2001

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QUARTO

QUARTO

QUARTO T H E UNDERGRADUATE LITERARY MAGAZINE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2001

SUBMISSIONS CURRENT AND RECENT UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING STUDENTS-INCUDING NONDEGREE STUDENTS AND STUDENTS ENROLLED IN OTHER DIVISIONS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WHO ARE TAKING UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING COURSES-ARE ENCOURAGED TO SUBMIT TO QUARTO. W E WELCOME POETRY, FICTION, NONFICTION, TRANSLATIONS, AND DRAMA, INCLUDING EXCERPTS FROM LONGER WORKS. EACH SUBMISSION SHOULD BE ACCOMPANIED BY A STAMPED, SELFADDRESSED ENVELOPE. PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME, ADDRESS, TELEPHONE NUMBER, A N D AN E-MAIL ADDRESS O N YOUR MANUSCRIPT. MANUSCRIPTS MAY BE SUBMITTED ELSEWHERE WHILE UNDER CONSIDERATION AT QUARTO. PLEASE NOTIFY US OF ACCEPTANCE

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QUARTO 2001 WISHES TO THANK THE CREATIVE WRITING CENTER FOR ITS GENEROUS SUPPORT. SPECIAL THANKS TO MARGARET HEPBURN FOR HER HELP, SUPPORT, AND EXPERTISE. COVER ART: VICTORIA SCOTT, POWER LINES TITLE PAGE ART: ELIZA BANG, TULIPS COPYRIGHT © QUARTO, 2001 ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED AND REVERT TO AUTHORS AND ARTISTS UPON PUBLICATION.

ISSN 0735-6536

QUARTO STAFF 200 1

EXECUTIVE EDITORS ANITA JOY AUSTENBERG MELISSA HILLIE

MANAGING EDITOR REBECCA KLEIN

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITORS SUHAEY ROSARIO JEREMY WILSON

ART DIRECTOR ALICIA BROWN

ART EDITOR LESLIE MCHALE

ONLINE DESIGN & W E B M A S T E R ALICIA BROWN

FICTION EDITORS KIMBERLY DOUGHERTY EARMANESE GRANGER ALICIA BROWN

CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR MINDYEISENBERG

POETRY EDITORS JOSEPH DONATO JENNY MUNDY-CASTLE

PUBLICITY DIRECTOR ANITA JOY AUSTENBERG

DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR KIMBERLY DOUGHERTY

FACULTY ADVISER LESLIE T SHARPE

DIRECTOR, CREATIVE WRITING CENTER LESLIE WOODARD

TABLE OF CONTENTS QUARTO 2001

WHAT YOU W A N T KELCEY NICHOLS

PROFESSOR O S L O

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DAVID AUSTERWEIL

C O L D BEFORE BEGINNINGS DAVID AUSTERWEIL

I KNEW THE WAY

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MY BROTHER W O U L D GROW SANDRA PAULINA BAZZARELLI

FIRE

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KRISTIE HART

VIRGIN MARY

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JESSICA POGGI

PAPERWHITE DAYS

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LILY BINS-BERKEY

PUT UP THE PINK S A I L

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AND TURN LEFT JULIE MAAS

T H E POND JEFFREY D. J. KALLENBERG

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HAIKU ELIZABETH FREIDIN

GRACE

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DUSTIN BEALL SMITH

ELEGY

44 MICHELLE J. LEE Q's

BIG ADVENTURE

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MARK MORAN

ROLF W A L K I N G TO THE TRAIN ALEXANDER P. DE LUCENA

C A L L OF THE W I L D BENJAMIN RYAN

BLACK Is . . .

KATORI HALL

TO BE THE ESCAPADERS DAVID SUSMAN

57

W H A T YOU W A N T KELCEY NICHOLS

T

he summer I lived with Michael, the sun burned holes in our days, a throbbing ball reminding me I was still in Southern California. The hills surrounding the stable and Michael's apartment were dry and people feared they would catch fire. Houses, once glamorous, hunched toward the ocean, slouching further with each landslide. It was the second year of a drought.

I cleaned the tack on Michael's porch, the sun not yet hot on my shoulders. Two girls rode past on their horses, lipsticked mouths curling. I was not part of their clique: I did not own my own horse or have an entourage of tan boys to drive me around in their sleek cars. What I did have was Michael; he was the only reason the girls looked at me at all. They were daddy's girls who possessed the affect of sophistication, the rehearsed brattiness that passed for maturity in Southern California then—girls who had experienced a lot when they were too young to understand it. Their gaze made me aware of my hands, stained by dirt and glycerin soap. Their eyes skimmed over me and rested on Michael, who was riding his horse in the dressage arena.

Michael's non-American grace stood out in a world where people ended every sentence as if it were a question. Born Mikhail, he had changed his name when he defected to America. He snuck out at an international horseshow, his mother's rings hidden in his riding boots where they dug deep imprints into his calves.

With the rings he had bought his horse Cortez from a Spaniard so fearful of the horse he was ready to sell the stallion to the slaughterhouse, a story Michael liked to exaggerate. To me the stallion was almost mythical, the summation of the Pegasus I had believed in as a child and the show horses I coveted as a teenager. When the sun shone off the horse's blood-red coat he seemed as if he were lit from the inside and his movement reminded me of flames licking at a log.

A woman with long, streaked blond hair rode past me on a tarnished ten speed. The sound of her bicycle startled Michael and the stallion, who reared. Michael kicked the horse hard and began cursing at the woman.The two girls looked at each other and muttered.The woman got off the bike and leaned it on the outside of the courtyard. "You whore," Michael said. The woman

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ignored him. She stopped in front of me and met my eyes and I felt as if I were staring at a beach without sunglasses, the light from the sand stinging my eyes. The woman was known as "the bicycle whore" and I had never heard her voice, though she came to the stable almost every day. I looked down as she passed and saw her go up the stairs with one of the grooms. I recognized the woman's walk: it was my walk.

I watched Michael school Cortez. Michael was abrupt with the horse for the next fifteen minutes. Then his temper settled and Michael fell into a rhythm with the horse.

When he was finished, Michael rode over to me and I could tell from his relaxed shoulders and bold eyes that he expected to win the following day. He swung his leg over Cortez and stood next to me, pulling me into him, the coarseness of his chin against my collarbone. He slipped one hand between my legs and I brushed him away. Michael laughed at me.

"The air today is like air of the Red Sea," he said. The day smelled of ocean, eucalyptus trees, and the hot, dry dust that stuck in my sinuses that year. Michael seldom spoke of his past.

The stories I had were scattered, broken images he told me halfcoherently on nights we had been drinking more than usual.

There was a woman with full breasts and a taunting laugh—there had been many women. I knew them by their witticisms, their preferences for certain foods. One drank only Bordeaux, another preferred Polish vodka. I knew the lush details only a lover would know and nothing more. Michael never called any of the people he left by name. He said it was bad luck.

"The Red Sea," Michael said. His eyes shone with warmth and his breath had no smell, only heat. "You are like me. You will try to run away from these things but you will not be able to leave them.

"Michael drew back then, and cupped his hands together for my foot. He helped me onto Cortez, who shifted sideways.

"Easy," Michael said, more to me than the horse. I turned Cortez toward the hill overlooking the ocean. I felt him gather his back legs under his haunches and his shoulders surge forward underneath me. Some horses gave me a feeling of floating, but this stallion seemed to push off the ground with each step. We reached the top of the hill and stopped. The land separating us and the ocean was covered with anise. I saw the white shack of the fruit stand next to the highway and the expanse of dark blue ocean. I never got used to the California seasons. They ran together into a long numbing summer that made me crave

recklessness. I was nineteen. As I stared at the ocean, I thought that if Cortez and I got a running start at this edge, we could soar over and land in the surf.

The temperature rose to one hundred that day so Michael and I stayed inside, going over the course for the World Cup Trial. Michael always played classical music in his house and I learned to love the rise and fall of the orchestra though I knew none of the works by name. We sat at the kitchen table and Michael closed his eyes while he described each detail of the course to me. Then he opened his eyes and told me I should wear a bra.

"1 do when I ride."

"You should wear one all the time," he told me. "All of those Mexicans stare at you."

"Let them look," I said. "They're my tits." Sex with Michael was like being in a car, speeding across a secret road ridden with potholes, crashing and jolting. I had always been the quiet girl, unnoticed by first my classmates and then my father. And here was Michael. The guttural sound of his breath, the insistence of his body. I started to scream but Michael put his hand over my mouth. I bit down on his fingers. I wanted the explosion of heat in my body, the silent time afterward, feelings that dispersed all too quickly. I lay on the kitchen floor; my breath calmed in my chest; I saw the black lines left by the mop under the kitchen cabinets—so orderly, as if the dirt had been commanded to stand at attention. I thought of Michael's other mistresses, as he called them, and me. I pictured blondes, brunettes, redheads, women with strangely shaved pubic hair.

Because I could never remember which details belonged to each mistress, I rolled them all into one superb woman who was everything at once.

"What are you doing?" Michael asked. He handed me a paper towel. I didn't move.

"Katherine?" He stared at his index finger where my bite had left square marks in his skin.

I sat up cross-legged.

Michael lit a cigarette and I took it from him. He lit another.

"You are too young for this," he said.

"No." My scream was still trapped inside me. I stood and walked out through the sliding glass door. I had convinced myself Michael loved me. I removed my shirt at the edge of the pool, flung it toward the kitchen. I dove and the water slid over my skin in one slick motion. o

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At dusk, I sat on the porch listening to the music from Michael's apartment, the crickets, the horses, an occasional car blaring a Ranchero song, my toes dangling in the pool. After my mother died, I would sit up at night in my bedroom and listen to the rush of cars on the highway. Raccoons came and overturned the trash cans and when I heard them, I would call out for my father. "Daddy's gone," he had answered from the living room.

"Daddy has the night off." I missed my mother's soft voice, the way she read me stories, and her fingertips brushing the hair from my forehead. My father missed her too. He stayed up after he put me to bed and thumbed through old photo albums. In junior high I started going into L.A. with friends, dancing at clubs where the music pounded out the silence of our house. I decided I would drive Michael's car into L A ; I needed to drown myself in music. When I turned around, Michael was sitting in a chair behind me. "How long have you been there?"

Michael put his arms around me. He kissed both of my eyelids and held me against his chest, rocking me. I heard the beat of his heart against the backdrop of the crickets. He said "Shh," as if I were a child. I let myself be rocked, giving in to the comfort, the warmth of Michael against me and I remembered my mother tucking me in, the flannel sheets against my skin, the smell of her skin like freshly cut lilacs, and how long it had been since I had felt anything like that.

"Are you sure you want to ride tonight?" Michael said. We had been waiting for the heat to fade.

"Yes." I met Michael in the ring riding the chestnut gelding Michael referred to as "my horse," even though the horse belonged to him, one of many. Without speaking, Michael pulled the stirrups off my saddle, clipped a lunge line to the horse's bridle, and tied the reins in a knot. He stood in the center of the ring and the gelding moved to the end of the rope where we began to circle.

The night was humid and the smell of the eucalyptus trees had grown stronger in the evening air. The hot dust of the afternoon had settled. Michael told me to put my arms straight out at my sides and take the gelding to a trot. "I feel like I'm in the circus," I said. Michael ignored me and tossed a clump of dirt at the gelding; the horse quickened. I felt rough, as if I was bouncing all over in the deep seat of the dressage saddle.

Michael told me to slow the horse down but I wasn't sure what to do without the reins. "You depend too much on your hands, on the bridle," Michael said. "Quiet him with your body." I leaned back slightly, then more, eased my lower legs from their grip on 4

the horse's side and he slowed to a more comfortable trot. It felt as if my limbs were wandering in the air instead of rooted. I balanced my body with the muscles in my inner thighs, holding myself into the saddle. Michael told me to close my eyes and I did. I began to anticipate the length of horse's steps; I could control his gait by shifting my weight.

Michael told me to bring the gelding down to a walk and then he reeled me into the center. "Come here," he said. "Close your eyes." My breath was fast and I waited for Michael to come toward me, to touch me. Michael told me to lean down and when I did, he tied a silk scarf across my eyes as a blindfold. It was one of my scarves, something I had stashed away in the back of a drawer and it struck me as odd that he should have found it.

The scarf smelled like Michaelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a mixture of musk, a fading, spicy cologne, and tobacco.

I listened to Michael guiding me through the gaits. His voice was steady and even. "Canter," Michael said and I urged the gelding forward. I heard only the horse's hooves, my breath, and Michael's voice giving me directions. The horse's muscles worked under my body and I began to sense when he was about to change stride. Michael had me go through a series of transitions. Walk. Canter. Halt. He told me to take off the scarf and I slid it over my head. I blinked for a moment and turned to where I thought Michael was. My eyes searched for the lunge line but I didn't see it. I realized that I was at the other end of the arena and the horse was no longer clipped to the lunge line. I panicked and reached for the reins. "Wait," Michael said. "Just make a figure eight." I still reached for the reins. "Breath," he told me. I sat back up. I turned the horse using just my balance, shifting my weight against his back. I felt his legs flowing out in huge strides, then I softened him to a slow trot. I commanded the horse to canter and did another figure eight. The gelding made each move naturally, almost without my having to ask. I halted in front of Michael. The night air had cooled and it reminded me of chilling water splashing over my skin.

Z

Michael led the horse toward the stable. Most of the lights in the groom's quarters were off. I saw the woman with the dusty blond hair come out of one of the rooms. I could barely see her face in the darkness but I felt she was looking at me. Michael didn't seem to notice her; he was blind to everyone that didn't matter to him. I leaned down and touched Michael's head. He turned back and smiled at me. The woman seemed to want something from me and it occurred to me that Michael had slept with her. Michael offered to put the gelding away and I knew I had done well: this was the first time he had ever acted as my

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groom.

As I walked to the apartment I felt the woman come up beside me. "Do you have a cigarette?" she asked. Her voice was thin, a shiver. I reached into my back pocket and gave her my whole pack. "Thanks," she said. She walked across the courtyard and took her bike from its place leaning against the wall. I wanted to know what she did in the rooms, if she was a prostitute like everyone said.

I made a gin and tonic and brought it out to the pool. I watched the woman sail down the hill on her bicycle, hair fanned out behind her. She tilted her head into the breeze as if she welcomed the wind on her face. My breeches were sweaty from the horse and I wanted to feel the night air on my skin. I took off my clothes and waited for Michael. I watched the sky, strained-to hear the crash of the waves over the hill.

Michael came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. I put my hands on his. His body felt warm. "Have you ever been with a prostitute?" I asked.

Michael drew his head back. "No." "Why not?"

"Why not? You don't have to go to one of those if—" His face was scrunched and red.

"It's okay," I said. "I was just curious."

"You are so strange sometimes, Kate."

His face was slack, eyes open in tiny slivers. He seemed like a young, hairless animal, weak, eyes searching. I thought of the woman and her stare. It hit me that this what I looked like to Michael before sex—helpless. I realized that I always closed my eyes when Michael and I had sex because I didn't want to see the way he looked at me—not tender, but angry. There was something in the eyes of that woman, predatory, wise, cruel.

