Here

tained pretzels and peanuts towards Alan. The first few months at the factory, Bon Bon had eaten so many pastries that he became nauseated by the sight of anything with sugar in it.

He looked at the clock. It was 6:54. If Tig didn’t show by 7, Bon Bon was out of there. Home, out of the sugar-stenched clothes and into the shower. He imagined hot water sluicing over him, the powdered sugar circling the drain and disappearing. He fumbled in his pocket for his wallet, looking for a ten, when a familiar voice said behind him, “You stink like the inside of a fat woman’s purse, you know that?”

Tig. Of course. “What?” Bon Bon asked him. “What does the inside of someone’s purse smell like? And where were you?”

“They keep cake in them,” Tig said. “The ladies.”

“Nobody keeps cake in their purse,” Bon Bon told him. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard you say.” And he’d heard Tig say plenty of stupid things over the years.

“Come on, let’s go.” Tig was already heading toward the door.

“Go where?” Bon Bon said. “Why did you want to meet here? Now we’re leaving? What’s going on?” Bon Bon grabbed a handful of the peanut-pretzel snack from the newly replenished dish, thanked Alan with a wave and trotted to keep up with Tig, who was already outside

By the time Bon Bon caught up with Tig, he was almost to his car, a beat-up dark green Chevy Malibu, whose passenger door had gotten side-swiped years ago and was missing the side mirror and most of the chrome trim. Tig was what Bon Bon’s mother referred to as “a character.” Overalls, sleeveless shirt, dirt-and-oil-coated John Deere trucker cap, Reebok tennis shoes so faded and stained with oil and dirt that their color would forever be a mystery.

“Get in,” Tig said.

“Where are we going? When will we be back? I can’t just leave my car — ”

“GET IN,” Tig said, almost an order this time.

Bon Bon never knew why he got in the car that night. Maybe because he’d done other stupid things with Tig in the past and this was just par for the course. You wouldn’t believe what Tig just did, Bon Bon imagined texting his friends later tonight. It would be fodder for conversation for days to come.

The car stunk of cigarette smoke and chaw. A spit cup sloshed in the dashboard console. Bon Bon shoved McDonald’s wrappers, Entenmann’s boxes, Dunkin’ bags and miscellaneous trash off the seat, and got in. Before he could even buckle his seat belt, Tig spun the tires and headed out of the parking lot toward the highway.

“What’s this about?” Bon Bon repeated, swallowing the last of the pretzels.

Tig smiled. Drove for a minute, enjoying the power. Then, dramatically, he said, “I’m about to make us rich.”

“No,” Bon Bon said.

“Yep.”

“OK,” Bon Bon said. “Let me out. Turn around. Stop this piece-of-crap and let me out. I told you before. I’m not getting involved in any of your messed-up money-making — ”

“It’s guaranteed cash and you’re already in it,” Tig said without missing a beat.

“Stop the car. I mean it.”

“Too late. You’re going to thank me in about 12 hours.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Twelve hours? What did you do? What are we doing?”

“I just made you 23K. I get 27K, you get 23K.”

“For what?” Bon Bon asked. Frustration and fury boiled in his gut the way it often did when he had to deal with Tig. “You just handing me 23K for sitting here?”

“For coming with me, yeah,” Tig said, darting a glance at him. Bon Bon couldn’t decipher it. “All you gotta do is drive when I get sleepy.” The highway spooled out before them, the endless ripple of white lines bisecting the night. Few cars were out this late, and all seemed to be going in the other direction.

“Hell no. I don’t know what kind of craziness you’re getting into, but I’m out. I gotta work in the morning. Turn around. Take me back to my car.”

Tig laughed. “Bro, they won’t miss you at that cookie house. Besides, in 12 hours, you’ll have enough money to quit that job and do something that doesn’t leave you smelling like a giant cupcake. Lose that dumbass nickname. Grown man named Bon Bon. I’m doing you a favor.”

“Screw you. Dammit, I knew I should have just gone home.”

The car banked around a wide curve, then through a series of up-and-down humps in the road. If you drove fast enough, it was like riding a roller coaster. For an instant, you could lose your stomach as you crested the rise.

On the descent, a thump came from the trunk.

“What was that?” Bon Bon looked in the back seat, stacked neatly with big square boxes: Macbook Air, read several. UN3481, read others, with the logos of a battery and a flame. They were all laptop computers. The back-seat floor was the usual sea of fastfood wrappers, napkins and trash. Nothing moved.

The thump came again, as if whatever was back there shifted back to its original position.

“What’s going on?” Bon Bon asked. He couldn’t hide the note of nervousness now in his voice. “What’s in the back seat? Is that stuff stolen? You raid an Apple Store or something?” He tried to imagine how many laptops would be worth $50,000. There’d have to be at least twenty-five, maybe more.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” The car was going faster now, well over 80 mph.

“I knew it. I freakin’ knew it. What did you do? I’m not dealing in stolen goods, Tig. Stop the car.”

Tig groped in the driver side door. Bon Bon thought at first that Tig was looking for his wallet or maybe a soda bottle. But after a moment Tig retrieved a small triangular object that seemed to absorb the dim lights from the dashboard before it resolved itself into a gun. It glittered as if alive. Tig gripped the handle and then the muzzle was pointing, impossibly, at Bon Bon himself.

“T, what the . . . ”

“Just shut up,” Tig said. “I’m doing you a favor. Nobody is getting hurt. We walk away with more money than either of us has ever seen.”

