The Punch

The Punch

The Look

O

ur cover says a lot about the type of journal that we have. It is simple, to the point, and it makes an impression from the very first time you lay eyes on it. It is black and white just as our pieces pack a punch or they don’t, there is no in between. If we had a physical journal, it would have this exact cover, only the style would not be glossy but matte, such as the Indiana Review. Though there are many pieces we would want to publish in our journal we would try and keep it very specialized with only very specific types of pieces that reflect the aesthetics of our journal, every time. If The Punch only publishes pieces that can pack a lot of punch in their meaning, in a short amount of time; then not just the size of our journal should reflect that but also the overall design. Short, sweet, and to the point, stories that can pack a punch.

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The Mission statement

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he Punch is an upcoming journal that aims to publish serious and meaningful works about life and provide a fresh and unexpected outlook on them. We pride ourselves in going out of our comfort zones to provide our audience with new perspectives on life. All submissions are looked over but what distinguishes the works that we publish from the ones that we do not, is how it packs the punch.

This journal intends to be thought-provoking but we are not looking for pieces of literary work that require two dictionaries, a thesaurus, and three overworked translators to understand. Our submissions are published if they use natural language and your common Iwonka, Jussi, Ryan, and Jordan can understand it. Our vision is simple. We think that there are so many different events and circumstances that each individual undergoes but despite this large diversity, somehow each individual human is united with one another. We may not be able to stop world hunger, bring world peace, or manage our time of watching Netflix and working, but we can help bring different individuals together and help unify them all in one punch.

In reading this journal, expect the unexpected. We may come across as a laidback or relaxed journal because that’s who we are as editors but beyond our calm façade, we are high impact, energetic people. Surprise. Our journal shows our wild side. All of our pieces begin as relaxed because we try to ease you into the harsh reality that we perceive as the world but as you get farther into our journal, we stop holding your hand. We get down to business. Most of our pieces range from the most common of topics or issues with unexpected twists to topics you’ve never even thought of before. It is an aspect we pride ourselves on, here at The Punch. Now, we understand that this is atypical—for a journal to establish a personal relationship with its readers but we think that every time you read something, you go on a journey and we want to be a part of that. I mean, it’s not like we get a lot of vacation days.

But on a more serious note, we understand that the world is a harsh place and that everyone has a different story to tell that may not be given the attention it deserves.

With that in mind, we want to bring more attention to these stories. We focus on telling the stories that make you cringe, wonder, and think because the stories that take you out of your comfort zone are often the best and leave the most impact. Reading something like the works we publish, something powerful, can often be a shock for some readers, it can make you take a step back and force you to reevaluate. For this reason, we try and be there for you, not as a stereotyped demographic.

But You, the individual reader.

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The Contents MISSION STATEMENT……………………………………………………………..

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POETRY AUBADE……………………………………………………………... PHILIP LARKIN TO SURVIVE THE REVOLUTION……………………..TRACI BRIMHALL PLUTO SHITS ON THE UNIVERSE…………………FATIMAH ASGHAR UNEMPLOYMENT DIARY: DAY 16………….VANDOREN WHEELER PAN DEL MUERTO……………………………………………… KURT BROWN BIRDIE FLY, BIRDIE STAY………………………………....HA KIET CHOW

6 8 9 11 13 15

NON-FICTION JOY…………………………………………………………………………..ZADIE SMITH LETTERS TO MY FATHER……………………………….. KARYN CHAFFIN ESSENCE OF THE UNIVERSE……………………………………HOLY BEAN KALEIDOSCOPE MIND……………………………………. ERIN CORRIVEAU

17 22 27 33

FICTION SPIDERS ARE NOT PEOPLE………………………………… KELSIE HAHN 41 VALENTINE…………………………………………………………. TESSA HADLEY 45 HOW HE LEAVES YOU………………………………………… ANKITA RAO 61 TAKE IT FROM ME, KID, I’M A CLOWN…………CHRISTOPHER LINFORTH 64 DELICATE CONDITIONS……………………………………….. BECCA DAGUE 66 4

The Poetry

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Philip Larkin

Aubade

I

work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

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Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

-Times Literary Supplement7

Traci Brimhall

To Survive the Revolution

I

, too, love the devil. He comes to my bed all wrath and blessing and wearing my husband’s beard, whispers, tell me who

you suspect. He fools me the same way every time, but never punishes me the same way twice.

I don’t remember who I give him but he says I have the instinct for red. Kiss red. Pleasure red.

Red of the ripe guaraná, of the jaguar’s eyes when it stalks the village at night. Red as the child I birthed who breathed twice and died.

The stump of flesh where the head should be, red. Pierced side of Christ, red. A sinner needs her sin, and mine is beloved. Mine returns with skin under his fingernails, an ice cube on his tongue, and covers my face with a hymnal.

I never ask for a miracle, only strength enough to bear his weight. Each day, I hang laundry on the line, dodge every shadow. Each night he crawls through the window, I pay with a name.

-The Kenyon Review-

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Fatimah Asghar

Pluto Shits on the universe

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n February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted.

Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.

My bad. Your graph said I was supposed to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can chart me. All the other planets, they think I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped moon, running free.

Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.

Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t shit but a day to me. I could spend your whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy on up and marry me by now. Your day?

That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day is barely the start of my sunset.

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My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.

And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.

Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.

It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.

Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview, and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.

I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks: wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.

They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like a motherfucker.

It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold: the freedom of possibility.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

-Poetry Magazine-

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Vandoren Wheeler

Unemployment Diary, Day 16

I

hold the remote just so, it feels like her indifferent wrist.

Television is the oven I rest my head inside.

My own tragedy splits in two when the TV star’s fiancée is stolen by his evil twin.

(Same actor, but the evil version is somehow more handsome)

Our clubbed hero wakes, wanders the new city of his amnesia.

He doesn’t know who he is now —just like me!

His fiancée’s doll eyes (green) close mechanically when the evil twin’s crooked smile twists into its kiss—I can’t stand it: I want to save her, want to screw her, I don’t know her. I click over

to another planet, which reminds me I also lack the determination of this 11

indestructible superhero crawling into the deadly alien radiation, and the tension rises, until it spills over into a hand soap demonstration, making hygiene so piercingly symbolic, I will never again feel clean, no matter how many times she claims what I did doesn’t matter…

I click back to these twins I’ve become, now locked in awkward combat. Each fist strikes its own face, then a clenched blade quivers between their throats, and the music crescendos like a toilet bowl swirl, sanitized bright blue, giggling synthetic blueberry bubbles— Good God, I need you.

I hear so vividly my evil twin scream—sucked into a fall we don’t see the end of— and the black swallows him like a lozenge.

I am ready for my whiter teeth! a new and improved lover! A delicious hamburger!

I am ready for something else to happen.

Again.

Again.

I keep clicking to find a responsive sedan to drive off a moonlit cliff, into the applauding waves below.

-Lunch Ticket-

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Kurt Brown

Pan del Muerto

I

n Mexico, they bake bread for those who died–flat little cakes they leave around the house for a mother or father or a child to find. The dead are living like us, growing fat, paying their debts, brushing their teeth on schedule.

Sometimes it's hard to make your way across a room to shake someone's hand or give them a drink. The dead are always there, in their evening gowns and tuxedos, expecting to be served– asking for more crackers or champagne.

Just making love is a sacrilege!

The grandmother is there and the school teacher and the delicate sister, even those who are not yet born, more innocent than babies. You get up in the morning to comb your hair and you are combing the brittle hair of the dead, which goes on growing like the eyelids and the finger nails, as if the body were the last to know or simply stubborn.

And maybe that's what the cakes are for– to nourish the vanity of the corpse, who after all would like to look as good as possible on such a great occasion. Listen! You hear the leaves cracking faintly at dusk, a tire humming on dry pavement, the sound of water rushing through a pipe? The dead are hungry! You must take your knives and bowls and go down into the cellar; you must begin to chant those old recipes you've been saving– 13

mixing your own blood with the dry sand the dead grow fat on, that the children of the dead roll into loaves for you to eat– for the dust that will eventually pass entirely through you.

-Terminus Magazine-

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Ha Kiet Chau

birdie fly, birdie stay

w

hen voices hush, the night lies down, tucks itself under a bulky plaid quilt.

you’re wrapped in sleep, snoring lightly, as coco saunters in from the rain, meows, disappears behind an armchair. i get up from bed, move hastily about the room like a thief, stuffing a sweater, a scarf, two nectarines into a rucksack.

5:56 a.m., a cab beeps impatiently outside. my hand on the doorknob, my legs straddling the doorway, i pause to hear you sleep-talk: birdie fly, birdie stay… birdie, don’t leave…

there are reasons to why we all come and go. i’m not the best version of myself. the commotion in my head loses epic battles. the broken in my body needs repair. i’ve been searching for nutrient and light— a nest to escape from the november rain. sorry for shutting the door, for leaving the key under the welcome mat, for not saying goodbye, for coming and going like those women who talk of michelangelo.

-Lunch Ticket-

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The Non-fiction

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Zadie smith

Joy

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t might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food.

An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.

You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring. Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort. “Don’t say that was delicious,” my husband warns, “you say everything’s delicious.” “But it was delicious.”

It drives him crazy. All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self. Upon leaving the library at the end of the day I will walk a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular, cat-eyed teenager, in skinny jeans and stacked-heel boots, a perfectly ordinary gray sweatshirt, last night’s makeup, and a silky Pocahontas wig slightly askew over his own Afro. He was sashaying down the street, plaits flying, using the whole of Broadway as his personal catwalk. “Miss Thang, but off duty.” I add this for clarity, but my husband nods a little impatiently; there was no need for the addition. My husband is also a professional gawker.

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The advice one finds in ladies’ magazines is usually to be feared, but there is something in that old chestnut: “shared interests.” It does help. I like to hear about the Chinese girl he saw in the hall, carrying a large medical textbook, so beautiful she looked like an illustration. Or the tall Kenyan in the elevator whose elongated physical elegance reduced every other nearby body to the shrunken, gnarly status of a troll. Usually I will not have seen these people—my husband works on the eighth floor of the library, I work on the fifth—but simply hearing them described can be almost as much a pleasure as encountering them myself. More pleasurable still is when we recreate the walks or gestures or voices of these strangers, or whole conversations—between two people in the queue for the ATM, or two students on a bench near the fountain.

And then there are all the many things that the dog does and says, entirely anthropomorphized and usually offensive, which express the universe of things we ourselves cannot do or say, to each other or to other people. “You’re being the dog,” our child said recently, surprising us. She is almost three and all our private languages are losing their privacy and becoming known to her. Of course, we knew she would eventually become fully conscious, and that before this happened we would have to give up arguing, smoking, eating meat, using the Internet, talking about other people’s faces, and voicing the dog, but now the time has come, she is fully aware, and we find ourselves unable to change. “Stop being the dog,” she said, “it’s very silly,” and for the first time in eight years we looked at the dog and were ashamed.

Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily. This is a new problem. Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.

Let’s call it six. Three of those times I was in love, but only once was the love viable, or likely to bring me any pleasure in the long run. Twice I was on drugs—of quite different kinds. Once I was in water, once on a train, once sitting on a high wall, once on a high hill, once in a nightclub, and once in a hospital bed. It is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of data.

The uncertain item is the nightclub, and because it was essentially a communal experience I feel I can open the question out to the floor. I am addressing this to my fellow Britons in particular. Fellow Britons! Those of you, that is, who were fortunate enough to take the first generation of the amphetamine ecstasy and yet experience none of the adverse, occasionally lethal reactions we now know others suffered—yes, for you people I have a question. Was that joy?

I am especially interested to hear from anyone who happened to be in the Fabric club, near the old Smithfield meat market, on a night sometime in the year 1999 (I’m sorry I can’t be more specific) when the DJ mixed “Can I Kick It?” and then “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into the deep house track he had been seeming to play exclusively for the previous four hours. I myself was wandering out of the cavernous unisex (!) toilets wishing I could find my friend Sarah, or if not her, my friend Warren, or if

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not him, anyone who would take pity on a girl who had taken and was about to come up on ecstasy who had lost everyone and everything, including her handbag. I stumbled back into the fray.

Most of the men were topless, and most of the women, like me, wore strange aprons, fashionable at the time, that covered just the front of one’s torso, and only remained decent by means of a few weaklooking strings tied in dainty bows behind. I pushed through this crowd of sweaty bare backs, despairing, wondering where in a super club one might bed down for the night (the stairs? the fire exit?). But everything I tried to look at quickly shattered and arranged itself in a series of patterned fragments, as if I were living in a kaleidoscope. Where was I trying to get to anyway? There was no longer any “bar” or “chill-out zone”—there was only dance floor. All was dance floor. Everybody danced. I stood still, oppressed on all sides by dancing, quite sure I was about to go out of my mind.

Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.

Years later, while listening to a song called “Weak Become Heroes” by the British artist The Streets I found this experience almost perfectly recreated in rhyme, and realized that just as most American children alive in 1969 saw the moon landings, nearly every Briton between sixteen and thirty in the 1990s met some version of the skinny pill head I came across that night in Fabric. The name The Streets gives him is “European Bob.” I suspect he is an archetypal figure of my generation. The character “Super Hans” in the British TV comedy Peep Show is another example of the breed, though it might be more accurate to say Super Hans is European Bob in “old” age (forty). I don’t remember the name of my particular pill head, but will call him “Smiley.” He was one of these strangers you met exclusively on dance floors, or else on a beach in Ibiza. They tended to have inexplicable nicknames, no home or family you could ever identify, a limitless capacity for drug-taking, and a universal feeling of goodwill toward all men and women, no matter their color, creed, or state of inebriation.

Their most endearing quality was their generosity. For the length of one night Smiley would do anything at all for you. Find you a cab, walk miles through the early morning streets looking for food, hold your hair as you threw up, and listen to you complain at great length about your parents and friends—agreeing with all your grievances—though every soul involved in these disputes was completely unknown to him. Contrary to your initial suspicions Smiley did not want to sleep with you, rob you, or con you in any way. It was simply intensely important to him that you had a good time, tonight, with him. “How you feeling?” was Smiley’s perennial question. “You feeling it yet?

I’m feeling it. You feeling it yet?” And that you should feel it seemed almost more important to him than that he should.

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Was that joy? Probably not. But it mimicked joy’s conditions pretty well. It included, in minor form, the great struggle that tends to precede joy, and the feeling—once one is “in” joy—that the experiencing subject has somehow “entered” the emotion, and disappeared. I “have” pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. A beach holiday is a pleasure. A new dress is a pleasure. But on that dance floor I was joy, or some small piece of joy, with all these other hundreds of people who were also a part of joy.

The Smileys, in their way, must have recognized the vital difference; it would explain their great concern with other people’s experience. For as long as that high lasted, they seemed to pass beyond their own egos. And it might really have been joy if the next morning didn’t always arrive. I don’t just mean the deathly headache, the blurred vision, and the stomach cramps. What really destroyed the possibility that this had been joy was the replaying in one’s mind of the actual events of the previous night, and the brutal recognition that every moment of sublimity—every conversation that had seemed to touch upon the meaning of life, every tune that had appeared a masterwork—had no substance whatsoever now, here, in the harsh light of the morning. The final indignity came when you dragged yourself finally from your bed and went into the living room. There, on your mother’s sofa—in the place of that jester spirit-animal savior person you thought you’d met last night—someone had left a crushingly boring skinny pill head, already smoking a joint, who wanted to borrow twenty quid for a cab.

It wasn’t all a waste of time though. At the neural level, such experiences gave you a clue about what joy not-under-the-influence would feel like. Helped you learn to recognize joy, when it arrived. I suppose a neuroscientist could explain in very clear terms why the moment after giving birth can feel ecstatic, or swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to you. Perhaps the same synapses that ecstasy falsely twanged are twanged authentically by fresh water, certain epidurals, and oxytocin. And if, while sitting on a high hill in the South of France, someone who has access to a phone comes dashing up the slope to inform you that two years of tension, tedious study, and academic anxiety have not been in vain—perhaps again these same synapses or whatever they are do their happy dance.

