Buried Letter Press March April 2015 Intimacy

Intimacy

BURIED LETTER PRESS March/April 2015

Intimacy MARCH/APRIL 2015

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ISSUE DESIGN AND LAYOUT BY MATTEW C. MACKEY Managing editor: Rob Balla Content Editor: Robin Clark COVER ART BY aSHLEY SMITH UNTITLED /COLORED PENCIL /2015

AKRON /OHIO

BURIED LETTER PRESS

intimacy PLAYING PRETEND by morgan Hall laVallee GRAVEYARD DOGS, fiShing,& People Next Door BY Jason Brightwell SYRINX

by Steven Anthony G e or g e WH AT C AN B E CREATED CAN BE DESTROYED & THE MEANING OF PROGRESS

by John ESteS FAT BABY

by Daniel Davis

untitled /aSHLEY Smith /COLORED PENCIL/ 2015

Playing Pretend Serial sluttiness; that’s what my family is calling it. My mom and stepdad know everything.

Everything. All the guys I’ve slept with and how many times and my fear of contracting an STD. They obviously know how frequently I’ve been visiting the gynecologist since I’m still under their health insurance plan and getting tested for some sort of venereal disease every month. And the lingerie; my mom is funding that one. Between that and the free dinners I’ve been able to save my money for all the therapy I need after each date.

My aunt and grandma know too. There are no secrets in my family. No judgment. If there were I might think that my version of sexual rebellion was risqué and unheard of. But instead I’m blessed with the knowledge that as long as my number remains half of my mom’s, I’m gonna be okay.

The women in my family are proud of me. They’re happy I’m finally going out on dates and receiving the attention from men that I should.

Not the sex part; they’re not as thrilled about all the sex, but they understand that it comes with the dating territory. No, they smile because currently eight different men have to buy me roses and Thai food and take me to see movies about sports or animated princesses.

My eighteen-year-old cousin Marina is happy that my number is finally higher than hers and my fifteen-year-old brother Julian is mortified because I wear short skirts to his soccer matches and I’m now the sister that all of his friends follow on Instagram.

I use men. I’m no longer the twenty-two-year-old girl that had never been hit on and had only slept with her high school sweetheart. I do still sleep with him. But on rotation. Because even after five years together, a breakup, and the realization that he may never find anyone else, he still doesn’t want to be with me.

So I try not to get attached to any of them. It’s not that hard. The sex is bad and the conversation always lacks a spark of equivalent intelligence. I don’t let them spend the night, which certainly helps convey the appropriate message. I also do it because I cannot stand waking up next to a useless half naked male body in the morning. They serve me no purpose in the light of day. It’s not like they’re capable of making me a vegan

breakfast in bed. So I kick them out by 2:00 a.m. and cuddle my teddy bear while I cry myself to sleep.

I cry a lot. I’ve even cried after an orgasm. An orgasm I gave myself.

The only kind I have now. Obviously not from lack of dates or wholehearted attempts by those well-meaning men. I cried because I was thinking of David. Most of time I’m crying, it’s because of David. David, my twenty-year-old barista ex-rebound who broke things off with me six months ago because we were getting too serious.

David. The man-child who is not my ex-boyfriend and who I knew for a solid month and yet cannot get over.

I’ve tried to move on. I make sure to try at least three times a week on dates with one of those eight guys in my free dinner rotation.

The dates are nice enough. They all want to impress me. But they can’t seem to make me forget how David felt on top of me. They can’t even buy me roses like he did.

I try to explain this to Penny, my psychologist, in her cold cream colored office but she doesn’t understand and her blank stare and slack folding lips make me feel as if I’ve done something wrong. I look down at my purple sparkle pedicure and Tory Burch flip flops and try to think of a way to curl up in the chair without exposing myself in my short pink dress.

I didn’t wear underwear again. I do this a lot.

Girls like me, she says, who claim to have low self-esteem shouldn’t act out sexually. Or wear such revealing clothing. Girls like me, they usually don’t go on dates and take off their clothes. Unless they’ve been molested. Or abused. Have I been abused, she wants to know. Was it the trauma with my father growing up, she presses.

I don’t feel like answering. I cross my arms tight beneath my chest so that my fingers can dig into my ribs. I already told her last week about my father. I’m not that fucked up. So he cheated and pushed my mom around those few times, it’s not that serious. Other people have it worse. And we got out and he sorta got it together so I don’t see how what happened has anything to do with my inability to feel pretty. That’s what I’m in therapy for, after all, to just feel pretty and like myself.

I tell her that. I stare out the three wall to ceiling panes of glass and tell her that I don’t want to talk about my father anymore. That I’m not traumatized and that I just want her to tell me how to stop obsessively hating myself every minute of every day.

Her lips disappear into her face as her disapproving gaze lingers on the tears slipping out from beneath my glasses. I refuse to meet her eyes. I refuse to allow her to make me a victim of divorce. There are far more interesting things for us to victimize.

Clearly, she waves a boney hand in my direction, I am traumatized and that is why I so desperately seek the love of a man.

Wrong. I just want someone to tell me I’m pretty and make me forget David. I’m not after love. It’s faded memories and relief that I want. Maybe small amounts of plastic surgery. And more Chanel. But I don’t need a boyfriend to love me. That sounds annoying and time consuming; like having a pet. I just need to like myself and I can stop coming to this office once a week and she can move on to someone who actually wants to cry about how their father didn’t love them enough or some cliché bullshit.

Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder are what my psychiatrist diagnosed me with. My psychiatrist, Rose, is the one with the actual medical degree and the ability to prescribe me pills. According to her those are my real problems. That’s what I’m spending so much money on to fix. Talking about my feelings is supposed to help with that, not make it worse. I want to walk out of the house feeling confident; I want to be happy. A relationship with my father and deep breathing technique are not things I’m interested in.

Penny refuses to understand this. She peers out of her cat-eye green glasses that continue to slip down her thin nose. I don’t think she likes me. I’m not sure she believes me either.

What exactly do you want to change about yourself, she asks.

How could you become prettier, she continues. Her small head tilts to the right as if I’m a puzzle she is trying to solve and put back together.

I don’t know, I mumble. I do know though. I know every single flaw on my body and I count them all in a continuous series from the moment I wake up until my Klonopin makes me fall asleep at night. I use my hair as a shield to hide my face so that she won’t begin there in attempt to find what I’m so insecure about. I cross my arms tighter to protect my stomach. I cross my thighs so that their fat inners are hidden beneath the hem of my dress. I pray that she can’t see the flabbiness of what should be my tricep and I pray that she will grow tired of this ‘sharing Morgan’s feelings’ exercise and that I can finally go home.

You don’t know, she challenges.

Therapists, I have determined, require a complete emotional breakdown from their patients before they feel like teaching them how to be less crazy. It’s like a game.

I guess, I say as I continue to keep my body self-contained, I just need my makeup to even feel acceptably ugly and I wish I was thirty pounds lighter. And it’d be nice to not have a panic attack every time I come across a reflective surface. I feel like that could really improve my quality of life. But that’s probably asking for too much so I’ll save that for the next time I see Rose and she prescribes me my meds.

You just need to accept who you are, Penny begins, I don’t know

what religion you are but there’s this Buddhist meditation center...

I stop listening. Big fat Chanel No. 40 colored tears slide down my face and into my lap. Meditation and self-acceptance, that’s the big reveal. That’s how I’m supposed to get better. More alone time with my thoughts. Wonderful. I’ll be fucked up forever.

We’ll meet next week, she says and gestures that it is time for me to stand and leave and go out into the waiting room where there are chairs full of people who will wonder why the ugly girl is crying so much.

I stare at the twisted threaded grey carpet until I get to the front desk to make my next appointment. I pick a day and time and wonder why I continue to come and if it’ll ever work or if I’m too far gone to ever feel happy again.

I make it to the front seat of my Volkswagen Beetle before I break down and call my mother. I don’t tell her how I feel or that I think I’m still in love with David because I don’t want to make her mad so I just tell her about how much I hate therapy and how I’m starting to think the whole talking about feelings thing isn’t working for me.

A mirror, she says, that’s what they should prescribe me. A mirror, so that I can see that I’m fucking beautiful.

I laugh. My mom always makes me laugh. That’s why I call her.

She’s funny and smart and my inspiration. That’s why I don’t tell her how I really feel. I don’t want to disappoint her. I don’t want to scare her.

There are times when I sit in my bed and wonder what I have left. I question what keeps me going. My relationships aren’t healthy. My best and only friend is David’s sister. I have no social life outside of work. No friends to rely on or text in the middle of the night when I can’t fall asleep and the weight of depression seems too heavy to lift from my mind and the only relief I want to find is in a metal blade.

No one loves me. Not really. And no one ever could when I don’t even love myself. My dates use me for sex because that’s the only part of me I’m willing to give. And my family loves the person I pretend to be. So I’m alone.

In the last six months my life has fallen apart. I graduated with honors and was accepted into my dream MFA program and was even granted the trifecta of a teaching assistantship and yet none of that is good enough because I’m no longer sure that I’m good enough. I’m not good enough for the only things that make happy. I’m not good enough to feel okay.

I used to want to be

someone’s wife. I used to desperately long to be married with seven kids and live happily ever after in a tasteful mega-mansion styled after Harry Potter. I can no longer imagine marriage. I can no longer see myself with a family. I’m unworthy and incapable of finding a man good enough to be a father and I’m far too selfish and unstable to become a mother.

I used to want to be a famous author. I wanted to be widely popular and assured by the hundreds of millions that my writing is good and worthwhile and meaningful. But nothing I have to say seems important enough. I can’t think anymore. Not of character building and scene setting. I’m consumed with self-hate and disappointment and far too content destroying myself from within my own mind to be bothered with writing.

And yet I’m a teacher, expected to teach the importance of words in front of unhappy judgmental students who will use social media to attack me and RateMyProfessor to warn others against taking me.

Success isn’t supposed to be stressful. I should be excited and content with my life and the path that my education has paved for me but I’m not. I’m terrified of failing before I even begin and I’m struggling to overcome the desire to just hide in my bedroom with the lights off and the mirrors covered until my medicine makes me numb.

I pull into my apartment complex and twist the keys out of the ignition. I want to run inside and never come back out. The world is too bright, magnifying my flaws and weakness and fears. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel okay.