Bon Bon had only seen Tig this erratic once before. It ended with Carl Simmons walking with a permanent limp and Tig spending three years in prison for aggravated assault. Bon Bon stared at the dark muzzle of the gun. His mouth had gone dry, the pretzel crumbs turned to gooey dust on his tongue. He wiped his hands on his pants and could feel the flour and sugar coating his palms. He wanted to scream. Instead he took a deep breath, looked out the window into the dark, trying to ignore the feel of the gun staring at him. “OK man, just tell me where you got all these computers from. And what we’re going to do with them.”

“The less you know the better,” Tig told him. “Get some rest. You’ll take over in six hours. We gotta make the drop by 8 a.m.”

Bon Bon had heard that Tig had gotten into some shady business while he was in prison. This whole scenario was making more sense. Tig, and now Bon Bon, were driving stolen electronics over state lines. He wondered if $23,000 was worth getting caught. If the police pulled them over —

Tig turned on the radio with an aggressive punch of his forefinger. Kellie Pickler’s “Red High Heels” deafened them. Bon Bon turned down the volume.

Over the next two hours, Bon Bon sat in silence, thinking. Tig couldn’t be reasoned with, that was pretty clear. Bon Bon could wait till Tig fell asleep and turn the car around, but what would happen when Tig woke up? Bon Bon glanced down at the gun again, resting lazily on Tig’s thigh, and looked out the window. He could grab his phone and try putting it on mute and dialing 911, but the phone’s light would turn on and Tig would see it for sure. Bon Bon’s palms felt chalky from the mixture of sweat and cake flour dust. The damp, sugary smell from his trousers made him want to retch.

“Hey,” he said when lights from the next exit glimmered on the horizon. Signs for gas, food, lodging. “I didn’t get dinner when I was sitting there waiting for you, and I’m starving. Do we need gas?” He pretended to stretch and stifle a yawn.

Tig kept his eyes on the road, but his grip tightened for an instant on the gun, then relaxed again. “OK,” he said after a minute. “I am, too. All right. I’ll pump the gas and you get us some food.” Tig took the exit too fast, the car almost on the berm before he overcorrected. Again came the thump from the trunk. “And don’t try anything, man. I’d hate to kill you, you hear me?”

The gas station was a half-mile down the road, its fluorescent lights bright and disorienting. No cars were parked at the pumps. A single beat-up Honda sat tucked against the building. Bon Bon had been hoping for a late-night police cruiser, an RV, anything.

After the car had come to a halt, Bon Bon got out, making sure his movements were slow and casual. He could run in, tell the attendant to call the cops, who could be here in minutes. He glanced over at Tig, who was staring hard at him. He looked away, pulled open the glass door. He could feel Tig’s eyes on him, even in the snack aisle.

He picked up several bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, hot chili and roasted lime Takis, jalapeño Kettle potato chips, and honey barbecue and hot mustard pretzels. Then went to the refrigerators on the wall and pulled out four bottles of Pepsi.

At the cash register, Tig’s gaze brushed his shoulders as Bon Bon paid and the clerk stuffed everything in a plastic sack. Again and again, he contemplated saying something but then imagined Tig leveling the gun at them, the bullets spider-webbing the glass.

The door behind them jingled, and Bon Bon jumped. “You almost done, man?” Tig called in.

“Yeah,” Bon Bon said. The clerk put a handful of change on the counter, and Bon Bon swiped it into his palm. “You owe me 18 bucks,” he told Tig as he brushed past him out the door, out into the cool night and the waiting car.

“Oh you’ll get that and more soon, buddy.” Bon Bon could hear the relief in Tig’s voice. “You feel like driving now?”

“Yeah, I can take over,” Bon Bon said. “You eat up. Did you check on the trunk? On whatever fell over back there?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s fine,” Tig said.

Bon Bon pulled out of the parking lot as Tig tore open the purple bag of Takis, stuffing a handful into his mouth. “Damn these are good. You want some?”

Bon Bon shook his head. “In a sec.” He took a sip of Pepsi.

“These things are spicy,” Tig said, playing on the word spicy. “Whooo-eee.” He cracked open his Pepsi and drained half of the bottle. Bon Bon took a sip of his.

Tig didn’t tell him where they were going, just directed him once to turn south, toward the highway running to the coast. Tig broke into the potato chips and Bon Bon munched on pretzels. They passed city after city, and a rest stop in three miles.

“I’m thirsty,” Tig said when he was halfway through the Honey Barbecue Pretzels. “These pretzels are making me thirsty.”

“Seinfeld,” Bon Bon told him without looking over. He checked the rearview mirror. The boxes sat primly on the backseat, giving away nothing.

“What?”

“Seinfeld,” Bon Bon said. “That was a running joke on Seinfeld.” The rest area illuminated the road. “Remember, George said it about 200 times during that show?” They passed the entrance, kept going.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You got more to drink?” Tig said.

“There ain’t no more. We drank it all.”

“That ain’t funny,” Tig said. “I’m seriously thirsty. We gotta stop.”

“OK,” Bon Bon told him. “Next place we see. I need to take a piss, too,” he added.

They passed a sign. “Next Rest Area: 28 Miles.”

“Damn,” Bon Bon said. “Another half-hour.”

“We can make it,” Tig said, staring out at the darkness. But after another 10 minutes he said, “I really gotta go.”

“So do I,” Bon Bon said. “Bad. I’m going to pull over.”

