have to remember, she’s an old woman. She wouldn’t be strong enough,” I say, wanting to add, “or lucid enough.” Hennessey cocks his chin and I see all sorts of defensive, insecurities flare: I see him picked on as a youth, I see him being rejected at a school dance, I watch him crying himself to sleep in an empty bedroom. Right now I see a man who wants me to believe he’s an expert when it comes to love and jealousy, the pitiful side of human nature. I extend an arm: be my guest. The door catches and after a moment Hennessey has to kick the jam before it swings free. It has been several years since I’ve been back to this old place and I’m not expecting it to match my memory identically, but still I gasp. I gather my hands to my face. I shake my head. There are graves in our back yard, humpbacked mounds of dirt, one or two fresh, some otherwise littered with random wildflowers—buttercups or bluebells, dandelions and sticker bushes.

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“Shovel in the garage?” Hennessey’s partner asks, but he’s already on his way. “It doesn’t make sense, I mean, how could she? Why would she? They’re just instruments. He never played, he conducted.” You come home in the early evening. We’ve been waiting many hours and what the officers have unearthed sit on the floor like metal artifacts: A tuba, cello missing a string, a broken oboe, many other woodwinds, a snare drum, one badly bent cymbal, a timpani. I’m on the couch, sitting rigid as if someone is about to paint my portrait. Hennessey and Miller stand behind me. They’re cool cucumbers but I can feel Hennessey’s breath move uneven on my shoulder, raising an addition layer of goose flesh. “Later Mrs. C,” a boy says, and you say, “Have fun on your date,” and turn in the doorway, small and crimped, a frail replica of the hard woman from ages ago. Your eyes swarm me like milky slugs. “Rachel?” “Come have a seat, Mom. We need to talk.” You sit down, eyeing the officers, cottonmouth making your lips smack as they introduce themselves. Miller gets right to it, reading a list of items stolen from the school over the summer. Their total cost is half the price of my walk-up in Brooklyn. Hennessey doesn’t ask if you did it, he goes straight for the jugular and asks how. You flap your hands, age spotted like raw-edged dimes. You look at me pleadingly, this new vulnerability a switchblade across my gut. When you next dip your head and mew, “Please” it’s such an unexpected response that I catch my breath and then I get the officers to give us a few minutes alone before they take her in. “I don’t know why,” you say before I’ve even asked. Then you punch the sofa cushion between us. I expect my fingers to burn when I touch your wrist but they don’t.

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“The affair wasn’t about sex. I did not desire Roger Green one stitch. Roger was your father’s best friend, so I thought, what a better way to spite him for being so obsessed that pet orchestra of his. He loved it more than me, yes he did, and so I made sure he found out about Roger.” This is the first time you have ever used the word affair with me. “I certainly never expected your father to kill himself. I anticipated the opposite, for him to come around, to come back to me the way he was all those years ago when we first started courting.” You slap your fists on your thighs until I catch them and hold tight. “There such a horrible song of guilt inside of me. I hear it every evening. In the morning it drowns out the birds, traffic even. It calls me a murderer.” I pull you into me. At first you resist. You are a skeleton and skin and a sweater, smelling powdery. I let you cry. I picture us reversed, me the one bawling, a little girl and you the woman teasing your fingers through my curls, patting my shoulders. “Am I such a bad person?” you ask. “Of course not,” I say. I don’t tell you the truth, that I’m the bad one. I let the image come back to me—Dad with that young man, a trombonist, the two of them naked and moving on the bed, Dad turning to find me home from school early, staring, then screaming. I promised I wouldn’t tell yet he surely didn’t believe me. The next day he hung himself, but me, I kept my end of the bargain. I eye the instruments over your shoulder. They resemble a dusty jury and now I can hear it, their song rising up with swooning incriminations, woodwinds the ocean’s turbulent waves, cymbals the water crashing on lichen-covered boulders, spraying everything frigid. I hold you tight, my teeth chattering. I squeeze you, realizing now how much alike we are and then I say it right into your ear, the words carrying a lilt of their own. I tell you I am sorry, so so sorry.

163

The Musketeers

The mice hunkered together gray and trembling in one corner of the box, four of them. They had been born blind , never even acquiring eyes. They scrabbled against the hard paper, shivering under the light, sensing its sudden heat upon my son flipping open the lid. He named them the Four Musketeers. One had a white oval shape on its head as if it had been scalded. My son said to notice their twitching whiskers. He said, “Put your finger under their nose and see what happens,” and when I did the first one nipped my nail. “Hey!” “They’re just being friendly.” “Where did you get them anyway?” “I thought they were a present from you.” “Are you kidding me? I hate rats.” “They’re not rats.” “Mice, hamsters, gerbils, what’s the diﬀerence?” He pushed out his lower lip. His eyes began to water. I apologized. My son insisted on taking the mice with him wherever he went. I allowed it except for school, and even then I discovered him stuﬃng the mice into a metal lunch box, camouflaging the rodents with his blankets of bread and PB & J.