We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. When my wild crush came, we wandered around a museum for so long it closed without us noticing; stuck in the grounds we climbed a high wall and, finding it higher on its other side, considered our options: broken ankles or a long night sleeping on a stone lion. In the end a passerby helped us down, and things turned prosaic and, after a few months, fizzled out. What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.

Real love came much later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and up to the very last moment I had been convinced it wouldn’t happen. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day it arrived I had already arranged for us to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz. You

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were holding my feet on the train to the bus that would take us there. We were heading toward all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy. But it’s no good thinking about or discussing it. It has no place next to the furious argument about who cleaned the house or picked up the child. It is irrelevant when sitting peacefully, watching an old movie, or doing an impression of two old ladies in a shop, or as I eat a popsicle while you scowl at me, or when working on different floors of the library. It doesn’t fit with the everyday. The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live?

A final thought: sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation? It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness.

The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

-The New York Review Books-

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KARYN

LETTERS 路 TO 路 MY 路 FATHER 5/10/06 H AP P Y B IR THD A Y Dear Dad, It's been three weeks now. I've stopped crying, except when I talk to mom. She really tears me up. I can't help it. I'm so worried about her, dad. She seems to forget things a lot more now. She has to write everything down so she can remember. There's just something really off there.

It's your birthday today. You should've been 62. I bought the stuff to make you a peach upside down cake, but I don't know if I can make it. I know how much you used to love them. I don't know why I bought it, I just wanted to somehow remember you today. I guess that's kind of dumb, but, dammit, dad, I miss you so much!

I found out that I got some kind of grant from the state of Kentucky to go to school. I'm a little nervous about it. I still don't know what I would want to go to school for, but I need a degree in something. I need to get a real job. I hate what I'm doing, and I need to find something that I enjoy. I can't help but think that maybe you helped the grant somehow. Divine intervention? I don't know. It's kinda funny that after so many years of not being able to get any kind of financial assistance, you die, and all of a sudden I get a grant? If it were you that helped, thanks dad. I promise to make you proud of me.

I miss you dad, and I love you very much.

Love, Karyn

5/6/06 Dear Dad, It's been almost three weeks now. I'm doing better, I don't cry every time I think of you.

I'm eating again..... sort of. I'm still having trouble sleeping, but then again, I was never a great sleeper. Everyone always thought all I ever did was sleep, but the thing is, I couldn't stay asleep.

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I talked to mom today. She's still not doing good. I want to be with her, but she says that she wants me to stay away. I wish I knew what to do. I'd ask you, but I can't.

You're never going to give me money to go birthday shopping for her again, are you? I'll really miss that.

Tonight is the first time I've really cried in a while. I think it's because of a combination of talking to mom, and being in a general good mood until I remembered that you were gone today and felt guilty.

Mom saw her first hummingbird today, and she said that wrens have moved into all of the birdhouses. She said that she told you that, but I wanted to tell you too.

I miss you more every day. I wish I would've found more time to spend with you. I wish I would've called you more. You are my hero, do you know that? I'll never love anyone the way that I love you. I learned so much from you. I'm a good person because of the way that you helped shape my life. I'm sorry that I was such a failure to you.

I have a date this week. Is that alright? Is it alright that I'm dating already? Should I wait longer? Is it too soon that I'm going on with my life? I feel like I'm not mourning enough for you. I feel like I should be out of my mind with grief, and since I'm not, I don't love you as much as I should. I do love you, Dad, more than I could ever write, or say, I feel as if I've been hollowed out. I feel so empty without you.

Kellie is in therapy. Personally, the only therapy I think she needs is to remove that asshole she's married to. But who am I to judge? I don't even have an asshole. I don't think I want one now. Husband, Dad, not asshole. I know I don't want an asshole. But the whole husband and family thing... I don't know if I want one. I don't have you to approve of him for me. I can't even imagine loving a man. I wouldn't want anyone who isn't as wonderful as you are, and I know that I'll never find anyone like you. You were one of a kind.

I love you, and I miss you so much, Love, Karyn

4/28/06 Dear Dad, I talked to Mom today. She sounded a lot better today, on Tuesday she sounded awful.

She sounded so small. Her voice was so quiet, and slow when she said that she didn't want to be alone. It's so hard for her. She went to see the lawyer and updated her will.

She's gotten so many letters from Cinergy. She's so proud of how much they liked you.

She said that people with college degrees keep talking about how much they learned 23

from you. You're missed by so many people. Not just the family. It's really a testament to your life. You touched so many people, you really made a difference. I'm so proud that I had such a great and loving dad. I really am a lucky person... I'd be lucky just for knowing you, but it's like I won the lottery, I had you raise me.

I tried to talk Mom into going to the doctor. The tranquilizer that she had prescribed to her when she came home from Danville wasn't from her doctor, so I'm worried that it might be bad for her. She keeps saying that the only reason that she is grieving is selfpity. Well, that may be, but isn't she allowed a little self-pity? She was married to you for over 40 years. She said that you would be mad at her for crying over you. I don't think that you would be mad, but you wouldn't want her to cry. But you understand why she does, don't you? She loves you so much. We all do.

I emailed Kellie, but I haven't heard from her yet. If I don't hear from her tomorrow, I'm going to call her. I'm a little worried about her.

I'm getting tired of people asking me how I'm doing. My father died, how do you think I'm doing?

I keep thinking about things that I want to ask you. What was the name of that German concentration camp where you were stationed in the Army? My car is making a strange noise when I go around corners, what should I do? How do you make ham and beans?

What were the names of your half-brother and half-sister? Can you tell me again that little poem? Is it willyawon'tyaain'tyagonnawon'tyermommaletcha, huh? Is that right?

What if I get married? How will I know if you approve of him? And what about kids? If I have kids, they won't know you. Alex, Ben and Eric already will miss your humor and strength. The screen door is broken at the house, and Alex kept saying that you would come home and fix it. How is he supposed to understand that you won't be around to do things like that? What are we all supposed to do without you? How are we supposed to understand that you won't be there for us?

I'm thinking of getting a tattoo for you. I know that you're not that fond of them, but, it's not the artwork that I'm doing it for, but the pain. I want to have the pain to help release the pain of losing you, I think. I don't know. Maybe it is a stupid idea. What I'm thinking is an Egyptian hieroglyphic of the word father, with the date of your death and the date of your birth on it. Does that sound stupid? I don't know.

What do you want us to do with your ashes? We talked about maybe a tree, but I'm not sure that I like that idea. We'd plant it at your house, but what if Mom sells the house?

Then we won't be able to come and visit you. Willow tree, definitely.

I always thought we'd have more time. There are so many things that I wanted you around for. I wanted you to see me make my life into something. I wanted you to be proud of me. I feel like I was such a disappointment to you. I'll do my best to make you proud of me. Could you please ask me again when I'm going to get promoted? I just want one more dumb email from you. Just another stupid joke? Weird picture? Lame 24

warning? Ask me if I've changed my oil recently. Just something. Anything. Five more minutes with you. That's all that I want. Two. Just enough time to give you a hug. Kiss you on your head. Scratch your back. Rub your shoulders. Rub your feet. Pop your fingers. Oh, Dad, please? Just a little bit more. I guess not. Would you if you could? Or are you happy where you are? Is there a heaven? Are you there? Are you with your parents and brother? Are you happy? Are you so happy that you don't miss us? Because we miss you so much.

I love you very much, Dad, and I always will, Karyn

4/25/06 Dear Dad, It's been a week today since you died.

I still find it hard to believe that I won't be able to call home and not have you answer.

The week you died, I told myself that the next time I came home, I was going to have you make me a fried egg sandwich. I loved your sandwiches.

What's mom supposed to do without you?

You would've been so proud of Michael, dad. He held the family together when we all came up to see mom. But he couldn't go and see your body, dad, only I did that. Your hands looked alright, but your ears were so blue. I don't understand how the rest of you looked just like you were sleeping, but your ears were so blue. I held your hand, and I talked to you, and I kissed you on the forehead just like I used to when we lived together. Did you feel it?

Everyone keeps looking at me like I'm going to have some kind of breakdown. People won't stop calling me, and I'm so sick of hugging people. And if I have to hear about how someone else's father died, I'm going to punch someone. I am upset. I can't help it.

It will be a long time before I can put that happy face back on. I wish they would all just be patient.

I'm so glad that the last thing you heard was mom's voice. It's harder on her, I know, but if she would've gone first, I know that you wouldn't have handled it well at all.

She's stronger that way. Not saying that you're not strong, but, well, she lived for you, but you existed for her. Do you understand what I mean?

You would've been so pissed, dad, Mark came to our house. Now, before you get to angry about that, he really made Kellie feel better. I have mixed feelings about it. I kinda felt that she insulted you by asking him to come, but when he got there, I saw how she leaned on him for support. Maybe he's not as bad as we thought.

25

Kellie was really a mess. She couldn't do anything, she couldn't go to the funeral home, she couldn't help with the dividing of your stuff, things like that. I don't blame her, I had a hard enough time with it. Mick was a rock. He took care of things so efficiently, he really made it easier for the rest of us.

Mick took a few of your things, your electricians measuring stick, and your shoeshine brush, and your shaving kit. Kellie took your ABBA CD. I took your jackets and the change that you carried in your pocket. God, what weird things. I don't know about the things that Mick and Kellie took, but, I remember that when you came home on weekends, the first thing that you would do is empty your pockets of change. And when I went out on weekends, I would always throw on your jacket instead of my own. It used to irritate you something fierce. You would bring me home so many jackets just so I wouldn't take yours, but I still did. You didn't really get mad, I think, I just think that it confused you. I'm glad I did. It made a nice memory for me.

Did it hurt? Did you die instantly, or did you lay there for a while, waiting for help that never came? I try not to think of it, but I can't help it.

I wish I would've come home for Easter. I should have. But I was lazy and didn't want to make the long trip. I would've seen you one last time. Just once. I would've held your hand once more, kissed your head once more, hugged you once more. Why didn't I come home??

Did I tell you that I loved you the last time I talked to you? I do, dad, I really do. Did you know that?? Did I hug you the last time I saw you? Oh, God, how I hope that I did.

I can't remember if I did either.

I used to complain about the stupid emails that you sent me. I would give anything for one more stupid email from you.

Why did you have to die, dad? No warning, nothing. Had you been having pains that you didn't tell anyone about? God, I miss you so much.

You missed Ben's 1st birthday. All week Alex kept saying that the screen door was broken and that Grandpa was going to fix it. But you're not going to, are you dad?

I love you so much, dad, and I'm really going to miss you. I'm not ready for you to be gone, but I guess I'm going to have to get used to the idea, huh? It's not like I have a choice.

Love Always, Karyn

-Published for the first time by The Punch-

26

Holly Bean

Essence of the Universe

“M

y favorite part of being underwater is the silence. You can lay your head back and cool water washes over you and you feel weightless. My mom used to tell me that being in water is the closest humans can get to God, that we can feel the universe in our hair floating around us. I never understood her, but it stuck with me. I thought it was dramatic and scenic—but Brad, I’m so tired. I’m going to go find my universe, maybe God will forgive me then.”

I tightened my fingers around the frail paper. Two months and six days ago they pulled Mary Grace out of the YMCA pool. It was nearly three in the morning when I got the call, the red lights still pulse in my chest instead of my heart. The panic. The frustration. The emptiness threatens to suffocate me with the air she will never breathe again. I should have stopped her. She came to me, she pleaded with me and I turned away. I thought I was being strong and defiant to prove that I had my own life without her. But she didn’t come for my life, she came for a friend and I denied her.

“Please. Oh god. Please tell me what’s going on,” I asked a uniform in front of me.

“Are you Brad?” Why was he looking at me like that? I saw her parents huddled together by the ambulance doors.

“Yeah. Yes. Brad O’Donald. Is she here? Is she okay?” I saw an ambulance so she must be okay. They’ll take her to the hospital. It was an accident. She loves swimming in that pool. That’s right. That’s all it is.

The badge put greasy hand on my shoulder. I jerked it off. Why was he acting like this?

“Tell me where she is.”

“I’m very sorry Brad—“But I didn’t let him finish the sentence. I turned my head as I heard a commotion as the EMTs opened the steel doors and I began to walk towards them, the gravel crunching beneath my feet. I stopped in my tracks, bile rising in my throat at the sight in front of me.

A white sheet covered her beautiful auburn hair but a gray, swollen arm hung lifeless off the gurney.

Water dripped from the same chipped pink nail polish she’d worn since second grade. The black asphalt began to swirl into a black hole, destroying everything I held dear. I shook my head, trying to clear my spotted vision, and my stomach dropped. Reaching forward to hold her, my foot slipped and I crashed into the hard ground, releasing the pain that gripped my soul, while hysterical sobs escaped my lips.

“No. No. No. No. No.” I couldn’t hear myself over the silence of my chaos.

“NO! NO!” I screamed into the ground, tearing at my throat. Tearing at my clothes. Tearing at my skin. Tearing my hair out as I thrashed against the sharp rocks banging my head down. This can’t be true. Again— bang. None of this can be true. Again—bang. Warmth spread down my cheeks. Mary Grace. Again— bang. I couldn’t see. Mary Grace was gone. Arms wrapped around me in a tight embrace. It was the 27

wrong embrace. I jerked and flailed my arms against my attacker. Someone pinched my arm. My tongue began to feel fuzzy and thick. I tried to fight, but my arms lagged like cement. Pink nails haunted me as I faded into nothingness.

I look into the mirror on my bedroom wall. That horrible and gaudy mirror mocks me—I only see a shell of a body shaking as the guilt racks it. Only a ghost of a person remains; gaunt and distorted like a cursed man. She died, but I stopped living. Slowly, I turn my hand and watch the frayed paper fall like a lost feather. It sways back and forth and I close my eyes to memories of other feathers.

“Come on! Hurry up!”

I squinted my eyes against the setting sun; I was running as fast as I could after her, dodging the trail of snow white feathers. We could hear the guard dogs of Pelt-Away barking behind us. The wind swirled around us majestically as the sun exploded in an array of colors. The sky was her pallet, it listened to her composition and today it sang the most beautiful concerto—the transparent feathers flitted against the canvas of an infinite sky. But that wasn’t the perfect part; the eleven-year-old girl turned to me and smiled.

“They’re going to catch us, Brad,” she squealed. Her toothy grin was too big for her face, but it shined like a thousand gold medallions in the sunlight. Her eyes were wide and bright with the joy of controlling the elements.

“Can’t you just feel the universe?” She threw her arms into the air and spun in a twirling circle.

“It’s everywhere, Brad!”

“I don’t feel anything!” I was starting to catch up to her spins when she saw me coming and jumped into the air.

“You have to listen to it. The universe is singing for us.” She turned and began to run again.

“Slow down,” I yelled after her, but she was already gone over the grassy hill. I’ve always been catching up to her.

That was the first day I loved Mary Grace. There were days when I fell in love with her instantly and passionately for one moment. I knew from the start that she would never love me back, but I didn’t care. That moment would carry me on to the next one. Our friendship was too potent for silly love.

We were all of the cheesy clichés—even to the point that when I got mono, she kissed me right on the mouth, so she could stay in bed with me for a month. How my heart stopped. That was the only time she ever kissed me. She didn’t understand the power she had over people. Everyone noticed her.

“Don’t be silly Brad. They probably see something in my braces.”

At first it was just Smelly Jimmy, Four-eyed Norman, and Christopher Boogie eater. We would run away from them screaming as kids do. Once Mary Grace decided that she had enough and whipped around looking Norman right in the eyes proclaiming for the entire playground to hear, “I’m never gonna date you, Norman! Stop chasing us, or I’m going to hit you where the sun don’t shine.” The yard froze. She wouldn’t dare, would she?

28

Norman, trying to collect his dignity, pushed up his wire glasses against his nose and rushed her, but she was prepared. Rearing up she slammed him right in the balls. Every puberty stricken boy on that playground fell to one knee out of respect. Mary Grace didn’t even flinch. She picked up his glasses and walked away to the monkey bars. We watched in awe—the legend rode away with her treasure.

