VL Editions / Mike Lee: All Your Ambition

All Your Ambition EditionS

Vl Mike Lee

All Your Ambition Mike Lee

Photo by Ena Lee

page 04 - 11 Until the End of the Day / page 12 - 17 White Dress / page 18 - 27 First Snow / page 28 - 31 South of Houston / page 32 - 37 Fell From the Sun / page 38 - 41 Mystery Train / page 42 - 49 î‚ťe 9th / page 50 - 51 Indian Summer / page 52 - 55 All Your Ambition / 02/03

A ColleCtion of Short-StorieS And StreetphotogrAphy

by Mike lee Mike Lee is a writer and photographer based in New York City and Managing Editor of Public Employee Press, the voice of District Council 37, AFSCME. Previous publications include e Ampersand Review, Paraphilia, Sensitive Skin, Glossolalia and e Potomac Journal.

His stories are also featured in several anthologies, including Forbidden Acts (Avon) and Pawn of Chaos (White Wolf).

A collection of photos, Le miroir invisible (e Invisible Mirror), was published by the French publisher Corridor Elephant.

His photography is featured in ArtPhotoFeature Magazine, Aspect: Ratio, Black & White in Color Magazine, Visions Libres, SHOT! Magazine, Inspired Eye and in the books Black and White Street Photography, World Street Photography (Kujaja Press, Austria).

Contact: www.mleephotoart.com.

EditionS

Vl

VL Editions / 2015 / Content of this Issue is copyrighted by the featured Artist Mike Lee and cannot be used without his permission.

VL Editions is a trademark owned by Louisa Dawn / Editor-in-Chief of Visions Libres Magazine and VL Editions.

Until the End of the Day (Midspring Dithering)

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wakening, katerina felt metal in her mouth. rough the curtain half pulled across the window, the clouds shielding the rising sun lent a dull grayness to the early morning. katerina pulled the black sheet away and padded across the parquet floor, into the bathroom. She remained on the toilet for fieen minutes, looking at the shoe ads in a fashion magazine and cursing her age. katerina liked her West elm chocolate brown furniture, the bookshelves neatly arranged, the coffee table square and modern, the lamps cheaper than they looked, the framed prints on the wall: Magritte, rothko, classic Mike kozik alternative rock show posters from Austin in the early nineties, back when that city was fun, before California, Mexico and new york moved in and fought for the couch. yes, new york, she thought. i was going to be a writer.

Manhattan. katerina moved there at twenty-seven in 1992, aer graduate school and a job in publishing. Went straight to associate editor, promoted to senior editor in six months. ere was still family money le over and the pay was good, so she could afford the apartment at the edge of the east Village in the sprawling red brick nothing known as Stuyvesant town. it was rent stabilized and on the l train, an easy commute from her stop on first Avenue and 14th Street, two stops to Union Square, transfer to the lexington four-five to Midtown, and a single block and an elevator ride to the 37th floor. katerina dressed the six digits she made. She liked her high heeled laboutins even though they were hard to find without platforms which made her feel like a stripper, and the somewhat butch power suits with pencil skirts and pants designed and tailored on the rodeo drive of rich hipsters, east Village 9th Street. katerina was five-one and a little on the zaftig side, with streaks of gray fighting her auburn hair for space, and therefore required a look that exuded her authority, albeit not much more than stage managing three different lifestyle 04/05

magazines for a company on the edge of collapse between the twin plagues of endless recession and the internet. katerina built up her design skills and had her resume at the ready since 2008, but she knew better. 47 had become the new 60 to this postmodern economy, and so she obsessively checked the stock portfolio from her parents’ trust fund as well as the investments made with the money le by her grandparents. She had a work 401(k) that was dented hard from the crash, but it remained enough to pay whatever capital gains taxes she would have to, and there was always texas. texas. home, though Austin and the surrounding hill Country had changed dramatically. home was Mom, dad in a suburb overlooking lake travis, going to football games with her best friend, and punk rock shows at raul’s and Club foot.

All that had gone and went away—consigned to nostalgic sentimentality on facebook. katerina was wise to reread her diaries. it was one matter that the bands she saw le more of an impression than the people in her life, quite another that the daydreams expressed in cursive on college-ruled lines were invariably better than the daily reality.

When she returned to Austin—and katerina was somewhat resigned that she would—it would be to a skyline like houston without philip Johnson, expensive restaurants rivaling Manhattan’s in fare, price, and sprawl. e little suburban community she knew at thirteen was built-up mansions over every hill—even the house she grew up in had been torn down in the mid-2000s for a horror of french whatever, complete with driveway fountain. it made her sick to see it, considering her father had designed the original neighborhood when the first spades struck. ere was still good bbQ to be had, which she missed, and the music scene was worthwhile, and she wouldn’t mind at all being the middle aged lady rubbing shoulders with the peers who had decided to stay. Most importantly, she could afford to live there, and being lonely in the sun in texas was far better than dying alone in new york. She needed to leave, but still resolved to hang on until she could no longer. katerina unrolled her mat and began her pilates, stretching in bra and panties. Aer an hour of that and then liing weights, she retired to the shower, scrubbed and cleaned, and dressed up in a pair of red gym shorts and a white ribbed tank top, leovers from ten years back and younger in the gym. She had stopped going when she realized she could do everything

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at home and the girls around her were getting younger, while the older ones were flailing against the brick wall of the calendar. katerina preferred to wrap her insecurities in a blanket. She liked her legs just the way they were, and while a little flabby in the middle and saggy ever so slightly in the rack, katerina still enjoyed the attractiveness of her body. it was the face that she had issues with – it seemed everything bad went there. forehead furrowed like the rivers of Mars and crow’s feet from decades of eye strain. She accepted this as part of her transition into middle age; to fight reality would only add to the stress. She had a coworker, evelyn, who had already gone in for surgery. Came out looking so stretched out she reminded katerina of her cat. She wasn’t going to embarrass herself, that much katerina resolved every morning applying makeup, and the evening with the cold cream. She also took a certain pride in her looks, telling herself these were marks of experience. Just not today. She did not want to look until she had a reason to, on her self-imposed mental health holiday. katerina sat behind her vanity, also West elm chocolate brown, and brushed her hair, this time not avoiding her face. her glasses were off, so the soness from aging vision buffeted her sensitive nature as she untangled wet wavy locks before rising and moving into the living room. She toasted a bagel in the kitchen and made coffee. She picked up the remote and clicked on the stereo, listening to reM’s Murmur, college age daze car radio and dorm room stereo, yet without much anymore of the sentimental. Sentimental to katerina was Simple Minds and e damned, reM was nothing but orchestrated elevator music. listening to these songs now as Mp3s or playing the old videos on youtube brought out mixed emotions. She still snickered, however, over the goofy lyrics of pilgrimage. twenty years aer first hearing the song, she still thought the opening included the words “take out washing.”

She hummed along to “your hate, two headed cow,” then munched on her bagel.

She spent the morning doing laundry downstairs and taking dry cleaning over, stopping off at Starbucks for her venti coffee, and then an hour watching a game of squash, sitting anonymously in the shade under blue skies. her cell was on mute, katerina steadfastly refusing to take any calls from her neurotic assistant, deidre. katerina felt like a cigarette. She had smoked a pack a day from high school until graduate school part two, as it were, and gave it up when she moved to 06/07

new york. too expensive these days. e urge returned on occasion, but this was the first time in years she’d had a nicotine fit coming on, albeit a mild one. katerina was surprised; did not know where that came from, remembering it had also occurred during her anxiety attacks before she went into therapy, was prescribed medicine, and learned yoga. at was fieen years ago, which katerina termed as the Middle Ages, while her time in texas was the Classical Age. katerina timed her life in epochs, framing her regrets as chapters in a history.

She was not any closer to being a writer than she had been when she decided to make a go of it in the big city. Shortly aer breaking up with Manny, she had been sitting behind the railing at Captain Quackenbush on the drag, drinking a double iced cappuccino, and a bum had walked by and handed her a book, saying, “is is something i think you ought to read.” it was e Story of the Eye, by georges bataille, and it was then that katerina decided to get the fuck out of Austin, away from texas, travel beyond the edge of the known world. yes, being handed a book – especially that one – was enough to say, that’s it. katerina consoled herself still that she had le not because her two great loves failed or she felt alienated from her circle of friends – no it was a dragworm, of all people, handing her a novel as she sipped her double iced cap. no man or woman would drive her from home into northern island exile.

So she named her cat Manny and her Macbook Sherry, Sherry being what passed for her high school sweetheart, dysfunctional at heart, dominating, manipulative, needy and clueless. Sherry was edited from katerina’s sexual experience biography, whenever it still mattered. Struck from the book and what the hell, it was a long, long time ago: Middle Ages, not relevant to her Modern day forty whatever, except on the occasions when she decided to express her domme, slipped into latex and headed off to the spanking club. She once did a smart chick lecture about bdSM to a bachelorette party. She was interested in one of them, a gawky blond – but couldn’t bring herself to ask to kiss, to connect. She talked her into the cage and cranked her to the ceiling, sharing giggles with her girlfriends, but when she stared at the blond clutching the bars of the cage nervously, katerina saw seventeen again and doing whatever Sherry told her to do. She turned the crank, bringing her down to cracked concrete, watching her click away in cheap platforms, probably thinking perhaps possibly would have been

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interested, but katerina had already stepped away from the cliff.

Mistress kat went back into the closet, on a hanger behind the prom dress from 1982. She thought about that young woman, though. blonde, asymmetrical cut with bangs, angular and thin, and tall, tall, tall. She so did what she was told.

Manny never did what katerina wanted to tell him. Somewhere in one of her old journals, katerina had made a list of everything she wished she had said to him when they were together. remembering the first entry still hurt, in the place in her mind where regret and stupidity resided as neighbors. If you like it, put a ring on it. Aer waiting forever to say, or for him to express, katerina le, over the fence, into the fields, through the mountains, across the river, to the shore, and beyond the sea. back to Sherry, but briefly, because returning to teenage vomit was always a mistake; because Sherry went off her meds and it reverted back to co-dependent la la woo woo moonbat crazy bitch into bondage and katerina finally figured out Sherry really hated women.

Aer abandoning Sherry, leaving her behind with the befuddled boyfriend who did get a couple of threesomes out of it and was a much better fuck and whoa what a cock but god was he an arrogant bastard more interested in watching her screw his girlfriend, katerina gleaned two important lessons from the experience: one, if it was bad the first time, leave it be, and two, she did not understand women. Add to 08/09

that: three, girls were fun to play with, but damn were they crazy. ose were the days lost lost lost lost lost – She froze: Did I remember my meds? Shit. Chest tightened, cramps rolling like cookie dough across her shoulder blades, le eye fluttering.