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He wrote stories about his blind mice. He read them aloud to the mice and had the critters act out some of the scenes by holding up a furry limb and moving it to whatever action he needed. My wife said it wasn’t healthy. She said the boy had my imagination and she didn’t mean that as a compliment. She warned me. My own parents were tyrants—belt on buttocks, pants pulled down-types. They’d made me the opposite, a softie. When my wife gave me notice, I was blindsided. We’d made love for several hours the night before. “Is this for real?” I asked, flapping the divorce papers over my cereal bowl. “It’s as real as your lousy cunnilingus,” she said. My boy took the news especially well. He said, “It’s all right, Dad. We’re men. We’re survivors.” A month went by, then several more. It felt okay. My son was right. Then my wife phoned. “You’re sick,” she said. I told her I felt really good. “Stop the games.” “What are you talking about?” “The mice.” “Huh?” “They’re everywhere.” “What do you mean?” “There must be a hundred. I open the door and five or six slip out. The landlord’s promising to evict me.” I was stunned but even so I chuckled. “Yeah, very funny. Not only that, I keep finding mice pellets everywhere. This morning I found a paw in my cereal and I accidentally ate it thinking it was a yogurt cluster in my Special K. Stop laughing. What if I get rabies?” When I saw my son, we exchanged looks. I asked how The Four Musketeers were. He said, “They’re tuckered out.” “Can I see them please?” 165

“I don’t want to wake them.” “I’ll be careful.” He brought me a bassinet, a Moses basket with a rattan handle, lifted the blanket and showed me they’re quivering slumber. “Is that good enough?” he asked, and I said it was.

166

Stones

My daughter bought a guitar because she said she needed to be happy, but then the strings hurt her fingers. My ex-wife said, “That’s the problem right there.” When I picked her up from school she was huddled with another boy, his head hidden in a black hoodie. They were both plump and smoking and staring at the same puddle of muddy slush, neither speaking. She gasped as she got in, bitter nicotine washing the air. “Good day?” I asked, but she was already lost to her phone. When I was a kid my father would take us to the fields to pick fruit. This was when there were no age restrictions. We were the only white family. The ones who picked fastest knelt on the stoneladen path instead of scooting on their ass. My ex used to make fun of my knees, saying mine looked like they belonged to a moose. “Was that a boyfriend?” I asked my daughter. “The guy back there?” She flinched. “Hell no.” “Hey, watch the language.” “What language?” she asked me, startled and sincere. Outside gas prices were up again. Steel colored rain spat at a slant. A skinny stray dog trotted through traﬃc. We pulled up later than I’d planned. My daughter said, “I want to stay in the car.” We argued and she won and when I went inside, down the hall to the last room, the man there looked like a

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cadaver version of my father. His eyes were egg shell white and day-old whiskers littered his parched skin like salt sprinkles. I told him all about the divorce again, about the bad things I’d done. I told him how afraid I was. He never answered, just sat staring at a wall calendar, his mouth wide like a trough. “Okay, Pop.” When I kissed his head I thought I felt his hand reach out and brush against mine, but it could have been my knees getting in the way. The car was filled with fresh cigarette smoke, everything tinged gray. My daughter did a double take, eyeing me suspiciously. “Holy hell,” she said, “have you been crying?” I put my forehead on the steering wheel. It felt cold and hard, familiar.

168

Someone Else’s Wife

Someone else’s wife is with my husband right now, in the Meat Packing District not far from Mark’s oﬃce. They just bought her a new pair of Louboutins at Jeﬀrey and now they’re lunching. Sometimes they simply stay in her loft which, if it’s anything similar to the building I toured next door, is filled with layers of rust-red brick, hard to clean and harder to look at. Someone else’s wife might be sending me a message, or mocking me, because she uses Obsession by Calvin Klein, and not in the least sparingly. Last week I saw someone else’s wife coming out of my favorite card store. I ducked behind a rack and when she’d gone I quizzed the teller on her purchase but the man—a foreigner with a turban-- arched his eyebrow and felt under the counter and told me to leave. My honest belief is that someone else’s wife would likely be a better mother to my daughters. I imagine she would bake sweet flakey things dusted with powdered sugar and that the girls and her would share gossip and giggle once they saw their faces dusted white. Someone else’s wife is not so beautiful. Really. Her hair is thin and flat and her eyebrows need a thorough plucking. In ten years, when she’s my age, all that eating is going to catch up with her. Besides, someone else’s wife wears white in winter. Her oversized jewelry and glasses shrink her face and make her like

