Philadelphia Stories Winter 2013

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free

FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

john dunham

TWO TRAILERS maxime d. mckenna

DOG PEOPLE nancy mendez-booth

SECURITY BREACH

W I N T E R

2 0 1 2 - 2 0 1 3

I S S U E

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

CONTENTS FEATURES 3 10 16 27 28

Two Trailers (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Dunham Dog People (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maxime D. McKenna Security Breach (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nancy Mendez-Booth McGlinn Ceremony Photos Atop the Camel’s Hump (essay) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Casey Otto

POETRY 6 12 20 25

At Night I Smoke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Dutch Godshalk Who’s the Boss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Margot Douaihy Under the El Tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Leonard Kress The Drunkest Three-Year-Old in the Room . . .Amanda Erin Stopa

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Winter Sun by Janice Hayes-Cha. Janice Hayes-Cha is an artist that works out of her studio in Elkins Park. She is a member of the Cheltenham Center for the Arts and MamaCita, a Mothers Cooperative in the Arts. She uses paint and recycled greeting cards in her mixed media pieces, and her work can be seen at: www.janicehayescha.com.

10 Philadelphia Skyline at Dusk

by Megan Grugan.

(See bio below)

14 Untitled (Shadows and Bones Series)

by Kim Mehler. Kimberly Mehler is a watercol-

or and mural artist who lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and three children. She is a Moore College of Art graduate who previously worked in graphic design. In 2012, she completed a mural for the SEPTA underpass in Glenside which was funded by a grant from the PA Cultural Alliance. This year, Kimberly, along with ten other artists from Mamacita, was commissioned to create art for the permanent collection of the new Einstein Medical Center in Montgomery County.

16 Moment by Dana Scott.

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/ Editorial Director Carla Spataro

Director of Development Sharon Sood

Publisher/ Executive Editor Christine Weiser

Production Manager Derek Carnegie

Fiction Editor Mitchell Sommers Assistant Fiction Editor Amy Luginbuhl Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick

Web Design Loic Duros Social Media Editors Michelle Wittle Board of Directors Kerri Schuster, secretary Mitchell Sommers Alison Hicks Christine Furtek Michael Ritter Editorial Board

Assistant Editor Diana Restifo 2

Art Editor Melissa Tevere

Andrea Applebee, poetry Peter Baroth, poetry Kate Braithwaite, fiction Deb Burnham, poetry Liz Chang, poetry Melinda Clemmer, fiction

Dana Scott is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is influenced by observation, discovery, and detail and inspired by simplicity, natural form and pattern and the beauty within. She currently teaches Design Foundations at Philadelphia University and lives with her husband and 2 sons in Elkins Park.

Sam Dodge, non-fiction Liz Dolan, poetry 18 Five by Cavin Jones. Cavin Jones is a muralBrian Ellis, fiction ist, a portrait painter and a fine artist. He lives and Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction works in Philadelphia. His work can be seen in both Melissa Foster, fiction private and public collections including the Print Kathleen Furin, fiction Collection of The Princeton Museum of Art. Erin Gautsche, poetry Elizabeth Green, fiction Pat Green, poetry Angel Hogan, poetry 22 Chicago Lights 3 by Michelle CiarloAimee LaBrie, fiction Hayes. Michelle is a photographer/digital artist Nathan Long, fiction from Philadelphia who uses a variety of techniques (traditional film, antique viewfinders, collage, and Chelsea Covington Maass, fiction painting) to create her art. Her whimsical designs can Walt Maguire, fiction be found on mkcphotography.com and in galleries George McDermott, poetry and boutiques across the country. She lives just outCheryl Grady Mercier, non-fiction side the city with her husband, two young boys, and two very Crystal Mills, fiction badly behaved dogs.

Deborah Off, non-fiction Aimee Penna, poetry Cover Art: Daniel Pontius, fiction Philadelphia Skyline at Dawn by Megan Tracey M. Romero, non-fiction Grugan. Megan Grugan graduated from Moore College of Barbara Solem, non-fiction Art and Design in 1990 with a BFA in painting. She lives in Bala Joe Tingle, fiction Cynwyd with her husband and four children and is the Clinical Lena Van, fiction Education Manager for a national health care company.

Michelle Wittle, fiction “Philadelphia Skyline at Dawn” and “at Dusk” are currently being Krystal Wright, non-fiction exhibited at the “Art Collides Gallery”. For purchase info: Hillary Umbreit, fiction 215.457.2185.

Philadelphia Stories, founded in 2004, is a non-profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs such as writer’s workshops, reading series and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!

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TWO TRAILERS wo weekends after Myra’s old neighbors vacated the trailer next to hers, this man and his bony brown Lab pulled in with all his furniture tied down in the bed of his pickup. His and Myra’s two trailers sat on either side of a broad driveway, fronting a small thicket of trees nested deep by hills of rolling corn. Myra introduced herself, and he shook her hand with a big grin and eyeballed her breasts.

“Very pleased to meet you,” he said.

His name was Booker.

A day after moving in, he tacked a confederate flag beside his front door, and after a week of waking early to his truck revving and revving, Myra gave up on sleeping as late as she used to. She slid from under her covers. When her feet touched the cold bathroom floor, she tucked her hands under her arms, sat on the tub’s rim, and squeaked the hot water faucet. She was accustomed to men looking at her the way Booker had; she was twenty-five and waitressed at Hildebrand’s, where Nancy, another server, had once told her, “Myra, you could land any man you wanted.”

But Myra had never wanted men, and since last year, when Tracy left, she hadn’t wanted many women either.

After breakfast the air hung blue and misty when she locked the trailer behind her. In Booker’s back yard, his Lab pined at her over its shoulder. In the past week she’d once seen Booker out there threatening his dog with a stick, charging, then hiding the stick behind his back and calling sweetly again. She smiled at the pooch and ducked into her Chevette.

She followed the line of telephone poles that ran with the road into town.

As a kid she had often seen her father working the tops of poles like these.

Standing way up there in the unfolded arm of his cherry picker, he’d salute her

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Winter Sun by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2012 in his hard hat as she walked to school.

Now she drove this route five days a week, past barns and silos and the treecovered mountains she never tired of looking at. She pictured herself as an old woman, still living in this valley in the middle of Pennsylvania. She climbed the mountains often, whether alone or with

a girlfriend, and had found the hidden cliffs, ridges, and pockets, secrets between her and the landscape. The view of it had been what sold her on the trailer, besides her limited means.

When she moved in four years ago, the Levis, a retired couple, invited her to dinner in the other trailer. During the

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summer she helped with their yard work and sat outside with them, their two trailers quiet. They’d been good neighbors.

As she neared downtown, the scenery turned to brick row houses, sidewalks, and stoplights. She parked behind Hildebrand’s and walked in under the second story porch in the back. The hot kitchen smelled like hash and coffee.

“Happy Tuesday,” said Norma, the owner, as Myra tied on an apron. Norma had freckles and a hint of crow’s feet, and a red braid that swung between her shoulder blades when she walked. “That neighbor still waking you up early?”

“He says he revs the truck to warm it now that it’s getting chilly,” Myra said.

She breathed in the steam and warmth from the stove, and watched Norma crouch in front of the counter until she was eye-level with a dish, adjusting the garnishes until it looked just so.

“Baloney,” Norma said. “He likes to hear that engine roar.”

Myra checked her apron pockets for her pen and pad. Though she mostly waited tables, Norma talked to her over many lunches about refining recipes and developing new ones, and Myra helped cook sometimes now, too. Not long after meeting Norma, her enthusiasm catching and charming, Myra brought garlic and olive oil home to her trailer and tried things she’d never made before. She moved on from the canned soups and boxed macaroni she’d habitually made for dinner, staples from when she lived alone with her father, growing up.

Myra pushed open the wobbly door from the kitchen and went out, serving her breakfast patrons a wide and trusting smile. They were all regulars, happy to be up, people she would see and say hi to when she went shopping. Dr. Kingsboro started his practice at eight sharp, and Gracie Stoltzfus opened the thrift across the street at eight-thirty. Myra laughed and traded news of the valley while bringing them their sausage and orange juice, and the morning was over before she bothered to look at her watch.

At lunch, tables and booths grew crowded. Guests barked over each other and forks clinked on plates. Myra sweated as she bustled with meals from the steaming kitchen and cleared piles of napkins and morsels left behind. Her neighbor walked in today, wearing coveralls, thumbs hooked in his pockets. He sat in a booth and looked around at the vintage advertisements and postcards on the walls. When Myra went to him, he grinned.

“I’ll have a black coffee.” The skin on either side of his moustache crinkled.

“And Myra’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks. My mother thought of it.”

She gave him the imitation smile she gave all the men who looked long at her nametag. “I’ll have your coffee right out.”

Mentioning her mother to him felt bitter, like the dregs he’d leave in his mug. Her mother had been dead since Myra was six, her father now single and full of stories. She put the coffee down in front of Booker.

He ordered a burger, too, and took his time eating. When he finished, Myra found the tip wedged under his plate.

She stood there and held the folded five in her hand. Fifty percent.

That night she stood at the counter dicing potatoes, when she heard a knock at the door. She cracked it open partway, the chain still in place, and held the paring knife in her apron pocket. “Can I help you?”

“Howdy.” Booker had put a denim jacket on over his coveralls. His Lab sat on a leash beside him. “Thinking about taking my grill out this weekend, having a few beers. I thought since you’re alone out here you might want to come over awhile.”

She gave him the same waitress smile from before. “I can’t. I’m visiting my father this weekend.” That was a lie. She looked down. “Handsome dog you have.”

“Thanks. I keep her trained pretty good.” He ruffled the dog’s neck. It blinked at him, licked its lips. Myra still

stood behind the chain. Booker said, “Feel free to stop over. There’ll be plenty of food on Saturday.” He turned and crunched across the gravel, unleashed his dog into his back yard.

Myra closed the door and slid the deadbolt into place. Leaving town for a day or two didn’t sound bad. If she called her father and asked if he’d like her over, of course he’d say yes.

