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Music from my iPod blares through a single, small speaker, almost drowning out the white noise of the always-on fan and my muttered swearing. My fingers are filthy, almost black, like those of a child who’s been playing in the dirt, like I’m young enough not to care again. The air in the shop smells like oil, industrial orange hand soap, and rust. I’m bent over a bike, wielding a pair of fifteen-millimeter wrenches, wrestling with a pair of nuts that have rusted onto an axle, waiting for oil to creep into the threads, wondering just how I got there.

There are the easy answers, or the smart-ass ones, at least. Wanting to do something different for my senior year of undergrad and needing a change from my job in recycling, spent sorting term papers from the beer bottles in every miserable sort of weather you can get in the mountains of western North Carolina, I had changed over to the Community Bike Shop. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

[img_assist|nid=8589|title=East Falls by Michael Morell © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=340]

Before I could even ride bicycles, my father was showing me how to fix them. He wasn’t a professional by any means, but he was handy with a wrench, and that’s good enough as far as machines are concerned. Whenever he walked his bike home with a flat tire when I was a boy, he would call me to his side as both a student and a helper, showing me how, with a pair of screwdrivers, to pry a tire’s bead free of the rim, asking me to hand him tools as they were needed. As I grew, he showed me more: how to install new cables and brakes; which screws I should turn to calibrate a derailleur; how to disassemble and grease a hub. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll never starve through ignorance.

Fixing bikes makes me happy. Back then, I would climb the steep, creaking stairs out of our basement workshop, hands black with grease, grime, and unknown gunk, smiling. I was a neat child, afraid of getting my hands dirty, but not with bikes in our workshop, where the bare bulbs overhead reflected their light off a dozen mirrors we’d found to brighten every dim corner. Even now, that stubborn layer of filth makes me feel young, whether I’m emerging again from my childhood workshop or from the shops in the mountains of western North Carolina and the streets of Center City Philadelphia where I’ve found employment.

Before we had books in common, my father and I shared bikes. I felt proud when I could do something the way he had showed me. I hoped he would be proud, too.

No, that’s not it either.

My father was disappointed by my inability to ride a two-wheeler by the age of six. He never said so directly, but I could tell. In 1944, when he was seven, he and his parents had fled their home in Riga, Latvia, never to return. He had taken his bicycle and all that he could carry on his back. Never a driver, my father found his freedom balanced on two narrow wheels. He only wanted me to have that same freedom. I, however, was content with my training wheels, wishing only for the freedom from falling.

What I found acceptable at six, when my kindergarten classmates were, one by one, announcing they could ride a two-wheeler, became an annoyance at seven, a social hindrance by eight. Even my younger friends could ride without training wheels. How was I to advance my social standing if I couldn’t go ride bikes with my friends? And yet, fear ruled me. Even with training wheels, even before, when I rode a tricycle, I had had my share of falls, but they were nothing compared to the imagined calamity of tumbling off a two-wheeler. I could break my head open. My brains might leak out through the vents in my helmet. Worse, I could skin both of my knees.

I tried to reason with Dad, asking if I could have just one training wheel removed. Nothing worked. My new two-wheeler – cobbled together, like all of my family’s bikes, from the best parts that could be found in the trash of the Squirrel Hill and Spruce Hill neighborhoods around my house and adorned with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo on the frame’s top tube – taunted me whenever I visited our basement workshop. It was everything that was cool for a second-grader.

The bike was both a reward and a practical consideration. At eight, I was getting too big for my training bike, my knees brushing against the tassels that hung from the ends of the handlebars whenever I pedaled. Dad knew that, sooner or later, I’d give in, and he wasn’t going to move the training wheels to another bicycle.

I did give in. Maybe some mental oil seeped in and freed me from my fear, a fear that had oxidized, and had me frozen like a rusted nut. One morning, I woke up from a dream about flying, ready to mount up and ride. Those first tentative jaunts only took me from one end of the basement to the other, but the ease with which I rode made me wonder, even then, what had been standing in my way. In that moment, I was in love. I knew my father’s freedom then.

Back in the shop, the nuts haven’t given yet. My muscles are burning and the wrenches have left grooves in my hands. I leave the wrenches hanging from either side of the axle and turn to the peg-board above the work bench, reaching for the hickory handle of the rubber mallet. The large, black head of the mallet makes it seem almost cartoonish, the sort of tool that I should pull from nowhere, but its reality is comforting. Returning to the recalcitrant bicycle, I give one of the wrenches a solid whack, making the whole bike bounce, though it’s clamped to a heavy repair stand, and shaking the other wrench loose. Another whack as the clang of the fallen wrench dies. The nut turns a few degrees. I move to the other side, picking up the second wrench, replacing it on the nut, and discarding an imperfect metaphor with another swing of the mallet.
Hilary B. Bisenieks is a lifelong Philadelphian
known far and wide (in West Philly) as "that guy with the kilt." He
recently returned north after a four-year sojourn in the mountains of western
North Carolina, where he completed his studies of Creative Writing and English
Literature at Warren Wilson College. In his free time, Hilary builds and rides
bicycles, both silly and sensible. Hilary can be found online at www.hilarybisenieks.com.

[img_assist|nid=8231|title=Break in the Armor by Brian Griffiths © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=middle|width=400|height=266]

Grace Churchill’s daughter died for the twenty-seventh time. It was the same room as always, bare white drywall under humming fluorescent lamps, a long wood table and stiff, squeaky chairs. The interview room, designed for discomfort. Grace listened along to the recording she now knew by heart, watching the lawyers across the table as they drummed their fingers and pretended to take notes and avoided her eyes. They never looked at her while it played – fear, she assumed, of seeing a mother in anguish.

There would be no tears. The lawyers heard Katie speaking from the grave in the recording. Grace just heard Katie.

Wilson Ross, the district attorney, had sat with Grace countless times to revisit the recording in the interview room. Today a younger attorney, a blonde woman named Emily, joined him. She wore glasses and a neat gray skirt and a serious expression as she listened. Grace knew it was the first time she’d done so when, twenty minutes in, Emily gripped the arm of her chair so tightly that her fingers grew whiter than the tips of her French manicure.

Twenty minutes in is when the shrieking begins.

They had offered at one point to give Grace a copy of the recording – a 911 call, captured from Katie’s cell phone nearly three months before, during That Night. Ross said it would be highly unorthodox (his words) to do so, but given her interest in hearing it repeatedly, he would make an exception. Grace came to the office three times a week, often more, asking to listen, drawn by the promise of her daughter’s voice. She wanted to understand why it happened. She needed to suffer with her child.

Grace did not want to bring the recording home. She thought it should never leave the interview room. There it was safe, stowed away in a small laptop computer, stored in a steel cabinet, and locked behind a sturdy wooden door. Outside of the room, she knew, it would follow her everywhere. Katie’s muted breaths, her shaking voice, begging to be heard, her mother obliging.

The tape faded to silence. Ross stood from his chair and hunched over the computer, closing the file and folding the screen down. He was unusually somber, moving with a tentativeness that was far from his normal head-high swagger. Ross was what her father used to derisively call Country Club, a man who lined his closets with monogrammed shirts, who whitened his teeth and darkened his hair and always had lighter skin around his eyelids from the tanning bed. He went to Stanford and mentioned it often. Whenever he’d approach Grace, he would briefly look down before meeting her eyes with a reassuring frown, as if recalling steps from the manual of dealing with Surviving Relatives. He thought of her as a nuisance, she knew, but he enjoyed seeing his name in the newspaper far too much to not be directly involved.

Ross sat down at Grace’s left. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder.

"We’ve got to give it to them," he said.

Grace said nothing. She looked from Ross back to the folded laptop on the table in front of her. Katie’s voice tucked away in its shiny black shell, marbles in a jar. Once released, it would spread uncontrollably.

"The judge issued her final decision this morning," he continued. "The tapes are public record. We’ve got no legal rights to keep them under wraps any longer."

"Who wants it?" Grace asked.

Ross paused. "All of them," he replied.

 

There are bumps, perpetual motion, as if the moment were recorded in a dryer at its lowest setting. The operator asks about the emergency, whether anybody is there, Hello? The dry rumble continues, then a muffled whisper, inaudible. Then, she speaks. Ray, please, she says. Ray, turn around. We can sit down and talk about it. You don’t have to do this. You’re not alone.

Ray says nothing.

 

There was a woman in a support group Grace attended whose daughter was abducted from a parking lot. She was a college student, and had been shopping at a department store for a television stand for her apartment. On security video, the girl could be seen walking out of the store and across empty asphalt, her outstretched arms wrapped around a large box containing her new assembly-required furniture. A man in a dark shirt and a baseball cap followed twenty feet behind her.

Grace remembered it well. The girl’s name was Libby Miller. Her body was found near a creek about a week after she disappeared from the department store. The last time she was seen alive was in that video when, in the far left corner of the screen, the man appeared to offer his help loading the box into the car. The grainy video of him grabbing her – the entire sequence, beginning with her leaving the store – played in an endless loop on television newscasts for weeks, always preceded by a stone-faced reporter warning viewers that what they were about to see was upsetting. An introduction designed to draw more eyes to the screen, to the tragedy unfolding on the blurred black-and-white security footage. Even after police caught the man responsible, the networks still found reasons to air the images, running stories about parking lot security or self defense or "stranger danger", but always – always – referring back to the video of Libby and her abduction.

The mother – her name was Sarah – said she no longer turned on the television for fear of seeing the footage again. Someone once told her the clip was on YouTube, under the title, "Abducted Girl’s Final Moments – Disturbing." It had received more than two million views.

"I couldn’t tell," Sarah said, "whether that last word was a warning or a suggestion."

Sarah couldn’t comprehend why Grace kept going back to hear her own daughter’s tape again and again. Neither could her family, her friends, the other parents in her group, or Ross, who only allowed her to do so because the psychiatrist said it would help her cope. When they listened to the recording, they heard only death. Grace heard it as well. Those final minutes, the screaming and fighting and choking, stained her memory the first time she heard it. Every quiet moment – at night in bed, or at home between the steady visits of condolence – it rang in her ears, inescapable as breath. She tried to drown it out with old VHS tapes from Katie’s school plays and cheerleading performances. But the voice from the 911 call shouted everything else down. When Grace thought of her daughter, the echoes of her murder smothered every other memory.

A week after first hearing the tapes, she asked to listen again. They sat her down in the interview room, set up the computer, and double-clicked the file. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in the backseat with Katie, where Raymond Jonas had forced her to lie after tying her hands and feet with strips of bed sheets from his room at the Gabriel Institute for Boys. Katie’s phone was in her front pocket, the investigators told her, and she had been able to call 911 by reaching around and using the speed dial. Grace whispered into Katie’s ear to stay calm, to relax, that her mother would protect her. She ran her hands along her daughter’s smooth face. She told her she loved her and that everything would be OK.

Grace returned the following morning and again a day later. Each time she listened, tense and nauseous, unable to turn away. She felt terror, anger, pain – what she imagined Katie felt while bound in the car. Joining in this suffering brought comfort somehow, as if her daughter hadn’t died alone after all.

"You’ll feel differently," Sarah once said after Grace attempted to explain her connection to the tape.

"When?" Grace asked.

"When the vultures get a hold of it."

 

No one responds to the operator’s questions, just a mild rumble, and the in-and-out fade of Katie’s voice. It’s difficult to hear what she says through the bumps in the road. The operator says to stay on the line, to be calm if you can’t talk, we’ll get you help, where are you? We’ll find you …

 

Grace and Katie had a tradition. On Sunday nights, the two put on pajamas and curled into the couch together, a week’s worth of reality television shows ready for viewing in the DVR. They made sundaes and hot chocolate, girls at a slumber party, gossiping and talking about their lives: Katie’s too busy with grad school and work for a boyfriend, Grace’s new supervisor is a bitch, did you hear about Linda’s daughter down the street? Grace secretly hated the television they watched so religiously – narcissistic garbage, she thought – but looked forward to Sundays regardless, to spending time alone with her daughter like they had when Katie was a little girl.

It had always been just the two of them. Grace nursed Katie, caught her after her first steps, taught her to ride a bike and throw a softball and braid her hair. The mom and the dad, rolled into one. Katie’s father was a man Grace had dated briefly and barely knew. She’d been past thirty, recently divorced and enjoying independence for the first time in her life when she realized one queasy morning that she was several weeks late. He did not have to know, she’d decided. Grace would love her baby enough for two parents.

She did once try to reach out to the father. This was after Katie began asking questions that couldn’t be answered with a simple sometimes god decides a mommy is enough. Grace made some phone calls and went to Google, uncovering an address about an hour away from their own. She wrote a letter, learned he had a family of his own, that he did not want to risk the turmoil Katie’s sudden existence might cause. Any further attempts at contact, he wrote, should be directed toward his attorney.

Grace told Katie she could not find him.

There was resentment – Katie rarely failed to mention her missing father during an argument – but Grace recognized it was never enough to damage the bond they shared. They were partners, working together on school science and home remodeling projects, splitting chores, seeking the other’s ear to vent frustration and air good news. They even looked alike: brown hair (Katie’s long and straight, Grace’s short and graying), chestnut eyes, tall and athletic. When high school began to pull Katie away – boys, cliques, activities, that first taste of teenage emancipation – Grace felt as if a part of her was being stolen away. Yet through graduation and college, through Katie’s taking the counseling job at Gabriel while weighing her grad school options, Grace could always look forward to Sunday evenings with her daughter.

That night in August, Katie called to say she’d be working her normal day off at the institute and would not be able to make it. Grace did not watch the shows they’d saved. She never would.

 

Ray? Ray, look at me. Where are you taking me? Ray?

 

The reporters first asked for the 911 tapes the day Katie’s body was found. She’d been left in a brown, weed-choked field behind an abandoned gas station on an empty road about 20 miles from Gabriel, where she’d last been seen the previous evening. Katie worked there for about eight months, her first job after graduating from college.

The rationale the newspapers and television stations used centered on the dispatcher who received the call. They said it was in the interest of the public whether the people answering emergency phone calls were doing their jobs, whether procedures had been followed. They wanted to know if Katie could have been saved, and if so, what could be done to prevent it from happening again.

This is what they said. Grace knew better.

The greater good was not their concern. Neither, she believed, was Katie’s well-being or memory. What they wanted was pornography, a sound byte with which to tease the 11 p.m. newscast, horror and violence and death their viewers could enjoy from comfortable couches, driving up ratings. Titillation. Like Libby Miller, unwitting star of cable and broadcast and World Wide Web, a life summed up in a cautionary tale, years of smiles and laughs and hugs and tears obscured by a blurred black-and-white video.

Grace understood the fascination.

Her father had been a soldier in Korea, and kept photographs from the war in a cigar box at the rear of his top dresser drawer. Inside the box, among snapshots of grinning young men holding guns and cigarettes and cans of beer, were photographs of dead bodies. Korean soldiers with gunshot wounds to the head. A pile of charred bodies near a ransacked village. A leg, attached to nothing, its foot wearing a sandal, lying undisturbed on a dirt road. She had discovered the photos as a child and returned to them often, unable to look away despite the horrors they depicted.

Once, when Grace was eleven, she slipped the old photos into one of her schoolbooks and secreted them to class. She showed them to her friend Mary on the bus, then Mary’s brother Robert when he saw the girls huddled around something in Grace’s lap. Robert, a seventh grader, brought two of his friends to see the photos once they’d descended the bus stairs into the schoolyard. A buzz soon electrified Walt Whitman Middle School, classmates and students she’d never before spoken with whispering during class and approaching her in the hallway, asking for a glimpse of the snapshots, the forbidden images burning between the pages of her history book. Some wrinkled their eyes and noses in disgust, looking away, then turning back for another peek, as if their first instinct required a second opinion. Others pulled the photos close, eyes widening, mouths slack, intensely studying the images. More than one grinned. Grace basked in the new found attention her father’s photos brought, eating with the older kids at lunch, standing by the basketball hoops at recess, where fifth graders never went. She laughed along with jokes about the people in the pictures. That’s the worst case of sunburn I’ve ever seen! You think he’ll be able to buy just a left shoe? She promised to look for more to bring the next day, even though she knew there were none left to uncover.

