Compass Rose Volume IX

Associate Editor Jennifer Monroe

Jennifer Anderson • Jennifer Bailey Noel Banda • Sérah Carter Christina Crawford • Jessica Douglas Jessica Eastman • Leah Guilmette Emma Haskins • Maggie Hatfield Kenneth Hodge • Derek Laurendeau Rachel Lieberman • Stephanie Libby Renee Mallett • Alyssa Marsh Jeff Metcho • Beth Ann Miller Lisa Pike • Venessa Rotondi Laura Spencer • Matthew Williams

Cover Design Brittany Barnes

Cover Art

Erika Dumont Compass Rose is a publication of Chester College of New England, 40 Chester Street, Chester, NH 03036. First North American Serial Rights copyright Chester College of New England. All rights revert to the author or artist upon publication.

None of the materials in Compass Rose may be duplicated without the permission of the author or the artist except for use in a review.

Copyright by Chester College of New England 2009 ISSN 1544-9513

For complete submission and contest guidelines, visit our website at http://compassroseonline.wordpress.com Submissions can be sent to: Compass Rose Editors, Chester College of New England, 40 Chester Street, Chester, NH 03036 or by emailing us at Compass.Rose@chestercollege.edu Copies of Compass Rose are available for $10.00 by mailing checks and requests to Compass Rose, Chester College of New England, 40 Chester Street, Chester, NH 03036 or by emailing us at Compass.Rose@chestercollege.edu

Mission Statement

Chester College of New England believes that a thriving literary journal is an essential part of any community. In this spirit, Compass Rose has dedicated itself to the publication of the finest prose, poetry, and visual art representing the college, the New England region, and beyond. As a student-directed magazine, we feel that Compass Rose can be an intense learning experience for students as well as an important venue for both new and established artists.

Table of Contents Compass Rose Volume IX

poetry 7

Patricia Savage

8 9 10 12 26 27 28 29 30 40 41 44 45 46 50 51 52 54 58 59 61 62 72 73 74 75 76 83 84 85 86 95 96

Tom Saya Caressed out of Clay Susan Howard Case Out of the Garden Laurie L. Patton Drawn Out William Jolliff The Preacher from the Black Lagoon Richard Bailey Lightbox Church Penny Perry Order of Things Joey Brown Geography Lessons Joel Allegretti Lot’s Wife Corrie Williams Kentner The Dress Kelly Sylvester Weld Lyn Lifshin Have you Ever Started, Annoyed Just Enough to Leave?

William H. Wandless Colorfast Jack Lindeman Catharsis Jay Rubin Dámelo Ruth Berman His Father Overseas Christina M. Rau Listening to my Mother’s South Street Seaport Album, 1978 Catherine Arturi Parilla Sleeping with Grandma Perie Longo Playing Crash Pamela M. Davis Little Scientists Irene O’Garden Hook in the Heart Rob Jacques Looking Forward to the Seventh Inning Stretch Fredrick Zydek Killing Time Joel Allegretti Nocturne for Edith Piaf Richie H. Smith Grieving with the Statues Lowell Jaeger Words are all I Have George Higgins One Spark Eleanore Lee Gate 32, Terminal B Deborah Lewis Voicemail Pamela M. Davis Mortician’s Daughter Rochelle Jewel Shapiro In Your Sleep Michael Jurkovic Citizen’s Arrest Joanne Lowery Embrace Rob Jacques Only For Self-Defense

Rewards

98 99

Gannon Daniels Zorida Mohammed

13 32 55 63 87 102

Todd A. Whaley Katherine Lein Chariott Dixon Hearne Roland Goity Greg Jenkins Randall Brown

48 78

Jennifer D. Munro Gretchen Heyer

103

Contributors

The Carport Couch Bow Wow Wow

fiction

essays

Clairvoyant to the Stars Last Night Washed Away Still in Kansas Shouts and Whispers What to Do

Ruptured Drawers A Bit Thin and Slippery to Hold

6

Parnell Prize Winner 2008-2009

Savage

Rewards Patricia Savage “Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have considered heaven, All of us, hanging out, No worries, time on our hands, No clock to punch, No kids to get through calculus and college, No one falling into my arms, Exhausted at day’s end.

No more longing, simmering Like a pot of tomatoes On the back burner of my soul.

I have considered this life, When I don’t back away from choice Or stop loosing myself on a blank page Or in the woods behind my house.

I keep risking all I have to love better, To see things with new heart, I have not given up on wanting more Out of nearly every day.

When I am done, I want to be all used up.

I want to be tossed in the air, scattered everywhere.

Dust, Imperceptible but part of the Huge space we call empty.

Fort Foster Sep 2007

7

8

Saya

Caressed out of Clay Tom Saya A calling from the sweetgum exposed now to full sun after last winter’s snow felled the long-needle pine, which leaned toward the northwest, ever falling an inch or two a year.

I do not recognize this call, though I may have heard it before.

It is somewhat loose-throated and must cover four or five octaves: stone-shallow brook, evening tree frog, wind-entangled windows . . .

I look through the branches, often fooled by the brown, spiky seed pods hanging like forbidden fruit or burnt-out stars.

The star-shaped leaves, amid small patches of sky, spread open to the light as if reaching for the moon.

The leaves point hundreds or thousands of directions.

Each vein a slow passage of collected rain. Each finger lending form to the sun as this calling the silence like water-bearing vessels caressed out of clay.

Howard Case

Out of the Garden Susan Howard Case Out of the darkening garden his shadowy figure leads you past signs of rowdy picnics— crumpled beer cans, styrofoam cups, a neon ice chest cracked in half.

Signs warn against trespassers, which is what you are, both of you, if he is real.

You’re lost in a place that’s no longer yours.

The branches that cradled your kisses are out of reach, your rose bush swallowed by weeds.

You keep walking west, looking for something you’ve never seen— a creature half-butterfly, half-bird riding on the shoulders of the man who might disappear at dawn.

9

10

Patton

Drawn Out Laurie L. Patton And the child grew, and she brought him to the Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son.

And she called his name “Moses,” and said: “Because I drew him out of the water.” (Min ha maim m’shitiho.) Exodus 2.10-12

What if our names were not just reminders of our bodies, snapshots of flesh and color-John Smith at ten, holding the dog; John Smith at seventeen, with girlfriend?

What if our names were remembrances of the places where our souls were drawn out into the world?

John–gift from God, Smith–the great metalworker: So we might say: the great metalworker who comes from God at ten, holding the dog; or the great metalworker who comes from God at seventeen, with girlfriend.

Patton

Then John Smith is always bringing forth iron from the earth in God’s presence.

Then Moses is is always being plucked

by God from the muddy wavelets.

What if a name was a memory of that first struggle when three shapes-wet body, wet earth, and God-were one?

11

12

Jolliff

The Preacher from the Black Lagoon William Jolliff Every Sunday morning was a new B movie.

He termed this world a dismal swamp and claimed he had the cure. His gut swelled like a beach ball full of garlic.

I still wrestle, after forty years, with those dark words. I know better: my brain you’d assume, has a few ridges, though I do keep forgetting my students’ names . . . maybe it has gone smooth as soap.

But I’ve taught for years at a good school, published the requisite articles, arranged appropriate retirement plans, been loved, regularly, by true believers whose faith I admire, followers of truth and Jesus and Socrates and all good roads.

But the preacher’s stench still wafts from hell to roil my belly, weekly, daily, hourly, with enthymemes that half-make sense, but with a terrible twist. Maybe that’s just the way of monsters, the enduring smell of muck.

Whaley

13

Clairvoyant to the Stars Todd A. Whaley

E

ighty-five miles an hour on the open highway was no way to treat an El Camino, not that Huey cared. After five beers and a line of coke, he thought it best to ride naked all the way from Eureka to Carson City on the mattress wedged in the back. A funny sort of fellow, Huey was someone whom people gravitated toward, and not just when he was stoned. That helped, of course, but I think they liked his hair. I liked him immediately.

Through the window at the end of the car—or truck, depending on whom you ask—Francis’ bag was squashed against the liftgate from Huey’s big feet, and his long legs—turning pink from the sun overhead—led up to his dark bush and erect manhood.

Huey rolled his head from side to side, singing loudly, with his eyes closed.

“How’s he doing back there?” Francis asked.

Francis had acted like a peckerwood from the time we left our homes in Colorado until we crossed the Nevada state line from Utah, but once Huey promised not to do any more lines until we reached San Francisco, his mood had lightened. Now he was acting like a Mother Hen, checking on Huey every few minutes, keeping the radio tuned to the local Country station, drinking water but not sharing it for fear of germ transmission. I wasn’t sure which was better. Huey had even kept his promise—more or less—and Francis, picking his battles carefully, had formed the habit of shaking his head instead of speaking out whenever Huey was concerned.

I tapped on the glass installed by Francis’s Uncle Bill who wanted a passthrough window, like in a bank, instead of the traditional Camino Curve, as it was known.

I thought it made the car less of an El Camino and more of a minivan, but Francis didn’t seem too concerned with my argument. I turned around. Huey, singing the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady,” raised a thumb attached to his fist.

“He says he’s groovy,” I said to Francis.

“Yeah, well, I gotta slow this thing down. It feels like tread separation.”

I watched Francis bite his lip when he slowed the car to 80, then to 75, then to 70 before finally hovering around 60 miles an hour, and I hoped Huey’s singing was louder than the change in engine pitch. It wasn’t.

“Hey!” Huey shouted, and he pounded his fist against the outside of the window.

Francis sighed and shook his head. “Tell him.”

I forced my head through the small window and noticed Huey staring up at me, a smile splitting his wiry, black beard in two and his dreadlocks collecting around his scalp like little dried dog turds. At least the bastard had hair.

“Hiya, Steve,” he said.

His eyes were piercingly blue, like cool mornings in August just before sunrise.

I found him strangely attractive; not that I was gay—heavens, no—but knowing that he was made me wonder what life would be like if I were. I liked what-if scenarios.

“Hue, you’re gonna burn if you don’t put some clothes on.”

“Did Francis tell you to say that?”

“No. Well, yeah.”

“Tell Francis,” he said, pointing his finger up at me, “that I can only see visions when I’m naked. Tell him that.”

14

Whaley

“Okay.”

“And tell him to drive faster.”

“Okay.”

I sat back down and saw ahead of us a small collection of houses in the low point of the valley, some of which crawled up the sides of the mountains, mountains that looked as if they were dropped from high above by some gargantuan hand. God’s litter or something.

“He said—” “I heard.” Francis rubbed his chin.

I wasn’t sure what kind of image Francis was going for. Ever since he had decided to drive Huey to San Francisco to meet Dr. Livingston—I presumed because of the newspaper ad—he had started wearing a silly beatnik hat and working on a goatee, which, in my opinion, was failing miserably. The hair on his otherwise-fair face—a baby’s face really—grew spotty: long in some places, short in others, not at all in thumbprint-sized patches. I thought maybe he was trying to look like an artist, but on the contrary, he reminded me of a scrappy car mechanic.

“When are you going to shave?” I asked.

“Shut up. It just needs to fill in.”

“All I’m saying is that my head looked like that before I shaved it all off.”

“Right, and now you look like a chemo patient.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” he said, sighing.

I had him there. He knew my girlfriend Denise had died from cancer the year before—that and an overdose of coke, take your pick—but what he didn’t know was that I had first shaved my head in honor of her. Now I just do it out of habit. The other habit, Huey’s habit, I broke.

A truck rushed past in the opposite direction, jostling us from side to side by the force of the wind. Francis, the goody-goody artist with no defined talent or medium, sat up straight in his seat. I liked Francis.

“Cover him up, will ya?” he asked. “Throw a blanket over him or something. I don’t want to get pulled over out here with a stoned, naked guy riding spread-eagle on a mattress. I might not get reelected.”

I laughed at Francis and all his high-and-mighty aspirations—including all his inventions like the self-dry-cleaning suit or the refrigerated Coke cans, or his goal of one day starting a new religion—but he was almost 30, and the only job he could keep was as a barista at Starbucks. That’s where I had met him. I had replaced my drug addiction with caffeine, and he made a wild macchiato. I had no idea how he knew Huey.

Our only blanket was in the back, wedged tightly against the mattress and spotted with burn marks. I couldn’t reach it without getting out of the car, but stopping would have made Huey hopping mad. He loved the speed, the air, the satisfaction of the sun baking him inside his skin. The town was coming up fast, so I tried a different approach.

“Time for modesty, big fella,” I said through the window.

Huey grumbled a bit but then reached for the blanket, dragging it across his waist. Still his penis sat like a lump at the union between his legs. I turned back to Francis who quickly looked away from the rearview mirror and smiled nervously.

“What?” he said.

“What what?” I said back.

Whaley

15

“Is he covered up?”

“Provided we don’t catch a crosswind.”

Francis slowed the car to an airless crawl through a dusty frontier town, and from the window, I spied grizzled men in cowboy hats—honest to God, cowboy hats!— overweight women in blue pants and multitops, a Dairy Queen, a billiards hall where a man, looking to be a Native American, smoked a cigarette and stared—in lust, most likely—at us strangers in the El Camino. His skin was rough and brown, like a purse.

Francis revved the steering wheel with his palms to no effect and raised one eyebrow behind his oversized sunglasses.

“Quaint place,” he said. “Let’s not stop.”

“Speaking of when we stop,” I said, “I have a question. What if we get all the way to San Francisco and you can’t figure out how this Dr. Livingston reads Huey’s visions? What then?”

“I’ll just watch what he does and copy it. It can’t be that tough.”

“He’s not a real doctor, is he?”

Francis groaned. “Of course he’s a real doctor. I talked to him on the phone.”

“Fake doctors talk on the phone. I talk on the phone. My gramma talks on the phone.”

“That’s not my point. The point is that he knew all about me without me asking.

He knew my height, my cousin’s name, my favorite color; he knew everything. He’s the real thing, all right.”

“Wow.” “Yeah, wow.”

“What if he’s blind, and he can read our minds just by grabbing our wrists, but when he grabs Huey’s wrist, he gets so freaked out that he goes mad? Or worse, he dies?

He’s an old man and he dies. What then? We’ll have to get out of there fast. I’ll stay in the car.”

“That’s not going to happen, Steve.”

“We should make sure we have a full tank of gas.”

Behind me I heard a rustle, followed by stale beer breath. Huey’s face filled the tiny window like he was trying to squeeze through to the front seat. I jerked my head around farther to see the sun shining directly on his bare ass and the pink line of an early sunburn dissecting him down the side of his torso.

“Okay, I just had another vision.”

“Christ, Huey, sit down!”

Francis smacked Huey’s forehead, but Huey didn’t move; instead he tried to wedge his head through the window despite the two of us trying to force him back, Francis with one hand on the wheel and me with my hand full of charcoal dreads. It reminded me of a Collie who roamed our neighborhood when I was a kid and the chunks of hair swinging underneath his tail.

“Wait,” Huey said, “it’s good. Fran, write this one down. I was in the woods, and it was dark, but yet it wasn’t dark, right? And these big, glowing balls were zipping around the tree branches—zip, zip, zip. I think they were souls, man. I think each one was like a person without a body, and they were trying to tell me something.”

“I’m trying to tell you something,” Francis said, and the car stopped behind a pickup at the only traffic light in town.

I was vaguely aware of the voices of people in other cars, driving past slowly to stare in amazement at a naked man with two-toned skin kneeling on a mattress while the

16

Whaley

two people inside the car beat him in the head. At least his erection had gone limp. That certainly would’ve elicited screams.

“Tell us later,” I said and tried to shove him back with my palm.

“Ow, quit it, Steve. No, listen, this is important. They told me I had to dance naked in the desert.”

Francis sighed again and—thank God—the car began moving.

“Alright, alright,” he said. “Pull a blanket over yourself, and we’ll see about a side trip.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”

He settled back down again to his usual spot on the mattress and, within seconds, began singing again, this time the theme to Dragnet. I watched Francis and the way the reflection from the hood of the car made his scruffy facial hair appear orange.

His eyes seemed like they were closed behind his glasses while he shook his head from side to side.

An hour later and we were in the desert, or at least an area that could pass for it. Huey wasn’t fooled. He busied his hands with tying knots in his shoelaces before looking around at the scattered rocks, low scrub trees, and dense, brown vegetation and announced, “This isn’t the desert.” His skin was the color of Pepto-Bismol.

“Sure it is, Hue,” Francis said.

Behind us the gray ribbon of road shot across the valley like Silly String along the ground, and a plume of dust from when Francis had pulled the car—or truck—off the road drifted east, suspended in air like a low-lying cloud. The buzzing of desert insects ebbed and flowed like the Pacific tide. I couldn’t wait to see the ocean.

Huey nodded and wiped his sweaty brow. “It’ll do.”

With one broad leap, Huey thumped to the ground, wearing nothing but a pair of sneakers and a smile. He seemed to have grown during our trip, standing now well over six feet tall, and his chest and arms were perfectly sculpted and ironically hairless.

“You’re burnt,” Francis said. “The least you could do is flip over.”

“Give me another line.”

“Hue—” “Come on, Fran. Just one more.”

Francis shrugged. With his floppy hat and sourpuss face, he looked like a disgruntled Frenchman. “Turn around.”

I watched while the two of them performed a routine that, over the past several days, had become a ritual. While Francis dug through a hidden pocket of his bag for the Ziploc and the mirror, spreading them out on the seat of the car and rolling up the windows, Huey, with his back turned and his butt cheeks jiggling, jumped up and down like a sprinter warming up before the big race. When Francis was done, it was Huey’s turn inside the car. One Huey bent over the mirror with the straw while another Huey, a more focused one, raised his head, sitting immobile for a moment with his eyes closed, and when he emerged—leaving behind two hemispherical puddles of sweat on my seat, much to my disgust—his eyes seemed more blue, his demeanor more energetic.

“Come with me,” he said, smacking us both in the stomach with the back of his hand and running across the sand with his arms spread wide. “I’m a plane!”

I shrugged and began to remove my shirt. Francis didn’t move but remained standing with his arms crossed and his back against the passenger door. He wore a poopeater face.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

Whaley

17

He shook his head again. “I’m running out of coke. And I’m running out of money. We’ve got to make better time than this.”

“Where’d you get the money anyway?” I wiggled out of my pants.

“I knocked over the tip jar at work.”

I stood naked in the late-afternoon sun, sensing the liberation that comes with feeling the light westerly wind infused with sand whipping around my body. If not for the company, I might have raised an erection myself. Out of the corner of my eye, Huey tripped over a rock and fell backward onto the ground. He popped up immediately. Now his front half was pink while his back was dirty brown.

“There’s not that much money in the tip jar.”

“You’re right, there isn’t,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Once I can read his visions, I’ll be able to pay everyone back. I’ll open a shop, put ads in the paper for my services, something. It’ll be fine. Things will be better.”

It made sense to me. I slipped on my shoes and ran after Huey, thinking that, at last, after all these years of Francis trying his hand at many different art forms—at mosaics, at music and sculpture—he had finally found his medium. It was Huey, and he intended to make him his greatest masterpiece. Just like that.

I imitated Huey, spreading my arms wide like an airplane and flying across the sand, around the brush and bones of dead animals. I even made airplane noises, but to others it probably sounded like a cat. Huey flew past, laughing, and I smiled back at him. This would have been a great trip if it were just the two of us. Instead we both had to deal with the Mother Hen and his grumpy moods. I shot Francis a glance. He hadn’t moved, although now he stared up at the swiftly moving clouds that hid the sun and made everything dim.

“Are you having a vision?” I asked Huey on our next pass, being careful not to stumble on a rock. He smelled like rotten meat. He answered back, although he was already moving away from me at such a rate that I could only hear a mumble. I rounded a bush, surprising him with my agile flying skills. The two of us were in a dogfight now, and I swung in formation several feet behind his bouncing, dirty ass.

“What did you say?” I asked.

Huey spun on me quickly, and I had to use some inventive tactical maneuvers so that our wingtips didn’t clip. He was a terrific flyer, like the Red Baron, or in this case, the Pink-and-Brown Baron.

“I said, I don’t see visions.”

I stopped. My arms dropped to my sides. When I turned around, Huey had suddenly become a helicopter, flapping his hands and making thpp, thpp, thpp noises while he studied an insect on a tree branch. The tips of his dreads were coated in light dust. I approached him slowly. Maybe the summer heat was getting to me, but it seemed like he said that he didn’t have visions, which would be silly because that was the entire reason for this trip, to take Huey out to California, to introduce him to Dr. Livingston who, I presumed, would be experienced enough to tap his intellect and unlock his true talent, all for Francis to exploit. This was a profit-making venture, not a joyride. If there wasn’t a talent to exploit, it was all pointless.

“What did you say again?”

Huey had stopped being a helicopter and now stooped low with his hands dragging the ground. “I’m corned beef with wheels.”

“Before that.”

“I don’t see visions,” he said again. “Don’t tell Fran.”

18

Whaley

“Then why are we out here? Why are we going to San Francisco? Why are we running around naked in the desert if you’re just like everyone else?”

“Because it’s fun.” His smile was wide and mitigated to his cheeks.

I began to walk back to the car—or truck—slogging my heels inside my shoes, and looked over to Francis. Smoking a cigarette on the hood of the El Camino with his soft-soled sneakers resting on the bumper while patches of shadow slinked across the desert, Francis really looked the part. He could really be someone. He could be a painter, a designer, a clairvoyant interpreter. He could be anything, but unfortunately, he was just Francis. A barista.

Let him find out on his own, I decided. It’s none of my business.

