Crack the Spine - Issue 174

Crack the Spine

Literary magazine

Issue 174

Issue 174 December 10, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine

Cover Art Resting & Nesting by Karen C. Boissonneault-Gauthier Karen is a Canadian photographer, writer and poet. Karen has shot cover art for Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Zen Dixie Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Journal and has been featured in Artemis Journal, Cactus Heart Press, Dactyl, Fine Flu Literary Journal, The Scarborough Big Art Book, Sand Canyon Review, The Notebook, Calliope Magazine and The Healing Muse to name a few of the creative places she dwells. Follow Karen @KBG_Tweets and discover more of her works on her website.

CONTENTS James McAdams Exit

Michelle Donfrio

Grimace

Elsie Platzer Letters to AK

Elias Keller The Quiet Car

Sanjeev Sethi

Placebos & Cosmetics

Bob Kalkreuter

Goodbye

James McAdams Exit

“The story of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, like the story of any great enterprise, 1 may be told in many ways.”

Beth reclined in the passenger seat with her leg curled beneath her, transferring records of the man in the wheelchair’s medical history and psychiatric evaluations into a Keystone Services binder labeled with the name: JTMCADAMS-.2 She wore long-sleeves to conceal the scars whose origins she’d told Jason about last week, post-coitally, Jason gassing the van along in first gear where the four lanes' traffic converged near the Exton exit, signs promoting Lancaster’s “Traintown U.S.A” and the upcoming rest stop in Lebanon. The vehicles, their occupants sunglassed, windows tinted and rolled tight against the heat, emitting exhaust fumes congealing in a cloud above them, crept along pylons and construction crews, inbent and at oblique angles to one another. SUVs and mini-vans with bumper stickers about children’s grades, trucks’ political slogans you had to read twice to comprehend, teenagers’ used coupes, sub-woofers vibrating, stereos so loud no one hears any vehicle’s urgent honking—all appearing as shelled, solipsistic insects forming a line without purpose, as if the Turnpike, once so grandly constructed and full of

1

Redd Jones, Penelope. “The Story of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.” New York: Jones and E.n Jones Publishing, 1950.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L. 104-191) ensures the privacy of all consumers of medical and social services by prohibiting the publication or appearance of their names on any documentation. (Not that you could identify him anyway; nobody ever really knew who he was, and nobody cares now, believe me.)

2

3 promise, had, like childrens’ broken dreams, atrophied, becoming a menace, out of its place in time.

The man in the wheelchair’s head lolled against the wheelchair’s necksupport. Clothed in Goodwill plaids and Docksider’s with Velcro straps and orthopedic inserts, his chair’s wheels locked into clasped grooves behind Beth’s seat. He faced backwards, his atrophic hands folded over a binder he’d received from Uncle Jim’s memorial in Philadelphia that afternoon. The binder consisted of interviews Uncle Jim had conducted during his travels throughout Pennsylvania, it always being his dream to write an “biography,” as it were, of the Turnpike, to document its effect on contemporary life, how it had changed the state’s collective psyche, creating expectations that real life be as convenient as the Turnpike’s once-luminous lanes.

The man in the wheelchair observed the passing of foreclosed farms, faded billboards for fast-food, hotels, and gas, green exit signs for destinations he’d neglected his whole life, thinking them inferior, the central regions of Pennsylvania those in Pittsburgh and Philly still dismiss as “Pennsyltucky.”

Orange-vested prisoners stabbed litter with long thin sticks Jason told Beth were called were called “grabbers,” saying they used to give him brutal blisters when he was serving for possession. The grass the man in the wheelchair remembered as baseball-diamond fresh between the Turnpike’s westbound and eastbound lanes (where Uncle Jim’d taught him how to throw a curve during the Turnpike’s early days) was baked into a buzzed hay color by the 3

“Engineering has done what it can to promote safety, but the Pennsylvania Turnpike is not foolproof. Scenery along the route is a constant temptation, as Rotarians, zipping over it to the Rotarian Convention in New York City in July, will discover. They and other motorists do well to glue their eyes to the road and leave sight-seeing to the backseat drivers!”-“The World’s Speediest Highway.” The Rotarian, 1949.

spring’s drought and concealed by weeds, construction materials, and transportation vehicles prison officers leaned against, smoking.

He appeared in no acute distress. Pike---I told you about tonight, Jason said, gesturing towards other drivers, motioning one to creep in front. The trucker hat he normally wore backwards he wore frontwards so the brim didn’t grind against the seat. Something came up.

--You can just say it’s her.

--It’s not, I mean it’s part her but not just her.

Beth continued documenting JTMCADAMS’s medical history on the agency’s letterhead. A fire extinguisher and first-aid kit in a hamper-like bag between the driver and passenger seats, along with Febreze™ and stainremovers for emergencies. Hypertension, arteriosclerosis, scoliosis, Beth wrote in agency-mandated black ink. Neither Jason nor Beth conformed to agency regulations regarding the mandatory use of seatbelts or not smoking in agency vehicles. 52 YOA, no children, one brother, estranged. The van moved 4 and stopped in the sclerotic traffic along the Turnpike.

No identifiable neurological or cognitive impairments; average to above-average scoring on Serial Sevens. Hx of alcoholism which was why the prescription toothpaste from Ganse’s Apothecary. Aphasia from the latest confirmed TIA two months ago, rendering him unable to communicate or perform activities of daily living.

4

"Sundays dad used to take us all even Matt Davis in our church clothes out on the Pike--that's what they called it then--to dine at the New Stanton service plaza. I believe it was that orange place, Howard Johnson's. Not the guy on the Mets. It was the one time a week we did anything together as a family. There were fancy cursive menus and fresh bread rolls for appetizers and the tablecloth was always heavy and warm. The wait staff wore church clothes too (at that age I thought of all formal clothing as church clothes). It wasn't at all like it is today, all that shitty fast food and fucking rip-you-off prices and trashed bathrooms smelling like hell’s own breath. There was something classy and special about it all, then, the Pike." Glen Harwood, 49, Carlisle, PA.

Jason lit two Newports and held one towards Beth, whom he’d met in COMP 101 at HACC, where they’d been assigned partners for writing projects 5 and started hooking up, even though she was his girlfriend’s cousin. She ignored him, vaguely skewing her chin towards the window. Jason’s arm sleeved with tats, skulls and band names in Gothic script and Asian ideograms.

Beth was ten years older than him but acted ten years younger, he reflected.

Kim’d said she she’d always been the family’s drama queen, almost bankrupting her parents with her drug abuse, her carousel of therapists, her hospital stays.

(It’s a sad socioeconomic fact that human health aides and resident advisors, who make $12-$15/hr. on average, are often as consumed with drugs and alcohol and psychiatric problems as those whom they are employed to provide therapy and counsel.)

--If you just sit there ignoring me that’s cool, just don’t say I was the one ignoring you, he said, opening the door and extinguishing the butt on the Turnpike’s cracked asphalt.

