Nib Magazine - Issue 2

nib.

December 2012

Issue Two

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poetry & short fiction from emerging writers

Editor’s Notes |

Issue One

Dear All, It seems like just yesterday we were rolling out issue one, full of excitement and anticipation. You’ll be pleased to know that we’re still full of the same kinds of feelings today, as we publish issue two to our website.

Issue Two is full of more of the same great work from writers of varying backgrounds and experience and we think the writing we have selected works well together, compliments one another, and helps construct a well rounded issue that everyone will appreciate.

One thing you may notice is that this issue is smaller than the first, which is ironic, because we received more than double the number of submissions this time around.

The reason for this is purely based on reader feedback and our own feelings that the first issue was a little too large. We were over zealous with it. The stuff inside was great, don’t get me wrong, but I think a web based bi-monthly such as ours, which we anticipate most readers will peruse in one sitting, should be manageable and not daunting in terms of size. I hope you agree and appreciate our decision to ‘slim down’.

A massive thank you goes out to our volunteer readers for this issue who helped so much with their dedication to voting and adding commentary to the submissions. I can promise you that we took all of your comments on board when shortlisting for the issue. Incidentally, if you are interested in being a reader for issue three, please get in touch by emailing editor@nibmagazine.com.

On a final note, I’d like to dedicate this issue to my godmother, Dorothy. She died a couple of weeks ago, aged eighty-six. She was like a grandmother to me, and was an avid reader and typist with a strong mind who would have enjoyed, in her earlier years, critiquing the writing we receive and have chosen for this issue. The issue cover is a photograph taken last winter at Clifton Country Park, Manchester, UK, where she and I spent many afternoons and weekends together – unafraid of the future.

Fare thee well, Dorothy. Rest well.

Enjoy the issue everyone. As always, feedback is encouraged and appreciated.

Chris

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Poetry A Drowning | Valentina Cano Fish Tank Portent | Richard Fein Auspicious | Bruce McRae Old Dawn | Ben Nardolilli Hot | Frederick Pollack Relocating | Changming Yuan Outbroken | Jim Warner Starting and Stopping | David Klose Two Soldiers| David Klose

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Short Fiction The Comeback | George Starling Glory, Glory | Amanda Aszman Never Mind | Matt Bellinger What Dusk Brought | MAry Parker Lies in the Glove Box | Andrea Wills

15 20 33 36 43

Non-Fiction Review: There Will be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights

| Laura van den Berg Essay: The Conundrum of Poverty | Raymond Greiner

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52 54

poetry.

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A Drowning

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Valentina Cano

This could not be heavier if you forced it.

Three seconds, bogged down by soggy thoughts, are like stones in my pocket, forcing me down, so that the only things visible, the only things I’ll ever be remembered for, are the bubbles of air dying in the sun.

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Fish Tank Portent

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Richard Fein

Dead angelfish on perturbed waters.

"The doctor will see you now," finally after an hour and a half.

But the dead fish bobs over the tank's bubble blower and is aligned between the receptionist's eyes and mine.

I will be healed if my pockets hold enough dead presidents, for it is dead presidents that inspire doctors to forestall my death.

And the fish?

Scooping up dead detritus is the fate of the minimum waged.

She points the way holding a fish net once again reassuring, “The doctor will see you now.�

And who-am-I-on-the-inside will be examined for a price.

After my examination when I leave and pay my fee, the receptionist will have long since scooped up the remains.

But for now, the fish tank filter blows gurgling bubbles troubling that surface, and on those disturbed waters the dead angelfish floats sideways, bobbing up and down, eyes open, unblinking flotsam.

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Auspicious

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Bruce McRae

The weather promises to change from man to animal.

Today’s forecast is absence, with a chance of longing.

In the east, flying horses and a scattering of flowers.

From the west, incursions, barbarous hordes, black ice.

The weather changes its mind, abandons its principles, is forced to choose between darkness and light.

They’re predicting tons of tons and long cold showers.

They say it might break, but we’re in for hard spell.

Today’s weather is being brought to you by sponsors who’d rather you didn’t put their names around.

Listener, the sea is rising up out of its empty shell.

For all its talk of courage, the wind is turning.

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Old Dawn

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Ben Nardolilli

We share an exhaustion, Yet we are still wide awake Among ashes and filth, Another empty cup of coffee, Another burnt out cigarette, Two pairs of eyes flickering Like the neon sign Out in front of this place, Look at us, how many stains Have we absorbed And is the world any cleaner?

Yet the world will not do The courteous thing and toss us Away to the dark lounge Where all villains go to rest, It does not matter How soft that chamber might be, It is distant and hidden from us Like the culinary world Steaming beyond the metal doors, We get to share the illusion of rest Here at this wobbly table, Listening to songs playing overhead And scratching the air That neither of us requested. nibmagazine.com | page 8

Hot

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Frederick Pollack

You needn’t say hello, feel you should, be afraid – or not afraid exactly, no, only startled as you round a sidewalk curve, bringing your long bare legs, arms, navel, mostly bare breasts into shadow.

Sublimely blond, unaware of the heat or its grateful momentary drop. But here, briefly, an approaching mortal takes up space. You mustn’t be afraid; it’s day; the mansions of your class surround you – not mansions exactly, though they will seem so to the future.

And probably, beneath his keratoses, he smiles. As you pass you speak to your cellphone – a new type, inscrutable to the old; always on, with someone always on the line. nibmagazine.com | page 9

Relocating

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Changming Yuan

your soul has grown large, so large you can move and settle it only in the Pacific where it can float and drift around, swimming like a blue whale, or remaining still at the center of the ocean, where no migratory birds would come down to peck at your heart, no ships to attack you with waves, no submarine volcanoes to agitate your roots, except some starlight shooting down softly on your selfhood like an island, far and beyond on a summer night

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Outbroken

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Jim Warner

Once, in Iloilo City, I was suddenly ill, scarlet insight in a concrete fever–pale patches, ignorant of marble metaphors.

Days reduced to crawls–lead sinker chest fish hook in deep (like regret). Memories dredge to surface, riverbed stirs with wheeze-fit-cough-blood-bleat. It’s 1984 and

I don’t know what cholera is. It’s 1994 and Annie Yoder slips a promise between my teeth. It’s 2004 and I’m broke, watching Twilight Zone reruns on a busted couch.

It’s now and it’s never now. It’s now and it’s never then. It’s now and it’s much later than the ashtray says. It’s October in an empty room and I didn’t even speak the language.

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Starting and Stopping

Jim Warner

All I can say is that I’m no closer to where I want to be than the day I finally admitted that I had no idea where I was going, that if airports were as inefficient as my soul than more people would travel by train or hot air balloon, that I don’t want to live as much as have my life lived for me.

This depresses me, more than knowing that there are men in Switzerland working in a Hadron Collider that could, with the smallest mistake spawn off a black hole and erase our existence.

This is the kind of depressing that doesn’t allow for easy outs like black holes, Armageddons, or second comings of well-intentioned messiahs. This is prom night depressing when your date doesn’t show and your mom is still smiling and holding your father’s bulky camera, waiting.

Now my dreams can be found scribbled on cocktail napkins, ceremoniously encircled by the sweat and condensation of a cold beer in a warm room, whispering “grow.”

But at the end of the night all wadded up pieces of tissue are shot for three pointers in the bagged bin behind the bar.

How can I want to live so badly, only to stop once I bother to start?

These are the questions I ask myself when I’m driving at night on the stretched out freeways of home, when I close my eyes and press on the gas, only to count five Mississippi’s before I call my own bluff. nibmagazine.com | page 12

Two Soldiers

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Jim Warner

In Dublin, on Lower Camden Street you spend an afternoon on rain stained patios, drinking pints of Guinness and smoking Lucky Strikes, while Laura, following the Free Visitors map she got from the hotel lobby, walks the historic sites: the statues and the museums full of paintings of the world and all its sun stroked places.

Later that night, you fumble with the hotel key and she has to let you in–a copper orange bath towel wrapped and curved around her head–and on the bed, with a makeshift barrier of pillows and blankets between you, she asks, the same way your Russian teacher asked, on the first day in class, in words you did not yet understand, whether or not you are where you’re supposed to be.

The next day you find yourself looking for familiar faces on Talbot Street, with its cobble stone sidewalks like brick walls laid down. You can run your fingers over bullet holes and now you’ll never believe anyone who tells you that wars don’t also heal.

You walk behind Laura at the River Liffey and watch as she stops to take a photo of a girl in a yellow dress, and you ask if it’s true that all rivers lead to an ocean, but your words are carried off by the wind or pushed down by the rain and the answer she would have given, the answer you already know, would have done nothing but make your feet uneasy, as if the soil was slowly turning into water. nibmagazine.com | page 13

short fiction.

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The Comeback When one of

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George Starling

the detectives said to cook the corpse for five days, making

Vince’s body disappear, I knew Dickie wouldn’t be charged with murder. The other detective objected, not about Dickie murdering his brother, both were glad Vince dead, but his method of punching him senseless with barbed wire wrapped around boxing gloves bothered him. The mutilation and lacerations surpassed anything Dickie did in the ring during his boxing career. Dickie and Vince’s two children would remain with us, our marriage saved thanks to the law.

