Imagine a World

IMAGINE A WORLD

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IMAGINE A WORLD

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Summer 2009 Design @Mari

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Table of Contents Editorial

January, Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick, ix

Poetry

Blizzard, by Nonnie Augustine, 1 In Memoriam, Wendall M Tomlin, 17 In the Depths of Winter by Nancy Norton 26 White Out by Nancy Norton 27

Short Stories

Medicine by Jim Parks, 3 Cold, Cold Heart by Jim Haughey 28

Creative Non Fiction

Pink Slip by Linda Boroff 40

Micro Fiction

Not Much Else by Bill West 45 The Final Goodbye by Marie Shields 53

Timelilne: Ann Walters 11

( A selection of Poetry and Prose) To Pierce the Sky, Umexpected Bats, The Dancer, Desert Roses, The Way Light Falls Ar Four In The Morning by Ann Walters,

Timeline : Bill Frank Robinson 47

The Bread Man is Dead, The Cat Skinner, Pauite Indian Story by Bill Frank Robinson

Script Excerpt

Mudmen by MIkal Hubber, 22 Photos, Mudmen, 18

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Editors for the Issue Managing: Marie Fitzpatrick Ficton Ramon Collins (Micro) Yvette Managan Poetry Nonnie Augustine Photography Maia Cavelli Web and Data: Peter Gilkes Ezine Design, Mari. Lynam. Fitpzatrick.

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Winter Editorial As January drives the light to toil it builds a body's frame for ghostly sons.

They work at propagating might in soil our growth is being infected once again.

For frost dug deep and penetrated cells, now waxen sun spreads quilts in spills of rain.

Conducted change means winter's on the turn no death is wasted now that spring's begun.

And King de jure begins his reign as winds upsweep old shade; Adams' obliging will confined and thinkers circle hellish sins.

Will February drench the earth in hail?

It's when Persian tulips undress their corm, affairs of greed; our blight; will be recalled bewitching men entreating sun, in tunes that cupid plays to loved-up cheer being formed.

Mari Jan '09

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Blizzard Naked lengths knee to knee, our bodies warm while winds gust.

You scootch lower.

Lips, tongue to navel, seeking heat.

How well we fiteach limb fierce, held, holdingwe ignite.

Our forms defy, protect, reel in sublime time.

Then knee from knee we separate. Lives wait.

Nonnie Augustine

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Medicine by Jim Parks

I learned to drive on the roads of deep east Texas. They cut through the piney woods like random surgical scars through undulating furry green tissue browned by fallen needles and cones.

I'm talking about really driving, now. I'm talking about balling the jack through the night and early morning while my father snoozed on the back seat, farting and scratching.

Sometimes he would raise up on one hip, gripping the back of the driver's seat with his fist and arm and peering groggy and edgy ahead of us.

"What the hell is that?" "What is what?"

"That stinking gawd day im thang in front us."

"Why, it's a cattle trailer, Daddy."

"Gawd dayim right it is. That's exactly what it is. Whut are we doin' running down the road behind a stinkin' thang like that, huh?"

"I don't know."

"You'd better by God be finding out. Do you know what this is?"

"What is what?" "What is what, what?" "What is what, sir?"

"This is a brand new five thousand dollar 98 Oldsmobile; that's what it is, by God. Now, put your foot in it and get around that Gawd dayim stinkin' cattle trailer - right now!"

He would cuff me lightly on the back of the head.

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I would find the courage to pass the stinking thing and pull back in the line of traffic just before a head-on collision with an oncoming log truck or milk tanker.

He was right about the attributes of the car. It was indeed built for the open road. Its massive V-8 engine was unrestricted by anything like the pollution control equipment found on today's cars.

The four-barrel carburettor could be heard sucking in cubic yard after cubic yard of air after the vacuum tubes and valves opened up and it was in passing gear.

The tuned twin exhaust bellowed in spite of the melodious mufflers and tail pipes with which it was outfitted, and the engine and transmission were so crisply mated to the action of the engine's back pressures that no driver could have replicated its fabulously smooth ability at downshifting.

One need never touch the brakes until it was absolutely necessary.

I was well-schooled in all these facts. I had been instructed at length. "Don't jerk the automobile around like that!" He would gesture with his high ball, having had me pull off the road so he could freshen the drink up from a jug he kept in a special little satchel he kept in the trunk that played a music box version of "How Dry I Am" when it was opened.

I have a feeling that in his day, he, too, was schooled in this art of driving at high speeds to meet a deadline. because of the need for help.

In those days, the men in his family took a kid with them when they were on business trips to change the frequent flats - an estimated three every fifty miles or so - caused from thorns, sharp gravel and rocks, rim cuts and slow leaks.

The thick tread of the Oldsmobile's wide, deeply grooved tires gripped the soft summer tarmac of the highway like a tree frog's toes, and it shot ahead at terrifying rates of speed, its air conditioning system spewing icy air on the top of your knees and freezing the sweat on your brows and trickling down the back of your neck.

He held forth on these advantages at length. His experience went way back there. Most instructive remarks began with "Way back there..."

He taught me all the tricks he learned on gravel and dirt when he was a kid.

Slack off on a curve just a little bit, then, once committed, pour on the coal and she would track through the maneuver, accelerating smoothly. If I encountered a skid, countersteer into it and never hit the brakes to avoid sliding. If anything, punch it and she would power out of the skid. Once she was under control, gently pump the brakes until she started to slow down.

It's the kind of nervy brinksmanship developed in the days of mechanical brakes and downdraft carburetors. All those tricks also worked just fine after the advent of hydraulic brakes, automatic transmissions and wide tracked, wide tubeless tires.

He would lay down in the seat and go back to sleep, muttering that he wanted to be in such and such a place before 9:30 a.m. so he could freshen up and call on his next customer at about 10.

Thus admonished, I would bum up the highway looking out for the flashing lights of truck drivers who warned of a speed cop up the line. I don't remember anyone having a radio. It was all done with flashing lights in those days.

I was just coming around a bend and up a hill, trying to find a break where I could pass a line of three or four old pickups doing about 40. In front of them was a little cattle trailer. The old boy must have been hauling steers or feeder calves to the commission barn.

Just as I openend that damn V-8 up and the four-barrel started its whooshing sound, a damned turkey darted out in front of the car from a farm yard.

I locked it up.

Man, white feathers and a bird about the size of a buzzard, it all served to just unnerve me.

That car slid at least a hundred feet on the scalding hot tar and asphalt of that road. When she started to tum sideways, I pumped the brakes and got her back under control for a moment. Then she hooked a wheel into the gravel at the side of the road and started trying to tum sideways in the other direction.

"Punch it! Punch it!" He yelled it and slapped the back of my head.

I got the damned car straightened out and I was cruising along about fifty before he asked me, "What the hell happened?"

"Oh, a turkey ran out in the road in front of me." "A turkey ran out in the road in front of you." "Yes."

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"Yes what?"

"Yes, sir."

"A turkey ran out in front of you in the road?"

"Yes, sir, a turkey."

"Gawd dayim, boy. The hell with a bunch of turkeys! Turkey or smaller, run over it. Hawg or better, dodge it!"

"Yes, sir." "You got that?" "Yes, sir."

"Are we clear?"

"Yes, sir, it's just that..."

"Thank you."

"I just..."

"Thank you. Just don't jerk the automobile around." I clammed up.

He spared me the business about the brand new five thousand dollar 98 Olds.

So that Monday we made it into that old east Texas county seat right on time. It's a place filled with rusticated stone buildings, a place where a revolution, a land grab, began long ago.

All the roads lead to the knob of a hill where the old brick and stone courthouse sits like a wedding cake. It could be located in a rural county of western Pennsylvania, upstate New York or the hills of Tennessee or Alabama.

You can get anywhere in the world from that courthouse and know that those folks stole the whole thing fair and square.

The old man checked into his motel, got cleaned up and went on downtown to see his customer. I fiddled around the swimming pool long enough to get tired and ready for a nap.

When I woke up, the old man was mixing a drink and listening to a side of jazz on his little portable record player. We were going to stay until the next morning because he had to explain to his customer's banker how they could deal a car load of his automotive products at deeply discounted prices by acting as the drop shipment point for that area. The credit was right, the terms were right and it was time to move in that market.

I was grown before I figured out that the old man was actually a silent partner in these deals, cutting himself in for a share of the action in addition to his commission. Some folks call it buying the order.

We walked down the highway on raw cut red dirt to a barbecue place and he showed me what the stakes driven in the ground beside the road meant to the equipment operators. The engineers had marked them to show what grade and slope to cut with their blades.

Then they would be back with the surveyor's transit and rod to check the work.

He was that kind of dude. He was always explaining that kind of stuff to me, how credit worked, who really owned the new cars on a dealer's lot, or how billboard advertising was really paid for, how and why new road right of way was chosen - through donation much faster than by condemnation - all that jazz.

He was an old school man of the road.

When we got back, Fred came by the motel for a drink. Fred was a wheel at his customer's place of business.

They talked for awhile, then they decided to go to the bootlegger's to get a jug of whiskey.

Now, in those days that part of the world was dry. You couldn't buy liquor or any kind of alcoholic beverages anywhere in certain counties. Or so the fiction was maintained. The truth was that bootleggers operated throughout the country. You could buy it all at these country houses back off the road - for a price.

It was a pretty steep price, but Fred was buying.