Grace glowed with celebrity as she walked home from the bus stop. She spotted a neighbor girl, Annie, who was a few years younger and went to a different school. Looking to maintain her high, Grace called the girl over, promising she had something amazing for her to see. They sat on a curb, Grace pulling out the book, opening its pages and slowly presenting the pictures, a ringmaster introducing the main attraction. She’d developed a routine, telling the jokes she’d heard throughout the day while unveiling each image. The burned bodies. The gunshot man. The leg. It wasn’t until Grace had finished that she saw Annie’s face: red, streaked with tears, mouth shut, choking back sobs.

"What’s the matter?" Grace asked.

"What happened to them?"

"They were in a war. My dad did it," she lied.

"Why?"

She couldn’t find an answer. Annie wiped the tears from her face and walked away, leaving her alone on the curb with the photos. When she got home, Grace placed them back in the cigar box, never to look for them again.

Grace hadn’t thought about those photographs for years before Katie died. Now, she couldn’t help wondering about the mothers of the men in the snapshots. Whether they’d been told how their babies died. If they’d had any contact with their sons in the weeks, months, or years spent off in battle. How they would feel if they knew that, in a cigar box halfway across the globe, photographs of their dead children were kept as souvenirs.

 

I don’t think she can hear me. Can you hear me, honey? I don’t understand …

 

Grace learned quickly what the reporters were truly after in the days following Katie’s murder. She spent nearly a full day about a week after it happened with Emma Stuart, a journalist from Channel 9 News in the city. They paged through yearbooks and photographs in Katie’s bedroom, reading her poetry, telling stories like the one where she skipped her junior prom because a friend was having a difficult time and needed support. Stuart held her hand, tears welling in her eyes. Grace cried at some point, and called Raymond Jonas a monster, a monster who should burn for what he did. It was a momentary lapse, words she wasn’t even sure she fully meant. But it stuck. After all that, the stories and keepsakes and memories, it was those tears and those words that made the two-minute clip on the evening news.

She stopped taking calls from the press, but the stories continued. They investigated how 16-year-old Raymond Jonas came to be held in a minimum-security facility like Gabriel when he’d been arrested for viciously attacking his female cousin. They questioned why it had been so easy for Jonas to slip past guards, across a lighted lawn and into the facility’s parking lot, completely undetected, and how he had gotten the knife he used to surprise Katie after she’d completed a rare weekend late shift. But it always came back to the tapes: Those 31 minutes that began when Katie reached her hand around to press a button on her cell phone and ended with her rape, stabbing, and strangulation. The police first offered a detailed explanation of the circumstances surrounding the call – how the operator was limited in her ability to send help because she couldn’t speak directly to Katie, that they tried to trace the call but couldn’t pinpoint its location. A transcript of the recording followed to give reporters a play-by-play account. When the press went to the courts, a judge offered a compromise: a pool of reporters could listen to the recording and describe what happened. The response was always the same. The public deserved the right to hear for themselves, they said.

Two months after That Night, in the interview room where Katie’s voice was safely locked away, Grace learned that the courts agreed.

 

Ray, are we stopping?

 

"I understand it’s difficult. But it’s the public’s right to know." Emma Stuart sounded surprised to pick up her phone and hear Grace’s voice. Grace had surprised herself by calling, in all honesty. She had left the District Attorney’s office only a few hours before, after learning the 911 tapes would be released to the media that afternoon. In her car on the way home, talk radio hosts discussed the court decision, with one promising listeners that portions would be aired later in the day. A friend called to tell her that an article had appeared on the local newspaper’s web site praising the tapes’ release as a victory for open government. They’d all be competing to get Katie’s terrified voice onto the airwaves first. Dialing Emma’s number was an act of desperation, Grace knew, but it was one of the few acts she had left.

"I’ve heard the call," Grace replied. "The woman did nothing wrong."

"Not everybody believes that."

"I do." Grace had met Shirley Jackson, the dispatcher who received Katie’s 911 call, at one of the court hearings. She’d been on a leave of absence since That Night, haunted, lying awake at night going over the scenario again and again, trying to determine what she could have done differently. Grace hugged her and told her she shouldn’t listen to what they were saying in the news, but the words slid right off the woman.

"I wish there was more I could do." Emma sounded like Ross, blowing Grace off under the pretense that she was trying to help. "The call will go to air. It’s not my decision."

"And if it were?" Grace asked.

She had no reply. Grace continued, "No good can come from airing that tape."

Emma remained silent for a moment, then briefly inhaled and held her breath, as if steeling to utter the next words. "I’ve been told you listen to them quite often."

The statement took Grace by surprise. There was an accusation in her voice, as if Grace’s desire to hear the recording somehow existed on the same plane as strangers in search of thrills. The judgment angered her – here was a girl not much older than Katie, who probably believed good was being done by putting that 911 tape on the evening news. Too young to know that ratings trumped public service every time.

"You’re not her mother," Grace said. "You couldn’t understand."

"Look, we’re not running the whole thing," Emma said. "They’ll cut it off before the … violent part."

Which is the violent part? Grace wanted to ask the question but stopped short, quickly ending the conversation and hanging up the phone. Even if Emma Stuart were on her side, she had been correct about one thing: She could do nothing to stop its airing. On Grace’s television, during the commercial break for an afternoon talk show, an advertisement for the evening news had already hyped the airing of the "dramatic" 911 call in the Katie Churchill murder case. The other stations were also likely doing so, as were the newspapers and everyone else trying to draw attention to their product. The anchors would warn viewers to prepare themselves for the disturbing footage, grim, studied looks on their faces that would disappear moments later during witty banter with the wacky weather guy. The recording would then hit the Internet, drawing millions of hits on YouTube and countless other sites, sometimes in snippets, others in full, unedited form. On the newspaper’s website, anonymous posters would use the comments section in the latest story about Katie’s murder to spout vitriol over illegal immigration and homosexuality and politics. Ross would hold a press conference decrying the judge’s decision, his suit neatly pressed, hair tailored, a practice run for his upcoming Senate campaign. Raymond Jonas would still be in jail. Katie would still be dead.

Grace turned off the television.

They’ll cut it off before the violent part. Her thoughts turned to another photograph, one that ran in newspapers across the country and won numerous awards when she was a girl. It showed a South Vietnamese soldier holding a silver handgun to the head of a Viet Cong prisoner. The prisoner was ragged, bleeding from the lip, hands bound behind him, wearing a checkered shirt that hung off his skinny frame like drapery. His face pursed in terrified anticipation, like that of a boy waiting for the doctor to prick him with a dreaded needle. A second after the picture snapped, the prisoner was shot. There were likely other photos taken after, showing the man’s lifeless body on the ground, a pool of blood and brain and skull. Images considered more violent than the look on a man’s face – the sound of a girl’s voice – when they know they’re going to die.

She wondered whether the boys by the basketball hoops at Walt Whitman Middle School had gotten a hold of that Vietnam photo. They’d probably invented more jokes as they passed it along in a circle, young hyenas smelling blood. It’s not good target practice from that close up! Snickering, pretending that there was nothing wrong with enjoying someone’s death. Their sons might gather in the same schoolyard tomorrow, pulling up Katie’s phone call on their iPhones, making the same cracks, ignoring the icy butterflies in their stomachs.

Grace wished she knew what happened to her father’s old cigar box with the Korean War photos. Maybe they were thrown away after her father’s death. Or, the box could have been lumped in with other junk dropped off at the charity donation center. Maybe it was resold to a customer who had no idea about its contents. That person could have had family in Korea, and recognized some of the bodies as brothers or sisters or fathers or neighbors, and packaged them into little envelopes and sent them across the ocean and back into the hands of the families who’d lost them all those years ago. Maybe they’d found their way home.

Gregory Kane teaches English and writing at a
middle school in Southwest Philadelphia. A former
journalist, his nonfiction work has appeared in numerous daily and weekly
newspapers. He was born and raised outside of Philadelphia
and currently resides in Haverford with his wife.
This is his first fiction publication.

[img_assist|nid=8232|title=House of Fog by Lee Muslin © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=297|height=396]Persephone Samaras can’t wait to escape the oppressive heat of the pizza ovens. She’s off to see her cousin Vasili in the hospital, that sterile, air-conditioned sanctuary. Before she’s out the door, her husband, Phillip, his thick dark arms already, at ten a.m., dusted with flour, can’t resist reminding her that she’s leaving him again, that he won’t be able to manage lunch today without her. This is his latest version of flirting-laced with resentment and provocation, which she pacifies with a smirk and a quick puckering of lips. "You’ll survive," she teases, knowing that in Phillip’s self-absorption there is no thought of Vasili-not that there is any hope.

When she enters Vasili’s hospital room, the doctor, ungloved, is tracing the unblemished skin on Vasili’s foot. Five nickel-sized lesions zigzag along the shin.

Persephone imagines Vasili’s secret, boiling beneath the purple skin that refuses to scab. Lately she’s been thinking that maybe the trick to healing is coming out with the truth, even though it wouldn’t be news to anyone, especially not to the men of the family, who laugh at the lie Vasili has invented for his mother, something about a woman in New York. He has never had to confess the truth to Persephone, not in explicit terms, anyway. Theirs has always been a special, unconditional bond that, for her, seems stronger for the miles and years that have separated them. Holding so much in for so long must have had some kind of damaging effect. But Vasili doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone-not even to Persephone; that’s what she’s always envied most about him.

This past Sunday at her cousin Spencer’s name-day dinner, the men of the family shared their wisdom. Before ringing the doorbell, Phillip, suddenly religious, said, "You don’t test God, Persephone," as if Vasili’s fate should somehow serve as a warning to her. "Remember the Korean fellow he was bringing home years ago?" he added. "Did he think we didn’t know? It’s hubris, is what it is." Persephone wondered whatever happened to Vasili’s Korean friend, Ted. She also wondered where Phillip had picked up the word hubris, not to mention when he had turned into such a philistine-a word she’d recently picked up from Vasili. Later, reaching for beer in the garage refrigerator, Spencer called Vasili’s illness "God’s revenge on the gays." Persephone had her hand on his back as she searched the freezer for ice cream. "I stopped taking Communion," Spencer boasted, and called the church "behind the times" for serving with the same spoon from the same chalice.

Persephone wants to tell the fools they can all go to hell-actually, she wants Vasili to tell them-but if he can keep his mouth shut, so can she.

Of course, she will never give Spencer the satisfaction of knowing that Vasili stopped taking Communion in church years ago when he was first diagnosed. Nor will she confess she’s been secretly careful herself, checking only the unmarked section of Vasili’s forehead for fever.

She is relieved, watching the doctor’s bare hands.

"You’re looking good," she says, approaching Vasili’s bedside.

"I’m getting eaten alive inside." Vasili sips from a glass of water. His eyes grow wide as he takes her in. "You’re looking good. My God. That skirt. Foxy!"

"You like it? It’s a hundred degrees out there."

"Like it? Am I not a man?" He grins.

The doctor pulls the sheet over the leg and offers a weak smile before exiting.

Persephone sets Vasili’s glass on the tray at the foot of the bed. Scrambled cafeteria eggs and honeydew melon remain wrapped in cellophane.

With the doctor gone, Vasili’s tone shifts. "I want to talk to you before Father Kosporis arrives."

"Father Kosporis? Why is he coming?" Persephone says. "I don’t want to see him today."
"I should think not-in that skirt."

"Funny," she says. "Is he bringing you Communion?"

"My last rites." He winks.

She shakes her head.

Years ago, the last time Persephone and Vasili were in church together, Father Kosporis made his Communion policy clear. "Let me ask you to consider again that this is truly the body and blood of Christ and that you should refrain from Holy Communion if you are not at peace with God. We are asked to stand here worthily. So, if you are in an adulterous relationship, a pre-marital sexual relationship, an unnatural relationship…" Persephone was shocked by this improvisation. Vasili grinned and said, "Well, that about covers all of us, doesn’t it?" She hesitated, and then rose to join him.

She wonders, now, what has kept his faith intact all these years, while something has been chipping away at hers.

“I need a walk,” she says.

"You’re not leaving me already."

She hears the echo of her husband and wonders why the men in her life must convey their affection with such unbecoming desperation.

"No. Just-some fresh air," she says.

"Out there?"

He is on to her, but she doesn’t bother to come clean.

"The cafeteria," she says. "Coffee."

He mirrors her strained smile.

Coffee is as obvious a lie as fresh air, given the heat.

When she reaches the door, he says, "Promise me you’ll be strong."

"What?" Persephone laughs. "I’m strong."

"I want you to be free, Phoni"-the name only Vasili still uses. "Let them know who you are," he cheers.

"Vasili!" She feels insulted. Why don’t you? she thinks.

"You’ve never really gone anywhere, or done anything. Don’t let Phillip-"

"Stop it. I’m free. You have no idea."

"I know, I know." He pauses. "New topic. My funeral dinner."

She grimaces. She can’t pretend-not about this. "Not now."

"When you get back. After you have your coffee," he adds, grinning, seeing that she has one foot out the door. "Foxy."

*

She rushes toward the cafeteria, eager for the relief that the company of strangers will provide. This has all come on so fast. But even that is a lie. She has had more than enough time to come to peace with this. It has been five years since the night he told her he was sick, in the kitchen, after Aunt Anastasia and Uncle Mike had gone to bed. It hadn’t occurred to her immediately what "HIV" was. He might have announced that he was off to Europe for a while. "A few months ago," he said, as if answering a question, "but I wanted to make sure. It’s dormant. Mom and Dad know. I’ve lost some weight." These were prepared pieces of information. "It hasn’t affected my playing." He contemplated his hands, his precious fingers. She remained dumbfounded, even as reality settled in. "The priest in New York gives me Communion in private." Then he answered the unspeakable question: "A friend from the orchestra, he had a house in the Hamptons. There were parties, after concerts, on the weekends. I’ve been careful since the AIDS scare."

The AIDS scare. She hadn’t shared in this fear that, to him, bonded everyone.

She has never been this close to anyone else-other than her husband. When they were kids, Vasili was the one who could make her feel buoyant and lovely.

Late last night, after returning from the hospital, she decided to assemble photographs of Vasili. She was heading to the family room, toward the cabinets filled with albums, when she stopped at the mirror in the vestibule. She took a deep, satisfied breath. Six pounds in six weeks. It was odd to feel so light, having just spent hours in the face of her cousin’s wasting disease-virus?-the two of them, together again, as thin as they’d been at eighteen. Standing there, hot-despite the air conditioning-she recognized Vasili’s imminent death as true, not just as a fact to which she had finally resigned herself, since he’d arrived home over a month ago, but as Truth, with a capital T, part of the flow of life and death that in recent years-since turning fifty-she had been trying to understand is neither good nor bad.

Phillip was asleep beyond the slightly open door at the top of the steps. The sound of his breathing heightened her sense of ownership-this body was hers to fatten or starve. She headed to the basement in search of old clothes, to test small sizes. She had always been what they call petite, but she’d puffed up after giving birth to three boys. With her two youngest moving out this summer, she’d decided it was time to return to form. Too skinny, Phillip would say. Still, in bra and panties she dragged boxes across the concrete floor, out from the cedar closet, and, fitting snugly into old shirts and skirts, felt not just a little bit, well, foxy.

 

*

 

After circling the wing, Persephone returns to Vasili’s room empty-handed.

"We must have strawberries," he announces.

It takes her a moment to remember where they left off. The funeral dinner.

"And asparagus," he adds. "Promise me."

He has said he is lucky to get closure like this-not everyone gets it, you know.

"What else?" she asks.

"At my viewing play Mozart’s Requiem. The Vienna philharmonic-you can find a recording of it."