Two days later in Hildebrand’s, after helping a pair of wrinkled women in hats, she turned and almost smacked into Booker’s chest. She had to look up at him, that grin growing repellent the closer it got. “Hi,” she said. “Just pick whichever seat you like. Nancy will be over to take your order in a second, okay?” She carried her load of dishes to the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind her. She stayed out of sight of the little window and waited for him to sit down or leave.

Norma looked over her shoulder from cooking. “You all right?”

Myra smiled her waitress smile.

“Catching my breath a second,” she said.

Booker left without ordering.

After work she drove home as the sun set behind the mountains. The slope of them on either side rose gentle but firm, cradling the valley. Their green turned to warm gold in the light. Soon she walked behind her trailer, through the thicket to the edge of the corn. The stalks were brown and would be harvested soon, but for now they stood shielding and tall. On summer days she would get lost in them, the green leaves brushing her arms until she found a hollow and shade to sit in.

She held herself in the wind and watched the shadows creep up the hill.

The last tip of sun sank out of sight, and she was cold. She went inside and called her father, said she’d drive up on Saturday for lunch. He said her old room was always ready.

On Friday, after stopping at the supermarket, Myra saw Booker in his yard in a lawn chair, Bud in hand, wearing a white tank top and baseball cap. He

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j o h n faced her trailer like he was lounging at the beach, waiting for a wave to roll in.

“Afternoon,” he called, raising his beer can.

“Hello,” Myra said. She carried two paper bags of groceries, and felt him watching her backside as she turned and climbed the steps. Inside, she put the chicken in the freezer so it wouldn’t spoil on the road tomorrow. She made dinner standing by the sink, and kept glancing out the window above it to see if Booker had gone. After eating, she packed clothes into a shoulder bag. Booker finally went inside when it got dark, and his windows glowed.

She shut the curtains and sat in the easy chair her father gave her when she moved into the trailer. The cushion had a hollow in it six inches deep now, and the snugness made her think of when she’d still been with Tracy. Of the comfort in a woman holding her, of curling against a smooth back before sleep. On the weekends, they had sat at a patio table in Myra’s back yard, thicket on three sides, trailer along the fourth. It gave her the safety she’d felt in the clearings in the woods and on the slopes where she’d taken girls in community college. Back then she still lived with her father, and none of those girlfriends ever saw her house. Once, her father twisted his face at two women holding hands on the street, and she’d never forgotten it.

After two years full of brief relationships, she finished her Associate’s in History and decided she needed space. With what she made in tips, the trailer was all she could afford.

Myra’s father waited on the porch where they’d read and talked and on warm nights listened to frogs and crickets when she was a girl. As always his gut stuck out, and she’d forgotten how gray his hair had gone. A grin cracked his face, and the boards creaked as he treaded down the stairs to meet her. He gave Myra a bear hug as she stepped from the

Chevette. It was good to be in his arms.

When he let go, he left his big hands cupping her shoulders.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

She walked to the house with him.

“Want to see what I’ve been cooking?”

Her father sat at the table while she put together a chicken sandwich with sautéed mushrooms and peppers. He told her about preparing to retire from the phone company after thirty-three years.

It was hard for her to picture him without his gloves and tools, the driveway next to the house empty of his cherry picker. She asked him what he would do.

“Bill next door’s getting a group together to fix old hiking trails,” he said.

“It might take all next year. They say being outdoors helps you live longer, and now’s no time to stop.”

Myra tried never to spend a day all indoors either. She had hiked with her father a lot, and he’d even taken her

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shooting once or twice. “You should tell me when you start,” she said. “I could go along.”

“You bet.” He watched her cook, got quiet, and looked at his lap. “I was also thinking I’d get more involved at church. I always felt it’d be right to give a bit more.”

She thought of the chair back at her place, the silverware set, and other furnishings he’d bought for her when she paid for the trailer. For most of her childhood she’d gone with him to the Baptist church three blocks down, though when high school and weekend homework rolled around, she stayed home. On the Sundays when she was free, she slept late. Readings like Paul’s letter to the Romans talked about women lusting for women, and she felt like whoever read them looked straight at her, small in the pew, even though she hadn’t told anyone she liked girls. On the way out of worship it unnerved her to shake the pastor’s

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hand and see him smile back when maybe he wouldn’t if he knew the truth.

“How about you? Anything new and exciting?” her father asked.

She put the finished sandwich in front of him, open-faced with the bread toasted and every layer visible, a pickle wedge by the side. “Still talking to Norma. She’s sharing tips and tricks.”

Her father started eating, and she sat down with half a sandwich herself. He frowned and nodded at the taste as he chewed. “You thinking about doing something with this?”

“There isn’t a culinary school around.”

“You could make more as a chef than

a waitress.”

“I know.”

He took a pause and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “And no one’s holding you back?”

She looked at her food, then picked it up and bit in. Her father had met Tracy once or twice when they’d been together, had seen the picture of her next to Myra’s bed, framed, the picture that was gone now. He must have figured out she loved Tracy, though she never told him the whole story. How New Hampshire was where Tracy always wanted to be.

When they first met at the one local gay club, she’d told Myra over a beer that she was saving money to go north, leave

At Night I Smoke

By Dutch Godshalk At night I stand in the street and smoke among rows of dormant cars, and all dark save for sporadic twitching television hues in third floor windows like the last heavy winks of eyelids fighting sleep. When rain leaves dry spheres under uncut trees, when the doors dead-bolted and the street lamps wane a bit and the neighbors upstairs stop pushing furniture around, I stand in the street and spread my arms wide and smoke facing the line of sky where a far off forest’s edge cuts into the horizon and red lit radio towers pulse like postured strings of Christmas bulbs and the stars all strain and shoulder each other to be seen.

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In the night as breath and smoke converge and rise I stand centered amid arrested life and say nothing, dreaming of sleep.

Dutch Godshalk is a poet and playwright living outside of Philadelphia. He holds a BA in English Literature from Arcadia University and currently works as a freelance content writer. In recent years, Dutch has worked as a volunteer for the Philadelphia Writer's Conference. His poetry has previously appeared in Apiary Magazine.

Pennsylvania behind. And if people here ever closed in on her, she’d be gone, money or not. Body toned taut and carried in combat boots, Tracy needed to be visible.

Myra looked up at her father eating his chicken. She’d never had a heart to heart with him about loving women, and supposed she might never do so. She had accepted that between them there would long lie certain silences.

The next day Myra smelled bacon and buttered toast when she sat up in bed. The sun broke through the curtains.

Her father had been to church and back by now, and she pictured him closing the front door as he left, gently so as not to wake her. When they’d lived together she was always excited for her father’s cooking on Sundays, the one day of the week he took his time and made the food his own. Afterward they used to walk to the river.

He never spoke to her the way the pastor preached, as if she’d wasted her chance at heaven. Myra doubted her father could imagine that for her. She’d wavered for a while about believing in heaven, but there’d been times, when she sat outdoors alone or with a girlfriend, that had forced her to reconsider. Once she’d sat with Tracy in a pair of folding chairs in her yard, and next to a table torch they talked long into the night, moving inside only when they realized how late it got. Hours when she was happy enough to forget her yard was a hiding place, hours when she was simply Myra.

After dressing, she headed downstairs and in the kitchen found her father reading the Sunday edition. He smiled big when he saw her and folded the newspaper up. “Let me get you something,” he said. She sat at the table. He brought her a plate of breakfast just as always. She ate, looked at his eyes, shared the silence with him. “Can we go for a walk?” she finally said.

They finished eating and put on jack-

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j o h n ets and followed the sidewalk to the river bank. She told him about her neighbor. His lonely dog, his noisy truck.

“He seem nice?” her father asked. He watched her as they walked, and she wondered how much to tell him.

“Everything okay?”

“He’s just not like the Levis is all.”

“You give me a call if he bothers you.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, close to her neck. “I mean it. You don’t have to be by yourself all the time.” She looked up at him and touched his cheek with the back of her hand and smiled. She didn’t tell him how alone she often felt.

That afternoon, she put her travel bag in the back seat of her Chevette.

Her father stood next to her. She shut the rear door and turned to him. Gave him one more hug.

“Take care of yourself, Myra.”

“You too.” She let go and got into the car, and they shared a wave.

Making to turn off the road in front of her trailer, she saw a red compact sitting where she usually parked the Chevette. She left her car on the shoulder. Brown bottles lay strewn about in Booker’s yard, and a black barbeque stood next to some plastic chairs and a cooler. She opened her door and Booker’s back gate squeaked. Over her shoulder she saw a short blonde with a mop of bobbing curls, cigarette pack in her hand. The woman walked sideways between the vehicles and got into the compact.

Good, Myra thought. She closed the door behind her and put her bag in the bedroom. She heard Booker’s gate whine again and touched the curtains open a sliver. Booker was out in his yard in just cutoff jeans, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His pale belly hung over his belt as he bent over and plucked the bottles one by one from the grass.

He dropped them clattering into his

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trash can and banged down the lid. The Lab bounded out of its doghouse, but he swung his hand at it and said, “Back.” He went in, leaving the dog in the yard.

Myra put some veggies on to steam, and sat in her easy chair holding her arms, watching the news while she waited. When Tracy had stayed over, Myra felt the peace of waking to hear someone in the shower, the security in knowing the trailer wasn’t empty. She’d had that as a girl sharing the house with her father. Though right after her mother died, Myra would find him sitting alone in dark rooms, sometimes with his head in his hands, and he would squeeze her tight. She wondered if he still got that lonely, and tucked her legs under her in the chair, curling close.

That Friday, after work, Myra put on heels, a halter, and earrings. She let her hair down. She hadn’t been out to the bar in months, and hadn’t dated at all in

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the year since the night Tracy came home bruised and almost in tears, talking only of leaving town the next day. Myra held her until she fell asleep, and then sat outside in the moonlight. She had put down roots here, and Tracy hadn’t.

The sky got dark early, the night clear as Myra’s car passed through acres of farms, the stars so close like she was out in the middle of them. She opened the window a little and let the cold whip in. Driving in the middle of nowhere could some days feel like freedom.

Nothing but land and trees and dark houses where no one would ever know her name.

She crested the next hill, and there stood the sign. Purple and blue neon, a lone building at the intersection, the traffic light yellow and blinking. Inside the club only the bar was lit. There were tables, dancing poles, and a jukebox.