--I’m working.

--So am I.

5

Edward Ketting/Adjunct Professor/Harrisburg Area Community College / “Literature of Loss”: So far this semester, we have studied how various works of literature negotiate such variegated psychological phenomena as loss, regret, and disappointment. In this assignment, you will choose one metaphor from those supplied below (from the introduction to Landman’s Regret .pdf) and write a brief, 1-2 page essay on how the passage relates to what we have discussed in class. No more than 20% of the essay—or about one paragraph—is to contain textual explication. Instead, I want to read your thoughts about the meaning of the metaphor and its relationship to theories and experiences of regret. Any essay containing unacceptable amounts of grammatical or spelling errors will be returned with no credit until these are corrected. I suggest you and your partner make an appointment at the Writing Center if you are confronting problems.

“Regret has been imaged as a waste of hard currency (explicitly in and unsympathetically in Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, implicitly and sympathetically in formal decision theory); a ‘baffling geography’ (Baldwin); a perilous slope (Lampedusa); soul-tearing teeth, a self-gnawing mouse, and a self-biting snake (Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway); [The Pennsylvania Turnpike (M.--)]; an arrow in the heart (Woolf); footfalls echoing the memory/disturbing the dust on a bowl of roses (Eliot); the forward/backward rush of a sacredly contrary brook (Frost)”; (Landman, xxiv). Landman, Janet. Regret: The Persistence of the Possible. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Beth closed the binder and shifted to face him, her back jammed against the window roller. Her face wide at the temples but sharp at the chin, with slanted blue eyes that make her ethnicity impossible to guess, so that it’s a little like fucking an alien, he’d told the guys at Durango’s. She juggled prescription bottles and while addressing Jason poured pills from each without looking into the different EZ-Dose packs spread on her lap.

--What is it that makes everyone leave me? she asked.

--Nobody’s doing that, it’s just in your head. Jason laid down a fierce sustained honk and glared at a merging driver. Don’t say things just so I have to say the opposite.

--If there’s nothing wrong with me than why are you leaving me?

-- I’m not leaving, I just can’t tonight. We can write it tomorrow— --Fuck the paper. Does it look like I care about the paper? I’m a Pisces, we don’t care about shit like that. Van Gogh, like can you imagine him caring?

--…

--So it’s her then. Kim. He was silent, pretending to focus on driving, and then said, She’s pregnant, ok? We think. She’s pregnant and don’t ask me what we’re going to do cuz I don’t have a fucking clue.

--You’re so simple. Kim can’t get pregnant. She has that thing.

--She’s pregnant’s all’s I know she said.

--She’s always had that thing my aunt told me. Beth rolled down to the window, spitting out her gum. We need to hit the next plaza for meds, she said, as Jason found an open lane and gunned the van into third.

The wind whipped Beth’s dyed blue hair back, where it quivered on James McAdams’s left ear lobe, reminding him of the time he got Mariah Harper’s note in fourth grade with the heart over the “I” saying she liked him back, and how their palms sweated together when they held hands watching Ghost in Jill Cochran’s parents’ basement. He adored Beth and worked vigorously with his speech pathologist so he would one day be able to tell her, to share his emotions just one more time—to describe in florid language her abilities, talents, her simple radiance that rescued the residents from their bleak routines. (If he had known the truth about Beth’s life, or what she would do to herself in the near future, he wouldn’t have believed it.) On Beth’s night shifts she spent special time (he thought) working with him to identify his medications, priming him with winks and compliments, and securing him in a Goodwill bed with erectable slats that resembled a crib, whispering “Night Handsome!” before skipping out the door carrying the medicine bag like a picnic basket. He’d remain recumbent smelling her peach shampoo and clothes’ detergent’s aroma, remembering incidents that he couldn’t separate from dreams and wishing to be rescued from his mind’s ceaseless regrets by Alzheimer’s, with which most of the home’s residents were diagnosed.

JAMES MCADAMS had not always been confined to a wheelchair. His Uncle Jim, a man of great wit, had always told him to think of his current projects and future endeavors as not so much a “work of art” (as JAMES MCADAMS’s widowed mom had referred to them), but rather as a “great enterprise,” the uncle pointing out marked spots on his engineer’s map of the Pennsylvania Turnpike with a sharpened pencil stub—all of his “exits,” as he referred to them, that made up the substance of his life: sight-seeing, photography, tourism, a capacious curiosity about the vast, unknown places throughout

“Pennsyltucky.” The map, cased under a glass top in the coffee table in Aunt Mary’s den, denoted all the places Uncle Jim had visited working as an engineer for PENNDOT, and the exits likewise indicated locations where he conducted his interviews for the Turnpike biography.

If there were one Great Error the man in the wheelchair now understood about his irrevocable past actions, it was his habit of viewing the Turnpike’s offerings—exits for museums, tourist sites, religious communities, farm fairs— as beneath him. His entire career as a CDL-licensed truck driver for J.B. Hunt, he’d driven in lateral vectors along the Turnpike (before it had disintegrated, 6 needing constant maintenance to perform its daily activities) sneering at the green exit signs for other places, certain they contained only hicks and Amish hypocrites and women fattened on milk, everything smelling of animal dung and illiterate religious people holding snakes and chanting. He mingled only with the urban elite, or what he considered as such. Now he shared the van’s back with three older female residents: all wore similar faded lavender dresses and slept with their heads on each others’ shoulders, their lower palate dentures sticking forward out of drooling gray lips, looking like weeds in an abandoned city lot.

What hurt more than regret about his previous actions and attitudes was his growing comprehension, spreading malignantly and billowing before him with mocking eyes that stared back into his, that it was not that he had missed out on what had been promised him, but that he had misunderstood everything, that the whole point of life had escaped him. Still, he appeared in 6

"I'll never forget how beautiful my son looked that first night at the booth, it was the first of October 1940 that first fall of the war before Larry enlisted, in his blue hat and the suit he graduated high-school in. Look at him in all that light, I remember that light, like some beautiful exposition the paper said.

That first night they didn't have hats for all the toll-collectors, so my son borrowed Glenn’s. That was my husband. They were both such handsome and good men, you would have liked them." Frances Lilling, 78, Shippensburg, PA

no acute distress, belted into his chair, hands folded on the binder of Turnpike interviews, as the van now decelerated while he looked at passing things retreating in space.

It took Jason five minutes to maneuver the van through individuals talking on phones or families bickering to the handicapped parking spot at the Lebanon rest stop. Young women walked poufy white dogs on the grass between the Sunoco station and pneumatic service stations outback. Everyone glared at everyone else as if assigning blame for the Turnpike’s congestion and its effect on their plans. Inside the plaza, spread out like a segmented cafeteria containing a Starbucks, a Walmart, a Burger King, and a gift, people expressed 7 anger and indignation by their postures and the way they sighed in the fastfood lines so long they couldn’t read the menus’ inflated prices.