She nods.

"I don’t mind open casket for the family, but then I want it closed."

Suddenly she wants to say: you ran off to be free, and now it’s killing you.

"Oh, and I want nice, fresh fish at the dinner. Snapper, I don’t know, whatever’s good now. And don’t worry about money. This will be the wedding banquet I never had."

She takes his hands into hers.

"Promise," he says, as he sinks into sleep.

He turns toward the metal box whispering to his right. She has barely paid attention to the thin tubes that curve out from his nostrils and disappear beneath the bed sheets; she recognizes them now for the job they are doing, thankful for their transparency and their discreet path to their source.

Strong. She will be strong.

"I promise," she says.

 

*

 

This morning Phillip asked where she’d found that old skirt.

"You don’t like it?" Persephone set her cup in the sink, her back turned.

"Yes, I like it. Are you kidding me?" He clasped her thigh, his thick thumb shocking her, sending her spinning like a schoolgirl. "How old is this thing, Skinny?" He slurped the last of his coffee.

He flipped up the skirt, and she welcomed the surprise, figuring-rightly-that for a few minutes she might forget herself and what was in store for the day. In this old skirt she was eighteen again-for better and for worse: she could see herself, newly married, in the Orange Street pizza shop, the first of the three they would own, kneeling on a booth cushion and setting a poinsettia on a windowsill, her hair falling from a small rounded cone, as Phillip surprised her from behind.

She knows she hasn’t changed much since then, or accomplished anything all her own. The restaurants don’t count. They are Phillip’s, though she plays partner dutifully and together they have thrived. Raising the boys-that’s her accomplishment-or at least Bobby, secretly her favorite, in his third year of medical school in Virginia. Phillip would claim the younger sons for his restaurants.

She has decided it is not too late to set her own path, and to revisit certain long abandoned ones.

Several days ago, Persephone raced from the hospital to her parents’ house-to get closure-to ask her father why he’d never protected his daughter from his wife.

"What can we do about it now?" he said.

She had planned to tell him the story of the night she nearly ran away-the night she’d lain on the couch, a box of frozen spinach pressed to her cheek. When Stephen Kouros had called after dinner, Persephone had stretched the phone cord into the dining room and whispered, "You may not call me here, Stephen," then quickly hung up and returned to the dishes in the sink. Persephone didn’t defend herself when her mother called her vroma-stupid whore.

Persephone planned her conversations with her teachers-all recycled lies: she’d been sick with bronchitis; it was impossible to stay after school because she had to work at her father’s sandwich shop. The excusal notes had become routine. She’d write them, faking immigrant English-Persephone no talk because she has sick throat. To the American secretaries, the notes seemed authentic if they were poorly written. Her father would sign them without reading.

Persephone picked up the pen from the coffee table. She doodled, making loops. She got carried away with the thought of being an artist, mused about what it would be like to paint pictures all day and get paid for it. She addressed the principal, Dear Mr. Gingrich. She wrote one sentence, then crumpled the first draft, not because she’d spelled bronchitis with a "k"-she knew how to spell it correctly; it was the immigrant spelling-but because she didn’t want to use the same excuse too often. She started again, stating first that the mark on my daughter’s eye is from my wife hitting her while I was at work. Persephone reread the sentence; it had felt good to write it, so she continued. Last night my wife told my daughter for the millionth time that she was a stupid whore.

Frank Sinatra albums leaned against the stereo-and-television cabinet, his sparkling blue eyes and shameless smile tempting her to think about love. She walked over and picked up Songs for Young Lovers and imagined filling the house right now with My Funny Valentine or, better yet, The Girl Next Door. Amused, she pictured her bewildered mother descending the steps.

Caught up in the world of the Young Lovers album cover-gas-lit streets, couples strolling-she decided to call Stephen Kouros. She picked up the phone on the corner table, happy, shivery, believing for a moment that she truly would call.

Instead, she called Vasili. He’d just finished practicing, he said. He was in the kitchen, eating chocolate-covered strawberries that his mother had bought at the market. The TV was on in the background. Vasili asked if she was all right, and she said, "Yes."

"Is anyone else home?" he said.

"Are you in the family room?" she whispered. The TV got louder-The Honeymooners.

"Friday I told Gingrich your throat was swollen and you couldn’t talk."

"Thanks." She pictured Vasili sitting on the step that joined the kitchen and the family room. She could see Uncle Mike’s belly rising with every breath. Aunt

Anastasia wore a white robe with pink roses and paged through Redbook, considering lipstick shades and listening for the rumble of the dryer in the basement to stop. Jackie Gleason barked. Vasili’s teeth cracked through moist chocolate.

Persephone lay on her side, eyes closed. She fantasized what her life would be like if

Aunt Anastasia and Uncle Mike were her parents-planning for college next year, winning scholarships, as Vasili was. She would be a dancer, performing in the kitchen, while Vasili, the prodigy, played the piano in the living room.

"You should call Steve Kouros," Vasili said.

"I should do a lot of things."

"What are you worried about? You’re the prettiest girl in school."

She loved Vasili more than anyone. "He must think I’m crazy," she said.

"You’re mysterious."

"Oh please."

"Trust me."

"What do you know about mysterious?"

He said, "I know about mysterious."

Her father’s Cadillac pulled into the driveway, then into the garage. The car’s hum filled the house. Her brother’s Mustang rumbled in the street. The engines stopped; the car doors slammed.

"What am I going to do next year?" she said.

 

*

 

"Vasili!" Father Kosporis beams, pink-faced and perspiring above his collar.

"Maybe we can do this before Mom gets here," Vasili says.

"As you wish." Father Kosporis sits down and unsnaps the locks of his briefcase.

Persephone waits for official papers to appear. Instead, on the tray at the foot of the bed, Father Kosporis sets a book, a miniature chalice, a gold spoon, a small bottle of red wine with a screw-on cap, and a hunk of thick-crusted bread in a sandwich baggie.

"You can take Communion with Vasili," Father Kosporis says to her. "But…" He looks at Vasili. "You understand she can’t be here for the Confession."

"I’ll wait outside for your mother," Persephone says.

In the hallway Aunt Anastasia is already approaching, a dark silhouette but for her pale face still featureless in the distance.

Last night Persephone called her cousin Spencer to ask him to bring their aunt to the hospital in the morning. She explained that it was difficult for her to be transporting their aunt as well as running back and forth between the restaurant and hospital several times a day. Spencer said he couldn’t take the smell of impending death; then he sighed and said, okay, he would drop her off.

"Father Kosporis is here." Persephone hugs her aunt. "For Confession and his last Communion."

She leads her aunt to the lounge, where they sit on a couch facing the hallway. Persephone recounts the morning’s events-breakfast, the nurse, the doctor, the priest-and describes Father Kosporis’s portable sacrament kit. Her aunt stares at the door across the hall. They sit quietly, holding hands.

"He always loved you," her aunt says. Her cheeks tremble.

"It’s all right, Ma." Ma-she doesn’t correct herself.

Vasili’s door opens. Father Kosporis steps into the hallway and looks both ways. A nurse hurries toward the speechless priest.

Inside, Vasili thrusts his head back into the pillow, lifting his chin as if to straighten his throat for air.

"What is it?" Persephone rushes to the bed.

Aunt Anastasia holds Vasili’s hand.

Father Kosporis stoops for his briefcase.

Vasili groans, his eyes opening wide.

Aunt Anastasia makes room for the nurse, who inspects the tubes and feels Vasili’s forehead. The nurse glances at the machines and whispers that Vasili should relax. The miniature chalice, spoon, and sealed baggie sit on the tray, apparently untouched. Persephone tries to read Vasili’s mind. His gray eyes shoot toward his feet, and she covers his toes. Vasili’s groan deepens.

"What is it, my son?" Aunt Anastasia strokes his arm.

"What happened, Father?" Persephone says.

Father Kosporis gathers up the chalice, spoon, and bread. "I’m sorry."

Air hisses from Vasili’s throat. He tosses his fingers, like wet flowers, toward the doorway.

When Father Kosporis leaves, Vasili begins to breathe more easily.

He confessed, Persephone realizes. Vasili knows the rules, and he knew Father Kosporis had no choice in the matter. Vasili never wanted Communion today-only the last word.

*

 

With his remote control, Vasili lowers himself a few inches, shifting his eyes back and forth between Persephone and his mother, who sit opposite each other on the bed.

"What was it, Vasili?" Aunt Anastasia seems convinced that Father Kosporis provoked in her son some grave revelation.

"It’s okay, now," Persephone says.

When the nurse turns to leave, Vasili’s arm shoots out to make a barrier.

Aunt Anastasia combs fallen strands from his forehead. "What now, Vasili?"

His eyes are nearly shut. He seems to be sustaining one last efficient breath-neither inhaling nor exhaling. He waves his arms, his fingers tangling in oxygen tubes.

"Okay," the nurse says, and folds his hands on his chest.

Vasili signals with closed eyes, grateful for her understanding.

Once the nurse leaves the room, Vasili turns his glassy gaze at Persephone, his breath a distant whistle of wind in a tunnel. She tries to smile for him. Aunt Anastasia’s hand remains on his cheek. Persephone leans her ear toward Vasili’s mouth, as he strains to speak: "Forgive me, Ted. I didn’t have your courage. You should have been here."

Persephone lifts her face to see his, and, in a moment, she forgets herself: "I’m here, Vasili. It’s me."

"Sweet Phoni," he says, when his eyes meet hers, "I wish you could have really known me."

She decides he must be delirious, or even nearly unconscious.

Aunt Anastasia’s tears vanish in the bed sheet pulled up to his chin. "Father and I will wait patiently," he whispers. "Mitera sighoreseh me"-Mother, forgive me. He strains to keep his eyes open. "Opos o Theos me ehei sighoresei"-Forgive me as God has forgiven me.

"Oh." Aunt Anastasia presses her glazed lips over Vasili’s mouth.

His eyes close.

"You were always a good boy," she whispers.

His lips are oblivious and dry. His eyes open briefly, shifting toward Persephone, then toward the ceiling.

Persephone is still replaying his last words to her: I wish you could have really known me. She raises herself on the bed and pleads, "Vasili?" His eyes absorb all they can of these last moments. "Shhhh," her aunt soothes, as Persephone lowers her face to Vasili’s cool, damp cheek, praying selfishly for words to form from his thick breath.

*

 

"You’ll visit me in New York," he said. "Then you can move there if you want."

She imagined the city at night, endless glitter surrounded by dark water.

Outside, her father called to Peter, who dragged metal trashcans to the street.

"California," she said. "Right now."

"I’m serious," he said. "We’ll meet at the Jersey shore in the middle of winter. We’ll have the boardwalks to ourselves."

"I have to go," she said.

"Okay, fine-no Jersey shore. Somewhere nice. Cape Cod, the Hamptons…" Places she’d never heard of.

"My dad’s home." Keys jingled at the door.

"We’ll rendezvous, ride bikes-"

"Bye," she whispered.

The doorknob turned, hinges squeaked.

"You’re lucky," she added.

"Call him, Phoni," he said. "You’ll break his heart if you don’t."

Persephone hung up the phone and peered into the foyer. Peter made his way down the hallway toward the kitchen. She stood up and froze, remembering her bruised face. Her father peeked into the living room and lifted his hat like a gentleman. "Oh, hello," he said.

"Hi."

After hanging up his coat, he sat on the couch.

She lifted her face into the light.

His eyes drifted toward the stereo. "You like Frank Sinatra now?"

*

Vasili’s silver-framed photograph, the same one Persephone sent to the newspapers two days ago, sits on the corner table, awaiting its place on the casket, which, for now, remains open, as he instructed. Mozart’s Requiem trickles through lush bouquets into the dim room lined with chairs. Aunt Anastasia places her black-gloved fingers to her son’s lips and closes her eyes. Faintly frosted by the photographer’s lens, the picture-of a younger Vasili at a piano, squaring his tuxedoed shoulders and his broad, cleft chin for the camera-strikes Persephone, as it did this morning, when she saw it in grainy, newspaper black-and-white, as a dreamed-up version of her cousin. Similarly, the reported cause of death-a heart attack-both annoyed and relieved her for its fuzzy truthfulness.

"He looks good," Peter whispers.

"They really did a great job," cousin Spencer confirms.

Phillip adds, "He looks terrific."

Aunt Anastasia turns from the casket, smiles, and nods.

Persephone can’t deny that Vasili’s layered clothes-the bow tie and ruffled tuxedo shirt, the black velvet jacket with satin lapels-and the mortician’s tricks have had an animating effect. Still, to say he looks good is absurd, but she has the sense not to argue with them.

"Is this him playing?" Phillip asks.

"No," Persephone says.

"Does anyone have a tape of his?" Peter asks.

"That’s what I was thinking," Phillip says.

"It’s Mozart," Persephone says. "Vasili wanted this."

"I’ll go out to the car." Spencer steps away. "We might have something."

Phillip nods to Spencer. "It only makes sense."

"It’d be nice," Peter says. "For people to hear his music."

Spencer rushes out, just as the undertaker enters the room. Persephone feels ignored, erased, but she won’t make a scene. She tells herself that Vasili’s music won’t be such a betrayal of his wishes-only his modesty would be offended. Before the double doors are sealed shut, she glimpses visitors gathering in the foyer. The undertaker, a blond man in a gray suit, walks slowly down the center aisle, inspecting the room. He nods considerately to Persephone’s parents, who are sitting in chairs against the wall. Beyond the ceiling, there is a rumbling Persephone realizes is thunder, not the dragging of chairs, or caskets, as she first imagines. She anticipates the arrival of her two youngest sons, who promised to be here, even if they had to close up the shops.

It occurs to her that some of Vasili’s New York friends must be out there among the attendants, including his old friend Ted-assuming he’s still alive. She wouldn’t recognize Vasili’s dearest friends from strangers.

Vasili was right. She didn’t really know him.

Her father rises slowly from his chair. He holds his hand out to his wife, who lifts herself. They trudge past Persephone and stand at the foot of Vasili’s casket. "He looks good," her father says. Her mother bows toward Vasili’s shoes.

The undertaker approaches Persephone. "We can start whenever you’d like."

Spencer, heaving, swipes a hand through his drenched hair, unbuttons his suit coat, beaded with rainwater, and, in triumph, holds up a cassette tape-"Got it!" -this man with arm outstretched over his head, so self-satisfied with success. He twirls his ring of keys on a finger as he hands the tape to the undertaker, who slips it into his suit coat pocket.

"We should leave it open," Peter says to no one in particular.

"No," Persephone says. "He wanted a closed casket."

"Leave it open," Spencer says.

Peter says, "What do you think, Dad?"

"It’s a nice idea," her father says.

"Very nice," her mother says.

The undertaker puts his hand on Aunt Anastasia’s shoulder. "It’s completely up to
you, Mrs. Manos."

"We should be proud," Spencer says.

Aunt Anastasia turns from the casket, nodding. "He looks so handsome."

As the undertaker bows and turns away, Persephone goes to the corner table and gets Vasili’s picture, which is to be placed on top of the closed casket. The undertaker approaches the sealed double doors.

The music has stopped, and for the moment, Mozart has been replaced by the murmur of people entering behind her, the faint thumping and fluttering of umbrellas shrinking. Her three sons enter first.

Aunt Anastasia waves for Persephone to join the family lining up next to Vasili.
As music-Vasili’s music-begins to play, Bobby rushes to her. "Mom, look at me." He grabs Vasili’s picture from her hands. "Mom, his goddamn boyfriend is out there."

"Bobby!" In a flash, she smacks her grown son’s mouth.

He raises his hand to his cheek. "What’s wrong with you?"

It’s the right question to ask.

Beyond her son’s reddening face, beyond the glistening mob, Persephone spots the sad familiar eyes of an aging Korean man. For a moment, she thinks of going to him. She could ask him to forgive her-as if he might know who she is and why she needs to be forgiven.

