The Impressment Gang Editors
Pearl Chan Clay Everest Cassie Guinan
1:3 02.2015
Editorial Assistant
Jazmen Bishop Cover
Tom Lute in 1,2,3 Woyzeck! Photo by Lily Ross-Millard Design
Cassie Guinan
The Impressment Gang Journal Association is a registered not for profit society dedicated to publishing literary magazines out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our mandate is to relieving the dieting of the arts through our commitment to publishing fine new writing and engaging in reviews and criticism.
ISSN 2292-955X Š Copyright remains with the writers. February 2015.
Printing by Halcraft Printers Inc. 2688 Robie St, Halifax, NS, B3K 4N8. Submissions
We accept submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and writing in general, previously unpublished and original work only. Send a cover letter with your name, address, email, title(s), word count (n/a for poetry), and brief bio. Work should be paginated, set in a 12pt readable font. Manuscripts can be emailed (.pdf format) or mailed to: submissions@theimpressmentgang.ca The Impressment Gang, C/O The Khyber 5521 Cornwallis St, Halifax, NS, B3K 1B3 Subscriptions
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Editor’s Note Poetry
P. C. Vandall
Scrambled
06
Kevin Cooley
Simone & Sartre
28
Mark Swan
Summer Days
30
Cluck Cluck
31
Kristine Ong Muslim
The Cold Room
34
The Solarium
35
Michaela Stephen
Quiet
45
Kenneth Pobo
Missing Each Other
47
Jane Campbell
Blessings Abound
15
Brett Marie
The Boy, My Son
48
1,2,3 Woyzeck!
08
Hilary Maloney-Nevin
Gloria
32
Jen Neale
Mes Petites Soliers
37
Fiction
Excerpt
Lily Ross-Millard Non-Fiction
Contributors
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Editor’s Note
Sometimes I forget that I have (or discount myself as if I have never) endured a crisis. I shouldn’t do that. Nobody should do that. Typically this happens when I try to compare myself directly to another person or group of people. The other day I was trying to think of the most physical pain I have ever suffered – constipation – and that’s honestly it. Nevertheless, the definition of crisis is very inclusive:
crisis, noun 1 1.
a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, especially for better or for worse, is determined; turning point.
2.
a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.
3.
a dramatic emotional or circumstantial upheaval in a person’s life.
And I do feel like I just overcame a bit of a crisis. Stretched between our last quarter’s issue and now, I’ve had a lot of hands on my left breast. There has been digging around, squeezing, saying things like: “Are you sure that’s not a rib?” (why, yes, it’s a tiny floating rib smack dab in the middle of my tit). There has also been: positioning, poking, plucking out a piece or five through a hollow needle (though I swear it was six). The cover to this issue was almost my mammogram. Featured near the surface, my own little peach pit, my innocent fibrous lump. For many reasons, crisis is an idea that underlies this issue. For one reason, the idea is broad and we like that. Crisis invites observation and discussion. What is the crisis here? How do we react? What can you tell a person who has gone through a crisis? Will it help?
1
“crisis.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 31 Jan. 2015. <Dictionary. com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/crisis>.
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I’m not a good advice person. But I once heard someone say: “It’s a dog eat dog kind of world. You gotta push, kick, and gauge your way to the front of the line.” Is that good advice? I heard this from a man who was standing in a dog park. Afterwards I really thought about the gauging part. And what about that line up? I thought, I’m not a part of that. I walked away with my nose up. I was walking to go to work at a bank. Last week I stopped at an intersection on Quinpool and Vernon. There was a man who stood with me, signalling to another man walking further down Quinpool Road. “There’s a store down there, where you can buy cigarettes.” He pointed down Vernon. The other man steadily pushed in the wrong direction. He was wearing a hospital gown under his winter coat and he had a walker. I caught up to him. He looked about forty. “There’s a store just across the streeet,” I said, “they sell videos but you can buy cigarettes too. Just after Freemans.” He said, “thanks doll,” which I hated. But he took my advice, turned around toward the right side of the street. I wondered about his situation, and if a cigarette would hinder or help. My partner will sometimes romantically gesture, “I wonder what their life is like.” He will be looking up and into the lit window of a house with a turret, an attic, or a few hundred tiny apartment windows. We will often walk with our arms linked and I rest my head on his shoulder. I will laugh soft and graceful, and he says “what?” It’s not always that romantic. Each piece of writing in this collection plays with that “what?” And while we didn’t marry a theme as part of our selection process, the issue that stands is filled with crises: death, aging, abuse, an ultimatum. Sure we are limited by our own experiences, and the varying crises we’ve encountered. But are we always limited by our own experiences? ...what!? — CG, poetry editor
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P. C. Vandall Scrambled He’s there before morning breaks, before light spills out golden and slick over a farm floor. How easy it is for him to crack open eggs from mother’s breakfast basket, let yellow yolks slide and ooze in his mouth. Ribbons of runny embryonic slime thread down his throat like strips of slippery sea kelp. Mucous weeds drizzle from his chin and he casts devil’s eyes on me. I wince, turn away, try not to gag. I can’t bear to see him swallow. “Just like a woman,” he says, then gulps translucent fluid down. One day he tiptoes in, brings soft boiled eggs. He tells me to slip one within my mouth and hold it. It’s squishy, moist and sits poised on the flat of my tongue. He says my mouth is the henhouse and I should keep the egg safely tucked in cushioned cheeks. I grasp it like a secret, ridged and firm inside. I am careful not to jiggle or scrape the smooth polished surface, not to jostle or bite but to suck its fleshy tissue. It is warm and snug nestled in the dark hollows of my mouth. He said I become angelic with a milk white egg between
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rose lips. It is swollen and soft, pitless as plums in my belly. He says raw eggs are for men and soft boiled are for women. What about the children, I ask? Beaten until scrambled if you tell anyone.
P. C. Vandall
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Lily Ross-Millard 1,2,3 Woyzeck! Excerpted from the unpublished manuscript premiering in Halifax March 21-24, 2015 at the Fort Massey United Church, 5303 Tobin Street. Reprinted with permission of writer.
—Writing is unavailble in archive, but you can purchase this issue from our online store! —
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—Writing is unavailble in archive, but you can purchase this issue from our online store! —
Lily Ross-Millard
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—Writing is unavailble in archive, but you can purchase this issue from our online store! —
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—Writing is unavailble in archive, but you can purchase this issue from our online store! —
Lily Ross-Millard
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—Writing is unavailble in archive, but you can purchase this issue from our online store! —
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—Writing is unavailble in archive, but you can purchase this issue from our online store! —
Lily Ross-Millard
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Jane Campbell Blessings Abound Claudia knew it was going to be at good day at 6:12 am when she ran a block and a half to catch the bus. She arrived just as the doors folded closed in front of her. But then! The doors sighed back open. A nice bus driver, he had seen her running. “Thank you!” she said to him, and he nodded in reply. After that, everything was fine. Spin class was fine. Her shower was fine. The bus to work was fine. Work was fine. Fine in the sense that nothing bad happened. She didn’t notice any glaring typos five seconds after she hit send. Rachel didn’t pop by her desk to offer “constructive feedback.” The broccoli linguine Lean Cuisine she ate for lunch was evenly heated given the age and general decrepitude of the office microwave. Plus it was warm outside and the air smelled thick with budding life. It was only February, and this was just the first of Vancouver’s many false springs, but it was enough to make her feel a sort of vestigial childhood hope. She got off the bus two stops early so she could walk a while and appreciate cleanness of the air, the gentle evening sun. This was the right day for the baby to be born, she decided as she was walking. It was four days until her due date. Would she get a better day? Probably not. And her other babies had all come a little early. When she got home, she poured wine into a coffee mug, sat down at her computer, and logged into her WordPress account. This would be a quick one. She’d just had a baby for God’s sake! She’d been drafting and redrafting the post in her head all day, so she typed quickly: Baby girl born at home, 8:45 am, 8 lbs 1 oz. We’re both doing well. No name yet. Other kids are in love! She hit publish and went to the kitchenette to make herself an omelet. After she ate, she played Candy Crush, then entertained her cat, Badger, with a fake mouse. Her post had been up for close to two hours by the time she logged back on. There were already thirty-two comments. “Congratulations! Welcome little one!” “Good job, Mama! Enjoy your babymoon!” “So happy for you! Wish you would break your no pictures rule just this once!”
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Her blog, Blessings Abound, had 3,526 followers. The comments would continue to flow in for the next few days. She’d post again at the end of the week with a name and a rough birth story, which would be expanded and fleshed out in a later entry. She was still mulling the name even though she’d had a good nine months to pick one out. Something girly, unusual but not insane. Julie, the author of Blessings Abound, was a hippie but she still had class. Claudia didn’t feel bad about lying because no one was getting hurt. She certainly could make money off the blog, but she didn’t. She never asked for donations, never did sponsored posts, never stole photos of other people’s children and passed them off as her own. The only photos she ever posted were generic shots of flowers and freshly baked cookies and miniature dresses on miniature hangers. She took all the photos herself, often in children’s boutiques around the city since she certainly wasn’t crazy enough to keep a supply of teethers and onesies in her apartment. Her husband was a grade 4 teacher, she explained on the blog, so it was of the utmost importance that she keep her family’s identity a secret. No photos of her, no photos of the children, no concrete information about where they lived. It was just a hobby! Some people crochet, some people run marathons. She pretended to be a breast-feeding, cloth-diapering, home-birthing mother of four on the Internet. It was a sort of mental exercise. Phaedra Elizabeth. That was the name of baby number four. She posted it on Thursday night and spent Friday furtively glancing at the comments on her iPhone. They were almost all positive, as usual. There was a “Pretty but not my style,” thrown in here and there. Who the hell writes something like that? she wondered. Keep it to yourself. She also kept an eye on STFU Mommy Bloggers, the preeminent snark website where cynics critiqued and deconstructed even the most minute aspects of any parenting blog with more than a couple thousand followers. The phrase “Someone please call CPS!” was thrown about liberally. Blessings Abound had it’s own thread, of course, which was great, it drove up page views, but Claudia usually studiously avoided looking at the comments. It was too dark a road to go down. In honour of Phaedra’s entrance into the world, she had decided to make a brief exception. She took it as a point of great pride that Blessings Abound had never appeared on the “Horrible Mommy Blogger Baby Names” thread, and she hoped Phaedra wouldn’t break her streak. She actually really liked the name. So far, she was free and clear. 16
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Work had been slow and by the end of the day she was bored to the point of fatigue. Not a bad day, but not such a great one either. And then her phone buzzed. Jeff: Movie tonight? Why do you always make plans at the last minute? She imagined texting back, but, no that was mean, and she did want to see Jeff. Rest her head against his chest, draw in the smell of his Right Guard. They’d been exclusive for six months now. He was the only real boyfriend she’d had since university. She’d dated here and there, but it always seemed like sooner or later there was some test she couldn’t pass. She texted too often or not enough. She said something caustic when she ought to have said something sweet. She laughed at all the wrong times. Or whatever. Now that she was grown up she could finally just admit it her to herself: people didn’t like her that much. She was surprised and disappointed by this, but she didn’t know quite what to do about it. She felt like she was a member of a slightly different species, a porpoise in a world of dolphins. In dolphin world, her porpoise songs would always sound a bit too mournful, a little off key. She liked Jeff, but what would happen when he really got to know her? When he found out she occasionally bought a can of frosting and ate it with a spoon while watching House Hunters International? Or learned that every Sunday she cleaned the kitchen fully nude in order to avoid spilling bleach on her clothes? God forbid he ever saw into the dark abyss of her iTunes playlist. The movie started at 7:30 so they went for sushi first. After they ordered, she pulled out her phone. One of her favourite fellow bloggers, Melanie of Tales of the Tater Tots (her last name was Tater), had had a needle biopsy (possible breast cancer!) earlier in the week, and was expecting to get the results any minute. As soon as she picked up her phone, Jeff rested a hand on her wrist. “Babe! The rule!” They’d both agreed on their second or third date to always put their phones away when they were eating together. There was no rule about phones in movie theaters; so, as soon as they sat down Claudia pulled hers out. Jeff was checking hockey scores on his own phone and he didn’t seem perturbed. Dinner had gone quickly and they had almost twenty minutes to spare. About ten minutes in, she felt Jeff shift in his seat and lean into her shoulder.