We headed out a county road to a house with a Seven-Up sign on the mailbox. That was how they marked them, usually, some kind of soft drink sign.

At this place, Chiefs, you pulled around the back of the house in the yard to a little conversation area under a screened-in shed where there was a barbecue pit and several tables made out of wire spools placed on their sides.

Chief was sitting there dressed in overalls smoking his corncob pipe. In front of him was one of

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those giant Canadian Club bottles they used to display in liquor stores.

People dropped their change in it for luck when they left.

It looked kind of surreal, Chief sitting there barefoot, an Indian less than five and a half feet tall with a huge cowboy hat, smoking a corncob pipe, and a totem of a four foot brown Canadian Club bottle standing before him.

Add to the vision the fact that we were out in the middle of this dense pine forest in the back yard of an old country house with a gallery around it and all the gear for hog killing and raising chickens, and it starts to get to you.

There were hunting dogs in pens in the back, the kind they use to run down wild boar. Pit bulls.

These were the big woods. The Big Thicket Leadbelly sang about.

They struck a bargain for two jugs of bourbon, then they got to drinking out of the bottle and swapping lies with Chief.

Fred asked my father ifhe knew Chief was a Kickapoo. "A Kickapoo?"

"Yeah, Chief is a Kickapoo, a medicine man."

Chief showed no reaction. He just sat and looked straight ahead. Fred said, "Till I met Chief, here, I just thought the Kickapoo were some kind of deal in L'il Abner, you know, in the funny papers. But, no, they were a real kickass tribe up in the Staked Plains and Kansas and the Panhandle and all. 'Bout as mean as the Comanche or Sioux or any of 'em. Ain't that right, Chief?"

Chief still said nothing.

"That's why Chief, here, sells this bootleg whiskey and wine and stuff. He's selling that Kickapoo Joy Juice, don't you see?"

Chief yawned and pulled his pocket watch out of the bib of his overalls.

"Hey, Chief," Fred said, "what kind of medicine do you make?"

Chief looked straight at him and straight through him, as if, to him, he no longer existed.

"Medicine is medicine," said Chief. "I'm making it now. You may never know. In fact, my guess is you will never know."

His eyes were as black as onyx and there were very few whiskers on his face, deep etched from the sun and pain and worry. The cowboy hat had a funny crease on it. It was pinched in the front of the crown. The rest of it stood to its maximum height.

In the light of the gasoline lantern, I suddenly realized that Chief was in no way a white man.

Chief was a medicine man for sure.

He stood up and scratched the instep of one bare foot with the nails of the other.

Pointing to one of those triangular-shaped hatchets embedded in a round of pecan log standing on end, he said to me, "Son, grab that hatchet and hand it here."

He kept his gaze levelled on Fred. He took the jug from my father's hand and took a polite drink. He handed it back. He stuck his other hand in the pocket of his overalls. They fitted very loose. You suddenly wondered what he had in that pocket.

I handed him the hatchet.

"Thank you, son. You know, Seminole has a meaning. The Seminole people were all kinds of tribes, but they fled to Florida because the Army was chasing them. Co-lon-neh and Sharp Knife would not leave them alone.

"Seminole means 'I ran away."'

Chief pitched the hatchet up and caught it, letting it make a hammer head stall in the air before his eyes.

"They say it will tum the opposite way on the other side of the Equator because of the rotation of the Earth. I believe them," he said.

"This roofing hatchet reminds me of the one my father used to use to make medicine. He used it to keep me from catching cold."

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He laughed grimly.

"You see, my father was a drunk. He was a blood, a Kickapoo, but the bottle had him. This was in Kansas.

We lived in a tarpaper shack beside the Santa Fe tracks. It was cold."

He smiled and tossed the hatchet up to catch it again after it did its dainty little hammer head stall, its murderous blade lined up neatly to do some business if thrown or swung.

Chief chuckled.

"I had no good clothes, just the ones we got from the churches. They humiliated him for being drunk.

They would give him over to some preacher to put him on the Jesus road and make him pure and holy and take away the demons that made him want to be drunk."

He gave Fred another one of those hot, penetrating stares.

"They made him paint the stripes on the street with a brush, then the curbs. They handcuffed him to a lawnmower and made him mow the lawn of the courthouse and jail and the cit hall. They made him wear clothes with stripes on them." He shrugged.

"He kept drinking. He drank until the day I found him dead, sitting in his chair in the tarpaper shack beside the railroad tracks.

"Anyway, back to what I was going to tell you. He used to go out in winter and find a den of skunks. They would be hibernating. They couldn't quite wake up. He would chop into the den from above with a hatchet like this. Then he would kill a couple of the damned things and skin them. He would rub me down with their stinking fat and put about four or five layers of clothes on me and send me to school that way."

Fred and my father exchanged glances.

"I guess that kept the other kids away from you," he said.

"Yeah, as the little school house heated up from the coal burning stove, that room would fill up with the smell of skunk and all the kids would move away from me. No virus would get to me because the white man's disease was far, far away from me. My father made medicine, you see."

After a moment in which no one laughed and no comment was made, he said "Good" in Kickapoo warrior dialect.

"Fred," he said, "say goodbye. Say good night. Is that enough medicine for you? Go away. Say good night."

"Aw, come on, Chief, I didn't mean no..."

Fred edged around, standing sideways to him to protect his nut sack and his vital areas. There was much of the truculent hip-slung, squint-eyed slab-muscled warrior left in all three of these war veterans.

They could fight at any moment. There was no one there to stop them.

"Fred," he said calmly, "say good night."

My father and I turned to go to the car, the five thousand dollar 98 Olds, and after a moment, Fred followed.

We got almost all the way back to town before anyone said anything. "You know," Fred said, "it's true. I had never really heard of the Kickapoos until I met Chief."

"Do tell," my father said. "They say Wichita, Wachita, Ouachita, Watashee and Waxahachie are all variations of dialect for the same meaning, which is 'myself.' The Spanish explorers would ask them what they called themselves, and they would tell them 'Myself."'

"Well, that's some kind of medicine," Fred said. He waited for a laugh. When there was no laugh, he clammed up.

We dropped him off where he had parked his pickup behind the motel.

-2It gives me a funny feeling to admit that in my travels since I have come to think of medicine as something caused by the totality of events and the way people speak to one another and treat each other.

Because that trip to east Texas was really the beginning of my taking out from home to head west and live the way I have always lived ever since.

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It was a Friday afternoon when the trouble started, as it always did. My mother had come home from her job and was busy getting dinner ready to put on the table. She called the lounge where she knew my father had been drinking steadily all afternoon long after he dropped me off at home.

I heard her tell him she was just about ready to put dinner on the table. He should come on home if he wanted to eat with the rest of us - at least eat a fresh home-cooked meal with the rest of us.

I knew what he was telling her by the expression on her face. "I think I'll just have one more drink."

It could only mean one thing. He would finally wind up at home several hours later and refuse to eat "that slop" she had kept warm in a Pyrex plate in the oven.

He would demand milk toast.

So, she would prepare slices of toast and heat up milk in a pan. Then she would throw the toast into the pan and let it soak for a short time and serve it in a bowl.

There has never been a messier, more disgusting thing for a drunk to eat than milk toast. But it was even worse than that. It wasn't cooked correctly.

He would go to the stove and fling each piece of toast back into the pan, making milk slop out all over the place. When it was finally done to his satisfaction, he would make a pig of himself with the sorry stuff, slurping and belching the whiskey past its nasty, glutinous mass.

This Friday, my mother wasn't having it.

She heard him yell to the bartender, "I ain't here."

That's when she left in her car, which was the five thousand dollar road beast he had worn out before he got the one he was driving, and headed for the lounge.

They say she never slowed down when she came of the highway, just plowed into the rear end of the five thousand dollar 98 Oldsmobile. The collision drove both cars through the cinder block wall. It turned over the pool table. It knocked over and shattered the juke box, scattering all the little 45 rpm records across the tile floor.

Drunks scattered and ran everywhere like the cockroaches they were. No one wanted to be there when the cops arrived.

My father poured his drink in a go cup and walked out on the highway in an attempt to hitch a ride to the house. No one was helping him.

A kid came by on a Mo-Ped, so he cold cocked him, got the damn thing going and rode it home.

He was just mixing himself another drink when the cops came to take him away.

I took out. I carried a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a little aluminum skillet and a fork and jack knife. I camped out in a pasture in a creek bottom until morning when I woke up to find a couple of wetbacks sitting on a dry rotted log looking at me.

They got to laughing, asked me for tobacco, which I had plenty of for smoking in a little pipe. After they had cigarettes, they rolled the first marijuana I ever saw.

They showed me how to smoke it. Man, I got high as could be. I thought of the "peace pipe," and I cracked up. You could have scratched your head and I would have lost control laughing about it. I had a little transistor radio tuned to rock and roll. I began to hear parts of the music I had never heard before. Everything made sense to me.

Suddenly, my world became very, very beautiful.

That's when I got hungry. They took me back to another camp deeper in the woods. It was my first trip into a hobo jungle. What a culture shock. I was about to learn all about the roads men take and make. Very few of them are paved.

I stuck around a couple of days before I caught a west bound to San Antonio, or so I thought. The damn thing broke up half way there. I was learning. But within a few days, I was on the California coast.

How I got there and the people I met during those few days is the stuff of my life. All this here is just sorry history. © 2008 - Parks

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TIMELINE: Ann Walters

A Selection Of Poetry And Prose

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The Way Light Falls at Four in the Morning This is not a question of light or dark, of shadow or unshadow.