“Get a 55 gallon barrel and slow-cook the scumbag, ” the fat dick said.

“I’ve been to many of Dickie’s fights and saw fighters massively cut up. I could’ve brought my kids and sat at ringside seats for those. Strictly PG-13,” the other plainclothes cop said. They left, dropping off their cards.

The wire had pierced Dickie’s gloves. From a formidable and expensive medical kit I found in Vince’s bathroom I used cold compresses to clean and cool Dickie’s lacerations and cotton swabs soaked in epinephrine, then applied petroleum jelly to cover his hands and fingers. Vince had everything.

“Vince knew what cutmen used in the corners,” Dickie said. We lived in Vince’s house.

“I’m your cutman,” I said.

“Good as Chuck Bodak, Angelo Dundee’s cutman. That fat detective, I saw him come and go at Score when I worked there.” Score Inc., Vince’s start up company.

Where had he gotten the capital?

“Not connected with the business end of tool and die of Vince’s?” I said.

“No, I was just a janitor. Saw Vin at lots of my fights. My manager pointed mobsters he was with.” nibmagazine.com | page 15

“Gambling and fixes are part of the trade,” I said, trying not to sound smug, too knowing. Dickie hated people who thought they were better than him, one reason he killed his brother.

“A few times I saw fat dick carry two suitcases and hand them to Vince in the parking lot. I’d be weeding outside and outta sight.” The dicks probably owed money to Vince.

“Maybe he was selling him suitcases,” I said. Damn, why the levity. We have a body to dissolve and I had to be jokesy. That big, gluttonous, lardy cop made disposal of Vin’s corpse easy. “He reminds me of the grossness of Orson Welles’ character in Touch of Evil we saw together after we tucked the kids in for bed.” Dickie mulled that over.

“Maybe I’ll get in better shape at the health spa’s weight room.” He pulled flab from his sides, patted his stomach from the cheap foods he loved. I’ve tried to get him to eat better food, sometimes succeeding.

I felt sorry for the movie allusion but Dickie hadn’t been spared from his own corruption, murder the top of the card, the main event. But Vince’s death I could live with because I felt closer to his brother Dickie.

“We need to purify ourselves, put distance from the past,” I said, Dickie’s blood on my brown trousers. He wiped a wet cloth over my face and showed me the blood.

“Yeah, life’s messy. I knew that early on when I got head-butted during an amateur fight.”

The dicks put the corpse into a zipped body bag to not bloody the rugs and floors, and dragged it to the basement. We’d cook Vince there. A large drum used for debris was in the corner. The dicks left. Dickie unzipped the bag, pulled him out, stripped him, and stuffed Vince’s naked body into the drum. He slid two wooden planks to the stove, making a ramp. Dickie rolled the drum to the stovetop and righted it on two electric coils. I set the temperature at low.

“I’ll be here when you get back, just cruising the net,” I said. We kissed. I was surprised how his eyes shone brighter. Nothing like boiling the dead to perk one up. nibmagazine.com | page 16

“I’ll get a driver’s license someday,” he said. Dickie packed his gym clothes and walked to the health club. During the boxing years, he, at first, rode in limos, then chauffeured cars. As his career tumbled, taxis.

I read on Google News about a new synthetic drug called 2C-I, how the ingredients were listed online for druggies to make in powdered, pill or liquid form. Users, thinking it purely an amphetamine and psychedelic high, found themselves running into power lines and walls under 2C-I’s rule, and died from force of impact. Watching a person’s face turn black, black tears sliding down another person’s face like death-mascara was a milder effect.

As I had seen Dickie pound Vin to shreds, I wondered whether Vin’s eyes streamed blackness. Had Dickie’s? Human metabolisms generate lightness or darkness, depending on the moods of killers, of victims, of God having a bad day.

“I used lots of machines today,” Dickie said, tossing his bag in the closet.

“Going 21st century, uh.” He smelled good. “I like your scent.”

“Aromatherapy. I rubbed essential oils over my body.”

“You shower?”

“Not yet. I used four machines and they smelled like blood. Metallic blood. I feel cleaner, purer though.”

“Immaculate. Not like Vince.”

“Not like the dicks or Vince.”

“Not rotten and cruel?”

“Vince didn’t have kindness in his bones, growing up or below boiling.”

The kids were doing fine staying with my sister until we could straighten our lives.

I told him about 2C-I. “It’s called smiles on the street,” I said. He seemed interested, showered, and watched reruns of The Waltons, about three generations living in a big house during the Depression. A poor family in the South struggled to survive; each episode averted catastrophe. nibmagazine.com | page 17

Troubles resolved; hope lived another day. Corniness lied. The smell of boiled veal seeped from the basement and made us hungrier than usual.

In bed, we normally talked before sex or sleep but not that night. “Machines take getting used to,” he said before turning over and went to sleep.

Those smells downstairs, how they reminded me of Nell, Vince’s kept woman below us in a basement apartment. We raised two kids and had many arguments over that bitch it made my blood pressure rise and gave me nosebleeds. Every day she jogged an hour then came back to lift ten-pound hand weights. She had been a mobsters’ gal until she got shunted to Vince, a “legit” gangster. The chief reason for leaving him was Nell: Who knew where she hung out now that he was steaming?

I never referred to her in conversation. If I had, Dickie would think I was foolish to repress memories better off discussed.

Dickie walked to the health center. After two hours, he returned.

“Nell worked out of machines today. I bought her a power shake.”

“What’s she up to these days.” I was shocked but concealed it.

“She’s marketing online her own power shakes.”

“She’s independent now and for that I applaud her.” I really wanted her existence lobotomized from my brain.

“We drank shakes in the center’s café.”

“Did she mention Vince or me?”

“No. But you might like to know I added liquid smiles to her shake.”

“Damn. Why? She could get hurt or worse.”

“It’s the least I could do for you.”

“Me?” “For the pain you suffered.”

“Had smiles acted yet?”

“She ripped off her clothes and ran into the weight room. She crashed into one machine after another.” nibmagazine.com | page 18

He told me about a huge machine, with a heavy barbell between two massive steel supports on either side of the incline press machine. She bruised herself and gashed her forehead when she smashed her head again and again on the supports.

“She collapsed to the floor. I stopped watching. No one was there.”

I jerked myself off the couch, went to the bedroom and packed all I could into luggage and one small trunk. After calling a taxi, I said: “I need to get away from you, Dickie. You’re on your own.”

In the taxi, I thought Dickie might do worse things alone. I pitied a woman living with him in that house. Let him find a grease trap to pour Vince’s thin veal soup down. Maybe those detectives will lure him into their unscrupulousness and rot.

Thoughts of Dickie entwined themselves with the movie, The War of the Worlds, how the aliens, machines, proved indomitable at first until the earth’s viruses and diseases killed them.

His permanence was unacknowledged artificiality and eventually his weakness would be exposed.

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Glory, Glory

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Amanda Aszman

You come to Fort Lewis, you’ll get five crazies a square foot, but Amos isn’t one of them. He’s just a shithead like the rest of us. I believe that, even now. A couple of Fridays ago, Porter and I drove to the airport to get said shithead. He was coming back from a surveillance training course down at Fort Benning. We pulled up with Zeppelin blaring.

“Bro,” I said, when Amos got in and slammed the door, “how many times you been told not to wear your ACUs for travel?”

“I know,” he said. “I left the only change of clothes I had at some chick’s apartment.” Porter blew a laugh through his big nose and leaned forward to clap Amos on the shoulder. Porter’s the youngest on our team, and the stupidest. He proposed to a girl with a kid after three weeks of free sex despite her history with just about every other soldier in the Pacific Northwest.

“Gettin’ some wherever he goes,” he said over the music. “That’s our Amos.”

“Remind me,” Amos said, “to never fly on Veteran’s Day again.” I knew what he meant. I’d flown home once on Memorial Day, not even in uniform, but those stewardesses can just tell, you know? They think they’re doing you a favor making you stand for applause.

“But at least we get to pass up the assholes in first class,” I said. “That’s all that matters, my boys.” Amos nodded, then he and Porter sang along to Stairway to Heaven. I turned it up and merged onto I-5. “Who’s up for meal hopping?”

It was a Veteran’s Day tradition to hit up every place in Tacoma serving free food to military. I’m all about free food, and Amos wasn’t touching his. nibmagazine.com | page 20

“I’m ‘bout to Jedi-mind trick you into giving me that bacon,” I said.

“No need. Take it, fatty,” Amos said and tossed the hot-sauced strips near my plate. “I’m too hung over for this.” He leaned back, folded his long arms and checked out the waitress, who had to be at least forty-five but was flirting with him nonetheless.

“Dude, it’s free,” Porter said. He sat next to Amos scooping runny eggs into his mouth. “Best part of the job. Free food and we haven’t done shit to deserve it.”

“Five months,” I said. “Five months we’ll be pissin’ our pants in Afghanistan.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Amos said. “If Denny’s knew how much I regret signing that contract, they wouldn’t give me jack shit.” Knowing Amos how I know him now makes it hard to believe he’s the same guy who got stationed here and took orders with his head down. He still takes his orders, but now he’s like a comatose fry cook, battering drumsticks with one eye closed and the other on the clock. And plenty of shit to say about it on his smoke breaks.