Myra slid onto a stool, and ordered a beer from a spiky-haired man in mascara and hoop earrings. She looked around.

Lots of couples tonight, mostly men, and some older pairs of women in sweatshirts. A woman closer to Myra’s age with an afro and high-heeled boots massaged a pole with her hips while a girl in a leather jacket waited her turn. Men sat around the tables, some young enough to be teenagers, some older than her father.

The barman handed Myra her beer, and she took a cold swallow. She noticed a trim blonde wearing thick glasses, sitting alone with a red laptop. Brown leather boots poked from under her long skirt. Myra watched her, then walked to her table, carrying the beer.

“Like some company?”

She looked Myra up and down. “I’d love it.”

Myra sat and introduced herself. The woman said, “My name’s Carolyn.”

“You writing something?”

“Senior presentation. I’m at Shippensburg.” She stopped herself and smiled. Shut her laptop. “Get this. You

hear about that homophobe governor who came out?”

“Which one?”

“Exactly.”

They laughed. Talked politics awhile and then went to a cozy corner. It brought Myra back to the days she first found the bar after moving out of her father’s house. More than once she’d wound up outside in a woman’s back seat. After she met Tracy, the swing life lost its appeal. But she’d always been attracted to intelligence, and the thought of this pretty woman giving a talk on some academic topic or other was alluring. She was on the verge of making an offer; it had been so long since she’d been with anyone.

They shared a lingering moment.

“What are you thinking?” Carolyn said.

Myra glanced at their empty glasses.

“Trying not to.”

“Interested in going outside?”

She smiled. “I live nearby.” They got up.

Carolyn followed Myra’s Chevette in her Civic. On the drive home, Myra felt five years younger, at college and taking a girl to the woods. By the trailers, Carolyn left her Civic parked on the roadside. Faded stickers covered the back bumper, like “if you didn’t vote, don’t complain” and “gay marriage won’t affect your straight divorce.”

As the women walked down the driveway, Carolyn stopped. “Damn.”

She was looking at Booker’s confederate flag.

Myra grimaced. “Sorry, I should have warned you.”

They went inside and sat with each other in the bedroom and kissed, a long one Myra held. They lay down and touched each other’s hips, and Myra let the moment carry her where it chose.

Their legs laced together, and she imagined the hills and mountains outside rolling hers and Carolyn’s bodies into one anther.

Half past midnight they put on clothes, smiling when they glanced up and reaching to fix each other’s hair.

They traded numbers. Myra went with Carolyn to the door, took her hand and in gratitude kissed her again, watched her walk to the shoulder. When Myra went back to bed she held a pillow to her chest, the blankets warm as she waited for sleep.

Monday morning, the first frost of the year tingled white in the sun and mist. The squeak of Myra’s screen door echoed off the trees. The air stung her nose, sunlit clouds of her breath rising, the gravel slippery. Usually Booker’s truck was gone by this time of day, and Myra stared at it. She’d heard the echo of a gunshot while eating breakfast and now made the connection.

A bark behind Myra made her jolt.

She turned expecting the dog to be on her heels, but it stood behind Booker’s fence, eyeing her through the slats. She hesitated, then started back up the driveway toward it. It watched her and wagged its tail, tags jingling. Myra stood at the fence, its rim to her waist. The dog whined. She reached down and ruffled the stiff fur on its neck, cold and wet from sleeping outdoors. A silver water bowl sat empty in a corner. She wished she could help the animal get warm, though she’d be late if she didn’t leave now.

“Finally decide to come over, then?”

Myra spun and saw Booker standing in front of the thicket, a shotgun crooked under one arm, a lot like the gun her father taught her to use. Booker’s other hand held a brown rabbit hanging by the feet, a neon cap above his eyes blazing orange in the sun.

“She looked cold,” Myra said. “I was seeing if I could help.”

He walked up to her. “Why don’t you run along?”

He stood there until she moved away from his yard, watched her step back to her half of the driveway. Before going to

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j o h n his door, he spit once on the ground. He left the water bowl empty. Myra got into her Chevette, cleared the windshield frost with her wipers, and drove.

The frozen ground was steaming.

The wood of the telephone poles looked like masts of old ships rising out of the fog, the sun glowing yellow as the wires rose and fell outside her window.

She got to work late. Norma was waiting on customers but said nothing about it, so Myra walked past her and took orders. Four years now she’d worked for Norma, but she was young. The arc of her life was still climbing, and maybe one day Norma would help her open a place of her own. Back when Tracy had left, Myra had told herself she ought to sell her trailer and leave Hildebrand’s behind, but in the end she never called the newspaper up to place an ad in the classifieds, and never wrote the “home for sale” sign to put inside her window. The valley hadn’t loosened its hold.

With her mail the next day, Myra found a sheet of paper, handwritten in blue. It said DYKE. She imagined Booker peering from inside his window now that it was cold, as she and Carolyn walked up to her trailer. Maybe he’d wandered out for a smoke, read Carolyn’s bumper stickers. Smiled to himself as he finally got it.

Outside, Booker’s driveway sat empty. The confederate flag’s corner curled up in the wind, faded red and coming unstrung. She wrinkled the paper in her hand and considered calling her father. Somehow she could see Booker facing him down, demanding evidence of guilt, thinking up more potshots for when her father left.

Still holding the sheet, Myra opened the door and stepped down. It clapped behind her, and she walked around her trailer to the trees, meaning to throw the paper away. It felt like a dead animal in her hand. She blocked branches from her face with an arm until she stood

where the corn used to be. Prickles of sharp tan broken stalk ran downhill, splinters shifting in the breeze. The harvest had skinned the landscape. Myra could see clear to the bottom of the rise, where the field crept into the darkness cast by the mountains.

Tracy and Carolyn had refused to hide.

She walked back to Booker’s trailer, climbed the stairs, and rapped on his door. It stayed shut. The peeling doghouse stood vacant in his yard. After a minute she stepped to the gravel and

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looked out at the street, hoping he’d pull in right then so she could hold the note at his face, ask him if she should wear it as a nametag. Or tack it above her door.

She kept the crumpled paper and sat on her steps waiting, watching the shadows of their trailers lengthen in the sun.

James Dunham’s fiction has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Glossolalia, and Plain China. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University.

He acknowledges the contributions of many a friend and mentor throughout the writing of “Two Trailers.”

Marguerite McGlinn Short Story Contest Submissions open Jan 1 — June 1

Prize: $2,000 Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for details.

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DOG PEOPLE ecause I no longer have a yard, at least not a yard that suits me (not like the one we had back in Wyndmoor), and because I am not the type, yard or no yard, to stay cooped up indoors—not on an evening where the summer heat has mellowed and the sun is orangeing—because of these things, I’ve been sitting out on the stoop these days, making it the place where I can undo my belt, slouch, and let my belly unfurl onto my knees. Where I can drink Bacardi and Diet Coke from the tiki glass that Lana abhors. Where I can stare down the cars creeping past, looking for precious street-parking while my station wagon sits in the middle of two perfectly good spots.

At this time of day, little things happen all on their own: dirty rain water drips through a sagging awning, and the breeze scatters glass, wrappers, and other detritus to reveal skeletal forms in the filth. And the stray cat, the longest, thinnest cat I’ve ever seen, comes out from under my station wagon to rub shyly against my back before I let it climb into my lap.

“Hey you,” I say to the cat, rubbing my hand across it. “Hey cat. Hey puss.

Hey kitty.”

The cat isn’t all that grimy for a stray.

I’m not sure what to call it: it has that quality between an it and a she.

“Are you a Catrina or a Catherine?” I ask it. “Or do you prefer to be called Mrs. Cat? Or even maybe Dr. Cat?” The cat meows. I like to imagine she was once gainfully employed in the cat world, as a college professor or a medical doctor. When she fell on hard times, she became depressed, and rightfully so.

Given how introverted a cat is to begin with, she must have been real unpleasant, so her family put her out on the street. But she’s ready to turn a new leaf,

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Philadelphia Skyline at Dusk by Megan Grugan © 2012 so I give her the respect she needs to get back on her feet. I tell her about what I’m reading. We converse. After all, isn’t this why people keep cats in the first place?

“Tough times, huh? You want a snack?” I ask. “Wait here.”

Inside, Lana is preparing dinner.

There aren’t enough hallways, not enough alternate routes in this townhouse; to get to the kitchen, I have to walk through the living room where the

three dogs lounge like a plague. Why even have a sofa? Why not just spread some hay in front of the television and let whoever wants lay in it?

I rattle the ice remaining in my cup until Charlie, the pit bull, shoots his head up and begins to whimper.

“Is that you, King of The Street?”

Lana calls. “How does everything look out there?”

I answer her question with one of my

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d o g own. It’s not that I don’t hear her. That’s just how we talk nowadays.

“What’s cooking, Lan?” “Don’t you want to guess?

“Steak?”

“Quinoa salad and baked fish,” she replies.

“Aha.” I step into the kitchen, grab her bony hips, and watch her denude a ratty carrot over the compost bin. Then I go into the fridge and reach into the back corner for a slice of turkey.

“You’re not feeding that cat, are you?” she asks.

“Nope,” I say, putting the lunchmeat in my pocket and filling my glass with ice.

“Good. I don’t want it to think it can come inside. We’re dog people, now.”

Lana likes to say that. But we aren’t dog people by nature, and had never been when we lived in Wyndmoor.

Dogs have conquered our new house,

bit by bit. It all started when Lana adopted Charlie as a young pit bull from the animal shelter, where they’d told her that Charlie was the sweetest, most friendly dog, but good for protection too. And for the most part he was. But the day he was brought home, Charlie killed our cat, Bootsy, just killed her like there was nothing to it. He bee-lined for her, grabbed her in his jaws, and shook the life out of her like a plush toy. I had to wrestle Charlie to the ground, which got Charlie even more excited, and he started to lick my face with his bloody tongue.

“On second thought, there’s no point in us losing two pets,” Lana had said, after I had loaded Charlie into the trunk of the station wagon. The animal was circling around back there like an excited particle, pausing once in a while to look at us, his tail whacking alternately between seatback and windowpane.

Not only did I blame Charlie for killing

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Bootsy, but somehow I blamed him for the fact that Lana, visibly, was not nearly as upset as I was. I started to hate Charlie that very day.