As we got older, more guys paid attention to her. At first, it was exciting. More mature men wanted to buy her dinner and take her out to movies. They wanted to spoil her, to buy her, to use her, to touch her. We were invited to all of the senior events. She would pinch my arm with a nervous grin and walk in with confidence sky high. But soon, it was every night. More and more drinking, more and more guys. But she was still my Mary Grace; she shined and she laughed with the wind. If I didn’t go with her she would come to my house in the middle of the night and call me out to our spot. We would sit in my old kiddy pool we spent years splashing around in talking about futures and living upon the stars.

“You wouldn’t believe who talked to me tonight.” She looked at me expectantly.

“Let me guess, some really awful pervert who looks like a child molester?”

“No.” She sat up taller. “Guess again.”

“A forty year old woman with spidery veins?” She smiled at that one.

“Last chance Brad O’Donald or I’m popping this dang pool.” Sighing, I looked at her bright eyes.

“Maybe Marty?” I half-wished I was wrong. Marty Hockner was the college student who hosted most of the parties. Every girl had been in love with him since kindergarten when he started the trend of sunglasses in school. Every guy tried to be him, without fail, of course. He was a douchebag, but he and Mary Grace had had an off and on relationship for months.

“Yes! The last time I talked to him he said he was too mature to have just one girlfriend. But tonight he wants me back.”

“How exciting, Mary Grace. You’ve attracted the biggest jerk and now you can’t get rid of him.”

“He’s not that bad. When he’s sober at least. This could be my chance to grow up.”

“Why do you need to grow up? Because Marty says so? You’re seventeen—not thirty.” I made her look at me.

“There’s no reason for you to change. Especially for Marty Hockner—he hasn’t done anything with his life and you’re going to do amazing things. Don’t you dare let him do anything to you.” She nodded.

January 27th was the last time I considered us the friends that we grew up as. This party was in the middle of no man’s land, in a barn where the wood was moldy and termite infested. It was apparently haunted so it was the epic theme of a January Halloween party. I knew it was going to be a long night when I talked with Mary Grace earlier—she was already hammered. For months we had been separating. She needed more time with Marty she said.

29

“I don’t have time to sit in a pool anymore, I have other things to dream about.”

“Like what,” I questioned her. “Whether Marty is going to love you tonight? Or is tonight going to be the one when he actually hits you?”

“Shut up! You don’t know ANYTHING.” She glared at me.

“Then tell me. What else am I supposed do but guess if you don’t talk to me?” I wasn’t going to be a toy anymore.

“You can stop pretending that you care about me—“ “What? When have I not been there for you? Name one time that I didn’t give everything up to follow you around like a puppy.”

She turned away from me, biting her lip. I noticed it was starting crack. She seemed a little paler too.

“Hey, are you okay?” I touched her shoulder, but she flinched away from me.

At the party I was standing outside looking at the stars blinking at us from way up high when I saw her. Or rather heard her. She was being dragged by Marty through the woods—his eyes were hungry. He was fawning over her dress like it was a million dollars he couldn’t wait to rip apart. Shit.

“Hey! Man! Let go of her,” I put on the toughest voice I could muster as I ran towards them.

“What the fuck? Who are you,” He slurred.

Nearing the woods, I picked up the heaviest stick I could find and rested it on my shoulder.

Marty tightened his grip on her until she whimpered.

“Let her go, or I will kill you.”

He burped when he tried to laugh. “I will do whatever I want,” He trailed off like he had forgotten where he was.

“Brad,” She murmured, “Go away. I know what I’m doing.”

“No way, it’s time for you to come home. Let her go Marty.”

My veins started to feel tingly like I was about to jumpstart at a track meet. My heartbeat quickened and I raised the hefty stick tightening my grip on it. Taking one last look into his face I thrusted my arm and the air whistled around the wood into the villain’s side. Gasping, he stumbled forward as a few ribs cracked. The few seconds of adrenaline had already started to fade away and my limbs dragged against my side. I looked to Mary Grace leaning against a tree. I was expecting a hug as her savior, but she looked at me like I was a bug to be crushed.

“Come on, Mary Grace. Let’s go home.” Only a pair of dull and unfocused eyes acknowledged my presence.

“Please, let’s go.” I held out my hand.

“Get away from me.” She looked down at Marty in horror.

“What?” I didn’t understand. I was doing her a favor.

30

“You have no idea what you’ve done. “ Her voice quivered. “Who gives you the right to decide who I get to be with? You? You do NOT get to make my choices for me.”

“Mary Grace, you’re drunk. You’ll feel better tomorrow. Now, come on.” I grabbed her hand but she smacked it away.

“No,” Her voice pierced the air like I was her attacker waiting to take advantage of her. I stepped back.

“Don’t you dare fucking touch me Brad, or I will never talk to you again.”

The fire was back in her eyes, but they weren’t the warm embers that welcomed me into her mind. No, they were the pits of hell laughing at my face.

“You know what,” I said straightening my jacket. My heart cracked like the drunk’s ribs. “I’m done with you. I’ve been watching you destroy yourself for months now. You have no reason to be acting like this and throwing me aside when I try to help you. I’ve been your best friend since second grade and you get to decide, like always, what is done. Not this time. I’m walking away from you and it’s my choice. I decide my own life.”

She stood straight and tall without wavering. Maybe I was telling the truth. Maybe this was the end and I never realized it had built up to this. I was going to let my love, Mary Grace, go, but to do that I had to walk away. Mustering as much dignity as I could, I said “Goodbye,” like it was a business partner. I turned and walked away. I didn’t blink. I didn’t breath.

“Wait! Brad!” I heard her calling from the distance—she sounded like she was crying. But I couldn’t turn or I would lose all integrity. Just keep walking. Through the moldy and dimly lit barn filled with intertwined couples only recognizable through sweat. Into the blinking stars, I walked.

I didn’t know that that was the last time I would stand up for her. For weeks, she didn’t come to school. She didn’t call, she didn’t come to our spot, she refused to see me, and I refused to see her. I started applying to colleges with her in mind. I didn’t think this was the end. We always fought, but I knew she would come back to me. This was just longer than normal. We were moving on with our lives. I wasn’t even angry when she came to my door—but I was too stubborn to let her inside.

“What are you doing here?”

She looked terrible. Her clothes hung off of her body and her skin was gray. She had wrinkles around her dead eyes and white was sprouting from her frayed, greasy hair. Her lips were swollen and crusted with old blood; her body was blotched in blues, blacks, and greens. A long, moldy gash stretched from behind her ear to her wrist. She opened her mouth and a gurgling came out sputtering with a thick spit.

I was too stubborn.

“Brad,” She croaked, a bony hand covered her mouth.

“I can’t help you anymore. I’ve tried for too long and I have to let you go. You don’t know how to be a friend.”

Why was I doing this? I didn’t care what had happened. She needed me. I needed her.

31

“Brad, I’m so sorry.” Tears leaked from the holes in her head.

“Please, please help me.”

“Did Marty do this to you?” I demanded.

She didn’t respond. When I looked over at her she was fiddling with something.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” She pulled it behind her.

“Come on, seriously what is that?” I reached over to grab it.

“None of your goddamn business,” she spat at me, just as quickly, she cowered into herself.

“You know what, I don’t know what you want from me anymore. You know how to use people, but there is no one left to save you when you’re used.” I started to close the door on my best friend’s plea.

“No, you don’t understand. I can’t do it anymore,” she rushed, “I can’t be what he wants. I’m worthless to him. I’m so fucking worthless. You’re the only one who understands. I’m so tired. I can barely stand—I can’t find the stars anymore. They use to shine so brightly, don’t you remember? The universe doesn’t talk to me anymore. It’s so dark and quiet. Don’t make me go back. God, please don’t make me go back.” She leaned over and vomited into the bushes.

“I can’t help you anymore.” The door clicked with a divide between us. She was gone from my life.

That night I received a call from the local police department about a break-in at the YMCA. Grabbing my keys I drove down the gravel road—the stars paving the light for me like a last procession.

Three days later I received a positive pregnancy test, and an unsigned note about the essence of the universe.

-Published for the first time by The Punch-

32

Erin Corriveau

Kaleidoscope Mind

I

am not your stereotype. People often have a preconceived notion of what Attention Deficit Disorder looks like. They imagine little children running around like wild animals, having temper tantrums, not paying attention, lacking the desire to learn. When I explain that the scene they imagine isn’t anything like my life, they don’t believe me. Possibly they imagine me running around my house when I get out of work like a madwoman—arms flailing, jumping from sofa cushion to sofa cushion. (I don’t have the energy.) They assume my house is in shambles—dirty dishes in the bathtub, car keys in the freezer, dog food on the nightstand. (It can get disorganized, but nothing like that.)

ADD manifests in people differently, although the term suggests a problem with attention, mine is with memory. I can’t remember what I am thinking. I can’t recall what I should be doing, or what my priorities are. I could tell you what I was wearing on Columbus Day in seventh grade when Jason Almeida asked me to be his girlfriend—light blue, ripped jeans and a periwinkle baby-tee with a pink heart sewn on the chest—but I can’t figure out what training I attended yesterday at work, or, midconversation, I may have to stop and ask the person I’m speaking with what point I was trying to make.

I can’t remember whether I fed my dog, so I feed her again. I can’t remember whether I returned a friend’s call, so I call again. I can’t remember whatever it is I am trying to remember. This means that bills are never paid, tasks are not completed at work, and people feel neglected. I forget friends’ birthdays; I forget to put gasoline in my car. The alarm doesn’t go off because I didn’t set it, and I wake up late for work. Once I am already on my way, I realize the tank is empty, and I need to turn off the highway and stop at a gas station so that I don’t end up on the side of the road, with the lever resting on empty. My life is a constant struggle of trying to remember things that I do not even realize I forgot.

I know I have the ability to find my thoughts. I just can’t figure out how. The thoughts are lost, and I always feel like I’m bordering on panic. It’s similar to losing a piece of jewelry while swimming in the ocean. You had the ring on your finger, yet when you emerge from the waves, your hand is bare. You didn’t even feel the metal slip away while you let your hands crash into the waves and move your body along the water. Like my thoughts, the ring can’t be found. You know where they both are—the ring sinking somewhere in the ocean, my thoughts trapped somewhere in my brain.

Sometimes I see the glint of a thought in the murk, so I push deeper, concentrate harder. This is what it feels like most of the time. Forgetting something, pausing to remember what it is I’m trying to recall, the sudden feeling that I might be headed in the right direction, but unsure of the exact location.

Forging through, I spend much of my day in limbo. There are moments of clarity, times of unknowing, but between the two, I sort of float in the indeterminate state of uncertainty. A constant reminder that I am misplaced.

When my thoughts are not lost, they are unpredictable, and I’m unable to grab at them. When I was depressed a few years ago, this was much worse. It was like an amusement park ride, the merry-go33

round, where thoughts circle around and around and around. I try to keep my eye on just one horse, but it rides away, blends into the others. Almost being able to reap the reward, but never being prepared enough to get the prize.

I am supposed to remember to take my medication. After two years of missing doses, I’ve finally started to remember to take the pills every morning. Before, I only took them every two days, or once in the morning and the next day in the evening. Never with enough regularity to make the medication work.

I complain about not being able to think and having jumbled thoughts, but I have the opportunity to do something to make myself better, and I don’t do it. I won’t feel better if I don’t take the medication, but if the medication wears off, I just don’t remember that I need more.

Most people might envision a simple solution: Remember to take the medication. They might suggest I find some way to set up a reminder system that will force me to take my medication. That, in fact, is correct. I need to set up a foolproof system that forces me to take my medication. I have tried putting my pills on my sink so that I take them when I brush my teeth in the morning. I forget, or I knock them down the drain by accident. I have tried taping them to my calendar. I forget to look, or it takes me a minute to figure out what day it is, and by the time I’ve sorted that out, I can’t remember why I am staring at the calendar. I send myself automatic emails at work: “TAKE YOUR DAMN MEDS, ERIN!!!!!!!!!” That worked for the first week. Then I forgot to keep sending the emails.

I used to be opposed to taking medication, especially because Attention Deficit Disorder is medicated with controlled substances. I grew up believing I could handle all of my problems without any outside help. To be unable to handle thinking makes me feel like a failure. Failing and forgetting do not make for a successful brain.

Even now, when I can feel the effects of the medication, I’m still ashamed. Prescriptions for controlled substances can only be dispensed in thirty-day sets, so every month, I need to contact my doctor and ask for a refill. Then, I need to pick up the prescription from her office, which is twenty minutes away, and travel the twenty minutes back to my hometown pharmacy. I need to wait in line, have all the documents ready before it’s my turn. I need to present a form of photo identification. The pharmacy clerk takes my ID, looks at me, looks at my prescription, and looks back at the ID before writing my birthday and license number on the prescription.

There is always a second glance. Once, while handing over my ID, the pharmacy clerk told me that his daughter takes the same medication. He asked me whether I have a boy or girl, and then he realized the name on my ID is the same name on the prescription.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed. You just look so professional and, well…,” he says, stammering, “you just don’t look like you’d need this.” I’m not quite sure how to take his comment.

Do professional people not need medication? And if they don’t, does that make me less of a professional? And if, because I rely on a medication to help me stay focused, and I’m viewed as less than professional, who am I? I wish I’d asked him.

I tend to fill my prescriptions on Saturday nights, after I leave my second job, where I work as a psychiatric case manager for adults with mood and personality disorders. I’m exhausted because by this point, I’ve been working every day without a single day off in weeks. I’ve driven the forty-fiveminute trip home; it’s almost midnight. I need to be back at work by 8:00 am, which means I need to leave the house by 7:00. I want to get in and out of the pharmacy as quickly as possible. At this point, I’m lucky if I’ll sleep five and a half hours. More than likely, I’ll only have four or five.

34

I usually see the same pharmacist every month. He’s an older man, and he’s always busy when I show up, but he stops what he is doing as soon as he sees me and always fills my order in less than ten minutes. He’s nice, always makes me smile, and remembers my name.

My mother tells me he used to be friendly with my father. The next time I see Bruce—whether that’s his real name or not, I can’t be sure, but that’s what I’ve taken to calling him—I wonder what he thinks when he fills my orders. As a pharmacist, you know all of the medication prescribed to every member of a family, but you don’t have access to any of their medical records. You don’t know whether Wellbutrin is prescribed as a method to help someone quit smoking or to alleviate their depression. You don’t know why a person needs the medication you are preparing for them. You can only speculate. Now that I know Bruce knows my father, I wonder about him. I wonder if he’s only been nice to me because he is familiar with my family or because I’ve actually developed a rapport with him. I wonder if he knows my name because I stop and talk to him whenever I’m in the store or because he sees Corriveau on the prescription and remembers who my father is. I wonder if he ever looked at my prescription history and thought, Wow, what the hell went wrong with her?

I want to ask him how he remembers this, but I don’t.

Either way, Bruce does his job well. Recently, my doctor changed my medication from the capsule to the pill form. Before he even looked at the computer, Bruce asked me if there was a change. “I thought you got the suspended release not the long-acting,” he says before I walk over to the seating area. I want to ask him how he remembers this, but I don’t. I just smile and tell him that yes, a change was made, and thank him for being so cognizant. *

*

*

I don’t realize how much I appreciate Bruce until he isn’t there one late Saturday night. Traffic is heavy, so I don’t arrive at CVS until about 11:55 pm. I don’t look as presentable as usual. I haven’t put on any makeup that day. I am more tired and worn out than usual. One of my clients was suicidal today, and I spent the entire night talking to him about what was bothering him, making him sign a safety contract, taking away all the possible tools he could use to hurt himself out of his apartment.

These included: all knives, forks, letter openers, any rope or twine, his belts including the one on his robe, can openers (in case he opened a can of tuna and used the serrated top to cut himself), razors, plastic bags, duct tape, car keys, medications, light bulbs, bottles of house cleaner. It would have been much easier to just lock him out of his apartment than to take almost everything out of it. Fortunately, nothing happened. From the way he was talking, I suspect his suicidal claims were just a behavioral outburst, his way of searching for attention. But I’m not a mind reader, and I didn’t know what he was thinking. If he tells me he is feeling suicidal, I am not going to question him; I’ll trust those words. By the time I arrive at the pharmacy, I am tired, physically and emotionally. I want to sleep. I don’t want to have to go back to work in the morning.