I spray Pumpkin Pie Glade onto anything covered in fabric because the smell of faux-fall calms me down. I step out of my flip flops and into fuzzy pink Ugg slippers as I slip my dress off in exchange for the first pair of dirty running shorts I can find on the floor. Unhooking my bra and putting on a shirt would take too much energy so I crawl into my bed and resume my binge watching of Californication which is probably not in my best interest as the fucked uppedness difference between Hank and I is seemingly becoming less and less.

Hank at least has an excuse for his actions. He self-medicates. I see professionals; two professionals. A tag team of psychiatry. I should be a functioning adult who can wake up and leave the house without checking her purse for the proper amount of pill bottles.

In five hours I have a date. It’s a sick ritual. I’ll dig through my dresser to find underwear that matches a pushup bra and shove my feet into heels and squeeze into a short skirt and too low cut top. I’ll reapply my makeup and lipstick and choke down some anti-anxiety pill that will allow me to pass the hallway mirror without regret and I’ll open the door for the cop, the lawyer, the sports editor, or maybe the engineering student and I’ll shut off my phone and slip it into a purse more expensive than they

would even buy me and I’ll pretend for a few hours that there’s no one else and that their jokes are actually funny and that their kisses actually feel good.

And after the dinner where the waitress will surely ask whether the check is together or separate because she can feel the utter lack of chemistry radiating from the table, he’ll drive me home and try to hold my hand while also trying to grope my thigh and I’ll rest my head against the window watching the lights blur by and silently wish that I could drink alcohol and be pharmaceutically sedated at the same time.

By the time he opens my door and walks me to my apartment I’ll be thinking of excuses to leave him at the welcome mat and he’ll be slipping his fingers beneath the back of my shirt as if it’s sweet to touch my bare skin when in reality it will make me gag.

I’ve become a liar. These guys don’t know that they’re not special.

They don’t know that I picture David’s face when I close my eyes. That I’m more aroused by the memory of snow sticking to the gelled black spikes in David’s hair than I am to their shirtless bodies in front of my face. That I still imagine his grey and red Northface jacket pressed against me in the frozen night as he pinned me against my car and kissed me until our fingers went numb.

But it’s Friday. So I’ll put on my heels and I’ll go out and play pretend.

untitled /aSHLEY Smith /COLORED PENCIL/ 2015

Graveyard Dogs You and I are graveyard dogs.

Always on the scent of our union; the corpse we keep digging up.

Then we are killers.

Armed with exposed bones; swords we thrust in to each other.

Finally, undertakers.

Hastily repacking loose dirt amid furious accusations of guilt.

Fishing After she was gone, you cast a long line into the next world.

I would’ve sat forever watching those lazy coils dip in and out of memory lake.

While you hid your hurt in light draws on the reel.

But at last the line went.

Your grey eyes lit.

Your journey set.

I could only watch as she finally came tugging, gently reeling you in.

Follow Jason brightwell at http:jason brightwell.com

People Next Door Your neighbor is akin to night.

Crouched in his spot outside your window where the earth bows under the familiar weight of his body.

A predator at prayer.

Whose self-benediction, a peeper’s wish: A flashing peek, even if just an ankle.

The prospect charges a hyena’s snarl, glaring over the same face he smiles at you in daytime.

Syrinx With her arms resting atop the steering wheel, Moira was barely in control of the car, talking in an endless stream, laughing at times, shouting for emphasis as the air whistled past, but I still didn’t catch all the words.

The top was down and she looked as beautiful in the summer sun as she did in the rainy spring. She seemed jumpy and I thought at times she would run us into a tree. The dappled light of the sun shining through the branches and leaves passing overhead dashed by in disco ball plays of light on her head, the dashboard, and the headrest of her Buick convertible.

She was explaining why she finally broke it off with Drew. She was wearing a yellow halter-top. She had dyed her hair red since I saw her last and it was cut in a Dorothy Hamill pageboy. Small beads of sweat collected on the nape of her neck, where she was beginning to sunburn. She kept her Winstons on the seat between her legs. She turned off the radio when she started to talk.

We planned to drive from Kittanning to the Finger Lakes in the hope of hearing the guns of the Seneca. People claimed to hear loud booms of some kind over or near the lake since the 1820s, and something supernatural was causing them, so Moira said. I read about it and I thought that the chances of hearing them were slim during an overnight camping trip. I told her that there had to be something more interesting to do closer to home. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s somewhere to go.”

“It just seems like a waste of gas,” I said. “This car’s a tank.”

“If nothing happens, I’ll have to rush back anyway. Nobody knows where I’m going. I told my parents I was staying at friend’s house who was going through a rough time.”

She picked me up at my apartment that morning after she had loaded the tent into the trunk and filled half the back seat with a cooler and a sleeping bag. When she got to my place, I added rye bread, sliced turkey, and cheese in my own cooler, and then I laid my guitar case and my sleeping bag onto the other half of the back seat.

She wanted to take the back roads for most of the trip. She liked to drive fast and was afraid of getting pulled over when she knew I was bringing doobies in a sandwich bag in the guitar case. I suggested the highways just because it wouldn’t take all day to get up there. She said that on back roads she could get us there in about six hours.

She said, “There’s a campground on the lake. I called ahead for directions. I think I know which road to take.”