She really hoped it was an anxiety attack. At her age and family history, she was not so self-assured. breathe, katerina, breathe. Chest rising, remembering she still had a clean bill from the last exam. repeat to yourself, it ain’t happening. breathe. breathe. katerina closed her eyes, dropping her arms to her sides, palms up. Wipe free the thoughts from thy mind, travel to the grayness of oblivion, that which no one who hurts may enter. try not to think, in other words, just shut up. katerina rose from the bench and went inside her building. home, she unrolled her mat on the living room floor, put on meditative music and worked through her old yoga positions. it calmed her, focusing her energies, centering as if by rote, and aer an hour or so of working herself, clutching her ankles, mind blank, katerina rolled up the mat and took a bath. it was still morning, close to eleven, and she already felt she had put in a long day.

Aer soaking, she decided to go pretty before going off to wander. katerina could still pull off white Capris, leather gladiator sandals, and a red silk blouse, late-May warmer than usual Manhattan spring. e anxiety attack pissed her off.

She had to put up with the twinges for a while, even aer she belatedly took her Atavin. She just should not have remembered Sherry, but twenty years later, the nasty bitch remained squatting rent-free in her head. Sucked, but sometimes that is

just the way it is, katerina thought, waiting for the bus on the corner of Avenue A. She forgot her headphones; however the bus was coming down 14th Street, so katerina shrugged and pulled out her MetroCard. She

made her way to the back, standing instead of sitting next to a corpulent woman breathing heavily, half her ass covering a third of the remaining available seat. katerina pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and leaned coolly against the pole by the

rear door. She reached into her bag, pulling out her book. katerina had gotten back into ernst Junger, having read roberto bolano’s references to his work in e Savage Detectives and 2666, and had to search online for a copy of her fa-

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vorite novel of his, On the Marble Cliffs, finding the first penguin printing for thirty bucks used. At Union Square, she stepped away to avoid the crowd emptying out, found a single seat on the le hand side, plopped down, and continued reading all the way to Abingdon Square by 9th Avenue. She got out at the bus stand by the park, walked north to 14th, and went into the market in the old nabisco factory.

Since it was a tuesday, it was not as crowded, and she didn’t have to wait to pick Swiss cheese, her favorite

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stone ground wheat crackers, a Soho vanilla crème soda, and ripe grapes from the boutique grocers. katerina moved through the indoor market, décor done up in post punk rusted metal and fritz lang without his glasses, to the rear entrance and the stair-well leading up to the high line. katerina especially liked the walk at night, but today’s cloudless blue and temperatures in the eighties made coming out in the day appealing. She made her way to a table in the shade and began eating her snack slash lunch, sipping her

soda through a straw, and checking out the tourists, attempting to guess country or state. Most coming to new york these days were german, though she swore from the accents there was a tour group from Alabama. it was rather simple, her cheese and crackers. katerina had her experience with the fancy and pretentious, but at heart she was a good texas gal with simple needs when it came to taking her solo act into the open. She was, in a word, boring, but katerina did not mind. Security

much she missed—starting with Manny. Was he the love of her life?

She asked herself that again. Maybe i should just say fuck it and move to Singapore and teach english, she thought. grow old as the crazy Jewish lady; maybe keep lots of parakeets and the like. probably can’t take the cat. “i love my cat,” she murmured. “So, texas it is. home, aer a fashion.”

“Manny. Maynard. boy. girl.” katerina stared ahead, stared inside herself through a telescope, standing in a snowy field. She took a breath, shut her eyes, and added, tongue rolling over the words, “Us. together. A we. en, no more.

Alone.” She placed her hands on her knees. ree and a half years of her life in a twelve-word mantra. twenty years aer they broke up, memories of Manny were painfully consigned to journaling and dozens of sessions with three consecutive therapists boxed in little rooms in various locations of lower Manhattan, so she stripped the story to single word bursts of postmodern eloquence, as if that were more than an avoidance ritual, keeping her from expressing what she felt.

Manny, Maynard, My one, at boy, the boyfriend, began as a novel in her mind and now a shopping list on a notepad, torn and jammed, folded, in a pocket. yes, missing Manny, who moved on, married and children and blocked from facebook because katerina just did not want to know because it hurt to look. Missing Sherry, too. one girl love, yin yanging with the solitary boyfriend,

swinging half past noon to midnight. neither meant to be, which left katerina with her cheese and crackers on the high line. Alone – yeah, that’s it – alone. katerina thought of a word she had learned from Manny, the night they met – kissless. perhaps she should use it in another short story that would be completed, sent out, and rejected. Until then, it was a description of what she had become. katerina smirked. five years since she hadn’t made it with a guy, and seven with a woman.

She sighed. Consider me, as usual, bi-furious, or just plain fucking rejected – two years, four months, and a week in therapy on that since it was the overriding theme. Yes, dear Katerina, always kissless until tomorrow and tomorrow never comes until tomorrow and tomorrow is forever eternal until nothing more tomorrow nor. katerina neatly folded the wax paper seal over the cheese and closed the cracker box, placing them in her bag, along with the untouched grapes. She rose from the table, her stomach slightly upset, slipped on sunglasses and walked into the breeze, north. With Jersey on the le and Manhattan on the right, katerina thought about texas.

You can’t, Kat, she murmured, there is no home there anymore. She sighed, addressing herself, “in new york, i have my ghosts to keep me company. ghosts don’t talk back, they do not hurt me. ey never leave me, so i am never alone.” She looked around her, noted the stares, and smiled, nonplussed.

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was more important than excitement.

Sometimes, however, katerina locked herself in the bathroom and cried. yes, cried: dashed of so much. no kids, no relationship, no published work beyond occasional short stories – and she had not bothered to do a public reading since the late 90s. She worked in obscurity, lived isolated and had become faceless, though a pretty face still, despite the lines of early middle ages. She munched on cheese and crackers at her metal table, thinking about how

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er murmur is a growl that rises slowly from her stomach to her throat. i listen intently to the whispers, the guttural elixir of her voice close to my breast, damp and warm from her open mouth; first breathing with increasing heaviness, occasional snoring, then as the night wears on, my eyes open to words i do not understand. Croatian strikes me a language from another planet, syllables generally broken down into a jumble of 12/13

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consonants. i remain silent, watch her, touch her wavy brown hair and twirl the locks between my fingers as she speaks in sentence fragments, hoping her voice does not rise to a crescendo and gasp unyieldingly to a scream.

When she does, she cries and leaves for the bathroom.

Aî‚?erward, she apologizes. i always tell her it is all right, and we kiss. At its worst, she does not fall asleep. She stays awake, reading.

stare through the half-open brown curtains into the breezeless Manhattan night with the gibbous moon shining above through the clouds.

II.

other than zdravo and do videjna, the volim te and jebem te, i know no Croatian. What is an imperative is that i try to love her, and i know with certitude that i do while i grasp her tightly in an effort to keep her from returning to age twenty-five, anchoring her to our bed, holding her at forty-eight. love requires acceptance, and with her there is at times more to accept than she dared to ask when we met. As she falls silent, i kiss her forehead and

Malva: looked up the meaning on the internet the morning aer we met. Means smooth and meek, but she’s a tiger in bed, her body writhing against mine. i learned soon about how she had to tough out the multiple and confounding yugoslavian civil wars. When she talks about that time, she is reticent with detail, leaving much behind with her weekly therapy sessions. Malva, as the high school American literature teacher she trained to be in Split before all came undone, describes the situation as akin to the Spanish Civil War without romance, without a hemingway, with a world collectively turning its back until one side finally crossed into total madness in bosnia. Madrid had its howitzer Alley. Zagreb, the city where she fled while Split was under siege by the Serbs, received only two days of missiles at the climax of that particular conflict. She told me of the photo of a woman she knew slightly, another refugee – from Sarajevo – immaculately dressed in brown suede pumps and snow white dress, taking shrapnel in the neck, dropping flat with a smack on the cobblestone pavement while Malva watched helplessly from her seat on the tram, not remembering the emotion, frozen but curious as she watched a thick crimson pool form around around the body, the woman’s blond hair remaining in place with bobby pins, her ponytail firm in the air as she lay nearly face down on the ground. dead, mouth open, staring, grocery sack at her side, as a New York Times stringer crouched near the corpse, snapping away with his camera.

Malva hesitates getting on the M 14 bus, looking about her before stepping on, at our stop at fourteenth Street and Avenue C. She tells me this is why she avoids wearing

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white. Understandable, although with her cream skin i can see her well in a wedding veil. We do talk about marriage; we have been together long enough to feel comfortable discussing it. is comes from our shared traditions, hidden beneath our east Village exterior, clinging to youth at our early middle age by wearing motorcycle jackets. Malva and i are Catholics, usually lapsed, yet we find the need to attend an occasional Mass together, mainly for the peace and connection with home it gives her. yes, Malva in white – maybe. While we might be too old for a church ceremony, i want to see her in white. i want Malva to not be afraid.

III. e day my daughter moved out, Malva and i rented a car to western new york, to help my girl unpack and meet the new roommates and school representatives. Malva blushed whenever they assumed she was her mother. on the drive back, we discussed Malva moving in with me.

When we returned to the apartment, she began looking at the empty space between the café table and my daughter’s work desk. Malva focused on the desk, stared intently at the chair for a minute before grasping the back with both hands, slowly leaning forward. Watching her posture, i got the sense of her stomach tightening. i thought she was in pain.

Malva let go of the chair and turned toward me. her accent is Midwestern, from growing up listening to Voice of America and radio liberty. When she speaks, one assumes she is from omaha. “robert,” she said soly, but with a jarring distance because of the mechanical tone and crisp grammar. “e chair. Why do you have it here? it does not match the desk. it belongs in your daughter’s room, because the design is the same as the wall candle holders above her bed.”

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her mouth half-open, her blinking brown eyes were the giveaway. i saw there was nothing behind them. i did not know what triggered the ptSd, if it was the lattice design of the chair or perhaps a book my daughter had le behind. i grappled with the why before shiing from searching for an answer, deciding to stick to truth. i responded, reassuringly, “honey, she felt comfortable with that chair there. it’s green, and that is her favorite color. e chair does fit with the tan desk. however, she is not here, so i will move it if you want me to.” i fell into silence, watching her intently for a spark of recognition. i could tell she wasn’t listening. Malva stared past me for perhaps a minute before snapping out of it, asking if i wanted coffee. i was relieved; sometimes Malva breaks into an uncontrolled rage over things like this.

IV. her eyes begin moving crazily, as if she is being jolted with an exposed electrical wire. She grasps my hand tightly and i feel the sweat of her palms against mine. We are sitting on an aluminum bench in hudson river park, looking over the river and new Jersey beyond. i am guessing Weehawken, but i never get the cities right.

Might as well be hoboken, for all i know. Malva is almost doubled over across my lap, her profile a foot above my crotch, hair hanging past her cheeks, quivering. i think Split is triggering her this time, likely the promenade. e only photo from yugoslavia she allowed me to hang is of her in Split in the mid-1980s. She is wearing a red sweater and pink gloria Vanderbilt jeans – drainpipes – undergraduate arrogance expressed in her stance, le foot planted firmly on the pavement, leaning bent at the hip, holding her textbooks, looking toward her right, red lips pouting, hair falling over the side, the ends rising from the breeze coming off the Adriatic Sea,

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V. two months aer returning to work, Malva seizes up like a run-down doll while getting ready to go grocery shopping. it is sudden. it always is. one moment she was going through her purse for the apartment keys, the next she sat silently, staring ahead. i sit with her for a while, taking the keys from her hand, putting them back into her purse and placing it on the coffee table. i slide my arm over shoulders, stroking her hair like i do when the nightmares occur. Malva leans limp against me. Sometimes she cries as i hold her. tonight, she doesn’t.

