Rathalla Review Spring 16

Rathalla Review

Rosemont College Spring 2016

Our Mission: Rathalla Review is the literary magazine published by the students of Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate Publishing programs. Our Mission is to give emerging and established writers and artists an outlet for their creative vision in our online and print publication. We publish the best fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, poetry, and art, culled from a nationwide community of writers and artists.

Rathalla Review’s staff, comprised of MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing candidates, merges the creative arts and the business of publishing into a shared voice and vision.

All written work in Rathlla Review remains copyright of its respective author and may not be reproduced in any form, printed or digital, without t express permission of the author.

Rathalla Review Spring 2016

Managing Editor T.M. Sumner

Production Editor Andrew Whitehead

Fiction Editor Rosie Corey

Art Editor Megan Hovermann

Poetry Editor Jennifer Rieger

Assistant Managing Editor Trish Rodriguez

Flash Fiction Editor Orey Wilson

Assistant Fiction Editor Yalonda Rice

Creative Nonfiction Editor Rae Pagliarulo Selection Staff Terrel Adams Elvis Alves Sarah Baker Maria Ceferatti Kara Cochran Jade Fleming

Brandon Hartman Angelina Horst Mary-Kate Kaminski Ed Krizek Abigail Lalonde Nicole Miyashiro

Eileen Moeller Susan Ruhl Lauren Stead Bailey Steidle Johnny Tucker Genna Walker

Table of Contents Featured Artist Albert Shelton

Existential Crisis

Anna Leahy (Poetry)

The Keepsakes RenĂŠe K. Nicholson (Creative Nonfiction)

Ant

Kristen MacKenzie (Flash Fiction)

The Mud Seller

Ivan Faute (Fiction)

My Mother Brings the Rains

Aruni Kashyap (Poetry)

Housewarming

Holly Day (Poetry)

Death of a Mouse Nancy Wyland (Creative Nonfiction)

Effigy

Adam Matson (Fiction)

1

2

3

7

8

16

18

19

23

Pact

Claire Scott (Poetry)

The Blessings

34

Elise Juska (Novel Excerpt)

36

Interview with Elise Juska

43

Above: Palacial Glacial Front Cover: Orchestration Rear Cover: Different Strokes

Featured Artist: Albert Shelton

Albert Shelton’s work is a reflection of his surroundings, inspired by the starkness of photo journalism, the traditionalism of early American Realist painters, and the existentialist critique of the early twentieth century Dada artists. His hyper realistic paintings juxtapose silent moments from both private and public spaces to create a moving stillness. Time is suspended and place becomes an illusion of itself. Portraitlike drawings of iconic objects and buildings suggest cryptic symbologies of Americana. Photographs show a world in constant flux, yet suspended in an abstracted state. Printmaking techniques pair objects alone with ambiguous passages of text to stir ideas on our conditioned associations. Collage work composites forms out of images, manipulating visual space and poking reality with a narrative stick of absurdity.

Conceptual performance installations embody the temporality of life and the conflicts within all forms of balance. Together, his whole body of work is an expression of the universal forces of identity and change.

For event booking, art sales, commissions, proposals, licensing, and consignments please contact Albert at albert.shelton@gmail.com.

All works copyright ŠAlbert Shelton 2016

Existential Crisis Anna Leahy

Wander around a bourbon. Sip the town. Sleep with a good book. Read a woman young enough to reasonably bear your children. Ask a telling performance. Answer in question. Name your future martini as you fall asleep during a beer. Order a child; chase it with a one-night stand. Marry an apartment. Hesitate when a smart woman asks you to move (into/in with) her. Be present in church as if tomorrow your life will change.

Attend to each day and pray. Yesterday is a revision; tomorrow, a rough draft. Find a penny of life; find meaning on the sidewalk. Let why break. Figure out your heart.

Anna Leahy’s book Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize, and her latest chapbook, Sharp Miracles, is just out from Blue Lyra Press. Leahy’s nonfiction book Tumor will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017 and her essays and poems appear in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Crab Orchard Review, The Pinch, Gravel, and more. “Half-Skull Days” was a Notable in The Best American Essays 2013. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she edits the journal TAB and curates the Tabula Poetica reading series.

2

The Keepsakes Renée K. Nicholson

1. Locket My brother’s heart beats strong, while his gnarled gut has recently been sliced open and sewed back up by a surgeon. I want to feel his pulse as sure as I see sun rise and set each day, to know what we cannot know, that in some bright future he will be okay. My brother plods day-to-day, making the best of it with his friend-enemy, chemotherapy, lending to both cure and additional ailment. When I call to check on him, the words feel as if they evaporate off our lips. Nothing lends itself to feeling permanent.

Chemo is like a person we’ve inserted into conversation but never speak about except obliquely, like the neighbor we all knew pulled tangerines from our tree from the limbs that draped over his fence. We knew he took them to savor, their sweet innards like candy. There were too many for us anyway. That the tangerine tree in front of our childhood home on Calle Del Paz—the street of peace—in sunny Boca Raton, are a time and place so far away it hardly feels real. Flung from there, he’s landed in Georgia and me in West Virginia, the last of our clan to live in our familial homeland, where generations of Nicholsons and Parsons lived on patch-worked hilltop farms crafted like my Grandma Lily’s quilts. Though my people were carpenters, all I’ve ever built are sentences. Words, I fear, will not cure my brother.

Worry grips me at inopportune times—when I’m teaching pas de cheval to the young dancers, or trying to write a book review, or while putting together a makeshift spaghetti dinner. Life interrupted. I know how to be the patient, but not the caregiver; deal me the pain, and I’ll grit my teeth and soldier through it. I’d like to think I’m made of tougher stuff than my fluffy exterior hints at. I might favor tying my hair back in bows, or twirling a rope of pears around my finger, spinning wide the full bell of a bright-colored skirt, but after my own surgery, knee replacement from rheumatoid arthritis, I refused pain pills. At the time, I claimed that the nausea was a worse condition than the bleat of my wound. But with my brother, I urge him to do what he needs to sleep through the night, even if it requires pills. Don’t be a hero. Slumber is a luxury I want him to embrace, although I have learned you can’t tell a grown man what to do, especially if he’s your younger brother.

He hasn’t lost his hair, though it is silvered prematurely, like mine, like our mom’s, his a play of light on dark as if strewed with Christmas tinsel. Body thinned, Chemo leaves his mark. Yet, in his voice I often hear the old Nate, sure and even-voiced. That voice eases my worry, even though I should be the one providing comfort. He sounded self-assured even when we were kids, and there’s something so solid about my brother, a trait that eludes me. Maybe that’s what has made this cancer episode all the more terrifying. The person most like bedrock now has cracks and fissures.

2. Toys As kids, Nate’s favorite stuffed toy was a koala bear, while mine was a handmade, stuffed dog our great-grandmother made me and that I named Sharky. I don’t remember if Nate’s bear had a name. He doesn’t have his sleepy koala anymore, and Sharky is tucked inside a chest my husband and I use as a coffee table, next to other leftover treasures from my youth: a Bloomingdales teddy bear, a tiara of snowflakes, a favorite blanket full of holes and that would be better off pitched. But I am my family’s collector, the pack rat and historian, the keeper of Grandma’s Fiestaware and paste broaches, my favorites fashioned into sparkly-gemmed insects I wear on shirts and sweaters and blazers.

Nate, somehow, is the sibling who can purge. He’s not attached to stuff, clearing closets of hardly worn clothes. He’s the kind to pitch a birthday card after reading. No comfort as he wrestles with illness, which doesn’t suit him, and that he can’t throw in the garbage to be hauled away.

I can’t shake the uneasy feeling; it is not supposed to work out like this. Nate’s a runner and a dad, after3

school soccer coach and marketing director, a good cook and a safe driver. If not most likely to succeed then least likely to be lonely. Loyal, smart, and funny. He has soft brown eyes, and my mother’s nose. I catalog over and again all the things my brother is that I can never be. When he listens, I feel a sense that I’m paid attention, while I flitter through conversations on papery, butterfly wings, alighting here and there but never stopping long. His laugh is never fake, and he can’t force a smile, so that when he does either, it’s as authentic and unexpected as finding a shiny, lucky penny, a bit of copper between cracks in the sidewalk. There’s good reason he has kids and I don’t, and his love, stronger than his affliction, gives him the will to go to practices and rent trumpets and make art projects and provide dinner when his body seems too depleted to make a proper cup of coffee. Somehow he is not just marking time, but wringing it of every little memory he can make. Though his long-term prognosis seems good, we can’t really know.

Despite our differences, there are points where we intersect. We are both wary of doctors, with their need to fix us stronger than their aptitude for caring about us. Nate keeps lists of meds and appointments. He enters information into his iPhone. I’m the planner, obsessive list maker, and all the not knowing becomes the scariest thing of all about what’s happening to Nate. I try to hide this when I talk to him, but I’m sure he knows. As siblings, we were always intuitive about each other. I remember a time when I was away, training as a dancer, and he sent an envelope full of little drawings for me to tack up in my room, even though I never said I felt pangs of homesickness. Or the time I knew to send him a watch as a birthday present, even though he never mentioned to me that his had recently broken. The family lore: my brother only started speaking to others, in full and complete sentences, when I went off to kindergarten. Before then, I got him anything he needed, tended to him like mother hen. I can’t do that anymore.

3. Word Art Cancer. Tropic of Cancer, a measurement of longitude, and Cancer an astrological sign. Neither are his, which is the kind that grows silently in the sightless places. I wordplay, but this one feels too flat in the mouth. Not Aries or Taurus or Scorpio. Not Virgo, like Nate, not Capricorn, like me. The “can” to begin feels wrong, transitive verb. To know how; to be mentally or physically able. The “e-r” perhaps closer to right. You can pull apart the words like cotton candy off the paperboard cone, but the affliction stays the same.

Nate can draw. His hand steady, obeying the shape and line of what he’s focused on, or what he’s imagined. His brain works in images, in the spatial awareness between him and the rest of the world. He draws for his kids and for his girlfriend, and sometimes even just doodles for himself. When I look at the gray strokes on the flat white paper, I feel like I’m privy to the way my brother sees the world, a snippet of his consciousness in these lines that form objects. The things he makes can be handled, touched, spun, considered.

I have only my words and my body for expression, only the ephemeral moment of creation, like those flowers that bloom at dawn only to die by dusk. Nate has permanence beyond what I might ever know. Does he know? I have never asked. But it seems to me only his cancer is hidden from view, deep in the recesses of his body. In this way, his affliction is cruel irony. And yet who really wants to face the full view of illness?

When my leg had the staples from my surgery, I avoided looking directly at them. Now the train-tracked scar continues its fade into my natural skin.

In high school art class, my brother constructed wondrous things: a paper mâché Calvin from the comic strip, a giant building block with a “G” on one side and a giraffe on the other, long neck bent with the three dimensional cube. Pages and pages of sketches. Although I am usually the keeper, he has kept these few artifacts. Nate’s daughter has become intrigued with her daddy’s artwork. She draws me a picture—she and me together—and I can’t help but think that maybe she’s inherited not only her grandmother’s round, friendly features, but her dad’s artistic aptitudes. Sometimes all she wants is to sit on her daddy’s lap. She doesn’t really understand cancer. I want to tell her that none of us really do, not even the grown-ups who pretend to have all the answers. We have to pretend so that we don’t lose our minds or break our hearts.

4. Coffined My friend, Lorence, once wrote a poem titled, “How to Position My Coffin.” He retired from years of 4

oncology to become a poet. Having stared down death in the eyes of many patients, he isn’t afraid of his own passing. He wants his wife to throw a party. While a raucous affair isn’t exactly what I want, I’m not afraid to go. And I certainly don’t begrudge Lorence his final fête.

Gardenias are my favorite flower, delicate white like a rose, but less robust and sweeter scented. I love the open charm of dogwood blooms in spring, the little bursts of either white or pink. Rather than a grave, plant the gardenias or the dogwood for me, even if they are difficult to grow. It suits me.

Cancer surrealism: I dreamt my brother was floating over our heads, and we could not pin him down.

He talked to us and we couldn’t hear him speak, the words just puffs of air that floated up into the atmosphere. At the moment he started to disappear, I awoke, flush with cold sweats and a racing heartbeat.

5. Toys Our LEGO town sprawled from our bedrooms out towards the living room, and we would trip on scattered blocks not yet used in our construction. Other times a maze of pillow and blanket forts that our cat, Farfel, would knock over. Then we would wheel Farfel around the house in a baby carriage as penance. We looped the crooked sidewalks of the neighborhood, first in big wheels, then on bikes, passing quickly by the neighborhood association president’s house, where his black standard poodles stood sentry and bared their teeth. I slugged Timmy Carpenter when he called Nate a bad name, and didn’t care that I was grounded. I’d slugged him good enough that I knew he’d not try it again.

Soccer, baseball, basketball, volleyball. Nate’s days filled with rec sports and school teams, while mine honed down to ballet, ballet only, bunned head and pink tights with long seams down the legs. We didn’t have time for Atari or HBO. On the move, go here and then there, our days were movement harnessed in sports or technique. Physicality made sense of our young-selved world.

Momentum shifted for me in my early 20s, when, diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, my dancing days ended. My brother is 38, fighting cancer, trying to rebuild his strength from surgery and radiation and chemo. We don’t yield easily, but if you tell either one of us that we’re “too young” to have our afflictions, I just might belt you like I did Timmy Carpenter. Disease doesn’t work on a linear timetable. It builds forts inside us as we did as kids. We used whatever was handy to make the next section, to keep expanding our maze, continuing our build out if we could, through the whole of the house. The challenge was to take it all over, one pillow and blanket at a time.

6. Pocket Watch There was a lost time; my brother’s wife, now ex, who I never liked, kept her distance. So went Nate.

We would go months without so much as a phone call between us, which rolled into years, where, during strained family get togethers, we’d all pretend nothing was wrong. His ex dumped him cold, tried to make off with the money and the kids and all the tangible stuff of their union. He fought and reclaimed time with the kids. The rest, he said, was negligible.

And then we talked more often; calls and visits not wholly like days past, but their own kind of satisfaction. Learning to be friends again, close, siblings, became its own kind of pleasure. Nate bought a new house, and later a new car, and shiny things fit together in this new life he’d been building, a new girlfriend, sweet and friendly, with long wavy hair and bright brown eyes. They ran 5ks and half marathons together.

I can’t believe that my time with Nate could be cut short again, but of course it could. Instead, I like to think of our lives like a wound spool of thread that slowly rotates releasing inch by inch the twine. Perhaps I have no firm grasp of time, perhaps time is really well beyond human comprehension. We think of it like the watch we might tuck in our pocket. Too often we linger in memory or project the future, without regard to where our feet are firmly planted, the tick-tock of minutes that pass from future to now to past. They go largely unaccounted.

Nate’s surgery was right after the Fourth of July, and so for the holiday, my husband and I drove down to be with him and the rest of the family, a bittersweet time all together. We met up with Nate’s girlfriend, and his old friend from high school, and our parents, who live not too far from Nate’s place. We decided to forgo fireworks to sit out on a patio at a local restaurant to take in a meal together. But as we finished our steak 5

salads and cool beverages, we heard the low boom of the fireworks, and all we had to do was walk out into the parking lot to see the blues and yellows and greens and reds burst overhead into shimmering blooms of light, raising our faces up into the afterglow. Somehow, and without planning, we’d received everything we’d wanted.