Once Moira had gotten us about ten miles out of town, she asked me

to get her one of the cans of Diet Pepsi out of the cooler and she started opening up about how much of a liar Drew was. “I was going to shack up with him. My dad would have killed me.”

“I’ll bet. You said he sent you to St. Catherine’s School to separate you two.”

“No shit. But I was in love with the guy since the eighth grade and I dated him on and off for all of high school and two years after that.”

“Wonder what your dad would say if he knew you were taking a road trip with me?” I said raising an eyebrow.

“He’d probably disown me,” she said, then showed me the “LOVE” pendant dangling from her chain. “But I can make my own money too. So that’s something. That’s where this necklace came from—my own hardearned cash, not Dads.”

“Pretty.”

“I do still need him. My dad can be nice guy, if you play the sweet, little Irish Catholic girl and don’t piss him off. He did buy me this car, which was very, very nice,” she said with a smile, nodding.

“One cannot buy love, and possessions don’t bring happiness,” I said, shaking my finger at her.

“I need to have nice things and that should prove that I was serious when I wanted spend my life with Drew, because I thought he was broke.

That was a lie too; it turned out that his rich grandma set up a huge trust fund for him. I didn’t find that out until after we split up. Asshole.” Moira drained the last of the Pepsi from the can and then stowed it under the seat. “Anyway, shacking up was his idea. He just thought it would be better to try it all out first before we got married too young, you know?”

I shrugged.

“Yeah, that was what he said. I was too naïve,” she said. “I just got out of high school. I wanted things to work out. I had just started my first real job. I bought some new clothes and some furniture… all stuff I could call my own. I just bought a new stereo for three hundred dollar a few days earlier. I was bringing that over to his place, still in the box, and he came running out of the bedroom in his undies and socks. I put the box down on the floor, stomped into the bedroom and there’s some black girl with a big afro trying to hook up her bra.”

Moira looked me and added, “I’m sorry, but she was black.”

“Well, that explains a lot,” I said. “But, I’m sure you were hurt pretty bad.”

“I didn’t want to show Drew how crushed I was, so I helped her get her bra on, and then I asked her how long she’d been banging my boyfriend. She was nice. After she was all dressed, we left the apartment together and I even took her back to her place. She didn’t know he was with

anyone. It wasn’t her fault.”

“That was mature for a—You were still nineteen, right?”

“Yep. I just turned twenty.” Moira smiled briefly at me. “I’m glad you were there to make me feel better at least, because after it hit me, I broke down completely.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “Still, we shouldn’t have done what we did.”

She went quiet for a few seconds, then, “Wow.” “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“We’re gonna have to stop in Corning before we go up to the campground,” she said without expression.

“Why?” “You’ll know when we’re there. I hate the world sometimes—a lot of times.”

She fell silent for a few minutes. Her brow was furrowed and she bit her lower lip.

“Can we turn the radio back on?” I asked.

“What?”

We were riding over a road that was rough and unpaved. “Can we turn the radio back on?” I shouted.

“Oh! Sure!”

I pressed the button and turned the dial up and down to sounds of static, a faint bit of Mack Davis, and then some preacher talking about “the world, the flesh, and the Devil” before more static.

“We’re pretty far out in the boonies,” she said, pulling a Winston from the pack with a free hand.

“I guess so,” I said turning the radio off. “We’re just a few miles from Brookville though. You might want to get gas.” I picked up the lighter from the dash and lit her cigarette. I sat back, letting out a dramatic sigh.

“The gas is fine for a while. I have cassettes in the console. Put one in.”

“Jethro Tull?” I suggested, examining the spines of the cassette cases.

“Songs from the Wood. I haven’t heard it yet.”

She looked at me from the corner of her eye; head tilted and made a face. “That’s not driving music.”

“Then why is it in the console?”

“For when I’m not driving. I’m surprised you want to hear that anyway.” A golden ember flew from the cigarette and landed briefly on the cooler before going out.

“What then?”

Without looking, she reached down and pulled out a cassette. “Play this. It’s new Steve Miller Band,” she said out the corner of her mouth.

She handed it to me, and then took a few long drags from the Winston before handing that to me as well. I put the cassette in, and I then took a

few puffs and crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray. I turned the volume about three quarters of the way and we listened to the music for a while.

She sang through most of it and I followed along when a song was familiar.

“You treat me like I was your ocean You swim in my blood when it’s warm My cycles of circular motion Protect you and keep you from harm You live in a world of illusion Where everything’s peaches and cream We all face a scarlet conclusion But we spend our time in a dream*,” I sang after the cassette had ended. I recognized it from the radio, because it was in heavy rotation. “I don’t know what that ‘swim in my blood’ line means, but I think I got it right.”

“I think it’s about malaria.” Moira then suddenly sat up very straight and shouted, “Oh! Michael!” as if she had suddenly remembered something important. “Do you have to pee? I probably should have asked earlier.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“We just passed a sign for Ridgway. I know I’ll have to go soon. I was drinking pop. We can stop at a gas station there.”

“The cassette is rewinding,” I said, ready to eject it.

“Leave it in. It’ll start up again. It’s a good album.”

“Okay. I can deal with Steve Miller. Most music is crap lately.”