Charlie was soon followed by Megan the Weimaraner (a yuppie dog, grey, athletic, vacant—in other words, a yuppie herself) and George St. George, a shih tzu that I was allowed to name. I named him that way because he walked into the house the first day and stared down the bigger dogs into submission.

George St. George is the one I dislike the least.

After dinner, we go for a walk. It’s dark now, and the breeze is refreshing.

Lana walks all three dogs at once, pulled along like a warrior on a chariot, driving through the night. She gets ahead of me instantly, so I sneak a glance under the station wagon. A pair of marbly eyes tells me that the cat is there.

“More turkey when I get back,” I reassure it.

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Lana pauses now and again to let one of the dogs shit. It’s a shameless show that they take turns performing while Lana and the other two dogs watch on.

Once the dog has finished, everybody is reanimated, and while Lana stoops to clean up, the dogs gambol about as if nothing has happened.

“Good doggie,” Lana says.

I lag behind on purpose, because I don’t want to get caught up in these chores of being a dog person. The upkeep of my own life is hard enough.

Lana is good at it though—taking care of

things, that is. We moved into the city because she wanted to be closer to the yoga studio, the farmers, market, and the animal shelter, and because she was tired of taking care of our big old house. She wanted something cozier, cuter; wanted to be more active in a community. She said being active might do me some good, too. But the only thing I was ever good at taking care of was the yard.

Thinking about our old house, I get uneasy. My buzz is wearing off and my belly starts to feel hollow. I look around and see the cat slinking ten paces behind

Who’s the Boss?

By Margot Douaihy All journeys start by leaving, that’s what Tony must have said to Sam, packing the van, closing the door, the way epics begin.

Don’t look back. In stations of the cross, you move on.

It’s time to go, he smiles, pulls the key from his ripped jeans, muscle line in his arms, like a sea wall meeting sand on a Brooklyn beach too polluted to swim. There’s an open road and a road that’s hidden, brand new life around the bend. A theme song’s being sung, just for them.

He’s not sure who sings it, but he knows a thing or two: boxing, cooking, secret blend of wind and lip to make a whistle. He’ll teach Samantha to dance—steps only the old folks know. She’ll need to learn how to speak Connecticut, make friends, shake off headaches after crying. He’ll vacuum curtains upright, iron a sandwich for uptight Angeler. Strange how it makes him feel like a man. Isn’t every departure a return to who we want to be? He’d never admit he is scared, he might not even know what to call it.

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All that matters: they’re together, going somewhere in their beat-up van, hands taking flight out the windows, future as go as the green light ahead.

Margot Douaihy has taught at Marywood University in Scranton, PA, and received her Masters from the University of London, Goldsmiths. Her chapbook “I Would Ruby If I Could” is forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press.

me (you see, if dogs gambol, cats slink). I want to tell it to shoo, but I like the idea of this unlikely parade making its way to the park. Besides, I know that it won’t follow us around the corner.

We cross through the park. Up ahead, Charlie and Megan are barking at a Rottweiler that belongs to some vagrant kids who smoke cigarette butts off the ground. George St. George starts to bark at the whole lot of them and Lana has to drag them away. I take this moment to turn around and see if the cat is still there, but it’s not.

“That’s right, fuck off, lady,” one of the kids says.

When I get up to where they are, the same kid asks, “Hey man, spare some change?”

I reach into my wallet and pull out a five-dollar bill.

“Sorry,” I say. I don’t know why.

The next morning, while Lana is out at yoga, I make a pot of coffee and go out onto the stoop. But the cat is nowhere in sight. So I go back inside, lift George St. George from the couch, and leash him up, relishing the look of disappointment on Charlie’s face.

“I’ll outlive you,” I promise him.

“You too,” I say to Megan, who’s done nothing other than to watch dumbly with a plush toy in her mouth. It’s her failure to understand me that I can’t stand. In Charlie, it’s the opposite.

I walk George St. George to the park, where we throw the ball around. This is my attempt at being active. The other morning dog walkers are there and another shih tzu runs up to George St. George.

They start to sniff each other.

“How old is he?” its owner asks me. “Is it a he or a she?”

“A he,” I say. “And I don’t know at all how old he is. I have no idea.”

She smiles behind her oversized sunglasses. She’s in her twen-

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m a x i m e ties and very fit, yoga-fit, but not yet all ropey like Lana.

“They seem to be getting along,” she remarks.

“Us or the dogs?”

She titters (women titter), and walks over to fetch her dog. Her pants cleave her ass like the cleft on a large peach, and while I know that I should find this arousing, I don’t. Through my pocket, I check to make sure my testicles are intact.

Suddenly a big boxer comes running across the lawn and starts bouncing around the shih tzus in a circle, barking.

The shih tzus start barking back and backing up a little bit. I see the owner of the other shih tzu swoop in to break it all up, and at the same time I see myself standing by doing nothing, George St. George’s leash dangling in my fist like a lasso. What kind of dog-person am I? I wonder. Do I rescue my dog or let him fend for himself? Isn’t part of owning a

dog having something that can fight and kill and die on your behalf? I decide then that I’m really a cat person—that what dogs do is none of my business.

The young woman shoots a stern smile at the boxer owner, and one at me, too. She picks her shih tzu up and cradles it. I try to apologize with my eyes, whatever that looks like. Then I walk over to George St. George and put his leash back on.

We stop off at the grocery store so I can pick up some breakfast, and I tie George St. George up as loosely as I can.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I dare him.

When I come out balancing milk and eggs and bread in my arms (Lana’s on an eco-friendly kick, so I’m afraid to come back with a plastic bag), I see that George St. George’s leash has come undone, though he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Why didn’t you run for it, son?” I say. “That ingrate Charlie would run. He

d .

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would run and never look back.”

There’s no point in taking the leash – George St. George leads the way back to the house and I follow ten paces behind. Back home, Lana’s just come out of the shower, and when she sees me with all the groceries, she says: “How come you didn’t bring a tote?

It would have simplified your life.”

“Sometimes I forget to do the things that simplify my life,” I say, and head for the sputtering old shower, to let it lurch invectives of host rust-tinged water on me.

That night, after Lana and the dogs have gone to bed, I lure the cat inside with lunchmeat. We go into the living room where I’ve set up a little spot for it under the bookcase with Bootsy’s old food bowl and litter box. The dogs are all upstairs—sometimes they take my place in bed and I don’t even bother to kick them out.

I sit down on the couch and watch

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Untitled (Shadows and Bones Series) by Kim Mehler © 2012

14

the cat eating as if this food and being in this house were the most unremarkable thing, as if it were expected, even.

I’m reminded of Bootsy, and the way she stalked about the old house in Wyndmoor with nonchalance.

Indifferent to the infestation we had, Bootsy used to stare blankly as we chased mice and roaches ourselves. It wasn’t for a lack of eyesight, because she would chase a ball or well-aimed point of light. I once went so far as to capture a mouse and dangle it live and wriggling in front of Bootsy’s face, only to prompt a

lazy bath.

“Ok, kitty,” I say, kicking off my shoes and laying down now on the couch. “Time for bed.”

I tap my belly, inviting the cat to come sit on me. But it just looks at me from across the room. I close my eyes and try to sleep. Ten minutes go by. Still the cat has not come to sleep with me.

When I open my eyes, I’ve lost it.

I get up and walk the perimeter of the living room, and suddenly there it is in the corner, watching. I’m getting frustrated now and hot at the same time, and

I’m remembering a Poe story or two where the narrator is spooked again and again by the indifferent gaze of his cat.

They can scare the hell out of you when they want to. And once they’ve done it, you can’t help but think that, even when they’re friendly, there’s something removed and awful about them. Maybe that’s what Lana was glad to be rid of the day Charlie mauled Bootsy. Maybe that’s what she was glad to be rid of when she sold the big old lonely house in Wyndmoor. That indifference. Maybe I should have been glad to be rid of it, too.

I sit back on the couch and silently will the cat to come over; maybe I even murmur a prayer. And finally it does, but only to the edge—it doesn’t jump up. I desperately want to take off my shirt and pants and sleep now, with or without the cat, but I don’t dare undress as long as it is in the house, watching.

I wake up the next morning, fully dressed. The cat has gone; I don’t know where. I spend the day out on the stoop and it doesn’t show up, not once.

Evening comes and Lana charges out of the house with the herd and I watch them disappear down the street to go perform their shitting and playing spectacles in a more public place. The cars still creep by and the ice melting in my tiki glass gives off a pop. And I think, somebody is making these nice things for me. Somebody is composing this world in a way that it hasn’t been all year, for my enjoyment and my enjoyment alone.

Max McKenna’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apiary, Cartographer: A Literary Review, and First Stop Fiction, and he has contributed essays to The Millions, Full Stop, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Filament, among others. He works at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia.

PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:55 PM Page 15

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PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:55 PM Page 16

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m e n d e z - b o o t h

SECURITY BREACH don’t know where Teaneck is, but John drives me here twice a week.

Doctor Berger’s house is on the residential side of a park, opposite the stretch of strip malls with glatt kosher delis. It’s cold today, even for March in New Jersey. Doctor Berger places the space heater close to the couch and pointed toward me in her basement office.

I can talk to Dr. Berger. The crisis counselor at the hospital made me nervous. Her name was Claudia, and she was on call that Friday morning. She was sent to my room, the one closest to the secured doors of the maternity ward.

She looked fresh out of school and scared to sit by my bed. She tapped her pad with her pen instead of taking notes.

i

New babies cried further down the hall, but Claudia never shut the door to my room.

Claudia didn’t know what to say. She hesitated even when asking easy things like my name. She never said the words stillbirth or baby, but we both knew that’s why we were there. I had arrived at the hospital in labor, and waddled into the emergency room like I was about to claim a lottery prize. Instead, I got Claudia in my room. My baby Liam died before I delivered him.

“The way she looked at me, like I was a monster,” I tell Dr. Berger again. “She didn’t want to be in the room with the woman whose baby was in the morgue.”

“Did she ever say anything to indicate that?”

16

Moment by Dana Scott © 2012

“She didn’t have to. I saw it. I didn’t want to be there either.”