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tawdry and pallid, as if she’s trying too hard to be Jackie O or Anna Wintour. I can taste someone else’s wife on my husband’s mouth when he comes home. She tastes fishy but fresh, hooked yet still squirming. I swirl my tongue around his and we become two slick-skinned porpoises playing tag. “What’s gotten into you?” he asks. I keep my eyes closed. I used to always keep them open when we kissed, mesmerized by my husband’s beauty, but also curious the way his face would wince and wrinkle in response. Someone else’s wife agrees to meet me for lunch and I’m late on purpose and she knows it, of course, but still says, “I thought you’d had a change of heart.” I was a young actress in high school. I could cry on demand. Now I devour my salad and crush the garlicky croutons between my molars so loud that the woman next table over turns. I keep my eyes on someone else’s wife. I don’t want to beg but I do anyway, no tears, but plenty of authentic quivering. When she tells me she’s pregnant I take my hand from my purse, oﬀ the gun I’ve brung, and I do the bravest thing. I say, “Congratulations.”

170

Soul Patch

Every family is damaged. That’s one of the things Mr. Cavanaugh taught us. He was speaking about the Montagues and Capulets, but he said it could apply to modern day. For instance: if you searched long and deep enough you’d find hideous secrets stuﬀed in any family’s old shoe box, even the Obama’s. It’s hard to believe this was Mr. Cavanaugh’s first year teaching, or that he’s so young, because he’s the wisest person I’ve ever known. Even the Dalai Lama or Jesus would have their hands full debating a guy like Mr. Cavanaugh. Sometimes when he’s speaking I go blind studying his musculature, imagining him naked. My thoughts aren’t vulgar, just as Michelangelo’s David is not considered obscene. I go deaf watching Mr. C’s lips move, wondering about their pulpiness. And that blonde hair of his, curly and long as a surfer’s—it’s a queer shimmering shade that looks as if it has actual sand crystals in it. How many nights have I imagined his head on my lap, staring at me pearly-eyed and wistful while I fingered those locks? It’s a crush, I know. But I’m not the only girl—just look around. I’m only the fattest. I heard the others talking in the restroom. They never care that I eavesdrop as long as I hang back a ways. I’m large but I’m also invisible most of the time. Candy Reeb tells all her friends how she’d do him in a heartbeat. You have to understand who Candy Reeb is to get the

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full import of such a declaration. Candy is just like her name: delicious, tempting, and too good to be true. I’ve been in love with her since second grade when Mom moved us here from Oregon, and that was seven years ago. Candy has honey-colored hair and she uses such a heavy dose of strawberry lip-gloss that you can see and smell her from half a block away. She’s tall but thin, with boobs. I’ve seen them in the showers. She has a bush of pubes, too. One week she came to school and the entire bush was gone except for this astonishing, frail V pattern. We all noticed. Everything Candy does gets attention, so when she says she’d do Mr. Cavanaugh in a heartbeat, that’s really saying something. *** We moved to Renton last year. Mom said it was because of the divorce and that she’d met Butch, but I knew the real reason. She won’t say, but I know. *** In ancient times philosophers were the brilliant people of the day. Heidegger, Kant, Sartre, Voltaire ….. If time travel existed Mr. Cavanaugh could journey back and he’d fit right in with any of those guys. The stuﬀ he says. For instance: “Life is wakefulness.” I mean, Wow! right? And he catches material others overlook, like Alice Cooper, this snake-wearing precursor to Marilyn Manson who was big in the seventies, the same one that wrote “School’s Out,” well he also wrote another song called, “Only Women Bleed” which is not necessarily what you think it’s about. It’s a ballad dealing with misogyny and how women pay the price day after day, night after night, so that men can go on playing hero. Sample lyrics: “He lies right at you. You know you hate this game. He hits you once in a while and you live and love in pain. 172

Only women bleed. Only women bleed. Only women bleed.” It was a sacrifice to take my eyes oﬀ him because class is just fifty-five minutes, but I knew about Ali Larson and her cutting, just as everyone did—the skin around her wrists scarred like a burn-victim. When Mr. C played that song oﬀ his IPod and wrote the words on the blackboard, I watched Ali’s eyes tear up and I felt such a kinship with her that I started crying, too, only I fell ass-over-tea-kettle into hysterics. I hate how I look when I’m bawling. For the longest time my nickname has been Buddha even though I’m not Asian. When I’m upset like that I’m a wedding cake of blubber stirring up an earthquake. It’s gross, sure, but what was I supposed to do? Mr. C couldn’t have been more than a baby when that song came out, yet he found it somehow and made perfect, poetic use of the message in order that Ali and all of us young women would know we’re more than sex organs, body parts and free labor. I mean, that kind of man, a feminist really, he’s sort of a God, don’t you think? Class was getting out soon anyway, so Mr. Cavanaugh dismissed the group. Just as I would have expected, he knelt down and asked if I was okay, if I needed anything. I buried my face in my hands but he pried my fingers apart, like plucking jungle vines out of your path, and spoke directly to me. His eyes were such a shade of blue that I panicked and just… well, I just grabbed him. I took Mr. Cavanaugh in my arms and pushed his sandy-haired head right up under my chin, cheek to neck. I could smell his Axe cologne and a twinge of pineapple in his hair from the conditioner he used. He let me hold him longer than I thought. The extra weight I carry provides me with an ample bosom and I pressed slightly against him, wondering if the gesture would register. Out of habit, my hand dropped lower, but he stepped back and that’s when the idea came to me. I was ashamed at first, but the more I considered my options the more I convinced myself. I was thinking about Darwin. *** 173