“Like ‘Undercover Angel’? I never had a dream that made sweet love to me…”

I laughed. “Stop! It’s awful.”

“She said, ‘Ooooweeeeee.’ I said, ‘All riiiight!’” Moira then reached for another cigarette and I lit it for her.

We drove on for another half hour listening to the music and singing together, and then she reached over and turned the volume down.

“I fell in love with his eyes, I suppose. That was the selling point from the start,” she explained. “He had those crazy eyes—bright blue with flecks of yellow in them and those long, dark lashes of his. I thought maybe I wanted to have babies with those same eyes—or at least one anyway…. Maybe two… I don’t know.” She suddenly went silent for a few seconds. “Fuck!”

“It seems ridiculous now, huh?”

“Everything seems ridiculous,” she said, biting her lower lip. She then slowed down and began to watch the right side of the road. “There might be an old logging road here somewhere. I need to smoke some of that weed. It’ll calm my nerves. I have to pee pretty bad too.”

A few miles further up, around a curve, I did spot an access road going up a hillside.

“You better hope no old hillbilly shoots us,” I said.

“The last house we passed was a good mile back and it’s not hunting season,” she said as we turned up the road, throwing up dust and stones behind the Buick. “There’s a spot right there to stop for a while,” she said, rubbing her lower belly. She then turned the car off into a turnaround to the left, and then stopped and turned it off. “I think I am going to get gas soon too. We can do that in Coudersport.”

“You seem familiar with the area.”

“I’ve been all through here many times. My parents took me and my sister to visit my mom’s family in Elmira almost every year for a week during the summer. We’d take the country roads going up because it was more scenic.”

“It is pretty,” I said.

“My sister lives in New York now. She met a boy the last time we went up and they started screwing. They got married last year and they live in Horseheads now,” she said while getting tissues out of the glove compartment. “Sorry, but I have to pee.” She then got out of the car and walked to a clearing behind a tree to squat down.

“You’re not shy.”

“Why should I be now?” she shouted back humorlessly.

“I suppose not.”

When she was on her way back, I decided myself to go off and pee against a tree a little way down the hillside. The woods smelled mossy and green and the shade from the old stand of trees was refreshingly cool. I heard her turn the car on and she shouted down to me. “I’m going to put the top up! You can drive for a while!”

“That’s fine with me!” I shouted back, zipping my fly.

By the time I returned, Moira was on the passenger side with the guitar case open in the back seat and she handed me one of the joints. She kept rubbing her belly and looking back and forth at the floor of the car, as if she had lost something.

“You all right?” I said while familiarizing myself with the instruments.

“No, but I will be soon,” she said, closing the guitar case and then pulling a bottle of sloe gin from under the seat. “I got this.”

“We better not get pulled over.”

“This is why I put the top up,” she said, chugging some down.

I pulled Songs of the Wood from the console and let it begin playing before I backed the car out of the gravel turnaround. Moira, riding shotgun, kept the sloe gin bottle hidden between the seat and door between drinks.

I drove almost to the New York State line, letting the album play

through, with Moira singing from time to time.

“I didn’t like it,” I said, and then looked down in short glances for another cassette.

“Told you it wasn’t driving music,” Moira snapped. She was drunk and fishing the roach out of the plastic baggie.

“No, I mean I like Tull, but this album sounds like folk music.”

She laughed madly, one arm flapping and head shaking. “Oh, FUCK!” she said, then took a toke. She was silent for a second, then more laughter and coughing. “You’re the only black guy I know who likes Jethro Tull!”

“Wow,” I said when the red light lit on the gas gauge. “I forgot we needed to get gas.”

“Don’t have a conniption.” More laughter. More coughing. “You can drive for another twenty miles after that light comes on.”

“I’m going to keep my eyes open,” I said.

After about five miles, I saw a Sunoco station and turned off, pulling up to the pumps.

“What happened to him anyway?” I asked.

“What happened to who?”

“Drew.”

“I ate him,” she said, straight-faced, “I shot him and I ate him.” She began to laugh hysterically. “Not all of him, just his liver. I happen to like liver.”

I filled the car up and offered to pay, but Moira stopped me. “No, I got it. You just fucking sit down and drive.”

When she got back in the car, I glanced at her. She was still drunk, but no longer laughing.

“There was another reason why you wanted to stay off the highways,” I said, getting back out onto the road.

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“It wasn’t just the pot. It was me too.”

Sometime after we crossed into New York, she bit her lower lip. It began bleeding, but she obviously didn’t feel it. After that she started to hit her belly hard over and over. “It’s not okay. I’m sorry! It’s still not okay!”

I grabbed her arm to restrain her. "Hey! What are you doing?”

She began sobbing and hitting herself harder.

“I WANT IT FUCKING OUT OF ME! “Oh my God, baby,” I said, beginning to pull the car over.

Blood had soaked through her jeans and began to pool on the seat.

“KEEP DRIVING! DON’T YOU DARE FUCKING STOP!” The Seneca Guns Almost two hundred years ago, I suppose, there were Iroquois villages on the lake's hillsides. The villages were wiped out by troops that invaded

their homeland to punish them for helping the British. Roadside signs trace the route along the east side of Seneca Lake now where the burning of the villages occurred. After the war, the land of the Iroquois was divided up among the veterans of the army in payment for their service. If only it were the Iroquois who had the heavy artillery. We suppose we’re better people than we were years ago and yet we enjoy indulging in the joy of recollection and nostalgia. It is as though we see our past through gauze. I looked out over the lake.