The driver wheeled JAMES MCADAMS through the dining area to the restroom, leading the way for Beth and the three female residents. When they exited the bathroom, Jason locked JAMES MCADAMS in between the male and female lavatories, in front of a large board with an interactive map of Pennsylvania and a star saying “You Are Here,” before going outside to smoke and call Kim. The lower pane or module of the board consisted of pictures of young children who were missing. Above each appeared the caption “Have You Seen Me?”

7

"The construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike—here's your brew—let me commute from Donegal to Pittsburgh every morning before the night shift in the factory. Before I'd had to stay at Joe Frunny's house on the South Side all week and only see Becca on the weekends. Me being around more, though, it got on each of us's nerves. We divorced within a year. Part of me still blames the Turnpike. Like maybe we weren’t meant for things to be that fast and easy, that maybe too many options is a bad thing…even worse nowadays, it seems. Hey you wananother, I have a cooler fu—" Michael Belacutci, 41, Donegal, PA.

This is when the incident occurred that changed future circumstances for everyone involved. Beth dumped pills from the wrong EZ-Dose packet into JAMES MCADAMS’s hand without making him identify the pills, rushing outside to eavesdrop on Jason’s conversation, leaving the three women slumped over like cardboard figurines at a table smeared with ketchup stains and crumpled tissues. JAMES MCADAMS reflected that if his picture were under the “Have You Seen Me?” caption, there would be no one to answer in the affirmative. He had entered the world with nothing and left the world with nothing, as the saying goes, whereas the goal, he remembered Uncle Jim stating, was to either improve the world yourself, or raise children who will do it for you. He ingested the pills without recognizing they weren’t his and for five minutes he didn’t feel a thing, but just sat there as people walked by without seeing him, reading the binder’s interviews.

After five minutes he began to experience neural and respiratory agitation; he couldn’t breathe and there was a great rushing sensation in his ears and what felt like little sparklers going off inside his head. His toes tingled and the binder fell on them, but by then he didn’t feel them anymore. He mumbled something that sounded like “Bttttth” and pounded only his left arm on the immobilized wheelchair’s joystick, but Beth and Jason were distracted fighting under a statue of William Penn and nobody inside noticed his seizure. He fell out of time.

JAMES MCADAMS’s neurologist later reported that these three-to-five minutes of the CVA were of utmost importance and that Beth’s failure to intervene then was the primary reason why JAMES MCADAMS had suffered severe and ineradicable retrograde amnesia. Toxicology conducted on JAMES MCADAMS demonstrated that there had been an amphetaminic agent in his

blood at the time of the attack, which was of course contraindicative for someone with hypertension and arterial sclerosis, and furthermore unprescribed, and as this was her third Medication Error in six months, Beth was terminated with cause and without references.

Jason remained at Keystone Services and assumed Beth’s vacated position of resident advisor, bumping his salary to $15/hr., allowing him and Kim to move into a larger apartment with a room for the baby. For a few weeks he fucked Beth when her foster-mom was at physical therapy or getting blood work done, but stopped talking to her for good when Kim gave birth. Beth complained continuously about how guilty she feels about almost killing JAMES MCADAMS (she always said “kill”) and declared that she wished that happened to her, but her foster-mom remained focused on her reality TV programs and the narcotics she snorted every two hours, leaving Beth to look through her astrology books of famous figures who were also Pisces.

She started hanging at The Point with Brody again even though he abused her and made her do things in front of his friends to score. After her second-tolast suicide attempt involving approximately 50 milligrams of sertraline and her mom’s Valium, she was placed by court order into a whole different type of group home than JAMES MCADAMS—all the while nobody knowing that JAMES MCADAMS’s greatest desire had been granted: he no longer remembered anything, not Mariah Harper, not Aunt Mary, not even Uncle Jim, after whom JAMES MCADAMS was baptized in a Philadelphia church now surrounded by chained fences and weeds, graffiti-tags marking off drug-dealers’ corners. He now lived in just that state of placid unconsciousness he’d yearned for, culminating at Elizabeth Ann Eaple’s funeral service one later, where he and Keystone Services’ other residents and staff congregated on a crested, curvate

8 lawn in Morgantown, accompanied by Jason and Kim’s second screeching infant and the somnolent babble of the proximate Turnpike’s traffic: JAMES MCADAMS’s chair’s wheels locked, hands folded, with no memories of the eulogy’s subject, in no acute distress at all.

8

“Were a city endowed with emotion, would it not look upon all those that ignored it, motoring by in fifth-gear with no regard for its importance, as so many people we know are passed by and ignored, with a desperate wistfulness? Like in kind to people whom we ourselves meet on streets and with a second’s eye-contact and glance-removal strike out of our existence: the ill, the old, the suicides and recluses and addicts—if a city could express emotion, do you not suppose that, perhaps driving by one night, a spectral confluence of headlights and moonlights might not just once reveal a white tear skiing down the sign’s cheek of green?” ANONYMOUS.

Michelle Donfrio Grimace

Adulthood is a mask thrust upon us that never quite fits.

We wear it without confidence, feign comfort within its clasped shell.

It’s too tight, too restrictive.

Chokes the throat, constricts-our-breath, clouds our eyes.

We hide behind its grimace, p e e r i n g o u t at a world that will never be ours.

Elsie Platzer Letters to AK

1. Let me say this: I don’t mean to write about our romance, to describe it, or to explain why it happened. These are the kinds of things I did when first coming out to my friends, in late-night messages with the requisite picture attached, in order to receive their questions and their excitement and their exultation. I think of that as a kind of gossip-rag journalism, a juicy news update, and not worthy of literature. Rather, I want to let you know that when you asked if you could kiss me on that carved ivory bench behind the steps of Low Library you dropped a pebble into clear water, and that concentric circles have been expanding from that point of impact ever since.

2. Here is how I think about relationships, beginning from when I was very small. When she was in middle school my sister hung a poster of teenage Anakin Skywalker, from the disastrous 2003 Star Wars reboot, on her wall. In the poster, Anakin’s skin is simultaneously glowing, as if buffed, and peppered with marks from some presumably deadly Jedi battle: splashes of soot, small, manufactured scratches, like marks from pen nibs. He is halfnaked, the outline of his six-pack lovingly contoured. “My first celebrity crush,” she says, perhaps imagining even at this very minute going back in time and canvassing the landscape of his musculature with her tiny, preadolescent hands. In my mind, ironically, she is the paradigm of Healthy Development, in that she has picked out an appropriate object of fixation.

3. I do not remember ever feeling this kind of intense, storied desire. In middle school, I remember liking Aragorn from Lord of the Rings very much. I liked the rhythm and importance of his many names: Aragorn son of Arathorn, Strider, Last of the Dunedain. He was a satisfying character in that he always seemed to get done what needed to be done, even when Gandalf was off fucking around on the top of Saruman’s tower with a moth and a satchel of Longbottom Leaf, but that is not the point. In middle school, if asked, I would have said he was my celebrity crush; however, this would have been a lie. It would also have been embarrassing, because Lord of the Rings was for nerds, but not, I think, more embarrassing than admitting I did not have a crush, and that I found it difficult to understand the concept of crushing (why “crushing”? is it that violent?) at all.

