Five Quarterly Winter 2015

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FIVE QUARTERLY

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in this issue

Desmond S. Peeples 5 Suzanne Wise 6 Emily O'Neill 7 Peter Geibel 8 Greg Zorko 10 Abigail Grosse 12 Paul Hansom 23 Colin Dodds 35 Gaetan Sgro 40 Hannah Sloane 56

guest editors

Jacob Brower Sarah Harris Rebecca Jones Kameelah Janan Rasheed Emily Zhang

founders

Vanessa Gabb + Crissy Van Meter

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POETRY

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Baba Yaga Is Tamed At Last

But, but—but—I can be a little box for you.

I can stammer east, west, north, and south and hide reasonable letters in the corners for you. (We) I can map a course from your hometown and ferry you anywhere in the world (I can make a new place if what we want will not be mapped) and I can make it stay our secret. No one has to know what they are not ready for. You can pretend my house doesn’t rise and roam in winter—I will weigh it down again. It could be as though I never took you with me. Maybe in this box I could still keep my eerie things, and you could just pocket me when it’s dire.

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Outer Space When I thirsted for a self beneath the billboard for the Powerball. When the beige powder fell from my skin onto the napkin with the water from my eyes. When the scrawny bird of unknown name hopped closer to see if I was food. This was when I noticed your intrusion. Why have you banished me to your outer space, where the PODs Moving and Storage truck rumbles by oblivious to the moat of air I carried here to a bench too early on a Saturday because I have nowhere to sleep because I sleep not, no matter where. Some alive thing quakes beneath the thin crust of this minor planet: it takes bodies away, brings more, nothing personal, not a hell, just vibrations and then nearly still. The basketball game is over, just about 8 o’clock of a morning. The men from India wait on the corner to start a job. The parked movie trucks pretend everything is planned out: cameras ready for the stars to emerge from their trailers. The basketball game isn’t over; the tall men only paused to shout at each other. If the universe is a collection of overlapping patches, then you are ripping at the seams. Police officer after police officer ambles through the empty corner where the Indian men used to be. I climb out of the threadbare version of my sorrow and turn the knob. The inside is cool, so I enter.

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A Thousand Yellow Daisies exactly that field in the highway cloverleaf where nobody stops properly or to pick anything but glass out of their tires. dirty scrub trees & raccoon carcasses. little hands in tiny black gloves. this funeral called traveling. highway, only constant in motion & static at once. the flowers try following along as they’re abandoned. nobody makes their beds or leaves breakfast in a pan like all the movies I couldn’t star in. exit like a drain. bodies—tinned herring, sliding along. the girl doesn’t know about the blood on the windshield. the cigarette that killed an entire history of forests. water shoveled from river to fire, river to fire. mountain iced with elk. just over the Idaho border there’s rock blasting. no flowers in the dry flat of Washington state, only potatoes. Russet. fingerling. Yukon gold. I can taste butter beyond the smoke. is my chin gold too? will we marry before the crest of summer, front hallway swollen ocean of yellow daisies? no. the flowers are hothouse (all wrong) a promise should be wild like Susan’s eyes or the elephant grass teased by a semi. this isn’t the route we mapped out. the plan was to discard the plan.

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the humming prayer the deer wait -for all of space to turn slight white and on its side odd valence locked -on the celestial “suddenly�

-air glows after atoms after mass countdown sapling -the junk keep watch wherever boundary speaks, potential to join -a colony collects dust --

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lets in least of branch width of field or picture tube growing curve to introduce anomaly, extinction, or analog for biography -yet go on growling

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Moses Malone i thought: today i didn’t leave my apartment at all except to buy muffins. i am on the floor with my feet on a pillow. “my social life is dependent on muffins” i imagine myself in the club, surrounded by banana nut muffins and the 50cent song “in da club” is playing and this feels right to me somehow. so i guess i am mostly scared in bed. i am often in between the processes of thinking and acting. some people have found out that if you touch me i might cry.

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FICTION

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THE WIDOW Abigail Grosse

June 1872 Kansas Lillian is serious like her father. She may be round and pink as a rosebud, but she learned solemnity from him. She learned to contain herself. It will serve her well later, but of course, she doesn’t know that yet.

What does she know? The wagon shudders violently. Land that appears flat as an unblemished Lake Michigan contains unforgiving rivets and knots, hidden beneath the whispering grasses. Does Lillian sense how much light we’ve lost since Chicago, how the night skies out here are coated with an impenetrable, thick tar? I could ask her if she’s afraid, but if she’s not, then I will be suggesting that she should be, and that would be the beginning of the end. We must focus on the stars, not the infinite blackness.

It’s comforting to cut through morning sunlight, to know that we have hours before we must face the dark again. On the bench across from me, she is compressed against the bodies of other children, the Milton spawn. Their parents reproduced with abandon despite their apparent difficulty feeding themselves. I suppose they thank Jesus each time Mrs. Milton’s belly swells.

Another miracle, Pa! I feel sorry for them, but they might feel sorry for me, too. The widow. As marked by bad fortune as their children are by freckles. Just as well. The same route is taking us

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to separate destinations. They were baited by the romance of wild space and the economy of cheap land in limitless supply. For Lillian and me, it has less to do with what awaits us, and everything to do with the Chicago skins that no longer suit us.

All of our cramped, unwashed bodies mingle with the oxen’s musk. I don’t advertise it, but even this is preferable to the pungent incense of William’s funeral. It followed me for days. I could let the steam of earl gray waft over my face, or remove biscuits from the oven, and still smell nothing but the incense of loss. Like our neighbors and our priest, it would not allow me to forget that I was – am – a woman grieving.

“May, I pray for you every day,” Father Gregory said. I said nothing. Why should I thank him for something that I do not need and did not ask for?

Lillian is wrapped in a heavy sleep, her cocker spaniel ringlets spilling onto the shoulder of the larger child next to her. My body aches from its prolonged stillness. How strange, to undertake an epic journey, only to have the scenery march by outside the wagon’s walls. I watch the driver’s back, bouncing gently with the uneven terrain.

I approach the small window that opens from the wagon’s body to the driver’s seat. “Sir,” I say, “Would it be at all possible for me to sit next to you? It’s just unbearable in here. Surely you sympathize.” He’s roughly my age, mustached and red from endless days in the cruel July sun. I don’t mind if he considers me improper; this relationship is transitory and transactional.

Then again, that’s what I thought about William when he first asked me to fit him for shoes at Father’s shop. The finest black leather and the thickest soles. He always had such a precise vision of what he wanted.

The driver does not meet my eyes. “If you wish, Ma’am. It would not trouble me.”

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Let the Miltons watch me climb through the window! How futile it seems to respect decorum outside the role of wife. Without the duty to protect someone else’s integrity, I lack the motivation to uphold my own. The oxen are only moving at the pace that Lillian toddles along, but I’m unsteady as I stand. I forget what it feels like not to be in constant motion. A surreal thing, to carry on living with no fixed location, no sturdy ground. In between homes, in between certainties.

Everything is more acute on the frontier. We can’t distract ourselves like we can in the city. I settle down on the bench next to the driver, and I am reminded that out here, there are fewer colors – just green and blue, wrapped over the horizon and God knows how much farther.

There are no buffers cushioning the land from the sky, as there is nothing protecting us from each other. We must accept it as we accept the rocking of the wagon and the hunger pains that make Lillian cry out at night.

My childhood friends were all nervous when they got engaged. They fretted over their dresses, their figures, their believability as wives and mothers-to-be. Elizabeth stopped eating and cried over the Tribune; Caroline refused to leave her mother’s house, worried that the sun would give her the appearance of a farmer bride – a fate worse than death! Their anxieties trailed them like an unshakable pack of stray dogs. They would not have guessed that engagement was the most immense and perfect relief that I had ever experienced.

When William told Father that he would have the Italian leather shoes and me, he couldn’t have known that I had vomited for the fourth morning in a row. I had run out of the shop “to run an errand,” which actually entailed keeling over in an alley and shielding my face from passersby. Just another day. The stitching on my dress was strained, ready to pop like

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champagne, eager to betray my secret. William said I looked “riper than a peach,” deliciously unaware that the fruit was long spoiled. What did it matter, as long as it was packaged nicely? I could charge the same price. The dressmaker wasn’t going to pat down my abdomen before sewing a modest white gown.

I always wondered if Lillian had an intuitive sense of it all. William repelled her; his embraces made her squirm and clutch at me. The truth eventually claws its way out into the open, doesn’t it?

Today, we all walk alongside the wagon. If we did this every day, our feet would blister and bleed. But on the gentlest, balmiest days, it’s a small pleasure we allow ourselves. Lillian plucks wildflowers out of the ground and squeals with ecstasy at every prairie dog sighting. The Milton children chase after each other and brandish sticks, as undisciplined as the land itself.

Mrs. Milton holds up the rear with me, as if motherhood gave us common ground and an obligation to befriend one another. I can hardly see her face for the grove of freckles that obscures it.

“You’re off to join your husband, I assume?” she says. Her lilting voice suggests that her parents were immigrants. Of course an Irishman’s daughter would have little to keep her in Chicago. William had probably seen her pockled husband on the street and called him a “white nigger” under his breath.