A former ballet dancer, past Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona, and author of Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center, Renée K. Nicholson is assistant professor in the Programs for Multi- and Interdisciplinary Studies at West Virginia University. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Midwestern Gothic, Moon City Review, The Superstition Review, The Gettysburg Review and elsewhere. Renée’s creative projects include editing prose for the journal Souvenir, co-hosting the literary podcast SummerBooks, teaching ballet and choreographing for young dancers, and collaborating with healthcare professionals in narrative medicine. Her website is www.reneenicholson.com.

Different Strokes 6

Ant

Kristen MacKenzie I don’t think I’ve ever sat and watched an ant so closely before. It moves without hesitating along the length of the bathtub to the place where my book is balanced. The shape of it shines with the black-purple of the berries I pick from the beach at the end of summer.

I put my book on the floor and sink my arms below the surface. Flakes of un-dissolved Epsom salts drift and settle onto the flat plane of my stomach. My knees lay against either side of the bath and I look at myself. The first time I saw another woman naked, saw her all the way, was in the bathtub. I’d held her, touched her, I had loved her but I’d been afraid to take the next step and she had known. In the water, I saw what I needed to see.

The ant has begun to walk closer, reaching forward with its front legs, grasping one feeler after the other, stroking them from root to tip like a girl playing with her hair. I watch it move to the white curve of the tub’s edge and wonder if it will slip, or merely walk its way down to the water before turning back. I feel protective.

The book that rests on the mat is a story of loss. “I will think of her every day of my life”. I don’t need the reminder. But, “This isn’t the healing place”, it said, of the time where you long to go back to what can’t be found again. And it isn’t; I know that.1 The water has cooled to blood-warm, my skin no longer blushed red by the heat. My winter pale is like the inside of the shells I pick up off the beach, and I count the tiny new moles that dot my torso, new since when? I don’t know. This body is mine but its hers I still see, the little scar just there to the left of her navel from a long-ago surgery, the patch of infinitely fragile flesh around it, so thin and soft I was afraid to touch it. I swish my hand under the water and make the white grains of Epsom roll across my hipbones and into the space between my body and the wall of the tub, invisible against the white porcelain.

The ant has decided it doesn’t like the feel of the edge, and moves closer to my head, stopping to flick its antennae some more, and I wonder now if its trying to communicate with those strange motions. I lean forward and watch. I can see the flat black rectangle on the floor beside the sink, an ant trap already full.

1

David Michaelis, “Provincetown” from The American Scholar, 2001 and Best American Essays 2001

Kristen MacKenzie lives on Vashon Island in a quiet cabin where the shelves are filled with herbs for medicine-making, the floor is open for dancing, and the table faces the ocean, waiting for a writer to pick up the pen. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Rawboned Journal, GALA Magazine, Extract(s) Daily Dose of Lit, and is included monthly in Diversity Rules Magazine. Pieces are forthcoming in Blank Fiction, Crack the Spine Magazine, Maudlin House, and MadHat Annual. Her short story, “Cold Comfort,” placed in Honorable Mention in The Women’s National Book Association’s annual writing contest and will be published in a special edition of the association’s journal, Bookwoman, in June.

7

The Mud Seller Ivan Faute

The year Trung fell in love with Thao and we exchanged piastre for dong was the same year the mud seller appeared.

Strangers were not wholly unusual yet. Soldiers from several countries had flown over, been shot down, recovered, forgotten; the roads and busses had decayed and the hamlet resumed its isolation, circulating the same bills and coins, over and over, reading the central committee proclamations plastered on buildings, messages about washing hands before eating, supporting progress by working hard and living frugal, reporting infiltrators disguised as countrymen. Like fiats from the gods who hid in fog that swirled at the top of Mount Fansipan, barely visible from the bend of the road that descended to the market’s central plain.

Sunday in earliest spring, after the market had gathered, everyone was settled into the same stalls. The mud seller appeared on that bend in the road, silhouetted against the sky. Trung was young, still helping his father, mother and multiple brothers raise and sell pigs, fresh beer, and the plums off the trees that rose up behind their house. His parents’ house included a small beer stall and butcher table, situated on the far end of the market space. That Sunday, Trung was dispensing beer, even although it was only mid-morning.

Most had risen in darkness to traverse the valleys, streams, and bamboo groves and arrive in town before sunrise.

Trung saw him. His legs and arms caked in mud, crusted and flaked like lizard skin, a yoke balanced across his shoulders with a flat basket on each side, each mounded high with slick, slimy mud. Everyone directed their attention to the filthy beggar, expecting him to follow the road past the village and continue to whatever was below, leaving the village alone.

But the old man got to the end of the row and turned aside. He planted his feet as flat and wide as an old buffalo. With a quick turn of his ropey shoulders, he flipped the baskets onto the ground, sending up a flurry of dust, and bent at his knees and hips to sit behind his bamboo containers.

The village ignored him. Thao returned to extolling the quality of the scarf. Auntie Binh tended to her donuts. The farmers picked their teeth. Trung poured another beer. However, the earth seemed to have tilted in his direction, as if the plain of the ground had become weighted where he sat and everything was drifting to him. Mr. Canh, who butchered pigs, felt his feet slip and found himself, hands splattered with flecks of crimson blood, standing in front of the crumpled creature. The old man did not look up, did not seem to mind the smelly, fat merchant practically standing on top of him. The man examined fingernails and toes and glanced at the sky, trees, and insects, looking anywhere except where Mr. Canh stood. Not used to being ignored, Canh rumbled, a wet grumbling sound. The muddy man took no notice. Canh shuffled his feet, thin long feet for such a fat man, and cleared his throat with a flourish, nothing subtle anymore. He spit over the man’s shoulder.

“What’s that you’re selling, grandfather?” It was a little surprising Canh used such polite language, considering how poorly the old man was treating him.

“Mud, brother butcher.” The man spoke in a thick, country accent, not unexpected.

“Just mud?” Canh’s confusion showed. He shuffled from thin foot to thin foot, then crossed his beefy forearms.

“Would you buy some, comrade butcher?”

Canh looked for support but was met with curious stares. Even the mangy dogs, that never stopped wrangling over scraps near the garbage pile, were sitting still, heads cocked to the side, staring.

“Is it magic mud?” There had to be something more to it than just mud, Canh reasoned.

“I make no claims.” The crusty man finally looked up. The mud seller had remarkably clear eyes. Canh would remark on that for years and years, until his own death. “There’s a look,” Canh would say after a few 8

beers, “that an animal gives you right before you cut its throat.” He would spread his hands out, splitting his fingers far apart, into two wide fans. “It looks up at you with such wide eyes. Clear eyes full of understanding at that moment. It says to you, ‘I know what you are doing now. I understand why you do it. I know what comes next.’ Then you cut the throat and the blood drains into the bowl. All that light drains out.”

Canh would close his eyes then and make two fists. “That crazy old man had that same clear-eyed look. ‘I know what comes next.’ That’s what he was saying to me. I’ll never forget that.” Canh would drop his head over his food and drink and stop speaking and we knew not to disturb him.

That day though, Mr. Canh gave the man a skeptical turn of his head, then turned to look at the villagers again.

“If it’s ordinary mud,” he said, “what would I need it for? Can’t you see we are surrounded by it? Mud’s what we don’t need, the thing we are most tired of, always trying to get rid of. Why would we want to buy more?”

The mud seller looked down. “You never know,” is all he said.

Canh laughed. The old man was crazy, stuck up in the mountains alone, had been talking to the forest spirits and wind gods, or the goats. Canh returned to his fresh pork and brushed away the flies. “Nothing but a crazy old man,” he announced to no one in particular.

That was enough. No one paid attention to the old man anymore that day, relieved no further action was required. He was only a crazy old man.

The appearance of the mud seller was not the only amazing thing to happen that day. It was also the day Trung realized he was in love with Thao. He’d known of her his whole life of course, had seen her following her mother around when she could barely eat rice, had seen her grow, week after week. When Thao was still a young girl, a tree had fallen on her father and crushed his legs. Since that day, the father stayed on a mat in his house, a house as far from the market center as possible to still be considered part of the village. Her father, now old and shriveled, understood the world by the evidence Thao brought to him.

Thao’s brother, sixteen when his father fell ill, had tended the rice fields and other duties, until he fled, years earlier, into the southern jungle to help free his country, and himself. Thao’s mother died waiting for the boy, sitting in the rain and cold by the front door, waiting for a son who never returned. Her father was confused and demanding, still expecting the world to come to him. Thao spent her mornings coaxing vegetables to grow, afternoons weaving, and her evenings, in the glow of a single bare bulb, explaining the world to her ever-shrinking father.

This is how Trung fell in love with her.

At the end of that market day, the mountain dwellers were on the road home and the villagers were gathering their things. The hamlet was sleepy and full, even the dogs were stretched out in long lines, flipping their tails to clear their flanks of flies. Trung’s stall was empty, and he sat drinking a beer, smelling the air, watching the last few people wander off. He enjoyed watching the town at that time of day, remembering people and how they moved, wondering about the lives that happened inside their heads, behind the walls of their houses. It was a trait that would serve him when he would become the village storyteller many years later. That afternoon, he saw Thao pack her fabrics, pile them in her basket and lift the bundle on top of her head. She walked past the mud seller, who sat with head down, arms circling his knees. He might have been asleep he was so still. Thao stopped and looked at him. The man tilted his head and looked at what threw a shadow over him.

“Your mud has crusted over, honorable grandfather.”

The man looked at her, his eyes like stones at the bottom of a stream. “It will refresh itself tomorrow,” he said.

Thao smiled and walked off. She turned back. “Have a good journey home, grandfather.” She smiled again.

Trung felt something jump then, like a little fish nibbling at the bottom of his heart. It gave him a shock, and the shock traveled in a thin line through the beating ventricles, up the vein of his neck, circling his left ear until it struck something deep in his mind. From there, a warmth spread throughout his body, and Trung 9

almost fell backwards off his bench. He watched Thao walk away, her blue ao dai flying back behind her, just to make sure, and he nodded his head, realizing it was true. He loved her.

The next market day was not as fine. A heavy bank of dark clouds lowered the sky. Trung set out the wooden benches and wiped everything with a rag but was distracted. His father kept calling at him. “You live too far up in your head,” his father said. “Pay attention to your hands and feet.”

Just then Thao came around the bend in the road and caused Trung to trip over a bench so that he had to catch himself on the rough table. “Stupid boy,” his father muttered. Trung picked himself up and continued wiping tables, watching Thao.

No one expected the mud seller to return. No one wanted him to because that would require them to decide something, to make a decision about what he meant or who he might be. It was easier if he stayed away and they could ignore him. But he did return. After the market settled, he appeared on the horizon just like before. He took the same spot, the same posture. Although everyone was even more curious than before, they feigned disinterest so they didn’t have to wonder if they should report him to anyone.

Trung was less concerned with the mud man than Thao. He looked for a few minutes to get away, but, despite the cold, cloudy day, everyone wanted beer. He was busy all morning. His brothers and father were nowhere to be found, and his mother kept yelling at him.

Close to noon, a few hours before the market finished, Trung looked up and Thao was not at her stall.

Concerned that she might have left and he’d have to wait another week to speak to her, he scanned the marketplace. She was purchasing donuts from Auntie Luong. Cradling the hot treats in a banana leaf, she walked next to the old, muddy man. No one had seen the man eat anything, and Thao had become concerned.

“The mud is fresh today?” she asked.

“Every day,” he said.

“Hungry, grandfather?” Thao gave him a donut, and he accepted with long, thin fingers, eating the donut in one mouthful. Thao nodded in approval and walked back to her stall.

The mud man left as he had the week before. The next day he was the only topic. Would he come back every week now? Is that all he had to offer, mud? Why pick their village? They didn’t need any more trouble than they had already. They didn’t need new things. Nothing needed to change. Everyone knew change was dangerous; it attracted attention.

Trung thought of the mud seller occasionally, but he was distracted with his growing love for Thao. The small burning spot that started in his heart continued to grow. Every day his love grew, she became more distinct to him. He remembered the way she held her elbows as she walked, the way she favored her right ear, how the waist of her ao dai always seemed to be too high or too low. He hoped to find some excuse to visit her. She lived on the other side of the small valley, and he had no excuse to go that way.

The next market day came sunny and especially warm. Everyone set up and sold as usual, they also kept an eye on the bend in the road. No one was ordering beer, and Trung stood, leaning on the bamboo support of the hut, looking between the spot on the road, to Thao, back to the spot on the road. A little brown smudge bobbed up above the edge of the horizon for a moment before it fell away. It popped up larger and closer, and, unmistakable, the old, crusty man was trudging along, a yoke across his shoulders, baskets dripping wet, creamy, brown mud. He took his market spot, and a gust of air, the exhalation of collective breath, escaped from the market.

That third week Thao took him a donut and a small cup of tea, as would become her regular habit. Auntie Mai nodded at him when she passed. The butcher’s children, six of them, whom no one could tell apart, walked by without even looking at him. The mud seller had become a part of the community, not because they’d welcomed him, but because they didn’t want to decide to accept or reject him.

Over the next few weeks, the mud seller returned. Thao took him a small breakfast, and he sold nothing.

Watching Thao sell her wares and tend to the old man, Trung’s love grew. He rushed through his work, accomplished more than ever. Finally, his father stopped calling him lazy at dinner every night, stopped begrudging him another helping of rice. But every time Trung found some time, an hour in the middle of the 10

day or a soggy hot afternoon, and started off down the road, his mother would call out. “First son,” she’d call, “what about the pig fence?” or “First son, we need to have some more wood or bamboo or water or fix the roof, patch the hole in the back wall, clear out the fields for planting.” The work seemed to bubble up from the earth to prevent Trung from taking a moment to talk to the one he could not stop thinking about.

In midsummer, when Trung thought he could hardly stand being away from Thao one more hour, old woman Bac Thi came down the mountain to the village. Bac Thi lived in a sheltered valley north of town, out of the way of everything. She lived with some grandchildren. No one knew how many because she kept them hidden. Four of them had disappeared during the war, and she feared for the afterlife, that she’d be left to wander the spirit world hungry and cold, only getting a good meal on holidays when everyone felt obligated to offer prayers for ghosts. She kept her remaining family sequestered with her until she could die, then, she said, they could scatter to the winds. For the most part, no one ever saw or heard from any of them. They grew their own rice and fruit, hunted in the forest for meat, and wore trousers until the pants were so thin, the fabric could be used for windowpanes. Twice a year, Bac Thi’s thirst for fresh beer overcame her fear of discovery and she wandered into town. She sat all day at Trung’s father’s beer stall and drank beer after beer until dark. She would wander to the edge of the forest, barely able to stumble, and several pairs of hands would emerge from the thick undergrowth, lift her off her feet and, presumably, carry her home. When Trung answered the knock on the door and saw Bac Thi standing there, he knew he’d not get away that day. He’d have to sit and keep the old woman company. These visits were her chance to catch up on all the goings on of the village. She systematically asked him about everyone she’d known, and, if he didn’t know something, she made him run off and find out. Sometimes he’d make up stories about certain people to avoid having to run all over the valley. After Bac Thi had finished asking about everyone she knew, she’d always asked the same question, “And what is new?”