"I don’t know what to say," she tells her son. "I’m sorry."

His bewildered eyes press into her, the mark on his cheek refusing to fade. In the distance, Vasili appears ghastly, aglow, exposed. The family stands beside him, their faces full of sympathy.

*

 

The box of melting spinach and her horrible note sat there. In the mirror above the couch she saw her rosy cheek. Her father pulled his T-shirt out from his pants, about to snooze. He cleared his throat and leaned toward the coffee table.

He picked up the pen and signed his name to the note, then sat back and closed his eyes. "It’s cold," he huffed. She lifted the afghan from her shoulders and draped it over his chest and legs. "Good girl," he said.

She turned off the lamp. The room remained lit from the vestibule and the front porch light through the bay window. Her father was asleep. She stared at the note: his signed confession. A puddle had formed around the spinach. She would leave it all there until morning. God knew it would be there, waiting for her.

Jim Zervanos is the author of the novel LOVE Park. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including the anthologies Philly Fiction and Philadelphia Noir. He is a graduate of Bucknell University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is a teacher of English and creative writing and lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son. "Communion" was a runner up in the 2011 Marguerite McGlinn National Short Story contest.

Seconds after my mother died, she began work in heaven on a little play titled "Naked in Bed with Eleanor Roosevelt." Or so the medium sketched. I only met with her because a childhood friend, who had eyes the color of pickle relish and on occasion called me Flinch, gave me a gift certificate good for three visits to a psychic. Our first Magic-8-Ball chat found her smooth, resourceful, so adept at improvisation, she could’ve been a veteran of Second City or SNL.

"You’re here to communicate with Deborah," began Miss Marintha. "I can tell you that she’s peaceful, even flourishes."

I coughed, "Flourishes?" She then launched the Eleanor rigmarole that drove me out of her storefront parlor. Through the window, I glanced back at her hoping a second look would clarify the lunacy. Instead, I saw an older man lift and carry her to a rear curtain. One arm beneath her shoulder blades, another under the crooks of her knees, he cradled her, inviting gravity’s press against her unsupported center—a kind force that accentuated the curve of her ass. The man twirled as he pushed through the drape, so that a pair of red culottes slung over gnarly veins was the last I saw of Miss Marintha that day.

I sped home. Distracted by thought, I sailed through a four-way stop and almost smacked a Saab. Came within inches of bleeding in the lap of a stranger. Once inside I squashed my impulse to trawl the web for Eleanor. Better: I downed Lunesta with a swig of scotch and proofed a syllabus to quicken the drowse. Dreams twittered and an old adage teased, politics makes strange bedfellows. I murmured something about understanding the so-called title. But writing a play? Wings under halo?

The next day Vaughn’s certificate pissed me off to no end. Normal people who read an obit donate to charity or send flowers or fruit; Vaughn created a game. But as awful as the first visit had been, I knew I’d go back to the cane table and chairs surrounded by dollar-store frames that hugged moons, stars, unicorns, and Sistine Chapel figures—sibyls, prophets, nude athletes plus two frames with identical reproductions of a woman breastfeeding her child.

After class I circled the South Street block on which my shaman in red jerked people round. In the afternoon rush cars bounced a tortured conga, rhythm set by brake lights. The line I joined a dozen times let me watch the action inside. A young woman and Miss Marintha sat rigid and compelled like spoons in steaming tea awaiting fingers to appear, grasp them, stir. Seeing another client settled me some. The idea that I was her only customer, gifted or not, had troubled me. On my last pass, both women were gone. I flipped my cell, called the parlor, requested an appointment at the voice-mail prompt, all with a sense of post-coital satisfaction appropriate to every South Street dance.

Come morning I entered as the old man pushed through the curtain and delivered the culottes to her chair.

"You left quickly the other day, Mr. Seldorn," she smiled, "I thought you had run off forever." Her eyes were younger than the rest of her face, darts of displaced child, precocious, looking down a well, peeps on high beam scanning waters for my beginnings. Slicked back, her dark hair fell to her waist, which added to the illusion of youth. She had to be in her forties. "So how can I help?"

"You can start by dropping the writing in the clouds routine."

"Done. What would you like instead?"

"Look, I’m only here because of a friend."

"I thought you came to learn about Deborah." She sucked in her cheeks, probably to emphasize her one-upmanship, certainly to slay me with high cheekbones. "Vaughn just set things in motion."

"Motion denotes progress. Not the creation of a floating loon tapping a keyboard."

"But everyone up there loves Deborah’s work. Up there you can’t go wrong." All this with a straight face.

"Once more: she’s not up in the sky. Sorry, not a believer. And Roosevelt, that title, c’mon, it’s twisted."

Marintha opened her palm and flashed a gold charm engraved friend.

I reached for the thing. "Where’d you get this?"

She drew back her hand and held it under the table. "Vaughn. Who else?"

"Bastard said he wanted something of hers."

"It’ll be yours again, relax." She jammed half a laugh into her promise. "Andrew," with her free hand she touched my forearm, "may I call you Andrew?"

A hard-on pressed into my pocket; I wanted blood back in my brain. "You dress—but don’t talk—like a Gypsy."

"Afrrrraid you’re a little off. Pop and I are Yugoslavian, on the cusp of exotic at best. At least that’s Pop’s story. And he sticks to it well." Her voice cartwheeled in the gravel between Eartha Kitt and Suzanne Pleshette. "Don’t bother your thoughts with wars and boundaries. Everything’s fluid. I was two when we emigrated. Pop had me tutored in English until I was sixteen and my language skills perfect. A regular xenophobe’s nightmare. Gypsy?" She smiled with Coney Island lips, all roller coaster climbs and falls.

To hide my admiration for her smarts, I folded my arms—then realized I looked like a schoolboy—sharp elbows held high—and unfolded. "Deborah was like a second mother to Vaughn. So he’s always said. When I was sorting through her things, he saw that. Wanted it. Stole it when I wasn’t looking. Maniac." I bit my bottom lip as I added fucker under my breath. "He shouldn’t have given, shouldn’t’ve let you touch it."

Before I folded again, Miss Marintha took my hand in hers and returned her other hand to the tabletop. She squeezed the gold. "Deborah was a complicated woman."

"Squeezing tells you that? Let’s forget the drama."

She scrunched her chin but relaxed it instantly. "Okay, Andrew. Let’s try simple skits. You, six years old, skinny as the row house you lived in. Terribly impressionable. Sneaking down steps with your pal to watch productions."

"My, my, you’re good." I pulled my hand away.

"Stepping down. Holding the banister. Lots of laughter in the basement. There’s a linoleum floor. A bar. The smell of sweaty bodies and alcohol: it scared you."

"All stuff my pal told you."

Marintha put down the charm. "It’s New Year’s Eve! With the Harowicks, Farkases, Browns, Ladimarts."

Although I knew Vaughn supplied the names, I looked to the side as if those mentioned had gathered to greet me. Instead, I greeted myself in a mirror. Fifty-seven, salt-and-pepper hair, a bit slouched in Marintha’s presence; I straightened.

"Your mother wrote skits for neighbors to perform at her yearly parties. The climax always was the entrance of Baby New Year in a diaper. Father Time was there, holding a cardboard sickle and wearing cotton balls on his chin. Scripts varied," she giggled, "yet typically turned into Punch and Judy shows. But in 1958 the group sideswiped Deborah. Started her skit but switched to another. Their surprise play mocked her because they’d uncovered an obsession. She had written to Mrs. Roosevelt months before and had gotten a personalized reply. Deborah chattered endlessly about it, nothing specific, only that she’d received a letter."

"She was proud of that letter." Proud was more lump in my throat than word, a tiny hunchback.

"Into the skit came a neighbor in drag. A big guy dressed as Eleanor. He sucked a pair of wax buckteeth and wore a hat, raked, mannish, pinned to a wavy wig. Under drooping breasts hung a sign that read ‘Eleanor Babe.’ Someone grabbed the 45 and blared Harry Belafonte’s ‘Cocoanut Woman.’ Down the babe stripped," here Marintha added deliciously, "stripped to freshly cracked milk. And as the whistling gang counted down midnight, voilà—in diaper—Baby New Year."

I admired the re-creation obviously authored by Vaughn. Every December 31^st he’d slept over our house. Loyal actors and willing to help clean up, his folks usually left around 4:00 a.m., too late to keep a babysitter. Vaughn’s stay was a given. Forbidden to watch parties, we played upstairs with my chemistry set and Robby the Robot. Eventually, we tuned-in Roland on "Shock Theater" and just once sneaked down to see the goings-on. Spied. Skedaddled. "You did your homework. Informer, whatever, forgiven," I lied. But the details made everyone live again, and I was hungry for Unruh Street, hungry for Mom’s once–a–year social effort. Even hungry for her Dead-Sea-Scroll distance, a coolness she seemed to reserve for me.

"Do you know that Deborah read Trollope?"

"Anthony Trollope? My Deborah?" I laughed at the idea, though George Eliot would’ve been a scream.

Marintha’s father, a few hairs standing on end like quills or beheaded stop signs, parted the curtain and tapped his watch. Marintha pushed the charm to my side of the table and as she was carried off, silently formed the word call.

I pocketed the charm, rose, and noticed a wood sculpture in the corner. It was an inverted pietà, a horror. Jesus, lips peeled back as if he were an astronaut in G-force training, held a lifeless Madonna. I moved closer.

Pop appeared and blocked me. "Bye-bye," he said.

I tore from the wood, pushed out the door, nearly toppled a family of crucible faces, clients whose torsos twisted this way, that, Gumbys startled by glass in swing. As I watched through the window, Pop removed the pietà. He returned and placed on a stool a portrait of a little girl. I jaywalked across South and turned to see Miss Marintha’s entrance in Pop’s arms, and the Gumby family, though now seated, bow.

#

"The third visit is often the charm," she winked, "and I hope you won’t run at the mention that we left off with Trollope"—Marintha’s opening gambit next morning.

"We left off with my laughter." My hand trembled, and I saw her glance at my fingers. "Caffeine and the cool of Starbucks and Saxbys." She didn’t buy my improv.

"Deborah read Trollope before she married. She was taken with the prime minister’s wife who spoke her mind and befriended many."

"Yeah, I know his novels, maybe too well. Never assign ’em."

"It’s interesting. You seem to doubt Deborah ever cracked a book, yet you—"

"Adjunct professor. Ain’t much."

"But," she pushed, "you’ve written a few things."

"Unveil your crystal and Google away."

Miss Marintha cleared her throat. "Deborah, being Deborah, was chilly regarding most of your work. But admired and was quietly pleased with one piece."

"With that you score a genuine boogey-boogey." I glanced off and spotted a new freak show in the corner. An unfired clay figure of a woman, draped head to toe, only her face and one arm visible. I pointed with my chin, "What’s that?"

"A tiny model of a statue Eleanor loved. She meditated in its shadow for years. ‘Grief’ is what she called it."

"A bit slapdash. I mean, look at it. Sorry."

"Pop had no time. The image came to me yesterday. I can’t claim a great coup: Eleanor’s devotion to the object is part of public record. I just thought it’d help. And yes, the Christ holding Mary is his."

"His pietà," I almost spit, "wasn’t done overnight."

"Or recently. You don’t think much of his talent."

I hated what I sounded like but pressed on. "He’s a prop master."

Her spine straightened. "He was a glassblower in Yugoslavia."

"And you want to see me—what—react to this crap? See me sniffle?"

"Why, Andrew," she gloated, sardonic, rich, "I can gyp a geyser out of anybody."

"We’ll debate that till ‘Grief’ does the Can-Can." This woman was buckling the knees in my brain. "So with clients, how should I put this, you try anything."

"It’s a business, yes."

"Fake it."

"Mostly. Absolutely!" She put her hand to the side of her mouth and with fingers that formed a kind of popsicle-stick fan blocked any view Pop might have of the whisper, "I’m almost always full of shit." Hand down. "Unless," she squinted at me, eyelids in tickle, "I’m sure."

"Faking aside, exactly what do you do?"

"I wrap gifts at Bloomingdale’s and attach bows," she tied an air ribbon and flicked it. "Whatever curlicues customers ask for."

"Then let’s top this little box with a squiggly R."

She nodded, "Okay. Deborah bared her soul in her first letter."

"First?"

"Touched Eleanor. Truly touched her."

"How many letters were there?"

"In my vision the number blurred, and their words combined."

"They had nothing in common. Mom wrote a fan letter. Got back a standard whatever."

Marintha shook her head. "Deborah knew her mail was just a curiosity to your father and you. She counted on that plus your dad’s assumption it was a form letter. She flashed it at you folded to show only the printed name up top, signature below. Then locked it away, and being human, told neighbors a few too many times about her prize. They thought her an autograph seeker, which actually helped her in the long run. If people perceived things as they did, privacy was assured. Rounds of letters never entered anyone’s mind."

I heard a little thud and out the corner of my eye saw the arm had just fallen off the figure. "Looks like ‘Grief’ is a one-armed bandit."

"You’re cold. Hypercritical."

I felt like a shit in swirl. "Like mother like son."

"Eleanor, too, was cool to her children and had a horrible childhood herself."

"You know, they cut out Freud’s jaw to shut him up about kids."

"Don’t cheapen what we’re doing."

"Cheap?" I threw my arms up, slashed the air, fingers, Punch and Judy. "I’m talking to a friggin’ fortune teller!"

And there was Pop. "I kick him out?"

Marintha picked at a fingernail. "Escort him."

I already was at the door when Pop caught up and pushed it open.

When I was halfway out, Miss Marintha called after me: "There were six or eight letters from Eleanor sewn into the dress Deborah was buried in."

Pop slammed and locked the door. In a rage I swung round, banged on the window, watched them talk a second. Pop unlocked the door but didn’t open it. He returned to the curtain, his millipede eyebrows ready to leap and wrestle me to the ground. Careful to stay by the door, I reentered.

Marintha studied me. "Go, Pop. Relax in back. I’ll handle him now."

Pop retreated, but not before he glared at me and arched his top lip.

"Glad you came back," said Miss Marintha. Her hand brushed the top of my chair.

"You’re mentally ill. You, Vaughn, your father. He is your father?"

"And sticks to it well." She flipped back some hair. "Since you and Vaughn were teens, there’s been nothing between you. He’s just had a thing about your mom."

"Then let the motherlover sit here."

She rolled her eyes. "Any mental illness—perhaps what I do is illness—would be mine."

"Sewn into her dress! I’d know."

"Did you dress her?"

"Of course not."

"Did you choose the dress?"

"Her choice was written out. And the dress set aside in a labeled garment bag. If she had letters from Roosevelt all over her body, wouldn’t the mortician have found them?"

"Letters pinned to clothing are common. Deborah just went further and sewed them into the lining. As she worked she wore the same thimble that fascinated you when you were five."

"You say you saw this."

She slid her head forward. "Clear as cotton balls."

"They had nothing in common."

"Try anguish over failing their children." The veins in Marintha’s forehead bulged in need of an additional head for blood to flow. "Both women needed profound friendships. To express whatever they could. Eleanor wrote back because there was a lack of guile, almost shocking, in your mom’s letters. Deborah wrote about your father’s other women. Eleanor never discussed her husband, but touched on many things. They wrote about the addictions that plagued their fathers’ lives. Your family whispered about your grandfather, but newspapers shouted every Roosevelt secret. The homeliness jokes both women endured were another theme. In appearance they weren’t Marilyn or Jackie O. It seemed there was nothing in the world more pressing than for everyone to remind them, remind. And their love of writing playlets, oh, they shared that in spades. Eleanor was even bound, gagged, and carried off by a pirate in a campy eight-millimeter adventure. There are published stills that anyone can see."

I massaged my temples. "A million women probably matched Mom’s profile, could’ve written letters."

"But," said Miss Marintha, "only Deborah would’ve written that since childhood she thought the satin in caskets was disturbing. Just the sight of it, debilitating."

"How’d you know that?"