“Emmet, my oldest brother, actually. He came out here a year ago, and him and his wife could use some help with the children. While they tend to the land.”

“Oh dear. So you’re husband is no longer with us, I take it.” Why she feels compelled to clarify that, I couldn’t know.

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“Yes, we had some lovely years. A gambler will inevitably make enemies, though.”

“Oh, Lord! That’s quite terrible.”

“I appreciate your sympathies, but I can hardly stand to mourn anymore.”

“You must be a very strong woman.”

“Dear, you really are too kind to me.” This is why I prefer Lillian’s company. She feels no need to make sense of it all. She doesn’t need to be comforted, and she’s too young to try to comfort me.

Lillian rushes over to us, grasping a little bouquet of indigo wildflowers. They’re more beautiful than any token William ever bought me. Certainly more honest. She beams with pride, foolish pride that she will eventually need to learn to reign in. But for now, it is contagious.

“When will we see the Injuns, Mama?”

“Who told you we would, my love?” With the virgin land stretching infinite around us, it’s hard to believe that we will encounter any other human souls, white or Indian.

Emmet left home after brushing sleeves with Father at his preferred brothel. I suppose Mother was closing the shop, or roasting a pork loin, while her husband selected the most appetizing prostitute in the whorehouse’s tarnished candlelight. Emmet was unmarried, twentyone, and unlike Father, never claimed to be any kind of exceptional Catholic. He could forgive himself, but not the man who had thumped his Bible over our infant prams. He no longer had any interest in the shop that funded Father’s cunt-buying habit. So he went West, into territory too fresh to be so rife with hypocrisy.

Emmet’s departure left an acid sting in my life. He had taken me by the hand through adolescence and through Chicago. I saw it all through the eyes of someone too protected to fear

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the desperation that seeped into the alleys. We strolled by a man pissing into a bucket in lurid sunlight, and Emmet tugged me away before I could protest. Without my brother for the first time at eighteen, I felt unmoored in a way I had never known. Then Emmet’s friends began to approach me in a way I had never known. Then I experienced pleasures I had never known. The slide was as natural as snow slipping off a rooftop, plopping on the ground without consequence – until I vomited in the street and popped a seam in my work dress.

Horizon ablaze with the sunset, we eat cured pork so salty it burns. I’m starved for fresh fruit and pillowy white bread; my whole body is sagging from this limited diet. My bones are pushing through my skin. I can’t help but wonder if this journey will stunt Lillian from becoming as strong and tall as she could. I wonder if she’ll resent me for it when she’s a hunchbacked old woman chasing after her grandchildren. She hops onto my lap, but refuses her portion of pork.

She cries when I insist she eat it, and not for the first time, I feel useless.

When the darkness begins to set in, we lay our bedrolls on the grass. I haven’t slept through the night since we left the city twenty-one days ago. I dread the intermittent awakenings that fill the cursed hours. Every night, the blackness feels thicker and more oppressive; all I want is for sleep to shield me from it, but it’s asking too much. These are the only times I think about Jesus. I picture him on the cross, screaming, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And I think yes, perhaps he does understand after all.

Unsurprisingly, I wake while the moon is still high in the sky. I don’t assume any cause other than a cricket’s piercing song, but I soon detect some movement in the grass. Something other than the wind raking its fingers through the prairie. I don’t want to move too suddenly, so I let my eyes rove around without moving my head. I catch the silhouette of a tall, muscular man

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with long braids like a woman’s. My first instinct is to scream, but something about his body language is disarming. He’s in no hurry; he has no weapon. All I detect is… curiosity, slow and childlike. As if we were a unique breed of rabbit or a grove of sunflowers. I remember that we are the invaders, not him, and pretend to sleep. No one need know about this but me.

When I wake to the sun, I can’t sift reality from fever dream. The space around us is as absolutely empty as it seemed before. But I suspect now that the stasis is an illusion; this prairie is teeming with life and with movement. We just aren’t conscious of it all.

I neither loved nor hated William. He was a fact of my life, not unlike a newspaper article or encyclopedia entry. He was the man who chose me, and in so doing, saved me. I had a debt to him that I couldn’t deny, and so I considered it my duty to please him. I learned how to replicate my mother’s recipes for him. I let him consume my body with impatience, greed. I pressed his suits and polished his shoes, content to be like a servant – well, there’s not much difference between a servant and a wife, is there?

We had three years together. Mother told me I had every reason to be grateful, and I could not disagree. When the sheriff knocked on my door and removed his hat in deference, expressing his “most sincere condolences” with beer on his breath, I felt rather like I did when Emmet told me he was going West – like a candle that had been extinguished, I suppose. Like I had to start over again, like security was as mercurial as a summer storm.

That was when the West began to whisper to me. I realized that the unclaimed earth was no more or less volatile than a charmed marriage blessed with a gorgeous, golden-haired child.

Here or there, safety was not guaranteed.

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The driver estimates seven more days. Mrs. Milton nearly keels over upon hearing. In the wagon, it’s easy to feel that another hour will be the end of us, let alone another week. “Lord almighty, when this is all over, I will never travel again. Mark my words!”

The lady does grate on me, but it is a charming picture, her litter of children romping in their own little corner of the territory. “What will your lodgings be?”

“Seamus has built us a sod house. It will be cramped, no doubt about that, but I would do anything for a roof over my head at this point.” She reclines on the bench, but the wagon rattles, and her head smacks against the wall.

“Yes, I’ll take a roof and a lukewarm bath.”

“This would hardly be so grueling if my Seamus was here with me.” As soon as the words slip out, she slaps her hand over her mouth. “My goodness, I could not be more dense! I suppose that was terribly insensitive.” She looks at me with the intense pity I thought I had left behind in the city, and I feel myself flush from thwarted pride.

“I’m no fabrigé egg, Mrs. Milton. You can speak of your darling husband without crushing me.” She looks pained – like she’s in labor yet again! – but I cannot soften. “In fact, it may shock you to hear this, Mrs. Milton, but the fact that your husband is alive does not render you more fortunate than I. Perhaps I am the fortunate one, Mrs. Milton. Perhaps I have everything I want!”

“My Lord, I did stir your grief! You must forgive me.”

“You all think that every word I say is burned black with grief. Is it so impossible to think that William was not my sun and my stars and my universe?”

Lillian begins to cry, swatting the flies that prey on her fair skin. If we don’t get out of the wagon and into the breeze, I might sob, too. I ask the driver to slow down so that we might

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hop out. He scowls; we need disruptions as much as we need a bout of dysentery. One of the Milton children howls at me. “Why is the angry lady making us stop?”

“Because your mother is an unbearable cunt!” I’ll only regret saying it if Lillian picks it up and starts tossing the word around.

After we exit the wagon, the driver spurs the oxen to a faster pace than usual, certainly to spite me. Deservedly so. I take Lillian’s hand, but she wiggles it free. She does hate it when I yell. I let her trot ahead of me, indignant, punishing. I question whether I still possess the drive to make it out to Emmet’s property. Seven more days of this? Seven years, seven eternities. What’s the difference?

There must be an Indian colony around here, judging by the previous night’s moonlit visitor. I imagine my own hair in braids like his. We have no common language, but maybe words aren’t the most important thing. Maybe words aren’t even where communication takes place. I surrender myself to nostalgia – for a thing I do not know.

The only force that could pull me from a fantasy so rich is Lillian’s shrieking. “Mama!

Mama!”

She’s twenty paces ahead of me, and she’s still as a sunflower. I see nothing in the immediate space around her, and for a fraction of a second, I think I imagined her yelp. But I see the grass shifting irregularly; a creature low to the ground slithers away. When I get close enough, I hear its distinctive rattle, and I know that it is finished. It is all over.

I was half-asleep during my last conversation with William. Exhausted from another day wrangling Lillian with no adult companionship, I turned in without him. He followed me, but made no indication that would be join me under the quilts. He sat lightly on the edge of the bed,

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stroking my cheek. I stirred; he usually reserved his touches for sloppy, whiskey-scented sex. He was sober then, and fully clothed. “You’re alright, May?” “Of course.”

“Why is that so hard for me to believe?”

I could have said, I’m so tired, I could sleep for years. Or everything about you is unsatisfactory. Or why do you want me to pretend that I need you? I could have said anything in that moment. For the first and last time, he wanted me to. Yet, anything I could have said would have been wind over the prairie – the grasses shuffling and trembling, but as firmly rooted in the ground as ever. So I said, “Good night, my love, please be safe.”

We bury her by a grove of indigo wildflowers. Mrs. Milton sobs as if she had incubated Lillian in her own womb. Her children seem bored, as does the driver, who has certainly buried little girls before. He delivers a tidy prayer in monotone, and then it is time to carry on. But I stay kneeling by Lillian’s makeshift grave, its earth loose and fresh.

“Please, ma’am, we cannot delay any longer.” I half-expect the driver to whip me like one of the oxen.

“You may go.”

“Ma’am, I know you must be hysterical after such loss. Please come with me.”

