Circa 1.2

Contents From the Editor's Desk

1

Comrade Laika by Patrick Donovan

3

Hobo in the White City by Nick Wisseman

6

The Scallywag Miner by Brinda Banerjee

8

Bored by Kawika Guillermo

11

King of the Heap by Kim Drew Wright

13

The Charge of the Light Brigade by Todd McKie

15

It Won't Be For Long by Jordan Legg

16

Everyone Was There by Crawdad Nelson

21

A Bullet for Jake by Michael M. Pacheco

24

Meeting E. M. Forster by Carole Glasser Langille

30

Contributors

38

From the Editor's Desk

October 2013

Welcome to Circa’s second issue! I hope you come packed and ready for an adventure for, like Comrade Laika, the first canine cosmonaut and the subject of our first story by Patrick Donovan, we are taking a journey into the unknown—and what could be more foreign than the past?

We begin with a fiery backstage experience at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair in Nick Wisseman’s “Hobo in the White City.” Then “The Scallywag Miner” by Brinda Banerjee takes us to California in the middle of the Gold Rush, when prospectors found more than they bargained for while panning the rivers for gold.

The love and heartache of a Malaysian prostitute in old George Town in Penang is the subject of Kawika Guillermo’s moving story, “Bored.” The flu pandemic of 1918 forms the backdrop to Kim Drew Wright’s tale of a little boy looking for his playmate in “King of the Heap.”

Todd McKie’s riff on Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” brings a hilarious change of pace—I can just imagine the general haranguing his men in this piece in a voice like Blackadder’s General Melchitt—before we turn to sixteenth century London and the persecution of Protestant heretics in Jordan Legg's vivid "It Won't Be For Long.".

The theme of persecution continues in Crawdad Nelson’s “Everyone Was There,” which highlights the complicit brutality of an entire community whether they were active participants or merely observers in the massacres of Native Americans during the nineteenth century. From roughly the same period we have the western, “A Bullet for Jake,” the story of a young boy and his hero­worship of the outlaw, Billy the Kid, by Michael M. Pacheco.

And finally, returning to the slightly more familiar twentieth century, is Carole Glasser Langille’s story of a young man coming to terms with love and his own identity in the moving “Meeting E. M. Forster.”

It has been a delight and a privilege to collect and present these stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!

Yours, Jen Falkner Editor

1

2

Comrade Laika

by Patrick Donovan

It’s funny what one might hear when listening, or whatever. Laika was born March eighth, nineteen­fifty­four, on the flats of Alberta. Her mother, Starthunder, was an American Kennel Club champion, but her father came from the streets—a mutt—and had wooed the championess with his waggle, bark, and snaggletooth. But after Starthunder became pregnant, her owners would shoo the mutt away each time he came to croon until finally one day the wife made the husband get his gun and shoot the mutt. This happened months before Laika’s birth and Starthunder mourned for the rest of the pregnancy.

With labor pains, Starthunder howled towards the moon, its emptiness echoing across the dark prairies. The owners finally woke and called the veterinarian, talking in soothing voices to their prize winner all throughout. After a weaning time, the husband and wife picked out those pups who showed no trace of the mutt’s features to sell, through deception, to the buyers in New Brunswick who wouldn’t know any better.

They boxed up the obvious half breeds, Laika included, with a sign saying free puppies in English and French that they left in a gas station parking lot in Saskatchewan on their way to New Brunswick.

No one looked in the box the first day. When night came and it got cold, the pups started to whimper until the bright, full moon rose into view of the box top and Laika started howling—stagnant at first, and quiet, but soon growing fluid and wet. The gas station attendant heard them when he went out for a cigarette break. The attendant decided to sell the dogs during his shift, and brought the pups home each night. Before too long, Shin, an entrepreneur from Hong Kong with a summer home in Vancouver, making his way by car across the whole of Canada to forget his ex­wife, stopped at the gas station and, deciding he might like the company, paid the gas station attendant ten dollars more than the gas for a dog and drove off with Laika.

Shin and Laika spent four months touring the countryside. Laika ate well and learned quickly not to pee on the car seat, and every night, whether they were driving or eating or watching motel TV, when the moon came out Laika always gave it her round, bellowing howls. Shin soon began howling too, though quietly because he preferred to attract little notice. Eventually they reached Nova Scotia and Shin had to return to his job in Hong Kong by way of a charter flight for the duration of which he hid Laika, still small, in a bag he carried. Laika obeyed and stayed quiet the whole time.

In Hong Kong, during the day, with Shin at work, Laika spent her hours restlessly looking out the windows of Shin’s house until she figured out how to open and close a back door with her nose and forepaws. From then on she wandered the neighborhood along the streets and alleyways between houses, staying close to home, and always returning before Shin came back. One morning, during the summer, when even the tree shade left Laika panting, she wandered onto the grounds of a Buddhist monastery, just a little further than she’d yet explored. Instead of returning home, she stayed sitting with a group of monks around a pond until that evening when Shin found her 3

and brought her back. Before she left the monastery, as the moon peaked over the tiled roof, Laika howled once and a tile fell to the ground.

Laika spent her days from then on with the monks who howled when she left each evening to greet Shin at home. Towards the end of summer, Shin took Laika on a business trip to Mongolia. They lodged in a rural hotel room, Shin had just returned from the outhouse and began reading the newspaper to Laika curled at his feet when two thugs broke in the door and shot him twice in his chest, robbing his corpse and bags, and taking Laika also, because she bit one on the groin and the other laughed so hard he cried and wouldn’t let the first kill Laika because of it. The thugs were Kazakh smugglers exploiting the communalizing, though still nomadic, Mongols.

Laika would fetch them a good price in certain villages near their home because Shin had fed her so well. Laika made trouble for the men at border crossings when they left Mongolia to straddle the Sino­Russian boarder back to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Though Laika was not contraband, and for no other reason than habit, the smugglers hid her away in their luggage wherein, when border agents questioned the men, Laika began to howl. The smugglers paid bribes and continued on to the next checkpoint.

At one crossing, the soldier checking the smugglers’ goods did not react to Laika’s howl, instead opening the bag and freeing the dog. When the smugglers tried to bribe the soldier, he took their money then told them it wasn’t illegal to bring dogs across the border, at which point Laika bolted away from the smugglers and the soldier. It took the smugglers some time to track down Laika by following her footprints in the snow, only catching her because she did not know the area nor any hiding places.

Being half thoroughbred, and entirely Canadian, the cold fell off her coat like starlight from the troposphere, which proved helpful on the trip through the Kazakh winter towards Tynratum and the Baikonur Cosmodrome where the smugglers worked as laborers when they weren’t smuggling. Laika escaped pretty quickly once the smugglers were home and asleep and had stopped keeping her bagged overnight. Laika waited for an evening with heavy snow and then slipped out a window the smugglers had not locked on the second story. From the roof, Laika leapt into a snow bank, sinking the few feet to the ground and then tunneling towards the snow bank’s outer surface where she broke free a ways from the smugglers house, trotted down the road, stopped, looked up, and howled at the moon.

Laika spent the few months before spring learning the streets and where unclaimed scraps showed up most often. She found a warm place to sleep at night on the spaceport near some vents leaking heat atop one of the buildings. She would leave the spaceport in early morning before the workers arrived, and return in the evening after the workers had gone home to their makeshift cottages in the built up town surrounding. Late at night, sitting in antennae dishes mounted on the roof, Laika would look up at the stars knowingly, and howl symphonies at the moon. When spring came she began to hear howls in return—welcoming. The other dogs around the Cosmodrome all had homes and roamed the town streets only sometimes and in daylight when they’d already eaten breakfast and were yet unconcerned with dinner. Laika fell in love with a spaniel named 4

Petre that always left some of his food outside in the mornings for her, and who would sneak out at night at times to trek onto the spaceport and roof where Laika slept, and sit in the dishes with her, howling. Eventually Petre’s owners figured out their dog left at night and so better locked him in each day, all day, except for walks at five which Laika never missed watching.

Laika rarely ventured near the part of the town the smugglers had kept her in.

She avoided people wherever she could and by summer had regained the weight she’d lost since Hong Kong. Petre escaped from his house one day, pulling behind him a bag of canned food from the Cosmodrome Petre’s owners had been eating in test trials. He waited atop the spaceport building near Laika’s heating vent having chewed one can open with his teeth, spreading the contents across the ground to share with Laika when she returned that evening. They were young and in love, spending the days of autumn secluded from the ground and people, rationing their cans of space­food and howling at the moon from antennae dishes every night. Laika was happiest those few months before the food ran out and the nights became too cold for Petre, even with the heat from the vent and from Laika. One morning he simply didn’t wake up and Laika did not move all day, silent towards the moon that night and those thereafter.

Maybe entanglement, or electro­harmonics, but Laika knew she’d find the moon again, to the west and not up, so she jumped in the back of a cargo truck and made her way to Moscow. She could not have stayed in the town anymore anyways with every scent the spaniel’s; Petre’s. Laika roughed the Moscow streets, joining and then leading a hungry pack of dogs. She did not like the gang life, but for a stray in Moscow who needed to keep tough and relatively healthy, running with a pack was good exercise. Laika planned it just right, as she knew she would each night when she used to howl at the moon, even back in China, or her motherland Canada, and the Soviet space program picked her out from the streets in the days after Sputnik’s launch so that the Soviets might celebrate forty years of revolution by sending the first dog—or living anything—into space. Laika had trained her whole life for the chance.

Her two competitors for spaceflight, Albina and Mushkas, both strays, had led their own packs. Albina did not handle well the progressively smaller cages they had to sleep in for training, and Mushkas wouldn’t eat the nutrient paste scientists provided for food, though all the dogs enjoyed the centrifuge training, simulating the rocket launch. Laika would think of her road trips with Shin. She remained always peaceful; quiet; accepting.

At night before being kenneled, Laika would look out a window towards the moon, pursing her dog lips, pushing hot air out her nose.