"More important—"

"How did you know that? Vaughn?"

"—was Eleanor’s similar terror. Again, documented." Miss Marintha screwed her eyes into mine. "Eleanor begged her physician, the man she loved most in those years, to check repeatedly at the end for signs of life before her body was removed. Her words were similar to these: ‘You must be certain that I’m gone and give it time, David. Examine my body and examine it again. I know you’ll honor my wishes.’ Stop thinking I’m not real. Let this sink in."

"I thought the satin was a secret she shared just with me. One friggin’ secret. In a letter of introduction?"

"Possibly eight. Remember?"

"And all but one," I think I pulled at my hair, "undocumented."

Her face pushed up into the understanding look friends use to greet mourners at a funeral. "I only wish I could help you with that."

My chest heated up. I felt pressure, everything out of control.

"What’s wrong?"

"Chest’s gone crazy. Oh, man, awww shit. Awww."

"It’s a panic attack—breathe with me." She called, "Pop? Take a deep breath in. Count to seven as you inhale."

"Shit, oh shit."

Pop came and pushed her chair against mine. She rubbed my chest with one hand and touched my cheek with the other. "Now exhale slowly. Count to twelve."

"What if it’s not a panic attack? It’s moving into my jaw."

"Just breathe."

I asked how often she did this.

"Daily."

"God damn it."

"Breathe with me." She pinched my cheek gently.

"It won’t go away. I’m going to die here. Fuck. I am. I’m going to die in this fucking chair."

"Will you shut up and breathe."

"Son of a bitch." After five or six minutes, the burn and pressure broke. As it eased, I realized my eyes were wet and I felt betrayed: humiliated by my chest. Pop brought me cold water, moved his daughter’s chair back, and slipped behind the curtain. I turned to take a look at myself in the mirror. Spotted Pop behind us peeking out. I sipped the water and took another breath. "Okay. So. So, what happens now? Is this where I’m supposed to thank you?"

"Typical Andrew," she lilted, "undoing any chance of something cordial, while courting it at the same time. Has anyone ever called you Andy?"

"Couple cousins, friends. Ex-wife."

"Andy . . ."

I enjoyed her license and nearly cracked a smile.

"I’ve one more thing to tell you. It won’t hurt. Are you sure you’re all right, Andy?"

I nodded as though she’d placed a brick on my head.

She cupped my chin. "After Eleanor’s death Mom made secret trips to New York. She took the train at 30^th Street and walked from Penn Station to Eleanor’s house on East 74^th. Before the image matured, I saw refugees, dark and light women together, balancing everything they owned on their heads. Regardless. Deborah used to stand across the street from the brownstone and stare at it for hours. She found a calm she’d never known."

A calm not mine. I was uncomfortable with the idea of Mother looking for sanctuary ninety miles away, alone, defenseless. A woman in need of a woman who was gone.

"You seem to be doing well, Andy. You trust me now?" She released my chin.

"Some, a little, a little; a little, yes."

"Then you’ll know how to finish this. Now kiss my hand, it’ll bring good luck. Yes, it will. Kiss." She kept her eyes on her hand after I pressed my lips to it.

Insane with skin I said, "Vaughn knew everything."

Eyes dead on her hand and far from flinch, "Goodbye Andy."

I denied the name and corrected: "Adjunct."

#

Caught in an updraft, a sheet of paper swirled in the wind, meandered like Casper the Friendly Ghost. I stood across from the brownstone and watched the sheet sail. I thought: All right, Deborah. I found your true grave. You bled in the lap of an unlikely stranger, and the stranger bled back—corresponded. I’m happy for you. You snagged a woman, what you needed all along. I remember that when I was a child I opened a door and saw your breasts. The brown circles around your nipples were huge and puzzling to me, areolas big as traffic signals. Not red or green, but muddy indifference. Proceed as you please. I couldn’t imagine where you kept your heart, other than behind the rings. Gargantuan brown circles that kept me out. I never saw you naked again.

I gave the charm to a homeless Robby Robot outside the station. Then caught the train back and wrote my first letter to Miss Marintha. Thoughts of her and a loneliness that savaged my stomach demanded I report. That I apologize for my rude behavior and language. That I wanted to see her, would pay any price; knew her worth was far above rubies. I stuffed the letter into my pocket. Stuffed another.

In my mind, precarious as a passenger’s clutch in a bathroom on wheels, Marintha’s nipples lived in my mouth.

Please, I wrote, laid thanks at her sandals, painted her toenails culotte color, begged her to take Deborah’s bracelets, rings, Corolla. Did she know she got me excited once, and I didn’t mean the chest pain. I recognized Pop’s talent and asked for "Grief’s" arm. Told her about an ad for glassblowing in the Bowery. Would she and Pop join me there, be my guests?

The next day I mailed eleven letters, last one written 6:20 a.m. I pictured Miss Marintha surrendering to them and slipping them into her costume—forever clinging to prizes invisibly attached, moons, sibyls, breastfeedings looking on.

Barry Dinerman’s plays have been produced regionally and Off-Off Broadway by A Contemporary Theater, The Quaigh, GPC, and other companies. Two of his plays were short-listed for production at American Conservatory Theater. He was awarded The Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship to help support his projects. His work is housed in the Performing-Arts collection of The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and further archived in Village Playwrights. He is the author of "The Kiss Me Stone."

[img_assist|nid=7435|title=Nature/Invention-Intrusion by Marge Feldman© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=202]I find Maggie squatting on the kitchen floor beside the door to the garage. My eyes always go to her belly first, as if she has swallowed a globe. There’ve been two miscarriages, both early. Never have we gotten so far. Then I notice she’s picking something off the floor, putting it in her mouth. Get closer. They surround her. Hundreds of them. Ants. Maggie is eating ants.

A lifetime of sitcoms has prepared me for cravings—pickles, hamburgers. Running out in the middle of the night for a pint of Haagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond. Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts. But insects?

Maggie looks up. She removes the finger from her mouth. “Must be the baby,” she says. Her hand follows the curve of her belly. “She wants bugs.”

“Really? They sell crickets at pet stores. I could get some.”

“Crickets?” She purses her lips, gazes up to the ceiling. Then nods. “Okay.”

The girl at Pet World brings them to me in a clear plastic bag, twist-tied at the top. She holds them up, dozens of them, hopping against the plastic. “You’ll have one happy lizard,” she says.“Yeah. That’s all one can really hope for in life, isn’t it? A happy lizard.”

She nods, a sign that we share some deep understanding. She tells me she threw in an extra dozen, then winks.

In high school Maggie wrote a piece about the opening of fishing season and the senseless slaughter of the earthworm. In graphic detail, she captured the wriggling on the hook, the oozing entrails, the practice of cutting them in half to double the bait. Together we collected money, went to bait shops, released nightcrawlers, earthworms, grubs back to the wild of gardens.

At home, in the garage, I hold up the bag. A cricket stares back; all eyes, bugs are. Crunchy. Gooey in the middle. Like pretzel snacks with cheese in the center.

 I picture the bugs skittering down her throat, at the bottom, a baby open-mouthed—a miracle baby. Dozens of times, the brown bleeding began, and we were told she was lost, only to see her on the ultrasound, hear the beat-beat of her heart. How useless and helpless I feel during these races to the hospital, as if there’s nothing I can do for them.

I carry the bag of crickets upstairs, find Maggie lying among the dozen flower pillows, her face the center, the cushions as petals. I swish the bag back and forth, imagine her sitting up, tossing cricket after cricket into her mouth, as if chomping on popcorn.

But instead the crickets bring tears. “What?” I say. “Beetles? You want beetles?”

The crickets pop in my ear.

“I’m bleeding again,” she says. “Heavier this time.”

A blur—the car ride, Maggie holding the bag of crickets, tapping against the plastic, then opening it, taking one out. “She’s still hungry.”

The breakneck drive, the crickets, the hospital waiting for our arrival—it’s all part of the blur, something to hide the truth from both of us, that nothing matters except the desires of Fate for our baby to live. But that’s nothing to tell Maggie.

“It has to be a good sign,” I tell her.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Maggie answers, then opens her mouth and feeds our baby’s desire.

Randall Brown directs and teaches at Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. His work has been published and anthologized widely. He is the founder of Matter Press, its online magazine The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and the blog FlashFiction.Net. “Little Magpie” appears in his flash fiction collection Mad to Live.

When the fog got in, the mothers were making the rotis for dinner. My mother, because she was younger and less important, did the harder job of rolling out the dough into perfect circles. Usha’s mother, who I called Other-mother, got to stand in the warm aura of the stove’s blue flame while she roasted the perfect discs on the iron thawa. Roll, roast, flip, next: I thought of the mothers as one joined roti-making machine. Usha and I were waiting for our usual treat, a fresh, buttered, sugar-sprinkled roti each. But then our grandmother bellowed from upstairs.

 [img_assist|nid=7421|title=Over the Hills by Liz Nicklus© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=300|height=104]“Who let all the fog into my room?” demanded Ba.

Fog? There wasn’t any fog outside; it was a sun-shiny autumn day. The mothers—faces tight with fear—stopped what they were doing. We all ran to Ba.

 “Come and shut the windows!” yelled our grandmother. “Get the fog out!”

“Ba!” shrieked my mother. “What are you talking about? What happened?”

Other-mother took Ba into her arms. My mother said something about an ambulance and raced back downstairs.

“Oh Bhagwan, Bhagwan!” cried Ba, calling to God. She pushed Other-mother away. “I can’t see you.” Then, she curled up on the floor and rocked and keened, terrified that the fog would not leave her room. The fog didn’t leave. Her diabetes had made Ba blind.  

***

Usha and I were the daughters of Ba’s two sons, who lived together as they might have in India, dutifully, under one roof with their wives and children, a son and a daughter each. Except that, we weren’t in India. We lived in England, in an old Victorian row house. I knew that the children belonged to different parents, but it didn’t matter much. Less than a year apart, Usha and I were almost-twins.

Like everyone else in the family, we were afraid of Ba, even more so now that she was the first blind person we knew. Still, because it rained so much and we were stuck inside so often, sometimes we’d creep into her room to see how long it would take her to figure out someone was there. Once, during a long wet spell, we went too far.

“Who’s there? Speak!” called Ba. We sat quietly, out of arms reach. As she pulled the sheet around her, a strip of grandmother flesh appeared between the bottom of her sari blouse and the beginning of her petticoat. She began to snore. Usha and I looked at each other, a laugh threatening to expose us. But instead of laughing, the both of us reached out and at the same time, quick and sure and hard, we pinched Ba.

“Aarrreh!” she yelled.

We ran out and then, deviously, joined the general stampede of people coming towards Ba’s room.

“They came to suck my blood, what is left of it in my poor fragile body!”

“What happened?” stormed my father.

“The girls! The useless extra mouths we’re feeding. Who will take such she-devils off our hands, who?”

Suddenly a slap came so hard and so fast across my face that my ear began to ring. Usha’s father, who I knew as Big-Father, still had his hand raised in fury. I began to cry and braced myself for more. Instead, I heard a voice like cold water.

“Don’t touch her,” said my mother. “You have no right.”

It was an insurrection–words spoken out of the usual order of things. Big-Father said nothing, but he let his hand drop. Up until this single exact moment, I had never heard my mother speak directly to Big-Father. Ordinarily, when he walked into a room, she would fall silent and cover her head with the loose end of her sari, looking out at the world through a thin, cottony fog.

“Bas!” said my father, meaning enough. I knew my mother was in trouble and that I should stop crying for her sake. But I couldn’t. Worse still, I fell to the floor, and surrendered to the kind of tantrum I hadn’t had in some time. Ba spoke deliberately.

“Why complain about your wife when you can’t control your own daughter?”

My father pulled me up with a tug, his thumb poking into my armpit.

“Ask your grandmother for forgiveness,” he growled. “And show your respect properly,” meaning that I should touch her foot when I spoke.

I got very close to my grandmother’s sour foot and mumbled a near “sorry” but I did not touch it. The diabetes was so bad by then that she couldn’t tell the difference.

“Good girl,” said my father.

***  

When it was winter, they took Ba to the hospital. Baby-uncle, Ba’s youngest son who lived in Florida, flew in to see his mother. Soon after, a doctor called the house and said we should all come to the hospital. When we got there, Ba asked us one by one to forgive her. The oldest grandson sobbed like a baby, the mothers wept freely; noses were blown frequently. I was surrounded by the sounds of my family in grief. A witch-thin nurse came by and snapped the curtain around us.

            “Quiet, please,” she spat, and then muttered, “Pakis always bring the whole damn tribe.” She left in a huff.

“Hey!” Baby-uncle barked, but she was long gone. “We’re Hindus not Pakis!”

“Brown is brown. We’re all Taliban now,” said Big-Father.

“How do you stand this country?” continued Baby-Uncle.

“Please, you’re Al Qaeda to the Americans, too” said Big-Father.

“America’s different,” said Baby-Uncle.

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” said my father, meaning only that it was time to drop it. The nurse came back.

“I can’t move in here,” she said. “Some of you will have to leave.”

Being the least important, Usha and I hadn’t yet had our forgiveness turns. Ba lifted her finger to let us know she needed someone to move her breathing mask.

“Leave the monkeys here,” she said. Our mothers left us with the men and took the sons home with them. When it was my turn with Ba, I looked at her grey, unseeing eyes, and thought that I should ask for her forgiveness, too. But I didn’t and neither did Usha.

Big-Father began to sing a bhajan quietly and his brothers joined in.

“Govinda hare bole, Gopala bole.”

 [img_assist|nid=7422|title=Dia de los Muertos by Paul McMillan© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=250|height=203]Usha and I clapped along gently. Each verse seemed to take lines off Ba’s face. When we were done, she raised the mask herself, smiled, and said she wanted peaches. Couldn’t someone get her some peaches? The nurse said that the kitchen was closed, and that there were only canned peaches there, and anyway, rules were rules. She left us alone. It was January, damp and cold. Fog hung thickly between the streetlights. Ba wanted real peaches. It was impossible.

“We’ll go,” Big-Father said, and he and Baby-uncle left. Usha and I fell asleep sitting on a leg each of my father’s lap.

I woke to the stamping sound of feet trying to get warm. Usha was awake, too. The peaches had arrived! There was a whole wooden crate with the words “Product of New Zealand” stamped on it. My father got up, stood us on the floor, and offered the chair for the crate. The nurse stepped in to check on all the noise. Big-Father spoke to her in his most polite talking-to-white-people voice.

“May we kindly get something to open the crate?” he asked.

“All right,” she said, probably staggered by the sight and smell of fresh peaches to say anything else. She came back with a screwdriver and a paring knife. No one said anything for a while and Usha and I knew to be quiet.

“Ba, we have peaches,” said Big-Father, taking the screwdriver. I could smell their perfume. I knew Usha wanted one as much as I did but we didn’t dare ask.

 “I’ll get some tea, double sugar,” said Baby-uncle, leaving. My father took the paring knife and started to cut a peach into small pieces.

Baby-uncle came back with the tea. Big-Father began to read the Gita out loud.

“The death of the body does not harm the soul.”

My father started to feed Ba pieces of peach.

“From body to body, air into air, the soul moves freely.”

Now and then, Big-Father wiped the juice from around his mother’s mouth; Baby-uncle gave her sips of hot, sweet, tea. Usha and I just held hands and watched and listened.

“Weapons cannot cleave the soul, nor can fire consume it. Nor can water drench the soul, nor can the wind, as breeze or gale, ever at all dry it.”

 It took Ba a very long time to eat her peach. I could hear the sound of soft fruit on gums, the drone of the machines, and the familiar cadences of the Gita, their poetry almost in time with Ba’s slow, scarce breaths. She finished her peach at the same time that Big-Father finished reading. A monitor beeped and a thin, straight line divided the screen.

***  

In the days after the funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ba’s fog. Once, I asked my mother where Ba was now and she said that if she wasn’t with god, she was probably around somewhere.