“I’m tired of driving,” he said once he heard me approach. “Let’s sleep here tonight. It’s as good as anything else.” *** I slept like crap. Of course, it was beautiful underneath the stars with the wind rustling through the brush, but it was also tight quarters since all three of us shared the same mattress. That had been Francis’s idea. We’ll save money on hotels, he had said. All night long I dealt with Francis’s elbow in my back and the movement, the constant movement, of the two of them sleeping next to me. There were the sounds, too, of animals sniffing around the wheels of the car, insects buzzing around my ear, and, of course, yogurt. It wasn’t really yogurt, but it had that sound, the sound of lips and tongues and yogurt on spoons. Both Francis and Huey made them for the third night running.

The next morning the gloomy gray followed us all the way across Interstate 80 from Sacramento. All three of us rode side by side in the front seat—arms touching, legs knocking against each other—and the thought occurred to me that perhaps we would never be separated again. Our skins would become fused together as one, the way trees grow around fence posts. It put me in a real sour mood. Only Huey was chipper, that is, as long as he didn’t move too much. His shirt stuck to his chest, and he complained—five times—that we had turned the heater on.

“I had another vision in the desert last night,” Huey said, winking at me.

“Really?” Francis was interested, and the closer we got to San Francisco, the more agitated and eager he became. I could see it in the way he rubbed his palm against his pant leg and squirmed in his seat: Francis was ready for the money to begin rolling in.

“Yeah,” Huey said. “I was swimming in this big pool of water, not a lake or anything, but a big fish tank where I could breathe. Weird, right? All the water began shifting around me, like someone had turned the tank upside down, and objects began to rain down around me. Rocks, beer cans, old tires, little bubbling treasure chests with the lids that opened and closed every few seconds. Then this hawk came up to me and said, ‘Can I offer you some tea?’”

“Wait,” I asked, “was the hawk swimming? Did it have a swim cap?”

“It was gliding. But I know what you mean. A swim cap would have been a nice touch.”

“So that’s it?” Francis asked, acting disappointed. I would have thought he’d have been impressed with a talking, swimming hawk. Maybe Huey should have given him goggles or a tank suit like people used to wear a hundred years ago before they had taste. “That’s the vision?”

“That’s all I remember, yeah.”

“I wonder what it means,” I said dreamily. “What if the treasure chest means

Whaley

19

that money will pour down on your head, and you’ll be swimming in it, loads of it? Or if the polar ice cap will melt and flood the world so we have to swim everywhere instead of driving?”

I knew the vision wasn’t real, of course, but it was fun to play along. Francis said that he hoped it was the money, and then it occurred to me that I would never see any of it anyway, even though he had requested my company on this trip. From the start, Francis had kept me out of the deal. Like Batman and Robin, Robin always got the shaft.

With the buildings of San Francisco in sight, Huey began to get excited. He had always wanted to go to the city, he told us—eight times—but he did nothing to help us get there. I was the one with the address; I was the one carefully comparing the street names to the black lines on the map; I was the one yelling, “Left here,” when Francis ran the red light across Noriega Street instead of turning onto it; I was the one—not Huey who viewed our banter as entertainment, like a television sitcom where the confused couple becomes more and more frustrated with every block, finally tearing the map to shreds in a fury of critical words—who got us there: 121 Bakers Street, San Francisco, California, USA. Huey did nothing.

Francis cut the engine.

“I gotta use the bathroom,” Huey said.

The door was plain enough, peeling, brown paint, a single guppy-eyed peephole in the center, a striped awning over the sidewalk to shield a rust-ravaged mailbox, and a sign above it that read, “Dr. Livingston, Clairvoyant to the Stars,” in animated lettering reminiscent of circus posters. I looked right and then left, noticing how the trim colors varied with each house on both sides of the street and how the ground floors alternated between fluorescent convenience stores and greasy diners and back again. Dr. Livingston, I presumed, lived among them in relative ease, inviting guests to his humble house—big names too, like governors and heads of State, kings, Golden Globe nominees—through this exact door. I wondered if I could steal his doorknob without him noticing. I would take it, examine it for fingerprints, and sell it to some witless sap for a thousand times its worth, all because I was clever enough to do it.

“I really gotta go,” Huey said. “Do you think he’s home?”

Francis wrinkled his brow from behind the wheel. “We’re not going to prance into this man’s house, shake hands, and run for the shitter. This man’s a professional. Use the one at the diner.”

Before waiting for me to open the car door, Huey began to crawl over my lap for the exit. I fought him back the best I could, managing to pop the handle and turn sideways before Huey fell onto the sidewalk. He shuffled like a penguin toward the diner door, his butt clenched tightly underneath his torn jean shorts.

Francis and I convened at the doctor’s front door, hands in pockets, to admire the quaintness of the street, from the zigzag of the fire escapes to the mushy hot dog bun on top of the metal grating. Everywhere I looked artists strolled arm in arm, each one wearing a floppy hat and sporting a scraggly beard just like Francis. He fit in well among them, and for the first time since I’d known him, he had a twinkle in his eye that suggested, at long last, he might finally rise above his heritage for a taste of real success.

Huey waddled back outside from the diner door. His face was bright pink, possibly from the sun but more likely from the strain.

“Can I bum a dollar?” he asked.

Francis looked annoyed. “Why?” “I can’t use their bathroom unless I buy something.”

20

Whaley

Francis muttered under his breath—something resembling “gawdammit”—and fished a couple bills out of his pocket that he slapped in Huey’s hand at the same moment Huey turned to run. Francis shook his head, especially when Huey appeared a second time to rummage through his bag in search of his shoes. I hadn’t even noticed he was barefoot.

“That guy is going to be the death of me,” he said. “He owes me a lot of money, and in turn, I owe a lot of money. And to think that I didn’t listen to my uncle when he told me I have too much riding on this whole idea.”

I had had enough of this charade.

“What if he’s faking it?” I asked, knowing that I couldn’t tell him everything I knew. He’d leave me here, stranded. “What if he doesn’t really see any visions at all, and he’s just making it up?”

“Do you have to make up a what-if scenario at every opportunity?”

“No.” Francis looked down at his feet, scratched his nose, and raised his head, not looking at me but beyond me, over my shoulder, in the direction of what I knew to be the edge of the world and the toiling Pacific swells, at the gathering fog that would quickly overtake the city. Without the sunlight, the sparkle in his eye had faded to a dull sheen.

“That’s stupid, Steve. Why would he do that?”

We didn’t speak for several minutes—me kicking pebbles that had collected on the curb, Francis using his fingernail to dislodge a chunk of pretzel from his teeth—until Huey came out of the diner, proudly displaying a Solo cup of fountain pop and a pack of Rolos. His step was more confident and, I dare say, lighter.

“Solo, meet Rolo. Rolo, meet Solo. Solo, Rolo, Rolo, Solo. Hey, Francis, can I start calling you Francisco?”

“I’d rather have you finish so we can go inside. It’s getting late.”

“Sad Francisco.” Huey stuck out his lower lip in mock sympathy, slurping heartily on the straw. He tossed the empty cup into the back of the El Camino and clapped his hands together. “Okay, who’s ready for some soothsaying?”

Francis groaned. He depressed the buzzer beside the door, and we waited several anxious moments until a panel slid to the side below the peephole and a small, squarish face beamed back at us. She was a bulldog of a lady—jowly cheeks, sleepy eyes, patchy skin, and a sharp nose that contradicted her droopiness with a certain aerodynamic look.

“Can I help you?”

“Hi, I’m Francis Pittborough. I spoke to Dr. Livingston last week on the phone about Huey Gonzales. He should know who I am.”

She studied him carefully, then me with my shiny, sweaty head and my armpit rings that changed my shirt to a deeper shade of green, and finally Huey whose dreads, raising themselves in radial spikes, gave his face an expression of permanent shock. The woman raised a single eyebrow, as though she had expected more from us.

“It’s important,” Francis added.

The closing of the panel was followed by the sliding of a bolt, and the door opened to reveal a set of steps, coated in the corners with a fuzzy layer of dust and occupied by a handful of old shoes. I saw the back of her heel climbing upward and followed Francis through the door. The staircase smelled like a church: old, with a hint of incense.

She led us into a room—a kind of waiting room with a wide couch, a cracked leather armchair, an Oriental rug like an old castle tapestry, and a single window in the corner that spread a smoky light over hundreds of celebrity photographs that hung on

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the walls in simple black frames. My jaw dropped. There was Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island, complete with his white suit and black tie, smiling at me above a scrawled signature. I saw Magic Johnson, the mean guy from The Karate Kid who beat up Ralph, and Bob Vila. Also Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Garcia, Jim Nabors, and—directly opposite me—the guy who tries to sell me a Lexus whenever I turn on Channel Four. It was an overwhelming army of teeth, airbrushed foreheads, and cheesy poses, all following me with their eyes as I took a step right, then left, then right again.

The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Henderson, the doctor’s assistant of many years, and motioned for us to sit down. The couch was the exact same size as the front seat of the El Camino and just as lumpy. Mrs. Henderson clasped her hands at her chest and grinned over a set of sharp teeth.

“Can I offer you some tea?” she asked.

Both Francis and I nodded. Huey sat silently with his back ramrod straight, a look of fear passing across his face.

“Alright, then if you don’t mind, Dr. Livingston requests that any payment be made in advance for new clients.”

Francis pulled the hat from his head. Inside was a pocket with a wad of bills, and he counted off twenties with a lick of his thumb. I tried to keep track, but after he hit two hundred, I got dizzy. I had no idea Francis carried that kind of cash. Once he finished and Mrs. Henderson seemed satisfied, he replaced his hat over a crown of thinning hair that had grown wet where the brim touched it, and Mrs. Henderson vanished behind a narrow door.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked Huey who sat like a Neanderthal in an ice block, frozen, shocked at the moment of his demise. Francis poked him with his finger.

“That’s her,” he said in a whisper. “That’s the hawk. That’s exactly what she said to me.”

“You’re full of it,” Francis said.

“Get a load of the beak.” Huey tapped the end of his nose.

Suddenly, a door opened in the wall, and filling the doorway with a shock of white hair, like a globe of dandelion spores before they dispersed in the wind, stood Dr. Livingston.

“Welcome,” he said, holding his arms out in front of him, almost as if he expected us to run into his arms like a group of giddy schoolchildren clamoring for their favorite uncle. None of us moved.

A slender man with gangly legs, Dr. Livingston stepped into the waiting room and adjusted the sleeves of his blazer before clasping Francis’s hand between his own.

A hand sandwich, I liked to call it. I was right about one thing. When the doctor’s smile deteriorated into a scowl and he lowered his chin, he began to probe Francis’s arm with his fingertips—checking for the presence of an endoskeleton or maybe for the sense of blood that could provide definition, like a spiritual fingerprint. Then he grinned and nodded.

“Francis, my dear Francis. You are indeed a wandering soul. So good of you to come.”

Next he moved on to Huey who immediately screamed in fright and pointed into the other room where a fish tank gurgled behind the doctor’s desk. I could see it when I leaned back, a tank of clear water filled with colorful rocks, green plastic seaweed, angelfish—which I always thought looked like little heads with wings—and a small treasure chest, complete with the bones of a pirate wearing an eye patch over a

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Whaley

white skull. A moment later, while a fish swam close to investigate, the lid opened its wide mouth and belched an array of bubbles toward the surface.

“You must be Huey, the one Francis spoke of so highly.”

Huey paid no attention to the stranger fondling his arm; instead, with intense nervousness, his bottom lip quivered like he was trying to speak. No sound came. The doctor raised his hand to pat the side of Huey’s cheek. His eyes were as round as a pair of ping-pong balls.

“No doubt you see something you recognize?” he asked Huey but got no response. “Is it the skeleton? Does it frighten you, my boy?”

Huey shook his head.

“The fish? Or the chest? Ah, the chest. It’s merely a plastic toy. Nothing to fear.” Then he turned to Francis, saying, “You were right about him, my son. It’s good you came.”

Then he stood before me. His fingers tickled.

“Nice to meet you, Steve. Shocked into a straight life, weren’t you, my friend?

A death, perhaps? Someone close, I think.”

I sat back down, and Dr. Livingston reclined in the leather chair opposite us.

Francis was right. This guy was the real thing.

“So,” he said to Francis, producing a pipe from his breast pocket and scraping out the burnt tobacco into the ashtray beside him with his pocketknife. His nostrils flared, glaring at me like the finger holes of a bowling ball. “What would you like to understand about this gift?”

While Francis described his desire to help Huey focus, to assist Huey to better understand the visions that, at times, were frightening, at other times quite bucolic and wonderful, Huey placed his hand on Francis’s knee, stroking it with his thumb. Francis took the steaming cup of tea offered by Mrs. Henderson. His hand covered Huey’s.

Puckering his lips around the pipe, Dr. Livingston nodded, stroking his chin, and listened to Francis relate the dreams Huey would have, night after night, and the visions spurred from them.

I sipped my tea, wishing it were something stronger to make my caffeine headache go away—like maybe one of Francis’s half-skim-half-two-percent-double-chai lattes—and paused at the thought of them together, night after night, in each other’s arms, with their fingers intertwined like they were now, with nothing on, in the dark, eating spoonfuls of yogurt. My stomach tightened. Francis wasn’t gay; Huey was. It didn’t make sense. I took another sip, startled to see Huey lean his big, spongy head onto Francis’s shoulder. Things were happening too fast.

Francis finished his speech by petting Huey on the head, like a Poodle, and saying, “I love him, I care for him, but I don’t want him to suffer these visions alone. If you could teach me, sir, how to interpret these images, I can help him lead a normal life.”

He stopped before adding, “With me.”

I thought his speech sounded practiced, like he had juggled the words around in his head for days while we crossed the mountains and sped through the uninhabitable places, starting out with real gusto but ending with a fizzle, an afterthought.

“I see,” Dr. Livingston said, and a cloud encircled his head. “Well, I can’t teach you to become clairvoyant, like me—Dr. Livingston, Clairvoyant to the Stars—since it’s a rare gift that I have, but perhaps I can instruct you to look for certain signs and become aware of common patterns that exist in these visions. You can, perhaps, take these signs and interpret them, with care, naturally. The best method is through example, so, Huey,

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my friend, are you ready?”

Huey looked from the doctor to Francis like a confused puppy.

“It’s okay,” Francis said. “Go on.”

With a grunt, the doctor rose to his feet and busied himself at a small table.

Suddenly, the haunting melodies of Enya streamed from a pair of speakers—one underneath a head shot of Molly Ringwald, the other beside a smiling George Jones—and the room filled with the wispy smell of incense. Dr. Livingston turned with one hand tucked inside his pocket, a smug grin parting his lips. Huey hadn’t budged.

“What’s the matter, my boy?”

“I only see visions when I’m naked.”

“I bet you do,” he answered, chewing on the tip of his pipe. “By all means. This is a private room.”

Huey slowly removed his shirt, wrestling it over his head and down his arms like an unpracticed striptease—one in which the sexiness of a normal routine had been replaced by his quivering lip and arched brow. He unsnapped his jean shorts, and the material slumped to the floor around his ankles. Standing in the center of the room, his beet-red sunburn glowing like a lava lamp, Huey sheepishly looked around at the hundreds of celebrity eyes.

“This isn’t fun anymore,” he said.

“Quite all right, my boy, quite all right,” Dr. Livingston said, stepping forward to reassure him. “You’re among friends here.”

Huey seemed to focus on William Shatner.

“They’re all staring at me.”

“Close your eyes, then. They’re merely photographs. They can’t hurt you. Now, allow your body to move, allow yourself to be free and feel the music. Let it guide you, yes. Huey, do what you need to so that these visions spring forward, like Hera from the forehead of Zeus!”

“He usually does a line of coke,” I said.

“Sh, sh,” he said, looking at me crossly with his finger to his lips. “There is no need for drugs. Not now, not ever. This is a sensory matter. Drugs may be a vehicle to allow him to free his mind, but in my world I have found Enya to be just as effective.

And I might say just as addictive! Listen to that rhythm. It’s the sound of water flowing around rocks. So beautiful.”

“I can hear it,” Huey said, squinting hard.

“Yes, Huey, yes,” the doctor said. “Water around rocks.”

“It sounds like the desert. Dry. Dead.”

“Then it’s the desert,” he said. “It’s different things to different people. That’s what makes her music so powerful.”

Huey began rocking on his heels—his arms swaying like boneless appendages—and the doctor studied him with intense scrutiny. Francis, on the other hand, shifted nervously in his seat, sighing heavily and biting his lip.

“Now, tell me,” the doctor said, moving behind Huey, “what do we see in this desert?”

“I see a woman,” Huey began, all traces of his earlier apprehension gone. He seemed to be concentrating now. “Steve is there too, sunning himself on a rock.”

I had never figured into one of Huey’s visions before. The thought gave me the chills.

“The sunlight isn’t yellow, but blue. Everything’s blue. From the giant flags—

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Whaley

warning flags, maybe—that stretch far into the distance to the glass discs that roll past.”

“Hm,” the Doctor said. “Interesting. And what is Steve doing?”

“He’s dodging them. Discs shattering against rocks. But he’s jumping out of the way. His feet are bloody from all the broken glass.”

I cut my foot on a piece of glass the day before Denise died. She had fallen forward onto a table, a reaction from the chemo.

“And the woman is trying to tell him something.”

After the doctor asked him what the woman looked like, a jolt of panic stole the breath from my lungs. I swallowed hard, although my mouth had suddenly gone dry. The armful of bracelets, the smooth head that contradicted her youthful skin, the infectious smile that I had fallen in love with when it was still attached to a young woman, the lithe fingers at the ends of her wrists, the spark of desperate acceptance in her look: he described her completely. Denise was trying to tell me something. Maybe she didn’t blame me after all, maybe she meant to take that big of a hit to dull her body to the pain that festered inside it, or maybe she simply wanted to escape completely. It wasn’t my fault. It couldn’t have been my fault. I had been too high to know what I was doing.

“And what is she trying to tell him, Huey?”

The doctor’s hand slid across Huey’s smooth, hairless abdomen at the same time he spoke into his ear, startling him and making him flinch at the tenderness of the touch. Without warning, Huey’s penis stirred, poking its head forward like a turtle stretching its neck for a look around.

Dr. Livingston peered over his shoulder.

“Magnificent!”

“That does it,” Francis said, jumping to his feet. “Huey, get your clothes. We’re leaving.”

“Sir,” the doctor stammered. “I beg you, this is a real breakthrough!”

“Francis, wait,” I said and pulled on his arm. “It’s Denise. He’s talking about Denise.”

“I don’t care if he’s talking about Toots McNasty. He’s a quack. We’re leaving.”

While Francis forced his way to the street with Huey in tow, the room erupted with the sounds of protest, from me, from Mrs. Henderson who had entered the room to investigate what all the commotion was about and screamed at Huey’s sunburned unit, from Dr. Livingston who voiced his dissatisfaction, I presumed, at a lost opportunity for multiple sessions, and even from Huey who didn’t like to take orders. But there was little anyone could do. Francis twisted Huey’s wrist and dragged him thumping down the stairs to the street that had become dense with a layer of early evening fog. I followed close behind, glancing over my shoulder, while the echo of Dr. Livingston’s verbal abuses chased us. His voice grew quiet once the door closed at our backs.

I looked up and down the street, puzzled. Our car—or truck—was gone. The only thing that remained was a torn Rolo wrapper and a puddle of broken glass.

“Son of a bitch,” Francis said. A barking dog responded.

“I’m cold,” Huey said.

Huey stood naked beside us, one arm shielding his privates while the other protected his hindquarters. He still wore his shoes, and he turned one foot, pigeon-toed.

“Gawdammit, Huey, I told you to get your clothes.”

“I forgot.”

Luckily, the people who strolled the San Francisco sidewalks didn’t seem to

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notice. Seen one naked, half-baked homosexual, you’ve seen them all, I guessed.

The sound of wind rushing past my ear was followed by the popping of glass, and I glanced down to where a jar of pickles lay oozing on the pavement, its contents limp and shiny like innards on a battlefield. I spun around. Two stories above the street, Dr. Livingston leaned from an open window, shaking his fist at us.

“Let’s get out of here,” Francis said.

One hour later, after we had found an Indian restaurant that was rather liberal with its coat-check policy, we strolled down the embankment to the rocky shoreline of the Pacific. The fog had lifted, leaving the sun suspended on the surface of the ocean like an iridescent red ball, and Huey shed his new parka to run nude beside the sand and surf.

He wasn’t the only one. I counted four other black shadows expressing themselves along the water’s edge.

“It’s not such a bad place to be, San Francisco,” Francis said. “It beats the hell out of Colorado.”

We sat together on a rock, and I watched the silent sun flatten at the bottom with each passing minute until the ocean completely extinguished the flame, taking with it the sunlight, the warmth, the calm winds. To our backs, the city lights reflected the waves.

“Sorry for leaving before you heard what Denise had to say,” he told me.

“That’s okay,” I said. I couldn’t be mad at him, not for long. Even before she died, Denise seldom spoke with words, choosing instead to communicate by rubbing her hand across the stubble on my scalp. I missed that. But maybe since I didn’t know what she was about to say, I could fill in the blanks myself and imagine something profound without being disappointed. Thank you, she might have said.

“What if all those signatures were just his autograph collection instead of his clients?” I asked him. “No one that important would have time for us.”

“Maybe,” he said, smiling.

I snatched his beatnik hat and leaped from one rock to another, expecting him to give me chase, but he sat motionless like a Mother Hen on her nest, fading from view, while I joined Huey and his newfound friends at the edge of the ocean, laughing when the water enveloped my feet, cruising in the airplane I fashioned from my arms, oblivious to all that lay ahead of me.