There is no one in the pharmacy section of CVS besides the pharmacist and me. He looks flustered, we make eye contact, and I decide to just wait patiently at the drop-off station. Two minutes go pass.

“I’m busy,” he shouts, with his back turned to me. I don’t quite know how to respond, as I never expected him to say this. Should I just turn around and leave? Stand there silent or begin an argument?

A moment later he turns and says, “Oh, you’re still there?”

He grunts and, with much exaggeration, stops what he is doing, and drags his feet over to the drop-off window. “Yes?” he asks, looking at me. I already have the prescription and my identification in front of me. I push them closer to him.

35

“I just need one prescription filled,” I say to him. He pushes my ID back to me.

“What are you giving this to me for?” he asks, and I start to second guess myself. Maybe I was wrong.

Maybe you don’t need to provide an ID when you drop off a prescription for a controlled substance, just when you pick it up. I put it back in my wallet. “Ritalin!” he exclaims, “I’m not filling this now, sweetheart.”

“Excuse me,” I ask him. “Why can’t you fill my order?”

“Oh, so now you’re getting sassy with me, aren’t you? Waited until the middle of the night to fill these controlled meds, and now you just want me to stop everything I’m doing because it suits your needs.” He waves his hands in the air as he says this, and I have a hard time not laughing because he reminds me of one of my clients who circles his hands in front of himself when he’s nervous.

I know there are a lot of rules about filling controlled substances, but I’ve been here before at this time of night. That can’t be why he doesn’t want to fill my meds.

Yes, I think, I do expect you to stop whatever you are doing behind the counter and fill my medication. For all the years I’ve taken anything, be it birth control or antibiotics, I’ve always had the order completed while I wait. It’s like going to a restaurant and having a waitress confront you about your interest in food. He is a pharmacist. It’s not like I showed up at his house at 1:00 am, a drug-sick little puppy looking for my next fix.

I don’t have the patience to argue with this man or even converse with him any longer.

“Is Bruce working tonight?” I ask, hoping he’s just taking a break, that I can wander the store until he returns and helps me.

“Listen, sweetheart. I’m here to help you, and like I said, I don’t have time to be filling your drugs right now.” He emphasizes the word drugs. “You can come and pick it up tomorrow, maybe.”

I’m furious with his ignorance, yet too tired and frustrated to even come up with a response. I stand there and stare. He shifts his feet. Fidgets with my prescription paper, and looks away from me, then back at me, away again, and finally says, “What do you want from me?”

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and when I open them, his brows are furrowed, slanted toward his eyes in irritation. I think for a minute about how my grandmother used to tell me that my face would permanently be stuck like that when I pouted as a child. I imagine this man’s face being stuck like that, and how he’d interact with people in happy situations like weddings and births if he always looked like he was so miserable. Then I started thinking about the women who have so much Botox that their faces retain a look of excitement for days afterward. Their skin is so taught that they always look youthful and excited. Even now, my ADD distracts me.

“Here is what you are going to do,” I start. “You are going to look up my insurance information in the computer. Next, you will put in this current prescription. As soon as it is approved, you are going to go behind that counter over there, and count out thirty pills. When you’re done, you will put them in a little bottle, place my identifying label on the bottle, and then I will meet you over there by that counter with those registers, and I will pay you my $30 copayment. Understand?”

He looks at me, blinks his eyes once—twice maybe—and then backs away, goes to the computer, and begins entering the information necessary to fill my prescription.

36

I’m proud, I realize as I sit in the waiting area. I never stick up for myself. Always too shy to create conflict, I let others have their way and shove my needs further back until they are unrecognizable.

“Don’t expect me to get this quickly,” the pharmacist says, interrupting my thoughts.

I close my eyes again, take another deep breath. I’m zoning out, not paying attention at this point, because with ADD, you either make the choice to obsess about the little details you have available to you—the irritating, rude man, the way his voice sounds when he says the words drug and Ritalin—or you fall into a vapid void of thoughtlessness. I’m in the void now; it’s safer there. If I were to obsess any more, I’d be more miserable.

Some time goes by, and I notice the pharmacist laughing, talking to the man who is leaning against the counter where I stood moments ago. “Those Yankees are going to do it this year, I’m telling you. I’d put a thousand dollars on the Yankees winning the series.”

Now, it is one thing for a person to have no customer-service skills. I can handle that, even if it drives me crazy. It’s another thing to stand there joking and gossiping with a stranger while blatantly making me wait. And to do so while celebrating the New York Yankees? That is crossing the line. I refuse to sit, being purposely forgotten, while an ignorant, rude man roots for my Red Sox’s arch nemesis. I will not stand by and watch this happen.

I rise from my seat and walk with serious intention over to the cash registers. There is a clock behind the register that wasn’t in my view when I was sitting down. 12:39 am. It has almost been an entire hour since I stepped foot in this building. All I need are thirty pills. Thirty pills. That’s almost two whole minutes that could be dedicated toward putting each single pill into a container. Two damned minutes for each pill, and he has not even stepped away from his counter to begin counting.

“Excuse me,” I say, interrupting their conversation. I begin my rant. “I have been here for almost an hour waiting for you to do the job you are paid to do. You have berated me and broken HIPAA regulations by shouting out my medication. If I do not have my pills in my hand in five minutes, there will be consequences.”

I want to smash this man’s head against the counter a few times. I want to watch it bounce like a basketball against the floor, but I just stand there.

“Listen, sugar,” he begins. Sugar? Honey? Sweetheart? Not only is he violating medical record laws, he’s bordering on sexual harassment.

He continues, “If you don’t stop your violence, I’m going to call security.” I actually turn around and look behind me. Violence? Was someone behind me threatening this man? I might be direct with my words, but I’m a five-one petite, blonde girl dressed in work clothes. I’m exhausted, and my body language reflects my fatigue. I don’t look threatening.

Mr. Pharmacy Jerk continues, looking at me, “I can see why you need these drugs, sweetheart.

You’ve got no patience. You can’t wait five minutes for me to talk to another man while you sit in your little chair. You’ll never make it in the real world.”

I miss Bruce.

Sometimes I wonder if I can stop the medication. I don’t like knowing I will be reliant on a substance my whole life simply to function. Even though I take the meds, there are still life skills I need to practice.

37

I rewrite lists. Over and over again. There are many reasons I do this. I do it because if I don’t keep looking at the list, I will forget what it is I need to accomplish. I do it because once I start crossing items off of the list, it starts to look messy, and I don’t like to look at a messy list. My life needs to look clean and organized in order for me to feel clean and organized. So when the overwhelming list starts to look disordered, it blocks me. I feel like I can’t control it, and instead of pushing ahead full stream, I retreat. Because that is what I do when my brain feels overwhelmed—I make the conscious decision to retreat even farther.

So I make my lists and then I remake them. And then I make them again. I do this because list making has been consistent in my life. It might fail me here and there when my brain retreats, but in terms of consistency, I’ve always been able to rely on my lists. They’ve been with me since before I even considered ADD as a possible diagnosis. They’ve been with me for as long as I remember. College, definitely. High school, yes. I spent more time writing notes to my girlfriends and boyfriends than actually list making, but it was the same type of distraction. I listened with my brain in class as much as I could without feeling overwhelmed and then utilize the rest of my brain to creatively distract. If I stay attentive and distracted at the same time, I succeed. I take in the information that’s being given to me, and I release the information that’s bugging me.

Each of my notebooks has much more in it than class notes. My blank pages are covered with shopping lists and reminders and drawings of tattoos I might want in the future and directions to the closest gas station. I need to take the time to write the random thoughts floating in my head. I do this to make more room for the lessons.

I’m known for being a great note-taker, which is partially true. Even though only about six-tenths of my focus in class is on the lesson, I’d never succeed if I didn’t try to write everything down. It can be a bit of double processing, but as my boss says when she wants me to increase my documentation, “If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.” This is especially important when it comes to my lists.

Tasks that seem ridiculously simple for some people to remember will not get done unless I create a todo list. If “take out the trash” isn’t written down, the full bags will sit in the bathroom and the kitchen. The same goes for laundry. If I don’t write down that I need to wash and dry my clothes, I am not going to do it until I am completely out of every last outfit. This could be why I own so much clothing. I will be in the bathroom and notice the full trash bag every time I sit down on the toilet.

And, yes, I will realize I’m running out of underwear, but, no, I will not be motivated to act unless it’s an item I can cross off a sheet of paper.

Welcome to the world of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

It is a disease of piles. Everything in my life is a problem with accumulation. Physical piles, including laundry on my floor, bills on my desk, photos on the coffee table, empty packets of Sour Patch Kids and plastic bottles on the floor of my SUV. There are piles everywhere I turn. One trick that does not work for me is writing notes on Post-Its or scraps of paper—another accumulated stack. The notes disappear. Not all, but some. Some notes that were supposed to go together become separated, and while one note says, “Call the insurance company and get rental coverage added to your policy,” makes sense, I can’t call if I lose the other sticky that has the number written on it.

You might think I could just look up the phone number on the internet or call 411 for information, but I can’t, because I don’t remember the name of my car-insurance carrier, the same place that has insured me for the past decade. I try the internet, even though I have no clue what I’m looking for. I type in “insurance company, Fall River, MA” and see a list of possible agencies. Almeida Insurance sounds familiar, until I look at the address and realize the only reason the name sounds right is because 38

it is down the street from my house, and I pass it on my way to work—not because I am their customer. I think to look at the addresses on the Google list in order to find my agency. I know it is off of Eastern Avenue because it’s also close to my house, and I used to order Italian grinders from the diner across the street. I scan through the list, but there are no insurance companies listed on Eastern Avenue.

This does not make sense. I can picture the building. It’s on Eastern Avenue. Wait, it’s on the corner of Eastern Ave. What is the name of the other street? I scan the list of address again. Many of the streets sound familiar. I’ve lived in this city almost my entire life; all the streets are familiar, I just don’t know which one is correct. I spend more than an hour looking at the list, clicking through all the websites, trying to sleuth my way to an answer. I call 411, ask the operator if she knows what insurance company is on the corner of Eastern Avenue in Fall River, Massachusetts. After I hang up the phone, without any more clues, I can’t remember why I need to call the insurance company. I go to a meeting, but I’m distracted the whole time, thinking about my insurance company. The next day, I’m looking at my computer screen trying to figure out what number is on the Post-It I taped to the screen yesterday. It’s my insurance company: Lapointe Insurance.

Now, if I could only remember why I wanted to call them.

-Lunch Ticket-

39

The Fiction

40

Kelsie Hahn

Spiders Are Not People

M

y long-dead parents’ house is infested with spiders. I’ve spent many sleepless years watching them. They skitter out from under dishes, loose papers, the pillows I kick off the bed in the night. They crouch in corners, tight circles of them, weaving away like old ladies. They swing from the ceiling on shining threads and slink between door jambs and behind picture frames and into the ears of my dusty stuffed animals that huddle on the shelves like refugees from my childhood. Spider tracks leave Sanskrit in the dust.

They only come out at night, but they’re around all the time, sleeping, as I suppose all creatures must.

I’ve finally had enough.

“Come out, spiders,” I say. The afternoon is murky, and a gray light creeps in the windows. “I know you’re there. I know you can hear me.”

I say it again and again. I say it until the words no longer have meaning. Finally, a single fat-bodied spider descends on what looks like a strand of spit inches away from my eye and says, “I speak for the spiders.”

I tell the spider that enough is enough. I tell the spider that they are messy, with their abandoned webs and the spackling of their tiny poops under my furniture. I know that they are crawling into my mouth at night, and it must stop. This is my house now. They are not allowed here. I have rights.

“I’m hearing a lot of anger,” the spider says. “Why don’t you tell me about your parents?”

And so I tell the spider. I tell the spider how they stopped seeing me at the end, both of them going down in a mental mist where I was everyone and no one, and that it doesn’t bode well for my own impending old age. How it was supposed to be so sad when the memories of special times with their only child disappeared, only they had none of those to lose. How even before their decline, they never really saw me. How I was an obligation, a chore. How they got me out of the way as quickly as possible so that they could go on to the things that really interested them, like the television or food or sleep. They didn’t keep one thing from my childhood, not one hand-turkey or one crayoned card from a Mother’s or Father’s Day, not one lumpy “World’s Greatest” mug. My name was misspelled on the will, and I suppose I’m lucky that they remembered it at all. And now I live in their house with their money and all these spiders, generations of spiders, and there’s not one spider in the whole house who remembers my parents or what they did to me and didn’t do for me, and the spider hums and nods to itself. A smaller spider drops down on its own silver thread and gives the Spokes-spider a corpse wrapped in silks. The Spokes-spider bites and sucks ruminatively before speaking.

41

“We may have one who remembers,” the Spokes-spider says. “The Matriarch is very old. If any of the people remember your parents, she will.”

“Spiders are not people,” I say, but the spider does not seem to hear.

“You will have to go to the attic,” it says. “She will speak to you there. She cannot come down here anymore.”

And with that, the spider gathers itself upwards and disappears into a crack in the ceiling, taking its meal with it.

I haven’t been into the attic since my parents died. From what I remember, it is full of the things that made them responsible adults: car manuals, tax records, expired rebate forms, boxes of receipts. All the way up the stairs to the second floor, the spiders are everywhere—more than ever. They swirl around the banister and cling to the ceiling. They cuddle with dust bunnies. I almost crush four or five when I pull down the ladder that leads to the attic. I climb up and wait for my eyes to adjust, listening to rustlings in the dim.

I am expecting a shriveled, decrepit spider in the corner, perhaps with an attendant spider in a tiny nurse’s cap feeding it pureed grasshopper, and other than for the nurse spider, I’m right. Except for the size. The spider is the size of a Volkswagen bug and takes up most of one side of the attic. She is gray and molted, the cruel barbs and joints of her legs festooned in the dusty weavings of her own offspring, as they must be if they call her The Matriarch. Her eight oblong eyes are dull and her mandibles open and close slowly, like fingers beckoning into her maw. The fat-bodied spider from before, or at least a similarly fat-bodied spider, is perched on the largest mandible, whispering earnestly and riding the thick jaw in and out on its slow undulations.

It’s been longer than I realized since I’ve been to the attic. I wonder what she could possibly be eating up here to stay alive this long, but the gloomy shapes I first took to be lumps of fallen insulation, upon closer inspection, turn out to be desiccated squirrel and rat corpses scattered around, each draggled mess honeycombed with cocooned balls of spider eggs.

The Spokes-spider finally speaks from the Matriarch’s mouth. “The Matriarch knew your parents well.”

It looks at me in what I sense is an expectant matter, as does The Matriarch. As do probably thousands of glittering eyes up among the roof beams matted with old insulation and from beneath the flaps of dozens of ancient cardboard boxes.

“Ok, great,” I say.

42

The Spokes-spider pauses, then speaks again. “So, now you know that someone remembers your parents. They live on.”

“Sure.”

“And she will pass on her stories to the spider children, and they to their children, as is our way in remembering our honored dead.”

“Ah.” “As a repayment.”

“Ok.” “For your kindness.”

“Sure.”

“In not destroying us.”

As in, they think that it is out of kindness, and not out of lack of motivation, that I have not fumigated the place. And I realize the only pests I have trouble with are the spiders—no cockroaches, no bats, no mice. Now I see why.

“That’s not really what my problem is,” I say.

“Tell me more,” the spider says.

I pull up an ancient rocking chair that might have belonged to one of my great aunts. I hover above the mildewed cushion to let a few dozen spiders run out from under it to new hiding places. When they are gone, I sit. There is so much to tell.

I tell them all the ways my parents failed me, how they didn’t stay for my soccer games or bring cupcakes to school on my birthday. They didn’t force me to take piano or dance lessons. They didn’t take me out for ice cream when my report card was good, didn’t lecture me when it was bad. They didn’t snap pictures of me on prom night or mail me cookies at college. All these things I should have had. All these ways I wanted them to look at me, parent me, but they never did.

The Matriarch and the Spokes-spider never blink. Their eyes glitter into darkness as the sun goes down, until the attic breathes with chill evening air. I run out of things to say. I don’t move.