That year, Trung considered telling her about his love for Thao. It weighed on his heart heavily. Perhaps this woman was someone he could trust to keep his secret; she’d not have anyone else to tell. While he was considering the wisdom of this idea, he filled the silence by saying that a mud seller had been visiting on market days.

“A what?” Bac Thi leaned over the table and looked more attentive and awake than she should have after drinking six or eight or eleven beers.

“A mud seller,” Trung said. “I mean, he doesn’t sell any mud. He just sets up two little baskets on the edge of the market street and sits there all day. Then he goes home.”

“How long has he been coming?” she asked. “Does anyone talk to him? What does he look like?” Before Trung could answer, Bac Thi called for Trung’s mother. Thinking something had happened, Trung’s mother rushed from inside the house.

“Why didn’t you tell me a mud seller was come to town?” Bac Thi demanded.

“What are you babbling about, grandmother? He’s just a crazy old man. Harmless as a summer cloud.”

Trung’s mother gave her son a reproving look and told him to go fetch some noodle soup for Grandmother Bac Thi. Before Trung could leave, the old lady grabbed his forearm. “Has anyone bought anything from him?” she asked.

“No, grandmother,” Trung said.

“Of course not,” his mother said. “Who would be foolish enough for that?”

“There are many fools in this world, you know.” Then Bac Thi did something she never did, she stood up to leave in the middle of the day.

“Where are you going old woman?” Trung’s mother was as surprised as he was.

Bac Thi started to gather her things. “My grandmother used to tell me a saying.” She spread her fingers wide.

“Fourth month begins the Summer A hard month in the hills Carrying, moving, the deep mud, In old baskets through the streams to the valley.”

11

Bac Thi shuffled away.

“What does that mean?” Trung asked.

“It’s just a poem, grandmother,” his mother said and waved for Bac Thi to sit down again.

Bac Thi shook her fingers and walked away. “She meant it as a warning,” she called over her shoulder.

“Don’t let anyone buy anything from him.” She wandered off into the woods but there were no hands to pick her up.

“Crazy old woman,” Trung’s mother muttered and returned into the house to finish her nap.

Trung watched Bac Thi disappear into the forest and realized he had an entire afternoon to himself. He quickly made his way down the road to Thao’s side of town. It seemed the whole village was asleep. It was still a time when it was not quite proper for a young man to visit a young woman, when they shouldn’t be alone together unless they were already engaged. Trung made his way to Thao’s house without seeing anyone. Her house was behind a screen of bamboo with a small goat yard to one side. The four goats were drowsy from the heat and made no noise as Trung made his way to the back.

He’d not been to Thao’s house since he was a child. The back yard sloped down to a rocky stream. Thao had set up a loom in the back room, and often sat on a stool, propelling her shuttle back and forth, singing low to herself. When Trung rounded the corner, he stood and watched a moment. Now that he had his chance, he had no idea what to do. He’d concentrated so long on getting to Thao’s house, he’d not thought about what he should do when he arrived. He cleared his throat, but Thao did not look up. He tried again and shuffled his feet in the gravel. She turned and let out a little yell.

“Sorry, sister Thao. I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

“Brother Trung. For a moment you looked like someone else. What are you doing here? Has something happened?”

“No, not at all. It’s just so hot.”

“Yes?” Thao stood and took a step forward. “Do you want some tea?”

“I thought I’d come and walk in the stream to cool off.”

“But,” Thao took another step forward, “a stream runs past your house too?”

“Yes, I know.” Trung shuffled his feet. He was a foolish, young man. “It’s just that the stream on this side of the village is colder than the one near my house.”

“Oh.” Thao understood. She knew Trung stared at her.

“Are you hot?” he asked.

“What?”

“I mean, would you benefit from some cool stream water too?”

“Let me check on father.” Thao stepped into her house and said something low to a bundle on the floor, then she returned just as quickly.

They descended to the stream silently, removed their shoes, and walked in the chilly mountain water. After a few minutes, Thao sat on a large rock. “You’ve finished all your work for today? You always seem busy.”

Trung sat on another rock a few feet away. “Bac Thi came to visit, but she left early.”

“Left? She never leaves early.”

“I told her about the mud seller and she ran off. She said something about a rhyme her grandmother used to say. She said maybe the old man is a witch. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘don’t buy any of that mud.’”

Trung laughed and ran his hand through the water, but Thao creased her forehead.

“She said he was magic? That the mud was magic?”

“Magic? No. You don’t believe in magic do you?” Trung wiped his hands on his trousers.

“Do you have to believe in it for it to work?” But before Trung could answer, Thao stood. “I have to get back to father. Thank you.” She started up the hill without waiting for him.

“Wait.” Trung saw his chances for declaring his love slipping away. When would he have another chance like this? Thao stopped to look down at him, still standing in the water. At a loss for what to say, all he could manage was, “When will I see you again?”

“At market, of course. As always.” And Trung might have lost all hope and died then, but Thao covered a smile with her hand.

12

The following market day, Thao was set up in her stall and ready to sell. Trung tended to his beer stall and stared at Thao longer than ever. That week he was rewarded with a return look, not a very long one, but it made his heart pound within him. The mud seller came just on time as he’d done for months.

Trung hadn’t talked to anyone about what Bac Thi had said, but his mother spread the news, not because she believed that the mud seller was dangerous but she thought Bac Thi was ridiculous and wanted to give evidence of the old woman’s regressive ideas. “Someone should go up in the forest and tell those grandchildren the world is moving along without them,” she said. But everyone answered her the same way: they’d find out soon enough. And while no one believed the mud seller was magic or dangerous, it was impossible not to watch him a little closer that Sunday. No one did know where he came from. Could you live in the forest with no food and no family for so long and never be heard from until you were an old, crazy man? Should someone have reported him? Should they have not talked to him? Could they get in trouble? Everyone was careful not to look in his direction. If anyone asked, they would say, “What man? A man selling mud? In our village? What a ridiculous idea! If I’d have noticed something so peculiar, don’t you think I would have reported it? I’ll certainly be more diligent in the future.” Could it also be the old man knew something about that mud that no one else did? Everyone could use a little luck, maybe some money or health or happiness. But watching that crusty, dirty creature crouch next to his baskets of wet dirt, everyone shook a chin and went back to business. Everyone but Thao. She spread a blanket over her display and, fetching donut and cup of tea as usual, walked to the mud seller.

He drank half the tea, stuffed the donut in his mouth, then washed it down with the rest of the tea. Thao took back the small ceramic cup, but instead of walking away she knelt beside the old man. Trung certainly noticed. The whole village noticed. There were no witches, they all told themselves, but that didn’t mean they should be tempting fate. Lighting joss sticks as you passed the divergent point in the road to ensure a good journey didn’t mean you believed it would protect your mind from splitting in two, it meant that you respected the ancestors, respected their traditions and built up your native culture. If it appeased someone somewhere, a spirit or a person, what did that matter, what could it hurt? You didn’t step into trouble though, and it certainly looked like Thao was trying to step into trouble. Trung, still an impetuous youth, not the wise, observant and careful man he would become, put down the half-empty beer cup and strode the length of the market to intervene. He arrived in time to see Thao press some notes into the old man’s hand and see the muddy creature hand Thao a weighty bag of mud. Thao stood and confronted him with her wide open face, closer than he’d ever stood to her.

“Good morning, brother Trung,” Thao said. “No one wants beer this morning?”

Trung took hold of his own mind. “What’s that in your hand, little sister?” he asked.

Thao smiled. “Auntie Binh’s teacup. I have to take it back.”

“Not that,” Trung said.

“Maybe it’s mud.” Thao no longer smiled. “Maybe it’s something else.”

“The material world is what really matters,” Trung said. “Mud is all good and fine, but you have plenty of mud at your house. Do you need to dirty your hands with this?”

“There’s a second verse to the rhyme that Bac Thi said.” Thao’s breath came. She noticed the market had stopped to watch her. “In midsummer,” Thao began and lifted her voice, “when the sun is high and hot, The stream heats, the birds droop, Then the old mountain will offer goodness, Circle to circle, life and death again.

Have you heard that before? That’s the rest of the riddle.”

The market was quiet.

“Who told you that?” Trung asked.

“My father,” Thao answered.

For the second time in his life Trung felt something stab at his heart. It was not a spark but a drop of cold water. It must have fallen from very high because he winced a little when it struck him, the coldness spread down into his organs, throughout his body, until even the tips of his fingers and toes were cold. Thao, 13

looking in his eyes, saw the cool drop pass over his face. She turned away.

The market was subdued then. For the first time, the mud seller packed up his wares before the rest. He walked with the heavy yoke on his shoulders, the mud still slick and wet, but with a large scoop missing. He walked up and down the rows of fruits and eggs and meats. Trung watched him. Trung did not understand the numb feeling he felt, the cold, hard feeling that lay down at the bottom of his bowels. He tried to catch the mud seller’s eye as he passed, but the old man kept his face down and walked up the hill, around the bend and away from the town.

The day was gloomy. Everyone packed and left the market under a cloud. Trung could only take surreptitious glances at Thao until, finally, when he looked for her, she was already gone.

The next day was no better. A cold wind blew in from the high mountains. It was too late in the season for such cold, the fruit trees all drooped and low brown clouds swept across the sky. Trung’s mother tried to talk about bad omens, but Trung’s father would not allow it. Everyone was in a bad mood. Trung tried several times to get away and visit Thao.

Overnight, a hot wind from the south blew and the morning was clear and clean. The wind was strong and hot, everything was dry and dusty by sunrise. Trung was awake to see the sun rise over the trees. He wiped the benches and tables of the beer stall, willing Thao to come down the road, ready to drop his rag and meet her. He knew, crouching in the bottom of his heart like some wild, dark animal, that she would not appear. The villagers were on edge, thankful for the dry day, but uneasy about what such weather might portend. His mother hovered in the doorway watching him. Trung muttered.

“What’s did you say?” his mother asked. She was wringing a rag.

“He hasn’t always appeared,” he answered her. “He is a newcomer.”

“What are you waiting for? Go.” It was then he realized his mother understood the world in ways he never imagined.

Before she could finish, Trung was running down the center of the hamlet. He was young, able to consume a meter in one stride. He reached Thao’s bamboo shade and stopped. The bamboo was shiny as wax, rippling in the wind. He walked slowly around the barrier. Nothing looked any different. He called for Thao.

Everything was still. One thing had changed. Along the back wall were faint, brown circles. Mud applied to every available space over and over. He called for Thao again. There was movement in the house, and Trung stepped inside. It was too dark to see. The bundle near the door was gone. He heard her shuffling before he could see anything. Then he smelled wet earth and ashes.

Her voice came from the dark. “Do you think it is a matter of good and bad, Trung?”

“Come out in the light, Thao.” He answered.

“When I asked father, he said he didn’t know, but we can’t change what comes in the future. That’s when I started to believe, I think.” Her voice was very low. “It didn’t work until today. ‘When the sun is high and hot.’”

“Come out and let me see you, Thao.” Trung stepped forward and stubbed his toe on a ceramic bowl. Its sides were coated with a dried mud.

Thao shuffled. “He didn’t explain what it all meant. You know how these things work. They speak in riddles. They can’t see into the future either.” Thao moved forward. “Otherwise, they would use their own magic.” She was without clothes, but it took Trung a moment to realize this because she’d covered her entire body with a thin layer of mud. Across her face, her hair, up and down every limb and all across her torso.

“Thao…” was all Trung could manage.

“Father’s gone.” She walked past him into the sun. Trung watched her pass.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not like that. I spread the mud on him like he said. Father stood up and walked away. He walked into the future.”

Trung wasn’t sure if Thao had been poisoned with medicine or a spell.

“Look here.” She pointed at the grass. There was an unsteady set of footprints. Smears of mud on the 14

grass, getting fainter and fainter until they disappeared near the stream. “Do you think I believe in it, Trung?” She turned to him.

Trung stepped closer. He should have taken her firmly then and pulled her back to the present, should have held on to her body and pulled her mind back from the edges, but he was young. Stupid. How did he know what would happen? How could he have understood what went beyond the material world then? It was impossible for him to know.

They stood face to face. As Trung looked in her eyes, his body was hollowed out. Thao lifted her arms and placed a hand on each side of his face. Her hands were hot, feverish, and the mud burned his face a little.

She dropped her arms and turned away, began to walk toward the stream. Trung watched her go. Just as she reached the edge, she turned back and looked at him. “Where are you going?” is all he could manage.

“To the future,” she said.

She stepped into the cold mountain stream. The mud on her legs began to wash away like smoke in the water, swirling around the stones they’d sat on before. The dirt mixed with the water and dispersed into nothing. A few feet downstream, the effluvia became indistinguishable from the leaves and sticks and little ripples of the stream. Thao was not being washed clean, instead, she, along with the mud, was disappearing. As she sank into the water, her body was washed away, as if she were made only of mud, a soft clay body that could be dissolved. Trung flew to the stream, but just as he made it to the edge, Thao disappeared under the surface, her hair floating up to the top before it, too, dissipated into nothingness. Trung pawed at the water, he splashed and moved stones and flew down the length of the stream to look for her body, but she was gone.

Trung searched for Thao all afternoon. He ran back to the village to tell everyone he could, and for days and weeks after, the villagers investigated. The mud seller did not come back that Sunday, even as everyone waited for him. The village spread the word, and many people were looking for Thao or her father or an old man carrying a yoke with two baskets of mud, but none of them could be located. Thao’s house was covered with brown mud circles on every surface. No one wanted the house and it fell quickly into disrepair. Trung left the village soon after, along with his brothers. Two of them never returned. Trung’s father died; the world moved forward. No one ever heard of Thao or the mud seller. Trung told the story over and over, but he didn’t know if his telling was meant to be a warning or a way to find, in telling the story over and over, a new ending, a different future, a way to stop Thao from disappearing into nothing.

Ivan Faute is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago Program for Writers. His recent prose appears in Crack the Spine and Origami Journal as well as a variety of print journals. His stage adaptation of Cris Mazz’a novella Disability will appear as part of the Planet Connections Festivity in New York this summer. His plays have also been produced in Chicago, San Diego, and smaller cities. He is currently a Lecturer in English at Christopher Newport University.

15

My Mother Brings the Rains Aruni Kashyap

My mother brings the rains to scorching Delhi, even before she lands. The skies wear cigarette ash, goats bleat, winds create sand-funnels, and even green leaves break-up with branches.

In her city, she was the famous beauty. Men stumbled when she walked, women asked her what she ate, what she applied on her skin, marveling at her elephant-apple rinsed silky hair; but she had no secrets to share, and refused to tell them her sorrows.

Years later, unable to leave the bed for months, on her way to a faraway hospital before the days of cheap long distance calls, my father bought her a notebook.

Write, he said. For yourself, for your son, Otherwise how will he know?

How will he know about your Muslim lover who was beaten up by your brothers for loving you, about the poet who wrote a new poem every night on a different classroom desk until there were none left to pour out his heart, the geek who made you the protagonists of his fiction but didn’t write reply poems like me?