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Bailey

Lightbox Church Richard Bailey The lightbox church is the oldest church in the province, where the weather is oppressive with pollution and the light at the windows so feeble the naked eye can only fret to discern the famous mysteries.

But there is commerce in this deeply religious community and some capitalist housed in traditional robes has installed a lightbox over each fresco, powered by a coin.

The bulb buzzing over the first reveals a line of fruit trees between a verdant carpet and color bar sky, wise as it contains every pigment in the world below.

Next, an infantry of snakes advances on the trees.

My third coin is eaten, but the fourth reveals the trees have swollen up their fruits the size of battlements.

The last image is a slaughter as all the trees deploy their fruits and squash the marauding snakes.

A child pleads that I spring for another tour and there’s a little mob of pilgrims hoping I’ll cave to this.

But I want these coins as souvenirs. They’re etched with presidents in headdresses, or maybe these are gods.

Perry

Order of Things Penny Perry Home from college, she climbs in the car, squints at my hair.

Her father wants me to look glamorous like his actress friends.

I wound my hair in sponge rollers and combed it into a stiff helmet.

I wait for her to tell me I look stupid. She has always been my critic-in-residence.

Daughters denigrate their mothers so they will have the courage to leave. The order of things.

“I love your hair, mom,” she says.

The car reeks of too sweet hair spray.

Airport palms look like movie trees on this bright December day.

I streak onto the wrong freeway.

Cars in the next lane zip past.

She sits forward. “We’re lost.”

Her words anxious puffs of air.

“I want to kill myself. Let’s do it together.”

She smiles in conspiracy.

“You’re not that happy.”

Like dove-gray kindling, my fear ignites.

“I don’t want you to die,” I tell her.

I glance at myself in the car mirror, a timid woman under a foreign helmet.

She leans against me, the sweet small weight of her an arrow in my bow.

I will become a warrior.

I don’t know it yet.

Sunglasses hide my wet eyes.

I’m grateful for a car that runs, all my credit cards, this black blazer that makes my shoulders big.

I tell my first lie.

“I know the way home.”

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28

Brown

Geography Lessons Joey Brown Lesson 1 Find maps. They are everywhere. Signs with pictures. Arrows on boxes. Recipes. Dash lights. Pictographs on bathroom doors. Lines on the grocery store floor. Be amazed by all words can’t say.

Lesson 2 Look at the kiosk telling you YOU ARE HERE. But when you look around your surroundings know they will resemble nothing from the map. A space opens between expectation and resolution. It is more often true that you just are where you are, rather than where you meant to be. Look forward to lost.

Lesson 3 Follow the flow to the front of the store where the old woman sits smack on one of those arrows on the floor that shows how traffic should flow through the automatic doors.

Groceries spill from a white plastic bag. One orange bearing a Texas Citrus sticker rolls away from the lady and under a cluster of carts. The woman is surrounded. Gary-TheChecker holds her hand, pats her, says “Oh, honey. You know where you are, honey?”

Look from the woman’s face to the floor again. The path of the orange has cut a gleam into the dust. “I’m sitting right here, stupid,” the old woman says, and you think you know what she means.

Lesson 4 Lying in bed at night maps will get the best of you. Feel the path your blood follows as it crosses over your heart. Patterns are everywhere. Hard not to be afraid of all the places your life doesn’t go.

Allegretti

Lot’s Wife Joel Allegretti Do you know Bera? He was the king of Sodom.

And Abram? My husband’s uncle.

Do you remember my name? Of course, not.

You don’t recall what no one bothered to record.

I will tell you my name is Bad Girl. Wife Who Must Be Disciplined. Woman Who Doesn’t Know Her Place.

I served my man faithfully. Scrubbing the floors.

Picking sand from the lentils. Roasting the lamb Until the sputtering fat raised blisters on my hands.

Breaking my back carrying the water jars.

Bearing his children. But he was the righteous one.

The good one. Who thrust his daughters before the city’s Preening queens. Who believed their virtue less costly Than an angel’s backside. Listen. We all were Sodomites.

While cattle licked and eroded my haunches, The apples of their father’s eye dulled him with wine, Then had their turns with him to continue the line.

What could come but a race of drooling, slope-browed idiots?

As for me? Know that I am the salt of the earth; But as far as you or anyone is concerned, I’m fit only For seasoning the wreckage and bones of the damned.

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30

Williams Kentner

The Dress Corrie Williams Kentner Black. Sensible.

A single sash, simple closure.

No-iron polyester travels well.

Days later, unpacked and hung with unexpected intention, a hunger for his steady blue eyes to trace its hems and seams, a gnawing need after days of quiet conversation.

Such humid anticipation and a black dress hung out to writhe, its metal hanger clicking away nights by an open window, waiting for that one night, a night when my palms were wet as frogs’ backs— wrapping, smoothing, tugging the sash taut.

I second guessed the neckline’s too deep plunge, my too wide hips, a lipstick seldom worn, my fingers fumbled with bobby pins, knocked them into a fine spun rain, stuck to the fresh polish on my toes. I was quivering, a last leaf spinning against fall.

And when I found him that night, cheap Merlot bitter on my tongue, we were hundreds of miles from home, my cheek pressed easily against his shirt, finding his bones, his sweet stale—beer, sweat, soap I had never known— and our fingers tangled, his hand slipped my spine, so near to skin, the sash, one pull… everything would have unwrapped,

Williams Kentner

in the barefoot slip through slivers of midnight where he steadied me against a wooden park bench, with hands on my hips, aching and primitive under his touch, while cricket legs scratching against our silence, stay a word held on our tongues, like a language ancient, almost forgotten, a syllable we could not pronounce, and I am left with a dress.

Black. Laced with longing that whispers to me in the tinny ring of water on washer, in the flat taste of wooden clothespins between my teeth, when I am alone, folding my husband’s threadbare undershirts

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32

Chariott

Last Night Katherine Lein Chariott

W

hen he first heard her voice on the telephone Tang didn’t recognize it, but his knees weakened anyway and his pulse raced out of control, his whole body responding to Deirdre’s very first words. Hours later at the bar waiting for her to show, Tang remembered this and was overcome with embarrassment. But, still, he understood: it was right that his body should know Deirdre before his brain did. After all, he never could think straight when it came to that woman. Which would explain why he agreed to meet her here tonight, though there was no reason for them to see each other, not after all this time and the way things ended between them. And it would explain that terrible disappointment he felt, when, finishing his second drink, he realized she might stand him up.

Tang knew, of course, that it would be for the best if Deirdre didn’t show; that he should leave himself, get up right now and go home to his wife. But he didn’t leave. He ordered another drink, which he let sit untouched on the table in front of him, staring at that whiskey now, instead of the clock. After a while, water beaded on the glass, dulling the amber liquid, which was cloudy anyway by then from melting ice. Those beads of water on the glass, tiny, and incredible, Tang thought, they seemed to come from nowhere. And then, from nowhere as well, there was a hand on his shoulder.

He turned and Deirdre was behind him, leaning down to kiss his cheek. Her lips were soft on his skin, and Tang felt too many different things at once to understand or fight. One beat later, though, when she sat down opposite him, Tang felt nothing but annoyed that she should show up like this, two hours after she was supposed to, and so casual and easy, despite everything.

“You’re late,” he said.

“Very,” she agreed. “But I still think you owe me a nicer greeting than that. It has been seven years.”

Deirdre reached for Tang’s drink as she said this; downed it like a shot, before leaning back in her seat and looking at him with a challenge on her face. She was confident, of course, the daughter of a rich man and a beautiful woman who received her inheritance from both ends early in life, she had always been confident. But maybe she was too confident, now. At thirty-three, Tang had not expected her to look the same as she had back then; he had known that the perfect fresh skin and those wide, innocent eyes must be gone by now, existing only in his memory. But Deirdre had changed more than she should have. Her face itself was different: that aquiline nose off just a little, though Tang could not have said how; the fine bones of her cheeks obscured as if their beautiful sharp edges had been rubbed away by time. Thinking of these changes, and knowing without thinking of the other changes, so humiliating for a woman, that had to come for Deirdre (for all of us) with age, Tang felt a rush of emotion he neither expected nor welcomed. He pushed it away.

“Actually,” he said. “February was eight years.”

“Okay, then, eight years. That’s even more reason to be sweet to me.”

“Is that why I’m here? Because you want me to be sweet to you?”

“I think you know why I brought you here,” Deirdre said. “Don’t you?”

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33

Tang didn’t answer. Earlier, on the telephone, he had avoided asking Deirdre what this meeting was for; all afternoon, all evening, he had refused to ask himself the same thing. But Deirdre’s meaning had still been clear from the very beginning. Tang had understood it in her tone of voice, and in the silences between her words, though she had chosen not to speak it, and he had chosen not to think it, until this very moment when he was forced to. But Deirdre could not force him to actually say it, not even when she took her index finger and ran it along that soft skin, so vulnerable, of his inner wrist. Tang watched that finger in determined silence: it moved so slowly up and down, and then again, and again. Finally, he pulled away.

“Why are you making this so much more difficult than it has to be?” Deirdre said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do. But, if you want, we can play it like that. I’ll tell you all about my awful life and you tell me all about yours and we can both get very drunk and pretend that things just happen.”

“Or?”

“Or you come home with me right now and we do what we’re going to do anyway.”

“Deirdre,” Tang began, but then he stopped. When he went on, it was in little more than a whisper, which he hated himself for, but he went on anyway. “You know,” he said.

“I’m married now.”

She shrugged. “Caught the ring. Not that it matters. I mean, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Tang looked away from her, down at the glassy wood surface of the table. He ran his finger along that smooth shiny surface, like Deirdre had run her finger over his skin, considering. Images tumbled into his mind, blocking out what was before him. His grey stone house, that beautiful old house, which was always cool in this desert heat, always welcoming, and safe; the perfect place to close your eyes at night and pretend at death.

Then his wife, Shuang-lin, and that face of hers: pretty, but always just a little sad. His sad, pretty, wife, so forgiving of his failings (and there were many); so devoted to him that he almost, just almost, loved her. Last, Tang saw his office, that small, quiet room, where he did his small, quiet job; a job which gave him a satisfaction which wasn’t passion, or even joy, but which was still very powerful. These smooth pieces of his smooth existence: Tang saw them all. Such smooth pieces, they fit together so well; he had to regret upsetting any of it.

But then his mind cleared, and all he saw was this table, this bar, this woman he was with. He stood, perfectly calm now, perfectly decided to let this night take him where it would. Deirdre was already on the move by then, pushing her way through the crowd and out of the bar. She didn’t turn to make sure he was following, didn’t even look for him until they reached her car. Then, she took his hand and squeezed it. But when Tang moved towards her, she stepped back, smiling at him with something on her face that stopped him. It looked like triumph, he thought, but it was gone in a second, and in the dark Tang couldn’t really be sure what he had seen. *** Deirdre behind the wheel, they raced across town, swerving in and out of traffic, moving always and moving fast, until they reached the Strip. There, they joined the line of cars inching along. Tang watched Deirdre uneasily now. Lit up by the gaudy lights of the casinos, everything about her seemed brighter and younger—a dangerous change. He turned away, adjusted his seat, moving it forward, leaning it back, and then settling

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down in the same position in which he started. Then he fumbled in his pockets for his cigarettes, only remembering when he could not find any that he had given them up last month, a concession to his wife.

Deirdre turned to him. “Something wrong?”

“Just wanted a smoke.”

“That one’s easy enough. In my jacket.”

Deirdre made no move to get the cigarettes, forcing Tang to reach for them himself.

He slid his fingers carefully into the pocket closer to him, but all he felt was Deirdre’s hipbone, hard under his hand. This intimacy unnerved him, but Tang refused to show it. He leaned across her to try the other pocket, this time pulling out the pack. Without asking, Tang lit two cigarettes, giving one to Deirdre. She put the cigarette in her mouth and took a deep drag.

“So,” she said. “Did you call your wife from the bar, or did you call her this morning when we made our date?”

“Excuse me?”

“To tell her you wouldn’t be home tonight.”

“I didn’t tell her that.”

“Oh. Then she must be missing you. A shame to worry her. Maybe we should call her now and ask her to join us?”

Deirdre took another drag off her cigarette, watching him and hoping, Tang knew, that he would look away. But he kept himself steady: met her gaze while she inhaled; held her gaze until she turned back to the road. When she did this, Tang noticed for the first time a too-smooth patch on the back of her neck, almost like a burn: the remnants of the tattoo she had gotten at twenty-one. That scar took Tang by surprise; for a moment, all he could do was look at it, feeling something close to disappointment. Then he closed his eyes, and tried to picture the dragon—not fierce or mysterious or Chinese, not like the one he had tattooed on his own neck, which was still there under his collar, but childish and Western, and sweet, drawn by Deirdre’s own hand—that used to be on that skin.

Instead, he saw only the scab that was there in the beginning, glossed over with Vaseline, Deirdre’s red hair pulled away from it, but slipping down in tiny strands to get caught in that greasy mess. For some reason, this memory made his whole body expand: his chest filled with smoky air; his arms opened in an unconscious embrace.

Then Tang pulled himself closed again. When he did this, he forced himself to look at the woman by his side. To focus on the skin of her neck and see it as just a scar, and know it as nothing more.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that will be necessary. I think we can leave her be.”

“Oh Tang,” Deirdre said, laughing. “You used to be the sweetest, most thoughtful boy in the world. You would never have left a woman to wait for you without calling, back then. But, back then, you would never have cheated.”

“Well maybe I’ve changed. Or maybe you didn’t really know me.”

“Maybe I didn’t,” Deirdre said. “After all, I never imagined you’d come back to Vegas. And like this: turned into a buttoned-down accountant with a little wife at home.”

Tang thought that what Deirdre really meant was that she never imagined he’d do anything after he left, because she hadn’t thought of him since, but it would never do to tell her that. “No,” he said. “I didn’t think I would do any of that, either.”

“Things happen,” Deirdre said. “Life happens.”

Her voice held no memory of why he had left, of what she had done to make him leave, but, as she spoke, she put her hand on his thigh, and her touch was knowing. Those

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fingers seemed to confess, and even to be sorry for all that was past. They awoke in Tang old, humiliating longings: the desire to tell Deirdre he had loved her, and to ask her why she never loved him.

“The first time I saw you,” he said instead. “Was through glass. I looked through a window one night and you were on the sidewalk, dancing. It was freezing out and there were Christmas lights everywhere, but all you were wearing was this tiny white dress.

Even your feet were bare.”

“Really,” Deirdre said. “Was that the first time you saw me?”

Tang nodded.

“But you always said the first time was that night at Ace’s. The night we hooked up.”

“I know I did.”

Tang waited for Deirdre to say something that acknowledged what he had just admitted, but she was silent. They were on the highway now, and both of her hands were on the steering wheel; she was absorbed in her driving. Watching her, Tang began to feel lonely and foolish. He had to wonder why he would come along for this ride, why he would go down this path again with this woman, no matter for how short a distance, and after all this time, too. But then the car stopped, and Tang felt only a sweet tightness in his stomach: anticipation. He pulled himself up and out into the cold darkness, going around the car to meet Deirdre. ***

They rode up the elevator in silence, both facing ahead. Tang stared at their reflections in the polished surface of the brass doors, hating what he saw: how flat and dull, golden and stupid and still they were. But he didn’t look away. Then the doors opened and the hallway burst out in front of them, embroidered tapestry and quiet. Tang was the first to move, but Deirdre was just a second behind. They made their way to her condo, together.

At the door, Deirdre stopped. “You remember the place. Don’t you?”

Tang nodded: he could see no point in pretending that he didn’t. She wouldn’t believe him, and he would only make himself look the fool if he tried.

“I remember.” He took the keys from Deirdre’s hand. “Allow me.”

Tang unlocked the door; pushed it open. He led the way inside, stepping through the hall and the kitchen with a fast-moving confidence he hoped Deirdre would believe.

But when he made it to the living room, Tang had to stop. Nothing, he realized then, had changed. Not in this room, not in the rest of the condo, either. Everything—the bright rugs, the beige couch and chairs, the tables of smooth glass stretched across Oriental vases and urns, Deirdre’s child-like paintings, all that vivid color and unsure form— everything was exactly as it had been. For a moment, Tang felt a strange sense of returning, and an uneasiness he did not want to examine.

“Why,” he said. “Why didn’t you change it? You always said you hated it.”

“What?”

“This furniture. Everything. You always said you’d change it. But it’s all the same.”

“Oh,” Deirdre said. “The furniture. The apartment.”

She shrugged. “I did hate it, but I never could get rid of it. Something always held me back. I didn’t understand what at the time. But now I know.”

She paused, looking at him meaningfully. “You see, Tang, there’s something important about the past. Something comforting, something good, about everything connected with it. At least I think so.”

Tang looked down. “Do you? I’m not sure that time improves anything.”

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“So it’s like that then,” Deirdre said. “That’s too bad. You know, Dear, it didn’t have to be.”

“Like what?” Tang said.

But she had already turned her back on him, and, before he could ask again, she had disappeared down the hall that led to her bedroom. Tang was left to stand where he was, wondering if her words were serious, or if they were just one of her seductions. Then, giving up on understanding Deirdre, he took off his coat and sat down. A phone was on the table in front of him; Tang picked it up to call his wife. Then he realized that nothing she said would bring him home, and he decided to save all that—her questions, his lies, and then the truth, which would come out—for later. He would save his apologies for later, too, when he could see Shuang-lin’s tears; witness her slow, sad way of accepting them, when her pain could be real to him. In such a relationship as theirs, Tang thought, where love is on one side only, it was easy to turn cruel. His wife’s forbearance kept him from that—at least it had.

Tang thought of his childhood: those long quiet days, and those heavy, sad nights, all that violence just under the surface. He had hated his father, then, and feared him, too, but he had not understood the man at all. Tang understood his father no more when he grew into a man himself, not even in these last few years, when they two had started to become the same person. But, now, Tang imagined his father on a night not so different from this one, in a room not so different, and for reasons that were not so different. So this, Tang thought, looking about himself, is how infidelity begins: with a casual disregard; with a strange absence of emotion, rather than with abandon or malice or guilt, as he had always thought it would. So this is how you hurt a woman; how his father had hurt his mother: it was how he hurt his wife. Tiny crack after tiny crack and then a blow like this one, not because you wanted to break her, not even because you wanted so badly to do all those selfish things you did. No, you did all these things, this damage, only because you could.

A disappointment, really (life, himself), but here he was, and he was ready to do it. So let it begin.

“Deirdre,” Tang said.

She didn’t answer, so he called to her again. Then he stood and traced the path she had taken across the carpet. *** The bathroom door was open a few inches, lighting the area around it. Tang stood just outside that light in the dark of Deirdre’s bedroom, unsure of whether he should go on.

Finally, he moved forward, until he could see into the other room. Deirdre stood at the sink with her back to him, her head bent over something Tang couldn’t make out. She had taken her jacket off, and her white arms were bare to the elbow. Tang watched them, amazed, just as he had been the first time he had taken off her shirt, by how light her skin was, by the map of veins so blue on her forearms, by the movement of her muscles just underneath that pale skin. Then Deirdre turned a little, and Tang saw the needle in her one hand, the way the fingers of her other hand were spread wide. For a moment, the parts of her body didn’t make sense. Then they did, and Tang felt just as much shock, just as much horror, as if he had come home to find Shuang-lin engaged in this same act. But Deirdre was not his wife, not so innocent or girlishly good it was sometimes laughable, and, Tang thought, she never had been. Still, she was not the kind of person to do this.

That kind of person, Tang thought, This.

There was something about the whole thing, apart, even, from the drug, which, Tang

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was sure, was one he would not even want to name, that made this act more than it was.

There was the needle, good God, a needle, and this the same woman who had once been too terrified to give blood. There was the way she had run straight to the bathroom to do it, unable to wait until he was gone and she was alone; unable to wait, even, until she had set him up with a drink, made a proper excuse for her disappearance. And then there was the secrecy of the whole thing, that pathetic secrecy of the needle in the web of her hand, as if the secret made it any better, as if the secret made it any less real. All these things added up to something so unbelievable that Tang really did not believe it, until the metal pierced Deirdre’s skin, poked into the narrow space between her fingers. Then, Tang had to look away. His eyes traveled the room, focusing on the clutter of orange pill bottles and the blue box of tampons on the counter; the ridiculous fluffy green carpet on the floor, too innocent for its surroundings.

When he turned back to Deirdre, he saw her lift her face and look in the mirror. In the harsh bathroom light, they both stared at the woman, strange and haggard, trapped flat under the glass. Deirdre shook her head at that cruel image, and put her hand to her cheek, and Tang felt sure she would weep. Instead, she reached for a bag and began to make up her face. Slowly, carefully, Deirdre smoothed out her features, turned them familiar again, made herself pretty, even, so that Tang felt the desperate beginnings of desire stir in him in a way that made him ashamed. But then Deirdre brought her hand to her mouth to lick away a tiny drop of blood that had dried there, the last evidence of what she had done. This gesture struck Tang with its childishness. Its innocence killed all the desire in him, leaving him to remember, by contrast, the terrible power of his need for Deirdre, so long ago. But how much of that was real, he wondered, and how much of it was just being young?

Not wanting to answer his own questions, Tang turned and, stepping softly, left the room. He knew, suddenly and surely, that whatever Deirdre wanted was more than he had in him to give, and that he needed to get away before she tried to claim it. More than that: he needed to get away before she saw him. Oh anything, he thought, as long as he didn’t have to look Deirdre in the eyes and pretend he hadn’t seen who she had become. ***

In the end, Tang got no farther than the door. He put his hand to the knob, but, unable to turn it, he went to the window. That same window he used to look out of, standing with Deirdre in his arms, all those nights when he saw nothing but what he wanted to see: the future spread out shiny and bright ahead of them. But that was so long ago that he didn’t even think of it now. That was a lifetime ago. In this lifetime, waiting for his old lover, and not knowing why he waited, Tang saw only what was really there: the Vegas skyline, a million tiny, tragic points of light. Seeing them, he was overcome with pity. Not just for the woman in the bathroom, or his wife at home alone, but for himself for becoming a man who could watch the one destroy herself in silence, and betray the other with only a small pang of guilt—all this in just one night.