4. I know I have never thought about running my hands over a boy’s stomach, or any other part of his body, for that matter. I also know that in this case it’s to be expected that I should spend time and puberty thinking about running my hands over a girl’s body, which is sadly untrue. I have had the privilege of seeing scores of bared bodies at sleep-away camp: wet, soft tits just out of the shower; shaven, peninsular labias; whiffs of girl-perfume embedded in long hair. I was neither aroused nor intrigued by any of it. To me any naked body is sluglike, oddly stripped, like a turtle removed from the comfort of its shell.

5. I admit I do think about sex at times. Mostly I think about being enveloped in a kind of ouroboros of affection, where our love itself rises up and devours us. I imagine knowing another human being so thoroughly that to me there seems to be no other option but to claim them, encase them inside myself as

an extension of my physical form. I have been informed that this is called cannibalism, not desire.

6. It surprised me then that I noticed your eyes. Eyes are not especially conspicuous, despite what thousands of dime romances will tell you—all the contrived odes to “shimmering green irises” inventions of the genre. But I did notice yours, even Before. In my head I compared them to an atmosphere, not in their size (large) or their color (pale blue) but in their limits. That is to say, your pupils.

7. I don’t know if anyone has ever written a love letter to pupils. This not being a love letter, as we were not in love, I guess one can still say that no one has, and someone else will get to take the credit. But if anyone is ready to love the pupil before the iris, the lack before the actuality, I think I am.

8. At first I thought you had just come from the optometrist’s, or, more likely, that you were high. “No, they’re just like that,” you said, quite firmly. You seemed very intent on me knowing you weren’t into drugs, not that I would have thought badly of you if you were. There are a lot of metaphors I feel that I could milk out of your eyes, their (un)natural dilation: meditations on void and space and dark matter, new moons and abandonment and the presence of a soul. Yet I don’t know if I should ascribe such weight to them. Other writers, poets can probably do better. I am simply glad that there was enough room inside of them for me to fit within.

9. I introduced you, so now me: a potpourri, newsprint, the cover of this notebook. Like driftwood I flung my way through Times Square, knocking into the giant red firmaments, the gaping neon billboards, the bolted-down tables, metal trash bins, ladies with their painted tits waving for tourists to take a five-dollar photo. The great Buddhist masters would diagnose me with a case of “monkey mind,” an intractable clinginess to the realm of observation and description. I would rebut that that’s where poetry comes from, if I knew where it was that poetry comes from. At least I know how to breathe, with my hands in the grass along the bank of the Hudson, lined with rotted wood, the studding numerations of piers. Shivasana, our practitioner says. I go down and I am looking at you. I don’t know it yet, but I am looking at you.

10. I thought you might be the kind of girl who liked horses and went up to strangers asking to be their friends. I thought we might end up as friends if you asked me, but I never thought we would be lovers (I daren’t have hoped).

Instead we became semicolons, a kind of punctuation that is never required, a link as a measure of choice.

11. When I kissed L and when I kissed S, it felt like a credit-card transaction. I kept looking for where to sign my name. I paid less attention to the touches and more to the places where they happened--an abandoned wine cellar, the darkened theater classroom during lunch hour. Sometimes I walk behind a building or past a patch of tile half-hidden by recycling bins where I made these points of contact and I imagine the weak impressions left behind by me/him/him, blue and speckled, like microfiches. During very lonely hours I

even tricked myself into wishing to return to them, standing in those tainted spots and hoping to subsume an old self, all my since-shed skin cells and sloughed period blood slurped back into my body. Today I drove past the spot we first met today on my way to the John F. Kennedy Airport and looked out over the blur of water. It is my greatest blessing to you to say that I hope I never stand on that flattened grass and long to be back at Sunset Yoga with you in your cheap leggings and palm-printed socks.

12. One girl in my writing class turned in a short story called “Nine Epithets to Mostly Shitty Memories.” My favorite of the nine-part saga was also the shortest. “6,” it read, “you were the first girl I ever kissed. You smelled like me. I loved it.” For a good three minutes I reread those lines and felt stunned by their brilliance, their sensory accuracy, their implicative destruction of “opposites-attract” and all its tired proponents. After workshop I even went over to thank her personally for writing them. She must have thought I was crazy, but it doesn’t matter. If I were to write my own “Nine Epithets” you would be my #6. You would be my Mostly.

13. Dating boys was what teenaged girls did. Boys were never bad to me, but boys were always exactly as expected. Boys were mirrors who gave me back hot wetness. Boys protruded. I imagined eventually having to touch a penis and became nauseous: it was like a scripted part I wanted to turn down.

When I was with you we went out for sushi and then attended that horrible salsa party where they would only serve me a virgin pina colada, and I watched you two-step with your tiny blonde friend and fumble that Fred Astaire spin, and I was not afraid of you.

14. Romance is the point at which certain things cease to matter. For example: my unapologetically hairy legs, how your friends took a solid hour to decide on a dinner spot in SoHo. The day we picnicked in Central Park we were eating food we had bought at the Asian convenience store and I put a stick of Pocky in my mouth and told you about “the Pocky game,” where two people take bites out of a shared Pocky stick until their mouths meet in the middle, like a faux-Japanese Lady and the Tramp. You said, “I don’t see the point if we’ve already been kissing.” But we did it anyway: the chocolate in my mouth, your smile on mine at the last crunch. That was what I liked best: that nothing we did was obligatory, not even to you.

15. In seminar that summer we read the short story “Something That Needs Nothing” by Miranda July. The title comes from a snippet of musing by our protagonist: “We wished we were something that needed nothing, like paint.

But even paint needs repainting.” Already you are thinning out in my mind, weary for a second coat: the redness of your bangs, the neat donut of your stomach. But if I am upset, let me only be upset because I don’t know how to go back to my old opaqueness. I keep noticing graffiti on the buildings in Historic Springfield, on the CSX trains that rumble past: scribbles of gang signs or bright, commissioned murals, color overtaking the presence of grayness, and without hesitation I can say that I love them. I guess the loveliest kinds of art are the ones nobody asked for.

Elias Keller The Quiet Car

“Look.” The transit officer put a paper in front of Diane with a line for her signature. “If you don’t press charges, he won’t either. But we’re banning you from regional rail travel until you show certification from an anger management class.” He looked at her pityingly. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty.” She looked down at her stained white blouse. Her freckly neck felt itchy.

“You better grow up and learn how to control yourself.”

No phone calls. Texting done on vibrate. Music low so others cannot hear.

Conversations short and conducted in a whisper. These were the rules.

“It was the Quiet Car,” Diane muttered, signing the paper. The officer made a photocopy and gave it to her.