Malva has therapy on Mondays at five, and the Atavin helps take the edge off, so these events are occasional. however, i never get used to them, because i should never be inured to this. i may accept it, but i am not complacent. i learned from my experience as a fatherless man

never to ignore or to abandon. i keep the image of that girl in Split. but it is tough.

Soon, she speaks, telling me she needs to lie down. i lead her to the bedroom, kissing her good night. i get on the bus, headphones on. e music i listen to is from a folder on my ipod that i call pretty in pink. not original, yet that is who Malva is to me in that old photograph. Consists of music she remembers from those years, mostly dance pop and post new wave – heaven 17, psychedelic furs, echo and the bunnyman, Simple Minds, level 42, e Jam, Modern english – music i believed i was too cool for at that age, except for e Jam. is music conjures the girl on the promenade, making her real to me as i head off to the trader Joe’s by Union Square. it takes me nearly an hour to get through the line, running back and forth from the shopping cart, grabbing what’s on the list she wrote out in the cursive only i seem able to read. She kids me that it was this ability that caused her to fall in love with me. on the ride home, i remember the night we met last year, at a bar on Avenue A, talking about faulkner. She read him in both english and Croatian. her favorite novel is Light in August. i like e Reivers. i return home, two heavy paper bags in each hand.

Aer putting everything away, i check on her. Malva is sleeping. i close the door and turn on the hall light.

Malva asks that i always leave that light on when her ptSd is triggered. i go into the living room and lie on the couch. i start crying. i need to. it has been a while.

VI. Sometimes i think of the dead woman in the white dress. i remember sitting in a café in greenwich Village in May of 1995, reading e new york times, with that photo on the front page; her mouth open in an expression of surprise, the eyes widened, staring out from and into nothing.

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wearing white faux ray-bans too big for her narrow features. Malva was so so, sweet, then. i want to know the Malva from then. Split used to be a popular destination for scooter punks and neo-Mods from all over europe and Japan. i wish i had been one of the few Americans that went, but those were days of different interests. loved to have danced with her to northern Soul and british neo-psychedelic bands at the all-nighters in the beachside dance halls, stayed up all night in her tiny apartment in the old city spinning e Jam and e prisoners, walked the promenade late at night, rid with her arms around me on a lambretta scooter like the one in the poster opposite the bed in our room. i regret not kissing the pure, unmarked Malva, her face lineless and memories not so stark and brutal. i wrap my arms about her, wishing for that girl in pink standing on the Split promenade in 1986, holding onto the woman that she is now as i grapple for the courage to reconcile the two in my mind again.

First Snow

ONE

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efine this whirlwind: lips touch aer that moment at the precipice when verbal and visual relation confront the desire for completion, expressing emotional need and physical desire with a singular act that makes me think eternal. online met, Syracuse and the City separate us and we could not get the time to meet until discovering we would be in oregon. during the intense conversation at a café the snow began, reminding me of 18/19

Manhattan in January when the big storms come roaring in. We stepped outside, waiting for our ride as the snow accumulated. at first kiss, momentarily brushing lips before wrapping hands around necks, open mouthed, deeper, is unplanned—just boom here we are with nothing else to say, and le with the accomplishment of closing a circle.

Assume she thinks the same; tells me later she had stopped thinking, listening to the music playing in her head. her pouting, delicate lips are too small to trace, but

i cannot help but pull her lower lip down with my thumb. nose scrunched up, flesh tickled, batting eyelids, eyes sparkling, reflected under the streetlight. Skin so clean, white, not porcelain but cream; she blushes easily, wiggles her nose. Sweet, not innocent or virginal, but in the manner of presenting herself without attributes, unpretentiously. Cute, but naturally so, appearance younger than age; scars kept to herself, le uncollected on every table she rises from. Wears pink without irony; heartbreakingly redheaded, achingly so with each strand falling over her face.

e snow melts on her glasses lenses, droplets obscuring walnut shade, staring up, shivering, so lips lied parted slightly. Appraising me, her situation; open doors, daring to peer in, but hesitation at reaching out. hands in mittens, crocheted, brace on wet black leather motorcycle jacket, slipping soly, wanting to hold and hesitant, perhaps waiting for me. i grasp her cheeks with gloved hands. gently, communicating to her i honor the soness, beauty, herself. kiss her again as her arms slip to her sides, yielding instead of

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indicating passivity, standing on toes, pushing her mouth as if seeking a redemptive connection while december snow dusts hair and coats.

TWO i dream of whippoorwills calling in the woods behind the house i lived in with my mother and grandparents as a child, before Mom found a job in texas, moving a month aer i turned 15 to a different world, new adjustments which decades later i continue to fine tune, oen from frustration. i have thought little of those woods: lady slippers poking through the ground amid pine needles, wild holly, oaks and pines, terrain sloping to boulderstrewn Appalachian summit. yet i have triggered a memory, boy alone staring at the constellations amid the forest rising around me as a basilica framing window to the stars.

Awaken, our bodies warm, having found the places where to meet. Under a black comforter and a plaid wool blanket, my le arm under her pillow, the right over her waist, under covers, against skin, hand resting near hers, curled in a half-open fist. i slip my hand underneath hers, positioning thumb against the back of her palm, and hold.

She sleeps with an open mouth, as if prepared for a conjoining embrace, but i want her to sleep. in the silence of this room, the only sound the silky crinkle of snow falling against the window above the bed. no whippoorwills calling except in dream. i watch her sleep, feeling the rhythm of her breathing, rising stomach against my arm, and kiss her shoulder with gratitude. i miss north Carolina. yes, i miss those mountains now invoked here while finding my heart so close to hers.

THREE Morning accompanied by big dogs barking and automobile engines idling. e house belongs to my old as dirt friend, david, but today it is ours. i wanted to think so, taking up on his comment that what’s mine is yours when he invited me to stay. She agreed to meet in town, having traveled far from home, Amtrak cross-country, stacks of trade paperbacks on the empty seat beside her; me intended as a way station of dinner and talking before on to 20/21

Vancouver and the trans-Canada, giing to herself the time and the experience, money saved for years, taking a leave of absence from her job, a solitary excursion which hours ago became temporarily diverted. She worked it out so that she has another day before she can get the next train to Canada, before the Amtrak pass expires on her return to her home in Syracuse. erefore, our home is a ramshackle three-bedroom david always seems to be working on with his neverfinished improvements, painted beige in a subdivision at

the foot of a grassy and treeless slope, sharply rising, perfect to roll down in summer and slide in winter snow. remnants of her warmth, her scent, remain where her body has been. My palm brushes against the sheet, my eyes close. hours before, making love in near silence, wordlessly kissing lips that could not be traced, conjoining intertwined connecting reaching across miles from home, holding tight, desperation. i rise, sliding on boxers and a t-shirt. e house is hot and dry, david leaving pans of water in front of the floor

grates. e wood floor is warm, though the bathroom tile is not. Aer washing up, i enter the kitchen.

Morgan is framed by light, reflected from sun to snow.

She is wearing a blue velour bathrobe; hair pinned up, facing the window above the twin porcelain sinks between two unfinished cupboards, watching kids slide and snowboard down the slope.

“Morgan,” i say soly. i don’t know what else to say, feeling i am in church. i touch her shoulder, placing my hand on the bathrobe.

☛

i kiss her at the nape, lingering while Morgan takes my hand from her shoulder, putting my fingers to her lips, head nodding back and forth while caressing.

FOUR Coffee: light with organic milk and, judging from the packaging, boutique sugar. fortunately, david isn’t cheap and while asleep he remains generous. Morgan and i are spoiled on Starbucks, therefore mutually immensely appreciative across red checkered tablecloth in the kitchen. We grasp our mugs with both hands. We share silence at the table, just stare, shy, or in shock that we have fucked. i have a growing misgiving at this silence, thinking that, as writers, we communicate best by writing sight unseen, tapping away on laptop keyboards, and meeting last night we talked ourselves hoarse. Selfconfidence taking a hit, ebbing, staring into walnut eyes, thinking that this is a sign we cannot relate in person. her eyes peer into mine, faraway, albeit beyond that remaining inscrutable. e thought crosses my mind that i am missing something, not getting it.

Morgan leans forward and kisses my cheek. “you need to shave,” she says, pulling back, cheeks adding color. “i love a man, but you’re scratchy.” Morgan tilts her head, lips curving to acknowledge a smile. i start to relax, but my doubt remains. i do her bidding, rise to shower and shave.

to find what he is looking for. however, i do not, and it takes a while to find something for my mood. Want to show off for Morgan, and i know david has the karen dalton record. i find Scott Walker’s Scott 3 instead, and put the record on the b&o turntable, with the vintage Marantz tube set-up that david has maintained for nearly as long as i have known him. i lounge in david’s leather chair, in my

FIVE for all the years i have known david, years adding up to decades strung together like abacus beads, one sliding over to account for the first ten marked on the calendar, then another, he has constantly referred to himself as a technopeasant. is is only accurate when it comes to his music collection, all vinyl, hundreds of lps neatly arranged on custom built oak shelves in his living room. Any piece of music not pressed in that form—and increasingly so for more than twenty years—he loads into his Macintosh hard drive.

As neatly presented as his rows of plastic-covered record albums are, david eschews organization. he knows where 22/23

pullover hoodie, black jeans stuffed into motorcycle boots, listening, daydreaming while Morgan showers. david finally comes out of his room, dressed to work on an art project he has going in his garage, speaks excitedly to me about it while knocking about the kitchen. he is in the garage when Morgan comes out. i am replaying side one and i sit watching her stand at the turntable, looking intently. Morgan turns to look at me, her expression what i term a little glaswegian: gloomy—gray and stark, and wanting to get out.

finally, she speaks, soly, her voice distant, revealing.

“She stands there, in her fire escape in the sky.”

SIX e aernoon: she leads me, mitten grasping glove, probably looking from a distance like Seventh Seal final

looks so young in pink, especially with the earmuffs. i remain significantly older. at fact worries me, but i hide it with the bravado inherent of borrowing a plastic saucer. Arms, legs wrapped around me, skidding, bumping down the icy slope, Morgan screaming, laughing until i lose my grip on the straps and we tumble in a human avalanche.

We linger on the ground, me afraid to get up and show my age while i assume Morgan stares at the fire escape in the cloudy sky. finally, she turns over, smiling more broadly than in the morning, arms on either side, her face close to mine, her glasses and earmuffs askew. “C’mon,” she says, pulling me up. Morgan picks up the saucer. “ey want this back.”

We ascend the ridge, and i am reminded of my age and how out shape i am, but endure.