I couldn’t tell Claudia about the Rubik's Cube. Today is my fourth session with Dr. Berger, but I told her about it at our first meeting. I watched her record my words. Doctor Berger is a professional and can do something with my words.

She doesn’t take notes as I tell her again today.

“My cousin gave me a Rubik's Cube when I was twelve years old because it was a good gift for smart kids.” I look at Dr. Berger. She nods at me to continue.

“I was smart but couldn’t solve the cube. I’d get the red, white and green sides, but the blue, orange and red would be mixed up, and I couldn’t solve those without messing up the sides that were already solid. There was this book called “Conquer the Cube in 45 Seconds”, and the guy who wrote it held the record for solving it in 20 seconds. He said anyone could learn to solve the cube in under five minutes. I believed it. I followed the diagrams, step-by-step, but I couldn’t get it. I spent that whole year turning a cube and feeling stupid.”

“Your expectations of yourself at that age seem unforgiving.”

Doctor Berger has pointed this out in past sessions. I look at the framed diploma on the wall behind her, still askew. It’s embarrassing to retell how I took the cube apart and reassembled it so it was solid on all sides. It remained solved and untouched on a bookshelf until I tossed it out during a summer visit home from college.

“Did you feel satisfied when you looked at the solved cube?”

“Yes, but that’s not how I feel today.”

“Go on.”

“I feel the same as when I was in the hospital. There’s something wrong with my mind. It’s scrambled, the core is off

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track like it got pounded by a brick.

There’s cubelets missing. The ones that are still attached don’t turn smoothly.

No, they just don’t turn at all. Here, right here.” I tap above my eyebrows with the fingertips of both hands. “My head. It feels like that, like someone kicked me right here.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “Right here.

It’s broken.”

“This is not unusual,” Dr. Berger reassures.

I ask her again if I’m losing my mind.

John brings me tea in bed many mornings, and I think how nice he is but don’t recognize him as my husband. I don’t leave home alone. I forget where I am. It’s like I suddenly wake up, but I wasn’t sleeping.

I look at my cuticles, picked and gnawed raw. Doctor Berger hands me “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” She asks me to look at the bold letters on page 463 again: 309.81, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“You’re reacting to cues that remind you of the event or something that creates anxiety. At those moments, yes, you do lose touch with reality. Visualize the happy place in your mind. You can stay there until you feel safe.”

She forgets I’ve asked her to call it a safe space. Happy place sounds like a drug-induced fantasy where trees turn to lollipops. It makes me feel defeated and pathetic. She asks how I feel about my trip to Puerto Rico. I’m leaving in the morning to spend ten days with my family. I’m afraid to interrupt my treatment, but I can’t stay in New Jersey.

“Can I call you, please, if it’s necessary?” I ask.

“Of course. Remember what we’ve been working on: recognize the signals.

Breathe before you react. Think of the happy place. You’re safe now, Nancy.

You’re not in the hospital.”

Doctor Berger reminds me to be patient. It’s only been six weeks since I left the hospital. I don’t know if six weeks

is just yesterday or another lifetime. Our session is up after 45 minutes, and she walks me to the door. I see my truck at the curb with John waiting in the driver’s seat.

“I’ll see you in two weeks,” she says.

“Have a safe and restful trip.”

Thursday, March 21 5 Liberty Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 5:47 a.m.

Everyone says going away to Puerto Rico will be good for me. I will surrender to the intensive care of the Marreros, my family, for ten days. I might rest. John and I have not slept since I was released from University Medical Center. No one warned us empty cribs keep you awake at night. John is afraid I’m not resting enough. He watches me as I keep my eyes closed and pretend. Hours pass every night, both of us suspended in silent darkness. We’re raw, edgy, and confined to our condo by this bitter winter.

John returned to work two weeks after my release. I still have six weeks of what was originally supposed to be maternity leave. I don’t think it’s good to be by myself. I got lost in our building.

Right in our building. The hallways didn’t look familiar. The man who owns Freddy, the gray schnauzer, found me on the second floor and accompanied me back to the fourth. I didn’t recognize him but I recognized Freddy, and felt I could trust someone with such a nice dog.

I need to get away from the highway overpass being built yards from our windows. The traffic improvement project began before I was even pregnant. It continues every day, day and night, through this snowless winter. The construction crew started up again about 30 minutes ago. The pile drivers thud and unsettle the inside of my head. I squeeze my head between my hands and pace our bedroom, but I still hear the pounding. I want to tear at my skin with each pound. Some days I feel the bathroom

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tile tremble beneath my feet. That’s why I had called my Aunt Cruza in Puerto Rico. I needed to tell somebody to take me away.

“What do you need? I’ll come to you.

I’ll book a flight right now,” she had said.

“No. Please. I need to be with you. I need you.”

I begged her repeatedly until I wasn’t sure if I meant Cruza, all the Marreros or someone else entirely. John and my family made the arrangements. Electronic communications between New Jersey and the island must have crashed networks worldwide. I had an itinerary within 36 hours: Nancy MarreroTwomey; one adult passenger; Continental Airlines flight 527; departs Thursday, March 21 at 11:57 a.m.; nonstop to Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport.

8:07 a.m.

I shouldn’t have believed Slim Cognito’s promises. The bodyshaping undergarment looks like a pair of black cycling shorts for a circus monkey. The packaging claims the super-duper body shaper is a luxe wardrobe solution, ideal for every occasion when you want to wow. I write marketing copy for a living, and know bullshit when I read it. My family won’t be wowed when I land in Puerto Rico in a few hours. Things might get ugly when I bloat in the plane’s pressurized cabin, and compromise Slim Cognito’s compression technology. I gyrate and try to pull the elastic fabric to below my breasts. I’m sweating from the effort.

“Need help?”

I don’t hear John enter our bedroom and he startles me. The waistband slips from my grip and snaps my lower belly.

“I’m not sure you can.” I grab the fabric in my fists again, determined.

The mirror reflects John standing behind me. He keeps his distance, confused by my hopping, the Slim Cognito,

17

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or both.

“It’s called a body shaper. It’s fat-girl underwear to make me look smooth.”

“You’re not fat.”

“I look like I’m still pregnant.”

“It’s only been six weeks, Nan.” “I’ll die if anyone asks if I’m pregnant.”

John pauses, as he does before he questions a volatile witness. “Do you think anyone would?”

“I don’t want to find out. People say stupid things.”

“They mean well.”

“Whatever they mean, it makes me feel like shit. I wish they’d shut up.”

Our eyes meet in the mirror. I look at myself to break our gaze. I’m a wreck.

My breasts hang like empty sock-puppets against my stomach. At another time, I would have looked at John in invitation to reach from behind. Any touch reminds me that I’m not looking good, but I’ve been able to hide under winter layers.

It’s eighty-two degrees in Puerto Rico. I’ll be there in less than seven hours, in shorts and a tee shirt. The last time I dressed so lightly was September. I was pregnant.

John and I hadn’t told anyone we were still trying to conceive. We wouldn’t need to deliver bad news again to family and friends if no one knew. But this pregnancy was different. I made it past the first trimester.

See ya, I thought, when I exited the waiting room of the fertility clinic for the last time. Let other women sit in that limbo. My nipples were as prominent as my belly button in the thin tee shirts I wore past Labor Day. That was September. I

still carry a belly that makes me look pregnant. It rests on my lap when I sit.

There’s no baby in that space. Our baby died in my body. At thirty-nine weeks of pregnancy.

I had looked perfect. I held my belly like a jewel set between my hands. Our baby was perfect. John and I kept the ultrasound images tucked into the mirror. I could see right into him, his vertebrae a string of impossibly miniature pearls against the dark backdrop of my womb. I stored those images in the box with the sympathy cards, in what was to be Liam’s room.

I look at John and myself in the mirror this morning.

What a pair.

“Could you give these things a hike in the back as I pull up the front?” I ask him.

“Uh, okay.”

John steps forward, the master of unsexy tasks for the past six weeks: stuffing ice packs into my sports bra to numb my engorged post-partum breasts.

Rinsing my vaginal stitches. Carrying

the life-preserver orange circle cushion, the only thing that makes sitting tolerable.

“Damn, these things are tight. How do you breathe?”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to.” I wiggle my hips and hop. “I just need one last tug. Pull like you’re giving me the mother of all wedgies.”

“It doesn’t have to be that much.”

“Yes it does. Now get ready. On three.” I hold the front of the waistband in my fists. John grabs the back and leans over me. Our eyes meet in the mirror.

He gives a small nod.

“Okay,” I say. “One. Two. Three.”

We hoist simultaneously with a force that almost sends me into the mirror.

8:42 a.m.

My carry-on and toiletries are the last things to pack this morning. The medicine cabinet is overwhelming. Do I need antibacterial bandages? There’s floss, a supply of contact lenses. Will I need extra pairs of contact lenses?

Five by Cavin Jones © 2012

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PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:55 PM Page 20

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Under the El Tracks

By Leonard Kress What I so clearly remember From the years we lived beneath the el tracks, Or just blocks from them, were the freezing Waits for the train and the hopelessly long Walks through the neighborhoods—Harrowgate, Torresdale, Fishtown, the bums and crosswalk prophets We’d encounter. Always the same: what will it profit A man, if he gains the whole world? I remembered Meeting one preaching outside the shut gate Of a half-demolished art-deco theatre. He tracked Our arrival, our baby strolled deep in her long Afternoon nap, questioned our wisdom—letting her freeze Like this. My wife with her camera busily freezing The twisted steel beams, drooping finials, scenes a prophet Might relish, beads of gilt debris melted in the long History of midnight fires, crack, and rats. What we won’t remember In the rush to rebuild. This was the place beneath the tracks Where prostitutes sheltered all winter, their gateWay to cruising cars, one by one, with that skirt-hiking gait, Raising 5 or 10 fingers, like figures in an ancient Chaldean frieze.

Everyone takes them in: walkers, drivers, passengers on trackLess trolleys—you might wonder if they’re the harlots the prophet Ezekiel railed against: Oholah and Oholibah as they remember Their Egyptian lovers, whose members were as long As those of horses, those sisters who continued to long For the orgies of their youth, before the city shut its gate To them. Officers with girded loins remembered Even in exile, even in the heat of this deep freeze.