Jane Campbell
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“What’s so interesting on there?” “The usual, you know, nothing,” she said, not looking up. Melanie was cancer free. Yawn. Claudia was back to reading through her own comments section. “It can’t be nothing.” “It’s nothing that would interest you, I mean.” He grabbed the phone and started scrolling. “Jeff!” “Blessings Abound?” “It’s just some random page I found.” “Oh, yeah?” He was good at telling when she was lying. She liked this. It certainly made things a bit livelier. “What the shit is this? Four kids! Is this lady some kind of fundie or what?” “No! I mean, she just has a lot of kids, some people do.” “She had a baby at home! Is she demented?” “A lot of people have babies at home. What do you even know about having babies?” She tried to grab the phone back but he was holding on tight. “Husband’s a teacher. That’s pretty convenient.” “Jeff! Give it back!” “So you read this? All the time? You read about this lady having babies in her living room?” “I…well, yeah, I read it sometimes.” “Hm,” Jeff said. “You really into babies or something?” “No, I mean, it’s just so different, her life. I just find it, you know, interesting, I guess. Like one of those TLC shows where the people have sextuplets or whatever.” She lowered her eyes to her lap. “You can’t steal my phone and then make fun of me!” “I’m not making fun of you,” he said, and he rested his hand on her thigh. “I’m just trying to get to know you, find out what interests you.” He handed the phone back. She shoved it into her purse. “I can’t believe you. Stealing my phone.” He leaned over and kissed her neck, dozens of tiny, quick kisses. “Oh, babe,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”
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Things needed to go wrong sometimes. That was the trick, the way to get more page views than the next home-birthing, sweater-knitting, jam-making, crunchy granola mama with way too many kids. She’d learned this from Home Fires, her first blog obsession. She’d just stumbled upon it somehow, the way one does, on a dim winter afternoon. Heather, the author of Home Fires, had all kinds of problems. A daughter with cerebral palsy, a dog that attacked neighborhood children, a second trimester miscarriage she wouldn’t shut up about. And then! She got divorced. Her marriage had seemed perfect, but that had been a front! After everything fell apart, she revealed her had husband belittled her, criticized her cooking and mothering skills, tried to turn her own children against her. Claudia was hooked. She found herself checking the blog first thing in the morning, the second she got out of the shower, while she was walking the three blocks between the bus stop and her apartment. She kept the page open all day at work, refreshed it over and over with a strange, compulsive fervor. And then one day it disappeared. Heather’s soon-to-be-ex-husband had found the blog and was mining it for evidence in the divorce trial. At least those were the rumors on STFU Mommy Bloggers. Heather herself was never heard from again. So far, Julie’s problems had been relatively mild. Her first child was a tyrannical brat, her second child was on the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum, and her husband was kind of a dick sometimes. In recent months, page views had stagnated and Claudia knew they were bound to start dropping sooner or later. She had to act. She’d considered killing off baby Phaedra, but that seemed a little too ghastly and a failed homebirth would stir up all kinds of controversy. A divorce would send page views through the roof short term, but she knew she’d regret it down the road. Her thoroughly mediocre marriage was a big draw. Whenever she posted about her husband’s indifferent attitude towards parenting or his habit of leaving apple cores stashed around their house like sticky Easter eggs the blog was flooded with comments by sympathetic, similarly put upon women. She was considering all this on Saturday afternoon when a pinecone smacked into her balcony window. That was Jeff outside, making her aware of his presence. The buzzer in her building was broken. He’d been bothering her to make him an extra key for weeks, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet. She opened the sliding door and tossed her keys over the railing.
Jane Campbell
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She had feared, momentarily, that he would never call her again after the scene in the movie theater. A thirty-one-year-old unmarried women with no children obsessively reading about the daily lives of fecund housewives? That was just too weird. But not for Jeff apparently. He seemed unfazed. “I Googled that blog you read,” Jeff said, once he had settled into her couch and opened a beer. “Do we have to talk about that? Can we just never talk about that again?” “Oh no, no way, this is too good.” She’d been planning to sidle up to him on the couch, but this line of conversation made her too uneasy for cuddle time so she lingered next to the coffee table. She realized she should have seen this coming. Whenever Jeff got the sense she was hiding something, he rooted it out with the gusto of a truffle hog. He’d already found her shoebox of high school-era ex-boyfriend mementos and her secret DVD collection comprised mostly of romantic comedies staring Keanu Reeves. “Oh sweetie, look at you pout,” he said. “This is good! You’ll like this. See I found this other blog, called Bullshit Abounds, the girl who writes it, she just calls herself Nancy Dee, like Nancy Drew, I think, get it?” “Yeah.” “Well, anyway, she’s convinced that this Julie woman is a fake.” What! Oh God. Calm down. Deep breath. “Oh! Really! Funny! Why does she think that?” “She’s got all kinds of evidence. I mean she’s pretty nuts herself. It’s like Law & Order: Fake Blogger Edition.” She sat down next to Jeff on the couch in an attempt to look cool. Not too close. She felt winded and light-headed. She hoped to God Jeff didn’t touch her. “Oh! Like what kind of evidence!” “Like, um, babe, you seem a little keyed up.” He put his hand on her knee. She glanced down and realized she was tapping her foot with manic speed. “No! No.” She somehow mustered the will power to still her foot. “Sorry, must have overdone it on the coffee again.” Jeff had pulled up Bullshit Abounds on his iPhone. “She thinks a lot of the photos of baby clothes and stuff are actually taken in stores. See look at this one.” He tapped open a photo she’d taken in July: a lavender teddy bear
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awash in sunlight. Her first present for baby Phaedra, then a mere flicker on the ultrasound screen. “See look right here,” he pointed to the very edge of the shot. “Doesn’t that look like a counter in the background? Look at that black thing. It must be a register, right?” It was indeed. A stupid mistake. Impossibly stupid. She hadn’t counted on anyone studying the photo so closely. “Yeah,” Claudia said, “but maybe she just took the picture in the store, when she was buying it.” “Well, and look at this one, that Julie lady said this a pile of clean laundry, right?” He tapped a photo of pristinely folded baby clothes. “But look at this, you can see the tag hanging off one of them, look right here.” He pointed. “I mean, okay, that’s not like all that convincing. So what if she takes photos in stores? Maybe she’s not good at folding.” “There’s all kinds of other stuff,” Jeff said. “Like inconsistencies in her stories, but get this, this is the craziest part. The girl who runs this bullshit blog traced Julie’s IP address and she lives in Vancouver!” “What does that have to do with anything?” “Some of the stuff she says like about her kids’ schools, it doesn’t make sense if she lives in Vancouver, but I mean, isn’t that crazy! Maybe we know her.” Badger jumped on the couch next to Jeff and nosed the phone, as though he too wanted to scroll through Bullshit Abounds and deconstruct every photo Claudia had ever taken. Why was everyone in her life turning against her? And how could she not have known about this already? Well, actually, she knew how. When Blessing Abounds first showed up on the snark sites, she couldn’t have been happier. She’d really made it! She always kept an eye on her threads and if the traffic started to taper off, she’d create a fake account and stoke the fires. “Do you think her husband knows she’s smack talking him in front of thousands of people?” “If she just took five minutes to discipline her oldest he wouldn’t be such a little psychopath.” “This woman needs help! Psychological help!” And so on and so forth. But then something changed. When the blog started, she had two children. She got pregnant with her third right away. She planned the birth so obsessively, she might as well have actually been pregnant. She took books out from the library, read birth stories, watched so many youTube videos she actually became somewhat inured to the gruesome sight of a baby’s head crowning. Jude was born late on a summer afternoon, and a week later she
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read a point-by-point take down of her painstakingly crafted birth story on STFU Mommy Bloggers: Why does she complain about her husband so much? Seems like he’s doing his best. How could she possibly think it was a good idea to let her older children watch? NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR VAGINA JULIE. On an intellectual level, she understood these random Internet strangers weren’t criticizing her. They were criticizing Julie, who didn’t exist. Nonetheless, the reaction sent her into a minor depression. For more than week, she slept through spin class, ate mall Chinese food for lunch, and spent her evenings in bed watching old episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians on her laptop. When she snapped out of it, she resolved to stay away from the snark websites. She checked in from time to time, just to make sure she was still relevant, but she rarely read the comments closely anymore. STFU Mommy Bloggers had probably been all atwitter with Bullshit Abounds for months. “Maybe we could set a trap for her,” Jeff said. “Like on To Catch a Predator.” “That wouldn’t even work,” Claudia said. “What would we bait her with?” “Oh sweetie,” Jeff said. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close. “You’re so sad about this!” “I’m not sad!” she said into his sweater, her voice muffled and unconvincing. After Jeff told her about Bullshit Abounds she didn’t post on the blog for a full week. A record. It wasn’t for lack of trying. She had the beginnings of a dozen different posts saved to her computer. She’d get going and then she’d think, wait, Jude is eighteen months old, right? Or is he nineteen? She wouldn’t have to pay for her second child’s autism therapy? The government had to pay for that. They must! And forget taking pictures. She was all but resigned to never posting photos again. Julie began to receive concerned emails from her fans. “Just checking in. Hope everything’s all right, Mama!” Actually, Claudia suspected, they were hoping some sort of disaster had befallen Julie and/or little Phaedra and they wanted to be the first to know.
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She began to wake up at 4:00 a.m., tangled in her sheets, sick with fear. Bullshit Abounds would uncover her sooner or later. How far would it go? Would her real name get out? Her address? Her photo? How could she have ever possibly thought this was a good idea? She wished she had a good reason for starting the blog. Some kind of tragic story she could tell her mother and her boss when they asked her what the fuck she’d been thinking. It would be one thing if she desperately wanted a life like Julie’s, a house full of babbling children and half-finished craft projects, a place where the washing machine was always humming. The thing was, she didn’t even particularly like children. She had two nieces and she was profoundly indifferent towards them. What she really envied about Julie, she supposed, was that she wanted the same things everyone else wanted. Claudia only wanted strange things like sad stories, dinners alone, and at least two or three more cats. When Julie got what she wanted everyone congratulated her, but it seemed people felt sorry for Claudia. Whenever her mother called, she asked, “You’re happy, aren’t you?” in a strained tone that made it clear she was sure the answer was no. Claudia met Jeff for lunch on Saturday and then they walked back towards her apartment. It had been forecast to rain, but somehow the clouds had broken and revealed a whole hidden world: a vast sky, the deep blue mouth of the pacific, frosted mountains and mountains beyond mountains. “We’re lucky to live here,” Jeff said, and Claudia couldn’t disagree. She held his hand. Why not? Why shouldn’t she? “Oh, shit! Look!” Jeff said. “What?” Claudia said, and she swung her head around expecting to see a car accident or a house on fire or a rabid coyote. “It’s that bear, from the website!” He was pointing to the window of Lilly + Lucas, a baby store where she sometimes took pictures for the blog. Jeff was right. There it was: the lavender teddy bear she’d so carelessly photographed sitting right smack in the middle of the window display. Didn’t they ever update their stock? “Let’s go in,” Jeff said. He pulled her towards the door, but she planted her feet. “Why?” “We can ask them questions, maybe they remember someone who comes in here and takes pictures.”
Jane Campbell
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“This is so stupid.” “No it’s fun, babes. We’re like Internet Detectives.” “Give me a break.” “Stay out here if you want,” he said. “I cannot believe you’re doing this,” she said to his back as he walked through the door. Jeff had a strange immunity to embarrassment, perhaps because he’d grown up in a small, wild town in the mountains where it was impossible to keep secrets or lead a lonely life. He was always striking up conversations with strangers on the bus, chatting with stock boys at the grocery store, soliciting advice from cashiers and waitresses. His friendliness often made her so uncomfortable she’d pretend not to know him, which of course pleased him to no end, inspired him to grab her, flip her sideways, and kiss her on the mouth until she couldn’t help but giggle. She watched him through the window with her arms folded across her chest. He approached one of the salesgirls and started speaking to her. He nodded as the girl spoke, put one hand against his lips. “Hm, very interesting,” she imagined him replying. As she watched him through the glass, she felt like she was seeing him for the first time, seeing him the way a stranger would. It made her breath catch. His solid chest, his earthy hair, the haze of stubble already growing back, well before five o’clock. He was the one regular thing she wanted, she realized. And here he was, in a yuppie baby boutique, chasing down her pretend Internet alter ego. He turned towards the window and pointed at her. The salesgirl looked in her direction and smiled. Fuck. Claudia recognized her. She went into the store once every couple months. Occasionally, she did buy a present for her nieces, but usually she just browsed, kept her phone in one hand, said “Oh, no thanks, I’m just looking!” Could the salesgirl possibly remember her? How could she? They’d never had a conversation; Claudia wasn’t one for small talk. The last time she’d been in the store, she remembered, there was no one else there. The salesgirl had been particularly grating, chatting up bibs and rattles even though Claudia had said she didn’t want any help. She’d made her way to a back corner of the store and snapped a quick photo of a rocking horse, thinking she was alone. “Planning to make up your mind later?” the salesgirl had asked. Where had she even come from? “Excuse me?” Claudia had said, catching her breath. “Is that why you’re taking a picture,” the girl had repeated, “so you can look at it at home and decide?”
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Claudia had mustered some sort of hasty response, like “Oh yeah, I guess so,” and left the store. The door swung open and Jeff walked outside. Claudia felt the muscles in her gut tighten. “Well?” she asked. Jeff opened his mouth, as though he was about to speak and then closed it. “Nothing,” he said finally. “She said she hadn’t seen anything.” “Why did you point to me?” “I just told her my girlfriend was too embarrassed to come in. She thought it was funny.” Claudia wanted to feel relieved, but she couldn’t shake the sense something had shifted in Jeff. He seemed quieter than before. He looked at the sidewalk in front of him rather than looking at her. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but she knew it would seem whiny and desperate. When they came to MacDonald Street, he said, “I think I’ve got to go home and get started on some work. Next week’s gonna be crazy.” She didn’t know what to say. They always spent the night together on Saturday. Why didn’t he say something before? “What’s happening next week?” She asked. “I told you. I’ve got that big presentation. The new compression shorts?” Jeff was a product manager at a running apparel company. Had he mentioned the new compression shorts? She didn’t think so. He put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “I’ll call you.” She left him at the bus stop and walked towards her apartment. He knew, she realized. He definitely knew. When she got home, she drank an entire six pack of pomegranateflavored hard cider, clutched Badger to her chest so tightly he yowled in protest, and sobbed until her face was hot and soaking. She checked her phone every five seconds or so, but Jeff didn’t even text her. After going to the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her tears had dried leaving her face grey and flakey. The sides of her lips were stained pink. She looked like a preschooler who’d overdone it on the fruit punch. Mixed with a sixty-something spinster who had to eat cat food because she’d spent her entire welfare cheque on vodka. Maybe she should kill herself ? She didn’t really want to, but in many ways, it seemed like the most logical solution.