My mother’s new boyfriend has his hang up’s, too. “Call me Daddy. Do it, or I swear, I’ll kill you right here.” It doesn’t usually take much prodding for me to respond to Butch. I’ve played the game plenty of times, I know the rules. I say whatever I’m told, same as I did with my own blood father. It’s not as if my pride gets in the way, but tonight while he’s on top of me I keep thinking about Mr. C. “Every family is damaged.” How does he know, I wonder? Maybe he’s making this all up, a fraud? It wouldn’t surprise me. “Say it!” “You feel nice, Daddy.” “Good girl.” Not much surprises me anymore. *** I confessed many things to Mr. Cavanaugh. I told him about my father’s visits but I didn’t let on about Butch. Mr. C wanted to call the police, of course, but I’d made him promise. I had gotten to know him so well that I was certain he’d never break such a vow. He wanted me to see a counselor, or a shrink, but I told him he was the only one I trusted, and as I said it I raised my quivering chin. I’d practice that maneuver in the mirror all week. I stalled my pupils, probably looking cross-eyed or possessed. He took me in his arms, scared. Laura Pixley walked in on us. Mr. Cavanaugh’s back was to the door and I was shrieking pretty hard, so he never even heard a thing. I was impressed with myself and the fine actress I’d become because I didn’t miss a beat. I continued to cry even as I gave Laura an assured wink. ***

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Our “Check-ins” as he calls them were on Fridays. I could tell they were wearing thin. His eyes no longer centered fully on mine, even if I sobbed or threw an epileptic fit. That’s how I knew he was a sham, because of his eyes. But when I told him how all the girls in class thought he was handsome and how some wanted to sleep with him, that’s when his body tensed in alertness. He’d never say, “Go on, tell me more,” and he didn’t have to because his silence was the answer for what he wanted. Men usually don’t have to give much away in terms of direction. “Like who says what?” was what Mr. C thought and wondered, so I gave him a story about Candy Reeb. In a bold move I described the V insignia she’d shaved above her pudendum, and he squirmed uncomfortably, but didn’t tell me to stop talking. And that’s when the raw remainder of my desire bled away and I knew my plan was fine, that I had nothing to be ashamed of. I said, “You should grow a soul patch.” He asked what that was and I told him Candy’s ex, Austin Dodson had one. I explained that a soul patch was not a beard or a goatee but a strip of hair hipsters grew out just below their lip so that it imparted a shadow eﬀect. He said, “I’m not a kid, you know.” Sure, but the truth was Mr. C wanted to hear me say he might as well be one, he looked that young. Instead I played hard to get. “Suit yourself,” I said, walking out. *** So many important events happened in the school restroom that I shouldn’t have been surprised. Still, no matter how prepared you think you are, it’s like a car crash the first time Candy Reeb looks in your eyes and says your name, even if the name is a nickname. “Hey, Buddha.” 175

“Hey, Candy.” Her name stuck in my throat like a Jolly Rancher, sugary but also cutting off my wind. “She’s gonna blow!” Ashley Moynihan said. “Oh my god, her face is turning purple.” I swallowed and thought of Butch to settle myself. “What’s this I hear about you and Mr. C?” “What do you want to know?” I couldn’t believe how suave I was. My knees weren’t shaking anymore and my voice felt velvety, as if I was spewing lotion-coated words. When she asked for details I gave her more than she bargained for. She and Ashley were sitting on the sink counter and Morgan Porter was handling the door so that no one could come in until Candy gave the okay. They were eating out of my hand. However, I could tell Candy only half-believed me. My experiences with Dad and Butch lent an air of authenticity to the descriptions I spewed, and I saw her confounded expression as she tried to reconcile what she was hearing with what she saw— me, fat, lard-ass me. “Anyway, he’s going to grow a soul patch. He said it’d be a sign of how he feels about us as a couple.” “Yeah, right.” “See for yourself,” I said. Cutting them off was the most difficult part of the entire episode. I was talking to Candy Reeb, for goodness sake. Candy Reeb! But willpower is key in situations such as the one I found myself. I cleared my throat and Morgan Porter opened the door and I walked out of the restroom fighting hard not to skip or squeal. *** At first Butch was intrigued by my back-talk. It must have sounded like a come-on, so I growled and spat in his face. He called me a bitch. I bit his hand and he slapped me. I told him to hit me again and he complied. This went on for some time. *** 176