43

Finally, the fat-bodied spider speaks again. “I’m hearing a lot of loneliness. But we do not understand.

Our children raise themselves. They grow up without aid. They leave and return. It makes no difference. They are not alone. You are not alone.”

“I’m not a spider.”

“You don’t destroy us. You are not alone.”

“I’m not a spider.”

“We could be friends. We could talk to you, bring you gifts. Tell you what you want to hear. If these are the things you truly want.”

“I’m not a spider. It’s not enough.” “…”

“I’m not a spider.”

“Tell me more.”

And I tell them more. I tell them everything, and the sun appears and disappears across the dirty window at the end of the attic, and I talk until I’m hoarse, until I can’t feel my legs, until the spiders name their children after me, until I’m shrouded in silk, until I tell them to make me forget.

-Lunch Ticket-

44

Tessa Hadley

Valentine

M

adeleine and I are waiting at the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our school uniforms: green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazers. In the summer, we are allowed to leave off our hated green felt hats. It’s June, and summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; hot blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, are ripe with smells from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We are fifteen, studying for our O levels; we have breasts (small in my case, luscious in Madeleine’s) and pubic hair and periods. A breeze, stirring the dust in the gutter, tickles up around our thighs, floats our dresses—we can hardly bear it.

Our talk is rococo with insincerity, drawling, lascivious. Everything seems to have an obscene double meaning, even though it’s only quarter past eight in the morning and, behind us in our homes, our mothers are still clearing the breakfast tables, scraping soggy Rice Krispies and burned toast crusts into the bin, wiping the plastic tablecloths. My mother is bending over my little brother, Philip, in his high chair, playing pat-a-cake to trick him into letting her wipe his face and hands, making his mouth spill open with delighted laughter. She lifts up his shirt and kisses his belly; I might be jealous, if I had time to crane that way, back toward home and the cramped circle of old loves. But my attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats, I can’t go back—or, rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything. But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house, bumping up against the ceiling like Alice in Wonderland after she’s found the cake labelled “Eat Me”: head swollen with knowledge and imagination, body swollen with sensation and longing.

Madeleine is my next-door neighbor and best friend. She and I have never even kissed boys: we have no actual sexual experience except a few things we’ve done with each other, experimentally, and out of desperation. (Not shamefaced afterward—flaunting and wicked; it is the nineteen-seventies, after all. But it’s boys we want.) At an all-girls school, we don’t get many chances to meet boys, although there are usually some on the bus, on their way to the Grammar School. This is part of our excitement, at quarter past eight. There are certain boys we are expecting to see, and we may even pluck up the crazy courage to speak to them, a word or two; any exchange will be dissected afterward in an analysis more nuanced and determined than any we ever give to poems in English lessons. (“What do you think he really meant when he said that his friend said yesterday that you weren’t bad?”)

Anything could happen on the bus in the next half hour; even something with the power to obliterate and reduce to dust the double maths, Scripture, double Latin, and (worst) P.E. that lie in wait at the end of the journey—a doom of tedium, infinitely long. And, after P.E., the nasty underground shower 45

room with its concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, its tin-pot team spirit, the gloom of girls passed over, the P.E. teacher’s ogling, the trodden soaking towels.

Something has to happen.

Into our heat that morning comes Valentine.

He walked down to join us at the bus stop. We’d never seen him before: into the suburban torpor his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet. I loved his swaggering walk immediately, without reserve. His eagerly amused glances around him—drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from his face—were like a symbol for morning itself. (His energy was no doubt partly a result of the Do-Dos—caffeine pills—he’d have swallowed in the bathroom as soon as his mother got him out of bed. Soon we were all taking them.) A Grammar School blazer, hooked by its loop around one nicotine-stained finger, was slung over his shoulder; his cigarette was cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s, too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones, pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall. His school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips; he tucked his shirt half in with a careless hand. The school tie that others wore resentfully as a strangled knot became under his touch somehow cravat-like, flowing. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He was sixteen.

He grinned at Madeleine and me.

At me first, then at Madeleine—although Madeleine was willowy and languorous, with long curls and a kitten face, pink cheeks. I was too small, too plump and shapeless, and my eyes, I knew, were blackly expressive pits in a too-white face. Madeleine, trying kindly to advise me on my sex appeal, had said that I might be “too intense”—but I didn’t know how to disguise my intensity. Valentine stopped and offered us his cigarette, me first. It was not an ordinary cigarette. (We went to school stoned for the first time, but not the last.)

“Hello, girls,” he said, beaming. “Does this bus go into town? Do you catch it every day? That’s good. I like the look of you.”

We met each other’s eyes and giggled, and asked him what he liked about us. Thinking about it, surveying us up and down, he said we looked skeptical.

What did he mean, skeptical?

Thank God we weren’t wearing our hats.

46

I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body—a glimpse, via his half-tucked shirt, of hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button— licked at me like a flame as we waited. His family, he explained, had just moved to one of the posher streets behind Beech Grove. When the bus did come, he sat on the back seat and took Beckett out of his rucksack: “Endgame.” The very title, even the look of the title—its stark, indiscreet white capitals on a jazzy orange cover—was a door swinging suddenly open into a new world. I’d never heard of Beckett; I think I was plowing through “The Forsyte Saga” then. None of the other boys on the bus read books. Val smiled at us encouragingly, extravagantly, over the top of his.

“He was gorgeous. I liked him,” Madeleine conceded as we trudged in a tide of other green-gowned inmates up the purgatorial hill from the bus stop to where school loomed, the old house frowning like a prison in the sunlight. “But I couldn’t actually fancy him, could you? There was something weird.”

I was disappointed in her; I was already wondering if I’d find Beckett in the local library. (The librarian, warmly supportive of my forays into Edwardian belles-lettres, would startle and flinch at my betrayal.) Madeleine didn’t insist on her doubt—she never insisted—and I closed the door on that early intimation of danger. I wanted Val because he was different—as I was different. What I’d felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: something like recognition.

When I read later in Plato about whole souls divided at birth into two halves, which move around in the world ever afterward mourning each other and longing for their lost completeness, I thought I was reading about myself and Valentine.

And it was the same for Val; I do believe that it was. He recognized me, too.

“What a scarecrow,” my stepfather, Gerry, said, after Val came to my house for the first time. “I can’t believe the Grammar School lets him get away with that hair.”

“He looks like a girl,” my mother said. “I’m not that keen, Stella.”

Following up the stairs behind Val, I had been faint from the movement of his slim haunches in his tight white jeans. How could she think that he looked like a girl? Yet all we did in my bedroom was cozy up knee to knee, cross-legged on the bed, to talk. We swapped our childhood stories. He was born in Malaya; he’d had an ayah.

“What was your family doing in Malaya?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I want to know everything.”

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“My father worked for the government; he was an awful tax expert. Now that he’s retired, he’s just awful and old. What does yours do?”

“Gerry’s not my real dad. My real dad’s dead.”

Mum brought in a pile of ironed clothes to put away in my chest of drawers. Then she called up to ask if we wanted coffee. Philip came knocking at the door, asking us to play with him. Afterward, Mum spoke to me awkwardly, about self-respect. The familiar solidity of the house and its furniture melted away around Val; after he’d left, I couldn’t believe I really lived there. I couldn’t hold my two worlds in the same focus. I wanted Val to be brilliant for my parents, and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He never made any concessions to them. If they asked him questions, he sometimes didn’t even seem to hear them; his eyes were blank. It was as if he simply paused the flow of his life, in the presence of anyone unsympathetic.

Yet among our friends he was magnetic, commanding, funny. He was a clever mimic. We started getting together at Madeleine’s in the evenings—a gang of six or seven of us from the streets round about. Madeleine’s father was often away; her mother, Pam, was bored and liked flirting with teenagers. She brought homemade brownies and cheese straws and jugs of weak sangria to Madeleine’s room, and we cadged her cigarettes. Madeleine fancied a boy who played the guitar and wrote his own songs; we tried to talk a shy blond girl out of her faith. Madeleine bought a red bulb to put in one of the lamps; we draped the others with colored scarves. When Gerry was sent over to fetch me home, he never stepped across the low fence between our front gardens but went punctiliously via both front paths and gates. He said that if Pam wanted teen-agers carrying on under her own roof it was her business.

“What’s this?” he joked, when I brought Beckett back from the library.

“He’s a play writer. Haven’t you heard of him?”

“Playwright.” (Gerry did crosswords—he had a good vocabulary.) “Aren’t they all waiting for some chap who never turns up?”

Gerry had been so keen for me to go to the High School, yet he was hostile to the power my education brought me. He thought I was putting on airs—and I expect I was. I was probably pretty insufferable, with my quotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, my good French accent. (I corrected his: “Ça ne fait rien,” not “San fairy ann.”) He could still usually trip me up, though, in geography or history—my sense of how things fit together was treacherously vague. Gerry knew an awful lot; he was always reading. He subscribed to a long series of magazines about the Second World

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War, which he kept in plastic folders on a shelf. Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books.

He was amused and patient, correcting my mistakes. He did it to my mother, too: as long as he had the upper hand, he was kind. If I had given in gracefully to that shape of relations between us—his lecturing me and my submitting to it—we might have been able to live happily together. My mother didn’t care about his corrections; she just laughed at him. (“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry—as if it mattered!”) But I couldn’t give in. I wanted everything I learned to be an opening into the unknown, whereas Gerry’s knowledge added up to a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him.

I took Beckett up to my room.

It wasn’t the kind of writing I was used to. I’d taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments—the subtle essence of unspoken exchange, the sensation of air against the skin. Now I learned to read Beckett (and then, under Val’s influence, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) like a convert embracing revolutionary discipline, cutting all links with my bourgeoisrealist past.

“Is he your boyfriend, then?” Madeleine wanted clarification.

I was disdainful. “We don’t care about those kinds of labels.”

“But is he?”

“What does it look like?”

Val and I were inseparable. We saw each other almost every day—not only on the bus going to school and coming back but in the evenings, as often as my parents allowed me to go out or said he could come round. They claimed they were worried about my schoolwork, but I didn’t believe them. I saw my mother recoil from what she dreaded—the dirty flare of sex and exposure; my making a fool of myself. (They were so innocent, I don’t think they guessed about the drugs until much later.)

Sometimes I went out even when they’d forbidden me to, and then there was trouble. When I got home, Gerry took me into the lounge for one of his lectures, screwing up his forehead, leaning toward me, pretending to dole out impartial justice. From my dizzy vantage point (high as a kite), I believed I could see right through him to his vindictiveness, his desire to shoot me down when I was flying.

“They hate me,” I said to Val. “Under his pretense of being concerned for my future, he really hates me. And she doesn’t care.”

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“Don’t mind them,” Val said, his eyes smiling. He blew out smoke. He was serene, bare feet tucked up on his knees in lotus position. “They’re just frightened. They’re sweet, really, your parents.”

We were talking in his bedroom: a drafty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkish carpet gray with cigarette ash, so unlike my little pink cell. Val’s attitude toward his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them—I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned. His father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, and thinning white hair. His mother had a ruined face and huge, watery eyes; she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings. (Unlike us, Val’s family actually ate in their dining room.) They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as any in my house, yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.

They never came up to his attic room. Sometimes his mother shouted up the stairs, if a meal was ready or Val was wanted on the telephone. We were private up there. I loved the evening shadows in the complex angles of the sloping ceiling. In summer, the heat under the roof was dense; in winter, we cuddled up for warmth under the blankets on his bed. Our bodies fit perfectly together—my knees pressed into the backs of his, my breath in the nape of his neck, his fingers knotted into mine against his chest; we lay talking, or listening to the Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Dylan. The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open. I couldn’t believe the long strides he made in his mind, all by himself. Sometimes, depending on what pills he’d taken, he would talk and talk without stopping.

“How do you know that I really exist, outside you?” he asked me urgently. “I might be a figment of your imagination.”

Our heads were side by side then on his pillow. How lucky I was to lie like that, so intimate with his lovely looks that I couldn’t see them whole: teasing green eyes, down on his upper lip, curving high hollows in his cheeks. I longed for him to begin kissing me, as he sometimes did, but I had learned that I must not try to initiate this—he didn’t like being hurried into it. “I just know!” I insisted, stroking his face as if the feeling in my fingers were proof. “And I’m not a figment of yours, either. I’m really here, I promise.”

“I believe in you. I’m not so sure about me. You’re solid. You’re fierce.”

I wasn’t as solid as I had been. Since meeting Val, I’d stopped bothering to eat. I couldn’t bear my mother’s gluey gravy any longer; I drank black (instant) coffee and gave up sugar. The weight had flown off me. Although I was small and Val was taller, we came to look like a matching pair: skinny and striking. By this time, we were on the fringes of a set who gathered at weekends in a sleazy bar 50

behind a cinema in town. Val had a good instinct for the people worth getting to know: a man with freckled hands and a mane of red hair who sold him speed and other things; a clever art student, half Greek, who played in a band (they sounded like art-punk before punk had really happened). These men were older and more powerful, and a lot of people were eager to be their friends, but Val was able to impress them with his quick wit and cultural know-how.

I knew it mattered to Val that I look right. I wore his shirts and his sleeveless vests and his Indian silk scarves, over the tight jeans that he helped me buy. I put kohl around my eyes, and so did he sometimes. We both dyed our hair the same dark licorice color. (My mother was aghast, another scene—“Whatever are they going to say at school?”) I paraded up and down the attic in different outfits for his approval, getting the effect just right—and yet when we went out we looked as if we didn’t care what anyone thought. Val’s idea of me was that I was single-minded, fiery, uncomplicated, without middle-class falsity. (“But aren’t I middle class?” I asked, surprised.) And I performed as his idea, became something like it.

We made plans to live abroad together—in Paris or New York. He’d been to both these places; I hadn’t been anywhere except Torquay and Salcombe. He talked about how we’d earn money and rent an apartment, and I believed that he really could make these things happen. There was a rare blend in him of earnestness and recklessness. And he seemed to know instinctively what to read, where to go, what music to listen to. He was easily bored, and indifferent to anything he didn’t like. Psychological novels were dreary, he said. The Beatles were consumer culture. I didn’t talk to him about the oldfashioned books I’d loved before I met him.

“In New York, I’ll work as a waitress,” I said. “And you can write.”

“Sometimes I think I could do something with my life,” he said. “But then, in the middle of the night, something awful happens.”

“What kind of awful?”

“I feel as if I’d already done it, this important thing—writing a book, or whatever it is. I feel as if it were a mountain to climb, and I’ve toiled up the mountain and achieved the thing and then I’m coming down the other side and it’s behind me, and it’s nothing. It doesn’t alter anything in the world by one feather’s weight. And then when I wake up I panic that, because I’ve already dreamed the end of the work, I’ll never be able to begin.”

But, more often, Val’s mood was buoyant and exhilarated—he was impatient to get started. Everyone assumed he would take the Oxbridge entrance exam, go to university. For the moment, he went along

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with the idea. “My English teacher at school,” he said, “he’s invested a lot of hopes in me. He’s giving me special tuition. I don’t know how to tell him I’m leaving, not yet. Soon I will.”

“Wherever you go,” I said, “I’ll follow you.”

We ran into him once—the English teacher, Mr. Harper. Val and I were arm in arm, walking down Park Street on a Saturday in the crowds of people milling about and looking in the shops—jeans boutiques, bookshops, places selling Indian and Chinese knickknacks and silver jewelry. A stubby middle-aged man was staring in a shop window; he veered away from it as we passed, almost walking right into us and then recognizing Val, putting on a show of surprise that seemed contrived, as if he’d actually seen us coming from miles off and prepared for this scene. I thought at the time that he was socially inept because he was such an intellectual. I knew that Val respected him, and that it was he who’d put Val onto Pound and Beckett and Burroughs. But I could see that Val wished we hadn’t met him—he seemed shocked by this collision of the worlds of school and home.

“Hello, Valentine,” Mr. Harper said. He was staring leeringly at me. “What a good way to spend your Saturdays. Aren’t you supposed to be revising?”

“We’re on our way to the reference library,” Val said sulkily, blushing.

“Oh—then I mustn’t get in the way of virtue! God forbid. But I will see you Tuesday, after school?”