“I could not be any less hysterical. You may go, all of you. Mrs. Milton may have my belongings.”

He looks at me with unadulterated contempt. “I would prefer not to use force, Mrs. Ashbury!”

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“My name is May, and if you touch me, I swear on my baby girl’s grave that I will poison you in your sleep.”

He turns his back, and I’ve never been so relieved. I watch them all crowd into the wagon and creak along. When they have disappeared over the horizon, I let a few tears dampen the patch of earth. When my eyes dry, I stand and brush off my dress. The Indian colony must be close. I have some time before the sun falls.

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THE GREAT DIVIDE Paul Hansom

I’m trying to tell this simple story, but some folks can’t be reached, no way, no how, nothing in their lives save practical matters. Might as well live like cart-wheels if that’s your take on things. And it seems to me right along my kin here see the world as fifty sacks of ground-up corn and a pocket full of dollars. Keerist! I’m rounding out supper with one of my best, explaining how Captain Elmore came to this country, a trooper with the 38th, cookie at first, then working up to interpreter over at the Agency. How he used to have this blue stone about as big as two fingers, a wonderful stone, that he carried in his pocket right along. Hearing him talk, it made you lucky in gambling and in war, and matter of fact nobody could throw him down while he had ahold of it. And every morning he always found money in his pockets. Elmore could go anywhere he wanted and everybody was his bestest friend.

But the stone made him a slave.

Elmore couldn’t sleep nights. He started having awful bad dreams, the stone carrying him off on long, lonesome trips, and once it took him to an underground house all painted up, filled with birds of every kind – parrots and sparrows and eagles, magpies too -- all dancing round a fire. And when they took a good look at poor old Elmore, these birds, they all rose up and threw him right into that fire, where he burned and sizzled like a knob of grease.

Next day he woke up all sore and scared, vowing to throw that stone into the Chana river.

But when he did, it started crying like a child as it sank and the river boiled over like a cooking

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pot. And he could hear that stone weeping his name for a whole month, saying “Don’t leave me Captain, please don’t leave . . . .” It broke his heart and he just had to get away.

“Some story, huh?”

My brother Lonny shakes his head and breaks a fart to make Daddy laugh.

“Pup,” Daddy says straight to me, then “Haw haw haw. . . .,” slapping his knee, “Now you know Lonny here’s the entertainer. Haw haw haw.”

Lonny smiles shaking his big old head. “Now what’s the good of that damn fool story, that damn fool stone?” he says. “Throwing it away like that just ain’t real, Pup. If that were me I’d hang onto that thing come hell and high waters. Specially since it were magical and all.”

Daddy loves Lonny’s mule sense, him grinning and shoveling like a pie-eating machine.

“Keerist! It don’t have to be all real. It’s how you put a bead on things. Sometimes stories look one way when they’re another, and sometimes you’ve got to leave good fortune cos it ain’t what it seems. Magination, fellahs.”

“Still don’t make no sense to me,” says Daddy, running his tongue down the knife to the handle. “Good fortune’s just good fortune, plain and simple. Now shut up and finish that supper,” kinda ugly like.

Course I know they can’t see nothing in this house cos they’re blind, and about the only things they can get an eye on is precious money, weekend bottles, or some poxy gal over in town. Nothing wrong with that deep down, but yessir, when it comes to those stories they can see far as they want to, but show them some different they call you crazy. And then some.

“Now look see here. There’s more to this life than them mill-stones out there, grinding round every day and us sitting like grains o corn just waiting the turn.”

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“Pup, don’t run down what keeps your trousers up. We’re important in these parts, good name and upstanding.”

“It ain’t standing-up in my eyes.” I clash down my god-damned greasy fork hard as I can, and it bounces off that tin plate right to the floor.

“Now Pup,” says Daddy. “No fits tonight.”

“Anyhow,” growls Lonny, “What you mean by these stories and fuss? What you playing here?” and he pushes that pug-ugly face into mine, clenching his fist under my chin.

“I’ll tell you what I mean as plain as you can foller. We’re squatting on the rim of this broke-down hole, grinding up their wheat their corn, day in day out, and for what? A loaf of bread! Some griddle-cakes! We’re pinned under them stones right along, squashed flatterer than bugs in a boot.”

Lonny socks me right in the ear knocking me off the chair with a ring in my head, and while I’m down he kicks me with them chisel toed boots, and Daddy stomps a heel, them both laughing big and loud.

“Goddamn Lonny I’ll kill you for that!” But screaming don’t stop the pain.

Daddy goes “Haw haw haw.”

“Daddy, that’ll be your last laugh on me,” and I take off running out o the kitchen into the night, which is where I spend all my time these days. I head on right to town, following those wheel ruts lit up by a sickly moon, hanging low and chilly. Oh those sons o bitches, sons o blind bitches, making me run off like a criminal man, and not even dressed like it was Saturday night.

Damned Lonny’d get to go in town whenever he sneezed, but I have to steal the time when a rage blows across me, and damned if I don’t hate Lonny to death, with his new fool suit and slanty cut-aways, twirling that spangly chain. Keerist! Damned if I don’t hate him! Hate. Hate.

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Hate. Nothing but Hate for Lonny. And I’ll never forgive the bastard for seeing the elephant over on Son-of-a-Gun hill when Daddy made me work his shift.

I run past the church with a stitch in my side, past the box-car corral, the drunk fool’s bust like you wouldn’t believe, washed up high, dry, and godalmighty! Right on past those suckers slinging their empties after me screaming “You better run kid, cos if we catch yer, that hair’s coming right off!”

Running and hating right into town, full to the brim with colored people, yellow-like and underfed, tough gangs of miners down from their huts hungry for a twenty cent meal and a smile from the waiter girl. Oh they’d had their shave, alright. They wore their new and shiny boots right along. But they walked like they’d never seen a pavement in their lives, and come Monday morning every trail’s jammed with lonely men heading back to their mines, all dreaming of that hotel girl. A sheep wouldn’t go where they climbed with a pick n shovel, some pork and beans.

I catch my breath by a tin lamp over the dance hall door, watch a moth battering over and over trying to get what’ll kill it. And some shrill wild woman stands up on the step, teetering in them high heeled boots, cursing her man, “Son bitch, son bitch, call that lovin! And you twenty years old! Be ashamed, oughta be . . . ,” and the back of his shirt cuts into the dark, him long gone before her whistling bottle chases him with its smash.

And the floor manager comes round back with the tip of his cigar glowing like coal. He takes one swipe with his big hand and knocks her off them stairs. “Keep yer croakin down,” he says. “Or I’ll cut you up like a chinaman.”

“You leave her alone or there’ll be someone sorry tonight!”

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“Get on home, sonny,” he says to me, glass eye glinting, a rope of tobaccy spit spattering on my boot. He twitches his coat side open once, once enough to see that razor sat comfy in there. He’s a dangerous man with an empty face and I’ve sense enough to know it. He closes the coat and goes.

The more I see men the more I like dogs.

And right along I try to lift up that dead weighted woman, her rubbing the welt on her cheek. But she swivels to me and gives a nasty long hiss and crumples back down in her bombazine dress. So-long you both, you’re in good company.

And I’m pulled on down the short dark street by some music coming over me, damn nice music too. Women singers bright and chirpy, violins and thingamies all going in tune – it beat anything I’d heard before – and being inclined to the curious I edge in through a doorway to see what’s what, and there’s a long sloon with tables all across the floor and at the far end some girls dancing and singing in short dresses like circus ladies. There’s a lot o men sitting, doing their drinking and I think, where’s the harm in standing, looking? So I go on in and soon the gals stop their singing, take a drink around the room – all but the little one, who’s pale and doesn’t grin like the rest – and as I’m standing there one of the gals squeezes me tight, nudges a man to make him cough, then damned if she didn’t knock my hat off! Then kick it along that floor in the spit and shavings, my own good hat!

“Now hold on there miss,” I say, “That’s a three dollar hat and it lives all alone. It ain’t no football now nor never will be.” And she laughs right in my face saying “You’re a fool for loving hats too much. Have a whisky and think on what’s good for you.” And I sweeped up my hat and had the whisky like she said me to do. And then one more, and then another, everybody

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laughing and egging on and me wishing for Elmore’s endless pockets, the music grown bigger than that room can hold, them ladies dancing like birds all puffed out.

And damned if I didn’t end up on those steps with the shrieking woman round back explaining all my stories cos her face says she wants to hear.

“My stovepipe,” she grins gap toothed, sucking at my bottle.

“Sure enough I’m killing all o them tomorrow. Every. Single. One.” “It’s beautiful,” she says, reaching into my pants.

“Everyone by eight!” And I take a long drink of my own.

“I believe that story o yours, that stone, –” “The best I know of yet . . . .”

“It makes me want to live there n then -- ” “Goddamn there’s gotta be justice!”

“No. . . . Just this, just this. . . .”

And I kiss her till I can’t breathe no more. . . .

***

Morning mules bray, dogs cough, and Blackie’s hammer clinks out another set of shoes.

My woman’s gone and left me laid out here all hungover. But quiet and calm just the same. And resolved. To go on home the only way I know, resolved about the whole damned thing.

