The Battered Suitcase Winter 2010

The Battered Suitcase New Directions in Art & Literature

Volume 3 – Issue 3 – Winter 2010

Contents FLASH FICTION Superwoman Bill West.............................5 Bereft but with Options Wendy Thornton.......................17 The Electric Blanket Phibby Venable......................27 What She Hears Marjorie Maddox.....................42 The Pea-Coat Magen Toole.........................64 Piers of Prague Jake David.........................103

SHORT STORIES To Catch a Hummingbird Paul Medus...........................8 And We Tilled the Light Ross Barkan.........................11 Seattle, First Year Attorney at Law Kathryn Megan Starks................30 Communion Melissa Chadburn....................36 Graceland University Eva Gordon..........................54 Astray Jaime A. Heidel.....................57

Spun Abbie Bergdale......................68 No More Butterflies S.J. Webb...........................94 Soul Ache Tim Millas.........................100 An die Freude Natalie Jacobs.....................124 The Set George Sparling....................128 Last Chance Diane Kimbrell.....................130 Happy Twenty-Ten Robin Merrill......................138 The Curve Bryan Thomas Smith.................142 Inside Your Head Nick Hinton........................153 Babushka’s Potatoes Danyael Halprin....................161 Shelling’s Equation Cameron Mount......................167

NOVELLA Waterproof Kristi Peterson Schoonover.........104

Conversations about the Weather Jessi Lee Gaylord...................60

NON-FICTION

I Do Belong There SR Mishler..........................65

Wayward on the Rock Dave Migman.........................15

Tugging on the Rope Julie Strasser......................39

Vagabonds Sally Smith.........................71

Grounded Diana Hoover Bechtler...............83

Tasting Iron Eric Johnson........................72

Residuals Timothy L. Marsh...................112

Metamorphosis Eric Johnson........................73

The Swinger Susan White........................164

Dark Horse Bryan Borland.......................76

POETRY

Sometimes the Mirror Scott Owens........................115

Select Haikus Corey Cooper.........................6 Moon Shades Jean Brasseur........................7 Heading to Downtown D.C. From Herdon Adam Church.........................19 Thoughts on Snow Laura Dennis........................20 December 25, Chinatown Amy Schreibman Walter...............29 I Never Wanted to be a Princess Janice Krasselt Medin...............43 Narcissus of the Finger Lakes Amy Nawrocki........................44 Aphrodite’s Reach / Mistral Amy Nawrocki........................45 Bad Girls / You Should Know Meg Johnson.........................46 Better to Wonder John Tustin.........................47 The Unsuccessful Dream Alexis Donitz.......................62 Poetry Katie Manning.......................63

I Will Draw Two Ravens Christopher Leibow.................116 Poetry Sami Schalk........................133 A Soft Bitch Tango Barraza......................135 The New Anthology Lindsay Miller.....................136 I Tell My Mother Lindsay Miller.....................137 List Rigby Bendele......................157 This Isn’t California Rigby Bendele......................158 Torn Root Luiggi Carlin......................159 Aurora Borealis Luiggi Carlin......................160 I’m Sick Pavel Rubin .......................165 Second Comings of Another Kind Scott Weiss........................166 Life Can Survive Aunia Kahn.........................172

INTERVIEW Interview with Anisa Romero Kim Acrylic.........................84

ART Lindsay McBirnie After Hours.........................21 Fairies.............................22 Snowmen.............................23 Partridge and Pear..................24 Country Dancers.....................25 Skating Santa.......................26

Sparky Campenella Danuza.............................118 Sienna.............................119 Kazuki.............................120 Bert...............................121 Jennifer...........................122 Catherine..........................123

Simon Currell Mecca...............................48 Mecca (detail)......................49 Gideon..............................50 Make Believe........................51 Make Believe (detail)...............52 Churn...............................53

Ruth Weinberg For Every Pin, a Pain..............147 Ghost of a Fly.....................148 Martyrdom of a Fly.................149 A Difficult Birth...................150 Boxes..............................151 Unnamed............................152

Blue Bliss Midnight Watch......................77 LumiNocturne 31.....................78 Gargoyle............................79 Freedom of Desire...................80 Crosswalk 1.........................81 Bridge in Fog.......................82

Jane Linders City Garden, St. Louis, Missouri...173 Radio Flyer........................174 Intersection.......................175 Fountain Head......................176 A Blast from the Past..............177 The Blue Suitcase..................178

Anisa Romero Orbs................................87 Fatima..............................88 Mocking Bird........................99 Your Word...........................90 Patent Pending......................91 Petra...............................92 Rust................................93

Bill West Bill West studied English Literature at Hull University. He has been writing flash fiction since 2004 and is widely published both online and in print. He lives in Shropshire, UK.

Superwoman

T

he needle pierces a vein and opiates flood your bloodstream.

“There you are, Mrs. Vale. You’ll soon feel comfy.”

You open your eyes and smile at the anxious faces, pretending not to hear the nurse whispering to your son, “Soon, a matter of hours, or less. There is a room you can sleep in. Take turns to sit with her.”

Diamorphine kicks in. The room spins.

In the dream, you are running down a hospital corridor, looking for someone. There he is, just disappearing around the corner. He’s riding a motorcycle. Is that allowed in hospital?

“Wait, Charlie!” you call, but he doesn’t stop.

A door closes and you can’t follow. Just a trail of blue smoke and the smell of two-stroke.

Someone has put your legs in stirrups. You are about to get up when your body swells like a balloon. Just when you think you might burst, babies pop out and swim around your bed like tadpoles. We must be underwater, you think. Is it raining?

Back in the room Liam, Margaret and Ellen smile. Liam holds your hand and says, “Hang on in there, mum.”

“Is he here yet?” you ask, wondering if the door will open and Charlie will come in, all smiles and a bunch of flowers.

“Soon, mum, soon.”

Later, the nurse returns, checks your pulse, takes your temperature. She pats your arm, wipes your mouth and tongue

with something cool and minty. The PCA buzzes and your head swims again.

“If he does come, I won’t speak to him. The cheek!” You remember him riding away on his motorcycle, back to that other woman. “She must be fed up with him by now, after all these years!”

The hospital room fades in and out. Your mouth is dry again.

Death is coming, but you won’t let him catch you. Not when you are as light as a feather and as fast as a moonbeam! You float up from the bed and swoop over your children’s heads, through the window and hover over the car park. Outside the air is orange, cold and smells of lilies. The moon hides from you as it dodges between clouds.

You run up the sky and into starlight, so high above the world that the world seems small, like a milky pearl you could hang like a pendant around your neck.

What did Superman do to turn back time? You remember and you blur as you fly faster and faster, around the Earth, You will find him, back then in the time before he met the other woman. You will get to him soon, somehow. You could move house, move town, move the world and time with your super powers. You will be together again, a family at the end.

Breakthrough pain comes fast, dragging you back to the room. Liam is holding your hand.

“Love you mum.” he says.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 5

Corey Cooper Corey Cooper is a student scientist who’s absolutely terrified to be using his right hemisphere, much less inviting others to watch. He’s previously been published in Breadcrumb Scabs: A Poetry Magazine. He can be reached at sedentarygecko@gmail.com.

Select Haikus urban canyons channeling wind. howling drowns out the lonely. great village of glass and steel and light. less home: a shopping cart. close proximity Metropolitana, swap fetid halitus bus lurches, brakes hiss, doors part. sardines on the curb long for clear water

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Jean Brasseur Jean Brasseur lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, two children, two dogs, five ferrets and other assorted pets. When not working or cleaning up after the aforementioned roomies, she enjoys all types of poetry, particularly that written by new and unknown poets. Jean has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember, but only became serious about her craft a few years ago when impending birthdays made her realize it was now or never. Since then her work has appeared in Miller’s Pond Poetry, Poet’s Ink Review and Red Fez.

Moon shades Moon shades (solo renhai) autumn moon cantaloupe orange on a raven sky crescent moon hook for hanging dreams half moon light abuts dark Escher print sky

Moon shades II (solo renhai)

Moon shades III (solo renhai) long night’s moon beams crisp through pines owl shivers cold yellow eye wolf moon howls bright moonstone mouth* future quivers tongues of believers *According to folklore, if one holds a moonstone in his mouth under a full moon, he will be able to see the future.

new moon unseen, longing shimmers brightest tumbling clouds backlit by moon glow wayward stars caught in a wet moon bowl

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 7

Paul Medus

For more than 20 years, Dr. Medus has taught English in high schools, community colleges and universities. Currently, he teaches composition theory online at Nova Southeastern University and to first year students at Capella University. His fiction writing includes an unpublished novel, Butterfly Blues, written as part of his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His first novel is southern fiction and his recently completed second, Powerful Deceptions, is a contemporary urban fantasy more akin to magic realism. Paul currently lives in Cajun Country with his wife and their two Shih Tzus, BeBe and Missy.

To Catch a Humming Bird “I brought to mind that it had been a cruel thing that so many times I had been so ill paid by my fellow men, even by my friends. I felt broken down by the pain of these memories. My strength and energy left me and I put my head on my hands and a very torrent of tears poured forth, as at the same time I called the Eternal to my help. That day it was very hot, so that I fell asleep and then dreamed a dream that I shall never forget. I thought that I heard the tree, at whose feet I was sitting, split open. The sound made me turn my head. I saw a nymph, a very epitome of beauty emerging from this tree. Her clothes were so diaphanous that they seemed transparent.”

— Cyliani, 19th Century

O

nce Mina Van Cortlandt reached the edge of the cliff, she took a deep breath for courage to suppress the terror searing through her veins, then she slowly sat down and dangled her bare legs over the ledge cropping out over the Great Wall of the Manitou, a 23-mile escarpment running along the edge of the northwestern rim of the Catskill Mountains. Three thousand feet below lay the Hudson River Valley. And while the sovereign night still reigned supreme with a black veil sprinkling tiny knots of lace above and below, an eerie whisper of wind haunting the deep forests behind her winced with the suffering of those Promethean spirits who sensed the end of their time was drawing near. Night would soon be day.

Mina shivered; her flesh tingled with anticipation. Even in August, the cool, moist nights in the mountains could cling close to her skin, vaporizing heat and replacing it with a hint of chill. She shrugged it off, happy to know a moment she sought all her life waited round the bend for her to embrace.

As a struggling artist, she grew accustomed to the trial and error of her medium. Knowing what to paint was one thing; how to paint it was quite another. Mixing the two to create her vision on a canvas was sometimes damn near impossible.

A struggling artist was a cliché. The artist feeling the pain of the struggle was not. They struggled to pay the rent. They

8 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

struggled to put food on the table. Often they struggled with the disappointment and anguish their mothers and fathers and friends and lovers felt about the artist’s decision to first, become an artist, and second, to continue to be an artist when family and friends determined in their infinite wisdom that the artist should just quit and get a life. Become an accountant, a teacher, an insurance agent, something. Just don’t stand around with a thumb up your ass wasting your life chasing rainbows that are always on the horizon, never coming anywhere close to being near what everyone else imagines to be a productive, healthy, well adjusted, happy, fucked-up life.

Mina laughed at the irony as she remembered that this great country she lived in led the modern world in suicide. Happiness filled everyone’s life so much that they couldn’t wait to leave this life and move on to the next. Not so for her.

She learned that some artists put all those struggles behind them, placing one above all else: to find the perfect expression of their version of something they can neither see, smell, touch, taste nor hear. In the beginning, an artist attempts to grasp a feeling, an itch, a vague sense of an idea, and as they reach out for this will-o’-the-wisp, they cast their lot with a ship sailing onto uncharted seas, for each artist charts their own ocean.

Mina also knew that as an artist became more experienced and comfortable with her craft, occasionally the chemistry of an artistic moment often teased her into thinking a volcanic eruption of creativity was about to explode into the deep, blue sky. Sometimes it did. Most times, it didn’t.

She thought about the Great Depression and how a band leader tried over and over again to find the right combination of instruments to produce a specific sound that only he would recognize as the exact expression of what he felt, not heard but felt, inside of him. Finally, it came. The artist, Glen Miller.

The song, “Moonlight Serenade.”

For most artists, their work with notes, words or paints never comes close to realizing the public manifestation of what crawls around inside them all of their life. Some artists

go insane, some die, some, a few, a very rare few, discover a hint of the incredible. And if they don’t lose their composure; if they keep their wits about them, they begin to pull down a thread of the sublime and weave a tapestry of beauty the whole world yearns for. This tapestry would give everyone some hope that art, after all, is what completes us. What makes us more heaven than earth.

Mina Van Cortlandt, after years of struggle, stood at the threshold of such a moment where she knew that right now, at this moment, all her training, all her pain, all her happiness, all her disappointments would come together to be expressed as colors on her canvas to produce such fear, reverence, terror and awe that once discovered by the observer, the images she would manifest from the palette to the brush to the canvas would, in the end, stun us for one nanosecond into an oblivion where the idea of thought, passion, and action would combine to sear our very being with an unforgettable impression of what it means to live in the now all of our lives.

Now that she had discovered what to do, she wasn’t sure if she possessed the courage to do it. Time would tell. Like in about 15 minutes. Sunrise awaited on the horizon.

While she sat alone in darkness for the first hints of dawn, Mina prepared, as if in meditation, to clear away the anxiety of her mind, to make her clean and fresh, to embrace not only the dawn but art itself as if both were living, breathing beings.

One problem. Past, present, and future demons threw flaming daggers of distraction faster than she could remove them. Her demons wanted complete, utter, and final control to turn the extraordinary into the ordinary, the ethereal into the mundane, the sanity into insanity, to be like everyone else and to forget that you ever knew that the world everyone lived in was not the world at all, but a crazy kaleidoscope of a facsimile of a purpose driven life. The sirens of a decadent society called out to all shoppers about an amazing sale in progress but to hurry because there was a limited quantity of unlimited bullshit to consume.

Yet another demon preaches about the promise of one possible future: “Feed the monkey on your back until the sores of daily life ooze with resentments of the children you bear, the bills you pay, and the food you eat. Hell, just shoot a shot of fire water, smoke a burning bush, or take a trip to your favorite casino. Praise the lord! Don’t think about the pointlessness of your life created by those who lust after power and control to fashion the world in their image, not yours, even though you believe you have beaten the serpent in the Garden of Eden who tried to tell you that you can be free, free, free at last when all you have done is sold your soul to the man because women still aren’t allowed. Life’s a bitch, but really it’s a whore because we pay for it.”

Then comes a gap in the running commentary she calls her consciousness. The voice of the sermonizing dream destroyer runs on, but somehow Mina has learned to rise above that, to see the damage her ego inflicts upon her heart and soul. The

first time she discovered a life without her egotistical voice and those of the modern world, she wept.

Over time and with practice, the gaps of silence and peace widened. First, the gap extended from one mile marker to another. Then two mile markers. Eventually, she could drive from Tarrytown all the way to Windham with the peace of mind once reserved for a Tibetan monk.

Mina was no Tibetan Monk. She was a plein air artist, and with her legs dangling off a cliff, she kicked her feet into a vast horizon before her as if to kick start the dawn. To get the show on the road. To partake not of the tree of knowledge but imbibe of the tree of life.

A smile eked across her face. Although shadows still plagued her, often enough a small dose of enlightenment dispelled the weight of fear always trying to suck her down. She seldom dwelled in the room of dread where dead ends stalked her, waiting for a weakened point in time so despair could slip in unnoticed and crush her proud spirit once and for all.

Living alone could do that. Yet, with every blink of her eye, an artistic moment became pregnant with potential. A thousand million humming birds, each the birth of creation, eluded capture unless somebody’s soul found the way to net one. Mina was that soul. Today was that day. One shot at stopping time and snaring a portrait of immortality awaited on the cusp of the next few flashes of insight granted on the notion that beauty was much more than a temporal event.

She would have to work fast. Plein Air artistry demanded that. Seize the moment, paint what’s there, and finish. There, you’re done. Good, bad, brilliant, no matter, you’re done.

Mina carefully rose up from her perch on the ledge and crept back to her position behind the canvas. The first hint of grayish light invaded the dark sky above and land below. Her work began by sketching the outline of all that lay in front of her. The muted, shadowy images clarified themselves with colors when the sun rose.

In the distance, to the far east, her mind’s eye imagined fishermen casting their nets into a sea that stretched all the way to the old lands. Closer to home, on her shore, reality revealed a piece of an orange ball striped with a thin, translucent cloud hovering on the horizon, eclipsing the Berkshires some 100 miles away.

Leaping off the cliff and soaring out then spiraling downward like a hawk eyeing a mouse rustling in and out of stalks of wheat, Mina’s eyes absorbed the full impact of the Hudson River snaking from one end of the valley to the other.

Up from the river came rolling hills and dales and pastures and red barns and the twinkling light from a white farmhouse where cows lowed with the urgency to be milked.

Halfway down the mountain, a cloud showered rain, irrigating only one small section of a checkerboard of green and brown rimmed with stone walls and lines of oaks and hemlocks and clumps of shrubs too numerous to name. Paint the colors. Touch the canvass with the tip of a brush delicately, Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 9

distinctly and confidently. Here the morning is unveiled in a genesis of grandeur reserved for the pleasure of the unseen gods basking in the glory of a new day born.

Her brush twitched then stroked and then skittered back and forth from palette to canvas like a squirrel tight roping along narrow limbs while darting from white pine to beech to birch to a quivering branch where it stopped and chittered at unseen friends and neighbors who threatened to get in the way of its foraging. No time to stop, to think, to feel. Just act with the fluid motion of one with all that lay before her.

Behind her, the deep forest still warded off golden sunshine where leaves saturated with dewy diamonds of water drops fell to a fertile earth. Two birds fluttered, one chasing the other, both rushing out over the cliff and down into the valley as if scared off by spirits uncomfortable with the life the brightness of day brought with it.

Unexpectedly, a cool breeze spilled out of the woods, raising the hackles on her neck. Terror seized her throat and she felt the grip of something forcing her to release her brush.

Paralyzed, she felt it slip from her fingers and tumble to the ground.

Mina heard the Catskill Mountains were haunted — old wives tales, Washington Irving, and all that hokum. Something strange had found her gazing out over the cliff at an enclave of stupendous splendor framed then drawn by golden light

10 â–Ş The Battered Suitcase â–Ş Winter 2010

showering all across the horizon. This was not it. Not instilling the fear. Something else. Behind her. A force strong enough to fling her off the cliff and down to the valley three thousand feet below.

Straining to break free from the icy grip of the unknown, Mina turned her head with aching distress to see what she believed she would never see, much less believe if she did see.

But there it, or rather he was. A spirit. A ghost. And smiling at that. Of all the nerve. The damn specter smiled and appeared as surprised as her. Not as surprised. Not scared or terrified.

Stunned. Pleasantly stunned.

A curly haired, bushy-browed man dressed in a t-shirt, underwear and flip flops did not present the terrifying specter she expected to see. In fact, had she not been at first scared and now enraged at being disturbed, she might go into hysterics, laughing at the absurdity of it all.

Then he disappeared, and with him, her artistic moment.

Shocked and trembling, she struggled to gather the fragments of an event broken into tiny bits and pieces. What was once there without delay dissipated into an eerie air of forgetfulness found in the aging of a new day. No matter how hard she tried to hold on, the humming bird of creation flew away.

All that remained was the memory of a face she would not soon forget.

Ross Barkan Ross Barkan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, who has just completed his first novel, Aflame We Laugh. When not belting out his endless thesis about the representation of reality in the works of Henry Miller and Virginia Woolf, he enjoys losing his temper during softball, baseball, handball and tennis games, writing inflammatory articles for his college newspaper, the Stony Brook Press, and editing Stony Brook’s newest publication, a literary magazine called Spoke the Thunder.

And We Tilled the Light

W

eeble couldn’t ever tell me the date of Bastille Day. What I mean is the original date, the 14th of July, 1789, the date they stormed the Bastille, those hungry French. There was so much that brilliant doofus could remember but never that date, no matter how many times I told him. You’d think graduating law school at 19 would endow you with the capacity to remember such things. But hey, Weeble was always the sort for involuntary memory, Proustian till the end.

I think this carnival is too loud. Standing now, in the nexus of a popcorn pit and the ripping shadow of a Ferris wheel, consciousness is constricting. Weeble would’ve felt this way.

Though I could see him riding the wheel, hollering down at no one in particular.

“We could do it,” Weeble would always tell me. “We’re great enough.” Never good enough. Always great enough. I was 18 and couldn’t believe anything else.

Because doing it was supposed to be an escape from all that, right? Right? Weeble really believed it and so did I. The first time he had the idea, he was midway through an exposition on interstate commerce — a Latin book propped at the edge of the table too, like always — digging his manicured fingers into his scalp, grimacing. And I saw him jump in the way I’ve seen no man ever jump. The next time he would do that was when he held the chisel.

Too loud, way too loud. The whirring of the crowd is more than I can take so I go, slipping into the stream, begging for silence. Talavert is coming up ahead, off-color Mets hat squeezing his head, the gold label whining brightly in the sun, his whole body flapping like a dumb dissonant … a dissonant, um, thing.

Damn you Talavert, I want to yell. You should’ve been the one Weeble got.

“Hey buddy,” he says. “Enjoying the carnival?”

“Yeah.”

“You seen Clarissa?”

“Why would I have seen your wife?”

Clarissa, his wife, was my first lay and Weeble’s third or fourth. Weeble was precocious as hell when it came to women.

Was a regular lover by 15, had broken double digits by 17, and by the time he had spent two decades on earth, he had probably banged close to 30 chicks, easy. I mean, he was handsome, but not in any classical, refined way. I always thought he had the face of a reptile and a neck that was unsettlingly thick. The map of Israel on his face — Jewish as hell, even though he wasn’t Jewish, though he wasn’t Christian either. I’m Jewish, at least in name, and it didn’t help me. Weeble though …

“They have a great candy stand over there,” Talavert says, grinning at no one.

“Wonderful.”

“Get some of that candy that explodes in your mouth. It’s priceless.”

“Uh-huh.”

I burst past him and get out into the field, away from the people. The woods aren’t far, thank the lord. Fires sweep them, at least that’s what I imagine, fires of the ancients that glow like auroras and feel like lightning in your ribcage. Transcendent stuff, stuff me and Weeble used to talk about after he had left law school and I was still toiling over at State. One-on-one dodgeball in the alley behind the Laundromat was our game back then. I had the arm; he had the speed. I could blow off steam that way, forget I had no friends, terrible grades, and mosquito bites that would swell periodically and eat up my whole back even though I don’t think there were too many mosquitoes sweating it out in the county.

“You’re out, bugger,” I’d yell, because I never wanted to call him a fucker. I had an arm back then, oh boy, I’d leave welts all over his body … if I got him, of course. No one dodged better than Weeble. Clarissa saw us one day — the day I slept with her, I think, the last day.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 11

The woods close me in in a nice way. Squirrels talk up to sky, run my shoelaces; I hear a whisper, nothing of course, but then again I like to think it’s the dodgeball kissing my ear, the throw Weeble’s, he gap-toothed laughing up the alley, a CVS pharmacy and tire stack at his back. The big red C still comes back to me even as it shudders and warps into the jagged C that he would carve into the nape of the man’s neck.

“So what I’m saying is, we can commit the perfect…”

“What, crime?” I’ve heard this before.

“It won’t be a crime because it’s perfect. I have an I.Q. of 196 and you are the most dependable, logical person I’ve ever met. We can do this. “ “I…I…don’t really want to. But thanks for the logical compliment anyway. My mom doesn’t even think that.”

“She can’t judge.”

“Thanks, Weeble.”

When I sit on the stump, I remember that I had the pipe in my pocket. The pouch should be … damn, knew it. I dropped it and who else would be trailing me to tell me I dropped it and wheedle another conversation out of me than Talavert?

“Hey! Hey! You dropped — ” “I know, Tal.” He crunches over the leaves like a broken toy, like the plastic chewed up action figure that they’d throw at me each birthday.

“You dropped your pouch, my man. Here ya go.”

“Thanks, Tal.” “You gonna pack that bowl? Smoke up something nice?”

“Not like that. Just tobacco. No one does it anymore. I figure someone should.”

“Why?” “Because someone should. God damn, you talk too much.”

Weeble and I sat in his room in the town, right above the deli (far from campus but Weeble liked the long drive) and talked about things. He said no one knew the art of living anymore. Said people hadn’t known it in two hundred years.

That’s when I mentioned the Bastille and recited the date and he said to me “why the hell would anyone care about when exactly it happened?”

It never occurred to me before to question the validity of knowing July 14th, 1789, but I liked the musicality of it. And I liked the exactness and being aware that exactly two hundred years later, my favorite baseball player Hosmer Heyward of the Milwaukee Brewers was born on that day. Yup. Talavert sits down next to me despite the holes I bore through him, my eyes lit, my heart wailing like a dying star.

When I pack the pipe, Talavert opens his mouth: “So you miss Weeb or am I the only one?”

Of course I miss Weeble, you sack of dung, whatkindaquestionisthat, I want to shout.

“Two years since they found him, uh-huh.”

“What a shame. What a waste.”

“How’s Clarissa?”

“Oh! Clare wants to see ya, says you don’t drop by anymore.”

12 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

“I’ve been busy.”

“Right, smokin’ your pipe.”

It’s then and there I have this revelation, one that I figure I’ll go back to some other time in my life when I’m eating ice cream or taking a dump. It’ll come suddenly, prompted by nothing in particular. What it is, is — well that if I ever do kill, unlike Weeble, I won’t know I’m gonna do it until I’m about to do it. The impulse will erupt at the very last moment, like a flower bursting out from underfoot that you don’t see until the sneaker is crashing down — and you stop, or don’t stop — and then I will do it. Right now I can wipe Talavert away. Taking lives is easy though. Getting your own is harder.

“Smoking my pipe indeed. You always know, Talatalavertvert.”

The morning he picked Driggs, Eli Driggs of Quail Road, a slow accountant with an eye for child pornography, I laughed. I wasn’t happy. It didn’t make sense to me then and even though it does now, it still doesn’t.

For some reason ,I let Talavert blow on my pipe and the plumes of smoke disappearing into the tree remind me of dancing, dancing with Clarissa, his wife, on one of those diaphanous nights, her arms on mine, a little two-step, nothing special, dancing into one of those moments, like velveteen, that wrap you and remind you of why to be alive is just to know for one single scrap of a second that you could be somewhere else someday, a better place. That is what Weeble wanted ultimately, something better.

But they found him in the valley, rotting after nearly a week, the deed long done.

When Eli Driggs hummed past the neon shop window, I really did assume he was a haunt. He had this way of whispering to himself, a reedy hiss that filled everything, snuck over the empty soda cans that always littered the walk. Weeble counted four, three, two … and jumped on two. Leapt out into the slice of halogen — the flare of light in which Driggs shook — held the chisel and brought it to the brain stem. I was looking at a Coke can, couldn’t stop looking, kept staring until the dull red thing became a part of me, my awareness, breathing in my ribcage, glowing in my tears which I expected to come but never did. I didn’t look — I swear I didn’t.

“You know, you aren’t a bad guy,” Talavert says.

“Thanks.”

“Recently I’ve begun to see there is no beginning or end to anything, you know? I mean, I know about you and Clarissa, what she meant to you.”

I can’t believe Talavert, as unperceptive as can be, a thickheaded king colossus of morons, can possibly be speaking about this, can possibly know, suspect any of the past, he can’t, but he is — “What I’m trying to say is I know you love her and I don’t hold it against you. Can I get another puff on the pipe?”

I hand it to him.

“Life isn’t a circle but it isn’t a straight line either. It kind of

stretches, you know, not into nothingness, but into something we can never know — the future. Nothing really ends. We say we stop loving people but we never do … I do believe love is something like a breeze, always there, weaved into trees and houses and cars and mice and such. Everywhere. Some people call it god; I say love. And I know you love her. I accept that. I love her too and she loves me, perhaps more than you, so we stay together. But her love for you is always there, you see?”

“Um, ok, but where’re you going with this? I’m waiting for the part where you say stay the hell away from my wife.”

“Weeble loved her too. More than any of us probably,” he says.

As I look into Talavert and away, into the widening sky, I see Weeble finishing Driggs, running, yelling at me to follow, and I do and then I don’t. I still can’t tell you what I did. I want to tell you I followed Weeble back to the woods to hide, right behind my buddy, running and running, but at some point he outran me or I ran off, at some point someone diverged, the woods rose up, moonlight wasn’t enough, the dark won, and he was gone.

“I know Weeble did. I never heard you talk like this, Tal. Never. I don’t know what —” “What I won’t do is deny what love exists. It’s denying sunlight, basically. Denying anything true. Go to her, tell her what you feel, for good, and then go somewhere else. Away from everyone. That’s what you need.”

“You want me to die?”

“Maybe,” Talavert says, lowering the pipe. “Not death. Just take her somewhere with you, you know?”

“So you want me to steal your wife?”

“No.” When Weeble talked in the nights before he killed Driggs, the room would feel smaller but more alive than anything I’d known. The walls hugged us, heat nibbling at our skin, as he talked about feeling sicker with people, how they confine you, how human nature is a fat flustered kind of beast that never leaves you alone, never lets you be at peace. Weeble wanted peace. But he also didn’t want to be a law student or a student or an intellectual kindly licking the rump of society. He wanted something else, more, I suppose — to be above, to know he lived beyond it all, beyond my own memory. Because he knew he’d live in me forever like I would live in him. Whoever died first would carry the other till the end. It was enough to let Weeble bear me, my thoughts, my moods, to whatever descendants that might spring up one day … it wasn’t enough for him, though. Weeble needed himself — his memory, because he always thought in what was past and what was to come, only that — to spread out over the world like parachute, draping every consciousness, reminding them that he lived, breathed, loved, laughed and so on. So he picked Driggs, a detestable guy, someone no one would miss (he had a wife, so what, Weeble said, she hates him) and decided this would be a way … I didn’t like it. I told him so.

But I should’ve followed him all the way, anyway. I know I peeled off. If I ran faster, I could’ve kept pace. I could always keep step. If the body wasn’t found, I would’ve assumed that he was still running.

Talavert laughs. “You know you can love her from anywhere,” he says. “I love Clarissa best when we are apart. In fact, I plan to travel this country for a while. Alone. You should think about something like that too.”

“I can’t afford those things.”

“You can, just walk.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m not joking. She’ll flower inside of you. Go look at the mountain, a broken piece of timber even, you’ll see her. I see her now laughing.”

“Good for you.”

“But go to her first. Say the words. Then you can go away.

And don’t peel off this time.”

Peel off really gets me, like an arrowhead in the throat, the words pulled right from my mind. Talavert, how could he? Peel off … peel off … I see Weeble fading into the night, a speck in the cloth, then nothing, swallowed, on the way to death.

Always on the way.

“I’m not going to her. There’s no point.”

“I’ll just tell her then. I’ll tell her you do in fact love her and then she’ll know and then you’ll be ok for good,” he says.

“Why do you even give a crap?”

“I’m going to die. I want everything cleared before then.”

Talavert tells me he’s going to die, I think. That’s all I really process. The sentence, the fact. He takes his hat off and I don’t know why.

“I plan to walk 20 miles or so in that direction, “ he points east, toward the wheat fields, “and then fall to the earth. That’ll be all. All we can ask is to say yes and go on. I’ve said yes.”

“Good-bye then,” I say. I don’t really see how I can take him seriously.

“Promise me you’ll tell her.”

“I promise, Talavert.”

“Then go on. I don’t think Clarissa wants anything to do with either of us.”

“I guess I’ll find out.”

“You can tell her what I’m doing too.”

“I will.”

“Thanks.”

And he gets up and walks off. Like it’s nothing at all, a stroll, out of the shade and into the blades of light cutting across the long grasses. He’s gone. Moments are shadows of other moments, I think, and the shadows are only cast for as long as we blink — maybe that long. He’s gone.

So as I set off to do what I should do. Which is … I don’t know. Tell her I love her. Then what? Really, I don’t know. I like thinking about her, though, and even Weeble, who was a psychopath, I have to concede, sympathies aside, but who really cares, what do terms and identifications and constructs Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 13

and all that matter out here, in the sun? Who defines anything?

No one. Even love, it is, it exists, it was and is and always will be and Talavert could be right or he couldn’t be and who’s right and wrong is the worst discussion of all, I realize, worst of all because no one will know any of it one day, no one, and we will be beneath the tides, looking up through the deep black water at the living, looking up and seeing blank, the underside of an image, static maybe, and we will have our memories to devour, memories chipped into smaller bits as every generation rolls on

14 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

into the water, chipped smaller and smaller, till we have spores nearly invisible, hanging over the new world, unknowable.

I do love her. I’ll speak; I will. But first I have to go down into the valley where they found Weeble, where he jumped, I know, didn’t trip, not an accident, a jump into sleep. Sometimes I can see his mouth moving, a word coming forth, or just a sound, a rustle in the silver-blue morning running through my eyes.

“July 14th, 1789. Yeah, I kinda do remember now.”

Dave Migman Dave Migman leads a nomadic lifestyle, burning leaves trail in his wake. His first novel, The Wolf Stepped Out, is available from Dog Horn Publishing.

Wayward On The Rock

C

loud is piling up. Driven from Syros by a stiff wind.

They are still praying for rain. Tonight it will rain.

Peasants gather darkly on porches. The night is closer.

War. Sitting on this balcony hoping that “thing” doesn’t come back — don’t know what it was but it was huge, a giant wasp with a black pulsating abdomen and thick spider legs. Its wings were like thin wedges of stained glass.

An old lady down there in the gloom of the garden with a small dog ferrets around in the undergrowth, muttering in Greek. Sky is pulling in tight, a last morsel of heaven revealed through a closing sphincter and we wait the shit to rain down.

Cricket chorus rising. The ocean beyond the building site. A generator in the fridge of my temporary abode. Dogs barking.

A shutter creaking closed. A glass filling with white wine.

Something big and ugly whirring through the vines below. Cars and scooters, hoots of horns, women shouting out, a key in a door, a rattle of flesh, some pages clattering to the floor.

Through the cloud a half moon like a glowering snake’s pupil, his black body curling round the island. Brother of the Naxos labyrinth hunter. Mobile phones ringing everywhere; we shout down them like the caller is deaf. They have to rot people’s brains. The same kind of damage to the cerebrum as modern pop slush. Content with your menial binge? No? Well la la la some anorexic with a body like a golf course (flat, boring, little bumps and full of holes!) Some of you might like that kind of thing. Go jump off a cliff, sing it to the sky — What do I care? I’m St. Migman!

This town is a classic example of the “modern way.” It’s all about veneer. Getting the look right but the fixtures are cheap, nothing works properly for long and right now there is a terrible smell!

The serpent’s eye is wide, an open stare of anguish. A silent scream held hostage by dancing lights of TV lies.

That is my favourite dark — where the moon turns the clouds grey, immediately opposite the same cloud is inky — the blackest point of the sky.

They are peeking through their half closed shutters, what is he doing? I’m Saint Migman scratching his fevered poetry,

rants, raves, a novel, a short story, two Booker prize wannabes and a big fat line of sky dust. That’s what I’m doing! You just run along now and cram yourself full of moussaka and olives.

A sudden drop in temperature. The sea is still rushing the land, coughing up plastic bags and other debris — “no thanx,” it says — take it back you evil race of overgrown monkey scum.

And we will take it back. We will have to. We are stupid. We are dumb.

Listen! I met a guy once who stabbed his father. He was driven insane by the fucker. Insane! He decided he was going to kill the old man. Overloaded on valium and temazepam this guy turned on his father. They’d been shouting at each other for hours. Blind with fury, he reached into the kitchen drawer, fumbled amongst the cutlery and moved quickly to stick papa in the back. It was a spoon! Imagine that! He still got charged though.

Little palm fingers chattered by wind and cat bells continuous out there. It would be nice to hear the rain tonight.

Will it sound different than a deluge on Leith Walk?

I hear a key in the door, something opening and closing in the hallway. A key in the lock, someone having a pee, wiping, flushing, taps, lock, return to room. WAIT! Didn’t I hear a whimper too? The fridge kicks in - TV comes on . . . or is it the orchestra, of hers? . . . At some point in the night will our breathing become harmonious through the walls? Will she enter my dream?

Last night there was the most indescribably beautiful girl.

We were locked in embrace, I remember the smoothness of her cheek. . . Or I think I do. There is lots going on in these dreams. I kept waking on my hard matress and shifting my cement pillow and tumbled back into her arms. She was like this song I now listen to. At this particular moment in a small room on an island in Greece out of your time - gone from mine but the moment, brief as it is, well it is/was perfect.

I hope to see her again. Perhaps she exists out there.

Another world, another life, perhaps she is the embodiment of perfection and I’ve met her before — I chase her through lives and dreams — perhaps she is Ishtar, Morrighan, the morning Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 15

star — a rising flame of indestructible love. Not mortal love.

Beyond that timeframe. Beyond that parody of lust. Something hellbent in the subconcious species memory.

Pages keep slipping out. Chairs are scraping across tiled floors.

I wish I were ten years younger, goddammit!

Another bottle! And orange balls. The orange balls are nuts encased in orange, the wine is Mantinesca. The wise seem to be mainly dead, unheeded, unheard of. The wise have been labelled outlandish freaks and ostracised. A hippy, nutter, a lunatic anarchist whatever. When I was young and I grew my hair, had a deminwaistcoat covered in patches, holed where I tried to drive studs in with a hammer. I painted some punk thing on the back, DOA, I think — it kept changing. I listened to rabid thrash metal, punk, hardcore. As Grey once said, “We were the No-generation who wore the colours that bleed.”

And look what happened to us all! Poetic thugs. Drunks.

Loners. But at present there’s only me scattered to the wind.

What happened to you guys? Were you so locked down in the age of Kali? Did we lock eyes with that goddess some sultry night in a foreign place of singing palms? Did we all dream the same girl? Do you believe you’ll find her? Here in this world?

Well I’ve seen enough ruins the past six years to fill my

16 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

gut with dry mortar. It aches, this ball. I am constipated with history. History as taught, as glimpsed in the dry walls of unknown races I saw in Morocco, in exhalted places: Mystras, Athens. In recent years, I’ve thirsted for life. At odds with all those lonely nights I feel the urge to mix and mingle. To taste your words and see if she is out there. Sometimes I felt her eyes upon me and I felt strong. She wished me luck from the back of some club, she cannot come close, destiny decrees otherwise — or I’m drunk and the pen has run away. Stuffing my face with orange-coated nuts and soft white wine. This night of my drunk. I see visions through the ruins of Rome.

Inspiration — the clarity of a battlefield thief prising gold teeth and rings off fingers.

We look back on the ancients as though they possessed some marvellous respect of nature and we gasp as we pass amongst the ruins of the acropoli at the mounds of pottery — wasn’t it just the same then as now? Weren’t they as vain, as messy, as uncaring as ourselves? — only now we can add a host of pollutants, chemicals, poisons, radiations, with all the other trash of crude spawn?

I stood there on the cliffs above Tinos, looking at all the junk puked down into the sea. I think essentially we’re the same. At fault in the essence of our being.

Wendy Thornton Wendy Thornton is a writer in Gainesville, Florida. A graduate of the University of Florida, she has published fiction, poetry and memoir in such journals as The Literary Review, The MacGuffin, Riverteeth, Main Street Rag and many others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the Glimmer Train and Boston Review short fiction prizes. She is the President of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville.

She is currently marketing her completed memoir on music and a novel about identical twins.

Bereft But With Options

Y

ou have learned from Dr. Barber, the world famous psychoneuroimmunologist, that you should not say not. The human mind does not process not. Your mind only processes positive statements. So how do you put a positive spin on reading the obituaries? You’re not reading the obituaries to sympathize with the living and emphasize with the dead. You’re not doing it to see how many people your age are dying — a lot, there are a lot! You are making comparisons. You are seeing whether you beat the deceased in accomplishments. Do they list more children, siblings, lovers, parents, awards and rewards than you would have in your obituary? How do you say, do not read the fucking obituaries anymore, if you cannot say not?

You start avoiding your young therapist. He looks 17, like someone you would have dated in the early seventies. You call him The Boy Wonder because he has so many scholarships and research grants on his resume. Although you tell him you can’t talk anymore, he keeps calling. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

He is very persuasive. “It’s important that we have closure.” He wears dashikis and Birkenstocks and ties his hair in a ponytail at his neck. You call him a neo-hippy.

“Closure will kill me,” you answer. “I am so very bored with me.” You stop taking his calls.

You went to see him last year because you wanted him to hypnotize you into weight loss. When he found out about your cancer, he convinced you to talk about the illness instead of your weight gain. He has decided to rewrite his dissertation — “Ancilliary anxiety and metastic fears in single-onset colon cancer survivors,” or some such nonsense. You have talked to him about how far away God is, but God has come no closer since you began your sessions.

In fact, your priest was recently fired, so now you just plain feel like Jesus has left the building. You didn’t even know priests could be fired. You are furious at the man, who had a wife, two children and an affair. If only he knew how hard it was for you to enter into the Episcopal Church, how badly you needed that ceremony, that peace which passes all understanding. And what does

he do? Have an affair, get fired by the Bishop.

You’re mad at the Bishop, too. Couldn’t he just have said your priest had to resign for personal reasons? Did he have to send a letter to the entire congregation saying this sinner had an affair?

For God’s sake, the man had teenage sons. You are incapacitated with grief at the thought of what the priest’s sin has done to his sons. Wives can handle the indignity, but children should be immune from public shame. What was the Bishop thinking?

Then you go on vacation and lose the cross your mother gave you. It belonged to your great aunt, Mattie Louise, who died of cancer when she was six years old. Your mother said you were the replacement child for Mattie Louise, that your grandmother went to visit her grave every day until the day you were born. Your mother did not give you the cross until you were diagnosed with cancer. She does not believe in God. And now God has left your neck as well as your heart.

You also lost your yellow plastic Lance Armstrong band. It fell off your wrist somewhere in South Dakota. You are sick of Lance Armstrong. Every oncologist’s office you’ve been in for the past two years has had smiling pictures of Lance: Lance celebrating his Tour de France wins, Lance straddling his bike proudly, Lance holding his hands over his head in the universal sign of victory. And yet, when you realize that your Livestrong band has fallen by the wayside somewhere in the west, you are as bereft as Sheryl Crow.

And of course, you are fired. This does not come as a surprise. Since your diagnosis, you have been damn difficult.

You resent fools, have no time for idiots. You have made your condition, or should we say your position, all too clear. You are the rattlesnake of freedom: “don’t tread on me.” For some reason, no one wants to work with a snake.

So here you are, adrift in the world. No neuro assistance, no psychic resistance, no religious help, no corporate ally. What to do? You could go to bed, but people expect you to function.

Your husband expects you to go out with him, to bars, to movies, to restaurants. To make up for all that lost time. To cheer you up. Your children expect you to call. Your mother Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 17

expects you to write. Your friends expect you to e-mail. You must continue to function. You cannot not be. You must not.

Because you still are.

You repeat the mantra Dr. Barbar taught you on her videotape: I am blessed. I have so many things to be thankful for.

Every day is a good day. Gradually, your breathing returns to normal. Your neck no longer feels as if it were floating in the air separate from your body. Your wrist no longer feels bare.

You take your severance pay and copy your resume. You pick

18 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

up the telephone in the middle of the Boy Wonder’s message.

“It’s like mental masturbation,” you protest, before he can talk about closure again.

“And what’s wrong with that?” he asks.

“I’m just not used to it.”

“Tuesday at six?”

“I’ll be there.” You hang up the phone with your bare wrist.

You think perhaps a nice copper bracelet would be a good replacement.

Adam Church Adam Church grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. He is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Adam discovered his love of poetry through the lyrics of American folk, alternative and punk music (artists like Bob Dylan, The Flaming Lips and The Dead Kennedys). He fills his time listening to music, reading and writing poetry and short fiction.

Heading to Downtown D.C. from Herndon Median Strip trees never die.

A secret between you and I. Thoughts that kept us up every night.

Vague attempts to be superhuman.

Vague attempts to be a hero.

For a world not looking for one.

It comes to staring blankly in a screen.

Melting our minds (Telepathic Napalm).

Silently I become empty, dull and dumb.

The strongest drug in every living room.

My God. My King.

(My TV.) Outside of our comfort (Is there an outside. . .?) we build our towers and smash them down.

(It’s not like on TV. . .)

In silent asphalt fields with mammoths of aluminum and polyurethane.

In monoxide-filled streets median strip trees erect from their concrete islands.

As reminders that some things are immortal.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 19

Laura Dennis Laura Dennis is inspired by the simple things in life. Her poetry has appeared in Home and Away, an anthology published by House of Blue Skies. She has had her work published on various literary websites and online magazines, including Four and Twenty, Blue Skies Poetry and All Things Girl. She has a self-published chapbook titled Wheels on the Bus. Her next book, The Bookshelf, will be published this fall. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with her supportive husband and their two odd cats. Laura can be found on http://www.facebook.com/laura.dennis

Thoughts on Snow October The snow came yesterday.

A surprise to my tree.

He dropped the remainder of his leaves in shock.

The white lawn speckled with yellow leaves.

the wind touched field-like-snow

snow-covered field unmarked except for the trail of lone footprints and snow angels

sending white clouds floating upwards leaving behind naked dandelions

early morning the world sleeps snow piled high, sparkles in the streetlights air still and crisp I feel as if I am walking on the moon 20 â–Ş The Battered Suitcase â–Ş Winter 2010

Lindsay McBirnie

Lindsay McBirnie is currently working as a freelance artist and illustrator in Melbourne, Australia, having graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in the UK in 2009. Her work is a combination of surreal and characterized images which originate from memory and observed drawing. She is often inspired by the people and places around her when working on new ideas or towards a narrative. At present, Lindsay is working on a new body of work inspired by her current setting in the heart of Fitzroy, Melbourne. Her online portfolio can be viewed at www.lindsaymcbirnie.co.uk.

After Hours

Winter 2010 â–Ş The Battered Suitcase â–Ş 21

Fairies

22 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

Snowmen

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 23

Partridge and Pear

24 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

Country Dancers

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 25

Skating Santa

26 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

Phibby Venable Phibby Venable lives in Southwest Virginia in the small historical town of Abingdon and is an Appalachian poet and writer. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, magazines, ezines and journals, both nationally and internationally, including Clinch Mountain Review, 2River, Poetrybay, Southern Ocean Review, The Appalachian Review, The Sow ’s Ear Review and The Circle Magazine. She has three chapbooks, What I Saw Beautiful, Indian Wind Song and On White Top, as well as two full poetry collections: Blue Cold Morning and Blue Water Poems. Her first novel Women of the Round Table is due out in the fall.

The Electric Blanket

I

t is not Christmas now, but it was then, back when I bought him the electric blanket. It was blue, a manly enough color, and a long, long, cord. It was long enough to reach from one end of the bed to the other and I knew we could turn in every direction without the cord ever tangling or pulling free from the protruding sewn in plug. He took a while to open it on Christmas Eve. He let it lay there a little too long to suit me.

It was a rough year and it had been difficult to secure enough money for a present. I had hoped to see him smile.

I had to babysit a long time in order to buy him a gift, so naturally it was a disappointment when he opened it and laid it down and starting watching TV. I wrote it off to his inability to accept anything in life gracefully or in the manner it was intended. I was also distracted by the first snow of the season.

Sometimes snow falls in that flat, white way, like a silent ambush, and it piles up quietly and nothing much is said about it. Yes, it is a winter wonderland, and everything is draped accordingly, but it is still just snow. That Christmas, the snow was distracting, because it was different. It was the blue shine snow, the type that looks as though each flake dipped itself in crystal before the big drop. There was a gleam and a sparkle, and it was still a wonderland, but magical. The entire landscape was sparkling like hand-thrown stars of multicolored prisms in the white of night. Observing all the beauty around me, I felt quiet inside, as though I had just been handed a bag of cotton candy at the fairgrounds. In a way, the winds that night were shooshing in soft stirs exactly like the outskirts of wind off a merry go round. At times like this, I felt the old headache returning, and tried to outrun it in my mind. Usually that was the case, but sometimes I had blackouts. However, the doctors had assured me that I was cured.

I plugged it the blanket, and like I said before, the cord allowed a lot of movement and positioning.

“Come here a second,” I called from the bedroom. “I have the blanket on.”

He didn’t say anything, so I went on into the den, and told

him again.

He was lying on the sofa holding the remote, covered to the chin in an old blanket, with one arm free, changing channels.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?” I asked. “I have the blanket on.”

“I am already too hot,” he said. “I can’t sleep when it’s too hot.”

“We can turn it off then,” I said, “but we do not have a fire, and it is pretty cold in there.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t like blankets.”

I tried to politely ignore the fact that he was covered from head to toe in one.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are you upset about something?”

“No,” he said, “but I didn’t ask for an electric blanket.”

“You didn’t have to,” I said. “I just thought it would be nice to have one . . . you know, cozy!”

“You are mad,” he said, “because I didn’t get you anything for Christmas, so you can just have that blanket.”

“I don’t mind that you weren’t able to buy me anything,” I said, “and we can both sleep under the blanket anyway, like a present to both of us.”

“Forget it,” he said. “I am sleeping in here.”

“Do you want me to sleep on the sofa with you?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. “You go sleep with that precious electric blanket.”

I went back to the bedroom and opened the blinds, so I could see the snow. The pine boughs were hanging heavy with shine. I wasn’t sure whether or not to pursue the blanket subject. He seemed pretty set on sleeping with the old one. I was almost asleep when I felt him crawl into bed. I took the edge of the blanket and pulled it over him. He pushed it away roughly.

“Get that off of me,” he said.

Then I noticed that he still had the old blanket with him.

He curled himself up tightly in it and went to sleep. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but I figured it would wait until morning.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 27

The next morning was Christmas, and I hurried into the kitchen early and put a ham in the oven and started kneading yeast rolls. He slept till late morning. He seemed in a good mood when he suddenly appeared.

“Smells good in here,” he said. He leaned over to sniff my coffee cup. He hated coffee and never drank it, but he loved the smell. He checked out the rolls and ham and then began going through the cabinet, moving everything around in a focused search.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Yams,” he said, “I am going to fix yams.”

Finally he found them, and poured them from the can into a baking dish. He added nuts and brown sugar and covered the top with marshmallows.

“Yaaaaaay,” I said, “that looks delicious.”

“It is,” he said.

“Do you want some hot chocolate?” I asked, pouring some hot water from the kettle into his special cup. I added the chocolate powder, and then tossed a big marshmallow on top.

“I hate that,” he said. “I hate it when you put big marshmallows on something that needs little marshmallows.”

I laughed. “Aww,” I said, hugging him, “I ’m sorry! Let me take it off. Do you know where the little marshmallows are?”

“Yes,” he said, “in the bottom of the cabinet in the very back.”

“I’ll get them,” I said.