How will he know about your empty stomachs, the mustard oil you applied on your face, the bitter juice you drank every morning for that golden skin, that men could kill for? Sit up write that you slept on beds from where you could count the stars, that rains meant placing tumblers on strategic spots of the house, and staying awake with a mope made of old bedsheets. Write about Rebellions and oil blockades, about farmers who rushed to the streets of Hamdoi to kill landlords. Spend the ink 16

if not for yourself, for your first born, who you worried wouldn’t have a sharp nose like his maternal uncles, for you married low, for love, for ideals, for protest marches and poetry.

Aruni Kashyap writes in Assamese and English. He is the author of the novel The House With a Thousand Stories (Viking/ Penguin, June 2013): set against a series of widespread extra-judicial killings conducted by the Indian government during the late nineties to curb an armed insurgency in the Indian state of Assam.

He has also translated from Assamese and introduced celebrated Indian writer Indira Goswami’s last work of fiction, The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar, for Zubaan Books (January, 2013) and is editing an anthology of short stories by writers from Assam set against the Assam Conflict for HarperCollins India. He won the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh in 2009.

He is an Assistant Professor of English and Writing at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India.

The Vapors

17

Housewarming Holly Day

We fill our home with mismatched groves of pine and oak and molded plastic chairs, put monogrammed napkins at every place setting. The scientists come right on time to study our relationship, offer kind, unwelcome comments as we pass plates laden with meat and cheese refill their glasses with wine.

This one is my father, that one is your mother, there are others, too.

They exchange notes, compare findings, shake their heads and sigh at something incurable, intangible, inconsolable.

We make excuses for the new furniture for the condition of the house for the awkward weather for each other.

Later, in the dark, I feel the splatter-marks of acne scars on your skin try to read the dents of Braille graffiti on flesh the broken ribs that spell out “joy” the tiny scars that spell out the longings that will never be met. This place will never smell like home, just as you will never be completely naked around me. In the end you will leave me howling, all alone, at the moon.

Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in Oyez Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.

18

Death of a Mouse Nancy Wyland

My job is to catch the fainters. There are usually one or two when we cram a bunch of adolescent bodies into a small, hot room to watch a mouse dissection. Each of them takes a lab coat and a pair of safety goggles from the table, making them “official” scientists for the duration of surgery. Some of them pass on the goggles – too dorky. Others like the authoritative look and can’t wait to put them on. The coats vary in size as much as the kids do at this age. A size 18 boy tries jamming his arm into a size 12 coat, while a waifish kid swims in white cotton. For the most part, they don’t really care. This is the big time. Hard core science.

On a warm day, our University of Iowa lab can smell like an old farmhouse that’s seen generations of mice. In my role as research administrator, I normally don’t have to smell the musky, mousy odor from the other side of the door, but during these middle school field trips, I have a role – fainter catcher. The irony that our facility is an inhalation toxicology lab is lost on these kids. This is where scientists learn about those things we breathe into our lungs – dust, mold, smoke, aerosols – and what they do to our bodies once they get there. So, while we must inhale the mousy musk in the name of science, the mice must in turn inhale toxins of our choosing.

A few of the kids cover their noses and mouths with a sleeve. One of our scientists, Andrea, peels a squirmy grey mouse from its cage, a Tupperware-like contraption with pellets and bedding in the bottom.

For some reason, the mice like to hang upside down from the barred lid like bats. This one is no exception.

Snug now in Andrea’s clasped hand, the little fellow inspects the sights and smells of the outside world, wiggling and wagging his nose with frantic excitement, eyes darting in all directions. A couple of the girls croon, “Oooh! He’s so cute!” Andrea places the mouse out of sight under a fume hood, turns a couple knobs and stands aside for a moment, hands concealed inside her lab coat pockets.

A small boy standing next to the Tupperware box watches the remaining mouse scamper around inside alone. “Poor little guy,” he says to no one in particular.

The boys find Andrea and her lab partner, Suzana, exotic and beautiful. They are among many international scientists in our lab, almost all of who are women. Never mind that they’re chemists and veterinarians or that they come from war-torn and former Communist countries. Andrea is petite and blonde, and Suzana is a tall brunette. Their pronunciation of body parts like “track-ee-uh” and “lee-ver” is curious and charming. That’s more than enough for a 12-year old boy.

“We have exposed the mouse to tiny dust particles which he breathes into his nose, and now we are putting him to sleep,” Andrea explains. “We give him a large dose of anesthesia, which makes him go to sleep so that he doesn’t wake up.”

Suzana offers her own gentle translation, “That’s right, he doesn’t feel anything anymore. He’s completely out—gone.”

“You mean he’s dead.” one of the boys clarifies for everyone.

“Well, yes. He’s dead.” Andrea opens the hood and takes the limp mouse into the palm of her hand. He looks like Stuart Little, D.O.A. On his back, his wrists are limp as if he was begging, and we can see up his nostrils, which no longer wiggle. Gasps all around.

A small boy interjects, “I wonder what his parents think about him being dead.”

“Nothing,” another responds. “They’re dead, too.”

Actually, Stuart’s parents are probably busy procreating under the neon glow of the climate-controlled room next door. Little Tupperware condos line up side by side on metal shelves, marked with identifiers for each of the scurrying rodent families. Sometimes these specially bred mice are studied for generations.

They can be expensive, costing anywhere between $100 to $5,000, depending on the rarity of the breed 19

and the disease under study. Because of this investment and animal care regulations, the mice live a fairly comfortable life prior to their sacrifice. They eat, drink, have sex, and make little mice.

Once in awhile, though, the mother devours all of her pups, and research has to wait for the next litter.

One theory is she becomes stressed by overcrowding. She loses it and does the only thing within her power for relief—she sacrifices her family. It’s Nature exacting its own efficient settlement. We don’t tell the kids any of this.

These adolescents know a few things about their bodies, death and nature’s propensity for cruel surprise.

The girls have figured out that their first period and breast buds aren’t exactly the joyous leap into womanhood mom described, and no boy ever expects his catechism teacher to star in his first wet dream. It’s a time of horrifying firsts—first love, first pimple, first broken heart—most of which play out under the harsh glare of unforgiving peers.

Sixth grade is usually the first time kids are exposed to animal dissection in the classroom, too. When I was their age we didn’t start right off the bat with Stuart, but were introduced to a succession of creatures in evolutionary increments. We started with a sponge, moved on to the earthworm, the crayfish, the codfish, the frog, and finally, the king of the corpse heap, a fetal pig. Our animals came to us long dead and sealed in thick plastic bags. They were furless and rubbery and smelled of formaldehyde.

My lab partner was Steve Schleining. His name rhymed with “shining” and sounded like something Jerry Lewis might involuntarily blurt when nervous. Steve was a testament to geekdom. He was a slight kid with pale skin and black-rimmed glasses. He also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the wildly popular Star Trek Original Series. In particular, he liked to pretend he was Chief Engineer Scotty. Most days, he followed me along the halls of the junior high in his red Command Uniform T-shirt, shooting at me with an imaginary phaser, shouting things like, “I don’t know if I can hold her much longer Captain!” with a jaunty brogue. I had to work hard to ignore him.

Schleining was in my face at every turn. During dissection, he plucked the frog’s heart and kidneys out with a teasing needle and waved them in front of my mouth and nose. Then he smeared my bare arm with his gut-stained rubber glove and laughed about it.

If Schleining or any other boy felt woozy during dissection, I don’t remember it. We didn’t have any empathy for the pre-packaged animals before us, either; they were so clearly dead and goopy, and the smell of formaldehyde was not particularly endearing. In fact, all the boys delighted in desecrating their frog corpses, stabbing their grey hearts with scalpels, throwing the livers at each other in a kind of cadaver battle. Now and then, one would ricochet off my desk, drawing guffaws from the boys, the most enthusiastic of which was Schleining.

When I complained to my mother about Schleining’s behavior, she broke into a little smile. “It sounds like he likes you.”

Likes me? She’s got to be kidding. I’ve never known mom to be so wrong.

After several weeks of this, I’d had it. The tipping point came when I entered the biology room for another afternoon of carcass carnage, and Schleining leapt out from behind the door. “The Enterprise takes no orders!” he declared, aiming his invisible phaser at my face. “Get away from me, you queer!” I screamed. “I hate you! God! Leave me alone!”

Much to my surprise, he did. He lowered his phaser and stopped aiming weaponry at me altogether. He set off in search of a new target and never looked back. Just like that. He didn’t raise his eyes to meet mine anymore, didn’t try to sit near me in class or follow me out to my bike after school. He didn’t seem to be aware of me at all after that. It was as if I had flipped a switch on the Schleining machine and powered him down.

At first, I thought, Cool. Finally, I was rid of him. I could walk the halls of the junior high without dread. Free at last! But, I’d also seen his face melt like a Dali timepiece at my cruel words. Wow, I thought. I did that to him. Thrill and shame surged together through my veins like venom.

These boys are just as awkward and energetic, electric bodies and brains barely within their control. They form a sweaty cluster around the examination table. Stuart lies compliant while Suzana clamps a hemostat over his toes. “To make sure he is dead before we start surgery, we pinch his foot like this.” The mouse 20

doesn’t flinch. “So you see, mouse is dead.”

In a business-like manner, Suzana lays the mouse on its back and begins to pin its hind legs to an examination board covered in white paper. “This stabilizes him so we can cut without accidentally damaging organs.”

She sprays some fluid on its furry chest and with a pair of scissors, snips a tiny hole in the skin over the heart. A couple of the kids cringe.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” someone asks.

“Oh, yes. He can’t feel a thing. Don’t worry.” Suzana makes a long incision down the mouse’s chest, pulls the skin open like a pair of cupboard doors and pins the flaps to the table on either side. Splayed open, we can now see the internal machinery of this tiny creature. Its heart, lungs, and rib cage, intricate bean shapes and wiring are still glistening pink and garnet with life. A little blood pools under the mouse, and all the kids lean in to see.

“Awesome!” someone at the back of the room cries out unconsciously. A couple of the girls exaggerate bug-eyes.

“We study the mouse, because he is very much like us,” Suzana explains. “It was hard for me to do this at first. Because I am a veterinarian, I am used to it now.”

Andrea takes the hemostat and leans in to push aside the heart. Without meaning to, she presses against a muscle, causing Stuart to involuntarily raise his head off the table for a moment, as if he has something to say about all of this.

The kids freeze. All eyes are trained on the mouse, and for a moment, the promise of a miracle hangs in the air.

“Oops,” Andrea giggles and shrugs. Then reassures the kids, “Mouse really is dead; I must have touched a nerve or a muscle. The reflexes still work a little bit after death.” She removes the hemostat. Stuart lays back down, apparently at a loss for words.

I scan the horror-struck faces, looking for that unique shade of ivory that appears when blood suddenly drains beneath the skin, as if racing away from the source of image and understanding. It’s hard to tell with some of these kids. At this age, their freckles are charming, their pale skin relatively unblemished by the ravages of time. What might be considered a sickly pall on a forty-year old woman could be a lovely porcelain glow in a twelve-year old girl. It makes it hard to discern who among them is most vulnerable.

“If anyone is having trouble, feels like they’re going to be sick or pass out, just let me know,” I offer.

The girls don’t have any problem with this. They don’t even wait for the lightheadedness or nausea to overtake them. One or two take a seat outside the room where they wait for the others. It’s the boys who refuse to surrender, especially in the company of girls. The boys will wrestle their vulnerability all the way to the floor.

“The mouse was exposed to dust particles,” Suzana continues. “Sometimes it is grain dust, sometimes it is endotoxin or other allergens. Now we flush his lungs with saline.”

She inserts a tiny catheter into one of the collapsed lungs, and they begin to expand. “See how the lungs are filling up with fluid? Now we drain the fluid into this tube to collect cells. We can look at them under the microscope and see if the dust has changed them in some way. From this, we can learn about breathing problems that affect people, like asthma.”

Suzana holds the test tube slightly below the edge of the table, letting gravity do the work of transporting cells through the plastic tubing. She takes the opportunity to mollify the animal lovers in the room. “The research is important, because we cannot learn this information through computer models, and we cannot test humans in this way, of course.”

The kids try to understand. In the space of eight minutes, we have together witnessed the execution of a playful, gentle creature, watched its chest bloom from under the skin and harvested bits of its body so that we might better know ourselves.

By now, the mouse is looking a little deflated. Its cavity is partially emptied of the button-sized organs that lay alongside the body. Everything pink has begun to grey and the pool of blood is drying along the edges.

One of the boys throws up his hands all of a sudden. “Oh, no, oh, no... I can’t watch this,” he stammers 21

and rushes from the room. I follow him out, and get a chair and a cup of water. His nametag reads Andrew.

We sit together and begin to talk. It occurs to me that he resembles Schleining a little. No, more than a little – a lot. Same black cropped hair, same black glasses, same geeky awkwardness.

“I’m no good at this kind of thing,” Andrew says loudly, without embarrassment. He stares blankly at the floor and shakes his head.

“It’s all right. A lot of kids can’t watch dissection. And you know what? More boys than girls have trouble with it, and sometimes it’s the football players or the guys who hunt deer that are the first to go down.”

“Well, that’s not me. I’m not really into sports. I like to write poetry.” He rolls his eyes. “Boys aren’t supposed to write poetry.”

Unlike my aversion to Schleining long ago, I feel maternal with this particular boy. I raised two sons, after all; one is gay and the other a perpetual bully target. Adolescence spares no one the indignities of growing up.

“That’s not true,” I offer. “Don’t let anyone tell you that boys aren’t supposed to write poetry. Believe me, in a few years that’s the stuff that will get the girls,” I offer.

He brightens a little. “I wrote a poem about Halloween.” He doesn’t ask if I want to hear it, but begins reciting his poem about the things that frighten him. He knows it by heart, and it’s long. He catches my eye at one point, and I recognize pride in his face. He tells me he plays in a band and they’re trying to get gigs.

“One lady wants us to play for her daughter’s birthday party,” he says with hope in his voice, and I realize, He’s trying to impress me.

I’m not sure he hears me, but I say it anyway. “You keep at the poetry,” I tell him. “There’s no reason you can’t be a writer if it’s what you want.”

If Schleining had tried poetry instead of pestering me with his Chief Engineer Scotty routine, would it have made a difference? I wondered if Andrew would remember my words thirty years from now, and if they might somehow have an impact on his trajectory. And, I wondered the same thing about Schleining.

Suzana announces, “It looks like we’re out of time.” She lays down her surgical instruments signaling the end of Stuart’s autopsy.

I quiz the group. “So, what did you think?”

“Gross!” a girl with braces says, sticking her tongue out between silvery teeth and slamming her white coat atop the pile. “That was so cool!” says one of the boys. A smallish blonde girl asks, “Where’s Andrew?

Did he faint? Is he okay?” She’s smiling and her eyebrows are arched in curiosity. No empathy. She wants “the dirt” on him.

“No,” I tell her. “He didn’t faint. Andrew’s going to be all right.”

Nancy Wyland is an emerging writer from Coralville, Iowa. She received her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa in 2011 and has published essays in Cedar Valley Divide, Content Magazine, The Daily Palette, and Club Narwahl, and has an essay forthcoming in Drunken Boat. Her full-time career is with the University of Iowa as a research administrator to an environmental health sciences research center.