When Laika entered space she knew she wasn’t coming down. She knew she did not even have the ten days until she reached the poisoned food paste. The rocket’s Blok A 5

core did not separate right which jammed up the thermal controls. But Laika had not planned on sticking around in the craft anyways. She started humming to herself about the monastery in Hong Kong, about all the points of light that can make up one life, every life, the universe and nothing, Petre and dog sweat. Laika began meditating like the monks had showed her, increasing her body’s temperature even more than the craft’s malfunction already had until all she could do to keep from burning up was to press her face against the ship’s still cool plastic window and howl and howl until she became like dust, encapsulated, floating between the earth and the moon.

Hobo in the White City

by Nick Wisseman

Remember when we used to be gods?

You’re right; completely right. I should know my place by now. And I do. But it’s hard to pretend I’ve always been what I am now.

Like yesterday, when Walter—the anarchist who picks his enormous nose when he thinks you aren’t watching and sucks in his gut when he thinks you are—was rehashing his failed plans to ignite the Ferris wheel on the fair’s opening day. Apparently the explosion would have been recompense for the “comrades in arms” he lost eight years ago in Haymarket Square. What a sodden fool. I nearly forgot myself after he lamented his wet gunpowder for the fifth time. “Detritus!” I wanted to yell. “Every last one of you!

I was more than you and your ancestors put together!” But I managed to hold my tongue.

Hedge and his undersized uniform are a little less infuriating, but not much. He can’t decide who he wants to hit first: Mr. Pullman, “for docking us rail­worker’s pay all unfair like,” or Mr. Debs, “for getting everyone to up and quit the trains when some pay was still better than none.” Within a week, the ex­porter will be as big a drunk as Walter.

And then there’s Johanna. Slow, blocky, Johanna. She swears up and down that she learned the Hoochee­Coochee from Little Egypt herself, but I’ve seen sexier shimmies from wet dogs shaking themselves dry.

Walter seems to like her tired gyrations well enough, though. He asks for a private show almost every night, usually in the Woman’s Building. (Which amuses me to no end: I keep imagining one of the structure’s progressive designers walking in and having an epic conniption.)

At least they’ve steered clear of the Electricity Building; I’ve more or less claimed it for my own. The orphans are welcome to the Midway (where Little Egypt and the rest of the exotics cavorted); Hedge and the other destitutes can have the Anthropology building (and the artifacts Franz Boas declared unworthy of the Chicago Field Museum); the rats can take the rest. Just give me the remains of Edison’s direct current exhibit, the proof­ 6

of­concept he never finished dismantling after the press fell in love with the alternating current system Tesla used to illuminate the fair. There’s something comforting about seeing the damaged goods of another failed genius.

And his work reminds me of my former affinity for fire, the energy I used to wield so easily.

Some nights, after yet another day of foraging for spoiled food in abandoned vendors’ booths and dodging the Pinkertons the city hired to guard this empty wonderland, I forsake the Electricity Building for Olmstead and Burnham’s Wooded Island. It’s almost always quiet there; I think the calm makes the rest of the interlopers uncomfortable. And the trees look so…flammable.

It would only take one spark.

A fraction of what I used to be capable of. One spark to paint the fairgrounds orange and red and then black and gray. All I need to do is reach into myself, locate the old inferno, and— Remember my place.

Because while I used to be a god, now I’m just a hobo squatting in the shell of the White City.

[Author's note: the “White City” constructed for Chicago’s celebrated 1893 World’s Fair—also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition—burned to the ground in 1894.

Historians attribute the blaze to striking Pullman railway workers.]

7

The Scallywag Miner

By Brinda Banerjee

Ma always said you were the luckier of us two girls. Born with a full head of curly black hair you nestled into the crook of her arm, eyes tightly shut, sure of yourself even at age two days. Then nine years old, I stood at the door of the midwife’s shack aghast at the iron smells and the rapt look on Ma’s face as she stared at you. What would Ma say now, as we stand on the San Francisco dock, with the dawn fogs rolling in over a flat steel gray sea, and your face constricting with fear, watching the crate heaved by the burly sailors.

Ma drank herself to an early death when you were just six. She’d be pleased with the way I take care of you. You’re all I have left, Betsy, now my Herbert is gone. You were six and I was fifteen when I snagged my man. I found him lying on the meadow behind Aunt Gracie’s shack by the river, cowboy hat covering his head, long legs that looked so strong; his spurs rusty and broken. Do you remember how he’d smile up the left side of his tanned lean face and his eyes would caress my face? No, you do not. He took us to San Francisco—in a covered wagon drawn by bullocks. We traveled the Oregon trail to golden California in 1848, even before the gold rush began. I think I was happiest those first years, in the settlement upstream from American river, running his store for him.

Cleaning and cooking sure seem like fine things to do when it’s for the man you love.

But this is the story of your love: who is more dashing—dashing from folks chasing him that is. Samuel Thurst burst into the house on that morning I cannot forget. I was the one naked about to step into my tin tub for my one weekly luxury, my bath, yet his eyes were fixed on you singing in your high voice as you scrubbed your pantyhose in the sink.

“Morning, ladies. Might I trouble you to hide a good man from them crazy goons in the sheriff’s office?” His voice was honey, eyes like golden butter and smile so charming I felt like I was hearing orchestra music in our poky two room shack above the store. He was running from an argument over a poker game that time.

You gave him one of your own dazzling smiles and jumped up to hide him in your chiffrobe as if you’ve known him all your life. Don’t think I never saw that first stolen kiss before you shut the door on his lanky frame. Not a moment too soon. The horses pounded below and the sheriff’s men shot a couple rounds into the air scaring the crows off the roof. I barely managed to get back into my dress, sans hoops, before they were pounding on the store door. You ran down ready to sweet talk those vinegary old men.

From the very first day you were willing to do anything to save that cursed man’s skin.

He left for panning gold in the river again. I never saw anyone as enamored of the gold as young Samuel with his eyes that are a such a queer gold color that I’ve never seen anywhere; and even though he was just a cowboy with no land, money or house to his name, he had plenty of optimism and was always sure he’d hit the next big find.

Whenever he wandered back to town in search of warm food or his favorite game of poker with the boys, he’d be sure to look you up. “Missin’ me,” he’d drawl, chewing his tobacco and smiling his charming devil smile.

8

Was it Missy, the hussy that served over at Ogie’s salon, that pushed you over? She is a two­bit wench for all her fancy airs. I think it might have been her that started the talk about your fella being sweet on her. You tossed your dark curls and laughed but I could see the tightening of your mouth and the hardening of your eyes.

You fixed in your head you would get that man to make an honest woman of you. He was going to propose when he next came to town. He just didn’t know it yet.

Samuel came to town once a fortnight to spend his gold dust—he’d weigh it on the Wells Fargo bank scales in exchange for money and he’d save a few pinches for us—in exchange for some pie or even for us to do his laundry. You always did it for him even though I knew laundry is a losing proposition and bad for business. Why you hadda go and fall in love with that scamp of a miner?

So on that day as I helped you curl your hair, when you smiled your ravishing smile and asked me to come with you to Ogie’s to wait for Samuel, how could I refuse?

The saloon was crowded and when we walked in, you with your new green flowered skirts swishing, your hair curled under the straw bonnet trimmed with daisies, it seemed as though the men all held their breath and let it out in soft whistles. “Bartend!” you called, crooking your little finger. When he served us you drank deep, the long outline of your white neck striking against the dark green of your dress collar. Your face was flushed as you smiled around at everyone while we waited for Mr Samuel Thurst to show up. I sat beside you, my mouth screwed into a thin line, my dark widow’s skirts a perfect foil to your brightness, tapping my bony fingers on the table in my nervousness.

At twenty­six, I feel old and frightened. Not 'cause I’d lose you to Samuel Thurst, but because he was a scamp underneath all that dazzle.

When the shots rang out all of us were shocked, lulled as we’d been by the festive mood.

Someone screamed, the men surged as one toward the doors. We were pressed against the wall then carried out to the road with the crowd. The rumors spread fast, there was trouble. Someone had tried to jump claim on a field that was not abandoned after all, and the owner wanted it back. They’d chased the culprit into town and heated arguments were going on in the sheriff’s office. As soon as I caught a glimpse of the accuser’s furious face I knew it—this was grouchy Gerald Bart. Herbert had known him and disliked him intensely. Never very lucky in the fields he’d been mining for years now.

Just like him to want a field back after having walked from it.

It sounded like the wanted criminal who had tried to jump claim the land had no rights, and moreover, he was accused of shooting Gerald’s right hand man and partner to death in the scrimmage. If so, then that man was in serious trouble. He would hang.

“Who’d you think it is?” you said in a wondering little voice, as we returned to our home. I knew even before we shut the door behind us; I could smell him. So could you, you ran whimpering to our fugitive and clung to him as he stared, white faced, his golden eyes dark with fear. He told us it was an accident, there was a scuffle and then a shot rang out. He said Gerald fired the gunshot that finished off his partner, and then framed him. No matter if he were really innocent, if the sheriff’s men found him, this 9

time he would hang. Our house above the shop was on the outskirts of town and the first place Sheriff would come to look, once he realized the wanted criminal was my Betsy’s Samuel.

I just had the few hours before dawn to come up with a plan. First things first, we will need money. I went to the kitchen while you pulled the shades down. I stamped and bent—even you didn’t know which floor board was loose and could be pried up to reveal my hard earned money. Those stuffy bankers with their beaver hats would not get me near their establishment if they begged. No, sirree, my money is safe enough in the tin box my Herbert left me, buried under the kitchen floorboard and sanded over.

The sky was barely light when the fog rolled in from the sea and, wrapped in our thickest shawls, we drove our loaded mule cart to the dock. I was looking for Mr Dwight, the merchant ship owner that usually brought me sugar and other goods from Hawaii. Spotting him at last I approached, my heart beating fast. He was supervising the loading of his steam ship; he would be casting off for Hawaii within hours. “Good morning Mr Dwight. “ Doffing his hat he said, sounding surprised, “Why Mrs. Herbert—why’ve you troubled yerself to come out here—I already have your order marked.”

“I have a last minute consignment—it is a shipment of laundry that must go to Hawaii.

My sister has started taking in laundry. What can one do—the folly of youth. As soon as the laundry poured in she realized it’s too much for her alone. I always said I will manage my store but not take in washing!”