“Funny you don’t complain about all the sex that contract gets you,” Porter said. “Isn’t ‘I jump out of planes’ your go-to pickup line?” Amos ignored him. He looked outside, and I followed his gaze. Homeless Harry sat on the sidewalk. He was bare-armed and the marshmallow fluff of hair on either side of his head bounced in the wind. He usually carried a Homeless Vet sign, but today he held a microwave.

Outside, Harry’s chanting ceased as we walked past.

“Hey,” he said. The three of us stopped and turned around. He stood up with his head down, knocking the microwave on its side, and pointed at Amos. I looked at Porter, who was grinning like a fool at the prospect of a new story to tell back at the barracks, homeless men and their microwaves being prime material, obviously. nibmagazine.com | page 21

Amos stood with his hands slack, eyebrows raised in a half-bored, halfcurious way, until Harry lifted his head and looked at him. Something fierce and garbled fell out of the man’s mouth, and Amos leaned forward a little. We stood there a minute, awkward like, till we got bored with it. We got in the truck, leaving Harry standing over his busted microwave, pointing his finger at the world.

You don’t realize how you feel about the military till you’re government property. That’s when it hits you that maybe you were lying when you told everyone you’d ever met that you were enlisting to serve your country, that you wanted to protect their freedom. Sure you’re paid to get ripped, and people trust you to do things with rifles and grenades, but you miss the freedom you had before the contract turned them into privileges.

A contract gets you a lot of shitty days. Some days are spent waiting around for someone to tell you what to do, or filling out paperwork you’ve seen a hundred times over. You get nights when you roll out your sleeping bag on an ant hill and don’t find out till morning. And sometimes after a day of pre-deployment briefings, you get nights when you can’t sleep at all. It’s times like these when Amos jokes we should find a way out of our contracts.

“Come on, Romero,” he said once. It was midnight, and we were sitting on the floor of the barracks dayroom shining our boots. Sergeant Lowe had made our team run ten miles that day for not having boots like mirrors. “You can’t go over there. Ain’t no one in Afghanistan gonna be afraid of your goofy ass face.”

“Ain’t no one gonna believe I’m a Quaker either,” I said, holding a flame to my boot. “They’d make one call to my mama and kick my Catholic ass straight to the desert.” Amos laughed and picked at a Quasimodo-sized blister on his toe.

“We couldn’t pull it off anyway,” he said. “We talk too damn much.”

That night we went to the bar near base where Porter’s fiancée Beth works.

She brought us all a Sam Adams, and I took mine without looking at her. You’re not supposed to look vampires in the eye, right? Amos gave me his and shot whiskey the rest of the night. nibmagazine.com | page 22

“I thought he only ever talked to himself,” Porter was saying. We’d been talking about Homeless Harry for half an hour, but Porter wouldn’t let up.

I sighed. “Story goes he was a decent soldier, expert shooter, funny as shit.

Then one day he stopped mid-pushup and scratched at the ground with his fingers. Said he was listening for steak. So the dude’s crazy. Probably was talking to himself. Probably didn’t even know we were there.”

“He knew,” Amos said, eyes wide. “He looked right at me.” Finally Porter got up to sing his white-boy country song. I watched him up there, pumping his fist out of beat, his big ears lit up red from the stage lights.

Beth came over and leaned her elbows on our table. I kept my eyes on Porter, but I could tell it was her from the smell of hairspray and immorality.

“Boys,” she said, and when I didn’t look at her she flung her big black hair over her shoulder, prickling my face. It’s sometimes fun to hate her, but then I see the ring on her finger and think how it’s my fault, how I’ve somehow failed Porter as his sergeant. If he doesn’t call off the wedding, she’ll suck him dry.

“You guys should come over later, keep me company,” she said, looking at Amos. “Matt only sings this song when he’s wasted. He’ll pass out within an hour.”

I noticed her hair soaking up some beer on the table and smiled. Amos was looking at the rose tattooed on her collarbone, probably imagining the nipple rings Porter went on about like they were learning to crawl. I finished my beer and slammed the bottle on the table between them.

“Hey guys,” I said, grinning. “Remember that time Porter proposed to Beth?

That was hilarious, right?”

“Fuck you, Jon,” she said, but she stood up. The three of us watched Porter stumble off the stage, pulling with him first the microphone and then an angry D.J. Beth grabbed our empty bottles and stomped off, but not without giving Amos a look.

“I’d be doing Porter a favor,” he said.

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“He’s gotta end it on his own,” I said. “You know he wouldn’t blame her.

And then we’d have problems at work, which means problems for me. So I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Amos’s face said, “Tell me if I give a shit,” and I thought again how if the Army hadn’t thrown us together for ungodly amounts of time in ungodly places, we’d probably never be friends.

He’ll give you a hundred reasons to hate him, so it takes a while to realize he’s capable of something else, something almost startling. He keeps these parts of himself separate, as though the guy hitting on the girl you’ve been out with four times is not the same guy who made you copies of all his Zeppelin CDs when your car radio broke. And he’s so indifferent to it all. Doesn’t seem to care which side of him you get. Like you should be satisfied to get anything at all.

Porter fell into a chair and slapped me on the shoulder.

“That D.J.’s crazy,” he said. “Your turn.”

I shook my head. “Not drunk enough.” Porter swatted at the table for a beer that wasn’t there.

“Fuuuuuck whiskey,” Amos said, then he pushed his chair back on two legs and closed his eyes.

Amos’ favorite scheme for escaping the military involves jumping from a Chinook and steering his chute into the nearest tree. He always tells that one after seven or eight beers, so no one takes him seriously. And sometimes the Chinook is a plane and the tree a pile of rocks, or a herd of elk. He tells it, and everyone laughs, and he sits back like a king and takes it all in. We laugh because, damn, who hasn’t imagined a way out? I don’t know a single guy in this unit who hasn’t wanted to kick in his recruiter’s face and disappear down to Mexico, but it’s all talk. You do what you gotta do. Besides, there’s no running from a contract with the government. They’ll find your AWOL ass, and then you’ll have your team to deal with. Your shithead brothers. nibmagazine.com | page 24

The Tuesday after Veteran’s day, Amos stumbled in late to work. His face was coarse enough to shave off his leg, and he needed a haircut.

“Corporal Amos, you smell like beer,” Porter said. Amos tilted back his head to down a bag of Skittles and grabbed the desk to keep from falling. Sergeant Lowe took one look at him and told me to square away my soldier outside.

The ground was cold and wet, but Amos flung sweat like a crazed human salt shaker. I went easy on him till Lowe came outside.

“I’m taking over,” Lowe said, and then he ordered pushups and flutter kicks till Amos threw up rainbows.

“Sergeant Lowe,” Amos said, wiping his mouth, “I need—” “Shut your fuckin’ mouth, Amos. You need whatever I say you need.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Amos said. Sergeant Lowe’s a good guy, but he hates weakness, probably more than he hates lateness and hairy necks. He’s deployed twice already, and everyone thinks he’d be happy to die over there. His first day leading our team, he made us watch this war documentary called Restrepo.

Afterward, in the blue glow of the flat-screen, he said, “You will be men. You will kill things in the face whether you like it or not.” And we all rogered that.

I knew Amos a whole year before he told me why he enlisted. He knew my story: how I’d been running blindly at this my whole life, even when I hated my dad for doing it, even when my brother declared Infantrymen nothing but bullet sponges. And I knew some of his story already. He and his dad fought all the time.

Amos wanted to have get laid and smoke pot. His dad wanted him to do something else. “Make a decision about your future,” “You can’t stay here if you’re not going to school,” “You have three days to make a goddamn decision”—you get the picture. His mom was always in the middle, this tiny pale woman with long brown hair that whipped around her like a cape, always trying to calm them down.

I knew that Amos never went home to visit them, that he wished his family would forget about him so that no one would be disappointed anymore. nibmagazine.com | page 25

One night a taxi dropped us off outside the barracks. The idea of going to our rooms seemed ridiculous with that whole porch of cool concrete, so we slumped down on the steps and leaned against the rails. The Jäger got us reminiscing about chicks back home, and he told me about Becca.

“Becca,” he said, “she was different. I should’ve loved her. She thought I did. I’m a good liar.” He laughed a little, then grabbed the railing and shook it.

“I’m a great liar. We dated four months. Fought like crazy. She always accused me of cheating on her. I mean, I was.” He shrugged and I shrugged back. I felt a little sorry for this Becca. “Kept taking me back, though.”

It started to rain, and Amos let go of the rail and lay down flat. I wiped some water off my face and pulled my hood over my head.

“Then I slept with her best friend. I knew she’d find out. Took her three days. We were at this party, I was hammered and she wanted to leave. She starts speeding down back roads, telling me I’m pathetic, I don’t care about her or anything else. Then she stops and tells me to get out, so I do. I get out and slide into a ditch and sleep till morning. It was a damn fine ditch.”

I laughed and looked at the road. There was no ditch, but I imagined one there. I imagined Amos passed out in it, surrounded by fast-food wrappers and empty whiskey bottles.