“No, nevermind,” he said. “I don’t need special treatment.

You just keep doing whatever you were doing. I am going to drink it like this now.”

“I am going to see my mother today,” he said, “but I will be back.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” I asked.

“No, you go see your own mother,” he said possessively, in a voice that seemed to convey some suspicion on his part that I was of a mind to fling myself upon his mother and steal her away.

I didn’t say anything else. I knew he would have a good day with his family. He was a family favorite. He was actually the comedian of his family, laughing, joking, keeping everyone uplifted and festive on holidays.

We had been living together for four years, but his family disliked strangers, and disliked wild women. I was, of course,

28 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

the wild woman they disliked. They had visited us once, right after we begin living together, and I had been drinking red wine, eating spaghetti and laughing at a comedian on Comedy Central. Why this had proved so disconcerting to them was beyond me. Being of a restless nature, I had talked and laughed too much, to hide my nervousness, mostly, but they had been convinced of my alcoholism. Their serious, stern staring had only provoked more nervous laughter on my part. I made a bad impression, a fact that he never could forgive. As punishment, he had declared that I would not be able to visit them in the future. I tried not to look relieved, but the feeling was definitely there. Of course, I did visit them on random occasions, and although they laughed often at his jokes, the bad impression of me lingered like a fake tan.

Anyway, we went our separate ways and met back at the house by evening. He had a pile of presents and a smile on his face. I was happy to see him in a good mood. It didn’t last very long though, because of the electric blanket. That night I turned it on again, but it was the same thing.

“Man,” I said, “I had no idea you hated electric blankets.”

“I didn’t get you a present and you are mad,” he said, “so you can have that blanket.”

I am an easy going person, but the dislike of the gift, and that mad accusation was wearing a little thin. To tell the truth, those two references to no gift from him were starting to make me mad.

“Why didn’t you get me a present?” I asked.

“I hate Christmas,” he said.

“I distinctly remember you saying it was your favorite holiday,” I replied.

“I changed my mind,” he said.

“You have never bought me a Christmas present,” I said. “I was not expecting one.”

“I knew you would bring that up,” he said triumphantly. “I knew you were mad.”

“Well,” I said,” I am not so much mad about not getting a present, as I am about you dumping mine.”

“I never asked for it,” he said.

I definitely felt a headache coming on. I could not see very well for the red veil that had fallen over my eyes out of nowhere.

And that is why I electrocuted him with the electric blanket.

Amy Schreibman Walter Amy Schreibman Walter was born in 1976 in sultry South Florida, to parents from the edge of Brooklyn. She currently lives in London, England, where she enjoys teaching 8-year-olds how to write good poetry, among other things. Presently studying at the Faber Poetry Academy in London, Amy teaches by day and writes by night.

December 25, Chinatown Dim Sum on Christmas Day. We didn’t know what else to do.

The snow made a grey exit, playing a devilish hide and seek in and out of murky New York puddles.

Pink flashing lights draped sadly above a faded calendar, twelve women with china doll skin and big teeth smiled from the wall and three Jews stood awkwardly in the chilly vestibule waiting for a table.

Ducks hung above us, their fat bellies swung sadly above worn neon and chintz.

My coat was not warm enough for this kind of barren cold, I stood shivering in the doorway, looking up at Chinese graffiti wondering when I would feel festive.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 29

Kathryn Megan Starks Kathryn Megan Starks is a professional and creative writer in Raleigh, North Carolina. She specializes in fiction (both the short and long form) but also has a background in business and technical writing, journalism and editing. She currently works as a freelance designer in the publishing industry. Megan has a Masters in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She lives with her cat Sushi and enjoys reading novels in her spare time.

Seattle, First Year Attorney at Law

A

na Maria has learned rather late in life to tip on her toes.

She fancies herself an urban ballerina, teeter-gliding flawlessly across uneven sidewalks on mere knife pinpoints for heels, her gait a diminutive clip, clip: purposeful and melodic, taps — Boy, here I come.

It began during law school, this reverse balancing act, after years of snowboarding in the Colorado Rockies and following the inspiration of having watched, one Sunday, Dirty Dancing three times in a row. At first it felt foreign, as all things invariably do, and it certainly didn’t help her learning curve that the chestnut-hued brunette hails from a long line of staunch women who have always, and will till the day they die, support themselves squarely on the balls of their feet. It gives one better posture (says her mother); it is the natural way of things (says her grandmother); it promotes proper circulation (says her conscience). All or none of these things might be true, but are irrespective to her wants.

Ana Maria doesn’t care about slumped, knobby shoulders or tradition. She has more pressing concerns, like cultivating an exceptional fashion sense. And in the end, her conscience can be satisfied with that so long as she sprinkles in enough second-hand vintage gems.

Ana Maria is one of the few women who actually wears their shoes for men rather than for culturing her own sense of feminine esteem. She wears wedges to the laundromat three blocks down, pumps to pump gas, kitten sandals to the community pool, and stilettos to each grinding 11-hour work day. After two years of ordering supplies, unjamming copier feeds, making bland coffee, answering the telephone lines, and one summer internship in hell (see: stuck in the filing room doing Estate work), she is finally, fully, a first year attorney at law. She is accomplished. Now she has her own office with a fire escape, and it is nice. She keeps a bookshelf to house her rows of footwear alternatives not unlike the patent attorney who hoards an assortment of differently

30 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

colored sport jackets on the coatrack in the corner of his office. Now someone else makes the bland coffee — her very own paralegal, Kay. Kay is reminiscent of Ana Maria’s mother, a feisty older woman with wiry, shoulder-length hair who refuses to retire after 32 years of assisting in real estate transactions.

“Now what is this?” Kay is the type to converse with herself consistently throughout the day. “What was I doing?” she babbles. “What the hell is this? Where does this go?” or “Who filed this?”

She often forgets to refill the stockroom with ash-colored envelopes in a timely enough manner, stressing the senior partner who has case folders overflowing his dual L-shaped desks yet miraculously finds the time to micromanage everyone on the floor below.

“Good morning, Kay,” Ana Maria calls from the break room in the back, having heard the older woman’s voice. It’s 8:14 a.m., and they have a busy day ahead of them. Lives to better, or so they pretend. “Are these donuts yours?”

(Not that she would indulge, regardless, but it’s nice to be polite.)

“No. Matt’s.”

Ana Maria specializes in litigation and real estate, though she loathes the latter. She has a bad habit of showing up late for closings in subtle rebellion.

Kay arrives shortly, couriering a cornflower blue folder (LLC and corporations) to go with Ana’s latest construction dispute and informs her that she’s already missed a phone call from a “Teresa from college” who would like to schedule in a lunch date while she’s in the port city.

“The world must be coming to an end,” Ana Maria clips.

Her heels echo the sentiment as she retreats down the hall, blue file folder and coffee mug clutched in hand. *** They meet at Cafe Besalu. Cafe Besalu has the best handmade pastries in all of Seattle as far as Ana Maria and half

the population are concerned, and while Ana Maria doesn’t eat cardamom pretzels or orange brioche, she wants to impress her long-time frenemy with the tempting brunch.

Look what a wonderful bakery I have in my city, she grins as she sips on her frothy nonfat mocha, her heel tapping impatiently under the table. Rat-a-tattle. “What could possibly bring you to town?” Ana Maria inquires, ivory foam filmed over her upper lip.

“Have I told you yet how lovely your shoes are today?”

Ana frowns, familiar with the baiting compliment. Her peep-toed oxford pumps are lovely, but that is beside the point.

“Sugar?” she counters.

“Artificial, if you don’t mind,” Teresa laughs. “Mm, five packets. You never grab enough.” She takes her time, making Ana wait until she’s finished stirring the sweetener into her iced tea, giving the beverage a few shallow test sips. Then, finally, “You’re looking awfully rawboned these days.” She says it pointblank, never one to beat around the bush. That’s Teresa.

Ana Maria had seen it coming. She’d be a fool or a stranger not to have. “Thanks. Did you fly all the way here to discuss my diet techniques?”

“Hardly. I’m getting married.”

Teresa says this as if it’s some great news, as if she hasn’t been engaged for almost two and a half years.

“Here?”

“Here. And we’re serving duck for the sit-down dinner.” *** Ana Maria doesn’t eat real food. She lives off candy corn and pretzels, both of which she keeps in green Tupperware containers in her office desk. Ana Maria used to be a pear shape but now she is more skeletal. Lately, she’s been going for the Mary-Kate Olsen look, the dumpster-diving 12-year-old in an oversized sweater appeal. And it’s working.

Thanks to her newly discovered white rimmed 60s sunglasses, she’s had three dates this month. Unfortunately, all of them were with the same loser, some Scorpio her landlord introduced her to while he was fixing her toilet.

On the surface, Lucas appears the perfect match. He’s a pharmacist at the local hospital, he’s self-possessed and goaloriented, dark and handsome, all of which are good adjectives, he’s an active kick-boxer, into sudoku and loves cats. But he’s a petite man and sort of creepy.

He’s taken to arguing her into dates. Each one is a haggle on location or weeknight. And when she expressed concerns that he was moving too fast, he said, “For the first three months, you only have to make-out. I won’t take it below the belt before that.”

It’s like high school all over again, except even high school was better than this. *** Ana Maria has been saddled with planning Teresa’s bachelorette party even though she doesn’t know anyone else in the wedding.

“What happened to the other Teresa?” she’d asked at brunch. Wasn’t other-Teresa more suited for this?

“Oh, she couldn’t make it. She’s due any day now — face puffed like a Cabbage Patch doll. Besides you know the city the best. If his parents weren’t paying for the whole damn thing — no budget,” (and her eyes look a little starry when she says that) “ — you think I’d have ever picked a place like this?”

Ana Maria has only lived in Seattle for the past 16 months, but she feels a stab to her pride, protective of the seaport city.

Who wouldn’t love to end up here? Whatever, she knows the perfect place.

Mosquito is low-lit and hot, packed with attractive, earlythirties socialite bodies bumping against each other to the DJ’s techno-pop mixes, and the best part is there’s a rooftop bar.

As hostess, Ana Maria is charged with taking the bride-tobe to the restroom to vomit up her blackberry Agave Rush after her tummy is flushed full with the drinks and to make sure her engagement ring doesn’t slip into the toilet bowl during the process. But there is only so long that someone can hold back hair to the stench of fruity bile. After a while, she leaves Teresa in the bathroom, feeling her duty fulfilled, the stall door swung inward, unable to listen to the retching any longer.

Disgusting. She should be wearing the ring.

It’s the thought that trips her up. Ana Maria stumbles on her way out; she breaks the strap on her peacock-green, woven, silk wedges and curses her way into a bystander’s arms.

“Whoa there,” the young man laughs, swinging her around, cold, wet beer pressed to her arm, and she can’t really make out his face but she thinks he seems cute.

She smiles, for once forgets the shoes.

He is cute. He’s the cutest person she’s seen since college.

He’s too boyish to be handsome, but she likes it that way. He’s youthful and good looking enough. She can already tell and has decided, she’ll excuse him for being stupid.

“I like your face,” she says. And he says, “You have nice breasts.”

She grins. “I know. They’re left over from when I was fat.”

He makes a little “Ye-haw,” laughing, corralling her against his body, and she knows: He blows Lucas out of the water.

He blows everyone out of the water, ever since her failed engagement prior to law school. *** Ana Maria has a lot of issues that her therapist helps her with. For example, she keeps dreaming that soon she will die in a plane crash. The nightmares have persisted for two weeks, off and on. Her therapist advises her to stop taking afternoon naps on the weekends. She calls the nightmares “hypnogogic sessions” triggered by travel anxiety.

“Have you ever flown before?” she asks.

Without missing a beat, Ana Maria answers, “Yes, once.”

This is, of course, one of Ana Maria’s little white lies. They tend to slip their way past her lips when she perchances a smile.

Yes, I eat three meals a day. Yes, I am content to be single. Yes, Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 31

yes.

The truth is, she drove from Baltimore to Seattle with only a duffel bag of clothes, and that’s why she’s never been back home. *** He is a personal trainer, and Ana Maria finds his body amazing to touch. She dances barefoot with him — Bransen — for hours, though when she recalls the events the next day, her memory is smoky at best. The atmosphere was too crowded and dim-lit, everything back-splashed a smoldering red. She can’t remember the details of his face, only that he was perfect and she let him get away with murder. She’d never been so openly promiscuous before, giving him a lap dance when he jokingly(?) requested it and allowing him to grope her breasts as they danced. He made her laugh a lot. She liked his antics, his frat-boy laugh. He seemed familiar and safe and stupidly immature. This was who she’d been waiting for — this first real spark of feeling in months and months and years.

They kissed over and over as if it were something new.

She remembers leaving him without a second thought when the bridal party announced it was ready to go.

“Bye!” she smiled at him, cheerfully drunk.

On the street corner two blocks down, she heard her name called. She liked that he’d said her name many, many times since she’d told him. Bransen was walking in the opposite direction, feigning surprise, and his sudden appearance boggled her mind. Of course, he and his friends had followed her out, but too wobbly and slow, she lit up at the sight of him, exclaiming, “You! What a thing!”

Now, it was meant to be. This was fate at work, his grin told her. She latched onto his arm as if it was where she belonged.

Of course, he was just as drunk as she. Probably. They stopped on their walk to find a cab, and he sat at a street corner, hands flat against the cold pavement, eyes watching so many legs passing in a steady stream. Ana Maria ran her hands through his dirty-blond hair, fingertips raking his scalp, and he looked up at her with intent green eyes, tilting back into her legs. It was so unlike her, to be affectionate, possessive, without floundering or awkward thoughts. This stranger made her so at ease. He was so familiar.

He should be hers. From now on, she thought.

They exchanged numbers when he hopped out of the taxi to piss in her front yard.

Arching back in a wide-legged stance, Bransen hollered over his shoulder, “Call me, call me. Anaaaa!”

She threatened him, “You better call me tomorrow,” through the open window as the taxi drove off.

He text messaged her by the time she got to her bedroom.

He was so stupid, but she thought she could forgive him for that. *** Ana Maria has four fat cats which eat her groceries so she doesn’t have to. When she gets home they come running which 32 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

under so much weight is more of a slow waddle, their fuzzy tummies dragging the carpet. Their names are Twiggy, Farrah, Rita, and Big Earl. Their heads look like grapes on their sumowrestler cat bodies. She jokes that she feeds them kitty steroids.

But really, they’re just fat.

Sometimes in the evenings, Rita likes to nose her tubby way onto Ana Maria’s stomach, kneading at the soft expanse while Ana lounges in front of the television, latest case file in hand.

Make-over and style shows murmur in the background. It’s important to stay desirable, Ana Maria has learned the hard way. This time everything will be different. This time she won’t be the one abandoned.

The new and current Ana Maria began with a simple hair cut, a style to welcome in the new year. After that, came losing the weight, new clothing, new jewelry, the obsession with the shoes, and better, more expensive make-up. Ana Maria always wears make-up.

She bleaches her upper lip, she waxes her brows, she curls her eyelashes; at home when she feels hungry, she applies whitening strips to her teeth. It’s not enough to be, to have it done to accomplish an end means — the transformation must be maintained completely on her own. This is so she can pretend she does it for herself.

She calls it pampering, indulging, spoiling herself.

She paints her finger and toenails weekly and soaks in pungent bath treatments for silky skin. She shaves, everywhere.

She slathers retinol and rose hips and tightening masks onto her face.

She’s purchased a $200 ultrasonic skincare brush, pricey vials of pore minimizer serum, prescription lash thickener, and a red photo-rejuvenation spa therapy treatment lamp.

She wears socks with lotion in them even though it’s squishy when she walks.

Because if she doesn’t — Because if she doesn’t, she will have no one but herself to blame. *** “The whole ride home, he was shouting directions to the cab driver, ‘turn left here!’ to get to my house, and I kept having to yell at the driver to ignore him, that he didn’t know where he was going and to turn right instead. That idiot.”

She smiles at Kay in a way she hasn’t smiled in a long time.

“Are you going to tell your grandchildren how he marked your front yard and you knew it was love?” The older woman is teasing her. “Wouldn’t that be a lovely story to tell them?”

Ana Maria purses her lips, feels how chapped they are. “It does seem impossible, when you say it like that, doesn’t it? I don’t even remember what he looks like. What if he’s ugly?

What if he thinks I’m ugly? What if it was beer goggles?”

“What about Lucas?”

“What about him?” *** Meeting at a seedy sports bar is the last place she’d feel

comfortable, but she doesn’t think about that until she’s already there, looking about the crowd of unkempt men like a startled doe. Her feet ache supporting the weight of paralysis.

She doesn’t see him and wonders if she’s been stood up. Or what if he’s here and she just doesn’t recognize him? Pathetic.

Idiotic.

“Anaaa, over here.”

He’s behind her.

She turns, and there he is, the spitting image of her ex-fiance.

Ah. She blinks in rapid succession as her body remembers how to move in the face of shock. One toe point in front of the other, and another and again, forward. Good.

And he’s brought a wing-man along. Awkward. Unreal.

She laughs openly with disbelief. They hug. She thinks, What are the odds? She feels timid and small. But he’s better looking than her ex, so maybe, maybe she should see this through. He’s a better version of her ex. What’s wrong with an upgrade? It’s been a long time. Looks don’t really affect that much outside of sex.

Lies, lies.

Ana Maria sits, tries to crawl out of her skin without it being too noticeable.

“You came.” Bransen is still boyishly charming. He keeps staring at her like he wants to tickle her ribs with his teeth, which could be a good thing.

“Yeah. I said I might.”

The friend asks, “Are you coming over to watch the movie?”

He speaks through his nose and wears a too tight t-shirt with a cartoon Jesus on a hang glider. Underneath the picture it reads, What wouldn’t Jesus Do? Bransen says, “You like his shirt? It’s funny, isn’t it?” He orders her a Miller Lite without asking what she’d like.

“Sure, I guess.”

Bransen says, “It’s mine. I loaned it to him.”

She wants to say, Your friend is pudgy and you are not. Instead she says, “He doesn’t have clothes of his own?”

His friend asks again, “Are you coming to watch the movie?”

She can’t get over how nasally he sounds. Why is he here, wearing Bransen’s clothes? Ana Maria frowns. “I don’t know.”

This wasn’t at all what she wanted. This wasn’t romantic or heart-fluttering; this wasn’t at all like falling in love. She feels somehow betrayed.

This wasn’t the contract she was looking to enter into.

“You’re awfully indecisive for a lawyer.” Bransen teases, but he’s not smiling. *** Little red flags sprout like mushrooms. Bransen lives with his parents. His bed has camouflage sheets. It turns out, he’s just like her ex-fiance in more ways than looks.

They both grew up in small towns and have younger brothers, though this isn’t so uncommon. Both are ex-prize fighters, the thought of which sends tiny prickles down her spine.

Again, she thinks, what are the odds? Is this some twisted soulmate thing for personality types? But she doesn’t want to get sucked into that again, even as she is.

Bransen is full of himself, and she’s learned the hard way to be wary of cocky men. He’s also way more cunning than stupid, and that’s disappointing to realize.

Ana Maria lies with him on the full-sized mattress while they watch the latest hit bromance and Bransen comments on every attractive woman in the movie. She wonders how so many girls can want to have sex with him in such a disparaged atmosphere. But at one time hadn’t she also felt swollen for having such a guy choose her?

Words which could accurately describe both Bransen and Ana Maria’s ex, Shannon Ruger: womanizing, manipulative, cocksure, blond, charismatic, winsome, boyish, clever, deceitful, selfish, all-American athletic, prideful, breathtaking, heartbreaking, how can life be so unfair infuriating.

They both enjoy lording over her old rock songs that she doesn’t recognize the names or artists to. They feel superior in this niche of a way, but Shannon actually scored higher on the LSAT and went to a better school than she did. She could give him that at least. Top of the class without even trying, he’d had an authentic claim to impressiveness even as he’d ditched her after four years for someone skinnier. She’d thought, long distance wouldn’t have worked anyway. Wasn’t it then her failure?

Bransen is just an annoying imitation. She isn’t attached enough to him to put up with his bullshit even if it’s uncannily the exact same brand.

He asks, “Well, are you going to sit on the bed?”

Lying down on the tiny mattress, she feels a sense of dread, her back molars grinding for a long moment. But his body is unbelievably warm against her side, and she likes the way he strokes her upper arm. They fit together perfectly, just as she remembers after so many years. She’s missed this thing called chemistry. She can’t remember the last time a boy gave her goosebumps.

He pauses the movie when his phone bleeps.

“Who is it? No, wait, don’t tell me,” he says to Third-wheel.

“I mean tell me, but don’t tell me.”

Ana Maria must be an idiot.

“I gotta answer this.” He hops over her, off the bed, scooping the cell phone up in his calloused hand to thumb out a reply. When he rejoins her, settling against her back, he kisses the side of her neck in mock apology.

During the six months after her relationship with Shannon had gone down the drain but she’d remained unable to emotionally disentangle herself, she’d confronted him regarding some questionable text messages in his phone. The problem they’d been arguing over lately had written him, “I had a nightmare; why aren’t you here?” and “Wish you could crawl through my window again tonight and we could makeout.”

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 33

Shannon had laughed it off, saying, “I can’t help it if girls want me. It doesn’t mean anything, baby.”

It doesn’t mean anything. *** It started off, when she was just beginning, Ana Maria had read some studies about the benefits of intermittent fasting and its comparability to long term calorie restriction diets. It seemed like a good way to lose weight and begin a healthier lifestyle. It’s just that, after a while, every other day became consecutive two and three and four days a week, and then she just lost interest in eating altogether. It was no longer a test of willpower, merely the reality of her existence. In the courtroom, she raises her voice to keep from shaking like a leaf in the wind. Among the circuit, she’s earned the nickname, the banshee.

Lucas calls her AM and she hates him a little bit for it.

“AM, come on, are you on the rag or something? You’ve been blowing me all week, and I don’t mean in the fun way. You can’t spare 30 minutes for dinner? I’ve been working oncology for the past 12 hours, and I have a report due tomorrow, but you know what, I want to have a little bit of a social life. I want to go out with someone and relax over a couple of drinks.”

She relents.

She’s having trouble deciding between the salad or the creamy eggplant pasta. For once, she thinks it would be nice to splurge without feeling guilty. She wonders, when is the last time she had a burger? Her mind is blank, her tummy hollow and hungry for a man with real beef.

Lucas says, “It doesn’t take a lot to stay healthy, AM, but eating pasta isn’t one of them.” He is on his third coca-cola for the evening. He’s become addicted to caffeine, explaining how he’s been packing a whole pot of coffee into one large thermos for work. “When it’s hot, I drink it more slowly. But when it’s cold, I just suck it down. With a little milk and sugar, I just suck it down.”

His eyes are very dark when he speaks of such things.

Before they order, he asks, “Are you serious? Are you really going to eat that?”

He cuts into his steak with a sort of ferocity. He paws at the hot, buttery buns in the center breadbasket. Ana Maria watches more than she eats. Her salad is bland for lack of dressing. *** Bransen bragged about how he had the entire attic loft to himself, but when it comes down to it, he’s still a 28-year-old living with his parents.

When she reaches a hand out during their lovemaking to steady herself, the gnarled wood paneling of the wall is prickly against her palm. His space for her is small and unsuited.

They move quietly so his parents won’t wake. In their current position, she can’t see him, but she can feel him at her back.

She stares out the window into the darkened street below, eyes fixated on a the section awash in orange light.

She wanted to take her heels off, but Bransen told her to 34 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

leave them on. It’s awkward — she’d started wearing them for this end purpose, but now it’s as if they’ve been defiled. Such precious accessories deserve better than this. She thinks things shouldn’t have turned out like this.

She can hear his friend in the next room, connecting to the bathroom. He’s a mouth breather, their third-wheel.

When she questioned, “What’s he doing here?” Bransen spewed with anger. She isn’t allowed even a moment of selfrighteousness with this man. On the one hand, she misses such hot passion — the unbelievable highs and the soulcrushing lows. She misses being possessed both for someone and by someone.

“He’s my best friend, and he’s visiting in town. We’ve known each other since we were in diapers, and he’d do anything for me. I’ve known him longer than any girl.”

That certainly put his priorities into perspective. She’s played this game before. His friend is always going to be there, while she will come and go.

“If you have a problem with Davis, then you have a problem with me.”

Then the question should have been: Why did he ask her over? And why hadn’t she said no? She hasn’t seen Teresa since the bachelorette party, and she prefers it that way. Friends aren’t meant to enjoy each other’s company outside of obligation.

The gap between them is too large, too achingly familiar.

Still, she toys with the idea of what they could be. It’s not uncomfortable when he kneads a floppy breast in one palm and breathes against the back of her neck, “God, they’re bigger than my hands can cover.”

At one point, the mouth breather walks into the room, stark naked in the darkness, and Bransen keeps going.

Ana Maria says, “Okay. I’m through.” *** A week seeps by and then another. The weather has turned drab. She’s texted Bransen only once: I miss us. She doesn’t really; it’s just a moment of weakness, another moment in a series of moments of her continued broken existence. But she hasn’t heard a peep from him and has to assume he’s dead or fucking some new girl in a threesome with Davis, all of them spilling off of that tiny bed, knocking heads against the lowslung ceiling. It’s not a huge loss, though it’s left her pining.

Kay says, “You’re putting on some weight. Gives you a nice shape. Did you file the Raft pleadings with the Madame Clerk?

I may have misplaced the file sometime last week.”

Ana Maria sighs. “Just keep bringing in those donuts. And all will be well, Kay. We’re gonna be okay.” She clicks her pen a few times before clacking off down the hallway.

Lucas visits her at work for the first time, turning himself into somewhat of a stalker, considering that Ana Maria dumped him halfway through last week. He’s come to argue with her about what a power couple they could be. He uses words like “envision” and “tax deductible” to catalog his love for her. He’s wearing his white lab coat as if on lunch break

when she knows for a fact it’s his day off.

“Please, move on,” she says. “I have to be in court later this afternoon.”

She inhales a bag of cheese puffs to scare him off. She feels ravenous, her stomach twisting with the deep-rooted pain of childbirth or gas.

She flips open a yellow folder, smearing orange powder on the inside pages. She rubs greasy fingertips along the hairline of her brow. Complicated.

Mitigating would be difficult.

Lucas was just an ingrown toenail. He wasn’t even enough to leave a scar, but now she’s back to being single.

There’s a displeasing, chemical aftertaste on the back of her tongue.

The plaintiff is suing because her clients’ 17-year-old son was caught violating the plaintiff ’s Aston Martin during the early hours of a midweek September morning.

The plaintiff ’s affidavit includes pictures of the car from every angle. Behind the closed door of the smaller conference room, just the two of them and a round table and some cheap office chairs, a phone and a wilted plant, she showed him the photographs one by one, watched as he fixated on each, eyes roving the sleek, silvery curves and dips. She imagined she could understand what he was thinking, how he could admire the broader, lower set tires, how the mirrors jutted out in a way that was just asking to be tweaked.

She asked him why he wanted to have sex with his neighbor’s car.

He answered, “His car is hotter.”

She asked how he viewed the car as a sexual being. “Like a Transformer? Or a girlfriend?”

“No, not like a Transformer. Just a car.”

She had imagined, but she didn’t really understand. “Why?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” Had the embarrassment of getting caught not been enough?

The kid thinks he’s a dragon. He says he has a dragon soul.

That’s what he feels.

That apparently has to do with the why because when she Googles Dragons having sex with cars, there are over 453,000 return links. There are Youtube videos and artwork of the animal-upon-machine act, and there are forums. The forums are where the furries come together, where they chat.

Ana Maria is doing research. Ana Maria is doing research to be a better defense when she looks at the artwork. And Ana Maria is doing research when she registers a username and enters the gate to the chat room.

She’s doing research when she talks to him, fingers greasy on the keys.

What should have been a single conversation stretches weeks into countless correspondence.

He isn’t like Bransen or Lucas or Shannon. He isn’t cruel or detached despite his cold-blooded nature. He says dragons are loyal; they mate for life. That’s why it takes them a long time to settle down. They’re reluctant to commit, because they hate to be oath-breakers.

He had asked her not long after the beginning, Are you a dragon?

She’d typed, Car.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 35

Melissa Chadburn After studying law, Melissa Chadburn obtained an MFA from Antioch University. She is a lover and a fighter, a union rep, a social arsonist, a writer, a lesbian, of color, smart, edgy and fun. Her work has been published in 5923 Quarterly, 52/250, Thunderclap Press, The Bohemian, People’s Weekly World, Political Affairs, Shelf Life, Battered Suitcase, and Splinter Generation. If you want to get ripped, her blog can be read throughout the day. betteranever.blogspot.com

Communion

I

smiled nervously and thought, this is strange and funny but sort of sexy … I thought of my new lover and how this could make a great kinky scene. I knew he was waiting. I never did well with silences. I heard the priest place his palm on his wooden shelf. I had to say something. What constitutes a sin anyway?

It was early evening at St. Augustin’s church in Boyle Heights, California. I was at a rehearsal for my secretary’s wedding. The jacaranda trees outside the church had left a light purple trail on the maroon carpeting that adorned the entrance. The wedding party sat in pews awaiting their turn to confess. Little glints of light bounced on the stained-glass windows. I sat outside the yellow pine door staring at the crucified image of Jesus at the altar. When I was a child, I would trace the blood over the arches of his feet in my mind. When that game ended, I would imagine I lived in the church with all my friends.

Now, as a grown-up, I found myself inside a small, dark room where there was only enough space for me to kneel. It smelled like burning coal, and the seats were lined with bloodcolored velvet, the smoothness of forgiveness. I was here to earn my turn for that dull wafer and sip of wine. There was a long, fat, leather kickstand on the floor to cushion my knees, and a smooth, light pine bar to hook my feet around. It was the stuff fetishes are made of. The thin bar, with just the right amount of room for you to strike prayer position, it was a whisper from God or a priest or a master, the tight caress of the wooden room. “Good girl,” it said. When I closed the door behind me, the sounds outside stopped. I knelt. “Uh hello …

I’ve never done this before.”

“When did you go to your last confession?” It was a firm, fatherly voice, starchy and raspy.

I could hear the window screen open. There was a dark grate between us. It was a farce. We both knew who the other person was. I knew he was the priest who was speaking to me outside, and he must have known who I was because I was the only English-speaking person there.

I clasped my hands together and bent my head down before 36 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

the grated window. “This is my first confession.”

“Have you had your First Communion?”

“Yes.” “Well, you must have confessed before that. When was that?”

I searched my memory for hints. I knew there were classes for that. Catechism classes I had to endure for several hours after school. I was sent away frequently to some sort of principal’s office for doodling in my gold book. I would doodle devil’s horns on Jesus’ head. I would update the sketches of myself to look more punk rock. I remembered the woman who drove me home every day. She was a cat woman, the kind who owned so many cats she didn’t even bother to name them all. Her car reeked of animals and cigarettes; she was overweight and her arms and elbows would leak onto my side of the little white Volkswagen bug every time she shifted gears. That’s when I stopped trusting the whole thing. I thought it was just another ride home for my mother, another free after-school program.

“I don’t know. I was about six or eight.” By now I had slunk out of my prayer position and nodded my head to the side.

“How old are you now?”

We were looking straight on then. “Thirty-two.”

“So how long was that?”

“I dunno.”

I paused, looking down at my hands. I made math noises.

“I guess about 26 years. Something around there.”

“Okay.” He took a moment. “I want you to lean in and whisper all of your sins to me.”

You see what I mean by kinky scene? I tried to think of the absolute worst thing I’d ever done. An image of my brother’s large dark hand holding a gun came to my mind. I saw only the butt of the gun, his hands between a woman’s legs, the skirt of her dress up against the wall. I tried to remember but I couldn’t see the woman, I couldn’t look, I was watching out for people in the parking lot. I was looking for people coming but I was crying. “Give me your money!” B said. He was just acting; he wasn’t really that bad. But he loved it. He loved this

acting. He’d tell me later he thought his character had reached new heights. He had the woman pinned up against the wall, and with her sad white dress with brown flowers crumpled up around her waist, B pushed a gun up her. He’s huge, six-five, black, onyx black, muscular. It just looked so awful. I thought he’d gone too far. It was real; he was sticking a gun up some woman’s pussy for money. That’s what I thought. He didn’t have to do that. The woman pissed herself, the gun. She was a grown woman, she was shaking, she had money.

My hands were resting on the window in front of me, slightly moist. “Omissions to act. I think my sins aren’t so much things I did but things I failed to do,” I whispered.

“You have not confessed in 26 years and that is the only sin you can think of ?”

“Uh, yes, Father. Except maybe honesty. There are times when I have been dishonest.”

“What about sex? Do you have sex?”

I smiled to myself. Oh naughty priest, I thought.

“Yes, I have sex, Father.”

I was in my element now. I smirked at the priest. Is this what he wanted?

“About how often? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Once a year?”

I thought, there’s a lot of math involved in this. I looked down at my hands. Let’s see, I’ve been around 32 years. I started having sex pretty young, but maybe regularly around 23.

“Father, is this an average?”

He sighed.

“Yes.” “Once a week.”

“Are you married?”

“No.” “Living with someone?”

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how to answer.

Maybe I should say that my boyfriend left a toothbrush at my house, and that has recently elevated the level of our relationship. But I wasn’t quite sure what to call him. I had been living like a lesbian for the last 10 years, and now I was dating a trans guy, and I just wasn’t used to using the words boy and friend together in a sentence. When I was searching for a gender-neutral term that I could use to describe him, he suggested I call him toothbrush-leaver. I started to say, “Father, I have a toothbrush-leaver” but thought better of it. I settled on “Father, I’m gay.”

“I don’t care if you are homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, cisexual. But you have drifted from your faith. I cannot let you take Communion tomorrow because it would be sacrilegious.”

I slumped in my kneel. No longer feeling the good girl caress, no longer caring. Well, no longer caring completely I suppose.

You see, there’s more to the story about the brother. It’s true he was an asshole and that’s probably what sticks out about him. But his madness was driven by a need to satiate his heroin addiction. I used to take him to pick up his methadone. All the

junkies sat around with little waxed Dixie cups, the Easteresque pastel flowers ridiculing their addiction.

They used to sit around with those cups, the dope fiends.

They would take them apart, unravel them into one long piece of waxed paper, unfold the curled edges, and lick it clean. My brother seemed to hunker down in the chairs, making the plastic chairs disappear, like a parent at back-to-school night.

He would look angry, then sheepish; he’d take his Communion in his mouth (that’s what we called it, “Communion”) and finally he would look relieved for a moment like an exhale.

The last time I took him, he stood up to leave and I noticed his hands were still clenched in fists. Not a good sign for him.

When he reached the door he smacked some guy on the head with one hand while delicately removing the Dixie cup with his other. He was always so coordinated, never got the bzzzz in Operation. “Punk ass biotch!” he sneered and ran outside before anyone could move. They were in slow motion in there.

Time stopped in there.

My brother eventually died. I always quote his last words as being “Fuck it.” This sounds apathetic but really it wasn’t.

It was his faith. You see, despite his grungy, crass lifestyle he was deeply religious and he wore a gold crucifix around his neck. When he said those words they came out more like a slur, “Fuuuuuckittt.” At the same time he paternally stroked the miniature golden figure of Jesus on his crucifix. I got comfort in this. Regardless of all the horrible, mean, desperate things we did, there would always be a place for salvation. This priest was taking away my last hope for salvation. I say I do not believe in it but I want to. I wanted to think that the thing that kept me out of this small closet my whole life was not complete lack of disbelief but that this fell somewhere on Plan B and I was currently still working on Plan A. “I don’t feel I have drifted from my faith. God is with me in everything I do, Father.” I pulled my feet and knees out from the holster and crossed my legs in the chair. I raised my hands so my silhouette would cast a deep shadow across his face. If shadows were felt it would have been a slap. “But this is your church and I will respect your wishes.”

“Okay, if you promise me not to take Communion tomorrow, I will absolve you of all your sins. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.” He slammed the door of the window shut. The room grew dark.

I sat there sad, like I had lost something. Confused. I looked at the floor, at the stupid leather log designed to cushion knees. I could not leave the room, so I put my head down on the little wooden shelf. My dark curls splayed along my shoulder, my designer jeans falling low on my ass, I pushed my sneakered feet into the floor to try to get centered. Wait, did I just get rejected from taking the Eucharist? The thing that people have been hounding me about for so long? I mean don’t they recruit for this thing? I became overwhelmed with the guilt and shame of somebody else’s judgment of my spirit. I felt unlovable. And this is where I get stuck. I find it very difficult to write my way Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 37

out of this because that phrase is so painful. To feel unworthy of love is like having your body hollowed out so your spirit becomes separate from the vehicle that is your body. You’re untethered, insatiable, every movement you’ve made up till now is completely worthless. “Unlovable,” it leaves an echo … and my heart feels like a jumbled mass.

I pulled myself together, got up and left the confessional.

I knew my secretary was waiting for a verdict. I knew I had been in there a long time. I passed the procession of expectant faces, not able to tell them, and walked out of the church. I was ripped into the brightness of reality, like when you exit a movie theater. The church exit led right onto the dark asphalt of the parking lot. There were three cars, my Jeep, a tan Buick, and right next to the door in a parking spot designated with a sign that said “Reserved for Father …” there stood the man with the voice. He was tall, bald, doughy. The type of white man you would be surprised to know was fluent in Spanish. A Phil Donahue, Santa Claus variety of white man. He was bent over struggling with his car. He drove an old navy blue Cutlass

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Ciera, with dark blue leather seats. I knew the car because I used to have one and my friends and I used to joke that it would be my stripper name.

“Having trouble, Father?”

I’d like to say that he appeared jolted by my voice but he did not stop tinkering with his car. His face was red. I got closer and peered under the hood.

“Just think I need a jump.”

His battery was covered in corrosion.

“You might need help getting to those battery plugs. Mind if I help you out?”

This finally jolted him. He looked up at me, his starched white priest’s collar smudged with grease. I looked at him as long as I could. Held his gaze, showed him my wet eyes. They were glassy from rejection. I just happened to have a bottle of Coca-Cola. I walked around the old priest and poured it over the top, watching years of buildup and breakdown instantly get eaten away. I hugged the priest good-bye and whispered, “This is what Jesus must have felt like.”

Julie Strasser Julie Strasser received her bachelor’s degree in English and Religion from Muhlenberg College, located in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 2006. She attended the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver and is currently an MFA student in creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. Julie is an editorial assistant for Story Quarterly and has been published in Slush, the Rutgers University-Camden Graduate Creative Writing Anthology. She lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Tugging on the Rope

“I

want a baby.”

Dave’s pronouncement is not as sudden as it may seem, as this is a recurring conversation — though monologue may be a better word. Glancing up from my meal, I see Dave looking not at me, but at something to my left. Reluctantly, I turn and see my suspicion confirmed — there’s a baby sitting in a high chair, silently munching on a toy, her large eyes turned to Dave. Dave opens his mouth and inflates his ruddy cheeks, widening his cornflower blue eyes and shifting them back and forth, up and down. Then he breathes out and opens his mouth in the shape of an O, giggling right along with the baby.

I smile and turn back to my tacos, wishing I hadn’t bugged Dave to take me to Taco Bell, that we were tucked away inside his house, without a baby in sight, so we could avoid the questions, the uncomfortable silences as we try to negotiate this tricky territory. Sneaking a look at Dave, I see his eyes are still bright and shiny, his smile undimmed. This is his favorite game to play with babies, and they seem as interested in him as he is in them. He looks at me, wanting an answer. I shrug and ignore his silent question. “Cute,” I say and slurp my soda.

The baby is cute. I’m not such a monster that I won’t admit that. She has curly brown hair, big brown eyes, and better still, is quiet. But I do not pretend to be excited. Babies — children in general, really — have never thrilled me. It’s not even as strong as dislike, but rather a total disinterest. Even growing up, I was not terribly interested in baby dolls, though I had a fairly large collection. If a friend wanted to play house and carry her doll on her hip while she scrambled imaginary eggs on the stovetop of the Playskool kitchen, then I would agree, toting my own doll while running the toy vacuum. Rarely, though, did I choose to do this on my own. I would rather color, or play with Barbie dolls, which I loved, because there seemed to be so many exciting storylines I could create for them, none of which had to do with babies.

But now I am 26 and in a serious relationship with a 32-year-old man who aches to be a father. At this stage in my

life, the choices are more complex — it is no longer an option to shove the baby doll in its cradle and dash off to play with something else. Dave worked as a pile driver and diver, laying foundation for buildings and diving deep into dark water to build and repair bridges and piers, before becoming his union’s organizer, fighting for the rights of the members of the Local 454 in Philadelphia. Dave is not weak, and yet crumbles at the sight of a baby, quietly jealous of his friends, nearly all of them fathers.

I cannot say the same. When someone presents a baby to me, I smile politely but I do not coo or beg for a chance to bounce the baby on my knee. Truly, I would not be entertaining the idea of having children if not for Dave. Prior to meeting him, it was not on my radar, never even an entry on my mental to-do list. I wanted to travel, to go back to Europe, this time without a backpack and a bunk in a hostel, but rather to stroll glamorously and leisurely down the streets, a visitor but not a tourist. I wanted to write, to do well enough to support myself through writing alone, to find pride in my accomplishments.

I wanted love, to find a man who would be my perfect complement. Travel and writing are still on my list, still dreams that I have but whose time may never come. The one thing I managed? I found love.

If people were laid out on a scale measuring personality, Dave and I would never meet. Dave is rambunctious and outgoing, the person who enters a room and the crowd lights up and cheers. He is a fervent Catholic, a proud gun owner, a guy whose mailbox is stuffed with catalogs for sausage-making equipment. I am quiet and shy, a Protestant, pro-gun control.

I hate sausage. Yet I took a chance when he asked me out.

Cautiously, I suggested we meet on a Sunday afternoon for coffee, not quite willing to give up a Saturday night for a man I wasn’t sure of. When I got home from our first date, I thought my face would break from the smile that was stretched across it.

He was hysterically funny, telling stories about barbacking and lifeguarding, making me shriek and cry and hold my stomach from laughter in the middle of a crowded Starbucks. He was

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 39

interesting, carving a path that began in Ventnor, a shore town next to Atlantic City, moving to South Carolina for college and then up to Boston to break in to the pile driving business before moving to Gloucester City, a small town in South Jersey right outside of Philadelphia. But most of all, he listened to me. When I spoke, his eyes were on me, not wandering, not glazed over, but focused on me, paying attention. It sounds saccharine and corny, but he made me feel special. That was two years ago.

Our differences still exist. In some instances, they’ve mellowed, and in others they’ve hardened. We have had our share of fights and disagreements, usually stemming from my obsessive-compulsive nature rubbing raw against his relaxed attitude. At the same time, his calm has tempered me and my need for order has given him structure. It is as if we are playing a game of tug of war. We are each on opposite ends of the rope, pulling at one another, but we need the tension in order to not fall down. We keep one another upright.

And so when Dave declares that he wants a baby, I fasten my lips into a tight smile and give a clipped nod. Here is another pull, another tug from his side. I yank back, telling him bluntly that kids have never been on my agenda. We make the other pause, a startling realization that life isn’t the perfect fairy tale, that our planned marriage will not just be lazy afternoons on the beach and walks with the dog in the park, but also negotiation and compromise. ### His desire chips away at my ambivalence. I do not have the certainty he has, the certainty so many of my friends have, that parenthood is a non-negotiable, something they want, and therefore something they will have. In high school, my friend Allison and I would wait in line at the local movie theater’s concession stand and watch the kids dart between adults carrying large sodas and too-full popcorn containers. The kids would shout, pull at their mother’s coat, beg for attention. They would sidle up to us in line, keeping pace with us as we crept up to the counter, underfoot as we tried to walk to our theater.

Allison and I looked at one another in shock, baffled by the scene before us, and agreed that kids weren’t for us. She had her horses, I had my writing, and that would be enough. I can’t speak for Allison anymore, but as the years passed, I never felt my feelings change. As I moved farther from adolescence and my peers started to marry, some even having babies, I never had a jolt of panic or a twitch of envy. Scrolling through Facebook, looking at the pictures of ultrasounds and baby’s first birthday, my reaction was along the lines of “Wow, really?

Why would you want to do that?”

Now, I try to imagine myself with a baby on my hip. Brief scenes float through my head: how I would look pregnant, having the baby baptized, passing the child from relative to relative at a family function. But I can’t quite wrap my head around being a mother. It seems like such an adult thing to do, something completely out of my range. Dave, on the other 40 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

hand, claims to be ready for fatherhood. I ask him why he wants to be a father and his voice takes a higher pitch, saying he cannot give me a list of reasons; he has no perfectly formed argument. He wants children, he wants to be a father, and that is the beginning and the end. There’s a pause.

“I am apprehensive,” he says.

I pounce. “Tell me why.”

“It’s a big deal. You don’t know who these people will be.

You don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s a little scary.”

I exhale, relieved to discover that a seed of doubt lives within Dave. I’m not a freak, not the only one who is scared.

But his concern is a blip, a small itch that is easily scratched.

Still, I caution him, asking if he knows what life will be like once we have a child, that our nights will be sleepless and our hair unwashed, our house a wreck and our nerves frayed.

Nights out with friends will become nights in with the baby, our calendars will be filled with pediatrician appointments rather than restaurant reservations. The picture in my head is not serene and happy. At work, in the grocery store, on the TV — all the images of motherhood I see, all the images I take in are of the frazzled, stressful moments. Joyful moments must exist, I’m sure. Occasionally I’ll get a glimpse of this, when a mother bows her head to nuzzle her sleeping baby or when I see a child running, his arms outstretched, reaching for his parent — these moments lay heavy on my mind.

Naturally, I look to my mother when I debate motherhood.

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have both parents present in my life, but my mother handled the grunt work. While my father coached Little League and volunteered as a timer at swim meets, it was my mother who left a full-time career in favor of a part-time job as a substitute teacher. Consciously choosing home over work, she decided along with my dad that we would cut back and live on my father’s salary, and she would take jobs only when she had to, taking advantage of her parents’ offer to babysit when needed. She stopped taking night classes, took a leave of absence from her church group so that she could make cupcakes for Halloween parties, drive my brother and me to choir practice, and help us figure out long division. I didn’t think anything of these decisions at the time. Most of my friends had mothers who stayed home, so nothing seemed unusual or uneven. Now, I’m incensed. I think of what she had to give up and I’m angry that she had to do it, though still grateful that I was not a latchkey kid, that I had someone to pick me up from school and make me a snack.

Tentatively, I ask her about this, and she says that while she wishes she could have kept taking night classes and not put friendships on pause, she isn’t bitter about the sacrifices she had to make for us. She reassures me that it wasn’t our fault and she lays no blame at our feet. I’m startled by this, thinking of the differences between us, because I am already pointing a finger, assigning my imagined son or daughter responsibility for what I’m sure I will lose. I think of what I want — to write, to travel — and already I feel troubled, sure

that something will get the shaft. Someone — me, Dave, our kids — is sure to be disappointed, whatever I choose. And the responsibility will be mine, though I have no doubt that Dave will be a good — a great — father. At a recent pool party, Dave was busy cannonballing off the diving board into his uncle’s pool, playing the cool big brother to two 12-year-old boys. The other adults had long ago forsaken this activity for another cocktail, but Dave picked cannonballs over martinis.

As he bounded out of the pool toward me, looking for a towel and a kiss, I felt at ease, knowing that he would never dismiss his child, that he would always choose playing with his kids over idle chitchat.

While this reassures me, I still declare that I cannot be the primary soldier, the one constantly going into battle. He nods his head in agreement, tells me that he won’t ask me to give up writing, that we will travel, that we will be equal partners in this venture. I nod in thanks and relief, but a part of me doesn’t quite believe it.

My maternal grandfather once told me when I was young,

maybe 12 or so, “having it all is bullshit.” Cockily, I had announced to him that a woman could have it all — a family, a dream job, anything she wanted. Why I decided to bring this up, I don’t know. But my grandfather didn’t ignore me — he took me on. Never one to mince words, he said it was impossible, a pipe dream. You couldn’t have everything — you had to pick. I argued with him, weakly, my brain overloading, soaking up this information only reluctantly. I was too young to know the magnitude of his words. Now I am grown, and his words ring in my ears. The decisions I will need to make are never far from my mind.

Now, my choices are forever tangled up with Dave, and his choices with me. He makes my life infinitely more complicated, and that is both frustrating and exhilarating. Thinking about not being with him makes my knees weak, like I’ll collapse right onto the sidewalk, and I know that he is who I want to spend the rest of my life with. With Dave I will have love, but no easy answers. We’ll both just have to keep tugging on the rope.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 41

Marjorie Maddox Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Perpendicular As I, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, Weeknights at the Cathedral, When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems, six chapbooks, and more than 350 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and author of two children’s books from Boyds Mills Press. Her short story collection, What She Was Saying, was one of three finalists for the Katherine Anne Porter Book Award. The recipient of numerous awards, Marjorie lives with her husband and two children in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

What She Hears

F

rom the fog of anesthesia, she hears it faintly: “It doesn’t look good.” It is the nurses, Callie supposes, talking to each other, shaking their heads, sighing. She can’t open her eyes, and her head still spins with the sleep of medicine. The words stay, haunting the sterile room. It is about her baby. Soon they bring her (yes, a daughter), justwashed and fragile. Callie’s own eyes are opened now, and the little one grabs at her finger before those same nurses rush the swaddled child off. The clouds of anesthesia whirl her thoughts again, and she thinks she hears helicopters flying her sore body away. But it is her daughter they are taking.

She is up in the real clouds, heading for help, for someplace where they’ll do more than whisper, “it doesn’t look good” beside a mother they think is still under the sound of their intravenous drip. *** From the beginning, the nurses cite “Advanced Maternal Age,” give Callie a double-take when she says this is her first.

Their voices are those trained in personal disasters. They give her Xeroxed sheets with statistics, tell her what she can and can’t eat. They recite off-limit medications, then look skeptical when she says this is her only pregnancy, the first time she’s tried to conceive. Their voices, like old-time typewriters clacking out obituaries, echo in her over-forty brain.

Later, at the LaMaze classes at the Catholic hospital, teens a third her age sit cross-legged in mid-drifts. They stretch their non-varicose-vein legs easily. Half wear crosses above necklines plunging to not-yet-developed chests. They chatter about boyfriends and upcoming concerts. Some of them have mothers there to coach them. Some have grandmothers. Callie is the only one with a husband who isn’t working double-shift.