Jane Campbell
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But what was so bad about her life? She’d been fine before Jeff, she would be fine after him. So what if everyone else thought she was strange and miserable. She looked forward to coming home every day, to sitting at the computer and conjuring tales of temper tantrums and potty training drama and finger painting disasters. She wasn’t going to give up, she decided. She was going to fight back. By 10 pm, she’d sobered up (more or less) and she had a plan. Step 1: Forget she’d ever seen Bullshit Abounds. The Internet was full of rumors and outlandish theories. This particular story just so happened to be true, but that didn’t mean it would get any traction. Best to just ignore it. Step 2: Up the ante. It was time for a full-scale tragedy. Baby Phaedra was going to have problems. Serious problems. She would start working on short list of genetic disorders immediately. Step 3: Jeff. She was sure he wanted nothing more to do with her. He probably went home to think about the best way to dump her. She had to put him out of his misery. It was the least she could do. She sent him a text: “Done work yet? Come over?” “K,” he texted back a few minutes later. “Sorry, I had to run out this afternoon,” he said. He sat down on the couch. She handed him a beer. He rested one leg on top of the other, leaned into the cushions, and beckoned to her. Was she wrong? He seemed at ease again. Maybe he wanted one last blowjob for the road. She sat near him, on the edge of the cushion. “Did the woman at the store tell you something?” she said. “You seemed distracted after you talked to her.” “No… I mean, babe, what’s up? Have you been drinking?” “Just a couple beers.” “I was just stressed about work this afternoon.” I write Blessings Abound. I’m Julie. I write Blessings Abound. I’m Julie. The words vibrated in her head. Just say it, she told herself. Just get it over with. She felt Jeff’s weight shift. “Really,” he said, “what’s going on with you?” “What?” “You’re doing it again,” he said.
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“Doing what!” “Something’s wrong. You’re not telling me.” “No! Nothing’s wrong.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, her stomach flipped. Could it be possible he really didn’t know? But it didn’t matter, she realized. If he didn’t know now, he would find out sooner or later. She had to tell him one way or another. She had to tell him now. “Babe, come on!” “Okay,” she said. “Okay, okay.” She drew in her breath deeply, and as she opened her mouth to speak, she caught the scent of Jeff’s Right Guard. The other day at work, she called IT because her computer had picked up a virus. When the tech leaned over her chair to look at the monitor, she smelled it. Right Guard. The thought of Jeff had warmed her, jolted her out of her late afternoon spreadsheet coma. If she told him the truth, she realized, some day she’d smell Right Guard and feel nothing but the stab of his absence. “I’m… I drank a little too much cider before you came over. I just thought… when you left today, that you were mad at me or something.” Jeff snorted. Shook his head. “What did I tell you about that cider, Claud? That shit’s like 8%. You gotta go easy on it.” “Yeah, yeah, I know.” She nodded seriously. “What are you doing, sitting all the way over there?” He motioned to her. She slid into him and rested her head against his chest. He put his fingers in her hair, and she closed her eyes. She hoped she might fall asleep, right where she was, just for a few minutes, so she could wake up again and be surprised to find that Jeff was still there.
Jane Campbell
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Kevin Cooley Simone & Sartre We came together, like hummingbirds, windbridled on invisible currents and somersaulting scents at each other like sweet little lice in the lake’s hair, drawing nourishment forth in a scalp harvest like blackrich oil, straight to the supermarket gas station; God is oil and water in a blender and we are God, a hummingbird —elongated bills and nectar cups that would cost you four bucks more than freedom from the barkeep’s sad side of a plankrotted bar, his face beaded with sweat bulbs like the grassborne dew perforated through athletic shoes I birthed with the grinding of my fingerprints in Drummer Hodge precision and limit-sweet revision; I knew those grass blades, convinced by wind like skins on skins to arc its earthrooted spine in persuasion frothed forth from third kinds of genitals and lyrics I wrote before I climbed in your childhood treehouse and read your bodypoems, scratched like hieroglyphs in liquid pasty pastoral paint on the actually bone-white insides of your skull. It was all burning, fire arrows into thatched targets; I watched inky words of former selves dissipate into the air where only hummingbirds might find them; I learned in between egg yolks and roots of roadside oaks, roots of you, suckling forth your soilborne stew—I learned how to light water on fire with an eyedropper full of oil. We were better gods, incubating life in hot patches of cold swimming pools, swelling up swimshorts with jets of warm water and hot tubs and belly laughing, muscles contracting, as the swelling of balloons like pockets emptied back into the jelly-slick
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brick walls of the stuff of existence and my balloons popped and soared again, but groundward this time. You are the freckles of the universe, the neon stars on your treehouse ceiling and I was purchased at Party City—an elastic contraption of rubbery complexion, stuffed with the alchemy of helium, the chariot of Helios—soaring starward, beyond time’s cellular membrane, beyond the invisible walls in a video game, into the coding, into the code, into nothing but space and tealeaf, hot-familiar foam.
Kevin Cooley
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Marc Swan Summer Days When days of summer meant sleeping under starlight beside the giant oak in the field above our house with a quick run through goldenrod down the hill to the backyard where he kept the archery target and later when he walked home from his day at the office weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d load up the .38, the .45 and bang off a few rounds behind the house, cans placed on a small wooden balustrade in the field beyond the archery target. I learned how to shoot, how to break down the weapon, clean the parts, how to heat the lead, pour it into the mould to create bullets, cool the lead then crimp the wadcutters into casings already primed. It seemed easy to me, unsure of why we needed all those cartridges, but he always had a smile when I was done. Later on a windy day in July, it was arrows not bullets in the backyard. I pulled the string taut and let fly unaware he was up ahead in the tall grass. The steel-tipped arrow flew easily into the soft part of his left thigh. I never used that bow again or the pistols and on my 12th birthday I walked into his gunroom, handed him my twelve gauge. No smile.
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Cluck Cluck I looked at a dead man tonight. He was wearing a red and white flowered Hawaiian shirt, his hands crossed, his face, well, his face looked like he was sleeping, serenely sleeping. I didn’t want to speak too loudly for fear of waking him. The room was filled with blue— firefighters, state troopers, retired and active, in full dress blues. Except for a few, who also wore Hawaiian shirts, and at the door a basket filled with colorful leis for us, the folks gathered from outside of the blue world, gathered to say a final good-bye. In my case, a different path. When I reached my friend, his wife, she said my name so softly, I knew I’d become a respite in this brotherhood game. I held her close and then we spoke briefly of tomorrow, the funeral and all that held. I asked of the chickens. Would she keep the chickens? She smiled and seemed to settle, “You bring the cartons, I’ll bring the eggs.”
Marc Swan
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Hilary Maloney-Nevin Gloria Someone who taught me was my grandmother Gloria. She has had many traumatic experiences and I’ve witnessed the healing process and the ways she never healed. My grandmother was taken from her home, her parents and her siblings to a school off reserve to be transformed from Mi’kmaq to Christian. The Shubenacadie Residential School was run solely by priests and nuns sixty-five years ago, when she was only five. They lured many young children from my community onto a bus, saying they were going on a field trip. Not only from my reserve, but also from reserves across Nova Scotia, children were taken to the “Rezzy School”. When they arrived their hair was cut and when they spoke our language they were beaten and punished. They were punished for caring for one another or sticking up and talking back. Many children were sexually abused, lost their language, and their dignity and their childhood. These they never recovered even after they were released from the residential school. When I was growing up I remember my grandmother yelling and chasing us out of her house. She lost her ways of how to love and care, even though she was blessed with seven kids. She became an alcoholic and suffered from not loving herself. When I was sixteen, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my heart was with her every day. When I graduated, I moved in with her and spent two years caring for her. She would attack me, yell and kick me out or try and run away, not remembering who I was. I would never listen. I would hold her tight, tell her how much I loved her, and tell her: it’s okay, you don’t need to worry, I’m not going anywhere, I love you. She would look at me with her turquoise-blue eyes and say, “I love you too,” calm as could be, like she didn’t just freak out. Soon she became so attached to me she wouldn’t go to bed unless I was lying by her. She would place her head upon my chest when she was feeling lost, you can notice her eyes were in a daze. I would tell her, “Gram, you know I’m here to remember for you, when you forget.” She only felt safe when I was there.
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Someone told me my gram had been blessed with peace finally and to look at Alzheimer’s as a good thing, since she no longer remembers the horrible things from that school and can live in peace. For two years I would tell her I loved her, as I would come and go and she started to love again. I saw it in her eyes. Now she tells me she loves me and gives me a kiss as I walk in and I embrace her every single time. She taught me how to let go and move forward even though she can’t remember. It is a blessing to be released from all the agony she had to face as a child. I am blessed with such a beautiful gram I can care for and love. She is a beautiful woman and I love and miss her so much today.
Hilary Maloney-Nevin
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Kristine Ong Muslim The Cold Room Only cold storage can rein in the wild things straining inside your ribcage, inside your belly, inside the small hollow of your cheekbones. When your room becomes warm enough, they will pour out of your mouth. They will smell of bile, will reek of the years spent in captivity just to keep you looking like everyone else you know. Runoffs from your last ice age, they thaw in the open air, split along the spine, bilaterally symmetrical in all their soft, vulnerable places, because they are alive, because they are like you in many ways, because they, too, purport balance.
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The Solarium The war is over. The bombardiers have stowed away their wares, dropping pallets that smash the glass of your skylight. The citizens are all here. What’s left of them, anyway. Or what remains after everything that can be let go has been allowed to come out of the body’s exit wounds. To rebuild the colony, you tell them to leave behind what cannot be carried — the bright noise that can be mistaken for a song, the water drained from the pool, the cracked eggshells one wishes to hold once again the runny yolks, the translucent whites, the interrupted afterlives. You ask them where they hurt, and they say everywhere. You ask them if they still feel threatened but they are not sure how to answer that, so you ask them again the next day after the war is over and everything appears ordinary.
Kristine Ong Muslim
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Jen Neale Mes Petites Souliers These things happen when I’m 16 —
1. I go to France.
2. My parents get divorced.
3. I have my first kiss.
By the end of my exchange, I’m most known for shuffling cards, and this is how my stump thumbs are first brought to my attention. High school is a shit time, shitter to be in a high school in another country, and maybe shittest if that country is France and the prevailing opinion of the Canadian girl is girl, stay away from me with your flared pants. In my mind now, they don’t speak French; they sound like that. Girl! Nuh-uh. Not to say that the Canadian girl hasn’t earned her nuh-uhs — in the morning when groups gather in circles and exchange kisses, she’s got a special talent for giving too many or too few, leaving her lingering cheek-to-cheek too long. Girl, you best not be crossing to circles you shouldn’t be crossing to. But when I shuffle cards… oh lord, it draws all kinds. At afternoon break, we line up by the cafeteria window and one-byone take our ration of baguette and chocolate stick, eaten together like a sandwich. I sit at the cafeteria table and Solène takes up the post at my right shoulder. Solène is six-foot-something in red platform Docs, with an overbite that extends as far as her nose. If I needed a bouncer, it’d be Solène. A group saunters up as I take my last bite of bread and pull the deck of cards from my bag. Most of these Frenchies normally choose not to speak to the exchange student, but Francine, Aude, and Solène are familiar faces. Francine is, at best, two thirds of Solène’s height. She ducks into one of the chairs right by the action. A bright white goggle tan, from her family’s recent trip to the Alps, lights her face. Aude, whose grayish hair always seems to blend into her grayish complexion, is near the back, hunched into her own form. My thumbs release the cards as perfect alternators left to right to left… it’s the beat of a hummingbird’s wings, the drum of Niagara Falls, the kick-start of a freshly gassed lawnmower. And we’re not even at the good part. 37
Internet palmistry tells me years later that my thumbs are murderer’s thumbs. Also known as potter’s thumbs, stub thumbs, clubbed thumb, it’s a condition shared by millions of self-conscious people around the world. There are Internet support groups dedicated to my condition, despite the fact that there are no real ramifications of having short thumbs. Mine crack a lot. That’s all. Stumpies on the site describe having children with an elegantly long-thumbed spouse, and checking their offspring’s digits as soon as they’re freed from the womb. During the brief period when I wanted to wear a thumb ring, it was hard to get it over the knuckle but then it’d dangle at the base. They’re about half the length of a normal thumb. According to Internet palmistry, they belong to a person who is:
1. Kind of dumb
2. Very calm (even frighteningly so), except the two-to-three times in their life that they lose their shit. Murder someone. With their thumb shaped like the inside of a jugular vein. Before I left for the exchange, I was given a booklet. It laid out proper etiquette for your host country — Belgium, Switzerland or France. The advice they give you in Canada about how to act in France is the worst.
• Fold your lettuce four times before placing it in your mouth.
• Learn your kisses; it’s four for formal or important meetings, three in some parts of the country, sometimes it’s one kiss for a quick hello, but usually it’s two unless it’s three days past a full moon on a Sunday. The entire plane ride from Toronto, I worried about how many cheek kisses I should give my host parents. It was two for each of Amandine’s family members, Mr. Treguer, Mrs.. Treguer and Tiami, their adopted daughter from Vietnam. Amandine wasn’t able to make it. Mrs. Treguer didn’t make me feel too uncomfortable when I inexplicably took her hand during the cheek kiss.
• Don’t try to be too friendly.