Michael sat up and pulled me into him. "I don't want this," I said.

"Katerina," he said, "You never know what you want."

He stood.

"I do," I said, but Michael had already gone inside.

"Hold him," I told Michael. Cortez tried to shake me away as I finished braiding his mane. I stood on a vertical milk crate with my weight balanced against the stallion's shoulder. Cortez kept tossing his neck. "Can't you hold him still?" I said. Michael was preoccupied with the course and stared at the wall where it was posted. When I had finished the last braid, I stepped down.

Cortez turned his head and bit my arm. I raised my hand and the horse shied away.

"See, no one likes to get bitten," Michael said. "You 6

shouldn't let him get away with that." Michael smacked Cortez's nose hard. The stallion jerked his head back, ears forward, and for a second he looked almost comically cute. Then Cortez flattened his ears and started snapping at the air in front of Michael. Michael hit him again. This went on until the stallion tired of having his face hit. "He's getting bad habits. You have to make him respect you," Michael said.

Michael waited for me, foot raised, to give him a leg up.

Instead I walked to the warm-up ring and leaned on the fence. I watched Michael warm up. He practiced the double flying lead changes that formed the crux of the course. If he looked up at me, I never knew it. The other riders stayed out of his way. I thought of the mornings I had spent watching Michael train Cortez, standing by the edge of the arena or by the pool, breathing in the hot California dust.

When Michael was standing outside of the arena, I wiped his boots with a rag. He didn't look at me. I reached my hand up to touch Michael's and he muttered something in Czech. Michael grasped my hand and held it for a second. Then he let go and it was his turn to do the course. I walked up to the seats and immediately felt as if I had disappeared into the crowd. The only sound in the arena was the movement of Cortez's hooves across the fine sand. The stallion crossed his front legs in perfect, even steps—the movements so exact Michael and Cortez seemed to be breathing together. The stallion's neck arched in a tight half circle, his weight balanced exactly between front and back legs.

They approached the crux of the course—a series of flying lead changes in which the horse had to alternate the leading leg in the air without breaking stride. The first two went flawlessly. On the third, Cortez skipped his back leg. I saw Michael's body tense. For the rest of the course his commands were too harsh.

His contact with the bit in Cortez's mouth became a disguised yank. The stallion looked as if he wanted to explode from underneath Michael but Michael kept the horse's body in check.

The tension in the reins showed in the way Cortez twisted his neck against the bit and the crease in Michael's brow. Michael finished and walked the horse out of the ring. He kicked Cortez's sides and the stallion's body jerked. The judges held up their scores. An eight, another eight—seventy-eight all together.

Michael did not dismount. A young man handed him his score written on a piece of paper. Michael refused to look at it. He stared directly at the judges, tore up the paper, threw it on the ground. It was the best score of the day. Michael took the stallion back to the warm-up ring and forced him through a series of canter to halt. A rush, an abrupt stop. He did this until Cortez was 7

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exhausted, sweated up and down. Then Michael handed Cortez to me. He met my eyes but seemed not to see me. I took the saddle off and bathed Cortez. I rubbed liniment on the horse's legs and the tingle shot through my skin. I wrapped each leg with quilted cotton and strips of linen to protect the horse's legs for the trip back.

My father once said that America was nothing more than a series of snapshots along a highway. He told me this after my mother died, when we were on our way to Southern California.

Driving back with Michael, I understood what my father meant.

Towns rose out of the dust and fell, a string of cars appeared on the shoulder, hoods up, engines smoking. Drivers shifted to the inside line and the passengers stood back, waiting for their cars to explode in a dramatic flare of Hollywood flames. In the trailer, Cortez stomped his feet. Michael smoked and gripped the steering wheel. "Are you tired?" I asked.

Michael took a drag off his cigarette.

"I'll drive if you want."

"It's fine," he said I read the highway signs that pointed to towns and cities I would never visit. It seemed as though we were not moving at all but were caught on a treadmill of highway, the backgrounds false as movie sets. At last we were ascending the hill to the stable.

Michael took the first curve too sharply and I reached for the handle above my window. In the trailer, Cortez kicked. I reached over for the cigarettes and lit one. I offered one to Michael but he refused to take it.

Michael pulled the trailer into the stable. I stayed in the truck and finished my cigarette, then I got out to help Michael.

His body was tense and Cortez felt it, perking his ears and bobbing his head when Michael entered the front of the trailer. I unlatched the back and put the ramp down; Michael began to back the horse out of the trailer. The stallion's hooves hit the ground and he pranced sideways and Michael followed the flow of the horse's movement. For a second they mirrored each other, shadowing left, Michael's body a more compact version of Cortez. Michael pulled on the leadrope and the chain tightened on Cortez's nose. The stallion's head thrust up, twitching, neck arched, the huge head moving higher, nose to the sky, then Michael cracked the chain with one downward pull. Cortez shied sideways and stretched his neck upwards, front legs leaving the ground, and I thought of Cortez approaching a hobbled mare, taking the skin of her neck between his teeth, and pulling his 8

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great body onto hers with a tremendous rock. Michael's boot made a hollow soundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a cardboard box collapsing as it connected with the horse's flank. He held his crop and Cortez danced left: I waited for Cortez's retaliation, anticipated the thwack of his hoof against Michael's bone.

Cortez began to rear on his hind legs. I heard the snapsnap of Michael's crop and a rip like a burlap bag tearing and I was aware of the thick smell of blood and sweat. The lashes made a gridlike pattern of narrow red lines across Cortez's coat.

In spite of his thousand-pound advantage, Cortez's eyes had rolled back flashing white as Michael lunged at him. The horse's eyes spun in his sockets as if they were detached from the rest of the body and trying to escape by themselves. I saw that Cortez was exhausted, his strength thwarted by the chain across his nose. The white bandages I had so carefully wrapped fanned out in long lines of white as the stallion tried to move away. I halfexpected the stallion to scream as a rabbit does when it dies in its sleep and I knew Cortez could not fight back. This knowledge came upon me slowly the way a fog can almost engulf a entire landscape before you notice it. I went to Michael, clasped my hand around the leadrope, said "Stop." His eyes locked on mine and his arm came up: I felt a sharp pain in my leg and a sting on my cheek and then I was on the ground. I looked up and saw the woman with the sand-colored hair sitting on the steps, her cigarette burning down. I saw Cortez's body drop a foot, the knees lowering, then a staccatoed sink accompanied by the echo of Michael's boot striking. The stable fell quiet and I could not even hear a horse stomp or a dog bark. Michael dropped the lead rope. He looked not at me but at the woman on the steps, smoke curling around her. Then he strode to the apartment against an orange sky that glowed like the inside of the blacksmith's forge. I thought of the steel hammer hitting the firered horseshoe, the deafening blow of metal on metal. For a moment, the world lost its sound and I could hear nothing. Then Cortez snorted the dust out of his nostrils. The woman on the stairs stood; her eyes touched mine. I saw that she understood all that I had pretended to know, as if I had only stared at a lacquered surface, seen a reflection of my face, and believed I understood. She walked up to me and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. Her brown eyes were dry, dry as the surrounding desert that would soon disappear in a crescendo of fire, and she did not feel sorry for me. I coaxed Cortez to his feet who, in one great shake, rose and sent ripples across his body.

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â&#x20AC;˘ PROFESSOR OSLO DAVID AUSTERWEIL Professor Oslo is crazy.

He spent four years in theological school but has a PhD in theoretical physics.

During mass he used to hide behind the altar and rap rosary beads around his finger creating a divine teslacoil to point at sinners and send waves of godly radiation through them.

Once when he was discovered there he used a chemical reaction to create a biblical fog and escape to his office; but not before shouting fiery words from Revelations about the collapse of the universe and the impending judgment at Jesus' hand.

He still holds a tenured faculty position at the university but has given up teaching in order to fully devote himself to translating the bible into obscure languages only spoken in towns with thatched huts, or towns that once existed with thatched huts and polluted wells.

Professor Oslo is not crazy.

He enjoys each morning and sleeps each night and never drinks coffee to keep working.

He studies the workings of the universe and fears the being who devised them.

He never pretends to understand and always fears the irreverence of people.

He trusts his hunches.

His current project is religious alchemy.

He has been trying to illuminate the archaic process behind the Eucharist.

It is written he will succeed.

10

C O L D BEFORE BEGINNINGS DAVID AUSTERWEIL I remember seeing her first down by the pond where she scanned the water surface for fish noses.

She looked like a thermometer with legs, arms, and breasts, or a stop sign in the breeze.

I said I was sick, and needed my temperature taken.

I told her to arch her back, and not to worry, yes, I could be this certain.

During lunch she told me, "Where I'm from it is always cold.

The body is the best radiator.

With another you will always be warm."

I had always feared the cold at night, knowing too well that vodka and electric blankets were not real heat.

In bed we locked like puzzle pieces.

I figured the finished puzzle must begin some golden age and asked her if she thought we'd see it.

She said it could not be seen from any vantage point.

I did not care anyway.

When it's cold out, she'll comfort me.

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KWE A D E ODUS, FIRST

HABERLIST

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] KNEW THE WAY MY BROTHER WOULD GROW SANDRA PAULINA BAZZARELLI Spying coarse men known as relatives, I knew the way my brother would grow.

In that Kodacolor instant in our garage I saw him as a man away A biddable child, the name-boy, the heir— the only son among tens of female cousins He stood akin to our dad's hanging prize with a coat buttoned up to his hairless chin His smile like a twisted nerve on his face His eyes round like coins of a yet undetermined worth He posed buried inside a borrowed hat that was fluorescent orange with ear flaps Slit, neck to nuts, our dad's adult game was bound at both sets of its skinny ankles While the flash off the camera soaked up its flesh cave that dripped with whatever was left in it And there at its side my brother behaved, plucked from his Saturday morning cartoons, wedged between the gathering of camouflaged men who, in thigh-boots, seemed shorter if anything I saw backyard birds beckoning with broken wings that my brother would mend with ice-cream-stick splints I saw the peanuts he'd leave for the squirrels on the stoop despite the mess they'd always made with the shells Then I heard him tell me all the proper names of his fish swimming in his tank, fed flakes as they passed I saw the ones whose size and color defined them best— the Guppies, the Orange Tang

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Still wearing my pajamas with sleep tangled in my hair, I spied my brother standing in his place in our garage Though his water-swelled lids never batted an eyeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; he was not a boy diverged in the would-be With self-breached roots branching out and over, I knew the way my brother would grow.

I saw a boy at close range, then a man away from all the things men would ever teach him

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FIRE KRISTIE HART

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haven't seen my brother in twenty thousand years. But my heart instantly recognizes his dark face in the torn and faded newspaper clipping.

Sitting in my kitchen, with the snow and bright moonlight outside, the fire inside and my own dark son on the hearth, I unwrap the Christmas peaches sent to us from Georgia that will be the centerpiece and the dessert at our holiday dinner.

Benjamin and I have developed a method of doing this. I pick the peaches out of their padded box, hold them gingerly in one hand and strip away the newspaper with the other. I add the paper to the fire; Benjamin claps his approval as the flames grow large for a moment, then sigh, and die back again. An especially large package reveals not only its smooth golden peach but a dark image on a white background. I fling the paper toward the fire but it doesn't quite reach. Then I stare at it a long moment.

My heart's eye has recognized him. It is another long moment before I realize what I have seen. I stand frozen. It is only Benjamin's appreciative cry that galvanizes me to rush fingers to the fire and pluck away the newspaper. I blow on my burned skin and stare at the ashy remnants in my hand. I stare at the face of my departed brother. I wonder how much of it has been lost.

He looks like the moon. Just as it is outside, pitted and scarred, and bright and round and cheerful.

Everything shining outside is in his face.

He has always looked like the moon. I wonder where he has been to have changed so little. Only the eyes now surprise me, only the eyes I do not remember. They no longer glow warm gold, but burn with frightening intensity. I search the paper for how, and why, and where. The fire has started to consume the article, but most of the photo is intact, caption nearly burned away. Along the burned edge, along his face, printed within the paper, there is a logo. Georgia State Prison. There is also a piece of an article on how a Georgia court has refused to hear an appeal on the first execution in twenty years. My hand shakes.

Is my brother in prison? Is my brother going to die?

With trembling hands, I put the newspaper aside and reach for a golden red fruit. I turn the peach over and over; I am stunned by its wrapping, stunned by its color, stunned by what 15

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have I just seen.

A Georgia peach. As I say the words, my lips curl in dislike.

My father taught me to love the taste of them when I was very young and I still love the fruit enough to send away for them year after year, yet I hate the word Georgia. My father came from Georgia. The state with a woman's name and a man's past. I stare at my son playing in the shadow of the flames and wonder what to do.

My husband will be home in a few hours, he would already be here, but he has had to work late this Christmas Eve. He will come home expecting the same family as when he left it this morning. He doesn't even know I have a brother.

Luckily, Benjamin's cry drags me to the moment, and as I feed him, and read to him, and the turkey bastes, I gather .my thoughts.

I try to think about the last time I saw my brother and I realize I can't remember events individually. They are one large, incessant, moving memory that carries me away. My brother is the moon, the landscape confused. I concentrate on him. I try to say his name. My father is ten years dead, yet it is nearly twenty minutes before I can breathe my brother's name out loud.

"Jacob."

Just that is joy enough for a moment.

"Jacob's not dead."

And the tears run down my face, silent as winter. I find that I have to put Benjamin in his crib because my arms are trembling so. I look at my hand, I look at the fire. I go to the telephone. And the operator's voice is saying impatiently, "I said, may I help you please?"

"I . . . I want to find someone who may be in the Georgia Prison system, o r . . . something like that?"

There is now a chill on the phone and while I wait, I think of Georgia. It is strange that Jacob might be there now. I look at the sweet peaches in front of me and suddenly wonder who picked them.

A smooth plantation voice drawls, "Georgia State Corrections Bureau, may I help you?"

"Well, I don't quite know how to begin," I say.

"Well, honey, begin at the beginning."

"I live in Massachusetts, and I have a brother. . . You see, I was unwrapping peaches . . . I think my brother might be in prison in Georgia. I haven't seen him in fifteen years. Since he left home."

"I'll connect you."

Connect me with who? I wonder. There is a beep, and a

16

click, and just like that, another voice comes on the line.

"May I have the name of the incarcerated, please?"

"Well, I'm not sure he's . . . Jacob Johnson. Do you have a Jacob Johnson there?"

"Hold on please."

I cradle the phone in my arms for long moments, listening to the sound of the rain coming through the phone all the way from Georgia. Outside the snow is beginning to fall. As I wait, I stare at the clipping . . . at the words . . . execution . . . at my brother's face. It is an eternity. The smooth voice comes back.

"Honey, I'm sorry, but our computers are down. You'll have to call back tomorrow."

"But tomorrow's Christmas, no one'll be there."

"Oh, honey, people will be here, I guarantee it."

"That's not what I . . . please . . . I haven't seen my brother in fifteen years."

I begin to cry now, with no pride.

"I haven't seen him since I was twelve and he ran away from home. You see, it was my fault, it was all my fault. Please, please . . . please?"