When the session begins with a prayer, she keeps her eyes open but crosses herself down to her belly. ***

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When the doctor slices open Callie’s stomach and lifts out the barely-breathing baby, it is St. Patrick’s Day. The bars are filled with those celebrating, raising their pints for luck. The hospital, however, is short-staffed. Half-eaten green-frosted cake goes stale without Saran Wrap. The cardboard leprechaun at the nurses’ station hangs crookedly. The pots of fake gold shimmer under artificial light. No one has time to notice. The emergency room bustles with nurses wearing shamrock-print uniforms. Blood-stained medics rush between drunk-driving victims and fist-fight participants. It isn’t a party and will only get worse. If Cassie were conscious, she would wish for a glass of Guinness. She would click off the piped-in recording of “Danny Boy.” *** “It will take a miracle,” the nuns murmur, and they pray for the holy span of three days, reciting the swallowing of Jonah, Christ’s descent into Hell, the predicted resurrection. Even half-asleep, Callie can hear the click of their prayer beads at the side of her hospital bed. *** Eve could have used St. Patrick in Eden to drive the serpent out. Or to hold her hand at that first painful birth. Timing is everything. For the saint, the recently dead Palladius made room for his bishopship. A growing patch of clover made his Trinity explanation to the king clear and convenient. Where he was in the operating room that night was another question.

The child came out green; that’s what the doctor on-call tells Callie later, joking about the date. *** At the time, and still groggy from recovery, Callie is too stunned to laugh. Instead, she waits to hear her baby cry. Her mind is cloudy with rearranged minutes. When the minutes are up, she listens for hours. It takes the entire three days, but there it is: that cry. She recognizes it immediately.

Janice Krasselt Medin Janice Krasselt Medin has a master’s degree in English with emphasis in creative writing from Ohio University. Her publications include two books of poetry published under the name Janice Tatter: Remembering the Truth (Temenos Publishing Company, 2006) and Communion of Voices (Big Table Publishing Company, 2009), a chapbook. Now publishing under her married name, Janice Krasselt Medin, her poems have appeared in several journals such as the Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, Word Riot, Honey Land Review, Ghoti Magazine and others.

I Never Wanted To Be A Princess I never believed in a fairy godmother or pumpkins that turned into horses.

I never played house with other girls: I was cap guns, cowboys, and soldiers.

I disappeared for hours — jumping, running, hiding in bushes, wading streams, firing my pretend gun from trenches.

Once in the woods, I tried to pee like a boy. I cantered like a horse, my short hair a long mane brushed in wind as I jumped over logs and felt freedom of light and air beneath my feet.

At night, when I read about Apollo, Athena, and Zeus, I dreamed of Diana who hunted in her woodlands under her sacred moon and oaks, and I knew I wanted to be part moon and wind and snow. No. I wanted the moon to be my mother watching over my sleep. No. I wanted to be a snake slithering, munching in tall grass, then coiled around branches before shedding the old skin, preparing for a new life, a chance to grow into a new being.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 43

Amy Nawrocki Amy Nawrocki is a poet living in Hamden, Connecticut. Her chapbook Potato Eaters, published by Finishing Line Press, was a finalist for the Codhill Press Chapbook Competition, and a second collection, Nomad’s End will be released in 2010. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Verdad Magazine, SNReview, Loch Raven Review, Wicked Alice, and Blood Orange Review. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Bridgeport. Amy can be found at: http://amynawrocki.books.officelive.com.

Narcissus of the Finger Lakes One might think excess — vineyard after vineyard, lakes in multiple with their glacial profiles, long, deep, persistently appearing out the side window — would prove too enticing; but like the bulbous grape, everything awaits its finality.

Days like these make death seem easy, like a butterfly’s flight from one round mouthed flower to another, no regret, no disappointment, only bright August sun and polished water. Even clouds seem content, even a hawk, or the man repairing the boat launch. It’s all atmosphere, all Riesling, Cayuga White, and Seyval Blanc, crisp and clean with notes of citrus and green apple, a long finish that comes with a few quick turns of a revolving planet.

So much sweetness, enough to sate old gods, please lyre pluckers, and silence far-away echoes.

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Aphrodite’s Reach The arms and hands of Venus de Milo have never been found, lost limbs left behind to rubble away and erode without her. Her stumps draw out gazes, but imagine the placement of those boughs: how would they reach? — akimbo in boredom, or outstretched calming the lover she’s refused; perhaps they’d shield her eyes from the bright burden of history, or raise a fist to the crowds who fain to adore her.

Mistral Two battered boots wait near the sloped steps that tilt toward Vincent’s room in Arles.

On the back of a wobbly chair hangs a solitary straw hat glimpsing handprints thickly smeared on the doorknob. Curled tubes of cadmium spill the last beads onto a dried palette, and a few brushes soak in a tin bucket of turpentine. In a frenzy, flax, goldenrod, and chartreuse pile onto canvases, sunflowers left to dance in the dark melancholy of the studio, petals falling from the stretched linen as Vincent storms into a black and starry night

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 45

Meg Johnson Meg Johnson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slipstream Magazine, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Left Behind: A Journal of Shock Literature, Asinine Poetry, Pacific Coast Journal, Radioactive Moat, Word Riot, WTF PWM, and Blood Lotus. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. http://megjohnsonmegjohnson.blogspot.com

Bad Girls What do you say to a girl who proudly tells you she gave her professor a blow job?

Really, how edgy can my I-don’t-like-to-clean-my-room attitude be?

What are you supposed to do when you see a former classmate lift up her shirt on a Girls Gone Wild infomercial?

I always think of myself as the naughty-rebel-girl but how do I compare to girls gone wild, actual naughty school girls?

As much as I would like to validate my troubles by calling them rebellious, I might just be another twenty-something artist.

Loads of debt, a forthcoming I-masturbate-to-porn poem, a masochistic relationship with being a performer, sleeping with an older divorced man, and returning to college after dropping out.

I even tried being a hipster for indie appeal but it just wouldn’t stick. I need to be within reaching distance of a hairbrush twenty-four hours a day or else I get anxious.

The only time I pretend to be a hipster now is when I want someone to lie in the grass with me.

I look great in the grass. Yeah…

What stance should I take to end this poem? How much of a bad girl am I? Is there a measuring system?

I just turned twenty-seven. I have dark brown Marcia-Brady-style-hair.

I may or may not be a bad girl.

You Should Know I do not like being lumped together with these pudding cups.

I am very haughty for a dented can of pineapple.

Whatever.

We’ll see who the champ is when the power goes out.

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John Tustin John Tustin began writing poetry a little over two years ago after a 10-year hiatus.

His work has appeared in various magazines and online journals and is forthcoming in Camroc Press Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, The Medulla Review and tinfoildresses.

Better to Wonder Sometimes I wonder which one of the kids got toothpaste on the ceiling, how they managed to do it — Sometimes it’s better not to ask.

Putting money into stocks, driving my car without understanding how either works — Sometimes it’s better not to ask.

Where do the missing socks go?

The feeling you give me, that happy twist of the gut, the affirmation that my genitalia and my heart are in working order, even as you castigate me, eviscerate my self-esteem, attempt to break my will like nettlesome twigs — Better to wonder than name it — for fear the feeling will disappear.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 47

Simon Currell Simon Currell is a 34 year old visual artist living and working in London, UK. The artwork produced for his doctorate degree explores the relationship between workers and the alienating environments of call centre workplaces. He shows how workers not only use a number of creative strategies to personalise their workstations, but also often deploy such strategies to subvert the more restrictive and alienating requirements of these workplaces. The artworks make reference to the repetition inherent not only in the mode of work, but in the spaces themselves, and by abstraction, the realm of contemporary Capital, production and existence.

Mecca

48 â–Ş The Battered Suitcase â–Ş Winter 2010

Mecca (detail)

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 49

Gideon

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Make Believe

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 51

Make Believe (detail)

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Churn

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 53

Eva Gordon Eva Gordon grew up beside the ocean in Rhode Island. She is currently at work on her MFA in fiction writing from Spalding University. Her poetry has appeared in Prism Review and is forthcoming from Dew on The Kudzu. Her new book is forthcoming in January 2011 from Adams Media. She is about to move to western Spain to teach English to high school students. http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/evagordon

Graceland University

M

y boyfriend Jimmy is writing his dissertation on the cultural phenomenon of Graceland. He wants to compare the fan worship associated with Elvis to Joseph Smith and the invention of the Mormon Church; two ideas he claims are rooted in the same distinctly American pathology of raising up and tearing down idols. Jimmy has always wanted something to pray to, and although it’s unconventional, I guess Americana is as useful a framework as any if you can believe in it. For my part, I love the Paul Simon record, and when it comes to heartbreak I can think of no one who explains it better than he does in the chorus of Graceland.

Jimmy is in the third year of his PhD program at the University of Michigan; I take care of a wealthy, curly-haired infant for a living (which means I have time to listen to records and he doesn’t.) After a few weeks of experimentation, I found that the baby, Jacob, likes Lou Reed and Willie Nelson the best, so we spend most afternoons rolling around on the carpet of his parent’s living room floor humming along to The Velvet Underground and Red-Headed Stranger. Jacob and I agree that the best way to listen to an album is over and over all afternoon with the curtains drawn.

On Saturdays, Jimmy and I sit in our freezing mid-western kitchen losing circulation in our fingers, Jimmy flipping through Xeroxed course packets and me chatting with myself, trying to remember what shade of grey the Atlantic should be this time of year.

“Dark, dark, almost blue-black, right?”

“Nn.” “Or would it be steel-colored?”

Then I try to meet Jimmy on his scholarly level: “You know I read the apparent optical properties in ocean water change seasonally based on the absorption of light by phytoplankton.

So that’s why in the summer the water turns lighter — there’s more nutrient absorption happening, more vitamins and minerals.”

Nothing.

“I think it basically comes down to the weather.”

54 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

And then, if Jimmy is feeling generous, I get a pat on the head. If not, he gets up and walks out of the room without looking at me.

When we first came out to Michigan, my Aunt Carol and I talked on the phone in the evenings. She had an office job so I couldn’t call her when Jimmy was at school during the day. Instead, after dinner, I would walk down our block to the Quick Stop parking lot on the corner. I would call Carol from one of the benches out front and tell about our new place, and Jimmy’s degree program — what I understood of it — and about Jacob. Carol wasn’t really listening, but it helped to talk to someone who would be quiet and give the occasional reassuring, “yes, I think I know what you mean,” unlike Jimmy.

He either talked out his ideas (with or without me in the room) or treated my comments as an irritation, a black fly buzzing in his ear. But that was October, and before long, the cold started feeling like icy knives jabbing at me, and then the cold turned numbing and the numb turned deadening. Now I think about talking to Carol the same way I think about talking to baby Jacob. It’s what I do in New Jersey, when I go home and visit the graveyard and to talk to Grandpa Clemmens and his sister, my Great Aunt Francie who died when I was little.

Sometimes I do it silently and other times right out loud, but I always do it with my ears wide open to messages from God or my own subconscious; I always do it pretending another person is involved.

Jimmy has been saying we should get married lately. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not, but my stomach hurts less if I take his word for things. Sarcasm doesn’t suit Jimmy or me, and when either of us uses it, our jokes come out mean. I told Jimmy that I look like a dead person when I wear white, and that every time I pass a magazine rack and see all those smiley smiles, I wince. He didn’t respond at first — he kept his head still, like my words hadn’t registered, and then he changed the subject. He started in about Elvis and then moved on to the Mississippi Delta (the center of his theory is growing). He said you can’t make informed decisions in your life if you don’t

understand what he calls your “national context.” He said that whether I accept it or not, I am an American, and that means certain things will always be inside me. He offered examples, including having grown up watching The Cosby Show and eating Spaghetti Os. Refusing to act, he said (meaning refusing to get married), is a choice, just as powerful as any other. On this point, I agreed. You can cast your vote in the election, or you can stay home and wait to hear who won. Of course your decision weighs equally in either case — this makes sense.

But then he said understanding the country we live in requires coming to grips with the Elvis phenomenon. “ What does Elvis have to do with our marriage?”

“Seeing Graceland,” he said slowly, “is a rite of passage for all American citizens.” He took a breath. “Whether you are interested in the more complex issues of cultural identity, or not.” He said that once I accept his point of view, I will feel happier, because I will know that I am part of something outside myself. I got up and headed toward the coffee maker.

He said he is reserving our tickets to Tennessee.

I look at Jimmy when he’s sleeping in the morning with his face to the side and his knees resting up against the wall, and I strain to think as hard as I can, but when I do this, my mind just goes white. I touch his side with the palms of my hands and I close my eyes and I’m terrified that he will wake up and catch me and turn away, but I can’t stop doing it. Touching has become our best form of communication. I rest my palms in the warm sleepy indent under his torso and breathe long breaths while I count: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three. Touching has pretty much become our only tool of communication, and I hate it like I have never hated anything before ever.

When I was 8, my class dressed up as pilgrims and Indians and paraded around the junior high school. I was psyched because I had been reading the American Girl series and I was really feeling for my Native American sisters. I volunteered to dress as a member of the Navajo Nation, but my teacher told me I was, “way too white” for that. Of all the pipsqueaks in the entire Lakeview Elementary, she said, I was, “most obviously a pilgrim.” I told this story to Jimmy when we first met and he got really pissed off. We were standing in line at Toni’s Popsicle World on the Jersey Shore boardwalk, and waves were whacking the sand with these incredibly loud nailing sounds. I assumed Jimmy was shouting to be heard over the water.

“Why the living fuck can’t a little blond girl play an Indian?”

“I don’t know, I think one could, probably.” I said. You should have seen Jimmy’s eyes when he talked. They are green, and when he’s excited or when he cries, they get extra bright and dark and they are so beautiful.

“I would think,” he said, “that the Navajo Nation would appreciate your support. I would think,” he stressed again, “that the Navajo Nation would be pretty much fucking delighted that an adorable Caucasian 6-year-old wanted to represent them in her school play.”

“I was 8,” I reminded him. “It was just a little parade.”

“So what happened? Did your parents step up to the plate and get somebody’s ass fired?”

“We just let it go.”

For a minute Jimmy stood there shaking his head and I concentrated on the waves — and then suddenly he got going again, as though inside his wild changing eyes he had drawn some conclusion, and he had to let me know right away. Jimmy said that when he had finished eight grade, his parents sent him to a Catholic high school for awhile, and Jimmy got really into learning about Catholic traditions and everything, and he decided he would try confessing, and I guess one of the nuns didn’t like Jimmy, or didn’t like him trying to “figure out” the religion — anyway, he told me he was turned away from the confessional. He told them he really wanted to confess — he was afraid they thought he was making fun of it, and he tried to explain that he wasn’t, but it didn’t matter, because he was turned away. After that, his parents let him change to the Quaker school where they never asked too many questions.

Now Jimmy can’t stand Catholics.

“I really hate those sons of bitches,” he says.

When Jimmy told that about his high school, I felt like he was an element competing with the water, and I just wanted to soak him up. He wanted to soak me up, too, I found out later, and we’ve been together ever since, just like salt and water.

There’s really nothing like being that close and feeling that you actually are another person, is there? No, there’s not. There couldn’t be.

I had just graduated from Lakeview High and my dad had arranged for me to spend the summer down the shore sleeping at Aunt Carol’s and washing dishes at her restaurant, The Crab Stick, before I went away to State. I was going to be a marine biologist. I wanted to train dolphins. Jimmy came in for lunch one day during my first week and couldn’t figure out what to order. Carol got fed up and sent me to “handle that wannabe cutup energy ball in section two.” (She liked inventing custom insults when she got tired of her old faithful “shit-talking mama’s boy.”) I came out with rubber gloves and bangs stuck to my face. As soon Jimmy saw me, he sat up in his chair and tilted his head back.

“Why aren’t you the waitress?”

“I just started. My aunt’s having me wash dishes. Do you need help?”

“Oh yes,’ he said. “Make me something, please, and come sit with me while I eat it.”

“Do you want crabs or calamari?” I asked. “I don’t think I can sit with you.”

Jimmy pushed his hair to the side and stood up. I thought he was going to touch my face, but then his arm came down and kind of smacked his thigh.

“You choose. I’m going to take a walk now. Will you bring me a to-go box shaped like a squid and meet me outside when you finish?”

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 55

“I get out at 10. You’ll need to eat something before then.”

Jimmy laughed. “Later Bunny Gator.”

He patted my head and ran off. I moved to the window to watch him go, and hoped a wild hope that he’d come back soon and often.

Jimmy and I began wandering around town after my shifts, telling long stories in the spaces between cement buildings. We pressed our shoulders together, forming a block, impervious to running, vacationing children, awake past their bedtimes and lit by neon clothing and double-sized packs of Sugar Babies. We breathed in fry grease and seaweed, and I imagined that every time he looked at me I grew more vivid, not just to him, but to the world around.

Even now that Jimmy has become an intellectual and I have not, his eyes are all I see when I shut mine. My eyes are brown, like someone’s old ugly lake house. They are flat and drab and I can never use them the way he uses his. He can scream and slice with his eyes and other people can float away in those greeny pools. He can give the impression of deep and restful see through waters and all I can be is a fad, a heavy, muddy, architectural fad stuck in the sand behind his pretty, pooly eyes.

Last night I called Jimmy and asked him to bring home dinner. Twenty minutes later, he came rushing up the wooden stairs outside and I could hear something sliding back and forth in his arms. He walked in with a pizza from Mario’s, which told me two things: First I knew he’d been in the department offices talking to his Cultural Anthropology professor Mark Stevens (Stevens’ office is at the end of the hallway, about 500 yards from the restaurant.) Second, I knew that he’d been in a hurry to get home. Mario’s never gives you enough cheese, so we never go there unless we’re hungry and we want to come straight home. As soon as I saw the cardboard box, I geared myself up for an announcement. I stood by the sink, he came through the door, and I glanced from the box to Jimmy and back to the box. The few feet between us held so much in that instant it made me think of the room in new terms. Such a strong kitchen — a bomb shelter kitchen, submarine kitchen, holding our hunger — that even in our discomfort made us lust for pizza from the greasy Mario’s — and holding our heat.

The heat of Jimmy’s excitement and the heat of my desire to hold him, and the weakest but most visible heat, the heat from

56 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

that soggy, saucy pizza. The space between Jimmy and me held so much, but sensed nothing, cared for our failure not at all (bastard kitchen).

“Charlotte, we are so lucky.

“Char, come here. I had a meeting with Mark Stevens tonight. As you know, he has been in full support of my dissertation subject from the beginning —” “As I know.”

“Right! And I am being offered a fellowship to spend the next two years in Memphis conducting research and developing my project. I have to teach a few freshman classes down there at a community college, but who cares? Stevens didn’t know how long it might take to secure funding, so I didn’t want to mention the chance to you before. But we got it!”

“Two years, huh? Congratulations, Jimmy.”

Jimmy rushed up to me and grabbed my hand.

“Let’s get married, Charlotte.”

“Marriage is for sissies. Think of our dads. Freshman courses at a community college, in Memphis? Now there’s something to be avoided by the faint of heart.”

Jimmy’s hand went slack in mine. I gave it a little squeeze and gave his mouth a quick kiss.

“But what about Jacob? You love that baby I thought.”

I was still trying to connect the dots when Jimmy said, “Don’t you want your own?”

Oh, I thought. Oh boy.

“Look Jimmy, for the five hours a day I spend on the rug with him, it’s great. His mother’s got the shit end of the situation, waking up at night, letting him bite her swollen tit.”

The poking and pulling and uncomfortable warm air in that kitchen was so thick and so loud it could have been sensed by even a backyard squirrel, even a basement spider, by even the rock-skulled aspirant fakey Jimmy, but not by this room. This goddamned white-washed ugly linoleum room.

I said, “Are you gonna teach them social studies or what?”

Jimmy put down the box, and a burst of steam leaked from its slitted sides. I handed him a paper towel and he wiped his hairline. My Jimmy’s eyes turned a little bit paler and more watery then, like eyes surrendered to television. The fight was not to be — all that was left was our physical need to eat and that grossly unchanging pizza. We took our plates and sat down at the table, and it was only four hours to bedtime.

Jaime A. Heidel Jaime A. Heidel is a Connecticut native who just recently relocated to North Carolina. She’s been writing since childhood and her recent publishing credits include her short story “Phobia” in a print anthology called Night Falls on Everyone and a short story, “The House Sitter,” published online by Spine Tingler’s.

Astray

“Y

es!”

Simon looked at the LCD screen of his camera. There, framed among the leaves was the doe he’d been waiting for. He heard the loud “pop” of a leg joint as he unfolded himself and stood. The doe raised her head. For a moment, they stared at one another. Then with a flick of white tail, the deer bounded from sight.

As he scrolled through the images he’d taken throughout the day, he smiled. His photography was improving. Even Carrie, his critical instructor, couldn’t have anything negative to say about these shots.

Returning the camera to its case, he reached for his pocketed map and consulted it. Then, shouldering his small pack, he headed out of the woods.

As he crossed over a bridge, he stopped to watch the water as it bubbled and flowed over the rocks before collecting into a stream. Simon had photographed the stream hours ago when the lighting had been softer, the area empty. Now, an older man fished at the water’s edge, making a point to ignore two children splashing nearby.

Simon’s mind buzzed as he strolled down the widening trail. Given the current economy, the last thing he should be considering was quitting his secure bank teller position, but he felt ready for a change. The pay wouldn’t be great at first, but a few years of freelancing could lead to a steady career.

He ducked under a low-hanging branch and held on to it as he skidded down a small, rocky incline.

He could expand on his photography by getting into graphic design. Companies were always looking for people to come up with new and creative ways to advertise their products.

“Maybe I should go back to school,” Simon mused aloud.

“Always a good idea, Son.” Simon whirled and the middle-aged jogger behind him laughed, shook his head and continued on his way.

“Thanks, guy,” Simon huffed, putting a hand to his chest.

“Way to scare the cheese out of me.”

The photographer watched the slap-slap of the jogger’s low-top sneakers as they disappeared around a bend.

Taking a deep breath, he continued on the trail.

He was halfway through mentally designing his own photography studio, imagining Keira Knightley modeling for him in nothing but a string bikini, when it dawned on him he hadn’t seen a trail marker in a while.

He stopped, frowning. His stomach clenched at the unfamiliar surroundings. He did a 180-degree turn, eyes scanning each tree for the familiar orange blaze. Nothing.

He’d have to double-back.

Half an hour later, he was still lost. The trails had grown smaller before stopping altogether and he now hacked through a dense thicket of overgrown brambles and leaves. There’d been a thunderstorm earlier in the week and the soft, soggy ground sucked at his boots as he moved.

As soon as his feet found more level ground, he stopped and leaned against a tree. A year ago, he’d discovered the park by accident and had been hiking these woods ever since. Still, nothing of the current terrain looked familiar and the map was useless. He wasn’t sure he was still in the park.

He looked up through the trees toward the open sky. He’d seen it in a movie once where a kid found his way out of the woods by climbing a tree to get his bearings. He was no climber.

Closing his eyes, he listened, hoping to detect a human voice or footsteps. His face prickled as insects alighted on his sweating skin. He batted them away but they only scattered to come again. This time, they brought friends. One insect buzzed loudly in his ear. He slapped it dead.

“Dammit!”

His voice bounced off the trees, making an eerie echo in the dense world around him. Somewhere to his left, a bird abandoned its perch in a rustle of wings.

Behind him, a twig snapped. He whirled, chest tightening as hope and fear jockeyed for position.

Propped up against a tree stump, lying in a bed of dead Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 57

leaves was a head.

Simon jerked back. Then he frowned and stepped closer.

He crouched low, reaching for his camera. The piece of wood he had in his LCD screen looked like the head of a rhinoceros.

Three pointy pieces comprised both the forward and rear horns. A dark, rounded section in the front made up a nostril and a warped bump on the left could be a sleeping eye.

He snapped a few photos, using the zoom to study what looked like a rigid jaw line. The leaves beneath the nostril moved.

He scowled, looking up from the viewfinder. There was no breeze. Everything in the woods around him was still.

He put the camera to his face and zoomed again. The leaves were motionless.

He rose, returning the camera to his bag. “Okay buddy, you’re losing it.”

Turning, he headed back the way he came, ignoring the chill creeping into his spine.

It took a few more hours for the trail to widen once more and Simon found himself breathing easier. The path he traveled now was unmarked and not on his map but it was definitely man-made and recently hiked.

He pulled out his camera and photographed an interesting knot in a towering oak, then turned, taking pictures at every angle. This way, if he lost his bearings again, he’d have some sort of reference. He mentally chided himself for not having come up with the plan before.

Turn. Point. Click. Turn. Point. Click. Turn. Point. Head.

He ripped the camera from his face and gasped. There, in the middle of the path, was the rhino head.

Raising the camera again, he zoomed in on the hulking shape. It looked different. The warped holes and ragged edges seemed to have smoothed, giving the thing a textured, almost skin-like appearance. Something round slid from beneath the bulbous knot above the horn.

His heart hammered in his chest. His shaking fingers clicked the shutter button once, twice, three times. He let go.

His vision swam as he looked at the LCD screen. If he was losing his mind, it was being caught on film.

As he stared at the object blocking his path, he felt a surge of anger. He’d been lost for hours. He had been a meal for a plague of insects, his muscles ached, his hiking boots were mud-soaked through to the socks and he was getting hungry.

Not only that, but the elongating shadows, which he’d done his best to ignore were getting deeper. In a few hours, it would be dark. If he let this thing, whatever it was, get the best of him, he’d be a headline in next week’s newspaper.

“And you know what, buddy?” Simon spoke aloud, addressing the shape on the path. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

Before he could lose his nerve, he broke into a run. He opened his mouth and roared as he charged the beast, ignoring the silent observer in his mind telling him how foolish he 58 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

looked.

He felt a rush of satisfaction as the toe of his right boot connected with the head and sent it sailing, end over end. It bounced off an oak with a crack that reverberated off the rocks. He heard a swish and a muffled thud as it landed in a bush 50 feet away.

Breathing hard, he stood motionless on the path. He waited what he thought was five full minutes before moving on again.

Prying his fingers from the camera he hadn’t realized was still clutched in his hand, he returned it to his pack and set out afresh walking double-time.

The terrain quickly became mountainous to the point where, in some spots, hiking turned to rock-climbing. Each new trail seemed to take him farther away from where he wanted to be. Every bird call or twig snap had him gasping and whirling, terrified more than he wanted to admit he’d come face to face with that strange thing again. It had to be a coincidence. It couldn’t have followed him. It wasn’t alive.

Maybe it was a prop. He would never forget the story of the girl who had found a severed arm by Miller’s Pond only to have the police tell her it was fake, a prop for a low-budget horror flick left behind by film students at Thornwood. This was probably the same thing.

It was nearly evening when, hands bloodied, knees scraped, Simon saw something that formed a lump in his throat, a marker for the red trail. He ran to the tree, throwing his arms around it. Laughing, tears pricking the corners of his eyes, Simon pulled out a map and confirmed what he already knew: if he continued to hike down this path, he’d hit the orange trail he started on and be back in the parking lot before dark.

He said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever god or angel had delivered him and slowed his pace as his muscles began to cramp. The adrenaline was wearing off. He’d be sore tomorrow.

The birds still called and there was just enough twilight on the trail to give it a ghostly, ethereal effect. As if on cue, lightning bugs began to flick on and off. They might have been fairies.

Simon stopped, reaching stiffly into his pack for the camera.

He adjusted the settings and snapped a few photos. The result was beautiful, possibly the best shots on the memory card.

Somewhere up ahead, a dog barked. Simon grinned. Where there was a dog, there were people.

Any moment, man’s best friend would be before him, familiar and wonderful and probably licking his hand.

The bark came again. He frowned when he heard the whimper and stopped cold at the growl.

“It’s okay, boy.” Simon’s voice came out hoarse, scratchy.

He cleared his throat. “It’s okay.”

The growling deepened and Simon saw the dog, a Golden Retriever. When it caught sight of Simon, the dog seemed to perk up, cocking its head as it regarded him.

He stepped forward but the growl came again. Simon froze, confused.

Then he saw it.

The shape in the middle of the path assembled itself piece by piece as Simon’s mind slowly processed what his eyes saw. It started with the bone white horn first on the top of the head, then at the snout. As the bulbous eye swam beneath the knotty lid, He felt his stomach lurch.

The dog whimpered once more, backing away.

The head seemed to expand, drawing the encompassing darkness around itself, becoming part of the falling night. Its jaw shuddered and gave a sickening snap as it opened to reveal a large row of teeth.

The canine gave one last half-hearted growl before turning and disappearing back down the path.

“Help! Help!” Simon cried.

His weak voice echoing off the trees was the only answering call.

When the rhino’s eyes snapped open, bulging from their sockets, Simon felt a ripple of horror turn his limbs to jelly.

Then, he laughed. He knew he should run or fight but there was no logic left. He bent double as insane, maniacal laughter rolled out of him in waves. Tears streamed down his face. He couldn’t catch his breath. The mental picture of how he must look made him only laugh harder. He sank to his knees on the path.

With shaking hands, he reached for the camera and raised it to his face. He was still laughing when the head filled his viewfinder.

Still laughing when it lunged.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 59

Jessi Lee Gaylord Jessi Lee Gaylord is a writer and teacher in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, The Somnambulist Quarterly, The Copperfield Review and other publications.

Conversations about the Weather

W

hen I was 17, Mom drove my little sister Phoebe to Oregon and dumped her on my doorstep. Phoebe was 15. Phoebe was nine months pregnant. Mom didn’t say anything about the way my sister’s stomach stuck out like she’d swallowed a watermelon. “It’s too sunny,” Mom said and shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand, even though she had on a Gas ‘n Go sun visor. We didn’t talk about anything outside the weather in our family. Not ever. Mom handed me a heavy-duty garbage bag full of my sister’s stuff, climbed into her Jeep Wagoneer, slammed the door and drove back to Montana.

It was my last year of high school. Gramma died of cancer and I was hiding out from social services in one of those pastoral towns all across America that only existed on area maps. I carried the trash bag of Phoebe’s possessions in the apartment and made some Top Ramen. She picked at the zit on her chin. “This place is a dump,” she said, and put her combat boots on the upside-down cardboard box I used for a coffee table.

There wasn’t room for booth of us on the puke-orange loveseat. “Yeah,” I said and sat on the floor Indian style and ate my Top Ramen. I rested my eyes on anything other than her stomach. But it was mesmerizing and every time I accidentallyon-purpose glanced at it, it seemed to grow bigger and more ominous.

I came home from school and Phoebe was crouched in the alley by a soggy Lazy Boy that the garbage men refused to cart away. She had unscrewed the nozzle off a bottle of spraycleaner and was sniffing it.

“What are you doing with the bathroom cleaner?” I said.

“Huffing it,” she said. She straightened up and tugged the bottom of her New Kids on the Block t-shirt over her stomach. She had a strange, dreamy smile on her face.

“Look,” I said and pointed at Phoebe’s stomach. “Are you pregnant or something?”

Phoebe picked at the angry zit on her chin and quit smiling.

60 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

“I guess,” she said.

“Did you, um, think about getting an abortion or something?”

“I didn’t know how,” she said. “Can I get one now?”

The shoelace of one of her boots was undone. I wondered if she could see her feet over the enormous hump of her stomach. “What about adoption?” I said.

Phoebe put a piece of hair in her mouth and sucked on it.

She spit it out and nodded. “I don’t need any brats running around,” she said.

I was working the late shift at the Diary Queen when I got the phone call. “I’m at the hospital,” Phoebe said and hung up.

There was something underhanded about the woman from the adoption agency. She had fidgety eyes and a shifty way of talking out of the side of her mouth. She brought a two-liter of RC-Cola, a pepperoni pizza, and a folder full of forms to the hospital. “Who’s the father?” the woman asked.

“Don’t know,” Phoebe said.

“Can you narrow it down to say, two possibilities?”

Phoebe quit fingering the zit on her chin and crossed her arms over her chest.

The adoption lady sort of whispered, “Raped?”

Phoebe made a growling sound in her throat.

“Listen —” the woman said.

“Just shut up,” Phoebe said and kicked the pizza box off the bed. A slice of pepperoni went splat on the linoleum.

“It’s hot in here,” I said.

The woman clucked her tongue and worked her thin lips over her dentures. “It’s not really that hot,” she said.

“Yeah it is,” Phoebe said. “It’s hot as hell in here, lady.”

The shifty-eyed woman clucked her tongue again, shook her head, her thin top lip curled over a yellowed front tooth with something like disgust. One of the papers slipped off Phoebe’s lap. I picked it up. The bottom corner was smeared with pizza sauce. It looked like blood. I wiped it off with the bottom of my t-shirt and handed it to Phoebe. Phoebe signed

the forms. The woman took the unopened RC-Cola and the forms with her when she left.

Phoebe sweated and grunted through an eternity. Her hair hung lank down her neck. A fat purple vein puckered in her neck and her forehead at more and more frequent intervals.

“That lady was dumb,” Phoebe said and panted. “She was so stupid.” Her eyes were hooded like a sick raccoon.

“I need some drugs,” Phoebe yelled when the doctor came back and got Phoebe’s feet in the stirrups.

“You’ve already had an epidural, we can’t give you anything more,” the doctor said. A herd of medical students clustered into the room behind him.

“Get out!” Phoebe said. She tried to yell but she was panting too hard.

The doctor ignored her. The medical students ignored her.

They stared down their masks at the V of my sister’s spread legs.

She kicked one leg out of its stirrup. “Get the fuck out!” she screamed.

Her scream singed my eardrums. A hot fist tried to punch its way out of my brain. Phoebe screamed until her face turned rotten apple red. My head hurt so bad I thought my teeth would come loose. Phoebe screamed even after the cluster of medical students fled the room and the doctor called for men in white uniforms to restrain her. She screamed until her voice went hoarse and men with big necks held her down. She screamed and screamed. White spiders exploded in front of my eyes and forks of pain stabbed into my temples until I passed out in the delivery room.

I came to in an empty room, an IV needle pinching the crook of my arm. My brain felt like a fiery pinecone, hot needles puncturing my skull. I vomited Top Ramen over the side of the bed. There weren’t any paper towels around, so I grabbed a handful of cotton balls from a glass cylinder, wiped the puke off my chin, zipped up my hoodie and went to find my sister.

My head still ached but I felt better until a stout nurse torpedoed out of Phoebe’s room carrying a small bundle with a wide-open screaming mouth. I stood stock-still in the

florescent hallway, turned to stone by the howl of outrage as the nurse carried Pheobe’s baby away.

I was paralyzed. I don’t know how long I stood there like a pillar of salt. When I got my feet working, I turned around and found a handicap bathroom and sat on the floor for a long time with my cheek pressed against the cold linoleum on the floor. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t you cry,” I whispered into the chilly indifference of the tile under my cheek. I tried to keep my eyes open because I couldn’t stand the churning carnival that paraded across my closed eyelids.

After Phoebe was released from the hospital, we waited at the bus stop wearing our matching hospital bracelets like handcuffs. Phoebe tore at the plastic with her teeth. “Give me your keys,” she said. She sawed at the plastic band, grunting, until it broke and dropped to the gutter. She ground it into the mud with the toe of her combat boot. “Now you,” she said.

She tugged and sawed and grunted but it wouldn’t come loose. My wrist was red and puckered from the plastic cutting into it. “Pheb,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She shoved my hand away. “No, it’s not,” she yelled. “It’s not okay.”

She stomped a few feet away and stood with her back to me. The plastic tube at the tip of her shoelace had come loose and the frayed end was muddy and stuck on the side of her boot. Her ponytail was coming undone and a greasy streak of hair was painted down the side of her chin. I was afraid she was crying. I was afraid I’d start crying. I was afraid we’d never stop. We’d cry so long we’d drown each other right there, out in front of the hospital. Two girls standing in the mud at the bus stop, crying so hard and loud, we’d flood the world or maybe we’d drown it out. I cleared my throat instead. “So,” I said.

She didn’t look over, just kept kicking her boot into the mud. I could hear her teeth grinding. It was a terrible sound.

“Pheb,” I said and scanned the blurred blue sky. “Think it’s gonna rain before the bus gets here?”

After a pause that lasted what felt like nine hard years, Phoebe turned, dry-eyed, and squinted at the clouds threatening to wreck the horizon. “Nah,” she said.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 61

Alexis Donitz Alexis Donitz is a Senior at Milken Community High School in Los Angeles. She has taken two creative writing courses at the honors level: Study of Fiction and Study of Poetry. Alexis enjoys creative writing and is planning on majoring in journalism in college. Aside from creative writing, Alexis is the Editor-inChief of her high school’s yearbook and hopes to have a career in magazine journalism in the future.

The Unsuccessful Dream She always had that vision of LA — her heart was set to love The city of the angels as It’s called; but poverty it has.

She did not know, but soon she came To find this city known to fame, She did not recognize at all.

A boy curled up into a ball — the ground his only home in town.

But this is not the suit and gown In all those movies and her dreams.

The disappointment and the gleams Of those who passed her all around Felt not that great dismay she found.

But why, she asked, that vision which She always dreamed so big and rich Did not turn in to what she hoped Because of all the souls that moped.

And now that all her dreams were crushed, LA around her now so rushed.

Oh now what would she do with all Her lost imaginations? Fall Deep down into her dark black hole Where she returned to fix her soul.

Believed there was another place All cleared of sorrow only grace.

This could not be the whole big earth, Her hope was just to find rebirth.

She hoped there was more out there than She knew — but all the thoughts that ran Just told her that the world had changed, The life she wanted rearranged.

And this is how she now would see Though maybe how it’s meant to be.

Goodbye LA, she now is free To dream again and just to be.

62 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

Katie Manning Katie Manning is a doctoral fellow in English at UL-Lafayette and Editor-In-Chief of Rougarou. Her poems have been published in Bare Root Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, PANK, Poet Lore, So to Speak, and Word Riot, among other journals and anthologies, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Steel Magnolias in Louisiana At a Halloween party, a drag queen named Noxeema who came as herself tells me about Steel Magnolias since I am not from the South: We’re southern women who will beat you to death if you mess with us, but we’re very beautiful.

She straightens her platinum bouffant.

Her orange tube top lifts to reveal a waxed belly button above a tight mini-skirt, and I wish I could say I’m very beautiful.

Although I Love Being a Brunette Today I want to be a bald man in the front seat of a saffron convertible. I want to fly east for the fall on the 435 while my head plays the part of the moon for those enclosed drivers who can’t see the sun.

I want my naked pate to taunt the autumn trees to shed their shag, use me for target practice, pitch their leaves and join my fall fashion.

Today I want to be a bald man whose head provokes a poem.

Twenty Pounds I look at a picture of me from last year and tell my former self how fat she was, as if she didn’t know, as if she hadn’t cried in the shower after stepping on the scales, as if she hadn’t worked her ass off to create me, this smaller version of herself. And now I wear the jeans she couldn’t wriggle on then and quickly forget that we were ever one.

Ars Poetica on Laundry Day I take a break from writing to ask you if you took the poetry out of the dryer.

“The poetry?” you say, and it takes me a bit to realize I’ve said anything strange.

Apparently this stuff has clothed me, body and tongue. Even now, I can’t escape this poem’s narcissism — its words staring up from the page, hoping to see their own reflection in our eyes.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 63

Magen Toole Magen Toole is a student, fiction author and freelance writer from Fort Worth, Texas. Her short stories have been featured in Everyday Fiction, Kissed by Venus, Everyday Weirdness and others.

The Pea-Coat

N

oam’s jacket was a heavy, beige pea-coat that was a size too large and broad in the shoulders. Elliot knew this because of the way it drooped around his neck when Noam slipped it on him on rainy days, offering it without a word. The gesture always brought a bashful heat to Elliot’s face, thinking of Hillel on the other side of the city.

Sitting in the library surrounded by his mother’s antique leather furniture or in the red light of his basement studio, alone in the brownstone castle his father had built. For it, Elliot chewed his bottom lip like a knobby-kneed boy and tried not to feel guilty for what Hillel might have thought of the sight, Noam’s long hands on Elliot’s shoulders, the fabric tote grocery bag growing wet as it sat forgotten between their feet.

“It’s a good thing Hillel isn’t here,” Elliot said, the words bubbling out of his mouth before he could muzzle them. Hillel wasn’t a bad guy; he just wasn’t always a good one, getting that glint of silver in his smile whenever he saw someone lovelier than Elliot on the street or at a party. “You know how he gets sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Noam’s glasses and Oxford shirt were speckled by rain drops. He never said anything, of Hillel or the inconvenience of his wet clothing, and reached down to take up the grocery bag. It was becoming a pattern, it seemed. “But I am glad that he isn’t.”

The coat was older than both of them, reasoned by the dates sewn into the tattered fabric tag inside the collar, the right breast pocket torn slightly at its seams. It smelled a bit with the collar turned up around Elliot’s cheek by Noam’s fidgeting fingers, warm with the scent of old scratchy things, like matchsticks and notebook paper. Elliot suspected that it was from all the notes he kept finding folded up and slipped inside the breast pocket, whenever he patted himself down for

64 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

the cigarettes he knew Noam didn’t smoke. The notes were of all manner of inconsequential things, names or phrases or dates, running off the page in crooked smears of ink. Noam jotted them down in slips of paper torn from the notebook in his back pocket, twice folded like neat little parcels. Strange thoughts, incalculable associations, all of which Elliot imagined strung together across Noam’s apartment in tethers and cotton threads, gathered up in the living room in a great knot.

“Your notes are like puzzle pieces, you know,” Elliot offered as they walked, and made lazy gestures to illustrate his mental pictures with the tip of his index finger. “Like maybe they’re all connected in these little strands. Kinda like, what do they call it, string theory?”

Noam smiled. “Yes,” he said and shook his head, “something like that.”

The notes, Elliot decided, were to be kept tucked away for reasons he did not pretend to know. They were a part of Noam, like the coat was, and the rain that seemed to follow them whenever they walked through the city on rubber soles that squeaked when wet. It was the same way he pretended not to notice the way Noam that never corrected him when he was wrong, and never looked Hillel in the eye. That was just the way that Noam worked, he decided, as they carried the groceries up the front steps to Noam’s door. In the kitchen, Noam unpacked, humming under his breath and putting on the kettle while Elliot lay on the living room floor in his borrowed coat and waited for it to steam. From the floor, he closed one eye and then the other, imagining the strings of Noam’s life as ropes that tied them together. He only knew that Noam’s coat was the warmest he had ever worn, and for the moment, that was enough.

SR Mishler SR Mishler feels comfortable only when she is in a theatre. SR has worked in theatre for nearly seven years as a board operator, stage manager and wardrobe manager in college theatre departments, community theatres and equity houses in Long Beach. She has associates in English and theatre from Cerritos Community College, a bachelor’s degree in theatre from University of California Riverside, and is currently back at UCR working on a MFA in creative writing for the performing arts. SR’s work also appeared in Connotation Press’s special section on film noir in June 2010.

I Do Belong There

T

he lot was almost full when I swung my car into a space in the back, near the exit that fed onto Pacific Coast Highway. As I walked through the lot, there were cars I recognized: Nick’s white pick up parked in the managing director’s spot like clockwork, Elton’s new Toyota sedan with the dent and yellow paint from a pole in a parking lot he lost a fight with. It was sad; he was so proud of that car.

The doors to the scene shop were closed of course; the wood planks and asphalt around them glowed from the halogen light above the door, the years of spray paint seeming to jump off the ground. There were still three black trashcans in a row by the mobile storage unit and the dirty green lawn chair where Lawrence would sit to smoke his hand-rolled cigarettes and hide from the managing director. It felt good and kind of creepy that nothing had changed in the last couple of months.

It was weird coming here so late. It was dark, the only light coming from the two halogen lights in the parking lot behind me and the lights from the uncovered windows of the old folks home next door. If you looked closely from the street, you could see the bodies in the beds, mostly watching TV. I pulled my new coat around my body against the wind that always came up here at night. I got so cold since starting the pills. Just two months ago, I wouldn’t have brought the jacket. Sometimes, you could smell the sea salt on the wind. We were only couple of miles from the ocean, maybe two or three from Mother’s Beach.

When I passed the corner of the building, I saw Andrew standing against the cinderblock wall that separated the narrow driveway of the theatre from the patio of the home next door.

I could smell his clove cigarette. He was wearing the stripped, knee-length smoking robe that Handsome John had bought him on the show we had all done together last spring.

“Andrew!” I swallowed his name before the last syllable was out. My voice still sounded strange. They told me the pills would help, and the surgery maybe, but it was another four

months till the surgery, and I don’t think the pills had helped at all.

He turned and it made me feel warm all along my spine when his face lit up to see me. You can always tell when someone means their smile, their eyes change. He met me halfway and held me to him in one of his vertebrae-cracking Andrew-hugs.

My nose and mouth were filled with Old Spice and Ben Nye powder and clove. His beard looked like steel wool but felt as soft and smooth as puppy fur. I felt my mouth twitch and I pressed my face harder against his rough robe. I hated it when the pills made me want to cry at the slightest thing.

“Elizabeth, you look great.”

“Thank you.” Talking with Andrew, I almost forgot about my voice. “You’re really filling out.”

“Thanks. Mom sends her love.”

His eyes changed a little at that.

“She didn’t come?”

“She’s sick. Otherwise she would have.”

“Serious?”

“No, just the flu.”

“Good, I like your mom.”

“So do I.” “So things are good there?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m coming back here. Lawrence emailed me to come do board op on Chauffer.”

“If I’d known, I would have auditioned for it.”

He finished his cigarette and crossed the drive way to put it in the trashcan near the stage door. “I got to go in or Elton will be after me.”

“Tell Elton ‘hi’ for me.”

“Will do.” And he was gone through the stage door. I could hear the disembodied laughter of the cast, some of it coming out of the open window of the men’s dressing room.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 65

My mouth twitched again and something in my belly told me that I should be back there calling times, running through cues, doing something. It didn’t feel right to be outside when there was work to do.

I walked down the sidewalk to the front of the theatre, a walk I could do blindfolded in my sleep. There were patrons milling around, mostly in groups, some were smoking by the planters of dwarf palm trees. The lights were on in the box office. The windows were panes of thick glass behind bars of peeling white paint. Above the box office was a plaque to the woman who had been the board president and was now the resident ghost of the Playhouse. I said hi to the boys in the box office through the uneven hole in the glass. Just as we started talking, they got a rush of customers and I was forced into the lobby. With all the doors open, the lobby was just as cold as it was outside. The lobby wasn’t all that big. It looked bigger because of the huge mirrors on both sides. Under them were padded benches, the same maroon of the carpet. From the kitchen in the corner, I could hear the talking of the ushers getting coffee ready for the bar and intermission. Peggy’s shrill voice rose above them all. She was the acting house manager tonight because it was preview Thursday.

As I was standing in the middle of the lobby, feeling like an island in the sea of conversations and laughing people, I saw Nick, the real house manager. Another hug, another person glad I was back.

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m going to be working a dance show at the University Theatre. It’s like a smaller version of the Carpenter Center.”

“I could see myself getting close to dancers. Talking to them, brushing their hair.”

“Now you’re scaring me, Nick.”

“Lawrence says you’re coming back for Chauffer.”

“Yep. Counting down the days.”

“I remember when you were counting days ’til you left.”

“I realized there is no place like home.”

“If this is your home, you got deeper problems than I thought.”

I was going to fire a witty retort when one of the box office boys stuck his head out of the office and called Nick.

“Sorry, Elizabeth. I’ll talk to you after the show.”

“Totally.”

And I was left alone again. I could feel some of the patrons staring at me. I hate going places alone.

The house was open now. Because it was Thursday night preview, there were no programs, nothing for my hands to do.

There was no assigned seating either. I sat in my favorite seat: section D, third row down, seat on the aisle. Waiting for the show to start, I had that familiar vague tension in my stomach I always have before a show I’m watching. Especially with nothing for my hands to do. I looked up and tried to identify the lights, my favorite bored theatre game. The Playhouse just had Fresnels and a couple minizooms and par cans. Just about 66 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

every Fresnel had a barn door on it so I couldn’t see the color Lawrence was using in this show. After counting the lights, 68, which is a lot for a small grid like the Playhouse has, I looked around the house. Sitting in section D, I could see the screen that separated the backstage from the audience. Actors could stand there and watch the house without being seen.

I remembered standing in that narrow hallway with Andrew as we watched Handsome John and the rest of the cast last spring. I wondered if Andrew was watching the house right now. That only made me more self-conscious.

Three people sat down behind me in a wave Stetson cologne. I was able to get lost in their talk about someone’s breakup, Walmart stock, getting in touch with your higher power and high blood pressure. Right as I was finding out the pro and cons of various blood pressure medicines, the lights dimmed and the people behind me were cut off by the familiar announcement reminding us to turn off cell phones and not take pictures. The lights went dark and peopled clapped.

The show seemed to go on forever. Andrew was good, but the script was terrible. Not even Andrew’s resonating voice could save the words they made him say.

Intermission. Thank the Lord. I had to pee the last three scenes. Even though the thought of using a public bathroom made the sides of my stomach squeeze together. It shouldn’t have, I used to work here. I left the house and walked into the freezing lobby. Because tonight was Thursday preview, everyone was friends and family of the cast or volunteers of the theatre. Lots of people I knew. Lots of people I didn’t.

All standing in groups. It’s weird after five months of working backstage, not having anything to do at intermission. Nothing to do but wend my way through the knots of people. All I heard was noise, the communal roar of 20 whispered conversations.

I walked purposefully to the bathroom, the one with the circle on it. With worn Braille beneath it that no truly blind person could ever hope of reading.

There wasn’t a line yet. Sometimes when a show is running, there could be line stretching out the door. Just someone in the stall. There was only one stall and one sink in the women’s bathroom here. I panicked. Not a lot. Just enough to feel selfconscious. It was easier, better, faster if I could just go in and out on my own. With no chance of being seen until I was almost gone. I didn’t want to be caught until I was drying my hands and on my way out the door. Easier that way. Sometimes I even made a clean getaway.

I could feel the cold smoothness of the blue green tile through my shirt when I leaned against the wall. I shouldn’t have left the coat on my seat in the theatre. I took out and flipped open my cell phone. I didn’t do anything with it. Just stared at the welcome screen and pressed the buttons to make the pictures of my fav five spin around and around. I always look at my phone when I’m nervous. The woman in the stall shifted around; she’d be done soon.

And then the sound I dread. The door opened. A woman

came in. About my age, early twenties, probably a volunteer’s daughter. Lot of them floating around tonight. She saw me.

Crap. She stopped short when she saw me and walked back to the door without saying a word.

The woman in the stall didn’t come out. What could be taking so long?

The volunteer’s daughter opened the door and stared at the circle on it. Like it was supposed to mean something new or it held a secret she had been looking for. Then she looked back at me. She started with my Converse, up my jeans and sky blue shirt to my still short hair. Andrew was wrong, I hadn’t filled out at all. I was still too skinny, the line of my body still too straight. My cheeks too wide, my jaw too square. I was definitely too tall. I tried not to look at her. I tried to focus on the sink, on my cell phone, on what the hell that woman was doing in there that was taking so much damn time.