“Is it Tuesday?” Val was vague. “I’m not sure.”

“You must come on Tuesday. We’re broaching the divine Marianne.”

I was disappointed. Val had talked about Fred Harper (the boys doing the Oxbridge entrance called him Fred) as if he were a portal to higher things, yet here he was chaffing and prodding about work like any other teacher. Also, he was rumpled and pear-shaped, with pleading eyes, and a bald patch in his hair, which was dark and soft like cat fur. He had a drawling posh voice. I knew that there was a Mrs. Harper and also children; and that Mrs. Harper got bored if her husband and Val talked for hours about poetry. Sometimes she went to bed, leaving them to it.

“Who’s the divine Marianne?” I said jealously when we’d walked on.

Valentine shrugged, irritated. “A poet in the A-level anthology.”

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Mum and Gerry were afraid I was bringing a contamination into their house. When I bought junkshop dresses, Mum made me hang them outside in case of fleas. Val found an old homburg and wore it pulled down over his eyes.

“What does he think he looks like?” Gerry said.

“What’s the matter with that boy?” Mum asked. “What’s he hiding from?”

He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, as improbable—in his collarless shirt, waistcoat, and broken canvas shoes, with a scrap of vermillion scarf at his neck—as an exotic bird blown off course. Even in those days, when he was fresh and boyish, the drugs left some kind of mark on him—not damage, exactly, more like a patina that darkened his skin to old gold, refining its texture so that minute wrinkles appeared at the corners of his lids when he frowned. His eyes were veiled and smoky. He smelled, if you got up close: an intricate musk, salty, faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter—delicious to me.

“Hello? Anybody home behind that hair?” my mother said.

Val looked at me quickly, blissfully. Later, he would imitate her for our friends. While he was with me, everything was funny. Without him, I was exposed, on a lonely pinnacle—afraid of tumbling.

They were still strong, my parents. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, yield to their judgment of what I loved, but it weighed on me nonetheless, as monumental as a stone. If I tried to carelessly condescend to them, they found me out. I was clever, I was still doing well at school, but Gerry was clever, too.

“What’s so wrong with Communism?” I’d lightly say, trying to be amused at their naïve politics. I really was amused—I knew about so much beyond their blinkered perspective. I’d read poets and visionaries, and “The Communist Manifesto.” “Doesn’t it seem fairer that everyone should start out equally, owning a share of the means of production?”

“It’s a nice idea, Stella,” Gerry said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out in practice. People in those countries wouldn’t thank you for your high ideals; they’d rather be able to buy decent food in the shops. The trouble is, a command economy just isn’t efficient. Breaks down because of human nature in the end. Every man naturally wants to do better than his neighbor.”

Because he knew those words—“command economy”—and I didn’t, how could I answer him? His knowledge was flawed, but substantial—an impregnable fortress. My attacks on it—so effective when we were apart, and Gerry dwindled in my imagination to a comic miniature—faltered in his actual presence, so that I battered at the fortress with weak fists. Even in the seventies, the old order hadn’t changed much. Young people wore their hair long and had afghan coats and went to music festivals— 53

some young people did those things. But at the top, bearing down on everyone, there were still those ranks of sombre-suited men (and the occasional woman): politicians, professors, policemen— inflexible, imperturbable in their confidence about what was to be taken seriously and what was not.

You could jeer at them, but their influence was a fog you breathed every day, coiling into your home through their voices on radio and television and in newspapers. Gerry said that Africans suffering in a famine should know better than to have so many children, or that feminists did women no favors when they went around like tramps, or that there was no point in giving to charities because it was well known that they spent all the money on themselves.

As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her. In my mind, I was convinced that her life— housework and child care—was limited and conventional. But, in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening—sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even when I had half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek, which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. She was in her late thirties then, and no doubt she was very attractive, though I couldn’t see it—compact good figure, thick hair in a short bouffant cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, too. In her withholding and dismissing manner, she seemed to communicate that women knew the prosaic and gritty and fundamental truth that underlay all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know, too, or would come to know sooner or later.

I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.

The summer I got my O-level results (all A’s, apart from a C in physics), my uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory where he worked. I wept to Val about how the women there hated me and gave me the worst tasks (I had to take the molds off the hot puddings—at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered), because I was only a student worker and because I took a book to read during my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up, but he didn’t. I think that he actually liked the romance of my working there—it was not “middle class.” He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so; my mother had always strictly policed the way I spoke at home (“ ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’ ”). Apparently, however, I said “reely” for “really,” and “strawl” for “stroll.” “Your mother has an accent, too,” he said. “Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.”

Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint— quickly, with the fingers of one hand, as only he could—and we went outside to smoke. The moon, watery white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spread-eagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our fingertips were touching—through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we were emptying ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head, I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.

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Then I was sure that someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared with ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, and a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top-heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbor and young fruit trees and a rockery, which Gerry had built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And it occurred to me now that he might be hidden in there. He did walk out into the garden in the dark sometimes— “to cool off,” he said. If he was there, he’d be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.

Val began to stroke my hand, rubbing his thumb around my palm, then pushing it between my fingers, one by one, over and over, until I was sick with love for him. But I knew better than to make any move toward him—he didn’t like me all over him. There was a rustling from among the shrubs next door, and a head like a pale moon-blob rose above the top of the clematis mound.

“My stepfather thinks that I should get a job in a bank, when I leave school,” I said aloud to Val. Surprised, Valentine turned his head toward me. “Do you want a job in a bank?”

“Of course not. I’d rather kill myself. But he thinks it would be good for me, and provide for my future.”

“He’s a cunt,” Valentine said. “What does he know about your future?”

“I know, he’s a cunt.”

The blob spoke. “Stella, come inside. You’ll catch your death. That grass is damp.”

Gerry’s voice in the night was sepulchral, ridiculous, tight with disapproval. Only when I heard it was I aware of myself sprawled so provocatively on my back, with my legs spread wide apart, my arms flung open. Let him look, I thought. I didn’t move. I pretended I didn’t see him.

“Did you hear something?” I said to Val, squeezing his hand in mine.

We were going to laugh—I knew we were.

“Come inside, Stella, now, at once,” Gerry said—but keeping his voice low, as if he didn’t want my mother to know what he had to witness. “I’m telling you. Get up!”

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Pointedly, he didn’t address Valentine, ignoring his existence.

“I think I heard something,” Valentine said. “Or was it cats?”

Leisurely, Val sat up, crouching over the cold end of the joint, his hand held up to shield it from the wind and his hair falling forward, hiding his face. Then came the scratch and flare of the heavy, shapely silver lighter that had been his mother’s until she gave up smoking. Fire bloomed momentarily in Valentine’s cave; I saw him aflame—devilish, roseate. I scrambled to my feet. I really was stoned.

The garden swung in looping arcs around me.

“Oh,” I cried, exulting in it. “Oh . . . oh!”

We were laughing now. Under my soles, the world rocked, and steadied itself, and rocked again.

“What’s the matter with you?” Gerry hissed. He must have been standing on something—a rock? a box?—on the other side of the fence, because it was too high ordinarily to see over; his two fists, hanging on, were smaller moon-blobs against the night. “Are you drunk?”

(My parents still hadn’t understood what we were smoking.)

“You’d better come back the front way. Come round by the front door.”

“Back the front way, Stella?” Valentine imitated softly, looking at me, not at Gerry. “Front the back way? Which way d’you like?”

I had always had a gift of seeing myself as my stepfather saw me—only in this vision I used to be a small and thwarted thing, blocking him. Now, in the moonlight, I was transfigured: arms outstretched, veering like a yacht tacking, I was crossing the garden, flitting ahead of the wind, like a moth, weightless.

Valentine and I looked so consummately right as a couple: stylish, easily intimate, his arm dropped casually across my shoulder, our clasped hands swinging together. We looked sexy. I knew that because I saw it in others’ faces. But the truth was, we didn’t have sex. In all the time we’d spent lying on his bed (or, occasionally, on mine), we hadn’t done an awful lot for Mum and Gerry to disapprove of.

We did work ourselves up; there was some touching and fumbling. I touched him, mostly; if he touched me he turned it into a joke, put on a funny voice as if my breasts were little animals squeaking 56

and crawling around on my chest. Kissing, he pecked dry kisses all over my face with a satirical, popping noise, smiling at me all the time with his eyes open. Then sometimes, if his mother banged the gong for supper, or the phone rang and she called upstairs to say that Val was wanted, he grabbed my hand with sudden aggression, pushed it down inside his jeans, and used it to rub himself fiercely and greedily for a moment, before he flung himself off the bed and ran to the phone, zipping up as he went, cursing, pushing his erection away inside. I wasn’t disgusted—actually, I’d say I was more fascinated—by my transgression into that crowded heat inside his stretched underpants, his smell on my fingers afterward. But also I was confused: if that was desire, it was unmistakably urgent. So what was the matter?

Who wants to remember the awful details of teen-age sex, teen-age idiocy?

I loved him because he was my other half, my twin, inaccessible to me.

One evening I was supposed to baby-sit while Mum and Gerry went out to a Masonic Ladies Night. I liked my baby brother very much: Philip was an enthusiast, always entertaining us with jokes and little performances, looking quickly from face to face for approval; he sat on his hands to keep them from waving about and swung his legs under his chair until it rocked. When Mum came downstairs, perfumed and startling in a silver Lurex bodice and a stiff white skirt, he and I were laughing at “Dad’s Army” on the telly. She stood clipping on her earrings by feel, giving us her instructions. The whole process of her transformation, she managed to convey, was just another duty to discharge.

“Stella, I don’t want anyone coming round.”

“Madeleine said she might.”

“I don’t want Valentine hanging around Philip if I’m not here.”

I wasn’t even expecting Val: he was at one of his sessions with Fred Harper. But out of nowhere— everything had been all right, the previous moment—I was dazzled by my rage. “What’s the matter with you?” I shouted. “Why have you got such a nasty mind?”

I knew in that moment that she regretted what she’d said, but only because she’d miscalculated and hadn’t meant to start an argument. She was afraid it would make them late: she glanced at the wristwatch on a silver bracelet that had been Gerry’s wedding present to her. “Who you choose as your friends is your own business, Stella,” she said stiffly. “But I’m not obliged to have them in my house.”

“Your house? Why d’you always call it your house? Don’t I live here or something?”

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My stepfather hurried downstairs in his socks, doing up his cufflinks. He’d heard raised voices. I loathed him for the doggy eagerness with which he came sniffing out our fight.

“What’s going on, Edna?”

He irritated my mother, too. “For goodness’ sake, get your shoes on, Gerry. We’re late already.”

“I won’t let her get away with talking to you like that.”

“I’ll talk to her how I like,” I said. “She’s my mother.”

Philip went off into a corner, dancing on tiptoe with his head down, shadowboxing, landing tremendous punches on the air: this was what he did when we quarrelled, trying to make us laugh.

“Dad’s Army” wound up; the ordinary evening melted around us; then they were too late for their dinner dance, their treat spoiled. Mostly, I shouted and they pretended to stay calm. Soon I couldn’t remember how it had all started: I felt myself washed out farther and farther from the safe place we usually cohabited. I couldn’t believe how small and far away they seemed. It was suddenly easy to say everything. “You think you’re so sensible and fair,” I protested to Gerry. “But, really, I know you just want to destroy me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

“Oh, Stella. D’you have to make such a performance out of everything?”

Gerry said that I wasn’t a very easy girl to like, that I was arrogant and selfish. He crossed the room to close a window, because he didn’t want the neighbors to hear us. At some point, Philip went quietly upstairs. I said that I would die if my life turned out to be as boring and narrow as theirs.

“Just you wait,” my mother warned. “Boring or not, you’ll have to get on with it like everybody else.”

Gerry called my friends dropouts and deadbeats, a waste of space.

“That’s what we think you are,” I said. “We think you’re dead.”

“I’d watch out for Valentine if I were you,” my mother said. “You might be barking up the wrong tree.”

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Gerry did lose his temper eventually.

“Get out, Stella, if you can’t respect this house. Just get out.”

Mum remonstrated with him, halfheartedly.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going. I wouldn’t stay in this house if you begged me.”

They didn’t beg me. I let myself out the front door, into the street.

Freezing without my coat, and weeping, I went to Val’s. His mother let me in and I waited for him in his attic, getting under the blankets to keep warm. When he came home from Fred Harper’s, I heard her expostulating downstairs, saying that I couldn’t stay, she wouldn’t put up with it. So she didn’t like me, either. And I heard Val’s voice raised, too, yelling awful things. (“You silly bitch. Don’t touch me!”) An infectious rage was flashing around between us all that night, like electricity.

“I can’t go back,” I said, when he erupted into the room.

And he understood that it was true. Anyway, he’d had a row, too—with Fred Harper. He was leaving school. We’d both leave school. We’d leave home, too. This, I felt, was the beginning of my real life, of everything I had been waiting for. My real life, in my imagination afterward, always had that attic shape, high and empty and airy, cigarette smoke drifting in the light from a forty-watt bulb. Val said he knew someone who had a flat where we could stay. Tomorrow he’d sort it out. For tonight, I could stay here. He didn’t care what his mother thought.

“Poor little Stella,” he said. “Poor little you. I’m so sorry.”

He was stroking my arms and nuzzling between my shoulder blades, trying to warm me up where I was rigid with cold. And there you are: that night he made love to me, properly—or more or less properly. Anyway, we managed penetration. And we did it another time, too, in the early morning a few days later, in a zipped-up sleeping bag in the front room of a fantastically disgusting ground-floor flat belonging to Ian, the freckled red-haired man who sold Valentine his drugs. We lay in the dawn light, crushed together on our narrow divan in the blessed peace of the aftermath, Val’s head on my breast: proudly, I felt the trickling on my thighs. I suppose we must have heard the milkman’s float passing—or perhaps by that time we had dozed off.

Then someone threw a full milk bottle through the closed window. I didn’t understand at first what had happened: it was just an explosion in the room, appalling and incomprehensible, the crashing

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glass as loud as a bomb, milk splashed violently everywhere. (It seems unlikely that the drug dealer had a daily delivery—the bottle must have been picked up from someone else’s doorstep.)

“What the fuck?” Val struggled up out of the sleeping bag, naked.

Ian came running in, pulling jeans on. “What the fuck?”

He cut his feet on the glass.

I saw in Val’s face that he knew what the explosion was, and who.

Some other girl, I thought. Some old love. Someone he loves, or who loves him and is desperate for him the way I am.

But of course it wasn’t any girl. It was his English teacher.

I thought—when the whole truth came out, when at last I’d understood about the sex, and Ian was so fucked off with Val about the window and was looking for him everywhere, and Val got some money from his older sister and went to the States, and it was all such a collapse of my hopes—I thought I could still go back, defeated, to my old life. Back home and back to school, and pick up where I’d left off, and be a clever girl again, and get to university. Even if I could never ever again, in my whole life, be happy.

But I wasn’t that clever, was I? Had I forgotten everything they’d taught us at school? That you only had to do it once, just once, to get into trouble. We had even done it twice. ♦

-The New Yorker-

60

Ankita Rao

How He Leaves You

T

his is how he leaves you. Door pulled quietly closed, last glimpse of a weathered leather bag and brown hair matted to the back of his head. You sit on the couch in a pair of running shorts—knees up, legs crossed, heels tucked underneath you. He doesn’t look back.

That night you drink orange juice and vodka and write letters to him, one after another. Some of them you fold into thirds, tuck into envelopes, and stamp with two stamps each before putting them in your desk drawer. Twelve letters until your roommate comes home and pulls away your pen and drink and makes you take a shower as she unbuckles her velvet heels. It’s three thirty in the morning.

The water is too hot and the steam is suffocating. You kneel by the drain, noticing the mold creep across the grout. The monsoon has turned Bombay green and grey and things grow in every crevice of the city. You wonder, as the water pelts your still-plaited hair, as the rain slams relentlessly into the window, if you are crying or just silently screaming. *

*

*

He leaves you on a Sunday in June and on Monday you are back at the office checking every e-mail he has sent you in the last two years, watching the signature switch from Best to Kisses to Love.