Then he heard the door to Deirdre’s room close. Deirdre was behind him.

“Sorry I took so long. Did you miss me?”

“Of course.”

Tang smoothed his face blank and turned from the night, walked to the center of the room where Deirdre stood, waiting for him. She smiled, so easy and casual that he was sure she did not know what he had seen. He was as grateful for this small blessing as he

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had ever been for anything. They faced each other and she reached for his hand. He let her take it, and let her lead him to the bedroom. Then he took her in his arms, holding her more tenderly than he ever had when he loved her.

But it was only a second that they stayed like this. A second before Deirdre stepped away from him; stripped off her clothes. When she stood naked before him, he could see her awkwardness before he saw the sad ways her body had betrayed her. And, though later that poor body would make him weep, that awkwardness was more poignant to him: it made him want to comfort her in all the ways that one person can comfort another. But when Deirdre looked up with a question in her eyes, all Tang could do was turn away. He forced himself to turn back, but too late: he saw that he had already given her an answer.

“So it’s that bad,” she said. “Well. I wasn’t sure it was, but now I know.”

“Deirdre,” Tang said.

“No,” she said. “Don’t. Please don’t lie to me.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“No. Don’t even try.”

Deirdre reached for her clothes; bent down and gathered them up. But instead of putting them on, she held them in a humble pile in her hands.

“You must want to leave now. So you should go.”

And Tang did want to leave; it was the only thing that made sense. But still he stood facing Deirdre, the both of them silent for so long he did not see how they could possibly speak again. Then he was moving towards her, wrapping his arms around her once more.

She went stiff in his embrace, but then relaxed, and leaned her head against his chest.

When she did this, Tang could feel her gratitude, as fragile and delicate a thing as this body she now lived in.

“You know you’re the only one,” Deirdre said. “Who ever really loved me. Just you, Tang. But I ruined it. Didn’t I?”

Tang tried to answer, but all he could manage was a shake of his head. He could smell her now, Deirdre’s scent, so strong it was a taste in his mouth: the individual notes of the hollow between her breasts, that gooseflesh under her arms, the darkness between her legs. All of this coming together in a song that was a variation of the old familiar song that had never really left him. And Tang could recognize the melody still; that melody, it had, every now and then over these years, played for a few seconds in his blood at the strangest times. Of course he could recognize that melody still, but there were notes that were discordant now, and so moving as they had not been before—they cut him in places for which there are no names.

Then Deirdre lifted her face for him to kiss. Looking down at her in the moment before he moved, Tang breathed in and then out; breathed in again. He felt something shift in his chest, right next to his heart, which seemed to him to be either the very beginning of something or the very end, though he couldn’t say which. Finally, he closed his eyes, and bent down to do as Deirdre wished. He tried to concentrate on a girl in white, dazzling under blinking Christmas lights, dancing, still dancing, barefoot and all alone, on the other side of a window. But all he could see was a flat mirror-reflection, a sick two-dimensional woman trapped in shiny glass, caught forever in that cruel bathroom light.

That woman stayed in Tang’s mind through the entire sad act that is so poorly named, love, and even after it, while he lay alone in Deirdre’s bed, Deirdre in the bathroom again, doing things he refused to think about. When the image finally disappeared, she was replaced by another woman: his wife, her face grey in the half-dark

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39

half-light that filled their house this time of night, her eyes anxious as they stared out the window, looking for his car. And, though he tried not to, Tang understood that this last night with Deirdre would stay with him no matter what he did to forget it; it would stay with him straight to the end. This woman he did not know and that woman who did not know him, his wife, were joined forever now in his mind with the girl he once loved: all of them always just out of reach, all three always just behind glass he didn’t know how to break through.

40

Sylvester

Weld Kelly Sylvester In a fluorescent room We meet His squinty eyes Stare down My facial scars Clangs steel Crescent mooned precision Meet stacked dimes A final moon wanes My viscous dance— Hands glide— One second forward Two back Smooth away imperfections His beautiful beads— Rippled stream of metal alloy— I braid concave metal threads Adhesive climax Heat rises between us.

Lifshin

HAVE YOU EVER STARTED, ANNOYED JUST ENOUGH TO LEAVE? Lyn Lifshin a message on a machine.

You know no one’s there.

It starts, who knows over what. Some dinner you didn’t make (as if that was part of the agenda) Or it was him bitching. Ok, maybe he just made a remark that he was sick of something, not even something I can remember and I bet you had a day when you suddenly felt like shit. I’m the one who has a gripe—I don’t need to explain myself. Esp with a badly gashed leg and it was of course his suitcase, 2 of 9 and who has ever heard of that many in OUR closet anyway,) scraping as if a vegetable peeler went up my leg the size of a dollar spurting blood, making a ruby trail thru 3 rooms. Now after five days of spurting blood I find it’s much worse than I knew like a 3rd class burn and whose fault really was it? But anyway, with the ritual of gauze and frosting and gauze again in the only

41

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Lifshin

bathroom I can use and he is upset that his friends who are taking over the house and who are used to going to places where there are 2 showers for 25 people or pooping and peeing in the trees for weeks are coming. And I’m supposed to feel guilty I said this. By the 3rd phone call I’m enraged. I’m a doormat, a second class slave. I didn’t decide the rugs need to be cleaned, the walls painted. I work like a dog, it’s not my fault I was born when everyone expected to get married and didn’t go to law school but I work my butt off and the stamps are all gone and by this time I am past furious.

He might as well have been the one to make priority mail 4:05 in January, absurd as this bathroom situation. Was I hired as a cook? Does everyone have 6 couples stay in a town house where all the bedrooms are studies? Couldn’t they go to a motel? And even the snow and ice coming— it must be his fault and I’m thinking of when he retires he’ll need a cook and a cleaning woman. Honestly,

Lifshin

hasn’t this happened to you? One thing reminds you of other things that seem more and more unfair. I buy my own insurance, my clothes, my lipstick. I wanted some angel food cake last night but did he get any?

But I remember he walked blocks to get his friend a fruit flavored yogurt swirl and still bet he’d do it. I’ve lost it. I wanted to just drink my tea and write for once with the snow coming, curl up with the cat but I can’t even remember what that first thing was that got to me. Do you know what I mean? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s done this?

But today I looked out and he was late, only got to the first two calls when I got him still in a good mood, walking thru the arboretum’s brown velvet roses and seeing the city’s beauty against the new sun so I tell him delete, delete, delete the next 6,7 or 8 calls and we both feel better and with me calmer, I hope the cat does too

43

44

Wandless

Colorfast William H. Wandless When doctors broke the news the truest hues betrayed her: aggressive reds suffused her blues and when the purple convergence unnerved her Chelle yellowed its edge till it looked like a mellowing bruise. Before long even her neutral tones grew brutal; her colors crossed, she sought serenity at any cost.

If it could be breathed, brewed, swallowed, or shot she invited it inside, then filled her frames with neon shades subdued by bloodshot eyes.

Chelle spent that grudging summer juiced and junked, blunted just enough to suffer the brush.

Papers hailed the daring of her final show, where easels creaked beneath the monochromes.

Lindeman

Catharsis Jack Lindeman Shall I whittle this wood, blaspheme against the demanding hours, ignore every obligation but the sun’s speech and the dog’s bark?

The trees will confine me to the modes of their branches, nothing more serious than a lament for the banished leaves that soften my steps yet announce my coming with a crackle like telegraph wires.

The visionary stream flows through my head after foaming down the slope of a precarious rock.

It expels the clutter of impending thoughts, life’s false machinery turned rusty and obsolete as I cross the threshold of this woods. Even the shadow that all my days have been walked within is left behind. The sun inspects me like a god who has designed my obscurest acts, yet the stream flows bathing the antennae of my five senses until I can easily detect the grass roots clamoring for my attention with their odor of dampness.

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46

Rubin

Dámelo Jay Rubin Dámelo

—for Ann Lauterbach Of course, I can’t recall those words, Those early sounds that first made sense, When I first knew the reach of speech.

Now, I watch my young son strive To comprehend the sounds I say: Go open the door. Let Lula outside.

Staring off, sensing images with sounds, He jumps to his feet, skips through the house, Shouting for the terrier, shouting, Time to pee!

In Uruguay, at twenty-four, after years Of español, I couldn’t comprehend a word, Not a single syllable anybody said.

The castellano slipping from their lips Could’ve been a cast of Cyrillic characters Sunning themselves on a Black Sea beach.

On the beach in Maldonado, A baby-oiled redhead in a blue bikini Says, Yo fui a la playa ayer.

The yo like zhoe, The playa like plazha, The fui sounding French, not Spanish.

Then lolling in the surf alone, I watch a boy toss a ball to a girl.

When the girl refuses to toss it back,

Rubin

The little boy kicks at the centimeter surf, Splashing and shouting, Dámelo!

Dah-may-low. Dah-may-low.

The syllables pierce the air in my ears Like red-tipped beaks of white-bellied gulls.

Da-me-lo. Give-it-to-me. Gimme back my ball, you brat!

You’d have thought those sounds were lemons, A line across a slot machine. Dámelo—!

He shouted, teaching me the reach of speech.

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48

Munro

Ruptured Drawers Jennifer D. Munro

T

he conveyor belt chugged to life at Tokyo Airport’s baggage claim. The crowd of tired travelers pressed forward. My backpack lurched down the chute amidst the tumbling suitcases, and we waited for Libby’s massive, overstuffed bag. The loaded belt squeaked and rumbled. A lone pair of ladies’ panties, beige, XL, cruised down the slide.

A bra skidded behind it. D-cup, padded, spent-looking, as if exhausted from carrying its normal load. Slips and stockings joined the pageant, and more stretched brassieres bared themselves between the lumbering bags on the black rubber pad. Well-used delicates batted their lacy eyelashes amidst the grimly marching luggage. Libby’s renegade underwear, set loose like a social disease on the planet’s most polite culture. Loud and lewd Libby often commanded embarrassing attention in public, but her knickers had never before put on a show without her.

The other passengers tried to look away while keeping an eye out for their bags.

They edged away from my best friend, backs turned—in this crowd of petite Japanese women, it was obvious to whom the unmentionables belonged. An old kimonoed lady plucked a clinging thong (a filly amidst the work horses) free of her bag. Libby’s obscene foundations littered the belt, peeking coyly from behind every close-lipped suitcase.

Her drawers had obviously been around the block a few times—though usually not on their own like this. Stunned, we watched this burlesque review of weary Grand Dames.

This was no Victoria’s Secret fashion show, but a circling runway of worn and faded garments, burst from the closet of a real woman with a real body on a real budget.

Libby’s lingerie took lazy laps, a catwalk of frayed and stretched intimates timidly working the room.

Her diaphragm case (open) and spermicidal jelly sidled down the ramp, joining the crop of hosiery and underwires. We expected culture shock, not to shock another culture so soon upon arrival.

While I held my bag and our carry-ons, Libby gathered her underwear calmly, as if she were by herself in a Laundromat. Soon her arms were full of sleek shrapnel, and she tapped a uniformed worker on the shoulder. He crossed his arms and looked over her head as if she did not exist. “Suitcase broken!” she yelled. He muttered in Japanese and turned away. She approached another airport employee. “Need bag! Can’t carry all!” He ignored her.

Her wide-open, unzippered bag, crested the summit and thumped down the slide. Her outer garments had remained in the bag while her undies erupted like a Jockeys For Her volcano. Libby dumped her wardrobe into the bag and folded it closed. Straps and hems spilled out of the split seams as she marched to the Lost Luggage desk. “Make claim!” But the clerk spoke in Japanese to the man behind her, passing him forms as if Libby was invisible. Her private apparel had become far too public. She may as well have hiked up her skirt and exposed herself.

Libby gave up and joined me. Behind her, a lonely box of tampons circled the ramp.

Customs was a breeze. The snickering women waved us through, since the entire airport had inspected the contents of Libby’s bag and deemed them to be safe, if

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inappropriate.

We settled with relief into the child-sized van that would shuttle us to the U.S. Naval Base, where Libby’s father worked. A dashing, uniformed officer squeezed between us on the cramped back seat. We merged onto the freeway, a free-for-all with no apparent lanes. Miniature cars swirled and swerved around each other at top speed. Glad I’d never grasped metric conversion, I had no idea how fast we were going. Then the van’s hatchback door popped open. Libby’s bag, strapped closed with our belts, tipped toward the pavement. Libby’s bloomers, it seemed, were hell bent on freedom—rebels with indiscreet flaws. As her bag leapt towards liberty, the officer twisted in his seat, reached back, and plucked it out of midair. He gripped the handle, fighting the wind, our hero wrestling to save the damsel from undress. Lingerie escaped and wafted behind us, silky confetti celebrating the arrival of armed reinforcements and reinforced tummy control panels.

As young women on vacation, we were eager to experience cross-cultural relations. We just didn’t expect Libby’s underwear to start the fun without us. I looked back at the trail of indelicates lap-dancing on windshields, wipers swatting at the aggressive peepshow. Falsies fluttered in the breeze, cheerful flags heralding foreign ambassadors of goodwill. *Names have been changed.

50

Berman

His Father Overseas Ruth Berman If he could go with his father, he thought He would be no trouble.

He was small for his age.

He wouldn’t need much housing.

A boulder hollowed out would do.

And all he’d need in the rock would be A bed, a shelf for food, A table, a chair, another chair, A toy car, the kind with pedals, And a fire engine, And a garage to put them in — And he would be so good And it would be so easy to be good And never want to throw a dozen eggs downstairs To see if they would break.

Rau

Listening To My Mother’s South Street Seaport Album, 1978 Christina M. Rau Vinyl crackles in the blue room Downstairs, skipping over Too-ri-ay, and instead Sticking on the refrain About The Old Dun Cow on fire, And no one bumps the table— No one moves the arm— So the sad song plays Stuck to the spot, A dust ball collecting On the needle tip until it grows So big that the needle Skips itself to a new ridge; A new lamenting sea tune Swells from speakers to the walls, Rising up the staircase and down the hall Flowing rampant into a new room Vibrating from outer edge To inner label on both A and B, Bringing what’s out there A little bit closer to home Vibrating from inland to the ocean Where the same song plays In hearts of sailors far from soft beds, Cotton wives with curlers, Powder fresh soft flesh, Instead stuck with yellow slickers Slick with spray, the only thought Keeping them adrift is the grog And the moors, the bosun’s last whistle— The only true movement is the stomping Rubber boots on wooden planks To the uncertain tune of heading back to shore.

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52

Parilla

Sleeping With Grandma Catherine Arturi Parilla Grunts, groans, stomping in the dark like a horse lifting its hooves in place, she struggles with her corset, bones, strings, straps.

I lie and wait for the bed to sink, holding myself from rolling into the hole.

Brother, first born, releases slow contented breaths of slumber in my face, asserting his space, his place.

Beside me looms the obese body I can’t see over, pinning me deep in a well, perspiration the scent.

Let’s pray she says: “In nome di padre...,” I repeat the mysterious litany, learning by rote: he has the edge, I’m engulfed by a worn female destiny.

Parilla

Our uneven voices, tipped like the bed, lull me into the stifling sweltering order where prayer is the haunting cry.

I clamber atop the pillows.

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54

Longo

Playing Crash Perie Longo Back from swimming lessons, my granddaughter doesn’t care about her baby sister’s tears or the fire’s smoke turning mountains into ghosts, nor does she mind her mother’s squinched face at the mouse found in the rice, or the new tenants who’ve taken over the washing machine. We talk about evacuation, should the fire mount the ridge.

She hears the word car and hands me her favorite Matchbox, demands “uppy” with a soosh sound, not shoosh for quiet but soosh to dash the car over the counter so it crashes into dishes, over the ledge and I scream whoopsy-doodle.

Soon we’re crawling on the floor, crashing it into the garbage pail where the rice has been thrown, the table waiting dinner, she attempting to say whoopsy-doodle so hard each time, it comes out with a spray and chortle and we all collapse with laughter, not giving a fiddle about the smoke or the mouse, the game reducing us to such carelessness if everything came crashing down we’d barely notice.

Hearne

55

Washed Away Dixon Hearne

I

’m not a brave person and never claimed to be – but I did try to save that little baby from drowning. You see, I just can’t swim, never learned how. I grew up in the sticks, and the only water holes we had around were at least neck deep. Mama didn’t have to tell me not to go in them when I was a child, I knew better. There was a boy that lived on a farm near ours that dove off a log one day and broke his neck on another log hidden just below the surface. A thing like that jars you when you’re a kid, everybody talking about it and scaring hell out of you. I’ve been scared of dark waters ever since, and when Troy and me moved to our farm ten years ago, he promised he wouldn’t ever drag me off down to the lake and throw me in. That’s how it’s done here. You just throw kids in and yell sink or swim. But that don’t work for grown-ups. We sink or die of heart attack.

Troy’s the cause of us living on the river now, him and his bragging. I should say his bragging and his friend Toby Hunt. Toby’s wife walked off and left him one year to the day after their wedding and moved back East with her family. But not before he left her saddled with twin girls and female problems that will plague her every day of her life. The doctor said she would have been fine if he’d just left her alone long enough to heal up after the babies came, but Toby said he’d done without long enough, which was a lie. Everybody and their brother knew the man was poking any woman that wasn’t tied down – and some that were. Just like a dog, that one. I can’t stand the thought of him to this day, and I don’t know why Troy ever took up with him.

It was back last spring when the river swelled up from the thaw up north that Troy decided we needed to buy us a plot of land along the levee here, where folks say the dirt can grow mighty trees from tiny twigs. It meant giving up our farm and moving closer to town which was not an altogether unattractive idea to me, but the notion of living next to the river with our kids coming up scared me a bit. He said I was just overreacting because I can’t swim and have a natural fear of anything deeper than a bathtub. He said it would help me get past it, and he badgered me for three solid months till planting season rolled around, and it was either then or never. So we packed up and moved every last thing we owned from our farmhouse to this place all hiked up on fourby-fours.

You might have noticed coming up the steps the water marks left by the river’s swell that just recently backed off. Can you smell it? Smells like a compost pile around here, all the bushes and undergrowth drowned and decomposing. But listen to me go on, when all you wanted was to know was how that child nearly drowned out here last week.

I guess you already know it was a Bradshaw – Cobie Bradshaw – and three years old.

They live a little further up the levee there, just before you get to Buckhorn Bend. That’s where the Bradshaws have been for a hundred years I’m told, their property on the city side of the levee now full up with family graves. Never met any of them till last week, though, and that was a mighty sad basis for a first meeting.

That morning Toby had come over to see Troy, and the two of them take off down a river trail with their fishing gear. Toby don’t keep a regular residence, just bounces around from place to place till they boot him out or get a bit too serious for him. He’s what you might would call a charmer if he had decent teeth, but most

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women overlook that because of his hard-handsome good looks and wavy blonde hair – especially if he plies them with enough whiskey. He dropped out of school at sixteen and ran the streets till the law told him to either join the service or he was going to the pea farm. So he joined the army, but that didn’t last long. Six months in, he fell off the back of a transport truck and fractured his leg, and they discharged him. When he got back home, he bounced from job to job, living with his mama, till he landed the one he wanted at the saw mill. That’s where he met his wife, but a lot later. In between, he spent his time with lots of other girls here in town.

Anyway, along about noon that day, here comes Troy traipsing up the trail all by himself with a stringer of white perch. I didn’t bother to ask him where Toby was. To be frank, I didn’t much care. But he later told me that Toby ran into an old friend of his, Dirk Bradshaw, and he left the two of them jawing up at the Bend. To my knowledge, Troy was the only real friend Toby ever had, and I found it peculiar Toby knowing Dirk Bradshaw. I ask Troy about that and he tells me Dirk came along a year after them in school and Toby used to come home fishing with him sometimes. Like I said, I grew up in the sticks and still don’t know many people around here.

After I get Troy his lunch, I set off on my walk to town. I love to walk the levee, so beautiful in the spring with the jonquils trailing along and throwing off sweet smells.

At the bend – Buckhorn Bend – I usually stop and rest a while, but in all this time I’d never seen a Bradshaw come up out of the river bottom. Not till last Wednesday, the day they almost lost little Cobie. While I sat there resting my feet I could hear voices off in the distance, but I couldn’t make out a word. I suppose one of them was Lisa Bradshaw because I definitely heard a woman’s voice. It sounded like arguing to me, but it was muffled and I couldn’t make it out – just loud voices was all.

Pretty soon, the arguing stopped and I continued on my way. I must have gone about a hundred feet when I spied Toby Hunt charging up the river side of the levee and down the other. I don’t think he saw me coming, and I sure didn’t yell to him. I was just surprised he wasn’t headed back toward our place where Troy was sitting there waiting for him. Like Troy says though – he’s unpredictable.

By the time I get my shopping done in town and reach the same spot coming home, there stands Lisa Bradshaw on the levee-top wailing and screaming like a banshee.

With both arms full I can’t move too fast, but I manage to reach her before she collapses.

“My baby!” she’s screaming. “My baby’s gone!” One of the cars driving by takes notice of the commotion, pulls over, and rushes up to offer help. By now I’m afraid for the other children she’d left unattended at home and I run off down the driveway to their place.