They crowd around, cooing over the baby—the prophet Isn’t paying attention,-losing track

20

Of time and money to be made under the El tracks.

It seems they’ve been doing this for so long You’d think they’d learn by now. Forget the prophet Ezekiel’s rant, listen to Isaiah instead. Enter the gates Of the city. Take your harps and sweet songs. Don’t freeze.

Sing that you may be remembered Leonard Kress has recent work (poetry and fiction) in Barn Owl Review, Passages North, Harvard Review, New Orleans Review, River Styx, Atticus Review, and Philadelphia Stories! Most recent poetry collections are Braids & Other Sestinas, The Orpheus Complex, and Living in the Candy Store. He lived in Philadelphia for 45 years before having to relocate to the midwest.He currently teaches philosophy, religion, and creative writing at Owens College in Ohio.

John enters the bathroom. Before I can ask him why I’m standing by the sink, he begins to put toiletries into clear Ziploc baggies.

“That’s my stuff, silly,” I say, as he dries my toothbrush before bagging it.

“I’m helping you pack. You’re going away, Nan. Your flight’s this morning.”

“I remember.” I turn away. I can’t watch him packing my cosmetics like an aide.

A woman’s face looks at me from the mirror above the sink. Her forehead is aged. I recognize the Marrero crease between her eyebrows. Her nose, full cheeks, and unsmiling lips are familiar. I saw them on Liam’s face. Those features were beautiful on him.

I forget why John and I are in the bathroom.

Parking Lot C Newark Liberty International Airport, NJ 10:32 a.m.

I agreed with John that leaving for the airport after 10 a.m. would leave time to catch my flight. It took 15 minutes just to get through the construction outside of our building. Take-off is in less than two hours. We’re still in the airport parking lot. The web sites for Newark Airport and Continental Airlines both strongly recommend checking in two hours before domestic flights. We should have left earlier. We’d already be inside the terminal. I might already be sitting at the gate with a coffee.

John takes my wheeled carry-on from the back of our truck. He rests one hand on the rear gate and pats his coat with the other.

“Yes, the keys are in your pocket.

Hurry up,” I want to yell, but it’s too cold to uncover my face. My hat and hood muffle the slam of the truck’s rear gate.

John reaches out his hand to me. I hold his arm like an anxious elderly aunt. I watch my feet and the ground. Pebbles of Ice Melt crunch under our treads.

The flat landscape of the parking lot

PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:55 PM Page 21

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is alien. I see three men in the distance.

They’re sexless in thick coveralls, insulated from the 18 degree temperature.

They push Ice Melt spreaders around the lot. I’m afraid they’ll spatter me. John guides me past the parking lot barricades, assures me it’s okay to cross the three car lanes, and we continue into Terminal C. The terminal lower levels are dim.

The escalators are slow and catch as we

clinking carts, slip inside my hood and into my ears. I hear beeps, pages and soft-toned announcements. There are monitors and directional signs to show where you are and where you need to go. I see an airline employee, a young man, smiling and chit-chatting with the woman in the wheelchair he pushes.

She’s white, very heavy, spilling over the edges of the seat, and holding a tote on her lap. She’s smiling, too. She looks

they won’t notice me, just continue walking.

There is no safe place for terrible mothers.

Only a monster leaves her baby in the ground on a February morning. Officers on motorcycles escorted us to Holy Name Cemetery that day.

They held traffic at intersections. The morning was flash-explosion bright. I saw the cops’ faces through my reflection in the limo window. One looked so young, his boy face red from the cold.

The windows were tinted, but he knew I was in

Chicago Lights 3 by Michelle Ciarlo-Hayes © 2012

22

ascend. I remind John to stand on the right side of the escalator so others can pass. I don’t laugh at his comment that I’m usually one of those left-side sprinters.

“It’s a joke, Nan. It’s good you’re standing still.”

The concourse level opens around us at the top of the third escalator. Light comes through the walls of windows and the ceiling soars three levels above us.

The sounds of wheels, on luggage and

nothing like me. I had been giggly with anticipation when the young Filipino man wheeled me to the maternity and delivery ward. I put my mitten over the scarf covering my mouth.

“Are you okay?” John asks. “Are you going to be sick?”

I shake my head. Port Authority officers walk through the terminal, carrying semiautomatic weapons. The back of my throat tastes sour. I hope silently that

there. Baby killer, I read on his face. Only monsters give birth to dead babies.

“This is too much.”

John lowers my hand and scarf from my mouth, pulls back my hood, and takes off my hat. I’m puffy as a marshmallow in my coat, like a theme-park character without the oversized head.

“There. Maybe now I can hear you.”

“It’s almost eleven o’clock. I can’t miss my plane.”

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n a n c y “It’s only 10:40,” John begins, but I’m already approaching the Continental Airlines kiosk.

The screen blinks. “Please wait as your boarding pass is printed.” I pull at the pass as soon as an edge appears.

“Okay, check the departures,” I announce and walk to my right.

“Nan, this way.”

“I know!” I turn to the left.

“Departs to San Juan, 11:57 a.m.

Status is on time. I need to be at Gate 36.”

“Did you want to get a coffee?”

I inhale, and look over my shoulder.

“There’s no time now, John. Please. I need to go through security to get to my gate.”

There is only one ticket agent checking boarding passes and IDs by the sign that reads “Only ticketed passengers allowed beyond this point.” The line of travelers snakes around repeatedly. John and I stand four deep from the entry. I sweat like I’m already in the tropics.

“I told you we should have left earlier. There’s not enough time.”

“You have plenty of time.”

“No, I don’t. Can’t you see?”

John pauses before he answers.

“Don’t start.”

“What? Don’t start what?”

John glances around, then looks at me with his swollen eyes. They’re just like Liam’s. “Get in line if you’re worried about time.”

I step into line before an approaching clump of women. John and I stand behind four spring break types, female undergrads in Montclair State University sweatshirts and shorts with “Juicy” and “Pink” printed across their butts. The group immediately behind us doesn’t sound like they’re from the Northeast. They are excited about their first trip to “Perderico.”

“It could become the fifty-second state,” one of the women announces.

John looks distant, standing right

next to me and holding my luggage.

We’re silent, just as we were on the drive to the airport. That’s the thing about losing a child: There are no words. I get angry when John speaks about Liam’s death. I talk about “being in the hospital.” It makes other people less uncomfortable. No one has to say, “When Liam died.” Those words don’t make sense.

The line barely moves. A man to my left talks on his cell phone to his administrative assistant. He guides her stepby-step through his computer’s directories and folders to find his urgent presentation. I want to tear out of my skin.

“Aren’t you hot?” John asks.

“No,” I answer, shivering. “How can they only have one person up there?

How can they not be prepared?”

“They’re professionals. They can handle it, I’m sure.”

It’s ridiculous. The agent greets each passenger individually. She looks at the face, the boarding pass, the ID, then the face again. I can’t believe she’s allowed to waste time like this. She should concentrate on her job as intently as I’m staring at her. The sign states clearly everyone must be prepared for their turn with documents already in hand. If John wasn’t with me, I’d tap the shoulders of those undergrads ahead of me and tell them to be prepared.

John interrupts my thoughts. “Was that you as a kid?”

He points toward a boy, maybe middle school-aged, standing ahead of us. A minor traveling alone, wearing a lanyard with an ID around his neck like I did every summer when I was growing up.

“Kind of. Except my parents would hover till the last minute when they had to hand me off to the stewardess. They would have escorted me onto the plane and buckled my seat belt if they could.”

John snorts. I’m almost forty years old, but my family will be waiting on the other side. They’ll stand right in front, where I can see them, like they’ve done since I was little Nancy. I envy that kid.

m e n d e z - b o o t h He’s as casual as if he’s in line at McDonald’s, engrossed in his texting, and backpack straps hanging off his bent elbows. He looks Puerto Rican, honey colored and curly haired like me. I imagine there’s family on La Isla preparing for his arrival, too: an uncle grumbling about traffic to the airport; an aunt preparing arroz con gandules frescos to keep warm on a stove top. I’ve joked with John that my childhood summer visits to the island were the family sponsored Fresh Air Fund, coordinated so little Nancy could escape the projects and inner city.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“You have time.”

“Could you just tell me what time it is?”

John looks at me. It is not gentle. His eyes are red. I don’t know when or if he’s slept.

“Never mind.”

“Good.”

“I just don’t want to miss my plane.”

“Nancy,” he says and takes his hand from his pocket. I barely feel his touch through the sleeve of my coat. “Believe me. I’ll get you on that plane.”

I don’t ask for the time again. I can see the watch of the woman to my left, a full line length ahead of us.

“Any big plans while the wife is gone?” I ask, to make conversation and ignore that it’s past eleven o’clock.

John shrugs. “Just work.”

“Will it be busy?”

“Busy enough.”

“How’s the trial going?” I ask, though I know. John and his client were on the front page of The Hudson Journal just last week when the judge denied the multipersonality defense. The man faced capital punishment until it was repealed in New Jersey. Now he faces life. I know John will visit his client at the jail as he does twice every week. He’ll speak with his client’s doctors, make sure the man is taking his medications, and provide the only genuine interest the man gets. It’s

23

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typically the calm personality who’s present during John’s visits, but I worry.

The man has a very violent side. I insist John call me at the end of every visit.

“The work just keeps going. You know how it is. It’ll be going for a while.”

Two additional employees join the original agent. The line stirs, and the momentum worries me, like a current might sweep my feet from under me. I remember the advice the guide gave me and John when we went white-water rafting a few years ago.

“Keep your feet up.”

“What was that?” John leans toward me.

“Nothing. I was just thinking of when we went rafting that time in Frenchtown.”

“That was a while ago.”

“Yeah.” I remind myself I’m not in a river. My feet won’t get caught in a tree limb nor my body weighted by my down coat.

“You’re almost up,” John says. “Got your–” “Yeah,” I answer, pulling my driver’s license from my wallet.

John looks at the photo on my license. “Your hair was so long.”

I don’t recognize the woman in the photo. Everything is different about her.

The photo isn’t even two years old. I don’t answer John and don’t want to engage in small talk. We’re approaching the checkpoint, and one of those agents might decide I’m not the woman in the photo. I have to remain calm and focused.