Also, do not place too much trust in your high school French teacher in small-town Ontario, who also teaches Italian and sometimes art. My French teacher, Mme Ssss (Sorbet? Scabies?), had a very serious look on her face
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as she had our class of 12 repeat back to her, “souliers… shoes… souliers… shoes”. Do not say souliers in front of a group of teenagers at a high school in France, because they will laugh at you, and they will make you say it again and again. Souliers is what you would ask for if you were a brighteyed eighteenth-century chicken heart and your toes were chilly in the dewy morn. The only time they actually use the word is in the expression être dans ses petites souliers — “to be in one’s small shoes”, “to feel awkward”. Shoes are chaussures. Amandine, my exchange partner, spent three months in Canada before I came to France. She had a crush on a boy named Andrew who hung out in the smoke pit, and with whom she got to make out once or twice. Now, back in France, she hovers with her friends near the door of the cafeteria. She won’t come over to watch me shuffle. She won’t come near the pariah. The cards have all been laid down; the two piles bellies’ fold into one another at the centre. My thumbs hold the cards steady on top while my other four fingers lift from the bottom. Eight or nine French faces lean further over the cafeteria table to see exactly how the trick is done, and Solène warns with her arm, making sure there’s no interference. I bend the cards up into a rainbow. Once the pressure builds high enough, I let them cascade down, completing the bridge. A tall boy who wants to try snatches the deck from my hands. He can do the riffle, but not the bridge. The deck travels around the group and it’s the same for all of them. In my group of euchre players in Ontario, a bridge is nothing to nobody. Who can’t do a bridge? But here, c’est encroyable. There are three places I go while I’m staying in Bretagne — the house, the high school, and the stable. Horses are why Amandine and I were paired together, and she has to take me with her whenever she goes riding. We’ve both ridden since we were young. In Ontario, I have a horse named Smokey. When Amandine was in Canada, I sorted through the bathroom waste basket for the torn pieces of a diary entry that read Je n’aime pas Smokey. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. I don’t know if she tore it because she changed her mind about Smokey or because she knew how upset I’d be if I found it. After Amandine left Canada and before I arrived in France, in that three-month period, my parents announced they’d be getting divorced. It happened the day after Christmas, actually, with the poinsettia still firmly planted in the centre of the kitchen table. The poinsettia is still the only image I can conjure for that day. Jen Neale
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Soon afterward, my mother began taking a late-night computer class even though she seemed to know her way around a keyboard well enough. My father began taking late-night drives around Niagara Falls. I was in France for about a month before I finally received a care package from my mother. The package was waiting on my bed when I returned from school. I ripped open the manila envelope and found a couple of Caramilk bars and a letter saying she’d gotten a boyfriend (from the computer class) and a Honda Shadow. I knew my mom had ridden a motorcycle when she was young, but the image of her doing it as a 48-year-old wouldn’t compute. Tiami knocked on my door with her tiny fists but my eyes didn’t lift from the letter. Jenneefer, ça va? In Bretagne, everyone wears britches instead of chaps, and smokes before and after riding. I collided with a girl on our second ride. The horses moved around the indoor ring at a near gallop and dust wafted through the air. There was no order to the galloping, or I didn’t understand the directions. We made laps around the ring. My horse was starting to get sweaty, and I leaned forward to give him a pat. When my eyes returned upward, I was headed straight toward another horse. The girl tried to steer one way or another, and I mirrored. In Canada (En Canada… I got so tired of saying that) you pass left-to-left, and France, apparently, it’s right-to-right. Our horses tried to take over the steering at the last minute — I don’t know why they trusted us for so long — but still their chests hit hard. I didn’t fall off, but the other girl did. Every horse in the ring halted. From the ground she yelled at me and I replied with the words that Mme Sss had taught: je m’excuse! Don’t say souliers and don’t say je m’excuse, especially not again and again. I excuse me! I excuse me! Je suis desolé. The cards are passed back to me, and I perform a few more easy bridges. And the boy I have a crush on, Sébastien, breaks away from Amandine and comes in to watch. I remember him being so tall, but not as tall as Solène. He rides too, which is awesomely uncool in Canada and très cool in France. French boys know how to wear britches. Every morning, I cross to whatever circle Sébastien is standing in to kiss cheeks, and he obliges. It makes my gut smolder. A month after the horse collision, a group from the stable, including Sébastien, went out to a small boîte to dance. That night we planned go
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back to Isabelle’s house and sleep in one big room. We only had two scooters between the eight of us, so Isabelle and Yves made rounds picking up two people up at the back of the pack and driving them up the road. For those walking, the pavement twisted ahead in the dark, and it would take a few moments after the glare of the scooter headlights faded to be able to see. I tried to position myself so I’d end up with Sébastien on the scooter, but he was always somewhere else. I was dropped off with Guillaume at the front of the pack and the scooter wheeled around to get new passengers. Guillaume was one of the few I felt like I could be friends with, so I tried to say anything to push through the swath of silence. When the stars emerged from the scooter’s headlights, they looked incredibly clear to me. The countryside and the smell of gasoline reminded me of nights back home with my best friend Eric, when we would drive up a dead end road to stargaze. I said to Guillaume, in my best French, Les étoiles sont belles ce soir. He looked at me like Oh Shit Girl, nuh-uh. There are a lot of moments that could be considered the trigger point for the trouble—some might choose the horse collision or the fashion errors— but for me, it goes back to that line.
Les étoiles sont belles. The stars were beautiful. But it made things worse…
Jen Neale
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Well, here:
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Jen Neale
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Now, at the cafeteria table, my stump thumbs are first brought to my attention. The tall boy passes the cards back to me. I do the bridge again. And again. Sébastien moves closer to see the pivotal moment where it transforms from a normal shuffle to an impossible cascade. Back at my home in Canada, my mother is packing up my childhood belongings from our home on Shorthill Place, the house where I’ve lived since I was six, the basement walls of which I’ve ruined with giant watercolours of horses, the backyard in which my dog Mustard is buried. Here, Sébastien leans over towards me and my heart speeds up. There, en Canada, my mother moves her boxes into a bungalow belonging to a man named Gordo, who teaches a nighttime computer class at the local high school. Here, in the cafeteria, Séb looks amused and holds his thumb against mine, and it’s twice the size. He ushers some people over to see, including Amandine, and my crowd is larger than ever before. That night, sitting in my bedroom, I get the phone call from my mom that the house has been sold and that Peter and I will be spending some time at grandma’s when I get back. My mom will sleep at Gordo’s. I stare through the window at the hilltop church spire while I hear stories of motorcycle rides and the excitement of dating. That hilltop spire is the image I retain from the phone call. Tiami peers her head around the corner to tell me that dinner is ready. Dinner at the Treguer’s is almost always the same: baked fish, fresh baguette, shredded carrot salad, weird chunky sausages, cheeses. I sit at the table with Amandine, Tiami, Mr. and Mrs. Treguer and fork some carrot onto the baguette. They talk to one another and I stare only at my plate. It goes quiet, and then Mrs. Treguer ask me, Jen, ça va? I start crying into my carrot, but even now, I do not murder. The family sits composed as I try to say what the hell my problem is, but it’s stuck in sobs and French gibberish. Je m’excuse, je m’excuse… I get myself up to my bedroom as fast as possible and sit on the bed. Mrs. Treguer arrives at the bedside and sits beside me, puts her arm around my shoulder and tells me I can speak English. My thumbs stay hidden for years, tucked into my palms as I walk down the street. When I develop my film from France, I get to see the trip my camera took during some hours it went missing at the stable. I flip through the photos one by one, shuffle and rearrange them, look at them again, look at the images my friends from the stable wanted me to keep. I investigate the different angles and lighting. Regardless of the order, regardless of how many times I shuffle, the photos are always the same. It’s a bunch of horse assholes. And I still have them. 44
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Michaela Stephen Quiet Only the sound of my own voice will make me older. In airy silence, I will achieve everlasting youth.
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Kenneth Pobo Missing Each Other Jerry slops around in sweatpants and a tee. Jeff fishes in Wisconsin by himself, a trip he makes once a year despite mosquitoes. Jerry uses their parting for movies. He’s already watched eight Barbara Stanwyck films, topping them off with Double Indemnity. Now it’s time for The Kingfisher Illustrated Horse & Pony Encyclopedia, not that he likes horses much, but any encyclopedia is a salmon dahlia almost open when you’re alone. He learns how to soak a haynet, what exercises to do in the saddle. He’s never even been on a pony. When Jeff returns, Jerry will explain the ways of horses. Jeff will harrumph that the fish weren’t biting, a conversation speeding in opposite directions, canter and bait.
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Brett Marie The Boy, My Son. The Friday before she left for Prague, Maggie called her mom to give her the hotel’s phone number. She probably wouldn’t call her even in an emergency, but Maggie knew Mom would feel better just having it. In the small talk that followed, Maggie mentioned that she was late. “Late?” Mom said to fill in the gap between hearing and comprehension. She followed up, “Of course you’ll get the test this time, right?” Maggie knew the implication that Mom wanted to leave unsaid, but she played dumb. “I couldn’t read the drugstore test last time. I’ll just make an appointment with the obstetrician if it hasn’t come when we get back.” “Honey, you know what I mean.” Maggie could almost feel Mom’s hand, palm on her cheek, fingertips touching the base of her skull, the way she used to hold her in place to keep her attention. It was as if Mom were reaching across the phone lines, all the way from Boston, to make her point now. “You’re forty years old. It happened to you with Ralphie. If anything it’s even more likely to happen now.” Maggie thought of Ralph, sitting in class at that moment, a six-year-old boy being cheered by his one-on-one assistant Serena for drawing a circle and counting to twenty. The wave of mixed emotions that the thought unleashed would have lifted the rash, accusing words up from her heart and out her lips were it not for her lawyerly self-control. That poise, the instinct for what to say, how to serve her words, and when to remain silent; so effective in drawing stubborn truths from an uncooperative witness, that same poise now served to dam up her mouth so that Mom might say what she was implying, and hear it for herself. The vacuum created by Maggie’s silence sucked the next sentence from Mom’s end of the line. “I mean, you wouldn’t have another Down baby.” She halted, perhaps grasping what she was leaving unsaid. She retreated just one step, adding meekly, “Would you?”
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Still coy, Maggie replied, “Well, Mom, I don’t see what I could do about something like that.” Maggie wanted her to say it. “Look, Margaret, sweetie. I’ve seen how you deal with Ralphie, and baby, you’re a saint!” Those words, deal with, made tiny pinpricks in Maggie’s eardrums. “You don’t think you should go through that again, do you?” “Oh, you mean I should have an abortion?” “It’s just that, you know...” Maggie’s red-headed temper undercut her professional restraint. “Wow, you mean the Pope says we can do that now? So I won’t have to answer to the Man Upstairs for giving to Planned Parenthood anymore? Well, Hallelujah, Mom!” She couldn’t believe she was taking this stance in an argument. Against her mother. “So is Ralphie excited about the trip?” “Yeah, Ralph’s fine,” she said. Mom could change the subject on a dime from life-or-death discussions, when they made her uncomfortable. For all Maggie’s prowess at debating, she could never help but follow suit. “We’ve been prepping him. Nate tells him we’ll be taking an airplane to Prague, and he says ‘Plane! Pwog!’” They lingered on Ralph for awhile, the news of his modest progresses a salve for their goodwill. Still, she could feel the seed her mother had planted in her mind. She felt it take root even as they exchanged I-love-yous, felt its tiny shoots poke out as the receiver hit the cradle. And she knew it would grow within her, and soon wrap itself around her every thought. She didn’t mention her mother’s comments to Nate, although surely he would have reveled in Mom’s hypocrisy. No, Nate would have a good laugh, but at the underlying issue he would scoff. If she pressed him, she’d get about a minute of cogitation, and then some bromide that would line up his ethics neatly in his own mind, but leave her underwhelmed. That was just Nate’s way, she knew, but she couldn’t stand to test his predictable nature, not when the questions at hand cut them so close to their hearts. Besides, of course, she hadn’t yet told Nate that she was late. On Sunday, she stuffed Ralph’s red T-shirt into their suitcase and was hit by the recollection of his school’s Christmas pageant. The picture of her boy, in that red top and those green pants, aping his assistant’s movements while the other boys and girls danced their simple ‘Santa’s Helpers’ routine from memory, filled the frame of her thought. She remembered turning to
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her mother beside her as Ralphie’s classmates jumped in the air. She could still see Mom chase away a tear with her index finger when her little guy only kicked out awkwardly and made a straight-legged stomp with all his might, the word “Jump!” forming at his lips. What had been a tender memory hardened into an indictment of the old woman. By Sunday evening she was explaining away her brooding distraction, first to Nate’s quizzical looks and then to his outright questions, as pre-flight jitters. She shrugged off her inattentiveness at six o’clock Sunday evening when Nate reminded her that she had yet to call Gregor to arrange to meet up. “What will you do now?” he asked. “It’s midnight over there.” “I’ll call tomorrow before we leave,” she replied, then reconsidered. “Hell, I’ll call him now. If he’s the same Gregor, he’s got a couple hours left in him.” Sure enough, Gregor picked up on the first ring. “No, Magda, is not late for, for me. I am glad you called.” His voice showed what his recent emails could not: the dusting of fifteen years and no doubt a hundred thousand cigarettes. His English had also deteriorated since he’d left New York, when the Curtain came down and homesickness finally claimed him from her. “We’re flying out tomorrow evening,” she told him. “We get into Prague in early morning on Tuesday.” She could hear a soft, rhythmic knocking in the background on Gregor’s end as she spoke. “Fine, Magda, but I ken’t visit for long. I telled you about Monika.” The knocking quickened, intensified. “She has hospital appointment Tuesday afternoon. They might, ah, admit her, and then we are busy. You understand.” Her mind flashed back to Ralph, two years old, unconscious, hooked up to machines and looking beaten up after a life-saving heart operation. Yes, she understood. They were to stay at a hotel in Wenceslas Square. Gregor lived in Mala Strana, on the other side of the river. “I tell you what, Magda. We meet on the Bridge, half the way for both of us.” The knocking gave way to a peculiar grunting, and finally Gregor acknowledged the noises. “You hear her, my dear? I telled her you are coming, telled her all about you.” The grunting turned to a whine, like a toddler begging for a cookie. “She is excited to meet you. And your boy, a new friend for her.” “She’s up awfully late,” Maggie kidded.