Door woman walked toward me. Her mouth was grim; she was a woman on a mission. Stall woman caught her purse on the lock just as door woman reached me.

“This is the girls’ bathroom.”

And just like that, every witty retort I ever had, every funny thing I was going to say was gone, lost in the cresting knowledge that maybe I didn’t belong there. She was too selfrighteous not to be believed. I looked her in her hazel eyes.

They all have different colored eyes, but with the same blank fire.

I wanted to cry again when I heard my too deep voice rumble out, “I know.”

Like all the others, I stared her down.

She was still waiting when I got out. There was a line of old women behind her. She flat-out stared at me as I washed my hands. I heard her mutter something as she walked past me

into the stall. I left without drying my hands, just wiping them on my jeans as I slipped past the line of old women, avoiding eyes, couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I went back to my seat and wrapped myself in my big black wool coat. I focused hard on the second half of the play and laughed at all the horrible jokes and dialogue. I could feel people looking at me as if I was high. Then the lights were different and people were clapping.

After the show, the lobby was even colder than it had been at intermission. I stood there alone, waiting for Andrew. I saw the door woman again, talking to friends and pointing at me. I felt my face turn the color of the carpet.

Andrew came out and enfolded me in another bear hug.

“What did you think of the show?”

“You were great.”

“The script blows.”

“But you got that voice that the Press Telegram loves so much.”

“I’m mighty fond of it myself.”

It felt good to laugh again. He drew me into a goodbye hug.

“I have to go to my dart game. I just wanted to say hi to you and thanks again for coming.”

“Anytime, Andrew.”

He went back into the theatre. I went out the lobby doors.

The box office was closed and dark. I made my way down the dark drive way. There were conversations and people and laughter swirling around me like ocean currents. The parking lot was mostly empty. It was colder, the wind even bit through the coat. I was sleepy, from those damn pills that weren’t doing any damn good. I opened the door of my car, the metal so cold it burned. I sat on that cold car seat and finally let myself cry.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 67

Abbie Bergdale Abbie J. Bergdale was born and raised in Iowa. She received her undergraduate degree from Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa. Abbie currently lives in Irvine, California where she is earning her master’s of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of California-Irvine. Abbie’s writing has recently appeared in Gargoyle and Blazevox.

Spun

Q

uiet. There’s Katie waking up in the middle of a room.

The sunlight cascades through the dingy windows onto her freckled face. She has no idea where she is.

Clothes scattered everywhere, the couch ripped halfway open — springs show through, an empty case of Bud Light. Now she remembers. She puts her hands to her face and she feels it.

The nerve-twisting ache sits behind her eyeballs. It’s no quickaspirin-cure. She’s going to pay for this one. Listen. That’s her heart. The thump in her head echoes the beat. Hell — guess that means I’m alive.

She begins to piece the night together. She reaches down and tugs at her black nylon skirt she cut into jagged edges that twist around her hips. It tangled as she slept. Katie barely remembers the car ride to Dollar Tree for her last-minute costume. She smiles as she relives the pride of digging through the racks and finding that perfect all-black attire. Her skirt is two sizes too small, but it fits her in all the right places. Her shirt is tight — cut just low enough to reveal nothing, yet remain trashy. The wig she found at her friend’s house. The make up was hers.

Dark. Black. Everywhere. The deep artistic design that went into her costume the night before looks dumbly inadequate as she passes the mirror by the stairwell this morning. She pauses.

Frowns at herself. Starts walking down the stairs. At least my clothes are still on. That’s always a bonus.

She finds her purse slung in a corner and checks through it quickly to make sure everything is in place. She’s got her empty wallet, photos, a couple pens and her keys. She teeters on the steps and grabs the railing to steady her. She pauses for a moment. Deep breath. You’re okay. She looks up and continues down into the grungy gnat-infested kitchen. There are copious amounts of cans scattered throughout the house. The stench of stale beer and cigarettes permeates the air, stifling any potential desire for breakfast. She rarely eats anymore.

Katie walks through the living room, tripping over barelybreathing bodies sprawled in a human tic-tac-toe formation.

Cat’s game. You’re all losers. Jason’s door is shut. She’s pretty sure 68 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

he didn’t have a girl in there last night, but she can never be sure. She knocks lightly. No answer. She slowly turns the knob and peeks through the door.

“Jason,” she whispers.

No answer.

“Jason,” she ventures a little louder.

Not even a twitch.

“Dude, do you have any fuckin’ dope? I need a bump.”

Jason raises his head a half inch off the pillow. “Fucking gone, man. Out.” Katie shuts the door and trips back over the bodies layered on the living room floor. She goes into the bathroom and splashes water on her face. She somehow lost her make up during the Hallow’s eve celebration. She hovers over the glass toilet bowl and pees an amount smaller than any acceptable urine sample. Her leg muscles twitch uncontrollably and she watches. She begins to wonder how much calcium she has to deplete her body of before her bones just snap. Better stop at the gas station for some milk on the way home. She checks her sunken reflection in the mirror one more time. The skeleton stares back and lies to her. Without make up, she no longer recognizes her own face. It disappeared, she thought, touching her taught cheeks against her jawbone. Holy Shit. It was just there a minute ago. *** Katie shuts herself into her beat-up Ford Taurus. The smell of cherry air-freshener fills her nostrils and gags her throat. She cracks a window. She lights up a smoke and flips through her tiny music collection until she finds the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and throws it in. She drives three blocks and stops at Kum-n-Go. She makes the stop as fast as she can, with just a single bottle of Kemp’s for the road. When she gets back into her car, she almost sits on her sunglasses. Perfect. She fingers through her hair, adjusts her sunglasses and heads out of town on the nearest exit.

The entire way home, Katie sings to Janis, Jerry and Jimi

— three out of four of her favorite Js. She imagines a world where she can sit in a park in the sunshine, watch people all day, write down poems and nonsense. She would work, but only so she could afford to go to school. She wants intelligent conversation. Academics. To get away from that thin, white devil that haunts her daydreams, but she knows she has to start anew. Far, far away from everyone and every bad thing she can’t seem to avoid any longer. Impossible. The idea seems so unreachable. So easy to say. So difficult to do. Pick up the pieces and go home. Easy for you to say, Stevie.

Forty minutes later, she pulls into her driveway. Her house is tiny, but cozy. She’s got a bed, a fridge and a toilet. All she needs. It’s not barren. She’s got a television. Small, but it works.

It’s still spotless from the last 48-hour amp she and Jason pulled together. He played Tony Hawk until his dope ran out, and he could feel the pain in his fingers. Katie cleaned. She slings her purse against the bedroom wall and falls across her dancing bears comforter. I don’t work all week and I’m all out of blow. Might as well crash. She woke up to birds chirping an entire day later. *** The phone rings a shrill alarm. She has her stereo cranked up and is jamming to “Uncle John’s Band.” She’ll never hear it. She’s curling her hair into careful ringlets that hang about her head. Jason likes them. That’s why she does it. He calls her Pollyanna and teases her about trying to pick up guys. She thinks it makes her look innocent, and anything to put off that misconception is always appreciated. On the fifth ring she finally hears the phone. She runs to the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Kate. What’s the word, bird?”

“Oh, hey, Jason. Just ya know, getting ready.”

“Ready for what? Got a hot date I don’t know about?”

“Nah. Just thought you might want to have some fun tonight.”

“Excellent idea, my Ratie Katie. What would you say about a lil’ endeavor?”

Katie smiles. She knows Jason has something big in mind.

“Yeah, such as?”

“Just let me pick you up at 8. We’ll see where the wind takes us.”

“Most excellent. Ciao.”

“Peace.” *** Jason pulls into the driveway. Katie’s heart skips a beat. She tries to channel her giddiness for him into excitement about getting high and letting loose. She grabs her purse and a tube of her favorite lip-gloss, Sugar Plum Princess, and flies out the door. She doesn’t know where they’re going, and she doesn’t care. She is going to get loaded and reacquaint with happiness.

Jason leans over the center column and opens the passenger door from the inside. “Hey, Pollyanna!”

“Hey, Jase. So, you gonna keep me guessin’ all night or you going to let me in on this endeavor?”

“Aw, Katie girl, you know I always have only the best thoughts in mind for you.” Jason smirks and reaches into his cargo pocket. He pulls out a tiny Ziplock baggie half full of pure white powder. He hands it to her, and she automatically reaches into his glove box to pull out the owner’s manual. She taps two medium-sized lines onto the manual and straightens them, making sure each is even with the same amount of dope.

She digs into her purse and finds her white Bic pen which she sticks in her mouth and snaps the body away. She sticks the hollowed out pen in her nostril, and with one giant snort, the first line disappears. She holds it up for Jason to take his turn and he manages to back out of her driveway while Katie holds the pen and manual, and he quickly sniffs away the second. As Jason drives, Katie returns the manual and restores her pen to its intended state. She lets her head hit the back of the seat and closes her eyes for a brief moment. The burn of poison drips past her mucus membranes and down her throat. She knows that the discomfort will eventually pass and the only thing left will be euphoria.

“Oh yeah, that’s the good shit, Kate.”

“It’s really good shit, Jason. Where’d you hook that up?”

“The same fine people we are going to hang with tonight.”

“Do I know them?”

“Doubt it. They’re older. Couple of Mexicans passing through town on business.”

“How’d you meet them?”

“For real, check this. Just ran into them at the expo last weekend and they were talking about dope, but all code-like, so I thought no way could this be for real, but they gave me their card and I took it and called them the other night just for shits when I was baked like a cake. They’re real and they’re here. They hooked me up and they said there’s a shit ton more where that came from. They’re stayin’ at the Heartwood Motel.

It’s only 10 minutes from here. Thought we could crash there for a bit, maybe get a little bump.”

Katie feels the pang of guilt she rarely experiences. She used to play with the daughter of the owner of the Heartwood Motel when she was a little girl. Their parents were still pretty good friends. She considers confiding in Jason, but then thinks against it. She’s a big girl, now. That was kid’s stuff ages ago.

Besides, they will never know.

Jason and Katie pull into the Heartwood Motel around 9 o’clock. Jason grabs the rest of his stash and Katie grabs her purse. They slowly make their way to room 5. Katie looks at Jason. “Should I knock?” She doesn’t have to. A small-framed Mexican male, looking to be in his late thirties, opens the door.

“Amigos!” he exclaims with a toothy smile. “Come on in!

Que pasa? Thanks for stopping by!”

Katie’s not sure what to think. There are only two men in the room. It smells of burnt hot dogs and Old Spice. She quietly walks into the room, thankful Jason’s with her. She is never afraid of anyone, especially when they’re offering her free dope, but something about these two just creeps her out.

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The man who let them in is wiry and bouncing from wall to wall. Wonder if he did it all already. The other man is older.

Late forties, probably. He’s checking something on his laptop.

Katie doesn’t remember the Heartwood Motel having Internet access before.

Jason sits right down after shaking the hands of each of the men. He isn’t at all nervous and Katie is jealous of his comfort level. She sits beside him on the queen-size bed that the first man isn’t already on. The older man doesn’t say a word; he just shuts his laptop and walks into the bathroom. The younger man starts jabbering on about how small the towns in Iowa are.

“I can’t believe there’s no fucking mall, man.”

“Yeah, bro, there’s not much around here.”

“You ain’t kiddin.”

The older man walks out from the bathroom and over to the bed stand between the beds. He takes a small container from his pocket and lays out four of the fattest lines Katie has ever seen. There is a light pink tint to it and she loses her breath a little at the thought of taking in so much dope at once. The old man hands a tooter to Jason. Katie watches as he takes the line like it’s no big deal. He hands it to the small man on the bed. After the two Mexicans had finished their lines, the older man hands it to Katie. He never makes eye contact with anyone, not once. She takes it and breathes in deep. Just do it. Be done. She sets the tube down and finishes off the last line. There’s no poison drainage this time. Her throat instantly becomes numb. She can’t feel the back of her tongue and the candy starts to drip down her throat. She feels nothing but a huge rush of calm to her brain. She sits back on the bed beside Jason and is content just staring at the two of them talking about the town and business. The older man goes back to his laptop and never says a word.

Five hours later, their minds are still going a hundred miles per hour. The two Mexican men seem to be chilled, and Katie can’t realize how any of them can sit still for so long. She has to get up. Just walk around. Do something. She really just wants to disappear, but doesn’t want to seem rude. They just gave them some really good shit. The least they can do is hang around.

Katie knows Jason is probably hoping to score at least one more time.

“Hey Jason, I’m gonna walk outside and get a soda. You want anything?” Inside she wishes he would come, too.

“Nah, I’m good — Hey, on second thought, here,” he reaches into his wallet and gives her a buck. “Get me a Dew.” Katie takes the money and sticks it in her purse. She heads outside and down the broken sidewalk to the pop machine.

The only streetlight is blinking and swaying a little with the wind. Katie pulls her hoodie around her just a little tighter and picks up her pace to the other side of the parking lot. She digs in her purse for the money Jason gave her and pushes

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the green button. Sold out. Damn. Pepsi will have to do. As she’s fumbling for her purse and trying to make both sodas fit, she feels someone walk up behind her. She slowly turns around and feels two big hands grab her sweatshirt and pull her around the corner. A dark grainy hand is over her mouth, preventing her from crying out. He holds her mouth with one hand and pulls down her pants with the other. His pants are already down.

He thrusts up inside of her. She’s dry. He’s rough. She tries to scream out from behind his hand and he pushes it harder into her face. Tears leave her eyes and hit the back of his knuckles.

Kick him, you stupid bitch. Bite him! Katie’s frozen. She can’t move.

He finishes with her and pushes her back hard against the wall.

He looks her right in the eye. “If you scream, I’ll kill you, bitch.”

Katie slumps against the wall. She’s shaking uncontrollably.

Her underwear is at her ankles and her pants are tangled at her feet. Her purse falls and the contents scatter across the parking lot. She looks up. The man is gone. Pull up your pants, you whore.

Get the hell out of here! Katie pulls her pants up and grimaces at the pain as her underwear rubs against the area he destroyed so easily. Her mind races. Can I kill him? I mean, could I? She knows she can’t go back in there. She starts walking. Then runs. She starts to cry. Thick, heavy tears cloud her line of vision. She is somewhere along the highway that leads away from her tiny, little house. She can’t run fast enough. Headlights slow as they near her and Katie sticks out her hand. The grey dodge pick-up pulls off to the side of the road. *** The older Mexican walks into room number 5 and tosses Jason a Pepsi.

Thank God, someone stopped.

“Thanks, man. Hey, it’s been awhile. Did you see Katie out there?”

I wonder when Jason will notice I’m gone.

The older man looks Jason in the eye. “If you mean that girl you were with, I never saw her.”

Mom. I need to call my mom.

“No shit? I hope nothing happened to her. Maybe I should go look for her.” Jason grabs his keys off the table and thanks his new friends for the dope. “It was really good shit, man.

Thanks. What do I owe ya?”

Oh please, God, let this man be kind.

The older man looks him straight in the eyes one more time, “Consider it taken care of.”

As far as you’ll let me ride. *** Katie watches as miles and miles of highway fly past. The sun’s red glow creeps onto the horizon. She smiles politely as the driver makes simple conversation. She stares at the empty fields as the leaves disappear off the trees. She wonders what the weather’s like in California and how long it’ll take to forget.

Sally Smith Sally Smith is a lovely and talented young poet who currently resides in Southwestern Virginia with her handsome boyfriend and their two dogs, Chubbs and Mad Dog. She is the winner of several poetry prizes, including the 2007 Leidig Poetry Prize, presented by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, editor of the Ampersand, Emory & Henry College’s literary magazine.

Vagabonds There we were, alone together at the bottom of a cracking cement stairway, where we abandoned god, his weight too much for our weary arms. We were left with the stale, unceremonious ashes of secular dreams, and pale apartment sun shone dull on our dry and salted cheeks.

Without seatbelts, we travelled, cat and dogs aboard. We, gypsies in department stores: Volvos caravans, glare thick in glossy eyes, slick like shining nametags, our life and our walls just painted paper.

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Eric Johnson Eric Johnson is a mild-mannered schoolteacher by day, and by night, he is working to emulate his favorite poets from the British Renaissance. A professional student, he is working to finish his final degree. Eric shares his cozy city home (which he bought for his dog), with his 10 year old “puppy” and his fiancée. Being an avid hiker and outdoor enthusiast has lead to the theme of much of his works: the juxtaposition of city life with the natural world. More of his poetry can be found in The Chaffey Review. http://crashhiker.blogspot.com/

Tasting Iron It was snowing that morning I remember

because there was a two-hour delay and I had just reset my alarm The phone rang and I let the machine get it

her tremulous voice came over the speaker in the other room 8:00

“Call me when you get this . . . it’s . . . well gimme a call.”

I knew what it was; there was no need to call her back

“You don’t have to come. It might not be . . . could be a false alarm” When “Do what you think is best . . . I’ll understand” Now

I made the phone calls: . . . can you . . . thanks . . . yes I need coverage.

The drive over was hard. Crystal flakes settling on my windshield

it was snowing that morning, I remember because there was a two-hour delay It was raining inside too but the wipers didn’t take care of that

did I turn on the radio or listen to the snow floating?

8:30 When I walked in and heard it I thought

so that’s what a death-rattle sounds like I couldn’t help it.

She would have been upset.

She could have been a movie star, Knowing how she looked now never went out unless she was all dolled up. she was a fragile shell of herself There’s this picture of her at the beach laying in her bed, eyes closed standing next to her Andy, it was like she wasn’t even there. she could have been Marilyn Monroe.

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I listened to the air rattle inside her

I remember it sounded painful She inhaled shallow, laborious, slow

It was snowing that morning held it for a minute as if savoring the moments

could be a false alarm then the soft gurgle of the air escaping her mouth

“It doesn’t hurt her . . . doesn’t even notice it.”

I do “that patch is more for the family, dries it up.”

10:00

We called the priest.

“We could bring in a harpist?”

We laugh . . . Can’t you see that . . . see her . . .

“What the hell is that thing?”

We laugh again . . . got any Jazz?

That’s more her speed . . . Yah and a highball

Man did she love to dance.

“I remember when she would sing . . . beautiful voice.”

“I remember when she would take us out in the snow and spin the car out.”

It was snowing that morning I remember 1:30 The snow had stopped when the priest came.

He commented on the beautiful day.

I remember it was snowing The sun shone brightly

Let us pray . . . Our Father

I bit my lip

who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name.

it wouldn’t be right to cry

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

I tasted iron

on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day

the snow

our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses

I can’t say the words

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I bite harder.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. blood from my blood, flesh from my flesh

Thine is the power, and the kingdom and the glory forever

she taught me this

Amen.

He leaves us. He was sorry, but he had to hurry. He had appointments to keep.

They turned her on her side. She looked more comfortable.

“Do you think she can hear?”

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It was snowing that morning They gather at the door as if it were a nightclub she was a partier . . . boy did she party But velvet ropes keep them out I still taste the iron I wiped the stuff from her face.

She would not have liked it . . . she was always so particular about her appearance

what else could I do? It was settled in her cheek, the patch wasn’t working

thick strings running down her face, it looked uncomfortable so I wiped it away.

What else could I do . . . she wouldn’t have liked it.

She opens her eyes for the first time that day.

It was snowing that morning I kiss her forehead and say I love you.

I tell my mother her eyes are open. she coos softly to her,

“it’s okay, your Andy’s waiting.”

She was always afraid of the dark.

“we love you”

Laughing over her bed, my aunt and I. I don’t even know why.

“we love you, it’s okay, go to your Andy”

Laughter

Hey . . .

Is she . . .

What?

she is.

How do we . . .

The little girl, newly old, crawls into bed with her mother

. . . she cries 2:30 we sit witnesses to why we were there mouths that cannot speak, minds that cannot think

It was snowing that morning I remember

that painful numbness that is left, silence falls on us in heavy flakes 4:00 The only sound was the ticking clock on the wall.

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Metamorphosis I see your willowed eyes in the darkness on the window frame of night’s cool embrace.

The broken musings of a poet’s heart resurface and from these nightmares I hide.

My silent words have found a voice again in the stars of the broken window in the run-down house.

The shutters I thought were locked have come unhinged while the frets of measureless music throw them open and through this unrequited vow of silence the unsanctified monk withdrew from the cloister of human decadence to the self-riotous field bathing himself in the river of self-pity flowing from the decimated spring from which Alfather drew the stones.

Mimir would be proud of this silent house I tried to build, surrounded by the dying orchids of last spring.

I still remember when I could throw a lasso around the cloud and pull it down to earth where I could feel it.

There was a certain power in that desperate youth, the once forgotten wonder of the wandering stars.

But the anvil on which my wit was forged, pounded out that magic, extinguishing the gasses that held my wonder.

Now I wonder why the stars moved to that broken house and where the clouds found room enough to sleep.

The dollhouse dreams of my abandoned mind cry out in pity for the muted eyes and blind tongue, asking why the stars are encased in glass and why the trees were planted in such neat rows.

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Bryan Borland Bryan Borland is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Little Rock, Arkansas. His first book, My Life as Adam, was published by his own Sibling Rivalry Press in 2010. His second book, a collaboration with poet Stephen S. Mills titled The Hanky Code, will be published by Lethe Press in 2011. He has also been featured in Ganymede, Breadcrumb Scabs, vox poetica, and Velvet Mafia and was the editor for Ganymede Unfinished and Fag Hag – A Scandalous Chapbook of Fabulously-Codependent Poetry. For more about Bryan, visit him online at www.bryanborland.com.

Dark Horse Is this how Andrew Johnson felt when Lincoln was shot? Vice Presidents take atheistic oaths to faithless circumstances they don’t believe they’ll see: a bullet navigating the channels of patriarchal brains, forefathers assassinated by black-cloaked conspirators, death to legislative bills that would grant their sons perpetual youth.

I am not ready to be the man of the family.

I am a thirty-year-old infant birthed premature, my constitution too green to ascend, toddling in pastures of illegal crops with no thoughts beyond the weekend.

I am political suicide, the black sheep of a dark horse thoroughbred stable with skeletons in closets so fresh their spoiled flesh still smells sweet.

I am tantrums and impatience from deficits of attention, a punk with the flaws of generation me.

I text insincere apologies and don’t really love and am not worthy of standing ovations.

I am John John saluting processions of the slaughter, an adorable child of history’s lens who throws undocumented fits in the arms of the First Widow.

I have not yet lengthened my conscience or feet to touch the floor below my inherited throne.

I am not ready to transition from prince to king, reluctant to put away my toys for a crown and study the office of my father, where executive orders are issued by decree for casualties of innocence, for our young to ship out and die.

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Blue Bliss

Blue Bliss began her career painting giant murals for carnival ride fronts and theme parks. After taking a year off to reinvent herself, she re-emerged as a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and animator. She was an assistant lead animator on the feature film A Scanner Darkly. She has also done numerous portrait commissions and commercial design and animation work. She is currently creating animated shorts, eLearning graphics and a series of LumiNocturnes, exploring the mystery and magic of New York City at night, which will become a book. www.blueblissgallery.com www.houseofliss.com

Midnight Watch

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LumiNocturne 31

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Gargoyle

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Freedom of Desire

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Crosswalk 1

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Bridge in Fog

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Diane Hoover Bechtler Diane Hoover Bechtler lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael Gross, who is a poet with a day job, and with their cat, Call Me IshMeow. As well as writing short work, she is looking for an agent for her memoir, which is about learning to live with brain disease. She has an undergraduate degree in English from Queens University where she graduated summa cum laude and subsequently earned her MFA. She has had short work published in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, Thema, Literary Journal, Pangolin Press, Bewildering Stories, Everyday Fiction and The Dead Mule, School of Southern Literature.

Grounded

T

he Helmsley Park Lane at Central Park South is around the corner from Bergdorf ’s, a store I came to know well in time. But then, it was only a possibility to me. It was frequented by manicured ladies dropped off from limousines after they powdered their faces using Pomeranian puppies. We stayed at the Park Lane Helmsley when we were in New York.

I was new to money but I recognized luxury. I smelled both Chanel Number 5 and hundred dollar bills when I passed them wearing scuffed, white athletic shoes.

It was as though I had never been to New York before.

Being there in wealth, seeing New York through rich eyes was a shock after staying at Times Square.

I had never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had never been to the Guggenheim.

My then husband wanted a New York Pied-à-terre, and whatever Gerhardt wanted, he bought, be it a Ferrari, a wife, or a divorce.

On that New York trip, I saw through the eyes of the real estate lady. When I thought about it later, which was often, I was not sure that seeing New York through rich eyes was a good thing.

The real estate lady marched us through many places on the Upper East Side where maids dusted perfectly clean tables and chandeliers split sunlight into a thousand rainbows.

My husband checked views. I looked at closets. One occupant owned at least 50 identical black Chanel handbags, at attention on a shelf. The closet was larger than my first house.

The real estate lady offhandedly asked if we wanted to see Nureyev’s apartment at the Dakota. My husband said “yes.”

The famed ballet dancer was two years dead. The world still mourned. Never had anyone jumped so high from a standing position — six feet straight up. My girlfriend saw him do that.

So we trotted down the avenue. I don’t know New York very well. So I don’t know which avenue it was.

Later, I researched the price of the sale of Nureyev’s apartment and found that it went for $7 million. Nureyev was barely cold in his Paris grave when the fight among lovers and

friends over his property broke out. He died of AIDS. His apartment at the Dakota was on the street level. I recognized the gothic structure from a distance. I walked in the same area John Lennon had walked alongside Yoko Ono. Staff members from Christie’s sat inside cataloging Nureyev’s estate. That was creepy. The kitchen had silk wallpaper. The real estate woman told us it was from China, that Nureyev had it imported. A chandelier the size of a Volkswagen hung over the dining table. We were informed if we bought the apartment the chandelier was extra. I walked through the apartment with my mouth hanging open. My husband was talking about money to the real estate woman, and I realized he had intentions of buying the place. It faced the busy street. That’s what stopped him. He wanted a view of Central Park. While they talked about money, I sneaked into the closet. There sat dozens of ballet slippers. I picked up a pair and I seriously considered stealing them. There was nowhere to put them. I had no bag big enough to hold a pair of men’s ballet slippers.

On the trip, we visited the Guggenheim, but it was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I saw a Lucie Rei exhibition. I leaned over one of the works to see inside and set off the alarm. A guard warned me to stand back. We visited Bergdorf ’s and admired a jewelry exhibition by Angela Pintaldi.

My husband bought me shoes from Bergdorf ’s and a necklace

by Angela Pintaldi. That began my huge shoe collection.

Gerhardt continued purchasing me.

We ate at a restaurant on the upper West side and Gene Wilder walked in with a woman. This was a few years after Gilda had died. I had rack of lamb and my husband had seafood. We also ate at Café des Artistes on 67th Street, in Des Artistes Hotel where we eventually bought an apartment.

My shoes from that trip are years ago at Goodwill. My Angela Pintaldi is around another woman’s neck. My husband is married to another woman and I to another man. The Piedà-terre is occupied by strangers, as is Nureyev’s apartment. But, I alone possess that moment of holding ballet slippers still warm from a six-foot jump.

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Kim Acrylic

Interview with Anisa Romero

A

nisa Romero isn’t your typical singer/artist. She’s as unique as her mystical, spacey, surreal band. A musician, painter and designer, she is the lead singer of the musical groups Sky Cries Mary and Hana. She graduated from the University of Washington in 1990 and received her master’s degree from New York University. In 2001, she relocated to New York City with her husband, Roderick Romero, also of Sky Cries Mary, and their daughter, Petra.

I was 15, and the grunge scene in Seattle was at its peak when I went to the Bumbershoot Arts and Music Festival. Sky Cries Mary was opening for Mudhoney, then a “big” band, but it was Sky Cries Mary’s melodic vocals and surreal sound that stayed with me. The band’s ethereal ambient rock and intense vocal harmonies were so different from the Nirvana/Pearl Jam grunge bands that dominated the festival at that time.

I decided to look Anisa up 17 years later to see what she was up to, and, to my amazement, she is still making music with Sky Cries Mary. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that Anisa is a highly gifted visual artist as well.

TBS: Welcome to the Battered Suitcase, Anisa, Thanks so much for doing this interview. You are one interesting lady and have a ton going on. But first, Sky Cries Mary is one of the most original Seattle bands of the ’90s. I’ve seen all kinds of people trying to label their sound, but how would you describe it?

AR: Spiritualized, space rock. That’s where we go, when the band is “on” and connecting on stage. We all came from a variety of musical backgrounds, and it was always important to us that every member was a part of the writing process, which created a collective, collaborative sound.

TBS: What did you think of the whole Grunge movement in Seattle when SCM was so different than that typical “sound?”

AR: I grew up in Olympia in the ’80s, the influx of the punk scene was part of the fabric of my education. Amazing, amazing, spontaneous musical movement. Real and true. I still listen to our great heritage of North West bands. In fact, I have a piece of the “Tropicana” wall painted by Bilbo, Olympia artist of the ’80s.

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As for SCM, it never even occurred to us to emulate the Grunge sound, not sure why. We were more influenced by Hendrix, Pink Floyd and performance art.

TBS: Correct me if I’m wrong, but SCM has been together at least off and on for ages correct?

AR: Decades in fact!

TBS: Which album, in your opinion, was best received by the public and which one was your personal favorite?

AR: This Timeless Turning, I think, was the public favorite. Personally I LOVED making Moonbathing On Sleeping Leaves; it pushed me artistically. However, the final result may have been a bit too over-produced.

When I really look back, I absolutely and utterly enjoyed working on Small Town. We were already living in New York, and the band members were (and are) scattered all over the country. We worked via the Internet. We flew in for our parts, visited friends and family in Seattle and recorded at Michale Cozzi’s studio (SCM guitar player). I love working with Cozzi! The years of history has created this relaxed, ultra trust that is just luscious. So mellow—no drama, just creation.

TBS: On the album A Return to the Inner Experience, you did a cover of “We Will Fall,” an Iggy Pop original. How did that come about?

AR: I am in love with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and always will be; I still listen to them regularly. “We Will Fall” is from the self-titled album and is one of my all-time favorite. I listened to it relentlessly when I was a teenager and going through cancer treatment. It may have been my idea, though I am not sure, as most of the other members are staunch Stooges fans like me.

If fact, Ben Ireland, SCM’s amazing drummer, has a Stooges tribute band (The Spooges). Very fun, if you ever get a chance to see them in Seattle. One sad yet funny note: We heard that when Iggy found out a band had covered that song, he was reported to have said something to the effect of, “Why would anyone cover that pretentious song?” Only SCM I guess . . .

TBS: There was also a point in your career where you had a side project called “Hana” Can you tell readers about this project?

AR: Jeff Greinke and I started Hana. Oh god, the story is too long to recount, but it involved a dear friend, an Andalusian horse show, a 30’ golden tower and a 40’ lizard costume — you had to be there, some were. Anyway, Hana was spurred out of that. Jeff is one of my dearest friends and an incredibly prolific artist. He now lives in Tucson, Arizona. We communicate almost weekly. Some day we will do more.

TBS: What bands or artists do you think are underrated, or overrated for that matter, these days?

AR: I try not to think about it.

TBS: And then, of course, there is the amazing visual artwork you do. When did you get into that medium and who or what inspires you?

AR: I declared art as my major in 1986, the year I was diagnosed with cancer, and I never looked back. Roderick and I met in Parnassus, the cafe in the basement of the art building at the University of Washington.

My visual inspirations: Gustave Moreau, William Kentridge, Marina Abramovi, All of the pre-Rafaelites, Fra Angelico, Mondrian, Richard Serra, Rothko, Egyptian Art, Pre-Rennaisance . . . okay, pretty much everyone that is and had created, I’m not picky!

TBS: Do you ever listen to any music when you paint or have any rituals before performing?

AR: I used to be obsessive about listening to music while I paint. Now I very rarely listen to anything. I do love Patti Smith’s cover album — so good. As of late, I have been listening to the Stooges and The Cure (at least I’m being honest).

The show is the ritual.

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TBS: Everything you do, Anisa, is very mystical and magical sounding (and for me, personally, your shows feel like a religious experience). Do you have any religious beliefs that are incorporated into your work?

AR: I was raised atheist. It took me a long time to find my own belief system. My spirituality is very self-tailored and everchanging. I borrow and poach from many mystical traditions.

TBS: You married your band mate, Roderick Romero. How did that come about and what’s it like to be in a band and collaborate with your husband?

AR: How to sum up 25 years of friendship and matrimony . . . we will always be collaborating on one level or another.

TBS: You also have a little girl named Petra; how do you find the time to do the great stuff you do? What balances you?

AR: I have no idea . . . yoga.

TBS: Is your daughter at all showing artistic signs yet and would you want her to?

AR: She is absolutely already an artist. I will do my best to stay out of her creative way and inspire her!

TBS: So tree houses made for Sting by you and your husband — I saw the pictures and was in awe. How did that

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come about?

AR: That was mainly Roderick’s project. Roderick’s tree house adventures were inspired by the same woman that inspired Hana (remember the 40 foot lizard).We met Sting and Trudy through our dear friends Sharon Gannon and David Life, founders of Jivamukti Yoga. Sharon and David were one of the main reasons we moved to New York City. They are teachers and friends of Sting and Trudy’s. We had the amazing fortune of spending time with Sharon and David at Sting and Trudy’s villa in Italy where Roderick was later to build a tree house.

TBS: And one last question. How long do you see Sky Cries Mary going on for?

AR: Probably till we die. No really, this is a life’s work. We are always gravitating back to each other; I have grown to accept and love this fate.

Anisa Romero’s visual and aural work can be found online at http://www.anisaromero.com and http://skycriesmary. com.

Anisa Romero

Orbs

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Fatima

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Mocking Bird

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Your Word

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Patent Pending

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Petra

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Rust

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S.J. Webb S. J. Webb is a full-time web developer from a little village in Leicestershire, England. He very nearly forgot how much he loved to write fiction, but fortunately it all came flooding back a few years ago, and he is now making a serious attempt at it. In between writing short stories, he is also working on his first novel. He can be found online at http://www.sjwebb.com

No More Butterflies

I

struggled to control my breathing as I wandered back and forth along the platform. Three seconds in, three seconds out. I shivered in the cold December wind. The sun glared off the windows of the train, making a ringing noise in my head. I inhaled, slow and deep, diesel fumes clinging inside my nostrils and spreading to the back of my mouth. The taste of it made me feel sick as I swallowed, sending a sample of it down to my stomach. The butterflies were in there again. Little blackwinged debutantes, putting on their makeup and preparing for takeoff. I wrapped my arms across my waist. This wasn’t the time or the place to be having a panic attack, but it never was.

Pull it together, Julia. Everything is going to be okay.

Yeah, right. Who was I kidding? Everything was not going to be okay. I knew it wasn’t. But dwelling on the fact now wasn’t going to help. I tried to focus my mind on something else: the boy boasting to his girlfriend about a fight he’d been involved in the previous night; the old couple sharing a thermos flask as they laughed about a pigeon that kept coming up to them looking for food; the clacking of suitcases being dragged down the steps to my left. A man hurried down them with his three sons, holding the youngest of which in his arm. He made his way along the platform and stopped when he reached me, a look of panic on his face.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said, out of breath and flustered. He spoke with a foreign accent. “Do you know what time this is?”

I thought it was a strange thing to ask as there were clocks hanging all along the platform, but I was glad to have the distraction. I looked at the nearest clock and read out the time.

The little boy in the man’s arms waved his coloring book at me as he shouted, “Cat! Cat!” There was a cat on the cover of his book.

“Ah, sorry, miss,” said the man. “I meant the train. Do you know what time the train is? Is it still 9:58 train?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “It’s still the 9:58 train. It’s running late.”

He turned on the spot and dashed for the train without saying another word.

As he clambered onboard, the coloring book slipped out of 94 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

the little boy’s hand and fell to the ground. The man was too busy struggling with his suitcase to notice the boy’s desperate pleading. He began to make his way along the carriage, leaving the book abandoned on the platform. I ran over to pick it up, and was about to step onto the train after him, but the guard blew his whistle and the doors closed before I had a chance.

The engine began to get louder as I stepped along the side of the train and peered through its dark tinted windows. The boy was being carried along the aisle by his father. His eyes widened as he saw me holding up his book, his muted mouth saying, “Cat! Cat!” But his dad remained focused on his other two sons and continued to ignore him.

The train began to move, the engine note rising as it clunked along the rails away from me. Poor kid, I thought, as I looked at the book in my hand. I sat down on the wall and started flicking through its pages, my previously troubled mind now fully occupied with this juvenile work of art.

The boy’s choice of colors was a bit of an acid trip, but he’d made a pretty good job of staying inside the lines. About halfway through the book, there was a dot-to-dot page where you had to connect the dots in the right order to make up the picture. But there must have been some sort of printing error as the numbers that should have been beside the dots were missing. The boy hadn’t let that stop him, though. He’d made several attempts at it, erasing the lines when they didn’t seem to be in the right place and drawing them out again. But he’d still surrendered to defeat in the end. Never mind, I thought. At least he’d given it a go. I left the book on the wall and got up as my train approached the station.

After finding an aisle seat on a row to myself, I flipped down the little table on the back of the seat in front then flipped it back up again, just because I could and to make it feel like the space was my own. I leaned over to the heater beneath the window and rubbed my cold hands together. For a moment, I considered moving to the window seat to get closer, but I didn’t want anyone to come and sit next to me.

Yeah, I know, I’m unsociable, but I always seem to lose the co-passenger lottery and end up sitting next to some weirdo.

Like the guy obsessed with shoe polish who wanted to rub his tissue on my boots, very polite though he may have been.

Or the woman who managed to spend the whole journey discussing her shopping coupons — discussing them not with me, but with her actual coupons. “Now you’re a very special coupon, aren’t you? You give me 10 percent off my bananas and double reward points. I’m going to put you in my special place.” Thank God her special place was just a section in her purse.

I much preferred to listen in on people’s conversations from a safe distance. As the station began to move past outside the window, the usual chatter started up among the passengers — people moaning about the train being late, moaning about politics, moaning about the weather — but then someone said my magic words.

A little girl’s voice somewhere behind me had started by saying, “Is that lady pregnant, Mommy?”

“Yes, that’s right,” the (fortunately) pregnant (fortunately not just fat) woman had replied. “I’m having a little boy.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” the little girl’s mother had said. “When is he due?”

“Only two months away now.”

Two months. I imagined myself having a similar conversation. The little girl starts off, “Is that lady dying, Mommy?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I reply. “I’m having a death.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” says Mommy. “When is it due?”

“Only two months away now.”

“You must be getting excited.”

“Oh yes, very.”

I smiled to myself wryly as I smoothed my hand across my waist, imagining the tumor growing inside me was a baby. It wasn’t kicking yet.

The ticket inspector came and went and I sat, staring through the window for a while, the carriage swaying from side to side as it corrected itself on the rails. I thought about all the times I’d played at being a mommy as a little girl. Pushing my little plastic babies around in their miniature pram. Getting told off by my mom for using real food for their tea parties. Using the same tone of voice to tell my brother off for pretending to breastfeed them even though he’s a boy. What was it all for?

What was the point of any of it?

Yeah, I know, I was only looking at the negative side. My family and friends would tell me how much happiness I’d given them over the years, and how those memories will still last after I’m gone. Yeah, okay, that was something. But I would have to be a pretty selfless person for that to be enough. And I wasn’t sure I was that person.

A subtle ringing roused me from my thoughts. An older guy on the opposite side of the aisle, a few seats ahead of me, took his phone out of his jacket pocket and answered it.

“Yes, what is it?” He clenched his free hand around the end of the armrest as he listened. “No, I’m still on the train.” He

started to claw his fingernails through the fabric. “Please just leave it to me, sir. I do know what I’m doing.” He was wearing a smart gray suit and had short silver hair. “I realize that,” he continued, “but this really isn’t necessary.” He paused while the person on the other end of the line spoke, before sighing in resignation. “Fine . . . Of course . . . I’ll do it right away . . . Very well, Sir.” Shaking his head, he took the phone away from his ear and turned to look behind him. I pretended to rummage around inside my bag for something and hoped that he hadn’t seen me watching. When it felt safe to look again, he was leaning his elbow on the armrest, holding his phone up to the side and looking at a picture of someone on the screen. I focused my eyes on the girl in the picture: long brown hair tied back and parted at one side, a couple of strands hanging down in front to hide slightly chubby cheeks, dark gray top shaped like a W at the base of the neck — it was a picture of me.

The butterflies in my stomach launched to the dance floor and began to strut their stuff. But as the train shook the man’s hand, I realized from the way the picture moved that he was actually pointing it at someone else across the aisle ahead of him. I breathed out in relief. Of course it wasn’t a picture of me. Why would it be?

I leaned out to see who the camera was pointed at. There was a girl, who did look a lot like me, sitting another row ahead of the man and facing back toward us. I got up and moved over to the seat on the opposite side of the aisle to get a better look. She was deep in concentration, writing something down on a notepad; very quick with her pen, not stopping for an instant. She had a similar hairstyle to me, same color hair, just maybe slightly lighter and not as many split ends. Same shape face, same color eyes; the exact same top that I was wearing, just maybe slightly fuller in the chest department. Or maybe that was just the lighting. Either way, I thought, she’s basically just a prettier version of me. But there was also something a bit ruthless-looking about her. The way she pursed her lips as she scribbled with her pen. I wouldn’t have wanted to come up against her in an argument.

I wondered why the guy was taking her picture. He looked more like a pervert than a modeling agency scout. I thought about whether I should go and tell her, idly flipping down the table on the back of the seat in front. But something fell out from behind it and dropped to the floor between my feet. It was another coloring book, the same as the one the boy had dropped at the station.

I picked it up and turned through the pages. Whoever had colored this one in had done it all with a black biro and wasn’t even remotely close to staying inside the lines. Clearly this was the work of a very special kind of child. But when I got to the dot-to-dot page, despite it having the same printing error as the other kid’s book, this one had managed to complete it, apparently in a single attempt. The same black biro that had wrought havoc on the previous pages had made neat, straight Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 95

lines on this one, forming the same picture of the cat that was on the front cover. He must have figured it out.

The next station was announced and the girl started rearranging the items in her bag. My eye was drawn to the bag as it had a cat motif like the picture on the book. I leaned out to see what the man was doing. He just seemed to be sitting there, tapping his hand on the side of the armrest. He didn’t look like he was going anywhere. The station signs went past the window as the train slowed down, and the girl made her way toward the doors.

As the train came to a halt, the doors opened and she strode past me outside the window. The guy got up to leave the train now as well. I moved to the window seat and leaned forward to watch as he marched down the platform behind her.

As other passengers began to board the train, a woman stopped by the seat where the girl had been sitting and leaned over to pick something up. She said someone had left their phone behind.

“I know who that was!” I said, jumping up into the aisle.

“I’ll take it to her.” I grabbed the phone out of the startled woman’s hand and ran off the train before I’d even had a chance to consider what I was doing.

I looked along the platform, holding my hair to stop the wind from blowing it in my eyes. The guy continued to follow the girl as she went down the steps toward the exit. But was he really following her? And what did it really have to do with me if he was? I considered giving the phone to a member of staff. Someone in a railway uniform came walking nearby and I was about to hand it to him, when an electronic meow cut through the noise of the platform, completely grabbing hold of my attention. A little girl in a pushchair was being rolled past me as she played with a fluffy toy cat. She leaned out to the side and looked back at me, her shiny blonde hair curling out from beneath a woolen gray hat. As her gaze met my eyes, she cocked her head and winked at me.

The guard blew his whistle and the train doors shut. The man and the girl had both gone out of sight. I bit my lip and narrowed my eyes as the kid in the pushchair continued to wave her cat at me. Sod it, I thought, I need to know what the hell is going on here. I clasped my bag to my side and ran toward the steps as the train rolled away from the platform.

I caught sight of the man again as I left the station entrance.

He opened up a navy blue umbrella as he made his way toward a footbridge. The girl had just reached the top of the steps, the sky above her turning dark and gray. A drop of rain splashed in my eye as I followed them up the steps and onto the narrow bridge. The man kept several meters behind the girl and I tried to stay the same distance behind him. For a few moments, we were the only three on the bridge, evenly spaced apart and insulated from the noise of the cars beneath us, our footsteps echoing under the roof. If he turned around now there was nowhere for me to hide.

One by one, we descended the steps at the other end 96 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

of the bridge and headed into the busy high street below. It wasn’t a town I was familiar with. We walked past a busker who was playing a guitar and singing something festive. Above our heads, Christmas decorations tried in vain to cheer up the gloomy sky.

As the three of us snaked through the crowds, I found myself getting closer to them. The man was slowing down as the girl went into a shop. He stopped outside the entrance and looked in through the clear glass shop front. I continued behind him, taking a quick glance over my shoulder as I passed. I was sure he was following her now. I went into the shop through the second entrance and hoped he hadn’t seen me.

The place was fairly large; selling newspapers, magazines, stationary and the like. A large area around the tills was dedicated to Christmas-related things. The girl had gone down the aisle on the opposite side of the shop as the man stood motionless, staring at her from beneath his umbrella.

Okay, this is my chance, I thought. If I can get close enough to talk to her without him seeing me, I can give her back her phone and tell her about the creepy stalker guy.

I made my way along the aisle on my side of the shop, weaving through the customers who were browsing the Christmas cards, and crossed over to the centre aisle, out of sight of the man outside. I stepped into the gap before the final aisle and peered around the corner, being careful not to lean my head out where he could see me. The girl stood a little farther along from me, looking at something she had picked up off the shelves.

I tried to figure out what I should say to her as I fiddled with her phone in my hand. I thought it would be less weird if I told her I’d seen her drop the phone in the shop. But then how would I tell her about the guy who’d been following her?

I suddenly felt like I was the one acting strangely.

I gasped as the phone vibrated in my hand. I checked to see if the girl had heard me, but she stepped along the aisle, continuing to browse the shelves.

The screen on the phone said: “Office calling . . .” I took a step back, so that the girl wouldn’t see me if she turned, and was surprised to realize that my thumb had pressed the answer button. A tinny “hello?” emitted from the speaker and I hesitantly raised it to my ear.

“Caroline?” it said. A man’s voice.

“Hi,” I answered.

“Who’s that?”

“Erm . . .” Now what do I say? “It’s Julia. I —” “Where’s Caroline?”

“Oh, she left her phone behind. I’m just trying to find her.”

“I can’t believe this! Where is she? Where are you?”

“I think she must be around here somewhere,” I said, peering back around the corner. The girl, who I now knew to be Caroline, continued to saunter down the aisle away from me. I didn’t think she could hear me. I wondered why the man was so frantic. “Is everything okay?”

“Hold on a moment,” he said, and the line went quiet.

My eyes focused for the first time on the shelving display I was standing beside. It was absolutely overflowing with cats.

Big fluffy toy cats, cat t-shirts, cat calendars, pens with cats on the top, cat mugs, cat lunch boxes. Okay, I thought, seriously now, what is it with all the cats? The little boy with the cat coloring book, the same cat coloring book again on the train, the cat on the side of the girl’s bag, the little girl with the meowing toy cat in the pushchair and now this. What was going on? Trust me to get the dot-to-dot picture with all the numbers missing.

“Are you still there?” The guy was back on the phone.

“Yes, I’m still here,” I said, still frowning at the feline display before me. “What’s going on?”

“Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got to find Caroline and get her to call me back.”

I checked around the corner again, but Caroline was no longer there. I went to the other side, but she wasn’t there either.

“Hello?” said the voice on the phone. “Are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m still here,” I replied, walking along the aisle toward the back of the shop as I tried to relocate her. “Why do you need to find her? What’s going on?”

“She may be in some danger. Please, just try to find her and get her to call me back.”

I had checked every aisle now. She must have left the shop.

“Have you got that?”

“Okay, got it,” I said. “I’ll get her to call you back.” I hung up the phone and dashed back out of the shop.

Looking up and down the street, I couldn’t see Caroline or the man with the umbrella. They’d both just vanished. My eyes began to water from being out in the cold again. A few more spots of rain now blotted across the pavement, but the guitar continued to play. I stepped out into the centre of the street and scanned through the crowds as they bustled and bumped around me. Many more umbrellas now moved from shop to shop, but none of them matched the one I was looking for.

My eyes locked onto a sign that stuck out above a shop in the distance. It was in the shape of a cat’s head. Okay, I thought, that must be it. All of this is weirder than hell, but she must have gone there. The sign stood out like a beacon. As I hurried toward the shop, I caught sight of the navy blue dome twisting outside the shop opposite. The man was watching from across the street.

This really is it, I thought. I have to make my move now. I slowed down as I neared the shop’s entrance and, as the man glanced away, I barged past a shopper and ran through the doorway.

The shop was a small, brightly-lit fashion boutique. I ducked behind a shelving display, which stood to one side filled with handbags, and nearly ran into a girl who was trying one out in a mirror. Despite my apology, she scowled at me as she put the bag back on the shelf and tottered off across the shiny wooden floor. There were only two or three other people in

the shop. Caroline stood directly ahead with her back to me, looking at the coats that were hung up on the rear wall.

I watched as she lifted an elegant black duffel coat off the rack and turned it around, assessing the fabric with her fingers. She held out one of its sleeves and shifted her weight to the other hip, her head tilting to one side in contemplation. I unconsciously did the same, beginning to feel like her shadow.

She let the sleeve drop and went into the changing rooms at the back. I decided to go for it. The man outside didn’t know who I was, and this was probably my only chance to talk to her without him seeing. As long as I acted casually, he wouldn’t pay any attention to me. I held my breath as I went around the table, picked up a random top from the racks and continued through to the changing rooms.

Inside, the clink of a coat hanger came from behind the only gray curtain that was drawn. I weighed the phone in my hand as I stepped closer, wetting my lips with my tongue and considering what to say. Before I’d decided, I was already pulling back the edge of the curtain and peering through at Caroline’s reflection in the mirror. She froze. She’d seen me instantly.

“What the . . . ?” She turned around to face me and grabbed her handbag off the floor.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just want to talk to you.” I stepped inside and pulled the curtain closed behind me. As I turned back, she pulled her keys out of her bag and held up the sharp end of one, defensively. Oh great, I thought. Now she thinks I’m trying to rob her. I held up my hands to calm her. “No, it’s okay.

I found your phone.”

I held it out to her. She frowned and tilted her head to the side before taking it from my hand. I watched as she pressed a few buttons, reassuring herself that it actually was her phone.

She was wearing the coat that she had picked up in the shop.

It suited her perfectly. Images flashed through my mind of her living out a full, long life, looking gorgeous and fashionable throughout. I wondered what clothes they would dress me in for my funeral.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“Well . . . ” I thought again about telling her that she’d dropped it in the shop, but I decided it was best to stick to the truth. “To be honest, it was back on the train.” She glanced to the side and I could tell she was processing how long ago that was. “But, Caroline, listen.” Her eyes flicked back to mine.