Despite my condition, Principal Gergen seemed skeptical until Laura Pixley showed up and validated my incriminations. I didn’t have a hard time looking Mr. C in the eye or anything like that. I’d rehearsed. Moreover, I focused my attention on the soul patch he’d grown, the conclusive, convicting evidence. I don’t know where Mr. C ended up. I do think of him sometime. He’s a smart man, so I’m certain he’s in good shape wherever he is. I’ve started working out but the truth is I’ve gained about six pounds. Candy, Morgan and Laura never mention my weight. No one does. I’ve fit right in, maybe even more than that. I’m something of a legend around our school.

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Shiny Black Pieces

Their photos hang from the wall like tombstones or tablets. My uniformed brothers stare back at me, looking as serious as sin. I am the last Mulroney. The recruiter has thick, swollen fingers. His face is ham-pink and sweaty. He collects his brochures and papers except for the ones he’s left me to sign. “You know that’ll have to go,” he says, eying my long hair, then moving to the puka shells around my neck before skimming to the door. When Dad comes back in his eyes are jumpy. He goes straight to the armoire with the plate glass door and withdraws a rifle, sits down and puts in on his lap. “They’ll show you how to do this when you get there, but a little head start never hurt nothing.” I think of things to say, questions to ask: I’m afraid of guns. I’m not my brothers. Don’t most parents want their kids to go to college and stay out of the army? You’ll disown me, but this is something I can’t do for you. The gun comes apart in shiny black pieces, snapping and popping metallically. The fragments look like some sort of deboned robot bird. Grease and gunpowder waft in the air. Dad inhales sharply—Go!--and then returns to work, ordering the pieces with a flurry until the gun is whole again. He grins. He holds it out like an oﬀering. He matches my stare and says, “Now you do it.”

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Black Box

Someone crafty has rearranged our furniture and stripped the walls but not the bedding because she’s laying like a lovely larva in the sheets and I stand there begging her to hatch, to wake, and when she does her eyes are dice, double deuces, and she tells me I’m the one, I’ve been sleepwalking again, but if that were the case why wouldn’t I have different news? Next morning same thing, nothing’s shaken or stirred in the place that needs it most. The air there is thick and pasty, a slice of hoar frost toast a stiff cum-dried athletic sock a loaf of molding memories, but what we have is today, unaffected by stagnation or incrimination awaiting something that feels loose like liberty or salvation. I find the gas can and swing it, spritz the air and the amoebapatterned love seat, dribble and shake it off like the end of a desperate piss. Taylor was a just a girl, no different than the others, he said, but he was a drunken drifter, a fraud and fortune liar, surfer songwriter, charmer, life thief. In his wake there’s a soup, a stew with bloody bits and clumps and bones to be picked out lest anyone choke to death. There’s a stain that can’t be cured or cleaned. So I go sleepwalking. “What’s that smell?” my wife asks. I hold out my hand. My fingers don’t shake, not any more. She collects them and pulls herself up, naked, skin puckering pale in the draft.

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“What?” she asks. She’s a mind reader a microscope a compass and a black box holding the secrets of an airplane’s destruction. “It’s too late for all that,” is my answer. We walk out the front door and do not look back. The heat from the flames threatens to singe our hair. Plumes of tarry smoke curls and unfurls around our bare bodies, shrouding us in smoldering scarves. We clasp each other. We walk, don’t run, our work done here.

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The Landing

There are pictures to prove it. In one we are standing on the moon, back when it mattered. Gravity holds us flat-footed. Our visors are opened and you can’t make it out clearly but that’s me, the one on the left. We decided to take the moon for our own when we were young. In our naivety, it seemed entirely possible. Mother sewed our suits and we built a craft out of supplies from your father’s workplace. It took an entire summer to construct, but time was what we had. It was me who suggested a reprieve. The demon sun had scorched my neck all week and I’ll admit it now, I was having second thoughts about our expedition, and space travel in general. Truth was I had been flattered just being able to hang around you. If you knew me, you mightn’t have liked me because every moment my mind schemed for your attention. At the river I tried too hard. Some people have social graces, flushed with confidence, but I can be soulless and shaky, needy and flattened. I was never certain you loved me. I kept reaching for it, for you and your lips to just say something approximating the effect, even if the words had to be parceled out, even like that. I swung with the rope and soared, somersaulting off a stiff, hijacked car tire. I saw blue. I screamed nonsense. I might have pissed myself. I know I thought your name. Water exploded and I landed violently in a broken collapse of momentum that frightened more than hurt, yet I realize now that