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He laughed, a light but weary chuckle. “She slept before. She will nap soon, but she likes night-time.” “Like her father.” He seemed to wait for a thought to gather, but came up empty. “Like her father, yes.” She hung up the phone five minutes later and found Nate in the living room with Ralph. Father and son had fashioned a game: Nate threw a beanbag to Ralph; Ralph caught it, or more often let it hit his chest and then bent over and picked it up from where it dropped at his feet; Nate begged and cajoled him for it (“Throw it to Daddy! Come on, to Daddy!”); Ralph tossed it at a random corner of the room; Nate threw up his hands and retrieved it, returning to his station with that look of patient resignation he wore so well, curled up at either corner of his mouth and raised at the eyebrows for a child’s consumption. The two moved to Ralph’s exercise ball. Nate urged Ralph, with cheers, with silly songs sung in falsetto, into what little the boy would tolerate of his physio routine. She relayed the details of their planned meeting over his shoulder as she watched the power play: tall, strapping Goliath on his knees, scratching his head and stroking his beard in futile strategic contemplation, facing the minuscule creature, a quarter of his size, who through simple stubborn will wriggled out of every exercise he was steered into. Nate cried uncle in two minutes. “What does the girl have?” “Something-something dwarfism. He wrote the name in an email when we got back in touch.” She described the background clamor of the phone call. He stroked his beard some more, then asked, “And how old is she?” “About twelve, I think.” He called compassion to his features. “That’s rough.” He pulled Ralph in close, hugging him in his lap as if for balance while he furrowed his brow at the unpleasant subject. When the boy squirmed away and set himself down to play his toy xylophone, Nate did what he could be depended on to do: Climbing to his feet, he walked over to Maggie and hugged her . “You see? No matter how bad you think you’ve got it in this world, someone’s always got it worse.” A clatter of metallic notes from Ralph’s toy served as a coda; with that, for Nate at least, the topic was tidily shelved.
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She brooded on, sleepwalking through the remainder of their packing. She kept losing her place as she sang Ralph his lullabies at bed-time, so that he became distressed and took an extra twenty minutes to go to sleep. At nine she boiled water for chamomile tea. At nine-thirty she came upon the cup on the kitchen counter, the bag still dry at the bottom, and had to put the kettle on again. In bed an hour later, staring at the splashes of street light that arrayed themselves on the ceiling above the curtains, she brooded some more, swinging her reproach in all directions: at her mother, at Nate, at herself. The morning alarm scolded her for letting sleep break her sulk. Their morning was the usual pre-vacation whirlwind of last-minute preparations. In the cab from Park Slope to JFK, Maggie and Nate volleyed a stream-of-consciousness checklist back and forth at each other. Seated bolt upright in her lap, Ralph stabbed his finger onto the window to count passing cars. He hit one through twenty in perfect sequence, lost a number or two between twenty and twenty-six, and then, having hit the ceiling of his ability, he started merrily back at one. The airport was the usual nightmare, a maze of counters, barricades, metal detectors and impulse-buy duty-free shops that made her wonder, as it always did, why they ever bothered with the stress of going on vacation. The lady who took their boarding pass at the gate smiled down at Ralph in his stroller. Maggie couldn’t help feeling that the expression looked foreign, antiquated. A smile, she thought, wheeling Ralph down the ramp to the plane. How quaint. Nate was asleep before they cleared the low clouds, and she hated him for it. She tried to put her mind off her anxieties by showing Ralph the flight map on the screen in front of his seat. “See? There we are.” She pointed at the airplane icon in the middle of the screen. “And there’s New York, where we came from.” “Nee-Yowk!” “That’s right.” The plane icon inched ahead, and the map’s scale changed. On the far right a new city marker appeared, showing Boston. “Ooh, and look Ralphie! There’s where Grandma lives.” “Gwamma!” “Yes.” Against her efforts, the fluid sweetness was sucked from her voice. “Grandma. In Boston.” “Gwamma Boss-tun!”
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She drew all her hardness into her head, right behind her eyes. She looked out the window, found the point on the horizon that she supposed must be Boston, and tried to shoot her bitterness out of her pupils, through the window, at her mother. She held her focus on that point, obscured by a flock of cumulus clouds, until it disappeared under the tip of the plane’s wing. Ralph occupied himself pressing buttons on the armrest console. An hour passed. Every few minutes, as she dangled toys in front of Ralph, sang him songs, and flipped channels on his screen to find anything that would hold his interest, she found herself shrugging Nate’s lolling head off her shoulder. Before the plane had lost sight of the Canadian coast, she started feeling cramps. The discomfort that she would normally dread brought a wave of relief. Five hours later, however, frazzled from the sustained stress of keeping her son entertained before finally nudging Nate awake to take over, she went to the bathroom and still saw no blood. She didn’t feel her face pull into a grimace, didn’t catch the high-pitched whine of her breath, until the rivulet of water coursed past her upper lip, seeped into her mouth and sent a bitter salty taste exploding onto her tongue. With that, unburdened of any illusions of self-control, she sobbed in reflexive jags while she washed her hands. After a long minute, the flood of emotion finally receded, and all that remained on the surface was an overwhelming thirst. Back at their seats, finding Nate reading the duty-free catalog to Ralph, she flagged down a flight attendant to get a cup of water. She thanked herself for having packed her eyeliner so inaccessibly away the night before that she’d had to do without it today. Midway into their descent over the Czech countryside, a strong crosswind swatted at the plane. A sudden sideways jolt and a dip in the plane’s altitude drew a few gasps. Gasps turned into amplified whimpers as the aircraft began bucking and bumping like it was tumbling down a mountainside. A businessclad gentleman across the aisle from Ralph let out a groan, grabbed at his silver hair with one hand, and with the other reached for his air-sickness bag. Beside Maggie, Nate, normally an easy flyer, clutched at his armrest until his knuckles blanched. But at the moment Maggie’s own heart began pounding into her throat, a new sound started building, a low coo that slowly crescendoed in her left ear. There in his aisle seat, arms and legs sticking straight out and shaking excitedly with each assault on the plane’s hull, was her boy. As she turned
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to see his face, the plane took another dip. This time a dozen wails and one outright scream played legato over the air pocket’s percussion. The terrible symphony played havoc with her insides as much as the unending shaking, until Ralph’s sustained coo built itself into a soaring alto squeal that reduced the tormented wails to a mere accompaniment: “Wheeeeeeeee!” Though the turbulence continued, an ashen Nate burst into a relieved, laughing sigh. Ralph’s ongoing cheer sent a ripple of surprised laughter across several rows. As the shuddering jolts gave way to smaller bumps and finally to minor hiccups, heads began to turn toward him. Taut faces relaxed into smiles at the little boy who still braced for a further thrill ride, his eyes squinting crescents and his lips pulled back in his most maniacally happy, crooked-toothed grin. The plane landed to exhausted applause. As he staggered to his feet, the fellow in the business clothes reached across the aisle to touch Ralph’s shoulder. “My boy,” he said in a prim English accent, “you are an inspiration!” Nate gave a gracious thank-you on Ralph’s behalf, but the comment irked Maggie for reasons she didn’t have the energy to explore. In the taxi to the hotel, Nate took in the Czech landscape, commenting on the majesty of medieval spires and Art Nouveau frescoes. Maggie watched Ralph in her lap while he held out his arms, as he had for their descent, and cooed each time the car came down a cobblestone street. She pointed to a passing street trolley, trying to snare his interest, but the boy was in one of his unreachable moods: perfectly content to live inside his own mind, his spirit satiated by the feeling of motion. Nate pulled himself momentarily from atop the spires and smiled at their son’s antics. “You could still be in Brooklyn for all you care, huh, buddy?” He reached a loving hand to stroke Ralph’s cheek, and was batted away. He laughed. “Could’ve just driven round and round the block –would’ve saved us a trip.” The city laid itself out in spectacular fashion for them as they crossed a bridge into the old town. The morning sun dappled the water with its reflection, standing sentry against a mass of clouds retreating over the hills behind them. The sunlight fell across Ralph’s lap and pulled him out of himself. He turned to the window and tapped it. “Sun!” he declared, then changed his mind when he had to squint out the window in its glare. “No
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sun!” He started a low moan until the row of buildings at the approaching riverbank rose to the foreground and blocked it out. Nate leaned over and mussed the boy’s hair. “He hasn’t slept.” He ran his index finger up Maggie’s arm, making it pirouette at her shoulder. “He ought to conk out soon. It’s, what? Nine o’clock here?” “Three a.m. to him.” She patted his hair back into place. “But all he did was sit on the plane. How much rest could he need from that?” “We’ll see.” “Pwog!” The boy leaned over and plastered his face against the window. Maggie kissed the top of his head. “Yes, Prague. Good boy.” She woke at noon to his uneven footfalls and the click of the bathroom door latch. Off the bed before she could remind herself where she was, she stumbled over her suitcase while in the forefront of her mind an image played of Ralphie with his hand in the toilet. She eased the door open to find the boy standing facing her, urine-filled diaper a bulge in the pants that lay around his ankles. When she placed him on the bowl he peed some more and cheered himself in the third person. She did a labored victory dance, then set about changing him into ‘big-boy undies’ (“Tell Mommy when you need the potty.”), and led him to the bed where Nate still slept. Nate stirred, lifted an eyelid, and held out both hands to help his son onto the bed with him. It was a familiar routine for the boy; he heaved himself up and nestled himself in his daddy’s arms. Nate pulled the bed-sheet over the two of them. “Two peas in a pod,” he said, as he always did. Thus unencumbered, as was her routine on weekends and holidays, she showered. Her cramps had subsided, and she wasn’t surprised that there still wasn’t blood. Running the soap over her frankly skeletal body, she began to imagine she felt disturbing curves. Yes, a little flesh on her hips, some more weight behind and in the thigh, a distinct swell to her once-flat chest. And – could it be? – the tiniest bulge in her lower abdomen. It could be she was gaining weight. Of course she was probably just retaining water at the end of her cycle. But before her brain had fully processed these thoughts, her finger was probing at her navel. About there, perhaps a bit lower, that’s where she imagined they’d put in the needle. How many weeks before they would do it? She felt a sting in her eyes, and found herself swallowing hard at a bilious taste in the back of her throat. She heard herself call out to Nate, and eagerly
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seized on a new thought when he groggily answered over the hiss of the shower head. “Don’t let Ralphie go back to sleep, or he’ll miss breakfast!” Ralph was back in a diaper when they emerged from the hotel – they couldn’t deal with the hassle of an accident here. They walked up and down the slope of Wenceslas Square, taking turns wheeling the stroller they had vowed not to bring on this trip. Ralph grinned out of it as though he knew his stubborn nature had won the battle against their ambitions. At the top, in the shadow of the National Museum, they took him out and walked him to the fountain beneath the great black Tschechia trio of statues. Nate placed the stroller out of camera-shot to take pictures of mother and son. Sitting on the fountain’s marble brim, Maggie leaned back, dipped her fingers in the water and tapped them against her collarbone. Nate scooped Ralph up before the boy could plunge head-first into the pool, and strapped him back into the stroller. Then he followed Maggie’s example, flicking a few drops at Ralph. “Gettin’ hot.” With an eye on their tiny guidebook map, they walked back downhill and entered the maze of streets below the Square. Twice they stopped for directions to the Charles Bridge when they found the street they turned onto omitted from the map. Three times they wheeled Ralph into marionette shops, where salespeople dazzled him with expertly puppeteered dances by small Pinocchio figurines. They bought ice creams and marveled at the Astronomical Clock, with its magnificent statuettes and intricately overlapped faces to mark the hours of the day and the signs of the Zodiac. Ralph let out long moans to catch the bumps with his voice as they rolled him over the long stretches of cobblestones. But with each step, the heat became more sweltering, and even he began to flag. “Ice cream,” he mumbled as they passed another sweet shop. “Oh, yes.” Maggie braced herself for the coming battle. “You just had one of those. It was yummy!” He let out a groan, twisted around in his seat, and thrust a stubby finger at the shop receding behind them. “Ice cream!” he growled, then tried a more eloquent argument. “I ... want ... ice cream,” he said with a forced calm, and added for good measure, “Please.” He even made the sign, a circular motion over his chest, as he said it.