The good man guffawed and strode over to inspect the large box of dirty washing. “No problem, ma'am. We’ll deliver this to the women in Honolulu and bring it back for you in a week with the next shipment.” We agreed on a price, shook hands and I whipped up the mules, hands trembling. You craned your neck watching anxiously, as the porters wheeled the crate onto the ship. But sister dear, one can only do so much. Samuel Thurst will manage crouched in that crate, I know he will. He will charm the Hawaiian woman when she unpacks him and he will figure out the best way to carry forward from there. I managed to stamp out your silly idea of running away with him. Two will get caught easier than one, I said, and Samuel agreed, his frantic eyes staring. You are quiet. Don’t worry, little sister, you will learn to live without him. (Not that I will tell you that. No, I will let you hope. I hoped to find love after Herbert died. Look at me now, running my business, taking care of you.)

I almost rode those mules into the ditch just then when you rose and near pitched yourself out the carriage! Yanking you back by the shoulder, I barely managed to keep the trap straight on the road. Listen now, I just had an idea, what if we take up religion?

The church is always looking for missionaries to go out to Hawaii. We’ll look for Samuel once we get there—huh? There now, sit back down. We have to let the fuss settle down, let the hunt for the missing miner run cold—no point in rushing; and then we will find our faith.

10

Bored

by Kawika Guillermo Everything about Xia was bulging, with nothing hidden or sunken enough to feel pity for. Even moving to Love Lane did not break her spirits. Like many of us ah­ku, she had escaped an arranged marriage in her home country only to find that her passage to Penang was no charity. Rather, she would spend the next five years in the brothels of George Town, paying back her passage debt.

Her desire for life could not be measured. "Ya know," she told me on that first night, after she had brazenly risked the Madame's ire by drinking the reserve rice wine and sneaking into my bunk. "I tend to be a bit nomadic. Those coins Madame found on me? I ripped 'em off some poor guy trying to get a feel off me. And well a few drunk pirates as well. Played tendress to them and got a good bit. Drunken pirates. Then I just disappear like, well, forgive me for the analogy I'm about to use, but—I disappear like a fart in the wind." She laughed slightly.

Married is perhaps not the proper term for what Xia and I had, but we were united. By the sense of our debts.

I never minded Xia's truncated sessions with the Chinese boozers. She pleased her clients with a fakeness so exaggerated that it seemed derisive—a gallant laugh, her finger pointing in their direction, at their naked bodies. Our Madame, Mui Fae, punished her frequently with brutal, public beatings with a stick. Xia was caught for all sorts of things—kicking clients out of her bed only seconds past satisfaction, mocking the mistresses who dreamed of escaping with their rich clients, badgering the clients for more money (that was Madame's job), and of course, for sneaking into my bed when the sunlight had faded from the gaudy, striped awning that made us all feel like prisoners.

"I'm not afraid of sinking," Xia told me once. "Just follow your heart. Right? Or not?"

I was no coquette. Older than she, a matronly age, in fact. My face, as Madame told me when I failed to satisfy a client, I was all crudded up. My bottom lip was unable to pout, and my wrinkles showed not age, but wear. I was worn. Every day since I had escaped my father, I tasted the mustiness of my cell, as well as the soused men flowing in and out of it—rickshaw drivers, errand boys, builders, sailors, old men faded by opium. I was the merchandise they sifted their hands over.

But when Xia and I made love it was not the ritualistic, cluttered panics that we felt with our clients. Our lips slipped against each other's in defiance; I felt my freedom in her embrace. The busier our beds were throughout the day, the more we gave ourselves during the night. A dark, sweaty cleansing. I held her tighter, obstructed by her massive breasts. I pressed beneath them, to her soul.

After her third year she was allowed to run errands about Penang, to barter with her own clients and sleep at the apartments the babas bought her. She purchased pork dumplings for the brothel, so our cells felt less like prisons. She was always moving up and down Love Lane, wearing chintzy see­through garments, walking a palliative walk, 11

and leaving trails of money. She still came to me, now and again, in the private temple of our love­making.

At the same time, I felt centuries old. That's what we called girls who had fallen to disease. I busied myself about the old Peranakan mansion, dusting and scorching up Sichuan soup, experimenting with those incensed Tamil spices from the migrants who moved only two blocks from our little Chinese section of George Town. The Tamils seemed in a similar place as us, homeless and hopelessly encumbered with the weight of debt. Whenever I went to the Tamil market, I watched their elders and wondered about being born among them. They seemed content and healthy, despite having nothing.

After months with her baba, Xia came back to my cell. As soon as she entered, down she went to relax, legs splaying as she leaned forward, propping her elbows against the dip just before her knees.

"This is boring," she told me.

"What is?" I asked.

She looked up at the awning, where the sun exposed levitating white dust in small splices of light. As she stood up, the movement of her full breasts, uncrushed by her thin cheongsam, sent a dispersive wind.

My anger came out muffled: "You're safe here. Things are finally stable." I turned away from her, to weep alone. "What did we escape for, if not for each other?"

She sat on the bed, running her hands gently through my straw­like hair. "Sometimes I wish I were so naïve," she told me. "Truly."

When the Madame discovered Xia's escape, she assaulted me in the kitchen, bashing scalding soup onto my legs. Our scramble went into the dining hall, where she tossed me down.

"You think I did not know about you two?" she screamed. "You were the only thing keeping her here—and you failed!"

The ginger soup stung my legs. "I did nothing," I told her. And after a beat of silence, added: "She just said she was bored."

"Bored!" The Madame lurched back, as if to smack me, but retched at my crudded­up face. "Look how ugly you have become. Get out. What good are you here without her?"

The brothel's bar had gone quiet. The mistresses and ah­ku motioned me toward the door. The Madame blocked my way to my own cell. Nothing I owned was my own.

In the streets of George Town I heard the slow drumbeat of the Tamil migrants, and went to them. I sat at one of their cafes, listened to their language, sensed their spiced incense, felt the thump of their drumbeats. I tried to crack smiles at the men.

12

King of the Heap

by Kim Drew Wright

My name is Maxwell Anderson. My friends call me Max. Leo Williams is my best friend.

He lives down the street, a couple blocks closer to the stack, which gives him an unfair advantage. When I told him that’s why he’s won the past three days he just grinned and yelled, “King of the Heap!” then shoved me off the stack. I plan on winning today.

Aunt Clara’s hawk eyes catch me at the front door and I have to stand in the dining room while Ma hangs camphor balls around my neck and makes me put two sugar cubes burnin’ of kerosene under my tongue. One thing’s for sure, I stink to high heaven. There goes my sneak attack on Leo. Thanks to Aunt Clara. When she came to live with us she brought three things to decorate our house, a photo of Uncle Robert dead in his casket, a permanent frown under hawk eyes, and a vase of peacock feathers which Leo told me was bad luck but Ma says looks pretty and makes Aunt Clara happy. How she knows that I have no idea, the only time I’ve ever seen Aunt Clara’s mouth move into any semblance of a smile was when she was quoting Billy Sunday about praying down sin to get rid of sickness. At least Uncle Robert died with honors, buried in his army blues.

I bang the front door behind me, cutting off Ma’s warning to, “Stay off those caskets, there’s sick peo…,” and I’m off running down the street. My baby sister, Evie, is jumping rope with her little friend Harriett and I stop to give a pull on both pigtails and a pinch on her nose. I don’t pull too hard and she smiles at me but keeps on singing and twirling the rope for Harriett, the other end tied to a fence post, “I had a little bird. Its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in flew Enza.”

I run past the Johnston’s house. There’s a grey crepe on the front door and I wonder if Mr. or Mrs. Johnston is the one that died. My money’s on Mr. Johnston, he was always too pale­looking and bunched up like a frightened chick when the Mrs. hollered at him to come in for supper. Could go either way though, they're both older than Christmas. I wish I had time to run down Edwards Street to see the crepes there, maybe Leo has the news.

Leo’s always bragging about how his Pa got picked to lead an army combat troop overseas. I guess he doesn’t stop to think how I feel stuck with a Pa with a bum leg still in town. My Pa got chosen health officer for Blithesville, which just means he sits at 13

his desk and looks worried. He posted, THIS TOWN IS QUARANTINED. DO NOT STOP, on the population sign on Main St., but I guess the flu can’t read, or doesn’t mind nobody’s signs, because it came anyways.

Leo said yesterday that there’d been a telegraph from his Pa saying he was coming home. He’s all excited to see his Pa since he’s been gone since Leo’s last birthday when he turned ten, and his next birthday’s only a few weeks away. I tried to act excited for Leo, and I guess I was a little bit, but it’s kind of hard to be excited about a Pa coming home when yours never left. Leo said his Ma looked bluish when she read the telegram, but I didn’t ask if he meant sad or sick. I overheard Aunt Clara and Pa talking about how near the end the sick turn black and blue like storm clouds and rain red out their ears and eyes and mouth. Ma said, “Keep your words to yourself,” to Pa when I woke up with nightmares. I was sorry I got him in trouble, but I couldn’t help it.

I trip to a stop in front of Leo’s house, skin my knee. There’s a black crepe on his door.

That means he meant sick blue. I look at the cracked sidewalk I tripped on and finally find my excitement about his Pa coming back. I walk slower now, running my hand along the fence slats, toward the stack. The street is empty except for the open truck stopped in front of the stack, adding five more boxes to the pyramid. The worker’s masked face turns to take me in and then shoves the pine box firmly on top.

Mr. Wallace, the undertaker, steps outside to give instructions to the man to add the rest to the base so it doesn’t topple over. He sees me and spits out under his breath, “Don’t know why they call it the Spanish flu when it’s those goddamn Germans that grew those germs,” like I’m a man, and goes back inside. Through the glass pane I watch him counting caskets. He must lose count cause he slams his palm against pine and goes back to where he started and starts again. The masked man is already driving down the street, looking for more boxes on porches to collect.

The stack is larger than ever and I stand and admire it for a minute, but don’t bother climbing to the top. Without Leo here, I guess I’m King of the Heap, but it doesn’t feel like a victory. It feels like loss.