We return and david makes dinner. Aerward we go to a factory by the river to hear an industrial music show.

We watch, standing at the iron railing with david as bemused spectators, looking down, minds elsewhere. i still view it as our house, but it also david’s, and where i come from we make an effort to be appreciative of kindness, despite my longing for melody.

SEVEN i wake to Morgan watching me sleep. i grab her with both hands.

EIGHT scene, slipping in trampled snow up the ridge as kids, teens, parents cavort and slide down to the subdivision below. e sky has returned to gray, but it isn’t so cold.

Scarves, not hats. Morgan in earmuffs, pink and fluffy, matching her scarf.

We stand, watching people climb the ridge to fling themselves down on cardboard, plastic, and metal. An hour segues toward two.

We talk about bands, interspersed with burt’s bees waxen against chapped lips kisses. Although 35, she

Age has its advantages. no, scratch that – experience. remain scared, however.

NINE on the drive to the train station, Morgan holds up her phone, takes a self portrait, and sends it to mine. i sit in the back seat, looking at her looking at me through the screen, glancing up to dark eyes framed with black plastic frames. david didn’t mind that Morgan moved the rear view mirror to stare at me. texans like us prefer

☛

to look through the side mirror or to the road ahead. What is in that mirror appears smaller than actuality. As for the road ahead, it is straight, ends when it ends, yet we are the curious kind, interested in that which lies beyond the horizon. pioneers, migrating, always moving on. i want her to stay.

Morgan is a french Canadian new englander, some irish, some italian, maybe a wrong turn at lisbon, Mohawk balancing on steel beams high in the new york City sky; different and distinct, reserved, cool. i am hot, fraught with anxiety, fearful of insult and hurt, of not measuring up and being nothing more than a station stop before dream vacation on the trans-Canada, twonight stand as a postcard she might share with her friends, nothing more than that. yet i sense she has a Southern soul. Writes like one and she watches me sleep, reserving the new england standoffishness, unveiling when it matters. Morgan scratches. Morgan bites. Morgan throws herself in with desperation. Why? i want to know. i want her to tell me more about herself—where that comes from. not leave me with an impression i could be wildly wrong about. i want her to know me, too. inside the station we take photos of the neo-italian renaissance interior. david tries to get us together to stand for a picture, but we demur. i fear that Morgan is beginning the process of separation. kissing goodbye is not the same; david is watching. i never saw someone off on a train before. it’s not at all similar to an airport or waving goodbye to relatives from a driveway. i can’t quite place why, other than maybe because it’s slow, on a fixed rail, and in Morgan’s case, a long journey ahead and far too much time to think.

TEN Aftermath: three days of david and i listening to records, reading a book to review, helping him with a slide presentation for an upcoming gallery show, uploading onto his website. We try not to talk about Morgan.

When we do, it is terse.

24/25

We drive to the mountains. i see Mount St. helens. i am distracted, thinking that i am too macho, too old for her. i tried to convey otherwise. i get hurt, historically often and easily. i respond defensively by becoming too hard to know, reticent; unapproachable is an old issue, been told of that frequently. david chooses this as the time to bring Morgan up. “you haven’t heard from her, have you?” Sometimes he cares; sometimes he projects the experience of his failed relationships onto me with passive aggressive nastiness. i continue to respond defensively. “no, i haven’t. She said she was going to be busy with friends in Sea-tac and had a day in Vancouver – also said she might go to Victoria.”

“So, she would be on the train today. interesting that she didn’t think to let you know she made it on the train okay.”

“She told me she would try to call when she got to kamloops.”

“yeah, kamloops. don’t you know someone there?” “not anymore. She’s in indiana now.” We let the pause last for a couple of downhill curves. david asks, “did she tell you she loved you?” “yes, that last night. She was – er, crying.” “you know what that means.” “yes, i know.” Shut up, David. “you’re obsessed. Again.” “i fall in love with every guitar and every bass drum. there, i said it for you.”

“We are at the times in our lives when our peers begin to die not by choice. We are 50, beyond the midpoint of our lives. Morgan is nearly half your age.”

At a crossing, david adds, “Should i say more? oh, there you are again, with the look of the man who is not there.” he returns his attention to the road, nodding. even so, one has to admire david’s coolness in his precision and clarity in his language; i am heat and light,

and talk fast with twang and syrup, stumbling over words, skinning adjectives and descriptive nouns, bruising verbiage. reflects our class differences – rich kid artist, trailer park boy street Marxist with not a helluva lot of an oeuvre. however, we both remain deeply insecure, thus our alliance. i let it slide and stare out the passenger side window, lost in my thoughts, just like the old days with david in texas. back then it was a 1970 buick with a four-barrel carb, though this Volvo shall do.

After dinner, david passive aggressively brings her up again by playing big Star. Morgan wore their t-shirt when she left. i get the hint while sipping his gourmet coffee; my heart is rising and sinking at once, me wanting to be elsewhere. i listened to big Star and Alex Chilton as a kid because i knew how it felt to never get the girl, and now, after getting to know him, i listen to songs like September gurls and it hits so much harder. one starts to understand that “When i get to bed late at night” is actually more like a pretty ballerina lyric, “close your eyes and she'll be there.” i get it, david. Alex would do these pop genius things about when you come across someone you instinctively feel connected to, but deep down you realize that, for whatever reason, it is not going to happen. failure visualized as an artist’s palette, counting off the colors squeezed on the board: missed connections, bad timing, impossible geography, age differences, incompatibility of moods, mediocre lover, probably has someone else in mind always someplace else, the list is endless, unwinds.

She may be everything you ever wanted – but, no, sorry. go to bed late at night. Close your eyes. i love you, oh never mind. that's how Alex talked. i now know the context. that’s how we men, after being boys for a while, sometimes too long, talk when we realize dream baby love of our life is a mountain moving without us. love and lost. love never attained. love you could have had if you had shut the fuck up and listened. yes, shut up, david. you too, Alex.

☛

ELEVEN that night i sleep on the left side of the bed. i stare at Morgan’s picture on my cell phone.

As we get ready to leave for the airport, david tells me he took a photo of Morgan and me going up the ridge. he sends it to my email. from my phone, i forward the photo to her.

TWELVE When the plane lands at Jfk, i turn on my phone to check my account. no response. i’m guessing she is still in the rockies, out of wireless range, or she is busy enjoying her journey. or asleep, lips slightly parted, wrapped in a blanket, head against pillow, against window economy class thousands of miles, the train rumbling toward the Canadian prairies.

THIRTEEN no, it’s the fourteenth, i realize. Morgan arrives in Syracuse on the fifteenth. no texts. no email. She doesn’t update her blog. i write her a letter, trying not to sound needy. i tell Morgan i love her. i wish her well.

Vancouver to toronto is five days, another to Montreal. She’s staying there for an extra day, then Amtrak to Syracuse. i check the schedule online once, telling myself Morgan gifted me two nights. that’s what i was good for. i try to accept. i force myself to sleep. i remain curled on the left side of the bed, fingers spreading over an empty space.

FOURTEEN i write Morgan a poem.

FIFTEEN i check blog, facebook, email. nothing. i go to the movies intending to leave the phone turned off until the next morning, afraid.

26/27

SIXTEEN in the empty space beside me on the bed, i line up the books i have that Morgan wrote she liked. i do not believe in my power to conjure, to change fate. not my job. never was. i print off her self-portrait, and stare. Morgan’s hair falls across her face, behind and in front of her frames, her eyes expressing both weariness and appraisal, judging possibly. i dwell on the paper image, questioning whether Morgan is tired, sad, or about to break into a smile; showing me who she is, paring back personal boundaries for me to see what lies underneath. Was she indicating leaving or staying? though at first i wanted to believe seduction, i interpret from the formation of her lips that she wants to kiss before doubt forms. guess she was telling me good bye. damn. i lie back to face the bland oblivion of the ceiling. taking a cue from pretty ballerina – close your eyes and Morgan is there. i focus on her eyes, brows curving. i imagine again my thumb pulling down her lower lip.

When i do i realize i’ve forgotten the sensation, confusing it with other memories. i drift off. Morgan is no longer in color. She is now in grays, pixilated, fading.

SEVENTEEN i wake to Sunday morning. Make coffee. take a shower.

Shave. get dressed, though i really don’t know why i should bother. have a book review on a book i like, but i decide on the avoidance ritual. i do that less now that writing has become an imperative. it is intensive labor that requires accepting failure often. Sure, things falter like horses in the stretch. in rejection, it is a form note where you know – many novice writers and those in denial are unaware of this – the first reader did not get past the opening sentence, at best the opening paragraph. that’s a tough thing to take, but take it you must. you have to like what you are doing to put up with the negative. however, it was my responsibility to have worked harder, earlier. now i work like a bastard to catch up with those years with book reviews, interviews,

EIGHTEEN “i have another week,” she says. “i stopped talking myself out of this in rochester.”

Morgan in battered riding boots, black pea coat and beret, wheeled duffel, shoulder bag beside her on the curb, cab pulling away.

She looks at my apartment building. “no fire escape?” “interior stairwells.” pause. “disappointed?” “no.” her expression is as it was in the car, until eyes close for an embrace. We kiss and look to the sky, catching the initial flurries of the snowstorm rolling in, the wind swirling about us, holding hands, hers in mittens grasping mine in gloves.

☛

and articles for magazines i would brag about if i had actually read them. Morgan laughed when i told her that. She was delicate with my snark, did not find it at all arrogant or condescending toward my self-described craft. Wonder, though, if she considered stuff like that on the train ride, concluding i was bitter. Women are not attracted to bitter – or old. Add elvis Costello to the list: i hang around dying to be tortured. you'll never be alone in the bone orchard. i am now beyond belief.

Shut up, Elvis.

With my mood half in aging angst mourning, the other portion in self-deluded denial, i look at Morgan’s blog.

She updated.

South of Houston I

ran into laurie at a party on Varick Street, just south of houston, in a refurbished solid red brick warehouse bere of graffiti, well-kept by the organization cum cult that had bought the building from the city several years ago. Walking up the carefully carved italian marble staircase, i realized that i had been here once before – two winters ago, for an aerhours party thrown by an off-off broadway theater group. i didn’t see the play; i only went to the party. i remembered i had an okay time. i stepped hesitantly into the foyer, attempting to prepare myself for the crowd. i didn’t know anyone there; only received an invite through people i waited on last ursday. Just a typical “new in nyC? C’mon over. here’s the address.”

Usually i blow off such invitations. i’m intimidated – fear the unknown, prefer the comfort and control of selfisolation. breaking up with my girlfriend, however, and her moving out earlier that aernoon, had changed my view. Satisfying curiosity is an avoidance ritual vital to my well-being when pissed off. So i showed up. i stubbed out my cigarette when i noticed a no SMoking sign, breathed deep, and walked in. inside, the room was what i remembered from two years ago. Spacious, sturdy, a wide expanse partially covered with Mexican cantina tables and folding chairs, mostly seating Middle easterners and east indians gesticulating wildly over paper cups of coffee and soda.