For over a year, rail transit customers had complained about the noisiness of trains under the reign of cell phones. It was impossible to read, rest, or work. So in a rare feat of responsiveness, the transit authority designated the first car of every peak train as the Quiet Car. Sometimes the train conductors enforced the rules. Most times they did not.

There were many rules Diane did not embrace—trying on bathing suits over underwear seemed asinine and impractical, for example, let alone impossible to enforce—but the Quiet Car rules were perfectly reasonable. Besides, people were not forced to sit in the Quiet Car. There were other cars with plenty of

seats and no rules. But every day, every single day, someone chose to sit in the Quiet Car—and decided that the rules did not apply to them.

At first Diane just sat and stewed, but soon she began confronting the offenders, pointing out the posted Quiet Car rules like she was disciplining overgrown, unruly children. Sometimes her vigilantism was effective. Most times it was not. One afternoon Diane sat in an unquiet car, thinking that it might be easier to handle the din of permitted noise than intermittent forbidden noise. But after a few minutes of ringing, pinging, and yapping, she fled back to the Quiet Car, fantasizing about a martinet conductor who enforced the rules with a bullwhip.

Then came the Friday. It had been a stressful week at school. A new student, an emotionally-disturbed boy, had been plunked into Diane’s classroom abruptly.

“I’m not set up to handle him,” she protested to the principal.

“We don’t have any other place for him. Everyone’s at capacity.”

“But it’s not fair to—” “You’ll have to deal with it,” the principal said. “At least until we figure something else out.”

The week had been as difficult as expected, but at least it was over. Diane boarded the train and looked forward to the weekend. Next week she would demand the school find a more suitable place for the boy even if it meant dragging the teachers’ union into it.

For six stops all was fine. She was in the middle of a good book. Her music was soft and non-disruptive. This specific train had the gray fabric seats rather than the tan vinyl monstrosities.

One ring. Two rings. Three.

“Hello?”

A few passengers frowned at the man on his phone, but the conversation continued.

Diane stomped down the rubberized aisle and leaned close to the offender.

“Excuse me,” she said. “This is the Quiet Car.” She pointed emphatically at the posted rules.

The offender rolled his eyes and ended the conversation. Diane returned to her seat and tried to resume her reading, twirling her frizzy red hair anxiously.

One ring.

Diane returned to the offender. “What don’t you understand about no phone calls?”

He waved her off and answered the call.

“You’re all OK with this?” Diane asked, raising her voice to address the other passengers. “Well? Well?”

Nobody said anything. They just looked nervously at their phones or out the window.

Diane looked back at the offender. “This is the—” “Hey—lady—it’s a free country. Mind your own business.”

Diane would not say that she acted unconsciously, or that she “blacked out,” but it did seem that she didn’t really feel herself as she grabbed the phone out of his hand and threw it as hard as she could against a hospital advertisement.

There was a satisfying crackle as the phone’s screen shattered.

“THIS IS THE QUIET CAR!” The coffee was hot, but not scalding, and mostly hit her blouse and some of her neck. Then she did black out, she did act unconsciously, and the last thing

she remembered feeling, before being led away by a transit officer, was how soft the offender’s hair felt between her fingers.

Sanjeev Sethi

Placebos & Cosmetics

Placebos During counterglow when I crack open my carapace, pare down drecks into dactyls, ensuing positivity guides me to grasp worth of this work.

Cosmetics In your right arm’s pillbox I found my peace.

My breath signed our bond. That is how we lasted, at least in my mind. Can any deodorant please a blocked nose? Jokes are a veiled way of airbrushing versions. Distended arches take time to rejoin the original curve. Camouflage: for shysters and soldiers.

Bob Kalkreuter Goodbye

“Can I help you?” asked the motel clerk, smiling like an undertaker. He was a young man with dark, oily hair, thick glasses, and a black bowtie.

“I have a reservation. For Rice,” said Nick.

The clerk stepped up to the computer keyboard, which looked out of place and strangely modern sitting there on the old-fashioned, laminate countertop.

The lobby was a mixture of old and new. Overhead, most of the light fixtures were state-of-the-art, but along the back wall Nick saw two that looked as if they might be holdovers from the original construction. In the foyer, the carpet was clean, but worn and scuffed.

Built in the early ‘70s, the motel appeared to have been renovated only under duress, one piece at a time.

“You here for the festival?” asked the clerk, clicking the computer keys.

“Festival?”

The clerk smiled again. “Fall festival. It’s big, you know. People come from all over...”

“No, I’m not here for the festival.”

“Well, I’m glad you picked us,” said the clerk. “You stayed here before?”

Nick paused and looked around, reminiscing. “No. But I worked here once, years ago.”

Against the back wall was a familiar bank of wooden cubbyholes, built to hold room keys and messages. Dusty now, no longer used or labelled.

The clerk raised his eyebrows. His fingers stopped moving across the keyboard, and he flipped from the screen to Nick and back. “You worked here?”

“I grew up near Rock Creek,” said Nick.

The clerk wrinkled his forehead, as if he were trying to ferret out some niggling word or thought. “Didn’t that church burn down? I mean, I wasn’t born then, but my daddy told me about it. Some people died, didn’t they?”

“Two,” said Nick. “In ‘89.”

“Whew. 1989. A long time ago.”

“Not so long, actually,” said Nick, his voice trailing away.

“Well, we have a frequent guest program now. Can I sign you up?” The clerk smiled again, expectant.

“Not today,” said Nick.

“It’s free,” said the clerk.

Nick shrugged, trying to look indulgent and impatient, both. He didn’t want to spend any more time here, bantering small talk. He shifted his weight. He felt edgy, wondering if he might’ve made a mistake, coming here at all. “No,” he said. “I won’t be back.”

The clerk lay a plastic keycard on the counter, along with a receipt. “Can you sign this please?” he said, pointing. “You’re in room 104. Outside, to the right.”

Nick scribbled his name.

“Enjoy your stay, Mr. Rice.”

Nick took the keycard and bent to lift his suitcase. “By the way,” he said.

“How far is Heaven’s Gate?”

“The cemetery? About five miles.” The clerk looked pleased to be consulted.

He grabbed a pre-printed county map and drew a circle around the confluence of several roads. “Right here. Take a left out of the parking lot, turn here and

follow the signs.” He tapped the map with a pen, jumping from one intersection to the next. “Beautiful place. Some of the biggest trees in the county.”

“That’s Heaven’s Gate?” said Nick, his mind trailing off into the time he’d spent there, fishing and hunting deer along the edges of Rock Creek with his brothers and Ben Alderson.

Good times, as he recalled them. In fact, they were better than that, they were great times. Now, though, he wondered if the past might be the only place you were ever truly happy. The distant past.

“Yes sir,” said the clerk. “That’s Heaven’s Gate.”

“It wasn’t a cemetery when I left.”