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this was an awkward and urgent warning, a portent, a plea perhaps. “You’re fucking crazy,” you said. It was the sweetest thing you’d ever told me. You bent down and sank your slender fingers in the water and snaked them several times through the sluicing waves, much the same as I imagined them raking through my scalp. “I’m not going in there. It’s fucking freezing.” “Don’t be such a wuss,” I said. You skimmed a stone and in your eyes I saw you retrieve a memory about Mandy, the girl who loved you first but broke your heart. “I’ll never do that,” I thought and did not say. When your shirt came oﬀ, the sun shivered, seemed to shift nervously, seeping into the mud-green water, stinging me like an eel, electrifying my world with the alarm of possibility. “All right, but I’m only staying in for a second,” you warned. “Do a running jump.” “What are you now, my track coach?” But you dropped your jeans and stripped down sockless and took my instructions nonetheless. You tore up the sloped path, wincing from the stones poking your feet, wind tucked up under your cheeks, perfectly perverting every inch of sun-tanned muscle and cord. When your ankle caught the exposed tree root, I thought it was a ploy on your part, an act, a second thought of cowardice, but, no, as it turned out, I was the only coward there that day. I saw you jackknife into the shallow ribs of the river. I heard your head crack the lurking boulder, saw the floating film of blood, watched your stunned body drift log-like with the current. I could not yell, could not move or breathe or think. My hesitancy might have cost you everything. I know it did me. Last night your father burnt the capsule. First he tore it apart. Bare-handed, his bloody knuckles beat down the steel sheets and each time he tore a panel loose he looked skyward toward the moon and wailed. 182

When he was done he drove the pickup to the smelter and tossed the broken pieces into the flames. He was sober and strong, deaf to all the flagrant hissing. He shook his head, his fists. Shook. He doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know I have the urn with me now. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t intend to keep it, only to hold you, for us to spend this one night in company, dreaming again.

183

Black Magic

My neighbor had a potato-shaped head and saggy skin beneath his eyes, showing way too much white. Rashes of angry acne rimmed his jaw and forehead. If you saw him in the dark you’d probably get shivers, but in daylight he was just ugly and odd. I watched his father turn the water hose on him once. Another time, his dad tossed stones at him because he wasn’t weeding the garden fast enough. At school it was just as bad, the taunting and bullying. A pack of juniors jabbed and kicked and pushed. One day I was bored, walking in the woods behind our two houses, when I ran into him. He said he knew a cool place, perched high above a cliﬀ. It made me dizzy, we were up so high. He had a rabbit foot on a chain and asked if I believed in magic. He said he wanted to hypnotize me. I let him. I pretended to be unconscious. When he snapped his fingers, I asked what had happened. “Who’s your best friend?” he asked. I didn’t hesitate. “You are.” He flashed a crazy grin, lips dripping milky saliva. I said, “Nah, just kidding.” He looked stunned. When I turned to go, he grabbed my arm. I hardly remember jerking.

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I only see him falling now, in daydreams and nightmares. But I always tell myself it was an accident, his fault as much as mine, that he wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have had much of a life anyway.

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One Out of Two

When my wife wakes, her hair a mass of tangles and her breath smelling like lighter fluid, she tells me I should consider cutting and pasting. In the last many months she’s been speaking riddles, many of them barbed. She’s been stealing people’s mail and piling it up in her underwear drawer. Last week she went up to the attic and found her old roller skates and started circling the cul de sac. When I asked why, she said, “My past is yesterday.” Jenny comes over one afternoon while my wife is in the backyard beating the pulp out of a tetherball she paid a workman to install. Jenny has been my wife’s divorced friend for a dozen years. She’s pretty, with elfin facial features and taffy blue eyes. Jenny likes competitions and wears clothes that are two sizes too tight. She wants to know how I’m dealing with all this. She tells me that I’m strong and brave and puts her hand on top of mine in a motherly way, yet her fingers start to move over my skin, rubbing and tugging. I should feel flattered but I draw my hand back across the table and get up for another cup of coffee. She tells me it’s not so bad, being on your own. “Look around,” she says, “everyone’s doing it. One out of two.” From the sink window I have a different view of the yard. My wife has plopped down in between two overgrown geraniums while she’s busy plucking split ends. The activity always makes her look cross-eyed and I remember how when we first started