The rest of the story goes like this: Amos woke shirtless and still buzzed but well aware of the morning traffic around him. He wobbled to his feet and flexed his naked chest like he owned that ditch.

Then he stumbled down the road and stopped in front of some buildings.

He isn’t one to believe in signs, even ones nailed to a pole and claiming private property or warning against slow children at play, but in his stupor the Armed Forces Recruiting Office before him seemed to glow. Could have been the sun rising behind it, but who could say otherwise? For the first time in his life, Amos was the kid in the front row wagging his hand like Miss America on crack, the answer burning the roof of his mouth. He’d never considered the military before, but he thought of his favorite war movies and imagined he might fit there, behind nibmagazine.com | page 26

a gun, driving a tank or some shit. This was his destiny, and he’d take it like a man.

As soon as he found a shirt.

Later that day he drove back to the building. And of course he lied about his history with illegal substances. And of course his recruiter volunteered only the brightest truths then put a hand on Amos’s shoulder and said, “It will change your life, son.”

When Lowe finished with Amos, he told us to get the hell out of his sight till the afternoon, when we had to prepare for the jump the next day.

So we went to the gym, where Amos stood with his back against the wall and watched the door. He sat down at a bench press and darted his eyes till a staff sergeant told him to get the hell up. Finally I yelled at him to get busy, and he went and rearranged the dumbbells. This wasn’t the Amos I knew. The Amos I knew never would’ve missed a chance to get ripped in front of a mirror and show up all the guys grunting under baby weights.

I cut the workout short and sent everyone to lunch. I said I wanted Taco John’s, and Amos said nothing, so he came with me. I watched him pour too much hot sauce over his nachos then frown at the mess.

“Alright, Amos,” I said. “I can’t let you go back to work till you get that hair cut.” He lifted a clump of chips then dropped it.

“Everything changes,” he said, bumping his fist on the table. “I used to think I could do anything. Thought I was tough shit, you know?” His voice cracked, and I took another bite before looking at him. His eyes were as red as the sauce on his plate. “Fuck I signed away four years of my life before I was old enough to drink.”

“Most of us did, bro.”

“They shouldn’t have let me sign anything.” He lifted his beret from the table and stared at it. “I used to love war movies. Now I put on Platoon and it’s like I can’t breathe. Shit’s getting too real. I don’t think I can do it.”

“Do what?” nibmagazine.com | page 27

“Deploy. Shoot people and shit.”

For the past three years I’ve been comfortable here, putting in the time, working my way up rank, even with all the bullshit we take. Most of the time I look forward to deploying. Everyone knows you can’t demand respect until you’ve deployed. Until then you aren’t a man, aren’t really a veteran. It doesn’t matter who I was because I’ll know when I get back.

But I tried to see it from Amos’s point of view. For him it was a mistake.

Another bad decision, only this time one he couldn’t run from.

“Dude, we talked about this before,” I said. “We’re recon. You won’t even fire your gun.”

“You don’t know that. We’re Airborne Infantry. It’s hardcore.”

“Right,” I said. “And you just now realized you can’t do it?”

“You were meant for this,” he said, waving his beret at all the people dripping burrito juice onto their laps. I would’ve made a joke had he not looked so desperate. “But I’m not.”

He looked out the window and scanned the parking lot, then turned to check the doors. I’d already taken note of everything, the bathroom, the entrance, the security camera in the corner. It’s a habit. It’s our job to do these things, reconnaissance, observation of the situation. It’s only natural that it carries over into everyday life. But it always makes me feel in control, whereas Amos looked like he was about to jump ship.

He leaned forward, and his chest hit the table hard. “That homeless guy?

Homeless Harry? I see him everywhere now. I couldn’t tell what he said that night outside Denny’s, but he’s in this dream I keep having. I’m down in a dirt hole, and Harry walks up and starts pissin’ on my head, to the beat of the National Anthem.

And I just sit there and take it. And then he goes, ‘Dead.’ Or ‘Death.’ Clear as day.”

I shook my head. “That’s what he said in your dream. Not in real life. You need to chill out. Eat your nachos.” His face was red and sweat dripped down the hair curling on his forehead. He held his beret in one hand now and was squeezing his left arm so tight the veins were bulging, green as the cheap black ink on his wrist. nibmagazine.com | page 28

Our whole team has the same tattoo. “US” made to look like a stamp, like property of the U.S., only we didn’t get the periods in between, so people always think it says “us.” Us versus them.

“The old man pointed,” he said. “He could’ve pointed anywhere, but he pointed at me. And get this, I had the dream again last night, only this time Becca was there, standing beside him while he pissed. She doesn’t talk, just stares at me.”

He slumped into his seat. “Like I’m a beast.”

I dropped the wrapper I’d been about to wad up and felt the familiar signs of indigestion.

The story of Becca didn’t end with the ditch. It ended weeks later, before Amos left for basic training. She called and told him she was pregnant. He didn’t cry or yell or throw his phone. He did nothing at all. Says he felt nothing. Says he hung up and ignored it altogether until she called a few days later to tell him she was getting an abortion. By then he was busy sobering up and lifting weights in tiny T-shirts and telling anyone of the opposite sex about his four-year commitment. It was like it had never happened.

I looked at his flushed face and chapped lips now and saw what it would mean for him to deploy, to be so close to death, to be reminded every day. The sides of my head throbbed. I squinted at him. “You don’t even know if she got the abortion, man.” I didn’t know what else to say so I wadded the wrappers. I filled my mouth with ice and my head with the sound of it breaking.

And here’s how it happened, the very next day.

It’s been raining all afternoon. We hope the pilots will cancel the jump.

Someone says, “Who the hell jumps out of a perfectly good plane anyway?” and we all laugh, or sort of laugh. Someone always says that. But the jump isn’t canceled, and we wait around in the backs of trucks all day, hungry as shit. We text each other funny pictures to keep from being pissed off. nibmagazine.com | page 29

Finally we get some MREs. Mine is a sloppy joe and a sad brownie impersonator. Amos doesn’t open his. He’s quiet while the rest of us eat, but he seems more relaxed than yesterday. He pulls his dog tags from his pocket and slips a tiny dolphin onto the chain. His younger sister Megan sent it to him last month.

She wants an Airborne dolphin keychain. She wants it to jump from 1300 feet.

It’s a routine jump. We’re supposed to jump at least every three months to keep our bragging rights and that extra $150 in hazardous duty pay. By the time the weather clears up, it’s dark. We’re all hopped up now, ready to go. We practically run onto the plane. There are 54 of us, but the plane is loud so no one talks. We sit on the benches along the sides of the plane, harnessed and facing each other. We nod off in the red haze of light, like we’re in a dark room and not on a C-130 about to jump into the freezing air of night. Amos sits across from me with his freshly buzzed head down. He could be sleeping.

Jump master announces we’re six minutes from the drop zone. We echo, “Six minutes.” Adrenaline hits. When it’s time, I stand with the others who are jumping on the first pass. I mean to catch Amos’s eyes, to see if he’s still holding it together, but I forget.

“Hook up!” We repeat the order and hook up our static lines. We check our own line and the line of the guy ahead of us. We check our equipment, smack asses and say, “Okay,” till it reaches the guy in front, which is Porter. Porter says, “All okay jump master!” Jump master smacks Porter’s hand away, because it’s what you do, then says, “One minute.” We repeat, “One minute.”

Then it’s thirty seconds and you just want it to be zero seconds because once Porter jumps you won’t be nervous anymore. That’s when your inner automaton kicks in, and you just do it.

“Stand by.” Porter steps forward. Jump master checks the door. He leans out, checks the drop zone below. The light by the door is still red. But then it turns green and jump master says, “GO.” Porter jumps and the guys ahead of you follow him at one-second intervals. nibmagazine.com | page 30

It’s your turn now. You hand off your static line. You’re supposed to look at the horizon but no one ever does. You look down. There are no lights in the training field but it’s a clear night, rare in Washington, and you can see the falling shadows. You jump, with feet and knees together, chin to chest, elbows tucked in tight, hands on your reserve. For a split second you wonder whether the chute will open. You count in your head. One-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand, four-thousand… You feel the tug, and you feel thankful.

It was so loud in the plane but now all you hear is your breathing and the wind hitting the canopy. If you had time to think, you’d think how it sounds like a flag in a storm, or a superhero’s cape. You’d think, This is incredible. But there’s no time for that. Not until later, when you’re all on the ground comparing jumps and feeling invincible. Now you check your descent with the other jumpers and prepare to land. Above you the plane circles, still dropping men in the cover of night.

I jumped before Amos, so I didn’t see him hit the side of the plane. The guys behind him watched him hand his static line to the jump master and look at the horizon. They saw him leave the plane but no one remembers how. Maybe his first step out the door wasn’t big enough, maybe he went head first. The propeller blast in a C-130 is fierce even when you jump in proper form. It’s bad news when you don’t. Whatever Amos did, the prop blast flung him back.