I want to see my friend and tell him the news, even if his Ma is dead. When I get to his gate I glance up the walk, consider knocking on his door. A white crepe hangs beside the black one for his Ma. It stands there like a ghost sneaking out of the shadows and I stare with eyes frozen. My heart refuses to beat, until the air rushes out of my lungs with a whoosh, pushing me along toward my home. I start to run and get flattened by a broad chest in army blue, a suitcase knocked to the ground. Leo’s Pa catches me by one arm and says something I can’t hear over the blood roaring in my ears. He gives me a little shake and my gaze travels from his nose to the splatter of blood on my arm. He follows my gaze and lets me go.

My legs pump hard as I run past the Whitman’s black crepe, and the white one next to them at the Hickson’s. So many more crepes since yesterday. It’s like the crepes are contagion themselves. Could there be one on my door waiting for my arrival to spread its message—white for Evie, black for Ma or Pa? I see the front gate, our door is empty. I run up the path and swing the door open, glad to find Pa at his desk signing death notices.

14

The Charge of the Light Brigade

by Todd McKie

Sorry to spoil your beauty sleep, ladies. Saddle up and do your Queen proud! One last look in your pocket mirrors, lads. Blouses tucked? Sanitary napkins in place, girls? Legs and underarms shaved clean, gentlemen?

Mount your steeds, you God­forsaken deviants! Mount your steed Sergeant Jepperson—quit off interfering with Lieutenant Newsome's private parts! A bad hair day, Williams? Put away the comb and mount your horse. That's a direct order, sir. You there, Holmes, shall we postpone the battle whilst you do your nails? What's it to be lassie, your cuticles or the future of the British Empire? Brassieres and bonnets lashed on tight, men?

Right then, you wretched pederasts, close ranks. Gunderson, urge your horse forward, girl. What seems to be the problem, Corporal Parker? Has your monthly begun? Oh, you just don't feel like it this morning. Well, adjust your panties, Missy, and sit up straight.

That's more like it, lad.

Sound the trumpet, Captain Edgerley—and none of your damned show tunes!

For God, Victoria, and England! Charge!

15

It Won’t Be For Long

by Jordan Legg

“Are you ready?”

“I am.”

The opening of metal hinges echoed in Hugh’s ears and he heard the sound of heavy footfalls in the passage outside. A set of keys jingled in someone’s hands. The old man gripped his crutch tightly and looked up to see the door swing open. A large jailer stood in the doorway before them, wrinkling his nose at the excremental stench. He surveyed the two men and then stepped into the cell to gather up the aged Hugh in his massive arms. After flinging the old man over his shoulder, the jailer gave John a kick.

“Up,” he growled.

John’s hands groped at the floor beneath him until they finally hit the stone wall. The jailer carried Hugh out of the cell, and John felt a shove in the back directing him to move forward. Their officers took them up the stairs of the dungeon and eventually into the open air. Hugh’s feeble body was flung roughly onto the back of a waiting horsecart and John, too, was lifted up and placed beside his comrade.

“To Stratford­le­Bow,” the jailer told the cart driver. The driver whipped up the reins, the horse gave a whinny, and the wheels of the cart began to bounce their cargo up and down over the cobblestone streets of London. The cart was flanked by two black­clad men­at­arms astride large black horses, baring their weapons to ensure an orderly execution.

Hugh put his crutch aside and tried to turn to better see his companion. The crutch had not helped him walk in years, but he had always carried it with him out of stubbornness.

He winced as his hands forced two limp legs around, cursing the paralysis that had plagued him for over forty laborious years. A little grunt escaped his throat. He ground his teeth together.

Hugh had needed crutches since age four. His father had fashioned them out of a pair of sticks, branching out in a tripod at the bottom and allowing him to walk around town.

When he was ten his father died and Hugh was left with no recourse but to compensate for his disability by the mercies of other men.

He sought the pity of the Church, which his father had extolled with his dying breath.

Hugh had been dutiful—he had prayed and fasted, and dragged himself into Mass with the pious hope that he might find favour in the eyes of God. He had heard the priests tell of the healing that awaited the faithful, and seen them parade their indulgences through town with the promise that when coins in coffers ring, souls from Purgatory spring.

But he had no coin for an indulgence. He could not buy the blessing of a priest. And not once had he tasted the blood of Christ at the Eucharist—it was reserved for clerics only, 16

lest the commoner spill a drop and tread upon the very blood of God. If he could buy no indulgence, nor partake in the holy wine, what hope was there for the salvation of his soul?

It was then that he heard rumours of men like Christopher Lyster and John Mace.

Lutherans, it was said, who preached that no indulgence would save men from the fires of Hell, but only by a naked faith in Christ and in his death and resurrection. No churchman was needed for this sacred faith, Hugh heard—only the plain Scriptures, which had now been translated into the common English tongue.

He had sought out Lyster and Mace, and had thus met the young John Apprice, who sat before him now. Hugh had known what his allegiance to these Lutherans meant—it was a heresy punishable by death. They had all plainly told him so. They had known this was coming. Their entire fellowship had been telling one another to be ready for the stake long before any had been arrested. In this company, with these books, and in this Eucharist there lies danger, they had told one another. Every man and woman among them had known it. And now their fears had come to fruition. Hugh and John had been preparing for this ride ever since casting their lot in with the Protestants. And not two weeks ago, they had been discovered by Bishop Bonner’s men­at­arms. They had been seized and tried, and then there in Newgate they had waited for their sentence to be carried out, hoping and praying that, when the time came, they would be given due courage.

He remembered the meetings that they had had together, he and John Apprice and the others that had met to break bread in secret. They had met in houses, secretly, praying and worshipping together. Someone had brought in Tyndale’s New Testament, and together they had marvelled at the words they found in that forbidden text. Now here, riding down this old cobblestone street, caught at last, Hugh reflected on the death that would surely come.

He had not expected it to be like this. All the hours spent in introspection, in steeling his spiritual grit for his inevitable final hour, seemed wasted upon knowing that the hour had come. This day, Hugh Laverock and John Apprice would stand before God. All he had yet hoped for in his earthly life was cut short. They would see no earthly retribution, he thought. He would not see the fate of the rest of their little Protestant congregation that yet waited, some in Newgate Prison, and some still at large and safe from the wrath of Bishop Bonner. There was this day only, and then he would behold Christ, waiting for them on the other side.

“Hugh,” John said.

“Aye, John.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No,” the old cripple told him with a grimace, and in that moment, wondered if he had told the truth. “We’ll burn today, John—that much is certain.” He wished his voice did not tremble so. “But I know wherein my hope lies. And before this day is out,” he forced 17

a smile, “I shall walk again.”

“I’m afraid, Hugh,” whispered the blind man. “It is my last day without my eyes. Tell me what you see.”

Hugh looked about him. “The whole of London’s waiting round us,” he said, “with folk of all sorts watching us and walking alongside the cart to the Stratford stake.” His voice grew strained and heavy. “There’s scorn in some eyes and sorrow in others, and in some it’s hard to tell between the two. Bishop Bonner stands beside the waiting stake, arrayed in rich prelate red, and round him his men­at­arms pile bundles of kindling round the faggot. They’re readying it to be lit.”

John nodded. “What else?”

Hugh found it hard to describe anything more. His eyesight was not what it once had been, but even in his old age he found it hard to imagine a life of total blindness. How could he describe what else he saw?

“Just speak, Hugh, please,” came the plea from the man beside him.

“He’s flanked by other clerics, doctors and priests in their black robes,” said the old man.

“A few knights on horses lie on the outside, watching to make certain there be no mischief here. There are drummers standing round the stake in a circle, waiting for their orders. The old stone chapel lies silently yonder, as if watching and waiting for when they set the flames.”

“See you any of our number?” John asked nervously.

“Aye,” Hugh whispered, his voice shaking. “A few, here and there.”

The cart stopped before the waiting bishop, and a few men­at­arms dragged Hugh off the cart and up onto the platform, where the stake stood like a bone, waiting to be clothed in the flesh of its victims. Hugh grabbed hold of his crutch as his handlers shoved his body up against the piece of wood, behind the stack of kindling, and chained him under the arms to the pole. One of them moved to take the crutch from him, but the paralytic dropped it before he could take it away. He hung there, limp and trembling.

Yes, afraid.

The proud bishop stared down at the old beggar and raised a scrutinizing eyebrow. His mouth pursed with haughty self­righteousness. Hugh thought back to the trial, six days before, when the bishop had demanded the two men confess transubstantiation and when he had insisted that only through the Catholic sacrament of body and blood might one receive the mercy of God. The men­at­arms thrust John down against the stake on the other side of his companion and together they began to tie his arms around it to secure their victim.

“Tell me more of what you see, Hugh,” John whispered to him.

18

“It’s a bright blue sky over us this morning,” Hugh told him, “with the sun shining down upon trees greener than I’ve ever seen in all my days. It makes me wonder what they’ll look like in July, when all the world is in full bloom.”

From the other side of the stake, Hugh could hear the blind man emit a nearly inaudible chuckle. “Today, Hugh,” he whispered with wonder, “today at last I’ll see it.”

“That you will,” replied Hugh, and a smile spread across his own face. He ran his hands around the unfeeling legs beneath him, crumpled between the kindling and the stake.

For a moment he felt the weight of despair—what if their reward did not come?

What if the grace of Christ did not wait for them on the other side of death? What if they were to be met, not with resurrection in the presence of God, but the agonies of Purgatory, or worse, the fires of Hell itself? Or what if there was nothing at all beyond the stake? A terrible, aching emptiness, a non­existence, a cruel trick by a world indifferent to cruelty and injustice?

And yet it was so tempting to imagine the vigour rippling through the bones beneath his flesh, and standing up straight for the first time in forty years. He yearned for the sensation of strength in those old bones—the glory of standing tall the way men were meant to do. How long it had been since that strength had been his—and today, at last, it would be again. He thought back to his childhood, and the feeling of bare feet against the cobbled streets of Barking parish.

“And I shall walk, John. Finally, I’ll know what it means to walk again.” Even as he said it, his voice began to grow more excited and quickly he whispered, “It won’t be for long, John. It won’t be for long—and then at last you will see. We will see. We’ll see him.”