This is not air on skin. An open window through which trees can be felt breathing, a wall, solid against the back, or a pillow tossed aside, useless for comfort, pointlessly malleable.

This is no palm to the forehead, no taut muscle at the base of the jaw.

Not the moment when the phone call comes and every fear is met, but the one after, when the phone falls and the breath taken in has not yet been let out.

Ann Walters

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Desert Roses, 1994 by Ann Walters

Roses flourish in my garden, even in this desert, while the lump under my arm swells like a bud high on Spring. Lizards practice their push-ups on the concrete patio.

By summer I rise at 3:30 every morning and race the sun to see which one of us will start her work first. She always seems to rise more quickly on the Reservation. The lump has fingered its way into my breast and it itches when the shaman offers his blessing for our survey crew.

The roses are never angry that I leave the watering until evening. They stretch their petals like a woman's lips spread in anticipation, the fallen ones a mound of velvet in my hand.

The night before my surgery it is one hundred degrees at midnight. By the moon's light I can smell the sweet release of roses turning in their beds. A thorn draws blood like wished-for rain. At the base of a rose, a cicada crawls out from under its old skin, singing a new song. ©-2008-Walters

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The Dancer She was riverine, fluid. Grace in her fingers, in the pads of her feet,

in the supple way she stooped from the waist to pluck notes one by one and lift them in the arc of her arms, offering music to the sky like so many songs of birds, like rain falling upward and condensing into dreams that washed her face with a simile of spring.

She was liquid motion. She was the dance.

Ann Walters

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Unexpected Bats It was something like football on tv, the difference between jelly and jam.

Too many stars crowd the sky, as though everyone has placed a thought there.

Driving alone, I remembered all the things I should have said to make you miss me.

A steering wheel wet with honest need, unexpected bats flying at the windshield like accusations. I brought a six-pack from the comer store and we drank it on the floor with the tv off.

Like the first night away from home, we were edging around a pool into which we had already jumped.

Ann Walters

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To Pierce the Sky On flitter-moist mornings when swallows scream at grey linen clouds, we tether ourselves to the jubilant blue above, hitching gossamer ropes and hoping to rise through the pearling mist that dampens our business suits.

We are cumuli, tumbled together into piles of soft muted wool.

Pinned down by the weighted sky, we strive to fly farther than the fine line of our expectations.

Ann Walters

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In Memoriam You knew our names and called them out as clearly as a beloved's.

You summoned our brightest beats from their hiding spaces; you held them up to view with untrimmed delight.

We will build a fire in the center of the night in the middle of a river that you not mistake us standing alone one by one yearning toward the sound of your voice, gone now but still wrapped around us, proof against the chill.

Wendell M. Tomlin, Jr

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MUDMEN

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Script

THE MUDMEN

by Mikal Hubber

(Script Excerpt by MIkal Hubber) FADE IN: A slow, stately passage down from a reddish sky, towards a battle-tom field far below.

Two jagged trenches face each other across a mile of barbed wire, shell craters and littered wreckage.

Shells fall in the distance. A faint murmur of war.

Two uniformed SOLDIERS occupy a crowded trench, but they are the only living souls left.

A fast blur of war images, then the muddy, board-lined trench surrounds us. Ammo boxes line the sagging walls, along which several bodies, Allied and German, lie rotting. Distant flashes, BOOMS of artillery.

The SOLDIERS sit in ponchos and soup-plate helmets, dripping wet, rifles propped on sandbags.

A cupped hand holds a handrolled smoke out of the drizzling rain. The cigarette glows faintly, then the red cherry disappears as a raindrop strikes it.

The hand raises the smoke towards a shadowed, gaunt and dirty face. Cracked lips try in vain to draw in some smoke, then crinkle in disgust.

SOLDIER (OS) (Tosses the smoke) Damn. This bloody rain.

SOLDIER TWO (OS) I’ve still got some dry, but my papers are soaked through.

SOLDIER ONE Well, believe it or don’t, it’s yer lucky day. Somehow, mine have managed to stay dry enou- SHELL!

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A shell descends with a horrid WHINE. It EXPLODES with red light and thunder .

The DOUGHBOYS duck and cover.

Dirt patters down.

SOLDIER ONE Aw, ‘crap cakes’, not again.

One more shell lands, then there’s a lull.

SOLDIER ONE Damn it all, I’ve had enough of this din.

SOLDIER TWO (Half-rising) And this damn mud. When I get back to Winnipeg, I’m gonnaA loud BANG nearby half-drowns his words.

SOLDIER ONE God, get me out of here!

As the debris from the shell blows up and away, we arc with it out of the trench, and from high above we see: • Overhead in sepia-tone of the trench zone, a muddy, TORN-UP field under skies red and smoky • Into a trench, past a dead soldier’s smiling face • The two SOLDIERS on their knees, hands over ears • The corpses lined up along the trench • A GERMAN SOLDIER among a pile of Allied dead • ON the GERMAN as his eyes open • The two SOLDIERS rising slowly • SHELLS explode on the horizon • The SOLDIERS duck once more • The GERMAN’s hand holding a potato masher grenade • SOLDIER ONE’s face as he turns to meet the open hateful eyes of the GERMAN • SOLDIER ONE covers SOLDIER TWO with his body SOLDIER ONE (Shouts) • Grenade!

• BLAM!

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• Another smaller series of BANGS as SOLDIER TWO empties his rifle into the German • Smoke gradually clears, revealing SOLDIER TWO cradling SOLDIER ONE’s dying body.

SERIES OF SHOTS: • A ruined church, a ruptured tank in its doorway • BOMBED-OUT houses, a destroyed schoolhouse • A line of chest-high bullet marks along a wall • Shriveled crops, bordered by bare, wintry trees • ON THE TREES, as they speed through the seasons leaves sprout, spread, fade and fall • ON THE TREES, as a GIANT HAND reaches down and adjusts a tree like God’s own gardener • PLASTIC COWS under the lichen and stick trees • A PLASTIC HORSE by a painted cardboard barn • Lines of ARMY MEN face each other across a muddy field strewn with wrecked machines, wrecked men • Two YOUNG BOYS stare down at the miniature carnage they have created.

EXT. BACKYARD DAY (1965) A clapboard house, two young generals bent over a diorama of considerable size and scope, filling the entire sandbox. Wash blows whitely in the wind.

BILLY Wow, Davey, that looks really real. I think it’s finally finished.

DAVEY It isn’t ...right. Not yet it isn’t. I think...

(Looks at model) You think I oughta chop the guys up more? Add more red paint?

He smiles, and shakes his head.

BILLY Naw, it’s just perfect.

CU: A twisted plastic soldier, horribly realistic.

BILLY I perticlar like the guy caught in the barbwire. Betcha that left a mark.

Looks at Davey with admiration.

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DAVEY Thanks, Billy, but... something still ain’t right. It’s ... alright, but not like I remember it.

The two boys consider.

Their mother’s shadow appears in the screen door.

RITA(OS) Boys! Wash your hands and come eat your supper.

DAVEY I BILLY ‘ kay , Mom. They carefully pull a tarp over the model, then saunter inside.

SUPER TITLE: FRIDAY EXT. FARMLAND DAY • Prosperous farms and fields • Walking pace along a long gravel road • Two pairs of small rubber boots, walking • Pass a willow tree near an old wagon • Slow before a small neat white farm, • AFARM WIFE hanging wash • A PIE warming on the window ledge • An old DOG sleeping under apple trees • WATER bubbling up in a clear spring ***

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In the Depths of Winter by Nancy Norton In the horrible hoarfrost heart of winter love loses its luster, the silver spark dulls to gunmetal gray.

A courtly boss turns manic and, blowing hard, turns his loyal supporters against him.

A winter coat develops a terminal case of static, grows worn and frowsy, tears its lining in despair.

The whole family of a dear friend, gripped with cold, sapped of energy, can eat only frozen vegetables.

The canal divulges a drainage problem, collects trash and rancid foam, drives the swans to leave for cleaner waters.

Bulbs refuse to bloom. Flowers reluctantly emerge lacking joie de vivre, refusing to dance with the ruthless wind.

Hearty winter meals gag throats.

Wool knit hats cut off circulation to brains.

Sweaters, scarves and gloves suffocate skin.

Wrapped and weighted, wretched souls are dragged ever down into drear winter's cold heart.

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White Out by Nancy Norton White sky tonight.

The plane is covered in de-icing foam that streams like electronic noise across the windows, snow blinding us as we make the final run down the icy way to the sky.

I wish us into the air; feel the miracle of this metal missile filled with lost souls lifting into the bli zzard .

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Cold, Cold Heart

by Jim Haughey

He wasn't sure how long the body had been lying up there. One, maybe two weeks. The smell had settled so thickly in the bedroom that though he lingered there only for a few minutes at a time, he was astonished at just how thoroughly the odor invaded the fabric of his clothes. The smell of organs atrophying. The eye balls turning to small orbs of dull gray jelly.

He should have burned his clothes, but he never liked the idea of throwing away anything that still seemed to be in working order. After each visit to the room, he made it a point to change his shirt and trousers and carry them out to the rose beds behind the house where he'd shovel a few layers of topsoil over them , leaving them there over night to let the damp soil do its work. But even after vigorous scrubbings with carbolic soap and warm water, the clothes still retained a faint sour smell.