***

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I take Lonny down with a sweet shot from my ought-eight.

A clean shot through the forehead.

I lay the bead on him, settle my breathing, squeeze one right off. A puff o smoke, and Lonny’s in the weeds.

He’s coming through the grass round back of the house, down from the hill larger than life, dead rabbits dangling from the end of his stick. Now he’s out there like a sack o flour.

I go to the mill looking for Daddy on his morning shift, and it’s all dark in there, some sun cutting the dust and heat like lightning right where the boards don’t fit. And those mules plod on with the chaff and the dust coming smoky, those stones turning a deep smooth grind that sets my teeth on edge.

Daddy watches me and the rifle, his eyes wide in the dark.

“Here for your shift?” Friendly like.

“Nope.”

“What’s the gun for, Pup?” “For nothing.”

“Then why the gun?” His voice wobbles.

I cock the hammer, Daddy’s eyes narrow down and he moves back from the grind stones, the turning wood gears, the mules all twitching with flies. He nods cos he knows, rubs a big thumb over his wide leather belt and the corner of his mouth jerks out a smile. “Seen Lonny?”

“Yep.” “Out back?”

“Yep.” The mules go round one more time and the stones keep to grinding.

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“What you about, Pup?” “All about done. And then I’ll be leaving.”

“Where’n hell you going?”

Daddy moves crabways and I let him turn me slowly, let him think he’s getting advantage by putting the sun right in my eyes. When he reaches for that rusty fork leaning agin the wall I shoot him up under the arm, up into his shirt-front, and he slumps down quick with a groan, face pressed hard on the boards. Another groan, a shiver, his boot twitching a bit.

“What you . . . . what you. . . . what. . . .” his breath sucking in out quick, string-spit all down his chin, his eyes rolling, fixing on this then fixing on that then fixing on me.

His fingers touch at the hole and he pokes the tip inside knowing he’s going to die.

So I tell him a story to help pass his time.

The one about Henley, how on his grubby death bed he took Jock and Webster back to the year of his camel train, strung across the high desert. You should’ve seen us, he says, should’ve seen us cavalry-men high and haughty hanging onto those humps, great hairy humps like buried tits, those spook-footed bitches loping slow past the salt hills, right past them indians running in terror who’d never seen the like.

They rode a regular saddle. They rode a side saddle. But either way they rode up sore, and nearly all chose to lead their beasts. See, the camels hated carrying both the men and their gear.

And Henley’s last words? The mule’s still the best, don’t forget that. Get over the fancy in this life, boys, and stick with your mule. And with that he shut his eyes tight, crossed his fingers, and let go a long last breath.

“I ain’t a mule, Daddy.”

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***

Finished up, whistling, I go back happy to my room and sling together a bag figuring I’ll be gone forever. I yank out some thick wove mountain shirts, some cheery kerchiefs, and an oilcoat for the rains to come. Some powder, some shot, and Uncle Frankie’s scrap-wood fiddle.

Damned if he didn’t love them Norwegian tunes with their crooked melodies, and us reeling round the hog-pen till the flies filled up our mouths. . . . Oh. And money. And the mare. A good strong horse that one, and Lonny’s saddle cos it’s the best thing he owned.

Then I’ll be damned if Sparrey doesn’t come creaking into the yard surprising me right along, so I throws down the bag, charge out to head him off, and leave my gun leaning right inside the door. “Howdy, Sparrey. Weren’t expecting you till Tuesday” Those eyes slits, his face browner than dry turd, he says. “I got some extra grindin for yer Daddy.”

“He don’t need no extra right now,” “Told me awhiles back to bring along some extra,” He winks, them slits thinner than nickel slots. “If you get my meanin.”

“Meaning or none, he ain’t here nomore.”

“Say?” Sparrey cups a dead ear and leans down to catch me.

“He ain’t here,” louder like.

“Ain’t here?”

“Nope. Yep” “Don’t rightly foller,” he says.

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“Sparrey he ain’t here. Can’t be no plainer than that.”

“So where he be?” And he climbs on down from the buckboard seat and looks straight up in my face. Searching without searching he thinks, but I know better.

“Gone off way up to Alaska. Gone right along to see his frozen brother.”

“Laska? Brother?” He turns once to see the yard then looks straight into me. “Pup,” he says, “I seed him just the other day and he said nothin bout nothin. Save this here extra which is the only why I’m here.”

“That may be old man, but he’s went just the same. Set away yesterday.”

“So he ain’t here?”

“Nope. Long gone.”

“Lonny? He round the yard?”

“Nope.”

Sparrey lifts his hat to scrat his brow, rubs the lines slow and gentle, studying that sweat all greasy down his fingers. He flicks a looks across his shoulder, the corn bags all piled up like teeth, then cocks his good ear to the grinding stones. He looks me up and looks me down. Real slow. “Well. . . . I’m owed.” he says.

“Yep.” “I’m owed now, Pup. It’s my livin here we’re talkin about..”

“That’s about right. How much?”

“See here,” Sparrey reaches in his duster and drags out the brown account book. He licks a big thumb to move the pages over. “Jumpy, Pup?” And finding my family writ there he says “Seven nineteen, anyhow.”

“That all?”

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“That’s it.”

“You come all the way here for seven nineteen?”

“And the extra.”

“You a narrow man, Sparrey.”

“Narrow, wide. T’ain’t no difference to me nor you. Just keep up your grindin, son, and we’ll all stay happy.”

“Maybe,” I say, go back inside and sneak a look down at him standing in the yard. He starts up a whistle, a jiggy little tune to hide his growing snoop. I pull a quick twenty and run back down the stairs.

Sparrey smiles, a devil round dinnertime. “I cain’t give you no change,” he says.

“What you mean?”

“I don’t have no change.”

“Keerist! It’s all I got,” the bill waving there between us.

“I need somethin smaller. You need smaller, Pup?” And I run off inside all jittered up, my plan going cold aound me, and I fumble ten off of the roll, run back and shove it straight at him staring.

“Can’t break that neither.”

“Sparrey, take your money. Make change next time round!”

“Ain’t good business, Pup.” And him stretching out that turtle neck, seeing up every creaking stair, undoing them buckles on my bags, on into those empty rooms, then out to Daddy and Lonny all stiff in the sun.

“Then we’ll pay next time,” I say.

“That ain’t good business, neither. Cain’t be no next time. Now’s now.”

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“So now’s now.” I trot back into the doorway and come right out with my gun to put a shot straight through his head. “That’s all I got, Sparrey.”

I calm his horse, give her some feed, and go back to packing my gear. Without no distractions. Can’t make change!

And then I wave so-long to the mill and head out on my way.

And why not Alaska?

Must be something over that great divide, and hell, I only want a peek. One look out onto the west that’s laying all unknown. Just like the arctic sea. With peace and stories and silence so deep the voice of a fly comes human.

34

BEES Colin Dodds

Sergio Nasrallah Whitehurst was very happy. Terrifying fortunes were at his disposal. A careful, low blend of chemically flawless amphetamines and opiates made the trip to New York an epic waking dream. In their moment in the hotel lobby, Judith dealt with the front desk, while his other travelling courtesan, Mitsuko, rubbed his neck.

He wore dark sunglasses carved from the shell of a dwindling species of armadillo, and below the shades, a blank expression. It wasn’t that the years of unremitting pleasure had jaded him. Rather, one of the only conditions applied to his exorbitant existence was that no one must know how deliriously happy he was.

A mix of beautiful and powerful people traversed the gleaming design of the inlaid marble floor. The beautiful outnumbered the powerful by a carefully modulated ratio of threepoint-one-five to one. The hotel was deliberately unknown to most, specialized in the gleaming and meticulous peak of global civilization. Sergio recognized some of people in the lobby from similar hotels in cities around the world, but gave no indication. As a group, they had more in common with one another than with their families or with anyone in the cities they visited.

Nearly breaking his impassivity, he gave a nearly imperceptible nod to a tall young man, pale with fine features, equally impassive, equally dark sunglasses. The young man wore his sports jacket draped over his shoulders. And Sergio knew why. The thought created a warmth that spread through his belly, and suffused the spring afternoon, and washed in with the whoosh of the revolving door. Mitsuko could sense what was happening and rubbed his neck more attentively, breathed wordlessly into his ear. As Judith returned from the desk, one of the sleeves of the jacket Sergio had draped on his shoulders became slightly heavier.

Judith and Mitsuko walked him to the nested series of rooms that formed his suite. There they’d feed him on the spinal fluid of whales and the ovaries of eagles, while a string quartet played masterpieces, and special movies played. Then they’d cut his hair, strip him nude, deposit

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his jacket in the refrigerated closet, wash and massage him. Mitsuko, a doctor, would administer more of whatever might better approximate the ever-retreating pinnacle of sensory perfection.

Thus prepared, Sergio would pass naked, deeper into the suite, through a completely empty white room, and ultimately into the sanctum. There, whores waited, and the final restrictions would finally depart from Sergio’s behavior. They were beautiful women, skin smooth and supple as still water. The women were new, as they always were, and had been prepared before his arrival. They had been rubbed with oil. They had been dressed in sparse clothing alternately diaphanous, skintight and absurd. They had been drugged, mechanically stimulated and left quivering on the edge of orgasm. And weeks before, they had been blinded, with whips.