“My daddy said Mayor Alderson donated the land in the 90s. About thirty acres, I think. And it’s only a small part of what he owns.”

“What his wife owns,” said Nick, feeling his voice tighten.

“You might want to stay away tomorrow,” said the clerk. “They’re burying Mrs. Alderson. There’ll be huge crowds.”

“What was Amy like? Did you know her?” asked Nick. Even after all these years, he hated to think of her as Ben’s wife. He still couldn’t bear to hear her called by the name of a man he despised, a man who’d not only stolen the woman he wanted to marry, but a man who’d stolen Nick’s life as well.

“Sure, I knew her,” said the clerk. He smiled again, but this time his face lit up.

“She was kind to everybody. Never asked anything in return.” He hesitated.

“When Pop Pop died, she brought Gamma a full-dressed turkey. Delivered it herself. I wasn’t very big then, but I remember. It was the first turkey I ever ate.

We didn’t even know who she was.”

“Sounds like Amy,” said Nick, turning toward the entrance. “She was like that.”

Nick’s room had a view of the street. Leaves fallen from the oaks bordering the parking lot lay in random patterns, littering the walkway and canvas-covered pool like a mishmash of animal tracks.

The room was chilly. He threw his suitcase on the bed and reached inside to unpack. Then he stopped. No, he didn’t want to unpack now. What he did want to do was get a drink. Several drinks in fact.

He closed the suitcase, leaving it unzipped.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to see Ben again. What would he look like now? And what would he say when Nick showed up at Amy’s funeral?

Although drinking wasn’t the reason he’d come to town, Nick wasn’t sure he could face the next day completely sober. He turned up the thermostat and went outside.

The growing twilight seemed colder yet. He shrugged up the collar of his coat and spotted a bar in the next block, one with a neon-lit peacock in the front window.

I don’t remember that one, he thought. But then, there were plenty of others he did remember.

Nick smelled the fireplace at the far end of the room as soon as he entered.

About a dozen people were scattered around, mostly in twos and threes.

“How about a draft,” he said, taking a stool near the center of the bar.

The bartender was a large man with a black beard and shaved head. He had a nervous tic above his left eye. “Glass or pitcher?”

Nick spotted a bleached blonde sitting alone in front of the fireplace. She looked to be in her thirties, but he’d never been good at guessing the ages of

women. She wore tight jeans with knee-length leather boots. Trying to look younger, he decided.

She was drinking wine.

“Change that to rum and coke,” he said to the bartender, pointing down the bar. “And I’ll take it down there.”

He made his way down the bar. “Mind if I sit here?” he asked her, nodding at the next stool.

She smiled, her face heavy with paint and powder, her hair stiff with spray.

The bartender set down the drink and waited.

“Thanks,” said Nick. He pulled a twenty from his wallet. The heat from the fireplace felt good. “And give her another one too, will you.”

She studied him. “You look like one of those Rice boys, Caleb or Robert. I never could tell the difference. Jason’s bald, so you’re not him.”

Somebody at a nearby table laughed and Nick looked that way, glad for the distraction. “Uh,” he said finally. “What do you mean? What makes you think I’m a Rice?” He tried to grin, but couldn’t, so he rubbed his glass as if he were trying to get rid of a spot.

“The red hair, partly.” She shrugged, leaning forward to sip her wine. Her perfume smelled strong and fruity. “Mostly, I guess you look like one.” She hesitated. “So maybe you’re not. I don’t know.”

He stared at the unpolished bar. “Well, you’re good with faces,” he said finally. “They’re my brothers.”

“And you’re…?”

“Nick.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re Nick.” She drew out the words, as if she were tasting the syllables. Her voice sounded guttural. “You don’t know me, do you?”

“Sure,” he lied. “I just can’t think of your name.”

“Alice Trimball,” she said, still watching him. “Nancy was my sister. I was ten at the trial.”

Nick felt himself go a little cold. “Oh,” he said.

The bartender set a glass of wine in front of Alice and slid Nick’s change across the bar.

“You here for Amy’s funeral?” she asked.

Nick nodded. “Richard called me. He’s my nephew…”

“I know who Richard is.”

“Sure.”

“Richard dated my niece for a while. My brother put a stop to it when he found out.”

“Guess I haven’t kept up with things lately,” he said, shrugging.

“Not since you went to prison anyway.”

He flinched. “I guess that’s right. Not since… since I left.”

They fell into silence, and the sounds of the bar grew. Firelight flickered across the floor, dancing with shadows.

“So when did they let you out?” she asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? They let you out of prison, and you don’t know when?”

He didn’t answer.

“They gave you eight years. How long did you serve?”

His skin felt warm and prickly, but he willed himself to look up. “Six… six years.”

“Six years,” she repeated. “That’s not enough. Not for murdering two people.

Nobody gave Nancy back her life. Or my cousin either. They’re still dead.”

“I know, but… it wasn’t murder. It was involuntary manslaughter and destruction of property.”

“You killed two people. That’s murder!” Alice watched him, as if he were a sleeping snake, not moving perhaps, but still dangerous. “They were in church for God sake, and you killed them!”

He wanted to say that nobody had been there to pray that night. Most Friday evenings, the preacher left the side door open to give teens a place to get together. Nancy and her cousin had been there to buy marijuana from him, although he’d faced no charges for that since the evidence had been destroyed by the fire.

But Nick didn’t say any of that. Instead, he said: “It was an accident.” Meeting Nancy’s sister like this left him dazed. In fact, he hadn’t realized Nancy had a sister.

Until now.

“Daddy wanted you dead,” said Alice. “He even tried to hire somebody to kill you, but didn’t know how to go about it. He went to his grave cussing you.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I wanted you dead too,” she said, her hazel eyes narrowed and fierce.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He wanted to say more, but he’d tried to explain himself during the trial, and it hadn’t worked then. Now, he didn’t know how to go about it.

“Sorry? Sorry about what, that you killed two people?”

“I tried…” He stopped, sighed. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“So it’s all right then. Is that it?”

“No. It was an accident, that’s all I meant. The kerosene stove got knocked over. I’m not sure…”

She snorted. “Knocked over? Who knocked it over? The jury said you did.”

He wanted to say that the jury hadn’t been there, but didn’t.

“Who else knocked it over?” she said.

“I was passed out.” He paused. “I don’t know.”

And he didn’t. For years he’d been trying to make sense of that night. Even now, his memories were spotty. He’d been drunk or stoned, probably both. So had Ben. He remembered waking to the stench of smoke, and the sight of yellow and orange flames skittering up the curtains that covered the back room where the choir kept their robes and supplies. He remembered the overturned kerosene stove, full aflame.

He also remembered bolting outside, in full panic, tumbling down the wooden steps to the path between the flower beds, already browned-up by November frost. Coughing and gasping, he’d scrabbled on his hands and knees until he lay panting and exhausted, his hands raw and scraped, his knees aching.

He even remembered the volunteer fireman who pulled him to his feet.