There’s a drawer of birthday cards and notes that were taped to the inside of your bag on weekday mornings. And underneath, on a crumpled piece of yellow pad paper, is the first letter he ever wrote you and slipped into your purse when you boarded a train to Delhi. You sat in the doorway of your sleeper car that morning, reading his tiny blue scrawl, peeling up words at the corner to look for hidden messages.

I’ll think of you, he wrote. I’ll think of you when I run down Marine Drive, slowing down by the bench where I kissed you for the first time, cutting off your laugh and getting my fingers stuck in your uncombed hair.

The letter looks different under the fluorescent lights, without Indian Railway cars chugging along the Madhya Pradesh countryside. His scratched out words look careless, not spontaneous. The middle paragraph, you realize, was more for himself than you. You fold the letter into a perfect square, slip it back into the drawer and wave off coworkers when they offer you a ride home.

Weaving back through the crooked, cobblestone streets you are so close to the sea that your jeans are damp with salty spray. For a second you lean over the fence and watch the rough grey water and breathe into the empty pit of your stomach until you almost feel full. *

*

*

August days are long, the nights longer, and in the morning, when sleep finally comes, you stay awake by watching the rain fall on the street where a man peddles flowers for a nearby temple on Pali Hill.

An imam calls namaz over the mosque speakers next door. Bells ring at St. Andrews church. There is faith everywhere but your dark bedroom, where light bulbs flicker on and off. Some days you walk the 61

length of your bed, back and forth, raising your hands up to the ceiling as if to throw a question at whatever exists beyond the fan.

Kanika still says, “Good Morning,” still brings you a cup of chai she makes with all milk and no water. But she is growing restless and you are letting the dust settle in your room, turning your feet black and your books musty. The silk curtains have faded from orange to peach. And when she asks you for rent money it takes you the entire day to find your checkbook.

He owes you money, you remember. Not just a little, but for a flight ticket to Goa because he missed a train. For at least a dozen dinners when he forgot his wallet. For the time his card got declined when he was buying his sister a present. He always said it was the American bank account, but none of the other white guys from his office had the same problem.

You wonder what he would do if you called him right now, asking for the exact amount you penciled in your budget notebook. But then there’s the chance that you would have to hear his voice and not just the echo of last words. *

*

*

That voice haunts you. It’s the sound men make when they stop caring. When they no longer notice your long eyelashes and tiny hands. Or the way you say the word water so delicately without the twang of his American South. Wotah, wotah, he used to practice out loud, lying next to you with sweat dripping off his brow. He could never get used to the heat—antsy and frustrated through each Indian summer, complaining when you didn’t want to turn on the air conditioning.

Now that voice keeps you up at night, convinced that he is watching his ex-girlfriend wake up in Brooklyn, his hand on her creamy, perfect white skin, relieved that he no longer has to look at your pockmarked back or the stretch marks where your thighs meet your hips. He used to call them your tiger stripes when you tried to cover them with the palms of your hands in the early days of discovering each other’s bodies. But you both knew they were just scars.

That night you walk into Kanika’s room and leave your phone on her nightstand and tell her to keep it for the week. But she puts it back on your dresser the next day—insisting your mother will call her to find out where you are.

Your mother does call. She calls in the morning and the evening and sometimes at night because she knows the break in your voice. When she asks about Nick you say he flew back to America—that you haven’t heard from him in a while.

Such a nice boy, she says, and you are suddenly furious that he ever stepped foot in your home, corrupting the sacred space where your mother does her surya namaskars each morning, where your father makes ginger tea. You remember how Nick said, I love ghar ka kanna, and charmed everyone by eating yogurt rice with his hands like you taught him. But when you were alone in the room he complained that the food was too heavy, complained that the dessert gave him indigestion.

You wondered that weekend if you loved him but he was already there in your childhood room, reading you lines from your third grade diary and kissing you, it seemed, whenever you wanted to ask him a question. By the end of the night your parents insisted on dropping him off at Pune Station with a bag of sweets and snacks.

He’s not a nice boy, you say into the receiver, and wish for your mother’s cool, strong hands on your forehead. She doesn’t say anything more. When you hang up you don’t miss him, or the chords he 62

strummed each night on the guitar, or his thin pink lips, or his attempt to say your name the right way, with a soft th and a long o. There is anger where the longing used to be, and you put all of your letters and his letters into a plastic bag and walk all the way to the dumpster before you turn back and toss it under your bed. *

*

*

He leaves you with the start of the rains but it isn’t until the sun dries off the roads that you don’t think of him when you brush your teeth every morning.

You take the train home for Diwali in October and notice some extra space between your ribs, between your brows, in the vertebrae of your neck. Your body has released him and you find yourself in tears because you remember what it was like before his scribbles filled the margins of the story you were writing when he showed up. Before he wooed you with his guitar and his dollars and the way he high-fived the bai who cleaned his house.

When you reach the station you are suddenly so hungry that you buy a huge chocolate bar and eat the entire thing in the taxi on the way to your house, hardly noticing the firecrackers that explode dangerously close to the car, or the driver’s curses.

At home you and your mother spend hours creating rangoli patterns in the driveway—drawing careful lotuses and mango leaves with colored powder and placing tiny, illuminated diyas amid the designs.

By the time night falls and the guests start to come, your hands are rainbow-stained and your nails lined with red.

You light lamps until there is no dark spot left in the house.

-Lunch Ticket-

63

Christopher Linforth

Take it from me, kid, I’m a clown

L

isten kid, I know it’s your birthday and all, that you only turn ten once, and that this is your special day, but, come on, you’re crying over your balloon animal because you wanted a giraffe and you got an Irish Wolfhound, which you say looks retarded, and that I’m retarded; please, give me some respect here—even though I go by Bozo the Clown, I’m no bozo, just part of the franchise—this is my career, my profession; sure, I studied English literature in college, discovering a love for Dante and Milton, and upon graduation I couldn’t find a job anywhere, even in my local strip mall Barnes and Noble or in any of the dozen coffee shops run by the evil empire, Starbucks, and yes, I went a little crazy snorting coke in dive bar restrooms and drinking rail whiskey in the mornings, and my mom kicked me out of the house and I lived with this hooker, kind of acting as her john until she overdosed on Methadone and her dad took her away, placing her in some upscale treatment center, and yes, I continued to squat in that shit-box apartment for a little longer, waking up in my own vomit and just existing for the hit, for the adrenaline pop of making a score, but I cleaned myself up, kid, and my mom eventually agreed to take me back in, though in the basement this time and I had a curfew and I had to promise to stop the drinking and the drugs, and so you have to believe me when I tell you I’ve been to that dark void, that negative space where rock bottom fights back, slaps you over the head, and tells you to get a grip, and kid, really, you should take my advice and stop bugging your mom about wanting a giraffe because she was the one who hired me and I only charge seventy-five bucks for the entire afternoon, which includes entertaining you and your little snot-nosed friends with magic tricks, miming man-trapped-in-a-box, and singing the entire Justin Bieber back catalogue; I have a feeling you don’t know what it takes to make it in this industry: it’s competitive as hell, and I have rivals who undercut on price (but also quality) and sport junk-ass names like Melvin the Magnificent and Chachi the Womanizer and one of these jerks I even mentored for a while, teaching the punk things like the necessary clown poise to juggle flaming torches and how to throw custard pies without blinding the victim, but I didn’t teach him everything—I had to keep something in reserve, like that unusual balloon animal (I mean who else can make a recognizable Irish Wolfhound?), which is one of my specialties, my calling card, if you will, but actually I have to give credit to this street performer, Gregor the Great, or something alliterative like that, who was a world-class twister, and seeing him model that air-filled rubber into all those wondrous taxonomies led to an epiphany that I could shape my own future, and, in fact, Gregor’s the one, even more so than my mom, who helped me pull through the DTs and the projectile vomiting, who called me when I was low—close to breaking—and told me it would be hard and I tell you it was hard for a couple of weeks, but I got my shit together and enrolled in night classes—method acting, circus skills, and contemporary dance—to reinvent myself, to give me a shot at something new, perhaps even take the clichéd route and be an artist and emigrate to Paris, and yes, kid, it took a while and I financed school with a part-time job stacking shelves at Walmart and also a life model gig at the nearby community college, letting those 64

old folks sketch my thin wretched body for $8.50 an hour, and then later on stare at me oddly when they see me stacking incontinence pads in the aisle, but I found a girl, a real blue-eyed blonde named Val, who was a cashier and had a pierced conch, and we dated, the way I always saw couples do in movies: romantic encounters brimming with candle-lit dinners, French waiters, and fancy red wine, which I could never pronounce and never drink (for fear of reverting to my old habits), but would tell her to finish her glass, and then, by midnight, after we kissed and I left her by the bus stop, I could smell only her cherry-red lip gloss, and I went out of my mind and proposed and we got married at the town hall the next year and my mom even came and cried all the way through the ceremony, and though the marriage was annulled, as Val hooked up with Randy in Electronics, I carried on, eventually met someone else … what I’m trying to say, kid, is that it’s all right things didn’t turn out the way I hoped, or expected, as, in many ways, my life’s better and I have a son of my own now, around your age, and he’s nerdy, into board games, particularly he enjoys thrashing me at Hungry Hungry Hippos, but I still love him, apart from the crying, that’s why you should stop, celebrate life, because you have it all in front of you, even though I know you’ve been through some shit, like your mom told me on the phone she was worried about you, that your dad left a year ago, that he moved in with a slut redhead named Babs, and this is your first birthday without him, and I know that’s tough— I never met my father: he ran off after mom told him she was pregnant with me, which led to zero alimony or child support, no visiting me on Sundays, or him in the stands watching my Little League games—but you’ll survive and attend college, like I did, snag a job where you can make ends meet and make good with your mom, maybe even move across town to the suburbs, which, by the way, aren’t that bad, but are a great place to think, even read some of those college books you’re going to skip; so, come on kid—what’s your name anyhow: Tom? Bill? Phil?—your mom’s here with the cake and it looks kind of tasty, chocolate sponge, I bet, smothered in white vanilla frosting; you should get closer, yeah and I’ll sing “Happy Birthday” and cheer you on; there you go you’re almost there, the big teno and now, for God’s sake, blow out those fucking candles.

-Lunch Ticket-

65

Becca Dague

Delicate Conditions

A

chambermaid from Northern Boston had once told Annie that if you put a knife under the mattress it would cut the pain of childbirth in half, but thus far the meat cleaver underneath Mrs Allen’s pillow didn’t appear to be making much difference to the miscarriage. She was young and this would have been her first baby, which was why, Annie thought, the doctor kept cooing at her from across the room like you would to a frightened horse—something to do with placating.

There didn’t appear to be much he could do. But still, Mrs Allen was arching her body as though she were trying to hold the baby in—back hunched an inch away from the decorative wood carved headboard of her new marriage bed, tight knitted brows and clenched jaw, fists tangled and whiteknuckled in the linen.

From the corner of the room the doctor beckoned, and Annie came quietly, her eyes wide staring between Mrs Allen’s spread legs, to the bloodstained sheets, to the doctor’s polished shoes, then up to his face.

“Much too early,” he was muttering, then: “She’s going to lose it, dear”—and then, brows raised in surprise as though a great thought had just occurred to him— “What’s your name?”

“Annie.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, gaze not quite reaching her face, but instead seeming to linger somewhere in the space between her chin and clavicle. “There isn’t much I can do for her, Andrea,”— Annie narrowed her eyes, but didn’t correct—“much of the work will fall to you.”

Annie nodded, “Yes, sir.”

The doctor looked up at the sound of her voice, and ceased wringing his hands in a wet cloth for a moment. “Unfortunate business”—from the bed, Mrs Allen let out a cry that seemed to come from the center of her chest and work its way up to the back of her throat—“unfortunate indeed.”

“Annie,” Mrs Allen was crying on the bed now, reaching forward towards her ankles where the sheets were twisted. Annie took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and went to stand at Mrs Allen’s bedside.

Mrs Allen was looking up at her with tearful eyes. Her hair was matted to her brow bone, and Annie smoothed it away as Mrs Allen clenched her jaw roughly. “Annie,” she whispered, “the baby— “ Annie shushed her and pushed her hair away from her forehead once more. “It’ll all be over soon, Ma’am.” And Annie knew for a fact that it would. As an unmarried woman in a household where her only regular male contact was her newly married employer, Annie had taken great care to keep hidden the fragile morning she had spent crouched over a chamberpot crying and pushing and letting the flesh of her miscarried baby leech its way out of her—taken great care just in the way she had tried to take care of Mrs Allen, never allowing her to see the way Mr Allen’s eyes twinkled when 66

Annie served him breakfast a morning after one of their trysts, and shielding her from the secret smiles Annie kept close to her own heart.

Mrs Allen contracted in another bout of pain, her small body shaking. From beneath Mrs Allen’s billowy nightgown, Annie could see the redness of the flush across her chest and neck and the beginnings of a growing bump over her abdomen. When Annie came to dress Mrs Allen in the mornings and before dinner, Annie had amused herself with cooing over it and making Mrs Allen laugh and blush. Together in the evening Annie and Mrs Allen had talked about picnics in the park with Mr Allen and the baby, flying kites and sharing sandwiches. Mr Allen had never understood this sort of bizarre camaraderie, and had often questioned Annie about it as he licked her neck in the kitchen, or the parlor room closet, or the spare bedroom after Mrs Allen had begun retiring early.

Annie wasn’t sure she had known herself, except that with Mr Allen skulking happily around the household, Mrs Allen having a baby, and herself working throughout the little antique house, she could almost imagine that the three of them were proud of it.

From the sweaty master bed, Mrs Allen began to cry. The doctor looked at Annie, and Annie looked back at him wide-eyed before looking down at Mrs Allen, whose eyes were squeezed shut. The doctor was nodding at Annie, gesturing down to Mrs Allen and then at the large basin of water on the bedside table. He handed Annie a rag, and situated himself at the foot of the bed.

“Pardon me, Mrs Allen,” and lifted up her nightgown to look at her swollen, inflamed, bloody vagina. Mrs Allen covered her face in her hands and whined and Annie felt a surge of protection for the small woman, spread out and bleeding into the face of a man she didn’t know. Annie squeezed Mrs Allen’s shoulder and brushed a hand though her hair. To Annie, Mrs Allen was still just that little girl who cried before her wedding night. It was entirely unfair, Annie thought, that Mrs Allen would have to be so resilient this young.

“Almost finished Mrs Allen, just a bit more and you’ll be through,” the doctor said. “Wipe her as she goes, please, Andrea.”

Annie’s hands were shaking as she situated herself between Mrs Allen’s legs and lifted her nightgown above her knees. There was much more blood than Annie remembered with her own loss, but then again, Mrs Allen was slightly farther along than she had ever been. Mrs Allen’s vagina spasmed quickly and blood oozed out slowly, then more quickly. Annie wiped, rinsed in the basin and wiped again, taking care to dab at Mrs Allen’s thighs where the blood had spread. Each time Mrs Allen readjusted her legs or moved her hips, the pool of blood seeping into the mattress through the sheets would attack her legs and leave splotches up and down her thighs. Small bits of flesh were amongst blood on the sheets—pieces of Mrs Allen or the baby, Annie wasn’t sure, but she picked them out slowly, holding a rag against the steady flow out of Mrs Allen as she plopped them, one by one, into the fine china washbasin. The water was already clouding.

Mrs Allen took a sharp breath. Her back arched and locked and she let out a high whine from the back of her throat. From below, a fistful of red flesh began to ick its way out of Mrs Allen’s vagina, glooping out into Annie’s rag, where she caught it in the fabric.

Annie stood quickly, her head swimming, her stomach turning. She gripped her own gut and felt for a moment that she could sense the sharp pain of bending over that chamberpot and feeling something melt out of her. Mrs Allen’s breathing was haggard. Annie squeezed her thigh muscles together to feel the comfort of the rag tied between her legs. It was her third day of bleeding this month and the first time she had bled since.

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Looking at the little lump on the towel, Annie began breathing heavily. It was not something she had looked at before, just thrown it into the fire and closed her eyes—it had never been something that could have existed, and so Annie had tried her best not to think about its little limbs shriveling and charring in the fireplace, but she saw now that it hadn’t had limbs at all. It had just been a little lump of white blood flesh, almost like a veiny purple lobster hunk before steaming.