I thought I heard a couple of loud bangs, but maybe it was just the sound of someone firing off a shotgun. It was difficult to tell. If you reserve judgment and expectation, it’s more rewarding for what it is and not a disappointment for what it’s not. Fuck James Fennimore Cooper. Fuck that asshole. He was an overrated, delusional hack, and I’m supposed to believe. The Iroquois or whoever else were here should come back and burn the hell out of Geneva, and Ovid, and Watkins Glen. Torch it all and build little villages of long houses on the hills again, hunt deer, and fish for trout.

Panpipes The reason people like horror movies is that it makes the horrors of life seem less terrifying. The chances that flesh-burrowing worms will invade your town are pretty slim, and anything compared to that would be kid’s play. I saw The Exorcist in the movie theatre. I turned eighteen on Christmas Eve and the movie was released the day after Christmas.

That movie scared the hell out of me, because I believed in the Devil then, and I believed that he or his demons could get inside us. I don’t anymore. Now I believe the Devil is us. We lie, and cheat, and steal, and torture, and rape, and murder, and we have a scapegoat in The Devil. I remember reading The Scarlet Letter in high school. The Devil was The Black Man. The Black Devil.

An owl hooted in the trees behind me and outside of the chirping crickets, it was quiet. It’s always hard to know what the truth is. For all I know maybe she did kill Drew. Maybe I never knew anything I thought I knew. I turned onto a secluded dirt road north of Watkin’s Glen, where I put Moira’s body into the sleeping bag and then I continued on to the lake. I got to a hunting area southwest of Burdett and turned off into the woods, where the lake was still narrow. By then, it had started to get dark.

I pulled the sleeping bag out of the back seat and dragged it into the water among some cattails. I used my pen knife to carve “M.M.’77” into the trunk of a nearby beech tree. Then I sat down on the grass and watched the stars begin to show themselves over the water, one by one, first the brightest and the dimmest last.

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untitled /aSHLEY Smith /COLORED PENCIL/ 2015

What Can Be Created Can Be Destroyed Why is it that I, the ever-molting one, and you, the always ripening one, barely acknowledge one another, not just anymore but ever?

It’s almost as if we’d made a pact, struck a deal to make it through as neighbors who feared acquaintance. You summer at the coast; I prefer the woods. I sleep on my back, you on your belly. You love stripes, drape yourself in green on St. Patrick’s, even don red socks if, by your reckoning, appropriate. I wear earth tones only, solid ones at that, no matter the occasion. We have never been photographed together. You have five different uses for a potato ricer (!), and put scotch in your French toast (did you get that from me?). In the world where I am your second person, I hope you say things like: others make grist of you, you eat whatever is put in front of you, you know the world by mouthfeel. But then maybe I am not your second person. Because you like to begin sentences with phrases like, “In cryptography...” or, “According to my favorite Russian existentialist...” it is fair for me to say: since we more and more act by algorithm (which is to say: act-by-not-acting), and depend upon the key stretching function of strangers to protect us, breaking no longer occurs, by necessity, at a weak link. This is to say how vulnerable to ourselves we have become. As the narrator of Demons says to Trofimovich: “Go, my friend, I am to blame for subjecting you. You have a future and career of some sort, while I— mon heure a sonne.” My French is poor, but that says: my hour has struck. When I finally get my hands on the periplus of your travels, and compare your geolocation data to my own, I will wonder how you navigated with so few clothes packed in so many bags. If anyone can find the definitive Lost City of Z without succumbing to it, that’s you. We are not, as distillers say of spirits, married with water.

But I take responsibility for your deviations, make sport of it; I narrate without perspective. We are two-factor, you a brute force hack.

untitled /aSHLEY Smith /COLORED PENCIL/ 2015

The Meaning of Progress If you want to worry, no one will stop you. No one is going to go to extraordinary lengths to head it off, curtail it even, or help you find the source of your anxiety. No one concerns themselves, all that much, with your terrible childhood, your edge-case traumas that you can’t seem to let go. You wonder why you dream so much about emergency vehicles—a collision with a hook and ladder engine, an ambulance that morphs into an ice cream truck, a police helicopter that circles endlessly—but this not a mystery that needs much investigation. Perhaps the fortune cookies are right, and all your misfortunes will turn auspicious at the new year. You should be better about tracking the moon’s phases, or should revisit that medium in Des Moines, the one who claimed you had not one but two guardian angels, who even told you their names. The fact that you didn’t mark them more carefully says a lot about the kind of person you were back then. What kind of hope is being held out here? When you talk about change, just what is it you mean. Sure, you taught yourself the necessary courage to jump off the quarry point; what was that, a 30 foot vertical drop? But there were girls involved, the second Laura was there, and your friends who exerted a bit of archaic shame that served to shape you into a certain version of a man. But that doesn’t make you mature.