The drums began to roll and the crowd grew quiet. Faster and faster the drummers pounded their sticks against the skins, echoing Hugh’s pounding heart, and finally, they stopped. Bishop Bonner spoke.

“On this, the Fifteenth of May, in the Year of Our Lord 1556, I find Hugh Laverock and John Apprice guilty of heresy against the traditions and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; namely, the rejection of the Eucharist, of the veneration of the saints, and of the preaching of indulgences and Purgatory. Yet even now, God’s mercy is at hand, if only these two men will humble themselves and recant their blasphemy against the Church of God.” Hugh thought for a moment of the fire that would come if they persisted in silence. The terrible consumption of fire over their flesh. His tongue trembled, wishing to succumb to the bishop’s taunt. But no sound came from his mouth. He wondered if he was just too afraid to speak up, and prayed for the reprieve from the temptation that came with silence.

19

“Very well. Hugh Laverock and John Apprice, guilty of heresy, are hereby sentenced to be burned at the stake. May God have mercy on your souls.”

The men­at­arms lit the torches and thrust them forward into the kindling beneath the two men. The stifled smoke climbed through the wood and filled their noses. Heat began to intensify against their skin. The bishop glared at them with cold arrogance. They could see the beginnings of a blaze growing beneath the shade of the kindling around them.

Then, suddenly, the flame seemed to shoot up and the sound of crackling filled their ears. John panted frantically, as the blaze rose quickly around him, like a dog leaping up to grab fresh meat dangling just above its reach. A pitiable suppressed whine leaked through John’s tortured lungs, and his eyes widened, darting frantically across the platform, as if they might find some way of escape.

“Hugh!” he cried out.

Hugh bent his head back in an effort to behold his companion. Fear was audible in John’s desperate breaths and visible on his tormented face.

“Be of good comfort, my brother; for my Lord of London is our good physician.” The crippled man inhaled deeply, but could not contain his breath for very long. “Oh,” he sighed, “oh, he will heal us both shortly,” he took a laboured breath, “you of your blindness, and me... me of my lameness.” Pain seared through him like he had never known before, and he heard a tortured scream erupt across the square. It was his own.

“Hold on, John,” he cried, “it won’t be for long.” He gasped a lungful of air. “Remember the text: ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation,’” he gave another wild, painful scream, “‘and have... have washed their robes and made them... made them white, white with the blood,” he cringed with the sting, “of the Lamb.’” Out of the corner of his eye, Hugh saw the tormented head of John Apprice nod violently, banging against the stake.

The flames ran madly across the cone of kindling and he began to sense the scalding heat against his own leathery skin. It grew closer and soon the flames began to lick corrosion across his skin. His breath vibrated loudly back and forth across his throat as he fought the fire for the air around him. It was like a ravenous animal, consuming, suffocating its condemned victims. Smoke, dry and unfeeling, filled his nostrils, making it difficult to breathe, difficult to concentrate. He winced, and his teeth churned against one another.

He could taste blood on his tongue as fire charred his trembling body. Hugh hardly knew what to hope for as he felt the fire deepen its scars across his ancient body. He had often wondered whether death would be painful—and perhaps for others it was, but not for him. He could feel it all—every terrible, excruciating cut. He reminded himself silently with each passing minute—it’s that much closer. That much closer to the end.

That much of it is over with, and afterwards— No. Not an end, he knew. A beginning. He would walk again. Today. He knew it, as surely as he had known anything. And surely that was not his greatest reward. Today, he thought—today he would see beyond that global veil. Today he would look upon Christ, and run, laughing, into his waiting arms. Today he would hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” He just needed to hold on. It wouldn’t be for long.

20

Everyone Was There

by Crawdad Nelson

We have long foreseen the present state of things and have been well satisfied, and so expressed it repeatedly, that it could be averted by placing the Indians on the Reservations or by extermination: in other words, by removing them from the range they now inhabit, either alive or dead. ­Austin Wiley, Editor, Humboldt Times. September 1858.

There was no secret, but everyone was in on the secret; everybody knew the truth, but nobody could remember it. The Army estimated the number of victims but such a job was near impossible given the chaos of what had been left behind. They didn’t lay blame on any particular person, nor would the forces of municipal law provide the least clarity.

The bodies had been found broken in every conceivable way: dismembered, partially burnt, tossed this way and that and into the tidal marsh where marine predators had feasted. The blood stood for days in bare pools on saturated ground, thickening in the mild winter sun, rippling thickly when light winds blew, frosting over at night. The island was only the biggest scene; the killers had moved quickly and worked hard at two other camps nearby.

A few days later, the Humboldt Times surprisingly came out with an editorial expressing shame for what had happened and questioning the morality of the entire Humboldt settlement. Editor Austin Wiley had briefly left the paper in the hands of a young reporter, Bret Harte, who dissented from the popular view. Later that day, a mob gathered outside the Times’ office to deal with Harte. There was much drinking and shouting. Everyone was there; if they weren’t there, they knew who was. They had all agreed it was over and done with and not to speak of it. They agreed equally that, however grim or displeasing it might have looked, it needed doing. The stockmen used colorful, disrespectful metaphors alluding to the efficiency of culling, the farmers spoke of plowing things under, the timbermen nodded and spoke gravely of dead and wasted wood. Those of deep religious feeling, that is, most, found spiritual and doctrinal justification to go with their economic theories .

William Sykes could see the fear in Harte’s eyes when he stood on the balcony addressing the growing crowd. Harte, understanding the gravity of things, called for reason and sanity, which only made the citizens, all of whom were otherwise respectable people, except the thieves and those who found pleasure in killing, angry. They shouted insults and defamed his ancestry; they called him a fool.

The butchery and savagery of the event had required the services of several confirmed sadists, but such qualities were valued rather than deplored on the frontier. Guns were fired into the air and some, women as well as men, asked for the right to cut his throat, or gut him.

Harmon Painter nudged his mount up onto the wooden sidewalk, loosed a lariat, and tossed it over a post on the balcony. He backed the horse to tauten the line, which vibrated ominously, then sat watching Harte speak.

21

Painter represented the majority. I done give up on compassion, he complained, as he gave a hard yank and the balcony shuddered. Another lariat shot out of the crowd of mounted vigilantes, then another. The loops settled on exposed posts and quickly found good purchase. Cowboys handed rope to eager hands on the ground, and soon the balcony was creaking. Joints began to part, nails to withdraw and fly.

Someone loudly suggested drawing and quartering Harte; someone else wanted to cook him.

The cattlemen snarled at him like wolves or bears after destroying the front window of the building to let themselves in. The frame sang and rocked as the mob surged and reveled in its power. Harte saw that he was doomed, but chose to give in rather than die in vain defense. He handed over a loaded pistol, but had never threatened to use it.

Regardless, they handled him roughly before bringing him outside.

The crowd lost interest in the building as the newspaperman stumbled forth. He looked as if he expected to die and hoped it would be quick. His nose bled and some teeth were gone. His captors had him by the wrists and had a loop around the neck, cinched to the point of discomfort. They kneed him in the back to force him into the muddy street and the crowd parted enough to let him move.

You ready to die? they asked.

He said nothing. He held himself steady and with a fixed gaze sought faces of people he knew by name or otherwise. All the eyes turned toward him filled with hatred and disgust for his opinion, for his compassion. Nevertheless, that was his final appeal, the only possible appeal.

They tied his wrists behind him and found a mule nearby that could be spared briefly.

He was lifted onto its bare back and sat amid those who planned to kill him. He realized that the few people he knew who weren’t prone and willing to violence either didn’t know what was happening or knew better than to get caught in the crossfire.

He sat the mule’s bony back while the animal glared at the eyes nearest and bared its teeth at men it recognized. Harte wore an old pair of wool trousers under a loose shirt, both passably clean but rumpled, and black leather boots. He had, as the citizens feared, been disturbed at work, preparing a new edition with further elaboration of his unpopular views.

How do you want it, Harte? More guns were fired into the still night air. They sounded hollow to Harte, but no less dangerous. He prepared for the worst, still hoping for a friendly or at least neutral set of eyes to meet his, but each man and woman, even children barely old enough to hold jobs, stared at him with cold eyes, plainly willing, clearly motivated.

At last he saw James Hat, whose half­breed son sat behind him on a huge draft horse.

They stood near the crowd, but a step back from it. Hat finally fired his own weapon into the air to gain the attention of everyone there. He turned the bead toward Painter, then 22

back to Sykes, as he spoke to the crowd.

Anybody wants to get to Paradise today, why just let me know. I don’t mind comin’ with ye but if that newspaper boy dies here today he won’t do it alone.

Shore as hell, some yelled back at him, That’s all right, said others. But he sat unharmed, scanning them with the muzzle of his rifle, then looking back at Harte, on the mule.

What the hell is this? shouted a voice although it seemed the shouter knew very well what it was. Heads turned and the mob saw Colonel Grant, a little bleary, in his uniform jacket with the breast undone. Even incomplete, he conveyed sufficient gravity and official authority to impose restraint on the crowd.

You okay in there boy? he shouted at Harte, who said, Yes, sir but I would appreciate a wet cloth for my face. I’m spoiling this shirt and staining a mule.

Yer shittin’ yet pants too, ain’t you pissant? yelled a wit, but Harte had maintained his bowel.

By now other soldiers inferior to Grant were arriving, looking as if they had been disturbed in some act of fraternity with civilians. The mob shouted angrily at Harte and reminded him that to remain in the area past this moment would displease them so much that even the US Army couldn’t preserve him.

Surviving Indians had done what they could to bury and remove bodies, but blood remained standing in pools for days.

23

A Bullet for Jake

by Micahel M. Pacheco Jake had seen a six­shooter from a distance but never up close like the one in his hands. It belonged to his sister’s beau, Billy.

“It’s heavier than I thought,” said Jake. He placed the cold barrel up to his face. It felt good in the hot, late afternoon sun. Every now and then a stray breeze moved down the hillside, ruffling the grama grass. Overhead the weathervane on the barn would creak back and forth, moving a fraction of an inch one way before jerking again in the opposite direction.