No one, not even the highly trained and professional whores, could be allowed to witness how utterly and flawlessly happy Sergio was. If word got out, even as a whisper among the transient, sequestered and pampered community of such women, about the scale and scope of his persistent ecstasy, the whole edifice of global civilization would, sooner or later, go up in flames.

Sergio spent half a day and most of the night in his sanctum, too happy to wonder where the women came from or where they’d be relegated afterwards. Such stunning beauties, with the most titillating and yet soothing appearances and the most deeply evocative smells, they ran together in his mind into a single deeply sexual magna mater, so that his culmination with them mimicked something as profound as the answer to his own birth.

Mitsuko and Judith took turns waiting in the blank room outside for what the whores brought from the sanctum.

At the end of the session, Judith and Mitsuko helped Sergio from the innermost chamber, to the room of sofas, where Judith draped a silk robe over his shoulders. Mitsuko, also a doctor, inserted the catheter, and checked that the line ran into the sleeves of the robe. Then Judith began to tell Sergio a perfect story.

“I had a thought,” he said, interrupting Judith’s story.

“Yes?” Judith responded. Mitsuko’s focus was elsewhere.

“It’s not a thought, more like something I saw, in the other room, earlier. Do you want to know what it was?” his eyes were wide, his pupils huge, black mirrors in a room that had no mirrors at all.

“Of course, honey.”

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“I saw a horse, in a tunnel, like the tunnels where the trains run and the sewers go. But it was a weird horse. It has the, you know, the, on its head, it had a…”

“A horn? Like a unicorn?” Judith offered.

“Yes. It was this white unicorn, just running through the subway, in the tunnel, with the garbage. Then there were two of them. Then I blinked and the tunnels were full of unicorns. And they started running out of the tunnels, poking their horns out of the sewer grates and out of the pipes, until the whole city started to sway, like it was rocking on a sea of them, a sea of unicorns.”

“Wow, that’s really good.”

“Yeah. It is.”

Sergio blinked his eyes shut. The effort of speaking exhausted him. It felt good to talk. It felt good to stop, too, though. It felt good to be tired. What Mitsuko was doing in his robe felt good, too. Sergio Nasrallah Whitehurst was very happy.

Above him, Judith silently recited Sergio’s unicorn blather back to herself, memorizing it. It probably didn’t matter. But they paid her like they did, more than any model-gorgeous Ivyeducated doctor could hope to make in a lifetime, to be thorough.

The next day, Sergio was fed a salad of vegetables grown below the floorboards of a Salzburg opera house, and an iridescent blood pudding made from a strange deep-sea fish that had to be caught in special pressurized tanks, lest it explode on its trip to the surface.

Once he’d digested his meal breakfast the glow of tv shows edited to reveal their secret meanings, he went back into the sanctum, to meet with a fresh quartet of blinded whores. At lunch, Judith and Mitsuko draped a fresh robe over his shoulders. He was given a shot of vitamins, stimulants and opioids the catheter reinserted, and he enjoyed a large bone bowl of ice cream made from the breast milk of women only slightly less wealthy than himself.

The knock on the door was a formality. The hotel had dozens of redundant measures to keep unwanted visitors from making it as far as the lobby. Sergio lifted his hand slightly.

Mitsuko sashayed over and put his sunglasses on for him, then caressed his shoulders gently.

Judith opened the door and kissed each of cheek of a man who wore a suit. Sergio barely looked up, grunted, and continued with his ice cream. It was delicious.

The man’s dark suit was carefully chosen and fitted seemingly better than his own skin.

He was familiar, maybe someone Sergio knew and maybe just one of an impeccable species that

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visited Sergio wherever he was, be it Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg or New York. The man was a banker. Federal Reserve, PBC, Bank of England, World Bank, something, maybe all of them. Sergio wasn’t a child, he heard things. It was all just so incredibly boring, compared to the sanctum, the special movies, his visions, or the gel capsule of his airplane. So boring.

He could tell that the banker’s boring words were almost as carefully chosen as the words he didn’t say. The banker and Judith went to the suite’s sealed room. All the hotels, everywhere, had that room. It was full of glass tubes, lit screens, gas torches and small, complicated machines. It was cold in there, and boring, so Sergio didn’t bother with it. From the sealed room, he could hear Judith talking to the banker, catching the word “unicorn,” though he couldn’t tell if she was telling the story right. At the end, the banker spoke, saying little, as he always did.

“I wonder where he ever heard about sewers,” the banker said.

Mitsuko retrieved his jackets and robes from the refrigerated closet. The sleeves were heavy, full of fluid, straining the impeccable fabric slightly. Judith removed the blind whores’ crystal flasks from a refrigerator in the sealed room.

Judith and the banker worked in the little laboratory while Mitsuko kept Sergio occupied.

She knew how to do things, because she was a doctor, she said. The thing she at that moment did made Sergio wild with wonder at what medical school must be like.

Judith and the banker were in there for a while, quietly working, words drifting out like boring scraps of paper into an atmosphere of riotous pleasure. Finally, things ran their course and Sergio lost interest in Mitsuko and in his dreams of medical school. Dangerously close to postcoital boredom, he could overhear their conversation in the next room.

“I’m just asking, because they’re going to ask me,” the banker was said.

“This is a very consistent batch. It represents both hemispheres and the twelve main time zones. It represents all six methods of extraction, and both the cream and the dregs, so to speak.

The cocktails have been evenly administered and his diet has been optimal. You can ask Mitsuko.”

“I know you two are always spot on. But with these levels, I have to ask.”

“Other than the unicorn talk, everything went as it always does.”

The crisp and precise man left the boring bright room and strolled through Sergio’s range of vision, somewhat less crisply than before. He took out a satellite phone, with an oversized

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antenna like a black unicorn’s horn. He dialed, put the device to his ear, listened patiently, dialed some more, then repeated the process a few times.

Finally, the banker took a nervous breath to speak to the person he was calling. Stark fear replaced careful disinterest on the man’s closely shaven face. His adam’s apple struggled just above the opalescent blue silk of his necktie. And having swallowed, the banker could speak.

“Sell,” he said.

39

WE ARE ALL SNOWFLAKES AND CITIES Gaetan Sgro

Today, everything I need is in the city. There’s a dive bar and a falafel window and a bodega selling glass-bottled milk from Lancaster County all within one block of me. And when I need to get away, I can borrow a car and drive across the blue bridge towards the beach. The engine revs up over the peak and then goes quiet, and I can see tall spires flashing like lighthouses above the estuary. Down the other side, I hit New Jersey without losing speed.

Coming home at night, if the sky is not too heavy, a glittering curtain will snap into view at the height of the span. The rough wind across the river and the tires clipping the jointed surface will ripple through my body, so that it’s either me or the city that shudders in the darkness.

I live now so smashed up against the river that coming down off the bridge, I have to brake hard onto the ramp at 5th street and double back towards the city’s eastern edge. The way the halos of streetlamps clatter against the ridges of polished brick always strikes me.

South Street is a mess of moonstruck tourists, punk rock kids, aggressive bass, and my apartment is only three flights above it. Some nights, I hear them shouting in my sleep.

And some nights, the sound of the street is as good as silence. Some nights, I can close my eyes and listen as a taxi rattles around the bend, then accelerates. I can lie on my soft mattress and

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picture the scene below as I’ve always pictured it. The gravel drive, narrow with gnarly pines. Night breezing in through the screen.

Some winter mornings, the city can look pristine. When the sun is lying low, I can stand up on the roof and stare for miles above the neighborhoods without blinking. I can see how some things resist the snowy coating, the smokestacks and the steeples and the tall, tall buildings. And I can see snow settling between rows of three and four story houses. Snow so deep that the furrows lose all definition. Streets disappear entirely.

“What the hell were you thinking?” my Dean had asked, incredulously, peeling off his glasses and massaging his temples as I sat there in silence. I wasn’t thinking of getting ahead in Anatomy. I wasn’t counting on surveillance cameras or security. What I was really thinking, what I really couldn’t say, was that maybe I’d made a huge mistake.

At the beginning of the semester, they asked us to consider the sacrifices of our cadavers. The only sound in the cavernous lab was the rattle of an air conditioner.

By the end of Anatomy, we were using hacksaws to decapitate the bodies. Sometimes, the ligaments would fray and catch in the blades, and we’d have to use our hands the rest of the way.

One night, I had let myself in late. I’d soaped my hands in the scrub sink and slipped them into clear plastic gloves, the kind used for handling meat. I dragged a rusty lamp beside one body and, leaning in, listened for the organs. The liver, brown and winged, like a stingray. The hard, yellow stones that were her kidneys. Slick, spongy lungs, clogged with ash and honey.

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There was quiet in the cadaver lab, which had nothing to do with silence. Like shells containing the voices of waves, they weren’t exactly silent. And I wasn’t exactly stranded. And the sound was like a blanket.