Though it was mid-April, the countryside was still reluctant to shake off the last grip of winter. That morning, he'd been to the cemetery to place some fresh flowers at Robert and Rosemary's grave. Just a few stems of garden roses he'd bought at Green Acres Nursery. Mr. Ludden placed them in a plastic vase but warned that they probably wouldn't last the night as a late frost had been forecast. He didn't care, though. It was the least he could do. After all he hadn't exactly wrapped himself in a robe of grief in the years after their deaths. And it passed the time. It was like work. "Work is all you have in life, George," his father used to say. And even though the old man might have been wrong about a lot of things, at least he'd got that right.

He'd been thinking more of his father lately. And his mother. A diminutive woman who stammered slightly when agitated. She was close to forty when she met his father. Robert and he were born barely one year apart soon thereafter. Perhaps it was two years. He wasn't sure. His memory had lately begun to fade in and out like a poor radio signal. Sometimes there was no static, and the reception came in loud and clear. Other times, everything seemed garbled. Dates got jumbled. Names became as incomprehensible as the markings on rune stones. The dead lost all chronology and drifted through his memory like wind-blown spores.

His mother fawned over her "wee boys." She insisted on making all their baby clothes herself and

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decorating their bedroom with homespun quilts cross-stitched with inspirational lines plucked from goodhousekeeping books. That was the part he couldn't quite understand . This selfless devotion. While he and Robert dressed in the best finery, she wore long, dull brown and gray matronly dresses with high collarettes and small bows in faded blues and yellows. She kept her hair equally austere, always parting it stiffly down the middle after the fashion of her mother and grandmother before her.

It was in matters relating to discipline, though, that his mother deferred to his father. He got his height from his father but not his muscular build. Like his father, Robert had been a school rugby standout, a fact George was constantly reminded of when growing up as the sideboard in the living room teemed with their rugby trophies.

With his high vaulted chest, thickly muscled legs and large, powerful hands, his father was a daunting presence in any company. The competitive spirit that made him such a success on the rugby pitch served him well in his career, too, rising quickly as he did to one of the top administrative posts in the Northern Ireland Post Office.

Despite the cold spring, he extended the length of his walks along the laugh shore, sometimes walking as far as the marina where he'd watch the sleeker, faster boats bridle their diesel power in observance of the no wake regulations. If it didn't rain, he'd walk to the end of the causeway where he'd sit and watch the cormorants plunge beneath the gray water only to emerge sometimes as far as forty feet away in a small explosion of foam. It was a dangerous stretch of shoreline. "No Swimming" signs were posted for miles in both directions. The sand barges that dredged the laugh floor were long gone now. Gone too were any signs of their work, except for the deep trenches that lay hidden beneath the immediate offshore waters. "The laugh always gives up her dead," the old people said whenever a drowning victim's body washed up, but he knew if you sank into one of those holes you'd never be heard from again.

He knew he'd have to do something about the body sooner or later. He couldn't just let it lie up there forever. He kept the door and windows to the bedroom closed at first, but the smell spread slowly through the walls like a silent invader. "This unfortunate business" is how he began to describe it. Sometimes while he puttered about in the garden, he'd catch himself repeating these words. He marveled at how everything had quickly escalated. But life was like that. You'd be motoring along a country road, steering the car cautiously between the lines when a slight jerk of the wheel, a bump in the road, a slick spot on the verge would send the car careening down a hillside. And that was all it would take. One half spin of the wheel and there'd be no more road. No more life safely contained within the roadside margins. That was what his life had become, a seemingly endless car wreck. Everything before now part of a life that no longer seemed temporally attached to this current existence.

And to think it all began with a cold sore. Was it really four years since Albert set foot outside the house? Or five? Again, he couldn't remember. He'd come home early from work that afternoon and found Albert staring into the bathroom mirror while trying to lance what appeared to be a painfully dark red boil on his neck.

Later, when the boil receded and a crescent-shaped rash appeared, Albert refused to venture outside, and he had had to call his friend Aubrey to tell him that Albert would no longer be working as a mechanic for Avery's bus fleet. It was a humiliating experience. He had gone to a lot of trouble to get Albert that job in the first place and this was the thanks he got.

Even when the rash gradually faded, Albert refused to leave the house, and the mention of doctors only triggered further waves of anxiety.

"You think I'm mental, don't you?" He told George. "You just want to get me locked up. Throw away the key. Just like you did to my mother."

There was nothing he could have said that would have made him or Albert feel any better, so to avoid further conflict, he accommodated his nephew's self-imposed house arrest. He arranged for a barber to come

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every month or so to trim Albert's hair. He applied for disability benefits. He had a doctor who was a friend of one of his fellow lodge members come down and sign the necessary paper work confirming that Albert suffered from some sort of nervous disposition. "An abnormal hypervigilance" is how the doctor described it.

Taking care of Albert gradually consumed all of his spare time. At first Albert had been fairly self sufficient He cooked his own meals and washed his own clothes, but then he gradually began to let himself go. He stopped shaving. He'd go for days without getting out of his nightgown. Finally even the confines of the house became too big. Trips to the bathroom lay beyond his range. Was it any wonder that George soon found himself waking up in the middle of the night hoping at first light that he would find his nephew stretched out stiff between the bed sheets, the eyes fixed in a polar glare at the ceiling.

Even before he had become Albert's keeper, his few love entanglements had been fleeting affairs, most of which foundered when he felt his private, separate life threatened. As age slowly transformed his lean physique to a soft, rubicund paunchiness, the only women he seemed to attract now were widows more preoccupied with long-term commitment, but even they didn't want to live in a house with a raving lunatic barking from an upstairs bedroom.

He tried to trace exactly when his car left the road. When exactly it had strayed beyond those thin white lines. It wasn't when the bed-wetting started. He'd put up with that disagreeableness for months, turning the mattress over every morning to air out the briny odor. Perhaps it was an accumulation of things--the constant burden of being responsible for someone else's basic needs. Answering every beck and call. Bringing up the papers. Fetching glasses of Lucozade. Killing wasps in the window sill. Opening and closing doors. Emptying the commode. He could barely look after himself never mind being somebody else's nursemaid.

The noise was the worst part. Some nights Albert would shout for hours on end. Most of it made little sense. Just a stream of invective aimed at the world. One night he swore he'd tape Albert's mouth if he didn't shut up.

"You killed my mother," Albert roared. "You killed her. She couldn't go on after you abandoned her.

You oul' heartless bastard. Now you're trying to kill me. Don't think I don't know what you're up to. You're trying to poison me. Murderer. Murderer."

The words kept assailing George's ears long after Albert howled himself to sleep. Not for the first time had he been struck by the irony that he was in the insurance business. But dealing with strangers' accounts was one thing: he owed them nothing. They paid for his help. What he hated was being freighted down by family obligation. It wasn't fair. Just because he'd never married himself or had children didn't give others the right to assume that he could carry everyone on his back. He wanted no more extra responsibilities, no more straying beyond the ruled lines of the balance sheet. He was determined not to share any more of his life or time with anyone else.

When Albert stopped eating, George knew it wouldn't take long for the whole "unfortunate business" to play out. At first he would sneak in and set the tray at the bottom of the bed while Albert dozed but quit when he could no longer justify all the broken crockery.

Some days he wished that what was left of his memory would self-erase altogether. That was what he wanted. A blank tape. But the unsavory memories crowded out any recollection of happier times with their willful bleating. Some days he blamed himself. Other days he felt he was the victim.

After all it wasn't like he had made their choices for them. Of course he hadn't helped. He may not have held their heads under the water, but he hadn't thrown them a life preserver either.

Heaven knows he'd warned Robert that marrying a Catholic wouldn't be well received, but Robert didn't care to listen. In some ways he envied Robert's disregard for what others would say, but he seriously doubted whether he could have done such a thing. Still, he had helped them book their honeymoon in Portrush. At such short notice it was the best he could do.

They used to go there themselves. He and Miriam. He hated the crowds, though. Especially the throngs at the Blue Pool and the South Pier. He always made reservations at the Northern Counties Hotel, and while Miriam collected shells along the strand, he'd spend the mornings at the local links. Sometimes they walked round Ramore Head stopping occasionally to watch the elderly men and women in their bleach-white linens bowling at the Recreation Grounds. They liked to eavesdrop on their conversations, sprinkled as they were with details from the local obituaries and the trivialities of small town gossip. There was something graceful

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about their sideways talk as they bowled on the fastidiously maintained Cumberland turf. Their lives all privilege, worlds away from hardship and despair.

There had always been an unspoken rivalry between them. He envied Robert's movie-star good looks and cavalier disregard. His sense of adventure. When Robert returned home after working for several years as a croupier on the P & O's far-eastern routes, he noticed how friends and family revered him as though he were some kind of returning explorer. That was before the war. He himself never felt any urge to travel abroad. The uncertainty of it all scared him. And so he had to tolerate his brother getting all the attention, like some exotically colored butterfly, alongside which George saw himself as an old, dust-speckled moth.

Coulter's public house lay at a rural crossroads a few miles outside Moira. With the war on, they often rode out there on their bicycles after petrol rationing began. A converted barn, even in the summertime a fire often roared in its black hearth, and the white-washed interior pooled with loud talk and the intermittent static buzz as someone dialed through the airwave frequencies on the radiogram.