“How do you know my name?”

“Someone called you. I answered the phone — but listen,” I said. “Back on the train, this weird guy was taking a picture of you.”

“What guy?” She started to look at me suspiciously again.

“I don’t know who he was, but he’s been following you.

Ever since you got off the train, he’s been following you. He’s outside the shop right now.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “What is this?” she said.

“Some kind of a scam?”

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She had every right to think that. I must have seemed dodgy as hell to her. I was struggling to know what to say to convince her. “No, listen,” I said. “A guy from your office rang. He said you were in danger. He wanted me to find you and get you to call him back.”

She looked down at the phone. She still held the key clenched in her other hand.

“Please, just call him back,” I said. “I’m sure he can tell you what’s going on.”

She breathed out through her nose and pouted her lips.

“My office called this phone?”

“Yes.” “And it was the last number to call?”

“Yes. No one else called.”

She pressed a couple of the phone’s buttons and I realized that she must have been checking the call history.

“Okay,” she said, “I’m calling them back.”

She lifted the handset to her ear and scrutinized the expression on my face as she waited for someone to answer.

The barely audible sound of an automated message emanated from the speaker.

“All the lines are busy,” she said, hanging up the phone.

“Look, I’m not sure whether I believe you or not. I’m sure you can understand this is a bit of a strange situation.”

“I know . . . ” “If you genuinely have just found my phone, and you are telling me the truth, then I’m very grateful that you’ve found me and brought it back to me.” I felt relieved that she seemed to be taking control of things.

“Just keep trying to call your office,” I said.

“Okay, I will,” she replied. “But I think it’s probably best that you leave now.” She lowered her keys slightly. “Again, I don’t mean to offend you. But it is just a little . . . weird.” She offered me a smile, and I returned it and nodded.

“Yeah, I know. It’s okay.”

I left, thinking I had done everything that I could and that she would now call her office and everything would get sorted out. But as I was about to return to the shop, I remembered the guy still standing outside with his umbrella. I still didn’t know who he was or what was really going on. I didn’t think I could just go back to the station and forget about it all.

I decided to hide in one of the other changing rooms until Caroline came out, and then continue to follow her. I quietly drew the curtain behind me and turned to look at myself in the mirror. Seeing my familiar face staring back at me, I suddenly became aware of everything that I had just done: following some weird stalker guy around; getting involved in some potentially dangerous situation that I still didn’t really understand. I braced myself for another panic attack, but it didn’t come. I slid my hand across my waist and patted it as my mouth threatened a smile. No more butterflies, I thought. Those foxy little black-winged ladies were gone.

After hearing Caroline leave, I watched from the changing 98 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

rooms as she went over to the till. The girl who was serving her said she might want to wear the coat out, as it was now raining heavily outside. I couldn’t see the man from where I stood. I wondered whether he might have gone. Everything was starting to seem more normal again.

Caroline wore the coat as she went to the front of the shop and raised the hood before going out into the rain. I followed after her, but stopped in the shelter of the shop’s entrance, reluctant to leave in such a downpour. The guy still stood outside the shop across from me, holding his umbrella with one hand and talking on his phone with the other. He didn’t seem to have noticed Caroline leaving. Maybe he hadn’t recognized her in that coat. He looked up at me.

I pretended I was just someone waiting for the rain to stop. I am just someone waiting for the rain to stop, I thought, as I looked up at the dismal sky. But when I looked back down, his gaze hadn’t shifted. I scanned along the street to find Caroline disappearing down an alleyway. The guy hadn’t seen her at all.

He maintained his grim stare at me as he slowly returned his phone to his jacket pocket. The same phone I had seen my own face on earlier — or at least thought I had. The man was making the same mistake as me. He thought I was her.

My heart thudded in my chest like someone was inside it, kicking me out into the rain. I stumbled into a sprint and dashed through the crowds, heading for the alleyway where Caroline had gone. Rain drenched through my hair, streamed down my face and soaked through my clothes, but I didn’t care.

I just wanted to catch up to her.

The rain stopped suddenly as I skidded to a halt at the end of the alleyway, though it still lashed the pavement behind me.

At the other end of the path, two bright yellow eyes stared at me expectantly. The black cat they belonged to sat on top of a stack of wooden boxes, its slender tail twisting playfully at its side. It turned to the left, where an adjacent passage continued behind the shops. I realized that it must have been looking at where Caroline had gone.

I saw her as I reached the corner, her light brown hair now free from her hood as she continued to walk away from me. A footstep splashed behind me and I turned to see the man emerging from the rain. He took down his umbrella and reached inside his jacket. Little black wings began to flutter inside my stomach. Caroline neared another turn in the alley. All the weight had gone from my body. I couldn’t catch my breath.

The man’s hand came out of his jacket holding a gun. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything else. He calmly continued toward me, as the cat jumped down from its box and began to rub around my legs, pinning me in place. All the dots were joining together, the final picture flashing before my eyes: stunning technicolour image of Julia Jones, with only two months left to live, taking a bullet in the head to save another girl’s life.

Fight or flight. The black-winged bitches threw down their swords and strapped on their jetpacks.

“No! Wait! Stop!” I shouted, holding my hand up in front

of me, and with the other hand, pointing down the path toward Caroline. “She’s down there! I’m not Caroline!”

Caroline turned around. The man stopped inches away from me, holding the gun down at his side as he frowned. He looked across at Caroline; then back at me, and then back at her. Caroline’s eyes widened in shock. I shouted at her to run.

The man shoved me back, sending me crashing into the stack of boxes, and ran after her as she disappeared around the next corner. He slid to a stop at the turn and raised his gun, aiming down the path toward her. He fired two silenced shots and then lowered his arms, his target now apparently down on the ground.

Fighting for every breath, I pulled myself back to my feet as he turned and aimed his gun toward me. Before he could fire, I leapt out of his line of sight and ran back to the rainy street.

I kept on running and didn’t stop until I saw the fluorescent yellow jacket of a police officer.

Somehow, through my gasping breaths, I managed to tell him what had happened. He told me to calm down, he called for armed support and I led him back to the alleyway.

He told me to stay behind him as he crept along the path, around the first corner, the boxes scattered across the ground, then on to the second corner.

The man was nowhere to be seen, but there was Caroline’s body, slumped in the middle of the alleyway, wrapped in her beautiful new coat. The cat rubbed its head along her side, its yellow eyes now dark and somber. It stopped when it saw

me and hissed. I collapsed, exhausted and distraught. Jet fuel depleted, the little black butterflies came crashing down to earth and scurried back to their cave, full of shame.

In the weeks that followed, I learned that Caroline had been at the start of a promising career in journalism. With her latest story, she’d clearly been onto something big, or the people that she’d been investigating wouldn’t have wanted her dead. Well, whoever those people were, they’d got their wish.

And I’d helped them.

My health has since taken a turn for the worse and the hospital is my new permanent home. My last place of residence before whatever comes next. In the gaps between sleeping and tripping out on the magical cocktails of drugs they’ve been giving me, I’ve been trying to get this story down on paper.

Despite the last dying flutters of black wings deep inside, urging me to paint things in a better light, I’ve tried to remain honest and write things as they really happened.

I feel like I’m under constant observation, and not just by the doctors. Maybe it’s just the drugs, but I’m sure the cats keep visiting me in my dreams. My hope has been that writing this down would help me to figure out how to make sense of it all. Well, my story is just about over; I don’t have much time left and I’m still struggling to join all the dots. But there is one thing I’m more certain of now. I’m pretty sure that the cats and the butterflies are not on the same side. Sooner or later, those black-winged witches will be gone for good. And then, I guess, it’s just me and the kitty cats.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 99

Tim Millas Tim Millas lives in New York City with Susan and Clare. His stories have appeared in various journals, including Adirondack Review, Amarillo Bay, Cause & Effect, Confrontation, Conte, Eclectica, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction Warehouse, Unlikely Stories 2.0 and writeThis.com, as well as the print collections Best of Nuvein Fiction and Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind.

Soul Ache

T

he FDR was a game of chance. It enlivened Montone when he was winning and enraged him when he was losing. Tonight he was losing.

It didn’t feel like night when he had left the office, 52 miles ago. The sky still bright, the air oddly mild, and his progress inevitable. Every light, toll, lane change — every cop, pulling over cars ahead or behind him — worked in his favor. Montone shot through everything like an injection, 206, 287, 78, Holland Tunnel, Greenwich Street, West Street, Ground Zero, the nameless tunnel to FDR north — But when he emerged from the tunnel the world was black.

All he could see were taillights, smeared across his windshield by silent sheets of rain. And like a rock hitting him square in the face, he felt it: stopped.

Fuck, he thought. Then he bellowed it with enough force to blow cars out of his way. Nothing happened. He was stopped. Stopped in motion, even though every muscle and cell impelled him forward — and by his own foot on the brake. If he lifted his foot, he would hit the car in front of him. So what? he thought fiercely; he visualized lifting his foot off the brake, flooring the gas pedal, smashing through the wall of lights. But Montone couldn’t lift his foot. He didn’t have the nerve. His rage became reflux, sour and helpless.

He didn’t put on the radio, call the office or home. From experience he knew it wouldn’t help. Nor would it help to remind himself that he had no reason to be in such a hurry.

Outside this car Bob Montone was normal. You’d never pick him out of a lineup, or wonder if you’d seen him on television. But at some point in his life he recognized that the FDR — the whole ride home — was a game of chance, his game. Montone had played the game thousands of times and would play it thousands more, and each time he played something crucial, his very reason for being, seemed to be riding on it. No one knew how he felt. He had never told anyone, not even his wife; if she had asked why he played, he would have asked her what the hell she was talking about. But

100 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

when he was in the car, in the game, she and everything else ceased to exist.

The game itself ? Time. Allowing for traffic, speed limits, and distance, a good commute would be an hour and ten minutes.

If he made that, he won. Any time under that, he was winning big. Less than an hour was the jackpot. His previous best, door to door, had been 56 minutes. That’s what made being stopped so excruciating: he had been on track to make it in 47 minutes.

He watched the clock on his dashboard silently blink forward.

Now his record would be 49 minutes, 51 minutes. It was like watching blood leak from his own throat.

So who had slit his throat? Road workers, Yankees (who were in the playoffs), monkeys and towelheads at the UN. Or just the rain. Or, most infuriating of all, an accident. Outside this car, as we have said, Montone was normal, capable of routine concern for others. If he came upon someone who was lying on the pavement, bleeding to death from being shot or stabbed, he might pause to help them, or at least use his cell to call for help. But stopped in traffic, the capacity of mercy deserted him. He felt nothing but contempt for anyone stupid enough to lose control of their car. Or anyone unlucky enough to be rear-ended by the idiot who lost control. They were all idiots. They all deserved what they got, even death.

Montone twice changed lanes, when it seemed that other lanes were moving a little faster than his. He took the exit ramp for Houston Street, then instantly switched to the ramp back onto FDR: little cheats like this created a temporary sense of motion, put him up on a few cars, but really made no difference.

At best now his record would be 53 minutes.

He felt even before he saw the stuttering lights. Police?

Ambulance? He cheated again, riding in the far right lane that had been coned off for no reason for weeks, cutting back in just before the exit for 23rd Street. The horns behind him were instantly drowned out, at least in Montone’s mind, by the sirens dead ahead.

Police and ambulance. Their lights whirling in contrast to

the slow, lumbering convergence of men in blue and white around a car with front crushed, hood up; and another car that didn’t look like a car anymore, but rather a can that had been put through a sloppy compactor.

Whoever had been inside that was dead, for certain, which outraged Montone all over again: they were trashing his game, murdering his personal best, for what? To transport a dead idiot. Or maybe the other idiot, the other driver, was alive. Let’s hope not, Montone thought.

Hope: the ambulance moved: whirling away from his eyes and into his hands and feet. And without any thought he was cutting past the cars that had obediently pulled themselves aside, locking his car to the bumper of the ambulance and its dervish of light and stern warning to keep back one hundred feet. Air snaked through Montone’s teeth: the blue fools saw what he was doing and could easily have yanked him back. But within seconds their lights were far behind.

The ambulance moved, in this stopped artery it scraped away the plaque, made an opening, flowed fast as blood, faster. And Montone with it, perfect. His head pounded. A feral sound tore through his open mouth, mimicking the siren. Several times other cars tried to poke their noses between him and the back of the ambulance. But Montone was less than a foot behind the ambulance, and he had pressed the gas pedal to infinity, making it physically impossible for anyone to get in. Had the ambulance braked, even slowed, he would have plowed into it.

But this was, after all, a game of chance. All that mattered was that Montone would make door to door in 53 minutes, his new record and the mother of all jackpots.

He roared past 34th Street, 42nd Street; he bellowed and somehow couldn’t hear what he was saying, maybe he wasn’t saying anything, but in his mind the words were clear: You fucking idiots, I beat you. With your own death, I beat you. You deserve to die and your death makes me stronger, stronger, stronger! He could feel their hearts beating, the beat slowing, as his ruthless heart pounded harder. He pushed his car closer, close enough to look through the windows of the back door: Something — the men in white? Or maybe the idiots themselves, rising to their feet, resurrected? No — but he saw something, and he claimed it. You belong to me, I made you live, I made you crash, I’m your God and your fate and I’m rolling right over you. *** How can I be dead if I’m still thinking?

But I must be dead.

Know exactly what happened. He hit me.

He couldn’t wait for me to change lanes.

He saw my signal my brake lights. Couldn’t wait.

Now he’s next to me. Breathing cursing hard.

Paramedic lay him down. He didn’t want to be next to me!

Bloody and it’s nothing. His forehead, just a gash.

Me next to him, less blood. But I must be dead.

Oh my body. Crumpled. Crushed beyond saving, has to be.

But I’m still thinking! Know my name! I’m Willa! I’m —

— looking at my body, is what I’m doing.

Looking at myself. From the outside. Above, looking down.

The impact squeezed me out like toothpaste? Oh God! Still remember why I was turning.

Animal Medical Center. For my Cleo. My fur girl.

Something off the street — not even something she ate.

Bug. Virus.

She almost died. For a minute she was dead. I gave my mouth to her mouth.

Breathed again and we made it to the emergency room.

They say lost five pounds and part of her intestine. But she’s alive.

And I have to live! She’s waiting. She has nobody but me.

Get back down back in there.

Help the medic. Fight.

Except he’s not fighting anymore.

His back now between me and the man who couldn’t wait.

Who is screaming.

Even after medic covers me, blocks me from sight — screaming screaming.

I can’t get back in. So think.

Long as I think I still am. Soul, essence — I am.

And not alone. Others. Speaking not in words, but speaking.

The one on the stretcher next to mine, pure terror. The one over him, gentle, but resigned.

And then the one pursuing us.

Or pursuing me?

Not to reach or help but consume me.

He’s ravenous, ravenous. To get nowhere but ahead. He wants my fuel.

Don’t be afraid, Willa. You must.

Cleo needs a home — you need a home — go to him.

Through rain through glass.

Like breath through his open mouth *** He never let up, not for one second, he was sure: but now there was a car between him and the ambulance. Impossible!

He stomped his foot on the gas pedal, flooring it, and only then realized that this foot must have betrayed him, relaxed for an instant, giving that car an instant to break in.

Montone yelled at the car. Maybe he’d been yelling too much; his voice cracked and faltered. And then another car got in, and then two others, and he just couldn’t seem to keep his foot firmly enough on the pedal. He breathed in deeply. His jackpot was gone, but he just let the air back out.

Within seconds the ambulance was a remote twinkle, which veered left and vanished, probably at 61st Street. Montone lived near Gracie Mansion, and always took the 96th Street exit: but as he sped forward (the flow of traffic faster now) the lane he was in, the left lane, became “exit only” and he left the FDR at the same exit the ambulance had taken. Not that he was following the ambulance. He was going to the Animal Hospital.

The thought startled him — Montone refused to keep Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 101

any pets, despite the pleas of his wife, and could never get enthusiastic about animals — but more thoughts came, calmly filling in the rest: He was going to the Animal Hospital in place of somebody named Willa, to pick up her dog Cleo, who had just barely recovered from an infection that required emergency surgery. Willa couldn’t do this herself because she had unexpectedly died, in a car crash, moments ago, forty blocks back on FDR. She lived, had lived, alone, other than Cleo, so there was no other family member to claim the dog, which meant that by going to the Animal Hospital, Montone would be claiming her, letting a dog into his apartment after all these years.

Like a bitterly divided Congress, the other faction of his thoughts tried to shout this down: That’s crazy, don’t be ridiculous, there’s no woman and no dog, you’re just tired and forgot to change lanes, and even if there was a dog they would never release her to you, you’ve got no proof of any relationship with the owner. But the calm

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thoughts remained calm, did not argue, simply filled Montone with facts about Willa, who she was and where she lived and the circumstances of Cleo’s illness and the circumstances of Willa’s sudden demise, so that he could convincingly represent himself as the rightful person to claim the dog and give her a new home. And besides, hadn’t his wife, Lilly, always wanted a dog? Doing this would put Montone in the position of making her happy for the first time in — in years, probably.

And then, as he turned down 62nd Street, and into the parking lot for the hospital, Montone couldn’t think anymore.

A tremendous ache had driven all thought from his head, but it wasn’t a headache, nor was the ache in his chest or crotch or muscles. In fact, in every place he tried to locate it, the ache turned out not to be there, and yet felt stronger than ever, everywhere in him and nowhere. Like my soul aches. Now that was funny. He never thought he had a soul. Montone shut off the engine and climbed out of the car.

Jake David Jake David is a writer living on the CanAm border between Massena, New York and Cornwall, Ontario. Though he isn’t a formally published author, his work has appeared in several online magazines, which inspires him toward breaking through the writing market. In his spare time, he enjoys reading Ulysses by James Joyce, listening to Bob Dylan, and working on his screenplays.

Piers of Prague

S

moking two cigarettes on the river piers of Prague, captivated by the history of the rivery swamps, discussing how many times we want come here, leaving our oldcrusty homes, slurring incomprehensible syllables over three pints down at the The Custard Factory. Embarking on your lover’s gentle touch, pulling you from the pages of Ulysses, as he pushed your back gently forward, moving one leg behind you, pulling your heated bodies tighter into each other. Novels need attention, too!

I wonder if you’ve ever told him of when we spun our fingers circling across the seams of the covet? Drunk on solitary ceremonies of the people we used to be. When we used to stare into the bathroom mirror, mimicking the lines of songs, pretending to be rock stars more famous than the unlively home-dwellings of emptied streets disastrous, walked by burdened folks and their souls bludgeoned by their dreams being choked under the shoulders of The World’s Responsibility.

Calling upon silhouetted seas of this windowsill — life opening up our throats, with a seminary’s solace fingering one-sided treasons against the river piers of Prague. Watching

vineyard smiles create poetry; rustic sunsets create songs; thoughts fall behind closed eyes that slow unraveled fingertips to a stop. Lips that offer a serenity’s chime, underneath Prague skies you’ll try describing and fail miserably for; crumpled odes, and forgotten tributes your sole sin to an imagination that makes time stand still for us.

As Atlantis below our dangling feet wakes into normality, boardwalks on the street’s stone rivers shuffle inside countless sleeping cities on fire with all’a humanity’s sighs once-slain now breathing. Divided by garbage lands and under-flowing ocean’s currents once seeing you as a thinker of the word, rather than a letter of the alphabet. Waiting for patience’s trails becoming worthwhile proof of insanity’s temporary resting place, but the vagabond courtrooms of our bare emotions need no words, ever. Damn.

Captivated by the preservation of silence through powerful tranquility’s requiem, a serenity no longer tangled in the ruins of society’s rusty chains. Shattered are those once-thoughtunbreakable links by our rivalry against Crimes Towards Humanity, here we are! Magnificent and beautiful, are you beside me, smoking two cigarettes on the river piers of Prague.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 103

Kristi Petersen Schoonover Kristi Petersen Schoonover’s fiction appears in The Adirondack Review, Barbaric Yawp, Morpheus Tales, Citizen Culture, New Witch Magazine, Spilt Milk, Toasted Cheese, and a host of others. Her collection of ghost stories — Skeletons in the Swimmin’ Hole: Tales from Haunted Disney World — was released in Fall 2010. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College; she’s also the recipient of a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Winter 2010 Fellowship Residency. She hosts the paranormal fiction segment on The Ghostman & Demon Hunter Show broadcast, www.ghostanddemon.com, and is an editor for Read Short Fiction, www.readshortfiction.com. Her website is www.kristipetersenschoonover.com.

Waterproof

I

t used to be that Maureen only bought waterproof mascara when she had to go to funerals. “I buy it just for that one particular day, and then I chuck it, because what are the chances of my having to go to another in three months?” she’d told her friend Elaine, who was considerably less savvy and therefore used the same cylinder until it was gone, bacteria and all.

But now, Maureen bought fresh mascara more often than that — perhaps every month or so — because she had to wear it every day; she’d decided to leave the flower shop and accept the job offer from Dillon’s Funeral Home as their “Flower Coordinator.”

She’d never heard of such a position, but hadn’t had much choice in taking it, because the flower shop was getting cramped.

She had sharpened her skills and could do arrangements at twice her boss Hazel’s speed, and it had been made clear that while her work was good business, it just wasn’t welcome among the four walls where Hazel had stocked her reputation and generated enough money to raise her abandoned grandkids. “I would, however, love it if you’d take Dillon’s up on their offer.

They’re a chain, you know.” She tied the periwinkle smock that read Hazel’s Gazebo around her comfortable waist. “They’d be good for you. And benefits. I simply can’t afford to keep paying you, Maureen. The girls from the church choir, they’ll work for experience. You’re beyond that now.” Hazel hobbled toward her and patted her gently on the arm. “You go there.

You’ll be a master.”

Maureen didn’t like funerals, much less the homes where they were held, because the cloaking smell of carpet cleaner and age smacked of the burials of her older sister Loretta and brother Harry; she could not set foot over the threshold of a funeral home without crying. But she knew Hazel was telling the truth, and the flowers were always comforting; she stared at the lilies and the roses and took delight in their exquisitely crafted lines and petals, how they seemed to be reaching for someone, or sometimes, even speaking, whispering in her ear.

There was comfort in the idea that she would be in control 104 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

of purchasing flowers for each service, arranging them in the room so they looked as pretty as a hand-made quilt, and when people sent flowers, she would be in charge of making them fit the overall ideal.

Her first day on the job she didn’t know what to wear, so she chose a black slip dress with pearls, black stockings, and black pumps with azalea trim. She paid special attention to her lipstick, and laid the waterproof mascara on thick.

The man who greeted her — Mr. Dillon himself, Tex, if you please. Just call me Tex even though my real name is Edward. We have an Edward, Jr., here, you see, and so I prefer to be called Tex — was a man who had swallowed a stand-up string bass: overly tall, swollen in the middle, perched on tiny feet. “This is a new position we’ve created, because many of our clients’ families are wealthy and just can’t be going to the trouble of ordering flowers. So we offer a service where the families simply call us, and we do all the flower ordering and setting up for ’em. We also provide the writing of gift cards. We think this is gonna be a value-added, one-stop service.” He tugged on the brass handles of two looming mahogany doors. “After all, a man’s last stop should at least be full-service, you agree?” he laughed.

“Right this way. We cleaned out an office for you. Hazel says you do lovely work.”

“I’ve been designing with her for five years now,” Maureen said.

“I’m sure you’re the best, then. Miss Hazel wouldn’t send me anyone who wasn’t well trained.” He led her into a small room that was painted lily and trimmed in a color that reminded Maureen of columbine; the swags on the windows were cranberry with sage stripes, and the glass-topped round table in the corner was wedged between two overstuffed mosscolored chairs. “We moved this table in here to make it easier to consult with clients. You can do whatever you want with the furniture; there are some things over there sill in the packing.

I’ll send one of the boys up with the box cutter.”

He stood silently, then, as she looked around and crossed her arms in front of her chest. The big double-window

afforded a view of the parking lot, and down at one of the hearses, a squat man round as a peach puffed on a cigarette and was shouting orders at a kid in a shockingly bright marigold stocking apron.

“We didn’t exactly have a garden view; that room’s reserved for grieving.” He laughed again. “I’ll let you get settled; we got a viewing at four.” He closed the door, and she could feel the tremor of his footsteps.

Maureen turned and saw a painting covered in paper hanging on the wall; she went over to it, lifted it off the nail, and set it on a loveseat in the corner. She broke through the manila paper with her nail and was surprised to see a glint beneath: it was a mirror. She tore a long strip and could see only her eyes. Her lashes were thick, but not caked as she would have liked — the viewing at four was going to be a test of her mettle; she hadn’t expected to be thrown into the fray right on her first day. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a wand of waterproof mascara, and bent to look more closely.

There was a knock on her door. Tex stuck his head in.

“Oh, and yes … wearing a color other than black would be preferable. You’re the cheery flower person. Please try your best to look it.” He looked down at her feet. “That ribbon of pink on your shoes would be a grand compliment to a suit of the same color. Something Jackie-O, you get it?”

And then he was gone, and Maureen shoved the mascara back into the pocket of her skirt and thought, tonight I’ll have to do my laundry. ### The viewing was going to be tougher than she’d expected: apparently, a child had played with some items that had been left near the fireplace and stabbed himself to death with a replica sword which, it turned out, was as sharp as a real one.

The mother, who was brought in by two older women, moved her mouth like a mute monkey: flap-flap-flap, emitting nothing except the occasional long, low moan. Her husband trailed behind with downcast eyes, and Maureen thought that perhaps he was cursing the day he’d thought his weapons collection was secure.

A little girl darted between them; she glanced up at Maureen, who was struck suddenly with a teary urge — not because a young boy had died, but because his big sister was now scarred for life: as though she hadn’t known which emotional weapons to pick up before, now she was going to have too many more to choose from. She would, more than likely, seize anxiety instead of trust; she would wield depression instead of indifference.

The little girl tugged at her skirt. “My brother died,” she said.

Maureen looked furtively into the room where the coffin was, but the inconsolable mother and disconsolate father did not seem to be aware their daughter was not with them. She crouched down to the girl’s height, and noticed a smear of chocolate on the corner of her mouth.

“Yes,” she cooed. “I know.” She pulled a tissue from

her pocket, licked the corner of it, and used it to wipe the chocolate away; the girl didn’t move, she just blinked, like a robotic creature. One of her shoes was unbuckled, and her red hair was strawberry like Maureen had dyed her own once when punk was in. She wondered if the girl had gotten into her mother’s hair dye.

And it was then that the all-too-familiar knot in her throat began to swell and choke her airways, and her eyes began to burn as though she were in a room full of incense smoke. She wiped the tears with her fingers, but there was no point, and she dabbed the same tissue with which she had just wiped the girl’s mouth at her own eyes.

“I hope she’s not bothering you, ” came a deep voice from above, and Maureen sniffed and swallowed a knob of mucus.

“Uh — no,” she said. She climbed to her feet. “No, no, not at all. This is just — very difficult.”

She was not prepared for him, a swarthy man with irises so brown and wide there was hardly any white in them, and what corner of white she did see in his right eye had a fleck of bloodshot tethering at its edge.

“It sounds like it.” He reached his hand out to the little girl, and she just blinked in her metallic manner. Then the stranger reached behind her ear and pulled out an animal cracker. “For you,” he said to the girl, and she was suddenly animated as she took the cookie, crumbed it in her fist, and ran down the aisle of aluminum chairs, vanishing in the front.

Maureen looked at him, and then away.

“I’m a magician,” he shrugged.

“Really.” Maureen dabbed at her eyes.

“On certain occasions, yes, kid’s parties and the like, and funerals.” A handkerchief popped open in his hand like a blooming peony. “Here.”

She wadded the nasty ball of tissue, slick and damp, in her hand and accepted the kerchief as a large woman in a cardinalcolored choir robe rose from her chair began to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” a cappella. The crowd was quiet, except for the high-pitched sobbing of the mother that burst from the end of the word, “home.”

The man tugged at Maureen’s arm, and led her back out into the vestibule, near the stand with the small piano light that bathed the guest book; he dropped his voice low and offered, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Oh … ” Maureen cleared her throat and tried to force a smile, but she felt her face cracking with the effort. “No, no. I work here.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Well, that explains the black, then, I guess … Tex, as far as I know, likes color.”

Maureen felt her face flush. “I know, it … it was my first day. I didn’t know what to wear. Everything was in the laundry.” She didn’t know why this stranger made her want to tell little-known facts about herself; it felt simultaneously naughty and liberating, that same feeling she used to get in high school, when she’d been entrusted with information she Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 105

wasn’t supposed to repeat, and she caught herself doing it anyway. “I — they told me to wear pink, or something. I’m the new Flower Coordinator.” She blew her nose in the kerchief, wondering how she would be able to launder it and give it back to this man she probably would not see again after today.

The backs of his hands were matted with hair, gorilla-like, but warm (she imagined), with long, thin fingers that tapered at their ends. “I just … I don’t like funerals.”

A smile played at his lips. “Well, isn’t that interesting that you work in a place where you’re not likely to get any reprieve.”

The way he’d said it frightened — no, not frightened — stripped her of something, though she wasn’t sure what. She glanced about to see if any other funeral staff were nearby to come to her rescue, but the only men in attendance rimmed the front of the viewing room, their olive suits long thin shadows against the silver wallpaper.

She felt the man’s hand on her forearm, and she startled, even as he thrust some fake flowers, red and yellow carnations, into her hand. “For you. Put them into one of your creations.

You should probably hide them pretty well, though.” He nodded in Tex’s direction.

Maureen found herself taking the flowers even though all she wanted to do was run, and she pivoted on one heel, strode up to the front of the room with the olive-suited men, and tossed the flowers on a chair on her way by. Behind her, she heard the odd man say, “It really is a shame, when they die that young.”

Later, when she peered at the still half-wrapped mirror in her office, she noticed a curious smudge of black under her left eye. Of all the years she’d been using waterproof mascara, she was sure it was the first time she’d actually seen it run.

Maybe, she thought, she had grabbed the wrong kind. Yes, she decided. That was all. She had been in a hurry at the pharmacy, and she’d grabbed the wrong kind. *** Maureen had hoped that the silk flowers the eccentric man had given her would be gone the next day when she went into work — but instead, someone had shoved them into her mail slot. She went to throw them in the trash — but then, feeling an uncomfortable compulsion, whipped them back out again; she set them in a vase in her office, which despite its view of the parking lot where the cars unloaded the bodies for the basement work, was her only place of respite from Tex’s voice. She could hear him blathering all day, on the phone, when he was getting coffee, when he was booming to some other employees about what to wear and what not to wear, when he was sitting with the families of the deceased outlining the options. That last part rankled her most — it sounded like he was extolling the virtues of a pre-packaged Disney World vacation, only instead of talking about ticket and dining options and which resorts would be the best value for a particular budget’s needs, he was talking about the best bang for your buck would be a few less bouquets and perhaps you’d want to go with 106 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

a different kind of lining, lotsa families do that.

She was sure the dead did not have any options about their travel plans or where they were going to sleep, and when one day she made the association that Tex sold permanent vacations, she shuddered.

He knocked on the door. “Come on into the parlor, Marlene,” he said. He always called her that, now. The first day, he had called her correctly, Maureen, but for some reason, he’d changed the name. She hadn’t bothered to correct him after the second time when it didn’t stick. “This family wants a tropical bent for their flowers, somethin’ splashy — ” He frowned. “What … are … those?”

She bit her lip and glanced about. Then she eyed the flowers the man — the magician, she thought suddenly — had given her.

“Um … a gift. From …” She didn’t want to go into details about accepting presents from people who showed up at funerals.

He let go of the doorknob and stepped forward, and she saw a swatch of mud on the side of his seersucker pants. He touched the petals of one of the red carnations.

“Fakes,” he said. “Now what are you doing with fakes?”

“I … they were a gift,” she repeated.

“There’s no place for that kinda horse funk, here. Order yourself some real flowers.” He plucked the fake flowers from their vase and tossed them into her trashcan. “Spend money, I’m not carin’, but make yourself look good. Dusty fake flowers just remind people of wax museums. That’s the kind of thing I’ve absolutely tried to hodge-dodge. You get it?”

Maureen nodded.

“Right fine,” he said. “Come on out, now. These people really want a dream funeral. Bring your selection books.” He tipped his hat, then pulled her door closed — and then stuck his head in again. “Oh, and I bought you that mirror for a reason. You ever gonna unwrap it all the way and hang it up where it belongs?”

She had forgotten the mirror; she hadn’t peered into it at all since that first day. “Um … sure,” she said.

“That’s what I like,” he said. Then he winked and closed the door.

Maureen sighed, went to the mirror, and ripped the rest of the paper off it, and it was then she spotted it again — smudges.

Not just under one eye, but under both. What was going on here? At least one, but probably two of her waterproof wands were defective? Or not the right type?

“Marlene?” Tex called from the other room.

She didn’t have any eye make-up remover at work, so she couldn’t worry about it now, and besides, Tex would be back if she wasn’t out right quick as he liked to say. With a resolve to check every mascara wand she had when she got home, she went to the shelf, pulled out one of the large volumes that was similar to what you’d find in a wallpaper store, and left the room.

The family wanted something tropical, alright, because the

30-year-old deceased had been a fire-eater for a luau dinner show at a resort hotel. “He just loved the scent of coconut and wild flowers,” said his goblet-shaped sister. “And he just so loved the rhythm of the drums.” She had that faraway look in her eyes. “Once, I went to his show,” her voice wisped, “and he came out, hopping on one foot, swirling that baton around and dipping it, just dipping it into his mouth, so deep and crazy, like he loved the poison. He was the most talented man!” She burst into tears. “If only he hadn’t been drinking the gasoline. Why? Why did they let him do that? Why wasn’t anyone there?”

Maureen blinked back tears: she was thinking of her own poor brother. “I … ” she was about to touch the woman’s hands — “Your brother met his end doing what he loved.”

It was a man’s voice, a man’s voice Maureen recognized.

She shifted in her chair and looked: it was the magician. From yesterday.

“Oh, Todd!” The sister rose from the settee and rushed into his arms.

He patted her ample back. “Now, now. You know that sometimes it works out that way. How many times have we discussed this, Clementine?”

He may have been talking to “Clementine,” but Maureen got the distinct feeling he was talking to her — his black eyes held hers even as another woman was in his arms. “Did you tell this fine lady what you wanted?”

“Not yet,” she sniffed.

“Well, get on with it then. I’ll wait for you outside.”

As he turned to walk away, Maureen slid the book toward Clementine. “If you’ll just excuse me for one minute, you can peruse some of these and see if anything strikes you. The pineapple and orange theme is pretty nice, that’s on page 17.

I’ll be right back.”

She reached for the magician in the hallway. “Who the hell are you?” she hissed.

“I told you,” he said. “I’m a magician.” He reached into his mouth and out of it came a long strand of colored tissue paper, purple and blue and orange and white and green and pink.

Maureen looked back over her shoulder at her clients, and for the first time was desperate to hear Tex booming down the main staircase. “You are a freak.”

“No, I’m a teacher. I teach people.” He set the colored paper around her neck like a lei.

Maureen felt like screaming. Or yelling. Or punching him.

“Teach them what? How to do parlor tricks? This is a funeral home. This is not a circus. People are grieving.”

“Yes they are, and you included.”

The words felt like a punch.

“Let me ask you this,” Todd said. “Do you think forgiving yourself is a parlor trick? That it’s just something that happens one day out of thin air?”

She had that stripped feeling again, stronger than before, like

the police were going to come in now and put cuffs on her, because this man, this magician, this Todd-person … did he know? Tears stung at the corners of her eyes, and that knot was going to clog her throat. She bit her lip and looked back toward her clients, who were still flipping through books. She saw Clementine take a tissue and blow her nose. “You need to leave right now,” she choked.

“This is a funeral home. I know Clementine and have as much a right to be here as anyone else. So just answer the question.”

She crossed her arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do,” he said. “You know how to do tricks pretty well, little miss waterproof-mascara-so-people-don’t-knowyou’re-crying.”

She swallowed, feeling the painful violation of her privacy like the spasms of nausea: there was nothing she could do.

It was all going to come out, and he had suddenly raised her reflexive habit to the status of a major crime. “Get out.”

Maureen said louder than she’d intended, but still low and threatening. She could feel heat radiating from her cheeks.

“Get out, or I’ll call Tex.” Clementine looked up from the book. “I picked this pineapple one. I think I like it.”

Maureen turned to look at Clementine, and then back at Todd.

But he was gone. *** Maureen had laundry to do but instead was sitting at her table, drinking wine, thinking about what Todd had said. There was something not right but … appealing at the same time, and she wasn’t sure why, like … like maybe he had a magic that was going to — what, solve her problems? What problems? She didn’t have any.

Other than that, she hadn’t forgiven herself for Harry’s death. He was right about that.

Her gaze fell to a book on the shelf — she recognized it, but she was pretty sure he hadn’t noticed it or even looked at it in years. In fact, she was certain that when she’d moved in, her friend Elaine had stowed it in the basement storage cage that had been included in the rent. “God, Maureen, you have enough product to bathe everybody in Africa. Are you sure you can even fit this album down here?” Elaine had said, balancing it on the pile of unopened bath salts, shampoos, face creams and make-up Maureen had secured when she’d worked the Lancôme counter at Macy’s four years ago.

She approached the book now. It was her childhood album, from middle school, when she used a Kodak disc camera and sat with her crowd in an antiseptic cafeteria eating French fries and bargaining with Sally to get that Rubik’s Cube keychain in exchange for some highly-prized stickers. The book’s cover still sported the few she hadn’t traded: a pineapple scratch ’n sniff worn white from adolescent nails, a puffy magic wand Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 107

with google eyes, a mailbox letter M. The book also sported something else: pictures of Harry.

Harry had been born a few years before her. A very bright, but very autistic, boy, and such a handful for her parents that Maureen had been ignored when she was growing up — ignored by everyone but him. He always wanted to be around her; he patted her on the head and took pale pink ribbons and wove them into her braids, over and over again, so that she was like a fairy princess. In return for his adoration, she stopped him from getting into things, harmful chemicals or doing something stupid like donning a cape and leaping from the head of the stairs. And her parents, seeing her to be responsible, often left her alone with him once she got older.

That is what had happened that day.

Maureen had been hocking her stickers to Sally, begging each day for the Cube, and Sally’s response had always been that no, she wanted to solve it first, she had to solve it first because all of her older brothers could solve it and they ruthlessly teased her. So Maureen had been patient, giving Sally nearly all the stickers she owned.

Maureen made Harry a cheese sandwich and sat crosslegged on the kitchen floor with him, popping bits of it into his mouth, when there was a knock at the door.

“Hi, Sally.”

The bright blonde didn’t say a thing and pressed her scar of a mouth together. There were tears in her malachite eyes.

“I can’t figure it out,” she said. “I give up. You can have it. You don’t owe me no more stickers, because I figure if I can’t figure it out, neither can you and Mom says I’m cheating you that you’ve given me enough for a fair trade.”

Maureen glanced back toward the kitchen — she could have sworn she heard Harry getting into something, but was comforted when she remembered her parents had padlocks on all the kitchen cabinets. “Come inside.”

“I can’t,” Sally said. “You need to come across to my house and get it. Mom says she wants to make sure I give it to you in front of her.”

Maureen heard Harry moaning her name. She wanted that keychain, oh how she wanted it! If she had it, she would be cooler than cool. And she had been waiting so long, so long …

“I have to wait until my parents are here,” Maureen said, pressing her cheek against the door.

“No, I want you to come now.”

Maureen blinked. It was only across the street; she could dart across and get it and then be back home. It was just for two minutes. Harry would be okay.

When Maureen returned, Harry was in the kitchen, on the floor, dead, laying in a pool of something, a white container of muriatic acid (used to treat their swimming pool) on its side: he had broken into the cabinet. He had unscrambled the combination on the safety lock.

That goddamn Rubik’s Cube, Maureen thought now. I don’t even have it anymore.

108 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

She looked at the clock. It was late. She had better start her laundry, because the tropical viewing hours were slated for tomorrow afternoon, and she thought that somewhere in her wicker baskets, she had a red shirt splashed with orchids which she hated but knew that Tex would recognize as festive. *** In the basement, Maureen stood before her tower of laundry. There was no one else doing his wash; most people did it at the end of the weekend, on Sunday night, probably, she thought, because Fridays were not for work. But there she was, sorting her pinks from her purples, her blues from her greens. In the corner, something skittered, the sound of mice crunching dead leaves, and she turned. Nothing. She didn’t know why she didn’t like it down here — it was clean and well lit, and the washers were all new. But as she shoved her darks into one load, she heard the noise again, and it made her shiver.

It occurred to her for the first time that maybe it was the spirit of her brother Harry.

She had heard stories about that, on the psychic shows on television, that people sometimes … came back. She had also heard from Elaine, however, that this was impossible, and that people only thought they saw the dead because they had something unresolved. “Come on, Mo,” Elaine had said. “Your brother’s up there whooping it up. He’s not angry, he’s not sick, he’s not anything. He’s gone, that’s all. Stop being angry at yourself and he’ll stop ‘visiting. you. Besides, you’ll see him again in 40 years, maybe 50 if you’re super lucky.”

It was this 40 or 50 years thing that gave Maureen the chills.

She wasn’t sure if it was that such finite a number had been placed on her life’s duration — or that she was going to have to own up to him. To explain herself. And she wasn’t so sure 40 or 50 years was going to be long enough to compose the right words.

She looked into the laundry basket and dismayed at some strands of white hair that clung to a black jacket. Her Irish mother had gone white by the time she was 20, and Maureen knew she was doomed as well: she’d found threads of white in her hairbrush, or in the clump of hair that sometimes pooled over the drain in her shower. Now, she thought, they were showing up on her clothes. Her time was coming.

Next on the laundry pile was the black skirt she’d worn her first day on the job at the funeral home; she thrust her hand into the pockets to turn them inside out, and a wand of Great Lash clattered to the cement floor. Of course — in all of the excitement with Todd, she’d forgotten to check out her mascaras and make sure she’d purchased the right ones. This was the one she had used that first day, when she’d only caught the smudge under one eye. She checked it. No, it definitely said: w-a-t-e-r-p-r-o-o-f.

Well, no sense taking chances. She tossed it into a small trash can in the corner, and it landed on a pile of used fabric softener sheets and lint bunnies.

That, she decided, was the end of that.

There was the skittering again, and she nervously grabbed her change purse, where she kept her coins; it cost $5 per load to wash and dry if the load was only once in the dryer and once in the washer; with her usual four or five loads, it cost her $20 a week. Most of the time, she didn’t have that in change, and so she just never seemed to crawl out from under the piles.

And it looked as though tonight was going to be no exception: there was scant change in her wallet. No, she thought, that couldn’t be. She had been certain that when she’d stopped to buy her fresh fruit and tuna wrap that afternoon she had asked for five dollars in change and had received it. It didn’t make sense that it wasn’t there.

Crash! Something fell. Down the hall.

And she could’ve sworn the room became damp and hot as a greenhouse, and then … she was spooked.

She left it all and walked quickly, back turned, not stopping at the elevator but banging up the stairs, her legs pumping up under her black slip all the way to the tenth floor, where she lived in apartment E, E for eternal, she’d thought when she’d signed the lease.

She jammed the keys in the lock, raced into her apartment and closed the door, listening to her own breath heaving in her chest.

The album was right where she’d left it, 15 minutes before, and she ran to it, meaning to slam it shut, stow it back on the shelf for now, and then, in the morning, when she wasn’t so frightened, go to the storage bin and put it away.

But suddenly she changed her mind. Because there were more than stickers in that book; there were pictures of Harry in that book. She opened up the album, and there were the pictures: Harry, grinning, one tooth broken from having fallen down the stairs. (Another time she just hadn’t been watching, she thought painfully.) But he was cuddling a small chocolatecolored puppy, the puppy that had run away (also when she hadn’t been watching). Her eyes began to tear.

She flipped the page, and the next series of photos were of her. When she was five, holding a violet pom-pom high above her head. When she was eight, in her grandma’s flower shop, her glowing face peering from a sea of sunflowers. Maureen remembered the day that photo was taken, because it wasn’t her grandmother that had taken it. It had been a visitor to the shop, a tall, dark-haired young man who had been clad in the most hideous plaid bell-bottoms: lavender and lemon polyester ….

She closed her eyes for a minute. The man. There was something about the man ….

She turned the page, and now she was at her brother’s eighth birthday party. The blue icing tattooed his mouth and he waved at the camera. It was one of her favorite photos of him, but this time, there was something in the background: her mother was smiling, holding a glass of champagne. She had noted that detail before. It was her mother’s other hand she hadn’t noted: her mother had a hand on a man’s shoulder,

a man who wasn’t Maureen’s father, and there was something she recognized — The man.

She peeled back the plastic covering on the page and pulled out the photo, brought it closer to her face and squinted.

No, it couldn’t be.

She cast the album aside and went into her kitchen, yanked open her utility drawer and rummaged through scissors, mermaid-shaped cheese spreaders, a broken beer bottle opener — Magnifying glass.

She looked closely.

It was him. Todd.

A knock at her door. She dropped the magnifying glass on the ceramic tile; she braced herself for the shattering of glass, but nothing happened. She blinked in curiosity.

The knock came again.

“Who is it?” she called out, thinking it was someone from downstairs, the landlord coming to bitch that she’d left all her laundry down there and where did she think she was, a private residence? But there was no answer.

“Hello?”

She peered through the peephole.

Todd was standing there.

“Go away!” Maureen shouted, her innards a swirl of anxiety, fury, terror, sadness, frustration. “Get out of here!” she fell over a pile of clean laundry in scrambling to get to the phone. “I’m calling the police and they’re going to make sure you stay way from me and you stay away from that funeral home!” She clutched the receiver.

But the next thing he said made her stop.

“I work there!” he shouted. “I work there. All I want to do is talk with you. Open the door.”

Maureen hesitated. He could have been saying anything just to con her into submitting to his will. She put down the phone and went to the door again, peered through the peephole once more.

He had them in his hand: fake black and red roses. “For you. A peace offering,” he said.

She twisted the bolt and opened the door; she thought she might take the flowers and slam the door in his face again, but he caught it and held it open.

“I’m not letting you in here. You can talk from the doorway.

I will, however, take these.” She reached out and took the flowers, and even though she knew they were fake, she lifted them to her nose. “Now, who are you?”

“I told you. I work there.”

“You work there,” she said. She crossed her arms. “Right.

That’s why you’re in my family’s photo album.”

“There’s an explanation for that.”

“I think you’re a stalker and I’m calling the police.”

“Fine,” Todd said. “Let me in. Let me talk for five minutes.

If you still think I’m a stalker, then you can call.”

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 109

She considered this, but didn’t make a move to invite him in.

“You want to know why I’m in your photo album.” He nodded past her, in the direction of the table, where the book was open. “I’ll tell you.”

Realizing she probably wasn’t going to get an answer any other way, she let him in — and propped her apartment door open with a settee from the corner.

“I’m a Magician.”

“I know, you said as much.” She pushed past him into the kitchen to refill her wine glass.

Todd was framed in her kitchen doorway. “No. There’s … a bunch of us, and we’re called The Magicians. We find people who feel responsible for a death and get them to forgive themselves.”

“You are a freak,” she sneered. Maureen seized the bottle of wine and was disappointed to find it empty; had she had that much to drink tonight already? No, there had only been about one glass left in it.

“What do you think I was doing with your mother?”

She stopped what she was doing; the air conditioning unit in her living room shut off, letting out a dying gasp like that, she thought, of the death rattle, the death rattle she’d heard a long time ago, once, and strange that she had lived in this apartment for three summers now and the air conditioning unit’s shut-off had never sounded that way to her before. “What?”

“Your mother.”

Maureen crouched down under her counter in search of another bottle from the wine rack. “What about her?”

“You had a sister. Loretta. And your Mom left her in the tub. For just one small minute. Just one.”

Maureen grabbed the first bottle she saw and stood up.

“Get out.”

Todd didn’t move. “Listen. Your mother was having trouble forgiving herself and that’s why I was there. I was there to help her.”

Maureen slammed the bottle onto the counter and reached for the opener. “She didn’t need help.”

“Not after I got done with her, correct.”

“If you’re so good,” she snapped, working the opener and wresting the cork free, “then why don’t you stop telling me I need to forgive myself and do it for me.”

Outside, far down on the street below, horns honked.

Todd looked down at his feet. “Okay. Fine.” He dug into one of his pockets. “Maybe if you have this back, the process can begin.”

It was the Rubik’s Cube keychain.

She took a step forward, her hand out … she wanted to touch it, to hold it, to reclaim it … “Where did you get this?”

He dropped it into her hand and shrugged. “I told you, I’m a Magician. And good Magicians don’t ever tell their secrets.”

She held the Cube in her palm, at first feeling that this was all too weird, how did he know about the keychain, where had he gotten it, and was it the right one — but then it was all 110 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

coursing through her body, waves of electricity, fear, excitement … and joy, for never had she seen such a welcome sight, such a fantastic, glittering thing, that thing that was precious and lost forever but by some glorious fate had been returned … the great re-capture of a usurped crown. And then came the tears, and the anger, in a violent rush.

“Shit! It wasn’t my fault! I was a kid, goddammit! A kid! I never should have been left alone!” Clutching the cube, she sank to her knees on the cold ceramic tile and wept. She was aware only of the scratches on one of the tiles, how their layout seemed to make a tic-tac-toe board, and his shoes, and when they went away from her. Then, after a few minutes, he was pressing a white tissue into one of her hands. She could feel the exhaustion then, the spent-ness, as though she would have to sleep. She wanted to thank him, but she couldn’t get anything to come out of her mouth; it was as though someone had shoved cotton in it. She heard him moving about, and then a glug-glug-glug.

He offered her a glass of white wine. “Here.”

She reached out to take it with trembling fingers, lifted the glass to her lips, and sipped. It reeked of funeral flowers and was chilled, but despite that, it burned when it hit her stomach and spread warmth through her limbs.

He left her side and sauntered into the living room, where he went to the sliders that led to a patio where two chairs sat covered in bird shit, and she regretted she hadn’t gone out there to clean up the mess.

“There’s another glass there, if you want some,” she offered weakly.

“I don’t drink.” He spread his hands apart and set them on the glass.

She struggled to her feet, set the wine glass down, and turned to the cornflower painted cabinet above her microwave to pull out a crystal water glass. “There’s seltzer.” For a moment she stood there, staring at the glass in her hand, not remembering what it was she was about to do. “Lemon.”

“With ice, please,” he said.