“Yeah, I thought that too, when I first got it a coupla years ago, but you get used to it,” said Billy. “I used to have a lighter one, but that was a single­shot Colt 44.” He pointed at the cylinder. “This one here holds six bullets.”

Jake’s eyes got bigger. “What happens if you’re in a shootout and run out of bullets?”

Billy smiled and pointed at his bandolier. On his right and left sides, the belt held a row of bullets pointing down at the ground. “Gotta be quick and hope you don’t get hit before you can reload.”

Jake’s sister, Paulita, called from the house. “You boys come on in here. It’s time for supper.”

Paulita and their brother, Pete, had taken over the family reins after their parents died of consumption. They were in heaven according Paulita and Jake believed her.

Paulita was a good cook despite having been raised in a wealthy family and attended by maids. She knew how to pick just the right vegetables and spices to turn a mundane meal into something special.

Jake could tell by the love and effort she put into her cooking that it gave her great pleasure in seeing others, especially Billy, enjoy her meals. Today, she had prepared shredded pork, beans and diced nopalitos in a tomato­chili sauce. As an added treat, she had heated up candied yams. Jake’s mouth watered.

He handed the heavy weapon back to Billy. Despite being only twelve, he was almost as tall as Billy. He looked him boldly in the eye. “Are you gonna marry my sister?”

“Boy, you’re fairly straightforward, ain’t you?” smiled Billy. “I been thinking about it.”

He pushed up the brim of his hat. “How would you feel, if I did that?”

“Okay, I reckon.”

Actually, he liked Billy a lot, the way he joked with him, the way he taught him to ride a horse and the way he let Jake handle his Colt pistol. It was Pete who had a problem with Billy.

24

Shadows began to sweep across the valley as they strolled into the house and confirmed Jake’s thoughts. The meal was delicious. Pete was a husky young man and helped himself to a second serving of the pork. Paulita smiled at him. “I assume the meal meets with everyone’s approval?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Billy. “You know you’re a great cook.”

“Good enough to be someone’s wife!” added Jake, smiling down at his plate.

Pete retained the serious look on his face. “She’s gotta find herself a rich suitor first. That way you don’t have to worry about where your next meal comes from.”

Paulita and Billy glanced at each other. She changed the subject, raising her fork and pointing somewhere toward the door. “Pete, did you see anyone we know in town?”

Earlier Pete had made his weekly run into Lincoln for supplies. Jake picked up a barely noticeable hesitation in Pete’s response.

“Nope. Well, except for Mr. Wilson at the feed store and Mrs. Jones at the grocery store.”

Pete moved his food around on his plate with his fork, as if looking for the next words to say. “I saw Jose Jaramillo. He said to tell you hello.”

“Well, that was nice of him,” said Paulita, “but I was wondering whether you’d seen Pat Garrett and his boys.”

Everyone stopped chewing. Billy lowered his fork slowly onto his plate and waited for Pete’s answer. Even Jake knew Pat Garrett was a lawman trying to locate and apprehend Billy for alleged crimes, like murder, unlawful escape from jail and horse thievery.

Every newspaper in New Mexico and some as far as New York City had carried stories of Billy’s escapades, though Jake knew most of them exaggerated the facts to sell papers.

Some credited Billy with as many as twenty­one murders. The truth was closer to four or five.

Pete cleared his throat. “No, I . . . I didn’t see him.” When no one spoke for what Jake thought was the longest time, Pete added, “But I did hear he was on his way.”

“What!” exclaimed Paulita. “Why didn’t you say something?” She regarded Billy with a pleading look. “Don’t tell me you’re going to leave us again, please.”

Billy was a confident man. He was also an accomplished escape artist, once freeing himself from cuffs and another time breaking out of jail. He lifted his glass of water and took a small sip. He wiped his lips with the sleeve of his shirt. “I came back to be with you, Paulita. I promise I won’t leave you again. If Garrett shows up here, well . . . we’ll deal with him then.”

That was another thing Jake liked about Billy. He seemed to live with a purpose larger 25

than himself.

That evening was quieter than usual at the Maxwell residence. By the time supper was finished, the hot New Mexico sun had sunk completely beyond the horizon. The stars were already twinkling on this moonless night. The blackness was so thick that even the mountains behind their house had disappeared in the sticky air of evening.

Jake helped Paulita scrape the food off the dinner plates and put them in soapy water in a metal basin. When they had finished washing all the plates and utensils, Paulita patted Jake on the shoulder.

“Thank you, Jake. I like it when you help me.”

“It’s okay. You do a lot to get food ready for us, so I don’t mind,” he said.

Paulita dried her hands with a towel and nodded toward the front porch. “Come, let’s go sit with Billy and Pete for awhile.”

Jake followed her to the front porch where the two men sat in silence looking into the dark night. A small lantern sat on a tree stump that served as a side table to Pete’s rocking chair. A hint of honeysuckle floated in the air.

Pete was puffing on a smoking pipe. Everyone knew he hated the taste of tobacco but he’d taken it up because he thought it made him look more important. He coughed as Paulita and Jake stepped out onto the porch.

“Put that thing away, Pete, It’s not good for you. Besides, there’s no one to impress out here. It’s just us and we’re not impressed,” said Paulita.

“You do what you like,” said Pete, “And I’ll do what I like.”

“But I thought you didn’t like that smoke in your lungs,” said Jake.

“Now don’t get smart with me, Jake. I’m talking to your sister,” said Pete.

Jake noticed that Billy continued to stare into the night, as if waiting for someone to arrive or maybe waiting for the Maxwells to stop bickering. Jake looked at their house guest. “Billy, you ever try smoking a pipe?”

Billy turned to Jake, as if someone had shaken him from a deep slumber. “A pipe? No, but I did try smoking cigarettes one time. I choked on the smoke and the men who were with me had a good laugh. After that, I never tried them again.”

“Maybe you just didn’t do it right. I mean, the inhaling part,” offered Jake.

“There’s no right way to do it,” said Paulita. “The whole thing is a disgusting habit. It leaves you smelling like a burnt pile of weeds.”

26

“Well,” said Pete, “It is a form of plant, you know.”

Jake looked at Paulita who threw her chin in the air and looked away. It appeared she was not going to dignify Pete’s comment with a response. Billy smiled briefly, at the conversation devolving into ridiculous banter.

Within an hour’s time everyone had bid each other goodnight and Jake was in his bed. He lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to the cooing sounds his sister was making downstairs. He knew Billy and Paulita slept together, though they pretended they didn’t.

Pete’s room was on the first floor and to the left of the front door. Paulita’s was across the hall. Pete had claimed his bedroom after their parents died and no one had challenged his occupation.

Billy’s room was upstairs.

A barn owl hooted in the distance. Another giggle emanated from Paulita’s room and Jake wondered whether Billy would soon become his brother­in­law. Jake whispered a prayer asking God to look over his deceased parents as well as his brother and sister. He made sure to include a request for the Lord to provide a husband for Paulita, namely Billy.

Jake noticed the crickets stopped their usual nocturnal chorus and everything fell silent.

Even his sister’s sighs of pleasure hushed. He glanced out his window into the night sky. The stars, billions of them, filled the sky with pinpoints of light and while they cast a barely perceptible glow over everything, Jake saw nothing unusual. He rolled over and slipped into a cozy slumber.

It may have been minutes or it may have been hours, but when Jake awoke later it was still dark. His skin prickled.

He sat up and glanced out his window. He caught a dark shadow moving in the direction of the hills behind their house. Was it a burglar or maybe a horse rustler? Jake knew unsavory bandits were common in these lands.

He peeled back his blanket and rose quietly. The night air had let in the absolute cold of empty space and stolen the day’s heat. He decided not to put on his boots in order to move stealthily down the stairs and warn his family.

27

He felt his way to the staircase by running his fingers along the wall. The newel post wobbled as he braced himself to descend. He gingerly felt the edge of each stair closest to the wall with his feet so as not to make them creak so loudly.

The closest room was Paulita’s. He skirted the edge of the doorway then turned to face it head­on. His night­adjusted eyes probed the velvet blackness as he approached her bed.

The floorboards creaked and he stopped to see whether anyone had heard him. When he was convinced that no one had, he came to Paulita’s side. He was shocked to find the bed empty.

This was not usual. Something was terribly wrong. He rushed back into the hallway and out to the front porch. There, he saw the silhouettes of two men sitting on the edge of the top step. They were wearing large­brimmed hats like the sombreros worn by Mexican bandits. Each one held a rifle or some other kind of weapon in their hands.

“Quien es?” asked Jake. He asked who they were because this was his house and felt he should take on the voice of authority. Neither man spoke. The one on his right waved Jake off dismissively, as if they already knew who he was and he didn’t matter to them.

Jake walked backward slowly until he crossed the threshold and he was once again inside the house. He turned and hurried to Pete’s room, puzzled as to why his brother hadn’t heard anything like those men on the porch or Paulita’s leaving the house.

When he turned to enter Pete’s room, Jake saw two figures sitting in Pete’s rocking chairs. Pete was barely visible near his window and the other figure, harder to distinguish, was seated in the darkest part of the room.

A voice from the stranger in the dark repeated Jake’s own words. “Quien es?”

Jake recognized Pete’s voice and responded to the man saying, “Es el.”

Almost instantaneously, Jake saw a bright flash of light and a sudden impact to his right chest, spinning him around and throwing him onto the floor. He curled in excruciating pain into a fetal position, grabbing his right chest with his left hand. He could not form words but he grunted, “Ah! Ah!” He couldn’t see it, but he envisioned a river of blood flowing from his body. He felt something hot coursing down his chest, sizzling against the cool of the New Mexico night.

A blood­curdling scream came from the doorway. It was Paulita. He would know her voice anywhere, even in the dark. She ran to Jake and eased him flat onto his back.

“What the hell?” Pat Garrett stood over the body of Jake Maxwell. He glared at Pete.

“You said it was him! Now look what’s happened.”

Garrett still had his gun in his hand. He pointed it at Paulita. “Where’s Billy? I know you hid him somewhere, so you best tell me right now.”

28

Jake began to lose consciousness. He saw the two men from the porch in the hallway with their rifles at the ready. “Don’t tell him anything, Paulita.”