“Anybody else in there?” shouted the fireman.

“I… I don’t know,” Nick said, shaking his head. Running out, he’d been too panicked to look for anything but the door.

“You didn’t even tell the firemen they were inside,” said Alice. Firelight flickered in her hair. “My God, what kind of man are you?”

“I thought they were with Ben.”

“Ben Alderson? He wasn’t there. You know that,” she said, her voice rising, her face twitching. She leaned back, as if adding to the distance between them.

The fire crackled, and he smelled burning wood.

He almost said that Ben had been there, but that argument had come and gone during the trial, when Ben produced several witnesses who put him many miles away.

The irony of those two girls being Nick’s only witnesses, the only ones who could back up his story, that was not lost on him. But it did leave him feeling trapped, a damaging legacy of that awful night he’d never been able to escape.

Nick took a long drink. He thought about leaving, but didn’t. After all, he’d been living with these memories since 1989. And Alice hadn’t said anything he hadn’t said to himself already. Maybe he’d even grown accustomed to this view of himself, written in his shameful past .

The hardest time had been the trial, hearing his life exposed, probed, and dissected in front of everyone, friends, family… and most of all, Amy. Yes, Amy. Seeing her in the back of the courtroom, sitting with the Trimball family day after day, they’d been the worst moments of all. In his mind, he still saw her face, full of sorrow and disappointment and revulsion.

Long ago he’d accepted Amy’s loss as another form of punishment. After prison, he’d bummed around, city to city, state to state. He’d had several girlfriends, although none had known his history. Once, he lived with a woman for two years. He even figured they might someday marry, but she finally moved out when he lost his job, the fifth that year.

Although he didn’t want to sit here with Alice, he knew that leaving wouldn’t change anything. He’d have to live with that night, whether he stayed here or waited in his motel room drinking whiskey alone.

Still, he squirmed.

“You’re a murderer,” she said. “And don’t tell me you’re sorry again. Sorry won’t bring back my sister. Or my cousin either.”

“I know it won’t.”

“Then why’d you come here?” said Alice. “Nobody wants you. Do you think Amy would want you at her funeral?”

“No, probably not,” said Nick. He downed his drink and raised the glass to order a refill. The bartender nodded.

In the late ‘80s, he and Ben started selling marijuana, and as the business expanded, they got reckless. At first they sold only to friends and relatives, but as the months passed, and they weren’t caught, they began selling to everybody.

Nancy Trimball and her cousin weren’t friends or relatives. In fact, Nick barely knew them by sight. Ben made the introduction.

Ben. For years, Nick considered that connection.

Although Nick’s expanding network of drug sales put him at greater risk, it increased the risks to his customers too. Nobody really understood that. Not Ben, not Nancy or her cousin, and especially not Nick himself.

He’d become a bubble ready to burst.

Alice shook her head, clearly stealing the moments to think. “There are folks who still want to find you. You ruined a lot of lives.”

Nick didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. He wanted to say that his own life had been ruined too, but didn’t.

Alice watched him closely. She raised her glass and finished her wine. “But I guess you think everybody’s a victim,” she said flatly.

“No, not everybody.”

“You’re damn right, not everybody!” she shouted. “You’re no Goddamn victim! You’re a convicted murderer! You can’t get around that, even if you got away with it.” Glancing at the second glass of wine, the one he’d bought her, she snorted and rose, leaving it untouched. “Too bad they didn’t set you on fire the way you did Nancy!”

The bartender held a bottle of bourbon, getting ready to pour a drink. He stopped and watched her stomp toward the door.

Traces of her perfume stayed in the air, even after she’d gone.

The next day, about two in the afternoon, Nick stood under a Sweetgum Tree that grew on a hill overlooking the grave site. Around him, the ground was littered with hard, spikey pods that felt like sharp stones.

He’d been out drinking past one in the morning, and was still a little queasy.

He couldn’t drink as much as he once did, not without consequences.

The air was cold, and there was an intermittent breeze. In the distance he could see the mourners pile out of their cars, following the casket in slow procession.

He wasn’t sure how many people were there, but the line of cars extended to the highway.

Ben Alderson’s short, square figure was flanked by his kids, a twentyish, redhaired woman, a skinny, teenage boy in a tailored dark suit, and another boy, perhaps six or seven.

There was a time when they’d been close, he and Ben. Neighbors since birth.

Playmates since the cradle. For years, they’d been inseparable… until Amy. Nick began dating Amy when she was a high school sophomore. Although they agreed to marry, she wanted to graduate from college first.

Nick never considered himself college material, and he struggled to make a living until he and Ben started a lawn care business. Initially they did well, until cold weather pretty much eliminated their income.

That’s when they hatched the plan to sell marijuana.

Looking back, Nick had plenty of time to rehash the evolution of events.

Once, while they were out fishing, Ben told him that it would be nice to have the kind of money Amy would inherit.

A month later, when Nick returned a day early from helping his father deliver a load of cattle, he found Ben sitting on her porch, looking suddenly nervous and distracted. Amy was her usual bubbly self, prattling about a family of deer she’d seen the day before, out behind Rock Creek Church. She’d been genuinely pleased to see Nick. Ben, on the other hand, looked glum.

It took Nick a long time to connect all the dots.

Even so, their marijuana business started out well. And continued that way, until a bleak November night in 1989, when Nick’s world spun upside-down.

Amy was the oldest of the bank president’s three daughters. If she’d ever been in a bad mood, Nick never saw it. Blonde and energetic, she graduated Salutatorian from high school. Although Nick’s family was poor, Amy always insisted that it didn’t matter.

Perhaps she was telling the truth. Ben’s family was just as poor, and she married him in 1996, right after graduating from college with a BA in English.

By that time, Nick had already spent five years in prison.

Now, Nick was back in town for the first time in twenty-four years.

Behind him, at the bottom of the hill, Rock Creek rippled and glittered, gurgling across the water-smoothed rocks. Blobs of sunlit sky scooted between shifting gray clouds like marbles in a massive shell game.

Nick tried to tell himself that he’d skipped the church service because he was hung-over, but he knew better. After Alice, he didn’t want to face any more acquaintances. Or questions.

Once, Ben glanced up the hill and squinted. After that, he looked several more times. His daughter looked as well, but the boys stared at the ground and the casket.

As the mourners started to disburse, Ben put his arms around his sons and the four of them walked to a dark Chrysler parked in a long line of vehicles on the snaky macadam drive.

Climbing into the car, Ben turned to look at the hill again. His daughter took him by the arm and leaned against his shoulder.

Once they were gone, Nick descended to the grave site, moving slowly across the uneven ground.

Two workers saw him approach, and just before he reached the grave, they wheeled the empty gurney toward a flat-bed truck.

Standing at the grave, Nick closed his eyes and tried to imagine the good times they’d shared, he and Amy. The promises they’d whispered. The future they’d believed in.