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dating she’d goof all the time, sending her eyes orbiting in diﬀerent directions. “My mom told me if I crossed my eyes too long, they’d stay that way,” I said. “Yeah,” my soon-to-be mate said, “but you’ve got to get your own facts if you’re ever going to make it anywhere.” Remembering the scene and our stiﬀ, teethbumping first kiss, I feel my stomach twist and coil and I realize that I’m sweating hard and trembling too much. When I come back to the table Jenny says, “I can see how much pain you’re in. Everyone can. But there are places that specialize in this sort of thing. You don’t have to feel trapped, or guilty.” I’ve been told that before. I’ve read books and been online for days and days and I know as much about Alzheimer’s as the doctors who treat it unsuccessfully. What I don’t know is how you’re supposed to sever a love that saved you from yourself, a love that helped make you a better man. Jenny fingers her throat. She favors big, colorful rings. She says, “I’m parched,” and waits for an answer from me, but I don’t give one. Years ago it was me, the one on the verge of destruction. Her name was Shawna. She knew a relative of Picasso. She painted and sculpted, so I got suddenly interested in the arts myself, very quickly in fact, interested enough to consider chucking my marriage and starting anew with this blonde Aussie. But Shawna did the dumping. Didn’t I know I was married, she asked? Afterward I drank lakes of scotch and lost my job. I couldn’t stand the sun on my skin or the sight of food. The night my wife found me with a fifth of Glenlivet and a noose in my lap, I was ready to be done with it all, but she took me to bed and rocked me like an infant. “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s okay. We all make mistakes. The important thing is we’re here, together.” I looked at her, carefully, avidly, as one might examine unearthed treasure. She was the same woman I’d met and fallen in love with, but now I noticed: stray strands of gray hair; a new set of wrinkles creasing the right cheek; faint, downy blonde hairs like sideburns on her jaw; how her eyes had softened, still shiny but 187

paler, having gone from navy to lavender. Yes, she had changed physically, yet her loyalty had never wavered. Ashamed and confused, I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Why stay with me?” She didn’t hesitate. “I made a promise—for better or worse.” I held her hand tight so that the points of her wedding ring gently stabbed my finger where my pulse thrummed. My mouth was dry. It tasted like rocks and sand. “I guess I expected you to leave me.” “Is that what you want?” It was a fair question, one I would have said yes to only a few weeks earlier. Now I realized how foolish I’d been, chasing after love when the real thing was right here all along. “No,” I said, and there was no burn because, for once, my answer was the truth. “Actually, I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” “For better or worse?” she asked, her face open yet serious, not quite ready to smile. “I promise. For better or worse.” Now I glance over at Jenny. She’s made herself a drink, a martini, and she’s got one of the black olives that looks like an ogre’s eye in between her lips and she’s puﬃng through the seed hole. “Everyone has needs,” Jenny says, shifting in her chair, scooting closer. “Especially men. I know because I used to be a masseuse.” She gets up, I guess to show me her massage skills, and doesn’t bother stopping when my wife presses her face flat against the window, looking at Jenny and I, but not really comprehending. Jenny gives her a wave and my wife giggles through the glass and I say, “That’s enough.” After I’ve sent Jenny home, I make my wife come sit with me on the sofa. She looks wild yet defeated, like an ostrich with its leg caught in a bear trap.

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I take up a position behind her, kneading her skin along the shoulders. Her muscles are hard but I’m careful not to overdo the pressure. I use my thumbs and knuckles. I scissor soft karate chops across her blades and work her neck. When she moans a little, I get another flashback of a diﬀerent time. I ask if she likes it, if I’m doing it right, and she says, “This is perfect. Please don’t ever stop.”

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Wicked Water

I wanted a way to kill water. The river ran like a gray scar, screaming in certain sections where it got caught up by boulders. Birds fluttered in the tree tops. A deer poked through a clearing on the other side and cocked its head at me. It should have been beautiful, but it took my breath away for all the wrong reason. Ironic, I thought, that Ann had been a swimming sensation in college. Before we’d married, I loved watching her in the pool, so fluid and controlled, each stroke like glass. The last time I’d seen her she was surrounded by water, too. I thought she’d fallen asleep in the tub. The jets were on, the water churning what must have been gallons of her blood. Our son never learned to swim. He came to this river with Jared, who turned out to be his lover. Jared said they liked to raft to the other side. It was safe, he assured me, so long as two people paddled. But then they’d gotten into a fight, my son angry because Jared wouldn’t come out publicly, wouldn’t let them be like any other couple. When he dove in, Jared told my son to stop screwing around, to grab the oar, but the current had already caught him. It would have happened right there, where I’m headed now. The water bites my skin. Its liquid limbs tug hard. I don’t resist at all. I let rage do the work.