Paulita looked up at Garrett. “You just shot my little brother, you stupid fool.” She pointed a bloody finger at him. “You’re the criminal here. You can go to hell. Get out of my house!”

When Garret did not move, she stood and moved her face within inches of his. “I have a gun in my bedroom. If you don’t leave this minute, Garrett, I’ll go get that gun and you’ll have to shoot me too, before I kill you. Do you understand?”

“You’re all gonna regret this,” said Garrett, as he stormed out of the room.

Pete tried to shirk into the shadows of the room but Paulita would not let him. “You’re just as responsible for this. You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Paulita. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We thought he was Billy.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? You just had our brother shot! Go get the doctor from town. Jake’s bleeding badly.”

Pete stood frozen. Then his knees began to shake, barely able to support him.

“Hurry up!” cried Paulita, shaking her head. She knelt once again at Jake’s side. “He doesn’t have much time.”

For a brief moment, Jake thought he might be in heaven. A ghostly image of his mother and father stood at the door with arms outstretched toward him. But the pain in Jake’s chest overwhelmed him and the apparitions vanished. That’s when he knew he was wrong, for heaven could not contain agony such as this.

If ever God was abundant in Jake’s thinking, it was now with his head in his sister’s lap.

He knew she would take care of him no matter what had happened.

29

Meeting E. M. Forster

by Carole Glasser Langille

The following manuscript was given to me after the death of a relative. I am the executor of the estate. Because it is a firsthand account of E.M. Forster, I have granted publication rights. —Esther Beckworth

Portrait of E. M. Forster by Dora Carrington, 1924 or1925

"Don't you think it's hypocritical to hang around with me?" Vincent said the last time we were together. "Hang—the word means wither, it means die. It's a sham, pretending there’s still something between us."

I stared into my beer. "Not this again," I thought, his words like a hammer striking an old gong.

"You don’t take risks. You'll always be more interested in protecting yourself.”

When I didn't, at that moment, protect myself, he said, “Look, I'm going to London to study with a teacher there. You might want a little dalliance where we’re both 30

anonymous. But that’s not what I want. I don't wish you to follow me." Then he got up, leaving money on the table for our beer. I picked up a coin that had been in his hand and, still warm, slipped it in my pocket.

I bristled at his accusation. But he was right. I followed him to London.

I didn't know where he was staying and I hadn't had luck finding him yet, but wouldn't he have loved to be in this room where I was now, with these five men, though they were all over sixty, one nearly blind.

We’d come to spend time with the man who lived here, the great writer, E.M. Forster.

Clearly, I had been blessed with good fortune. Mr. Greenwood introduced me to Forster without mentioning that he'd met me in a bar a week before and that he'd offered me a job as his chauffeur, though I hadn't yet gotten a British driver's license and petrol was still rationed. He’d asked me to call him Leonard, this dignified man, nearly eighty, dressed in a natty suit.

"Young Gerald writes poetry," Leonard said to Mr. Forster. "He's from Boston."

Mr. Forster shook my hand saying, "Good to meet you," and then he did not speak another word for the next hour. I was more impressed by this than anything he could have uttered.

I'd admired the writer from the moment I'd read Howard's End, years ago. It was all I could do not to stare as he drank tea. But I made myself look around at the low chairs upholstered in chintz, the hyacinth in the vase, portraits on the wall, worn Indian rugs in magenta and gold, the other men sitting in the room. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

It was l947, and I was 25 years old. I'd come to England to be in a room with men like this. Well, I'd come to find Vincent, but the thought of telling Vincent about such a gathering filled me with pleasure.

The blind man, I learned, was a translator. He sat hunched and alert, as if ready to attend any new sound. Several conversations were going on at once, about biscuits, a book by Bentley, a current play I hadn't seen, but the translator was talking to Morgan (everyone called Forster Morgan) about Eliot's work.

I remember the translator saying, "Tom is fond of you. He says he misses seeing you."

Morgan said, "I think he wants to have seen me rather than to see me."

I told myself, remember his words exactly. After a while I gathered my courage and, leaning toward Morgan, asked if he liked Eliot's poetry.

"Yes," he said, and then he laughed. "When I first read him I thought he was beyond me.

But his poetry is good to read out loud." He paused. His face was very kind, his skin smooth, not many wrinkles, ruddy; his eyes, pale blue. I was surprised that his tweed jacket was worn and a bit snug. He looked at the tea he had just been drinking, then he 31

looked at me directly and said, "It's his homage to pain that I find intolerable."

"But there is pain in life," Leonard volunteered.

"Why should it be sanctioned and glorified by school masters and priests when so much of it is caused by bullies or by disease?" Morgan asked.

A few moments later he said to me, "Tom and I spoke at a conference, here in London.

Afterwards there was a reception and we both sat by the fire. A large group collected around Tom, pressing him with questions and I was pretty much deserted." He laughed a full laugh that came from his belly. His whole face filled with mirth. "My lack of fame spared me," he said.

I asked him if he enjoyed giving the reading, my voice ardent as a schoolgirl's, I realized, and felt my cheeks flush.

"It was the usual conference," Morgan said, "the smaller writers sidling up to the larger ones and the larger ones sliding away." I had to laugh when he said, "We praised the usual back numbers, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.”

He shook hands with me when Leonard and I were leaving. "Come by again," he said and then, as we turned to walk down the steps, I heard the click as he closed the door behind us.

Back in my flat, when I opened the letter that had arrived a few days earlier and that I’d left on the kitchen table, I felt the weight of my situation, but of course the letter offered nothing unusual. May wondered how I was. In her flowery handwriting she asked me to tell her about London. I knew I should answer; she depended upon me. We were to be married when I returned.

She wrote about books she was reading. She read far more than me and remembered everything. I admired her tremendously.

But I was thinking about Vincent and how Vincent was the one I would like to tell about the great writer. Did Mr. Forster actually want me to visit, or was he just being polite.

He'd mentioned, during the afternoon, that a young writer had visited him recently. "It was very curious and curiously tiring," he'd said.

"But fame has its compensations, surely," Leonard responded.

“At this time in my life people want to know me more than I want to know them," Morgan had said in a low voice. He was talking to Leonard, but was his comment meant, indirectly, for me?

The next time we visited, a man close to my age was there, Mark Elvin. We joked about being the two young writers in the room. I was too unsophisticated to hide my admiration of Morgan and I think Mark was amused by this idolization. Perhaps he knew what Forster’s reaction would be when he said to him, "Spender says you are the 32

the best English novelist of this century."

"What nonsense," Morgan grumbled and turned to pour more tea. It was clear that the conversation was over.

Later when I was driving Leonard home he said, "The effect of knowing Forster is that he becomes a supplementary conscience." I didn't know Morgan well enough, then, to understand.

After we'd visited Morgan several times, I got up the courage to ask him to play a piece.

Without protest, he went to the piano and played the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 27 in E minor.

The first piece I'd heard Vincent perform was Beethoven’s Concerto No. 3 in one of the old churches in Boston. We were planning to drive back to my place afterward. I had gone outside to wait for him after the concert.

"I saw you standing here before I came out. You looked so damn sad," he said. But I wasn't sad. I was thrilled to be waiting for him. I did wonder why no one else he knew was there to hear him. "Don't your parents want to take you out to celebrate?"

No, he said, they were away at their cottage. The rich boy who had everything but his parents' attention.

I don't understand music. My mind wanders at concerts. Music seems to rush over rather than through me. But it was heartbreaking listening to Vincent play that piece. It seemed so defiant. "Go,” it said, “and I'll leave too. Watch me head off." And then the orchestra rejoined with violins. In that piece, love was sad. Or rather it confessed its hidden sadness.

We went to a pub nearby after he had changed from his tuxedo. He was covered with sweat but didn't want to wear a coat, though the evening was cold. We ordered something to eat.

“You were marvelous,” I said.

“Beethoven is marvellous.” And then, “Actually, I don't know why you came tonight.

You should be with May.” Not this again, I groaned to myself.

“What is it you want?” he asked at last. At that moment I simply wanted to sit with him and eat our dinner. His beauty was like the sky at dusk. The blaze of colour was so beautiful yet what one felt most strikingly, looking at it, was loss.

“Beethoven is a great teacher,” Morgan said, snapping me into the present. “And Mahler. I wish I had discovered Mahler earlier. I see beauty going by and I have nothing to catch it in. But music helps." We were drinking tea and I’d taken rock cake and jam 33

from the sideboard. Morgan was used to my questions by now.

Even his silence made me bolder and I filled it. I told him about my friend Vincent, a pianist who was here studying in London. It embarrasses me to remember what I said next: "There are things I'd like to write but I'm afraid I might offend people." I said this though I hadn’t saved a single thing I’d written, nor had I written much.

"Well, you can write down something that happened once it hardens into a form which was not the original. Or you can let it melt away." He didn't wait for me to respond.

“This plum cake is dire," he said and took another bite.

When I was with Vincent I hated that he paid for everything. Once I suggested we take the subway instead of hailing a taxi. "But I don't need to take a subway!" he'd sneered.

"Why should we both suffer because you're poor?" It was easy to see him as a lout. But I was the one trying to track him down after he gave me the shove.

I wrote to Marcel, a mutual friend who wouldn't feel he was betraying Vincent if he gave me his address. But Marcel didn't know where Vincent was staying either.

"You missed Vincent's going­away party,” Marcel wrote back. “He came with his new boyfriend and his ex­wife and her husband. The only ones missing were you and May.” New boyfriend? I didn't realize he worked with such speed. Marcel wrote, “The truth is, I'm sure you're glad you don't have to put up with his insanity any longer.” Whose truth was this? Not mine.

I haunted pubs in London I thought Vincent might frequent, but either he did his drinking at home, or he kept different hours than I. There was one pub in Earls Court I visited weekends. One evening a man in a suit came in. His sandy hair fell over his high forehead. Blonde strands glistened with filaments of platinum even in the dark. I liked his square jaw. "A businessman," I thought, "or a parliamentarian, a conservative." As thin and tall as he was, there was something solid about him.