He eased the Chevy onto the shoulder, put on his flashers. “What the hell you think you doin’?” Tig said, spraying pretzel crumbs onto Bon Bon’s shirt.

“What? You want me to piss myself in the driver’s seat? I didn’t shower after work because somebody wanted me to meet them at 6:30. So now I smell like cupcakes and if I piss myself I’ll smell a lot worse. That is not a good combination. So you’ve got a choice. Either stop yapping in my face and let me pee, or you can drive the rest of the way in a wet seat.”

He hoped Tig would be too preoccupied to suggest that he pee in the Pepsi bottle. Tig was.

“Whatever. Don’t do nothin’ stupid.” Tig got out of the car, slammed the door. Again the thump from the trunk, and then another.

The car’s headlights beamed into the nondescript grass as Bon Bon climbed out, went around the front of the car. As he reached the berm, he stumbled, tripped, and fell. Then got up, close now to Tig.

“Clumsy idiot,” Tig said, laughing, transferring the gun from his right hand to his left, unzipping. “Next rest stop we’re gonna get something to drink. I’m really thirsty. We got how many miles? 15 or — ”

Wham. The rock that Bon Bon had just picked up struck Tig perfectly, right on the temple. Tig dropped, soundless, so quickly that Bon Bon thought for a second that he was pretending.

But he wasn’t. A moment later he groaned, reaching for his scalp. Bon Bon lunged for the gun, grabbed it and sprinted back to the car.

In a moment, cinders flew and he was back on the highway, heart in his throat, going 70, 80, 90 miles an hour.

After a couple of miles he slowed slightly, pulse still pounding. The thump from the trunk came again. Bon Bon pulled over, popped the trunk, went around back.

Inside, a young boy lay wedged against tires and fabric, his hands and feet bound with zip ties. His eyes were bigger than any eyes Bon Bon had ever seen, with such terror and misery that Bon Bon couldn’t speak for a moment as he loosened the gag. The boy struggled away, a panicked bird.

“Hey, it’s OK,” Bon Bon said. “That piece of garbage can’t hurt you.”

He looked in the front seat for a knife, scissors, anything to cut the ties, but could find nothing. So he carried the boy to the front seat, tried to make him comfortable.

“I’m taking you to the police,” Bon Bon told him as he adjusted the seat belt. “The bad man won’t hurt you anymore, OK?” He tried to sound as calm and nonthreatening as he could.

“You smell like a cupcake,” he told Bon Bon accusingly, voice rough.

Bon Bon laughed. “Story of my life,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

The little boy eyed the bag of pretzels, tucked in between the seats. “Can I have some?”

Bon Bon reached past him for the pretzels, fed him a couple at a time.

“These are making me thirsty, “ he said.”

“Do you like Seinfeld, kid?” Bon Bon said as he pulled out his phone and dialed 911. PS

Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb is a graduate of UNC Greensboro with a degree in music education. He is the author of The Violin Conspiracy and Symphony of Secrets. He is currently working on his third novel.

memoir by Stephen e. Smith • illuStration by h arry blair

“Get up! Get up! Get up, up, up!” my mother blurted.

It was at 6:30 a.m., the first day of Christmas break, and as always she felt compelled to rouse her children at the most ungodly hour. I lifted my head from the pillow and stared bleary-eyed at her figure in the bedroom doorway. Wrapped to her chin in a blue terrycloth robe, her fists were planted firmly on her hips. She meant business. “You’re to march yourself down to the Safeway and ask Mr. Short if he’ll give you a job for the holidays,” she ordered. “You can earn enough money to pay for your books next semester. And next time I see Mr. Short, I’ll find out if you asked him for a job.”

“Can’t you even say, ‘Welcome home’?” I asked.

“Sure. Welcome home, Mr. Big Shot College Guy. Now get out of that bed and get yourself down to the Safeway.”

I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation. I’d caught an allnight ride home from North Carolina and had dragged into the house on Janice Drive at 3:15 a.m. But my mother was not to be denied, so I managed to pull on the wrinkled clothes I’d worn the day before and stumbled downstairs to eat a bowl of my brother’s Froot Loops. At 8:30 a.m. I scuffled up Bayridge Avenue to the Eastport Shopping Center, where I found Mr. Short on the dock, supervising the unloading of pallets of dog food from a tractortrailer. He shook my hand and asked how college was going.

“It’s fine,” I answered. “I was hoping you might have an opening for a cashier during the holidays. I’m not looking to work eight hours a day, but, you know, something part time.”

“If I had an opening, I’d hire you,” he said. “But right now I have all the cashiers I need. I’d have to cut someone else’s hours, and that wouldn’t be fair, especially at Christmas.” My spirits soared. If he didn’t have an opening, I could pass the holidays stretched out on my bed reading P.G. Wodehouse.

“I’ll tell you what,” he continued, “I’ve got a friend who’s the manager at the Drug Fair in Parole. Go see him and tell him I sent you. He’s looking for holiday help.”

A job at Drug Fair was the last thing I wanted, but I had to make an inquiry. My mother was as good as her word, and I knew she’d buttonhole Mr. Short the next time she visited the Safeway. If she found out I hadn’t applied for the Drug Fair job, she’d make my Christmas break miserable, which she had already begun to do by wakening me before sunup.

Among cashiers, there existed a hierarchy, and working a register at Safeway carried with it a degree of status and a wage that was at least $1.75 an hour. Drug Fair was a discount pharmacy, emporium and grocery store, a low-rent warehouse for plastic crap and wilted vegetables, where the discount prices were clearly marked on each item — work for the dimwitted — and the pay was $1.25 an hour.