Most days I’m good at pretending, for my parents’ sake, that med school is every bit as thrilling as it’s meant to be. Making absurd claims in emails to my extended family. Analogies between pathways and poetry. The sanctity of bodies. Bromides about finding my place.

Now that I’m on break, I half step, half slide down the stairs and across the street into the warm, Pink Rose Café. “Eggs over easy with wheat, and coffee,” I say to the waitress before she even has a chance to ask me. I do my best smile and make sure to add in a “Please.”

I sit there slurping my two dollar eggs and fifty cent coffee without having to do any talking.

I watch pairs of uniformed officers fall in and out like they’re part of some slow motion relay. I squint out the window and pretend not to listen to calls coming over their two-ways.

In the glare, last night’s revelry seems remote. I remember, early, how the music in my headphones and the light in the streets had seemed in synch. I remember flurries swimming in liquid darkness, the air charged with possibility. I remember crowded bars and songs that everyone could sing. I remember a need to buy another round, to feel the warm breath of bodies, to cling to friends before the scatter of the holidays.

I remember being alone in the end. Some corner dive with a halo of smoke and the staleness of empty cans. A cigar store Indian nodding in the corner. His face of driftwood, his steady hand.

The feeling that somehow I knew him.

And in the warm glow of recognition, the audacity of 4:00 a.m., I felt a pang to dial Kate. A shock of light, flickering, before morning crashed in.

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Another pair of officers finishes their coffees and goes off to walk their beat. I decide to miss my train, texting, “Can’t make it today. Home later this week,” which I have no hope of being.

The truth is, a girl, actually. This girl that I’d found accidentally as I wandered, one afternoon, around the Museum of Archeology. Ever since Brandywine, I had been going at least once a week.

In grade school, on half days, we used to board the train at the very last station and glide into the city. We’d lean against each other in the window seat, grasping at blurry trees, train cars foundering on gravelly beaches, and bridges flashed with shiny paint, while mom sat upright and inside, reading.

Inside the museum, we’d go straight for the cavern of mummies. We’d press our hands against the glass, towards artifacts and royalty. A knife to cut the diaphragm. A hook to snare the brain. A princess with wide, obsidian eyes. Blue diamonds on her face.

The first time I saw this girl kneeling in a shallow, roped-off space, I thought instantly of Kate.

Something about her intensity, how it seemed like nothing existed beyond her working. The field reminded me of surgery. Abrupt cuts in the floor’s smooth surface. Disorder underneath.

“Are you part of the exhibit?” I remember saying, shakily.

“Yep,” she said, smiling, a bit breathless and not exactly looking up. “Just part of the scenery.”

“What are you working on?”

“Just some Lenape artifacts. Pottery. Arrowheads. It’s all right there,” she said, pointing her brush at the placard in front of me.

It had seemed a clear signal to move on, but my legs wouldn’t carry me.

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“I like your dragon,” I added, nodding towards the dark green engraving on her arm. Its squinting eyes, jaws wide open.

She stopped what she was doing, but didn’t say anything at first. Just stayed down, considering.

“I like him too. He’s a crocodile. I’m Marion.”

I felt a warm wave wash across the room.

“Jake,” I answered, extending my hand.

She put her brush aside and leaned back on one knee and pushed her bangs across her face.

Her skin was ivory underneath the lights.

Only that, and Marion started growing deep down in my gut like a weed. Like dandelion.

That first night, I chose a place where we could use our hands, to cut the tension. Inside was a clutter of beaded curtains, red lights, hookah, tinny music. Tray after tray kept dripping with oil and lemon. Marinated eggplants, coriander carrots, chicken with cinnamon, lamb with raisins, mint tea, oranges. By the time we had finished and stepped back into the alley, the old redbrick houses had locked up and turned down their lights.

“One more drink?” I had asked hopefully, not wanting it to end.

Marion frowned, puffed out her cheeks and put her hands across her belly.

“Ok, let’s get you a cab then,” I said, nodding towards a wider street while Marion stayed in place.

“That’s ok, Big Jake. No worries. I’ve got you to walk with me.”

“Change of plans… decided to stay,” I text her, and she texts back a smiley.

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The bus lets me off in front of the old brick coliseum across from the museum, and I brush quickly through a curtain of thick flakes and into the entryway.

Marion is leaning casually against the information desk, chatting with a matronly docent with a harsh Philly accent.

“I keep telling Frank – that’s my husband – to ask one of his brothers. They’re probably dying to go and, God knows, they’d enjoy it more than me. But Frank thinks he’s being romantic, asking me to the game.”

“So why not just go along with it?”

“Honestly, hon, cause I don’t want to freeze. This is that outdoor game they’re doing once a year now, down where the Phillies play.”

“Wait, aren’t all hockey games played out doors?”

“No, no, hon. Flyers play down at the Spectrum, or Core-States, or whatever it’s called these days. Inside.” The lady pauses, confused for a second, then asks, “Hey, where are you from anyway?”

I decide it’s time to intervene, and start walking towards the two of them. “I’m sorry mam,” I say to the docent. “Is this lady bothering you?”

“Better late than never,” Marion says to her, shooting a glance at me.

“I’ll tell you what, hon. You could do a lot worse. A lot worse. I know it.”

“Have fun at the game,” says Marion, smiling and turning to walk with me.

Marion, who is from Southern California, dresses in a way that suggests it is always summer in her mind. Aside from a long, downy parka, her panacea for all sorts of foul weather, I have never seen her in long sleeves. Today, it’s a thin tee with a boat neck collar, and jeans with holes below each knee.

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“What’s the plan, boss? How should we celebrate your freedom?” she asks, shouldering her gym bag in a way that projects confidence and athleticism, as if to show she’s up for anything.

“It’s snowing, surfer girl,” I say, gently grazing a shoulder blade. “If you’d put your coat on, we can go get something to eat.”

We bus back towards the central market that expands in a portion of an old train shed. Tight aisles are jammed with customers, melt water sliding from their snow-packed gear.

We wait at a counter for broth steaming in a giant wok and carry tall, plastic containers to a table in the corner. An old man taps the keys of an upright piano while slush puddles at our feet.

Under the table, our knees rub comfortably. We slurp our soup from shallow spoons and neither of us speaks.

I think about how easy it is with Marion, and also, how strange. I think about other girls I’ve dated, and how she is nothing like them. I swallow the rest of my broth, and twist the last few noodles in my chopsticks, and smile back at Marion. She asks about my hospice patient.

Parts of the city recede like dust-covered memories. The alphabet soup of Kensington, the badlands of Southwest Philly.

Out there, on the ragged fringe, I work hard to follow directions. There is a man who looks directionless, who is dying, whom I visit. There is a chair beside his low bed where I sit and listen through the static. There is a sister, who is like a mother, who always fixes me a sandwich. There are windowed cabinets, and rusty appliances, and there is sweet tea in plastic glasses. There are children and grandchildren and neighborhood children, a constant stream of traffic.

There is black skin, which is dry and cracked, and there is my skin, which is neither. There is a taste like honey in the sandwiches, some sort of secret ingredient. There is a feeling about the 46

shabby house that has nothing to do with money. There is the way the sandwiches feel on my tongue and in my belly. A feeling like family.

I think about the final leg of every journey. How the EL slides clean through silver sky, its skin embellished by the slightest scales of colored light. How I always aim my camera through the ground glass window of the train. How the scales never shine through the screen.

We’ll have to take it out for a spin one of these days,” I say, expecting Marion to pick up the thread. “The camera, I mean.”

Walking back to Marion’s tiny studio on the bank of the lesser river, a cold mist condenses and snow falls out again. Inside, we flop on the couch and click through to an old, familiar movie. Grey lights flicker and we sit together closely, like siblings. We are practicing a ritual celibacy, each of us suspecting that the other is damaged in some way.

When it's fall, and you’ve just moved into the city, and your parents come down for dinner, unannounced, you assume they must be worried. When the three of you walk down towards the water to see the tall ships resting in the harbor, all you can think of is somewhere to eat. But when your mom does all the talking for a change, and your dad drags behind hopelessly, you begin to get a feeling. You realize everything you’ve lost already wasn’t everything. You realize that now, they’re coming for the memories.

I come back from brushing my teeth and find Marion sprawled out in my space.

“Mar. Mar. Marion, do you want to get in bed?”

“I’m not sleeping,” she says in a whisper.

I lay a blanket over her and curl up, dog-like, at her feet.

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In the middle of the night, Marion’s hand on my shoulder, and the question, “Who’s Kate?” before going back to sleep.

In the morning, we go out walking. We walk across a bridge and eat croissants and sip strong coffee.

It’s Saturday morning, and vendors are lining the streets. A blond bohemian does a clumsy Dylan.

Kids tangle in the basin of a snow-packed fountain. A few flakes twist overhead. Her mouth full of butter and almonds, Marion leans in for a kiss. For an instant, everything feels solid.

Marion, who is so very new, is drawn to everything old. We walk around town, and she tells me that nothing is broken, only changed. That nothing is missing, only buried. It is very cold, and I am sure she sees clear through me.

We walk through sinking cemeteries, over crooked streets, down alleys choked with ivy. We walk until the naked trees give way to towers overlooking a highway. We walk to the end of a pier and look out over the river which is high and rushing madly. Then, we turn around, and go back another way.