And sure enough, there on the sofa sits her young daughter, Hope, clutching her twoyear-old brother like I’m going to take him away. I quickly ask her where her daddy is, but she’s too scared and upset to answer me.

From the wide back porch I can see all along the riverbanks clearly, and I yell in both directions with all my might. Nobody yells back. My motherly instinct took over at this point and I run off through the woods calling wildly for little Cobie and then Mr. Bradshaw again. When I finally reach the river’s edge, a short man in a straw hat is just sitting down on the bank with a cane pole. I ask him if he’d seen a child wandering around or Mr. Bradshaw, and he says no to both. Then, I no more than turn around to leave when he yells back to me: “Look there!” He points at something in the water some twenty yards away, something yellow caught between the willow branches that drag in the current. And that’s when it hits me hard and deep – my horror of dark waters. I freeze stiff for what seems like a long time before I realize the man is trying to get my attention

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again. “It’s a body!” he yells. “It looks like a body.”

The man is right. Purely out of reflex, I do something I never thought I’d see as long as I live. I wade out up to my very neck straining to pull that body to shore. I can feel the current testing my legs beneath me and just about to sweep me away when the stout little man grasps my arm and hauls me back in – empty-handed. By this time, though, here comes Lisa Bradshaw and a handful of help. Two of the younger men jump in with their clothes on and work the branches till the body is freed.

It is not until we get it landed that we realize it’s Toby Hunt – along with another, tinier body zipped inside the front of his shirt jacket. Poor Mrs. Bradshaw goes down a second time at the sight of the two of them so blue and lifeless. I work furiously trying to give mouth-to-mouth like I’d seen it done a dozen times on the television. I work on them both – but mostly the child – till an ambulance team finally arrives. I try my best to save that poor child, and I guess I did some good because the ambulance driver finally manages to bring him around.

The best anybody could figure was that the boy had wandered off and fell into the river and Toby Hunt came along and went in after him, clothes and all. It was Dirk Bradshaw that proposed it first. He’d gone into town when it all happened, he said. We never would have found the bodies if they’d gotten swept off through the locks and dams.

Troy – bless his heart – said later he was proud of me for getting over my deep fear trying to save his friend Toby and that poor child.

After things settle down a bit, it occurs to me to ask Troy why Toby didn’t come back here that afternoon. I tell him about seeing the man charging over the levee from the Bradshaw place, and he just reminds me one last time how unpredictable Toby could be. Troy thought he’d be right along behind him, he says, after they ran into Lisa Bradshaw coming down the trail. She’s Dirk’s whole life, you know, and a very attractive woman, too, despite her deformed leg. Her daughter, Hope, and the two-year-old look just like their daddy and all the Bradshaws. Little Cobie, though, is the handsomest thing, with the thickest shock of blond hair you ever saw.

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Davis

Little Scientists Pamela M. Davis On Sundays our Mother, who lapsed long ago, delivered my brothers and me to the First Church of Christ Scientist, and promised she’d be back in an hour.

We sat straight in stiff-backed chairs at dark wood tables, eight year olds stuffed with a God too big for our heads, spooked by the words omnipotent and omnipresent, jealous of our Methodist pals and their playmate Jesus vibrant in coloring books.

While they planned pageants, we bent to the Bible and Mrs. Burrell, who said pain was all in our heads, though our bottoms hurt and the day was half gone. At home Grandmother read the Sunday lesson, her knuckles knotted with flame, and refused even aspirin, convinced to the end that death was just a misunderstanding.

O’Garden

Hook in the Heart Irene O’Garden easy it enters steady now rocking from the dock to the ribby chipped unbailed bottom of the don’t forget the tacklebox the coppertone the pipe tobacco two pairs of shoes full of feet a steady canvas gummybottom pair two twirling bumptoed keds bronze-red upturned outboard sleek as a Zippo as his Remington shaver paddle dip paddle dip tipping the propellor in the gasoline rainbow spreading on the surface of the pull and the pull like a lawnmower cord and the mixmaster buzz and the gurglechurned duckweed shoreline treeline timeline shrinking in the sightline shadowbottom clouds the tremendous clouds in the breezeblue sky and the snap of the sun on the wake on the waves we make as we fly through the watery way to a shadowy bay “looks promising today” holler over the outboard motor noisy as another set of siblings persistent permanent clamoring yammery finally stops and the anchor drops ploosh easy it enters

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lapping water softly tapping reeds tackle’s metal melody plunge in the bucket slithery wriggly minnows as lively as fingers hook him under the dorsal fin so he can swim the keds curl the pierce of the hook in the heart clickety whizz of the casting reel ploop of the bobber red and white and red and white reflected great wide glassy lake of nothing to be done circling settling silt haloes round our shadows on the water skeetling skeetling redyellow flash blackwing scratch of a match crackle of tobacco draw through the stem the flute blue sigh wind through pines dragonfly easy it enters shadow twist light love twist loss twist

Jacques

Looking Forward to the Seventh Inning Stretch Rob Jacques I hate this game and Mom knows it, Picking up and fingering the rosin Before flinging it back on the mound, And Dad gives her the sign, she nods, Rears and lets go with a sinking curve I should have seen coming from birth.

That was the first inning of my life, And the second and the third, But now I’m away in college And it’s professors who toss heat, Sarcastically sneer (or is it snarl, And does it make a difference?)

As I swing for the fences and foul Pitch after pitch after pitch.

And now, suddenly, it’s the fifth At work and my bosses toss junk That breaks away or in or down And I look stupid swinging at air, The catcher a jackass peer who acts The clown with stale comments On my awkward, productionless Attempts to hit even a single sale.

And I’m in my unemployed sixth Before you know it, loosely packed And moving back home, and look!

Mom’s coming out of the bull pen, And Dad again, grown gray and fat, Strapping on worn catcher’s gear Grumbling, fumbling with a mask, Arthritically crouching, once more Calling for Mom’s galling curve.

I call time! She can’t pitch again!

She left this game in the third!

She’s through! But Mom spits, Stares in for Dad’s cryptic sign.

“Son,” she says, rearing back to fire, “On my home field, rules are mine.”

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Zydeck

Killing Time Fredrick Zydek The enemy within always keeps close quarters. We are more enthusiastic about wisdom than forgiveness, he and I. His logic is more reluctant than mine. I do not know if he is chased by death or by the sun. I walk on egg shells either way. He’s a gate-crasher with the perfect escape clause.

He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m his shield against the devil. I keep an ear to the ground and my eyes on his silent places. He’ll treat time like spare change if I let him. I keep telling him life is not a rehearsal, that he’s living in the scariest place in the world. Nothing fazes him.

He looks at his watch, tells me he’s seen it all before, that I’m a fool if I wait longer than 15 minutes for anyone, and that includes my dentist.

Goity

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Still in Kansas Roland Goity

L

eonard Bonner stood outside his office that morning and stared at the scuff marks on his loafers and the poor tailoring of his navy polyester slacks. He spit at the base of the building wall before he muscled the key in the lock and turned it with such force he was lucky it didn’t snap in two. Then, he flipped the sign on the window as soon as he stepped inside—he was now open for business.

The day would likely be spent filing and phoning and not actually selling. He’d be happy, in fact, just to generate a few leads. Property insurance sales had withered for years now. After the meat packing plant relocated to a Wichita suburb, the agro-giants arrived and snatched up and consolidated the area’s family farms. Now big box retailers a few exits down the highway led to the demise of Sundale’s mom-and-pops. Jobs were lost everywhere. Leonard was sixty-two, an age at which he once planned to retire. Now with his business suffering, he knew retirement would wait at least five years.

He thought about the letter he received from his old friend Don a few weeks earlier—their first correspondence in a decade. The envelope was stamped, “Par Avion,” and sure enough Don and his wife now lived in France, in Bordeaux. Don wrote that they were spending their twilight years “drinking the best cabernets on the planet.” He invited Leonard to join them anytime on even the shortest of notice.

Don’s gone all “laissez-faire” Leonard thought to himself before pulling a contact list from a nearby drawer and dialing mindlessly on the phone. He called half a dozen prospects before reaching anyone. “Uh, hello, is…uh...I’d like to speak with Harvey Jackson please…”

“It’s JACOB-son not Jackson, can’t you read? And no, he’s not here,” a haughty young man barked. The response caught Leonard off-guard and he nearly dropped the phone in his lap. “God, I’d hate to be you,” the fellow said, “selling whatever you’re trying to sell. You don’t sound up to it, old guy. Get another job before you go broke.”

“Oh yeah?” Leonard shouted, red in the cheeks. But all he heard was a dial tone.

He couldn’t figure out the youth of today. Even Emily, the one joy in his life, was drifting further away, and was now prone to dissent. Take Old Man Kennedy’s suicide the week before. She claimed it was due to the impending loss of his farm, and so-called financial “ruin,” when everyone knew he’d never been the same since his wife left him that spring for another man. Leonard believed Emily thought too much. And listened too much to that new boyfriend of hers, Robbie Voskuhl, the kid from Oregon.

But there was another reason Emily slowly slipped through his grasp. Leonard knew he still hadn’t quite come around since the day Millie died, a fact now going on many years. It was why writing back to Don had been difficult. There were things that were too painful to relate, like life without Millie. Even changes in Sundale. When he and Don were in school it was a slice of American pie: a quaint little town of soda fountains, car-hops, and Friday night football games—including those many decades before when Don caught the bulk of his touchdown passes. But now, somehow before his eyes, the town had become unrecognizable. Strip malls, seedy bars, fast food chains and billboard signs for the new Hummer dealer constituted “progress.”

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Leonard didn’t go into details about any of it in his letter of reply. He knew Don wouldn’t understand. Their lives diverged right after high school, when Leonard signed up for duty, the one time he actually left Kansas. He spent two years in a village outside of Berlin prior to the Vietnam War. Don went off to college then got married and became a publishing executive in New York City. Don never considered Sundale in the idyllic sense that Leonard did. He’d probably blame the town’s misfortune on the presidential administration, the way he seemed to blame it for everything else in his letter. The syndicated talk show host on the AM dial to whom Leonard listened called those like Don disparaging but clever names that usually gave Leonard a chuckle. So now, while Leonard looked fondly on their past, he didn’t much relate to his old friend’s current style of living.

That morning Leonard managed to make at least a dozen more calls and actually spoke to few folks in the process. They were a friendlier lot than the rude jerk from earlier, and he even convinced one elderly woman, who sounded like she had a frog in her throat, to upgrade her policy. He then organized and filed the leaning tower of papers that had rested in his inbox for more than a week. But quickly he grew weary again; he hadn’t been sleeping well of late. He felt his droopy eyes and sagging jowls, and recalled looking like a bloodhound during his morning shave.

Leonard kept his office open forty hours a week, but except for the mail carrier, on most days no one passed through the door. The market just wasn’t what it was, and most of the friendly residents who poked their head in to say hi over the years no longer lived in town; they’d filtered out to other parts of the country. Also, he was aware that people claimed his disposition had soured, and knew that fellow shopkeepers and passersby often sought to avoid him. The office’s solitude often brought moments of reminiscing and wafting thoughts—like now.

He stared at Emily’s photo on the desk and a warm glow filled him. Emily. She had her mother’s high glistening cheekbones, milky-white skin, and strawberry blonde hair. Best of all, she had her mother’s laugh: a trumpeted giggle that usually followed a mischievous smirk. Leonard thought it a cagey form of laugh, one that let you—and only you—in on some secret. He was proud that Emily was shaping up to be Millie’s spitting image.

When he’d met Millie, she was barely eighteen and he nearly twice that. When they later married, she told him how she wanted to leave Sundale, leave the plains altogether. For years she suggested they move to the coast; she particularly liked the idea of living at the edge of the Pacific, liked the idea of raising Emily there. The day of the accident, their anniversary, they shared a bottle of white wine at lunch and she brought it up again.

Leonard shook his head and told her uh unh, that they couldn’t leave their lives behind just like that. But then he rose from his chair and kissed her on the lips. Millie seemed to fight back tears, yet she said it was okay, just as long as she still had him. Her eyes twinkled from the sun lining in through the shutters as she ran her fingers through his hair and said he was the one and only thing she really wanted. He could still see Millie’s rosy smile as she drove off afterward to the market. It was an image he’d never forget.

Leonard dabbed at his eyes from the recollection, then gathered some papers into his briefcase. He decided to head home for lunch, and figured he just might work the afternoon from home, too. He wanted to be there when Emily returned from school.

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*** “Daddy,” she whispered, gently shaking Leonard by his shoulders. “Time to wake up.”

Leonard, reclined in the La-Z-Boy, snapped out of his catnap feeling hot; his undershirt clung to his back from sweat. “Emily,” he said, turning in embarrassment.

“Must have dozed off there.” He looked at the German wall clock above the bookshelves and saw it was well past six.

“Sorry, I’m late,” she said. “I’ll get dinner ready. Spaghetti okay?”

Leonard nodded as he rose for the bathroom where he planned to splash cold water on his face.

Emily worked quickly in the kitchen, a maestro amid the pots and pans, the steaming water and brimming sauces. Before Leonard finished scanning the nightly TV listings, they were seated for supper. Between bites, he asked Emily about school and she told him things were going well. She described what they were learning in each of her classes and mentioned her expected grades, which were good; she was right there at the top of her class. Then Leonard asked about her plans for the weekend.

“We’re gonna do trail work at the reserve on Saturday.”

“You and Robbie?”

“Me, Robbie and a few friends,” she said. “Then on Sunday we’re distributing flyers.”

“What does that mean?” Leonard asked.

“Flyers, you know, about all that contaminated waste being dumped at Appleby Lake.” Emily leaned halfway across the table, her sweeping hairs nearly mingling with the noodles on her plate. “It’s way out of hand,” she said quietly, as if passing along topsecret information.

“It is, huh?”

“Yep, and people need to know. So we’re going to plaster the windshield of every car and truck while everyone’s in church.”

Leonard spun his fork in his hand, gathering a ball of spaghetti in the tines. He wished his glass of red table wine was something stronger. He remembered when Emily was younger and wanted to be a nurse. Now she set her sights on Congress. More and more she enjoyed a heated debate, and was even starting to call into question his political views and the values on which she’d been raised. Robbie’s influence, Leonard was sure.

He was glad the boy was a year older than Emily and planned to hightail it to a university in the fall. Mr. Voskuhl had taken on a local environmental project as a consultant, and the whole family would be gone in about a year in any case.

Emily was like good old Don. Well-intentioned but misguided. They were the types who mistakenly think they understand the ways of the world, the ways of human nature. The kind apt to get on their high horse one day and never get off.

After a quick dessert of Rocky Road ice cream and Oreo cookies on the side, he joined Emily in the kitchen and offered assistance in cleaning up.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind. You work hard to put the food on the table. It’s the least I can do to clean up afterward.”

“Come on,” Leonard replied. “What can I do to help here?”

“Nothing, really. I’ve got the kitchen covered Daddy.”

“If you say so, honey,” Leonard said.

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“One thing, though,” Emily said, just as he geared up to return to his beloved La-Z-Boy. “It would be nice to have some more dinner options around here. Spaghetti, grilled cheese or meat loaf is getting pretty old. I can come up with something creative if you add to the grocery allowance.”

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled, but Leonard didn’t like what she implied. While Emily scrubbed a pan under a running faucet, he stepped so close to her warm water sprayed him as it splashed off the sides of the pot. “I’m doing what I can,” he told her through nearly clenched teeth. “Times are tough; we just need to buckle up.”

Emily shut off the water and dried her hands on a nearby towel. “Times aren’t tough for everyone,” she said. “The executives of mega-corporations are raking in record salaries, and oil companies are profiting hand over fist.”

Leonard stared breathlessly as her hazel eyes sharpened, her freckled brow creased. She soon upped the ante with specifics, explaining that while the unemployment rate grew higher and higher, U.S. companies were rewarding their CEOs with a pay scale ten times that of what European CEOs made. Leonard, searched for words as he tried to debate her points, but it wasn’t easy without the facts he needed before him. He never liked engaging in the specifics; he just knew what was right. It was learned through experience; part of being an American, understanding the concept of “one nation under God.” Knowing the meaning of real values; the ones taught by scripture, hard work, and common decency, not by political convenience.

Soon it seemed to Leonard that Emily was just regurgitating Robbie’s words.

She paced about the kitchen in circles, and shouted, “We shouldn’t have to live like this!

But you make it so, always supporting Neanderthal groups and politicians that only care about themselves and their cronies.” ”Stop it, Emily, stop it,” Leonard said. She’d gone over the line and he hoped to quell her diatribe once and for all. He felt dizzy, overwhelmed, as if on a roller-coaster ride that wouldn’t stop.

“Face it!” she said. “We’re victims of your own making.”

Before he knew what happened, Leonard struck Emily, delivered a roundhouse with an open fist. The first and—he was certain—only time he’d ever done so. A dire sense of regret hit him immediately. She looked at him with glazed eyes that bugged from their sockets. Then her tears began to flow. Leonard clenched his chest and felt his heart palpitate as it never had before. Or had it stopped completely? He couldn’t really tell. He looked at a sobbing Emily, unsure whether to beg her forgiveness or beg her to call 9-1-1.

In the end, he did neither. He simply slumped to the floor and rested against a bottom cabinet, staring at the grooves in the yellow linoleum tile. He gathered himself moments later—the ticker okay—and stumbled into his room, leaving Emily alone in the kitchen with only her tears. He awoke, hours later, clothed and on his bed. When he switched on the bed lamp he noticed a note pinned to his pillow. It was an explanation from Emily about how she only said what she had because it mattered so much to her, that she didn’t want to hurt him but felt he needed to hear it. She ended by writing that she loved him and always would. And that she’d already forgiven him for what he had done. ***

“My folks would love to have you join us for dinner some night, Mr. Bonner.

They don’t know many people out here.”

Leonard, out on his porch with Emily and her boyfriend on a Saturday

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afternoon, gave a blank expression, as if Robbie spoke in a foreign tongue. But the young man’s parents had indeed already invited him to their home. First by phone a month before, and more recently in person, when he met Mr. and Mrs. Voskuhl at the school fundraiser. Leonard guessed Robbie—and Emily—knew of the invitations.

Emily, in a bright tube top and pleated jean skirt, folded her arms and smirked at his reticence, so Leonard offered a change of subject. “Well, what do you think about this great state of ours, Robbie? You and your family like it out here?”

Leonard heard Emily snicker and saw her glance at Robbie. Robbie was well groomed and smartly dressed in a button-down polo shirt and khaki slacks, though Leonard fixated on Robbie’s sandals and the tiny stud in his ear. Even so, the kid was well mannered and knew more than a thing or two; Leonard wouldn’t begrudge him that.

“It’s alright, I guess,” Robbie answered finally. “But I’m a West Coast type of guy, Mr. Bonner. In September I’m off to Oregon or UCLA; it’s down to those two.” He paused as if expecting congrats, but Leonard never flinched, so Robbie said, “My Mom’s finding it tough; the novelty of living here is gone and now she’s pretty much goin’ bonkers.”

“That so?” Leonard asked.

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “And if it weren’t for Emily, I might be too, Mr. Bonner. I might snap and do something really stupid. Like drop out of school and enlist.”

Robbie gave a friendly grin, perhaps thinking he’d spouted words of endearment. Leonard muttered to himself and felt his forehead bead with sweat. He started to head inside but thought better of it, only to turn and see Robbie reach over and slap Emily’s behind with a casual familiarity, and Emily widen her eyes and loll her tongue in response.

“So Daddy,” Emily said, draped over Robbie’s back like a cape, her hands cusped around his neck, “We’re off to meet friends for a barbeque and bonfire out at the lake.” The pair backpedaled down the wooden steps and away from the house.

“When will you be home?” Leonard shouted, after they’d opened the doors to Robbie’s pickup.

“Late,” Emily finally answered over the hum of the engine from her passenger seat, as Robbie turned the truck around. “Don’t wait up!”

Tires kicked gravel as they sped out of the driveway and out to the county road.

Leonard spotted a backpack Robbie accidentally left behind, a metallic blue one with embroidered stickers that said “Green Day,” “Soundgarden” and “Sonic Youth.” It lay under the porch swing by the edge of the deck. Without much thought, Leonard decided to paw through the pack—it was left on his porch, so he considered it fair game. Inside the main pouch he found a cotton sweatshirt scrunched up against a spiral notebook and a science fiction paperback. But once he unzipped the pack’s outside pocket he knew they’d soon return. In fact, they were probably already turning the truck around at that very moment. Inside the pocket were a pack of condoms, cigarette papers and a tiny Ziploc bag containing what had to be marijuana. *** Two weekends later, Robbie was out of town and Leonard and Emily were out on the porch again. They passed around a plastic yellow pitcher and poured iced tea into pint-size glasses after washing the Bonneville together. Leonard felt unusually tranquil that warm afternoon. He leaned back in the Adirondack with a smile, and swirled the ice

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cubes in his glass like a wine connoisseur with a fine Pinot Noir. For a moment it felt like the good old days; he could almost imagine Millie out there with them.

Feeling good, Leonard sought to pick Emily’s brain, and perhaps provide a little parental advice while he was at it. He mentioned to her the latest in what was now an ongoing series of letters with Don. How his old friend had criticized the current American know-how, thought the citizens of the country had become too complacent—no, not complacent, the word he used was…compliant. Don suggested the French were more open-minded than Americans, even New Yorkers.

Emily sucked in her cheeks and brought a finger to her chin in concentration.