There is silence on the telephone. I hear her pity. I also feel her moving away fast, fast as she can.

"Please . . . please."

A long silence, then a sigh.

"I tell you what I'll do. I got to go home now to my little ones. But I gotta come back and the computers should be working by then. If you give me your phone number, I'll call you back when I'm done with my work."

Benjamin is crying now again, and so am I. I hold him as I hear my husband come strolling up our long driveway. Then I collapse into his arms, me and the newspaper clipping, the baby and the story.

Long before I was five I had already heard of the five-mile walk each way that was not the beginning or the middle, or the end of a day, but merely the something that happened after my father woke before dawn, after his back stopped hurting from bending to pick strawberries, and before his fruit-stained clothes brought laughter ringing from his schoolmates' mouths. He always stopped the story there, as if that were the end. Before he straightened his back, protected his younger brothers and sisters from grandfather, and stood up for his mother. As if he didn't care, wouldn't take those mornings out on my brother, as if no one would have to pay. My sister never tired of the stories like my brother and I did. My brother, who had the misfortune of looking just like grandfather and having a will as hard and strong 17

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as my father's, would not be bent to his iron hand. They fought for every piece of ground in our house and in our yard. It is probably a very common story, this one of my father and brother, and their long undying battle with each other, man to man, over the women in their house. My mother stood poised between, my oldest sister made her home with my father, and I with my brother.

I remember sneaking across the hall to my brother's room, and playing with all the wonderful living animals he could carve from dead blocks of wood. He would sit me on his lap, and we would trace the outline of the animals with fingers and he would teach me to draw with my eyes closed.

But I also remember how my brother could do nothing right, how their fights grew from words to pushes, to blows, and how no one would give in. My brother would leave for days on end, reappearing at last, haggard and drawn, tethered back by the tears in Mother's voice during their whispered calls when Father was not at home.

Until the night I set the bed on fire. I played in my brother's room all the time because it made me feel closer to him.

Now, of course, I do remember. I remember being alone, and feeling alone, amid his loneliness, in the room he lived in.

Lying with my head under his bed, under the old mattress, my nose tickled from the bulging stuffing hanging nearly to the floor.

I remember the delight in striking each match, setting the frayed ends of the mattress alight and watching the decay melt away.

Then I snuffed each tendril of flame.

I don't remember how it happened, just the moment it did.

Unbidden, a hitherto captive portion of the fire stole a life of its own and raced to set the others free. In a gasp, it was out of my control. I stood frozen. For a long time, I think.

Then I ran, ran to the kitchen. A full glass of water in my hands I returned. My childhood eyes met a raging inferno. I don't remember saying a word, I don't think I did. My father seemed to think that just my brother's vanished presence had been enough to almost destroy our house.

When the firemen had come and gone, the living room still stank and promised to remember the shame of their dirty boots. I think that when my sister saw me hide, with the telltale matches still in hand, my father had already chased my brother down the street with the baseball bat. Past the knowing stares of the neighbors, past our own entreaties, past my mother's sobs.

I tried to speak when Father swung his fist toward Jacob that night. Only my tears rained down, and that was not enough.

In an instant they were at each other's throats. I remember how 18

at last, after so many years, Jacob sat atop Father's chest and punched him, again and again, until Mother and my sister and I pulled him away. For moments in the long, wet grass, we thought he would hit us as well. Then he simply ran, ran away. My father was just beginning to stir, the blood pouring from his face.

That was the last night Jacob's name was ever spoken in our house. As my father said, he no longer had a son. I went to my father, I told him what I had done, I begged him to let Jacob come home, not to be blamed for my sin.

Then my father held me in his arms, and told me what a good girl I was. He talked about how nice it was that I would have a brand-new room. He never said Jacob's name aloud again. There was a moment when his voice shook as he asked me what color I wanted my new room, but it passed. He tightened his arms around me until it hurt. I did not struggle, for my brother was already gone, chased far past the Georgia nights my father lived with. I never saw him again.

I am crying, as I tell the story. Suddenly the telephone rings. My husband takes his arms from me, leans me against the couch. He answers. I turn away. I don't need to see his face to know my answer. He comes back.

"It wasn't your fault. You're just seeing this through the eyes of a child."

"I know."

Benjamin plays in front of the fire. The moon is bright outside.

3 m

19

â&#x20AC;˘ VIRGIN MARY

JESSICA POGGI

Doing her crazy drugs With our Mother the Virgin Mary looking over us From the bureau top In slight admiration and Obligatory condemnation.

20

ELIZABETH VERNA, THE DOOR

PAPERWHITE DAYS LILY BINNS-BERKEY

during the paperwhite days my mother will gather us as the daylight fades upstairsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a few chairs, a table, a lemon tree a big bed stays three-quarters made from the left to one foot from the right just about all the time the wall of windows looks out over the clearing, for a few minutes we will see the tops of trees across the field glow in sideways sun shadows will fall a wallspot where my mother marked the highest point the sun can touch a blue dot will fade into tea-soaked silence my mother will read aloud The Dead and remark at pauses that she loves the imagery the snow settles on my sister will answer the phone stand in white bra and blue jeans talk about the newest gel enjoy her hair on her shoulders she'll know she's too loud and come back and sit as her cup of untouched tea gets cold my mother will smile and say "my mother and my sister and I used to sit around like this, except we never talked

22

only stared at different places within the room" a little later she will begin again "did I tell you that my mother married again? after Poppa sent us back from Minneapolis to Chappaqua when she was released from the hospital. some stranger, he moved in for three months, got her pregnant, then disappeared. her sister had the sense to help her get rid of it, though without her knowing, they got rid of it all. afterwards, everything went back to the way it was beforeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;how the three of us would just sit around and stare. too dark for my mother to read, my sister will get up to turn on a light, will say she doesn't get the story at all the house will be cold with the sun gone my mother will put down the book gather the cups grumble about the cat hair on the carpet go down to light the fire start on dinner my sister and I will follow her down the stairs. en 00

m -a :* m < m I

m D

PUT UP THE PINK S A I L AND TURN LEFT JULIE MAAS

H

e stood in the baggage check-in line in a black tee shirt and jeans, wool greatcoat hemming the floor, a few tufts of black still sprouting amid the silver of his beard and hair. He was concerned about the length of the line and the lateness of the hour, both ultimately of no relevance, the flight having been delayed. She invited him to join her for dinner while they waited, and he seemed relieved for the company. .He spoke of sailing and historical novels, Australia, whose length had never been traversed on foot, of the death of his younger son in a motorcycle accident, and of his unfinished book of essays titled, Put Up the Pink Sail and Turn Left. Later, he slept, his head lobbed forward like a cut flower having burst forward in bloom and color, now spent, resting its petals against the stem, catching its breath, that it might rally for one last infusion of beauty and perfume before it withered to brown and died.

Fiona put aside the book that lay unread in her lap or rather, uncomprehended; her eyes skimming the page but the words falling away barely tasted. This stranger had spoken of his wife of forty-two years with humor and wry fondness and a delicacy that suggested he was still in awe of his good fortune.

He spoke of how he had to be careful, handle her softly, always before their son's birthday, always near the anniversary of his death; held lightly like a Faberge egg, rare and treasured and fragile, lest it might shatter.

Like this old man, she had counted on Frank to be there, to be soft with her, serving as damage control against the approaching darkness. There was still enough Roman Catholic left in her to be afraid of the dark. Not of hell, no, not of hell. All that damnation and brimstone rhetoric, that was just grownup, boogeyman stories, to keep the adults in line. If you're not good, Santa will leave coal in your stocking. The fables just expanded, coals in your stocking, fire in your eternity. No, she was afraid of what they didn't talk about; the not being here, the being she didn't know where. Or, maybe, just not being. She hated not knowing. She hated waiting. She hated being alone. And now, once the boys were grown, there was the possibility, this distinct possibility, that she would spend her not so golden old age waiting by herself for the unknown.

24

She pulled the compact out of her purse, that oversized Coach bag which would have been all of the luggage necessary had she ever decided to run away from home. She held it open in her palm, head bent to check her makeup in the mirror. This was always a mistake, gravity working in such a way that the soft pouches under her eyes became large, lumpy, overstuffed bags, a precursor to what she could expect in the next ten or fifteen years. She hooted to herself. This was hardly the image to attract companionship, commitment.

Past the compact she saw her legs descending to the floor, thin, shapely. They were still good and likely to stay so. She had noticed in older women that even if all else sagged and bagged, wrinkled and crumpled, the legs remained the last vestiges, the last visible evidence that they had once been young and toned, sexual magnets. Frank had commented frequently an how good her legs were, how well turned the ankles. She had always smugly construed this as a sign of physical attraction, though it had never translated into passionate bedroom activity. Now, she knew. This assessment of her ankles, her legs, was merely the mark of a discriminating art director, checking for form and layout, content and design.

Her anger began to bubble in the open pit of her stomach, threatening to erupt into a full-scale boil if she didn't gain some restraint. Her fist began to pound silently, rhythmically on the armrest of the airline seat. This was not personal. She couldn't take it personally. This had nothing to do with her, or his feelings for her, or her feelings for him. This had nothing to do with anything either one of them could control. Frank had told her that. He had held her by both arms, hard, pinning her between his big hands, and when she didn't want to listen, had talked quietly into her profile, his breath washing over her cheek.

A week, two weeks later, she had begun repeating this to herself, over and over again, like an incantation. This would gradually dissipate the anger, but nothing seemed to alleviate the overwhelming sense of failure she carried around with her like a colostomy bag attached to her body. If she had done nothing wrong in the marriage then her only remaining indictment was an appalling lack of good judgment.

Why hadn't she sensed this when they were first dating, courting, engaged? How could she have chosen a man so desperately wrong? What was missing in her that this was the man she had loved, needed, wanted? Still loved, still needed, still wanted? Her molten anger had thickened around her rib cage, and sliding between the bones, had dripped down around her heart, encasing it. Its heaviness was the measure of her 25

j* $ â&#x20AC;˘ ^ * >

defeat, and defeated, she began to sob.

Her mother picked her up at the airport. Catherine was a slight woman, comprised mainly of bone and sinew and tempered with silver steel. There was nothing soft or warm or beckoning about her. Fiona had only known her to cry once, at her father's funeral, something so out of character for her mother that she had stared at her throughout the entire service and then at the grave site, amazed. It was not that she thought her mother incapable of deep feelings for her father. It was its physical manifestation that had so surprised her. Catherine viewed any show of emotion as a violation of personal privacy and a needless waste of time and energy. She was circumspect in her actions, her words, her emotions.

No-nonsense wasn't just a philosophy, it was an essential adjunct to Catherine's Catholicism. Fiona had often speculated that to interlace that much religion into one's life, there was only a minimal amount of time one could spend on anything else, like laughing or crying or conversation. Housekeeping and God seemed to take up most of her day. She beat the dawn and the rugs every morning and Fiona would hear the slam of the screen door as she left for 6:00 AM Mass. There was breakfast to prepare and beds to make, and buckets of water and ammonia surrounded her like small moats as she scoured another floor, another wall, another cabinet or shelf. The smells of fresh raised bread or noodles drying or a pie cooling on the tile emanated from the kitchen during the day and after dinner there was always charity work for the Diocese or quiet evenings of Bible study. She would stop by her room every night and, pulling the fresh sheets and two light blankets up around her shoulders, would ask her if she'd said her prayers.

"You're a good girl, Fiona."

Then she'd give her a rough brush of the cheek, not quite a kiss, more corner of the mouth touching skin, and tell her to sleep well.

In the dark, with the outlines of all her stuffed animals at the foot of the bed, she longed for one of those sitcom mothers on their big black and white TV. Those women who spent all their time listening to their children, consoling their children, interfering in their children's lives. How ungrateful they often were, those children. She would not have been so feckless. She would have sat at this tele-Madonna's knee and absorbed all the wisdom and attention she had to bestow. And when she hugged her, she would feel something relent, something bend and flow outward, a reciprocity that she had never known in her own mother's rigid stance. She was reminded of this again as she put her arm 26

around Catherine's shoulders and squeezed. Solid rock.

"Let me have your bag."

It amused Fiona that her little bit of a mother always insisted on carrying the luggage; but she had seen her move large pieces of furniture around with the ferociousness of a woman lifting a car off a pinned child. Despite the heaviness of the two-suiter, Catherine was moving at a brisk pace.

"We have to hurry. Those robber barons in the airport parking lot will charge for an additional hour if we're not there in five minutes."

Her mother's parsimonious nature had been a source of no little irritation and embarrassment to Fiona in her childhood. The handmade clothes, the home-cooked meals, the needlework, the cranberries and popcorn strung on the Christmas tree in place of tinsel, all the handicrafts so valued and admired now would have been eagerly jettisoned by Fiona for their chic fifties counterparts, department-store clothes and Swanson TV dinners. Then through the sixties, the decade of sleek, vinylcovered A-lines and Nancy Sinatra "Walking Boots," she was hopelessly uncool in her jumpers and Peter Pan collars, painstakingly sewn by Catherine. Wrong clothes, wrong religion, wrong side of the educational fault line as she was considered exceptionally bright. A triple whammy. And all three her mother's fault.

They reached the side of her mom's 1966 Volkswagen bug.

"Good car. Excellent gas mileage and your father showed me how to fix everything on it with two wrenches."

Catherine had sold her husband's Caddy years ago. "A boat.

Never felt comfortable driving it." She put the luggage where the engine should have been and beat the airport parking attendants out of their pernicious fees with at least two minutes to spare.

On the thoroughfare, Catherine didn't speak at all. She directed her attentions to the driving, feeling not at all at her best here. There was certain support for these misgivings. Catherine had had six or seven near accidents in the past few years and Fiona held her breath whenever the phone rang in the middle of the night, certain it was the Highway Patrol. "We regret to inform you . . . " She would have preferred to have done the driving herself but Catherine didn't allow anyone to do but her.

As they pulled into the driveway, Moose stood sentry in the front bay window. Watching for birds, no doubt, Fiona thought with a small shiver of disgust. Moose had a predatory side to him that was decidedly unattractive, offering up the mangled bodies of his unfortunate prey at the back porch like gifts from the Magi.

Given his size, it was astounding he ever caught anything at all.

27

^ $ â&#x20AC;˘ =? >

He was a large cat, twenty-two, twenty-three pounds, and when he walked, his haunches rhythmically shifted from left to right like the buttocks of some firm-bodied young woman encased in tight jeans. When he sprinted across a room or a yard, he had moves that would have been the envy of any shooting guard executing a fast break.

Moose had little or no use for Fiona, giving her a wide berth whenever she came to visit. She didn't take offense at thisâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Moose had little use for anyone but Catherine, showing such a complete indifference to anyone else that, in human terms, it bordered on rudeness. Fiona suspected Moose's apathy masked a sincere contempt for their species at large. His affection for Catherine, however, was unstinting. Less amusing was Catherine's response in kind, lavishing on Moose all the attention and warmth that Fiona had craved as a child, craved even as an adult. She would pull Moose onto her lap and tugging at his front paws so that his face was level with hers, would begin to kiss him unabashedly around the ears and forehead.