“What do you think she came back as? A cat?” I asked.

“No. Eat your cereal.”

“A dog?”

“No. Put your bowl away, put on your shoes.”

“A person?”

“Too soon. Get me the comb.”

“Could she come back as fog?”

“No. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

“Are your laces tied?”

“Is fog alive? Can a soul get into fog?”

My mother stopped trying to do three things at once and looked at me. Then she bent down to hold me.

“Sometimes we all live in fog.”

“Did the fog get out of Ba’s room?”

She didn’t answer and from the way she was breathing into my shoulder, I knew she was crying.

“Mommy, am I going to get Ba’s fog?”  

***  

It was summer when we moved. Once everything was loaded up into the truck and the moving men were ready to drive off, my mother and father stood waiting next to a taxi, the youngest boy from among us children standing at their side. I told Usha to hurry up.

“She’s not coming,” said my father.

“Not coming? Why is he coming?” I whined.

“How would your brother not be coming?” said my mother. Usha didn’t come; she stayed with her own mother and father. She was my cousin. Inside, my heart began to thump against my ribcage. Things were starting to go wrong.

I watched as Usha’s father came up to mine, waited for the familiar swoosh of my mother’s loose sari end against me as she wrapped it around her head. But the swoosh didn’t come. I began to tug at the sari’s end myself to remind my mother of what she was supposed to do but she just batted my hand away. That was when the thud in my chest began to echo in my head as I realized that she was neither going to cover her head or step away. The closer Usha’s father got, the faster the thudding in my body. Why couldn’t my mother do what she was supposed to do? I took a deep breath and waited for the shouting to begin. Instead, Usha’s father folded himself at the knees and took me into his arms. My father gave his brother a handkerchief for the tears that stood in his eyes.

“It’s a big move for her,” my mother said to Usha’s father, her voice quavering.

The thud and echo of my heart stopped and gave way to something else, a feeling so unfamiliar that I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t put words to it.

Standing back up, Usha’s father looked at his brother, then to my mother. “May God watch over you and yours.”

“And yours,” said my father, looking over to my cousins and their mother. Then he bent down to touch his older brother’s feet. It was the last time I saw him use that gesture of respect with anyone.

“I hear the weather’s always good in Florida,” said my uncle.

“They call it the ‘Sunshine State,” said my father.

“Just take care of everyone and keep in touch,” said my uncle, “and don’t become too American.”

Too American I wondered?

I saw that the sun around us was so bright and the air was so clear that my mother, my father, my brother, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousins were separate, lucid shapes. This was the absence of fog.

Nimisha Ladva lives in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in the Connecticut Review and Stand. She has been featured in Philadelphia’s First Person Arts Festival.

[img_assist|nid=7420|title=The Kuerner Farm by Annette Alessi © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=187]Holly scrubs sauce pans and three-quart pots and centers her attention out through the kitchen window, across the driveway until he emerges from his house and mobilizes, punches his fists on his hips, elbows poking right and left, surveying in his usual way. Holly always wonders what. What is he looking at? What precisely does the world look like from his viewpoint?

At her back, the rustle of the local newspaper muffles her husband’s voice. “New cereal?” he asks, and then, like the path that their marriage has taken, he renders the question rhetorical with a non sequitur. “Still working on that artery project, if you can believe it.”

The python curled inside her stomach slithers to her throat and she smoothes her hair with her hand, though her neighbor would be unable to detect a stray strand due to his lack of proximity and his misdirected gaze. They existed as neighbors for years and Holly barely noticed him, but all of a sudden this summer, whenever she sees him, she can hardly breathe. All her organs pulse and squeeze their various rhythms into erratic backwards and opposites. At some point, she couldn’t say when exactly, she started watching for him. Every day.

As a housewife, approaching middle age, Holly maintains a youthful appearance, with pale smooth skin, strawberry blonde hair and a slight, fit figure. On the other hand, Mil, for whom she aches, resembles a well-aged Maple. His face, deeply grooved like gray bark, surmounts his skinny trunk. Limbs stick out at odd angles, and with their sprawling gangly grace, epitomize all the brave forbearance of a harsh winter before the promise of spring. In the midst of summer now, Holly reminds herself that the season delivered its potential, and she remembers her dentist, last summer’s crush, when she fabricated symptoms and scheduled unneeded extra appointments so that she could sit in his chair while he leaned close, spearmint-scented, gently touching her.

Earlier that year, in the spring, there was a young man at the deli counter with dark hair and brown eyes whose long thin fingers handled the meats and cheeses with a sexuality she found difficult to resist. That crush engendered an unusually high number of cold cut lunches – nitrate, sodium, and fat loaded meals eventually making her believe that her indulgences were killing her family. So she bought the meats and threw them away. Finally, the shame of wasted food drove her from the store and toward a moratorium on deli foods and cougar crushes. 

Those were playground romances compared to the intensity of her feelings for Mil for whom she wants to abandon her marriage and race across their driveways into his waiting arms where he gathers her to him, his long bony limbs against her back. He presses his thin torso to her breast, his leg between her thighs, their bodies crushing together in an embrace so tight that neither of them can know, can feel, where one body ends and another begins. He whispers her name.

“Holly…Holly…”

The sound emanates from behind her, the newspaper insinuating itself into her moment and denuding her pleasure.

“What.”   

Rustle, rustle, rustle, the newspaper speaks again. “Are you gonna pick up the invites today when you’re shopping?”

She asks, “How do you know I’m shopping?” A jarring metal screech followed by a thunderous reverberation represent all that remains after Mil disappears into his basement bulkhead and slams the doors closed. Holly swings around and faces Scott.

“You always go Tuesdays,” he says.

“How do I know what invites?” Her voice rises as the newspaper lowers. She knots her arms across her chest.

“What?”

“How can you just say invites like that and figure I know what the hell you are talking about. You just say invites with no preamble.”
Holly’s anger derails him. She watches as the tracks run out from under him.

Finally, he says, “Well, I ain’t no constitution, baby.”

She concludes that he is missing a gene, always confused by her anger, perpetually wondering what he’s done wrong, unable to comprehend why they argue, drawing no conclusions about it after all these years. It must be a genetic defect, like a thyroid dysfunction, to believe that all anger is the same and that he can mollify her with a pun or a joke.      “Okay.” Now Scott treats her to the slowed-down speech reserved for children and rabid animals. “Invitations for the fiftieth wedding anniversary party for my parents.”

“Fuck you, Scott. I know what they’re for.” From her angry words, she extrudes a calm clarity. The whole concept of a couple staying together for fifty years eludes her, especially her couple, mismatched from the very beginning. She’s going to have to tell him, crack open the sophistry of their union regardless of the consequences. She’s not sure when or how but Holly will confess Mil. And Brian, too. All of it.

Holly liked to party with boys. Fifteen years old, an average student in a small, conservative, blue-collar town that proved, for many, tough to leave. Holly overlooked the pool of insouciant teenagers from which she could select her girlfriends. She gravitated to football players. Lured by their doctrine of entitlement, she admired their matrix of fundamentals; assigned roles, hard work, inevitable pain, measurable points and savored victories. She loved their rough voices and coarse words. And their smell, like fields of spring mud, intoxicated her. When she got high with them, she embraced the out-of-control feeling, her power stretched before her without horizon. Tacitly, she shared their glorious dreams of fame and fortune, fast cars and freedom. In a sober moment, alone, she devised the plan that would fulfill those dreams. 

Phase One began with an unwitting boy, all too willing to accommodate Holly’s desire. Even if he was in love with her, he fell to Holly’s plan in a strafe of collateral damage. Her first time – was it his too? — they abandoned only enough clothing so that their bodies connected. Years later, Holly would forget his name and all the ancillary events of the evening. But memory of the sex imprinted; the stinging pungency of cheap cologne, his initial struggles, telling her to relax, just relax, then the brief, ripping pain, surprise when his body jerked and shuddered against hers, and finally, probably only minutes later but seeming much longer, his belt buckle digging into her thigh. For days, she wore the bruise from it, an odd shape that made her think of getting a tattoo there. She stopped at every mirror, examined her reflection, and the C student congratulated herself. “That’s an A, baby.”

Fortune delayed her deployment of Phase Two because her frequent absences from home alarmed her parents and drove them to search her room. There, they unearthed an old baggie with a few joints Holly had neglected because there was something better to smoke. Infuriated, her mother flaunted her discovery at Holly, herbs trembling inside the murky plastic. Her father imposed the strictest curfew ever; home directly after school, no TV, no computer, no music, no, no, no, no…no! Okay, whatever. Holly didn’t waver. Her resolve deepened. The week of her eighteenth birthday, she met Scott.

Scott, green eyed, thick lashed, dirty blonde, halted, at Holly’s request, outside Dave’s Liquors on Main Street. While she addressed the stranger, he stood by, his towering six-foot plus, muscled frame stuffed into a fresh off the rack business suit. “Hey,” she said. “Buy me a six pack?”

“Name’s Scott.” His low strong voice reminded her of a Great Dane.

“Scott, buddy. You’re over twenty one?”

“Twenty six.”

“Yeah. Buy me a six-pack. I’ll owe you big time.”

“And you are?”

She hesitated. “Well, I am twenty one. It’s just I left my ID home.”

He smiled a goofy, white-toothed grin. “I meant your name.”

“Uh. Barbara.” She should have waited. All of a sudden, this guy seemed really extra tall. “I’m kind of in a hurry so if you – “

“Sick grandmother?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.  I’ll do it if you keep your word.”

“My word?” 

“You said, you’ll ‘owe me’. So that’s your word.”

Holly’s instinct said run, but something about his tone sparked her anger and she glared at him instead. “That was just a figure of speech, you know.” Plus, she would have liked to commission the job to someone else but he was the only guy anywhere near the store in the last half hour who didn’t know her. “Look,” she said. “I’m not gonna sleep with you.” Although he did have a nice ass and all those muscles in just the right places. And when she saw her comment actually made him blush, she softened and considered the possibility.

He said, “I meant I’ll buy your six pack if you have one with me.”

“Is that all?” Holly couldn’t help but feel a bit of disappointment over not at least being forced to choose.

“That’s all. I mean, if your plans can wait.”

“My plans?”

“You said you were in a hurry.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay. Deal.” Holly realized suddenly that she wasn’t exactly showing off a spectacular vocabulary. 

A few minutes later, mission accomplished, they walked along the street. Scott reached into the bag and handed her a cold one. He unleashed the Great Dane voice. “You always drink Rolling Rock?”

Holly struggled for something to say that would seem witty or, alternatively, sexy. “I’m usually a Bud kind of gal.” She pictured the horses with their regal white booties.

“Ever try Magic Hat?”

Holly gave up on wit and squinted at him. “You’re not from around here.”

“I was. Um, from here.”

Then he said it. Medical school. Scott’s name preceded by the title, “Doctor.” 

She said, “You know, my name’s not really Barbara.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

Three months later, when Holly missed her period, she celebrated alone with a Thai stick and a bottle of Jack Daniels that she lifted from the same store where she’d met Scott. He didn’t hesitate with his proposal. She didn’t hesitate with her response. Holly didn’t know if the arrangement horrified her parents or bewildered them. But they probably preferred their daughter’s chances in a loveless marriage to a doctor versus single motherhood. On the other hand, Holly envisioned her plan miraculously unfolded. She pictured herself in a big house with a swimming pool, enjoying a pedicure while she lounged with a frosty drink and socialized with her wealthy friends.

Then Brian was born.

What a surprise, after waiting out an easy pregnancy in their tiny studio in Western Massachusetts while Scott, absent mostly, interned for barely enough pay to cover the rent. How unprepared Holly was, equally for the pain of childbirth and for the even more painful joy of intense love that she immediately felt for Brian, a love that torched in her a mortal fear for his well-being. The baby in her arms immolated all remnants of her plans and dreams, giving way to a steadfast devotion to every aspect of her family’s sustenance.

She discovered a diversity of banal talents working nights on the computer at the library, clipping money saving coupons, haunting Salvation Army stores for used housewares, purchasing in bulk from BJ’s Wholesale and cooking to stock her freezer. Scott wore GAP while she wore K-MART. Brian got Bauer skates and football camp and Holly got This End Up furniture, in southern yellow pine. “That’s the same wood they make floors out of. It’s guaranteed for life,” the sales clerk assured her.

Long after it was necessary, Holly practiced frugal ways. When Scott suggested a cruise to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, Holly funded Brian’s college education instead. When Scott wanted to trade in their southern yellow pine, Brian’s budding musical talents warranted drums and lessons and his teeth required braces. And when Scott surprised her with the sparkling diamond anniversary band on their tenth “for the diamond I couldn’t afford back then,” he said, she snapped the box shut. She hugged him and insisted she’d be afraid to wear such extravagant jewelry. Besides, she needed a new refrigerator and she wanted Scott to buy that convertible sports car from the brochures he’d collected and studied for the past two years.

Now, seventeen years later, Holly looks at Scott look at her and she sighs. Scott folds his newspaper and drops it on the table. He stands, strides directly to her and, inexplicably, he kisses her gently on the cheek. One soft, brief suck, Scott’s lips and Holly’s skin, a meeting arranged thousands of times before, now the incontrovertible truth of her life enfolding all of the dirty diapers and scary fevers, ABC’s, PTA’s, Little League and MCAS. Math homework and meatloaf. After years of Scott’s affection, the steady performance of all of his obligations – all the qualities that drew her to him – she feels it only as this shabby, relentless taunt. She hates Scott for her own complicity in her privileged, even life, a life marked neither by great joy nor by great tragedy. Only Brian.

When she sits across from Brian at the dinner table, Holly can still visualize her beautiful new baby burping formula all over her only fancy holiday blouse. But she recognizes her son, now licensed to drive, as a tall, athletic blond occupied with researching schools in California and Wisconsin. Brian’s presence obliterated her teenage dreams, what would his absence do to the rest of her life? Does she really have to tell Scott? Can’t he see for himself, the crumbling after-effects of a Brian-less house? 

“OK, honey. I’m on call tonight. Don’t forget.” Scott reminds her of his years and years and years of Wednesdays – half a day at the office with light morning appointments, on call all day and night, swapping with the other doctors in the practice only for vacations and emergencies. Holly clenches her body as Scott withdraws silently. She pictures the bruise on her inner thigh from when she lost her virginity at age fifteen. She wonders how it could have faded, how she failed to notice, how first the pain left, then she gazed at her skin one day and the bruise had vanished.   

Mil and Scott converse outside in the driveway. Inside, Holly chops celery, peppers and cucumbers into three-inch strips for the fiftieth anniversary party. Her preparation of appetizers is a holdover from her frugal years, doing for herself when she can easily afford catering.

She hasn’t told him yet.

Tree leaves flutter in an eastward wind, and simultaneously Mil’s gray hair and Scott’s blonde hair lift in the breeze and now settle. In spite of their disparate appearances, their relaxed demeanor, side by side, makes them seem like brothers, as if they share a long history, not just the street. Mil gesticulates his description of some phenomenon; the fingers on one hand form the “O.” He pokes the index finger of his other hand in and out. Besotted by Mil’s innocent illustration with a lewd gesture, Holly momentarily perceives the heady, slightly rancid aroma of sex. At the same time, she embraces the solace that her lust for Mil offers.

“Ma, where’s the keys?” Her son’s voice surprises her, not by its interruption of her thoughts, but by its tone. She often forgets how strong he has become, how his strength has carried along with it a new voice, from flute to tuba.

Holly turns slowly and raises her eyebrows. Brian, a tall, lanky teen sports all of Scott’s features, as if Holly’s genes weren’t involved.

“Ma,” Brian says. “The car keys.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“I didn’t ask for your state of being.”

Finally, he looks at her. “You’re so bizarre.”

“Nevertheless…”

“I’m meeting friends.”

“Where?”

“Ma…”

Holly reaches into her pocket, withdraws a set of keys, and jingles them, playing the music of his independence. Brian swipes them from her hand but at the last moment, Holly clenches her fist around the keys.