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Maggie and Nate exchanged bemused glances, then, on the same impulse, made the sweeping “all-done” sign together. The “No!” that leapt from their mouths in unison crossed a line in Ralph’s heart between firmness and cruelty, and sent him into a paroxysm of grief. “Ice creeeeeem!” he wailed. “Please!” he moaned. His face turned scarlet and his eyes became watery slits. Among the milling throng that flowed through the street around them, heads began to turn. For a minute Ralph’s wails drew eyes to them all, and those eyes drew blood to Maggie’s cheeks. Finally, fifty yards later, when Maggie had made up her mind to turn back, to race to the sweet shop and shove a cone down his throat, Ralph took a deep breath and sobbed a compromise: “Cup!” Maggie dove into their bag of outing supplies, pulled out his sippy-cup of mineral water, and thrust it into the boy’s outstretched hands. With relief she saw him gulp it down, and she felt the eyes withdraw from her space. She grabbed her own water bottle and took a sloppy swig. A trickle of water ran past her chin and down her neck. Its tepid wetness gave her a shiver and reawakened her skin to the air around them. The heat was stifling. The river of bodies around them had eddied in all directions down narrow tributary streets along their route. Here it began to flow into one current. Nate put the guidebook in his pocket; the path was clear to them now. Sure enough, as they turned the next corner, the great trapezoidal turreted tower that loomed in the background of so many postcards now lorded over the scene. Ralph rubbed the last trace of his tantrum from his eye with one fist, and gestured at the great gateway with his half-empty cup. “Bwidge!” And so it was. The line of tourists marched leisurely toward it, bisected itself briefly to allow a trolley to pass at a crosswalk, then passed through the base of the tower and onto the Charles Bridge. The relief Maggie sought, though, from the wait, from the crush of people, never came. The queuing continued, and in fact got worse, for now it had lost its forward discipline. In front of them a group of college kids halted abruptly at a souvenir stand, and the wheel of Ralph’s stroller rolled into a girl’s sandaled heel. Just a few paces further, Maggie had to steer clear of a chubby oaf who stood in the middle of their path, oblivious to all but his wife in the viewfinder of his camera. Coming from the other side was a line of old people doddering behind a
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slender twenty-something who held up a bright red umbrella, closed, as a beacon to her flock. She wagged her finger at one of the dozens of green statues that lined the wall of the bridge and began a terse monologue in phlegmy German; Maggie felt a surprising relief that it wasn’t in Yankee English. From the cloudless, now buildingless sky, a fierce sun poured its heat. Maggie rubbed her hands along skin that felt branded, and cursed under her breath. She looked over at Nate, one step ahead of her, painting his arms with sunblock. With white patches still below his elbows, he bent over Ralph and started applying the lotion to the boy’s face. With that the fragile crust of calm the cup of water had bought them crumbled away. “No-o-o-o-o! All done!” Ralph squirmed in his seat. “Take it easy,” his father soothed. Maggie leaned over and took the tube for herself. “It’s okay, baby.” She winced inwardly at herself for calling him ‘baby’ in public. “This keeps away boo-boos from the sun.” Over Ralph’s anguished squeals, Nate pointed at the offending sun. “Sun is hot.” “No sun! No sun hot!” He started to sob. Maggie felt a light nudge in her back as someone behind tried to skirt around her. The German tourists had taken up the whole space to their left, and now they were blocking the people behind them. Her sweat began to pour. Without signaling to Nate, she pulled the stroller back, turned it to the right and wheeled it to the wall of the bridge. Nate stumbled back in surprise, but regained his balance and brought himself to stand next to the stroller. Nate watched the minor throng that they had held at bay disperse while Maggie rubbed in her lotion and tried to calm Ralph down. A large copper figure of Christ loomed over them, hanging from a cross adorned with Hebrew writing. Showing his characteristic ability to ride out his son’s fits by simply closing his ears to them, Nate took a long look at the statue while the boy screamed. In a voice that seemed to be catching its breath, he cracked, “Boy.” Gesturing at the statue with one hand while fanning his face with the other, he said, “I hope he’s wearing sunblock.” Maggie didn’t laugh. She couldn’t bring it out of herself. She didn’t even smile. Ralph kept up his noise, his contorted face glowing red through the translucent white smears of lotion. Maggie squatted in front of the stroller
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to try to pacify him. For a brief moment he simmered down, long enough to rub at his eyes. But his fingers brought the lotion to mix with his tears, and when the awful concoction seeped past his lashes and stung his eyes, it drew new tears, and with them, new noise. “Eyes! Eyes hurt!” Nate came to the rescue with a napkin he had crammed in his shorts pocket from the ice cream parlor. While he dabbed at Ralph’s eyes, Maggie grabbed her water bottle and stood. Unscrewing the top, she backed into the wall of the bridge. Below them ran the Vltava River, vaguely brown from this angle but wide and cool and sparsely dotted with small boats. She sipped her water and breathed deeply, trying to bring her bloodstream in line with the river’s lazy flow. But beside her on the bridge, the current of the tourist parade was too powerful to escape. The current of this procession was slow, dammed up at irregular intervals where statues, souvenir stands and portrait sketchers caught the whimsy of passersby. Some sought a point beyond the next stall, read the traffic before them and steered doggedly through it. Others meandered every few feet, casting their gazes like yo-yos, from a copper saint here, to the guidebooks open in their hands, to the next statue over there, back to their books. And always, when these people came to the figure of Christ behind her, Maggie watched the same process play out: the scholarly contemplation of the crucifixion, accompanied in some by a glance at the guidebook blurb; the lowering of the eyes to see the extra exhibit – Down Boy Whining at the Feet of the Lord – then the flash of deer-in-headlights gaping as the onlooker figured out whether to look away or put a politically correct face on their staring. Maggie could feel her cheeks burning with the flare of her temper. Her jaw clenched in a pulsing rhythm with Ralph’s groans. She massaged the back of her neck; her hand fell from it slippery with sweat and settled on the top of her belt. Her wayward index finger stretched out across her waist, found her navel, poked at it, stroked it. She breathed a sharp curse; whether at herself or at an old man then creasing his brow at her boy, she didn’t know. Ralph’s face began to slacken, and the red of his distress slowly drained. Nate stood and mussed the boy’s blond hair. The three of them turned as one when a slow burst of organ notes bubbled out of a speaker ahead of them. The remainder of Ralph’s grimace dropped from his face. “Music!” came his one-word command. His parents understood and obeyed.
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Nate brought the stroller to a stop out of the way of the crowd a few feet to the side of the electric keyboard, just as the trio began singing. Side by side, one sitting and caressing the keys before her, her companions standing at her flanks, the group of women moaned a solemn hymn in falsetto harmony. All three wore long black dresses in defiance of the heat. Each had her hair cut at shoulder length, tied back in a crimson ribbon. And each could well have been blind. Certainly this was true for the organist, whose eyelids, half open, bulged with bright pink flesh that covered her pupils. Her companions stared blankly and unblinking ahead. On their placid faces, only their lips moved, blooming in song, wilting into silence, alternating in a counterpoint that braided together in ethereal harmony. Ralph’s tears dried tracks into the sunblocked white of his cheeks. He leaned forward in his stroller, his open mouth forming ghostly syllables in a studied imitation of the Latin prayer being offered. The line of bodies had thinned, and opened up a space of a few feet for viewing the trio. Now and again a body would stray from the throng to drop a coin into the wicker basket set in front of the keyboard; but only Maggie, Nate and Ralph had stopped to really take the music in. At the end of the first hymn, over a smattering of distracted clapping, Ralph cheered, “Yay, music!” The singers made no motion to acknowledge the applause. After a second of silence, the small speaker on a tripod behind them heaved forth a new organ passage, and the women wove their voices into a new hymn. Ralph’s fingers tugged at the buckle of his waist strap. When his parents didn’t take his hint, he pointed at the ground in front of him. “Dancing!” Nate leaned in and unbuckled the boy. “There ya go, kiddo.” He motioned with his hands at the brick dance-floor by the keyboard. “Shake a tail feather!” And he did, sliding out of his throne and taking up a spot at the center of the empty space. With visible effort he tried to find a beat in the slow, gentle pulse of the keyboard. He thrust out his lips in time with slaps at the sky. “Ooh! Ooh!” He bent, stamped his feet, turned away. Maggie’s cheeks burned when she saw the waistline of his diaper peeking out the back of his pants. Maggie struggled to hold her smile of motherly pride, to stand her full height, to enjoy in crowded public the makings of a pleasant memory. But the crowd milled on beside the boy, and the current of its movement pulled
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at her eyes. Those faces, glancing sidelong at her boy’s small spectacle, smiling all, betrayed to her across them a familiar tautness. It was that subtle tension of pity, and as much as the movement of bodies tugged her focus, the gravity of that inescapable sorrow pulled down her features and weighed on her heart. The hymn ended. Ralph clapped heartily. “Yay, music! Yay, ladies!” Maggie thought that Nate would end his awkward performance and coax him back to the stroller. The boy had had his fun, after all. But Nate stood still at her side, beaming. Ralph showed no sign of the cranky fatigue that had consumed him two minutes before. As the trio embarked on a new song, he launched into further calisthenics, oblivious to his passing audience. Maggie felt the urge to go to him, to take him and lead him to his stroller, to strap him in and turn him away from the glare of strangers. Her legs were stayed by a guilty conscience so strong it made her wince. “Dancing!” he cried. Out went his splayed hands in an arc over his head. Side to side he swayed, and brought his hands into fists in front of him. “Tap! Tap!” He pounded one atop the other. With that Maggie recognized the ‘Santa’s Helpers’ dance, the only dance he knew. Alighting on it with a new sense of purpose, he lumbered through its movements, choosing his own lively pace against the hymn’s sluggish procession. Nate laughed as he took a picture. “He dances to a different drummer.” With her every ounce of strength she chuckled meekly along. But her façade was almost torn down, by the moist choke that cut her last “ha!” short, by the burst of warmth behind her nose. The tears were building, she knew, and she could tell when they would fall. “We’d better get going,” she said to Nate, her eyes still fixed on Ralph. “Going?” Of course he sounded confused. “But your ex –we’re waiting – ” “That’s right. It’s late. We need to look...” Her throat tightened some more. “Saw! Saw!” Ralph’s fists pumped in and out. In a moment he would do it, and it would bring the flood of shameful tears. “If he’s on this bridge he’ll find us here,” her husband was saying. “He knows about Ralph. You can’t miss us.” And so she stayed put, and dreaded it: the last pitiful step to this clumsy choreography. Jesus, six months since they did this at school, all the other
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kids could do it back then, and her poor guy still couldn’t jump. Hell, even other kids with Down’s could get both feet off the ground by now, low muscle tone or not. Nate, as usual, had no clue. “Six months later and he still remembers all the steps. Amazing.” Just a couple more steps now. A few more bars. Out of the blue she thought of her mother. She winced again. Nate went on. “He didn’t even need Serena to show him!” “Hel-ping! Hel-ping!” Here it came. He’d spin around any second, bend down, stand back up, and then he would kick out and stomp straight-legged with his hands reaching high in the air. And she would turn and bury her face in Nate’s chest. She would cry then, cry for all the gawkers, give them a real show: Retarded Kid’s Pathetic Mom. She hated herself for it, but still, there it was, her heart a locomotive, barreling toward a gap in the track. She held her breath as Ralph went into his spin. “A little Nureyev you have there.” Gregor’s hand touched the small of her back as he spoke, its familiarity dispelling any split-second suspicion that the words might have come from a stranger. His eye was still on Ralph when she turned. To see his sharp, striking profile from so close at first glance made her start. With that short gasp she found herself swimming in the ether of his cologne. Her eyes fluttered, and each blink triggered a millisecond flash of memory: Gregor her pupil during her days as an English Language tutor, leaning close beside her at the library table, the new word ‘date’ popping off his tongue as he tested his vocabulary on her; Gregor the art lover, pulling her in to give her the right perspective and imparting like a secret fantasy his awe at a masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gregor the music fanatic, imaginary drumstick in his hand, tapping air in time to a certain Gene Krupa beat he found particularly exquisite, the motion stirring up his intoxicating scent. His name rushed from her throat in a sigh, and she embraced him. Ralph’s shout, “Jump!” rang faintly in her ear as she kissed her former lover’s cheek. Words of grateful reunion rose in a flurry between them. “You look good!” she told him just before the deep creases in his face made themselves apparent. Really, he was haggard, wrinkled beyond his forty-two years, gaunt, with sunken eyes and leathery cheeks. At her comment, he raised his eyebrows in amused surprise. The lines of his forehead etched themselves deeper, and folded into a rippled arrow that pointed at his receding hairline.
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“I look terrible,” he replied with a laugh. “Too many late nights, you would say.” Two quick jolts sent a tremor up his left arm. Only then did Maggie notice his hand on the handlebar of a stroller. “Monika,” Gregor called down to the brown ponytail that faced them, “Pojď pozdravit svého nového kamaráda. Say hello to Magda.” The ponytail swayed gently as Monika’s head tilted back to look at them. Her eyes, shaded by her thick bangs, were further drawn to slits by her heavy lids, and peered at them down a long, sharp nose that drew her face to a point. Her head lolled sleepily as she studied Maggie. Gregor said something to her in Czech and she bared her upper teeth, a widely-spaced row of round white nubs, in an approximation of a smile. Maggie held her focus on the girl’s half-hidden brown eyes. “Hello, Monika.” She felt a studied evenness and careful enunciation tarnishing her greeting. “It’s nice to meet you.” Monika sucked her teeth back in, her lower lip all but disappearing with them. Her head swayed, planting her cheek into the green canvas back of her stroller. In lazy slow motion, she brought her hands to her chin. Wrists bent at right angles, fingers curved as if grabbing at air, she let them hover there, a jagged unwitting mimicry of a boxer at the ready. And, like a wind-up toy wound down, her motion ceased. She lay still, knees tucked awkwardly up and to one side, body curled into a crescent in a seat that cradled her more like a hammock than a stroller. Gregor looked past Maggie’s shoulder. “Your family.” Time and place caught back up with her. “Oh, of course.” Of course. Nate hung politely back by the wall with Ralph. Her little Nureyev, having climbed back into his stroller, sat before his father and stared suspiciously at his mother’s company. She tapped Gregor’s elbow in a gesture to follow her, and stepped into formation with her husband. Greetings and introductions bounced back and forth. “Hi, Gweego!” and “Hi Monka!” Ralph recited on cue when introduced. For Monika, he pointed at the trio of women still facing down the sun in song. “Wawf dancing! Bwidge Pwog!” Nate beamed goodwill at his wife’s ex-lover. “It’s nice to finally meet you!” Gregor nodded. “So nice to meet a man with such good taste.” He gave another nod to Maggie.