"I know you hate this but every now and then you have to act like a pet and let me kiss you. Yes, you do."

Moose would wrap himself in resignation, allowing this affront to his feline dignity, to his cat cool, because it was Catherine. Anyone else attempting such a liberty would have been wise to insure heavily, Catherine not believing in declawing.

The house was quiet and cast late-afternoon shadows on the Early American and Primitive furniture. Sturdy, sensible, all of one piece, foregoing any unnecessary ornamentation except for the occasional hand-crocheted doily that rested on a gleaming cherrywood surface.

"Have you had any lunch? You must be starving. Leave the bags by the door, you can take them up later. I have a piece of cold apple pie right here in the fridge. That should do you till dinner."

Catherine moved quickly around the kitchen, marking her territory, pouring a glass of milk from the carton, scooping the pie from tin pan to plate, punching down the dough rising in the large ceramic mixing bowl on the counter. Fiona had spent the better part of a summer making that bowl at college. Her first few attempts had lacked the symmetry and weightiness Fiona felt was essential for the creative process. As far as she was concerned, her mother's baking was high art, high consumable art.

Taking several ribbons at the state fair, Catherine had considered writing a cross between a religious journal and a cookbook, tentatively titled In God's Hands, the Right Recipe for 28

Life. Fiona later found several spiral notepads filled with spiritual musings and ingredient lists tightly bound and garnished with dust on an upper shelf in the garage.

"Is this your book, Mom?" "I'm not writing a book."

"Then what is this I'm holding?"

"The scribblings of a vainglorious woman, too puffed up with her own self-importance to know her place in God's plan."

"Little tough on ourselves, aren't we?"

"Nope. Now put those back where you found them."

Fiona saw an opening and took aim at her elusive target.

"Sounds like the sin of pride to me. But why keep it at all?

Why not rip it up? Better yet, burn it? Remove all temptation."

The dart barely grazed its intended victim, falling flat, harmless to the floor.

"I wrote every one of my recipes down on those pages. If my memory should start to fail, they will prove useful."

Fiona found that thought slightly disturbing. She couldn't imagine her mother operating any differently than she had for the past forty years. She might wish for it, but she couldn't imagine it.

She smelled the cooked apples coming from the refrigerator. Even cold, it had a tangible aroma. Lifting her fork she viewed the culmination of a lifetime's achievement, the perfect crust, the perfect pie. Well, it was one more perfect thing than she could put claim to.

They skirted around it, talking about the boys, church politics, Fiona's garden. Dinner was comprised of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and meaningless conversation. After dinner they sat in front of a large console TV in its own authentic woodgrain mahogany cabinet with the doors that closed over the screen-a throwback to a time when leisure activity was disguised as sensible furniture, lest one appear frivolous or unnecessarily idle.

They were watching a movie based on the "actual events" of a reported alien abduction. Maybe that's it, thought Fiona ruefully. Frank was kidnapped by spindly little men from outer space, with dome-shaped heads bearing teardrop slats that substituted for eyes. They had performed several surgical experiments on him, the last of which was to determine if you could alter a person's sexual preference or desires through genetic manipulation. Then, directly before returning him to earth, they removed all memory of the occurrence.

"The operation was a success, Fearless Leader."

"What?!"

Looking at the startled, slightly concerned expression on 29

^ $ â&#x20AC;˘ g * % F

her mother's face, Fiona realized she had spoken out loud.

"Nothing, Mom. Just getting carried away by the movie. I swear, if that is what we are going to look like when we evolve to a higher, more intelligent life form, I think I'd prefer regressed and stupid."

"We're made in God's image and I have my doubts if God looks anything like that."

"Don't you believe in extraterrestrials or alien life forms, Mom?" "I believe in God, His angels and saints, Satan and His demons-and that's alien enough for me."

Fiona suppressed a small laugh, surprising herself. It seemed so long since she'd stifled anything but anger. Life was so simple for her mother, filled with goodness and sin, duty and elbow grease. In her index, Frank would be just another victim of Satan's pernicious ways, abetted, undoubtedly, by his turning away from the Church. If she could just believe it was that simple, that merely by praying, maybe . . .

"What's the problem between you and Frank?"

Catherine was regarding her daughter with the same close attention she often paid her needlework upon realizing a stitch had been dropped or a particular yarn did not suitably match the corresponding pattern color. Fiona found this scrutiny unsettling.

She was not used to notice being taken of her, having become the invisible child, wife, mother; guardian angel to all within her scope of protection, but standing apart, unseen by these loved ones as they went about their daily lives.

"I wouldn't call it a problem, exactly. More of a situation."

Catherine's mouth set in barely restrained irritation. She had little use for semantics.

"Well, this situation, what is it?"

"Frank . . . Frank wants to make certain lifestyle changes. I believe he did his best, Mom, I really do. But he finally had to come to terms with the fact that he's been suppressing some very strong feelings for, for awhile now. Feelings he couldn't possibly control. Genetic imperatives, really. I'm not the only Catholic to say this. There are several priests who hold this opinion. And, and I think he still loves me, he just doesn't want me."

Like a skateboard going downhill, she began to pick up speed, accelerating her speech patterns as she neared the bottom and one final curve that led to what she knew was a dead-end.

"He said he'd understand if I didn't want a divorce, do whatever was necessary to obtain an annulment, full disclosure, 30

wipe the slate clean, never been married. I'd still be in the good graces of the Church, teenage kids and I'd still be a virgin. But I tell you, Mom, I don't feel like a virgin, I feel like a widow. And I don't want an annulment. I want the record to show I was married. I had a husband. My boys had a father. I want it noted. I want it noted."

It seemed she was screaming and she found her body rocking back and forth as her voice returned to her like echoes.

Soft echoes falling back on her ears. Soft words, soft words, but not her words. Catherine was holding her, talking quietly, pushing back her hair. What was she saying? Fiona couldn't hear what she was saying. She couldn't hear over the screaming.

She found herself in bed with fresh sheets and two light blankets up around her chin. Her mother was holding her hand.

"Go to sleep now. I'll say a prayer and we'll talk in the morning. You're a good girl, Fiona."

The morning held the feel of being smothered in syrup: warm, thick, sticky. It seemed unusually humid for this late in autumn. She looked out the bay window of her girlhood, across the street to a bay window mirroring her own where another little girl withdrew behind the sash upon being seen.

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."

Half asleep and succumbing to the sensation of lying in a bed of moist cotton candy, linear time folded back on itself and she felt the tug of a younger self, eight, maybe nine, pulling her behind the sash.

"Look, out there. It's the future. It's not safe. It will hurt you.

You should stay here with me."

Safe. Safe behind the sash and cocooned in cotton candy.

Safe and warm, falling into a mattress of pink clouds. Safe.

Fiona was aware of the thin air sweeping around her bed of cumulus. It was amazing how warm she felt at this altitude. She expected to find it quite cold and difficult to breathe, like searching the summit of some majestic mountain peak. In that picture of Perry with his men at the North Pole, weren't they all wearing very large bulky parkas? But here it was extremely pleasant and she watched intrigued as various configurations of clouds drifted past.

She was studying a particularly intricate formation, something resembling circus animals on parade, when she felt a series of gentle pushes on her shoulder. The pushes became more insistent and she fought back a panic rush as she realized she had been shoved through her mattress of posturepedic clouds and was now free falling to a hard ground. Looking up, her lovely cumulus had turned dark and dangerous; had

31

p $ ^ g >

mysteriously and rapidly transformed into a cumulonimbus, the black chariot of some evil, vizored wizard. Hard rain was pelting her toward a swiftly approaching earth and she could hear the wizard calling after her, cheering her fatal forward progress.

"Fiona. Fiona. Can you see the moon?"

His taunts landed as a sharp blow against her shoulder and accelerated her downward spiral.

"Fiona. Fiona."

The wizard seemed so far above her now as to be but part of the dark water and wisps that layered the sky. But his voice had grown proportionately louder as his visage had faded and now he was screaming in her ear.

"Fiona. Fiona. Look at the moon."

Fiona brought herself up with a jerk. Her mom pulled back sharply with a quizzical smile on her face.

"Fiona, it's almost noon. The day's three quarters gone.

Rise and shine, pumpkin."

Fiona looked around her and felt her heart reverberating in her ears. This was OK. This was beginning to look familiar, to take on a reassuring shape: the four-poster bed with gauze dripping from the pine cones which crested each corner, the white eyelet ruffles, her first stuffed animal, Jellyroll, a cinnamon striped cat, missing one glass eye and half his whiskers and suffering from what appeared to be an advanced case of mange, a pink metal desk selectively covered in Disney decals which, though designed for a child, she had used right through high school, her bookcase of children's classics and a complete edition of the World Book Encyclopedia circa 1959 with annual supplements up to and including 1968.

Catherine sat on the edge of the bed playing with an invisible piece of lint on the wedding band quilt.

"Bad dream?"

"Just your basic bungee jump without the bungee nightmare. That'll teach me to go back to sleep after I should be up and about. It's the only time I dream and they're always doozies. Must have something to do with work ethic guilt."

"It might have something to do with your marriage breaking up."

God, it just never went away. It was like the smell of cat urine in the carpet or a terminal illness.

"My marriage is having some problems because my husband is goinq through a midlife crisis of sorts. The crisis doesn't come as much of a surprise though its timing caught me

32

off guard. I didn't anticipate it would happen until Frank hit fifty and I thought it would take the form of a couple of fast sports cars. I was wrong."

"What form did it take?"

Catherine was almost sure she didn't want to hear the answer to that question but she couldn't help her daughter get things back on track if she was working in the dark.

Fiona felt a stress pain in her chest.

"Frank thinks . . . Frank feels that he is . . . by nature a-" Fiona's thoughts broke off. She couldn't take it any further.

She had never discussed sex with her mother. What was to discuss? Good Catholic girls didn't do it until you were married and then only for the purpose of procreation. She was a virgin on her wedding night (as was Frank, she believed) and together they had tentatively and haltingly discovered each other's bodies and needs and desires and had, at least in those early years, or so she thought, satisfied them. How do you talk about the end when you never even acknowledged the beginning?

"Fiona, I'm a grown woman and I watch the news every night. There's nothing you're going to say that will shock me or that I haven't heard of."

Catherine had always been impatient with those who wasted her time.

"Frank believes he's gay."

Catherine was not one to let her composure slip easily.

There was that time at Patrick's funeral, but under the circumstances, completely understandable. Certainly a far more stressful situation than the one confronting her now. This could be managed with a slight set of the back teeth.

"That's ridiculous. Frank is your husband, the father of your two children. He's just . . . confused. Working in New York City can do that to you. He just needs some spiritual counseling from the church. Call Frank. Have him fly out and I'll call Father McCabe. He's very busy but I'm sure he'll make time for this.

Frank is putting his mortal soul in danger just having these thoughts."

So like her mother. Track mud into the kitchen, onto the carpet, and all you needed was a bucket, a gallon of warm soapy water and a little effort and you scrubbed at the dirt until the floors looked like new. A sermon here, a little holy water there, the sign of the cross made by the thumb to the forehead and your marriage was seamlessly pieced together again. Except for her clenched jaw, she might be tackling the spring cleaning.

Well, let's just see how unshakable she was.

"I believe it's gone a little past the thinking stage, Mom.

33

5* $ â&#x20AC;˘ g * > F

He's moved in with his lover, a Bret somebody or other, and has met with an attorney, a family friend, would you believe it, to begin divorce proceedings. Unless, of course, I want an annulment. The option is mine."

Fiona watched with malicious delight for traces of horror, shock, even repulsion on her mother's face. She wasn't looking for pity. What she wanted, what she needed, if only for a few minutes, was a companion in her unremitting pain. As cruel as it sounded, as cruel at it was, it was imperative to feel that someone was bleeding as badly as she was. Even her mother.

Maybe especially her mother. Hadn't her mother taught her to be a "good" girl, to follow her husband's sexual lead, never but never to be the aggressor?

When her marriage, never the apex of passion, drifted from warm camaraderie to nodding, if friendly, acquaintance, could she have drawn him to her, learned to seduce him, inspire him, enthrall him? Could she have turned whatever had attracted him to her initially into something more than comfort and sufficiency?

Could she have made him more than love her, could she have made him fall in love? She would never know, she had never tried. She had been too lazy, too frightened, too smug.

Fiona looked up at Catherine and for the second time in her life, stared in total amazement.

Catherine was crying.

And then it all became perfectly clear. To her mother, Frank had died.

34

THE POND JEFFREY D. J . KALLENBERG They fished the pond—as they had, I'm sure, before From either side.

Both lines breaking the water's mirrored surface and held in patience.

No recognition yielded to the rising sun, or to each other.

A small patch of water, at best a pond— separating the two as effectively as light within a prism.

They contemplated, I would think, important matters— Creation?

The cricket or the worm?

But certainly not each other.

And as they had not recognized the rising sun, they ignored its descent behind the pines, Only pulling in their lines when light barely flickered— Untangled, they turned for home.

35

KATHERINE BROWN, TRAIN STATION

HAIKU ELIZABETH FREIDIN

My shell is almost Beautiful like sorrow is almost Happiness not understood.

37

â&#x20AC;˘>

GRACE DUSTIN BEALL SMITH

I

f your parachute doesn't open, you hit the ground at 125 miles-per-hour. This means going from a vertical speed of 174 feet-per-second to a dead stop, instantly. The resulting energy (mass times acceleration) splinters bone and liquefies cartilage, and usually shoots your innards, if not through a ruptured abdominal wall, then directly out your anus. You might bounce, you might not. But to the folks who will have to convey you from the scene, your body will feel rubbery and limp, like a jumpsuit stuffed with applesauce and gristle.

I knew the risk, on that moonless March night in 1960, as I sat crammed behind the pilot, waiting to make my 152nd jump. It was the kind of stuff we instructors joked about every night in bars, when our students weren't around. Creaming in, we called it, and buying the farm. I knew I was risking my life, and I wanted to write about it. But if you'd asked me back then what risking my life meant, I'd have deflected the question with a cocky grin. At the age of nineteen, my notion of the future remained as opaque and featureless as the California desert a mile-and-a-half below.

We'd taken off just after dusk from a nearby dirt airstrip, in a four-place Cessna-180. The aircraft, its right door and passenger seat removed, had been climbing steadily for twenty minutes. The whine of the Lycoming engine, combined with the staccato whap-whap-whap of the propeller, made casual conversation inside the cabin impossible. Hot exhaust swirled about in the turbulent air, its oily stink mixing with the odor of old upholstery, adding to the tension in my bowels.

The last rays of sunlight had long since abandoned the high cirrus clouds, leaving night to settle on the horizon. From my backseat window, I could just make out the lights of San Diego, 80 miles to the west, and I found myself staring at the glow the way a child might gaze at the sliver of light beneath his bedroom door. God knows, looking straight down into the darkness brought little comfort: from this altitude, our intended target, a white canvas cross lit by two sets of car headlights, looked like a life raft floating on an ocean of ink.