I know how easy it is to get hurt on a jump. I’ve had two concussions, one of which was another guy’s fault. It was windy and the guy lost control of his chute, landed right on top of me. And it’s easy enough to freak out and exit the plane with bad form. Shit happens. Amos hit the side of the plane, and then he hit the ground hard. No one knows what happened in the air.

I went to see Amos in the hospital, after they put the titanium rod in his femur. They say he’ll need six months of rehab. Half his body was wrapped up nibmagazine.com | page 31

and his face was bruised as shit, but he sat upright, eyes closed. On the table next to the bed lay his sister’s dolphin, broken.

In Airborne school they teach you this morbid song that everyone loves about a guy who gets twisted in his risers and hits the ground with blood spurting high. His team rolls up what’s left of him in his chute, and everyone marvels.

Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die. I wondered if Amos remembered that song.

When he finally opened his eyes, I stood up. I’m his sergeant, but I’m also his best friend. I wanted answers. He reached over and touched the plastic dolphin’s tail.

“It broke,” he said.

I don’t know if he meant the dolphin or the leg, or something else entirely. I didn’t ask.

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Never Mind

|

Matt Bellinger

As we crested the last dune, her voice sprang alive with a gasp. “Finally, a little space to breathe!” she said, as if the geometry of the town had been some evil corset, or a necktie drawn to painful formality. My own breathing was unchanged, but the truth of her sentiment rode a shiver across my shoulders. It was all here, all the glory of Poseidon’s gift: a chilled breeze, the sharp scent of the sea, and the sky, spread out like a black putty stretched too thin, pierced by pale pinpricks hurtling through the fragile membrane of darkness. There was the gentle kiss of wave against wave—a mindless and thoughtless tradition, a repetition, a force of habit, an ancient compulsion. It was good to be out in the open, naked before the stars, beholden to the soft song of the surf. It was good to get away, to break from home and family and the benevolent oppression of day-to-day existence.

Sometimes that’s just what you need. A little room, a little drifting from who you are. Sometimes you just have to give geography the finger—and wander.

But I could say none of this, least of all to her. Not simply because she was beautiful, or because I thought I loved her, or because our clothes lay in a blind man’s pile where the forest breaks into seashore. I mean, I’d tried to explain it before, back home, but every attempt collapsed beneath the monolithic stares of dead, unfeeling faces. Every explanation, every summons of reason to the service of this deviant need—well, it failed. My thoughts, my reasons, my justifications, they all came spilling out of my head, but in the foul shape of words. And that somehow corrupted them, thrust them beyond all remembrance. They became strangers to me, disavowed children—bastards, one and all. And so we stood there, she and I, naked in the dark, and all I could offer was a dull platitude: “I know.”

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She grasped my hand and we picked our way down the dune, sand avalanching in miniature beneath the clumsy stagger of our bare feet. When we met level ground, she released me, and with a playful laugh ran ahead, pausing only to caution me against the debris marking the furthest reaches of the tide. I followed, blind, until the ocean’s solemn gray detached from the blackness of the night. She was there, ahead. By the loose glow of the starlight, I could see her standing, etched as constant against the churning of the surf. Her long hair fidgeted in the breeze. Her hands paused at the twin apogees of her hips. The posture was firm, even defiant.

Perhaps there was a challenge there, a dare to the sea and the sand and the sky— and to me. But even as muted steps erased the distance between myself and the proud silhouette, I knew that this moment was itself the climax: Move forward, and I would run past it; halt, and it would elude my grasp. So I slowed my pace, timing footfalls to the groaning of the water, and fought to savor the anticipation.

In something between eternity and an instant it was over, and I was at her side. My palm embraced hers, and in the dim light I saw the contours of her face collapse into a gentle smile.

“Ready?” she whispered.

A flood of words struck me, but only one escaped the sieve: “Yes.” As one, we plunged forward into the water. Splats gave way to splashes, then splashes to slogs, and our running turned to forceful wading. The shock of a wave rushed to meet my waist, and suddenly I was aware of just how cold the ocean was. Perhaps sensing the same, she pulled me close and drew my mouth to hers.

For a moment I strained for the hope of some strange communion, as if the brute impact of tongue against tongue could do what words could not. Her arms encased me, the points of her breasts drew swaying designs on my chest, and I felt myself stir in response—but despite all of this, despite the ancient and holy ambition that ruled, I knew that it was already over.

The motions followed as predicted. We were slaves to an old causality, sharp and Newtonian. But afterwards, when we lay on the beach, our lungs heaving and our eyes fixed on the glory of the heavens, I tried once more. nibmagazine.com | page 34

“There’s so much there,” I began.

“What?” she asked. The word echoed across a gulf that only I could perceive.

“Never mind.”

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What Dusk Brought

|

Mary Parker

Old oaks stood sentinel over the parked ’46 Willys Jeep. Within its stale oil and cracked leather interior, 9-year-old Katie-Lynn cringed each time the highway beside her buzzed to life, each time the condensing of headlights proved the thickening of night. Shadows came wrong for the little girl this time each day, especially this day, with her father a far-away field speck too distant for a holler.

When she’d squinted in the earlier brightness, he’d appeared only back-and-forth motion against raw umber and ochre, skin altogether a shade lighter, his hat known and therefore imagined.

Daddy and Doug had taken the machete and a hacksaw, crossed the two lanes of asphalt, dipped through rusty barbed wire and walked away from her. As she’d watched her father’s shoulders grow smaller, her feet wiggled with the first inklings of despair and a whispering need to pee. But she wasn’t to leave the Jeep.

Her father had said so. And so, instead, she dug deeper into the comfort of the hard candies by her side.

Once, months ago, she’d tricked herself through eager waiting by counting in slow increments of sixty, one by one, until the ten minutes before a muchanticipated birthday party elapsed. She decided to count now between sucks, ticking off numbers through hard-peppermint juice, sixty at a time until all that she knew was the black of the back of the seat before her.

The crunch of tires on gravel caught double-digits mid-throat, tongue poised to bring them to light. She swallowed.

What had dusk brought her?

As if to answer, she heard a door slam and a man’s voice. “What year you think it is?”

Another slam. Another voice. “’45, ’46.”

“Sure is sweet.” nibmagazine.com | page 36

“Yep. Too sweet to be sittin here all alone like this.”

Fear stilled her like the cottontail Daddy had shot, the one in the ice chest beside her.

The crunch of feet now – swifter than tires and with a beat more insistent – surrounded the Willys, crisping first this way then that.

Sliding cloth against sandy soil then a voice from underneath her seat, muffled: “The oil pan’s leakin some, but I reckon that’s what you’d expect from somethin this old, eh?”

Suddenly, at the driver’s side, the handle shook. Daddy hadn’t locked it, but it often behaved that way generating “Dammit, stuck again!” from her father’s lips and nervous creases of tension from her stomach.

But now, entire body pressed by terror already flat to the floor, she pleaded with the door, focusing every ounce of wishful might, entreating it to pretend to be locked tighter than ever before. She bargained, too, with the god they said would come again – except this time not by fire or flood – begging more from it than she even had last spring when her cat, Jailbird, died from that car-hit.

Sliding. Crunch on ground just outside her window.

Voice: “Locked probably. Lemme try the passenger side. We get in and this baby’ll be ours. Don’t you worry none.”

Urine began a seamless, steady journey down her legs. Its thick, yeasty warmth rose up to her nostrils as she squished bonelessly down deeper into the rubber mat.

With a rough jerk the passenger-side door opened. “This side’s a go!”

More yeasty smells – warm beer and day-old sweat – filled the Jeep and grew stronger as a man in a dull brown Army-issued T-shirt reached across the gearshift toward the driver’s side. She glimpsed the stain under his arm, post-oak-leaf irregular, as he strained at the door handle, shaking hard at it.

“Mother fucker still won’t open!” he hollered to the other man.

As if the words themselves had scents all their own, an abrupt foulness instantly swept over the Willys. Without warning, stench suddenly swung itself nibmagazine.com | page 37

violently upon the back of the man’s legs. And, as he turned in defense, rotten perfume shuddered savagely against kneecaps, shins, thighs, shouting its necrotic essence through his screams of pain.

Something larger than gravel flew into the back and stung her cheek. Blood traveled down her skin and her hands sprang to her face to provide protection.

Death visited. She could smell it.

“You’d best leave my girls alone you son of a bitch! Get your fuckin ass on outta there!” Roaring rankness filled the air as her father fired words like flames.

Daddy had come back.

Pounding pulsed from the other side of the Willys, too. Pleading from both sides. Feverish thuds. Gravel silence.

Then: “Katie Lynn?” Daddy ‘s voice. “You in there, Girl?”

Throat rough from hard candy, raw with fear, she could barely answer but knew she must lest her father grow angry next with her. She feared his ire already from the puddle she’d made.

“Yeh…yes, yes, Sir. I’m back here, Daddy.” She worked hard not to sob. He lacked patience for that.

“Get on outta there. We gotta get us some bailin wire outta the back seat.”

Then a short notch softer: “You okay?”

“I peed in your Jeep, Daddy.” The tears began then, more wet warmth flowing into to her liquid fear.

“You’ll clean it up. You was scared of them bastards, weren’t you my pretty girl?”