I caught the bus to Parole and found the Drug Fair manager, a rumpled, balding, ectomorphic fellow with thick wire spectacles and a long pointy nose, puzzling over paperwork in an elevated office that overlooked a line of disheveled employees who were pounding away at their cash registers. He appeared to be in emotional distress, his mouth screwed into a grotesque snarl.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up, snatched the glasses from his face and tossed them on the countertop in a display of frustration. “Mr. Short over at Safeway said I should talk with you about working as a cashier for the holidays. I don’t need a full-time job, just some part-time work if you’ve got it.”

Sweet relief swept over his face, his lips stretching into a half smile. “Mr. Short sent you?” he asked.

“He said you might need an experienced cashier.”

“You used to work at the Safeway?”

“For two years, until I went off to college.”

He grinned fully. I was apparently the man he’d been waiting for. He stepped out of his office, planted both feet flat on the linoleum and looked me up and down. “Can you work a register?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’ve worked stock?”

“Yes, sir.”

My God, he was going to hire me! I was going to pass the next two weeks checking out Christmas junk at the Drug Fair for minimum wage! This was not good.

The manager handed me a pen and an application clamped to a clipboard, and I took a couple of minutes to fill in the information.

“Follow me,” he said, and we walked quickly down aisle four toward the back of the crowded store. “I can use you to relieve my regular cashiers for their lunch and supper breaks, and you can help keep the shelves stocked, especially this display. We’re selling the hell out of these things.” He pointed to a chest-high pyramid of black, orange and beige boxes crowned with an unboxed white plastic kitchen device known to every American who owned a TV. “We’ve had to restock this display three times this morning. You know anything about Veg-O-Matics?” he asked.

What happened next was probably brought on by fatigue — or maybe I needed an excuse to get fired before I got hired. Whatever the cause, a synaptic misfire propelled me into the past. I picked up the display device, held it out in front of me and began to deliver the requisite spiel:

“Imagine slicing a whole potato into uniform slices with one motion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic makes many slices at once. Imagine slicing all these radishes in seconds. This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke with every seed in place. Hamburger lovers, feed whole onions into Veg-O-Matic and make these tempting thin slices. Simply turn the dial and change from thin to thick slices. You can slice a whole can of prepared meat at one time. Isn’t that amazing? Like magic, change from slicing to dicing. That’s right, it slices, it dices, it juliennes, perfect every time!”

By the time I’d finished yammering, the manager’s eyes were wide and his jaw slack.

“How’d you learn that?” he asked.

“I used to watch the commercial on TV, and it just sort of stuck in my head.”

My fascination with the Veg-O-Matic stretched back to my junior year in high school. Strung out on testosterone and teenage angst, I suffered insomnia for about six months. On those long, restless nights, I’d roll out of bed after everyone else in the house was asleep, slink down to the “rec” room and turn on the black and white TV. WJZ, the local CBS affiliate, was the only station out of Baltimore that aired anything other than an Indian Chief test pattern in the early a.m., so I’d tune in channel 13 in time to catch Father Callahan of St. Francis Xavier House of Prayer bestowing his benediction. Then I’d settle in for a three-hour run of continuous raise-your-own-chinchillas commercials.

My clandestine obsession with Father Callahan and chinchillas continued for two or three months — until the fateful night when the good Father delivered his usual homily and the chinchilla commercials failed to materialize. Instead, a plastic guillotine-like device appeared on the TV screen, contrasted against a background map of the world, below which were printed the words “World Famous Veg-O-Matic.” Then a disembodied voice said: “Imagine slicing a whole potato into uniform slices with one mo - tion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic makes many slices at once. . . . ”

I’d spent my Father Callahan/chinchilla nights dozing fitfully on the couch and sneaking back to my room before the rest of the family awakened, but on that memorable evening — I’ve come to think of it as Night of the Veg-O-Matic — I sat there stupefied, watching the commercial over and over. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, and by morning I had the narration memorized — every nuance, modulation and inflection — to which I could add hand gestures, including the graceful, upturned palm that beckoned, “Buy me, buy me, buy me. . . .”

Later that day, I was eating lunch in the high school cafeteria with my regular buds when freckle-faced Ronnie Wheeler produced a sliced tomato his mother had wrapped in wax paper to keep it from saturating the white bread he needed to construct his BLT. I jumped up, grabbed the tomato slices and ran through the entire Veg-O-Matic routine, spreading the segments across the Formica tabletop and finishing with the obligatory “. . . perfect every time!”

My friends were speechless, especially Ronnie, whose sandwich was ruined. They stared blankly before bursting into hysterics. The vice-principal, Mr. Wetherhold, a stern disciplinarian who abhorred any form of frivolity, hurried over to our table to discern the source of the disturbance. “What’s going on here?” he asked sternly.

“Do it!” my friends begged. “Do the Veg-O-Matic thing!” They didn’t have to ask twice. When I finished my second run-through, it was Mr. Wetherhold who was howling with laughter. Suffice it to say I spent a good deal of my time in high school doing “the Veg-O-Matic thing” for my friends. They never tired of it.

Now the Drug Fair manager’s face glowed with approval, and I could see that he’d suffered an epiphany. He rushed into the stockroom and reappeared with a folding table. He extended the legs, positioned the table in front of the pyramid of boxes and covered the top with a square of red cheesecloth. He grabbed an onion from the produce aisle, peeled away the skin, and ordered me to deliver my recitation again, this time with the unboxed VegO-Matic at my fingertips.