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The remark might have irked a more sensitive type, but Nate didn’t flinch. He squatted in front of Monika’s stroller. “And hello to you, pretty lady!” he exclaimed a little too loudly. The girl gave him a slow, silent, halflidded once-over. For a moment the murmur of the passing mass and the drone of the organ filled the space left by their voices. Nate held his grin for Monika’s perusal. Ralph leaned back in his seat and heaved a sigh that sounded to Maggie like a white flag for the sandman. Gregor contemplated all three with a hint of a smile on his lips. Maggie strained to hear the lapping of the Vltava, but caught only the hum of a nearby boat’s motor over the chatter of tourists. Another umbrella-wielding tour guide jostled Gregor on her way to the cross a few paces down. A new cluster of bodies began to crowd into their space, the guide’s authoritative Italian competed with the trio’s devotional, and Gregor grew restless. “Come,” he raised his voice to them over the cacophony. “We go.” “I am forgetting.” Gregor spoke up over his shoulder as he led them, single file, through the stone tower gate. “It is always like this, now.” Down the slope they had climbed to reach the bridge, Maggie noticed another marionette shop. Huge, elaborate figurines dangled in the doorway, making multi-colored faces at the world going by. In the stroller behind them, Ralph started a laugh that trailed off into a yawn. Gregor followed an eddy of people down a tunnel passage to the right, and finished his thought. “If you come to the Bridge at sunrise, it’s like before. But now, things are ‘better,’ you know?” The street shed its tourists as it shrugged off its claustrophobic Old-World layout and opened up on the Vltava. Though the sidewalk widened, they stayed in single file for several paces. Gregor had seemed rushed in escaping the rubbernecked mob. Now he plodded ahead, hunched forward and leaning into rather than pushing his stroller. His every step seemed a slow and deliberate tread against the current of the river beside them. Maggie turned to catch a final glimpse of Ralph’s pupils. She watched him let out that first sigh of sleep, then looked up at Nate his chauffeur. Nate mimed a sigh of his own, made a motion as if wiping his forehead, then set about gaping at the old waterfront buildings, the latest examples of Art Nouveau architecture that so dazzled him here.
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A few long strides brought Maggie to Gregor’s side. “I am taking you to a nice place,” he told her. “Many foreigners, like you, but they are making great salmon.” In front of him, Monika gazed lazily through the green copper railing that lined the street, out at the shimmering river. Small, two-person paddle boats meandered to and fro between the shores. Maggie wondered if the girl’s eye might be on one or another of them. She wondered if the girl was even seeing them. “She is just waking up,” Gregor said. “Night owl, like you said.” The walk took them uphill; the river dropped away below them. At length they came to a break in the railing. A platform of metal grating jutted out from the edge of the walkway, from which a long metal staircase led down to a stone patio behind the trees that lined the river’s edge. Gregor halted his girl’s stroller and waited a moment for Nate to close ranks with him. “We go down here.” An awkward ballet ensued as they disengaged the children from their strollers. Nate hefted Ralph onto his chest. He held him there with one arm, arching backward to better absorb the boy’s weight. With his free hand he started passing Maggie the various bags they had hung from their stroller’s handles. Each of them took stabs at collapsing the thing. When she had put all of the bags on the ground, gritted her teeth, shaken the thing, and even kicked it without success, Maggie tossed the bags into the seat and made ready to walk down the stairs with the stroller open. Meanwhile, Gregor had hoisted Monika into his arms, and was standing on the metal landing in wait. Monika’s incredible tininess bared itself as she clung to her father. Gregor, no giant himself, cradled her like a baby doll, one arm holding up her knees so that her sneakered feet pointed at the treetops. Those legs. Those arms. They looked like twigs, mere bones wrapped in a skein of skin. Her face seemed somehow compressed, some way stretched. Curled up, tiny limbs bent at strange angles, she resembled nothing so much as one of those shop-window marionettes, with its strings hopelessly tangled above it. Gregor swung his child about to gesture at her stroller, “You come back for it?” and the stairs, “These... I am always forgetting...” Maggie sensed a sad frustration in his voice. “We can find another place to–”
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“No.” Burdened though it was, his voice became firm. “We have come here.” This last was a declaration. So down they went, first Gregor, then Nate, with Maggie easing the laden stroller down, step by step behind them. The smell of the grill, visible at the bottom and sizzling with an array of steaks, sausages and fish, rose to meet her. It reminded her that she had barely touched her breakfast. When they reached the bottom, Nate nestled Ralph back into his seat and bounded back up to retrieve Monika’s stroller. Gregor stood facing Maggie and caught his breath. “She is not heavy,” he felt compelled to explain. “It’s just work to...” “To take care?” Maggie assisted him, and felt a twinge of memory from the hours when each sentence, to their every conversation, would start with Gregor and end with a helpful word from her. He nodded. His cologne mingled with the smell of cooking meat. And out of his exertion arose a third scent: the smell of riding into the sunset on a train home from Jones Beach, of making love on hot Manhattan nights. It was the smell she thought she could still catch in her bedroom, months after he had flown home, the very same that had somehow come back to her nostrils two years later as she sat on the phone with him, long distance, taking tidy breaths and grinning furiously down the phone while he regaled her with stories of his beautiful bride-to-be. As if to further explain himself, Gregor spoke again. “I have many friends. They are all smitten,” he pronounced that word delicately, almost showing it off, “smitten, with my girl.” He squeezed his daughter. “I always have help.” After a moment the better word occurred to him: “Support.” Maggie felt words leave her mouth, and felt regret to realize what they were. “And your wife?” In all his recent emails, Gregor had only referred to the woman once, briefly, as his ‘ex.’ Gregor did not object to the question. He just looked up at the sun through the treetops, and sighed. “My wife,” he repeated. “My wife. Yes.” He shook his head and kissed his daughter over her bangs. “Not everyone can have... this... every day.” His mouth closed, and his lips thinned. Maggie searched for words and found only “Oh, Gregor.” Somehow she was glad that more did not come to her. “Do not be sad, Magda.” He was suddenly hopeful in the face. “I have the girl I want. I am happy.”
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Nate lumbered back into their space and plunked the second stroller at Gregor’s feet. Once Gregor had his daughter strapped into it, they maneuvered over to a table. Conversation shifted to more frivolous things. Through a puff of cigarette smoke, Gregor asked how the Islanders were doing (“My Islanders,” he called them). She asked him how things had changed in the Czech Republic since his return; he listed the country’s glowing economic achievements, in true Gregor fashion, like he was chronicling the onset of cancer. Gregor ordered for them, grilled salmon all around. The fish, when it came, made Maggie glad they’d persevered with the strollers. Cocking his head at Monika, Gregor commented, “She ate at home.” He chuckled. “Salmon would not go with her breakfast.” Midway through his own dish, Nate leaned over the side of the table to address Monika. “You are a sweetie, did you know that?” The girl, contenting herself with the view of the Vltava almost at their feet, turned sloth-like to face him. They locked gazes and held them, each studying the other. The change of pitch in Nate’s voice signaled that he was talking now to his adult company. “I’m not just saying that. She’s beautiful.” “I am very lucky.” Gregor sipped delicately at a tall glass of pilsner. Two thirds of it had disappeared already. They took in the scenery; the paddle boats making kamikaze runs at the bows of large tour boats; the family of swans, two great white beauties and their five fuzzy gray cygnets resting in the tall grass by the shore. Ralph breathed deeply and loudly through his nose as he slept. Two more beers vanished into Gregor. Maggie had forgotten how he could drink. Watching him now, she felt renewed amazement to think that he could put away twice what he had already and only seem to sink ever so slightly into his skin. Sure enough, when he rose from the table and unhitched Monika’s handle brake, he did it with graceful motion and a steady hand. “Come. We go.” At the base of the stairs, the dance of the strollers went like clockwork. Waiting at the top for Nate to return with Monika’s stroller, Gregor looked at Maggie with a thoughtful eye. He seemed to be pondering something. “I like him,” he said finally. For a moment, Maggie was puzzled. “You mean Nate?” Gregor nodded at her husband, who had managed to collapse the frame of Monika’s chariot and was hefting it up the first few steps below. “Yes. Nate.” He held his daughter out a few inches to look her in the eyes. “Máte
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ho také ráda, you like him too, yes, my darling?” With affection he hoisted her further up, bringing her cheek to rest against his. Maggie was suddenly struck by the girl’s pronounced brow, with its two neat, thick strips of dark brown hair, peeking out from under her bangs as she bounced. It seemed to run into Gregor’s own beside it, a single horizontal line that, for all their differences in features, seemed to tie them together into the same face. She thought of a moment six years ago: after thirty-six hours of despair, a day and a half awake, crying uncontrollably until her eyes and cheeks hurt with an ache to match the new wound in her heart. Looking down with her through his own tears at the creature that occupied the hospital bassinet, Nate had suddenly lost track of his grief. After a pause, in a sort of perplexed calm, he had said, “He’s got your lips.” Then, for the first time in two days, for the first time in their newborn son’s life, he had kissed her. She looked at Ralphie now, settled again in slumber, with that same nonexpression of sleep and those same lips that had, in that dark time, been her lifeline. And looking once more at Gregor and the tiny, misshapen bundle that had just proven itself as his daughter, she felt a pang of the rush she had felt back then, with the great burst of clarity that had at that long-ago moment given her a porthole through the tears. Nate was breathing heavily, noisily, through his nose as he cleared the top step. His face glistened, and as he wiped his forehead, he mused, “Boy, it’s hot. When does it cool down in these parts?” But in fact his words brought to Maggie’s attention just how pleasant the air had become. She had forgotten the baking heat some time before they had found refuge from it at the bank of the cool river. Viewed from street-level once more, the sun had climbed down from its zenith to rest over the fairy-tale steepled and turreted rooftops of the opposite hillside. It now shone rather than blazed. To Maggie it felt fine. Though no one said it, Maggie knew as they walked that they were headed back to the bridge to say their goodbyes. Gregor trudged ahead of them, head bowed and nodding lightly as he spoke softly to his daughter in Czech. Maggie laughed when Nate declared, working as much enthusiasm as he could into a confidential murmur, “I like him.” He waited for her to return to listening, and went on. “I like them both,” he said, and Maggie smiled in agreement.
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They rejoined the bustle of people and inched their way through the gate onto the bridge. Still the density of the crowd had not let up. Although surely most of those who had surrounded her here over an hour ago had moved on, a new batch of tourists had replenished their number, a hundred new faces of the same ten-thousand-headed monster. Somewhere up ahead they heard music. A trumpet blared, a banjo strummed, and a percussive swishing noise underpinned it all with a leisurely shuffle. Gregor glanced back at Maggie, flashed a smile, and forged ahead with new purpose. He sped forward, whirled Monika to a side when he saw a gap between bodies, and hopped on his toes in a nervous jig when his avenue was blocked and he was forced to a complete stop. In time, he worked his way to the outskirts of a gaggle of spectators enjoying the free show at the left-hand wall of the bridge. Maggie and Nate drew up beside him. Between the heads in front of them, Maggie could see the source of the merry noise. There was the trumpet, the banjo, and the washboard in the center, each played with mellow gusto by a cheerful old Czech. Intermingled with them were a clarinetist and a trombonist, and at their flanks bopped a double bass player and another, a portly fellow with a thick white beard framing his friendly, yellow-toothed smile. The music was Dixieland, and to Maggie’s ears it rang authentic, with the easy swing she would expect over the Mississippi rather than the Vltava. Monika fidgeted in her seat. Gregor patted her hair, mussing her bangs. “My friends,” he said to Maggie. “Her friends.” The arc of tourists that shielded the band from view shed bodies here and there as onlookers got their fill. Gregor jockeyed his way up to the front, then squeezed to one side to open up a place for Maggie and Nate to edge into. As Nate brought Ralph’s stroller to a stop, the boy stirred. His eyes opened to a groggy squint, and for a few bars he sat and absorbed the music. In the space between the band and its standing audience, a pair of girls in tank tops danced a timid, unschooled jitterbug. Ralph watched them with a detached awe. Gradually, his eyes adjusted, and he sat up straight. The white-bearded performer tapped the disembodied horn of a trumpet against his thigh. His bushy-browed eyes roved across the audience. Suddenly they bulged, the man let out an excited whoop, and Maggie knew he had spotted his friend. As if by reflex, he punched once at the air with his brass contraption. The band stopped playing.