A few Anglos scurried about, pulling people who were clustered in groups away and leading them to the tables. i was immediately struck by all this; i realized it was what i had suspected before – weird-ass cult thing.

As i turned to leave, the woman who invited me touched my shoulder. “glad you could come.” She hugged me, not too tight, tittering.

28/29

“yeah.” i faked sincerity, a skill picked up from living with the now ex-girlfriend. “really glad to be here, but ….”My eyes searched the room. e woman detected my shyness. “don’t worry about it. C’mon over here.” She led me to a group of people huddled at a corner table. ree indian men sat uncomfortably, definitely out of their element. one, an older man holding a video camera on his lap, smiled when he saw me. My nervousness must have been a dead giveaway. i felt relieved.

Aer introductions the four of us staggered into inconsistent conversation. helen had already disappeared into another far section of the room, leaving me with the three men, all in search of dynamic leadership. i found it funny that three men from the same country wouldn’t have enough in common to carry a conversation, but was too polite to laugh.

So i broke the ice by asking to look at the video camera. i toyed with it for a few moments, even filmed a couple making out in the supposed sanctuary of the bathroom doorway. i swung the camera around slowly, taking closeups of faces conversing, enjoying with voyeuristic relish the facial distortions of passion. e feeling wore off aer several minutes of videographing and i even grew bored of the bathroom tryst. i handed the camera back with a polite thanks and went back to sitting silently with my arms across my chest, wondering how in the hell i was going to leave without insulting my attractive host. fortunately, she returned to rescue me. “here’s somebody you should meet,” she said, showing me who was escorting her. i stood, and reached out my hand, and then my mouth dropped open.

“Mike … lyvere?” her face was lit by the dim overhead lights.

☛

“Um … hi. laurie.” My stomach tightened, full of a prickly sensation i hadn’t felt since high school. Almost laughed out of sheer nervousness.

She smiled, beaming.

* * * i remembered when we first met, back in 1980, late July, right before the finals for my last summer school session. i went with ompson, my then-best friend, to see bands and raise hell at raul’s, the local punk club. it wasn’t much of a crowd, but the bands put on a great show, and i remember floating as i stage dove, flying in slow motion over outstretched hands. e lead singer for one of the bands spotted ompson and zeroed in on him. “dis 30/31

song goes out to de boys in the audience,” he shouted. “teen Challenge!” ompson and i stepped up to the front and danced, self-conscious. it was okay back then, real punk for the straight guys, without enduring faggot slurs. ere was a newfound freedom in the air – an emotional looseness flowing unstoppable every minute of our lives, an ability to be different and daring without risking victimization. is gave us a sense of power we had never felt we would have, as we jumped and swayed our arms out in a celebration of our release. i didn’t know any of this then, i just wanted a good time.

Aer the song finished, ompson went to the bar for more beer as i stood swearing under the amplifier stacks out by the side of the stage. at was when laurie entered.

* * * i smiled. i hadn’t seen her since a show shortly aer we broke up, if one would call it that. i later found out she got married, which made me wonder where i was in that stellar constellation of hers. i searched her expression. laurie had kept the build, but was somewhat shopworn. irty-two was not a good year for her, even in shadows. e soness of her face had molded into haggard edges, battered by waves of unwilling growing up and honed to look like someone’s aunt.

helen guessed right off there was a click, and walked to another table to play her mix and match games.

We talked. Mutual acquaintances, who either became friends or not. Who went to lA, detoxed, or dead. Who was a religious cultist. Who was teaching Caribbean literature. We talked about our own lives, and she was as heavy an editor as i; we were too weary for unpleasant surprises. ere was no conceivable logic in us meeting, then or now. We were overwhelmed by self-hatred, and had she stayed we eventually would have cycled into hating each other – spitting burning acid on each other’s faces, scarring. ere was a certain purity to that brief summer, and it brought us here to the city, clean.

Couldn’t help but check her out. black flats and tights, an oversized gold button down shirtdress, which while still girly, made her a little age inappropriate. She smiled, though, when i told her she looked pretty.

We le, and lit Marlboros as we wandered down Varick Street. Watched a car fire near the holland tunnel and a fight outside a bar in Soho before doubling back and heading east, stopping off in a deli to buy more cigarettes.

She held my hand at broadway, kissed me on Mulberry. i had carefully placed a blanket and a bedsheet on my mattress. Aer laurie undressed, i looked at her alabaster skin and remembered the girl in the hallway, practicing the first position.

* * * e next morning we went out to breakfast at the café down the block. i still hadn’t found out much about her life, and grew curious. Why she was at that party, hanging out with creepy cultists? i think she felt the same uneasiness. didn’t seem enough to cast a pall, but we remained wary of the present tense. to make it easier, i wrote my telephone number down as our breakfast came. laurie stared at it, wrote hers on a napkin and slid it across the table. She folded the slip slowly, carefully sliding it into an inner pocket of her purse. “i always loved you,” she announced, before taking a bite of her apple pancakes, chewing slowly.

☛

it was the first time a girl said hello first. by the time ompson came back with two Millers, we were already on our way out the door. he tossed an unopened can, which i caught backhanded.

She lived with a roommate in a ranch-style house out in South Austin. e grass needed cutting and the kitchen was a disaster. We fucked on a mattress strewn with dirty laundry. her cat kept jumping on the bed, scratching my ass. i guess he liked the rumbling rhythms of our passion. laurie was three years older than me and in her second year at the University, but her breasts were girlish lumps and she was short and thin, her face outlined with baby fat. i had almost asked to see her id on the way to her place, because she was so statutory girly. i didn’t want to get hung up with someone adult in only the wrong ways. but she had piercing blue eyes and a beautiful smile that melted away misgivings. i wrapped my arms around her as i thrust deeply inside. i got her to cum – the first time in my life. i felt like a true sophisticate, and a man. e next morning i woke up to her nude figure beyond the open bedroom door, at the end of the hall, bathed in morning sunlight. laurie was standing in a ballet first position. i felt at that moment i finally had it made. however, we only went out a few sporadic times until the end of the summer, when i figured out she was banging others. She treated me like a kid, patronizing, to the point where i couldn’t start a conversation without an unpleasant twinge. by the beginning of october, we seemingly were effortless in shedding each other. i met my first girlfriend shortly aerward. She looked like laurie. at settled it, and i set laurie into what turned out ten years later to be a closet full of dolls.

Fell From the Sun ONE

“

“is world is mine,” penny said to herself, loud enough to startle the woman lounging on the park bench, interrupting her reading of an italian comic book, fumetti, they call those books over there, for god 32/33

only knows why, because comic books are comic books, she thought, unless you were high brow and pretentious, therefore you referred to them graphic novels. e woman gave penny the stink eye, fumetti grasped tightly. diffidently, penny shrugged and walked on.

penny mulled further upon the notion that she possessed the world while walking through the night, on this only friday of fashion Week at bryant park. Manhattan was in the depths of indian Summer, hot as hell, and sweaty and stinky in the subway that penny rose lazarus

from her corporate netherworld paid well, benefits solid but working late on a friday again, fuck it. her mind wandered as penny walked, dress down weekender night high heeled sandals, drainpipe blue jeans and her white cotton top, with fringes dangling from the

shoulders, hair down from the subway car heat to catch the first breeze on the evening; dishwater blonde waves a little flat in heat of the September night, but that wind shall come soon, because penny willed it so, and a slight burst of air conditioning through the opening door from the green tent on her le succeeds in liing her burden of follicles above her ears, buttressing her view this world was hers. if her arrogance masked her insecurities, she wore this mask gracefully through penny’s clear grey eyes, shimmering under floodlights. penny got paid, electronically deposited check covering the rent check in the big complex she shared with two roommates she saw when Saturday shopping and Sunday cleaning, the weekly girls night, and occasional dVds of Mean girls to guffaw over how they were rather like the main characters, but not that bad, though they saw enough similarities to pray there was no hell. Also the sprawling complex where penny lived isn’t really in the Village, but close enough to say she did by not lying – just fibbing a little – but that was all right, a behavioral trait expected, tolerated in a world where nothing is exactly as it is believed to be. penny turned le, passing the mahjongg and chess players on both sides of the concrete path as she made her way toward the reception that she wrangled an invitation from work. She passed the carousel, wrapped in plastic sheets, closed for the evening and as she passed her eyes lingered on a pink bunny rab-

bit, reminding her of the one she rode as a child at a carnival in ohio. her grandparents took her there, and she smiled at that day, feeling like she was riding the sun on a leash, and how on the drive back to the house penny looking out the window, straining against the shoulder belt, staring through the tinted windows of how it all felt different, the excitement, the joy, and the power of being free, grasping the leather straps, holding them tight, believing she was above the sky and stars, the clouds and land below; above it all, astride the sun. penny smiled and stepped to the back of the line. She reached into her bag, pulling out the printed envelope with the invite still inside, and waited patiently as the line moved slowly forward. She remembered how aer coming back home from ohio, she began reading more, mostly the series books she received for Christmas, and began drawing, mostly pictures of the sun and clouds, with her riding or flying above the clouds, putting herself at the very top of the picture, arms spread like a bird’s, over the houses and mountains and ocean she put into the composition.

TWO e party was located in the bartos forum on the ground floor at the new york public library. When entering into the room, with its majestically high glass and iron dome ceiling, penny thought this was well worth the half-hour wait in

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line to get in. e interior was equally expansive, with four beaux arts columns, black lit with the shadows silhouetted against the navy curtains put up for the event. e event was sponsored by one of her agency’s clients, and although penny was uninvolved with their account, she had an interest in this particular fashion house, and took care that morning to dress in their merchandise. Made sense, she supposed, but she thought doing this was on the wayside of tacky. As an assistant art director for an advertising agency that somehow survived the 2008 economic crisis intact enough to hire and eventually promote her, penny long learned the wisdom of making the rounds, and networking, and she hoped to score some interest as well as satisfy her curiosity. is was her first fashion Week she was able to attend; her busy production schedules in the previous two years prevented her from being part of the party. tonight as she passed through the crowd, hoping to meet up with Clarice and gita, her colleagues in the art department, she believed with certitude that she was riding the sun.

She spotted an actor from an hbo cable series gliding by, and their eyes met. nonplussed, penny smiled shyly, before her eyes moved elsewhere in the crowd under the glass dome. Unlike Clarice and gita, penny was not too keen on meeting celebrities, in fact, flatly disinterested. instead, she had career goals in mind, and hoped for a few intro34/35

ductions to potential connections for an eventual linear career move, maybe into one of the fashion magazines or in the in-house art management groups. Since the crisis, one usually stayed put and hung on unless laid off. fortunately her job remained relatively secure; she worked on some solid accounts with longterm contracts and, as well, her boss found penny’s work superlative. penny never lacked in ambition, though for five years she remained patient, sometimes testing the waters, discreetly handing out business cards and even briefly taught a class on graphic design at the learning Annex to bolster her resume. Secure as she was, penny grew to be dissatisfied and bored. She wanted a new opportunity, and so thus began her journey to this event. penny noticed suddenly that there was a difference between this event and the others she had gone to over the years since she moved to new york, first to attend art school at pratt, and the years at the agency.