Above the chatter, cigarette smoke hung in thick blue folds among the rafters. American soldiers drank there frequently, and even during the blackout, heavy muslin shades were drawn and bottles of beer popped by guttering candlelight.

It was Christmas and Coulter's was crowded with holiday drinkers and soldiers enjoying a night's pass. Catholics and Protestants often mingled freely there, and with the war on, old tensions were further sidelined by the war and speculation about when the expected Allied push would come.

Nervous with the rumors that some of them would be shipped out to Italy soon, the soldiers couldn't see the bottom of a beer bottle quickly enough.

Doreen Coulter was there that night helping out behind the bar as usual with her mother, Winnie.

George had had his eye on Doreen for some time now. With her violet eyes and shoulder-length brown hair, Doreen's schoolgirl looks belied her maturity. She had sensed George's interest in her but had grown impatient with his boyish reticence.

With few women in the bar that night, the soldiers flirted with Doreen, teasing her about her home knit pink cardigan. One soldier, a stocky kid with a thick New York accent, caressed Doreen's hand every time she handed him back his change. The other soldiers laughed as he winked conspiratorially back at them.

"C'mon now, babe. Don't be shy. Let me read that cute little paw of yours," he would say as he spread Doreen's hand out, feigning interest in examining the lines on her palm.

Though she pretended to ignore the soldiers, George could tell she was offended. Robert just shook his head.

"Don't bother your head. They're only fooling. Probably the last chance they'll get to have a bit of fun."

George sat there drinking quietly, saying nothing.

Later in the evening, the soldiers were joined by three girls Robert recognized from the factory.

They appeared to know the soldiers quite well, and extra chairs were commandeered as the group formed a circle close to the fire. George watched the stocky soldier intently. He hated everything about him. His white, even teeth. His constantly shifting eyes. His weasel-like furtiveness. The way he lit a cigarette and extinguished the match with a flamboyant wave of the hand. The placing of his broad hands on the women's shoulders, his head bowed close to their ears as though he couldn't hear what they were saying.

Each drink seemed to magnify his resentment. How he hated the Yank's booming voice. The way it laughed at its own jokes which he thought were more vulgar than witty. Several other local men sat at the bar observing the soldiers also. They raised and lowered their glasses, every so often swapping glares of sullen hostility.

At closing, the young stocky soldier got his arm round one of the factory girls and whispered something in her ear. She rocked backward, giggling.

"Where are you goin' with your wee hooer, Yank?"

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It was one of the local men. He slid off his barstool and stood up, his hands stuffed into his coat pockets. Threats were soon exchanged as friends of both men gathered round. The soldiers were asked to step outside. As Robert tried to reason with one of the local hotheads, the stocky soldier pointed a finger.

"Any time shit heads. Any time."

The words had scarcely been uttered when a beer bottle grazed the stocky soldier's head. Curses and screams punctuated the rumble of boots and clatter of breaking glass as men slipped and fell among the overturned barstools and card tables. In the middle of the melee, the silver gleam of a knife pierced the fabric of Robert's coat, and a dark, arterial crimson stain quickly soaked his chest. As Robert fell, the brawl melted into a diorama of broken images. Voices blended together in a shrill choral wave of sound.

George shoved his handkerchief into the wound to try and stanch the bleeding, but the cut was too deep.

The picture-making mechanism in George's brain preserved these memories like long-lost negatives. Robert's bloodied under-vest on Dr. Dowey's surgery floor. The dark wine-colored blotches on his trousers as he lay lifeless on the table. The fingernails still black with the soot and cinders from cleaning out the fireplace that morning. Dr. Dowey's nurse, Mrs. Gracey, guiding Rosemary into the waiting room and holding her hands.

The next morning, as the falsetto cries of children playing hopscotch echoed from the front street, George wheeled the bicycles round the back of Robert's house.

As the weather grew warmer and the trees threshed into full foliage, he felt strangely animated. He wasn't sure what the source of the impulse was, but he welcomed the unexpected energy. He couldn't wait to get out in the garden. The only thing his father ever showed any interest in growing was gooseberries. He remembered the old man explaining how if there were too many shoots, the bush would produce smaller berries with poor flavor. How careful pruning helped the shoots form more permanent fruiting spurs. And yet, despite all the care his father heaped on his gooseberry bushes, he never picked the berries when they ripened and forbade anyone else from picking them, either. Instead, he would just sit by the kitchen window and watch the birds plunder the fruit and the sawfly caterpillars attack the leaves till the delicate branches were bare and what was left of the berries rotted and fell to the ground.

He drove out to the new shopping center and bought a pair of shears so that he could trim back the shrubbery. Then he weeded out the bedding plots and the flowerbeds at the back of the house and along the driveway and raked in bag after bag of potting soil. When the flowerbeds were finished, he spread potting soil round the base of the pear trees . Later, at Green Acres, he sought advice on what to plant and where, and over the succeeding days, he put in dozens of Magnolias and Enkianthus, established rose bushes along both sides of the driveway, and filled the space between each bush with small Campanules. Along the front of the house, he replaced the creeping mint with mixed borders of Cowslips and Peruvian Lilies and planted Crocuses and Tulip bulbs for the following spring.

The following weekend, he climbed the ladder and hammered lines of steel wire into the gable walls for the Clematis and Virginia Creeper and staked a row of pine saplings at the bottom of the garden to serve as a future windbreak. When he got tired, he sat on the back step and surveyed the garden. Sometimes he ate his lunch there while listening to his portable radio, tuning into Radio Four whenever he got tired oflistening to all the fuss being made over these so-called Civil Rights marchers.

"What was your father like?" Miriam had asked him on their second or third date.

"My father?" he said, unsure of the intent of the question and surprised by its direct line of enquiry. "Yes. What was he like ... as a father?"

This was another habit he had acquired recently. Re-imagining conversations with the dead. In the two years that he and Miriam were together, it always took several drinks to erode his usual reticence and distrust of intimacy. But eventually he seemed to be aware of it: as though he was observing himself through a camera.

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Miriam was a widow, but unlike the other women he had dated, she shared his reluctance to commit to anything more than friendship. She'd been a high school English teacher in a former life. Married to a librarian who showed more interest in maintaining the card catalogue than their marriage. He died from a stroke.

"Just keeled over while re-shelving books," she said. "They found him on the floor with a volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire still in his hands."

In their two years together, George had developed a certain fondness for her. A feeling not quite unlike love. He wondered whether she felt the same way about him but never asked. Later, he would remember this moment and wonder what would have been had he met Miriam thirty years before. The unborn children. The empty photo albums. The never-to-be bought Christmas ties and after-shave. All the non-years that couldn't be undone.

One thing he found odd about her at first was that she loved country music and was a big fan of Hank Williams. Like many of his unexamined prejudices, he'd always equated that sort of music with a lowbrow sensibility. Music for those with no discriminating taste. Unlike the classic pedigree of Debussy or Sibelius whose music he often listened to on The Third Programme. Yet the more he listened to these songs about broken hearts and lost highways, the more he began to suspect that he only listened to classical music because it projected a certain degree of urbanity that he may not have possessed at all.

This was what he'd liked about Miriam. Her self-honesty. Her tastes were formed by what brought her joy, not affectation. She knew who she was and what she liked and didn't like. For a time he wondered whether she knew him better than he knew himself. Whenever she bought him gifts, he could tell that they had been chosen with considerable forethought. Except for the time she gave him that terrible novel for his birthday. He wasn't fond of fiction, but he had read the book so that he would have something to say if asked. He preferred history and biographies and found the book tough going in places. He was particularly disturbed by the behavior of the emotionally repressed main character and wondered whether Miriam's giving him the novel was her way of making some sort of statement about his life.

The night she pressed the questions about his father, he remembered feeling somewhat conscious of his attempt to assume an air of garrulity, the sort of demeanor he observed in other people who he regarded as chirpy conversationalists.

"Oh, he was always a very busy man, you know. Very busy. But he still took time when he had some to be with us."

That was what he had told Miriam, or words to that effect. Yet he remembered that look on her face as though she sensed that his voice lacked the appropriate degree of conviction. The moment passed though and the rest of the conversation quickly dissipated into aimless chatter about health matters and the weather.

On another occasion as they walked along the beach at Tyrella, she asked again about his father. He chose his words carefully. Even though the old man had been dead for years, his authority still reached beyond the grave. He couldn't recall one moment in their relationship that wasn't constrained by the authority of that archaic moustache or the formality of those starched collars.

"Oh, anything really," Miriam had said. "Tell me what you remember about the place. What was it like?"

Somehow there had been a slip of the tongue about Fallowfield. But what could he tell her? That it was a boarding school for boys? Boys alleged to have emotional and behavioral problems? Yes, his father had sent him there because he believed it would straighten him out. Those were his very words.

"Straighten him out."

"Why did he think you needed straightening out?" Miriam had asked.

He was in the garden again. The spade heavily caked with mud. He leaned over on the handle and watched as a beady-eyed magpie stepped gingerly along the garden path, its black and white coloring incongruous to its leafy green surroundings.

"He thought I was always getting into mischief," he said to himself. "You see because he was ... he

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was away at work so much, when he came home, he got regaled with all the little things I'd been up to. So he must have thought I was becoming a bit of a mischief maker."

He laughed at the thought of it--as if his childhood antics could in any way be equated with the mayhem caused by the long-haired louts he saw running round the streets these days with their angry signs.