She ambled about in circles before remarking, “I got to meet this friend of yours someday, Daddy. He sounds very perceptive.” Leonard felt foolish for bringing up the subject, especially now that Emily went on about the usual—how corporations were continually calling the shots and how the working class was left at the wayside. “It’s true,” she said, “Just read the papers. The big corporations lay off middle class workers in droves and outsource jobs overseas and investors eat it up. Their stock prices are soaring!” Emily announced theatrically. “And the oil companies! You wanna know what the oil companies are up to?”

“Let’s talk about what you’re up to,” Leonard said suddenly, surprising himself.

“What you’re up to with that boyfriend of yours.”

Emily offered a nervous laugh, hemming and hawing, and Leonard actually enjoyed watching her squirm. She tangled a few strands of hair nervously in her finger as she blushed and turned away. Within seconds, she gulped down her tea and poured herself another.

Without providing specifics, Leonard told her that he knew what she and Robbie were “doing these days,” to which Emily’s face burned several shades redder than her hair. For a brief moment, Leonard wore a victor’s smile as he sipped away at his tea, but Emily quickly regained her composure. She returned to the porch bench and looked out at the road as cars passed by. Then she swung her head back around at Leonard at told him that she loved Robbie, that he made her see things in a whole new light.

“Grow up, Emily!” Leonard said, waving his hands haphazardly. “He doesn’t care a wit about you. He’s getting the hell out of Sundale as soon as he can. He’s not our kind of people.”

“He’s not your kind of people, Daddy,” she screamed. “You know, you’ve never been the same since Mama died. You think everyone still thinks the way you do.

Well, the world’s changing and you better get used to it.”

“I know enough to see that he’s using you,” Leonard said hastily, the rare mention of her mother, of Millie, spiking his blood pressure.

His eyes met Emily’s and he felt her unspoken defiance like never before. He didn’t react as she grabbed the keys to the car that were left by the wash bucket and made her escape. As she spun the car around, the thought of Millie exiting the driveway on her fateful drive intervened, and gave Leonard a shudder. He rubbed his palms together, as if he were a shaman preparing to deliver words of spiritual wisdom. But there was no one to speak to, and he had no words to say. So he hung his head and headed inside. *** Hours later, a highway patrolman called. He had spotted a smoking vehicle after its dissection by a telephone pole hit at high speed. At first, Leonard couldn’t fathom the

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news: that the license plate confirmed it was his car, and that the young woman behind the wheel had died on impact. The sound of the man’s voice and the words he uttered seemed entirely surreal. Leonard dropped the phone and let the line twist and dangle, even as the patrolman’s voice still echoed forth. He recalled one thing the man said: “You’ll be required to come down to the morgue to identify the body.”

Leonard never thought he’d feel worse than he had upon learning of Millie’s death, but he was wrong. On that day he had Emily to turn to. Now he had no one. His mind was awash in anger, guilt and sheer bewilderment. Why did God test him so? He scoured his medicine cabinet after pulling a dusty bottle of bourbon from the kitchen shelf. But he decided to forego the pills and didn’t open the bottle either. He just went to the bedroom and threw himself on the bed.

Perhaps ironically, the first person to console Leonard was Robbie. In Sundale news spread fast, and the Voskuhls discovered the truth of the tragedy not long after Leonard. They broke the news to Robbie in the car that night after picking him up at the airport. Their son showed up at the Bonner’s doorstep well past midnight and knocked and knocked and knocked despite the lights being out. Leonard finally opened the door and Robbie looked like Leonard felt, a complete wreck: his otherwise handsome face a ruin of bloodshot orbs, cheeks crusted in dried tears, and mucus streaked above his upper lip. But a certain tenderness shone through Robbie’s reddened eyes as he opened his arms for Leonard to sink into. As Leonard hugged Robbie he felt the young man’s pain, his loss. Right then he knew that Emily had meant just as much to Robbie as she had to him.

Leonard paid for the service, but with no one to invite, let Robbie handle the invitations and the logistics of the proceedings. Scores of people lined the pews, as there was an outpouring of sympathy by much of the school’s student population; Emily was well liked. And many of the town’s older folk appeared, too, especially Leonard’s fellow churchgoers. After the service, outside on the church’s steps, they told Leonard that no man should have to lose his wife the way he did, and suffer the same fate years later with his daughter.

Through it all, Leonard realized the people he felt most comfortable with were Robbie and his parents. After receiving the obligatory condolences from all in attendance he joined the Voskuhls at their home for coffee. *** The bouquet of carnations smelled as sweet and lovely as her hair always had when he kissed her goodnight after reading her to sleep. Leonard placed them at the foot of the headstone and read the inscription again, as he had every week: Emily Danielle Bonner. Beloved daughter of Leonard and Millicent Bonner, and angel to all. Born June 27, 1987. Died April 29, 2004. May she rest peacefully in God’s hands.

He’d already set a bouquet at her mother’s headstone alongside. Emily’s was the plot he’d planned for himself, when he’d return to Millie. Never in a million years did he think it’d turn out like this.

An entire year had passed since Emily’s death. To Leonard it had passed in a daze. His insurance business was better, to be sure. Not because economic activity was picking up, or anything he’d done, but because of the community’s response to what had transpired. It was their way of letting Leonard know they understood his suffering and wouldn’t forget him. He appreciated the support, though he considered the way he received it just a hair above groveling.

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Leonard ruminated on Emily every single day, just as he still did with Millie. As he watched the evening news from his rocker, he’d swear he’d hear the doorknob turn.

He’d swing his neck around, and expect to see Emily. Afterward, he’d turn off the TV and go into the bedroom, where he’d pull out old photo album and pore over them. When he closed them shut, he’d kneel on the hardwood floor and pray.

Often, he’d think of Robbie. He’d come to really like and respect the young man, if now only from a distance. Even after Robbie had gone off to college the previous fall, the Voskuhls persisted in their invitations to dinner. Initially, he’d shied away, but soon he found himself accepting their offers. Leonard enjoyed his visits there; they’d tell him about their favorite activities back home, in Oregon. About all the hiking they did on Mt. Hood. About their salmon fishing trips at the mouth of the Columbia River. About their frequent jaunts downtown. They weren’t hesitant to discuss current events either.

And they asked his opinion on things, too, even if he was rarely up on the latest. He always enjoyed the table talk and respected their views; he sometimes even agreed with what they said. They were good people, Robbie’s folks. Fate had linked them all together.

But they were gone now, too, having recently returned to Portland. He supposed he’d still hear from them—the occasional postcard or letter—but those would taper off, he knew.

They always did.

Except in one case, at least. Don had recently written a beautiful and uplifting poem about Emily and her spirit, based solely on what he’d garnered from their correspondence over the past year. Recently, Don had apologized for the tone of his prior letters, explaining that he never meant to put Leonard ill at ease, but that he was worried about the direction of the country and in some small way wanted to voice his concern.

Don was on Leonard’s good side again, and some of his reasoning rang true. Don reminded him of Robbie’s parents, the kind of people he hadn’t always warmed up to, but whose company he now enjoyed. Second-guessers. Leonard chuckled for a second at the idea that he, too, might soon be a second-guesser. Emily would be proud.

When Leonard left the cemetery, he stopped for gas halfway home. Across the road he could just make out the jungle gym in the lot of Sundale Elementary. He remembered the times he left work early to surprise Emily as she waited in the bus line for a ride home. He’d park in the corner of the U-shaped lot right. Right before the bus pulled up, he’d hammer on the horn and all the kids’ eyes would look his way. Emily would be embarrassed at first, but when she’d shut the door her bright eyes and cheery smile would tell him everything he could ever know. They’d soon visit the pizza parlor, catch an afternoon matinee, or do whatever she wanted.

Leonard put the nozzle back, screwed the gas cap on tight, got in and started the car. Then he rolled in at ten miles per hour into that same school parking lot. He hopped out feeling good; a gentle wind blew through the warm Sunday afternoon. He headed for the playground, for the sandbox.

When Leonard got there he kicked off his shoes and slid off his socks. The bottoms of his feet smarted for a second, but then the sand he unearthed below cooled them as they dug down deeper. Anchored, he reclined, knees up, until he was flat on his back. Leonard stared at the sky and its wispy clouds. He grabbed handfuls of sand and let them sift through his fingers. He thought of Millie and remembered all those heartfelt conversations about where she hoped they’d someday be. And now, here he was in a sandbox, still in Kansas.

He soon imagined Emily, playing right there so many years before. Right where he now lay. Beautiful young Emily—the shine of her freckled cheeks.

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Then another thought came to Leonard, and a warm, disorienting flow coursed through his veins, the same feeling the sodium pentothal gave him the time he underwent the knife. He remembered that awful day he struck Emily, and he realized his greatest wish of all would be to go back in time and change things. Put that striking hand inside his pocket before ever making a move.

Leonard slithered his arms out through the sleeves of his t-shirt, lifting the shirt and bundling it so that the whole thing rode up around his neck. Then he drew scoop upon scoop of sand until it meshed with the gray hairs of his chest and covered his belly. He closed his eyes and listened. With some practice, passing cars sounded like the lapping waves of the Pacific.

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Allegretti

Nocturne for Edith Piaf Joel Allegretti The accordionist, the gigolo, The pugilist surely knew: It all came down to the lights – The footlights that fawned over Your delicious agony. The lust lights Of Place Pigalle. The chaste lights Of the Cathedral of Sacre Coeur.

Mais non. It came down to the heart.

How it fractures like a thrown vase, Like a lover’s airplane for which the sky Has no further use. How in breaking It is more of a heart, more than a heart.

Non, rien, rien, Non, je ne regrette rien.

We smoked a Gauloise in your honor.

We danced the Apache in your name.

How we envy you, Mlle. Gassion.

You had no regrets. But we do.

Smith

Grieving with the Statues Richie H. Smith (Preface) 1. my boy squints in the Floridian sun

next to victims in effigy, sculptures molded from the same material

that lined the ovens 2. he comforts two other boys

jarred from their parents eyes braised blue-green

tears of corroded bronze copper fingernails sharpened from clawing

the cement bunker,

defiant

and stained, it distinguished

another rainy Thursday morning

from oblivion

(Epilogue) a crisp admission ticket

cold and papery like the tattooed skin

of shivering ancestors, one guaranteed appearance on a pedestal,

in this garden

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Jaeger

Words are all I Have Lowell Jaeger and not enough without you here to read me as you do by the tempo of my boot heels as I enter the room, slope of my shoulders, square of my brow.

Translatable angles of a half-smile. Eyes lit or dimmed in a lie.

Or the invisible magnetic arc between us as we orbit each other, brush teeth, dress, preen. Sparks out of the blue as we cross paths in a doorway and one of us steps aside to let the other through.

Or touch. The best nights bridge moon-rise till dawn, my chest pressed into curves of your spine, our limbs inter-laced, our greedy/generous wide-eyed flesh.

The pleasures of each other’s body so near at hand. Unbroken nights I love best the smolder of snuffed candles, the unnamed perfume of nakedness. How my tongue still savors you, as we burrow under pillowed down, the ache of exhaustion loved away.

Now the heat rises from us half-dreaming.

We can see with eyes closed.

Aglow in black space, stars burn.

No more words. Nothing to say.

Which I recount for you thoroughly with a kiss low on the neck. And you so elegantly reply in just the twitch of finger tips against my thigh.

Higgins

One Spark George Higgins After dinner my Wall Street lawyer friend left me near the subway chamber underneath a latticework of scaffolding, thick-gauge plastic and yellow hazard tape.

My friend James had given me instructions.

It’s just a matter of time before it happens again.

While sitting on a bench, waiting for the train to take me through the tunnels of Manhattan, I let the subway doors open up.

The train, a catheter of sorts, inside an artery, was leading to the chambers of the heart, a living organism where my friends were waiting in a midtown bar.

Supple, flexible, the train car probed and sparked and penetrated.

This train, a coil of wire, a boomerang, an index finger pointing, a handkerchief waving good-bye, passed through the twisted rebar, passed by my face reflected in that sunken hole.

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Lee

Gate 32 Terminal B Eleanore Lee “Travelers should go about their plans confidently, while maintaining vigilance in their surroundings.”

--Transportation Security Administration

Even when you’re just starting out It’s called terminal.

And it is—what with its rows of sculpted silver seats And dutiful travelers murmuring on cell phones Under the TVs’ jabber and drone.

At the terminal We wait and listen to broadcasts and bulletins— Delta Flight 550 has begun the boarding process.

Departures and arrivals, Notices and warnings.

Forbidden items include: knives, spears, scissors, Mace, explosives, guns, and toxic substances.

God knows, at flight’s end . . .

Well, that’s terminal too.

The plane nosing in to the gate, Slowly opening slowly emptying.

Then we wearily file down blank corridors, Dragging our bags and kids To find our way to Baggage Claim and Long-Term Parking.

Unattended baggage is subject to search, inspection, damage, and removal.

My latest flight Was out to see my mother at her nursing home.

How many more of these trips will I make?

To see the rows of waiting waiting old women. No men left.

To walk the long halls supporting her.

Lee

To eat creamed chipped beef and Jell-O salad To hold her hand.

Then on to the cab, the highway, the airport again.

Bottled breast milk is permitted, after special inspection at Security.

Inquire at the terminal.

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78

Heyer

A Bit Thin and Slippery to Hold Gretchen Heyer

H

e was in love with my voice, the story I told: the woman who sat by his bed while he waited at the cusp of life and death.

The idea of love can kill as well as cure. Didn’t Charcot talk about that? And Freud—now there is a man who should have figured it out. Not me. At least not who I was in those empty hours after midnight when the page from Renal ICU yanked me from a maze of dreams, propelling me into the corridor where I blinked into overheads and began to walk.

In those years I climbed the religious hierarchy, a hospital chaplain with a goal of being seen as good in the world, on the side of grace and godliness. Never mind that good and grace and godliness have more to do with perception than anything. Never mind I had already lived enough of life to know something about that. My footsteps thudded in the carpet of those deserted corridors as I reached to fasten my skirt, wiped the sleep from my eyes. If the woman I was had known what waited in front of her, she might have prepared herself with various theoretical explanations, such as the way falling in love is a search for that long-ago gleam in our mother’s eyes. It’s a merger in pre-oedipal depths, a longing that depletes us by locating all the energy outside. From the Romantic age onward, we have polished our love illusions and kept them sacred, removed from scrutiny.

At least these are ideas I now entertain from time to time. They’re easy enough.

When students of the mind seek to explain the unexplainable, we so often look to childhood. Those injuries have already been inflicted, and are therefore unavoidable. My explanations offer a way to shield myself from who I was to him. They save me from responsibility. As if love doesn’t alter body chemistry in a measurable way, a way that can save a life—or end one. *** Lights of the Renal ICU had been dimmed to a briny blue that matched the dull whir of machines. I dragged a chair to his bed and tried not to cough. I thought about putting my hand over my nose, but to indicate to anyone—no matter how sick—that I found his stench offensive, or the stench of the machine or his leg bag or maybe the sheets themselves—that did not feel like a kind or compassionate thing to do. I took another breath and caught my hand before it made it to my nose. People who work with dialysis get used to the urine odor. I was not one of those people.

Around us ICU beds lay bathed in the sea-colored light with blankets tucked neatly below the pillows. His was the only bed with a person in it. A nurse with skin so pale she must never move during daylight studied my face from the nursing desk. I scooted my chair back, and went over to her.

“You don’t look like a chaplain,” she whispered The lines around her eyes wrinkled up, as if she wanted to say more and hoped her words revealed what never made it to air. I touched the corners of my mouth, checking I’d put my lipstick on my lips and not beside them. It’s difficult to be sure of such things in the middle of the night. I had agreed with supervisors and boards and

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committees to wear those square official-looking suit jackets to camouflage my breasts, but I wore high heels and lipstick. Everywhere. All the time. I even wore lipstick to swim, and would have worn high heels if the chlorine wouldn’t ruin them. Bright red lipstick was my flag of femininity, my announcement of freedom from all the black suits of supervisors and boards and committees. Now here I was with chlorine-blonde hair and lipstick. Hell, I must have looked like I was trying out for a part.

I pointed to my identification badge, as if it exonerated me.

The nurse nodded, and swallowed quickly. She said he’d asked her not to call his parents in, or friends. She said she’d called me—the on-call chaplain—but she hadn’t asked him first.

“I don’t want to be alone with him when he dies,” she whispered. “He knows.

They always know. But it doesn’t have to be Kevin’s time, not yet. He’s almost to the top of the donation list. He could fight, you know. It wouldn’t take much. He just doesn’t want to.”

Perhaps I should have left then. The patient hadn’t asked for me after all. I had showed up where I was unwanted by the one I had come to see. I could have mumbled something trite and found my way back to the windowless call room. Or at least I should have engaged the nurse, leaned over her desk into the spotlight of her halogen and asked if she got bored with only one patient to monitor, that kind of thing.

Kevin’s eyes were closed, but the eyelids quivered. His dark hair had been cropped close to his face. He had a strong chin, thin nose, thin arms, and his skin with that yellow tint of inside systems shutting down.

The phone rang, and the nurse reached for it. “Paged the attending. Not that he can do anything, but I have to let him know.”

Kevin’s eyes jerked open, watching me. Silly, this farce we played. He had the largest part in it and there we were, acting as if he didn’t know his lines. I walked back to him and sat.

“The nurse says you’re dying.” It felt truer to say it. Niceties never veil things long enough for them to disappear.

“Do you have to be so blunt?” His voice was thin, not quivering, but not firm enough to be sure of.

“We all get there sooner or later, and she says you know it.”

He closed his eyes. “Her name is Janice. She’s ok.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Why?” He barely mouthed the word.

“You might want some privacy, I don’t know. It’s a personal thing. She said you didn’t ask for me.”

“Aren’t you going to pray or something?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Do you always ask so many questions?”

I didn’t know what to say to that because I probably did. Questions were my antidote to a habit of assuming things. At least I knew enough to know that I needed an antidote. Or at least sometimes I knew that.

“What would you pray for?” he asked.

“What do you want me to pray for?”

“You’re pissing me off.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s a trick or something. You’re supposed to piss me off and then I’ll get up

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enough energy to live or something.”

“I’m not trying to piss you off.”

“Well then, don’t pray. But if you don’t pray, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Sit here, I guess.”

“You’re not going to pray in silence or some bullshit?”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Good. Stay then. But talk. I don’t want to lie here wondering what you’re thinking. You could be praying for all I know. I can’t stand that. Just talk. Talk about yourself. Tell me about you.”

This did not prove difficult. I talked about myself for three hours and forty-five minutes. Maybe more. It’s difficult to be sure of such things. I told him of my own years close to death; the way colors were more brilliant because I knew they were soon going to end. My parents were missionaries to Africa, different countries, different languages, and everywhere the same blue and white VW bus for us to drive, the same huge eyes staring at me to say how little I really knew about the world, how much I had to learn.

Childhood self-pity felt foolish next to other girls my age who were married with kids and maybe husbands who beat them.

“I took it personally,” I told him. “The whole missionary thing. It felt fake—I mean, I felt fake. I had more food, more clothes, more water and books and electricity—it was ridiculous the way I willed myself to die. The Africans had more of something else, something I wanted and didn’t know how to get. They had each other and joy—no, joy isn’t the right word. I’ve never been able to find the word—but they had it and I didn’t.

After a while, my mind turned on me, like it wanted to eat me up or something. It turned on me so slow so I didn’t even notice at first. My hair fell out. My feet swelled up. All the doctors said there was nothing they could do; I was going to die.”

He reached towards my hand. I took the thin parchment of his fingers between my own and held them tenderly, as if I could warm them, make them firm and resilient again.

I told him about being dragged to an African healer who had the kind of power I glimpsed only distantly, who was in touch with forces beyond me. I told him how my death felt like a mockery to her, and how I couldn’t do that. But now she was the one who was most likely dead with all the killing that went unseen by the rest of the world. I cried as I told him.

He said life happened that way at times, that he was glad I met her. He said he knew it was harder to live than to die.

The day shift nurses began to walk past the clear glass windows of the ICU, peering in on us, the chlorine-blonde chaplain wiping her face while the patient who did not die held her hand. Somewhere beyond the walls of the hospital, dawn broke. ***

A nurse from the day shift called down to the chaplain’s offices the next afternoon to say the chaplain with the lipstick was being asked for Renal. The nurse said the chaplain’s office should put an ad in the paper for miracles. That Kevin Minz was being transferred to a regular unit that afternoon. That he credited me with his life.

Miracles are a bit thin and slippery to hold. Besides, I was a young 28, with not much of an idea how to hold a miracle or anything else. I remember my age because it was the same as Kevin’s. Maybe it was our common age that caused me to believe I had

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some right to wade into areas of his life where I had not been invited. Although I’d never invited the African healer into my life. She showed up. She changed me. And if we all stood around waiting for invitations, where would we be? Besides, there is nothing new about an idea changing the course of a person’s life. Long before Kevin or I there was the Delphic oracle, and some great length of time after the oracle, Charcot used hypnosis and suggestion to demonstrate that an idea effects cures—temporary cures, to be sure—but the problem is not always in the muscles or stomach or kidneys or intestines—the problem is an idea, and when countered by another idea, the patient can be cured. *** Flowers arrived. Bright crushing drops of tulips and irises. My boss brought them to my office and glared down at me.

“It’s against regulations to receive flowers from a patient.”

“I didn’t know they were coming or I would have stopped them.”

“What did you do to the guy who sent them? You did something.”

I pleaded ignorance. I had only talked and held Kevin’s hand. I pleaded innocence of the way I reached out to him with a story of my own dying, calling him back to life

“He says he’s in love with you,” my boss said. “That’s the message he left with the secretary. He’s in love with you, and he’s going to die if you don’t return his calls.

Tell me exactly what you did to him.”

“Nothing.”