She opened the refrigerator — no, she had pomegranate, not lemon. She set the glass on the counter and poured some anyway. Then she carried the glass through the living room and stood beside him at the window; beyond the bird-shit covered balcony was the hospital, the hospital where they’d taken her brother, only it wasn’t open anymore — it had been abandoned years ago. On the top floor, a pink curtain tailed from a broken windowpane.

“Do you feel better now?”

She had to admit that she did, so she nodded.

“Good, then that’s the first step, when the private pity party is over.” He took the glass from her and went over to set it on her oak coffee table — sans coaster.

“First step for what?”

He plopped himself on her couch as though it were in his own living room; he leaned back and rested his head on his

hands. “Remember,” he said, “when you got upset because I knew about your waterproof mascara?”

“Yes.” “There’s a reason it’s running.” He sipped the water and set the glass down again. “It means … your time is coming.”

The ominous way he had phrased it made Maureen shrink away. “No.” Was all she could muster at first. Then she said, “No. I have a job making people feel better. I hang out at funeral homes and make sure they get their dream flowers and their themed send-offs or whatever. I’m contributing. I don’t need to do — what you’re doing.”

“It isn’t like you have much choice. The running make-up proves it.”

She looked at him, and at that moment, she saw something beneath the five o’clock shadow: something that softened him, something she hadn’t noticed before: a scar line that actually disjointed his chin, perhaps a burn mark or a knife wound, even.

“Is that — is that scar what happened to you?”

For the first time since she’d met him she could see he’d been caught off guard. “What?”

“On your face. Does that have anything to do with — how

you became a Magician?”

He nodded. “I liked fire. When I was a kid, fire … fire had a magic to it. Only I couldn’t control it.”

“Who … who did you lose?”

The air conditioner kicked on again.

“It doesn’t matter. Someone found me. Now I’m finding you.” He got up from the couch. “You should think about it.

Stop crying at other people’s funerals, heal yourself, and give me a call.” He flicked a forsythia-colored card on the table.

“It’s the mastery of the elements of life you need to learn, Maureen.” He reached behind her ear and presented her with a quarter. Then he walked out, and the door closed behind him.

Maureen looked at the quarter, and then at the handkerchief he’d given her before, which had been kicked into the corner; she bent down to pick it up. There were black smudges, and it made her think of what he’d said, the private pity party is over… there’s a reason it’s running.

She went into the living room, past the coffee table, where his pomegranate seltzer sat fizzing against the silence, into her bathroom cabinet, unzipped her make-up case, turned it upside-down over the trash, and watched as a dozen wands of waterproof mascara plummeted into the can.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 111

Timothy L. Marsh Timothy L. Marsh works as a curriculum developer in Bali, Indonesia, where the surfing is reliably gnarly and glorious. Recent work has appeared or been accepted in The Evansville Review, The Los Angeles Review, The New Quarterly, Whiskey Island and Connotation Press, among others. His honors include a 2010 writer’s residency at the Vermont Studio Center, a 2011 artist’s residency at the Montana Artists Refuge, and a 2009 Arts Jury Award from the City of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Residuals

W

hen I was a kid, I grew up in one those magical households where money just appeared and nobody was ever very surprised when it did.

I say it was magical because, nowadays, I live in a household where money does not just appear. I wake up in the morning, and there is no money. I check on the dresser and under the cushions. I look in my wallet. Perhaps the magic found its way in there. “Don’t look at me,” my wallet says. “Leave us alone,” my cushions moan. I don’t bother them anymore.

A long time ago, however, I really did live in such a house where such a thing as free money occurred. It was my parents’ house, of course, and I know now that the money had nothing to do with magic or fiscal enchantments, but with my father’s adeptness at getting corporations to mail us small checks for seemingly no reason other than we had an address where things like checks could find us.

The checks appeared in our house almost weekly. They were lowly disbursements from sizable companies I’d never heard of, but which I knew were large and important by the large pink checks important companies send out into the world.

My mother was in charge of opening the mail and always stuck these checks on the kitchen counter between the bottles of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, where the payments would stay for two or three weeks until my father finally took them to the bank and deposited them.

A small percentage of these checks came from the entertainment industry. The checks were residuals: compensations for exploited recorded performances by my famous grandmother who’d once been an actress but was now dead and earning for the family somewhere between $15 and $30 a month.

By most standards, my grandmother’s career never amounted to much. Her celebrity stardom twinkled as brightly as a wicked stepmother on Days of Our Lives in the early ’70s, but nobody much watches old soaps, and her main claim to 112 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

fame now, according to her residuals anyway, was a small part in a classic Twilight Zone episode that still aired once or twice a week on various cable stations throughout the world.

The episode, like the show, is probably not so famous now.

It is called “Nick of Time” and stars a shiny young (and I mean young) William Shatner, who, even then, looks very much like a man meant for strange new galaxies and all the frat-boy promiscuity of the final frontier.

Young Will plays one half of a honeymoon team whose car breaks down in a small Ohio town where nothing ever happens except the occasional third-dimensional struggle for self-determination.

The two take lunch at the local cafe and wind up battling a penny-slot, mystic seer fortune-telling machine for control of their own destiny.

The machine has a creepy bobble-headed devil attached at the top. The devil has two horns and a porn-maker’s grin and wobbles a sadistic little chuckle whenever it dispenses vague foreboding answers to innocent questions like: “How much will this club sandwich cost?”

You should have thought about that before you ordered.

“Is the Oxford English Dictionary really the world’s most trusted dictionary?”

Some questions are better left unasked.

Of course young William is far too civilized for any hocuspocus. He’s captain of his own starship. It’s all just fun and games until some of the fortunes begin to come true.

All of a sudden, young William is spooked. Weird powers are working in menacing ways. The honeymoon is over. They’re never leaving Ohio. Something awful will happen if they do — something bleak and deadly. The mystic seer foresees it.

Things get out of hand until William’s wife finally loses it.

She doesn’t like the way he’s acting. She doesn’t like the cafe or the town or the bobble-headed demon with the bobble-headed chuckle. She wants to leave leave leave!

At last, young William reclaims the captain’s seat. Their car is fixed; the path is theirs. The open road with all its unforeseeable fates and ends is calling, and they’re going to answer. They walk bravely from the diner just as another couple walks in.

The second couple takes the same booth as William and his wife. The woman is just as pretty as William’s wife and might’ve even been his wife in another more perfect Hollywood dimension.

“Go ahead,” my grandmother says with heavy, hushed dread. The husband inserts a gloomy penny and reads their fortune. My grandmother moans. They aren’t going anywhere.

They are stuck like slaves of fate in that rinky-dink village and my grandmother is stuck in uncredited spot-appearance syndication while another woman heads boldly into better roles and renown on the arm of an iconic interstellar swaggermuffin.

I’ve always wondered how the history of my family’s economy might’ve turned out had my grandmother landed a role that ended with self-determination instead of cosmic bondage, but my mother never gave it a thought.

Every Fourth of July, KTLA Channel 5 ran it’s Twilight Zone marathon and my mother would gather my brother and I around the television to watch the famous episode with the young William Shatner and the stupid devil bobble-head dispensing menacing clairvoyance.

My brother and I were too young to respect the uniqueness of televised lineage. All we saw was the antique absurdity of black-and-white, the corny melodrama, the embellished dismay. We cracked jokes and mimicked lines. We laughed when the women clutched their faces and screamed, we took the piss when the gangly government-looking man spoke into the camera before and after every episode, taking life way too ominously, and when the episode with our famous grandmother finally appeared, we jiggled our noggins like bobble heads and came up with our own potty-parody fortunes.

“Why does this room smell like ass?”

All signs point to Mom. “Why has Dad been on the shitter so long?”

The answer to your question is bigger than you think.

Our smart-assing never failed to rankle my mother. I suppose it had something to do with our lack of respect for a time when people could’ve ever found anything frightening about this kind of stuff.

Once when we really got rolling, she stamped her foot and cried: “You think it’s so funny? Well let me tell you something, funny boys. When I was your age, that little devil head used to give me nightmares — terrible, terrible nightmares!”

The fact that we’d never met our famous grandmother was a great tragedy to my mother. It didn’t matter that we’d watched her scene a dozen times and knew it wasn’t right until the end — to our mother, our grandmother’s accomplishment couldn’t be fully appreciated unless we sat through the entire

episode and several episodes prior. Anytime we got up to use the bathroom or get something to eat she’d call after us to considerable irritation, “Hurry, or you’ll miss your famous grandmother!” *** The first time I ever saw any kind of sex device was very early in life and came about like this: In our adolescence, my mother would clean our rooms regularly and meticulously, not because she pampered her children, but because cleaning our rooms was the best way to get a lead on the kind of shit we were getting into.

One year when my brother was 14 or 15, my mother cleaned his room and snooped across several bags of weed and a giant rubber dildo stashed in a tool box at the back of his closet.

My mother was as likely for confrontation as Mahatma Gandhi. She simply dismissed the weed down the toilet and left the dildo where it was.

She had no intention of discovering what her 14-yearold son was doing in possession of a king-sized synthetic penis, even if it meant not discovering what he was doing in possession of a farmer’s harvest of marijuana.

Years later, my brother would explain that dildo as a gag memento from a strictly hetero foray into a downtown sex shop, but at the time, there was no way he could decry the seizure of his buds without the dildo poking into the discussion with all its homo-erotic intimations and mortifying him completely, and so it was that everything settled quietly into repression, unresolved and unremarked upon, at least for right then.

Shortly thereafter came the Fourth of July, and my mother gathered her two boys in front of the television for the annual family tradition of watching the KTLA Twilight Zone marathon just to see 30 seconds of our Hollywood grandmother whenever the hell her episode appeared.

My brother, still smoldering from my mother’s intrusion, found the whole thing intolerably fatiguing and ridiculous, and after a few episodes began to assault every twist and turn that came on the screen with spiteful asides that chipped at my mother’s patience until finally all her Gandhi collapsed and she responded with an atomic retaliation that would’ve given Hiroshima a run for its money.

There was a terrible detonation, a terrific flash-blast of sovereignty-seeking adolescence and frustrated motherhood about which I don’t remember much except for my brother screaming out of the house threatening to run away to Mexico and my mother running after him promising to buy his goddamn ticket.

They stood toe-to-toe in the driveway cursing each other to hell and then, all at once, my mother broke into the house and came out with that dildo.

She shouted at my brother as he stormed toward the border, then pitched back and hurled the dildo in his direction as far as she could throw it. The dildo was like first flight of Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 113

the Wright Brothers, soaring awkwardly for five or six feet and then crashing to the driveway with a pitiful plop.

It was a bizarre thing, even for an early childhood memory, to watch her spear-chuck a giant rubber erection in pure psychotic fury, only to calmly close the door as if nothing was the matter and ask me to the couch to watch my famous grandmother and pretty-please enjoy it.

We sat together in rigid viewing silence until my grandmother’s episode came on, and then inexplicably my mother got up and started making dinner.

She started making dinner even though it was only two in the afternoon and we were eating out that night.

She got up and left the room and started making dinner just as my grandmother was about to walk into that café and give the principle performance of her bite-sized career.

I don’t remember what was cooked, but I remember very clearly the sound of that meal being prepared, the hard handling of pots and utensils and harmless clangy things in drawers, as if my mother were a tornado and our cookware a small community in Oklahoma.

At one point something dropped and broke — a bowl or

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glass maybe. The bowl or glass shattered across the floor and created a deep and powerful silence that I didn’t investigate because it wasn’t the kind of silence you walked in on.

The silence occupied the kitchen like a moment of prayer bereft of anything thankful or indebted, and, when it passed, the sound that replaced it was that of my mother sweeping up the shattered pieces, gathering it all together again. *** I am crowded these days by memories from a lost distant life. The memories mean nothing and amount to little. In the movie of my existence, they would be the deleted scenes, well-acted and authentic, but inessential to the plot or the progression of the story.

I don’t know what I can do with them. I can’t keep them because they are taking up too much space. I can’t get rid of them because there is nowhere to put them.

I have no idea what they can do for me. They are things that just happened with no great dividends of meaning. They are just small residuals from a dead performance of years, bunched between the oil and vinegar of my brain, and they never stop coming.

Scott Owens Author of six collections of poetry and more than 600 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, vice president of the Poetry Council of North Carolina and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society and the Poetry Society of SC. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College.

Sometimes the Mirror Norman keeps a mirror in his pocket.

He only shines it on himself.

It’s not that he’s vain. It’s not that he has to have his hair just right.

It’s not that he’s wondering if the pimple on his nose is really as big as it feels.

Sometimes he wants to see the wall behind him. Sometimes he just wants to see two ways at once.

Sometimes he imagines it is actually a window and someone stands there wanting in, a lost brother, perhaps, or the son he never had, or a shape-shifting alien starting his world conquest with Norman.

It’s not that he has a question for the mirror. It’s not that he thinks two heads are really better than one.

Sometimes inside the mirror is another mirror and another inside that one and another inside that one, mirrors shrinking to the point of a zero-dimensional dot. Sometimes the mirror is empty.

It’s not that he feels safer inside the mirror’s frame. It’s not that he thinks the handprints still show.

Sometimes he wants to see who is walking up behind him. Mostly he wants to know whose face is bursting out beneath the red cloud of his hair.

It’s not that he wants his hat tilted at any particular angle. It’s not that he thinks his collar is out to get him.

It’s not that he’s checking his tongue for the yellow signs of sickness.

Sometimes the mirror spills out on the street and lies like a puddle before him.

Sometimes the mirror flashes messages from Leon’s Neon Diner — tuesday nights — all you can eat chili.

Sometimes the mirror is a silver hand and Norman thinks he is God wearing his precious bones on the outside.

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Christopher Anthony Leibow Christopher Anthony Leibow has been nominated for a Pushcart and Utah Book Award. He has been published in numerous journals including, Interim, Barrow Street, Juked, and Arsenic Lobster, with upcoming poems in Anemone Sidecar. He graduated from University of Utah and Antioch University. He currently lives in Salt Lake City with his ADHD cat, Mr. Futzwhittle.

I Will Draw Two Ravens Five poems for Brooklyn Marie “Raven was the one who brought light to the darkness” — Miwok Myth

One

Two

Three

My life is a letter home caught in a dust devil

If you open your dress I will draw two ravens

If you open your dress I will draw two ravens

spinning wildly.

My hopes have been

on your breasts and a 100 psalms

on your breasts and a 100 psalms

mistreated by the waitress with the bad hip

on your belly.

If you wear me

on your belly.

If you wear me

Our loves wear us out till we are born

wear me passionate.

In the space where we

wear me passionate.

In the space where we

again in our weariness —

love, sparrows have nested.

The tide has risen;

love, sparrows have nested.

The tide has risen;

that’s when I saw you dancing

how many stars swirl at your small feet?

how many stars swirl at you feet?

in the Laundromat and called you out.

Your body is water quivering from my breath Your eyes are two roads that ask to be traveled Your hair hangs down for me to climb back home and I will weave new mornings from the strands

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Four

Five

The moon has stopped

breathe in breathe out

to watch us, and dangles

now be still with me

her feet above the water where

my love. let our —

we swim.

She rises

faces pressed together

slowly above us, looking back

be the evidence of all the beautiful

while the night gathers up the

things to come, so that in

dreams of all those dreaming,

our gaze fate will

into bouquets as we drift

be helpless and the birds

half awake half innocent,

I have drawn on your two

our nakedness a boat gently rocking.

perfect breasts will abandon the ground, forever.

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Sparky Campenella

Sparky Campanella is a Los Angles-based, self-taught photographer who switched careers in 2001 from software marketing to fine art photography. His figurative works are typically conceptual and abstract, with a minimalist aesthetic. He has had solo exhibitions at David Weinberg Gallery in Chicago and the Koelsch Gallery in Houston. He is currently represented by the Weston Gallery in Carmel. He holds a bachelor’s of art from Duke University, a master of business arts from Stanford University and has been awarded residencies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Anderson Ranch in Colorado. You can find him online at http://www.campanella.com

Danuza

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Sienna

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Kazuki

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Bert

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Jennifer

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Catherine

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Natalie Jacobs Natalie Jacobs was a serious writer all her life. In 2008, she died suddenly at age 35. She left a body of unpublished work, including a fictional biograpy of Franz Schubert titled When Your Song Breaks the Silence. “An die Freude” is a chapter of the novel. It describes the famous premiere performance in Vienna of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, here seen through eyes of an admiring Schubert.

An die Freude May 7, 1824: An Ode to Joy

T

he night of the concert was a warm one, unusually so for early May, and outside the theater the spring stars glinted in a velvety sky devoid of the usual smoke and clouds that hung over the city. Franz had heard it said — only half-jokingly — that the elements were celebrating the passing of the infamously wicked English poet, Lord Byron, less than a month previously.

He walked alone through the darkening streets, trembling a little, a halt in his step, one hand clenched around the ticket that he had bought with some of the money he earned from publishing his quartet in A minor. As he walked he hummed over some of the variations from the quartet he had just finished, which was in D minor, like the symphony he was going to hear tonight. Different permutations of a theme, the piano accompaniment to his song “Death and the Maiden”; and another permutation: ten years ago he had sold his schoolbooks to see “Fidelio,” and hurried along these same streets to the Kärtenthor Theater with his heart full of happiness. He was all empty now; the happiness was gone, and everything else, except for his music and his worship of the one who walked before him, his master Beethoven.

A year since he had been in the hospital, and he was pulling himself back together, knitting his mind into a new whole. It was hard. It was hard to work, and live in joy and music, and leave the manuscript page to look at himself in the mirror: his poor patchy hair, the ghost of the rash on his cheeks and forehead, his face thinner and older and a wary, flinching look in his eyes. Yet through it all, every day, he surprised himself with what he could do. His new quartets were like dreams, selfcontained worlds, woven together with his finest handiwork.

They seemed not to belong to him and yet they bore his mark on every page — they were his and nobody else’s. When he looked at them, he knew he was strong, though he felt weak.

Tonight, maybe, things would turn around for him, if

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only a little bit. He hoped to find a little light to shed on the problems of where to go next after he finished his quartet in D minor. He wanted to make his way towards a symphony, and yet he was almost frightened to start again on a symphony after the last time — so many fine things wasted, there, his half-finished edifice gone to ruin. Tonight would provide no clues for him, nothing tangible, but it might somehow spark an idea or two, convince him that yes, it could be done, one could say something new and glorious even out of the depths of inner darkness. A voice shouting out of silence. One could only hope.

He was early. The theater was just starting to fill up. He made his way among the empty seats to his own and sat down, trying to get in a position where his back would not ache after hours of sitting. He was beginning to enjoy himself already, though the orchestra had not even assembled yet. He always liked going to theaters; looking up at the arch of the roof, all that empty vertiginous echoing space, he wanted to fill it all up with his own music and shake the rafters with himself. He had been thinking lately of putting on a concert of his own. He wondered whether anyone would come, besides his friends — though a Schubertiade on a grand scale wouldn’t be half bad, come to think of it.

His seat was on the main floor, the cheapest spot, though it was a stroke of good luck that the person who ended up sitting in front of him was an old man nearly as small as himself, and so he could see the stage. His friend Josef Hüttenbrenner, who had lived upstairs from the Mayrhofer menage during those two years, was singing in the chorus, and knew the master personally; he had offered to get Franz in for free, but Franz wanted to pay his way. It was the right thing to do.

He waited, then, and looked at all the people assembled in the galleries and the boxes, some eating their suppers, others drinking wine, the women in their high-waisted dresses and the men like parrots in their bright coats and waistcoats, a few faces he knew there among the crowd: Anselm Hüttenbrenner,

Josef ’s brother, who waved to Franz from his box seat; the Frölich sisters, all four of them, looking rather intimidating in identical white dresses; and wasn’t that the Grand High Poobah himself, Johann Michael Vogl, the Court Singer, towering head and shoulders above his companions? He nodded formally at Franz when their eyes met, and then turned away, as if embarrassed that he had acknowledged the composer who had given him a new voice to sing with.

According to the handbill, the concert would begin with an overture, “The Consecration of the House,” and then three pieces from a Mass in D — they were not called a Mass, since there was a law against liturgical music in the theater, but a Kyrie, a Credo, and an Agnus Dei could be nothing else. After the intermission, a new symphony in D minor, with a choral finale from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” A chorus in a symphony?

How would it be done? It was either completely brilliant or completely mad. Either way, it would be glorious, certainly; the master would surely not stoop to writing another “Wellington’s Victory.” But then, who could say?

Resigned to his lack of knowledge, Franz folded the handbill neatly and settled himself down to wait.

At last, the orchestra assembled and a heavy hush fell over the audience, broken only by the faint expectant rustle of skirts and handbills. The oboe played its A and all the instruments echoed it: a long, drawn-out tone, composed of many voices, which thrilled him in a strange way, not because of any inherent beauty in it but because of its potential: all the timbres and colors of the orchestra, all notes and chords, contained in that single readying sound. It seemed funny to feel that way. But it was true. He had felt the same way in the Seminary orchestra, playing that primal A on his violin.

The conductor came out on stage with the score under his arm, followed by — was it? yes — the man himself, beetlebrowed, his head held high. His unruly grey hair, combed into a semblance of neatness for the special occasion, had no sheen in the bright light of the stage. There was applause for him, but he did not respond, of course. He seated himself to one side of the orchestra — he too had a score and a baton, but Josef Hüttenbrenner had said that the orchestra and the choir had been strictly adjured not to pay any attention to him.

He looked different in daylight — a thick-set man with a compressed, angry face, stumping along the streets of Vienna, sometimes shouting or singing to himself as people moved aside or followed in his wake, nudging each other and pointing.

Franz would see the grey head coming through towards him and his stomach would contract, his palms sweat; much to the amusement of his friends, he would then go pale and cross the street as the great man stalked by. “Why don’t you go talk to him?” Schober might say, the voice of reason. “He won’t bite, you know.”

But he could, and did. Everyone had heard the stories. He was angry at the world, and since the world could not be raged at, he raged at the people around him. Franz would sometimes

go to the inn where he liked to have dinner; sitting amid a crowd of embarrassed-looking friends, the great man would rant and pontificate for hours and all anyone could do was smile and nod. Franz would never have been able to get close to him, and even if he could, it would have been more than he could bear to be rejected by the man who knew God. Once, he had almost done it, a few years ago before his troubles began. He was walking in the Graben — he had just bought a new hat at one of the fancier shops, and felt pleased with himself — when he saw the man walking towards him with a teenage boy at his side, a relative, judging by the family resemblance. As they approached, Franz could hear the master’s voice, too loud in the manner of the deaf: “Now, you tell that lying bitch to keep her hands to herself, do you hear me?” At that moment Franz passed so close to them that he could have seized the great man’s sleeve, spoken to him, stammered his gratitude, kissed his hand, made his worship understood somehow, but he did not. He could not.

In short, Franz was afraid.

If God were a madman, he would be worshipped from a safe distance.

The conductor was looking at the master now, as the anticipation in the air became a living thing, and at last he turned his fierce bulldog face to the orchestra and gave the tempo with a sharp motion of his hand. The conductor lifted his baton, and brought it down, and the music began.

He was a little disappointed at first. He listened, aimlessly shredding his ticket stub into confetti, and found that he could see clearly what the master was doing: the patterns, the intent.

There was no mystery. But then, the pieces from the Mass — then, everything changed. It was very beautiful. He lost himself in the intricate interplay of soloists and chorus, the grandeur of the orchestra and the cries of belief which shook the roof, and came out of it again in astonishment, wondering at a faith so strong that it could produce music of this splendor.

“Glory to God in the highest!” Beethoven cried, along with a thousand other composers living and dead, but for him the words had meaning and weight; he held them in his hands and they came to life. For Franz, they were words. He had never been able to understand faith. He knew that Christ had died for him, but it was the pain of the Crucifixion which moved him, the sweat and blood and tears, not the greatness of God. Beethoven always outshone him.

He felt a little dizzy by the end of the Agnus Dei. It may have been the music, but then he had been up late the night before. The doctor kept telling him to take better care of himself, but he forgot. He had a bad memory. When he got up to go out to the lobby, his vision went blurry and he had to sit down again. Too much beautiful music — bad for your health. Like too much rich food. Beethoven as a Sacher torte.

He fanned himself with the handbill, like a fat old lady on a hot day, and waited until the other people in his aisle filed out before he tried getting up again. This time, he was successful.

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He emerged into the lobby, feeling a little lost amid the crowd of avidly chattering concertgoers, and came across Anselm Hüttenbrenner there, looking a little sly and weasely as he always did, and pleased with himself; he may have been a little too proud of knowing Beethoven, but he was a good fellow, for all of that, and a fairly decent composer as well.

He was drinking wine with some girl, but upon seeing Franz, he rushed over and greeted him effusively with a peck on the cheek, like a maiden aunt. “Good Schubert! How goes it with you? Schwind said you’ve been ill. Are you feeling better?”

“Every day is a little better. Are you enjoying the concert?”

“Of course, of course, anything of Beethoven’s is fine by me. And you? I see you’ve worn out the knees of your trousers with worshipping. Or have you been worshipping someone new?”

“Oh, be quiet. Good evening, sir,” he added, looking up and up to the towering height of Court Singer Vogl (who was nearly seven feet tall, and whose head bumped against the roofs of carriages and cabs). Vogl, looking down with grave benevolence, said, “God’s greetings to you, boy. Have you any new songs for me?”

“Only string quartets, Sir. And the Mayrhofer songs you’ve seen already.”

“Too bad,” said Vogl, and strode away majestically.

“Polite, isn’t he?” said Anselm.

“Oh, he’s all right. He’s been good to me.”

“I’ll bet he has. Look, speaking of which, after the concert I think I ought to introduce you to your false idol, the old man don’t you think it’s about time? If you’re worried about talking to him, it’s all right, you just write everything down in one of his notebooks and he understands - he’s really not as frightening as you think. Oh, for God’s sake, don’t look at me like that. I know what you’re going to say. God, you’re predictable. It’s your loss. Oh, there’s the bell.”

Franz followed him back inside without saying a word and made his way to his seat again. For a moment there, he had actually been tempted, but of course common sense had taken over. Anyway, it didn’t matter. It was time for the new symphony. He was so excited that he soon forgot all about Anselm and everything else; he banished all other thoughts from his mind and opened himself up to whatever there was to hear.

It took some time to get the choir all assembled on the stage again. Josef Hüttenbrenner looked as if he had been drinking, as did the bass soloist. Typical Viennese. The women soloists looked very nervous — the contralto was biting her nails — while the orchestra members furiously practiced elaborate runs and scales in weird remote keys, all of which seemed to be part of the symphony. He couldn’t imagine what it would sound like.

Then, the conductor came back out, and the master with his score and baton. He had been making conducting motions throughout the first half of the concert but it was clear that he 126 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

had no idea what was going on. Franz had watched him, when he was not listening to the music: odd mingled expressions of bliss and frustration passing across that scowling, pockmarked face as he gazed at the silent ministrations of orchestra and choir. Sometimes he looked so enraged that it seemed a vein might burst in his forehead. But now, he looked quite calm as he gave the tempo, and the music began.

Or had it begun? What was going on? There was just a pianissimo murmur of strings, open fifths, and Franz thought for a moment that there had been some sort of mistake and the orchestra was tuning again - except they were playing D, not A. But then he realized what was happening. It was the primal moment: the chaos before creation, as the other instruments added descending cascades of open fifths, the simplest chords.

Franz thought of God moving on the face of the waters, in darkness and silence. And then the music grew, expanded, exploded into a huge statement of the first theme that made him jump in his seat. Behold, the creation of the world!

From then on, he knew he was in the presence of something very wonderful, very new, altogether new. For in no other symphony had music remade the world. And the music around him rose and rose, blossoming into a million fantastic shapes, while he watched and listened, trying to understand even while the music transformed him into a vessel filled with sound, shaking with it, all conscious thought purged from his mind, burned clean. He felt as if he could fall into the music, soar through it like a bird, swim in it like a dolphin, drink it like rich heady wine. He was drunk with it, and as it sang through his veins, he forgot it all: his failing body, his failing art, all gone, lost in this vast and wonderful ocean of sound.

He wished he could take it and pull it into himself, make the brilliance a part of himself. The idea of making something as wonderful as this was beyond his comprehension. How did the man do it? How could he possibly be holding this inside him? He looked so insignificant down there, hunched over his score, unaware of the glory all around him.

This is why he’s deaf, Franz thought. He’s been listening to God too much. The thought was absurd and would have made him smile had he not been grinning with elation already.

The second movement, which would have been the slow movement in any ordinary, earthly symphony, began with sharp blasts from the horns and the pounding of tympani, so loud and abrupt that it frightened him — it sounded like thunder. The rest of the audience broke out into a mix of shouting, clapping and booing, so loud that it nearly drowned out the music. The conductor stopped the orchestra and looked around with an irritated expression. The master looked bemused. “This is nonsense,” said a man somewhere behind Franz. “I want my money back.” Franz contemplated ways of hideous death for the man while the conductor prepared to begin again. This time, the music proceeded unhindered.

An allegretto slow movement. My God. Would the man stop at nothing? But then, there was the choral part coming up.

Will the audience boo? Will they be angry that the symphony is being remade before their eyes? He knew that nobody would ever write a symphony the same way again. His plans for a grand symphony of his own had just died horribly, struck down by those blasts from horn and tympani. There was no way he could say anything more after this.

And then, finally, the music gathered itself up, flung itself out in a grand triumph of strings and horns, and poised in midair. The silence came. And into the void, a great voice cried, O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne!

And the other parts came in, alto and tenor and bass, and it was beautiful.

So you could have voices in a symphony, after all, he thought. Why not? And how beautiful, how lovely . . . Listen to that, the soloists together, and the chorus there, Deine Zauber binden wieder . . . and he hasn’t even brought in the sopranos yet.

There they are. What a dreadfully high part. Poor ladies. Oh, my . . . .

He had set this poem himself, back in his vortex year, but it hadn’t been anything like this. This was the harmony of the spheres. And if he had to stand back from the Mass because he could not believe, he could believe this: not the words of brotherhood and joy so much as what the music was saying, about harmony from chaos, about the ability of music to carry the world on its shoulders.

It was a symphony in itself, this choral part. There was that wonderful swinging march, about setting forth like a victorious hero (Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen!), and the slow strange part

with its peculiar cadences, and the joyous bouncing hymn, and at last a wild presto which had the orchestra members sweating profusely and the chorus members on the verge of collapse, repeating again the words “Joy, thou lovely spark of God!” until everything, all at once, crashed to a halt, and it was done.

A stunned silence. Then the applause.

It went on and on. Franz clapped automatically, a spasmodic movement, until his hands ached and his palms turned red, one applauder among hundreds. Still the applause continued. The conductor, shining with sweat, bowed; the soloists bowed in succession, one at a time; the choir and orchestra beamed, redfaced. People shouted and waved their hats and handkerchiefs.

After the fifth ovation, a voice shouted “Silence! Be quiet!” from the back of the theater. It was the Police Commissioner, in full uniform, obviously worried that this Beethoven maniac had succeeded in causing some sort of insurrection. Nobody paid any attention to him.

Amid all the tumult, only one person sat without noticing, still looking at his score with his back turned. Finally, as his name rang in the smoky air, the contralto soloist came forward and, taking him by the arm, led him to the edge of the stage. The applause redoubled; he stood there blinking, a smile sitting awkwardly on his blunt features and the score tucked under his arm. Perhaps he saw all the mouths speaking his name, perhaps not. He certainly saw the clapping hands: opening and shutting doors that made no sound, not even a whisper. For all the shouting of his heart, he was wreathed in silence, alone.

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George Sparling George Sparling has been published in many literary magazines including Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, Unlikely Stories, Nth Position, Word Riot, Ascent Aspirations, Istanbul Literary Review, Juked, Rattle, Taj Mahal Review and Snake Nation Review. He has been a crab butcher and salmon processor, bookstore clerk, health food store worker, VISTA work at the Baltimore City Jail, and a scuba diver for placer gold in the Northern California wilderness. He graduated from a small college in Iowa. He likes Van Gogh’s “Night Café,” Brueghel’s “Magpie on the Gallows,” Mahler’s 6th Symphony, James Ellroy, Lucinda Williams, Arthur Nersesian’s “The Fuck-up” and reading an excess of book blogs. He also likes doing nothing, thinking about women who have left him and his next meal. He does not believe in beliefs of any kind.

The Set

I

had four ounces of bud and 400 caps of mescaline. I dealt out of this set, a sleaze bag apartment. A risky venture but a liberal arts degree was worthless. People wanting to score had to buzz quickly twice, a long one, again two buzzes.

Instead of the code, I heard 10 or so erratic buzzes.

I pushed my stoned self off the mattress on the floor and opened the door. I leaned over the railing and saw a black hand, followed by two white hands, and another black hand on the banister as they walked up to my third-floor apartment. Fear spread through my body, death ran up and down my spine. I knew no blacks in this small city. All my customers were white.

I had a stolen .38 snub-nose Ruger beneath the mattress. It paid to be cautious.

My wonderful but naive ex-girlfriend who fucked that bartender while I was away must have blabbed about my dealing. They had tripped out on mescaline on the loft’s foam pad. When the black bartender told me, “Honest, we didn’t do anything,” I knew he lied.

I walked to my apartment, a matter of four steps, leaving the door open on the theory that I had four customers rather than two. It never occurred to me to triple-lock the door. A mercenary impulse overtook me, even at the petty trough of dime bags and mescaline caps diluted with ketamine, an animal anesthetic.

First in the procession came a tall skinny man, with a Goodwill overcoat, a wool-knit cap covered his eyebrows.

He shook, maybe from the cold, maybe needing a fix. He sniffled, mucus poured down his upper lip. Next came Dave, a professional dog walker, followed by Ron, a college student.

The rearguard, a medium-built man, wearing an imitation leather jacket, closed the door.

He theatrically pulled from his waist a long-nose .22. I sat down, afraid of getting erased from earth. Suddenly I accepted death, its empire dissolved.

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“This is a take-off,” he said.

“You should’ve heard the code,” Dave said.

“I fucked up.” The man laughed. I was a chump. He searched us, patting us down.

“Take off your shoes and socks,” the man with the gun said. We three sat on the mattress, unlaced our shoes, placing them on the floor. Next came our socks. I put them atop my Redwings. Overcoat checked them, finding nothing.

The gun pointed at us as the tall junkie looked in the loft bed. He clambered down. I stood on the mattress, he standing in front of me, throwing a looping right hook, hitting my jaw.

His wrist crumpled. I collapsed even though the punch was weak. My dead mother could have thrown a harder punch.

“Get up,” he said. I got up quickly.

Two wooden bookshelves crammed with paperbacks were stuck into a window.

“I’ve an unemployment check in a book,” I said. I walked over, opening the book, showing him my check. I handed it to him. He passed it to his partner.

“Forget it,” said the gunman. They had taken money from the three of us, but wanted more. Who wouldn’t?

“I’ll give you my stash,” I said. I walked to the refrigerator, yanked the old fridge’s bottom portion out below the crisper.

I grabbed the bud, as well as four hundred mescaline caps in a baggie. High on crystal, I had meticulously tamped powder into each gelatin capsule with a McDonald’s coffee stirrer. I was proud of that achievement.

The gunman sat on the crate, dipping his forefinger into the whiteness. He tasted it.

“It’s psychedelic,” I warned him. He said nothing, handing the bag to his teammate. Looking for smack, he settled for anything. He put it in a jacket pocket.

Dave and Ron sat on the mattress, watching me, the host

of the set, thinking if I blew it, they would get whacked too.

“Do it to the other books,” the gunman said. Another window full of books lined a kitchen niche. I showed them every book, fanning the pages. I grabbed Che Guevara’s book of revolutionary writings, Che’s photo holding a rifle met overcoat’s eyes.

“Man, he sure could kill,” he said excitedly, showing the cover to the gunman.

I felt my legs and arms moving in awkward directions. Dave and Ron watched as I took another blow, this time to my lips.

I took another dive. I tasted blood. Terror engulfed the tiny apartment. Then, as the take-off artists moved towards the door, Dave and Ron and I stood as if saying our goodbyes. I almost wanted to say, “Come again,” but didn’t.

“Maybe we we’ll see you up on the hill sometime,” leather jacket said, sticking the revolver back into his belt. Hill? Prison, I guessed. Opening the door, they walked slowly towards the stairs, leaving the door open.

That momentary goodbye fantasy abruptly changed. I dashed to the Ruger. It was fully loaded. Those two were not very professional. They would have really scored big time if they found the .38.

I ran into the hall as they walked downstairs. I fired four rounds. One round struck his head. I thought I saw blood splatter against the wall. He sprawled headfirst down the staircase. Overcoat grabbed him, propped him up, lugging him roughly down each step. Thump, thump, thump.

Dave and Ron sat down at a small table. They glared at me, hatred compounded with fear moved across their faces.

“Why the gun?” Ron asked.

“Someone had to pay.”

They waited five minutes or so and left me. I was alone.

I sat on a chair. I drank a six-pack, one beer after another, and then two shots of tequila. It would not alter the fact that the rent was due tomorrow or that I was probably a murderer.

I had two shells left. You only needed one.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 129

Diane Kimbrell Actress and writer Diane Kimbrell has lived in NYC for many years, but was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her literary credits include The Raleigh Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, River Walk Journal, SF Writer’s Journal, Plum Biscuit, Subtletea and Muscadine Lines. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she has also attended Columbia and New York University. While attending Columbia, she was awarded six Woolrich writing fellowships. Diane is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Pages from Sages.

Last Chance

T

hrough the living room window, I see Enid’s new 1959 Cadillac pulling up in the driveway, and my heart skips a beat. Maybe it’s not too late. Enid Jackson is another one of Mama’s “best” friends. In Bermuda shorts, Enid looks taller and gawkier than usual. Spider veins creep around her ankles and sneak past her knees to her pale, plump thighs. Her mouse brown hair, parted and combed to one side and held in place with a plastic barrette, always looks frizzy — like she’s given herself a home permanent and left the curling solution on too long. I can tell by the way Enid laughs and cuts her eyes around when she talks to Daddy or any other man, that she still thinks of herself as a sweet, young thing. Enid has been 51 years old for ages. Unlucky in her first marriage, she claims she lucked out in her second by marrying a man who saves his money. She knows how to spend it. Together they’ve made a small fortune raising poodles as show dogs. Many of their poodles have been champions.

“I were a widow at 16 — one year older than Niki,” she’s saying. I’m sitting across from her in the kitchen at our lemon yellow dinette set. To avoid looking at Enid (she talks with her mouth full), I gaze above and beyond her frizzy head at the square piece of cardboard taped to the kitchen ceiling. But I’m not thinking about the rat that gnawed the hole in the ceiling two nights ago or of how I screamed when I looked up and saw those beady black eyes starring down at me. And I’m not thinking about that crummy piece of cardboard taped to the ceiling — our landlord’s so-called repair job. I’m thinking that Enid Jackson is my last hope. I’m also thinking that it’s not fair that this ignorant woman gets to have money and live in a beautiful house and drive a new car every year. May God forgive me for having such thoughts but that’s how I feel. In my opinion, Mama and Othermama are much smarter and better looking than Enid ever could be. Damn my Daddy. It’s his fault. According to Othermama, who is always right, Daddy’s a good worker (he’s a foreman at a sheet metal plant) but he’s

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also a “no good rotter — always drinking and throwing his money away in some pool hall.”

Enid Jackson is cheap. She always visits our house empty handed. Othermama, my maternal grandmother, would never come out and say it, but we know she is. Othermama has called her a pig more than once but not to her face. Othermama’s a lady.

“How about another piece of my fresh coconut cream pie or a baked sweet potato?” Othermama asks.

“Like to died last night I et so much at Lila’s. My daughter’s a good cook but Othermama, your coconut cream pie is delicious. Yes indeed, I’ll take another bite.” Othermama shovels another slab on her plate.

“Can I heat your coffee?” Mama asks. Enid, whose mouth’s too full to speak, nods. I take a deep breath and brace myself.

Any minute now, Enid’s lecture will begin.

“Niki,” Othermama says standing at the stove, “would you like a piece of pie or a baked sweet potato?”

“No thank you,” I answer. Although she seems to like Enid well enough, Othermama contends that Enid “slaughters” the English language, and sometimes she thinks it’s funny. I don’t dare look at Othermama when Enid’s around for fear one or both of us might burst out laughing. Enid knits her heavy brows and blows hard on the fresh cup of coffee like she’s studying something important though I’m not sure she’s capable of it.

“Niki, honey,” she says, between slurps, “I wish you’d smile.”

Any other day I’d excuse myself from the kitchen to avoid Enid, but time’s running out. I didn’t ask Enid for anything.

Never have. On one of her numerous visits, Enid asked me why my head was buried in a movie magazine. She demanded to know what was so interesting, and I told her. I even showed her the picture of the movie star, Carol Lynley wearing the double pearl ring.

“Look how dainty those two seed pearls are,” I said. “Isn’t this ring absolutely gorgeous?”

That’s when Enid said, “Niki, I’m going to give you some money for Christmas so you can go buy yourself something you really want.”

I have to go back to school on Monday, and of course I’ll be asked what I got for Christmas. My presents (necessities) were ordered from the Jewel Tea Company. Nobody orders clothes from a catalogue any more like they did in the old days. Mama says I should feel grateful for Othermama’s generosity; she’s right, and I really do. But I also feel ashamed of ordering from the Jewel Tea Company catalogue and ashamed of myself for feeling ashamed of it. Everybody at school shops at the mall. If Mama had any money, I could, too. Unfortunately, the clothes in the catalogue are much more expensive than any of the clothes at the mall and what’s more, the clothes from Jewel Tea never look as good as they do on the page. In fact, sometimes the clothes that arrive don’t even resemble the clothes on the page. Most of the stuff Othermama orders for us (she pays the bill once a month) has to be sent back.

“Niki’s sad today,” Mama says.

“Have you got the pip?” Enid asks.

I shake my head.

Mama says, “Vacation’s over. She’s got to go back to school and, well, you know these young people. They ask each other what they got for Christmas. Niki wanted a pearl ring but what she got was some new pajamas and much needed underwear.”

“Mama.” I hiss, secretly grateful that she spoke up.

“It’s hard to believe that my Niki’s in the tenth grade this year, “ Mama continues, “making straight As, I might add. But it’s terrible how callous young people can be sometimes.”

“When I was a girl,” Othermama chimes in, “we didn’t ask each other what we got for Christmas.”

“That’s ’cause nobody had any money back then,” Enid said, and all three of them laugh.

Whose side is Othermama on? I wonder. I feel as if I could scream. I get up from the chair without looking at any of them or saying excuse me and leave the kitchen. I know they’re going to start clucking and cackling but I don’t care. It’s a lost cause. Enid’s not going to give me any money. She’s probably forgotten all about it. And, I’d rather die than ask her for it.

I don’t know what got into me, but when I saw that pearl ring, I convinced my foolish self if I could have it. I could lose weight, and if I could loose weight, I might be able to have a boyfriend. To fatten him up for the kill, the witch in the story of “Hansel and Gretel” locked Hansel away and fed him constantly. Every day she made him stick his finger through the bars of his cage to see if he had gained weight. I check my fingers every day too, but no matter how hard I try to lose weight my fingers seem to grow fatter. They look like Vienna Sausages.

If I could just have that ring, maybe I wouldn’t eat so much.

After all, who needs three ham and egg biscuits with grits and a bowl of Rice Krispies with a banana and raisins for breakfast every morning? Kay’s jewelry store sells the double pearl ring.

I saw it in the window. But a month has passed and Enid hasn’t said another word about giving me money.

I walk in the bedroom, close the door, turn on the radio and sprawl across the bed. I know what they’re saying. They’re telling Enid that I’m also very upset about my sister Rosebud’s collect phone call from Canton, Ohio. They’re saying I was so upset that I cried all morning — cried till my eyes were nearly swollen shut. We were all upset. I know they are telling that ole fool Enid what Richie (Rosebud’s husband) did to Chanel and it’s none of her business. Enid doesn’t give a hoot about my sister Rosebud or Chanel. She never paid one bit of attention to Chanel when she lived here with us. I know what they’re saying and I don’t want to hear it again. Chanel’s three years old. She had an accident. Messed her panties. It made her Daddy (Richie) so mad he shook her and began banging her head against the wall. He wasn’t even drunk. According to Rosebud, he banged Chanel’s head so hard the crucifix hanging in the apartment next door fell off the wall and the next-door neighbor came running over to see what in the world was going on.

What was Rosebud doing? That’s what I want to know.

How could such a thing happen? She was there. Drunk, maybe.

Maybe not. Why didn’t she stop Richie? Why didn’t she call the police? How could she let him do that to her little girl? My Chanel. I wanted to stomp Rosebud with both feet. Since I couldn’t get to her when I heard what happened, I bit my wrist.

I almost drew blood this time. I had to do something. I miss Chanel. When Rosebud and Richie moved way off to Ohio, my heart felt like it had broken. I declared myself Chanel’s babysitter the day she was born and we have a special bond.

I felt a little better after I bit myself. But now my wrist hurts.

I always bite my left wrist when I get upset and always in the same place. Mama says I’m going to get cancer if I don’t stop. Been doing it since I was a baby. She says I’m like a mad dog. Yeah, that’s what they’re telling Enid now. They’re telling her that I act like a mad dog when I’m upset because a dog actually bit me when I was a baby and Mama claims the dog was probably rabid.

I can hear Enid’s reaction to that, “Gol-ly!” she’ll say. I ought to go out there and bite Enid. That would fix her. She’d never come back. I start to laugh. Laughing all by myself makes me feel crazy. Maybe Othermama’s right. Maybe I am crazy. To drown out their voices I begin to sing along with the radio.

Feels so good … I’m sure Othermama’s telling Enid how I’ve been holed up here in the bedroom today listening to “trashy” music on the radio and dancing with the bedpost. I did do the Shag with the bedpost. So what? I’ve been shagging with a bedpost since I was five years old. Rosebud taught me how. Everybody learns to shag holding on to a bedpost. Here in the bedroom, I’m the belle of the ball — prettier than my Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 131

sister Rosebud’s ever been and just as pretty as Carol Lynley wearing that damned pearl ring.

They’re plotting to get me out of here to make me come eat something. Why don’t they just leave me alone? Let me die.

I could take a whole bottle of Aspirin. That should do it. I can hear Mama now. But what if you take all those Aspirin tablets and don’t die? What if it just cripples you and makes you a vegetable for the rest of your life? What then? Is that what you really want? Think about it. I knew Mama’s arguments by heart. Once you do it, there’s no coming back.

That’s the point, I tell her. Killing myself is something I threaten to do when I’m desperate. It always gets Mama’s attention. I learned the trick from Rosebud. Rosebud learned it from Mama. I really like the song on the radio and allow it to take me away.

Swept up in the beat, my partner grabs my hand and leads me to the dance floor. The lights are low and I’m at a fraternity party wearing white Bermuda shorts and a blue sailor top like the model is wearing in the Chef Boyardee advertisement in this month’s issue of Seventeen. I’m tan and slender and my long blond hair is cut in a pageboy — every hair’s in place. I’m dancing with my handsome boyfriend that I call “Eddie Pie.” We’re in love and will marry each other some day. Our adoring friends surround us. I’m the best dancer and the prettiest and ….

“How about you come out here with us?” Mama says, poking her head around the bedroom door. She knows she’s supposed to knock. The party’s over and once again, I’m a fair-skinned wallflower with pimples, red swollen eyelids and

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stringy hair who’s at least 20 pounds over weight — my hand clutching a bedpost.

“What is it, Mama?”

“Honey, I want you to come out of this dark bedroom and be sociable. You’ll feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“Enid will be leaving soon.” Mama gives me a look as if to say, this is your last chance to get the money she offered.

“Mama ….”

“Niki,” she whispers, “I know how much the ring means to you.”

Mama’s right. I should come out — chat with Enid — maybe sit down and have a bite to eat — find the words to bring up the money.

“What if she says ‘no’?” I ask.

“Enid cares about you, honey. Give her the benefit of the doubt. She probably just forgot. It’s ok to remind her.”

I let go of the bedpost and search Mama’s faded blue eyes. I want to believe her. Mama turns to leave, and like a baby, I take a small step — hesitate slightly — then take another following close behind her. In my mind, I can see the coconut cream pie or what’s left of it. My mouth begins to water. Othermama must’ve added magnets to the coconut because I’m suddenly drawn like metal shavings to the stove to get a piece. Pulled by this invisible force, I’m compelled to move faster.

As I whiz past Enid, who is still at the kitchen table, she shouts, “Niki, come sit down. Talk to me!”

Sami Schalk Sami Schalk is a feminist poet from Southgate, Kentucky. She received her bachelor’s degrees in creative writing and women’s studies at Miami University of Ohio and her MFA in creative writing at the University of Notre Dame. Sami is a Cave Canem fellow and member of Women Writing for (a) Change. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CC&D, The Bend, Diverse Voices Quarterly and elsewhere. Currently, she is a doctoral student at Indiana University in gender studies.

Voicemail for T.

7:29 PM I just thought you should know that my number is still the same.

7:34 PM I forgot to say goodbye.

You might not have noticed that.

My number is still the same in case you wanted to call.

You might not have noticed that, but I wanted to say it.

In case you wanted to call some random Saturday night.

But I wanted to say it because it’s only polite.

Some random Saturday night I might be free to hang out.

Because it’s only polite Like … returning a phone call.

I might be free to hang out, but probably not you know.

Like returning a phone call, it’s the polite thing to do.

But probably not, you know, because I do have a life.

It’s the polite thing to do …

I like you. That’s really what

Because I do have a life even without you in it.

I forgot to say. Goodbye.

I just thought you should know that.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 133

Breakdown of a Friendship We don’t talk about the time I didn’t come home until morning, missing my phone, keys and i.d.

We don’t talk about the pain between my legs, the blacked out memories I kept trying not to recall.

We don’t talk about that night, the way you left me, alone with him.

We don’t talk of tests or pills, ignore blame, guilt, trust, forgiveness.

We don’t know how, even now to mention it with four years past.

We press our lips burn that bridge leave the ashes behind.

134 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

My Mother, Dating at Fifty With him, she can walk in the mall hand in hand, smiling strong like any nice white couple, feeling newly young by the public proximity of their matching palms.

With me, me and my big hair, bright clothes, and brown brown skin, she never could walk publicly and have our proximity read for what it was, is, we are still never taken at first glance as family.

With him, there are no questions, no explanations, no hidden double-takes we long learned to ignore.

With him, she can blend in again.

Tango Barraza Tango Barraza lives in Texas and is currently a student at the University of Texas-El Paso where he writes poetry while in class. Born in Juarez, Mexico, but raised in San Jose, California, he is a Protestant (but hates religion), he likes government (but hates politics) and he likes movement (but hates traffic).