The farthest thing from your mind were concepts—of questionable utility anyway—like integration or balance. No one cares to mention that these are only achieved by one yoga or another, and few of those who would say it know what that means. You didn’t ask for that job cutting grass, using their shitty old Lawnboy, the face-lifted woman who wore a bikini that barely contained her sagging tits every time you showed up, and sometimes the teenage daughter, much firmer of body of course, who would sunbathe in the backyard and around whose lawn recliner you had to maneuver.

You didn’t make that older boy molest you any more than you made the world that couldn’t protect you from him, anymore than you were unable to forgive either of them. This seems like something forgettable, no real harm, no one was mortally injured. What are you

afraid is going to happen? And no, saying you’re tired of performing doesn’t count: this is just what the life requires.

They failed to inform you of that, to teach basic skills of impersonation, so you keep expecting a kind of naturalness to set in, an organic freedom and grace that proceeds from the whole of you like dusk and lightning bugs, like the kids who used to chase them on nights in July (I rarely ever see this, do you?, or even see so many of the glowworms as we did), and even like the mason jar with a twig and some grass that they carry, holes punched in the lid with a screwdriver, convinced with an unquestionable faith that life in there is just as good as it is in the open air. No one pointed out the hovering bats to us until it was too late. Then there were the men, who sat cross-legged in a line of folding chairs, each with cigarette ember glowing in the deepening grey, each one dying more slowly than the next, without any acknowledgment of it, talking about what goes on out there, or back then, but little more, all without much thought to the sky that’s threatening fire, even if that’s what everyone came there to see. Even if there were no sirens in the distance, or any sense that it all amounted to any more than just that, right there and right then.

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Fat Baby Dina came in from the nursery with Bentley, dressed in a Bears hoodie and matching booties, cradled in the crook of her arm. Clark was in the kitchen getting the pasta ready and he turned to her and said, "I have to tell you something."

The tone of his voice stopped her, made her look up. Emotionless, as though he had thought so hard about this moment that he'd drained all the life out of it. Dina couldn't remember him ever sounding this way.

Like an automaton, a prerecorded voice on the other end of the line.

"I have been unfaithful," he said, looking over his shoulder but not at her. "I've been seeing someone. For a couple of months now." He turned to face her completely. Eyes flitted across her face, then away again. "I think it's serious."

Dina stared at him. Clark shifted uncomfortably on his feet. Behind him, the water began to boil.

"I had to tell you," he said, shrugging. "I couldn't hold it any longer."

This didn't seem rehearsed. Not this part. This was the Clark she knew, always indecisive, doubting every choice he made. Soup or salad?

He would lament it after dinner. She always had to choose the movies they watched. She could make up her mind. Clark's mind was endless.

He saw all possibilities, and all of them held promise.

Dina knew she had to say something. She supposed she should express anger; she felt some, but it kept itself hidden deep inside her, tickling at her insides but not daring to emerge. Surprise? Shock? Nothing. She bounced Bentley in her arm and asked, "Who?" Clark shook his head and returned his attention to the pasta. "No one. I mean, no one you know."

"Who?" "Kelsie," he said. "From work."

Clark didn't remember; why would he? He didn't have his wife's brain. He didn't catalogue every woman who came in and out of his life at every second. That was Dina's job. She remembered Kelsie From Work.

A cute little blonde, maybe twenty-six. On the chubby side, which was hard to picture, because Clark had always preferred his women thin, almost too thin. Dina had seen pictures of his ex-girlfriends; they'd all fit a similar pattern. Dina came from the same mold herself. Kelsie From Work did not.

"Oh," Dina said, wondering why Kelsie. If not her looks, then her

personality? Wasn't that even worse? It implied that Clark wasn't satisfied spending time with Dina. She could no longer entertain him, keep his attention. That had to be it, and Dina didn't think there was any coming back from something like that.

Looks could change one way or the other.

Personality could not, not after three decades of arranging itself.

"I guess we can still do dinner," Clark said, not realizing that Dina had turned around and was heading for the door. "I think I'll spend the night at a hotel. We can talk about this more tomorrow. Like I said, I think it's serious. I want it to be."

Dina opened the door and stepped outside. Cool out, but Bentley was already dressed warmly, and she couldn't feel a thing. Her child gurgled in her ear. She felt his smile against her skin, his tiny hand probing at her chin and lips.

She left the door open and walked down the stone pathway to the street.

Turned right and kept walking. She wondered if Clark was still talking. She didn't hear him call after her. A car drove by, she saw someone wave in her peripheral vision.

Bentley made a happy noise. Air hissed from his nose.

I think it's serious. Dina thought these words over and over. I think it's serious. I think it's serious. I think it's serious. The last seemed too melodramatic, the one before that too surreal, the first so laughable she smiled. Which had Clark used? She couldn't remember. She heard all three distinctly, echoing, colliding with each other in her head, a cacophony of doubt and surprise and determination. Bentley's voice joined the barrage, happy giggles directed at a dog across the street. Dina pulled her son tighter against her. It was a big dog.

After a while, she looked up and found herself outside the Mach 1 station. A few patrons looked at her, entertainment while their cars greedily guzzled dinosaur bones. Dina realized her nose was running. It looked warm inside, beneath the glow of florescent lights and neon signs advertising Marlboro and Milwaukee's Best. At some point, a light mist had begun to fall, the kind of late September drizzle that wears down your clothing and pushes its way to the skin.