Annie’s head was swimming, and she began to sway back and forth. Mrs. Allen groaned faintly from the bed, and the doctor was saying something to her—or maybe to Annie. Annie herself wasn’t quite sure.

“More water,” Annie said, and gripped the basin in heavy numb hands as she ran from the room. In the hallway, she breathed heavily—once, twice—before resetting the washbasin in her grip and making her way down the hallway.

As she carried the water basin across the threshold, the lip of the bowl cut into her tender breasts through the muslin cloth of her maid’s uniform. She walked forward slowly through the dimly lit hallway—towards the stairs—and with each step her vagina contracted and spasmed. She gripped the washbasin tighter, her sweaty hands slipping on the fine china, her feet treading heavily on the carpet. As she bent her knees and turned towards the first stair her vagina spasmed once more, letting out with its little seizure a great glob of blood. Annie felt it go, and stopped for a moment three steps from the landing to feel it ooze its way out from her insides—just below her belly button—all the way to where it was cushioned by a bed of scraggly hairs and kitchen cloth rags. She continued down the stairs, more cautiously this time as the fabric carefully tied between her legs was releasing a wetness that was slowly making its way down her thigh. It would have to be changed shortly.

Her vagina squeezed itself together thrice more in quick succession and Annie started, the water sloshing back and forth, almost but not quite dribbling its way down her uniform. She could feel her heartbeat in the little moist cavern between her legs, and it seemed to echo the emptiness there. The little clumps of bloody shredded tissue squelched out of her without obstacle, and with each move she made she could feel the fingernails of an old hermit scratching away at her from the inside. If her body could talk, Annie thought that it might say No babies, no babies. Crouching over a rusty chamberpot after weeks of intentionally corseting herself tighter every day to suffocate the bump, and one week of being truly desperate in which she had hit herself hard enough each morning to leave bruises over her stomach, and all she could think about now was the call of her uterus: No babies. Annie herself had made sure of that.

The blood in the washbasin was light, and as she walked it seemed to swirl its way further into the water, making it an almost perfect pink raspberry punch if not for the little clumps of Mrs Allen’s vaginal flesh that floated stagnant near the bottom. Still, if Annie didn’t look straight into the bowl, she could pretend that they were perhaps blueberries that had been crushed under someone’s heel at a summer picnic—not the little purple and blue pieces of milky wife flesh that they were.

She stepped down onto the foot of the stairs, stopping suddenly as from around the corner came Mr Allen. Annie’s heart skipped a beat when she saw him and she very nearly smiled. It was such a small house that she saw him often, but sometimes when they came upon each other unexpectedly like this, seeing him felt like a fresh breeze on her sweaty face.

Annie stopped suddenly and the pink water slopped over, splashing onto the wood floor between them and onto Mr Allen’s shoes. They stared at each other wide eyed and smiling watery smiles for a moment, before a sob came from the sweaty master bedroom at the top of the stairs.

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Annie’s smile dropped and she sunk to her knees quickly, setting the bloody white china basin aside and using her skirt to wipe at the mess on the floor.

“I’m so sorry, Sir,” She was reaching for his shoes, crawling forward on her knees each time he pulled them away from her.

“Annie—” “—Very, very sorry, Sir—“ He was bending down to her now, pushing the washbasin away with enough force that a single piece of crushed blueberry flesh plopped onto the floor with the new splat of raspberry punch. “Annie, you know you don’t have to address me that way when Catherine’s not around.”

From the top of the stairs, Mrs Allen sobbed audibly once more. Annie flinched. Mr Allen crouched down to her, his hands hovering over arms, close enough where she could feel their warmth.

She scrubbed at his shoe with the hem of her skirt, and he drug his fingertips across her cheekbone tenderly before cupping her chin with his hands. Crouched on the floor with her face in Mr Allen’s hands, Annie held his tender gaze until her eyes filled with tears.

“The baby’s dead,” Annie whispered, “The doctor says its dead, it just has to—” And he was shushing her and pulling her into his chest. Together their backs thumped firmly against the wall at the foot of the stairs. His arms were around her and her head was nestled against his shoulder. “Don’t cry, darling,” he whispered into her hair.

But she did. It was here that she felt the safest to cry, tucked into the space between Mr. Allen’s shoulder and chin. She could feel his heartbeat against her arm, steady and strong. In the moments when she felt she couldn’t bear the little house any longer it was this that kept her there. Once Annie had gone to her sister’s house, convinced that she would never come back, never feel the oppressive stare of the very walls that seemed to judge her, but the thought of Mr. Allen never holding her again was unbearable. She had lain awake in her sister’s home, thinking of the way Mr. Allen’s thumbs caressed her cheeks when he kissed her, or how he would hold her hand like a lifeline as his tongue worked between her thighs.

The muscles between her legs contracted once more, leaving behind and achy sort of numbness that quietly radiated into her lower back and down her thighs each time she breathed. Mrs. Allen sobbed again, and Annie’s shoulders tensed at the same time that Mr. Allen dropped his hand from her shoulder to her waist. He gave her a squeeze.

Annie knew that they were both remembering the same string of little events—the way Annie’s body had looked spread out for him two weeks after his wedding night to Mrs. Allen, the way she would tease him around the house by bending over to tend to the fire in just the right way, how he would retaliate by pulling her into closets and around corners to suck on her neck and nip at her collarbone—always careful not to nibble on flesh exposed by her uniform. The way she had cried when her blood didn’t come on time—still, she tied a piece of kitchen rag between her legs each night before she went to bed in the hopes that her crimson visitor would surprise her in the night. How she had begged him to hit her three nights in a row because she was scared and all the herbs made her do was void her bowels. He had cried and she had cowered when he raised his hand to strike her above the pelvis but below the ribcage. She had tried herself more than once, but all her flimsy fists did was leave bruises. He hit her twice nightly for a week before it happened, crouched over a chamberpot after

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waking up in a pool of her own blood. It hadn’t been more than a bloody lump of flesh but Annie had still cried thinking that maybe it might have looked like her one day.

She burned it in the fireplace. It had smelled of fishy vaginal fluids and wet earthy dirt just after a good rain and something else that seemed bitter and tasted shrill in her nose—like the ringing left in her ears when the schoolboys on the corner whistled too loudly at her.

“Ahem.”

From the top of the stairs, the doctor was staring down at Annie and Mr. Allen. As he made his way down to the creaky stoop, Annie scrambled back over to the bloody china, tripping on her skirt and pitching forward as she crawled.

The doctor’s shoes came to rest just three inches from the washbasin, and Annie stood up slowly. The water sloshed as she picked it up. The doctor was looking at her through his spectacles and down his nose, his back planted firmly to Mr Allen.

“Mrs. Allen will still be needing that water.”

The doctor had turned the full spectrum of his disdain upon Annie. He looked her up and down, from where her apron was creased from how she had been positioned on Mr. Allen’s lap to the bloodstains on her hands, already beginning to cake underneath her fingernails and on her palms from how long she had been gone from Mrs. Allen’s bedside.

Annie bowed her head, looking once more into the depths of the water where, astir from the recent activity, the little shreds of skin rotated quietly like planets on small independent axes.

“Yes, Doctor.” And Annie left—down another flight of stairs to the kitchen, where before hesitating slightly, she threw the contents of the basin out the side door. She heard the liquid splash hard on the pavement and sighed. Setting the china down on the counter, she watched as the thick blood that had settled into the bottom crevices pooled at the center of the bowl once more. From the alleyway outside, she could hear the sounds of Mrs. Allen crying through the open window above the kitchen. The master suite wasn’t far above Annie’s head, and though she had tried her best, sometimes when she washed the dishes left over from the evening meal she could hear Mr. Allen making love to Mrs. Allen—sometimes even loud enough to hear when the window was closed. Annie would sing to not hear the moans and occasionally it would stop her from crying herself to sleep. Mrs. Allen was younger than Annie and more beautiful than Annie had ever been—still, they had enough in common that Annie could sometimes pretend that had her father been a lawyer or a politician instead of a whaler, she could have been Mrs. Allen instead. At the best of times they felt like a small family, and at the worst of times, listening to the echoes of Mrs. Allen’s cries from the alleyway below, it felt like this.

Annie walked slowly back up the stairs, leaving the washbasin behind.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she could hear Mrs. Allen crying in the bedroom. She walked to the closed door, holding the knob in her hand for a moment. It was cold, and it felt good against her slick palm. The door creaked when she opened it and Mrs. Allen looked up.

Her face was sweaty and streaked with tears—eyes red, she was sitting up, still situated in a pool of her own crimson blood. Her hair was frizzing all around her face, coming out in every direction from the braid Annie had done for her just a few hours earlier. Her shoulders were hunched over her hands, which were cradling a piece of bloody cloth that, Annie was sure, held that small 70

round of uncooked crustacean flesh. Mrs. Allen was looking between Annie and the bloody parcel, her eyes flicking up and down, up and down. They settled on the glob of flesh nestled in her hands, widened, narrowed, and filled with tears.

“I was going to name him Charles,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh, Ma’am,” Annie sighed, and moved to walk swiftly to Mrs. Allen’s side.

Mrs. Allen’s eyes went wide and she jerked herself away from Annie, pitching herself forward on the bed. Her nightgown began to seep into the pool of blood that already saturated the sheets and mattress. “Don’t you dare condescend to me!” Her eyes were furious and bloodshot, her mouth compressed into a thin line, her chin quivering. “Not now,” she said, “don’t you dare.”

Annie bowed her head and took a step back. “Yes, Ma’am.”

Mrs. Allen’s head twitched to the side slightly and her eyes narrowed. “Tell me, do you think he might have looked like his father?”

Annie cast her eyes to the floor. She had asked herself that question so many times, going over and over in her own head what her own baby might have looked like had the circumstances been different.

Mrs. Allen clutched the bloody rag tighter to her chest, the bright red liquid dripping down her pale white nightgown and into the tips of her long hair. “Do you?” Her voice broke.

“They’ll be other children, Ma’am, this is far from the end.”

Mrs. Allen’s head snapped up to look at Annie. “Of course there will be—I’m his wife.” She was crying in earnest now, baring her teeth at Annie. “Did you hear me? I’m his wife.”

Annie’s eyes widened.

“Oh, you thought I didn’t know? I heard you—I can hear you, my God, Annie have a little compassion!”

Annie felt a hot burning embarrassment working its way up the back of her neck.

“You two making cow eyes at each other over tea and you think I can’t see? My God”—Mrs. Allen was rocking back and forth, crying and clutching her rag—“I’m his wife, and you think that when he kisses me in the morning I can’t smell you on his breath?”

“Please, Ma’am—” “Please? Please? Please what, Annie, please stop?” Mrs. Allen was speaking so forcefully that her hair was whipping around her face and over her shoulders. “You stop! Did you hear me? You stop!

I’m his wife.”—then, quieter, “I thought you were my friend.”

Annie stepped forward, eyes watering before Mrs. Allen held up a bloody palm forcefully.

“Don’t come any closer,” Mrs. Allen cried, her voice breaking again, and Annie stopped shortly.

Annie could feel Mrs. Allen’s blood caked under her own fingernails, and she ached to comfort Mrs. Allen. She wanted to hold her and tell Mrs. Allen that she thought she had been doing enough, thought that there was no way for Mrs. Allen to know, and that Annie and Mr. Allen were something special, that she never would have done this if not loving him had ever been an option.

71

Annie’s eyes watered, and she reached down slowly to her maid’s apron tied around her waist, lifting it back up to wipe at her eyes.

Mrs. Allen noticed the movement, and lifted her head to watch Annie cry. For a moment, she looked as though she were thinking of something else to say, something scathing that would surely be ruined by the watery quality of her voice, but instead she reached out one bloody hand. Annie took it.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Allen was crying. She hunched over the unformed body of her bloody rag-child and cried, and Annie hunched over the body of Mrs. Allen—still too small to feel like the body of a real woman. Annie could feel Mrs. Allen’s ribcage expand and contract rapidly as she cried. “We can go back,” Mrs. Allen was saying. “I don’t know anything, please don’t tell Mr. Allen what I said—it will only make things worse. Please, I’m sorry—” Annie was shushing her, moving her body more fully behind Mrs. Allen’s, and beginning to rebraid her hair with the expert fingers of the lady’s maid she was. Mrs. Allen crouched further over her rag and continued to cry and coo “I’m sorry,” over and over—Annie wasn’t sure if the apologies were meant for her or for the little oozing rag that might have been a boy.

Annie tied the plait with a ribbon, and covered Mrs. Allen’s hands with hers.

“Ma’am,” she began.

“What will you do with him?” Her eyes were wide and teary, and her voice was barely more than a whisper.

“That’s not important,” Annie whispered back, holding her eye contact. She tried to communicate through the stare so much more than she could say—Please don’t ask any more questions, Catherine, and You don’t want to know, Catherine, and I’m sorry.

Instead she watched Mrs. Allen unfold the rag and take a last look at the fistful of bloody flesh.

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Allen whispered to it, her voice hoarse and breaking. “I’ll always remember you”—her voice cracked, her mouth turning downwards and swallowing her tears—“my darling boy.”

She puckered her small mouth and, barely touching it, kissed the small mound of flesh. “Goodbye, little one.”

And she shoved the rag forward towards Annie, physically turning her body away, sobbing into her own bloody palms. Annie stood, holding the mound, and watched Mrs. Allen cry, feeling her pain with her, aching to wipe the tears and blood away from her cheeks.

“Ma’am—” Annie began.

“For God’s sake, Annie, take him!” Mrs. Allen screamed, and lurched forward towards Annie with enough force to shake the bed frame. “Take him!” She was pushing and pulling at Annie from whatever angle she could reach, clawing at her skirts and arms with one hand and pushing at her chest with the other, sobbing: “take him, take him, take him!”

And she did. Across the threshold, down the stairs, past Mr. Allen—now doctor-less—to whom she said only “Your wife needs you” and into the kitchen where the fire was low but waiting.

She knelt before the fireplace quickly, placing the bloody rag just above her knees while she tended the fire. She added another log, then one more, and waited. It would need to be full and crackling in order to not be doused by the rag.

72

From the alleyway outside, Annie could hear the soft grooves of Mr. Allen’s voice in the bedroom. Mrs. Allen’s high vibratos were there too, answering back. Annie couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but it sounded peaceful.

Just as her knees began to ache, she put the baby on the fire. The rag began to shrivel and burn away first, leaving behind only small fabric residues that caught fire quickly and burned away like little tobacco leaves. Little Charles was blackening and smoking more quickly than she thought he would. The smoke was wafting into her face, reaching out and combing its fingers down her neck and rubbing its hands on her uniform. Collapsing further onto the floor, Annie began to cry—unable to look away, unable to move away, unable to stop thinking of her own child she had beaten out of existence and burned on the fire, like she was now burning Charles. The smell was the same—that sort of musky sweet smell mixed with something bitter in the back of the throat. It caressed Annie’s face and invaded her eyes, but still she watched. The feeling was the same too—the little pitch and drop in the pit of her stomach that settled on the drop and made her wish she could vomit.

Mrs. Allen was upstairs with Mr. Allen, and she knew—maybe not about the baby, but about the trysts, surely. And about the way Mr. Allen looked between Annie’s thighs, and the way he kissed her neck to wake her up in the mornings, and the way his tongue would move in her mouth. Annie knew Mrs. Allen knew these things about her in the same way Annie knew these things about Mrs. Allen. She saw them in her sleep at night and couldn’t stop them as she was falling asleep, in the same way she knew with absolute certainty that she would see this—this lump of flesh of an unborn child slowly roasting and blackening—for many years to come.The smell would work its way into her hair and suffocate her when she rolled over in the night, wafting across her face as the smoke and smell was now invading her nostrils and terrorizing her.

Annie couldn’t look away. She sat by the fire, smelling and watching and crying and hearing the soft voices of Mr. and Mrs. Allen speaking from the master suite upstairs—their words always just out of reach.

She awoke in the morning to cold ash.

73