Of course there had been that incident where the rear window of Mr. Browne's car got broken and a constable arrived at the front door.

"Mr. Noble, we believe your son George has been in a bit of bother," the policeman had said. George stared at the spade. But it was an accident. And for that he was sent away.

He stepped into the bedroom with the tea towel pressed firmly against his nose. The body seemed to have recessed further into the mattress. He could see the tip of the head, the forehead colored with a purplish hue. He pulled the bed sheets back. The pajamas hung looser now and blotches of a mold-like substance formed colonies here and there on the exposed chest. He had read that the terrible smell was due to the release of gases. The lungs putrefied first. Cells simplified. Proteins broke down. Enzymes ate away at skin tissue. He studied the face for a moment, etched as it was with a look of profound sadness as if all the indignities of life had suddenly registered themselves in one glare.

He had just started work at the office in Belfast when he first clapped eyes on that face. Back then it belonged to a little boy of not more than two or three years of age. It was probably the first time Rosemary had ever traveled to Belfast on her own. All that morning he had wasted time mentally mapping out the route she would take to his office. Train to Great Victoria. Cross the Grosvenor Road. Directions to Castle Street. Down Howard Street. Left on to Donegall Square. The tall, gray office buildings blocking out the sunlight on the side streets. City Hall. Clang of trolley buses. The Great Hall, the Banquet Hall, the Courtyard, the Greek and Italian marbles dusted with the gray grit and grime of wartime neglect. The high squat statue of Queen Victoria, her heavy-lidded, gelid eyes peering purposelessly at the passing trams.

Then down Donegall Place past Robinson and Cleaver's to Castle Junction. High Street to the right, Castle Street on the left. The usual crowds milling round the City Transport Kiosk. Schoolboys ogling the latest beach wraps and telescopic swim suits in the windows of the clothing stores. Royal Avenue and beyond that York Street's broad thoroughfare with the scorched support walls of the firebombed linen mill.

With his father's connections he landed a job with Crawford and Gillespie, Insurance Agents, in a second floor office at the top of a semi-lit, narrow staircase. He remembered shifting in his chair, trying to assume the appropriate authoritative pose as he awaited her arrival, looking resplendent in his tailor-cut blue suit, his hair heavily oiled, his whiskerless jaw redolent with after-shave as if posing for a portrait. Everything about him bore the marmoreal tidiness of a monument.

He could see it all as if it were only yesterday. The wisps of cigarette smoke curling from his ashtray.

The typescript of a heavily annotated legal document lying on the desk sprinkled with curlicues of pencil lead.

She remarked about the noisy soldiers on the train, and he said something about the Yanks slapping Red Biddy into them and jitterbugging at Lavery's. As he spoke, his eyebrows wrinkled theatrically in mock disgust.

He noticed that she was staring at the picture on the wall above his head. It was a photograph of him standing alongside the Prime Minister, Lord Brookeborough. Dressed in duck-hunting gear, the group posed with hunting rifles cradled in the crooks of their arms.

"So, what can I do for you?" he asked. But he knew what she wanted.

She told him how hard the last seven months had been and how Robert's pension was barely enough to make ends meet. She didn't mention the growing copper stains above the cistern, the brown, shiny earwigs that emerged from the cracks round the kitchen sink or the street front window sills which sprouted little burred clusters of moss. The other morning, as she swept the floor of the larder, she noticed mice droppings mixed in with breadcrumbs and blue-gray tufts of lint.

While Rosemary spoke, his thoughts were swept up in a flurry of self-pity and regret as he searched to

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justify what he was about to say. When she first telephoned him to say she was corning to see him, he briefly entertained the idea of setting up a trust fund for her and Albert, but after further reflection, he realized that this was not possible. His hands were tied.

Rosemary was only nineteen when she had Albert, and the subsequent furor over having a child out of wedlock triggered a vicious round of gossip among the more genteel families of the town.

Mortified that their son Robert had brought shame to the family name, the parents vainly wasted the energy of their last years trying to reestablish their social pedigree. They held lavish dinner parties. They became more active in their church. They donated money to all the proper charities. But they were never able to reconnect with their old-moneyed friends who maintained a genteel distance.

When she was finished, he straightened out the folds in his waistcoat then reached over and picked up a small silver porringer that an ink stand partially obscured from her view. He turned it over in his hands as though he were an antiquarian looking for an engraving that might reveal its place of ongm.

He looked up at Rosemary. When he spoke, his voice quavered as though he hadn't spoken in weeks: "Have you looked for a job yourself?"

"Aye, but with the ways things are, there's not much to be found. I work three mornings a week in Murray's bakery but sure that's only a few shillings." He breathed heavily through the dark embrasures of his nostrils.

"Times are hard all over, Rosemary."

"Well, I was wondering whether I should move." "Where would you go? Belfast's hardly safe."

"I know. I know. Maybe Lisburn. I was wondering whether you could help me find a job there."

"Well as you know, times are hard all over. I'm not sure I'll be able to help you there. Do you have any secretarial skills? Typing?"

She nodded. She'd left school at 16 to work as a hemstitcher sewing the seams on handkerchiefs but quit when she got pregnant with Albert.

There was an awkward silence. He offered tea. She bit into a bun, licking the trace of powdered sugar from her lips.

"I was wondering whether you could put me to work here. I could do messages and clean up the office."

As she spoke, her eyes surveyed the room, taking brief inventory of what could be done to brighten up the antiseptic surroundings. He lifted his cup to his lips, took a sip then delicately placed it back on its saucer. When he opened his mouth, he knew the words would tumble forth in well-rehearsed order.

"We've had to cut back here ourselves. We've four other office workers besides me and Mr. Gillespie and to tell you the truth we can hardly afford to pay them. Just last week there we had to let our invoice typist go. People are more worried these days, Rosemary, about where their next meal's coming from than buying life insurance, I can tell you."

She stared at the partly chewed bun on his plate. The wafer-thin crust had caved in, and the cream wedge lay exposed.

"I don't need a whole lot, George. Just a steady wage. That house is too big for us and Robert's pension only goes so far."

He looked into her eyes. They were red-rimmed and tired from hours of sleeplessness and tears in a lonely bedroom. He wanted to do something for her, but he knew the situation. Besides Albert there were other considerations to be made. What would his district lodge say if he hired a Catholic? It was true. He couldn't really afford to take on another employee, but if the situation had been right, he could have made allowances.

"What about your own people?" he asked.

She told him how they kept to themselves now. How they crossed over to the other side of the street whenever they saw her. Her father had died the year before from emphysema. All those years at the linen mill had finally caught up with him.

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George gave her his handkerchief and then stared out the window at the office building across the street, his eyes scanning its gray stone facade as though he were looking for a previously undetected architectural fault. There would be no Twelfth parade in the city that year. It had been suspended for the duration of the war.

But the situation was impossible. Robert was his brother, but he had been out of touch with local realities. Those years with the P&O may have changed him but sure where did that get you round here? No. The war was going to end soon and things would get back to normal. He had to be mindful of the future. He shifted the legs of his chair sharply on the smooth parquet floor. He had no time to embroider his remarks with false assurances.

"Look, I'll see what I can do. I have a lunch meeting with a client in a few minutes so I'll have to go. Oh, I almost forgot."

He opened a drawer and pulled out a blue velvet bag sealed with a small, braided gold rope.

"Here. Here's a wee something for the child. I've been saving them. Maybe you can take him to Bangor for the day. Tell him not to be buying too much rock. Rot his teeth out."

He laughed awkwardly. When she made no immediate move, he pushed the bag of coins to the table's edge till she grabbed it before it fell into the folds of her coat. He reached over, lifted her limp hand and shook it weakly then stepped round the desk and opened the office door.

"When will I hear from you?" She asked.

"Let's wait till the July holiday is over. Now I can't promise you anything." "Any help at all George, please."

"Well, I'll see what I can do. Check with Joan when the next train for Lurgan is. Cheerio now."

He avoided making eye contact with her as she got up to leave. When she looked back, the phone rang and he waved as he picked up the receiver.

In the distance, over the tops of the reeds and the choppy water, he could barely make out a thin wafer of land: Toland's Flats, a small island inhabited only by roosting wildfowl. Local birders said it was a good place to see Great Crested Glebes, but without his binoculars, he could see nothing but the faint trace of land on the gray horizon.

That night he sat at the kitchen table and tried to compose a letter. He scribbled down a few sentences only to score heavily through what he had written before tearing the page out. He didn't know where to begin. All he had was facts. Rosemary dead in London. A cold, damp flat in Kilburn.

Prescription bottles lining her bedside table. Albert found her face down in the bed sheets. Choked on her own vomit.

Outside, the summer sun dipped below the curve of the earth. There was a gentle thrumming on the kitchen window as a solitary moth beat its wings against the glass. Its eyes two bright red nubs.

By mid-morning, the garden hummed with the shrill of insects among the flowerbeds and shrubbery. Despite all the work, he noticed that his mood was turning increasingly introspective. The past intruded more and more. He was no longer sure that he could trust his own memories: Fallowfield with its Elysian fields, his overbearing father, the eclipse of his ambition, the curious absence of grief over the break-up with Miriam. She had booked a holiday for two in Crete, but he couldn't go because of commitments at work. It was round about the time President Kennedy visited Dublin. He thought of the postcards he'd never send and the beaches they'd never share. The sunsets they'd never linger over. In the following days, as he took stock, he suspected that his life had been a charade. That what he had lost had been unappreciated and that was why it had been taken from him.