22

Effigy

Adam Matson The antique shop had a fire escape along the back wall facing the mill stream, and every kid in Clayton knew that the third floor window was never locked. Moira Johnson and a few of the seventh grade girls claimed to have snuck into the shop a few times, and we believed them because they smoked cigarettes.

On a summer day when we were about eleven and were supposed to be riding bikes around town, Jess Castellano, Alecia Farmer and I pedaled up to the antique shop and hid our bikes behind the ghostly white building. Lecie peeled her pink foam helmet away from her sweaty hair and stashed it beneath the spokes of her front wheel. Jess and I did not wear helmets.

The antique shop was only open on weekends, when old Mrs. Helstrom emerged from her cat colony on Cedar Street to converse with what few locals wandered into her store. I had been in there a few times with my mother. It was like three creaky floors of somebody’s storage closet, filled with the kinds of things you put in the attic. Old clothes and doll houses and picture frames.

Moira Johnson had stolen a 1920s-era woman’s hat from the antique shop. The hat smelled of mold, and came from who knows where to get to Clayton, Maine, population 1,470. I did not care about hats. I wanted to get ahold of the Book.

The fire escape’s closest step was about three feet off the ground. Jess gave me a boost, and I pulled her up behind me. Lecie stayed behind, standing next to her bicycle.

“I don’t know, guys,” she said, frowning up at us. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

Little Lecie the baby. I had known she would chicken out. Jess and I only invited her along so we could watch her squeal.

“Stand watch then,” I said. “Whistle if anyone comes along.”

Jess and I exchanged a knowing grin and left Little Lecie twisting her hands beside the mill stream. Gripping the rusted steel railing of the fire escape, we climbed to the third floor.

I peered through the window into the black cavern of trunks and boxes, my heart nearly in my mouth. Jess leaned in beside me. I could smell the flowery detergent scent of her tee shirt.

We pushed the window open and climbed inside. The antique shop was like a museum dedicated to the preservation of dust. The stale air was choking thick. The floorboards squirmed beneath our feet.

“Where’s the Book?” Jess asked.

“On the second floor.”

She stopped and touched my arm. “What is that sound?”

“What?” I froze.

Music rose up through the floor from somewhere in the lower unknown. Classical music. Violin. Tentacles of sound climbing the stairs.

“Someone’s here,” Jess said.

“No. It’s Wednesday.”

Sweat dripped down my sides from my armpits, pooled beneath my eyes, beaded on my lips. If I had been alone I probably would have turned back, but Jess was with me, and I had promised her we’d find the Book, and explore its secrets.

“I think someone left a record player on,” I whispered.

The music grew louder as we tip-toed down the musty stairwell to the second floor. My imagined bravery was evaporating by the moment. We inched into the main display room of the store. It was empty. There was a record player, spinning out Vivaldi. Jess stared at the music machine and pinched my arm.

“Mrs. Helstrom’s ghost,” she whispered.

I laughed, terrified.

23

Together we crossed the room to a display case and peered down through the misty glass at the Book.

It was leather bound and three inches thick, like a dictionary. The cover showed two sets of bare legs, presumably one male, one female, intertwined below the tantalizing title: The Big Book of Sex. “Told you,” I said.

We crept around the counter and liberated the Book, lifting it out of its case and setting it on the counter.

Jess traced her finger along the embossed letters of the title. “Emma,” she said. “You first.”

I peeled open the Book to a random page. The Book was illustrated, in fairly graphic detail. The image we happened upon was a bedroom scene like none I had ever imagined. At eleven I knew almost nothing about sex, just that I wanted to know more. The picture showed a naked woman bending over a naked man, who was sitting on a bed with his legs spread, his penis long and thick and pointing straight up. The woman was placing some sort of ring around the penis, like a bastardization of a wedding ceremony.

Beside me Jess took a deep, shuddering breath. The warm skin of her arm brushed against mine, and my chest seized with a feeling like panic, only it was hot, and I liked it.

We turned the pages, absorbed more seedy imagines into our fertile minds. There was a man holding his penis inches from the inviting, leg-spread vagina of a smiling woman. There was a man and woman twisted like a pretzel in some weird shape that reminded me of snakes, their faces between each other’s legs, no bed or anything to give context, just an act being perpetrated in space. We kept turning and found a picture of three naked people sitting on a couch: a woman, legs open to reveal what seemed like an extremely hairy vagina, sat between two men, and in each of her hands she held one of their penises.

Suddenly I felt scared. There was so much I did not know. Was this kind of thing actually done?

“Look how big they are,” Jess said, and her finger brushed the creamy paper where one of the penises stood erect.

Without even thinking I reached down and touched the page over the other penis, and together we burst out laughing, sweating, leaning into each other. Then we seemed to understand that perhaps the sneak had gone too far, and we shut the Book and dropped it rather gruffly back onto its shelf beneath the counter. We had accrued enough stolen knowledge to make us legendary at school, and now it was time to go.

We sprinted upstairs to the window.

My hands felt like Jell-O as they gripped the railing of the fire escape. I descended carefully, worried I might trip and fall. Jess said nothing as she hurried down behind me. We jumped to the ground. There was no sign of Lecie.

“She’s such a chicken,” I muttered. Something had changed already, and I felt unreproachfully superior to Alecia Farmer, our scared friend who had stayed behind. I was even scornful of her for leaving.

Then I heard her voice.

Jess and I picked up our bikes and hurried out from behind the antique shop, and there was Lecie, standing with her bike about thirty feet away, eyes downcast, two adults looming over her.

“Oh no,” Jess whispered.

It was Mrs. Helstrom and her son, Michael. She must have been in the shop, and left for a moment. That’s why the music was playing.

Lecie was crying. When she looked up and saw us she pointed in our direction, and I felt tears welling up behind my eyes too. We had not stolen anything, not like Moira Johnson, but how would we explain the Book?

The adults started walking toward us. Jess stood beside me, her arm touching mine again, only this time it was clammy and cold.

“We’re in trouble,” she said.

My cell phone rang as I was driving home from dropping Kelsey and Ryan off at soccer practice. I groped for the button of the hands-free on my steering wheel, pressed it and introduced a hollow gasp of static into the car. “Hello?” “?”

24

“Yeah.”

“Hey.” “Hi. Sorry, who is it? I’m on the hands-free.”

“It’s Jessica.”

She pronounced it Yessica, with a Spanish inflection, the way we used to do when we were kids.

“Hola, Yessica.”

Brief pleasantries. I spoke to Jess only two or three times a year these days, so a call from her always revved up my little girl engine, but I could sense that she was trying not to sound overtly chipper.

“You checked Facebook lately?” she asked eventually.

“Not on much anymore.”

“Oh. Well. Alecia Farmer died. Two days ago.”

In the movie version of my life that often played in my head alongside the real, unfiltered version, the Emma character might have pulled over to the side of the road to absorb this news. But in twenty-five years life had thrown me its share of punches, and I had hardened accordingly. I was on my second husband, my first set of kids, had a soul-sucking job and a Subaru Forrester. I’d lost my mother to cancer, my favorite cousin Annie to a car accident, and an ex-roommate to suicide. I hadn’t seen much of Alecia Farmer in the recent reels.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Were you in touch with her?”

“Not much, no.”

I passed the Dunkin Donuts where the cops always hung out, saw the cruiser crouching in the parking lot, felt as usual like it was waiting there specifically for me to screw up. I slowed down, checked my rearview for movement from the 5-O. They were not after me today.

Jess told me about the funeral, said it was this weekend and she planned to attend. She had always felt sorry for Lecie, never knew what drove her from being such a shy, timid kid to the grown-up train-wreck derailing through Clayton. I said nothing about Lecie, told Jess I would consider the funeral, and eventually we hung up.

November was a hard month to drive home in. It was already dark when I pulled into the driveway, not yet five o’clock. I sat in the car for a while and thought about Alecia Farmer. Her death could hurt me if I wanted it to, if I let it. And a part of me wanted to square off and let the hurt throw a few punches. But the light was on in the living room. Derek was home and I had dinner prep duty before my aerobics class. There was no time to wallow. I stared at my husband’s Prius and wanted to crash it full speed into a rocky abutment, watch as hungry flames engulfed it. A funeral pyre to our suburban self-righteousness. There were days when I just plain did not like myself.

In the living room, Derek sat hunched over his laptop in front of the television, checking his fantasy football stats. He held up a hand in greeting, but did not look at me.

“I chopped all the vegetables already,” he said.

If he had not said this I might have skipped my evening homecoming kiss, but I actually felt a little better as I bent forward and pressed my head against his.

“Are you beating Dave Lewis?” I asked.

“Barely. How was school?”

“They said it was fine.”

“You’re off and running?”

“I am.”

“We just need to marinate the pork chops. I’ll help you in a sec.”

I peeled off my jacket and dropped it on the couch.

“We might need to have Al and Sue take the kids to soccer this Saturday,” I said, staring into the darkness of the kitchen.

Derek looked up from his laptop. “Why? What’s up?”

“We’re going to a funeral.”

25

We met Jessica and her husband, Chad, for coffee before the funeral at Millie’s, one of two restaurants on the gray Main Street of Clayton. It was a two-hour drive out to Clayton. Since my mother died and my father moved down to Portland to be near us I had hardly been back to my hometown. Behind Millie’s, visible through the rear windows, was the antique shop, long closed.

Jess and Chad each gave me a long hug, and I remembered, as I usually did when I saw her, how much I missed Jess’ mischievous smile, which had not been scraped away by adulthood, but had refined itself into a worldly smirk, the grin of a girl who always knew exactly who the joke was on. Not this time, though—she still didn’t know. Didn’t know about me, or Little Lecie, or the Pervert, the last of whom had slunk back into my mind the moment Derek and I passed the Old Winthrop Road on our way into town.

“So you guys were pretty good friends with her?” Chad asked. We sat in a booth. Chad sat half-turned with his arm along the back of the booth behind Jess’ shoulders. They looked like college sweethearts home for Thanksgiving break. I was envious.

“Until junior high,” Jessica said. “Then, you know, in junior high you lose the first round of friends.”

“But you two stayed friends,” Chad said, indicating Jess and I. “Lecie though,” Jess said, staring out the window and shaking her head. “She was one of those girls who turned wild in high school. Like, out of control. And she was never like that. Was she, Emma?”

“Not as a kid, no,” I said.

“Wild how?” Chad asked.

Derek said nothing, watching over me to see if I might crack. But cracking was not something I would do.

Soul like Maine limestone.

“Drugs,” Jess said. “Drugs get some people up here. There ain’t shit else to do.” Hamming up the Downeast accent. “We had, like, what, maybe three, four classmates get pregnant in high school and drop out? Lecie was one of ‘em. I think the father was Aaron Wilkerson, a real prince from Clayton’s trailer kingdom. He was like five years older. Fresh off the farm from an assault charge. Or maybe stealing cars.

She had another kid like a year later. By somebody else.”

With Jessica as narrator, the story of Lecie’s life read like a rap sheet. Or a rap song. I decided not to contribute a verse. In high school, Lecie had been a cutter, and her parents had put her in an institution in Lewiston. In one of the rare conversations Lecie and I had in high school she told me she used to piss herself in the hospital because the drugs made her so groggy she could not get out of bed. And there was a female nurse there who used to fondle her at night. Allegedly. I cried when I heard that story. Cut myself too, with an Exacto knife.

Outside the sky was steel gray. Leaves swept down the street in great, migratory flocks. The thin coffee at Millie’s would never win a taste contest. It was hot though, and I sipped it quickly, inviting the burn.

“I always felt sorry for her mom,” Jess continued. “Brenda really tried to help. She took the kids after the State tried to take them away from Lecie.”

With a dull feeling of repressed panic I realized that Lecie’s kids, now young adults themselves, would be at the funeral.

“It will be good to see Brenda again,” I said quietly.

Derek gave me the checking-on-you look. I nodded and leaned against him.

“It’s like there were two types of people up here,” Jessica said. “The ones who grew up and went to college.” She waved her hand to indicate herself and I. “And the ones who just did drugs. And it’s so strange, because if you think back to, like, kindergarten, elementary school, we were all the same. We all played tag and soccer, and watched The Simpsons. You wonder how people end up taking such different paths.”

“Were drugs really that much of a problem?” Chad asked. “Seems pretty quaint out here. This isn’t exactly Breaking Bad.” “Well, everybody smokes weed,” Jess said. “Everybody grows weed. And like I said, there’s nothing really to do, and it’s so damn dark all the time. Kids were doing ‘shrooms, and acid, and coke. Then Oxy and meth.” She shuddered. “It makes it kinda hard to come back here.”

“And Lecie just fell in with the wrong crowd?”

26

It was like Jess and Chad were having their own conversation. So many couples seemed to form a shell.

Maybe I was going to crack.

“I don’t know if drugs were the problem for Alecia,” I said. “They might have been the symptoms. I think a demon got her.”

“Apparently,” Jessica agreed, but she had no idea what I was talking about.

We had to leave for the funeral in a few minutes, and I definitely wasn’t going to bring up the Pervert.

The same inglorious summer as the antique shop sneak, I was out riding my bike alone, something I often did when I wanted to think. The long empty roads around Clayton wound up and down the rolling green hills. I pedaled hard up the hills, thighs burning, teeth clenched, then cruised down, exhilarated, wild, gliding to a gentle stop.

Since peering into the abyss of the Book, sex had been on my mind. In school they had taught us the nuts and bolts, so to speak, in a grossly selective, Christian-flavored affront to sexual education that left most of us (I imagine) with more questions about sex than answers. My peek at the Book told me there were questions far beyond the scope of sex ed. I had developed a crush on a boy that summer, Tom Higgins, a kid who threw pebbles at younger kids on the playground. And that was the summer of the Pervert.

Everyone in Clayton was in a thinly veiled huff about Albert French, who had inherited his deceased parents’ dilapidated farmhouse out on the Old Winthrop Road. I don’t know how the grim truth of Albert’s past first leaked, but I remember my mother coming home from a PTA meeting in a steely-eyed tizzy, her limbs flailing with more angry conviction than usual. “Well, we have a child molester living in Clayton,” she told my father. The rumor mill churned out the rest. He had exposed himself, he had touched a girl, he had touched a boy, he had done time, he had not done time, he had been institutionalized, and he was on parole. Small towns contained no shortage of speculation about matters sordid and unknown.

None of us kids had ever seen the Pervert. No one knew what he looked like. But we kept our eyes peeled around town. And we knew where he lived.

I was still on my invincible girl streak. My older sister Corey was in eighth grade, and had dated two boys, and so knew everything about boys, and talked incessantly about her boyfriends. She literally ran to answer the phone when it rang. And I went for bike rides thinking about the penises I had glimpsed in the Book, my heart clenched in a tight, nervous fist. The penises had scared me, especially in the image where the woman was gleefully gripping two of them, but they also excited me, and I desperately wanted to see one, if only to wipe that know-it-all grin off my sister’s face.

To make matters worse, Jess had already seen a penis, three weeks earlier, at a birthday pool party I had missed because I was grounded for sneaking into the antique shop. Bobby Callahan took down his bathing suit behind the pool when the other kids were swarming the birthday cake, and since then Jess’ mischievous grin lingered a little too excruciatingly long when she smiled at me.