“Call me and let me know where you are.”

“What for? Isn’t the tracking chip implanted in my head working right?”

He kisses her cheek and runs out the door as Holly calls after him. “It’s not you I worry about.”

She stretches over the sink and peers out of the window trying to track Brian’s progress, but she sees only Scott. Mil has disappeared from view. Before Holly can return her attention to washing snow peas, slicing broccoli and to her dilemma, she sees Scott’s eyes widen. He jumps and shouts. Holly hears him through the glass. “Not in my car you don’t!” Brian trying to sneak away in his Dad’s sports car again. 

How will she explain to Scott that all this is just a lie behind thickening smoke and mirrored glass that Holly positioned long ago? The time Brian fell off the ladder and broke his finger, the afternoon Scott wrecked the car jockeying for position on Beacon Street near Fenway, the Thanksgiving Holly celebrated in the hospital with double pneumonia – none of it really happened. Insert Scott’s pun here.

Holly arranges the hard, crisp vegetables on a platter. Green vegetables on a green platter. Torpid and green. Green, all green. Holly breathes deeply and musters myriads of magenta, violet and chartreuse, striped purple and orange eggplants, luscious swirls of royal blue and neon pink tomatoes. She giggles aloud. And that damn lifetime of southern pine will be the first to go.

Through the window, the sun strikes the green plate, and ignites a blinding emerald glitter. The harsh light intensifies and explodes into all colors. She concentrates hard on this bright anomaly as if it is a gift, useful but complicated and without instructions. Don’t stare at the sun! Don’t stare at the sun! The warnings Holly delivered to Brian all through his childhood. He was eleven years old for the eclipse and they constructed an elaborate pinhole device for an indirect view.

But Holly stares and stares directly for so long that the light and the power of the light, all the power of the colors radiate inside of her, dig through her cells molecule by molecule. When she finally cuts away, her sedition cracks open the kitchen walls. From the cracks, the blood of her house oozes, a green slime, the blood of open circulation, insect blood. It streaks the walls with color, pools in the serving dish, runs in a jagged path down to the floor, snakes across the linoleum, and stops, finally, just before it reaches her feet.

Well into the eighth decade of their lives, Scott’s parents celebrate fifty years together, along with a meager gathering of friends and family still alive and more or less ambulatory. From the kitchen, Holly spots Brian fading into a corner of the living room where a battalion of canes stands ready. He mopes, absorbed by his only companion, an overflowing plate of food.

Holly sees him, and not for the first time, as Scott must have looked, before the burdens of life crossed his path, medical school and the family Holly forced on him. Over the years, Brian brought lots of friends by the house but she can’t recall one particular girl – or one boy for that matter – in whom she suspected a serious sexual attraction. Music inspires Brian’s passion and in that also, she sees his counterpart in Scott. She envies both her son and her husband in a way that reminds her of the boys she envied in high school. Whatever they accomplish, however they succeed or fail, they begin at the rim of their lives and fearlessly eye the roiling fire of their potential. Mil is finally Holly’s very own desire, not one she borrowed from someone else. All she has to do is tell Scott.

Stationed in the kitchen Holly avoids the party and observes her elderly guests. Aunt Greta, a widow for decades, always wears a frown. She readily and competently debates any political issue and Holly could serve drinks off the old woman’s stooped back. Cousin Fred loves to flirt but Holly wonders if his viscous, clouded eyes can still deliver the distinctions between male and female. Cousin Harriet, the faded party girl, spills more than she consumes and insists on wearing fancy pumps in spite of swollen ankles and puffy feet. Brian catches Holly’s eye and she suppresses a smile. When she confesses to Scott, a celebration like this won’t factor into her future.

Holly turns her back on the party and pirates a moment for her kitchen window fantasy. Mil’s red pick-up is parked in his driveway. Beyond it, on his side porch, he stands over his wife who smiles up at him from an orange plastic chair. Animated, he explains some mysterious concept that utilizes a full repertoire of his awkward, beautiful gestures.

“Everything okay, Hon?” Scott interrupts. “Have we got any more toothpicks?”

He opens and closes a few cabinets, hunches over the utility drawer and rummages.

Holly says, “You should invite Mil and Dot over.”

“Huh? Toothpicks…”

“You should go over there right now, Scott, and ask Mil and Dot if they want to come to our party.”

“Mil and Dot?” Scott straightens from the toothpick quest.

“I’m sure your parents won’t mind a couple of extra guests.” Holly opens the drawer at her hip and from the clutter, produces a box of toothpicks, multicolored plastic spears with miniature sword handles.

“Well, all right,” Scott says awkwardly, taking the box.

He won’t go.

She can picture Mil in her house, in her white house, sampling her green vegetables, sitting on her southern yellow pine. His cigarette ash falls to the floor and she drops to sweep it up, hesitates at his feet. He pulls her to him.

But Mil is two driveways away, and might as well be continents away as likely as she is to convince Scott to get Mil over here. And before she absolutely explodes with her desire, she pulls Scott to her meaning to say, “In seventeen years, I’ve asked you for nothing. Now all I want is for you to bring Mil to me.” Instead, what comes out is, “Brian wasn’t a mistake.”

“What’s that?”

Desperate now. “It’s Brian. It’s about Brian.”

Scott pulls up, still in her grasp. “My god, what? What?” Scott guides her into the bathroom and searches her eyes so deeply that it blinds her. She composes herself by concentrating on bathroom fixtures, porcelain anchored to the linoleum floor, toilet tissue gripped by a cheap plastic holder and guest soaps molded into seashell shapes. She represses the urge to smash it all to unrecognizable bits, all the porcelain and plastic, especially the seashells.

She says, with measured calm, “Brian wasn’t really a mistake. I never told you. Brian wasn’t really an accident.”

“I know that.”

He shrugs, inscrutable. Perhaps he didn’t hear her.

She begins again, “I said…”

His voice is hard. “I heard what you said.” His eyes release her. For the first time that she can ever remember, he seems angry and she can’t reference why. “What’s this all about, Holly?”

“I just told you…”

“I mean, what are you trying to say?” Holly remains silent. He shakes his head. “You want out? Now? You’re telling me now?”

She tries to respond, stammers a few beginning syllables and trails off.

“I was twenty six for chrissakes. I knew what I was doing.” Pale and shaken, he sinks down to the rim of the tub. He drops his head heavily into his hands. His voice is softer now, distant. “I stole your youth, your chances in life. You think I didn’t know? You think I didn’t know how much your parents hated me for it? Well, I didn’t care. Holly, you were so wild, unattainable. I was so damn in love with you.”

His words linger, regroup, grab her by the neck, and choke off her air. The floor undulates and vanishes. Walls warp, twist, and jet away. The ceiling swirls, presses down, and crumbles. For a moment everything slams and crashes and in this one moment Holly sees her entire life burn in an unexpected way, caramelize sweetly.

Scott looks up at her. His eyes glisten. “Please, don’t leave me. I don’t know what you want, but I’ll do anything. Don’t leave me.”

“Shh, Scott.” She ventures toward him.

“Don’t leave me.”

“Shhh. Shhh.” She reaches out, cradles his head against her breast. She feels Scott’s body pressed warmly to hers, her eyes open wide, not wondering, just feeling all of it. The thought makes her laugh aloud, a genuine laugh that climbs her like a vine. She says, “What more could I want?”

D Sprung Kurilecz grew up in Middletown Township, New Jersey. She frequently visited her mother’s family outside of Philadelphia including Grandparents in Conshohocken who owned a candy factory nearby in Norristown. Currently, she lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts where she teaches creative writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have received international award recognition and been published in numerous literary journals, including most recently, North Atlantic Review, Willow Review, The MacGuffin, American Letters & Commentary, Oyez Review, Blue Earth Review, The Jabberwock Review, The Broome Review, and West Wind Review. She has a Masters in English/Creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

            A couple old as mud wobbles to my counter. He scowls like he’s just stepped into dog shit, slaps his check down on the counter, [img_assist|nid=7087|title=Milja by Loren Dann© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=284]and slides it toward me, message-side up. In a phlegmy voice he growls, “What the hell’s this supposed to mean?”

            The back of the check reads, “You are dead already!” Of course I recognize my Marigold’s arcane, Euro-trash scrawl immediately.  

            I say, “We choose our waitresses carefully from among the graduates of the finest waitressing school in Paris.” I lean closer with my secret. “Many of them have read deeply in philosophy. I assure you this is obviously a philosophical statement.”

            The old woman at his side sneers. “Well if this is philosophy, somebody should tell her parents.”

            I respond, “They are as heartbroken as you are.” The couple finally leaves and I’m relieved we’ll never see them again. Neither them, nor their family nor their friends nor their professional colleagues. In fact, a whole army of greedy, gaping, chewing, and drooling mouths now will never darken our door. I restrain myself from running to tell Ron the happy news. 

            My Tiger Lily moves in a nimbus of pale yellow light. Water glasses glitter in her presence, French fries glow at her touch. “Too late already so much.”

            She’s come from one of those countries I’ve never heard of, and I’m not embarrassed to admit there are a lot of those. I assume her English will never get any better, which is just fine with me.

 

            We all work together at the Kitchen Knook on 4th Street close to the shopping mall. I’m the late-shift cashier, a very demanding and responsible position, which is why I’m paid so little. Ron, the night manager, explains that the low pay discourages frivolous people who lack the drive and determination to take the job seriously. And he promises me that with another year of this responsibility I could go anywhere, do anything. Smiling he says, “Even president of, like, General Motors, or something.”

            Of course I’m impressed, even if I can’t remember who General Motors is. I’ve told Ron we ought to have cool military uniforms. I remind him that people love uniforms, and they love to have their food brought to them by persons wearing uniforms. I explain to him that basically, this uniform wearing is the wave of the future, and we need to be part of the future if we expect to succeed. I remind him that I watch the news, so I know what’s going on. I tell him that from what I’ve seen, eventually all the people feeding us will wear uniforms and this will make us all really happy.

            A young, attractive woman places her check on my counter, but she is not smiling. “You know,” she says, “this sort of thing usually indicates serious psychological difficulties.” On the back of her check my Little Petunia has scrawled, “The surface is without substance.”

            I respond, “We try to help those who are in difficulty.”

            “That may seem noble to you, but you should not inflict such darkness on those of us already entombed.” A tear sparkles at the corner of her eye. She turns and leaves, and my regret follows her like a thick snake. 

            My Buttercup waits tables, from 4 PM until Midnight. What she does is what waitresses do, and her customers bring their checks to my cash register, a cash register of which I am proprietor. They slide their checks across my counter accompanied by either a fist-full of cash, or a shiny credit card. We don’t take checks, that’s our policy.

            Our three other waitresses are named Camille, Ellen and Brandy. Hoping to pump up their tips, each writes a little message on the backs of their checks. Ellen is in law school, so she just writes “Thanks so much!” with a little diamond at the bottom of the exclamation point. Maybe she should change it to a dollar sign. Brandy writes, “Have a Good Day,” and puts smiles in the middles of the “O”s. The horror is that she earnestly means it. I tremble at her glance. But Camille is the worst. Camille writes, “Smile, God Loves you!” and she uses little hearts to dot the “I” and at the bottom of the exclamation point, and in place of all of the “O”s. It must take her ten minutes to draw the thing out. But my Squash-Blossom is different. Where others are mesmerized by the surface, she sees all the way down.

            “Stop touching yourself and start touching others,” is written quirkily on the check slid onto my counter by a young man whose acne will be with him until he’s collecting Social Security.

            He says, “Women these days are so fucked up.”

            I shrug. “Estrogen’s been leaking into the water supply.”

            His eyes get large. “You’re shitting me?”

            “Drink bottled water,” I say. “It’s the only way to be safe.”    

            My Rose-Petal always shares her shift with at least two of these other waitresses, along with a revolving door of dark, foreign-looking busboys who pass through so fast I never learn their names. So we have four waitresses for a three-waitress staff. Ron makes up the schedule. He says the task will make him crazy. Apparently, doing the schedule is the hardest thing he’s ever done, even from high school, figuring out how to cover from day to day, week to week. He begs me to pick up the bus-tray whenever I can. These women will drive me nuts, he says, and I’m sure that would be a short trip. But I remind him that busing tables is beneath the responsibilities of the cashier, who must handle money. After all, what is more diseased-ridden in our society than cash, filthy cash?

            Ron does not like me and never agrees with anything I say. But he does not want to hire another cashier. His cashiers tend to steal, and he tells me I’m the first in half a decade not robbing him blind. All Ron wants to do is sit in the back-office at the computer and download porn from the internet. He burns the porn onto CD’s and takes them home with him every night and does god-knows-what thereafter. I’m too nauseated to ask.

            “The brain atrophies before the penis,” is followed by a smiling sun-face with X’s over the eyes. The middle-aged guy belonging to this check grins as he leans across the counter. “I just took my pill,” he whispers, “and I’ve got a woody like a sequoia. What time does she get off?”

            “She doesn’t,” I assure him. “Our evil manager keeps her shackled in the basement. He’s the only one gets to see her.”  [img_assist|nid=7088|title=Out Building Walnut Hill: Pagoda of Weeds by Dae Rebeck-Sanchez © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=225]

            He frowns sympathetically. “Any little thing I can do to help?”

            In fact I keep all of these complaints from Ron. He likes my Little Dove even less than he likes me. He thinks she thinks about him. If it wasn’t for the fact that she can carry six filled platters in the middle of a rush, she’d have been long-gone. At closing I count the register while she helps clean up. I lose count every time I look up to see her bending over. I lose count a lot, so this usually takes the rest of the night. Ron comes over to me after firing another busboy. He likes to keep in practice. “Stupid little shit,” he says looking at nothing in particular, and it takes me a second to realize he’s not talking to me. “Any of your creepy friends need a job?”

            I tell him my creepy friends are all over-booked. I tell him it seems like people will only hire the really creepy ones. He looks hard into my eyes. “You don’t like this job, do you?”

            “I love this job,” I say. “I gave up being General Motors just to work here.”

            He looks at me a moment and then he smiles. “My bet is you’re going to be here a good long time.”

            I ask, “Is that a promise?” I finish counting, or actually just give up and write down the amount on the slip that I already know is supposed to be in the register.

            “Oh yeah,” he says, “that is my promise to you!”

            As he walks away I say, “Thanks! Mom will be so pleased.”

            I time my departure to follow her out the door. Half a block from the restaurant I say,

            “Listen, you have to stop writing that shit on the checks. People get upset. They say things. They think things.”

            She shrugs without turning.   

            I say, “It seems they are not grateful for your subtle generosity.” She has gorgeous shoulders. I say, “If you don’t like gratitude you should be happy every day.” 

            Finally she turns, her arrogant frown thrills me.   

            “Do you ever have a good time?” She stops at the corner, her bus is already pulling up. She shrugs as she brings a token out of her pocket. Climbing the steps she does not turn. “Misery is underrated,” she says.

            The doors fold closed, her sweet butt framed sweetly in the folding bus-door windows. 

Nothing left for me to do but sigh, which I do louder than the bus.

           

            Two women. Young, secretary-types. The taller, older one slides the check toward me like we’re conspirators and this is grade school. On the back of the check my Dumpling has written, “A penis in the hand – better two in the bush.”

            “How was your meal today?” I ask with the blandest look I own.

            “Funny,” she says, and the two leave giggling. I spend the next ten minutes figuring.

  After closing, my Nightingale leaves without a glance back. I hustle to catch up, pull up just behind her right shoulder. Her profile fills me with something I cannot name. “Tell me? Was it the Freud that didn’t sit well, or the Kafka?”

            With her firm, long-legged gate she steps on the gas. I hustle double-step to keep up. She turns to face me without losing a step, her grin vicious and wise. “You!” And she says, “You!”

            At the corner she turns. A guy is just getting out of a cab. She strides faster, has her hand on the closing door, slips inside and is gone, all before I can say, “Me! Me! Me!”