Unfolding her bonelessness didn’t go easy. Joints frozen by adrenaline wouldn’t budge without hard coaxing. Pain tingled. Toes needled. Finally, legs undrugged and stretched long for nine-years-old and allowed Katie Lynn to put herself firmly to the ground.

There the world grew rotten, for next to the man her father had beaten unconscious lay the rotting bull’s head Daddy had used to do it. Katie Lynn shrieked. She longed to climb back inside the Willys’ womb, but knowing she nibmagazine.com | page 38

couldn’t she skirted the sickening decay best she could and continued out into the dusk.

“Whoa now, Katie Lynn, what’d I tell you ‘bout screaming?” her father admonished. “Besides, that thing’s long gone. It can’t get you now anyway, Silly Girl.” With a wink, he tousled her hair. Then he shouted, “Hey, Doug! You ready for that bailin wire?”

Doug’s cackle rang eerie through the odd light, shivering her more than her wet pants. “I suppose I should wire him up,” he answered. “Though I don’t reckon this one’s going no where no time soon. Machete’s good for a whole lot more than cutting. Always said so.”

“Yep, you did say so once or twice.” Her father chuckled and reached into the back seat, which he’d made from a metal box spray-painted silver and topped with rent and worn leather cushions. He took out three bent bundles of bailing wire. “Get ready to catch, I’m throwin some over now,” Daddy said and flung a wad of wire Doug’s way. With two others in hand, he walked toward the sprawled man in the dull brown T-shirt. “Katie Lynn?”

“Yes, Daddy?”

“Go on over to that big rock over there while Daddy takes care of this bad man. You hear?”

“Yes, Sir.” She didn’t want to sit on the jagged rock, which sat pocked in shadow, reigning darkly from under ominous oaks. But Katie Lynn never argued with her father.

After Daddy and Doug wired the men so they wouldn’t be going nowhere no time soon, they set to work attaching their efforts from the field, their real handiwork, to the spare tire at the Willys’ behind with the third bundle of bailing wire.

From the rock, Katie Lynn heard Doug’s high-pitched voice squeal, “Damn, this thing sure is squirrelly. How’d you hold onto the slimy bastard long enough to beat the shit out of that dude?” nibmagazine.com | page 39

“Adrenaline, I reckon.” Katie Lynn could almost hear her father’s shrug.

“And whaddya expect? It’s been out there for, what, ‘bout four days of hot sun?”

“Yep, I reckon at least that long considering that’s about how long it’s gonna take me to wash this Goddamn reek offa me!”

Suddenly, a loud bellow twisted up from Daddy. “Holy shit!” he cried and ran sharply for the chaparral. Through the silhouette of brush, Katie Lynn caught tints of Daddy’s raw umber and ochre jerks. Each trembling back-and-forth motion beckoned her to come and comfort him, but she fought their curledfingers of pity and stayed put instead.

Doug watched differently. “Hey!” he laughed. “Don’t leave me here holding this Goddamn thing! You fuckin wimp. This was your idea.” His voice turned up in ugly parody: “‘Hey Doug, lookie what’s out yonder in that field. I just gotta have it for the porch…’ Come on you pussy, quit your barfin and get back on over here.”

With a final shudder, the chaparral relinquished Daddy and he walked carefully toward the spare tire, wiping warily, coercing himself to laugh with Doug.

“Shit, I’m sure glad we’re about done. This thing’s ripe.” Head shaking. Wire cutters twirling. Turning. Snip. Roll. Reel. Heave.

The two men stepped back, staring from dusk into the job they’d done.

“Think that’ll hold?” her father asked.

“Should,” Doug replied. “And if it don’t, can’t look any worse if it falls off and hits the pavement at seventy miles an hour. Hell, might even scrape some of that shit off ‘o there so you don’t have to.”

“You know better than that.” Another slight tremor and Daddy swiped his forearm across his mouth again. “The Willys can’t do over forty-five.”

Doug snickered. “Well, anyways, we best get our asses on outta here before the law shows up and we gotta explain not only these two fuckheads, but that headless bull out there in the pasture.”

“Whatcha waiting for then? Get in the Jeep,” Daddy told Doug. nibmagazine.com | page 40

Katie Lynn didn’t need Daddy to tell her to get in the Jeep. She’d never even for a second allowed herself the comfort of a flat spot on that serrated rock. Nor had she allowed herself to soak up its final day-heat. Instead, as a sort of increments-of-sixty trick, she’d perched purposely on the rock’s roughest angle in the all-wrong light and exposed as much of herself to the coming-night’s chill as possible.

With Doug already in the passenger’s seat, she had to walk behind the Willys and get in on her father’s side. As she did, the putrid form reared its ugly head, snarling. But now, instead of fear, curiosity picked and grabbed at the lint of Katie Lynn. It told her to stare and showed her that flesh hung, maggots burrowed, and goo slid.

Candy, numbers, and moments in the millions rose in rebellion.

“Come on, Katie Lynn. You don’t need to be getting that picture in your head,” Daddy’s stern voice told her. “Get on over here and get in. We gotta get on home so I can drop that thing in acid and start it cleaning. Besides, Mama’s like to be right worried ‘bout now.”

“Yes, Sir.” Her eyes found his even in the dim light and she swallowed thickly to still the rebellion.

As she crawled into the back seat, she felt something sharp dig into her knee and danced her fingers through the rubber darkness until they hit again upon its hardness. The next wave of headlights told her it was a bovine molar. With a secret smile, she placed it in her mouth where her worry-stone-tongue-fingered ways began to suck comfort from its grass-eating grooves.

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nibmagazine.com | page 42

Lies in the Glove box

|

Andrea Wills

“Well, Mr. Weber,” the mustached teacher began, “as it stands, your daughter Veronica is just not prepared for the eighth grade. I hate to hold her back, but there isn’t much else we can do. If you take a moment to consider these test scores…” The teacher pushed his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose as he slid a packet of papers towards Mr. Weber, who leaned forward to inspect them carefully. Cassi worked to pull her attention from the two men who so sharply contradicted each other: her kid sister’s teacher with his friendly walrus mustache and red bow tie, and their clean-cut father with his slicked-back blonde hair and that wretched realtor suit.

When she was finally able to look away from the teacher’s bald spot–a glowing orb illuminated by the empty classroom’s fluorescent lights–Cassi settled her eyes on the still form of her sister. Nee, known to everyone but her family as Veronica, was sitting at a desk near the door with her arms crossed. She was looking out the door’s tiny window into the hallway from under her stringy mop of pale hair, paying no attention to the exchanges between her teacher and her father.

Cassi knew she had to be listening, though. There was no way Nee was going to get out of this one.

After a moment, Mr. Weber cleared his throat, and Cassi gave in to the seduction of observing something more interesting than her troubled sister.

“There’s no possible way she could go on to the eighth grade? No summer classes or, y’know, extra credit?”

The teacher sighed. “Well, to be quite honest, it’s really up to Veronica. If she thinks it would be helpful to try and get up to speed over the summer, we’re open to giving her an opportunity. She could also continue meeting with the school psychologist during that time.”

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Mr. Weber looked over his shoulder and met his youngest daughter’s eyes, waiting for an answer. “I don’t like the school psychologist,” was all she said.

“Don’t you want to give it a shot? So you don’t have to be held back?”

Nee just stared at him, then said, “I don’t care, Dad.” Mr. Weber whipped back around and beamed. “Sign her up!” The teacher’s mustache gave an uncomfortable wiggle.

A few minutes later in the Diablo Middle School parking lot, Nee receieved her father’s wrath. The little family stood between Cassi’s scratchy old sedan and her father’s Hummer, the vehicles casting shadows in the setting sun. “Veronica Elaine, I can’t believe you would pull that shit again! Don’t you want to be successful?”

Nee looked like she might cry, all the indifference she had shown in the classroom gone. “Just let her pout, Dad,” Cassi said. “Yelling at her won’t help.”

Mr. Weber yanked open the Hummer’s driver side door and climbed in shaking his head. “There was no need to make me look like a fool, Nee. You never brought those test scores home to show me or your mom. How was I supposed to know things had gotten so bad?” With a weak smile, he slammed the door and started the engine. Cassi and her sister watched their father pull out of the parking lot, but before he turned onto the highway he rolled down the window and as an afterthought yelled, “Daddy loves you, girls!”

Cassi rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.” He hadn’t even thanked her for carting her sister all over town just so he wouldn’t have to leave the office early. Mrs. Weber was also unable to attend the parent-teacher conference for the second time this year. On the road in her own car, kid sister in tow, Cassi couldn’t think of anything to say that would make her feel better. Nee sat in the front seat with her hands tucked under her legs, staring out the window and looking small. She had always been tiny for her age and, at thirteen, seemed even smaller under the scrutiny of worried adults.

“You know,” Cassi finally piped up, “maybe your grades and stuff would be better if you didn’t sit in front of the TV all day.” nibmagazine.com | page 44

Nee turned and gave her a dirty look. “What?” Cassi continued. “I know you’re smart. You can’t watch hours of 60 Minutes reruns without picking up a little something.” Nee didn’t even crack a smile, and Cassi knew it would be no use to keep prodding her. The rest of the ride was spent in silence until they were a mile from home, when Nee shuffled her foot then reached down to pick something up off the floorboard of the car. She examined it under the fading light of the sun.