This was my first night free fall, and I made a mental note of the ways in which the onset of night had heightened my usual 38

I

prejump jitters. Increased vertigo; anxiety about dropping my flashlight in free fall; fear of collision with another jumper in the dark. I intended to jot down these observations later. As the plane continued to climb, I wondered how Hemingway would treat the material. Men waiting to jump. That was the gist of it. It just begged for the kind of brief, declarative sentences that could rocket a writer to immortality. Men waiting to jump ...

Bill Jolly, a veteran jumper in his late-thirties, sat on the floor next to the pilot, his back against the instrument panel. As I studied his rugged, impassive face for some sign that he shared my apprehension, he stifled a yawn with his hand. There it is, I thought. Men waiting to jump always yawn. No, that wasn't it.

Confronted with the jaws of death, men always yawn. No. A yawn is to a skydiver what spit is to a batter at the plate .. .

By this time, I was yawning. So was Jimmy Flynn, the thirty-year-old, 275-pound karate expert who sat next to me on the backseat. Nerves. Little was known then about the behavior of the human body falling at terminal velocity, and even less about "relative work"—two or more bodies in free fall together.

Understand that the free fall part of a parachute jump takes place between the exit altitude (in this case, 7500 feet) and the recommended opening altitude (2500 feet). On this particular night we planned to free fall for one mile—thirty seconds—before opening our chutes. (Follow the sweep hand on a watch, if you need help imagining it. You're probably aware that once the parachute canopy is open, the descent takes about three minutes. But try to remember, as this narrative progresses, that my failure to pull the ripcord at 2500 feet reduces that descent time to thirteen seconds.)

The plane banked steeply then leveled onto jump run.

Jimmy Flynn, getting a nod from the pilot, slid forward on the seat and stuck his helmeted head out the door. His cheeks flapped in the prop blast and his bubble goggles buffeted atop his nose. Using the bottom edge of the doorway as a sighting device, he peered straight down.

"Where are we?" he called out to the pilot. "I can't see shit down there!"

"Should be coming up on the target!" answered the pilot.

Flynn looked again, then raised his hand. "Got it! Jesus fucking Christ! Do you think they could have made it a little smaller?"

I tapped the glass on my altimeter, checking that the needle wasn't stuck. The bulky instrument was strapped to my chest-mounted reserve chute and would be my only means of knowing when to pull the ripcord. I tested my flashlight

39

^ § H ^ g 0

m

essential for reading the altimeterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;then tightened the chin strap on my Bell helmet. My fingers trembledâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;something I hoped would go unnoticed by Jolly.

"Right ten!" yelled Flynn.

The pilot kicked right rudder, making a flat correction of ten degrees.

"Ten more! Ten more!"

Again the plane jerked right.

Flynn was screaming now. "No! Twenty! Twenty! Twenty!"

The pilot glanced over his shoulder, eyeballing me and smirking. I swatted his arm in response, which made him laugh. I welcomed his levity, wished it would spread. You had to laugh.

Men waiting to jump must. . .

Bill Jolly wasn't laughing. Indeed, he looked quite uneasy.

Maneuvering to a kneeling position on the floor, he switched on his flashlight, then signaled me to do the same. I nodded, giving him a thumbs-up and winking. Still, his anxiety had unsettled me.

I checked that my ripcord handle was secure in its elastic housing, then fingered the pins on the reserve chute to be sure they were seated. I tested the Capewell releases that connected the parachute to the harness, and felt the snap connectors on my leg straps. Everything was set. I'd done all I could. There was only the going now. I took a deep breath. We'd be in the bar in an hour, I told myself. Howling with laughter, scoring chicks.

"Ten more!"

Flynn clutched his flashlight close to his body.

Were we that far off course? I wanted to see for myself, but Flynn's enormous bulk prevented it. Stuck in the corner and squirming to get some leg room, I set my flashlight on the seat behind him.

Just then, without warning, Flynn yelled, "CUT!" The pilot obediently throttled back, and the plane mushed to near-stall speed. Then, Flynn dove out the doorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;alone.

That wasn't the plan. We were supposed to go out together.

The stall warning sounded. Jolly muttered something, then waved at me to follow, as he, too, dove out.

I felt like a sprinter still crouched on his heels after the sound of the gun. I managed to get out from behind the pilot, heaved myself forward into a standing crouch, duck-waddled a few steps to the door, and toppled out into the night.

When my body left the slipstream, I caught sight of the pilot staring down at me, his face lit green by the instrument panel, as he was sucked up into the heavens with the stars.

40

I sit this autumn evening, watching the sunset from my window overlooking the Hudson, and I'm shocked that I forgot my flashlight. It was foolish and reckless, a foreshadowing, it seems now, of the years I would spend addicted to drugs and alcohol; an omen of future relationships, carelessly entered, painfully abandoned; a portent of my episodic life. It steals breath from my narrative, tempts me to quit writing.

But, as I recall that long ago night, I find myself searching, not for the impulsive spirit that got me out the door, but for the faith that allowed me to hang in there as I fell.

I realized I'd forgotten the flashlight, a few seconds after stabilizing. My mind became serenely clear. It was not going to be any other way than this. Time could not be wasted thinking it might be. There could be no reaching back or looking away. Like the time, ten years down the road, when a hospital administrator would tell me that my second child had been born "mongoloid."

Or the night, eighteen months later, after I'd come home from being with him, when the administrator would call to say he'd died. Or the night, five years ago, when I zipped my father into a body bag. Or the morning, a while back, when I photographed my mother's corpse.

Clarity.

Falling face-to-earth through the night, ruled by the forces of gravity and time. I remember having to blink repeatedly to make sure my eyes were open. After a few moments, I could see the shiny steel housing around my altimeter. The instrument's face remained dark, though, and its phosphorous needle too dim to read.

I felt the up-rushing cushion of air supporting my body and heard the flapping of my chest strap against the harness. I hadn't fallen for ten seconds before my eyes began to tear beneath my goggles.

Executing a flat right turn, I searched for the target.

Nothing. I shook my head, trying to clear the tears, then turned back to the left. Nothing. Once, when I thought I glimpsed it from the corner of my eye, I turned in that direction, but it vanished in the darkness.

The horizon was black, San Diego gone. When else has it seemed that dark?

In a sweat lodge, maybe—last summer—on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. So dark in there I had to shut my eyes for fear they'd pop out of their sockets from straining to see. A darkness that illuminated disturbing aspects of myself: The black hole of failure. The ten thousand bar napkins on which I scribbled brilliant insights. The writing projects planned but never 41

^ s ^ • x 0

engaged. The novel that didn't sell because it lacked a voice.

The decades spent laboring as a key grip on movies. The years wasted pretending that I knew how to love. The truth endangered by my fear of it. The laziness. The inspiration pissed away. The countless times I told this story in bars, giving it away to the wind: So, there I am, falling through the night. I could pull the ripcord right now, but then I'd drift for miles over the desert and it'd take them forever to find me, and everyone would think I panicked. Fuck it, I tell myself, keep going. Then I remember Flynn and Jolly are below me. I sure as shit don't want to come crashing through their open canopies at 125 mph, so I go into a tracking mode, like this (I jump off my barstool and assume a delta position, like a ski jumper in mid-air): I'm traversing-the ground at about 90-mph—which doesn't mean I'm falling any slower—and I keep tracking until I figure there's enough distance between Jolly and Flynn and me, right? Okay, then I relax a little. But I don't like all this blackness—it makes me feel antsy as hell—so I collapse one arm, and I do a half-barrel roll, then extend my arm again, like so, and just lie there on my back, looking at the stars. Seeing Orion makes me feel better. Time's gone by, but how much? I flip back over, face down, and tell my self again, No way in hell I'm going to make an ass of myself by opening high. But then I start to think, Shit, if I haven't seen the target yet, I must be way out in the toolies, which means they're going to have to come looking for me anyway, so . . .

By this time, I've kept my audience on the hook way past the time I was supposed to pull the ripcord. I'm standing there on the barroom floor, arms and legs spread as if I was in free fall. A few people are looking at me like I'm already dead. Then, I uncork the part they want to hear: So, I tell myself, It's better to be seen as a coward than to cream in without a word. And I reach across my chest, take hold of the ripcord handle, and pull. . .

Even now, I can feel the sleeved parachute peeling off my back, and the nylon suspension lines ripping free of the stows. I tense my shoulders, bracing for the opening shock. When it comes, I grip the harness, anticipating the second and final opening.

And then, just as the chute breathes fully open, my feet gently touch the ground, and I find myself standing next to a ball of tumbleweed.

The chute collapses onto the desert floor. I stare ahead into the night.

42

TWINS SEVEN SEVEN, LONG-EARED

GHOST

â&#x20AC;˘>

MICHELLE J.

LEE ELEGY

C

rack. Evie gave a cry, dropping her flashlight, then fingered the eggshell remains on the floor of the chicken coop. It was too late, she thought, as she touched the broken fragments covered in sticky egg white.

Nothing she could do would bring it back. Gone, gone, irrevocably gone. Evie sighed, then whispered a few quick words of prayer, rapidly picked up the shell pieces, put them in her pocket, then carefully covered the mess with some nest straw. It was about time and it wouldn't do if Papa saw.

Yesterday had been the last day of school. As a treat, teacher read Charlotte's Web. Evie never heard a story before; Papa never read to her. She fell in love. The animals talked and had secret lives. As the story progressed she felt worse. Why would they want to kill Wilbur? She then became sick with the thought of her own farm, where every weekend Papa did his work, clothes fresh with blood, then afterward left for town, coming home late smelling dirty of whiskey and sweat, knocking things down while cursing a hidden Evie and her dead mother's name.

Evie worked fast. The chickens clucked while she put the rest of the eggs in the basket, careful to handle them gently, as if they were Charlotte's. She then stepped outside. In the warm Saturday night the breeze felt good. She then headed back toward the house, hoping to reach her room where a shoebox full of socks lay waiting. Basket in one hand, flashlight in other, Evie made it halfway when the flashlight slipped out of her hands and fell in the tall grass. As she dropped the basket and crawled for it, a light came from down the road behind her. A car. It crept up to the house and parked. Evie's father, stone drunk, silently slid out and walked toward his crouching daughter.

Crack.

44

â&#x20AC;˘ BIG ADVENTURE MARK MORAN he letter Q fell off, Fell clear off my screen Right while I was typing A poem for the queen.

It rolled down the keyboard And onto the floor.

Before I could catch it, It got through the door.

Just like that poor meatball, So quick out of sight.

Without letter Q, I Was in quite a plight.

My queen thus read ween And quack now was wack.

I knew then that I had To get that Q back!

I put on my jacket And ran to the street.

Q can't have gone far, He doesn't have feet!

The letter Q saw me And raced down the block!

He rolled through the gutter But stopped on a rock.

And right there I had him, Q could've been mine.

I reached out to grab him, Things would've been fine.

Just then on a scooter, A boy rode on past.

The Q jumped aboard

And got away fast.

I called for a taxi, Said "Follow that Q!" The kid kept on going.

What was I to do?

They wove through the traffic, My cab was too slow.

They rounded a corner And then, I don't know.

The taxi drove downtown, We searched all around.

I checked every alley, He couldn't be found.

I went to a jazz club Called "Alphabet Spot" An H tended bar there But didn't know squat.

The room was all smoky, A bluesy band played.

And out on the dance floor Some cool letters swayed.

I went in the backroom, I needed a lead.

Those letters just played pool And even smoked weed!

I asked if they'd seen Q, I needed an answer.

They said talk to ~ The erotic dancer.

I soon found the ~ 45

Who's really a whore!

She said she had seen Q Two hours before!

The Q was all shook up And he had some scars The & shouted "Stay out of my bars!"

h

Then W came out And she told me straight, That Q had been captured By sly number 8.

Q rode with me back home, Sufficiently scared.

He's back on my laptop And glad he was spared.

got in the subway And headed southwest To &'s hide-out, The bad letter's nest.

The lesson he learned is To stick with his job And don't mess around with The Alphabet Mob.

It was guarded by numbers 4, 8, 2, and 3 I'd have to get past them To set my Q free.

I snuck in a window And ran down a hall.

That's where I saw Q stuck Tied up to a wall.

A ? beat him Cause Q owed some debts.

I then learned that Q had Welched on his bets.

The & came up With his skirt little r Among all the letters He is the crime czar.

I said I'd pay Q's bill But he made me beg.

I never thought Q'd cost An arm and a leg.

I wrote them a fat check And gave all my cash.

Then they freed Q and Said "Take out that trash!"

46

R O L F WALKING TO THE TRAIN ALEXANDER P. DE LUCENA

I

'm the song "Por Mujeres Como Tu Hay Hombres Como Yo." I'm not the best song, a lot of strings and crying. I go well with the smell of beans sitting in the pot that's been sitting there since last night. I'm the woman behind the counter singing with the song. I'm the lipstick she left on a can of Diet Coke; I'm itching to be touched up as she's already had two lollipops and kissed her best friend's daughter. I'm the quarter tip next to the napkin frowning with water. I'm the man who, overhearing the woman sing the song, says of the singer, "This faggot was born crying and if I can help it he'll die crying."

I'm walking out the restaurant and hear first the door scraping against the floor, then the bell at the top of the doorframe trying to make a noise. The man who didn't like the singer grunts behind me, I'm the door straining to stay open, "Thank you," traffic outside. I pass a couple shuffling to the music, sort of dancing, sort of holding. I'm the bench outside the restaurant swarming with men. I'm the baby carriage in front of the bench. I'm the Kool-Aid in the baby bottle. I'm, "Yo, she's got big tits." I'm, "Yo, you shouldn't talk like that." I'm the black spots on the sidewalk that look like liver spots; I'm gum and tar and spit. I'm the look to the left and the series of green fire escapes disappearing down a hill into the greener park. The sign nods don't walk. I cross, towards the hardware store with the mops outside of it and a small crowd ahead. I'm the van the man from the restaurant gets in; he turns me on and the singer he was talking about comes on the radio as we drive away.

I'm the middle-school fight outside the laundromat. I'm the door of the laundromat held shut by two twelve-year-olds. I'm the man caught inside, holding shirts, screaming how he'll be late for work. I'm the grunt of a back hitting the ground and the smack of a head that follows. I'm the policeman breaking it up, picking up the girl on her back. I ask what happened and she says nothing.

I'm the words, "What are you, retarded?" I'm the ashy skin around the cut knee. I'm the street sign folded down ready to piss in the trashcan below. I'm "Earsnot" painted on a sign. I'm the look to the right that says everything's fine. I'm the woman sitting under the picture menu of the Chinese restaurant. I'm the grease at the bottom of the bag that doesn't know how to hide 48

anything. I'm a payphone asking for more money; I'm the friend hovering saying, "Just tell them to meet us there."

I'm the cigarette smoke blowing by a woman as she gets on the bus. She gets on, realizes she smelled me, realizes I'm smoke, remembers when she smoked. She takes some steps, forgets me for the chair in front of her, sits and stares above the head of the person across from her. I'm the shape of a guy I know. The cigarette's flicked forward, little to the right, stamped, dragged a step, stamped, and he turns his face to the side. It's me, the guy who sells me coffee, sometimes more, and tells me nothing but the price. He takes out a phone and stops, following with his head the bus passing by.