Despite my long and intimate history with the kitchen device, this was the first time I’d worked with one. But I muddled through the presentation by recalling the images I’d watched hundreds of times on TV, each motion transmitted from memory to physical articulation. I made quick work of the onion, repeating the entire monologue. My demonstration, although clumsy, went well enough to instantly earn me the title: 1965 Parole Drug Fair Veg-O-Matic Man.

“You’re hired!” the manager said. “I want you to do a demonstration at the top of every hour. Use all the tomatoes and onions you want, but stay away from the cheese and Spam. That stuff costs money.”

“Yes, sir,” I said dutifully.

“The rest of the time you can restock these Veg-O-Matics and relieve the cashiers who are going on break. Can you start tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess.”

“Be here at 8 o’clock, and wear a white shirt.”

Crestfallen, I dragged myself into the parking lot and caught the bus back to Eastport. When I stumbled into our living room, it was 11:30 a.m., and I was whipped.

“Did Mr. Short hire you?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

“He didn’t have any openings, but I got a job at Drug Fair in Parole.”

“Excellent,” she said.

When I turned up at Drug Fair on Saturday morning ready to begin my new career, the manager had anticipated my every need. The folding table was set up in aisle four, which was stocked with kitchen junk — Melmac dishes, spatulas, plastic forks, spoons and knives, etc. — and beside the table waited a freshly replenished pyramid of multicolored boxes containing the Veg-O-Matics. The tabletop was covered with the red cheesecloth from the day before, and a white apron of the style that loops around the neck and ties in the back was folded neatly on the table. An unopened can of Spam and a brick of Kraft Velveeta cheese were stacked beside the gleaming white Veg-O-Matic display model I’d used in my earlier demonstration, and a bag of assorted vegetables — tomatoes, onions, carrots and potatoes — awaited their fate. As a touch of class, the manager had placed a roll of paper towels on the table, and a beige commercial dome-topped trash can sat directly behind my workspace.

“Here, wear this,” he said, handing me a handsome black clipon bowtie. I donned my apron and attached the bowtie to the wrinkled collar of my white shirt. “Now show me your stuff. Just use vegetables. The Spam and cheese are for show.”

I launched into my Veg-O-Matic dance at a measured pace, slicing up a small potato and allowing my hands to gracefully execute a lilting swirl at the conclusion of the shtick.

“That was even better than yesterday,” the manager beamed, “although I’d take it a little slower if I were you.” He looked up and down aisle four. “I’ll make an announcement at the top of every hour. You get yourself set up. Sell the hell out of these VegO-Matics. If you don’t, you’ll be in a checkout stand all day.” And he left me on my own.

I peeled an onion, and trimmed it to the proper size and shape. I was ready. Or as ready as I was ever going to be.

“We are pleased to direct your attention to aisle four,” I heard the manager announce over the PA system, “where you can view a demonstration of the miracle Veg-O-Matic, the 20th century’s greatest kitchen appliance. It makes an economical and useful Christmas gift! Do all your Christmas shopping in five minutes and have your Veg-O-Matics gift wrapped right here in the store. Christmas cards are available on aisle six.”

After my first two demonstrations, I discovered that operating the Veg-O-Matic wasn’t quite the effortless exercise I’d observed on TV. I directed my attention to the tomato, which I positioned perfectly between the upper and lower blades. “This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke with every seed in place,” I said, as I slammed down the top of the Veg-O-Matic. The tomato exploded like a water balloon, splattering juice and seeds all over my apron and the tabletop. The two customers who had gathered for my demonstration jumped back and bolted for the exit.

I’d created a huge mess. I mopped the tomato slop off my hands with a paper towel and brushed the seeds from my apron, but pulp continued to dribble from the bottom of the Veg-OMatic, and I had to retreat to the stockroom to wash the blades. So tomatoes were out. Ripe ones, at least. After mopping the splatter from the tabletop, I attempted to slice an onion I’d peeled earlier. I gave a forceful downward thrust and the device worked perfectly, sending a cascade of onion slivers onto the cheesecloth. Still, it was a messy business; pieces of onion got stuck in the blades and had to be pried out. I had the same experience with carrots, stubborn chunks of which had to be worked free with my fingertips.

I settled, finally, on a peeled Idaho Russet potato. I cut the spud into four pieces, which I fed individually into the chopper. And the device worked as intended — neat and clean. The Veg-O-Matic was, after all, meant to transform a time-consuming, chaotic operation into a simple, wholesome procedure. And that’s what it did.

The secret, as with many physical actions, was in the wrist. It was all finesse. I’d place a piece of potato on the bottom blades and apply a sharp downward whack with the top. And voila! the potato was julienned, perfect for hash browns. If I spoke slowly, worked methodically and was meticulous with my cleanup, I could kill the better part of a half hour on each demonstration, thus allowing for only 30 minutes of working at a cash register before my next demonstration.

At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t sell enough Veg-O-Matics to keep my new job, but the pile of boxes diminished at an everincreasing rate as Christmas approached and the manager was a happy man. I’d sold six to eight Veg-O-Matics with each demonstration, and I noticed that many customers who didn’t make an immediate purchase returned later to snatch up two or three Veg-O-Matics, having chosen convenience over thoughtful reflection. Usually these return customers felt compelled to offer an explanation for their delayed purchase. “You know,” they’d say, “I was thinking about your demonstration, and you’re right, this will make an excellent gift for my mother.”