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I’m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither Are You

The light is weak, wan, thin. It streaks across your cheek like a blade, a scar, a gnarled finger. This frail radiance reminds me of me, of us. I reach out to you before it goes too dim, dark. You are chilly then crisp, cold. When we were younger we invented events like these for frightened fun but that was before Mother’s new man, the refrigerator, the dumpster with hairy forearms, the one that smells of tapioca and cilantro, venison and earthworms. His footfalls are heavy on the floor above. He sounds impatient and hungry again. “Hold my hand,” I say. “He’ll never find us here.”

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to the editors of the following magazines where these stories appeared: “My Mother, Marilyn Monroe” in Blueprint Review; “Missing Chance” in Elimae; “You” in PANK; “Summer Scalping; Scarecrows” in Storyglossia; “Free” in 52/250, A Year of Flash”; “Facts About The Moon” in The Smoking Poet; “Relative” in Staccato Fiction; “The Hard Dance” in right hand pointing; “Mockingbird” in Necessary Fiction; “Song of Infinity” in Prick of the Spindle; “The Launcher” in Juked; “Like This” in Emprise Review; “Castaways” in 52/250, A Year of Flash; “Skin” in Word Riot; “Terminal” in left hand waving; “My Father’s Workshop” in Five Fishes; “See Through” in Splash Of Red; “Early” in Mad Swirl; “The Repairman” in Corduroy Mountain; “Soup” in Cricket Online Review; “The Exchange Student” in Seven Letter Words; “My Life In Black and White” in Foundling Review; “Veteran” in Rusty Truck; “Quicksand” in Intrinsick; “Room Service” in Foundling Review; “Mother of Pearl” in MICROW; “Coﬀee Stains” in Troubadour 21; “Lens” in Gemini Magazine; “Black Diamonds” in The Northville Review; “Not So Close, Not So Far” in Ascent Aspirations; “Insomnia” in Rumble; “Candy Hearts” in Metazen; “Waterfall” in LITnIMAGE; “Timing” in 6S; “Moving Day” in 6S; “New Gray” in Troubadour 21; “Grace” in Camroc Press Review; “The Sound of the Cars on the Bridge” in Mad Swirl; “Just As You Are” in Bartleby Snopes; “Center and Fringe” in Word Riot; “It Wasn’t Meant To Be Found” in right hand pointing; “Crescent” in Apollo’s Lyre; “Gone” in Glossolalia; “A

Lover of Beautiful Things” in Glossolalia; “The Right Cut” in Troubadour 21; “So Clean” in Glossolalia; “Improvised” in Troubadour 21; “What Became of the Clouds” in Troubadour 21; “Stems” in A-Minor Magazine; “Up High on a Shelf, The Living and the Dead” in Troubadour 21; “Normal” in Troubadour 21; “Doppelganger” in vis a tergo; “Little Holocausts” in Troubadour 21; “At The Water’s Edge” in Rose And Thorn Journal; “Thoroughfare” in Troubadour 21; “Two And A Half ” in The Legendary; “I Like You” in Camroc Press Review; “The Wages of Hunger” in decomP; “Bananagrams” in Metazen; “Up High in the Trees” in Troubadour 21; “All I Ever Wanted” in Troubadour 21; “The Spiders In My Room” in Troubadour 21; “Mermaid” in BLIP; “Daughter” in Dogzplot; “Press Rewind” in Troubadour 21; “Ruthless Trust” in Troubadour 21; “In Flight” in Eunoia Review; “Starling” in Eunoia Review; “Scoliosis” in Eunoia Review; “Locked In” in Eunoia Review; “Hunger Strike” in Anastomoo; “Burial Music” in Troubadour 21; “Stones” in Long Story Short; “Someone Else’s Wife” in Troubadour 21; “Soul Patch” in Cantarville; “Shiny Black Pieces” in Metazen; “Black Box” in Disenthralled; “The Landing” in Outside Writers; “Black Magic” in 52/250, A Year of Flash; “Wicked Water” in 52/250, A Year of Flash.

Gratitude

I was nine years old when I knew I wanted to be a writer and, since that time, it’s been the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. I’m grateful to so many people for this book, to the editors who saw something they liked and published my stories, to wonderful friends and an incredibly supportive family. I’m especially thankful for Bud Smith, who took on this project with a zeal rarely seen in publishing today. His generosity and kindness never once veered. Robert Vaughan’s input and keen eye were instrumental in editing and pagination, for which I’m immensely grateful. I’m indebted as well to Emily Lindstrom, who provided the stunning photograph--taken by her and featuring her--that graces the cover. Finally, thanks, too, to you for reading this collection. If I tried to express how much it means to me, I’d likely fail miserably.

â&#x20AC;¨ Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State, an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans, and the author of the story collection, THE DARK SUNSHINE, which debuted from Connotation Press in 2014. Over 900 of his stories and poems have been published in various literary journals. He can also be found regularly at lenkuntz.blogspot.com