The original agent is still all smiles.

The male agent to her right squints at the snaking line, and the woman to her left is humorless.

“Excuse me. Excuse me,” says the male agent, too weakly to get anyone’s attention.

“Attention!” barks the humorless woman. “Everyone should have their boarding pass and ID in hand. Do not wait until it is your turn. Be. Ready.

Now.” I do not want to take my turn with that woman. I count the number of people ahead of me, but there is no way to predict which agent will check my ID. The woman whose wristwatch I’ve been watching gets through the male agent without incident. I look again at my license, then at John, who’s staring ahead.

The minor traveling alone is attended by the smiling woman. He waits to the side for another agent to accompany him through the metal detectors to the gate. I’m getting closer. My tee shirt sticks to my back. I don’t ask John how well-trained these front-line workers are in identifying unusual behavior. It’s better if one of us can remain calm and natural.

The undergrads each take their turn.

I stand behind “Juicy,” and she gets waved forward by the male. The smiley woman is still wasting time grinning at everyone. I stand at the head of the line and hope she calls for me. The humorless one becomes free and stares right at me.

“Next!” she yells.

I wonder if I should let the women behind me, the ones who’ve never been to the future fifty-second state, go ahead.

“It’s you, Nan.” “I know! Don’t rush me.” I try to act normal as I approach. John walks behind me with my wheeled carry-on. The agent’s name is on the ID on the lanyard around her neck: Lorraine. Her photo is dated but the penciled eyebrows and hard-set jaw are clearly hers. I can smell the cigarettes on her clothes. I hold the boarding pass over my license.

“I need your, oh, you have it already.

Hmm. Nancy Marrero-Twomey.” She glances at the boarding pass, my license, me, the license again.

I’ll be taken out of line if she notes a discrepancy, escorted to a room and questioned. I don’t know why that woman in the photo is not me. John is an attorney, but he can’t defend me if he

doesn’t know why I’m not that woman.

Lorraine hands everything back to me. “Okay. Will it just be you traveling today?”

I nod.

“Did anyone pack your bag or give you anything to carry?”

A lump lodges in my chest. It’s a trick question. I watched John bag my eyelash curler and eczema lotion this morning.

Lorraine won’t believe I’m incapable of packing my own toothbrush. The woman in my license photo can pack her own bag, but I’m not her. I stand in front of Lorraine, with John by my side, afraid she will ask more questions.

Lorraine breathes out loudly through her nose and looks upward. “Did anyone...”

“Yo no se,” I blurt.

Lorraine places both hands on the stand before her and leans toward me.

“Excuse me?”

She could unravel everything, keep me from getting on the plane, keep me in New Jersey. I begin to pant, shallow, like a dog sensing thunder. Why did I let John pack my bags? He prepares his clients for questioning, why didn’t he prepare me? If I had more time, I’d know what to do.

“My wife has trouble with English,” John lies.

“Well, does she understand the question? Can she answer?”

I know John can’t repeat any of this in Spanish. I grab his sleeve and say the few words I know he understands. “Si. Si entiendo.”

“Okay, muy bien,” he answers with the few words he knows and pats my hand.

“She understands. Yes, it’s her bag.”

“That’s not what I asked. Does she understand the question?”

John steps forward. “She understands English. She doesn’t feel comfortable speaking it.”

I steady myself with John’s arm. My tee is sopped under my coat, and my

PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:56 PM Page 25

n a n c y tongue is stuck in my mouth. I pucker for saliva and repeat, “Si. Si entiendo.”

“Is she talking to me or to you?”

I am suffocating. My face quakes even though my molars clench the inside of my cheeks. “Por favor,” I plead.

“John, me tengo que ir. I need to go. Por favor, Dios mio.”

“My wife is indicating yes, she understands. It’s her bag, which she packed. She’s very upset. She’s very afraid of flying.”

I squeeze John’s arm, and he keeps his hand on mine. The metal detectors are yards away, like time counters at the finish line of a race. Other people are getting through and continuing to Gate 36. I inhale audibly to expand my chest and fill my stomach, like Dr. Berger has taught me.

Lorraine doesn’t even look toward me. “Jesus Christ. Always on my line.

She’s traveling alone, right?”

“Yes.” “Tell her she needs to get to Gate 36,

straight ahead after the metal detectors.”

Lorraine jerks her head as she gestures for the next people in line to hurry and approach.

John and I step aside. My heartbeats throb in my ears. My hands fumble as I unwind my scarf, slip off the ankle length coat with its hood and the zip-up wool sweater. I stuff the random small articles into the sleeves of my coat. John rubs my upper arm, cups my shoulder, and squeezes as gently as if it were my cheek.

“Ah, there you are. Tropical Nancy.”

He leans in, and adds, “We know you’re not afraid to fly. Lovely Lorraine back there wouldn’t understand. I can tell these things about people.”

I nod to play along. I’ll be in Puerto Rico in less than four hours. A new woman. I collapse at the joints like a spring-loaded toy. Tears run down my cheeks before I can get a tissue. I’ve cried so much over the past six weeks, but

The Drunkest Three-Year-Old in the Room

By Amanda Erin Stopa Here comes a school of them right nowJust look at em! They are sooo wasted they have to be strung along on a guide rope, one walking like Frankenstein, another like he’s on Broadway.

These addicts can’t take two steps in the same direction without falling all over the place. And it’s only noon.

And that one’s wearing a tutu, on a Monday.

I’m going to guess she’s coming off a weekend long bender; looking mighty sloppy. And lookover by that fountain, those two kids are so hammeredrunning, trying to climb over each other up the backside of a copper goat. But oh, it looks like their little drunk girlfriend is a bit of a downer, possibly cross faded the way she’s kicking around the grass, yelling at her Velcro shoes. Loose cannon.

But the drunk I love most is the one who is finding his legs for the first time. Unashamed at how he wobbles, arms reaching towards his intention, the blonde woman cooing through picket fence teeth, he takes his first steps to sobriety.

Amanda Stopa lives in Philadelphia, although she is not from there, and attends a Masters Program at Rutgers University.

m e n d e z - b o o t h these tears come fast. I tremble and look down at my exposed knees.

John places my coat on the ground, and gathers me to him. “Hey,” he repeats into my hair, my ear, my cheek and neck.

My nose swells and I clutch his coat.

“I’m okay,” I say, muffled by the wool.

“This is good for you. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

“I love you,” I say and it makes me want to cry more, so I think about making it to my gate in time. The delays of going through the metal detector, of standing behind people who have to unlace shoes. I need to make one last trip to a normal-sized bathroom before boarding the plane.

“I love you too, Nan.” I lift my chin and close my eyes.

Even without sight, our lips find each other. I kiss him as if I’d not seen him for weeks. We look like lovers whose rendezvous is ending too soon: Me, the small brown woman returning to my island; John, the white man, staying behind. The image of us is more romantic than the truth. We are long-married. We lost our baby boy. This is breaking me. I am afraid.

I take the handle of my carry-on and pull it behind me as I walk past the rope barrier. I turn one last time to wave to John. He raises an arm in uncertain response. My quilted coat is draped over his other arm. The stuffed sleeves hang down stiffly. It looks like a small woman John has caught just as she fell back in a faint.

Wednesday, April 11 54 Cedar Lane, Teaneck, NJ 7:00 p.m.

25

It got warmer in New Jersey while I was away. I sit on Dr. Berger’s couch and tell her I don’t need the space heater. She comments on how tan I look. I wore as little as

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possible in Puerto Rico. I would have walked around naked to feel the sun on every inch of me.

“But I don’t think my family would have been into my being naked. They think I’m still little Nancy.”

“Is that how they view you?”

I say yes and laugh, realizing Dr. Berger doesn’t know the Marreros.

Years pass so quickly on the mainland, but time is suspended on the island.

The Marreros are always the first Puerto Ricans I see when I get off the plane. They must camp out at the airport the minute I book my flight. They were waiting right in front at the arrival gate, crying, and seeing them like that unhinged me. I stumbled and thought I’d have to crawl on the rough airport carpet to reach them, but my Uncle Pedro ran and caught me. I was nested in their arms, and we were all one shuddering, wet mess, but that’s what Puerto Ricans do at airports: We cry whether we’re arriving or departing. Me and my Marreros looked like a normal boricua reunion. My family drove me everywhere during those ten days and hovered over me like I was just learning to walk.

“Did you enjoy that?”

“It was nice to have everything taken care of,” I admit. “It’s okay when it’s temporary. I haven’t been little Nancy for a very, very long time.

We’re silent, but that’s okay with Dr. Berger.

“Doctor Berger, what I’m saying sounds crazy.”

“What does, exactly?”

I hesitate.

“It’s okay, Nancy. Just say it.”

“I sound like I’m talking about different Nancies. I feel like I’ve been away for longer than ten days. I recognize New Jersey. The diploma on your wall is always slightly crooked. Everything is familiar, but it doesn’t feel mine. This is the life of someone else. I recognize the lives of little Nancy and the old Nancy,

but none of those are mine.”

“What experience is your own?” Dr. Berger asks.

“I’m not sure.”

“Let me ask another way. What Nancy are you now?”

I look at her in the arm chair across from me, legs crossed under her, and notepad on the side table. She waits. I know I can talk to her.

“I don’t know, Dr. Berger. I’m not any of those Nancies.”

“Are you a new Nancy?”

“No. New means never scrambled.

The old experiences are too familiar. I’m different.”

“Can you describe how?”

“I tried to do things I used to do, but nothing feels the same. I started running again. I ran every day while I was in Puerto Rico.”

“It must have felt good to do something you enjoy.”

I tell Dr. Berger it wasn’t the same. I expected running to feel different after being pregnant for 39 weeks and delivering a baby, but my limbs were reluctant. Doctor Berger knows about the mind, but I’ve learned about the body.

The body is not faithful; it can only be counted on for betrayal. All those tens of thousands of miles I’ve run over the years should have earned interest like a bank deposit. I felt ripped off as I lumbered and gasped around the track in Puerto Rico.

My Aunt Cruza went with me every morning. She’s the other runner in the family, the one who remembers my marathon finishing times. We would arrive at the track before sunrise but were never the first ones there. The temperature in San Juan hits eighty degrees before 8:00 a.m., so runners complete their daily miles predawn.