“Did you go see that movie A Road in Dark Hearts? Was it good? I saw a commercial for it.” She held up the discarded ticket stub.

Cassi glanced at it and quickly looked away. “Oh, yeah. It was pretty good I guess.”

Nee gave a splinter of a smile. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Just stick it in the glove box.” Inside Cassi’s glove box were a few dozen more movie ticket stubs. The one from A Road in Dark Hearts dropped down to swim with the others. Cassi had never actually seen a single one of the movies, especially not that one. It looked completely senseless, but judging by the number of people she had noticed coming out of the theater at work smiling it must mean something to everyone else. When the theater was empty, she would go in to sweep up the spilled popcorn and sticky candy wrappers from the theater floor, trying not to get butter stains on her violet Diablo 10 Cinema uniform. If she was lucky, someone would have dropped a ticket stub on their way out, and Cassi could slide it into her pocket.

Each ticket stub quietly attested itself as a lie. If her mother or father ever asked where Cassi had been the previous night, she would have a recovered ticket stub at hand to show them. Of course, no one ever asked anymore, especially since she had gotten a job–but just in case, she had an innocent excuse ready.

There really wasn’t much else a teenager could do in the small Arizona town of Diablo, which was devilishly charming but boring as hell. Unless she was a hardcore partier or associated with her family, the only thing a teenage girl in Diablo had to do was get a job or see a movie. nibmagazine.com | page 45

It wasn’t difficult for a girl like Cassandra Weber to do either of those things. She was one of the most well-liked girls in Diablo due to the popularity of her parents’ various business ventures and pleased clients, so it was no surprise when she applied to the theater and got hired on the spot. The elation of having her first job didn’t last long. The job had fallen into her lap at exactly the least opportune moment in her young life. She had reached the age where she was beginning to notice despicable things in the world for what they were, like spidery men eyeballing her at the grocery store as if she was more delicious than any fresh piece of produce in front of them. Naturally, it didn’t take long for her to get caught in a web.

Really the trouble began earlier than the job, or even her troublesome situation with Ryan; Cassi could even admit that much to herself. It was all about her parents. Her family was broken well past the point of repair, and there were few moments in Cassi’s teenage life that she felt she could have fixed it. She had never completely understood the partnership of Daniel and Elaine Weber past the realm of business: her investment banker mother and realtor father agreed on nothing outside of the office. How they had even conceived two children together was beyond her, but how they managed to keep up the appearance of a functioning family was completely unfathomable. Especially in the year since her father’s affair had leaked out (some secretarial tramp, no doubt) it was strange to even think of two more distant people sharing a house, let alone a bed. How could they still bare to warm themselves under the same blanket when their marriage had turned so cold?

Cassi could still remember the fights between them, though more and more they were becoming a blurred dream of “Do you even love me anymore?” and “It’s better for the girls this way” heard through the crack below her parents’ bedroom door. Then after a few times of walking into the first floor bathroom to find her mother crying cross-legged in the empty bathtub, Cassi and Nee began to see less of their parents. It became a surprise to see them leaving from the same bedroom before school in the morning. Mr. Weber remained at the office most of nibmagazine.com | page 46

the time, and when Mrs. Weber was home she could rarely ever be found anywhere but working at the dining room table with a glass of wine in one hand and her Blackberry in the other. Her daughters barely spoke to her when they did see her for fear of being snapped at by the almost alien woman glowing in the bluish light of a laptop computer.

They were all coping with the “anti-divorce” (as Cassi secretly called it) as well as they could, she thought. Her mother and father would be fine in time; it was their fight, after all. As for Nee, Cassi tried not to think about her too much.

The pale little twelve-year-old surely would be fine if she kept seeing that psychologist at the school. Some positive change had to be happening, even if Cassi couldn’t see it. Nee never did anything except squat in front of the big screen all day, favoring criminal investigations or Lifetime. She never had friends over or went to sleepovers. It wasn’t good news at all to hear she was so terribly behind in school, either. But Cassi couldn’t dwell on it, especially on that day after the parent-teacher conference. She had her own problems to deal with.

A glove box full of sticky ticket stubs, for example, had been weighing on her mind. Her own special way of dealing with her messed-up life was beginning to catch up with her: Ryan. The engaged son of her mother’s work friend had been texting and instant-messaging her again, wanting to meet up in the darkness of night. Cassi had known the years-older man for half a decade, but he had never paid more attention to her than it took to smile a greeting. She had harbored a secret, girlish attraction for him since she was in middle school and he was graduating high school, and she looked forward to the several times a year she knew she would see him at his mother’s extravagant business parties–even if they had never held more than a few conversations and his fiancé was always a few drunken bankers away from him.

Towards the end of the previous summer, Ryan had caught Cassi in the Diablo 10 parking lot on his way out from seeing a movie. The groaning engine of her old sedan refused to start, and she was sitting on the hood taking a break from struggling with it. Her head was clouded with exhaustion from a full shift’s work nibmagazine.com | page 47

and angry thoughts about her father. She had been wondering over and over why her father would feel the need to seek affection outside of his marriage and what kind of woman would knowingly sleep with a married man. Ryan snuck up behind her and shocked her out of her unhappy daze. “Would you like a ride home, stranger?” he had asked, and she accepted with a relieved smile.

It was then in his car, driving down the familiar road with cacti racing past them in the starlight, that Cassi noticed how he had been watching her from the corner of his eye. It wasn’t until Ryan’s eyes leeched their way down the silhouette of her body and he pulled the car over on the side of the dusty back road that she knew her attraction towards him was reciprocated. Cassi thought of her father again as Ryan reached for her hand, then she thought of her mother as Ryan said “You look so grown-up and beautiful in the starlight” and slid his slithering fingers up her leg and then leaned in slowly to kiss her.

There are many kinds of heat in Arizona. Cassi came to understand this in the backseat of Ryan’ car that August night, and she also finally understood why anyone would do the horrible thing her father did: the warmth of a lover, even someone else’s, could help free a girl temporarily from the confines of a cold family. She continued to meet with Ryan on that back road dozens more times, even though she was sure her mother’s claims that “Ryan’s fiancé is just the sweetest girl” were true. It was clear Ryan was not sweet to match, though Cassi wouldn’t have let herself tell anyone otherwise. She knew her secret was hers alone to keep. Letting it out would cause an explosion, and the fallout would be too much to handle. What she thought she could handle, however, was knowing at any given moment the bomb ticking away inside would finally detonate. She felt cheap and dirty and was often depressed when she thought of the lives that could be ruined if this secret came to surface. Ryan was no help, hanging around work and bugging her for alone time. She wondered how someone so parasitic had ever gotten himself engaged in the first place.

Work was no longer fun with Ryan always there, so in order to get him off her back for even a brief amount of time Cassi finally agreed to meet with him nibmagazine.com | page 48

again. A few days after the parent-teacher conference fiasco, she walked downstairs to find no one home but Nee. She was on the sofa, sunken in the couch’s chocolate-colored leather and her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. Cassi could not see her face, but the Lifetime movie on the screen seemed familiar.

“Haven’t you seen that one before?” she asked. There was no reply. In no mood to deal with Nee’s coldness, Cassi furrowed her brow and stomped past the couch towards the front door. She then heard the quietest of squeaks from Nee and spun around to snap at her.

Nee’s face was crumpled into a pained pucker, refusing a sob to escape as tears ran down her cheeks. Cassi stopped and her face softened. “Nee?” she asked, going to sit down on the sofa next to her. “What’s wrong?” The girl shook her head and the tears fell, darkening the leather. Cassi moved to put her arm around Nee’s shoulder. “What’s the matter?” Nee pushed her hand away and jumped off the couch, running towards the first floor bathroom with the sob following closely behind her.

Cassi was dumbfounded as she listened to her sister’s weeping through the bathroom door. How often did Nee just sit in this house alone, crying in front of the television? How had she never realized her sister’s desolation existed outside the classroom, how had no one considered her for more than a moment? She found the door to be unlocked and walked in to see Nee cross-legged in the bathtub. The girl was her fair-haired mother’s twin, Cassi thought, the only thing missing was a glass of wine. There was just enough room in the bathtub for Cassi to lower herself down next to her sister. “Nee? Please tell me what’s going on with you.”

“Why? You never cared before!” Nee was almost screaming. “All you guys do is walk in and out and no one cares about each other anymore! What happened to the way things used to be? What…what happened?” Tears streamed down the girl’s face and she stared at her hands.

“Can’t you see it’s been hard for all of us? You aren’t the only one who–” nibmagazine.com | page 49

“Maybe I would be able to see if anyone was ever here.” Their eyes met, and Cassi saw into her little sister then. All those days spent in front of the television, waiting for the day when everything would go back to normal and they would be a family again. Yet no one was ever even home to keep giving her that hope.

Her mind deserted all thoughts of meeting up with Ryan as she took a deep breath and asked, “Do you want to come with me to see A Road in Dark Hearts?”

Ryan could text her all he wanted but she wasn’t going to see him, not that night or any night after; someone more important needed her.