I'm walking, towards Broadway, to the subway. I'm my pant's clinging to my legs, letting go, clinging, panting almost. I'm the thought that my book is still where it was, by the sink with the cup, knife and pan in it. I'm my book in my jacket pocket, pulling one side down a little, nagging me like a younger cousin. I'm the woman who cut my hair once, a while agoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;usual guy, gay guy, nice guy, wasn't there. I'm fat, real fat, to the point you kept thinking about it when I cut your hair; when I put my thighs against your shoulders, forcing your head sideways to get at the hair above your ears; when I stood behind you, done, and my breasts were like two speakers in the mirror in front of you. This is all you think of as we pass, and now I'm your pants, clinging, letting go, wondering what it is you should be feeling. We look at each other, but what can we say. I remind you of Natasha and the lunch you missed today. You think of other women, quickly; remind yourself you've touched before. You tell yourself you'll touch again, that you can still touch Natasha, maybe.

I'm the broken bag of soles outside the shoe repair place.

Three kids kick a sole back and forth, into the street. Car stops, kid stops, car goes, game continues. More apartment buildings. I imagine the noise I hear inside the trashcans is rats, it sounds like a newspaper being folded. I'm the empty stomach pretending to sleep because life will never be that hard. I'm the man looking up at a building, yelling, "Mariselle." I'm the phone conversation that went: "Is Mariselle there."

"What number are you looking for."

"Who's this."

"This is Rolf."

"Sorry."

I'm the green brow of the park rising as I approach.

Broadway. I'm dogs and babies and I'm warm shit and cute faces. Fruit, steps and door, a sunburned record looks past me,

o fH c m > x O "^ ^ r g

49

°

a radio plays a song I know the words to. I'm the silhouette of a chicken on a restaurant window. I'm the joke "Why'd the pervert cross the road . . . because his dick was in the chicken," I'm the people I've told the joke to and the degree to which they laughed and I'm the people I can still tell it to. Down to the platform with the song's chorus. I'm the new wallet that just can't let go of anything. I'm the brush against your jacket, your keys clap, the book sways like a buoy. I'm the words "Too fast swipe again."

"Too fast swipe again." And you're ramming against the turnstile like a putz, like there was someone to save on the other side.

"Go." I'm the platform, the train, the air that feels like wind. I'm the shoulder against yours, a purse reaching at your elbow. We get on together. I'm the free seat; the step forward away from the shoulder; the triumph of the seat I regret taking away. I'm the leg next to yours accepting you, giving in to you. You feel as close to me as you do to the idea that you once had your mother's breasts in your mouth. I'm gone at the first stop as you were with your first steps.

50

KEVIN D. BECKER - UNTITLED

CALL O F THE WILD BENJAMIN RYAN !

There is an energy and it grows from beneath the tired the poor weatherbeaten sidewalks from within the hot impatient subways lines the lines of desperate cattle calls the lines of coke shooting a million miles an hour whizzzzzzzz through the nostrils of the overcrowded stock exchange the sweaty night clubs speaking the dreams of the bustling bursting investment bankers the crying cursing cabbies the awestruck fuss just off the bus buzzing barking blowing outwards and upwards.

There is a feeling and it lives within the old Italian grandmama the dirty old Chelsea queen the Old Spice scent of eager hopeful lovers diving swooooosh through the net of the back alley basket ball court on a hot summer's day under the fire hydrant fountain dowsing the flames 52

of the movie star the corner bar big spender hot dog vendor thrusting thriving throwing BAM!!

There is a hunger and it grumbles in the Pepto Bismol stomachs of the Fifth Avenue cutthroats and the Peanut Butter lunch pails of the fighting first-grade felons and it growls in the passionate kiss of the cheap hooker the dirty looker the Jewish shrink the skating rink growing louder until stuffing silly on burnt Central Park pretzels and kosher deli coffee brewing brawling and boiling over Splash!

And there is a name sung in tune to the honking cars which drive so far in time to the cool break dance of the game of chance rising growing screaming echoing high high above yo' m a m m a ' s porch

x :> ? ÂŁ> jl O ZJ ^ ^ r 53

the green lady's torch in a blasting scorch burning building bursting singing into the night sky New York!

New York, New York.

(You gotta problem with that?)

54

BLACK IS KATORI HALL Black is a 360-degree centrifugal godforce sent to enforce Black is the funk and nothing but the funk that stays after a midnight fight despite the ever-growing pile of debt that litters the 3-legged kitchen table.

Black is a syncopated beat born in the Bronx that breaths life into a whole generation downtrodden, lost, but true.

Black is fried bologna popped in the middle, boiled hot sausages and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without bread.

Black is never having cocoa, mocha, or cinnamon pantyhose to choose from.

Black is a beating heart on the New Jersey Turnpike lying cut open to bleed into the pavement a dream deferred.

Black is tight cornrows, gold teeth, a 5'5" woman with thick thighs laden with Vaseline and Oil Sheen.

Black is the Blues drifting from the Delta Bayou, screaming forth a resounding ghost that makes love to me in her grave.

Black is Church on a Wednesday night where Holy Ghosts and tongues talking erase the hurt of hemp ropes for an hour.

Black is waking at sunrise to pour life into Shakespeare and Aristotle forgoing Nkrumah and X that reside on college shelves.

White time not permitting my dance with blackness.

55

Black is blood-splattered bedrooms balistically pointing to conspiracy that has no consistency for all-white juries.

Black is summer hopscotch and gritty white chalk chewed up penny markers, scuffed saddle shoes, and honeysuckle tips on cherry virgin lips.

Black is millions of dollars unpaid in uncounted hours waged on Shiloh lakes.

Black is white . . . and blue and yellow, red, brown, and green.

Black is cocoa, mocha, and cinnamon.

Black is everything.

Black is miseducation, dreaded graduation, and force-fed miscegenation.

Black is a crinkled woman in neon church hats stabbed with feathers that castrate then meditate.

Black is forgiving and forgetting.

Black is a Chicago sky from a South Carolina pillow.

Black is lost oils and hard souls lost to corporations.

Black is me. Blackisyou.

Black is Blak.

Black is god.

56

O BE T H E

ESCAPADERS DAVID

SUSMAN

HILLARY 'he seconds ticking away to midnight, Shannon pulled up in the silver Cutlass, signaling the end of my years in Philadelphia. The boxes that didn't get shipped went in the backseat, the suitcases in the trunk, a folded turquoise anorak under my seat up front, and that was it. I could have brought along the whole six years I spent here-in the lukewarm breeze of a night that was no longer summer and not quite fall, my time here seemed so short, so compressed and brittle that it may well have fit right in the glove compartment. And off we drove.

Even then, when I saw Shannon, the first tingles were envious, almost to the point of flirtation. Her face, though familiar and memorized as any in my life, shone resplendent, smooth as an underwater stone. She gazed back at me like a child on her birthday, the aged bronze light of Philadelphia touching off little candle glares in her simple brown eyes. Shannon had the kind of complexion that men adore.

Every single time I saw her, I wondered how Shannon had been my best friend, for a good two and a half years. With our friendship relegated to the phone, the telephone wires and the voice cadences had evened out everything that seemed so plainly different about us right there in the moonlight. I was a good nine years her elder, and if my face skewed older, hers inched younger by just the same margin. Together, perhaps we looked like occasional friends, maybe half-sisters in a tumultuous family, or on the rare day, a once-upon-a-time teenage mother and baby from a storied past. Inside and out, she was uniquely beautiful.

My amazement at our friendship flooded over the little tide pools of envy in a generous wash. She looked no different than she did two years prior, ever the adventurer, still cute and as plainly proud as when she made this same pilgrimage up the Atlantic seaboard. Things to her were all the same. The difference between a bowl of warm oatmeal, fireworks on the Fourth of July and a permanent change of location were registered one and the same on Shannon's face. Perhaps it was 57

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this sparkle of velvety indifference that had sent each of her past suitors crying the hazel right out of his eyes, thinking he had lost the most beautiful girl in the world.

Shannon merged across an intersection and looked over at me. "Hill, I can't believe it's been two years. Two whole years since I've seen you."

"It's been long enough for me to grow old and bored.

Especially in this city."

"Well, I'm here to take care of that, wasn't that the plan?" she said. I remembered the steely confidence of her words.

"Shannon, thanks for putting me up till I get my feet on the ground in the new city."

"Hey, my pleasure. Stay as long as you like."

"So how's your life, darling?"

"I love it. New York heals all wounds by giving you worse ones. But it's worth it," she said.

"Believe me, I'm all ready."

"It's what every American needs. To exchange their problems for New York problems." Shannon had a way of circuitously talking around things. It wasn't a fear of divulgence, for when you got her to talk, she'd spill it all, right down to the amount of ice in the Lynchburg lemonade, to the way the pool table had yellowy scratches from a lifetime of game. But you had to ask.

"So, that means you're seeing someone right now, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, I'm seeing this guy Josh. He's not great. Kind of a tool, you know?"

"Sorry to hear that," I said, doing my best to sound sincere.

She never loved the men in her life. But she always found them, regardless. "How long has this been going?"

"Just a few weeks actually," she said. "And what about you? Is there any man who gets to be king of the Hill?"

"Oh you're funny. No, there really isn't anyone. The last guy was Leonard, I think I told you about him. You know how men are. They come and they go. Mostly go."

"And they're all the same. Right out of the assembly line.

You think whoever ran the factory might do some quality control."

We laughed, and it felt like old times.

Shannon was a strange one. She loved to drive at night. I imagine that we were the only Philadelphia-to-New York caravan that left at a prompt five minutes to midnight. If someone else was coming along, we'd probably have to conform to the typical mammalian automotive routine of starting car trips during 58

daylight hours. But Shannon preferred her Cutlass at night, and so I felt the same.

It actually became somewhat of a ritual when Shannon still lived in Philadelphia. We favored the more ordinary nights of the week, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nightscapes that were otherwise destined for macaroni and cheese, the late local news, or an early theft to sleep. Perhaps Shannon felt a sense of pity for the oppressed cluster of days at the beginning of the week, meek and unspectacular compared to their weekend rivals. There was always an unspoken thrill in escaping to the turnpikes on a plain and boring Tuesday, a couple of too-old-tobe-teenagers sneaking out the bedroom window to ride around in the Great American frontier.

During these night drives, I'd see us as a couple of burly truckers plowing a long, circuitous path from a Dunkin' Donuts in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, to a Mobil Express in Equally Nowhere, New Jersey. It was a moonlit labyrinth where we were free to roam. Once, I'd let the trucker character bubble up from its imaginative source and worm its way into conversation. I'd refer to myself as Biff, and Shannon donned her best Tennessee drawl and called herself Chattanooga Chuck.

"Haaaaaaaay, Biff, ain't it a chooore carryin' all dese prayleens across the prareeeee?"

"It killin' ma baaack, dat's what it dooin'!"

"Biff, yaa thank wee shud get some doooonuts?"

"Chattanooga Chuck don't think that a southun accent at awl!"

As the old colonial city disappeared behind us tonight, it was no wonder our entertainment always flirted with the idea of escape. The only thing slit at night were the relatively new industrial bridges. Towers of steel shot up in lackluster crosses and matrices, arrogant with the stoic pride of early-century industry. Dots of light dangled from suspension cords, more reminiscent of helmet lamps off the heads of coal miners than Christmas lights laced around a tree. Even the golden opulence of Society Hill had not been touched for a sextet of decades; it seemed to emanate from light-years away. It was a sad, mechanical city. In its melancholy inadequacy, its empty streets, its harsh utilitarianism, its meshwork of factories, Philadelphia could make the best of us surrender to pity.

Philadelphia was meant to just be a pit stop on the road to something grander, something more beautiful. I once had young, affluent dreams of where my life would take me. Like white plastic letters adorned on the glass fagade of a store on Rodeo 59

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Drive or Fifth Avenue, I envisioned my future traveling out as a burgeoning franchise. London. Athens. Barcelona. Maybe even Casablanca. Philadelphia never seemed to fit anywhere in that lineup.

"How's the new place?" I asked, interrupting a silence born simply of time apart.

"I'm shopping for a solar system," she said.

"What?"

"Solar panels. Energy bills are killer."

"How do you put solar panels on a Manhattan apartment?"

I queried.

"If there's one thing I hate, it's paying good money for something that comes right out of the sky for free all day long."

"You crack me up, you know that? Who else tries to. put the sun to good use in the middle of the big city? You're a crazy one," I told her.

"Sure am. And you are too, you know. Clinical," she said.

"Not as clinical as you, sweet thing."

"You know what, Hill, it's good to see you."

"I've missed you, Shannon," I said.

I thought about pulling Biff and Chattanooga Chuck out of the repository, feather-dusting the past for its reconstituted use in the present, but I opted not to. There were some moments you had to just let stand for themselves. The clumsily manicured landscapes of New Jersey, alternating imperceptibly between industrial, suburban and entirely forgotten, gusted past the Cutlass with an enthusiasm unique to things experienced for the first time. Tonight, no matter how dark it got out there, it all still glittered. Shannon reached over to the tape deck, put on her Tom Petty cassette, and drove on.

SHANNON

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or a few days, life was a strange, softly numb cocktail of two things that were formerly distinct. A splash of whiskey in Seven-up, a martini glass of tequila and tonic, having Hillary in the little flat on East End Avenue was not so much difficult to taste as difficult to organize. Sometimes, things are meant to be kept separate. But when they are conjoined, it leaves the earth spinning tipsy ellipses around its axis, even in a city like New York that rarely conforms to the physics of the rest of the world.

The first morning Hillary was in town, I overslept. If I'd gotten up early like I'd wanted to, I'd have gotten out the nice 60

glass plates Hillary bought me for my twenty-fifth birthday, made a fruit salad and put it in the crystal bowl. There would have been eggs and a few judiciously placed slices of toast, but my slumber got the better of me.

There at the kitchen table, the magenta orchid centerpiece moved to the side to facilitate conversation, were Hillary and Carrie. Hillary, my dear old friend with whom I shared countless bottles of cheap wine, the daily sob story of life as a waitress at the Blue Water Cafe, and a few thousand rented movies during my struggling days in Philadelphia. And Carrie, my bohemian partner-in-crime on fire escapes and crosstown buses these past two years in New York. I never expected us all to be sitting together, ever really. And if I ever did imagine thrusting the one world into the other, perhaps when the mechanics of my mind broke down, it would have been in a milieu far different from this.

The three of us would make a toast to life at a midtown restaurant that pined of opulence and bathed in a dark gold light.

I'd professionally direct and choreograph the whole event, and it would look like a Stanley Kubrick film. The two of them around my breakfast table, this looked more like a low-budget, Generation X reincarnation of the "Golden Girls."

Carrie saw me walking in. "Good morning, sleepy-eyes," she said.

"I see the two of you got a head start on me this morning."

"Not by too much. I've only been up for about an hour."

"Hill, can I get you anything? More milk, some toast? I could make a fruit salad."