She felt she could actually taste the excitement, as if there was something about to happen. is sensation she had had in the past, particularly the time she rode on the carousel as a little girl in ohio. A sense of predestination, of fate, and upon realizing this penny began to feel a growing sense of excited anticipation. She crossed over the carpet to the wine table, picking a Cabernet and turned to sip, sizing up the crowd before her, scanning them le to right, looking for Clarice and gita.

is moment was an awakening, an epiphany. penny looked up at the ceiling, the strobe lights dancing and moving over the cut glass, giving off a kaleidoscope of colors. penny was synesthesic, so the effect was electricfying. She saw as fireworks, spinning pinwheels, sparks jetting across the glass in broken patterns. penny stared at the ceiling lights dancing above her. She realized she

could control them: blue le, green right, yellow crossing red, goldenrod turning and crossing fuchsia turning a figure eight as violet clashed with gold and silver and bronze curled into a fetal position as orange surrounded while red runs roughshod in a dance with blue, and black goes on the attack with white and pink allied, across glass and iron while penny rode the sun.

THREE e night came down, with the stars and sky, and wrapped as a cloak, tightening about penny’s neck as a noose. She sat slumped, legs sprawled, at the base of a column on the subway platform. her bag was at her feet; penny had already flung the heels in, swapping out with her scuffed black ballet flats, heels worn

down already, but she didn’t care at this point how they looked. She had pulled her hair back, felt hot, and wanted to puke again, but already was enough of an embarrassing mess and didn’t want to push it further. She already had attracted enough attention falling on the stairs on the way to the platform, and the last thing she needed this night was a public drunkenness ci-

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tation. it was bad enough feeling as in tatters, and humiliated. ough still stoned, penny tried to remember what the fuck had happened, but had a hard time putting together the segments. She did find Clarice and gita, and they got totally blasted on ketamine in the pantry back stage with the stage crew and one of the designer assistants they knew. it was an completely stupid white trash thing to do, and the most vivid me36/37

mory from the evening were the hallucinations: penny saw monochromatic russian suprematist shapes like kadinsky and rodchenko before suddenly she was hallucinating a motorcycle race in a northern italian town with team Medici, against the borgias, like in a video game, old Atari one. She thought it was tron, which she remembered playing as a child. She rode hard, fast on a guided rail, all in black and

white. e rush was intense – and as now that penny was coming down and breaking clear she dreaded what she did while she was that high. losing control always frightened her, so she desperately searched her bag for her phone to check her texts. last one she sent was to her mother from 8 p.m., from when she was still in line for the party. ere was not anything aer mom’s response: “luv U sweetheart!

penny didn’t do anything to fuck her life up, or cause her to lose her job Monday morning. She accomplished absolutely nothing tonight. Just got fucked up on sleazy psychedelics they give dogs when they chop their balls off.

She went into her bag. her clutch was in place, though wet and smelled weird. ankfully, she did not lose her keys and id card. She realized then she jumped the turnstile to

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knock em dead!” penny checked her phone messages. She was relieved there no were no calls.

With great difficulty, penny thought about what happened later, realizing that she did leave on her own, recalling with gita but not Clarice. Clarice did something; penny couldn’t quite recall or define if it were good or bad, and gita got a cab but she was going uptown and penny was downtown. Satisfied

get into the station. finally, he checked the time on her iphone. 4:25.

She had been tripping for at least seven hours. What the fuck did I do tonight? She could not remember anything more other than her hallucinations. one hell of a motorcycle ride through renaissance italy, she thought. fuck, she would have to call gita when she got home; find out if Clarice was all right. if she was okay – what the goddamn fuck, seven fucking hours in a library with hundreds of industry people, including some of our supervisors and what the hell did we do, or say? penny dug through her bag again, looking for scraps of paper with strange names and telephone numbers scrawled on them, new business cards – stuff she did not have before. She pulled out her sketchbook, flipping through the pages. ere was nothing.

She dropped the bag between her legs, pulling them in closer. penny looked toward the dark tunnel, seeing no train in sight. She opened the sketchbook, and pulled a case of pencils from the bag. penny began drawing a little girl riding astride the sun, above the earth, the mountains, the moon and the stars. penny continued to draw, missing trains, ignoring the early morning stares – the pages tearing as she drew with growing intensity, covering the page with exquisite details, the paper becoming damp, the lead smeared, while she cried unstoppably.

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Mystery Train

Broken windows, a shuttered room, flakes of white paint of multiple sizes dusting the wooden floor, swept by winds, dampened with rain and snow in autumn and winter; dried out and crumbling to dust during summer. is constellation of paint, brushed upon walls and ceilings more than half a century ago, provides an audience for the oak rocking chair shrouded in darkness in a corner of the room, placed where sunlight shall never greet it. e chair only rocks when the storms are at their fiercest; the occurrence is rare in this town in the mountains. hurricanes and tropical storms never reach this part of tennessee, the last range of the Cumberland Mountains east of tullahoma, and the last tornado touched down nearly a decade before this house was built. ere is no one le alive to remember its passing, though this event is recalled in photographs exhibited at the local historical museum. erefore, the house never endured a major storm, only relatively

mundane and normal weather events such as summer thunderstorms and the annual winter blizzard. it did however offer home to several families, the first of which—according to the records kept in the historical museum—in 1947, the year it was built, shortly aer the Second World War. e house replaced a Crasmanstyle structure built before the great depression which had burnt down the summer aer the tornado. e architect disdained modernity, and built this new home in a similar style, adding archaic though charming Victorian touches such as ornate wooden frames and lattice above the front porch, and had installed stained glass windows in the first floor parlor and dining room. e family which moved in tolerated the windows until they were able to afford to make changes: 1955, to replace the stained glass with more modern frames in order to accommodate an air conditioner in the parlor and more sunlight in the dining room. at year the eldest daughter discovered elvis, hearing Milkcow blues boogie late one night while spending a sleepless night aer breaking up with her boyfriend. e following day, she went into the local Woolworth’s on the corner of park and Main and flipped through the 45 singles bins. She could not find the record, so she asked the clerk, a bespectacled gentleman, balding, with his hair greased tightly high above his eyes in increasingly failing vanity. he was older than her father, yet not by much. “do you have any records by elvis presley? i’m looking for the song Milkcow blues boogie.” he looked at her with a judgmental stare, a gaze which chilled her still when she remembered as a much older woman. “at’s race music, miss.” however, without blinking he pointed to a bin in the far corner of the music section. “you will find something of his there, i imagine.” e record she was looking for was not there, but she found his latest offering, “i forgot to remember to forget.” on the flip side was a song titled “Mystery train.” She listened to the record, smoking a fatima cigarette she had snuck from her fathers’ pack. She didn’t like the former song, but as she told her grandchildren before her death, played Mystery train to death while staring out her window at the moon and stars aer

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dinner and homework, imagining of big doings in the world beyond and true love with hearts intertwined forever.

Aer high school, she packed her things and le for college, taking Mystery train with her. She came back on school breaks, and sat in her room staring out into the night, her imaginings of big doings evolving. not necessarily her dreams becoming bigger, as it were, but more realistic, polished, becoming more apparently realistic as she learned more than from books. When she felt sad, she would go to her red paper covered portable record player and play the single she bought at Woolworths, along with more from her growing record collection. She always kept the volume low enough to not disturb the family, so she sat at the window in her rocking chair, the one which had been in the family since her great-grandpa came back from the Shenandoah, with the record player balanced on the window sill, listening to elvis. As the years passed before graduation, the voice of elvis presley became more distorted due to the vinyl wearing out from the heavy stylus with each rotation. but to the girl, now crossing the threshold to woman, hearing him remained the first time ever. diploma in hand, she moved on to knoxville to take her first job as a clerk in a regional national bank. A year later she made lateral move to a branch in Asheville, met a guy there, got in trouble, and quickly married. he wasn’t such a bad guy, but aer years passed, working in the bank, with one daughter, then another, she packed up elvis and the girls and le him. ey stayed briefly one last time in the house, her mother, and father distraught, but understanding. e father withdrew a substantial part of his retirement savings from the bank, and pushed the money on her when she refused. e last night in the house, aer the girls fell asleep, she took the record player and placed it on the window sill.

She sat in the rocking chair, in her old bathrobe, hair pulled back, smoking a benson and hedges, blowing cigarette smoke into the cloudless night, Mystery train playing one last time as she conjured fragments of past dreams, sewing the unrelated segments together in a quilt. ey made to leave the following morning with their destination texas, taking on a promising job at a much larger bank with a promise from her little sister to put them up until she could settle. When it came to time to leave she found she did not have enough room in the car to bring 40/41

the rocking chair. her mother, tears temporarily dried, smiled and put her hand on the back, pushing it back and forth. “don’t worry, sweetheart. at ole chair is always going to be here for you.” ey had one final hug, and the woman le without looking back.

She did however; occasionally return to the rocking chair: Christmas in 1972 and 1974. Also, the girls came to stay a month every summer from 1975 to 1979, taking the greyhound bus from texas to stay with granma and grandpa. however, at the end of these visits, the rocking chair remained in the upstairs bedroom. in the winter of 1979, aer a trip to Memphis, granma and grandpa were killed in an accident involving a runaway tractor trailer on Monteagle Mountain. eir daughters were indecisive what to do about the house.

Aer dividing up the property, donating the bulk to the Salvation Army, they chose to keep the house off the market and defer renting it out, and hired a caretaker to maintain the property until they made a final decision.

Aer the last load of furniture was loaded, the eldest sat by the window in the last remaining piece, the rocking chair, watching the Salvation Army truck pull away. She placed her hand on the window sill, sliding her fingers across where she used to place the record player. She had quit smoking several years before, and felt the urge for one, but thought better of it. “at ole chair is always going to be here for you,” she whispered, before rising and closed the bedroom door behind her.

Mys

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stery Train

e passing seasons added to the dozens. despite the promised maintenance the house slowly deteriorated, as did the surrounding neighborhood. by the end of the 1990s, the sisters decided to sell the house, and it was bought by a couple intending to use it as an investment. e new owners were charmed by the remaining Victorian touches, particularly the lattice work on the porch. before they were to begin the necessary restoration work, they lost most of their intended budget when the dot.com bubble burst, and were forced to sell. e purchasers were in the process of buying up the entire block to build an apartment complex and only looked at photographs of the house online at a realty site. ey never visited the property and went bankrupt a year aer the sale. e notation regarding the current ownership of the house is listed in a description which is repeated across several databases from the bank to the local tax authority. one only has to know the address to find it, but no one has since the elder daughter, curious, checked and called a cousin to stop into town and see what had happened to it. he took a photo of the house with his cell phone, and wrote a long email. e elder daughter decided against visiting tennessee and instead had flowers sent to her parents’ grave. She regretted not taking the rocking chair. e copper wiring and plumbing was stripped out by meth heads, graffiti scrawled through most of the house, punctuated by multiple holes punched out in the walls. Sometimes the interior reeks of human excrement, one of the consequences from the visits of vagrants and drug addicts. in the undetermined future, once the condemnation proceedings are finalized and permits are issued, the bank will tear the house down, the lot marketed for commercial use.