He looked at me from the feet up, the kind of look that itemizes details in order to record them and use them against you. I felt glad for the jacket. In the future I would wear glasses to hide my face. But not give up my lipstick. Or my high heels.

“Ignore the calls then,” he said. “Unless you want to lead him on, more than you have already.” *** What we believe changes everything, or nothing at all. No one talks about this, except for curt commands to “think happy thoughts,” as if such thoughts can be willed into being. No one mentions the bloody battle to grab that elusive happy thought, the effort of holding it tight, not letting it squish away, how all this exacts its toll on the nether regions inside. No one so much as whispers that a happy thought might not be enough. A lot of living has to fall into line to make the happy thought work. Someone else has to give a damn, maybe even try to understand a bit.

Charcot’s cures never lasted. His hypnosis bypassed too much, a kind of short cut. His patients went right back to whatever he had pried them away from when he left them. Looking back on myself, it’s embarrassingly obvious how close this was to what I did with Kevin, what I participated in. In his analysis Freud took the long way around to make the killing ideas available to normal consciousness. The long way worked better. Although, not much that Freud did is completely scientific; as in repeatable, as in verifiable.

The fact that an idea can kill as well as cure fits no equation. It cannot be itemized in books. It bears no argument because it won’t be pinned down. It hangs just beyond us, a mystery that is as much a part of all those blood vessels pulsing though tissues as it is about the sperm hitting the egg or breath stopping. We’re not exactly

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unified beings: a Freudian understanding, or simple common sense if we look at it close enough.

I took the short cut. I fell in the camp of bypassing too much in those hours between waking and sleeping, between life and death—those hours with their own kind of trance. No wonder Kevin fell in love with me. Love is a hypnosis. It changes the length of days and weeks; it alters the value of money, of time. It takes us to the brink of nothingness and lets us go.

Perhaps I misuse the word ‘love’. Love implies Kevin knew me, that there was more than the mirage of connection. It implies a real occurrence flared between us, not a fabrication that could float a soap commercial, or cast a sheen on the glossies of a celebrity. I was not who he saw me to be. But is it only possible to fall in love with a person as she is not? The line between Kevin and me—between you and me—that line is none too clear. It seems in some way translucent.

I did not return Kevin’s calls. He called five, ten, maybe twenty times. I acted as if we had never met. I told myself anyone could have sat by Kevin’s bed. He could have fallen in love with a goat that sat there.

Although a goat would not have spoken to him with the shapes of other beds waiting like coffins in the dark. A goat would not have used her voice as a rope to haul him from one side of the abyss to the other. She would not have held his hand with the thin parchment of his skin rubbing between her fingers.

My boss was an excuse to keep me from Kevin’s calls, an excuse that mattered as little as career ambitions with their prerequisites of the political game, or discomfort with Kevin’s smell. If I tell the truth—I was afraid—terrified of the energy between us, a force I had not intended, not willed into being, a power I did not know how to manipulate or understand. I did not return Kevin’s calls because I did not know what would happen.

Would I become entwined in his life? Then what? I dared not know that love brings with it a responsibility to someone other than oneself. *** A month later, maybe two, his mother left a message.

“Car wreck, an accident by himself,” his mother said. “He was driving alone in the country and ran off the road into a tree, a freak accident. I’m sure he would have wanted you to know. He thought so much of you. He talked of you constantly. He said you were coming to visit someday. I’m sorry we never got around to it.”

Kevin’s mother did not say, ‘You are responsible. You called him back to life and let him go. Dropped him.’ She did not say, ‘You should have been with him, or at least called, and there would have been no accident.’ She did not say any of this, but I know.

Perhaps at such moments we finally meet ourselves. And then someone else’s idea blows it all away.

Lewis

Voicemail Deborah Lewis You call me from a remote fishing hole somewhere in Wyoming, leaving a message on the machine here in Wisconsin, where listening to it a third time I still can’t understand a word, lost in a stream of static and trout, except for love and miss you a lot, which is all I really need to know anyway.

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84

Davis

Mortician’s Daughter Pamela M. Davis My parents talked death at the dinner table. I was ten.

Dad sliced the roast with the same care he used to straighten a dead man’s tie or brighten him with Fleshtone #3.

In his navy suit and white shirt, he looked like all the other Dads dropping kids off on their way to work, except he drove a limo and taught me to sing The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.

After school I climbed in the caskets displayed in a row like shiny new cars, squealed when the room went black, knew his hand was on the switch.

The day I came upon a girl my age with pinked lips and perfect yellow curls, I reached to touch but Dad pulled me back, Don’t worry, he said, nobody’s going to die soon. He did not know the warped white cells had already taken hold.

At sixteen, I passed his coffin in my new black dress, gazed down at his face arranged with someone else’s smile, his body folded and neatly boxed.

I brushed his cheek with my fingertips.

Shapiro

In Your Sleep Rochelle Jewel Shapiro you still live in the apartment carved from a rundown mansion long ago smashed by the wrecking ball.

Your middle sister, whom you haven’t spoken to in 23 years, is asleep in the twin bed next to yours, her long hair waving over the blanket like a dark river.

In the living room your oldest sister sleeps on the pull-out couch since you got too big for your crib, and she hates you for it.

Your dead parents are snoring behind the closed French door with the crystal knob and curtained panes. You’re still glad that in their sleep, your parents don’t holler: Drop dead to each other or I’ll live to dance on your grave. Your little brother, whom you will hate because you’ll have to take care of him every day after school and on weekends, isn’t in your mother’s womb yet. The neighbor lady who used to be in the Women’s Army Corps, the one who claimed she’d once slept with General McArthur, is still climbing down the fire escape in her see-through nightgown.

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86

Jurkovic

Citizen’s Arrest Michael Jurkovic I have never borne bullshit well But today I’ve zero tolerance.

Bullshit is a quality of life crime And I’m having you arrested!

C’mon, let’s go!

Come quietly or I’ll break your legs.

I’ve had enough of your peculiar logic That frees you from responsibility And dumps it on my front lawn!

I’ve had enough of your crab-assing discourse About how mommy didn’t make Cherry jello on that morning thirty years ago And Oprah’s on in five And your clothes don’t fit and Your husband’s a twit and Your father’s tweed knit Was a hit at the party And your wife keeps IT from you While soliciting IT from the rest of us!

Now I’m not Calvinistic But you’ve got some time to serve.

Always unburdening yourself While using the latest technology As if these things were invented To carry your old story, Your sloppy sagas Of dissolution and demise.

Well Fuck you!

You’re under arrest And the judge is my brother.

Jenkins

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Shouts and Whispers Greg Jenkins

S

tanding at the deep end of the kidney-shaped swimming pool, the odd little man, who seemed reasonably sober even if he wasn’t, had just announced that he intended to walk across the water to the pool’s opposite side, pause, then walk back across the water to his starting point.

His name was Diddle. A short, plump, scholarly type with huge tinted glasses, a button nose and a fluffy white beard, he reminded me of an owl—a mentally disturbed owl. As always, he was fully clothed; on this mild evening he was sporting a stonecolored suit, rumored to be “genuine Italian,” and a pair of gaudy alligator shoes. The shoes were directed toward the waiting water, but he had twisted himself partway around to address his buzzing audience, which was multiplying by the second. He spoke in a voice that was rich and orotund, and he gestured freely and dramatically. He was very convincing.

“Making it across the first time should be doable,” he was saying. “It’s the second part—the walk back—that could give me problems. That’s when my concentration can start to waver. That’s when I’ve gotta earn every step.”

The crowd began to stir; we all wanted to have a clear view of what was about to happen. Personally, I’d seen Diddle do his walking-on-the-water act at least ten times before, but I still found it fascinating. I think the biggest reason I never tired of it was the riveting speech he regularly gave just prior to taking that first fateful step. Slowly and meticulously he would outline what to look for in a solid performance, what signals would indicate he was having difficulty, and so on.

“I always get a bang out of this,” I said to the girl next to me, a glassy-eyed brunette whose tight white T-shirt had been pulled up and knotted at the hem to expose her supple midriff.

“Hey diddle-diddle!” she shouted toward the pool, ignoring me.

“I’m gonna ask for complete and total silence,” Diddle intoned, lifting his arms into a crucifix.

The chatter diminished, though it didn’t completely stop. Much to his credit, I thought, he didn’t seem to mind or even to notice. It would’ve been the perfect moment for a drumroll, but Jack, the man in charge, never had a live band at these soirees, only recorded music.

Facing the pool, Diddle gazed down and out at its broad impassivity, the color of the water deepening now from blue to indigo with the sun’s decline. A gentle breeze caused the water’s surface and the performer’s beard to ripple. He seemed to’ve sunk into a yogi’s trance.

“It’s time,” he said finally. “God be with me!” And we all held our breath.

His right foot came up, went out, then went down again. It struck the water and plunged into it along with the rest of him. Before lurching wildly out of sight, he was able to emit a single piercing yelp of shock and defeat; it sounded as if one of the drunks had tromped carelessly on a puppy’s paw.

The crowd continued to watch, for the most part quietly, with an air of nodding satisfaction as Diddle thrashed about in the water, screaming for help. After a while, two

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or three of us went to the lip of the pool and casually fished him out. He came up gasping, coughing and spluttering, drenched but unhurt. Someone threw him a beach towel. He accepted it and trudged away, his head down, mumbling to himself, leaving behind a heavy trail of water.

Diddle was actually one of the better, more responsible people I ever encountered at Jack’s. ***

It was mid-summer when I first became aware of Jack’s. My divorce had just gone through, and I was out drinking all the time. Beer, schnapps, tequila, vodka, gin, rum, scotch, bourbon, superior wine, inferior wine—I wasn’t choosy. If it had alcohol in it, I’d give it a try. And keep on trying till the world went sideways.

Funny thing was, during my four turbulent years of a half-assed marriage, I rarely drank at all aside from a sip or two on New Year’s; one reason Zita gave for leaving me was my chronic “fuddy-duddyness.” She was always ready to party. Me, I’d come home from a long day at my True Value hardware store, flop down on the couch and open a book: Stephen King, John Grisham, Tom Clancy.

Man, she should’ve seen me now. She wouldn’t’ve recognized me. When I got my divorce decree, I went out immediately—it was early afternoon—kept the decree in one hand and a charged-up stein in the other. I concluded the evening by strolling through a closed glass door whose existence to that point had been too subtle for me to notice.

The cascade of glass singing and shattering all around me made me think of sleet, and I raised my palm in a civilized gesture to check if the weather had taken a turn for the worse.

Matter of fact, it had. Because while my injuries weren’t serious, neither was my resolve to sober up. Instead, I was off and running on what I would later characterize as my Wild Period: a bent, blurry epoch marked by brushes with prickly police, sexcapades with undiscriminating women, fistfights with strange and sometimes bleeding men.

Several weeks and bad decisions into this Period, I had my stout belly pressed snugly against the bar in a dive known as the Bear’s Den. And it truly was a dive; the décor featured mismatched stools, a mud-wrestling pit, a poster of Mike Tyson snarling, and a gun rack. Most of the customers looked like extras in a spaghetti western; I kept a bloodshot eye on them, all right. But mainly I was using the occasion to air out my selfpitying thoughts (which tended to recycle every five minutes or so) by bouncing them off the bartender, who was pretending to listen.

“I don’t get it,” I told him. “I should be happy, but I’m depressed as hell. I mean, we were a lousy couple. Everybody used to say so. Zita used to say so. Even I used to say so.”

“Women,” the bartender said, working a swizzle stick like a tiny pool cue.

“She used to quote Buckminster Fuller to me. You ever read Buckminster Fuller?”

“Can’t say I have.” He stuck the swizzle stick in the corner of his mouth. “Fuller than what?”

“She did,” I groused, skipping over his dimwit question. “All the time, when she wasn’t out running amok. She used to tell me she was a verb. Now what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

The bartender shrugged.

“Then she’d tell me I was a dangling participle.” I took an aggressive gulp of

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whatever I happened to be drinking. “I guess I’ve been called worse, but it was the way she said it, you know? She said it with real contempt.”

Oh, I had the bartender bored out of his skull, I knew that, and on some level I was even trying to bore him. To offend him. I figured if nothing else, maybe I could provoke him into a fight, blow off some of the nagging frustration the alcohol couldn’t reach. But he was a big, brawny dude, almost as big as I am, and I go two-fifty whether I want to or not. So his bulk, not to mention that gleaming gold incisor, was causing me to rein in my full powers to offend. When I went after someone, as I often did that summer, it was usually the smallest someone in the house. I didn’t want a challenge; I wanted an overwhelming victory. I wanted to get the other guy down and just pound the snot out of him.

The bartender leaned into me. His face had the same color and grainy texture as raw beef.

“Look down there at the end of the bar,” he said.

I did, and saw a moist-lipped, chesty blond in a low-scooped top staring straight at me. Her date, a real Gloomy Gus in a pink polo shirt, was seated beside her brooding over the pile of worthless tips he’d amassed on the bar. Neither of them seemed to belong, exactly.

“So?”

“So she’s been making gaga eyes at you all night.”

“Really?”

I looked at her again and this time she winked. I felt a ticklish sensation in my groin. “Gimme a napkin,” I said, “and a pen—quick. I wanna write her a note.”

He went away and came back with a napkin.

“Good.” I snatched it out of his hand. “Now a pen.”

“Look at the napkin,” the bartender said.

“Why?”

“Just look at it. It’s from her. A note. She beat you to it, my friend.”

I held up the napkin and saw nothing. Flipping it over, I saw four words, penned in lime ink, in a swirling, dizzying, almost unreadable hand. The note said Meet me at Jax. ***

Jax turned out to be Jack Palmetto’s place, out on the manicured edge of town.

It wasn’t a bar; it was a private estate—a white, four-storied mansion recently constructed on wooded grounds that seemed to roll on forever.

Jack was a nouveau riche who offered no apologies for his condition. “Beats the hell outa being nouveau poor,” he liked to say. He’d made his fortune in the computer business, founding his own software company, Sof Sel. From what I was able to learn about him, it was probably one of the few things he’d ever done right; Sof Sel took off, went stratospheric. And Jack was free to indulge his fantasies.

Every night that summer he put on a Gatsbyesque party for a few hundred of his closest friends. (To qualify as one of his closest friends, all you had to do was show up and not cause too much trouble.) The parties were played out in what might be called the back yard, a weak phrase for such a magnificent, sculpted spread whose precise extent I never could ascertain. Among its highlights were the pool, a clay tennis court and several terraced flower gardens bursting with yarrow, phlox and lythrum, their cool pastels a welcome touch on a warm night. Dense green bushes concealed speakers that brought us nothing but kooky, New Age music, and red and white maples had been hung

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with dozens of round, orange, humming lamps. Some nights the lamps reminded me of radioactive fruit; other times they suggested stricken moons. Two gazebos had been set up with food, and two more with drinks.

Over time, some pundits would speculate that the parties were Jack’s way of giving back to the community. Others felt he was attempting to make some sort of social or philosophical statement. My own opinion was, he simply liked to get his kicks.

My first night there, not so fresh from the Bear’s Den, I maneuvered cautiously among the many clumps of merrymakers that shifted beneath the mansard roof, the dormer windows, the bracketed eaves. The sheer spectacle of Jack’s had me awed and bewildered. Most of those around me, I could tell, had found better ways of making a living than by running a hardware store. I recognized no one—didn’t even see the young woman who’d asked me to join her.

Unsure of how to proceed, I decided to approach someone and ask. The person I settled on was a short, black-haired man in a blue silk shirt, chinos and sandals. He had his shirt open to his sternum, displaying a forest of chest-hair and three or four fat gold chains arranged in concentric loops. Idling by himself for the moment, smiling contentedly, he had a seigniorial air about him that hinted he might know something. He was swaying slightly to the weird music, drink in hand.

“Say, I just got here,” I assailed him. “What do I do?”

“How’s that?”

“Am I . . . Do I sign in or what?” I didn’t sound overly intelligent, even to myself.

The man looked at me appraisingly. “You got a written invitation?”

“Sorta. Somebody gave me this.” I showed him the napkin.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” He laughed uproariously for an unpleasant length of time, his gold chains quivering. “First time I ever saw a real invitation,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “Jack Palmetto. This is my show.”

“Harry Brinkman.”

“Larry, good to meet you. You’re a super guy, right? I can tell just by digging your vibes.”

“Well, I—”

“Larry, what you do here is frankly whatever you wanna do. Within reason.

Your responsibilities are minimal. Enjoy.”

He was turning to leave when a coppery girl in a black string bikini fell— deliberately—into his arms. Despite her obvious drunkenness, she was a stunning creature, lean and exotic as a cheetah. Jack seemed unimpressed. She tried to ask him something, something about a Ferrari, but the dual problem of her drunkenness and his restlessness wouldn’t permit it. He nudged her aside briskly with his forearm. Then, almost as an afterthought, he tilted back in my direction and said:

“Larry, you want her?”

“Want her?”

“Yeah. You can have her if you like.” He gave me a pearly smile.

“To do what with her?”

“Why, whatever floats your boat.”

It seemed a generous offer. I glanced at the girl, who sneered at me.

“Maybe some other time,” I said.

He nodded indifferently and again started to leave, the nearly nude girl clinging to his arm.

“Jack,” I spoke up, “what can you tell me about that one?” I had suddenly

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spotted the mysterious blond who’d sent me the note.

“Which one?”

“Under the weeping cherry tree. With the three guys.” I noticed that none of her companions was the chump I’d first seen her with.

“Ah. Connie. Sexy lady. Want me to fix you up?”

I couldn’t help it: I had to laugh a little. “I was just wondering if you could tell me anything about her.”

“She’s a mink,” he said shortly. “You’d love her.” He paused for only a second, licking his lips, peering at her with tepid interest. “She’s my wife,” he added. ***

I soon became a regular at Jack’s, more so than I was at any tavern, at my hardware store, or even at my own disordered house. My reasons for going there were foolish but irresistible, with free drinks, free eats and free—or at least cheap—women topping the list. On a deeper plane, I guess, I went there to savor the tacky kinship of all those whose values were as diseased as my own. I went there for the decadence and degradation that I craved in the way a junkie craves white powder. I went there so often that eventually Jack began to get my name right; so often that Connie and I finally did meet, only to learn that a passing acquaintance with her husband was all we had in common. I went there so often that my daylight hours ceased to exist, and my nights blended together into one long and ragged night, filled with shouts and whispers and laughter and booze.

I met some curious people at Jack’s. Some one-of-a-kind oddballs. I’m sure each of them affected me in various ways, but I’m equally sure I don’t want to analyze what those ways were.

There was Diddle, of course. The messianic Mr. Diddle, who made such a splash with everyone . . .

And there was a particular woman who was unforgettable. I never did catch her name, but privately I gave her a name of my own: The Crawler. The woman, whose coif was always impeccable, whose attire was always swank and immaculate (except through the shin area), and whose firm manner called to mind movie great Joan Crawford in her later years—this woman never walked in my presence. I was with her twice, briefly, and on both occasions she crawled. What’s more, she scooted around with extraordinary speed and agility, as if crawling were her natural means of locomotion. Like Diddle, she didn’t seem drunk especially, but then how else to explain her being down there on all fours? I tried to talk to her on our second meeting but without success. She branded me “pushy” and crawled away from me, toward the tennis court, at a speed that would’ve humbled the most energetic two-year-old.

Then there was the tall, portly fellow who always showed up wearing a stovepipe hat, a fake black beard and a pinstriped Yankees uniform with the number 3 stitched on the back. He billed himself as “Honest Babe.” Some nights he would discuss somberly and eloquently the necessity of keeping the Union whole. “It is our sacred duty,” he’d insist. On those nights he’d remember my name and everything about me.

Other nights he’d curse, tell ribald baseball stories and help himself to superhuman quantities of Jack’s superb food: great uncompromising fistfuls of oysters and clams, southern fried chicken, decorated baked ham, beef with horseradish sauce, oyster beignets, Italian sausage rolls, barbecued spare ribs, herring in sour cream, goose liver pâté, salmon on black bread, countless canapés heaped with cheese or caviar. . . . On

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those nights he’d seem not to remember me whatever, and call me “kid.”

Still another eccentric made it a point always to arrive by air: he would leap from the wing of a small plane and parachute to Jack’s. One night he landed in the pool just as Diddle was doing essentially the same thing. A shouting match ensued in which each man accused the other of trying to upstage his act.

I must’ve seen at Jack’s every night-nut in the area with the exception of my ex-wife. Zita I never saw. Rumor had it, however, that she was no longer in our area: she was studying economics at Berkeley, writing poetry in Mexico, dallying with a federal judge in some ritzy suburb of Washington. . . . It didn’t much matter to me. Whatever slender attachment I’d once felt for her had faded with the summer, which itself was starting to fade. Emotionally, I was left with a smoldering, red-black residue of anger and resentment; it was subsiding now, but would not quite be extinguished despite the liquids I poured on it.

“So you’re happy, then,” Connie asserted late one night as we chatted under a maple tree. The ocher light from a nearby moon-lamp gave her splendid face a jack-o’lantern tint.

“No, I wouldn’t go that far,” I said. “But I’m working on it.”

“Oh, but you are so happy.” She moved closer to me. “I can see it in your eyes—in your mischievous brown eyes.”

A breeze was blowing between us; it felt crisp and cool, and I could sense the change of seasons coming on.

“I like happy people,” she said. “Happy people are sexy people.”

“An interesting equation.”

“Would you like to go to bed with me, Harry? Right now?”

I truly didn’t. Long before this interlude, I’d seen her with too many others— even with Jack, once in a while—and she’d lost some of her sheen, in my mischievous brown eyes.

I told her I was flattered.