"No, no, Shannon. Sit down, sit down. With all you're doing for me, I should be the one running around for you." I thought about it and she probably meant it. There wasn't much that Hillary wouldn't do for me, and in truth, there wasn't much I wouldn't do for her either. We'd just been apart for a while. I just didn't think the point of reentry would arrive again so soon.

I interjected.

"Heyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;until you find a place of your own, you're still my guest. Carrie and I have very strict rules about guests, isn't that right?"

"Of course. We wait on them hand and foot, all day long."

Carrie played right along, but she must have known that something was wrong. I was acting like a stranger right in front of her. It was all off. Hillary and I hadn't been caught up in the same day-to-day pattern of talking and behaving, so I doubt she picked up on anything. With Carrie, it was different. I couldn't remember a day gone by where I didn't go to sleep with the distinct feeling that Carrie felt the same thing I did at the end of the day. We had

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become friends to the point of contagion. Whatever I was doing, Carrie could sense my discomfort, I'm sure of it. I tapped my nails against the table.

I guess there was no reason really for me to expect that this reunion wasn't inevitable. Philadelphia was just a few hours away; it wasn't as if I had moved to Tokyo. Of course, I had told each about the other, but had fashioned them a little differently for each other than they were in reality. For Carrie, I made Hillary a little younger, gave her brighter clothes, perhaps threw butterfly clips in her hair and lavender eye shadow around her eyes, and avoided the topic of her career in real estate. For Hillary, I made Carrie more distant. She was a roommate, a good conversation partner with a bottle of Bacardi on a sparse Saturday night, a good friend, whatever that meant. In either case, I evaded talking about one with the other. My oversleeping gave the two all morning to compare my character sketches with the real thing, and see what they could find in the gap in between.

Carrie took charge. "What do you say we get out there and enjoy the sunshine. It's early October, there aren't going to be many more days like this one," she said.

Hillary looked my way and asked, "Shannon, do the seasons play out the same way here that they do in Philadelphia?"

I checked Carrie, and then answered. "They're warmer, somehow. I know we're further north, but I think Philadelphia just got badly placed. I can't remember winters much colder than the ones I had down there," I said.

Carrie gave me a silly, shocked stare. "Well, it's not that much warmer here, if at all. It's further North, crazy head." She paused for a second, put her hand on Hillary's shoulder and got back to business. "All right, Shannon, why don't you walk Hillary over to the car, and I'll meet you there in five minutes once I clean up. Let's go over to Riverside. It'll be a beautiful day in the park."

Carrie would do things like this, take care of things while I had one of my spells. She was so composed and together, I wondered if she even noticed that I lost myself sometimes. She was the concrete and the plaster of my life in New York. I'd go out and get fucked up, come home at the tip of daybreak from the apartment of another guy I couldn't love, come home in the night's trance, the pillars of my life taken out of geometrical balance by Stoli, everclear or even ecstasy, I'd come home a girl so unrelated to the maiden spinster I once was. Carrie would make it all come back to normal. She'd keep things in place, cement in the foundation.

She was also an excellent planner. She had a small circle

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of extremely social acquaintances which she'd source with precision to turn out an ever-changing, pulsating schedule of apartment parties, clubs, bars, and lounges, giving credence to the hype of a city that never sleeps.

She made the menu, but I brought surprises in from the kitchen. I took us to the Staten Island Ferry in the middle of the night and sang showtunes for New York City's smattering of nocturnal commuters. I took us to lie between the towers of the World Trade Center whenever I suspected a snowfall, ready to watch the delicate birth of snowflakes upon such an escalating, dramatic set. I'd always be the one who'd suggest leaving early so we could go back to the apartment and have a food fight, or ride the elevators at the Marriott Marquis after stealthily evading the security staff. She was macro, I was micro. She was the superhero, and I the nutty sidekick. She once called us the escapaders, and I think it's a name that fits.

Hillary got to the car before I did and got in. She seemed nervous and unhappy, and it spread back to me. The cherished brightness of the day was almost too much. I was tired, and would have been contented staying in and watching the rain.

"Hill, get out of the back seat. Get up front. You've got to see your new town." The words rolled slowly off my tongue.

"You sure, Shannon? I remember you as a front seat girl."

"That's because I would always drive."

"That's right. Well, thanks. I'll take shotgun this time."

"I've been here for two years, it's not like I'm seeing anything different. You should have just gone up front."

"No problem."

She moved up front, and I took her seat in the back. We were doused in silence.

Carrie joined us in the car, and took care of leading the conversation. She was good at avoiding pedestrians, potholes, and the silent spots in chitchat alike. I took note of the diamond and rhombus-shaped slots between the yellow and orange trees in Central Park. We reached the river. Unlike the Schuylkill or the Delaware, the Hudson looked like a taut blue trampoline in the lazy autumn light. But Carrie wouldn't agree with my reverence one bit. She was a Californian, and having never been out there, I could only imagine the coastline that she said would make this day look like "a cow ulcer gone wrong."

Hillary commented, "Shannon must be rubbing off on you. I thought she was the only one who said things like that." It seemed like a cue. Cow ulcers, I thought. I started mooing, and Carrie joined in. Hillary just walked along, amused with our silly 63

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animal noises, but too shy to make her own. The charade never reached a critical mass where there might be the possibility of laughter. I gave it up pretty quickly.

We walked down the Riverside Park esplanade, by the 91st Street garden, and eventually down right by the water.

Carrie walked in the middle, and she and Hillary did most of the talking. Every once in a while, I'd shoot a smile over at Hillary, to see if she was having a good time. It seemed like she was. The only one who wasn't was me. I was sick to my stomach. I blamed the car sickness, but I knew better than that. More than anything else, I was embarrassed that I might be figured out.

HILLARY

T

hough it had little or no resemblance to the life I had imagined for myself in New York, everything began to fall in place. I woke up in the mornings after Shannon and Carrie had headed off to their jobs, did my best to clean up the kitchen and the hallway, and caught a pair of city buses to Faschke Reuter, the advertising agency where I had landed a less-than-wonderful job as office manager. I oversaw office supplies and the occasional office personality, but my job was so tangentially related to the business of the agency that I may as well have been working in nuclear astrophysics, or in a morgue.

It was a job; it was an income; and most importantly, it privileged me to continue doing what I was doing.

It had been at least a year since I had been so happy. In Philadelphia, the days had lost that continuous feel, that gelatinous sweep of time where one day falls into the next and into the next, where the philosophy of "taking it one day at a time" holds no relevance. I had forgotten the steady thrill of sweet repetition until I had moved in with the girls in New York.

The biggest surprise was that my newfound contentment had little or nothing to do with Shannon. Almost every moment around her was a conscious effort at reinvigorating what had once been a great friendship. Shannon was really the one thing that sniped at the subtle champagne high of my new life. I tried to look for ways that Shannon might have changed, but couldn't find any. This was the same girl. A waitress once, a software designer now, but it was all irrelevant to the girl inside. We just weren't clicking like we once did. There weren't any outward signs of hostility, hardly a moment of clear conflict, but she was never the confrontational type. Time had just passed, and rippled the landscape along with it.

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The mere fact that Shannon had a steady boyfriend, while Carrie and I did not, left us alone in the apartment for long stretches of time. Without its ever being said out loud, dinners began being made for two instead of three. We'd order a pair of movie tickets a few days in advance, and not worry about the third (it didn't take long for me to learn that premieres sell out fast in New York). The six-packs of beer would disappear column-bycolumn instead of row-by-row. Soap vanished more slowly from the bathroom.

I could have easily found an apartment in New York. I had the resources and the connections from my days doing smalltime real estate back in Philadelphia. I just didn't want to. I'd still have to call for Shannon. But it was Carrie I wanted to see. Or perhaps it was Shannon, but everything I sent in her direction came back so confused and unsatisfying compared with what we once were. It was all still too ambiguous to do anything about it.

It was the rare weekend evening where we weren't headed off somewhere in the city. There was a one-night hole in Carrie's social schedule, and I was relieved to be in for a change. I thought I'd snare her into the realm of domestic entertainment, an evening bounded by the sofa, a movie and the apartment's vast collection of delivery menus. She flipped through the menus so slowly that it seemed like she was imagining every possible dish on her palate, judging how each might sit on her taste buds.

It looked like a good thing to interrupt.

"Carrie, you want to play a game of cards?" I asked.

She looked back at me with a soft glance that was so easy it bordered on expressionless. "Why the hell not. Name your game."

"Anything you like."

"How about Go Fish?"

"Go Fish? I don't think you can play that with two people.

You'd know all the cards the other person had."

"Oh, that's funny. I didn't even think of that."

"There would be no strategy at all. You'd just ask the other person for what they had and they'd have to give it to you."

"That's really funny because I think the last time I played cards, it was Go Fish with two people. It didn't even occur to me that something was off." At this, we shared a long, almost ridiculous spell of laughter. It was the all-consuming type of laughter that leaves little tear droplets in your eyes and on your brow as a tangible filtrate of the whole experience.

I was still on my way down from the laughter when Shannon walked through the door. Though we all lived together, 65

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it seemed as if weeks had passed since we had seen her, or at least since I had. Josh absorbed almost all of Shannon's life as it was currently spilled out, only little flecks and dots of it making it all the way back to the collective life back in the apartment. But suddenly she was here at nine o'clock on a Saturday night.

"Hey girls, what's so funny?"

"Oh nothing," I said. "We were just trying to play Go Fish with two people."

"Carrie, didn't we just do that a few weeks ago?"

"I think we did, didn't we."

"There was nothing so funny about it then." With Shannon back in the apartment, Carrie returned to her menus and for the moment, a silence prevailed. Shannon was the one to break it.

"Girls, I was shopping across town today and got you both a little something."

Carrie walked up to her, spread her wingspan and the two shared a light hug. Shannon let out a high-pitched, fluttering laugh. For a second, she sounded like a little girl.

"Carrie, I got you butterfly clips. For your hair. Hillary, I found this letter writing set that reminded me of you so much. The stationery is handmade, with dried blue flowers on it. And it comes with a brass letter opener." We took our gifts and Shannon disappeared down the hall.

She sounded almost plastic, like someone she didn't want to be. This wasn't my Shannon. This was far too normal to be Shannon. A religious avoidance of the normal had been Shannon's greatest charm. Her most dazzling, almost stereotypically good looks, as far as I could remember, had been matched with a penchant for the ridiculous. She was a strange girl at heart. But the guys she brought home would be so enchanted with her that they'd do any and all of the weird things she dreamed up while whistling in the shower or while fixing the dishwasher. She'd want a romantic weekend by the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and they'd make the reservations. She'd want to go on a historic windmill tour, and they'd find the same one lonely windmill in Amish Pennsylvania, spinning idle circles in a forgotten field somewhere. She'd want to drive at night, and they'd usually say no, because they'd have work the next day. So I'd go along.

"Carrie, have you seen my pink shoes? I could have sworn they were in the hall closet," Shannon said.

"You're heading out again, sweetie?"

"Yeah, Care, I'm meeting Josh downtown in a little bit.

Shoot, have you seen the red ones either?"

"Haven't seen either of em. Or you for that matter."

66

"I know, when am I going to see you?" Shannon could so innocently turn something around like that, as if Carrie had been hiding from her. Her eyes would pucker and sparkle, and you'd know not a drop of malevolence existed in her.

Shannon glowed briefly, and gave Carrie a kiss on the cheek. "Love you."

"I'll see you later, Hill," she said, speaking a good three feet to the left of me. I'd lost her, or she'd lost me. I'm not quite sure which. She was out the door, and the tension in the room dissipated like the last shards of orange light just after sunset.

Seated, I turned to Carrie.

"Do you ever get lonely here with Shannon out of the apartment all night?" I asked.

"What, me?"

"I, uh, don't mean to pry. It's just that she's never here, and I wondered if, well I don't know. If it ever got lonely."

"Well . . ." Carrie smiled. "It's not as if it's always been like this. This fall she's been especially remote. It's like the weather changed and something in her snapped."

"She's not the same as I remember her."

"But it is true that when she gets someone in her life, things change. When I'm dating someone, he just kind of fits right on in.

With Shannon, she orbits off in her own stratosphere."

"Back in Philadelphia, Shannon was dating this guy Bryce for almost a year. I really thought they were going to get married.

That whole time, it felt like I only saw her on the phone."

"Bryce? I never heard about a Bryce."

"Really? He was the closest she came. He was real serious stuff."

I could guess that Carrie was irritated, though it was imperceptible in her mannerisms or her voice. She was a lot like Shannon; the wild spirits they were, they veered toward tranquility when it came down to it.

"Damn," she said. "Damn, maybe she was real hurt by it and didn't want to talk about it again."

"Could be. I can't say."

"How did it end?"

"Actually, I don't think I've ever seen anyone more hurt than Bryce was when the whole thing ended. I was at Shannon's place when she broke up with him, and it ended on a fight so she just left. And he sat there and cried for three hours straight."

"Did you stay there?"

"Well, Shannon took her car so there was no way to find her, and I couldn't leave the apartment alone with him, so yeah, I 67

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just tried to make him feel better."

"What did you tell him?"

"There's not much you can tell someone who's lost Shannon. He said he felt destroyed. He was like a terrible love song; he said she was the moon and the stars, the planets and Saturn's rings. It was kind of pathetic to listen to, but he was serious about all of it. I don't think I've ever seen anyone quite so devastated before."

"I guess that's our Shannon."

"He just cried and cried; he asked me to hold him."

"Did you?"

"Well..." I started. I should have lied, but I didn't.

"Dammit, you can't tell Shannon. But I held him there on the sofa until we heard the car engine hum out front."

"You didn't..." Carrie held her calm.

"Oh my god, nothing happened. Oh I wouldn't even think . . . Carrie, you understand don't you? I'd never.. ."

"Oh I know, I know. You don't need to worry. You probably did the right thing in that situation."

"The boys love Shannon."

"They do."

Right then, something was the same about Carrie and me.

It was still hard to know exactly what. It came as a surprise, because the moonlight hit the apartment windows with such honesty that our differences were fully illuminated, waxing right in front of me. Tall and sophisticated, she had dark, short hair that never looked too far removed from its last shower. She was stylish without being moody. She sported an all-black attire and a small silver loop earring two-thirds of the way up her left ear that had the audacity to catch glare despite its slender build. For all her calm, she was the type who would seem intimidating on the subway or across a crowded street. She looked like she owned the city, or at least had the capacity to. I was just the meandering thirty-something from Philadelphia, trying to establish a small bit of something. Carrie was the perfect person to move on to. She was a life to move into. I came to New York and she made it a city.

I didn't say much, but just asked her if she wanted to be held. She looked at me, and I could feel the tinges of suspicion flirt about her eyes. But she was lonely too. I lay down on the sofa, and then Carrie lay down next to me, the top of my head brushing against the peak of hers. I lay one hand across her, and it fell gently but securely across her side. In the moonlight, we fell asleep.