He wasn't a politician, as it turns out, but a young physician. "Wesley", he said, after he sat down and smiled and I'd asked his name. I'd just finished my first gin when he said, "Let's leave, shall we?" He wasn’t planning to even skid through preliminaries, simply eliminate them. He got up. I got up. I didn't want him to walk out the door without me.

"Wait," he said and looked slowly around the dark, smoky pub. “Okay," he said, as he touched my shoulder, “I just wanted to see if there was anyone more handsome than you. But there isn't," he laughed. As we walked toward the door I reached into my pocket to touch my lucky coin, one of the quarters Vincent had left on the table when he’d paid for our beer.

The next time I was at Morgan’s, when I was about to leave, he told me he had something for me and left the room. When he returned he handed me an envelope.

“They’re by a poet I met in Alexandria.” When I opened the envelope at home, I found a sheaf of poems printed on thin vellum. That’s how I first read the great “Ithaka” by Cavafy.

34

"As you set out for Ithaka... don't hurry the journey…

Better it last for years,… not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

The poet had been dead for a quarter of a century, and yet he was whispering in my ear.

I copied the poem on scrap, then I went out for a walk through the London streets, cold as the night was, and memorized it. Anyone seeing me would have thought I was intoxicated.

The sky with its patches of grey and mauve clouds was ragged as the Thames River, ragged as the feelings churning inside me. It wasn't until I got home several hours later, and warmed myself with tea, that I read "The Twenty­Fifth Year of His Life," a poem of such despairing desire and love I felt both chilled and fevered as I read it. It was the first poem I’d seen about one man longing for another. His flesh, all of it, suffers unremittingly from desire, the feel of that other body is on his, he wants to be joined with it again. I was astonished.

Cavafy made the ancient world contemporary and the contemporary, ancient. I'd never read anything like it. So, Morgan must know about me. But how? I’d never contacted Morgan before, but after reading the poems I rang him up and asked if I might visit sometime in the next week.

“Cavafy’s astonishing,” I said.

"Yes,” he said. We agreed upon a day I would visit.

Perhaps it was knowing that I would see Morgan the following week that buoyed my spirit. I wrote to Vincent, copying out On the Twenty­fifth Year, and included it. I thought I'd send it to his address in Boston. Surely someone would forward it. But as the light faded, I lost heart. Eventually I put the poem in my desk and ripped up the letter.

Vincent would have ripped it up too, I was certain. I put on my jacket, wrapped my scarf around my neck and went out.

One afternoon at Morgan’s, his friend Bob came by with his wife, Mae, and Morgan introduced us. “Mae is the name of your fiancé too, isn't it?” Morgan asked. Later I learned that Bob had named his son Robert Morgan after Forster.

“When Bob came into my life, things changed for me,” Morgan said later. “I became part of his family. Once that happened I was happy. I would like to remind others that their turn will come. It is the only message worth giving.” I nodded.

“Matrimony offers the great prizes. I can scarcely imagine such happiness as Bob and Mae have had.” Was this how bachelors viewed marriage? I wondered. He said, “You too will soon be married.”

Yes, but I wasn't married yet. When I left I headed for a pub. There were still buildings being repaired, and rubble in empty lots from the German bombing, and though I rarely 35

noticed my surroundings, whenever I did, I was always surprised.

I ended up in a pub in Covent Garden. No one interested me and I thought I'd leave, when a man sat down beside me. He was at least ten years older than I and had a beard.

I don’t like beards. But I ended up going back to his place. He was very funny, actually.

He had a scar on his cheek, a white glistening line that made him look rugged and I wondered how he'd gotten that scar. In fact, he wasn’t rugged at all. He was gentle, his touch very kind. I left before it was light and didn't wake him. I didn’t flatter myself that he’d care.

The first night I’d spent with Vincent, he'd said, “You're not allowed to break my heart.”

His words were prophetic.

The longer I stayed in London, the more it felt like time was running out. What was I doing here, what did I think I would find? When I decided to head home, it was not only because I’d learned Vincent had gone back to Boston. At least I convinced myself that wasn’t the only reason.

Once I decided to leave, I was determined to board a boat in a fortnight. I was anxious to see Morgan again before I left. When I let him know my plans, he arranged for me to come by.

He was so kind to me in that drafty room. He told me how glad he was to have met me.

It was then he lent me a manuscript he’d written but was not planning to publish. When he put the manuscript in my hands he said, “I do believe books can show a world greater than our own. They can help us resist fear and hatred.” Then he laughed. “Look,” he said, “I have been so conceited about myself as a novelist that I had better add I am quite sure I am not a great novelist.” He asked me to tell him if I thought the story was dated.

I believe it was a test of our friendship that he gave me one of the few copies he had. I promised I’d return it.

I remember he got up when I was leaving and walked me to the tram. I was wearing a t­ shirt that belonged to Vincent and was too small for me. I'd taken it out of his hamper after showering at his place. Clean, I smelled his sweat on me, which made me feel cleaner. I don’t see how anyone could think my being with Vincent was anything but natural and good.

Before we parted Morgan said, “My New Year’s resolution is to enjoy myself more and more in every way.” He said this sadly, as if relating bad news.

I read the manuscript on the ship travelling home and what hit me most strongly, what shocked me really, was the depth of my own loneliness that the words evoked, and the sharp sting of desire I’d felt so intensely and had tried to bury. I was plunged into the chaos of feelings I had for Vincent, feelings that threatened to imprison me. I kept turning the pages and thinking, Ah, here we go again, here we go. How had Forster managed to evoke so much? When I finished, I realized he was doing more than testing me. I thought, Perhaps, by giving me this unpublished book, he is telling me that I can 36

marry and still enjoy the passion I am drawn to. Or is he telling me to be true to myself, and not to marry?

The manuscript, entitled Maurice, depicted a love affair between two men. A few weeks later, when I returned the manuscript to Morgan, I included a letter telling him how much it had meant to me. He wrote back immediately: "I thought, after I'd written Howard's End, that my real heroism would be to stop writing. But I didn't."

Months later, when Mark Elvin was visiting Boston, we met for dinner and spent most of the meal talking about Morgan. Mark told me that Morgan’s fame had not changed his self­doubt. After his initial success, these are the words Morgan used describe himself: famous, wealthy, miserable, ugly.

“Once Morgan gets to know you, he is remarkably open,” Mark said. He’d spoken to Mark about an early love affair he'd had in his thirties. Living with his mother, his social life had been furtive. But in Alexandria he met a young man, Mohammed, who took tickets on a train. He was handsome and not inhibited. Morgan wrote to his friends about love that was flourishing at last in middle age. He was determined that his life should contain at least one success.

And then he told Mark, “I concealed from myself and others that Mohammed was frequently cold toward me and his occasional warmth may well have been due to politeness, gratitude or pity.”

After reading Maurice, I felt less alone, even as it forced me to own up to my loneliness.

Perhaps that was why Morgan gave it to me. Knowing him has been one of the great gifts of my life. Mark Elvin told me that Morgan said to him, at one of their last dinners together, “I do not take the hour of my death too seriously. It may scare, it may hurt, it probably ends the individual but in comparison to the hours when a man is alive, the hour of death is almost negligible.”

The pages printed above were written by my father, Gerald, and given to me as the Executor of his estate upon his death in 2001. My mother May predeceased him by eight years. The last lines of my father’s notes were: “Morgan said to me once that there is no enemy but cruelty. I have asked myself if I was cruel to people in my life. Of course, I have been. Most grievously, I lied to my wife about what was most essential. But I have tried to see my way clear. And make amends.”

37

Contributors Brinda Banerjee lives and works with her young family in New Jersey, writing fiction is her weekend/night/vacation passion and pastime. Brinda’s short stories have been published in online journals such as 'Escape into Life' , and an Indian national newspaper. Visit Brinda’s blog to read more of her fiction at modscheherzade.wordpress.com.

Patrick Donovan lives in Los Angeles, having completed his MA studies at Loyola Marymount. His work has appeared in the Bicycle Review.

Kawika Guillermo is currently finishing his doctorate in Seattle, where he also teaches literature. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Medulla Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Annalemma, The Monarch Review and Mobius: Journal of Social Change. He is currently the Assistant Prose Editor at decomP. Carole Glasser Langille is the author of four books of poems and a collection of short stories, When I Always Wanted Something. Her most recent book, Church of the Exqusite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, was nominated for The Atlantic Poetry Prize. She teaches Creative Writing at Dalhousie University.

Jordan Legg is originally from Oshawa, Ontario, and is currently studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. He has been published twice before at Issue 16 of epiphmag.com and the September 2012 issue of the science fiction branch of fictionmagazines.com. When he is not writing he enjoys cycling, drawing, playing soccer, reading, and growing his beard.

Todd McKie is an artist and writer. His stories have appeared in PANK, Twelve Stories, Pure Slush, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Conclave, and elsewhere. Todd lives in Boston.

Crawdad Nelson has worked as a freelance journalist, poet, and editor for over twenty years. His work appears in many small press and alternative publications. "Everyone Was There" is from the collection 1,000 Days in Murder City, which explores the humanitarian and moral implications of massacre in the process of colonization.

Michael M. Pacheco was born in Mexico and raised in the United States. As a retired attorney, he is concentrating on his fiction writing, presently polishing his fourth novel.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various literary journals and magazines.

Nick Wisseman lives in Bear Lake, Michigan with his wife, daughter, fifty cats, twenty horses, and ten dogs. (Okay, so there are actually ten times less pets than that, but most days it feels like more.) He's not quite sure why he loves writing twisted fiction, but there's no stopping the weirdness once he's in front of a computer. Eventually he hopes to merge this stubborn surrealism with his academic training and produce something in the historical fantasy line. But for now, he's content with the purely speculative fiction he's published in magazines like Allegory, Bewildering Stories, and Circa. You can read his short stories here: http://www.amazon.com/Nick­Wisseman/e/B005G7XEN2 38

Kim Drew Wright graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Her career in advertising has encompassed the positions of media buyer, account representative, and brand manager. She currently resides in Richmond, Virginia. She is a member of James River Writers and the Poetry Society of Virginia. Three young children, two crazy Westies, and one husband in retail, occupy her time when she is not writing short stories or working on a novel. Her poetry captures the madness and keeps her sane.

39