The man who cut Albert's hair phoned wondering why he hadn't heard from George recently and he'd had to conjure up a weak lie about Albert not wanting any visitors at the moment. As he set the receiver down, he sensed that his explanation had been less than convincing. Thank God there

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were no relatives to drop in unannounced, and the nearest neighbor was a good half-mile up the road.

But "this unfortunate business" chafed him. Something had to be done and soon. He couldn't continue to shutter off a wing of the house. And questions would be asked. Disposing of the body wasn't the problem.

The problem was how to explain. A bedridden invalid didn't just disappear.

He'd waited too long now. He knew that. He had hesitated because he knew the coroner would pronounce the cause of death as due to starvation. And now with the flesh withering away on the bones, what else was there to conclude? Why would a man let his nephew's dead body solder itself on to the bed sheets? There seemed to be no way out of this mess.

The house was in County Fermanagh, and it took the better part of a day to drive over there from Belfast. He had had this image in his head of a draughty old workhouse. But it couldn't have been anymore different. In its heyday, Fallowfield had been a high-walled country manor with its marble entry and carved staircase leading up to the second floor. Out front, two tall monkey-puzzle trees dominated the plush front lawn.

Sure, some of the boys had problems, but many of them had been dumped there by rich parents who didn't really want to be parents. The music teacher Miss Trenier had been a dancer in her younger days and told the boys stories about the famous people she'd performed for at the Metropole Ballroom in Dublin. It all sounded so exotic. She was exotic, too, in her floral gowns and beaded necklaces. Every afternoon as the boys kicked a ball on the front lawn, they could hear her playing the piano up in the music room. The notes tumbling out through those large French provincial windows.

At the end of each class, she always reminded them that they were her boys. That's what George had liked most about her. She didn't treat them like they were abnormal.

They kept scrapbooks, and every Friday she had them cut and paste pictures that they found interesting from magazines or newspapers and write poems about what they saw. Sometimes when the weather was bad, she'd call them all up to her study, for there were only ever about twenty of them at the most, where she would tell them stories about her travels.

His father saw the scrapbooks during George's summer break and told him to put them away. "Poetry is a waste of time," he said. "You have to deal with the real world, not write poems about it." Not long after, George wrote a letter to Miss Trenier. He wasn't sure what he hoped it would accomplish. Perhaps he hoped she'd "straighten" his father out. But she never did. She had suddenly taken ill and had to move to England to stay with relatives. He would never hear from her again. Fallowfield, he liked to imagine, had been a happy parenthesis in his life after which a procession of heavy curtains had fallen.

The day after Rosemary visited him in Belfast, he took the train to Lurgan. He wasn't sure why, but the false promises he'd made the previous day weighed on his mind. The train rattled along the track expelling blossom-white bursts of steam in its wake. Fields floated by. Hedgerows crisscrossed the landscape like undulating lines of thread. Small white-washed farmhouses shone like tinsel paper from sycamore clusters.

When the train stopped in Lisburn, he saw a woman pushing an infant in a pram along the platform.

An older child trailed behind her trying to guide a hoop with a stick. The woman's stockings looked new, and an exotic-looking black mantilla draped over her head and shoulders. She waved and blew a kiss from her plum-red lips to someone boarding one of the forward carriages. A man's voice shouted back: "I'll write soon, Marie." A brief look of incomprehension flushed over her face before an eager smile spread across her cheeks. She tried to shout something back, but her words were carried away by a crescendo of hissing steam.

In Lurgan, he made his way through the town center, past the Church of Ireland's tall gray spire. It didn't take long to reach her address. He followed the numbered doors till he came to hers. A small houseplant sat on the windowsill, its potting soil saturated. He stood there for a few moments deciding whether to knock then turned slowly away.

The porter walked down the platform slamming the carriage doors shut with a syncopated stroke. He

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watched him wave his flag, and then the train began its slow, sidling motion. Lurgan's narrow streets receded. Heavy cloud rolled in and the afternoon sky turned gray.

From the next carriage, he could hear loud , boisterous American accents. It was the usual Friday parade of Gis off to Belfast for the night. Lurgan was full of them. They were stationed at the Castle, and they drilled in the park and tramped the country roads round the town handing out chewing gum and chocolate to the children and stockings and mostly empty promises to local girls.

Near Lisburn, the train crossed a steep embankment. Down below he saw mottled-brown cows standing in shallow-gray water at the edge of a rush-choked marsh. He must have nodded off for a few minutes for the next thing he knew the train was speeding past Milltown Cemetery. He thought about all those headstones engraved with names that some day no one would remember, and for a moment he thought of Robert and the past stretched out behind him, lost and infinite. How much of his own life would he soon forget? How much of Robert's did he ever know? He propped his head against the window and watched as his breath slowly clouded the glass.

He thought of the garden on his way to the lough. It wouldn't be long now till the roses opened their tightly folded buds, and next year the Clematis and Virginia Creeper would edge ever higher on the gable wall. But all that was yet to pass. As he approached the shore, he saw sunrays sparkling through the high branches of the monkey-puzzle trees and heard the twinkling keys of a piano, the notes drifting over the fields before settling in the grass of the cold earth. ©- Haughey-2008

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PINK SLIP

by Linda Boroff There are as many roads to poverty as there are paupers to follow them. As a writer, I have always tried to see my own journey as a leisurely, rather loopy jaunt-material for an anecdote to be delivered with a wry chuckle during my acceptance speech someday at a national awards gala.

Right now, though, the road ahead is looking rough: I’m on my way to sign over the pink slip on “Moby Dick,” my white 2000 Buick Century, as security on a loan to pay the rent, five days late and counting. My destination is a storefront in a bleak San Jose strip mall where, between a liquor mart and a shoe repair shop, a fuchsia neon sign beckons: “Fast Cash! Paycheck Advance! Auto Title Loans!” There, my signed pink slip will net me$2000 in cold cash, which I promise to repay over two years at an interest rate of about 98 percent.

I back out of my carport, find a jazz station playing pensive, rueful sax, and hit the road. The rain that has threatened all morning now arrives in earnest, the mist on my windshield quickly turning to tears, as if to make up, for the ones I’m holding back. Somehow, my whole life seems like a prologue to this humiliating ordeal. But it could be worse, I console myself, which only reminds me that it may, indeed, get worse and soon.

The windshield wipers begin beating time to the bitter scold in my head: why didn’t you, why did you, why didn’t you, why did you?

I merge onto Highway 280 south, the road comparatively empty on this Saturday morning. Commuters are home enjoying their well-earned rests and leisurely breakfasts before heading out to spend their spendable incomes. As the miles unreel ahead, I cannot resist thinking back over my own highway of financial choices that have delivered me to this pass. How many wrong turns? How many dead ends, detours, directions unheeded? Or is the problem deeper? Perhaps the map is wrong; the destination does not exist.

Or maybe I’m just genetically wired for this destiny. Certainly by age seven, I was already displaying impatience with saving, along with impulsive overgenerosity, dislike for routine, and a general temperamental unmanageability- all traits that have cleft my life like a fault line. Reading Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants, I quickly identified with my gangly orthopteral soul mate, shivering out in the cold with his inedible fiddle.

“It’ll be okay, mom,” says my daughter, Nicki, guessing at the reason for my silence. She sits beside me now, as she always has, and in a way nothing has changed, although her once downy head has grown into an avalanche of blonde-streaked waves, and the rattles and sippy cups she once clutched have given way to a plastic box of eye shadow that she dabs on in the passenger mirror.

She has just graduated from college and is herself seeking a “real” job. In the interim, she has moved back with me-compounding the financial pressures but giving me a comrade in the trenches. I understand,

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without taking it too personally, that to not follow in my footsteps is for her almost a career goal in itself. Who can blame her? Financial turmoil has shaped her life since her father left us when she was three years old.

South we hurtle from Palo Alto, that wellspring of limitless venture capital, none of which has ever moistened my bank account. I presumed to live in this costly enclave so that Nicki could attend its top-ranked schools. And was that another wrong tum, I wonder, hearing her reel off anecdotes about the snobbery, anorexia, grade grubbing, and soccer field behavior that would shame a velociraptor.

After years of battling the gridlocked commute and enduring the petty bullying of middle managers, I quit my marketing communications cubicle in 2000, planning to work freelance and support a modest writing existence.

Fiction was calling me: those story ideas scratched on the message pad on my bedstand table or scribbled on the back of parking stubs or the flap of an envelope as I drove. Many had already deteriorated into wads of lint at the bottom of my purse. It was time to start drawing down that cache of inspiration, the only savings account I had.

And what made you so special, my roadside Greek chorus now chants, that you had to just walk out on a fulltime job? Did you think yours was the only quiet desperation or stifled ambition? While others remained on task, year in year out, dutifully paying their bills and building their 40lks-something you were too artistic to bother withyou were planning your exit, every single day. And when the Millennium came, did that just have to be your new beginning too? Think of your kid now, just starting out. You are a bundle of plastic twine floating on her ocean, lying in wait to wrap itself around her wings with your self-imposed poverty, neediness, and irrational ambition, you.. you... writer!

Last week, I dusted off my interview suit and explained to a succession of loan officers at various banks that I was a “freelance technology writer” (though I understand technology about as well as do Stanford’s pampered cattle, gazing down on us from their bucolic hillsides.) All I needed was a little “bridge loan” to get me to the next, lucrative project, I assured them, mere days, away, right on the horizon.