Until then, the house stands, decaying. Upstairs, the shuttered room with the antique rocking chair shrouded in darkness remains. e story one hears in that part of the Cumberland is no one goes into that room with the rocking chair. As time passes, the story is layered with wild details – such as a ghost of a headless woman in the chair, or of hanging corpses in the closet – the kind of crazy stories always told about abandoned houses. truth be told, if one is daring and patient, if you hang around outside on a June night, particularly at solstice, you’ll hear elvis, the static revealing the record was very well-played.

“

Mirror, whatever, mirror: My name is not kat, or kitty, or katherine, kathy or kitty. it is kat-err-reeenahhhh.”

Although the room was not spinning, one more scotch neat would tip her into the tiled wall at her le. katerina stared deep into her reflection, wondering if she should go home, or have one more round with the girls, before a cab ride from the bar in the West Village to east, and home. She was owed a buyback, and katerina never turned one down.

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“i still can’t believe my name is misspelled,” she told her reflection, trying not to slur her words, the clipped texas lady belle accent pronounced from four scotch neats and a Stella chaser. “i could be katarina, a russian princess, a character so tolstoy i’d rate a book on my own, but no, i am a misspelling no one gets right. kat-err-reeen-ahhh. Whee.”

She grasped the porcelain sink to steady herself. “forever a miss, yes, that would be me—kat-err-reeenahhhh linsky. Shit.”

The 9th Aer lingering for a few more moments, katerina suddenly straightened up, rocking back on her heels and flipped her bangs back. She picked her bag from the counter and returned to the table. five girls in hobo hats, pullover knit sweaters and like her, blue or black jeans jammed into leather boots, welcome to new york in January, dead of

winter, snow outside and freezing tits and ass cold until february something or other. it was the outdoor winter uniform for professionals from intern to haggard boss, unless they had a tighter dress code, or worked in Wall Street. for them, however, it was strictly editorial. good old publishing, with its glass ceiling lowering ever so slowly thanks to the internet and shrinking advertising revenue. katerina remembers starting out as an assistant editor at twenty-three thousand five hundred twenty years ago. however, these days that position is filled by an unpaid intern who takes in copy to proofread, five nights and alternate Saturdays as a barista in Williamsburg, and lives with four roommates in a three-room apartment in greenpoint. however, Zoe the intern comes well dressed. her mother pays for the clothes, and katerina fills the gaps from her collection of hand-meover-here-you-goes to give to staffers she feels lousy for. new york is harsh on the unprofessional looking. hipsters are either too rich to actually work or they have all the fabulous gigs, working boutique publishing and web-based content slop. katerina couldn’t afford to do either, and never had enough saved or inherited—especially aer the crash in 2008—to venture on a project of her own. She admired Zoe, and was jealous of her too. is new generation, not the same is katerina’s peers, more confident, less insecure, rather prettier and tougher. Well, maybe, katerina sometimes mused, noting there is a

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crack in the wall somewhere with everyone while covering her own with haste with each visit to the bathroom.

So it’s 22 years of new york City, with eleven more before she can cash out her 401(k) and move on to someplace, anywhere else, just as long as it isn’t Manhattan, or points north or near, where it is cold, too expensive and she can drive without worrying about narrow lanes and assholes who pull into the intersection during red lights. katerina felt alone and out of place when she sat with the girls, so she grabbed her hobo hat and put it on, now comfortable no longer being the fih wheel at a table of acrylic and wool headed women. katerina gave up being different a decade ago when she made managing editor. bosses are bosses because katerina learned eventually that in sameness there is strength, and she needed to feel strongly about something, so the job fit that particular need. one wears power suits and heels when the weather is nice, boots and jeans when it is not. hobo hats and bags slung over the shoulder with a rolled up yoga mat with uniformity and expressionless reading on the subway, with a book—mind you—katerina’s ipad was for work, only, and she cherished the woven fabric of paper and she held her book in the morning ride and from her midtown Manhattan office. e book tonight remained in the bag, but she was too drunk to concentrate, and she was planning on a cab cross town. it was from a somewhat small press post-post modern something vaguely feminist and muddled that was recommended by one of her hip underlings. reading it only depressed her—it wasn’t particularly very well written, but had an interesting angle. Angles sell these days, like monkeys frolicking in otherwise mundane street photographs. She thought of bringing up the book at the table, but she couldn’t fit it in the talk about how they all hated hr and when the bitch from there finally fucking retires. katerina hated the hr lady, too, even though she was grateful for being recommended for the second interview twenty-two years before. but she wanted to mention she didn’t feel any connection to this novel at all, particularly to Zoe, the senior editor who gave it to her to read. katerina is misspelled, she feels old and out of place, and she has a Master’s degree in creative writing, and doesn’t get what the fuck this book is all about. it all seemed too pat—sad-eyed creature with shitty home life, meandering in an existential crisis that had to do with some childhood trauma that, in her personal experience wasn’t that big a deal, but having to do with gender roles, or something like that, and ---katerina looked down at her buyback. one of them got it for her while she was in the can. katerina took a sip, and suddenly felt sober, and more aware. in that awareness she realized she resented the hr lady because she got the job she grew to hate. her golden handcuffs of health insurance with reasonable co-pays, a 401(k) with a decent matching, an 44/45

unbroken linear career track and up until 2008, a biannual raise. if she hadn’t gotten the job, she would probably have struggled on her father’s inheritance, taken that alternative music magazine editing job she had been offered at the time, and eventually wrote a novel, or several of such, that were better than the book she was reading.

She also could have gotten into a relationship, but that did not matter anymore. ose days were past, and accepted.

Well—sort of, at least until the other night. katerina took another sip. She learned to like scotch.

Sweet drinks were for the young, and beer, other than the occasional, made her fat. She’s a whisky-swilling dorothy parker, now, with a staff title, but rapidly aging literary credits. As she listened into the conversation she counted the years since she last got published. it was nearly as long

as the last time she got laid, and she was soused during both experiences; never a good thing to be in when engaging with what may turn out to be sadly the last hurrahs on both subjects.

Struggling to find something witty to say, she instead nodded, and went uh-huh. e women—her staffers— liked that about her. it made them feel she was one of

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them, and while still the boss, this silence made katerina approachable, human. human was katerina, and she became more so now that she reached the age when the clock seemed to move faster. two years ago no longer felt like such; everything always seemed like it happened yesterday, or the day before, or last week. never two years ago. time has sped up, and faster it shall go, leading toward that age when katerina can take out that 401(k) and go, destination to be decided upon later.

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for now, however, she was halfway through the buyback, and felt she could handle another. She was a good texas girl, could handle her liquor despite the dizzy spell in the bathroom and thusly ordered another from the barmaid. none of the women at the table seemed to notice, or mind, chugging along with top shelf vodka and tonics, imported beers and with Morgan, her fancy pants craî‚? bourbon from brooklyn. everything was so boutique these days. Single-minded solo project product from

apartment and warehouse share stills in Williamsburg and advertised in online hipster blogs and news sites, reviewed laudatory and not really all that different than what generations of tennesseans and kentuckians served up for decades. Maybe some added flavor from alternative sources, but the difference was it was diy and not by red-

necks. katerina tried Morgan’s favored brand and it reminded her of rebel yell; burning and sharp but still tasted like rebel yell. When katerina mentioned rebel yell was the brand favored by keith richards, Morgan gave her a look like she was searching in her mind as to who he was. katerina quickly added from rolling Stones and all was right with the universe and the potentially ensuing embarrassment was avoided. in a word, what Morgan drank, sucked, and smelled like a pair of old boots a cat had crapped in. katerina never liked bourbon anyhow and if she did, it wouldn’t be cra. She preferred her top shelf single malts and occasional merlot with dinner out and alone or with a potential advertising client to woo, which was part of her new associate publishing job. katerina gulped the last of the buyback scotch and handed it to the barmaid when she arrived with her drink. She placed it down on the table and felt like a cigarette. She had been trying to quit, again, and the cold spell this month had helped, by keeping her from going out on her smoke breaks outside the office. however, she felt warm enough to take a few quick puffs outside. rising, she grabbed her midnight black pea coat and scarf, and excused herself.

She immediately regretted this. one aspect of new york that she never got used to in her years, were when it got cold, it was deceptive. from behind the comfort of a plate glass window, Manhattan in winter looked pretty, with the city lights and people walking by, faces uncovered, smiling—not grim—as it is in places such as Chicago and toronto, but once the first burst of gusty wind hit you, the feeling of being aged struck with lightening speed. Several years aer she moved to new york, in 1993, she felt that for the first time, and reconsidered her decision of moving, but at the time she was doing well, dating, had a great job and was writing on the side for a literary journal she was taking in proofreading and first reads for, so she demurred. twenty years later, she was regretful of her decision, and miserable. e cigarette wasn’t worth smoking aer the first drag. katerina managed a couple of more puffs, coughed, and tossed it into the snowdri on the curb. She returned to the table of hobo hats and leather boots and swigged a fingers’ depth of scotch to warm up.

She grew bored and claustrophobic in the bar and the noise began to bother her. She felt again that she was too old for bars, as well as hanging out with the girls—or anyone for that matter. even though underwhelmed by the novel, she felt the urge to go home and crawl into bed with it. Unlike many of her books, this trade paperback made for a lousy partner, but in her experience she realized the book remained a better

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sharer of space than the humans who once inhabited it, and sometimes her cat. e cat, she named Manny, sometimes bites.

As the evening wound down katerina mellowed some, even engaged in the small talk again with comfort, being the boss, they listened, and felt in charge again, as she was back on the floor. While not wealthy, she was rich in that for the moment she wasn’t alone.

Maybe i should show some gratitude to myself, she thought, as the women laughed at her sly, sharp comments and wit. en she realized she thought the same at 25, and the realization sank her a little in the chair with the feeling she washed up on yet another foreign and opposing shore.

Wealth squandered, i suppose, thinking while she finished her scotch, for the moment intending it to be her last. katerina finally breached the boundaries of buzzed; she was drunk, along with the attendant giggles and slurred speech. She sounded more texan when getting smashed, and she perceived it added a veneer of cute. it got her by and out the door and into a cab with Zoe, and Marie from accounting aer the night broke into the street, the taxi racing down Seventh Avenue to houston Street.