But he could imagine none of that. Instead, he shivered in the cloying chill, remembering only the broken promises, the broken lives. “Goodbye,” he whispered. “I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

The knock was firm and loud.

Nick stiffened, wondering who knew where to find him.

The knock repeated, faster.

“Who is it?” he said, putting his eye to the peephole.

“Open up,” said a familiar voice. “Don’t make me wait all day.” A short, stocky man with a bald head stood outside. Beside him was a younger man with long dark hair, a red baseball cap, and an unkempt beard.

“Jason,” said Nick, opening the door. “Richard?”

The young man grinned.

Beyond the pool, the evening light clutched the trees looming over the parking lot, as if the light and bare branches clung together mutual protection, trying to blunt the attack of night.

Nick studied them. The last time he’d seen them, Richard was seven and Jason had hair. A long time and a lot of changes ago.

Now, Richard was taller than his father, although both had the typical Rice jawline and long upper lip.

“How’d you find me?” asked Nick.

Jason laughed. “Where else would you stay?”

Richard took a long drag from his cigarette, dropped the glowing butt, and stepped it out. “I went to school with Andy,” he said. “You know, the desk clerk.”

“We need to talk,” said Jason, looking up and down the empty corridor.

“I’m about to check out,” said Nick.

“Inside,” said Jason. “We need to talk inside.”

Nick looked at each in turn and stepped back, letting them enter. Richard closed the door.

“Heard you met Alice Trimball,” said Jason.

“Word’s out, I see,” said Nick. He moved toward the bed, giving them room to stand.

“Word’s out to Ben too,” said Jason.

“Ben? I saw him at the funeral, with his kids.”

Richard nodded. “Yeah, both of them.”

“Both? There were three,” said Nick.

Jason cocked his head.

“Well, he has got three kids. They’re just not all his,” said Richard.

“What do you mean?”

Richard looked at his father.

“Hell. Angie, she’s not his,” said Jason.

Nick stared for a moment, then repeated: “What do you mean?”

“Angie was born in ’91 or ‘92,” said Jason. “Before Amy went out with him.”

“Angie?” said Nick, dropping his voice to a whisper. “With the red hair?”

“Yes sir,” said Richard. “She’s got the family curse all right.” He lifted his cap and grinned, rubbing his own dark hair. “Guess I got mine from Momma.”

Nick’s mind whirled. “She’s not his? That’s what you came to say… she’s not his?”

“I thought you knew,” said Jason.

“How… well… no… Ben’s not her father?” said Nick. There was a moment of silence, then he asked: “Does she… does she know?”

“I don’t know,” said Jason. “Ben doesn’t confide in us lowly Rices. Not since, well, since he married into money.”

Nick tried to clear his mind, but couldn’t. He stumbled back and sat on the bed.

“The Trimballs are looking for you,” said Jason. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Me and Daddy are staying until you leave,” said Richard. He played with his beard.

Nick sighed. The silence built. “I decided to shoot Ben, you know,” he said, speaking into space. “Even bought a pistol.”

Jason looked at him. “A pistol? You aren’t supposed to be carrying…”

Nick shook his head. “I left it at home.”

Richard grinned and tapped his pocket. “That’s okay, I…” Jason glared at Richard, who stopped in mid-sentence. “We need to get you out of here,” said Jason. “We don’t need any more trouble.”

“Ben was there at the church,” said Nick, this time speaking to the floor. “The rest, I don’t remember.”

“Ben landed on his feet, for sure,” said Jason. “Set himself up for life.”

Nick rubbed his forehead. The heater whooshed on, sending out a rush of warm air. “I wasn’t supposed to get out alive either, you know,” he said, slowly, letting out thoughts he’d been harboring for years, unspoken. “He had to change plans when I woke up.”

Jason rocked back. “Damn, you mean…” He paused, regrouped, then nudged Nick’s shoulder. “Well, come on. We need to go. Robert and Caleb are waiting outside. They’ll follow you out, until it’s safe.”

Nick rose like an old man, one side at a time. He looked around the room, as if he wanted to store the memory. “Yeah, it’s time I left,” he said. “I already said goodbye.”

Contributors Karen C. Boissonneault-Gauthier Karen is a Canadian photographer, writer and poet. Karen has shot cover art for Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Zen Dixie Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Journal and has been featured in Artemis Journal, Cactus Heart Press, Dactyl, Fine Flu Literary Journal, The Scarborough Big Art Book, Sand Canyon Review, The Notebook, Calliope Magazine and The Healing Muse to name a few of the creative places she dwells. Follow Karen @KBG_Tweets and discover more of her works on her website.

Michelle Donfrio Michelle Donfrio works as an Advertising Media Supervisor in Chicago and have been published most recently in Silver Birch Press’s “The Great Gatsby Anthology.” She has also written for WGN Television and the Joliet Herald News. She is currently on the staff of Minerva Rising as a poetry reader.

Bob Kalkreuter Bob has placed fifty stories in magazines such as eFiction, The Stone Hobo, The Literary Yard, Underground Voices, Bartleby Snopes, Edgepiece, Writes For All, The Rusty Nail, and Solecisms. Two of his stories were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. One story was awarded the Herman Swafford Prize from Potpourri Magazine.

Elia Keller Elias Keller is a Philadelphia native and earned degrees in Anthropology and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. His fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction, APIARY, Slush Pile, Forge, Pindeldyboz, The Legendary, and elsewhere. His novel, “Strange Case of Mr. Bodkin and Father Whitechapel” (2012), a reinvention of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was named an Indie Groundbreaking Book by Independent Publisher. He currently lives in New Orleans. Visit his website.

James McAdams James McAdams has published fiction in decomP, Literary Orphans, One Throne Magazine, TINGE Magazine, Carbon Culture Review, and r.kv.r.y Journal, among others. Before attending college, he worked as a social worker in the mental health industry near Philadelphia. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University, where he also teaches and edits the university’s literary journal, Amaranth.

Elsie Platzer Elsie Platzer is a rising senior at Stanton College Preparatory School, where she is president and chief editor of the Stanton Literary Magazine. She has been published in Jacksonville Jewish News, The Devil’s Advocate, and Glass Kite Anthology, and won Honorable Mention in the international JASNA Essay contest. Most recently, she attended the Master Class in Prose at Columbia University’s High School Program in New York City, generating material for her debut novel. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

Sanjeev Sethi The recently released, “This Summer and That Summer,” (Bloomsbury) is Sanjeev Sethi’s third book of poems. His work also includes well-received volumes, “Nine Summers Later” and “Suddenly For Someone.” He has, at various phases of his career, written for newspapers, magazines, and journals.

He has produced radio and television programs. His poems have found a home in The London Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Otoliths, Solstice Literary Magazine, Off the Coast Literary Journal, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Oddball Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Dead Snakes, Indian Literature, Journal of the Poetry Society (India), The Hindu, The Statesman, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India. Poems are forthcoming in Sentinel Literary Quarterly, and Literary Orphans.

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