I sort of knew what I was doing when I pedaled my bike up the Old Winthrop Road, and I sort of had no fucking clue. The Pervert lived on the downslope of a hill, a small house set back from the road. It badly needed a paint job. I imagined myself the very picture of bravery as I prepared to ride by, the little girl defying the Pervert. Jess would not have dared ride her bike up the Old Winthrop Road—and chicken-hearted Little Lecie? Forget about it.

I lost my nerve as I cruised down the hill, just before I passed the crooked mailbox. Panic seized my chest and I pedaled hard in low gear, tripping up my feet. The handlebars swerved in my sweaty grip and I veered into the ditch, held on as I hit the embankment, but lost the bike as I vaulted over the stone wall. I may have blacked out for a split-second, and I remember feeling grateful that on that occasion I was wearing a helmet. Both my knees were torn and bleeding. I don’t know how long I sat in the tall grass, not crying but more like scolding myself.

“Looks like you took a spill.”

I was more embarrassed than scared as I looked up. He stood about ten feet away, arms crossed, wearing grass-stained jeans, a flannel shirt, unlaced boots. I thought the boots being unlaced was strange.

“Come on inside, I’ll fix you up,” he said.

27

“No- no thanks,” I mumbled. “I’ll just ride home.”

“Come on.”

“It’s okay.”

“You don’t want to get infected. Come on now, won’t take a second. We’ll get the dirt out, and you won’t bleed all over your clothes.”

Two thin strands of blood ran down my legs. I had little conviction around adults at eleven- every child’s inherent weakness. I followed him into the house, leaving the bike propped against the stone wall at the end of his driveway. I did not think I would ever see my bike again.

Inside the house smelled of dirt and mold, and I saw dust. He was fixing up the place, one room at a time.

There was dry wall in the kitchen, exposed insulation in the foyer. He told me to sit at the kitchen table. The chair creaked on the floor as I sat down.

He didn’t say much as he cleaned my knees, warning me, as adults always did, that the alcohol would sting. Firmly he swept the dirt out of my cuts. He asked me my name and I told him, my heart pounding. I had no idea what was going to happen. After applying broad square bandages to my knees he threw the bloody gauze in the trash and washed his hands in the sink.

“Always wash your hands after coming in contact with blood,” he told me. “They teach you that in school?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet your blood is clean as a whistle anyway,” he said. “I’m not worried.”

He smiled at me for what seemed like a moment too long, and that was when I knew I should run. But I didn’t. I felt glued to the chair. I hunched my shoulders and pulled my knees together.

“Sit still a minute, I’m going to go get something,” he said, and his tone of voice shifted.

I stared at the floor. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears.

He returned about two minutes later, and at first I had the weird sensation that it might be a dream. Like the whole day might be a dream. That might make sense. He stood there naked except for his dirty unlaced boots, his face the grin of a fiend, his penis swollen and erect. It was like the drawings in the Book, but real, pink and fleshy and not something that could be banished with the turn of a page.

The only thing I could think was: how would I explain this to my parents? First the Book, now this. They had threatened to send me to a therapist after the antique shop incident, but ultimately settled on a firm grounding instead. Now they would know there was something wrong with me. My whole life was about to end.

“I helped you, now you’re going to help me.”

He took a step toward me. I imagined my mother yelling at me.

My mouth was bone dry, but somehow I whispered “I don’t think so,” and I jumped from the table. The chair clattered to the floor. I bounded outside and sprinted for my bike, thinking that the steep slope of the hill was my getaway, the only thing that would save me. My footsteps dragged along like his driveway was soggy cement.

At the end of the driveway I jumped onto my bike. I had no idea where my helmet was now. Maybe it was still in his house.

“Hey!” I looked up, pushing the bike into the road.

Now in bare feet, wearing only his jeans, he stomped toward me. I stood frozen in the road, staring at this strange approaching beast. He stopped too, pointing at me, his eyes scowling black.

“I know you,” he said. “I will find you. I helped you and you owe me. You know you owe me.”

For some reason that I could explain, I knew what he meant. I was escaping, but with a debt. I felt like he could see into my soul. Even if I made it home I knew there was nowhere I could hide. I’d been stamped with the mark of the demon.

“You will give me something,” he growled. “Or I will find you.”

I released the hand breaks of my bike and pedaled for all my skinny, blood-streaked legs were worth. In moments I was flying down the hill, back toward town, away from the Pervert and his sawdust hovel.

Later I told my parents I had wiped out coming down a hill too fast, and had bandaged my knees myself.

28

It was a closed casket funeral. I did not want to contemplate what Alecia Farmer’s face might look like after she had hung herself and been found dead hours later.

Derek and I sat with Jess and Chad in the back of the Clayton Universalist Church. The minister spoke a few somber words about Lecie. Suicide cast an extra shade of darkness on the occasion. It had been the same way at my ex-roommate’s funeral, after she killed herself. Nobody said anything. The cause of death hung over the room like Death’s own scythe, ready to fall on everyone.

Lecie’s mother Brenda sat in the first row, next to Lecie’s father, Chuck. They were divorced and had each remarried. Brenda’s face had swollen and grayed over the years. She looked like a woman without a soul.

I could not help staring at the backs of the heads of the young man and woman sitting beside Brenda.

The young man had long hair dangling in greasy rebellion from his head, like Kurt Cobain. He wore a black suit, pinstriped. Beside him sat the girl, her hair buzzed into one of those half-shaved punk styles, her ears pierced several times. These were Lecie’s children, and I tried desperately to avoid making assumptions about them. Would they or did they already follow in Lecie’s footsteps? Had the next generation been contaminated too? I could feel my chest tightening. I squeezed Derek’s hand, tried to think of something else.

What I did think about were the words of the Pervert on the day I narrowly escaped his grasp. “I will find you.” The standing threat. The demon always did find you, didn’t it?

While Alecia Farmer was getting high and fucking random men through her misguided youth, I had tried to be careful with sex. Tried to maintain control. Lecie became one of those kids parents warned you about in high school—don’t end up like her. Personally I was determined never to become Lecie. She and I were fundamentally different, and I knew why. I harbored terrified illusions of superiority, and I chose my boyfriends carefully.

Until college, when everyone goes to pieces a little bit. There was so much drinking and so much talk of sex that every night when I joined the hoards or roaming partiers I felt like a driver on a midnight highway with my headlights off. Thrilled and reckless and hoping not to crash. Curious to see how fast I could go.

On a college night like any other the demon caught up with me. Drunk, giddy, I followed my boyfriend back to his dorm room. There playing video games was his roommate, drunk as well. My boyfriend insisted on making out on his bed, and I did not object, despite the roommate. I had never been watched before, was not entirely opposed to it, figured drunkenly that that was something kinky I could hold over everyone else. But his roommate turned off his video games and then he was on the bed with us, and soon we were performing a sloppy version of the picture I had seen in the Book so many years before. Me naked on the bed, holding each of them in one of my hands. The next morning I did not tell anyone about it, or brag to girlfriends later, but I owned the experience, just another one of life’s punches—it stung for a while, then went away.

Everyone was invited to the cemetery after the service to see Lecie’s coffin lowered into the ground. The crowd milled around in the sanctuary, mostly silent.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” I whispered to Jess.

“I think we can leave,” she said, nodding at Chad for confirmation. “We should say something to Brenda first.”

I was grateful for Derek’s grip on my hand as we walked toward Lecie’s mother. It was a good life we’d built, I thought, and soon I would be back to it, hiding in front of my television.

A part of me wanted to confess the truth to Brenda, and I could feel it leaking out of my brain, ready to be spoken. But as we reached her I realized it would be absurd and cruel to add to her pain, a needless kick while she was down.

“Oh, look at you two girls,” Brenda said, squeezing Jessica and I by our arms. “I appreciate your coming. I know Alecia would have too.”

“I suppose we could have been around more since the old days,” I managed to say.

Brenda took me in her arms and hugged me, a gesture I was not ready for, and in no way deserved.

“Your being here now is what matters,” she said.

29

The hug was suffocating. I needed her to let go or I was going to cry. Finally she released me, and I retreated to Derek’s side, laced my fingers through his.

“Maybe we could get together for a visit sometime,” Jessica said, placing her hand on Brenda’s arm. “You know, to remember Alecia the way we want to.”

So grateful for Jess, and her oblivious well-meaning. I wanted to hug her, but I was afraid to look at her, afraid of what she might see in my eyes.

“I would like that,” Brenda said. “You girls were such good friends to Lecie when you were little.”

And I turned to stone. Brenda said goodbye and turned to other mourners. Jess took her husband by the hand and ferried our group toward the door.

“You drive,” I said to Derek when we reached the parking lot.

“Just come with me and all is forgiven.”

For weeks after I escaped from the Pervert I could not relax or sleep. I lay in bed expecting him to jump out of the closet or out from under the bed like some monster. I slunk around the house, checking to make sure the doors were always locked. I left lights on at night, wore layers of clothes even though it was not cold. My parents asked me if I was behaving strangely to get attention. There was more talk of sending me to a therapist.

When you’re a kid you believe the monsters. It never occurred to me to tell my parents what happened.

As an adult I knew that if I had told my parents a convicted sex offender had exposed himself to me and threatened me, the police would have been over to his house that day, and he might have gone to jail. But as a girl I just assumed he was lying in wait for me in some shadow, a coiled snake.

“You owe me something.”

The words repeated themselves endlessly in my head, a snarling voice I could not tell to shut up. I came to realize that if I was ever going to escape from the monster, I would have to do what it wanted.

I met Lecie on a cool Sunday afternoon. School had started, and everyone seemed to have a boyfriend except me. Jess was going out with Bobby Callahan, the poolside penis-shower. Even Little Lecie had a boy interested in her. While I remained distrustful of boys. Jess and Lecie did not know what I knew. Jess only knew about the Book. And Lecie the baby knew nothing.

We rode our bikes out of town. At first I tried to talk to her, mostly to relax myself, but my chest felt packed with ice.

“I thought you were mad at me, Emma,” she said. “About the antique shop.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “Just come with me and all is forgiven.”

Eventually I just shut up and pedaled.

When we reached the Old Winthrop Road, I leaned into the turn and pedaled harder. Lecie picked up her pace and followed me. Poor dumb Lecie, she really had no idea what demons lurked out there in the world.

She was one of those girls who cried when she got in trouble, fingered somebody else to take the blame, and got away with things, learning nothing. She needed to know that sometimes you had to face the bad things and that nobody was going to bail you out.

I stopped at the end of the Pervert’s driveway, sweating and out of breath from the uphill climb. I wished I had remembered to bring a water bottle. My swollen tongue filled my mouth.

“How much further are we going?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Let’s just take a break here.”

A moment later he appeared, not from the front door of his house, but from the brambles out by his woodshed. He wore dirty overalls and work boots. Staggered across his weedy lawn and down his driveway like some forest creature. He waved when he saw me, smiling as if we were old buddies. I waved back.

“Who is that?” Lecie asked.

“Just the man who lives here,” I said. “He’s nice. Remember when I wiped out and skinned my knees? He bandaged me up. I would have had to go to the doctor.”

Lecie looked skeptical as he approached, covering her eyes to shield out the autumn sun.

“Hi there, Emma,” he said.

30

Of course he remembered my name. My heart was pounding, a dull feeling of nausea sloshing around in my stomach.

“Hello,” I said.

“You girls out for a bike ride? Nice day.”

We nodded.

“You look thirsty. Don’t you have any water?”

“Forgot it, I guess,” I said.

“You should always bring water when you go out for a ride. Don’t want to dehydrate. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”

“I don’t know,” we both kind of said at the same time.

“You want to come inside? I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade.”

Lecie glanced at me nervously. She looked dubious of the muddy man from the dilapidated farmhouse, but also I could tell she was thirsty. She would follow my lead.

“Okay,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

He grinned and waved us toward his house. We walked our bikes behind him. I could think of nothing but the monster, so I started singing some inane song I could not remember now for the life of me, and this must have relaxed Lecie a little bit.

“Go ahead park your bikes against the house,” he said.

Lecie leaned hers against the paint-peeling wall. I rested mine over hers.

He opened his door and stood in the doorway. Inside there was little light. Lecie stepped inside, still wearing her helmet. I stood perfectly still in the driveway. They both turned and stared at me.

“Emma?” he said. “Lemonade?”

“I… have to get home,” I said. “I’ll get some later.”

Distrust filled Lecie’s eyes. He gently took her hand and closed the door, nodding at me as he did so. I nodded too. We had an understanding. The monster was appeased.

I pedaled home and went into the bathroom and threw up. My parents were not home. I had no idea where they were. I went up to my room and shut the door and sat on my bed, crying. Over time that day just became one more thing I never told anyone.

On our way out of Clayton after the funeral I told Derek to turn onto the Old Winthrop Road. It was not exactly the right way home, but it was not out of the way either.

“I haven’t been through town in so many years,” I said, as if I just wanted to take the scenic route to check out the autumn leaves. Derek shrugged and turned up the road.

At some point when I was in high school they caught the Pervert. He was sent to Thomaston for some act of indecency I can’t remember specifically. I remember avoiding that story when it came out in the papers, feeling glad that he was gone, but not wanting to delve too deeply into something that reminded me of what I had done to Alecia Farmer.

Derek drove past the Pervert’s old house without turning his head, but I glanced over, briefly. Long enough to see the faded “For Sale” sign at the end of the driveway, the boards on the windows, a red sign posted over the door.

About two weeks later I told Derek I was meeting a co-worker for dinner and a movie, a woman named Dinah, whom I did occasionally go out with so we could drink wine and gripe about work. Derek casually waved me off, an evening of TV and fantasy football ahead of him.

I drove out to Clayton. My mind raced with a checklist of silly precautions gleaned almost entirely from television shows. Had I remembered to fill my car with gas? Yes, that explained my trip to the gas station three days ago, my purchase of gasoline. Had I wore a dark, non-descript outfit? Yes, jeans and a coat I almost never wore. Had anyone seen me leaving town? No. I thought of Brenda hugging me at Lecie’s funeral. The poor oblivious woman, whose life had been ransacked by her daughter’s behavior for twenty years, even before the suicide. Never knowing what the cause of it all was. And I the coward, failing to tell her the truth. Standing there in an embrace I did not 31

deserve while her daughter lay in a closed casket.

I parked on the Old Winthrop Road in the dark, not pulling off the side of the road where my tires would leave tracks in the ditch. I took off my shoes so I would not leave footprints, ran down the Pervert’s driveway wearing thick socks. In my gloved hands, I carried the can of gasoline. From television I knew that an astute investigator would find traces of gasoline in the refuse, evidence of an “accelerant,” implying arson. A risk I was willing to take. I would throw away this entire outfit, everything I was wearing, in some random dumpster in Lewiston on the way home, change into the spare outfit I had in the car.

I poured gasoline all around the frame of the Pervert’s house. I thought about kicking in a window and throwing the can in too, then thought no, I would dispose of it in another dumpster, different from the one for the clothes. There was little time. Someone could come down the road and see my car. I bent to the base of the wall and lit the gasoline with a disposable lighter. The gas erupted in a hot puff, swallowing the cold night air. The old damp rotten wood took a moment to catch, but then suddenly a ring of fire engulfed the house.