Every day I’d work straight through until 10 p.m., taking an hour each for lunch and dinner, and then I’d catch the bus home in the dark. I’d shower and collapse into my bed to read for a few seconds in Pigs Have Wings, my latest Wodehouse novel, before falling asleep.

And that’s how it went for seven straight days. I’d turn up at Drug Fair at 8 a.m., an hour before the store opened, to prepare the potatoes for my demonstration. I’d restock the Veg-O-Matic display, piling the boxes high in an ergonomically conical construct of my own contrivance, and check out a register tray so that I could relieve cashiers who went on break.

If my schedule was exhausting, it also had its advantages. I slept like a stone, and the days flew by. At home, I didn’t have a conversation with my mother, father or sister that lasted more than 10 seconds. “Hi, how ya doing?” was as intimate as it got, which suited me. My father was asleep when I left in the morning and when I came in at night, I didn’t have to listen to my mother and sister bicker. Only my brother Mike, with whom I shared a room, was around when I staggered in whacked out from 12 hours of working with the public. He’d fill me in on the day’s drama with my sister, which made me glad I’d be headed back to college soon.

When the store closed at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, I used my humongous 5 percent employee discount to purchase gifts for the family — a cheap cotton bathrobe for my mother, which turned out to fit her like a circus tent, a simulated leather wallet for my father, a 45 of Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” for my brother, and the Beatles’ Help! for my sister. I was headed out the door with my packages when the manager stopped me.

“You’ve done a good job,” he said, a genuine smile on his pasty face. “And I’m hoping you’ll consider coming back to work through New Year’s Eve. You won’t be selling Veg-O-Matics, but I need experienced help to run the registers and handle returns. I could use you for at least 12 hours a day.”

Normally I would have responded with an emphatic “No,” but fresh in my memory were the money problems I’d experienced during my first four months at college and the hours I spent in McEwen Dining Hall scraping greasy dishes and scrubbing pots. With my paltry allowance, there was no hope of establishing a relationship with any of the girls I found myself drooling over as they roamed the campus. It was essential I screw up my courage and get myself an on-campus date. I’d have to double with an upperclassman who had a car, and to make that happen, I needed enough money to cover my share of the gas.

“All right,” I answered. “Can I get some overtime?”

“I’ll give you all the overtime you want. You can work 14 hours a day if you skip lunch and dinner.”

“All right,” I answered, “I’ll be glad to help out.”

So on December 27, I was standing behind a cash register refunding money for the Veg-O-Matics I’d sold the week before. “I’d like to get the money back for this thing,” the customer would say, handing me the orange and black box. They occasionally offered excuses such as “I already have one of these” or “I have no use for this piece of junk,” but what they wanted was cash. In almost every case the customer returning the Veg-O-Matic was not the person who’d bought it, so I didn’t consider the returns a criticism of my performance. I handed them the money and stuck the boxes and signed receipts under the register. At the end of the day, I toted the returned Veg-O-Matics to the storeroom and piled them up in the same space they’d occupied when they were new.

To compound this irony, the manager handed me a hammer at closing time on my first post-Christmas day as a cashier and sent me to the stockroom to smash the Veg-O-Matics the store had taken back. “Just bash those veggie things into little bits and put them back in the boxes,” he directed. “And while you’re at it, smash up these toys that didn’t get sold.” The manager didn’t explain why I needed to destroy so much perfectly good merchandise, and I didn’t ask. But I laid into my new task with gusto, obliterating hundreds of Veg-O-Matics along with Chatty Cathy dolls, Etch-A-Sketches, tin airliners, space guns, trains, batterypowered James Bond Aston Martin cars, Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Easy-Bake Ovens, electric football games, G.I. Joes, and the occasional Barbie doll, perfectly good toys that might have gone to poor children who’d suffered a sad Christmas. But it was exhilarating work — and strangely gratifying — an anti-capitalistic binge that assuaged the guilt I’d suffered from selling plastic crap to poor people.

But the days were long, and there was no time to hang out with my friends. When I got off work at 9 p.m., I was too worn out to go to parties or ride around with high school buds. I’d catch the bus back to Eastport and fall into bed. The following morning, I’d get up and do it again.

On my last day of work, a Friday, the manager shook my hand. “You’re a lifesaver,” he said, pumping my weary arm. “If you need a job next Christmas, just let me know.”

I smiled, gave him my college post office box number and asked him to send my check there rather than to my home address.

“You should get it before the 10th,” he said.

During the two-and-a-half weeks I’d toiled at Drug Fair, my parents hardly noticed my absence. I was a shadow who flitted in and out at odd hours. And I wanted it that way. I didn’t have to listen to them argue, which was their habitual method of communication during any holiday season when they were forced to remain in each other’s company for more than five continuous minutes. And if my parents didn’t realize the hours I was working, they’d have no idea how much money I was making. Had they an inkling of the cash I was likely to pocket, they would have given me that much less for tuition, room and board, and the endless hours I’d spent slaving at Drug Fair would have been for naught.

On the evening before my return to Elon, in honor of my having been invisible during the holiday season, my mother prepared lasagna, my favorite dish.

“You headed back tomorrow?” my father asked.

“First thing in the morning,” I answered, “I’m going to catch the bus.”

My mother looked puzzled. “It seems like you just got here,” she said.