“The hospice lady says Peter’s time is coming. That I need to decide if I want another case.”

“Time is coming like he’s dying?”

“Well. He’s always been dying. That’s kind of the point. Now, I guess he could die any day.”

Marion needs calories, so we’re waiting at a food truck for her soft pretzel to finish warming.

She pushes a button and the little box tucked into her jeans spits out another reading.

“Can I get a hot chocolate too, please?” she says, smiling playfully at the young Sikh under the shiny aluminum awning.

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“So, do you?” she asks, leaning in and pushing her shoulder into my chest.

“Do I what?” I push back.

“Want another patient.”

“I don’t know,” I say, stepping back. “I’m not really doing anything for Peter. I just sit there watching him disappear while his sister fixes me dinner.”

“Sounds good to me,” says Marion, only half listening. She bites down on one of her mittens and sets her hand free with her teeth. I carry her hot chocolate while she works on her pretzel, which she says is too good to share.

“There’s something you need to know about me first,” Marion says. She’s sitting on the edge of my bed with one leg folded underneath her, ready to begin, but nervous. “Not all of these lines are ink.”

Marion takes my hand and guides my fingers under the thin skin of her dress. She stares straight ahead as she moves my hand, insisting on this examination.

“There?” I say, my fingers rolling over a long, smooth ridge that makes an angle under one of her breasts.

She takes my other hand and presses it against the matching one. “Two of them," she says, then goes quiet to let it sink in.

“Don’t dance around them,” she says after a while. “And don’t act like I’m breakable. I won’t be able to stand it.”

I try to act like I understand.

“Three weeks on the respirator at the end, waiting for new lungs to come in.” Her voice trailing off leaves me in suspense.

And when I don’t ask, she answers, “Car accident. I got lucky, they said.”

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For a while, I say nothing. Just sit there, facing her and running my fingers along the full length of these scars that extend halfway around her body. These scars that might have been wings.

Then I close my eyes and slide down slowly, steadily, picking my spots like I’m climbing down rocks towards a stream. When I reach the water, I keep going. I try to swallow everything.

After, the tone arm sticks, and we lie awake listening to the static that lingers after the record has ended.

In the morning, Marion scans my music collection and my bookcase while I make eggs in the kitchen. When I come to get her, she’s holding the one from graduation. Mom and dad flanking me and smiling brightly at the lens. And in the center, my arms and my heart holding Kate.

Every day, there is another bombing in Damascus. Every day, more ancient buildings crumbling.

We go out walking with the camera while the snow stays fresh and clean. Chasing each other from river to river, I will not appreciate until much later, until prints, how Marion is able to overtake spaces, or else give into them. Her edges blur with garage door graffiti. On a hill overlooking the river, she obliterates tall buildings.

We drink real Cokes and squeeze fat limes onto tacos made under a highway. A square of sunlight is stamped on our table, and my feet feel tired and ache in a good way. I ask Marion to tell me more about her family.

“All I remember about being a kid is not being able to breathe. Not keeping up with my brothers. Not being able to swim through rough surf. Always having to leave the party early.”

Marion takes another bite of her taco, and the juice runs off her face.

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“My mom stayed home to take care of me. Every few hours I’d have to stop for breathing treatments and CPT. She’d spend all day massaging me and keeping track of everything. And then at night I’d run to the door and cling to daddy.”

I reach across the table and use my napkin to dab her chin. Marion grins widely, to show the food still in her teeth.

“I remember when I first got listed, how the doctors all said that transplant is another disease. That I needed to think of it as a trade.”

The waitress, a thin woman with stylish bangs cuts in and asks to take our plates.

Marion dries off with a napkin and swallows before she finishes. “They said I’d get to keep parts of my life, but not everything.”

Peter’s sister calls but I don’t answer because I don’t have her number saved. I listen to the voicemail over the hiss of the shower as steam fills Marion’s apartment. Behind the thick, glass blocks, Marion’s body blurs like an ink blot. I see a Monarch. I see a honey bee. I feel a dark purple bruise spreading somewhere deep.

Peter’s sister says I shouldn’t bother about this week. She has family coming to town and the place will be a mad house. She promises to put something aside for me. And that’s when I realize, I won’t be around when it happens. After all these months, I won’t be there to see it.

I want to tell Marion everything about the last time I saw my sister, but it doesn’t exactly translate. I mostly remember the white stone building, the bright copper roof, the weathervane. I remember waiting with my parents in the gazebo overlooking the Brandywine. I remember the aide guiding her towards us, a slight, older woman. Still, twice as thick as Kate.

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I remember understanding then that there was no way to stop her disappearing. That I wouldn’t be with her on the razor’s edge between breathing and no longer breathing. That sooner or later, it would happen anyway.

I see Marion step out from behind the glass and lean to one side to wring her dark, red hair like laundry. Above there is frost on the window, and steam swirling towards the ceiling.

There is the best part of the day, late afternoon, when we lie like seals on a beach. There is shabby plastic taped across the window, and sunlight warming the sheets. There are so many lines in Marion’s skin that she makes me feel dizzy and weak.

I ask her to tell me again about the dragon. About the crocodile, I mean.

Marion tells me about traditional Hawaiian tattooing. An old man tapping stone against stylus. Very quiet. Almost painless. “Dad’s idea of consolation, after my mom left.”

She flips over onto her back and points to a rare, unclaimed patch.

“My mom used to call me her bee because I was always making honey,” she says, feigning a hacking sound to show me what she means. “We got the same one in the same place on the day I turned sixteen.”

There are no parts of bee left, but the skin there looks uneven. Sun-damaged. Like memory.

“I sat through fourteen half-hour sessions with the laser tearing me apart until I realized it was pointless. You can’t erase these things.”

There is a day stuck in my memory. Chasing Kate, no more than ten and already wiry, down a path paved with matted leaves. The dirt had been pressed hard into clay, so that my feet made slapping sounds as I gathered speed. I caught her kneeling at the base of a tree, her canteen slung around her 52

back so that her hands were free. The tiny skeleton she’d uncovered was complete, bright white, picked clean.

I watched her lean in and send a quick draft downwards. Flecks of earth took off like dandelion seeds.

We borrow a car and drive to Atlantic City. I want spaghetti and she wants the beach and also, dancing. We order mussels in red sauce. Clams and linguine. The gravy is old-fashioned, predictable, in a good way. Afterwards, she takes my hand and leads me through the maze of hallways with low, yellow ceilings. Augmented women in tight dresses, their asses showing. Old gamblers leaning hard against table games. Palm trees glistening with fake, plastic leaves.

While I fumble for the cover, Marion rushes past the bouncer and dives headlong into waves of light and sound. Inside, there is music crashing all around us. There is fog and rain and thunder.

There are pills and pillows and liquor. There is the way Marion’s wet skin shimmers like a mirror.

There is a need to hold on tight, or risk losing her forever.

After, we walk for blocks just listening to the surf. We walk the darkened boardwalk until one of us feels sober. There is a fog horn sounding in the distance, and lights off the end of a pier. There is no moon, nor any stars to light the water, but we feel certain that it’s there.

On Christmas Eve, I take her to see the lights in South Philly. Blue collar blocks of Smedley and Cleveland Streets draped in colored sheets. The bulbs hanging tight, all running width-wise, so that the threads mingle in a solid canopy of light.

While the taxi waits we swim beneath the incandescent waves until the colors paint our faces and the houses fall away. And Marion asks if it’s how I remembered, and I’m not sure I answer. And

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we just stand there looking skyward like we’re staring at a fire, and the meter keeps on running and neither of us cares.

On Christmas Day, we hike northeast through the River Wards, and cross into a dead space. Wide swaths of earth reemerging, glass scratching under our feet.

Here, in this graveyard of buildings, cold smokestacks mark the bodies, and we drift into a clearing. A few grey mares are leaning on a split rail fence, unaware of their surroundings.

Out here, on the pale, grey margin, there is sand where the sidewalk had been.

And in the neighboring pasture are earthmovers sleeping. Bulldozers. Dump trucks. A crawler crane.

Turning home again we can almost smell the diesel burning, and hear the engines roar.

A million years exploding. A million layers of sediment. Sand and glass, glass and sand. Our feet in the sand in the ocean. Lost at sea. Lost in translation. Transplantation. Living in a transplant nation.

Chasing the fossil record. The fossil is a broken record. The unchained melody of static. Horses, smokestacks, horses, smokestacks. Fish sky. Honey sandwiches. Eyelids glittering like fishes. Pupils dark as death is. A gallery of princes. A wind in the window in the desert. The earth is here to visit.

Then everything is skin. The lighthouses are smoking again. Imagine lungs reopening, and lungs will reopen, just in case. It could happen again. Just in case. Breathe out. Breathe in. Deep breath.

Breathe in.

She is the only person I have ever known who could say, “Our bodies are a palimpsest,� without irony, as I lie awake interpreting the fine etchings on her skin.

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The day after, we embark on a quest for soup dumplings, falling into a dingy, dimly lit space just past the Chinatown Gate. The dumplings splash open in our mouths, and we smile at each other with bulging cheeks.