“I’m sorry, Lecie, that I sacrificed you to the demon. I wish I could pull you back from that house, bring you home to Brenda safe, tell you I loved you.”

I drove away in the dark, heart pounding, bowels a bowl of cold water, devilish flames dancing in the rearview.

Adam Matson’s fiction has appeared internationally in over a dozen magazines including The Bryant Literary Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Morpheus Tales, Crack the Spine, The Indiana Voice Journal, and The Broadkill Review, with forthcoming publications in Infernal Ink Magazine, Straylight Literary Magazine, Soundings East, and The Crime Factory. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Sometimes Things Go Horribly Wrong.

32

Right: Cherry Drop

33

Pact

Claire Scott I press the pillow over her face and I can’t breathe A pact made long ago on a sunlit afternoon as we sipped chardonnay and smoked Virginia Slims watching our children shoot marbles, jump rope

Mabel, Mabel

set the table Surely we wouldn’t want to be warehoused in Applewood or Sweet Pines squandering our grandchildren’s college funds Surely we wouldn’t want to force friends to visit to feel guilty they prefer golf or pulling dandelions Reluctant to see our marbles roll across coffee-stained carpets

beta-amyloids

destroying synapses Reluctant to see us stare with blank faces, drool Ensure on flowered nightgowns complain about strange men

34

In our closets, under our beds stealing pearl necklaces and sapphire rings

plaques multiply

and suffocate I let go so I can breathe The pillow falls to the floor I lie down next to my closest friend who no longer knows who I am

signals between cells

gone silent I run my fingers over her creased face I brush thin hair aside and kiss her dry forehead

forgive me I close my eyes as we breathe together scissored from time I see a sunlit afternoon I hear distant voices

Mabel, Mabel

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was also a semi-finalist for the Pangaea Prize and the Atlantis Award. Claire was the grand prize winner of The Maine Review’s 2015 White Pine Writing Contest.

Her first book of poetry, Waiting to be Called, was published in 2015. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

35

The Blessings: Chapter 3, The Lookout Elise Juska

Stephen didn’t want to go through with it but there he is, standing in the parking lot behind the Wendy’s on Rhawn Street. Lately, everything in his life felt like this. He doesn’t want to do something, knows he shouldn’t, but suddenly there he is, doing it anyway. It’s like something just goes slack inside him, the way he lets his right eye wander when he’s tired. In the end, his friends start hassling him or cheering him on and it seems like too much work to resist, and he thinks, Fuck it.

They’re standing by the Dumpster next to the red Chevy Impala. The air is warm and smells like trash. At eight o’clock on a Sunday night, the Wendy’s parking lot is less than half-full, the sky above the roof the deep yellow of a deviled egg. Pigeons stalk the Dumpster lid.

“Where the fuck is he,” Mark says.

“Fuck if I know.”

Mark toes a burger box on the ground, nudging it with his Chucks. Stephen has known Mark Rourke since there were in kindergarten at St. Bonaventure’s and swears the kid gets uglier with each passing year. Mark has a square head, eyes set too close, and serious acne peppering his sideburns, which are black and flecked, like ants. One of those guys so ugly that it turns into something else, like cool or scary.

“Sure we shouldn’t wait until it’s less crowded?” Stephen says.

“No, asshole,” Mark says. “That’s part of it.”

“What’s part of it?”

“You know. The risk.”

“Right,” Stephen says, smirking at Mark for taking it all so seriously, though infact this is what makes Mark a good partner for things like this.

“Here,” Stephen says, and passes Mark the sticky, near empty bottle of Jameson he stole from his parents’ liquor cabinet. Mark grabs it, takes a deep swallow, and swipes at his chin. At least, Stephen thinks, guys like Mark have reasons for doing stupid shit like this. No one in the world cares what happens to Mark Rourke. His dad took off when they were in ninth grade, his mother drinks too much. Stephen has no such excuse. His is a big family, a nice family that taught him right from wrong. Maybe that is his excuse—they have enough good kids already. His brother, Joey, working up a shelf of basketball trophies.

His cousin Alex, some kind of nerd superstar at his public high school out in the suburbs. He’d be better off in Catholic school, where they’d make him cut his hair. He looks like a tool.

“Give me that,” Stephen says, grabbing the bottle back and taking a swig.

Stephen feels rattled tonight, jittery. For dinner, he and his dad ate pizza in front of the TV. Lately his mom has been visiting his uncle every night, which means his dad is in charge of dinner, which means that nine times out of ten they have pizza in front of the TV. Joey is usually out playing ball, so it’s just the two of them. At six fifteen, his dad gets home from work at the ShopRite, smelling like the deli counter, and drops into his big brown tweed chair. Stephen makes the call. At seven, his father watches the lottery numbers while Stephen carries in the pizza and two plates. Tonight it was sausage and pepperoni and America’s Funniest Home Videos when his father said: You know John is gonna die, right?

Stephen froze with a half-chewed glob of pizza in his mouth.

His father added, Your uncle.

I know that, Stephen managed, swallowing, but didn’t clarify which part. He knew, obviously, that John was his uncle. And knew that he was sick. Uncle John is very, very sick, his mother said constantly, eyes

36

teary, rubbing her locket like she was praying on a rosary. But being very, very sick wasn’t the same thing as dying. Earlier that day, Stephen had visited his uncle—his mother drove him and Joey over to Uncle John and Aunt Lauren’s, and it seemed like a good sign that Uncle John was home. If you’re that sick, hospitals don’t just let you go home. But his uncle looked terrible. Bony, with sunken cheeks and yellow skin. He was bald under his Eagles hat, and his voice sounded thin. Later, talking to his father, Stephen understood this was what dying looked like, but in the moment he was shocked. The joint he’d smoked before he left the house was starting to wear o and he was sweating. It felt like something was crawling on his skin. Uncle John had always been a good-looking guy—how could a good- looking guy end up like this? Their house was warm, too warm, because Uncle John was always cold. Uncle John had started asking Joey about basketball in that thin voice, eyes bulging in his head. Harry Kalas was calling the Phillies game on the radio while they watched it with the sound turned down on the TV. His mom was holding Max, jiggling him and making these kind of desperate cooing noises, while Aunt Lauren hovered over everything and Elena brushed her doll’s hair. Pretty dolly! she kept saying. Stephen needed to get the fuck out of there. Eat anything you can find! Aunt Lauren called after him as he headed for the kitchen. Stephen wished she weren’t so nice to him. Lately, he felt like some kind of impostor with his family; they gave him too much credit. None of them knew about all the dumb shit he’d been getting into, and what his parents knew they were too ashamed to tell. Last Thursday, the day of the locker room “incident,” Father Malcahy had called his dad at home.

Vandalism, his father had repeated after he hung up, his big face blushing red. Obscenities of a religious and sexual nature. His mother had looked at Stephen with tears in her eyes. He’d thought she might cry, but instead she spoke through clenched teeth. “Now, Stephen?” Her voice was hissing, shaking with fury.

“Now?” Then she’d left the room. Even his father, who Stephen could usually count on to go easy on him— even seem a little bit proud if he was caught drinking or fighting, chalk it up to normal kid stuff, guy stuff —looked angry. More than angry: disgusted. Cut the shit, his father had said. And that was it. They never spoke of it again. It was worse than being punished.

Standing in Uncle John’s kitchen, Stephen felt weirdly nervous. He found a can of orange soda rolling around the cheese drawer, chugged half, then stared out into the backyard. He used to look forward to coming to Uncle John and Aunt Lauren’s. It was quiet here, and kind of shielded from the neighbors. The backyard was five times the size of their square of burnt grass in Northeast Philly and backed up onto a little grove of trees. They had a pool, too—a real one, in-ground, put in last summer. A basketball hoop, a deck. But now it all had a sad look about it. The soft basketball planted in the driveway, the things that looked like flowers but he knew were really weeds. His mom had made Joey and him come mow their lawn a few times, but that was weeks ago, and now the grass was shaggy, the ivy growing wild. The entire place felt like sickness, inside and out. At the back of the yard, the trees swayed softly, though it wasn’t windy. Stephen’s pulse hammered in his throat. He was convinced suddenly that this fringe of woods was haunted, that there was something—not something stupid like a werewolf or a zombie, but something real, like death—lurking in those trees. His hands shook a little, like they had when he sprayed the lockers, and suddenly he needed to not be alone. He drank down the rest of the soda and went back to the living room, where he and Uncle John shot the shit about the Phillies for a minute—Looks like they’re going to be contenders again, Stephen said; for the rest of his life, he would remember this as a particularly fucking stupid thing to say—and as they walked back to the car, his mother looked at him with those teary eyes, as if seeing—what? a young person? a not-sick person? Was she remembering how Stephen broke down crying the night Pop died? Was she feeling bad that Uncle John was dying and nobody had told him? That he wouldn’t be a mentor for poor Stephen, get him back on the right path? Fuck knows.

“What?” he snapped, slumping low in the front seat, his brother’s knees digging into his back. *** It’s a warm night, too warm for a hooded sweatshirt, but Stephen’s palms are damp and cold. “Where the fuck is he,” Mark mutters, giving the burger box a hard kick. It flies open and half a bun falls out. The pigeons go nuts. Of course Timmy is late; he’s the one who started this whole thing. Timmy’s always late, always the one who starts things. He’s also dumb. Mark might be the world’s ugliest human being, but at least he isn’t stupid. In fact, Mark’s combination of ugliness and intelligence and general lack of morals 37

would probably make him an excellent criminal in the real world. Timmy’s just a loose cannon, a dishwasher at Wendy’s with the same long, loping stride he’s had since the first grade, pants always an inch too short, that stupid hemp necklace. He always has a crush on a girl he’s convinced he has a shot with. Mark has no luck with girls, even ugly ones, but he doesn’t pretend to. In this department, Stephen is their hero.

He’s had sex with three girls and is currently screwing Molly Healy, who isn’t especially pretty but is nice, and comes over whenever he calls.

“There he is,” Mark says, and sure enough, Timmy is slouching across the parking lot, backpack hooked over one shoulder, grinning as he heads toward them. He angles his head toward the Impala, as if to say, What did I tell you?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Mark exhales, annoyed.

Timmy had promised them the red Impala would be parked by the Dumpster. It was always there on Sundays, he swore; he saw it whenever he worked Sunday nights, went out back to dump the trash and smoke a joint. This one, apparently, had some kind of high-end stereo system, a piece of information Timmy got from some guy named Bruno, an ex–pro wrestler who works the French fry station and who Stephen suspects is half-invented. Whatever. He just wants to get this over with.

“See?” Timmy grins. “Here it is. What did I tell you?”

“We get it,” Mark says. “Do you want a medal?” He scratches hard at his chin.

Stephen looks at the ground, at the pigeons swarming the ketchup-stained bun. He’s done plenty of dumb shit before and sometimes gotten in trouble for it—for the locker room, he got a week’s detention and (worse) had to talk to the school shrink—but that was just school. He’s never done anything in real life, nothing beyond shoplifting or buying pot off his neighbor. He’s never done anything so personal and planned. But he reminds himself this isn’t personal; he doesn’t know the car’s owner. It isn’t about people, just stuff. The locker room incident wasn’t personal either, despite what the shrink was driving at—Your brother is a very good athlete, isn’t he, Stephen? Yes, yes, he is. He’s fucking Dr. J. But Stephen didn’t vandalize the locker room because he’s jealous of his brother. Timmy had the spray paint, his friends were hassling him to do it, and he got pissed off, so he did it—Fuck you, assholes!! streaming from the nozzle.

This got a laugh. Then, there was the other stuff. The shrink just smiled and sat there, letting the silence drag on and on, thinking it would break him. Stephen didn’t say a word. If she thought he was going to make it easy, she was nuts. Finally she asked: Is there anything going on at home?

“Okay,” Mark says, looking both ways. The parking lot is about half-full, cars inching toward the drivethrough window. “Take your positions.”

Stephen might have chuckled at this, but he knew Mark was dead serious. Earlier that day, Mark had doled out their assignments. Timmy’s popping the lock, because he claims to know how. Mark is covering Timmy’s back. Stephen is the lookout—standing by the bumper, watching for oncoming trouble—and, if necessary, the muscle. That’s how Mark put it: if necessary, the muscle. Stephen wasn’t thrilled about this, but of the three of them, he made the most sense in the role. He’s the biggest, and can bench-press 250.

Sometimes he practices keeping his face perfectly still.

Timmy and Mark move to the driver’s-side door. Stephen steps up next to the bumper, yanking up his sweatshirt hood and tightening the cords under his chin. Behind him, he hears the backpack unzipping and then Timmy’s loud breathing as he jams the hanger into the crack at the top of the window. The sun is setting, the orange edged with bright pink. It looks almost pretty, even though Stephen knows it’s just pollution from the oil refineries near I-95. A fan on top of Wendy’s starts to crank and whir, blowing the smell of stale grease in his direction. The back of his neck is sweating. He thinks about Molly Healy, sitting on the edge of his bed yesterday, fully dressed, the way she twisted a single strand of hair around her thumb.

She was asking him about the stuff he’d sprayed on the lockers. She’d heard some crazy things, she said, with a little laugh. Fuck God? she said nervously. Jesus loves pussy? Stephen could barely remember—it wasn’t like he thought about it first. He aimed the can and that’s just what came out. But hearing the words spoken in Molly Healy’s small voice, Stephen winced. He hated himself for making her say those things. I mean, that’s kind of really weird, isn’t it? Molly said. Then she told him her stomach hurt and she better go home.

38

“What are you doing, Tim?” Mark hisses. “Hurry the fuck up.”

Stephen looks over his shoulder. Both of them are hunched over the lock, Timmy guiding the bent hanger, metal scraping the inside of the glass.

“Hang on,” Timmy says. “It’s stuck.”

“You asshole,” Mark whispers. “I thought you said you knew—” “I do. Just give me a minute. Jesus.”

Stephen faces forward again. Cars are rolling slowly past them, toward the drive-through lane, glancing over and away. They don’t want to know.

Behind him, Timmy’s breathing is getting louder. “Shit.” “What?”

Stephen looks back, sees Timmy’s face reddening as he fishes with the hanger, trying to grab the button.

“I almost had it.”

“Hey!” somebody shouts. “Hey, you!”

Stephen turns around and sees the old man, halfway across the lot. He’s at least seventy, maybe older, and wearing plaid pants and a windbreaker. It’s Stephen the man is yelling at, Stephen he can see. “That’s my car!”

“Guys,” Stephen says. “He’s coming.”

“Hurry!” Mark snaps. “Jesus, Timmy, what the fuck?”

The old guy is trying to hurry toward them but can move only so quickly. He has a limp—maybe he was in the war. “Get away from that car, boys!”

“Steve, how close is he?” Mark says.

“Close,” says Stephen, glancing again over his shoulder. Timmy is hunched over the lock, whispering, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The old man yells, “Step away from there!” Then Mark straightens up and looks pointedly at Stephen. His ugly face is hard as a rock. He says, “You got this, Steve?”

This, after all, is what Stephen is there for—if necessary, the muscle. He just hadn’t considered what would happen if it actually came to this.