We’d go round and around the track. I’d think about the years when I competed and my running was fluid. I had transcended the barrier between the mental and physical. I didn’t wear a watch

when I trained or raced because I could feel my pace and knew I was running seven-minute miles.

It wasn’t anything like that in Puerto Rico. I felt like I was pushing through Jell-O. I did three frustrating miles in the dark every morning with Cruza.

My breathing was too labored for chitchat and Cruza is a silent runner. The white lane lines of the track were barely visible. The sound of other runners approaching and passing guided us.

Every morning, I wondered if I still had it in me to reach the post that marked the end of our last lap. We’d be on our final laps when the line of pink appeared above the tree line, grew wider and split the sky open like a papaya. The other early morning runners ahead of us became visible. Past races played in my mind, and I willed my legs to turn over faster. My arms pumped faster, hands open, as if there was a winner’s tape at the finish, and I anticipated the snap against my hips as I burst through. I ran like there was still a medal for me. I cursed God, my body, and my life as I grunted through those final early morning sprints. I ran as if I heard the crowds from past races instead of my lone aunt, calling after me and asking if I should be running so fast.

I’m breathless as I recall this and tell Dr. Berger. She asks if I completed the final laps, and I tell her I did. I reached that post every morning and slapped it, knowing I can never run fast or far enough.

Nancy Méndez-Booth was born and raised in Queens, New York. After receiving her BA from Amherst College, she relocated to New Jersey, where she received her MA and MFA from Rutgers. Nancy's work has appeared in phat'titude, Jersey City magazine and The Packinghouse Review. She has been a featured blogger on mamapedia.com and also blogs at http://www.nancymendezbooth.com). Nancy teaches writing, Latina/o literature and cultural studies in the New York City area. She lives in Jersey City with her husband, John.

PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:56 PM Page 27

Marguerite McGlinn Prize Winner Philadelphia Stories members gathered at the renovated Gertrude Kistler Memorial Library to celebrate the fourth winner of the Marguerite McGlinn fiction prize, Adam Schwartz.

Photos by Peter Kind.

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On this page Clockwise from top left: 1. Adam reads from his winning story. 2. Publisher Christine Weiser, Adam, Publisher Carla Spataro, Tom McGlinn, Contest coordinator Nicole Pasquarello, and judge Kevin McIlvoy. 3. Nicole and fiance. 4. Guests enjoy the renovated Rosemont Library. 5. Rosemont President Sharon Hirsch with guest and board members Kerri Schuster and Alison Hicks.

6. Rosemont Dean of Schools of Graduate & Professional Studies Dennis Dougherty and President Hirsh.

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c a s e y

o t t o

ATOP THE CAMEL’S HUMP sland is a word that calls to mind countless pictures. Common images, ones we all share through vacations, photographs, or what we see on television: azure waves, pristine white beaches, palm fronds sighing in a humid breeze. Islands are places of peace, sanctums of serenity.

Well, not my island.

My island is ugly. Bare and bleak. It rises from the earth, fifteen feet high and dimpled like a camel’s hump, ringed by acres and acres of corn; an ocean of sweet Indian gold. Its muddy slopes are sharp and steep, treacherous in the rain. No soft carpet of grass adorns my island, no bed of furry moss. Instead, jagged thorns tear at flesh and snag on clothes. The island’s only thriving flora, an ancient white oak, watches the world and casts a long black shadow.

It is a truly unwelcoming place, and not very lovely to behold.

Yet I love it.

The Camel’s Hump I named it, upon staking my claim, believing I was the one person in the world to acknowledge this little plot of land, this poor wretched isle.

In the summer, when the country steams and sweats, the corn circling the Camel’s Hump grows tall enough to scratch the sky.

Miles of corn, all green and gold in the haze of morning, the stalks glittering like diamonds under a layer of dew. Mice feast on kernels until they are too fat to flee the foxes, and foxes feast on mice until they are nearly too fat to flee the farmer. (I think he lets them get away.)

Several signs along the road that divides the farm and the adjacent neighborhood, read “No Trespassing” but for the moment I am blissfully illiterate. I’m only visiting, after all. The farmer will not fault one girl just for exploring. Corn swallows me like a gaping yellow maw. I run through it eagerly, losing myself among the stalks, the blonde hairs of the corn tangling with my brown hair.

There is no north or south, no east or west; only corn, yellow and bright, rising up

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against a blue sky.

The earth trembles.

From somewhere out of sight comes a roar, followed by a great mechanical groan.

The harvester coughing to life. For a moment I see myself racing through rows and rows of corn, desperate to find the road, but I am lost in the maze and the farmer’s tractor hunts me down before I can escape. My bones are ground to dust, my blood and organs and sinew squeezed out of me as out of a tube of toothpaste as the farmer drives on, oblivious that his bountiful summer harvest is now two ears richer... and two eyes richer, and ten toes richer, and a nose richer, too.

But then I see my island. The Camel’s Hump.

I can just make out the peak; the rest is obscured by towering stalks. The old oak stands sure and still, my lighthouse in the yellow sea. Its bark is ash-gray and splintered, its leaves fiercely green. I make it my target, throwing myself up the island’s steep banks, clinging to roots and rocks while the tractor wheezes by, flattening the yellow sea in its wake. Well, thank God I’m not down there.

I am the tallest girl on the planet—emerald meadows and farms and dusty roads unfold before me. I am in the heart of the Garden State. I wait for the farmer to finish reaping his field, with only the splintered old oak for company. Its roots, as thick around as one of my thighs, erupt from the dirt as though the tree tried to break free of the earth and walk the world. Ants travel up and down its bark, which is scarred by time’s passing. The lowest hanging branches are still too high for a girl to climb, but the birds make good use of them. A red-tailed hawk, sharp of eye and sharper of talon, scrutinizes me from the safety of his perch. His tongue flutters from his beak like a trembling pink worm.

“It’s hot today,” I agree, and the hawk wheels away toward the summer sun. I wonder, when the black canvas of night descends, will

he return to the oak? Or will some slow-witted owl claim the tree in his absence?

Around me, the earth rumbles.

Puffy white clouds fashion the shapes of fantastic creatures, dragons and dwarves and dinosaurs.

I love this place. Despite the rocky soil and vicious brambles (and my near brush with death) I am at peace, sheltered by the old oak. No one knows I’m here. Not the farmer or the drivers racing past on the nearby road. Only the red-tailed hawk—and who would he tell?

When the tractor sputters to a stop, spewing oily black smoke from its rusty exhaust pipe, I bid farewell to my island, carefully slide down to solid ground, and cross the flattened field of corn. Crushed vegetation cushions my feet and softens my footsteps. I feel exposed and naked—the wonder of the yellow sea trampled to a bitter green pulp. There’s a shout behind me, likely the farmer, and I’m spurred to a sprint.

Over the field, across the road, and into my car.

The Camel’s Hump looks bigger when not flanked by so much corn, yet somehow more vulnerable, a secret revealed.

It is winter before I visit again.

Snow powders the earth and cruel winds sweep across the land. Branches, weakened by frost, splinter and snap, loud as a bullwhip in the eerie stillness of December. The animals have all gone: birds to warmer southern states, rabbits to their warrens. Humans venture into the world only once properly bundled up against the elements.

The oak looms in silent vigil, its naked arms reaching toward the blue-gray sky. The corn is a summer dream, but the Camel’s Hump remains.

Before I cross the snowy field I wonder how many winters the old white oak has seen. Twenty? Fifty? Has it ever seen a winter free of people? A winter before Hartford Road trundled along its left or Centerton Road to its right? A winter before the homes

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a t o p and farms and businesses? A winter before time? What ancient wonders, I meditate.

What stories it could tell had the little seedling sprouted a mouth instead of roots.

I study the island from across the road. It looks as though an enormous camel fell asleep in the middle of a snowstorm.

Every season has its scents, I reflect, trampling across the unbroken snow. Spring smells like wet earth, summer like salty surf.

Autumn has pumpkins and spices and rotten leaves. But winter freezes in your nostrils until your snot dribbles down your chin.

The old oak looks bigger. A handful of stubborn red leaves still cling to its branches, and a few are tugged free in the frigid winter gusts.

Carefully I make my ascent, pulling myself upward with one of the oak’s massive roots.

There are a few animal droppings here, but otherwise the Camel’s Hump has been left undisturbed. White snow, frozen earth. The gunmetal superstructure of the Cornfield Cruiser,

t h e

an old US Air Force Space Command site, is visible from atop the island. The building belches steam, hot steam. Suddenly I’m aware of shivers rocking my body. My skin is raw and red, my lips split.

I have to do this quickly.

I take the Swiss Army knife from my pocket, a relic of the days when my brother and I were kids. Where once the blade had flashed polished steel, it now glinted dully, the victim of rust and mud and many gutted fish. Yet it would serve my purpose.

Normally I am not one for defacing nature, but this oak struck something in me. I want this tree to be mine. The sharpest edge of the Swiss Army Knife hacks through the bark with all the grace of a poacher chopping his way through the Amazon. Small slivers of wood peel away under the blade, pepper the ground.

In minutes I’m done. On one of the white oak’s roots I’ve carved my name: CASEY 2008. The letters are shallow on the root’s girth, a root like an anaconda with a

c a m e l ’ s

h u m p

tiny tattoo.

As I make the short walk back to my car, I wonder who would come along after me.

Two lovers, perhaps, drawn by the solitude.

Children who dream of monsters and adventures. Who would see my name?

Would someone add his or her own? And in fifty years, when the world is all sterile and steel, will the white oak with my name still live?

So many will hurry by without a second glance. Who could be bothered to marvel at a gnarled old tree and an ugly hill plagued by thorns? Not many, truly. An island in the Bahamas would better serve them. But someday, someone will see the world as I did: from atop the Camel’s Hump.

Casey Otto just graduated from Rowan University with a degree in Writing Arts. She is a science fiction and fantasy enthusiast with a passion for writing about our natural world, specifically locations around New Jersey that have made a huge impact on her life. This story won Rowan’s 2012 Denise Gess Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction at Rowan.

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ing everything n hav .” tha

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

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