She'd crossed half the town. Dina held Bentley in front of her, looking him over. He grinned at the attention, batted her nose with his hand.

Said something that sounded like mommy, though he hadn't started speaking yet and wouldn't for a while. Dina ran her hand softly across his face.

Skin so smooth. And, thankfully, dry.

"Excuse me," a voice said, so calmly that Dina wasn't even startled.

An older voice, crisp with age and experience, accent ancient and indiscernible. Dina turned and saw an elderly woman behind the wheel of an Oldsmobile, bright lipstick smile and blue bags beneath her eyes. "Miss," the lady said again, "miss, do you need a ride?"

Dina didn't, because she wasn't sure where she was going, but she nodded and walked around the back of the car and climbed in next to the lady. The driver frowned slightly at the child in the front seat, but didn't make a fuss. It was a small town. Bad things didn't happen in small towns. Not tragic things, at least. Bad things, Dina supposed, happened everywhere.

"Guess you didn't expect the precipitation," the lady said. "You or the little one."

Dina shook her head.

"Well, which way, miss? You were walking west, if I remember correctly. So west?"

West sounded good.

The Oldsmobile pulled out, against the traffic. "I just had to offer you a ride," the lady said. "I'm not going very far. Just to the Lodge, you know. Early Bird Bingo. I know, it's silly, an old filly like me playing bingo. I also read Agatha Christie and bake cherry pies. I come from that generation, miss, and we won one World War and in Korea as well, so I'm proud of it."

The car reeked of the woman's perfume, liberally applied before the upcoming social occasion. Heat blasted from the vents, an easy twentydegree difference than outside. Maybe thirty. Dina pulled back Bentley's hoodie. The child seemed started at his widened peripheral view. He gazed at the elderly driver, slack-jawed.

"Oh, he's an adorable one," the woman said. "So chubby, so very chubby. My Ollie was exactly the same way, you know. Used to eat everything in sight. We had to put mittens on his hands to keep him from

picking stuff up and putting it in his mouth. You know what he did? He learned to pick it up with his tongue. He just ate and ate. I guess you could say he ate himself to an early grave. So sad, but that was ten years ago, and I'm strong enough to admit I should've seen it coming."

Dina nodded. Wind-blown droplets of water sputtered against the window, trailing upward against gravity. Bentley poked his finger against the glass.

"You should watch that," the woman said. "Their bodies don't know when to stop eating, you know. Babies would keep growing until they burst, they would, if not for parents. I used to think of my Ollie as a towering giant in diapers. It always cracked me up."

Neither the woman nor Dina laughed. Bentley grew bored with the futility of trying to catch raindrops, and settled in against his mother's belly. Her clothes were damp, but Dina cradled him.

"Here we are," the woman said, pulling into the Moose parking lot.

"Do you want to come inside, or do you want to keep walking?"

Dina eyed the front door. She hadn't been inside the Moose in years, not since she'd been in college. She wondered if they still hosted Thursday night bingo; open to the public, beers a dollar twenty-five. There was little else to do with the weekend so close but just out of reach.

"We'll come in," Dina said. "They won't mind?"

"Bar's open, dear." The woman turned off the car. "What's his name, may I ask?"

"Oh. Bentley."

The woman pursed her lips, stared at the child for a moment, then nodded. "Bentley."

They left the car and walked up to the door. "She's with me," the woman told the doorman, who shrugged as though he didn't care. He gave Bentley a second glance but seemed to come to some decision.

"Bingo's for members only," the old woman said, "but you can sit at the bar over there."

"Thank you," Dina said, not sure she meant it but knowing it was expected.

"Bentley," the woman said again.

Dina nodded.

The woman sighed and shook her head. "Oh well. He's a chubby one, at least. A beautiful chubby little baby."

She wandered off. Dina sat down at the bar, Bentley in her lap. The bartender, a middle-aged woman who looked older, offered to get a child seat, but Dina shook her head and ordered a vodka and soda. The bartender hesitated, but eventually poured the drink, because that's what she was there to do.

Daytime talk show on the television, volume muted and no Closed

Captioning. A wildly gesturing man Dina vaguely recognized seemed either angry or impassioned by a young black couple. A child was eventually brought out, three or four years old, a little girl in pigtails. More posturing.

Scripted, Dina thought. Everything was scripted.

Halfway through Dina's second drink, Bentley fell asleep in her lap. His soft snores drifted up to her. She watched him for a while. The door behind her opened, heavy boots thumping on the floor. Whispered voices.

Dina stroked the top of her son's head.

"Ma'am," a man said. In the mirror behind the bar, Dina saw a young policeman, possibly her age, hands clasped in front of his belt buckle. His hair was matted and damp. He leaned slightly toward her, squinting against the dim lights to see her reflection more clearly.

"We've been looking for you, ma'am," he said. Cleared his throat, as though unsure what to follow that with.

Dina finished her drink. She her hand up for the bartender.

"Are you okay, ma'am?" the officer asked.

"One more drink," Dina said, to both him and the bartender. She returned her attention to the television. A new couple, also young, also black. Eventually, another child as well.

But the same gestures, as though the host were distracting a wild animal. Scripted, Dina thought again, as Bentley nuzzled deeper into her stomach.

Definitely scripted, but still surprising.

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