“He’s old,” Stephen says.

“And?” The guy is so close, Stephen can see the bulge of the cigarette pack in his jacket pocket, banging against his ribs as he walks. His hair is silver, combed backward in neat metallic lines. He looks like somebody who might go to St. Bonaventure’s. Stephen would bet money this guy knows somebody in his family. His family knows everybody.

“Get away from my car!” the old man is shouting, fumbling in his pocket for his keys. “I’ll call the cops!”

Stephen takes a breath and steps forward. It’s then that he sees the hat. Sitting in the back window of the Impala, facing outward, not tossed there but propped deliberately. Local 691. His grandfather had kept a hat in the back window of his Buick, a black-and-yellow cap that said World War II Veteran, and something about the proud way this hat is displayed makes Stephen want to bolt from the parking lot and run home.

But then the old guy shoves past him, knocking hard into his shoulder, barking, “Get away from there!” just as Stephen hears the door slam and Timmy crowing, “I’m in! Guys, I’m in!”

Mark sprints around to the passenger side. The motor guns, tires rip backward, and Timmy yells out the window, “Steve! Let’s go!”

But Stephen is frozen. The old guy is reaching for the door, yanking at the locked handle. “Steve! What the fuck, man?” Mark is annoyed, Timmy laughing like a maniac. The old guy is trying to poke his key in the lock as his car rolls back out of his reach, a few inches each time, like a game of chicken. Stephen’s face fills with heat. He’s angry at his friends for being such ass- holes, angry at the old guy for being unable to stop them. His hands are trembling and the next thing he knows he’s swinging, fist connecting with the loose skin of the old man’s cheek. The guy’s head flies to one side and he staggers a few steps backward but stays standing. He hits Stephen back, knocking him square in the nose. He’s surprisingly strong. A vet for sure. Timmy is now laughing hysterically. Mark is incredulous, saying, “Really, Steve?” But now Stephen is in it and can’t stop. He’s punching and getting punched, feeling the blows land haphazardly on the old man’s face and chest. Vaguely he senses cars stop- ping but he’s just throwing his fist, sometimes getting nothing 39

but air, arm sailing weightless through the empty space, other times feeling his knuckles connect with bone. He hears the guy grunting, breathing hard, and then a menacing growl—You’re done, Steve. Stephen hits the guy in the stomach and hears a low moan. The guy stumbles onto his knees, bracing himself with his old spotty hands, and a wallet falls from his pocket, flopping on the pavement like a dead brown fish.

Stephen grabs it. “Steve!” Mark yells. “Jesus! Get in!” There is a note of something—true panic—in his voice that Stephen has never heard before. Stephen stands up, but slowly. He feels huge, untouchable, capable of any- thing. He doesn’t want to look at the old guy, but he does: curled on the ground, knees pulled to his chest, a thin line of blood trickling from his nose. He shoves the wallet in his pocket and gets in the backseat and is carried away.

Stephen is dumped in front of his house on Tyson fifteen bucks richer. The Impala’s stereo system was a piece of junk—not even a stereo, just a tape deck with a bunch of old-man cassettes. Tony Bennett, Fats Domino. Why Tim ever thought this guy would have a high-end stereo was anybody’s guess. Even the wallet had just thirty-five bucks inside. They each got ten, with Stephen getting the extra five for doing the stealing.

He slumps on the curb in front of his porch. It’s nearly dark. His mom’s car is still gone. Stephen assesses the damage. His left knee hurts, knuckles are sore. He feels a black eye forming, but nothing’s broken. He sits and he waits, listening for the sound of cop cars, but the street is quiet, or as quiet as it ever is. A gang of kids is playing stickball near the corner, extra charged up from the nearness of summer vacation. In neighbors’ houses, TVs blare from open windows. Cheap electric fans crank and spin. It feels like summer, sounds like summer, the lazy chirp of crickets, the smells of dinners clinging to the humid night air.

When the streetlamps snap on and the kids are called in, Stephen decides that the police aren’t coming.

It doesn’t surprise him. In fact, it makes sense: Because if his uncle is dying, really dying, nothing truly bad can happen to Stephen. The chance of two things happening in one family, in one week—the odds are impossible. As long as his uncle is dying, Stephen is safe.

Still, there’s a knot of fear inside him. The same feeling he had looking at the trees in Uncle John’s backyard. It’s not a fear of getting caught, but the feeling that he’s waiting for something else, something bigger, worse than the police. Usually when Stephen gets in trouble, he asks for it. He invites it. But this other thing, this unknown darkness, is abstract, formless, and approaching with a certainty Stephen can’t shake.

When he hears the dribble of a basketball, Stephen quickly pushes himself to his feet. He can’t deal with his brother right now, asking what happened to his face. Not because he’s jealous that Joey is so extraordinary—the shrink had that completely backward. It’s that his brother is so totally fucking normal. He has normal friends, thinks normal thoughts. Stephen walks in the opposite direction, limping a little on the knee. He crosses Longshore, heading toward Rising Sun, goes into the Wawa, and spends the old guy’s ten on a hoagie, a bag of chips, and a Coke. Then he sits on the curb and eats. At least it tastes better than pizza. In the car today, his mother said that Uncle John could barely eat anymore—the chemo caused sores in his mouth, so he could handle only soft things. When he’s hungry, he watches cooking shows. Stephen pauses, the food stuck in his throat. He thinks what an asshole he is, fucking around with his life while his uncle is trying just to stay alive, then pushes the thought back down and stands up, shoving the rest of his sandwich in the trash.

His mother’s car is parked outside by the time Stephen gets home. As he opens the front door, he braces himself, but everything seems normal. Joey is playing Mortal Kombat, the sounds of fake video fighting spilling under his bedroom door. His father is exactly where Stephen left him, watching TV and drinking a beer. “Mark called,” he says without taking his eyes off the screen. Stephen goes to his room and shuts the door, shoves his sneakers off, and kicks them across the floor. He stretches out gingerly on the bed and props his head on the pillows. Through the wall behind his head, he can hear his mother on the phone.

If she’s home, she’s always on the phone. He can’t make out all the words, but he knows the sound: the muffled rise and fall of it, the nervous pauses, the sad one-note answers, as she talks about Uncle John.

Mm-hm. I know. It will.

Stephen’s right eye is throbbing. He places a hand over it, as if the darkness might keep the swelling 40

down. He thinks of the old joke: Does your face hurt? Because it’s killing me! A corny joke, the kind uncles tell at parties. It occurs to him that if Uncle John dies tonight, he’ll have a black eye at his funeral—the thought makes him sick. He can’t even imagine what his mother would say. Now, Stephen? Now? He presses both hands over his eyes. In the darkness, he pictures that red Impala. Not the car itself—now dumped in the back of the Clover parking lot—but the back window, the hat. He wonders what became of the World War II cap his grandfather always kept in his Buick. Last winter when Pop died, they all went over in the middle of the night and filed into the bedroom to say good-bye. Stephen had lost it that night in front of everyone. It wasn’t the rigor mortis, which he had expected from biology class, but the other stuff, the little stuff. The stubble on his cheeks, the dab of toothpaste on his chin, signs that an hour ago he had still been alive.

At least he died in his sleep, Stephen thinks. At least he was old. He lifts his hands from his eyes and stares at the ceiling. His upper lip is sweating. From the other side of the wall, he hears a click as the receiver is returned to its cradle. Then the eternal grind of numbers as his mother dials the next person.

Slow, heavy, as if just placing the call is an effort. It’s Margie, she says. Two days to two weeks.

Stephen’s heart is throbbing in his chest. He tries to empty his mind, focus on the bubbling of his fish tank to distract himself from the sound of his mother’s voice. It’s the tank his parents gave him for his ninth birthday, along with a bag of blue gravel and two goldfish he named Nuts and Bolts. Stephen was really into the tank back then. He saved up his allowance to buy a bunch of other junk for it. A little ceramic bridge, plastic plants, a dorky sign that said NO FISHING ALLOWED. He stuck a kitchen place mat behind the glass, an ocean scene with a lighthouse and waves. He was thinking he might become a deep-sea diver. That summer, when his family was all down the shore together, he’d told Uncle John about his plan. Uncle John always took his ideas seriously, unlike his dad, who chuckled—Aren’t you afraid of swimming? But Uncle John asked Stephen a bunch of questions, the two of them leaning against the deck railing like they were businessmen discussing some proposition, or he was interviewing Stephen for a very important job. Do you have a backup plan? Uncle John said, and Stephen thought about it before answering: Astronaut.

When they got back from the shore, Nuts and Bolts were dead. The dissolving food pellets hadn’t dissolved fast enough and the bodies floated on the surface of the water, already partway decomposed.

The clumps of uneaten food looked gray and wet, like brain matter. They’re dead, his father told him, and Stephen said nothing, watching his father scoop them out with the measuring cup his mother used for baking cakes. A minute later he heard the flush of the toilet, pictured his dead fish flying through the pipes inside his bedroom wall. The next day he trashed the NO FISHING sign, the place mat, the bridge. For years the tank sat empty, a few gray pebbles of gravel in the bottom. A year ago, when he got a job at Pet World, the new fish he picked out were silver, sharp-finned, with teeth and whiskers; they looked like miniature sharks. He didn’t give them names. He rigged black lights to the tank so when the fish swam through, they glowed. Freaky, said Molly Healy the first time she came over, lying beside him, partway naked, the covers pulled to her chin in the semidark.

Stephen’s blood pounds thickly in his ears. He pulls the five from his pocket and stares at it, the one from the old man’s wallet. The bill is wrinkled and damp, torn at one corner. He opens the tank lid and drops it in. He watches it float like a lily pad, soaking up water, then start to sink. Isn’t that kind of really weird? The five drowns slowly before settling on the bottom, the fish swimming obliviously around it. Stephen thinks of the old man, curled on the parking lot, and wonders what happened after they left. Could the man have died? Could Stephen have killed him? You’re done, Steve—had the man actually said that? He must have been hearing things. Or maybe the old man was a messenger, the thing that had been haunting Uncle John’s backyard, rustling in the trees.

From the other side of the wall, his mother’s voice rises suddenly and Stephen feels a twinge of panic— then it drops back down to the lower register, murmuring. He grabs the pillow from behind his head, angling himself so he’s leaning directly against the tank, picturing the fish’s teeth just inches from his ear. He hopes the motor will drown out the sound of her voice, but the tank only amplifies it, like a glass pressed to a wall, sharpening every word. I know, his mother says. Stephen closes his eyes and for a minute just rests there, listening. He is. It could come at any time.

41

Elise Juska’s novel, The Blessings, was released by Grand Central Publishing in Spring 2014. The book was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers series, featured on Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List,” and named one of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Best Books of 2014, among other distinctions.

Elise earned her MFA at the University of New Hampshire, where she received the Tom Williams Memorial for fiction writing and the Charait Award for best short story. She has since taught fiction writing at The New School in NYC, in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire, and at various summer writing conferences.

Elise’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, Good Housekeeping, the Hudson Review, Harvard Review, and many other publications. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares and her work has been cited in The Best American Short Stories.

Elise now spends summers writing on an island in Maine and the rest of the year teaching in Philadelphia, PA, where she directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at the University of the Arts. Learn more about Elise at www.elisejuska.com.

The Blessings by Elise Juska. Copyright (c) 2014 by Elise Juska. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Palindrome 42

An Interview with Elise Juska, author of The Blessings We had the pleasure of interviewing Elise Juska this spring, and here’s what she had to say: Your novel, The Blessings, is the story of the Blessings, a large Irish Catholic family from Northeast Philadelphia. How did Philadelphia inspire the characters and setting in your novel?

The Blessings was inspired in part by my own experiences in and around Northeast Philadelphia growing up. I lived in the suburbs, but several of my relatives lived in the Lawndale section of Philadelphia; it’s a place that’s really stayed with me and, more than any other, crops up continually in my fiction. For a novel about the closeness of families—the kind that see each other constantly, are close both physically and emotionally—that warm, crowded Irish Catholic neighborhood felt particularly right.

Do you write about Philadelphia in other works?

Many of my short stories have been set there in either the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhoods where my relatives lived or in the suburbs where I grew up. I think the tension between those two places was something I felt deeply as a child—I was very shy, and the Northeast felt intimidating to me, the kids there far more knowing and mature than I was. One of the first short stories I published, in The Hudson Review, was called “Northeast Philly Girls” and was, in part, about that very tension.

Each chapter in The Blessings is told from a different character’s point of view. How did you use this structure to support the themes and content of your story?

When I began writing The Blessings, I was thinking about how, in big families, so much of your identity is shared. The same rituals, traditions, and memories belong to everyone; they’re a large part of who you are.

At the same time—and this became clearer to me as I got older—there are parts of everyone’s lives that are private, that exist outside the family sphere. In the novel, the use of multiple points of view was an attempt to bring that dynamic into focus. Though the novel follows one main story—the death of the uncle, John, and its aftermath—the multiple perspectives are meant to show how various family members are affected differently by the loss, and are simultaneously dealing with their lives outside the family, with all the individual struggles and decisions and challenges that come with it.

Do you want to experiment more with form as a result of writing the novel?

With each novel, I find myself taking on a different sort of technical challenge, though it’s not something I purposefully set out to do. The variations on form and structure always stem from the particular needs of the story I’m trying to tell. Lately I find I’m interested in exploring more wide-ranging characters, with distinct points of view on the same event, which helps determine the novel’s shape. That idea is relevant again in the new novel I’m working on, but executed very differently than in The Blessings.

Did any contemporary novels inspire The Blessings?

I love novels-in-stories, and when I was writing The Blessings, that’s how it felt to me: like a novel told in stories, each chapter able to stand on its own but with this larger narrative binding it together. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Mary & O’Neil by Justin Cronin, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout—these are some of my favorites in the novels-in-stories genre. For inspiration, I also look to writers who capture the nuances of big families, particularly Irish-Catholic families, among whom I think Alice McDermott reigns supreme.

43

How long did the book take you to write, and what did you learn about your writing process as you were drafting?

This draft took about two years to write, which is quick for me. In a way, though, I’d been working on it for much longer. Even back when I was in college, I was attempting to write the story of this family, and the death of the young uncle, but it never cohered; I hadn’t figured out how to write it, technically and structurally, and also probably wasn’t mature enough to tell it. It was simmering for quite a while, though, so when finally I hit upon the structure and began writing the first chapter, it came relatively easily.

You also teach at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, among other places. How has teaching informed and impacted your work?

I’ve always found it a very lucky thing: to sit in a classroom with a group of students—and, this being the University of the Arts, a group of uniquely thoughtful, engaged students—articulating what it is I love and believe about writing fiction, then going home to put those beliefs into practice at my own desk. It’s a fortunate balance, one that helps clarify and motivate my own work.

What advice would you like to give aspiring novelists?

I wasn’t focused on publishing when I first started writing, and I’m grateful for that. I wrote because it was what I most loved doing, and I’d encourage aspiring writers to do the same: focus on writing the best book you can write. Read widely. Remember that drafts that ultimately don’t work, pages that are cut, aren’t wasted; they’re part of the process of getting to the next thing, the better thing.

44

45

rathallareview.org rosemont.edu