“I’ve been working the whole time.”

“Good,” she said. “How much money did you make?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten paid yet — and the wage at Drug Fair isn’t as much as it is at the Safeway. I’ll let you know when the check arrives.” I was lying, of course. I had no intention of telling anyone how much money I’d earned. It was nobody’s business but mine. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of eight books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Year We Danced: A Memoir.

Andi hadn’t been startled awake for several nights, ever since the contractor fixed that foundation problem, but now she sat straight up in bed. Something was wrong. The house, her new home in a new city, remained quiet, all that groaning and cracking having been eliminated by the repairs. It was that other silence — no hum of cars passing on the street, no sounds of a city waking up. And, she realized as she stared into total darkness, no streetlight glow filtering around the blinds.

For a while, she heard nothing. Gradually, light began to show and she heard a chorus of shrieks and whistles — birds? She got up, shuffled to the back door and opened it on a bright

Fiction by Valerie nieman

illuStration by Jenn h aleS

dawn, cornfields stretching flat and green in every direction. The rows came right to her steps, tassels waving well above her head. Blackbirds wheeled in huge flocks.

Her house had moved. And she had moved with it.

Even as she tried to make sense of it, speculating that this looked like Iowa — must be, maybe, everyday, common Iowa — nothing to be afraid of, the rest of her brain was rabbiting around the bonkers impossibility of her situation.

She had loved the cottage from the moment the realtor opened the door, but, after moving in, she came to realize there was an uneasiness about it. Day and night, floors creaked and popped without the weight of a footstep. When she reached to put something in a high cupboard, the top of it did not line up with the ceiling. Everything was slightly off one way or another, but that’s the way old houses were. They settled year by year, in a long, uneven conversation with the ground.

She didn’t miss her previous home. It wasn’t that, at all. When her ex abruptly went away (for good this time), and shortly after so did her job, she’d decided she needed something smaller to meet her changed circumstances. Something older, solid, with its own history.

Stay, or go. It hadn’t been a difficult choice. Her former home had no longer felt like home. It just felt like him, his house, cold all the time.

Three different construction dates — 1921, 1927, 1928 — were listed variously on deeds, descriptions and reports. It made no sense. A house was completed or not in a certain year. The cedarshake cottage had been moved sometime in the 1970s and new sections had been added, a porch, a deck. Extensions that almost seemed to buttress the square main building, pushing out on three sides.

Andi had become fascinated by the idea of house-moving. It wasn’t unusual, of course; houses were moved out of the path of development all the time. Even lighthouses were raised up on rollers and carried inland, away from the encroaching sea. She remembered reading about a town in Minnesota that was hauled away from mining damage by horses and tractors and a steam engine. Elsewhere in North Carolina, the former village of Avalon had been moved when its mill burned down, the little houses incorporated into the neighboring textile town of Mayodan.

History was like that, for a house or a person — gaps in the record, mysteries.

The recommended contractor came within a week — the benefit of a small town, Andi supposed — and rang the doorbell with his ball cap off, gripped in his hands like he was entering a church.

“Miss Andrea?”

“Andi.”

“Miss Andi. I am pleased to meet you.” He paused and glanced inside. “What were you needing done?”

“I’d like you to look at the foundation.” It sounded too — something — to say she heard strange noises. “I understand the house was moved. Is it well supported? The home inspector didn’t mention anything.”

“Well, you are spot on about the move. I remember when they did it. Quite the show, with traffic held up and all. They put an office building where it used to be.” He kept talking as she led him back to the utility room and the trap door to the crawl space, wondering if a man that old (he had only a fringe of white hair around a polished dome) was agile enough to get around under the joists. But she needn’t have worried — he was quickly out of sight, banging around beneath the floor, and it wasn’t long until he came up out of the hole.

“Found your problem.” He turned off his flashlight, dusted off his hands. “The main support beam, a steel beam at that, has been cut in two.”

“What?” That sounded terrifying, as if the house might bend at the center like a cardboard box and fold itself flat.

“Yep. Might have been part of moving it, I don’t know.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, no, there’s plenty of support pillars. Just . . . strange.”

She hadn’t been able get the vision of a collapse out of her mind. “Can you put it back together?”

“I can do that, sure. Have to come back with some tools, bolts and such. And good steel.”

And so it was done.

Two mornings after the cornfields appeared, she awoke to the mooing of cows.

She hadn’t ventured into the tall corn, featureless as a sea. Now she looked out on new fields that rolled away over little hills, fields bounded by hedges instead of fences. Brown and white cows. She looked out of windows on each side of the house. Far away she could see a steeple and what appeared to be a castle.

England?

The house did not move on a regular schedule. It stayed in the same place for days, even weeks, then she would hear the wind moaning from a new corner of the eaves and look outside to see — what was that?

She was cautious. When the house set down in a populated area, no one seemed to notice. People apparently could not see the house, but once she stepped off the porch, they could see her. The first time she’d tried, somewhere under a hot, pale sky, blackhaired children clamored at her and she ran back inside. They stood for a moment, wide-eyed, letting the stones drop from their hands, and fled.

Did she appear suddenly, popping into view? Was she floating in a bubble like Glinda? No way to tell.

The movement of the house in space and time became wider and wilder. One day she might look out on a Japanese seaside town with little boats and a pagoda, and a couple days later, she’d be in the United States, far to the north, in a logging town at the edge of a redwood forest. The house, severed from a permanent base, had no utilities, but Andi did have a large supply of candles. And a rain barrel that had been strapped to one of the additions.