“Tonight,” she says, “We get some ink.”

In a famous shop, my landlord’s place, she slips her coat onto a rack and slithers out of her shirt. The bright colors and dark lines are disorienting, and I realize for the first time that, nearly naked, it’s hard to see her body.

Even Eddie, working with another customer, takes a long pause to make sense of her. The long twin scars turn purple when she shivers.

I take off my shirt too, slide into the chair next to her and hear myself say, “Kate was the name of my sister.” And the needle hurts like a motherfucker. And in a way, it doesn’t even hurt.

And we both cry a little afterwards. And Marion says she already knew, and that I can trust her.

And we put our clothes back on, and I reach over her shoulder and press our bodies together against the murky glass, and back into the slipstream.

Above the river, stars that tangle with the sky’s heavy cables will seem to quiver. The night will feel raw and clear and new in a way that I will always remember. And we will stop somewhere, midblock, to adjust my bandage, and Marion will kiss me and whisper, “We are all snowflakes and cities,” and I will actually believe her.

End.

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WARREN Hannah Sloane

He’s unpacking from his beaten up Audi, removing boxes labeled ELECTRONICS and HARDWARE in scratchy marker pen. I light a cigarette and with a dull flicker of detached boredom I study his appalling taste in clothes, his pale blue eyes, his strawberry blond hair. If he’s representative of the student demographic here then I’ve picked the wrong college.

Later, in the doorway of my box-shaped room, he reappears. My music is distracting him from reading, he says in a clipped tone. The book of Ecclesiastes, he adds. His sinuses sound blocked, like an invisible force is pinching his nostrils. I shrug and offer to turn it down.

“Want to come to a Christian meet and greet later? Expect hot cocoa and even hotter discussions!”

“Not really my thing.” I glance up and see he’s grinning. “Wait, you were kidding?”

My laugh echoes down the tinny, bleach-drenched hallway.

“I’m Anna.”

“Warren. And I thought I was the only one with that view.”

I turn and stare at the window decorated in bird shit.

“Yes, it’s really quite something.” # I cycle across campus in the rain. My long scarf trails to the ground, it grows sodden and streaked with mud. After class I sit in cafes. Darkness approaches quickly, the winter sun setting increasingly early, and I move from cappuccinos to wine. An uneasy malaise sets in, a sinking sense of dread. I’m procrastinating, waiting for the adrenaline of a deadline before I attempt an

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essay. My flaws seem more apparent at college, as though a mirror follows me, fascinated by my ennui, by how slovenly I can be when left to my own devices.

Maybe he was bulled in school. He would be an easy playground target, I decide. He wears short jeans that flap at the ankles and mustard yellow Dr. Martens. His small silver-framed glasses, grossly unfashionable, give him the air of an aspiring accountant. A shopping spree proves futile. Warren’s inherently nerdy aura clings stubbornly. A lime green fleece can’t be shaken off as easily as I imagined.

In this competitive petri dish environment, this small bubble that bows sycophantically to academia, Warren is in his element. He lives in a world of superlatives: the smartest, the wittiest, the best. While others drink and make regrettable hook up decisions he reads beneath the steady buzz of fluorescent lights. He studies until a lady with gray hair tied carefully into a neat bun taps his shoulder, telling him the library is closing and he packs his books reluctantly. He majors in biology. After this he’ll attend medical school, then complete his residency. He’ll marry another doctor and they’ll have adorably geeky kids, he tells me in a rare moment of intimacy. # “What made you choose this detergent?” he asks.

“It’s on offer.”

“And?” “I saw a commercial for it?”

“When you pop a pill for a headache listed side effects might include dizziness or shortness of breath, but companies never list what it could induce you to do. You might be more prone to buying products of a certain dimension or color. My point is...”

“We’re becoming robots?”

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“We, and by we I mean society, are being nudged into pre-programmed decisions.”

I pour myself another glass of wine and yawn. Warren points out my teeth are crimsontinged but he knows a product that can fix that.

“And the listed side effect?”

“Complete lack of bladder control and an overwhelming desire to sleep with me.” # “My memory is the worst,” I moan after leaving my gym bag in lectures.

“It’s a muscle. You can train it to do anything.”

Later I’m writing about the influence of Chaucer on contemporary literature. I’m sitting cross-legged, surrounded by low-hanging clouds of smoke. Cigarette stubs lie idly in coffee mugs. Clumps of hair are nestled in my hairbrush, collecting like mothballs for months. Warren bursts in. His nose wrinkles in distaste. His dorm is immaculate, clothes and groceries piled in neat stacks in their assigned spaces.

“I can improve your memory.”

“Not now.”

His Dr. Martens step into view. Reports about geriatrics cured of senile dementia drop into my lap. I want to hit him. Instead I throw a cigarette stub. He shrieks and runs out. # “It’s not fair.”

Warren has been given a bad grade. He speaks of the injustice, how little his professor knows. Expletives escape his lips in rapid succession.

“Welcome to the club,” I respond without sympathy. “For once you understand mediocrity.”

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# Dr. Almássy moved to America when he was three. His parents are Hungarian. He returns to his country of birth for weddings and Christenings of distant family members and has the odd sensation of an animal that’s escaped a zoo and should be returned immediately. His relief, at cloud height, when he peers down at Logan International Airport is palpable. He is an introvert, happiest in his lab peering through a microscope. He forces himself into a gregarious mood when social situations require it with a painful awareness of acting. He enjoys hiking. He makes a mean pavlova. He lives with his partner, Gregory.

A bath is running. He’s listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Dr. Almássy answers the door in a crisp white towel. A glass of wine rests in his left hand, the first of the evening. His small frame is pushed with a brute force he’s unprepared for. The Malbec goes flying. It sprays the living room wall and police initially mistake these marks for blood. Glass shatters on the floor, the same parquet hardwood floor his head is slammed against repeatedly. He thinks vaguely of Gregory, upstate for his niece’s first piano recital. Right now Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.14 in C-sharp minor is being performed by the adorably inexpert, uneven fingers of a seven year old. As he loses consciousness he is injected with taurine and glucuronolactone, chemicals mentioned in a paper he graded last week. # Gregory visits. He says the same as others: I should return to college, I shouldn’t this ruin my career prospects. It is magnanimous of him to care. I explain I have carved out a new life. I cover human-interest stories for a local paper, a cat caught up a tree on a bad day, the opening of a hospital wing on a better one. I write menial things that bored housewives read, chirpy stories that little old ladies dressed in too much maroon discuss as they wait for their hyperactive

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grandchildren to arrive. The questionable highlight of my day is when Terry, an unattractive man working at the local grocery store, makes jokes that might be considered flirting.

Gregory and I have never met before. We have read about each other in articles, many articles. The media leapt on this story; broadcasts, nationals, newswires, the coverage was overwhelming, ubiquitous. Warren was found sobbing three blocks away from Dr. Almássy’s apartment, his car motionless despite a green light. He confessed immediately. His lawyer pleaded mental illness but it proved unnecessary. Warren committed suicide before the trial began.

Gregory stares at me pleadingly, as though I can turn the insanity of this situation into something neat, digestible. I think about Warren’s view that certain consumer products are tainted to influence our purchasing decisions. Was that conversation a clear sign he was deranged?

“There was the time I saw some porn poking out from beneath his bed. It was a surprise.

He seemed too intelligent to drool over photos of big-breasted blonds sucking dick.”

It was the wrong thing to say. I should articulate something meaningful or reassuring, or nothing at all. We sit in silence. I study my hands.

“I never saw it coming. I’m sorry. I didn’t.”

“It’s okay,” he says finally. “I don’t know what I was hoping for by tracking you down.”

I turn the heating on. The sun, if anywhere, feels very far away. We stare at each, beyond grief, beyond comprehension in the gathering dusk, and then wordlessly he stands up and walks away.

---END---

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the poets + writers Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City, where he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

Peter Giebel recently received his MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and currently resides in Denver, CO. Abigail Grosse is finishing her undergraduate degree and waiting tables in Minnesota.

Paul Hansom has an MFA from the University of Southern California and lives and writes in Ithaca, New York.

Emily O'Neill is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. You can pick her brain at http://emily-oneill.com.

Desmond S. Peeples is a writer and occasional performance artist based in Vermont. His other work is available in Big Bridge, Cultural Logic, Squawk Back, and Goreyesque. He is the founding editor of Mount Island Magazine and an associate literary agent with The Dede Cummings Agency; s/he has also performed as a musician and a drag queen here and there. He likes very obscene jokes, but he's demure about it. Find out more at desmondpeeples.com Gaetan Sgro is a writer and a physician who went into medicine for the stories. He blogs at wardstories.org.

Hannah Sloane lives in New York and is currently at work on her first novel. More of her writing can be found at www.hannahsloanewrites.com Suzanne Wise lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan at the poetry library and literary center Poets House.

Greg Zorko is originally from Albany, New York but now lives in Indiana and studies Russian History at Indiana University. You can follow him on Twitter @Zorknogg and on Tumblr at zorknogg.tumblr.com.

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