“Have you ever heard of kinesics?” she asked.

“No.”

“It’s the science of body language. My body is sending you an intimate message this very second. Can you read what it’s saying?”

“I’ll figure it out later,” I hedged. “Right now, my body is sending me a message. It’s telling me I better find a restroom.”

I turned away from her and walked up toward the house. ***

When I went inside, I discovered that the guests’ three designated bathrooms were occupied. One of them, in fact, was grotesquely out of commission, with Honest Babe tossing his cookies and everything else in the general vicinity of the toilet—he was clearly in the Ruthian half of his cycle—and an elderly, blue-haired lady sprawled snoring in the bathtub, her dusky rose dress hiked up around her withered thighs.

So I decided to venture upstairs. The upper floors were off-limits to guests, but tonight I felt like ignoring the restriction. I’m not sure why. Actually, I doubted I’d make it very far—I figured I’d probably set off one of those security systems you read about, with lights, sirens and armed guards all coming at me at once. And maybe I wanted to do just that: get caught, get hauled off to the police station in a paddy wagon. Prove, even in the face of incredible competition, that I was the most pathetic clown of them all, the

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blue-ribbon bozo. . . .

But nothing happened. I slogged up the dim steps, tottered down the dim hallway, and not a damn thing happened.

Without much trouble I located a bathroom, used it and was set to leave when suddenly something did happen. From up the hall, I heard a whimper. It was a sound of utter despair, soft and weak and human.

Had I been slightly drunker, or slightly less drunk, I wouldn’t’ve done what I did—I went searching for the person who’d made the sound. In the dimness I came to a door, ran my fingers over the smooth cool surface of the wood. Waited. From inside the room came another whimper. Silently I turned the knob and pushed open the door.

“Hello,” I said.

The room was awash with pale moonlight. There were two dressers, a closet, a herd of stuffed animals staring hushed at me from a couple of shelves, a few vague pictures on the wall. A personal computer on a pint-sized desk, and a tiny chair to go with the desk. A bed. And in the bed, face-down, crying into a pillow, was a girl. The girl, who could not have been more than six years old, was about the size of my right arm.

“Hello,” I repeated.

She lifted her head and blinked at me but didn’t speak. Her eyes looked like a pair of rain puddles.

“You OK?” I said.

“No.”

“Whatsa matter? You sick?”

“No.”

“Have a bad dream?”

“No.”

“Thirsty?”

“No.”

“Well, what is it? Why’re you crying?”

She sat up and studied me. Her face was round, and her sandy hair had been cut in a pixy shag. Swarming across her pajamas were colorful splotches that I eventually determined to be cartoon bears.

“Because,” she said finally.

“Because why?”

“Just because.”

“Well, it’s two in the morning. You’re supposed to be asleep.”

She crinkled her nose at me.

“You Jack’s kid?” I asked.

She nodded. “And Connie’s too.”

“You want me to go get one of ’em?”

“No. No, thank you.” Then: “What’s your name?”

“Harry.”

“I’m Crystal. You can read me a book if you like.”

“I can what? Read you a . . .”

“Book. You read books, don’t you?”

I ran my hand over the stubble on my jaw. “I used to.”

“Then you can read one to me.”

“Awful damn late for books.”

“Pleeeeeeeeeease?”

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Feeling large and awkward as a bulldozer, I approached her bed. “If I read you something, will you go to sleep?”

“Yes.”

Next to us, up on one of the stuffed animal-guarded shelves, was a row of Dr. Seuss books. I was inclined toward The Cat in the Hat or Green Eggs and Ham, my own favorites from when I was a kid, but Crystal wanted to hear If I Ran the Zoo. The moonlight alone wasn’t adequate for reading, and I was about to snap on a lamp, but she advised me not to—down in the yard, the light would be noticed. Instead she turned on her computer, whose monitor gave off a cold nebular glow.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I opened the book. I was relieved that the lettering was bold enough that I could decipher the words. With as much drama and whimsy as I could muster, I read to her:

“It’s a pretty good zoo,” Said young Gerald McGrew, “And the fellow who runs it Seems proud of it, too.”

“But if I ran the zoo,” Said young Gerald McGrew, “I’d make a few changes.

That’s just what I’d do. . . .”

When I finished, a series of drunken shouts drew us to the window. The view was panoramic, green fading into gray fading into black in the distance. Beneath us, their numbers thinning, the night crew milled about. Though they were doing the same things as usual, it was momentarily interesting to watch them from this new angle: their patterns, their posturings. In front of a gazebo, Jack was groping two women at once, one with each hand. Behind the gazebo, Connie was wrapping herself around another man.

Many of the others were drifting toward the pool, where an inspired Diddle had once again convinced himself—and perhaps some of his listeners—that he could actually walk on water.

“Hey,” I whispered. “See that funny man? The one that looks like an owl? He’s gonna fall in the pool.”

“Diddle,” Crystal said. “I know. He’s stupid.”

I thought about it. “I guess he is.”

We pulled away from the window and I put her in bed and covered her halfway with the sheet. “You get to sleep now,” I told her. “Doesn’t do to be up all night.” I kissed her on top of the head. Her hair smelled like flowers.

“Where you goin’, Harry?”

“Home.”

“You could sit with me for a while.”

I could, and I did. She snuggled into her pillow and closed her eyes as predictable noises arose from outside the window: a yelp, a splash, a sarcastic remark, a bray of loud laughter. Neither of us moved.

Within minutes she was fast asleep. I turned off the computer and continued to sit with her, watching her breathe, allowing my head to clear. I was trying to remember what I’d dreamed about when I was that young.

Lowery

Embrace Joanne Lowery The Master of the Universe went to Wal-Mart and bought a ten-dollar bubble machine.

Asteroids came out instead, but we lived in the Milky Way, plenty of space, and they floated like the real thing, reflecting rainbows of starlight. NASA and the Enquirer told us that someday one big one would get here and splatter itself worse than soapy translucence.

The date looked like something we had never thought of, a kind of Tuesday.

So Monday nights we practiced standing in our backyards with open arms begging.

Oh beautiful end, a miracle the postman will be too slow to catch when it toddles from a high window.

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Jacques

Only For Self-Defense Rob Jacques He carried poems, not for pleasure, But as weapons. Naturally, he took A safety course on their sane use, Their operation, the mechanisms By which, like loudest lightning, They discharge dangerous fare Straight into the heart, the brain.

Against all advice, he sent poems To children, let them learn to aim, Squeeze triggers, feel firsthand A stanza’s heft, textured rhythms Of hand-tooled lines, feel surprise Of fresh insight, gunmetal cold, Logic like nickel-plated steel Warning them, cautioning how The hammer coming down fires An image, a metal-jacketed idea For sudden drama, caught breath, Eyes widening with surprise at Portents of a skipped heartbeat.

He joined the rabidly activist Poetry Society of America, Their feared lobby protecting The First Amendment. He read Their tracts, effective in stopping Government licensing of poems, And he secretly hid in his attic Volumes by Whitman, Yeats, Sam Hamill and Wendell Berry Just in case. He’d be ready.

Jacques

They say one moonlit evening, Cleaning a tome of Carl Dennis, He accidentally pressed his finger On the hair-triggered profundity Of a poem pointing right at him.

The thought, going off with a bang, Hit him between his eyes, lodging In his frontal lobe. From then on He understood why governments Prefer the contented metrophobe.

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Daniels

The Carport Couch Gannon Daniels She thought that she could tolerate for a while—let them finish her apartment just over the carport someone had abandoned a couch she knew exactly where they lay imagined two strangers making their way home after a night finding a dream they could gristle without exposing dirty dishes or an unmade bed touch arms around their lives no papers just a way a moment maybe undeclared but her tolerance had a register the noise was annoying they were men she was tired so in her bathrobe she managed her way to the scene and coughed and coughed then spoke they looked up guys, she said it’s, I can hear everything oh, very polite oh, sorry embarrassed they covered things became two single people again as she turned away they smiled cordially at each other, no words perhaps she was a welcomed uninvited guest and so they went tucking, buttoning down the driveway and vanished one toward 20th the other 21st.

Mohammed

Bow Wow Wow Zorida Mohammed Before the dew is dry on the doob grass, the Indian women meet. Three or four of them sit in the breezeway under the upstairs house, their orhnis askew, as babies suck at homely breasts, breasts without any trace of having ever been anyone’s fancy or lovely thing, but hanging now heavy with purpose, elongated milk pods jutting in and out of babies’ mouths.

Their eyes quiver with disapproval at any child who dare approach as they talk “big people talk” and show off the mysterious black and blue marks that appear overnight on their child-worn bodies.

In knowing tongues, they talk of Soucouyant and steps to be taken to ward off the artful bloodsucker who takes off her skin to become invisible.

At night, open scissors could be hung on mirrors to be mistaken for a cross.

Salt could be sprinkled on the boundary of yards to sting her from entering.

If her skin could only be found, salt would be rubbed in, leaving her forever in limbo.

Some people thought Bow was the Soucouyant, but she had no teeth.

“Bow Wow Wow,” my mother would call, and she’d answer, “How youh doin’ Shira?”

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I don’t know how she got stuck with Bow; her name was Iris.

She and her mother lived in a little falling-down dirt house set back from the street.

Vines and trees had overtaken the yard, which, except for the path, seemed pristine and unhabited, like Eden before anyone was evicted.

Unexpectedly, she married Farley.

He was always busy and tired-looking.

He was never off his bike, his tools sticking out behind him.

There must have been a time when Bow could walk, but I don’t remember it.

Her legs did not bend; her bare feet minced forward, in a ballerina shuffle eminating from her hips.

She stopped frequently.

Sometimes, she peed.

At first, she pretended it wasn’t happening, then went past leaving a wet trail in the dirt road.

She was always pulling weeds for Ma and Pa Jordan’s pigs.

One day, taking the short cut, she caught her foot and fell flat on the bamboo bridge.

She kept lying there picking up grains of rice, PLAIN BOILED RICE! that had spilled out of a little brown bag.

She clutched the bag

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like a coveted flower.

The rice were full of sand, but she kept putting them back in through the bottom of the busted bag.

She begged me not to tell Farley.

It was such a small amount I wondered where God was.

I got her to her feet and was wondering what to do when she shuffled away, leaving me with the bag and the scattered rice.

I glanced around, snatched the bag and ran from the rice in the street.

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What to Do Randall Brown

I

wondered if the old woman collected stray children as one would cats. So many children, the rhyme went, she didn’t know what to do. The picture of the shoe showed a playground built into the shoe’s tongue and happy face after happy face going down the slide, peeking out the windows, leaning against the heel. In one window, bread seemed to be cooling. But there was no bread, only broth. How plump and round the artist drew them! Each of those so many children she whipped soundly. The rhyme really said that. I didn’t understand soundly but imagined it be like a stick against skin, or the stick against the air on the back swing. This verse haunted me at night, my mother out and my father crying like a kitten in the room next to mine. My mom had only one kid and didn’t know what to do. Her shoes made the tiniest tap up the stairs after my father had fallen off to sleep. She never once looked on in me to see if I were there, even if I coughed or sniffed real loud. She slept soundly, until noon. I counted the children, the bowls of broth, each thwack of the old woman’s switch until it felt as if I were among them. At the end, when she put them to bed, I could imagine them happy, I really could.

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Contributors Joel Allegretti is the author of The Plague Psalms (2000), now in its third edition, and Father Silicon, chosen by the Kansas City Star as one of the 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in River Oak Review, Confrontation, Margie, Porcupine, descant, The Laurel Review, and more. He resides in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Richard Bailey’s poems have appeared in several literary magazines, including Amoskeag, Concho River Review, Euphony, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Madison Review and Mudfish. His short films, Diogenes and Tropic of Oz, were shown in festivals across the country. He is presently at work on a series of plays about mysticism and crime.

Ruth Berman’s “His Father Overseas” grew out of working on Dear Poppa: The World War II Berman Family Letters (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1997), and the v-mail letters my then-five-year-old brother sent “Poppa.” Her poems and stories have appeared in a variety of general and literary magazines and anthologies.

Joey Brown’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in a number of journals including Argestes, The Chaffin Journal, Quiddity, Rhino, Front Range Review, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Story South, and The Florida Review. She is a professor of writing at Missouri Southern State University. “Geography Lessons” is part of her collection Oklahomaography.

Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph’s University and holds an MFA from Vermont College. Work has appeared in Quick Fiction, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Evansville Review, Upstreet, and others. He is the author of the award-winning collection, Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008).

Susan Howard Case is a former English teacher who devotes her time to reading, writing, and leading workshops. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, The Ledge, Peregrine, Primavera, The Sow’s Ear, and Small Pond Magazine, and is forthcoming in Eclipse and Red Cedar Press. Her chapbook, Blown Roses, has been accepted for publication by Puddinghouse Press.

Katherine Lien Chariott’s has been published in literary magazines including Columbia, Sonora Review, Hungry Mountain, New Ohio Review and 580 Split. She received an MFA from Cornell University, and a PhD from UNLV, where she has a Schaeffer Fellow in fiction. She lives in Shanghai. “Last Night” is part of a collection of short stories set in Las Vegas.

Gannon Daniels lives in Echo Park in Los Angeles, California with her husband and two boys. Her first book of poetry was published by GaltArtHouse in 2001. This poem is dedicated to Mo Jennings.

Pamela M. Davis lives in Santa Barbara, California and was a freelance writer and editor before returning to poetry. She is working on her first chapbook, Taffeta Casket. Her

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poetry is forthcoming in Red Cedar Review. As a poet and essayist, Pamela is inspired by dead French poets, overheard conversations, tricks of memory, and hiking the flammable hills close to home.

Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and received his MFA from San Diego State University. His stories appear in Fiction International, Scrivener Creative Review, Bryant Literary Review, Watchword, Talking River Review, and several online publications. Currently, he is editing a literary anthology on rock music and culture.

A Louisiana native, Dixon Hearne teaches and writes in southern California. His work includes stories in recent issues of Cream City Review, The Louisiana Review, Big Muddy, and forthcoming in Louisiana Literature and Puckerbrush Review. He recently received an Editor’s Choice award for short fiction, and his latest short story collection, Tethered Hearts, is forthcoming from a university press.

Gretchen Heyer’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Sulphur River Review, the Florida Review, Harvest, and Quadrant. She is the recipient of the Mayborn Conference prize and the University of Houston Barthelme prize, both in nonfiction. She lives in Houston where she works as a Jungian Analyst and is completing her PhD in creative writing.

George Higgins is a public defender in Oakland, California. His work has appeared in or will be forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2003, 88, Pleiades, Fugue, Inch, Poetry Flash among others.

Born in 1943, Rob Jacques grew up in New England, earning degrees in English from Salem State College and UNH. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam Era and worked as a technical writer for the federal government. His poetry has appeared in several literary journals. He currently resides on Bainbridge Island in Washington.

Lowell Jaeger teaches creative writing at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana. He has published two collections of poems. Several of his poems are forthcoming in The Iowa Review and The California Quarterly. Currently, Jaeger serves as Editor of Many Voices Press and is busy compiling New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from western states.

Greg Jenkins resides in Maryland, where he is Professor of English at Garrett College.

He is the author of three books: Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Adaptation, Night Game: Stories, and Code Green, a novel. His fiction has been published in numerous journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Tampa Review.

William Jolliff, professor of Writing and Literature at George Fox University, grew up on a farm outside Magnetic Springs, Ohio. His poems, articles, and songs have appeared in many journals, including Southern Humanities Review, Northwest Review, West Branch, Passages North, Sing Out! and Studies in Short Fiction.

Mike Jurkovic is co-director of the Calling All Poets Reading Series, Beacon, NY & host of the annual Hudson Valley Poets Fest. His poems have appeared/are forthcoming

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in The South Carolina Review, and The Wisconsin Review. Anthologies: Riverine (Codhill Press, 2007), Dyed-In-The-Wool: A Hudson River Poetry Anthology (Vivisphere, 2001).

CD reviews appear regularly in Elmore Magazine. He loves Emily most of all.

Corrie Williams Kentner resides in Columbus, Ohio. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Southern Maine. Her work has also appeared in the Barbaric Yawp.

Eleanore Lee has written poetry and fiction for many years in addition to her day job as a legislative analyst for the University of California system. She has also worked as an editor at Columbia Teachers College and as a stringer for Time. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in CQ (California Quarterly), The Rambler, and River Oak Review.

Deborah Lewis was born in Detroit, Michigan. Since 1982, she has been teaching writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin. She is a graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont. Her poems have received several awards including the New Voices Series Competition in 1992.

Lyn Lifshin’s Another Woman Who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow.

It has been selected for the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines and she is the subject of an award winning documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass.

Jack Lindeman has published two books of poetry, TWENTY-ONE POEMS and AS IF (nominated for a Pushcart Prize). He also edited a book on the Civil War entitled THE CONFLICT OF CONVICTIONS and wrote a book about living on a farm, APPLESEED HOLLOW. His poems have appeared in many magazines as well as in a number of anthologies.

Perie Longo has published three books of poetry: Milking The Earth, The Privacy Of Wind, and With Nothing Behind But Sky: a journey through grief. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Flyway, and others. In 2007, she was appointed as Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA. Joanne Lowery’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Eclipse, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, Atlanta Review, and Poetry East. Her most recollection is Jack: A Beanstalk Life from Snark Publishing.

She lives in Michigan.

Zorida Mohammed was born in Trinidad and works as a social worker in Bergen Couunty, NJ. Her poems have been published in The Caribbean Writer, Folio, Phoebe, Fulcrum, The Oyez Review, and other journals. Poems are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Apalachee Review and The Distillery. Zorida won a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant for poetry in 1991-92.

Jennifer D. Munro’s stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including North American Review; Boulevard; Massachusetts Review;

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Zyzzyva; Best American Erotica; Best Women’s Erotica; Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica; The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image; and Literary Mama.

Irene O’Garden’s poetry has found its way to the Off –Broadway stage (Women On Fire), into hardcover (Fat Girl,) into children’s books (The Scrubbly Bubbly Car Wash, Maybe My Baby) and into many literary journals and anthologies. She has received awards, fellowships and residencies for her writing, as well as an annual listing in Who’s Who in America.

Catherine Arturi Parilla is author of “A Theory for Reading Dramatic Texts,” and teaches expository writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her poems have appeared in POEM, Wisconsin Review, Descant, and Knightscapes. She lives in Alpine, NJ. Laurie L. Patton is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Early Indian Religions at Emory University. Her scholarly interests are in the interpretation of early Indian ritual and narrative, comparative mythology, literary theory in the study of religion, and women and Hinduism in contemporary India. In addition to over forty five articles in these fields, she is the author or editor of seven scholarly books on early India and comparative mythology.

A Pushcart Prize nominee in both fiction and poetry, Penny Perry’s work has appeared in many journals including Poetry International, Earth’s Daughters, Passager, California Quarterly, THEMA, Lynx Eye, and Redbook. She is the co-author of a new chapbook, Maiden, Mother, Crone.

Christina M. Rau is a professor of English at Nassau Community College and the founder of Poets In Nassau, a reading circuit on Long Island, NY. Her poetry has appeared in journals like The Honey Land Review and Origami Condom. She also writes for RealityShack.com, so she can justify her obsession with bad television shows.

Jay Rubin teaches writing at The College of Alameda in the San Francisco Bay Area and publishes Alehouse, an all-poetry literary journal, at www.alehousepress.com. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College and lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Patricia Savage is a wife, mother of five, educator, poet. Her love for everyday life has kept her from making a name for herself but seems to have given her so much to write about. Indeed, a theme seems to be developing: to discover in the most ordinary, the essence of happiness.

Thomas Saya was born in Michigan City, Indiana. He was educated at Indiana University and the University of North Carolina—Greensboro. He has taught English at Miami University of Ohio, and is currently teaching at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN. His work has appeared in The South Carolina Review, Artful Dodge, The Midwest Quarterly, and various other literary journals.

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro’s novel, Miriam the Medium, (Simon & Schuster) was

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nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. She teaches Writing The Personal Essay at UCLA Extension and has published essays in NYT (Lives), Newsweek, My Turn, and in many anthologies. Her poetry has appeared in Iowa Review, Coe Review, Pennsylvania English, and Stand.

Richie Smith is a writer, performer and physician. His work has appeared or is upcoming in Slipstream, Sulphur River Literary Review, Red Cedar Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Ducts.org, The Dos Passos Review, The Texas Review, Mudfish, Fox Cry Review, Distillery, Briar Cliff Review, Pebble Lake Review and Poets Podium. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Kelly Sylvester is Michigan native who studied under Julia Kasdorf at Penn State and Louis Asekoff at Brooklyn College. Currently she resides in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and is completing a Sociolinguistics degree. Her poems published in Beginnings, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Forge, and Words of Wisdom, achieved The Bernard Grebanier Best Sonnet Award and Honorable Mention for The Beatrice Dubin Rose Award.

William H. Wandless is assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University, a teacher of British literature who has returned to writing poetry after a long hiatus. His verse appears or will soon appear in The Cincinnati Review, New Delta Review, The Potomac Review, Bayou, Pearl, and other literary journals, and he has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Todd Whaley has had work published in a number of journals, including Peeks and Valleys and PennUnion. His story “Fearless” was honored as a Finalist in Glimmer Train Stories, while other work was nominated to the Best New American Voices 2006. Raised in Indiana, he now writes and works for an international architectural firm in Washington, DC. Fredrick Zydek is the author of eight collections of poetry. Formerly a professor of creative writing and theology at the University of Nebraska and later at the College of Saint Mary, he is now a gentleman farmer when he isn’t writing. His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Cimmaron Review, Nimrod, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Yankee, and others.

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