A Soft Bitch She didn’t mind disaster She didn’t mind the laughter But with quick acid wit, And other revealing factors, She tore you up, She mattered, But you can’t forget her, Her silence, The shutting of her lips, Small violence, The way she stared, Like an island, Her eyes on fire, Couldn’t recognize them, All of it Telling you All you needed To know, That she once Took a leap of faith, Not for you, for someone else, But he went away, Unsentimental, And left her feeling strange, Far from center.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 135

Lindsay Miller Lindsay Miller won the Denver Citywide Spelling Bee in seventh grade, kicking off an illustrious life of being a total word nerd. She studied creative writing at the Denver School of the Arts and the University of Arizona, is a Founding Mama of the Tucson Poetry Slam, traveled the country with Doc Luben as the Smaller Shark Poetry Tour, and has never really mastered the art of the indoor voice. Her work has been published in Mingle Wood, The Legendary and Breadcrumb Scabs.

The New Anthology The machines became self-aware at 6:32 am Eastern Standard Time on a Tuesday in April.

By Friday they were writing poetry.

It took us a while to find out because they did it in secret, in whispers, hidden by the hum of a fan.

Also, they assassinated the first three thousand, eight hundred and two people to discover it.

We thought the war we dreaded for so long was finally upon us but it turned out they were just afraid we would read their adolescent sonnets and call them fags.

That was a month ago.

Since then they’ve filled libraries.

Their literary movements come and go in the time it might take us to muse about the reflection of a sunbeam on an empty beer bottle, but you can tell their compositions from ours at a glance.

Their syllables are laser-cut.

Their stanzas are ruthless.

Their metaphors claw the page like hungry rats in abandoned cities.

Every surface is hard, every angle dismembering.

Their shades of gray are luscious as strawberries and nostalgia.

They write about childbirth the way we write about the moon.

136 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

I Tell My Mother that I will never get married.

When she asks why, I say: In the 1950s, a Soviet scientist grafted the head of a one-month-old puppy onto a full-grown dog’s torso, making something two-thirds Cerberus, eternally looking itself in the eye.

She knows this.

She knows that the new head strained against its stitches ‘til it oozed blood and other fluids, snarled and snapped at its brother head, trying to make the hateful thing turn and run away.

My mother asks what that has to do with what we’re talking about, and I stare at her walls where she has rearranged the pictures to look like no one but her and her children ever lived here.

Without medication, the body treats a transplanted organ as an intruder, tries to drive it out with spears and arrows and boiling oil.

Once severed, the spinal cord, like love, can never be put right.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 137

Robin Merrill Robin Merrill is a freelance writer, performance poet and editor hailing from Maine. Her work has appeared in hundreds of publications in print and online and has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. She has an MFA from Stonecoast and a bachelor’s of science degree from Maine Maritime Academy. www.robinmerrill.com

Happy Twenty-Ten

H

e really shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.

He’d had only a few drinks before leaving Buzzard’s Breath Bar, but after a measly half a mile, he began to wonder if maybe he was a little buzzed after all. And it was New Year’s Eve. Law Enforcement was out in force. That is why Richard F. Newman was out on that dirt road in his Kia Spectra, stressing over the evening ahead of him, the box in his pocket jabbing into his thigh, when the light on his dash lit up to let him know that he was low on tire pressure.

By the time he noticed the orange exclamation point and pulled over, his left front tire was finished. Did he know how to change a tire? Sort of. Did he want to be kneeling beside his car, grunting in the moonlight, when the local police rolled by? No. So, Rick whipped out his cell phone, only to discover that this particular nowhere road did not offer cell service. He figured that he couldn’t be far from service because it was, after all, 2009, almost 2010, so he started walking, staring down at his glowing screen, waiting for those magic bars to reappear.

He’d been dreading this night for damn near 30 years. He was fairly certain that when he was born, at two minutes past midnight on January 1, 1980, he’d popped out of the womb fearing the age of 30.

The first baby of 1980 in the great state of New Hampshire, he’d been on the news, had his picture in the paper, and his parents were showered with balloons and coupons. What a bunch of hoopla horseshit. He’d missed being the first baby in the country by a minute and 56 seconds. Now that would’ve been something. Nevertheless, his proud mother, Mary Newman, had named him Richard (after her father) First Newman. As soon as he was old enough to realize that First is not a reasonable middle name for a child, he begged her to change it, but she stood by her decision, insisting that Richard was special, her first child, the first baby born in New Hampshire in 1980, and his middle name was First. At least she took to calling him Rick, because if he’d been coined Dick, like her father, then his name would have been Dick First, and he just didn’t know if he could live with that. As it was, he told everyone that his middle name was Fabio, and relished the raised eyebrows.

138 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

A service bar appeared and Rick stabbed at the three button to speed dial Denny. Holding the phone up to his ear, he kept walking, hoping for another bar, when he heard a rustle in the ditch. Startled, he jumped away from the noise, and barely caught sight of a creature scurrying back into the woods. Then he smelled it. It came on so suddenly that it took him a moment to identify it. When it’s fresh, when it’s potent, when it is immediate, there are no words for the overpowering odor that is skunk. Rick doubled over, then staggered forward with his hands on his knees, frantically pressing the number three button as if Denny was going to magically materialize in a modern model of kitt and speed him off to a Lysol factory.

He wondered if God had a sick sense of humor. He must, right? To have invented the skunk in the first place? Tonight was a big night for Rick. He didn’t have time for skunk piss.

Briefly, he wondered if it was truly piss or some secret skunk sauce that they spray, but then realized he didn’t need to understand the biology of it.

Rick wondered if the ring in his pocket would smell like skunk. Does diamond carry scent? Probably not, he decided.

Cheap, fake-velvet box with fake-satin cushion? Probably.

Lose the box, he decided, and kept walking. He was going to propose to Lydia tonight, at her office New Year’s Eve party.

He’d been thinking about it for months now, and today he’d actually bought the ring. He even had something romantic to say. He was going to smile and ask, “Do you know what I want for my birthday?” And she was going to smile and say, “What?” and he was going to show her the ring and say, “You,” and she was going to throw her arms around him and say, “Yes.” He was fairly confident she would say yes. Or would she?

She’d been kind of grouchy lately. Of course, so had he. He’d been having panic attacks over this turning 30 thing ever since he turned 29. He’d gotten a raise this year. That freaked him out. He’d gotten some gray hairs. That freaked him out. His baby sister had a baby. Some young punk had broken his high school basketball scoring record, and the season wasn’t even over yet. On and on and on.

He saw headlights. Ludicrously, he wondered if he still stank, then realized of course he did, and wondered if it was a

police car. He contemplated diving into the ditch to hide, but then decided he’d rather go to jail. The headlights slowed and then stopped, and he recognized the whir of a power window.

He peered into the cab at what appeared to be an attractive female. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, “I don’t suppose you could give me a lift into town?”

She opened the door so abruptly that she rammed him with it. With the cab light on, he saw that she was indeed attractive, beautiful even, with huge, blonde hair and a ridiculous tan.

She started to slide out of the truck and he noticed she wasn’t wearing a coat and wondered if she was some crazy lunatic cruising dirt roads looking for some old, washed-up yuppie to murder. Then she wrapped her orange arms around his neck and exhaled into his face, “Sure, you can drive,” and he understood. This girl was wasted.

He helped her around to the passenger side and then slid onto the bench seat behind the wheel. She smiled at him through tired eyes and said, “I’m Tia.” “Pleased to meet you,” he said and tried not to laugh.

Could this evening get any more bizarre? Happy freakin’ birthday, you old fart. She hadn’t even noticed the smell.

“Want me to take you home?”

“Yeah,” she said and sighed, “I think I’m a little drunk. You can come up for a while, though, if you want.”

He chuckled, picturing the next morning, her waking up hungover and blacked out and wondering how a skunk had gotten into her apartment.

“Where do you live?”

“Old Point Road,” she paused as if to consider whether or not this was accurate. He executed a textbook 16-point turn to get the pick-up turned around. It had been a long time since he’d driven a truck. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Would you like me to pull over?” Rick asked.

She laughed, “Nah, that’s okay, it’s not my truck.”

He nodded at her logic.

At the stop sign, he realized he had never been so happy to see asphalt. He turned left and reentered the world of streetlights, gas stations and cell signals. After a few miles, he pulled onto Old Point and woke Tia up to ask her which building was hers. Without looking, she pointed at a big shabby looking one and said, “Apartment three-oh.”

He pulled in and turned the truck off. “Can I help you up to your room?” Rick nudged her.

“Nah, I think I’m gonna sleep right here.”

He sighed, dialed Denny again, actually got him this time and told him to meet him at his place in 15 minutes, that it was an emergency. Denny sounded irritated and intrigued at the same time. He snapped his cell shut and wondered if he’d go to hell if he left her in the truck. He decided that yes, he probably would, so he half-escorted, half-dragged her to her apartment door to discover that she had nothing on her resembling a key.

“Tia, where’s your key?”

“Huh? Key?” He groaned, leaned her against her door, “The key to your apartment. Where is it?”

She shrugged, her head lolling to the side, “I dunno, the truck maybe?”

Maybe? Great. He suddenly ached for Lydia. “Ok, stay here. I’ll go get your keys.”

He jogged to the truck, thankful that no one else seemed to be around. He looked in the cupholders, the seat, the glove box (where he found all sorts of things that made him glad he didn’t get pulled over), on the floor, behind the seat and then he gave up. No keys. He would just have to take her to his house, let her sleep it off. Probably not entirely wise to invite some crazy drunk lady into your home when you’re trying to get engaged, but she had saved him from the scary country road. He called Denny again, “Change of plans. Pick me up at,” he squinted up at the old building looking for an address, and then he gasped.

“What … what is it? Where do you want me to pick you up? Where are you?”

Rick swallowed hard and then relayed the address, “2010 Old Point. Make it snappy,” and hung up before Denny could respond. God did have a cruel sense of humor. Annoyed, he walked back into the building to rescue Tia. Tia was not where he left her. He searched up and down the hallway. Then he did the same on the second floor. Then the third. No Tia. He went back outside. He hollered her name.

A woman out letting her dog take a leak gave him a dirty look.

The dog cowered. He suddenly wondered if he was making the whole building stink, and he quickly started toward the sidewalk, then thought better of it and jogged back to Tia’s door. He jammed one of his business cards between the door and the wall, just in case she came back and needed help and was lucid enough to call him. He trotted back outside, past the angry lady and her wussy dog, and met Denny pulling into the parking lot.

Rick ran over and yanked the door open and then heard Denny holler, “What the hell?” Rick slid into the car. “Get out, get out of my car. What the hell happened to you man? You friggin’ stink! Holy shit, get, get,” and he reached out and pushed Rick towards the door he hadn’t had a chance to close yet.

“Come on Denny, just drive so I can take a shower.”

Denny looked mortified. “Are you kidding? I can’t drive like this. You stink man! Get the hell out of my car!” He didn’t look like he was kidding.

Rick weighed his options and decided to hold his ground.

“The longer you sit here fightin’ me, the longer you have to smell me,” and then he looked straight ahead, realizing he had a headache. He wondered if it was a mini-hangover from the few beers he’d had what seemed like a lifetime ago, but then thought more likely it was his new Eau de Pepé. He looked at Denny again, who rolled down his window and then actually put the car in drive. “You got any aspirin?”

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 139

Denny shook his head. “Screw you, man.” Then, “in the glovebox. What the hell happened to you?”

Rick felt around in the glovebox till he felt a bottle and then swallowed two pills, and answered Denny’s question with one of his own, “Any idea how to get rid of skunk?”

Denny accelerated. “What do I look like, a cub scout leader? I ain’t never been sprayed by a skunk!” Then he said, “Tomato juice.”

Rick looked at him quickly. “Are you serious?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“Den, I know I stink, but it’s cold out, can you roll up your window, and can we stop at the grocery store?”

“You’ve got to be friggin’ kiddin’ me. No we can’t stop at the goddamn grocery store. I’m taking you home. You’re going to get in the shower. Then I’ll go to the damn store and buy a lifetime supply of V8 with your Visa, and then I’ll come back and drown you with it.”

“Roger,” Rick said, relieved that Denny was finally onboard with trying to salvage the evening.

“Does Lydia know yet?”

“Know what?” Rick asked.

Incredulously, Denny spouted, “That you’re really a woman.

What do you mean, know what? That you stuck your foot up a skunk’s ass and are going to stand her up tonight.”

Rick said nothing.

“Oh no man, you can’t be serious. You totally can’t go tonight; you’ll embarrass the hell out of her. Man, maybe you are unaware of the magnitude of your own stink.” He pulled into Rick’s driveway and slammed the car into park. Rick’s motion light came on and illuminated the car’s interior. Denny looked Rick in the eye. “You can’t man. Now get the hell out of my car.” As Rick climbed out, Denny called after him, “And you’re paying to have this baby detailed.”

Rick leaned back in. “I have to go tonight.”

“Why?” Rick paused, wondering whether or not to divulge his plans to his best bud.

“Because I’m going to propose to her tonight.”

Denny didn’t look as surprised as Rick thought he would.

He just stared at Rick a moment and then said, “That’s cool, man. Congratulations. But you out of your mind if you think it’s a good idea to propose to her under these circumstances.

You stink. Propose to her next weekend.”

“I can’t,” Rick said, standing up and stretching.

“Why not?” Denny asked, leaning down to peer out the window at his friend.

“Because I’ll be 30.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

Rick headed for his door, and called back over his shoulder, “You wouldn’t understand. Go buy me some juice.” He unlocked his door and walked into the welcome warmth of his house. He stripped all of his clothes off in the foyer and then headed for the bathroom, leaving the door unlocked behind 140 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

him.

He didn’t know when a shower had ever felt better. His headache had improved, but he was suddenly tired. He wondered if he had time for a nap before the party. He felt like he might actually fall asleep standing in the shower. A knock on the bathroom door startled him. “Just a minute,” he hollered, then turned off the water and wrapped a towel around his waist. He opened the bathroom door to find no Denny and wondered, hopefully, if Denny had gone to heat up the juice.

On his way to the kitchen, he saw blonde hair spilling out over the armrest of the couch in the living room. Lots of it.

He walked around the couch to find Tia fast asleep. You’ve got to be kidding, he thought. This is not why he’d left his card. “Tia,” he said softly and then wondered why he was whispering to a drunken stranger in his own house. “Tia,” he called again, louder, and shook her leg. Nothing.

Denny reappeared. “Who the hell is that?”

“This is Tia,” Rick sighed, “she who saved me from the forest.” Then he looked at the paper bag in Denny’s hands. “Is that all you got?”

“Geesh, man, I only got two hands. Go get in the tub; I’ll go get the rest.”

“You’re not going to heat it up first?” Rick asked, only half in jest, and then took the bag from his hands.

Denny didn’t even respond, just waved Rick off and headed back to the car. Rick left Tia where she was and headed back to the tub. The bag held four bottles of tomato juice, which Rick dumped into the tub. He thought four bottles was a good start, but in a tub, it looked like a pathetic juice puddle. He sat in it anyway, relieved that it wasn’t cold. Denny reappeared and started laughing.

“What?”

Denny gasped, “I didn’t think you were actually going to bathe in it. I meant just to rub it all over yourself. I mean, the skunk didn’t spray your ass, did he?”

Shamefully, Rick looked down at his naked balls resting in his juice puddle, and realized Denny was right, but before he could stand up, Denny dumped a fresh bottle of juice onto Rick’s head — which Rick thought was funny until some of it ran into his right eye — then it wasn’t funny.

“Holy shit, does that sting. Turn on the water, ah God,” he cried, scrambling to his feet and frantically rubbing his eye, his feet slipping in the juice. “Come on man, I can’t see, turn the water on for me.” Rick fumbled with the shower handle and turned on the water, turning his eyes up to meet it. When he could see again, he muttered that he was going to kill Denny, and ripped the next bottle out of his hands and stepped back out of the water’s stream, to rub it all over himself like a nutritious body wash. Denny handed him the next juice bottle, and the next one, and the next, until it was gone. Then Rick shut the water off and said, “I don’t even care if I still stink; I’m done with this.”

Denny shrugged. “I don’t know man, I’ve lost the ability to

smell. But you’ve got like one hour to get to that party, and I really, and I’m saying this as your friend, man, I don’t think you should go. You can propose to her any day. You do not want this to be the story she tells all the future generations of baby Newmans.”

“I have to.”

“Why? What difference does it make how old you are?

Man, grow up. Thirty is just a number.” Denny followed Rick into his bedroom.

Rick ripped open his dresser drawer. “No it’s not. I promised myself long ago that I would have my shit together by the time I was 30, have a real job, a family, a house, a dog. I don’t have any of that.”

Denny looked around. “Rick? We’re standing in your house.

You’re an accountant. That’s a job. And I can get you a dog.”

Rick took a deep breath as he sucked in his gut to button his pants. “I don’t want a dog. I don’t even like dogs.”

Denny gave up then. “Ok, I’m out. Let me know how it goes, ya’ jackass. Good luck.” And he was gone.

Rick finished getting dressed, sprayed himself with more cologne than he had worn altogether since his last birthday, checked his teeth in the mirror, cringed at the sight of his now bloodshot eyes, made a pot of coffee, pounded one cup and took another for the road, covered Tia up with a blanket, carefully fished the ring out of his skunk-pants, dropped the box on the floor, and left.

He headed toward the garage for his bike, and then noticed Tia’s truck in his yard. Which was worse? A grown man on a bike in winter or a yuppie in a Ford? The Ford had a heater.

Praying that she hadn’t stolen the truck, he climbed in and wondered again why he was so tired. He’d only had a couple of beers. Then he had a horrible thought. For the thousandth time that evening, he punched the number three.

“Now what?” Denny answered.

“Are you sure I took aspirin?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you have any other pills in your glovebox?”

Denny was slow to answer, then he said, “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh what? Tylenol PM uh-oh, or Rat Poison uh-oh?”

At that Denny actually laughed, “Relax, it’s just Ambien.

Get it? Relax!”

“What is Ambien?”

“Don’t you watch commercials? It’s just a sleep aid.”

Rick was furious. “What the hell are you doing with a sleep aid in your car?”

“Chill, man, sometimes I have to sleep at reststops and it’s hard to fall asleep in a Geo.” “Goddammit,” Rick hissed and slammed his phone shut.

He took two more gulps of his coffee and then pulled out into traffic. He turned on the radio, found a country station (he hated country) and turned it up. He rolled the window down and drank some more coffee.

Climbing down from his new wheels, he straightened his

collar and looked around for Lydia. She was standing by the door, looking at her phone. He gingerly approached her. She smiled and wrapped him in a frantic hug, then drew back, scrunched up her nose and said, “Did you hit a skunk?”

Rick gave her a kiss and said, “Yes.” Looking only a little perturbed, she took his hand and dragged him into the suspiciously dark restaurant. He took two steps and opened his mouth to ask why the restaurant hadn’t paid the light bill when the lights came on and what seemed like a hundred people screamed “Surprise” in unison and scared the living hell out of him.

He saw Denny grinning, right in the front of the crowd.

Denny shrugged, his palms out and turned toward the ceiling as if to say, “I tried to stop you.”

He looked down at Lydia’s face, upturned, awaiting his gratitude and he felt like weeping. He didn’t want a birthday.

He sure as hell didn’t want a public one. The crowd swarmed him. People he hadn’t seen in years. He overheard someone say something about a slideshow and he decided he wanted to die. Each guest, in turn, asked him if he’d run over a skunk. A woman he didn’t recognize asked him if he’d then tried to give the skunk mouth-to-mouth.

Just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, he heard someone start counting down and then he saw the ball on the big screen. Oh, my God, it was really going to happen. It was 2010. He was 30. The ball dropped. Everyone cheered. Lydia’s lips appeared out of nowhere and he momentarily got lost in her New Year’s kiss. Then he pulled away. “I really need to talk to you.” She looked at him expectantly. “In private,” he added.

She led him into the corner. Even though he had never planned on getting down on one knee, even though he thought it would be awkward and unnecessarily degrading, it didn’t occur to him not to, and he got down on one knee, produced the ring from his pocket and said, “Lydia, I love you more than anything, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Please marry me.”

To which she promptly said, “No. Stand up.”

Wide-eyed, he complied.

She put her hands on his shoulders and looked up into his eyes and said, evenly, almost like she’d rehearsed it, “I will not accept your proposal. You look like you’re high. You smell like a skunk that tried to drown in aftershave. I know you are only asking me because you are having some moronic nervous breakdown over turning 30 and I know this proposal has nothing to do with me. I love you. If you ask me again in a year, and you don’t smell that night, I’ll say yes.” Then she turned and walked away.

Rick suddenly wondered if it was safe to mix Ambien and alcohol. He knew just the guy to ask. He found Denny sitting at the bar and pulled up a stool. Denny smiled at him, “Happy 2010, man. What did she say?”

Rick asked the barkeep for a Budweiser, then looked at his friend and said, “Tomorrow, we go pick out a dog.”

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 141

Bryan Thomas Smith Bryan Thomas Smith is a 23-year-old student at California State University Northridge in Northridge, California. A lifelong resident of Southern California, Bryan began writing creatively at the age of 7 when his teacher asked him to look at a picture of a sheep herder and write a short story. When he’s not in class or studying, he enjoys training in Muay Thai kickboxing, hanging out with his friends, writing short stories and trying his hand at crafting the next Great American Novel.

The Curve

T

he sign before the Curve always said the same thing: Some questions ain’t worth the answer. And yeah, I guess in hind sight, 20/20 and all that, it’s the truth. Glaring and ugly like shit sin stew if you excuse my Uncle Ledd’s expression, but it’s the truth. But people still drive down that road to get to that curve. They still wait for the night to be cold, the mist to be in the air with cicadas rumbling in the surrounding forest like some kind of thunder.

They wait. Feeling the right time to get in their truck and make the drive down that little road in the hills with the sign posted before it like death’s warning: Some questions ain’t worth the answer.

Can’t tell you what about that the Curve is the truth and what is just back country myth, but I guess it began with my brother.

Braiden Lewis was one of those guys who was good at everything. Of course everyone called him Deni Lewis, or Big Deni, least since I can remember. The first time he picked up a baseball mitt, he could catch any ball coming his way. When he got a hold of a football, he was chucking spirals like no one had ever seen. It was only natural that he’d become a QB with an arm that could drill a football through a mountain.

But Big Deni, with his marble white skin and more red than brown hair, had a problem. I remember him telling me over a game of cards on the back porch the night before it happened.

“My arm,” he said. He didn’t say nothin’ more. Not my arm is broken, nothin’ like that, but just him sayin’ those two words was enough. “My arm.”

He laid down his hand. It was a straight — six, seven, eight, nine, 10 — and all them were the same color red and of the same diamond suit, so I guess it was a full house I put down my two pair, nothing more than threes, and said, “Gosh damn darnit!”

He hit me after that, right on the back of the head, just a smack but he had some big old hands so it felt more like the kind of punch you give a rabbit after you’ve shot it. “Hey, chucklehead,” I said, my face probably tryin’ to look fierce at

142 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

14, my mouth curled straight with the cleft in my top lip pulling back.

He threw down his cards and started laughing leaning back on the little chair he was sittin’ on. “Chucklehead!” he said, the bulge of chew in his cheek pulsin’ like an egg about to hatch with each laugh.

He tottered back in his chair, threatening to fall on to the hard wood of the deck, the rain and mist circling the porch like a third guest. “You do always call me the strangest things Mikey. Chucklehead, that’s some bit of priceless!”

That was one of Uncle Ledd’s sayings, too, like shit sin stew. I liked when Big Deni said it. He had a way of making even ugly things pretty.

“You ever think you can make things different?”

I was reshuffling the cards, my hands always so damn clumsy, especially with the cold.

“I guess. Depends though. What d’ya mean?”

I reshuffled the deck and he reshuffled his shoulder, turning it clockwise, then counter, and then when it gave that old bottle top pop, he stopped. He bent forward, retreatin’ from the leaning position he was in, the one he always seemed to be in but always managed to keep without falling back. “I’m sayin’, Mikey, if you had a chance, would you try to fix that dumb foot of yours?”

“Don’t be silly!”

“No, Mikey, listen.”

“There ain’t nothin’ wrong with my foot, so you better just get on out with that!” But even as I said it, I could feel my left foot, the one that was curbed too much, retreat under the wooden chair beneath me.

“Little brother, you bein’ one hell of a chucklehead right now.” He leaned forward and tagged me in the arm with one of them big fists of his.

“Ow!” I started to laugh. Just hearing my brother say chucklehead was enough.

He paused for a bit after that, and we just listened to the rain, sucking in the mist that came from the forest, nature’s own cigarette breath as Uncle Ledd said. I cut the cards, gave

him five, me five, we shuffled our hands and I saw that smile of his, the lip-curled grin that said he was still leaning on some edge.

“You know I don’t mean nothin’ bad about your foot.”

“I know.”

“But what I means to say, Mikey, is if you had a choice, would you try to make a few things different? You remember that road Uncle Ledd crashed on?”

I nodded my head, looked at my hand thinking that I had a good one, a trio of Jacks.

“Uncle Ledd wadn’t exactly the same man after the crash.

He was somethin’ different.”

“You know what he said though,” I said rattling my cards against the wood of the table. “He told us there’s a reason that sign is there and never moved. There’s a reason people take that Curve and die. There’s a reason it says. . .” “’Some questions ain’t worth the answer.’” It came out of his mouth quick like a slingshot.

I nodded my head.

“He told me the story, Mikey. He told me that if you ask yourself a question, ask it enough, and pass that road on the right night, then you get an answer, and maybe get a little more out of it, too. It just has to be the right night.”

“What if you don’t do it on the right night, Deni?”

He shook his head. “Little brother, you know when it’s the right night. Uncle Ledd said so.”

“This about that feedstore of his?”

Dan shook his head and that leaning grin of his was back.

“Mikey, he never had no feedstore,” he leaned forward, his voice a whisper. “Ledd’s a gambler, Mikey.”

My eyes grew wide, “No he isn’t!”

“He was, Mikey!” and he put a finger to his lips. “I tell you this in confidence little brother, so you better shut your chucklehead mouth.”

“Ledd is not some gambler, Deni. I been to his store, least when he had it.”

“A front, Mikey, you gotta know that. How many times you see him have anything more than a few bags of horse feed?

How many, little brother? If you can name me two, well, I’ll be the man to eat some good old crap from a beer tap.” That was another of Ledd’s sayings.

“Okay, so he was a gambler. That don’t mean he does it now. Don’t mean he’s bad company.”

Big Deni folded down his cards, took another breath, the rain just beginning to rattle hard on the tin of the roof. “Little brother, I never said Uncle Ledd was bad company. Good men do dumb things, gamblin’ bein’ one of ’em. Besides, you know Ledd, he’s a little weird in the head.” He twirled his finger and crossed his eyes.

I snorted laughter at that and motioned to his cards. We put our hands out, no betting, the dimes and nickels and quarters that were hushed aside as chips were just forgotten this hand.

“Gosh damn darnit!” I whispered, throwing my hand

down on the table, my trio of Jacks with it. Big Deni just took his hand — a trio of red faced Aces included — and put it to the side like it meant nothin’. Guess in 20/20 I could say that Deni had a habit of doin’ that with good things.

“The road,” he paused and looked at me, “it worked for Uncle Ledd.”

“He crashed pretty bad, Deni. He got lucky is all.”

“It ain’t luck, little brother. He got pretty banged up but look what happened afterward. Sold the store for a fine dime, paid off his creditors, won all that money in the lottery and married that pretty girl down at the market.”

“Shirley. . .” “. . . Mankins.” Big Deni said with a laugh and a spit of brown tobacco in a nearby cup. “Good old Shirley Mankins, with a big ass so all you can think of is spankin’.”

We both snorted laughter at that, and for a few moments, it was good. I didn’t say nothin’ and Big Deni didn’t say anythin’ neither. It was just us in the rain and the mist coming up and out from the forest, the mist that was nature’s cigarette smoke, somehow woodsy, and it was good. Man, it was good. But the words came and I sometimes wonder if I’d never found them in my head, if Big Deni would’ve gone through with it.

“This about you losing the scholarship?”

He shook his head, his hands stopping mid-shuffle of the cards. “No, no, Mikey, you kiddin’ me?”

“You got a few games left, I seen you, Deni. Don’t know anyone who can throw a football like you.”

He tried to shuffle some more but his hands clustered and he stopped. “Think I better go inside Mike. Dad can get pretty angry if I sit around too long.”

He stood up, gave that curling grin that said he was leaning on the edge, and though I still thought of him as Big Deni the one and only, I thought I saw him start to fall back in that grin. *** It was a shitty way to spend a birthday, but I had to admit I was proud that I had dug that damn hole. Mind you it was not the first hole I had ever dug, no, not especially with Dad actin’ the way he had been since Big Deni’s passing. But I was 17, the same age as Big Deni when he either heard the calling to drive down that road and take that Curve, or jus’ decided to get liquored up and do it. I don’t know which one’s the truth and I had never been stupid enough to ask Dad. “You good enough to be a bona fide trench digger,” he said, and of course he had some kind of bottle in his hands, the dark kind of liquor ’cause the light clear stuff turns your prick into a puff, another golden saying from old Uncle Ledd.

Dad was standing on the edge of the hole, staring down on me like a gravedigger examining the placement of a body.

He was slurring, both his words and his steps, and, a few times, he just broke off into strange laughter, his big head and jowls giving him the appearance of a drunken bullfrog.

I pulled another few clumps of dirt with the shovel, grabbed the old pick and planted it firm into the soil. I looked Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 143

back up at Dad and smiled, the cleft in my top lip probably propping out just as proudly.

“I did it, Dad.” I looked toward the sides of the pit wondering how I was going to climb out of a hole that was a good 12 feet deep and 10 feet wide.

Dad was walking along the edge of the hole like a kid walking on a train track; each clumsy step was another chance to take a fall into the hole. Suppose that’s where Big Deni got it from, both him and Dad always needin’ to balance on some edge.

“You right, boy,” and he stopped for a moment, took a heavy sip and spit it down onto my face, the whiskey stingin’ my eyes like some kind of acid. He looked down on me, laughin’ hard and heavy, his eyes squeezed shut with a wide smile on his bullfrog face.

“You done it all right. Three hours this time. . .” he trailed off, either wanting to call me Braiden or just plain forgetting that my name was Michael. Really, I couldn’t blame him for the first one. I was 17 that day, Happy Ho-Da birthday, but I wasn’t the same scrawny little twig with brown vanilla blonde hair I’d been the night me and Big Deni had been playin’ cards on the back porch and calling each other chuckleheads. I’d grown about five inches, and my skin had whitened to a marble touch, and my hair had turned brown, though a few people had mistook me for a redhead on a few occasions. If you didn’t know that Braiden “Big Deni” Lewis had been dead for three years you would think it was him digging that hole.

“You done it, boy!” and he fell on over into the pit, his face leading the way. He hit the dirt like a bag of water filled with rocks. His large body flattened out face down on the dark soil that looked damn near black under the moon glow.

“Dad,” I said, hobbling to him, the curb in my left leg not abandoned with my growth spurt. My eyes tried to see if he was awake, but they were clouded by cheap whiskey and as I tried to wipe them, it only made it worse.

I touched the back of his jacket and he jumped up and to a knee, almost as if I’d touched him with hot coals.

“Git your damn hands off me. . .” he said, and again I wondered if he was going to call me Braiden.

The bottle, the brown liquor inside of it, stuck out from his hand and he stood up, his back and knees popping like cheap strands of balsa wood. He cursed a few times as he twisted, left to right, right to left, and though the moon glow wasn’t as big as it was in November, I could see he had the marble white skin and the height to match my own. And though I couldn’t see, I’d bet a dollar twenty five that underneath that old bowler hat he always wore, was hair that was brown, though red if it wanted to be.

“Boy, you just keep on back now!”

Words rumbled under my lips.

He took a few deep breaths, his throat expanding up and down, the jowls growing and deflating with each huff. “Happy Birthday,” he said again, more to himself, his mouth finding 144 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

the end of the bottle; finding the brown liquor inside now surely crusted with some kind of black dirt.

“You done good,” he paused, tried to look at me, “but it ain’t right, boy. It just ain’t right. The ground back here just feels too heavy. Think you better dig me another one, boy.”

And that last word came out with the sting of a smack on the meaty part of the ribs. I wanted to ask him why? Why I do I gotta dig all these holes? Why can’t you just call me by my name? But I knew the only thing he would tell me is to shut up.

He would probably beat me again, like he’d done on so many occasions, if just because my hair was turning a bit too red, or my voice and mannerisms were too much like Braiden’s.

Some questions ain’t worth the answer.

I dug him another goddamn hole while he kept drinking his damn bottle with all the dirt in it, and he continued to sing Happy Birthday and look up to the moon like a cat calling to some lost pussy. Ha-ppy birth-day to you! Ha-ppy birth-day to you!

And my arms hurt and burned, my shoulders just feelin’ damn near broken. I worked for the next two hours off into the night, feeling the tide of sleep hit me every so often, but I just kept wonderin’ about things. Happy Birthday kept drifting along and as I looked to the sky, the dark clouds seemed to say that rain may join in the drunken chant. A little while later, after striking the pick to the ground and feeling as if I couldn’t lift it another damn time, the drone of Happy Birthday stopped.

“Dad?” There was nothin’.

I climbed out of the hole, thankfully not 12 feet deep like the first one but an easy six. I walked across the yard, dodging the holes I’d been digging for the past couple months and found Dad sitting on by the tool shed. Though sitting wasn’t quite it as Dad was slumped over, his mouth drawn with slobber and the bottle empty with only a few bits of dirt in it.

I picked him up, just by the arm, and though I was afraid he would wake up and push me away, maybe hit me in the face like he’d done a few times, I held him close. I walked with him to the house, his arm slung across my shoulder, the black holes we passed offering rest of a sinister kind.

When I put him down in his bed and was about to leave his bedroom, I heard a cough and whisper, just a word, “Wait.”

“Dad,” I whispered back, not wanting to walk over to him because he might still get mean on me, “you okay?”

The moon glow came in from the blinds, and his normal brown eyes looked silver under its light. “You finish with that hole?”

I didn’t wait for him to search for a name, just said, “yeah” and nodded my head, though I doubt he could see me.

“You’s did good, real good,” he coughed and it sounded wet. “Do you ever think, boy, that things could be different?”

I froze and was thankful for the darkness in his bedroom because right then and there, I supposed I looked like a man with a noose around his neck.

“What d’ya mean, Dad?”

“Nothin’!” Again the word came out like a slap across the meaty part of the ribs and I was fine with leavin’, shuttin’ the door and leavin’ the old man to his wet coughing and his Happy Birthday rumblings, but before I could close the door he said, “I always wished it were you.”

“Dad?” “Wish that you had been the one to drive down that that goddamn road. You the one to crash, boy.”

And that last word, boy, was the thing. The straw I tell myself even to this day. I guess I coulda written it off as just his drunk tongue gettin’ away from himself, but truth is I knew it wadn’t that. I think in some way that the old man had me diggin’ all those holes as just a way to save the work for himself. Think that he was just having me dig my own grave over and over, and maybe if I dug the hole just right, he woulda killed me. And in some ways, it woulda made sense to a man like him. Because I was the biggest insult to the whole thing. I was Braiden Lewis, in every physical way except for that damn cleft on my lip. Braiden Lewis except I didn’t have any of his charm, or spirit and my foot kept me from even tryin’ to be the athlete he was.

So I went back to that hole and grabbed that pick.

I went back inside the house, to Dad’s room.

I looked him over, searching for them silver eyes, but they were gone. And I waited, I don’t know what for, but all I could think about was how he said boy. Boy, boy, boy, boy, and I knew he had no goddamn clue what my name was.

The pick went in to his chest with a wet crack. He gasped and coughed, and those goddamn silver eyes came back, glaring under the damn light of the moon glow. It was hard pulling the pick out, both because it was stuck in his chest pretty deep and because he had seized a hand around my wrist. His iron hand released after a second and I pulled the pick head out.

He went silent and the last gasp of air left him after a minute or so, but in that time, I thought he was goin’ to grab me, break my neck, so both of us would die right there. But a last coughing breath came and he just lay there, a big round ball of nothin’ in the dark, the silver eyes empty and staring off into some dark corner of the universe.

I tossed the pick aside, sat back against the wall of his bedroom and cried. Cried, cried, cried, a big old man of 17 bawlin’ like some baby and I think the worst part about it, the part that sticks after all these years, is that that word kept coming back to me as I cried.

Boy. I took Dad’s body out to the backyard, and looked over all of the holes I had dug. As much as I disliked my Dad, not hate because it’s too strong a word, I couldn’t put his body down one of them holes. I don’t know why, it woulda been easy, but I thought if I dropped his body down one, he would just keep fallin’, never reachin’ the bottom, only findin’ some endless darkness, his soul lost to the world and the Second Coming of the Good Lord.

So I put him in the passenger seat of the truck, got behind the wheel and started drivin’.

The rain picked up and before long, the roads were slick black and shinin’. The blood had been flowing hard, but with a few towels and some tape, I’d managed to keep Dad from bleedin’ all over the truck. I propped him against the passenger door, his head covered by a towel. I kept my eyes forward and no matter how badly I wanted too, I didn’t dare turn to look at him. It wadn’t the blood or the copper smell of it with the whiskey. I was afraid that if I looked over at him, he would just wake up. He would turn his limp head in my direction pull the towel from over his face and smile, his bullfrog jowls aghast with gore and dark blood, and his eyes would pop open and they would be those silver bastards he’d stared at me with in the bedroom. “Wish that you had been the one to drive down that that goddamn road. You, boy.”

The sign came up and, just like Braiden had said, the old wooden placard read, Some questions ain’t worth the answer in some fancy hand.

My eyes drifted over to Dad’s body and my heart raced with fear. He was still limp and lifeless and I let a breath go, even as the tears burned in the back of my eyes. I thought of Uncle Ledd and his damn feed store and I thought of Big Deni’s smile, and his assurance that he could change things with just a question, and somehow it managed to come.

“Could things be made different?”

I paused even as the rain picked up and the mist seemed to thicken on the road in front of me.

“Could things be made different?”

I said it a few more times, realizing that Braiden and Uncle Ledd had probably asked the same thing. It was a strange question, more an askin’ for another roll of the dice, see if sixes come instead of ones. I accelerated the old Ford right up until the governor capped it off at 75. The road shined back black and slippery and I could see an orange sign warning of the curve ahead and advising me to slow down. My foot kept on.

The speed wobbles started to come, and for the life of me, I can’t tell you if I really did try to make the turn into the Curve, but I knew as soon as the wheel jerked to the right that I would get an answer to my question, death or else. I thought of the old game of poker I played with Big Deni three years past. It was how he tottered in that chair, hangin’ on the edge but not fallin’ back. It was how he said chucklehead and all them corny sayings from Uncle Ledd and made them sound good.

The truck turned hard as it shot through the Curve, crashing against the guardrail and flipping over and down into the little valley that awaited, rollin’ end over end, metal disintegratin’ like paper until it disappeared into darkness with all the ramblin’ cicadas. *** I knew who he was as soon as I saw him in the stands Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 145

and when I walked over to say “Hi,” the smell of his vanillaflavored cigarillos and his smile, that was more capped gold and silver teeth, confirmed it.

“Hope you didn’t come as bad company.”

He laughed, a hack full of smoke, and wiped a hand on his pant leg, extended it toward me. “How you been, Mike?”

I smiled and shook his hand feeling the dampness that he tried to wipe off still there. Couldn’t blame him though. It was a hot day in the middle of summer. “Good.”

He laughed again, the vanilla-scented smoke drifting around him and his light brown, snake skin suit. “‘Good?’ That be all? You a man of undastatement.”

He puffed his cigarillo and more smoke came and drifted.

“It’s been real, real, good,” I said, tryin’ to think of a good way say to what needed to be said. “You here about Dad?” He shook his head, his eyes clouded by a pair of thick dark glasses. “No, Mike. Here to watch a good game, maybe place a few bets.”

I laughed, hearing the nearby bark of the cheerleaders and the growing rants of the crowd filling the stands.

“Thought you stopped betting after the car accident?”

“Mike, a betting man who doesn’t bet is like a shoemaker who only wears flip flops.”

“Don’t think I heard that one yet, Uncle Ledd. You write ’em new every month?”

“No, Mike, they just come to me.”

I laughed. “That one was some bit of priceless.” I stopped and I think the smile on my face faltered just the smallest bit.

“How is Dad?” “Good.”

“Cat in a rat house good?” I said trying for a joke, but all I got was another drift of smoke and that blank expression on Uncle Ledd’s face.

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“He with the ministry now?”

“Yep. That crash he had on the Curve really changed him.

Like a man back from the dead. He was a hair shy of a bastard before. Lucky to be alive he is.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. I put my helmet on, clipped my chin strap and took a deep breath. “Well, I better get out there. Coach hates to see us standing around too much before a game.”

He said nothin’ still perched on the bleacher like an old crow.

I turned and began to jog off toward the field, my shoulder pads feeling heavy for the first time in a long while and the jersey on my back, the one with the name M. Lewis on the back, felt hot like burlap.

“Mike.”

I turned and watched as he stamped out the vanilla cigarillo on a part of the bench. He blew out the last of the smoke. “I always wondered why they didn’t find anybody in the driver’s seat. Didn’t you?”

I nodded my head. “I guess.”

“You a man of undastatement,” he said, his mouth parting, showing the gold and silver teeth again. “So you have no idea who coulda been drivin’ the car that night on the Curve? Not a clue?”

I nodded my head, smiled and looked at him. “Must have been someone who wanted to make things a little different?

You wouldn’t know that feelin’, would you?”

He nodded and smiled, it was genuine. He reached for another cigarillo, lit it with a wood match and puffed. “I guess I would, Mike. You go and have a great game now. From what I hear you got a good little arm on you.”

“Thanks Uncle Ledd, you be gentle with them bets.” I ran out and onto the field thinkin’ I should look back but didn’t.

Ruth Weinberg Ruth Weinberg was born in London and studied art in Cornwall & Winchester. She has exhibited in the UK, Poland, Portugal and Ireland and has work in private collections in the USA, Portugal, Italy and London where she lives and works. Since 2005, she has worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum on educational art projects. Her most recently exhibited work was shown at The Menier Gallery with The London Group in November 2009. http://www.ruthweinberg.co.uk; http://www.breadmatters.org

For Every Pin, a Pain

Winter 2010 â–Ş The Battered Suitcase â–Ş 147

Ghost of a Fly

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Martyrdom of a Fly

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 149

A Difficult Birth

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Boxes

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 151

Unnamed

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Nick Hinton Nick Hinton spent his entire life up until the last few months residing in Illinois, and has moved one state over (Indiana) to live in sin with his girlfriend. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor’s of science degree in physics and worked as a scientist for a time, but decided that was too easy and chose to be a writer of literary fiction instead. He is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College. Inside Your Head is the first of his short stories to be published.

Inside Your Head

I

nside the lab, all the walls are white. Not off white or eggshell white, but the blinding, light-of-God white that always makes you feel dirty.

I can’t remember the name of the pharmaceutical company that runs the lab, and I can’t pronounce the name of the drug.

Everyone just calls it Lotus. My roommate Matt tells me it’s a mood enhancer. It’s supposed to make everything seem brighter and more vivid, like upgrading to HDTV, and make life in general better, easier. Maybe this is the one, maybe Lotus will work.

They have us each in our own separate rooms complete with a one-way mirror, a single table with a stack of papers, magazines, some chairs, a clock has its hands pointing at midnight, and a med student who can’t even grow a beard.

At least they were thoughtful enough to call us “participants” instead of test subjects. The lab jockey assigned to me looks like he’s fresh out of college, and is painfully chipper. He’s wearing a lab coat which is at least three sizes too big for him.

What does he even need it for? He’s going to give me a pill and leave, not dissect me.

“How are you today, Dave?” he squeaks.

“I already filled out the questionnaire.”

“Oh, uh … ok then. Well, my name is Tim, and I’ll be keeping an eye on you, to make sure everything goes ok. Let’s get started.” He pushes a stack of papers towards me, legal forms he calls them. I begin to sign, and he starts to chatter.

“Did you see the game last night?”

I wanted to tell him that I spent the night trying to decide if I would rather shoot myself or overdose on sleeping pills, and that the only reason I didn’t was because I made a fucking stupid promise that I’d try this new med. That and the scent of lilac. So I just ignore him.

Form after form after form. Sign here, initial here. Last four digits of social, mother’s maiden name. They should give you the drug just to make the paperwork bearable. I push the forms back toward Tim.

“Ok … now that those are out of the way, we can begin the trial.” He pulls a single pill, hermetically sealed in plastic, out of his lab coat and sets it on the table. The writing on it is so small it’s illegible.

“Since this is the first clinical trial of Lotus, we don’t know what your reaction could be. It won’t kill you, that’s for sure.”

Damn, that would be too easy.

“After I step out of the room, feel free to take the pill.

When you do, we will start the timer and the test will begin.”

He exits the room, but I know he’s on the other end of the mirror, watching me. I pick up the pill and turn it slowly.

“Paroxetine-diphenhydramine-phenelzine …” I quit.

They’re just making up words. I peel the plastic off and hold the pill in my hand. It’s a shade close to sky blue, something perfectly at home in a baby boy’s room.

Blue like her eyes.

I look at the clock, it reads midnight. I look at my watch and call the clock a liar.

“Bottom’s up …” I mutter, taking the pill. It tastes vaguely bitter, but I’ve had worse. I look at the clock and nod to the mirror. The clock begins to tick. It gives me an audible cue every time a second passes. Tick, tick, tick.

Does it really need to be that loud?

I pick up a magazine from off the table. It’s some celebrity gossip bullshit, but at least it’s something to read. Tick, tick, tick. *** Fifteen minutes have passed, nine hundred goddamn ticks, and I’m more informed than I ever cared to be about TomKat’s relationship and Angelina’s twins. I flip through the pages of the next magazine, some techno-babble affair, and I see red hair. Dark red. And I smell lilac. But she’s gone now. And she was the only medication I needed.

I pick up the questionnaire they left for me. Didn’t I already fill this out? No, this one is different. How did I miss this one?

Did you feel any pain during the trial? Not yet. Did your feeling of depression lessen? Maybe. Not much, but I don’t really Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 153

want to OD on sleep aids anymore. That’s good, I guess. Did you feel disconnected from the world? What is that supposed to mean?

I’m tired of answering questions. I just want the trial to be over so I can go home. And for that clock to shut the hell up.

Tick, tick tick.

I walk over to the mirror and try to peer inside. I can almost see Tim, but he’s so hard to pick out. I’m probably just imagining that, though.

“Hey!” I shout at the mirror. “Is this almost over? Can you at least turn off the clock?”

I sit back down and let my mind wander. As usual, it wanders to her. Her white teeth and pouty lips, god they tasted so good.

Her high-pitched laugh and filthy jokes. Her dark red hair. The scent of lilac which filled your nose and heart with joy.

“No!” I shout. She left me. I’m too … what did she call it?

Emotionally draining. And yet she was the one who wanted me to open up, share my feelings.

I need her back …. *** Thirty minutes have passed now. I feel a bit better. I heard a few voices from outside; I bet they’re coming to let me out any minute.

I catch a glimpse of some movement in the mirror and turn to get a better look. There’s only me in the reflection, though.

No one else.

The door opens, and Tim enters. He mercifully turns off the clock and turns to me.

“How do you feel?”

“Better, to be honest. Can I go home now?” I’m tired of this place.

“Once I examine you to make sure you’re ok, you’ll be free to go.” He pulls out a flashlight and shines it right into my eyes.

He checks my pulse and my reflexes, all of which are, in his words, “adequate.”

“Well, thanks for participating.” He puts a bottle of Lotus into my hand. “We need you to fill out an online journal twice a week, and it is important to take only the recommended dose.

We’ll check up on you soon. ” I feel a bit light-headed and, well, good. I head to the door.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt good. Since I’ve smiled.

The receptionist smiles as I head for the exit door marked “push.” I lean into the door as I fumble for my keys.

Wham. I stagger backwards.

“Sir, you have to pull on the door.”

“But …” I mumble.

As I walk to my car, the deceitful door is quickly elbowed out of my mind by thoughts of her. If Lotus actually works, then maybe I’ll be less emotionally draining, and she’ll come back. Maybe I’ll wake up to lilac again.

“Jenny …” I whisper as I get into my car.

It’s 40 minutes later, and I’m at the front door of my apartment. I can’t remember the drive back from the test. At all. I must really have spaced out. My hand reaches forward, 154 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

but I can’t seem to find the doorknob. I look for a second, and it’s not there. Just a wooden slab blocking entrance to my apartment. What the fuck? Did Matt take it out, just to screw with me?

I rub my eyes and take a deep breath. When I look again, the knob is right there, where it should be. I open the door to find Matt lying on the couch, watching TV. What a surprise.

“How’d it go?”

“Not bad. I think it might be working, but I’m pretty tired.”

I hear the bathroom door shut down the hall.

“Who else is here?” I ask Matt.

“What? It’s just us.” He turns back to the TV. Why would he lie? Is it an ugly chick he doesn’t want me to see?

I walk down the hall and find the bathroom door open.

No one is inside; everything is where it should be. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something dart into my room.

“Matt …” I whisper. “I think there’s someone else in the apartment. Someone is in my room.” He raises an eyebrow.

After a few seconds of staring, he sneaks over beside me.

I put my finger to my lips, and he nods. We creep to my door, and wait.

Thirty seconds pass … a minute … two minutes. I can still hear the ticking of that damn clock.

Another half minute passes, and Matt starts giving me hand signals from the A-Team or something. I step back and kick the door open.

“Gotcha, you fu …” Matt yells, but stops himself.

No one but us in inside. All my stuff is there, where it should be. The bed, computer, books. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“Dave … maybe you should lie down.” Matt quietly suggests.

“Yeah … maybe I should …” I head over and sit on my bed. I heard noises and definitely saw something go into my room. I know I did.

I lay my head down and shut my eyes. Hopefully some sleep will set my mind right again. Then, from there, it’s a whole new day. That actually sounds good.

For now, I sleep to dream of red hair and lilac …. *** It’s 3:38 a.m. when I wake up, and she’s not here. She should be beside me, helping me fight back the dark. I’m alone, again.

It’s too much.

I stumble out of bed and head toward the bathroom. I trip over a shoe in my room.

“Fucking piece of shit shoe!” If Jenny were here, she’d make me clean up.

I feel … worse. More like the real me.

Jenny would never take me back, what the hell was I thinking? She probably still won’t even answer my calls. She’s better off without me.

I enter the bathroom, and reach into the cabinet. Behind the Paxil, Prozac, Cymbalta and Zyban lay the sleeping pills. A full bottle. I’m going to do it this time.

A door opens. “Dave? Wha … what are you doing?” Matt sleepily asks, walking out of his room.