Marie was let off at Mulberry, and katerina insisted Zoe take the taxi into brooklyn, paying the driver cash in advance, as he turned le onto first Avenue. ey hugged before katerina got out, and aer she stumbled out into the snow on the corner, it struck her that she hadn’t hugged anyone in months, and kissless since forever. katerina so lacked physical intimacy that she wanted to burst into tears, and she let go and began as she passed the church, with its pipe-smoking homeless man huddled in his torn, stained sleeping bag at the entrance, mascara streaking while she passed the burned out bodega, the closed up shops soon to be an nyU dorm, the greek diner, the projects, stepping over the frozen piss trails, before jaywalking to her building, heavy bags slipping off her shoulder as she fished for her key card and house keys at the entrance. tears dried on the elevator up, katerina thinking she needed to get over herself for the umpteenth time and glad no one saw her cry. experience unforgotten yet with her shit together, katerina entered the apartment, flipping on the aging atrium lamp. “hellooooo kitty,” she announced loudly in a fake received oxford that everyone found annoying aer the first time. e cat ignored her, wandering to his food bowl in the kitchen, waiting patiently for katerina to shed her bags and coat so he could be fed. Aer feeding her cat, she wandered into the bathroom, sliding off her boots and sweater, kicking them over to her bedroom outside the door. She was drunk, yet not nauseous, but she knew a hangover was in store for the morning. bad one, and she cupped her hands under the faucet and drank in the cold water, hoping to lessen the blow she knew would be hitting her between the eyes when she awakened.

“Cudgels out, thus the ding-dong girl exclaimed,” katerina said, quoting a half-remembered line from a novel she read years ago while washing up and brushing the scotch out of her mouth, she pulled off her jeans and tights, tossing them into the clothes hamper in the corner. She picked up her sweater, hanging it over her desk chair. her fingers lingered on the wool. her last boyfriend gave it to her for Christmas a very long time ago. he married. has a kid. She met his wife not too long ago; actually, not really. katerina sat across from her on the A train, knowing who she was. She remembered being always afraid of him finding younger and prettier when they were a couple. looking at her, she was right.

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ched his neck, his favorite, purring louder in response.

“So like you, thus begins my ninth life; with just you and me, until there is no you and me, Manny,” she said to the cat, with her tears returning. katerina turned on her side to pet Manny the cat, who had flopped next to her. She stroked him along his back and neck until sleep, mercifully, came down.

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katerina flopped on the black duvet, spreading her arms across. She stared at the ceiling, suppressing the urge to cry again, feeling somewhat alive waist up but elsewhere not, and sleepy. is cougar is up on blocks in the driveway, leaking oil and brake fluid, she mused. e steam pipe in the bedroom banged, and the sound of the steam hissing seemed comforting enough. e cat jumped on the bed, and purring, nudged her check. katerina scrat-

r e m m u Indian S

T

here was a sense of peace, anticipation and of place when i arrived at the krispy kremes that cool october morning; autumn arrival leaves turning and sun bright over the roofs of Asheville and the surrounding mountains. it was a friday, before school and coffee and glazed donuts beckoned while waiting for Maria, my girlfriend and walking on to the bus stop. Suppressed an urge to talk her into skipping school; we had fih period english together and it was our chance to read our story assignments. i worked hard on mine, and typed with hours of effort on mom’s boyfriend bill’s remington rand upstairs in his house the night before. i was not going to playing hooky aer working that damn hard on the story. i looked forward to showing it to Maria. i wrote it for her, and she read the cursive, in pencil first dra in class and told me how much she really loved it. Admittedly, the story was little more than a pastiche of fritz leiber’s fard and 50/51

the grey Mouser, but i based one of the characters on Maria, so she liked it better than she would otherwise. i ordered a half-dozen glazed for us to share, along with a large, coffee light. i sat down facing the highway, waiting for Maria as i dumped sugar into the Styrofoam cup. i had to stir it again aer the first sip, the half-dissolved sugar so thick in my mouth. i opened by white plastic notebook and carefully pulled out the manila folder that held my short story. looking at my first page, with the title and my name typed neatly at the top, i decided this was my first short story, a true piece of literature, typewritten, with overtypes on liquid paper corrections. ese five pages in my hands were far beyond a cursive scrawl in a spiral notebook – while not perfectly neat, this manuscript signified me as a writer. i looked up from admiring my first page to see her.

Upon arrival, Maria stood, rapping lightly on the window.

front of him if she could play his meat whistle, or telling dwayne, the kid from our old elementary school, if his mother put out, him not knowing dwayne’s mom died years ago. it was embarrassing, and we gave him a wide berth, cool cassettes playing on the bus or not. boy was too fucked up for words, and we imagined he set fires and tortured animals. We did know for certain he lived in a trailer park, and that for certain marked him as bad news. at was one lonely boy, Maria said quietly, aer she finished reading my short story, squeezing my hand. i nodded. indian Summer by e doors began playing on the cassette player. We mouthed the lyrics as we tried hard not to kiss. i leaned toward Maria, looking into her ice blue eyes, cold yet inviting me always, never closing them whenever we kissed. people didn’t know about us being a couple, especially our parents, and unfortunately we had to keep us a secret since we began hanging out nearly a year ago during eighth grade. her old man did not care for me, and my mother didn’t like Maria, either. i looked beyond Maria’s adoring eyes, to see the boy’s face reflected in the dirty window opposite us, and saw his eyes were closed, and quietly singing along to the song.

When we got off the bus, making our way up the steps, i tapped him on the shoulder. “gotta smoke?” he jerked, surprised, then recovered. “yeah.” he reached into his pocked and pulled out a battered pack of Marlboros 100s, offering me one. “anks, man.” i let him light it for me. Maria seemed to soen up, too, and we hung out for that half hour smoking and talking bullshit until the buzzer indicated first period. found out his name, finally. perry. perry wasn’t as fucked up as we thought, but we assume the worst from others when we are too afraid to admit are like us, so while he was a mess, so were we.

Maria and i read our stories to the class, who though bored applauded politely. got A’s for them. rode the bus, with perry playing e doors until his stop, and Maria and i went on to the krispy kreme, holding hands, her head leaning against my shoulder, both of us thinking about the weekend as a far and distant shore, although only four days away, counting the hours, from 96 on down to zero.

☛

She wore a woven hippy shawl over her peasant blouse, blue jeans stuffed into black leather boots, heels worn and need of replacing. Maria was a tuff girl, she: mirror sunglasses stolen from the tunnel road Shopping Center, the shawl pulled from an open window of a parked VW microbus, the rest were all mom-bought clothes from bon Marche and iveys, but the shawl she wrapped around herself, and the beret perched and angled precariously over her dark straight hair was the evidence used in her occasional desperate lie she was older than fourteen, a façade, though, just like my denim jacket marked up with blACk SAbbAth in Marks-A-lot and washed over and over in the laundry room to take away the stiff justbought look. ese freshman year uniforms never fooled anyone, so we hid behind sword and sorcery and fantasies of fake medieval combat and byzantine plotting while occasionally taking tokes from joints in the smoking area before class. e donuts eaten, coffee spilled out on the ground, sitting on the back seat of the bus trundling toward high school, right past the old elementary school downhill to under the i-40 overpass, city turning to suburb and then mountains. We read each other stories while the creepy guy sitting across from us played e doors Morrison hotel on a norelco portable cassette player. We didn’t pay much attention to him since school started in August – he was from a different junior high, Swannanoa, he said when we asked. kind of like us, denim jacket and dingo boots, and greasy shoulder length brown hair that was haphazardly parted on the side and hanging over his eyes, hiding behind them like those greasy locks were his veil of invisibility.

When he wasn’t bumming smokes from everyone in the smoking area, he smoked Marlboro 100s, probably stolen from ingles. he also had that cassette player, and listened to decent jams: doors, hendrix, black Sabbath, Steppenwolf. one day he played e Stooges on the bus, and that blew our minds. nobody listens to e Stooges unless they were crazy or cool and we assumed he was just plain fucked up so we did not talk to him. he did look like he needed a friend. i could tell by the way he acted. he came across as unapproachable and never talked unless it was the wrong thing to say, like asking the born-again Christian girl who used to sit in

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All Your Ambition

T

hrough the forest passage Anthony went, struggling through vines, climbing over fallen tree limbs and brushy undergrowth, and navigating the rocky creeks that seeped downhill between the hills, under a canopy of pine, cedar and oak. in autumn’s grasp, the first snow flurries already dropping at mountain summits, and colder aernoons with rain, Anthony knew with shorter days his journeys through the forest would be shorter in duration, having to return home before dark. darkness fell heavy upon the country, and Anthony moved in haste, having dawdled at the summit of the far mountain he ascended earlier in the aernoon. ere was a sadness with each heavy step, because on the mountain Anthony had an epiphany; one too old for a 12year-old boy. he tried not to think about what he discovered while looking at the valley below his feet, the narrow strip of asphalt that was fairview road, scattered houses and small developments on either side, along with the high school. e sky was clear that aernoon, and for miles beyond he could see the broken backs of the blue ridge Mountains off to the distance, fading into the haze. it all started with a dream the night before. in the dream he visited his grandparents. While he lived with them, along with his mother, who slept on a fold out couch in the living room, he dreamed of them when they lived elsewhere before, as a small child. in the center of the room was their television set from the time. ey sat regally in overstuffed chairs on either end. is was like meeting the pope for an audience.

☛

his grandmother looked sourly at him. he always feared that expression. his grandfather also looked none too pleased, staring at him from behind his horn rimmed glasses. pointing at the television set, Anthony’s grandmother said, “you came all this way to ask us … this?” “yes, is that the tV we had, then?” he moved closer, and looked into the fading cathode rays.

Anthony remembered little else, and nothing of what he saw, but when awoke in the morning he felt a little sad, and those emotions grew until he decided to go for a walk through the forest behind their house.

When he arrived at the precipice, looking down at the valley below, he remembered an important aspect of the dream. he had gone to see them as a middle-aged man. he could not recollect why he knew this, but this thought struck him as truth, and it was piercing. is realization pained him, and he suddenly had a sense of where and what from this dream occurred. down, down, walked Anthony through the forest passage toward his home, feeling he will be losing, missing it, as he will where he lived next, and aerward. e clouds now obscured the sun, the shades heralding the last hour of daylight growing dimmer as he hastily made his way to the hill trail that led further down the mountain, terminating at the gravel track that led to his house. he did not remember what he saw on that screen, but he surmised it was the future. eventually he would forget all but the lingering doubts.

☛

54/55

ViSIONS M

libres

The Art and Culture Magazine

Visions Libres Magazine / VL Editions is an international photography and contemporary Art Collection. The magazine serves as an exhibition space that embraces every aspect of photography and art.

Take a free review on Visions Libres Magazine / VL Editions on www.issuu.com.

Visions Libres Magazine / VL Editions est une collection d'art contemporain et photographique. Le magazine est un espace d'exposition ouvert à tout aspect photographique et artistique.

Les éditions du magazine Visions Libres sont visibles en ligne gratuitement sur www.issuu.com.

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The Print-Edition VL Editions / Mike Lee: All Your Ambition available on www.blurb.com

La version papier de ce magazine est disponible sur www.blurb.com.

VL Editions / 2015 / Content of this Issue is copyrighted by the featured Artist Mike Lee and cannot be used without his permission VL Editions / 2015 / Le contenu de cette édition est la propriété intellectuelle de l'artiste Mike Lee et ne peut être utilisé sans sa permission.