What should I have said? That I’m a perennially aspiring novelist whose self-indulgent, autobiographical short stories are probably read solely by other writers and by the editorial staffs of second-tier literary journals? That I have spent the last eight years trying to shoehorn myself into Hollywood’s clenched consideration, resulting in one low-budget feature film and five options simmering gently in a perpetual broth of revision? That all of this frenetic activity has yielded so far one bankruptcy, a credit score too low to register on the loan calculators, and tax arrearages accruing interest briskly? As a borrower, I am about as appealing as a glass of silicon wastewater.

I took the rejections well, I told myself, shaking hands as I rose, walking out with my head high, smiling like a fool. I made it to the parking lot before the tears came and stood there feeling sorry for myself. And then suddenly, I looked at my Buick as if seeing it for the first time.

It’s been through a lot, the Buick, and today’s barter is only the latest insult. In 2005, for example, it was repossessed one morning at 3 a.m. by a couple of husky young men. They had it up on the towtruck by the time I awakened and emerged in a ratty bathrobe, holding my Lhasa Apso. “Put some shoes on,” one of them said. The Buick looked forlorn and reproachful and a little silly, its capacious rump elevated by a chain, its grille tipped into a puddle. When a copywriting windfall enabled me to redeem it a few days later from where it huddled in a dusty south San Jose repo-yard, a girlfriend said admiringly, “You always land on your feet.” But I had not landed yet.

Today looks and feels more like a landing, and not on my feet.

We enter San Jose at last, the manufacturing hub whose arcane etching rituals and caustic baths gave silicon the wherewithal to transform mind into matter into money. The profits, however, always seem to migrate north, towards Palo Alto and Menlo Park, with their venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and marketing whizzes, while many of the neighborhoods here in San Jose remain chronically indigent and crime-riddled.

It takes two or three passes around the block in what is now a freezing deluge to find the auto loan storefront. We park the Buick, which now feels like a cozy sanctuary. Nicki, impatient with my umbrella, leaps out and makes a dash for the door, getting herself thoroughly soaked. I come up behind her, and she grins sheepishly, the rain bedewing her face and lashes, the damp tendrils of hair pasted to her fresh, unconquered skin. I am suddenly dazzled: “Young Girl Caught a Downpour,” I mentally title the artwork. We wrestle the door open, and a line of people turns at the cold, wet draft, one or two actually smiling in commiseration at the sight of us. They are mostly poor: Mexican and Filipino immigrants, African-Americans and Pacific Islanders; many elderly and several

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young mothers with children hanging from every limb. There are two women in wheelchairs and several Vietnam veterans wearing bill hats with numbers and letters on the front.

The young woman at the window is smiling too, though the line is long, the paperwork complex, and her computer temperamental. She hands us a battered camera and tells us to photograph the Buick’s VIN number and its odometer. My daughter waves me to a chair and ducks outside-again without the umbrella-though the rain is now coming down in sheets from a truly biblical sky occasionally riven by trees of lightning so close you can almost grab their molten trunks. Seconds later, massive thunderclaps trigger little screams from the women.

Several of the veterans flinch and look straight ahead, jaw muscles working.

When Nicki re-enters, she is drenched, and I thank her with faux exasperation, pulling off her outer sweater as though she is a kindergartner to give her my own. She offers only a token protest before putting on the dry sweater. “Thanks, Mom.” The people in line titter. I catch the eye of an elderly Mexican lady, and she beams at me, a universal smile of motherhood, and all at once, everything is all right-it’s more than all right. Why, the Buick is merely fulfilling another of the roles it was intended for, I realize. Like reindeer to the Inuit, my car is both transportation and sustenance. And this place is not a hard landing, but a port in a storm.

Nicki and I watch the rain through the window till it finally subsides and a cold blue sky peeps out from the turbulent clouds, and a fresh wind begins to whip the treetops. The line slowly shortens and, when it is my tum, I am presented with a small bale of papers on which I provide my signature in about forty places. The clerk time-stamps a document and then counts out two thousand dollars in small, used bills. Feeling far from dissatisfied and more than a little rich, we leave and get back into the Buick. © - 2008 - Boroff

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NOT MUCH ELSE

by Bill West

His door opened and some broad in a man's shirt and little else looked me up and down, then let me in without asking who I was.

"Who the fuck is it?" I heard him growl and I called, "It's me, your son, Ben." Then he was there in the cabbage stink of the hallway in shorts with the belt cinched tight under the hairy bulge of his belly.

"Come in, sit down" he said without a smile "I ain't got no booze but we can sit awhile."

We sat by the window, street side. I wanted him to ask me how I was, where I'd been for the past five years since Mum died, anything. I couldn't look at him so I gazed out the window, watched a convertible with whitewall tires pass by, half listening while he bitched about the landlord and the guy upstairs with the wooden leg who banged all night, and I nodded and grunted and watched women in the street, their tight skirts and heels.

He went quiet, just his breath kinda ragged. And when I looked at him he said in a whisper, "I still miss her, your mother."

And in that moment he looked shrunken, not frightening, his sagging flesh loose beneath his chin and a thin tear sliding down his boozer's nose. And for a second I wanted to rest the meat of my hand on his knuckles. A chance for reconciliation. But that moment passed and I remembered his fists swinging, the thump as they landed.

Then he went to the john with the door open and I heard him piss and cough and hawk up. I looked around the dirty walls. No pictures, no memory of her.

"You want coffee?" the skank called to me in a sing-song voice. I turned. She posed in the doorway showing too much leg and the rest and I said, "I gotta go."

I walked fast, out into the street, breathed in free air. I bought a bottle and sat on a low wall to watch the sun set across the river. And the water sparkled and I toasted absent loved ones. Toasted the sun sinking, the clouds blowing fast, and the cat chasing a rat in the alley behind. ### © 2008 - West

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TIMELINE: Bill Frank Robinson

A Selection Of Poetry And Prose

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The Cat Skinner All heads tum as he walks across the yard Splendidly dressed, polished boots Jodhpurs, crimson scarf Leather jacket, leather helmet Goggles pulled down to Mask his face

The battle rages The Big Cat charging The ace holding The splendid clothes dissolving Into a soggy mess

Hard-bitten working stiffs whisper, "My god, dressed like an ace From the Great War. All to skin the Big Cat?"

The day ends The job complete Time to go home And face Mama

The Big Cat roars, bucks, shivers, And shakes. The Great War ace Grabs and holds, fighting hard Against the force that Threatens obliteration

Mama screams, "What did you do To my boy? His clothes are Ruined and he's only five"

The dust swirls, the new clothes Soil. Fuel oil seeps To the skin beneath The soiled clothes

Daddy says, "He's got to learn To carry his weight I started at four"

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Pauite Indian Story by

Bill Frank Robinson Many years ago the game warden stopped by Junior Jackson's house and caught him with four deer carcasses strung up. Junior explained the deer died when they got hung up jumping the fence.

The warden said, "Tell it to the judge." and wrote him a ticket.

The judge said, "I ll let you go this time but next time take the meat to the poor house in Big Pine."

Junior replied, "Judge have you been out to my house lately?'

The judge answered, "Not in quite awhile."

Junior said, "Well, drive out there next Sunday. I got seven little Indians running around there and if that s not a poor house, I've never seen one."

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The Bread Man is Dead Long before the dusty path had a name Long before the road was paved There was the Bread Man Winter and summer he tended His yard and greeted passers-by With a smile and hello Friday mornings he made His rounds Delivering bread and news To his customers Old and new He died in the ancient trailer He called home He will be buried on The desolate hillside South of town Friends and relatives will come Some from half-way Around the world Back to their ancestral home Back to the burial grounds Used since time began A soldier from the Iraq war will demand And receive leave to Attend the funeral Of the only father She ever claimed She will give the eulogy Lead the cry-dance The dance around the fire Each dancer tossing The Bread Man's clothes Into the fire Then the Bread Man Of Pa Ha Lane Will be no more

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Final Goodbye

by Marie Shield

My husband died last night. I don't know when for sure.

He reached out in the night and touched me, sliding his hand over my waist and down my hip and leg, then I turned to sleep on my stomach and he put his hand on my arm.

We roll about, like puppies in the night, touching, laying our arms and legs around each other; last night was no different.

I woke up and he was cold as he so often is. I pulled the covers up and put my legs over his and my body on top of him to keep him warm, kissed his shoulder and said, "I love you".

I think I went back to sleep. I'm not sure. Usually when I cuddle him he wakes a bit, touches me, mumbles and holds me, but not always. I know that I awoke again and as I often do, touched his face, listened for his breathing, shook him.

This morning there was no response. I know he's dead. I don't know what to do. I don't want him to leave me. I don't know what to do with his body. His spirit remains.

It is strange the way he feels, like a log. Not like a man, not my husband, my lover, my friend.

Perhaps this is the way it's supposed to be. Perhaps this is how one says good bye. I'm not afraid and not yet ready to let him go. I get a pan of warm water. Wash his face, his hair, his body. He becomes mine again as I do this. My beloved.

I should call someone. I don't know who. Do you call 911 when someone dies? Do you call God? I wrap my arms around his cold body and in those moments that often come just before I fall into a deep and dreamless void, I hope that I will sleep forever. ### Marie Shield (GOODBYE first appeared in A Long Story Short - Jan. 2008)

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