68

SHANNON

A

t first, I found Josh breathtakingly attractive. It's almost impossible to describe it now, with the seasons having turned, the wheels having changed, the summer having faded. He had a dark complexion for being such a lightskinned, easily sunburned creature, and fuzzy blond arms that for a while felt good to be held within. He was nicely muscled, but soft to touch, and on warm nights, sleepy and gentle from a couple breaths away. The more I think about it, perhaps it was just the heat-dusted light of September that made me think he was beautiful. You could put anything in that warm September glaze, the residue of three months of accumulated New York City heat, ever so slightly anxious of the inevitable fall, the unavoidable destruction ahead, and it would shimmer. At that time of year, people appear as diamonds anticipating their cut.

The season itself is irresistible.

His beauty waned precipitously the more intimate we became. His touch had always felt so hesitant and worried that when we held hands, it felt like I had walked down Madison Avenue, picked up a bird from the concrete and cupped it in my hands. I was never worried that he might fly away, but instead I feared that all his hesitancy was covering up for something frightening and sinister. Josh began to look tentative as well, almost like a gaudy plastic mannequin wrapped around something terrible. The first time we slept together only confirmed these simmering suspicions. Up close, his good looks were lost in a force field that revealed his immense fear. He wanted to devour me whole, consume me like the last drink in a closing bar.

Sex was like being annexed.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Josh was that I had outgrown him. For a short while, he was the stream of my life. It was just a couple weeks, but our trajectories in space lined up just perfectly, two jet engines tracing parallel silken paths across the sky. And once our systems fell out of alignment, we were still left with all the evidence of a familiarity that only came paired.

We made names for one another. We spoke to one another in voices that no one else heard. We configured a whole slate of rituals that filled the week, Tuesday night movies and Sunday morning muffin walks that replicated themselves out in the mechanism of us.

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Now, he was just an alibi, a mildly hairy, rather forceful and largely unpleasant alternative to the world crisis taking place in my apartment. My relationship with Josh had deadened to the point of suffocation, and it could no longer serve as my escape valve. It was time to deal.

I had a lot in that apartment. Carrie had been everything, and I still would have done anything for her. She had taken a lost girl from the wayward, sullen metropolis of Philadelphia and lit within her an enthusiasm so rare that New Yorkers try to bottle it every time it comes along. Hillary had done much the same for me a few years earlier, though her tonic was a sturdy, exquisite wholeness that we together completed for years. But the two at once, mixed in the small confines of a New York City apartment, formed a concoction I couldn't manage. It was probably because they fit together so well, teeth on gears turning in a circular permanence.

But I knew it was not an irrevocable situation, and everyone I'd asked had told me I just had to tell Hillary to move out. Then, I could reestablish my separate friendship with her, and my escapades with Carrie, and Josh's relevance would diminish altogether. Yet as much as she had stepped in on my world with Carrie, I could see how happy Hillary was, and for some reason, it killed me to have this conversation with her. I came straight home from work on a Wednesday, took a shot of gin, and waited for her at the kitchen table.

"Hill, how've you been, you know, in general? How's New York come to treat you?"

"Good, real good. It's finally started to all settle in for me."

"I'm glad to hear it. I really am. I knew you'd love it here."

"You come to this city, and somehow, it all comes together.

You know what I'm talking about?"

"I sure do. I had the exact same experience."

Something clicked. In a wash of gin and clarity, I saw what had been coming. It was coming even before Hillary got there.

"Hill, I've got something to ask you. I've been meaning to bring it up fora while."

"Oh, I think I knew this was coming. Don't worry, I can move out whenever you want me to. To be honest, I've just been so comfortable here. But I know, it's time. It's past time."

"No," I began. This was right. "No, Hillary, I wanted to ask you if you wanted to stay. You could just make up the last couple months in rent and share the place with us. I'm sure Carrie would love it."

"Oh... uh, really? Are you sure?"

"I am."

70

"No, Shannon. I can't intrude any longer. I'll . . ."

"Come on, Hill, I know you too well. Move in. All right?"

"I, uh, I don't know how to thank you."

"It's a great place. You'll like it, you really will."

This put everything in place. It's what happens every year.

The trees tire of their leaves, and despite the foreknowledge that there will eventually be new leaves that look and feel exactly the same, it's necessary to get rid of the old ones, stand naked in the foul cold, and wait for new ones to clothe the bare branches. It was the organization of everything.

It was a Saturday morning; I was up before Carrie and Hillary, and I headed out upon the sidewalks that gently quaked with the anticipation of winter. There's a rock in Central Park on the edge of the lake that I'd love to call my own, but in New York City, nothing can be your own. The apartment had previous tenants and it would have future ones. Your favorite little Italian place in the Village is the favorite little Italian place of thousands of people just like you; the intersection where you had a first kiss, broke up, or saw someone for the last time is the same intersection where other New Yorkers have stained their own repositories of memories. But this rock I loved. So I went there and watched the city.

This time of year, it didn't so much as gleam as it did prevail. It was white and solid, a gradient of grays in the largest imaginable scale. I brought a pair of binoculars. I picked them up and looked out at the midtown skyscrapers. They didn't quite reach, so I couldn't see what was going on inside any of the buildings, but I nonetheless got a number of double-sphered pictures of the skyline. I took off the binoculars, and looked around. The brave few hit the park this morning. The avid dog walkers made their customary paths, some with more cooperation from their canine companions than others. A family or two ran conjoined footsteps on the paths and in the mud. It was a beautiful city. I found a couple small stones, smooth, simple and brown. I threw them out into the lake, and they dropped, making the ripples one would expect. I saw there, that it was right. It was.

Now that I knew what was happening, it was time to get everything in order. In the movies, change is immediate and transcends everything. In the real world, it takes a few weeks for the paperwork to go through, for the wheels to churn and spin, and for a person to catch her life up to the decision she has made. In the end, even the best of people are just gears that convey you on to somewhere else in the machinery of it all. The mechanism compresses around you, and it's time to cut loose,

71

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break free and dance your somber little dance somewhere else.

As much as you may love someone, the realization comes that they have now come to occupy the past tense, some iridescent, distant place somewhere in your history.

For a few of us, constancy is not an option. Life shines and trembles along, the days rolling along with a narcotizing repetition that quells the body like molasses. Each morning dawns with the same almost brightness of the one before, offering a mere rearrangement of the same matrix of hope, promise and activity that the previous one held. In daily practice, such a life is easy. But in snapshots, it begins to resemble less and less the one you'd like to see yourself living. We always hold close to the raw material of our young dreams, this hazy template against which the world in front of us must be judged.

December came to New York on a Friday. I called Carrie and told her and Hillary to meet me between the towers of the World Trade Center at 9 PM sharp. I got there at about eight-thirty and searched out a security guard. After a long business negotiation in which funds exchanged hands, and my possessions were carefully searched, I left in his care a box of Dunkin' Donuts there with a note affixed to the top. It was a short note that explained what I was doing, and it began with the greeting, "To Biff and the escapaders from Chattanooga Chuck."

The guard was to deliver this package to the two women arriving at precisely nine to the point spaced exactly between the two towers.

I ran off the plaza, down the steps by the Marriott, and left an envelope with the doorman to mail; it would go to Josh. I ran into the subway station, cascaded uptown, and snared a cab which I had wait in front of the apartment as I removed my suitcases. I quickly closed the door behind me, and watched New York City surrender to a watercoloring of snow as the cab made its way down Park Avenue and across town to Penn Station. From Ninth Avenue, I could make out the tops of the twin towers, and I pictured Carrie and Hillary there, hopefully with a box of donuts, the brilliant promise of an endless train of each other's escapades, and the most storied city on the blue earth. If Carrie had learned anything from me, she and Hillary would lie down between the towers, and watch the season's first snowfall.

It would be a beautiful sight to see.

I bought a train ticket. A good portion of the sale of the Cutlass went into this paper stub marked Denver, Colorado. Why Denver? I was a city girl and Denver was just about as rural as I'd be able to handle. I also had a couple phone numbers scribbled in the address book whose area code matched 72

Denver's, which put it ahead of close competitors Seattle and Chicago. I had heard the mountains were beautiful, and plus, it got me more than halfway to the shimmering California coastline to which Carrie had shown such heartfelt reverence. Denver would be a perfect stepping-stone.

I got on the train, put my bags away, and snuggled up against the window. The seconds ticking away to midnight, the wheels turned on the tracks and the old train rolled out from the station, signaling an end to my days in New York. The city bid me farewell and rolled past in its silvery, exorbitant glory. The great machine whistled out of the metropolis on its iron tracks, and the world was born again. These were the somber passages made of the inevitable failure of all things I had known. I fell asleep.

And off I drove.

(S)

w 2

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73

QUARTO 2001

CONTRIBUTORS

D A V I D A U S T E R W E I L IS THE EX-GENERAL OF HIS TOWN MILITIA. HE RETIRED FROM THIS POSITION IN ORDER TO BECOME A PRODUCTIVE STUDENT AT A NICE SCHOOL. AFTER A SEMESTER, IT BECAME CLEAR THAT THIS WAS MERELY A FRONT. HIS SUBVERSIVE NATURE HAS NOT YET BEEN FULLY REALIZED. E L I Z A B A N G IS IN HER SECOND YEAR AT BARNARD COLLEGE, AND IS CURRENTY THE EDITOR OF THE BARNARD BULLETIN. SHE ENJOYS USING PHOTOGRAPHY AS HER STRESS-RELEASING CREATIVE EXPRESSION. K E V I N D . B E C K E R IS IN HIS FIRST YEAR AT THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS. THOUGH HE MOST OFTEN USES PHOTOGRAPHY TO DOCUMENT HIS TRAVELS, HE DID NOT HAVE TO VENTURE FAR FROM HIS COLLEGE APARTMENT FOR HIS PHOTO. K A T H E R I N E B R O W N IS THE OPERATIONS MANAGER AT AN ORLANDO TALK RADIO STATION AND MOTHER TO OLIVIA MORGAN. S A N D R A P A U L I N A B A Z Z A R E L L I IS A GENERAL STUDIES STUDENT AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. SHE IS A SINGER/SONGWRITER AND A LITERATURE/WRITING MAJOR. HER POEM, "THE O L D ITALIAN PRIEST," APPEARED IN QUARTO 2000.

L I L Y B I N N S - B E R K E Y IS IN THE CLASS OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE, 2003. S H E HAS A PASTORAL HOME IN WARREN, CONNECTICUT. A L E X DE L U C E N A I S C A J U N . HE LIVES IN NEW YORK ON 107TH STREET AND COLUMBUS AVENUE. E L I Z A B E T H F R E I D I N IS A SENIOR AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE MAJORING IN PSYCHOLOGY. S H E IS ORIGINALLY FROM BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, AND IS CURRENTLY IN THE UNDERGRADUATE HONORS POETRY WORKSHOP WITH ALAN ZIEGLER. K A T O R I H A L L HAS BEEN PUBLISHING POETRY, SHORT STORIES, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM ESSAYS SINCE THE AGE OF FOURTEEN. A SELF-PROCLAIMED DRAMA QUEEN, HALL WILL GRADUATE FROM COLUMBIA COLLEGE WITH A B A IN DRAMA AND THEATER ARTS AND A CONCENTRATION IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES AND CREATIVE WRITING.

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K R I S T I E H A R T IS THE AUTHOR OF A PLAY, MOTHER'S DAY, RECENTLY PRODUCED AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND A SCREENPLAY, CARMEN COMES CLOSER. "FLRE" IS FROM A SERIES OF SHORT STORIES ENTITLED, IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE. MS. HART IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON AN EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSICAL. J E F F R E Y D. J. K A L L E N B E R G WILL BE A SENIOR AT GENERAL STUDIES, AND IS MAJORING IN WRITING/LITERATURE. H E HOPES A LITERARY AGENT FOR DREAMWORKS READS "THE POND," BUYS THE RIGHTS AND MERCHANDISES THE HELL OUT OF IT. H E CAN BE REACHED THROUGH THE WRITING DEPARTMENT. M I C H E L L E J. L E E IS FROM NEW YORK CITY AND IS AN ENGLISH MAJOR AT BARNARD. THE IMAGE OF CRACKING AN EGG HELPED HER CONCEIVE "ELEGY." SHE BELIEVES IN KARMA AND REINCARNATION. MUCH LOVE TO ALL HER PROFESSORS AND MENTORS, AND THANKS FOR THEIR SUPPORT, ESPECIALLY LESLIE WOODARD. J U L I E M A S S SEES HER LIFE IN TRIPART-THE PAST: DILETTANTE; THE PRESENT: WIFE, MOTHER, STUDENT; THE FUTURE: MENTOR TO YOUNG MINDS. M A R K M O R A N GRADUATED IN MAY 2001 FROM GENERAL STUDIES, WITH A BA IN LITERATURE/WRITING, AND HE PLANS TO PURSUE A CAREER IN FILM WRITING, EDITING, AND PRODUCING. H E IS DELIGHTED TO HAVE HIS FIRST POEM PUBLISHED, EVEN IF " Q ' S BIG ADVENTURE" WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR COLUMBIA'S BAD POETRY CONTEST, (IT WAS TOO GOOD TO WIN.) K E L C E Y N I C H O L S IS A GRADUATE OF BARNARD COLLEGE AND A FORMER ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY EDITOR. HER SHORT STORIES HAVE APPEARED IN QUARTO AND POST ROAD. S H E CURRENTLY LIVES IN NEW YORK AND WORKS IN THE INTERNET BUSINESS. K W E A D E O D U S WAS BORN IN GHANA OF A NIGERIAN FAMILY. H E WAS THE GIFTED YOUNGER BROTHER AND APPRENTICE TO FOUNDING OSHOGBO ARTIST, ADEBISI FABUNMI. H E DIED FAR TOO YOUNG IN 1988.

J E S S I C A P O G G I IS A BARNARD STUDENT. B E N J A M I N R Y A N IS A JOURNALIST AND AN ON-THE-SIDE NOVELIST. HE RECEIVED HIS B A IN ENGLISH AND A CREATIVE WRITING CERTIFICATE FROM COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN MAY 2OO1.

CARRIED TO INDIANA AND TEXAS BY FAMILY, TO AFRICA BY VISION V I C T O R I A S C O T T HAS MADE CHILDREN (2), ART (SOME), AND FRIENDS (MANY). S H E LIVES IN SANTA FE. T W I N S S E V E N S E V E N IS ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE OSHOGBO SCHOOL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART AND ONE OF NIGERIA'S MOST INFLUENTIAL AND SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS. D U S T I N B E A L L S M I T H PLANS TO ATTEND THE SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, IN FALL 2001. His ESSAYS HAVE APPEARED-OR ARE FORTHCOMING-IN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL/CONSTITUTION, BACK STAGE, THE NEW LONDON DAY, AMONG OTHERS. D A V I D S U S M A N , A NATIVE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, NOW LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY. H E IS STUDYING VISUAL ARTS AND AMERICAN STUDIES AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND IS ALSO PART OF THE COLUMBIA COLLEGE CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM. E L I Z A B E T H V E R N A IS A SECOND YEAR MEDICAL STUDENT AT P&S. SHE IS INTERESTED IN INTERNATIONAL MEDICINE AND PURSUES PHOTOGRAPHY AS A CREATIVE OUTLET.

ELIZABETH VERNA, ROOFTOPS