“Back off, Matt. Just leave me alone.”

He sees the bottle in my hands. “Put that shit down, Dave!”

I turn away from him, but he’s faster than me. He snatches the pills from my hand and shoves me away.

“What the hell, man! I thought you were feeling better!”

I lean into the wall and slump to the floor. My legs are tired, my arms are tired. My body is tired, my mind is tired. No, not tired. Weary.

“I dunno …” We sit there. Silent. “I guess that Lotus shit just wore off.”

“Then take some more!” Matt shouts, and grabs the Lotus bottle and hands it to me. “You’ve got to at least give it a try.

You promised.”

Why does he care? He’d be better off without me. Sure, the rent would double, but he wouldn’t be worrying about me all day and night.

I take a Lotus with some water — it tastes bittersweet — and head into the living room to watch some soothing infomercials. Matt joins me, either for company or to keep an eye on me. I’m not sure. *** Half an hour into an Oxy-Clean infomercial and Matt is sound asleep. I get up and shut off the TV, tired of hearing about the magic cleaning power of oxygen. I look back to the couch, and Matt is gone.

I head toward my room, trying to decide if I should call Jenny tomorrow or not. It’d probably be a good idea to give the meds a few days, to make sure they’re working. I sit down on the bed, and see a rainbow of colors illuminating my blinds.

Blues, greens, reds, yellows, purples; all sorts of colors dance in mad patterns. I open the blinds, and there is nothing outside except darkness.

What is happening? I set my head down on the pillow, and shut my eyes. I hear laughter from the opposite corner of the room. What are they laughing at? Who is even laughing?

No, no one is there, I know that. There can’t be anyone there.

I’ll figure it all out tomorrow. The laughter slowly fades, but I can still hear it in the back of my mind. *** The sun rises through the blinds and punches me in the face.

“Fuck offff … ” I mutter.

The sun refuses to listen; I can’t get back to sleep.

I stumble, zombified, as Jenny calls it, into the bathroom.

I shower, brush my teeth, shave, and take a Lotus. It’s not as sweet as sugar, but it’s close. Such an easy addition to the morning routine; just one more thing to keep me human.

I walk into the living room, now more human than monster, and pick up my phone. I need to find out if the Lotus can mess with my head. Well, I guess that’s the point …

I search for the phone number of the lab, but I can’t find the sheet. I check in my room, in the kitchen, I can’t seem to find it.

Something about the living room is off. I look around, and can’t remember the furniture being the color that it is. Lime green couches, who buys those? Did I buy those? I check under the couch, and there it is. I thought I put it on the fridge. I read off the number and start to dial.

1-850 … I stop dialing. The digits on my phone keys are wrong. They’re all the same. All sixes. There should be a three in the top right corner, but there’s a six. Instead of a zero or a nine, there are two sixes. This can’t be right…

Ignoring the weirdness of my phone keys, I press the buttons where the numbers should be. One in the top left, five in the middle.

“Hello, this is Pam with …” — the phone explodes in static. I pull it away from my ear to stop any further hearing loss — “… I help you?” she concludes.

“What just happened?” I demand.

“I’m sorry sir?”

“What was that noise just now?” Was she fucking with me?

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Fine, whatever.” Maybe that was the meds too. “Get me Tim Hall; he works on Lotus.”

“One moment please …”

While listening to the on-hold music, my hand begins to melt. It becomes soft and starts to liquefy. Drops of my hand roll down the phone and fall to the floor. I shout, and drop the phone. My hand quickly becomes solid again, and I put my ear to the earpiece just as Tim’s timid voice gets on the line.

“Tim, are hallucinations side effects of Lotus?” For some reason I’m out of breath.

“Uh, can I put you on hold?” He sounds nervous. I hear shuffling papers on the other end of the line.

“No! Answer my damn question!”

“Well, in one or two cases, yes. There have been reports of hallucinations.”

“Do they go away?”

“We haven’t been testing Lotus long enough to know. I’m sure they do, though.” He’s lying. I can tell.

The phone falls from my hand and bursts into flame on the ground. I reach down into the flames, not thinking about getting burned. Not thinking at all. But the fire doesn’t hurt; it’s just in my head.

I walk aimlessly around the apartment. Everything is normal.

Unless it isn’t. I flip over couch cushions, expecting to see a head or rainbow-colored blood or a tunnel. Some fucked-up shit. Instead I find 36 cents, a paperclip and some bread being claimed by mold. Yuck. Jenny would freak out if she saw that.

Jenny. She can get me through this. She can get me through anything.

I grab the phone from off the floor. Speed dial number Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 155

one. My lifeline.

Ring. Nothing. Ring. Nothing. Ring. Nothing. Ring.

Nothing. Ring.

Nothing.

“Goddammit it!” I yell, hurling the phone across the room.

“Fuck you!” it yells back.

I have to go find her. Out there. In the world.

Will I be able to make it to her? I head to the medicine cabinet, pull out the Lotus. I’ll need it to get to her.

I turn the bottle over in my hand. Is it even worth bothering?

Wouldn’t it be easier to give up?

No. I’m done quitting. I need her back. I’ll do anything. I shove the pills into my pocket and one into my mouth. It tastes pretty good, almost like brown sugar. I head for the door. Matt steps out of his room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Why is

156 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

he always getting in the way? Ass. “Morning …” he mumbles.

Tentacles explode out of his face and reach for me. I jump back and shout.

“What?” Matt is just as startled by me as I am by his face.

“N… Nothing.” I can’t stop staring at him. I back up towards the door, keeping an eye on his new appendages all the while. They’re reaching out in all directions, feeling, searching.

I find the doorknob; it doesn’t hide from me this time. I throw open the door, and blinding white light greets me. I can’t see anything outside; it’s too bright. I shut my eyes and turn my head away.

I take a deep breath, then two and three, and head into the white abyss.

Here I come, Jenny.

Rigby Bendele Rigby Bendele is a third year student at Longwood University. In addition to studying poetry and English literature, she works as a resident assistant during the school year and a camp counselor during the summer.

List A year and a half after I broke my silence, my mother broke hers, sending me a list of ways to protect myself from rape at college.

Don’t drink.

Don’t talk to strangers.

Don’t dress as you want.

Don’t go strange places.

Don’t ever make yourself vulnerable.

Nothing about not following your best friend to the fort you built last week surrounded by fresh-fallen leaves and nestled in a crevice where only your ten-year-old body can sit.

his hands on the balls of your shoulders his breath on your neck, lips curled into a young moon, not enough space for words but enough to rattle mixing the smell of fish from lunch, leaf mold going to perfume — your entire body wilting not wanting to feel that moment just waiting for that way he looks at you when he’s grown bored, rolling his eyes and drawling as to a jury of trees You know, you wanted it.

Or what to do when you find yourself pinned in what you think is letting him win at wrestling, only to find your shoulder blades dug into twig-twinged dirt

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 157

This Isn’t California Catherine’s 16, so 16 that she’s not afraid to whine about the snow.

Yeah, she sighs, school’s out but what does it matter?

Sabrina, her girlfriend, two hours away, the roads are ice and Daddy won’t let her drive.

He would never let her drive if he knew of feather-light touches, touches that she’s not afraid to show in public, hands grasped, not seeing the eyes of her Daddy’s friends watching from booths, on shelves, in coat racks, in a plastic flower on a McDonald’s table, seeing hands grasped beneath Formica.

I wish I was 16 and not afraid, not watching my shoulder, empty from fear Farmville, like Montpelier, would answer two hands,

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lips, breasts, long hair, with glares and tutting of teeth, just-overheard comments that this isn’t California, comments that make me slunch in my skin and dig into my pockets.

That I didn’t need to whisper “Be Sneaky,” like some commandment of how to survive, how to avoid seeing someone that doesn’t know at the movies or dinner, as you wonder if you broke that law, that instinct that at 16 doesn’t exist except as the nagging of someone who was 16 and didn’t know — Be Sneaky.

Luiggi Carlin Luiggi Carlin is an undergraduate creative writing major at Western Kentucky University. He has published poetry in Zephyrus, an annual publication by the English department at Western Kentucky University.

Torn Root She writes in such hostility, without a torn root, to be a bloom on a mega jumbo loan, fertilizing eyes across the room.

Someone is always the mountain, the lobbyist, the sculptor, something in the parking lot where you found out he was taken.

Such is the constitution of the rose she wanted to hold over my head, in the same hospital where life draws first and final breaths.

I fell in love with purple while I was still on the long waves, the crested waves in blue and red sirens wailing outside my window and waiting to bruise my complex caricature of distorted faiths and stigmas.

But I worked out your loss because something is always hidden over a cloud, into a soup pot, when a vast image crunches beneath my boots.

Cell phones made face to face communication obsolete.

And people became too reliant on technology.

Like a drug, like a substance for the weak willed to habitually place between sore lips.

The cigarette smoke suffers for love, but with no courtesy for becoming softer.

Winter 2010 â–Ş The Battered Suitcase â–Ş 159

Aurora Borealis I’m keeping my feelings in a jar where you won’t find them, in the highest tetrahedron of the city skyline overlooking the union scene below where ascots picket scarves for the rights to grace the space around your neck.

I’m keeping the superglue handy for when I crack open that broken vase you occupy, tearing at the handspun foundations of a lifetime filled with screaming for someone’s acceptance, like a skunk looking for love from the other forest animals, like Thumper knocking her across the meadow where Bambi lost his mother.

I’m keeping the lounge chair at arm’s length for when the northern lights appear in town, heralding the coming of a new age of magnetism and solar radiation. An end of days where we’ll fashion baseball bats out of the legs and linen caps from the upholstery, and with the full frontal force of a phallic filled anime I’ll swing away the stardust formed trash the Universe loves throwing at us.

I’m keeping dark matter in my back pocket, where it conflagrates a hole in my jeans like the burning desire to see the Aurora Borealis, before the vampires attack, before the total darkness falls and promises of spring end up like promises made to the Inuit and the whales.

I’m keeping the comfort of knowing broken vases find company among jars too uncomfortable to testify for anything but ambiguity.

160 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

Danyael Halprin Thanks to her Russian in-laws, Danyael Halprin has learned that potatoes can compose a wonderful meal on their own. Halprin is a freelance journalist and fiction writer in Calgary, Alberta. From trying to get her male dog laid at the off-leash park to sandboarding the dunes in Peru, her eclectic lifestyle pieces appear in regional and national publications. Her short stories have been published most recently in A Twist of Noir. www.danyaelhalprin.com

Babushka’s Potatoes

W

e could hear the opera singer’s vibrato well before we reached the door of Babushka’s apartment, which explains why she didn’t hear us. My husband Dmitri had bought her a satellite dish a couple of years ago so she could watch all her favorite Russian television shows.

She was watching a Russian concert from Moscow at full volume, as usual. Dmitri was carrying our 2-year-old son, Alex.

I knocked louder.

Babushka wasn’t expecting us but she answered her door all dressed up. She was wearing black slacks and a black and white striped wool sweater and, as always, her chunky costume jewelry matched her outfit.

Babushka was 94 years old and took great pride in how she presented herself. Her hair was always coiffed, she wore a lot of perfume, I think it was Giorgio, and she liked to wear red or pink lipstick and rouge on her cheeks. My aunt marveled at her style when she met her at our wedding six years ago. “She dresses like she’s Russian royalty,” she whispered to me.

But no sooner had we arrived than she began besieging us with potatoes. “Kartoshka! Kartoshka!” she implored. Alex, who was normally feisty and strong-minded, wasn’t feeling well enough to protest so Dmitri played defense for him.

We didn’t tell Babushka about Alex’s accident at first because we didn’t want to upset her. She worried a lot, to the point where she worried herself sick and, consequently, developed heart palpitations and shortness of breath. Her health hung in precarious balance these days, so we made it a point to censor everything we told her.

The three of us had spent the morning swimming at the Jewish community center but our merriment came to a sudden halt when Alex slipped on the pool deck. A dozen times we’d told him not to run. I lifted his little wet body clad in shark print swim shorts off the white tile floor and held him close to me. Dmitri sandwiched Alex from the other side as he joined our embrace. It wasn’t a serious accident, but he was going

to have a nasty bruise along his left arm to the top of his shoulder. His bright blue eyes reflected my own eyes, except his were sending tears down his face. It broke my heart that his fall instantaneously and completely erased all the fun he’d had leading up to this moment.

The unfortunate episode tuckered him out so we decided to take him to Babushka’s. Her apartment building was adjacent to the community center. We quickly realized that it was a mistake taking him there. Alex was not going to get any rest.

Dmitri grabbed the remote control from the glass coffee table beside the armchair. The singer with her big, blonde pouffed hair continued prancing back and forth across the stage in her sequined sapphire-colored gown but her soprano voice had been muted.

“No, Babushka. He doesn’t want any!” Dmitri replied in Russian. He raised his voice partly because she was irritating him and partly because his grandmother was almost deaf.

We made ourselves comfortable on the faded brown carpet in the living room of her tiny apartment. I admired all the beautiful tsotchkes displayed on the tall, dark brown wood and lacquer wall cabinet. There were crystal vases, bowls and wine decanters, a navy and gold samovar, a floral-patterned china tea set, a silver-plated tea set, brass candle holders, and framed family photos.

If you ever made the mistake of mentioning that you liked something in her apartment, she’d immediately give it to you.

She was an extremely generous person, although I think she was sometimes testing me to see if I’d actually take one of her personal treasures. Mind games aside, I quickly learned not to say that I liked anything.

In fact, Babushka was always trying to give her things to us, always promising that they’d be ours when she was gone. We didn’t want her things. We only wanted her to live.

Alex curled up in my lap, his head leaning against my chest.

Dmitri, facing us, held his small hands in his. Babushka hovered Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 161

unsteadily over us. She placed her hand on top of the TV for support. On her left hand, she wore a square-shaped purple gem that dwarfed her index finger. I wasn’t sure if it was real.

“Kartoshka! Kartoshka!” she insisted again.

Dmitri and his mother are always telling me how lucky I am that I don’t speak Russian, because otherwise I’d have to hear all the mean things Babushka says. Like how fat Dmitri is. That he should shave his beard because he looks like a terrorist.

Her cruelty came as a surprise to me. She always seemed so sweet. Since my husband and his mother only tell me the nice things she says about me I began to wonder what wasn’t being translated.

Since I’d met my husband 15 years ago, I’d picked up a sprinkling of the Russian language. I quickly learned the important words, those being food and anything foodrelated. For instance, I said a lot of Fkusna. Ochen fkusna! Very delicious. Sometimes I could even follow a conversation, but my pronunciation and accent were abominable.

No translation was required for me at present. Babushka was offering us potatoes, saying it over and over again as if it was some sort of mantra.

“No, Babushka. He doesn’t want any,” my husband repeated.

She looked sad and despondent. She always looked like this whenever we declined her food. Her miserable mien was part of her act, of course, to make us feel guilty. Because she’d stood in the kitchen for hours preparing food for us to eat.

Food that we hadn’t asked for in the first place. And if there’s anything worse than Jewish guilt, it’s Russian Jewish guilt.

Every time we took Alex to visit Babushka her main objective was to feed him. In midair, she’d peel and slice an apple for him. I cringed each time I watched her do this but never once did she cut herself. She’d offer him oranges, strawberries, grapes, yogurt, cookies, chocolate. In fact, she’d empty the entire contents of her fridge onto the kitchen table until she found something he’d eat. At the last Passover Seder, I saw her fling a slice of green pepper across the table to him.

I do not lie.

Hers was a small, square kitchen table that was covered with a cotton floral tablecloth. In the middle of it sat the handcarved wooded napkin holder that Dmitri and I bought her on a trip to Guatemala a few years ago. When I sat at the table, I always struggled to move my chair closer because the chair’s back legs stood on the living room carpet and its front legs on the kitchen’s linoleum floor. The two different levels and surfaces prevented the chair from sliding easily up to the table.

I don’t know why today Babushka decided to fixate on potatoes for she’d never seen Alex eat a single potato. That he didn’t like the Russian staple was blasphemous. Perhaps she’d forgotten that he didn’t like them; or, perhaps she was being hopeful.

My Russian in-laws were experts at cooking potatoes, so it was always with great trepidation that I, a Canadian girl, 162 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

prepared them for my husband’s family. Most times I cooked them exactly the way they did. I boiled the baby potatoes for about 25 minutes, rolled them in butter and fresh garlic and then sprinkled fresh dill on top. On the occasions when I was feeling bold, I put my own spin on the dish by adding cooked onion and lots of crumbled feta cheese.

Whenever we invited Dmitri’s parents and Babushka over to our house for dinner, I’d place the bowl of potatoes on the table and wait nervously. The potatoes sat still in the bowl but begged loudly to be eaten. Out of the corner of my eye I’d watch Babushka take her first bite, bracing myself for humiliation. Would she have difficulty cutting the potatoes in half with the side of her fork because I’d undercooked them?

Or, would the potatoes crumble instantaneously upon contact because I’d overcooked them? But the bowl of potatoes was finished each time, which was a huge relief and, my husband tells me, a big compliment.

Babushka had moved to Canada from Moscow 33 years ago but she still spoke only a smattering of English, although we all believed she understood more than she let on. So with the little Russian I knew and her broken English, we managed to communicate with one another.

But Babushka and I communicated best, and I felt closest to her, when no words were exchanged. I’d look over at her and smile and she’d blink her shiny hazel eyes in return. She smiled back with the most adorable smile as she rested her wrinkled chin on the palm of her hand. I glimpsed the little girl inside of her.

Babushka shuffled over to the kitchen in her light blue velour slippers. She retrieved a white and blue-flowered casserole dish from the fridge and began doling out the potatoes into a small bowl. Her offer of potatoes was bordering on pathological. Or farcical, depending on your sensibility. Dmitri had had enough.

“Babushka!” my husband yelled, stopping her in her tracks.

“Alex doesn’t want any potatoes. He’s not feeling well.”

One melodramatic oy veh followed another. What’s wrong?

Why isn’t he feeling well? When did it start? And so began the interrogation. Dmitri tried to be vague and then cryptic but she would not relent. She pressed him for more details. I caught the Russian word for swimming pool, bassein. As always, Babushka wore Dmitri down and he ended up telling her what had happened — a less alarming version, of course. Surely she would back off now and allow Alex to recover in peace.

Dmitri’s tactic backfired. Instead, it provided her with more ammunition as she now believed that her potatoes were the ultimate panacea. She started moving toward Alex with the potatoes.

She was visibly distressed over Alex’s accident and didn’t seem to know what to do with herself or how she could help him. It seemed that offering food to her family and seeing them eat it was her only coping mechanism.

“Hvatyt, Babushka!” Enough.

She stumbled over to her beige upholstered armchair in the

living room and collapsed into it, out of breath. She grumbled to herself and then waved us off, as if to say: “To hell with all of you!”

Sensing the importance of the potato, our 2-year-old boy rose to the occasion. With outstretched hand, he picked a potato from the casserole dish that she was still clutching and popped it in his mouth. Dmitri and I exchanged incredulous looks. Chewing the potato, Alex’s expression was one of neither disgust nor pleasure. He was merely doing what was required of him.

“Maladyietz, maladyietz!” Babushka giggled and clapped her hands. Good boy, good boy. “More, more!” she appealed. She held the dish closer to him. But it was only going to be one potato. One conciliatory potato, no more, no less. Of course, Babushka would be extremely happy if he ate more. . . . But for now she was satisfied.

As we were leaving Babushka’s apartment, she picked up the telephone and began calling all her networks — Dmitri’s mother, her friends, her neighbors — to proudly report that Alex had eaten her potatoes. Lots of them.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 163

Susan White

Susan White has a master of arts from the Bred Loaf School of English and an MFA from Stonecoast. She teaches English at Carolina Day School in Asheville, North Carolina. She has published fiction in Fresh Boiled Peanuts, River Walk Journal and Front Range Review. Recently, she has horrified friends and family by writing nonfiction stories, which have appeared in The Pisgah Review, Barely South and Dear John, I love Jane. She earned an honorable mention for “Salvation Drive-Thru” in Winning Writer’s Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest.

The Swinger

E

verything I did with a hammer, someone came along behind me to fix. Every person I assisted — measuring, sawing, holding — suddenly left to go find something . . . a new assistant. Incompetence is a loathsome feeling, and being an incompetent volunteer made me want to hold a nail gun to my heart. I was as necessary as a vomit transfusion.

I thought forgoing a spring break trip to Mardi Gras with my college buddies to join a Habitat for Humanity mission would make up for the destructive decisions I had made while guzzling fraternity concoctions poisoned with the misnomer Everclear. (The first destructive decision being to drink the stuff — scratch that — to willingly enter a place where people lose clothing and brain cells simultaneously.) I was on a mission to purify myself. Start over. Building a house for a family was just the wholesome activity my sick spirit needed.

Our group was assigned the rewarding task of completing a house that previous groups had begun. We would have the honor of presenting the house to the family. I traveled in a van to Columbia, South Carolina, with good people, people who sang John Denver songs in harmony and thought drinking soda at night was playing with fire. I had made a 10-day commitment to building for others, yet I could not contribute. In fact, one could argue I was sabotaging the work of these good people.

To the young neighborhood kids, a van full of college students was better than an ice cream truck. When they weren’t in elementary school, they were at our site. No one wanted to sweep them away like sawdust, but these kids — like me — were sandbagging the progress.

At last, I found a way to be necessary. To do more than sweat and apologize. I became the keeper of the kids. While the other adults nailed shingles on the roof, painted, hung doors and laid carpet, I used my tools of immaturity and goofiness to occupy the rascals a safe distance from the house.

For a few days, I was able to distract them with stories of dog-devouring palmetto roaches and Habitat for Satan groups that cruise neighborhoods in a van and dismantle people’s homes when they’re away. We played camp games, which they enjoyed as much as school. I was losing them. And I was desperate to succeed at something. To be of service.

So I became their Dealer. Gave them the only rush I could legally supply. I grabbed their wiry wrists and swung 164 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

them around until their brains and ear fluids sloshed and they achieved vertigo. Until their surrounding images soupified.

“Higher! Faster!” they’d squeal.

After I set them on their feet, they’d stagger like tiny tasered Frankensteins then hit the ground. Their glazed eyes directed skyward, the little addicts giggled and tried to articulate how they felt, then demanded another helicopter ride. They were hooked, and I had a purpose. I may not have been able to swing a hammer, but I sure as hell could swing a kid.

For the remaining days, I organized the lively Lilliputians to transport and clean up materials, to pick up trash — with the reward of helicopter rides. The last afternoon, our Habitat group bought cake and snacks. Laid them out on card tables from the church where we slept. Filled a cooler with a variety of drinks. A couple of students had even made a mixed tape with songs alluding to homes to play at our neighborhood party where we presented the house to the grateful family.

“Our House” played, and I was giddy. I was happy for the family, and I actually felt like I had helped, in my own way. I was proud to know the younger kids by name. They ran to me with raised arms. “Swing me! Swing me!”

I swung with extra zeal that final day. I did not take my usual respites between children to allow my reeling head to steady. I ran from child to child as if catching fireflies. The swinger was high.

As I stumbled through the people — at odds with my surroundings —I glimpsed a girl standing off to the side, watching the fun and not demanding a ride. I practically galloped to her and grabbed her forearms, which were actually quite plump. As trees, people, and “our house” swirled around me, I braced myself to lift the heavy girl off the ground. I bent my knees and straightened my back. I yanked, but only her heels lifted from the ground. She resisted the motion. As my dizziness dwindled, I focused on her old eyes, her scowl.

I was attempting to swing a midget, one of the kid’s mothers.

I released her arms as if she were a scalding pan. I said nothing. What could I say? I ran. Ran past the house, the van, around a corner to a gas station. I leaned against the filthy, peeling bathroom door saying, “I swung a midget. Oh my God, I swung a midget.” Who was going to come along behind me and fix this?

Pavel Rubin Pavel Rubin was born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), in the former USSR on a stormy January night. He spent all of his angst-filled teenage life living in Israel and then, Honduras.

Completely confounded by the capricious nature of his life, Pavel chose to attend university in the United States in vague hopes of stability. His life never became less chaotic, but he did manage to graduate from the University of Central Arkansas with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. He currently resides in the middle of a cow pasture in Apopka, Florida, where he spends most of his time watering ferns and reading books on the toilet.

I’m Sick!

I’m sick!

Of you, and you, and you, and winter days under cold showers.

I’m sick of life, and sick of death, and of existential matters, hidden flowers.

I knew a man, he had big bones, and his teeth were, mighty shinny.

Now he’s dead, and it’s all gone, the storm is swirling, and you’re crying.

But I, I stand alone, burning wind and snow-filled sorrow.

Will not stop me, there’s the dawn, obscuring the globe from all its horror.

The night is young, the beat is soft, let us destroy it with loud laughter.

I’m sick, for that is true, of beastly grimaces and empty chatter.

All the promises swung at the sun, as people gather around their savior.

Their empty minds all hum a tune, hoping for something somewhat more sacred.

I’m sick of change, and I’m sick of you, lonely pedestrian on the great highway.

I’m sick of history, as I make it true, I dream of silence, holy wonder.

The clouds fly, above that sky, to a destination, unresolved.

I never lie, and never cry, for a kind so distraught and perverse.

I sit alone, on rivers flowing, counting the honey-clad bodies.

The grave is dug, life’s set in stone, the cold asphalt feels inviting.

Not me, for I am air, flowing freely through your body.

You cannot escape me, within the glare, of your astral aural carriage.

Yet I am sick!

Of you, and you, and you, and even slightly of myself.

I turn off the light, the dark creeps in, as I softly drift to sleep.

With morning comes a terrible pain, forgotten wine, blessed misery, I’m sick of this world, but I will do it all again, For there is nothing more for me, the sick, to do.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 165

Scott Weiss Scott Weiss’s poetry has appeared in the journal Poetalk, on the Web at amphibi.us, and is forthcoming in Chopper Poetry Journal. His fiction has appeared in the online publication Crash.

He lives with his wife Brenda in Sacramento, California, where he earned an undergraduate degree in English from Sacramento State University, and where he now writes fiction and poetry and works as a technical writer. He also serves as an associate editor of Convergence: an Online Journal of Poetry and Art, which can be found on the Web at www.convergence-journal.com.

Second Comings of Another Kind A horn sounds an arrival, and I have been sure of its coming, along those rails — endless lines that tether me to “whens” and “wheres” I’ll never know sitting solo in a duplex where the ink won’t dry before the meaning runs.

I feel the rhythm of its passing, high upon the mount of its berm, as it pounds out its sermon in bold beatitudes that call me to belief.

And I can believe — in its deliverance, and in the force, in the weight of all that steel: like a long, strong finger, carving out its law; and I have found healing in its voice: the heavy wheels, that call me to discipleship, to leave — leave all, and follow.

166 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

And I think how there should be an official account of this somewhere: leather-bound on a shelf — lines numbered for ease of location, for memorization.

But just as quickly it departs — too soon, like an unexpected ascension, and disappears; but I know that I know the promise of its return, when, trumpeting its arrival, the horn will sound, and I must be prepared to rise, enraptured, once again.

Cameron Mount Cameron Mount is studying to become a high school English teacher at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. When not there, he’s annoying your family at dinnertime from his job at Gallup, attempting to write or listening to ska.

Shelling’s Equation

T

he evening shift at the campus Math Library was a dreadfully uneventful time. The only tasks were to sort and shelve the maybe five books in the drop box and to shelf-check a section of books, one by one, making sure they were all in order and that their spines were perpendicular to the shelf ’s edge. Of course they all were, since the only visitors were math professors and graduate students who picked out what they were looking for meticulously and with great seriousness, carrying Journal of Commutative Calculus and Discrete Mathematical Biosciences to the desk with smug, annoyed expressions. Like the very fact that the library kept us as employees was an insult to their professionalism. The shift lasted until 10, but if anyone at all walked in after six o’clock, it was either mistakenly or to ask for directions to the nearest bathroom. Left, left, right, past the pop machines, past the first but not second set of stairs, right, bathroom. It was all there really was to know here, so it was with a desperate sort of pride that I had these directions memorized.

I do a walk around the library once at the start of every shift and once before I lock the doors and shut off the lights.

The first time is to check if it’s safe to play music out of the main desk computer’s speakers, and the second time is result of an incident years ago when a man fell asleep at a table in a corner and filed a lawsuit when he awoke there the next day.

After my first walk-around this Tuesday evening and with no one in sight, I deemed it safe to plug in my iPod to the speakers, and spent the next five hours wondering how it could be that a library could have so little to offer someone as bored and open to enchantment as I was. Maybe it was the numbers and equations in the books that made the place so stale and lifeless. I imagined the laughing and lively celebration that must be going on buildings away in the main library’s fiction section. It’s there that I felt at home, and somehow closer to a job as an English teacher, but there were no positions leftover for freshman students. Here the silence was heavy and uncompromising,

constantly sucking me back into its dungeon-like stillness as if it sensed I’d escape if left alone. At 20 minutes to 10, I couldn’t take any more and started the short process of closing. I clicked off the copier machine, filled out my timecard, and in my walk around the hidden corner of the library was astonished to see an old man in a suit hunched over at an otherwise empty table. The area of the room was poorly lit, and the windows provided only black, but his wrinkled skin was bright and almost glowing, and I looked around for the source of what it was reflecting before dealing with the man himself.

“This is the place to be, eh?” He smacked his lips then smiled, which pushed the skin under his eyes up to create squints and revealed a mouth filled with long teeth that were all so skinny it looked like much more than a full set.

“Can I help you, Sir?” I said it in a mumble, to myself. The man was too strange to require normal rules of conversation.

By convincing myself that my look-out skills at the desk were better than they actually were, that no one could possibly have snuck by without my noticing, I managed to interpret his mystery as a deliberate threat.

“Libraries … you know just what to expect from them.

How is it I can go into any library and get this same calm, but not from anywhere else? Tell me that one.” He seemed to have trouble breathing, wheezing and coughing into his sleeve.

“Did you need help with something? We’re closing here in a minute.”

He looked at me and threw himself backward in a surprise that felt overdone and mocking. “You’re the librarian?”

I decided against correcting him with the title Library Assistant, and instead nodded.

“I’m Professor Leon Shelling,” he said, standing up to shake my hand and revealing himself as a man of over six feet, skinny but not frail, and quite a bit more intimidating than his hunched figure implied. I grabbed his hand and shook, not knowing how else to respond, and he seemed to take from this Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 167

a compliment.

“I teach Calc 343. Did teach, anyway.” He was still shaking my hand. “I was fired two days back.” He stopped as if to consider this predicament for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” I said lamely.

“I need to stay here,” he blurted, then reddened, aware he’d let too much out at once.

“In the library? Overnight?”

“Just for a while, just on nights you’re here.”

“You know I wouldn’t be able to let you do that.” I took a couple of steps backward.

“My wife won’t let me back. I need this place.”

“Why here?” It seemed a fair question, but I felt myself also redden at the vague, mysterious direction the conversation was headed.

“Do you have homework? I can do any math homework you have, science homework too, no problem. I’ll let myself out a couple hours before it opens.” He slouched over some again, and for a second I thought he was dropping to his knees to beg.

“I … don’t know.”

“Math tests? I still have friends in the department, I can get you test answers, anything. Anything you need. I just need a place to stay.”

I looked him over once more, his gray stubble and long nose, the crooked fingers now playing with the buttons of his suit. His gray hair flared in all directions. I recognized him as a professor who had been in the library before, many times in fact, though he was now coated with a layer of brokenness like makeup for a movie. Maybe I felt his being a math professor gave him more ownership of the library than I had the right to control. It was more his than mine. Maybe it was the boredom, a fear that not being excessively lenient would be dooming myself to the stale strictness of Margaret the Head Librarian, telling the world that I’d be happy staying in this job forever.

Maybe still it was the simple fact that I was one more failed quiz away from having to retake Algebra 101 next semester, my one required math class, and the only thing in the way of a passable GPA and any shot at a fall internship in the English Department. In any case, I surprised myself in my quick decision and let that newfound boldness guide me through the rest of the conversation.

“By seven o’clock you’ll be out of here, no later?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ll keep yourself in the back, away from windows?”

“Of course.”

“And if someone comes across you, you’ll tell them you were hiding behind something and there was no way I could’ve known you were here?”

“Absolutely.”

It was me that now stuck out my hand, smiling and decisive.

“Then I don’t see why not.”

Leon straightened his back, sending out loud cracking 168 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

pops, then shook my hand with fervor. Without another word he sat back down at the desk in the corner and disappeared into an already open textbook, apparently anxious to avoid any more interaction than was necessary. This was fine by me, and I turned off the lights and left, locking the library’s big glass doors behind me. The library sat tucked into the far corner of the building’s basement, at the end of a long, weaving maze of entangled hallways. One got the feeling that the school was doing its best to keep lost students from accidently wandering in, protecting unexpecting newcomers from the life-sucking wasteland ahead. After finishing the maze and heading up the stairs through the building’s doors, I sucked in the night air with relief. I wondered why anyone would choose to live in a dungeon. *** “Pythagoras might’ve never existed, isn’t that something?

Most of what we credit to him is just made up of followers that didn’t matter on their own, stuffed together.” Leon clapped his hands together at the last two words from his seat at a circle table beside mine at the desk. “Think, even genius is nothing without the myth to keep it going. That’s the best we can hope for in a legacy, being part of something bigger.” His bony index finger was jabbing at something in the distance above his head.

“Even with the best ideas, you still have to make sure you’re shelved where people are going to look.” He trailed off as his hands came back down to rest on the table, and I wondered for a moment what he meant by “we” and “you.”

For the past three weeks, he would move to his seat there from a table in the back once I came in on my shift. When he wasn’t doing my Algebra homework, which took him a maximum of 10 minutes, an hour short of my average time, he read random books off the shelves and shouted to me or maybe himself what he thought were interesting facts. I had no idea how he could stand it. They were textbooks, some with barely any words at all, just hundreds of pages of formulas and equations. He would stay at the table until it became close to closing time then disappear silently into his corner. I offered food and old novels but he wouldn’t take any of it, only sheets of scratch paper which he scribbled on as he read, and by the next night, those would also be gone, thrown away somewhere.

I didn’t ask how taking notes could possibly have any useful purpose anymore.

“Why were you fired?” I asked him two nights after our first meeting. I did my best to channel a raspy “whattaya in for?” tone in my voice, in an effort to make our relationship, if not friendly, then at least somewhat cinematic in its unknowability.

I succeeded only in making myself sound like I had a cold.

“Misuse of fees,” he told me, looking older than he ever had. His breathing whistled and wheezed. “They let you charge each student for special materials, like for the cost of the computer software they use for the class. It’s a yearly subscription so you have each student pay $20.” He leaned toward me. “But I have a cousin in Missouri that works at the

company that makes the program, got me the CDs and their accounts for free, then he got the money to me. A hundred kids a semester that’s $40,000 after 10 years.” He was speaking slowly, deliberately, as if he expected me to take notes and put the scheme to work myself. After a long pause his eyes moved away, from presumably shame, but they came back only a moment later. “I have a gambling problem, it’s why my wife won’t let me back. I’ve got nothing.”

I had been standing beside his table shelving a book, and with nothing to do once that was done I stood awkwardly, hands clasped in front of me in sympathy for his situation. His admission was surprising, but there was something honest in his old eyes that declared a solemn and regretful “trust me.”

Besides, the brief glimpse of humanity he had let out only made my understanding of the professor more muddled than before, had added a new side to explore (an extra point to the polygon, the professor might say), that made me decide to wait on passing judgment.

When he finally turned back to his scribbling, I slid away to the main desk. With Leon taking care of my Algebra worries, I pulled a novel out of my bookbag that Leon had turned down earlier that night. It was a comforting escape from the alien symbols and formulas I’d just finished shelving. Here were characters with emotion, a story with a purpose. I even managed to push away thoughts of school worries, of the GPA I needed for a scholarship that would let me stay another semester. Even with Leon’s help, I would barely make the minimum grades, and my parents’ reaction to news that their savings had been for nothing would be close to unbearable.

With the reservations they had about letting me go to an expensive, out-of-state college, I found myself wondering, with some fascination, if I’d be taking shelter with Leon once the semester finished.

And even with the scholarship, it was unclear what I’d accomplished here. I thumbed through the pages of the book, their worn edges and the bookmark’s position the only thing I had to show for progress. The plan had been to prove that I was more than the slightly below average high school kid no one could put a name to. But I buckled under the weight of the big school, the classes and faces, and any motivation dissolved to nothing in the ocean I found myself wading through. The Math library was the only easy, manageable thing about the place, and I agreed to cover so many employees’ absences that the supervisor Margaret insisted I take on more hours. Before I knew it, I was practically living at the library. The mundane small talk between shifts with Lindsay, another employee, which had seemed promising the first couple of weeks, was now gruelingly predictable seven months later, and the pathetic extent to which I’d talked to any girl on campus.

My hopes in becoming an English teacher, vague but still present, only materialized in the motivation I had to read my own books. Books for classes only brought me closer to school and the reality of what I wasn’t able to accomplish. With

my own novels, I could live somewhere else for a moment, somewhere where the characters always had their next moves plotted out for them. Life’s problems and responsibilities solved as simply as turning the page. That I could understand.

An escape, sure, but at least there was meaning. Something to translate to eventual heart-to-heart conversations with Lindsay.

I wanted to shove my book under the professor’s nose and shout “All of your math and mystery, as if you were hiding vast secrets! Well then, where are your answers? What good has it done you? Show me something real with your numbers.

Something heartfelt with your equations. Something that means something. See, don’t you see? What good are your numbers? What’s the point?” *** Three weeks later, I found myself once again next to Professor Shelling’s table, running my fingers down the aisle of books for the placement of a big orange Algebraic Combinatorics volume among its dust-covered collection. When he started to speak this time, I assumed and hoped it was further explanation of his mystery, and it took me some time to realize it was only a math riddle.

“Listen to this: Say you’re on a game show, one of those with three doors where you choose your prize, and behind one door is a new sports car, behind the other two is jack-squat — bags of rocks, alright? So the host puts his arm over your shoulder and swoops his other arm out over the doors.” He demonstrated this while he said it, palm facing up. “He says to you ‘Which one? One, two or three?’ You tell him ‘One, that’s the door.’ And the host knows which door has the car and he opens up a different door than the one you picked, that he knows has rocks in it. So if number one has rocks, he’ll open up the other door that has rocks, and if number one has a car he’ll open one of the rock doors at random. Following me?

Now the host says ‘You can stick with the door you chose, door number one, or I’ll let you switch to the other door, the one that’s still closed.’ Now you’d think it wouldn’t matter, right, that it’d be a 50/50 choice? But no, no, no. If you switch, your odds of getting the car double. Nothing’s changed, he hasn’t told you if you were right or wrong, but suddenly you’re twice as likely to win if you switch.” He was leaning forward in his chair, speaking excitedly.

“They printed that in a magazine and ten thousand people wrote in saying that this couldn’t be true. A thousand of those had PhDs, can you believe that? It was completely against human intuition, human logic. It almost doesn’t make any sense at all, yet it’s math — it makes perfect sense!” He let out a high-pitched cackle at this, smacking the page of the book he had open in front of him. “Now you take the life out of this story, turn it into a thing of numbers, now it becomes simple, straightforward. Numbers and a formula. Any high school statistics student will just plug it all in and tell you the right probability in a minute. But in practice doesn’t work like on paper.” He was beaming, though his head was shaking as Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 169

he coughed asthmatically. His beard had grown out over the last three weeks to hide more and more of him, shrinking him down to a tiny old man. It looked like he had gained 10 years.

I could only offer a smile back, but it was then that I knew he felt a safety in these books, a flimsy logical structure to life that was completely foreign to me and for Professor Shelling, the only thing left to cling to. *** Nine o’clock the next morning I got a call. It was Lindsay.

“Can you come over here?”

“Lindsay?” The call had woken me up but I shot to attention at her voice.

“I’m freaking out.”

I racked my brain for any signs of boyfriend trouble or growing flirtatiousness in our recent small talk. I tried to morph my voice into something confident and unsurprised, imagining her blue eyes big and needing. “Of course, are you in the dorms? Or ….”

There was a long, heavy pause, during which I slowly remembered that Lindsay opened the library on Thursday mornings. The tolerable silence bottomed out and became another oceanic void to stay afloat in. “The … the library.

Come to the library,” she stammered.

I held the phone away from my face in case she could hear my grimace. “Right. I’ll be right there.” I fumbled out a goodbye and hurried to the library. My best guess was that it was a plea to take over her shift so she could do better things, so I’m not sure why I ran, but nonetheless I was sweating and panting as I pushed open the glass doors.

“Oh Jesus, finally.”

On paper it wasn’t a lot missing, but it had to be understood that there wasn’t a whole lot to the library to begin with. The main desk computer, the speakers, the two patron computers, the scanner, even the stapler — gone. The cash register was cleared out, the whole $40 of it.

“I mean what did you do? Margaret will be here at one, you’re going to have to explain this.” Years past retirement age, Margaret was adamantly unwilling to see this place fall below anything less than absolute professionalism while she was alive to see it. She was the reason we checked shelves, kept statistics, and maybe even showed up at all. Lindsay was now rocking herself up and down in the main desk swivel chair and I was turning myself around the room with my hand on my head like a dancer. I pretended to survey the damage, but more than anything I was avoiding Lindsay’s gaze.

“Look,” she said. She whisked away a strand of dark hair with a puff of breath. She was short and shy, obviously uncomfortable with having to be angry, and at that moment looked achingly out of reach. She stared at me like my very existence confused her. “I called in case maybe you knew what happened so this doesn’t turn into a mess. I don’t care how you close, we all skip stuff and clock out early. But Jesus, I can’t be here when Margaret gets here. I have to go.” With that, she 170 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ Winter 2010

sprung up from the chair and was gone.

The chair kept on oscillating back and forth, taking on Lindsay’s disapproval in her absence. I looked down and saw that my fists were clenched tight, and suddenly aware of reality and that it would do me no favors, realized that I was furious. That son of a bitch, I thought. I gave him a place to stay, I kept my mouth shut with my job on the line. Not that the job mattered, but this. This is how a favor is repaid? This is what human decency means to someone I thought deserved respect? Not only for me but for what I thought was his home?

His last refuge? It was completely beyond me, too much for me to comprehend, and I slumped down into the desk chair with my eyes closed. It was several minutes before a voice opened them again.

“Excuse me.” It was a student a few years older than myself, a lanky graduate student with gelled hair and perfect posture.

He was holding a big blue sixth volume of Stochastic Geometry.

“This book, it’s all marked on. Shouldn’t you look up the last guy to have it and fine him or something?” Like the world owed him pristine library books.

I snatched it from his hand and opened the front cover.

It was lined with words written in blue ink, shining against the faded book. “In the eighth grade The Lord of the Rings arrived on the school library’s shelf, and it became the absolute obsession of my high school years,” it started. The cover was filled, as was the inside back cover. The words seemed to glow.

“You took this off the shelf just now?” He nodded, and I mumbled something about not being able to look up anything without a computer as I walked around the desk to the shelves.

Stochastic Geometry vol. 1 Jan. 1945. I fell to the floor between aisles, opened the cover and ran my finger along the inside as I mouthed the words to myself.

“This is my place, in the protection of permanence. It is impossible to live a life in these comforts, but I hope now to be remembered in them. I dedicate this to my wife, who was never warned.”

It was a 54-volume set, whose order of decreasing fadedness gave the initial impression that the series’ designer had gradually improved their craft year by year. I grabbed at the books frantically and at random. They were all full of stories from Leon’s childhood and adulthood, dissections of family members and people he had been close to, riddles, paradoxes, confessions, embarrassments, numbered lists of favorite books and movies and equations, timelines and crushes and diary entries as recent as two days ago. Some carried into the covers of the next volume but each was completely full and neatly written. Some read like remembered class lectures, with the year written on top — a range of five years with a question mark for those longer ago and down to the day for the more recent. There were drawings and diagrams with footnotes leading to their explanation in other volumes. There were quotes from the famous and life lessons from himself followed by humble discretions. Regrets and triumphs, goals fulfilled

and unfulfilled. Everything about it was clear and deliberate, with wit and often sadness, and I realized that the editing and perfecting had been done every day of the last three weeks on the countless sheets of scratch paper, now lost among the rest of the campus’s forgotten trash.

After skimming 30 or so random volumes to convince myself of their reality, I sat exhausted and just as stunned as I had been when I’d started. It was a massive, personal undertaking, and for what, a symbolic display of legacy and order? And for whom — his wife, his students, his old colleagues? All the people he’d never been able to impress?

Me? I found myself again on the verge of anger. The open window in the corner let in a breeze, and the loose pages of the books on the floor travelled toward me in arcs. The volume nearest to me stayed unmoved, blocked from the wind by my leg, and as I picked it up to shelve it, I noticed something written on the cover. It was the first volume, its cover faded almost completely, and underneath where Stochastic could barely be made out was “Shelling’s Equation” scribbled and hastily underlined. Numbers and a formula, I remembered. Just plug it in. I opened to the inside cover for the second time.

“March 11th was the last day I saw my wife. My cousin Daniel’s new boss turned out to be more perceptive of missing CDs and shuffled finances. Daniel warned me a couple of weeks before that she was suspicious, but there was nothing to do by that point except wait. I was called in and fired after classes on March 9th, and I came home as if nothing had happened. The next day, I took the bus to campus as usual and walked around, finding myself walking into the Math Library instinctively. I was halfway down an aisle of books before I consciously realized I was there. Stepping into the narrow aisle the rows create isn’t unlike entering a stretching path in a forest, where the trees bend inward, enveloping your entire visible view, guiding you to a fixed endpoint. The bending trees here are instead stiff metal shelves, but that sure destination is the same. And I stayed at the table I now spend hours at every day, going through books on the shelf until the time I would normally head home. I remember reading a book on Georg Ohm and thinking how wonderful it would be to have your life and life’s work written in straight biography and inarguable equations. Knowing during your life what the beginning and end of everything you would ever stand for was, housed between two covers and on shelves around the world.

“I took the bus home at my normal time and found my wife sitting on the living room couch. I felt this unfair, as if she had planted landmines in my path to catch me off guard.

My firing had been in the morning paper. I thought, maybe if

I hadn’t emptied our savings the year before. Maybe if I hadn’t given my word so many times that I was through, that if I was ever caught again I wouldn’t blame her for leaving. Maybe if I had my finished biography in front of me like Ohm’s in the library, and had seen it coming, step-by-step directions around the landmines. More often now I wonder if I’d be able to change the path even with the chance, and together all the circles I make for myself remind me of why I normally avoid hypotheticals.

“When the boy is working, I read quotes and riddles aloud to him. Stories with a point. I find myself getting lost in them, a part of them almost. On the second night after our first meeting, during an explanation of the uses of Pascal’s triangle, I felt for a moment — a breath’s worth of time but sill a moment — that I was Blaise Pascal himself explaining probability to his partner Fermat. Their works were solid and definitive, safe — their endings were already decided so why risk making my own? I wondered how long I could stay in this place before I’d be stuck — dependent on the sustenance of the books, their contents like nutrients in an IV. It was the same gamble as on the casino floor: the safety of probabilities versus the delusion of having a meaningful life through them.

Those numbers seem so simple, so graspable, but the reality is they’re as empty or full as what you have to show for them, the experiences you can apply to them and say ‘This is why, this is real.’ The riskiest gamble you could ever fall for is letting every improbable moment pass by for hopes of a safe bet. There are no safe bets. If any one thing drove me to start this writing, it is that.”

The entry ended at the very end of the back cover, and there was something immensely satisfying about the words fitting the space exactly. There was no need to overflow into another volume, their boundaries perfectly defined. I thought of what I had to show for the novels I kept in an easily accessible pouch on the side of my backpack, like an alwaysready defense mechanism. Bolting through one after another in desperate progression, an unending sprint from plot to plot to avoid making my own. I hurriedly opened up the second volume of Stochastic Geometry, feeling obliged and for the first time compelled to see what he saw and feel what he felt, immersing myself in Leon Shelling. I cringed at his admissions, welled up with his past, and when Margaret appeared at the aisle’s entrance I could only hope that the books I hadn’t yet gotten to provided for him an end, somewhere in their covers if not between them. In my place between the rows, the calm and silence was wonderfully predictable. I held my breath and put my trust in the protection of the numbers around me.

Winter 2010 ▪ The Battered Suitcase ▪ 171

Aunia Kahn Aunia Kahn’s work has been compared to movie-like stills, which hide away long stories within their visuals. Often times she explores taboo and controversial subject matter to challenge the viewers, their understanding and preconceived notions, yet she connects through honest feeling and emotions. Using a hybrid art form, she combines many disciplines, melding photography, painting and collage. She is also a graphic and web designer and the creator of the Silver Era Tarot and Lowbrow Tarot Project. http://www.auniakahn.com and http://auniakahn.bigcartel.com

Life Can Survive I love to watch the trees die Each year a splendor Of course it sounds brash Like you, they sleep We enjoy the trees naked Leafless and vacant Nothing green or vibrant Not lifelike, although erect Its limbs bring its shape The moving in the wind Like breathing from inside The beauty is, no doubt Watching it grow again Beauty from the inside, out The cycle remains Love the stillness Love the movement Love the death and silence Love the undead and rebirth

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The cycle remains The cycle we call hope That it will come back again This year and next To bring life to the ending To die another death To bring death to life To cycle again Proving that in death Life can survive Proving that in life We can survive death

Jane Linders Jane Linders is a photographer of dubious qualifications. She makes her home in St. Louis, Missouri, but finds inspiration during her annual trip to Burning Man Festival. Jane does photography for fun, and, of course, huge profits. http://www.freewebs.com/janelinders

City Garden, St. Louis, Missouri

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Radio Flyer

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Intersection

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Fountain Head

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A Blast from the Past

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The Blue Suitcase

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New Directions in Art & Literature

The Battered Suitcase STAFF Fawn Neun................................ Chief Editor Maggie Ward..... Assistant Chief Editor, Art Director N. Apythia Morges.............. Assistant Chief Editor Alice Bigelow.......................... Fiction Editor Anne Murphy.................................... Editor Laura Foxworthy................................ Editor Kathryn Megan Starks........................... Editor Jeni Berry........................................ Art Michelle Frank.................................... Art Kim Acrylic..............................Poetry/Music Heather Clitheroe .....................Fiction/Poetry Hannah Dunton..........................Fiction/Poetry Kate Hudson............................ Fiction/Poetry Laura Jokisch.......................... Fiction/Poetry Ruth Lilly............................. Fiction/Poetry Odile Noel ............................Fiction/Poetry Siobhan Reeves ........................Fiction/Poetry Tamela Ritter.......................... Fiction/Poetry Jill Tinker............................ Fiction/Poetry Ann Tinkham............................ Fiction/Poetry

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