I am resourceful, she thought. I am doing fine.

Turn and turn and turn again.

The days were long and the nights longer in the wandering house. She missed her friends, especially Nicole, a coworker who had stayed close through both the divorce and her early (forced) retirement from their employer. Nicole had always teased her for overly careful preparation, cautious decision-making. What would she say about this?

Andi even sort of missed her ex. He had been a familiar problem, at least.

She learned how to gather food in exotic places, covering her foreignness with a long, hooded cloak, a souvenir of her role in a college Shakespeare production. Where there was a store, a souk, a market cross, she waited and watched, moving in when the crowds had thinned and the leavings were cheap. The smell of cooked meat made her ravenous.

She could barter jewelry and small items to merchants. Gestures were pretty much universal. As her hair grew unruly and her scrupulously kept-up color faded to salt-and-pepper, with her head down and a hand upturned, she could sometimes gather alms from passersby. No need to speak. Maybe she couldn’t any longer.

Andi fell asleep with the house settled someplace that was high and cold and empty, a steppe. She woke to find it beside a long lake clasped by dark-forested mountains. Well down the shore was a cluster of thatch-roofed cottages.

Hunger drove her to the village and, as she looked for someplace to get food, she was relieved to realize the people were speaking a sort of English. It wasn’t market day, but a house displayed a bush over the door. That meant beer was available, she remembered from a long-ago advertising class.

She nodded to the woman inside, dressed in a bodice and full skirts, her hair covered.

“Beer,” she ventured.

The woman, stout as one of her casks, looked oddly at her.

“Ale?” Andi mimed drinking.

The woman responded by shaking a bucket at her.

Ah. Medieval takeout. She had no pitcher, bucket, anything with which to carry the beer away.

Andi put her hand on a pottery pitcher and indicated that she would buy it. She produced a piece of jewelry she’d brought to trade, an alloy ring decorated with the figure of a nude dancing woman.

The woman backed away, eyes wide, and whispered something that sounded like “elf.” Or “help.”

A man came from outside and she pointed to the ring where it lay. He picked it up and turned it in his dirt-caked fingers, squinted at her, and then spoke to the woman, who hustled off to get someone, a priest, a soldier, someone that Andi didn’t think she should meet.

She gathered up the skirts of her cloak and ran.

The house didn’t move that night, or the next, or the next. She wished it would.

Andi did not go back to the village, fearing people who feared her. Andi imagined the townspeople might think she was something supernatural, in league with the Devil. She also considered that maybe the stylized figure of a naked woman on the ring had offended them. People went past the house, on their way to fields or driving herds of sheep along, without even a glance.

Then a man as dark as a devil stopped right in front, turned and stared into the window.

“I spy a lass, through the window,” he said.

She hid behind the curtain.

“There thou be, though how this house came hither I dinnae ken.” The man began to walk away, and she thought he’d gone until he emerged from the other side, having circled the house. He stepped up onto the porch and came to the door.

“How can you see this house?” she asked, almost whispering into the gap between the old door and the frame.

“Metal calls to me, shaped in some cantrip-time.”

Andi opened the door but stood behind the screen as though that bit of protection would be sufficient to keep out this brawny man. A blacksmith, she realized, his skin and clothing darkened by the smoke of the forge.

“The house moves,” she confided. “It was cut apart underneath and then, when it was fixed, it began moving.”

He cocked his head as he listened, the way a dog turns its head as it tries to tune in its person’s unfamiliar words. “The house is magiked.”

She nodded.

“Gie me leave then to see?”

Andi opened the flimsy door and stood back. The whiff of fire and charcoal came with him. He looked around the room, bemused (What did he make of the black slab of the television, photographs on the wall?) then followed her to the access. Like the old contractor, he moved with the assurance of someone who dealt with problems all the time, physical problems that could be addressed with tools and skill.

He was quickly back up, head and shoulders out of the trap door. He tried to explain the situation, and now she was the one who couldn’t put all the words together. However, she came to understand that he had found the steel beam bridged by the contractor’s plates and bolts.

“Can you fix it?”

“Fixt? Your house is scarcely that,” he said, a smile opening his sooty face. “I’ve a gift from the Fair Folk to forge steel that will nae break nor blunt at the bite. Aye, I can do this task. A wandering heart can be put aright, house or lass alike.”

He heaved himself out of the crawl space. She pulled back, away from his seared hands and leather apron.

“If you do, if you fix — unmend — it, what will happen?”

“The heart was cut in twain to end the wandering. If I take away the clampar, ’twill rest again.”

She thought about the various recorded dates of the house’s construction. Had it skipped from year to year, somehow, appearing and disappearing until it was tamed?

“But where? Where will it be?”

“Why, here, lass! I canna make it skip the sea from one shore to another like a stane from the hand of the giant Benandonner,” he said, laughing. “Here this house stays, and thou with it, or else be ever a-wandering like Will-o’-the-wisp.”

She looked out at the dense forests and the long silvery lake. She was aware of the interest in his merry eyes. And the able heft of the man. Solid, he was.

“My folk will thee like. There’s much eerie hereabouts, m’self not least, though we’ve never seen a lass sa conveyed.”

He offered his fire-marked hand.

“Andi,” she said, as she took it. PS

A former professor at NC A&T State University and editor for the Greensboro News & Record , Valerie Nieman lives and writes in Rockingham County. Her novel, In the Lonely Backwater, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for 2022.