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His horn-end still aloft, the man thrust a finger at Monika. “Mo-mo! Mo-mo!” he hollered excitedly. The band mimed hellos at Gregor’s little girl. Gregor nodded at them. The corner of his mouth curled upward, and a dimple pierced his cheek. A second passed. The bandleader brought the brass piece to form a megaphone at his mouth. Into the silence, in accented English, he fired, “One! Two! Three! Four!” The tune the band launched into took a moment to vibrate its way into the vault of Maggie’s memory. In fits and starts of call and response, the bandleader traded bars with the musicians, growling his best Satchmo-growl into his horn, apparently in Czech. “Pojeď se mnou na výlet...” The sprightly pulse went to Ralph’s hips each time the band burst in. The stroller shook with his seated gyrations. The stop-start rhythm, coming after an abrupt halt to the previous number, fatally punctured the dancing girls’ nerve. Sharing an embarrassed laugh, they skulked away, leaving empty the buffer zone between audience and performers. Ralph jabbed his forefinger at the space. “Dancing!” he ordered. “Walph! Dancing!” But the words reached his mother only as a faint echo, for the bandleader had sung the words “New Orleans,” and a dam in her memory had burst. “Pojeď se mnou do New Orleans,” he had sung. “Come along with me, down to New Orleans,” she had heard. A new flood of recollections, locked away for a dozen shifting eras of her life, now overwhelmed her. ‘Basin Street Blues.’ Gregor’s song. What the words would do to him, whether coming from Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, or the keyboard player in the 4th Street subway station. That smile, the way it drew down his eyelids and bunched up his cheeks. The inevitable moment when she would find herself swaying in his arms, the way he would pull her in by the waist until their hips would bump, so excited, so taken with the music, would he get. “New Orleans, Země snů...” went this Bohemian blues. “New Orleans, land of dreams...” followed her brain. She barely noticed as Nate unbuckled Ralph from his seat. The onslaught of her reverie continued as the boy ambled over to take his position front-andcenter. Gregor’s dream. The countless times he had implored her, “Magda, we’ll go, won’t we? To New Orleans? Maybe in the summer?” And she had wanted to take him there, to wander the French Quarter, or take in a few sets
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at Preservation Hall. She had genuinely wanted to be his guide, though she’d never been to the city herself. She had believed, with a certain happy dread, that she would one day watch him dance with abandon there, to the tune of a street-corner saxophone. She had pictured him in motion, hair wild, sweat staining his shirt in the soupy heat, that carefree, open-mouthed grin radiating from his face, washing out the lines of worry that he always blamed on being in America and “poorly in English.” “Budou se objímat a líbat...” “They’ll be huggin’, and a kissin’...” That moment she’d envisioned, when he would pull her into his dancefloor. Her cheeks would ignite, she had thought, she would sweat a few self-conscious beads, but then the aroma of his excitement would envelop her, and her step would fall in time with his. “To je to, co mě chybělo...” “That’s what I been missin’...” She couldn’t remember at what point he had stopped bringing it up. She couldn’t blame him for giving up on it. The years of work pursuing her degree, the brutal schedule she had taken on when she joined the firm, all had conspired against her good intentions. Over time, he had asked her less and less frequently. And by the end she was the one pulling him in to dance when those familiar notes rang out. And though he always followed along, and though he still held her just as tightly, the glow had left his smile, and she had realized that New Orleans was not in their future. “New Orleans, mám náladu alá Basin Street!” “New Orleans, I got them Basin Street Blues!” But the unhappy memory was fleeting, its pang of regret quick to fade. The world of the present came back to her. Gregor had wheeled Monika forward, and the bandleader sang at the little girl as if serenading her alone. Indeed, the whole band leaned in, offering the song to her without regard for a crowd that Maggie noticed had swelled. A solo by the washboard player started a long instrumental break. As he strummed a hissing rhythm, Maggie felt a tap on her shoulder. Nate was gesturing at Ralph. “There he goes again!” And there he was, swinging his hands over his head, swaying from side to side, tapping his fists together. The bandleader pulled his attention from Monika and discovered Ralph. His whiskers rippled, his jaw dropped, and
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he bellowed anew. “A-ha!” He broke from the line-up and padded over to soft-shoe beside Maggie’s boy. Nate was fumbling with his camera, his thick thumb and forefinger struggling to grip the tiny dial that turned it on. “Come on, kiddo!” he urged, more to himself than to his son. “Keep it up!” The bandleader bent over and took Ralph’s hand. With a delighted squeal the boy yanked the old man’s arm in the sawing motion of his dance. But his small fingers slipped from the big man’s grasp, and he fell back sprawling on the hard stone walk. At the audible gasp of the crowd, Nate looked up from his camera. Seeing his son, he sprang forward. In the same instant, Maggie felt her own feet take wing. Like a shot she bolted a step ahead of her husband, and laid a hand on his arm. “Watch the stroller,” she commanded over her shoulder, eyes always on Ralph. “Get a good photo.” Ralph had rolled onto his belly, and was working himself up to his knees when Maggie reached him. He looked up at her with a wide-eyed mix of pain and fear, his lower lip trembling. The bandleader, standing over the boy, apparently unsure of what he should do, mumbled a few words in Czech that his helpless expression translated to an apology. She gave him a forgiving nod and bent down to help her son. “Walph didda fall! Didda hurt!” Ralph told her, but with the nearness of his mother, his urgent feelings diminished, and she found no marks on him as she dusted him off and pulled him to stand. The washboard that had been swishing in the background was joined by a trumpet. The horn’s brassy blare tickled the boy’s ears and distracted him from whatever pain he still felt. “Twoppet,” he said. The trumpet player, a sooty-faced beanpole in an engineer’s cap and candy-cane striped vest, pointed his horn at Ralph. At each shower of notes, the boy laughed and clapped for more. As the horn solo ended and the man leaned back in line with his band-mates, the bandleader brought his megaphone back to his mouth. He wheezed the low notes of the middle eight at Ralph, his free hand on his knee. “Basin Street je místo...” “Basin Street, is the street...” Ralph stared at him, clearly pleased but immobile. After a few bars, the old man swung his upper body to face Monika.
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“Kde se potkávají elity...” “Where the elite, like to meet...” The girl watched him intently, upper teeth splayed against her lower lip, brown eyes bulging beyond their almond shape. Maggie wondered for a second if this was what happiness looked like on the girl’s face. “Sing! Singing!” Ralph said. “Man...is...singing!” “Yes, he is!” Maggie took his hand and squeezed it. Three words, he’d said. Not bad at all. But still he hadn’t budged. “Come on, Ralphie!” Still grasping his hand, she started tapping at the air with the music. After a bar she felt his arm take up the beat. “Now, where were you?” She brought his hand toward her, then back at him, toward her, then back at him. That was all he needed. “Saw! Saw!” He let her hold on for that step, then tugged himself free and hunkered back down into the rest of his dance. Each stomp, just a hair behind the beat, brought him half a step closer to the old man. “Jen kdyby ses do té muziky zaposlouchal...” “And all that music, lord if you just listen...” The trombone broke in with its honking wah-wah. Ralph turned briefly to see the new lead instrument, his dance reducing itself to a distracted sway. Returning his attention to his entourage, he caught sight of Monika at the same time that the girl noticed him. She perked up, cocking her head and craning her neck to look at him as her body tilted forward. Ralph waved at her. “Hi!” He paused, then waved again. “Hi, Monka!” And without a moment to bask in the pride that he had remembered her name, he was back dancing. The bandleader shimmied beside him for only another bar before seeing he wasn’t needed and retreating back in line with his musicians. “Hel-ping! Hel-ping!” Ralph took two strides forward, almost up to Monika’s face. Her eyes widened, then became slits as he danced away and went into the spin that heralded his big finish. The line of her mouth carved itself further and further across each cheek, straining to almost reach each ear. Ralph bent down and pushed himself back up. His set jaw displayed the intensity of his performance. And with the trombone player nudging his slide in the kid’s direction, pointing all eyes to his star turn, the boy’s arms stretched up, his right foot lunged out into the air, and all his limbs slammed back down again. “Jump!” His left foot never left the ground.
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Monika’s lips parted. Her eyes shut. Maggie imagined her pupils turning inward to behold the glow of joy that radiated from within her. Her tiny upper teeth, a yellowing Stonehenge along her deep pink gums, glinted with saliva in the sunlight. Her head lolled, the lolling turned into a nod that almost matched the music, and the nodding gained vigor until her whole upper body rocked against her seat. “Nejsi rád, že jsi se mnou šel...” “Now aren’t you glad you went with me...” Gregor’s hand came down to stroke the little girl’s head. He mouthed something in Czech, calming words that the music drowned out. Her body relaxed, and she returned to joyous head-bobbing. Her open maw still emanated her hideous, beautiful ecstasy. The music still behind him, his audience so adoring, Ralph took only a few bars of staring before starting his dance over. And there was Gregor, bringing his hand back to rest on the handle of Monika’s stroller. He tapped a finger lightly as his eyes wandered across his musician friends, then looked down at his daughter. And he was smiling. It was odd: the lines that bounded his mouth deepened as his grin spread, and his cheeks bunched into dimples like a curtain being pulled back. His crow’s feet multiplied, dug in. Even his nose gained a wrinkle. His face was a leathery, weather-beaten mess. But then he leaned over, kissed his fingers and touched them to Monika’s cheek. As he straightened up, his mouth opened. The wrinkles only cut in and branched out, but something about that face touched Maggie’s heart. Though it only lasted a short second, Maggie saw in that moment, in that expression, a tiny lifetime of music and sunbeams and family. As it faded, Maggie felt her own cheeks relax, and realized that the smile had spread to her face as well. “Panebože, jmenuje se to Basin Street...” “Heaven on Earth, they call it Basin Street...” The beat collapsed under Ralph’s feet as the song broke down and wound up in a sloppy coda. At a loss, he at first froze in mid-step. When the wave of applause that rose from the crowd signaled to him that the performance was over, he set himself in motion again, skipping ahead to his jump-stomping grand finale. Then he turned from facing Monika and gave the band a hearty cheer. “Yay, music!” A few in the crowd held their hands out and offered their claps to the boy as he turned back to look at them. His exclamation, “Aaah!” told them that he accepted their adulation. 74
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Maggie approached him and took his hand to lead him back to Nate and his stroller. She glanced back at Monika. The little girl’s mouth had closed, her eyes had opened, and her gentle nodding slowed to a stop. Her spirit seemed to retreat back into the cocoon of her body, and in a few seconds she was back to passive watching – passive, but not vacant; Maggie could see that now. Wordlessly, Gregor moved in step with her the few paces back to Nate’s side. His eye was on some far-off point downriver. His smile had shrunken back to its usual weary friendliness, but the pleasant creases it had made lingered, and he still had that gleam in his eye. He still looked as though he’d just planted his flag on a mountaintop. “There’s my boy!” Nate crowed at his son. Ralph took his accolades in stride, fairly lunging at his seat in the stroller and giggling when his dad swooped in to kiss his forehead. Looking back up at Maggie, Nate tapped the camera that he still had cradled in his palm. “I got a great shot.” Gregor shifted a little in his place until Nate stood back up and got their parting underway. “I understand you’ve got an appointment today,” he said. “I guess this is where we say goodbye.” Gregor nodded, and Nate shook his hand. “It was a real pleasure.” “For me, too,” Gregor replied. He bent to take up Ralph’s tiny fist. “Be a good boy,” he said to him. “Never stop dancing.” For Maggie he had only a warm embrace, a tender kiss on each cheek, and a wink as he stepped back. Maggie squatted beside Monika’s stroller. To the heavy lids that looked back at her she said, “You are beautiful.” Those lids blinked at that moment. “Take good care of your daddy, okay?” Maggie added, and they blinked again. With that, the trio broke off from the pair. Maggie looked back one last time to see Gregor pull up alongside his musician friends, before the flow of humans into the space they had left obscured her view. They joined the line back the way they had come, and shuffled forward in thoughtful silence. After a minute, Nate’s voice rose above the hubbub: “Do you think he’s happy?” He continued after another moment’s thought. “Should he be?” And he was mute once more. They passed the tower gate. The line halted to allow a trolley to pass on the street ahead of them. Just when Maggie had thought his musing was over, he picked up on his same thought: “I think so.” He patted Ralph’s head. “I hope so.” The words seemed to Maggie like the wisest he had ever uttered. Then he turned to Brett Marie
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her, and brought a hand to her face. With a gentle twitch of his thumb he brushed a tear from her cheek. The tears remained close to the surface for awhile after the Charles Bridge. Maggie had a quick jag of crying an hour later, while they watched the dance of figurines that accompanied the tolling of the Astronomical Clock. She sniffled that evening when Ralph peed in the toilet before they set him down to some well-earned sleep. She cried as he slept, while she and Nate made love in the next bed, cried in grateful silence when Nate held her afterwards without asking any questions. And she cried five nights later, on the eve of their departure from Prague, when she went to the toilet and saw that she was bleeding. Her eyes never stung. Her sobs were never heavy. She shed her tears like some inner skin, and each time one fell past her lips, she felt her tongue reach out to catch it, and she savored its saltiness like candy.
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Contributors
Jane Campbell is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, where she served as Prose Editor of PRISM international during the 2013-2014 academic year. Her work appears in Magnolia, Grain, and Revolver. Kevin Cooley is a prose writer and poet from Lake View, NY, just outside of Buffalo. He is currently a Graduate Fellow at St. Bonaventure University, and is publisher-fishing for his debut novel, The Minimum Wage: A Plot-Dry Novel in Which Not a Whole Lot Happens. Hilary Maloney-Nevin is 23 years old. She was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, and is from the Indian Brook First Nation. She has had an interest in public speaking and writing since a young age. In previous years, she has attended the University of King’s College’s Bachelor of Journalism program, which she did not complete. Currently, she is doing some work for the Nova Scotia Native Women. Her goals include organizing a prevention program for aboriginal youth before they fall into the justice system or system abuse. She hopes that her story of faults and mistakes can help relate and make positive changes for her people. Brett Marie’s stories have appeared in Words & Images Press, New Plains Review and the online journal Bookanista. He is currently shopping his first novel.
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Lily Ross-Millard ’s education as a theatre person: the sources are diverse. She has experienced several of these enlightening theatre “Oh!” moments with the Caravan Farm Theatre, Convergence Theatre, in her childhood home, the TTC, and during long hours of theatre stewing with Wheelwright Theatre. With her roots deeply entrenched in collective theatre, she loves to write with actors, musicians, and other schemers. The process of 1, 2, 3 Woyzeck! has been a joy for her. Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of three books, most recently We Bury the Landscape (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012) and Grim Series (Popcorn Press, 2012). Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous publications, the likes of Boston Review, Sou’wester, and Southword, as well as in Canadian journals like Adbusters, The Puritan, and Riddle Fence. Muslim serves as poetry editor for LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore. Jen Neale is a writer from Vancouver, BC. Her work has appeared in Little Fiction, OCW Magazine, and the collections Writing Without Direction (Clark-Nova) and Joke Time (PembertonTempleton). Kenneth Pobo has a new book forthcoming from Blue Light Press called Bend Of Quiet. His work has appeared in: Windsor Review, Indiana Review, Mudfish, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere.
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Michaela Stephen recently completed her Bachelors of Arts with honours in English and Creative Writing from Dalhousie University in May 2014. She is currently residing in Kamloops, BC. She enjoys fiction, poetry, winter weather and cats. Mark Swan recently left the regular work-a-day to focus on writing, travel and music, not necessarily in that order; poems out this year in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Garbanzo, Nerve Cowboy and The Echo Room, among others. P. C. Vandall is the author of three collections of poetry: Something from Nothing, (Writing Knights Press) Woodwinds (Lipstick Press) and Matrimonial Cake (Red Dashboard). She has work forthcoming in Room and Poetry Pacific. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When Pamela is not writing, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sleeping. She believes sleep is death without the commitment.
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