Nee wiped her nose. “I thought you already saw that one?”

Cassi smiled and pulled her sister into a hug. “It was pretty good, I could see it again.”

“The trailer did look awesome.”

As the two sisters left the theater a few hours later, on their way to get ice cream, Cassi had to admit to herself that the movie had actually been pretty good.

The ticket stub was safe and warm in the pocket of her jeans. She had planned for it to stay there, but when they climbed back into her sedan, Nee whipped her own ticket stub out and made to place it with the others in the glove box. “Let me add to your collection,” she said with a smile.

“No!” Cassi placed her hand on the handle of the glove box. “Wait, Nee.” Cassi reached in and scooped all the old ticket stubs out. “Help me out here?”

Together, they collected all the tickets. “Now just toss them,” Cassi said. Out the open window they flew, dancing in the Arizona evening breeze, and the two sisters gingerly placed their own stubs in the now-empty glove box.

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non-fiction.

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. . . r e v i e w . . .

There will be no More Good Nights Without Good Nights Laura van den Berg Review by Ursula Villarreal-Moura Published: 2012 Origami Zoo Press (www.origamizoopress.com) A slim volume registering at just 36 pages, Laura van den Berg’s new flash fiction collection There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights resonates at a much heavier emotional frequency than its length would suggest.

In the same vein as her previous short story collection, There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights explores variations of several themes, namely marital discord, new leases on life, the wisdom of animals, and daughters seeking to distance themselves from their families.

Several stories examine dissatisfaction in marriage and how the upper hand is a fickle position to hold. van den Berg’s fascination with the vulnerabilities of marriage is best illustrated in “The Golden Dragon Inn” in which a couple playing Monopoly discovers bad luck doesn’t discriminate, all while skirting the issue of the husband’s current affair. Revenge runs deep and cold in the broken marriage in “Parakeets,” and in “Lake,” the female character becomes every day more aware of the temptation to stray from her companion.

The repetition of marital dysfunction can get a tad tiresome, but van den Berg is skilled at carving out intricacies, granting us nuanced views of familiar scenarios. nibmagazine.com | page 52

The most breathtaking piece in the collection is “Photography,” a story about a widowed woman peeping in on her artistically inclined neighbors. Each sentence in the story is a fireworks display of riveting imagery laced with grief.

In “To The Good People of Mars,” the daughter of a squabbling couple gives her parents a written exam of her own creation. When they fail, she reprimands them by stating “Parents are supposed to know more than you do.”

Animals are ubiquitous in this collection, ranging from wild horses to shit talking parakeets. While a few creatures remain neutral observers, many animals in these flash stories become friends, guides, or foes with “all knowing, prehistoric,” glares.

In “Reptiles” animals become burdens, bad ideas, and elucidators of character’s blind spots.

It would be easy for this collection to sink with the sorrow of wrecked marriages, a drowned child, a collapsed business, and a paranoid single mother, but Laura van den Berg’s stories are, to borrow an image from the book, meticulously crafted origami animals. Many of the stories are humorous in their desperation. A man on the brink of closing his exotic pet shop phones a prayer center, “asking for things like please let the sale on geckos be a success and please let that kid come back for the boa.” A father, having royally failed the written exam his daughter imposed on him, uncorks a bottle of champagne that had been saved for a special occasion, skips the glass, and instead pours the alcohol straight down his throat. These touching failures are funny and painful in equal measure.

The outlier in the collection “Cannibals,” a fairy tale, is a speculative story told from the perspective of an abandoned twelve year-old daughter. The story, on first read, seems outlandish and silly, but touches upon thematic threads in other stories. The hypothetical ending sheds light on the comical narrative, begging the reader to decide who really gets eaten alive by the jaws of absence.

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. . . e s s a y . . .

The Conundrum of Poverty Raymond Greiner Poverty is an emotionally powerful subject. With few exceptions global human quality of life is structured from a base of economic opportunities hailed as modern civilization marching to a cadence seeking prosperity through enterprise, commerce and trade. Contemporary social design is a byproduct of early Mesopotamia referred to as “the cradle of civilization.” Social patterns evolved from this base developing geographically mixed cultures in a mutual quest for fiscal gain. Economics, trade and enterprise are world encompassing with striking disparity and exclusion.

Poverty is described in three distinct categories: “Absolute poverty” is the most desolate, without adequate food or shelter, barely surviving and often plagued with extreme hunger and death by starvation.

Education and medical services are compromised or non-existent.

“Relative poverty” is a condition gauged according to a threshold established by income demography. US poverty is categorized as relative poverty. Relative poverty is less apparent, homelessness being the most visual circumstance. In Los Angeles County on given nights in excess of 80,000 people are homeless.

“Asceticism” is voluntary poverty used as a method of seeking spiritual consciousness and a plane of life in opposition to the omnipresent ambition for affluence through economic status, material gain and accumulation. Practitioners of asceticism vow poverty as a means of teaching, revealing meaningful values beyond infusion of wealth and abundance as sources of enlightenment. nibmagazine.com | page 54

Kenya and sub Saharan Africa display vivid, widespread examples of extreme, absolute poverty. Sordid conditions exist in many third world countries; however, statistically the degree is most pronounced in sub Saharan Africa. The film documentary: The End of Poverty? Think Again is a compelling revelation exposing the level of horror these places have become. Children gleaning trash heaps for anything of the slightest value. The little work available is slave labor type jobs with finite wages, taxed heavily by corrupt governments preying on the world’s poorest of the poor. Many third world regions have abundant natural resources and industrialized countries have exploited these resources in order to produce manufactured consumer goods for global distribution and economic gain.

Large loans were pressed upon these impoverished countries under the guise of development projection, which has never manifested as industrialized countries continued to extract resources without implementation of self-sustaining commerce leaving a residue of extreme debt without ability to reduce the debt.

Corrupt governments claim the need for high taxation in order to pay the debt, which is not occurring thereby suffering, continues.

Countries achieving economic success and prosperity have melded manufacturing and consumption. This formula relies on an expanding rate of consumption. If consumption dwindles, economies dwindle. In present day America excessive consumption is ubiquitous. There is an urgent drive to expand manufacturing and consumption as a means of strengthening economic conditions. Questions appear regarding this social design. Is this balance or imbalance? The collective mentality is, “I have earned everything I own.” A more honest assessment would be, “I have been given opportunity to succeed.” Opportunity does not exist in sub Sahara.

On occasion I drift into Mac Donald’s to get my senior coffee and take advantage of the free Internet connection. The drive-up is where most business is transacted.

The location I visit has two drive up service windows with car lines extending into the main access road, while the inside dining area has only a few scattered customers, mostly retirees chatting about things as a manner of passing time. No poverty in sight here, as shiny new SUV’s line up for their morning food fix. My question is: “Why not park your car and walk inside? The wait time is less with a nibmagazine.com | page 55

shorter line at the service counter.” It’s a fascination and without logic. Soon we may become a totally lethargic culture, as our bodies dimensionally increase.

So, where are the answers? Will disparity continue and increase? Charitable food donations given to oppressed countries are pilfered and sold by corrupt, ruling powers.

Some would say this is a natural process as the Africans are incapable of competing. Africa was much slower to be influenced by the new civil design remaining a cohesive hunter-gatherer culture far longer than Europeans. When I see old photos of tribal Africa I see an extremely self-reliant race of people, harmonious and thriving for thousands of years in a harsh and challenging place.

These are very strong people, likely the strongest in the history of humanity. The tribal villages and housing of ancient Africa were far more inviting and comfortable than the hovels of tin and cardboard that modern civilization has bestowed upon them. No culture has been more exploited than the Africans. The English came first, seized their land, killed their game for sport, and brought an entirely new living design, forcing radical change upon them. Enslaved them, sold them, continuing exploitation today as natural resources are pillaged without reward, and the global glut feeds itself on commandeered wealth leaving a wake of unfathomable despair.

American’s bicker about leadership failings, line up for double cheeseburgers, and complain about a lacking of abundant jobs. Discuss the rise and fall of economic indicators, while the folks in Kenya are seeking their next meal, sifting through landfills, clinging to a thread of life as they wonder if they will see the next day.

Natural forces are the source of all earthly endeavors; capable of overpowering human created dysfunctions. Healing will likely be presented naturally, uninfluenced by the Dow Jones Average or the Gross National Product. Humanity has moved away from its organic roots seeking idolatry ritual within material wealth. Early tribal cultures embraced communal uniformity, housing was equal, and the act of sharing was important to security and longevity. Hunter-gatherers were directly connected to the earth; life was sustained by earth’s gifts creating harmony, which has been lost in the current living design. Globally we have fallen nibmagazine.com | page 56

into ethical contraction, expanding intolerance and the ever-presence of war, questioning direction and purpose. If we as a species are unable to alter inequities, solutions will self-generate. It would behoove the onslaught, self-feeding frenzy of acquisition to seek greater balance and sensitivity gearing energy toward apportionment and equality. As a species we have proven an ability to invent and install highly complex, technical devices it would seem equally possible to install basic comforts to those in dire need.

Compassion is not complex.

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Contributors Full details of each writer and contributor can be found on our website: www.nibmagazine.com

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