            Two little girls, maybe twelve years old between them, timidly place their check and cash on my counter. On the back I read, “Death is your friend!” I shove the cash back toward them

            “Hey!” I say kind of loud and I’m smiling. “It’s your lucky day. You’re lunch was free! 

Hope you enjoyed it. Come back again soon!”

            I’m relieved when the little girls turn to each other and smile. The one girl says, “Thanks,” as she grabs the cash. The other says, “Yeah,” and they’re laughing together before they reach the door. And I’m relieved nobody is making a big deal.

            An hour and a half later and it’s slow. To my Dandelion I say, “We have to talk.” I take her by the elbow to lead her to the back. She shrugs me off, gets to the office door before I do, stands arms folded across her generous chest, and watches me approach like a hot dog watches mustard. I stand as close to her as I can without fainting. “Please leave the kids alone. If you aren’t about to say something nice to a kid, just shut up. How about it?”

The fire in her black eyes roasts my scrotum no matter which way I turn. When I don’t say anything she sneers. “Pot-licker,” [img_assist|nid=7091|title=Dinner by Kathleen Montrey © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=225|height=189]she says and then she moves past me like I’m a can of dead flowers. People want to know why I hate my life. 

            Back at the register Ron comes over smiling like his whole face’s shot with botox. He calls out, “Brandy, cover the register a minute?” He signals me to follow and we walk back to the storeroom. He flicks-on the light and closes the door behind us. He paces back and forth like he’s been constipated for a month. Watching him is about to wear me out. I sit down on a case of catsup bottles. He looks like he’s trying to think about something, and then he steps close and leans forward. “We have a problem.” Then he freezes, stares into my face like whatever I do next will twist my future absolutely. So I do nothing. “We’re missing a can of mayonnaise,” he says. Then he watches me like by knowing this I will now change into something.

            “A whole can of mayo, you say?” I squint and dip my head as if I know what he’s getting at. I ask, “Any ideas?” Because I don’t like having-to-think forced upon me. I’d rather that it sneak up on me, like a toothache, until finally I have to do something about it, but all along I’ve been sort of dealing with it in the background.  

            “One or two,” he says with cultivated inscrutability and then takes a step back, “one, or two.” 

            He sits down on boxes of canned soup and sighs, rubs his hands together and then along the tops of his thighs. The aura of defeat hovers over him as miasmal as a fart.

            To move things along I ask, “One of the gallon cans?” I’m incredulous because it is incredible, and I want to be certain before I continue with this thinking-thing. He nods.

            “And you’re sure it’s not misplaced?” I ask. “Because you looked everywhere?” Silence in this case is assent.

            “Well,” I say still not grasping the magnitude of our situation, “it wasn’t like it was a can of the good stuff. Can’t be more than a few dollars a can. I mean, we’ll make it up in tips.”

            Suddenly he looks at me in a way that I had never expected him to look. As if his face was a box of tools, and this expression was just not included. “You don’t get it, do you?” Suspicion tightens his eyes. “Can you be so fucking self-centered and naive?” He stands, slowly steps forward to bring his face right up to mine so that I have to lean back. “This isn’t just about the fucking money. It isn’t even about any fucking principles. The question I can’t answer is why? And even worse how?” His own suspicion turns to incredulity. “Pick up one of those fucking cans. How you going to sneak one of those out of here? Where the fuck you going to hide it? How you going to carry it so nobody guesses? What kind of fucking bag you going to put it in so nobody says, hey, where you taking that gallon of fucking mayo?”

            Before I can venture any stupid guesses he says, “And why? How much goddamn mayo can one family eat, for Christ sake?” He begins to pant, his voice is getting louder, and I’m wishing he brushed his teeth more often. “You can’t put this shit on goddamn breakfast cereal, for Christ sake!”

            Ron looks around the floor like he’s surrounded by scorpions. “And if somebody’s snatched the mayo, should we maybe put an armed guard on the tuna?” His face has become very red. “I defy anyone to explain to me why any normal human being would steal a gallon of goddamn mayonnaise!”

            Who could imagine Ron is a passionate philosopher? But he’s already given-up trying to find anything out from me. He’s turned and is already reaching for the door handle. So with hardly a twitch he’s opened the door. And there stands my little Flesh-Bulb.

            She’s looking a bit cowed though she’s easily a head taller than Ron. He stares up at her a long time. My Sweet Onion cannot return his look. He steps around her and returns to the restaurant. She stands another moment looking at the floor and then she returns to the restaurant. And me? I’m still sitting on my ass, Brandy covering the register for me, and I’m waiting for this head-thing to stop, so much like a blender running filled with steel screws. 

             A priest comes to my register smiling, slides his check toward me with his cash. I see her handwriting and tremble. I turn it over to read, “Sleep with God!”

            The priest says, “Your staff has a rare and subtle sense of the world behind the mask. I shall return often.”

            Panic grabs my throat, I suppress the scream and manage to whisper, “That would perhaps not be wise.” The priest’s smile disappears, as his eyes get large. Leaning closer I say, “Our manager is a Satanist, and he would say anything to corrupt you.” I drop my voice to add, “He would even lie to you.”

            The priest is about to turn. I touch his sleeve and add, “Pray for our souls.” The door closes and he never looks back.

            About a second later Brandy steps up smiling. “Let me know if you need me to cover for you.” Her voice is so bright I put on sunglasses.

            “That’s generous of you, but I can’t possibly burden you with this enormous responsibility.” 

            I pull another girly magazine from the rack and lean back as I open it.

            When I look up again I’m surprised to see Brandy still standing there. She cranks her smile up another level. “I hear Ron’s got you on some kind of inventory duty or something. About the tuna, I mean. It’s a little slow today. Maybe I could give you a hand.” Now I’m looking for the hidden camera. These places always have hidden cameras even though they usually don’t work, but if we have them, they must be really well hidden. So I ask, “Did you wait on that priest?”

  Brandy experiences a panic entirely out of proportion to the question, which relieves me completely. “No,” she says, “that’s what’s-her-name’s table. Why?” As if she doesn’t know. 

“Did he complain?”

            “No, worse. He was so impressed he threatened to bring all his priest-friends here. Does that make any sense to you?” I look at her real hard, a sort of highlight and underline to the point.

            She turns and scans the room as if help might arrive any second. She shrugs before she turns back again. “I guess some old guys find her type charming. Don’t ask me. Old guys are always so obvious.” There’s nothing to that with my name on it, so I let it drift. After another minute she drifts too, and I’m relieved.

            A withered and old woman about four feet tall staggers to the counter, slides her check

Across and says, “What the hell’s this shit?” My Little Cauliflower has written, “Sex is death.”

            “Words to live by,” I say hoping that if I don’t look at her she’ll evaporate.

            “Know anybody needs to get laid, give ’em this.” Then trembling, she scribbles a phone number at the bottom of one of the take-out menus stacked on the counter. She doesn’t wait for me to answer, but it takes her four minutes to walk to the door. When she’s gone I fold up the menu and shove it into my back pocket. I know that one never knows.  

            A heartbeat later Ron’s standing beside my shoulder. “You know who that is?”

            “Don’t know who she is, but I know what she wants.”

            “She’s maybe old and crazy but she’s rich as they come.”

            “Then, here!” I say and pass him the menu. “She’s waiting for you to call.”  

            He looks at the menu with widening eyes. “You shitting me?”

            “Would I shit you?”

            He grins. “That’s why I let you work here.” He walks away lips muttering the phone number like he expects to remember it.

            Walking behind my gorgeous Petunia as she makes her way to her bus I say, “Your English is getting so much better.”

            Walking fast she shrugs without turning. 

  Perhaps my little Artichoke is a secret poet. Her way with words is so elegantly awkward. 

Or perhaps she simply speaks as she thinks. Thinking and speaking so rarely coincide, but perhaps my Apricot Jelly has discovered some secret. And perhaps if I’m earnest and determined she’ll share that secret with me. We reach her bus stop and I’m about to peel off toward my apartment but she turns to me. “Every day is coffee. How is that? How is that?”

            I’m stunned. No words, her eyes are black icicles in bright sunlight. And for the first time ever, she smiles. Her teeth are bad but her smile is brilliant. By the time my brain remembers I have a mouth and the muscles in my jaw unlock, she’s already climbed the steps to the bus and has gone. When I get home I make a note on my calendar, it’s that sort of thing.

           

            Later in the week we’re really busy, a convention or something, I only find out after the fact, but ninety percent of our customers are female and almost all of them are young, some sort of convention. For the entire evening rush, Ron’s running in one direction and looking in the other. Beaming with his natural-born idiocy, he can’t get to these tables fast enough. He’s even carrying platters and busing tables, an explosion of activity that demands to be commemorated with a photograph it’s so unlikely. It’s Brandy’s day off, just Camille and Ellen and my Sweet Plantain, and we’re all stunned by Ron’s enthusiastic participation, though for different reasons and to different degrees. Ron’s one of those hiding-managers; don’t bother him unless the register’s short or there’s blood on the floor. My little Star-Light maneuvers around Ron like he’s a pile of dog shit. Even Camille finds his participation remarkable, so she makes a remark.

            “What’s he doing here?”

            “As little as possible.”

            “Doesn’t he know even how to carry dishes?”

            “Like the rest of us, he knows as little as he can get away with.”

            “Something’s going to happen,” she says.

            “Something always does.” I know I’ll be proved right, but I’m surprised at how soon.

            The collision happens when I’m not looking, but the sound wakes even the comatose. And before the last glass shatters, the stream of venom from my little Buttercup’s sweet lips is terrifying Ron shields himself with his server tray. Fortunately, my Sugar Cube has reverted to her mother tongue, so no one understands what she’s saying, but none of us needs a translation. Women at the tables giggle and point, terror, and embarrassment alternate in Ron’s eyes like lights on a billboard. 

            My little Lollipop’s pale face is red as a sunset, and then to all of our surprise, big, bright tears appear in her eyes. Its then my heart shatters like another dropped glass.

  In the next instant Ellen appears with broom and dustpan muttering about lawsuits. My little Nectarine is sobbing, tears glide down her cheeks, and I struggle to resist running over to lap them up with my tongue.  

            But Ron suddenly recaptures his self-importance and sense of disproportion and explains to my Love-Doll that she’s fired.

            Without a thought beyond a determination to spare my little Pop-Tart any more embarrassment I decide to tell Ron that I quit, and then describe to him how deep into Hell I know he’ll fall. And I’m ready to do this. And I promise myself I’ll do this, just as soon as I can step away from the register.

            But somehow my hands have become cramped around the edge of the counter. Somehow they’ve escaped my control and have conspired to hold onto the counter-edge. Do they know something I don’t? Do they understand something that has completely escaped me? Do they recognize something about me that I ignore at my own peril? Have they learned something from working here that I’ve forgotten, or worse, never even recognized? Just clamped onto the edge of the counter, and I can’t make my hands relax.

            Suddenly and to my surprise Ron’s standing immediately beside me. “You put up with this shit every day, you deserve a raise.” And then he mutters into my ear a number.

            He’s breathing hard so I’m pretty certain he’s serious. Frozen by greed and cowardice, perhaps, my left hand, the faithless hand, the treacherous hand, the hand that can’t be trusted, devious, cynical, and cruel remains gripping the counter. I call upon my trusty right hand, but clearly it has entered into a conspiracy with the left. My hands in remorseless grip of the counter are listening to Ron and they like the sound of his number. My hands are thinking about my landlord and my checkbook, and how good it feels to wrap themselves around a mug of cold beer. And thinking this they begin to think how they would miss all this. So my devious, treacherous hands betray me. As they so often have in the past, they do as they wish and not as I want. My hands are content to watch my little Pudding-Cup tearfully gather her things, exchange her apron for her overcoat, and then walk to the door. But worst, most dreadfully, most terribly, my hands smile derisively as my Tulip-Blossom steps out the door without even a single, vicious glance back.

            When Brandy comes in the next day she makes it clear to Ron she believes my Succulent Rasinette was dealt with too harshly. Ron fires her before her coat’s off. She looks hard at me as she leaves, but no tears for her. She’s tougher than I’d guessed. By the dinner-rush two new waitresses are plying our victuals; women who’ve been yelling at cooks and filling water glasses since Nixon was president. A reassuring stability has emerged, refreshing in its inconsequentiality.

            My hands are ecstatic with money play, but my heart remains unemployed.

In addition to the novel Master Siger’s Dream, recently published by What Books Press of Los Angeles, A. W. DeAnnuntis’s fiction has appeared in: Silent Voices, The Armchair Aesthete, Timber Creek Review, Lynx Eye, Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, First Class, Pacific Coast Journal, Short Stories Bimonthly, Luna Negra, CrossConnect, Mind in Motion (where he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize), and many others.

The first thing is we smell smoke.

            ‘Annie!’

            The Living Skeleton – Isaac to his friends – is the only one still stuck upstairs with me. He’s got one foot on the fire escape, skinny ribs slipping between window and sill, and he’s shrieking at me. ‘Come on Annie!’

            My legs are not my best feature – never have been – but now they’ve rooted like winter wheat and I can’t move. Panic seals up my throat. I have to rip my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

            ‘Come where?’ I gasp. ‘Through a slit of a window or straight through the wall? That fire escape’ll never take my weight. Get help. Just try Isaac, try.’

            It’s the most I’ve ever said to him.

            The Museum is both work and home to me.  The top floors accommodate many of the live exhibits but Isaac and I are the only ones still upstairs today. He’s having trouble with his digestion and has taken the morning off. I’ve been getting ready for the afternoon show: taking as long as possible and wanting to be left alone. There I am, all dressed up as Lady Macbeth. Out damned spot: even larger than life.

            Isaac’s face goes red and I know he’s about ready to wash his hands of me. He opens his mouth but then closes it again as his impossible bones slide away through the gap. Shoes clatter on the ironwork. Then my legs buckle and I hear the hiss of a hundred steam trains as the blackness threatens.

            Smoke stings my nostrils and brings me back, sharp. A squeeze of real fear sends me scrabbling across the floor toward the window. I put my hands on the panes of glass, find my knees, and hoist myself up enough to look out.

            Broadway. The circling crowd on the street below tip up tiny doll faces and point. Blood pumps noisily in my ears, competing against the wail of bells outside and the roaring fire behind me, eating its way up the stairs.  I manage to stand. Then I take a firm grip of the window sash and pull it up as hard as I can. Pain streaks down my shoulders, my toes grind against the wooden floor. It lifts a little. The window opens enough for a normal person to crush their ribs through, but impossible for me, for the giant, Anna Swan.

[img_assist|nid=7084|title=Nature Photography by Michael Morell © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=129]

             ‘Just look at you, Anna.’ Mother used to shake her head over the sight of me with all the wonderment of a child surprising a butterfly out of a rose bush.

            My parents weren’t for Barnum in the beginning. His agent came down the track to our weather-washed house near Tatamagouche Bay and ran the gauntlet of all my brothers and sisters marauding about the yard. Mother and Father listened to him with arms folded and Scotch wariness glinting in their eyes. I hid behind the pantry door; caught a sight of tweed, of shining shoes, of a waxed moustache. Out there, he was almost a match for me in freakery.

            New York City. Piano lessons. Books to read. An exhibit, but a prized one. The second time the man came with his offer, hands were shaken.

 

           There are so many people down there on the street. They’re pointing, calling, running back and forth crazily between the fire trucks. They’re pouring out of the buildings opposite and from around the corner on Ann Street. I have to keep the fire away. I run to the door, slam it: push across a display case with a two-headed calf and a threadbare push-me-pull-you. I tug at the table – that won’t budge – but I strip down the drapes and push and poke them, wadding my makeshift barricade like a pastry-chef trimming a pie. Then I back away to the window and hunch beneath it, clutching my knees, balled up in prayer. These are bad minutes.

            ‘Get away from the window! Now!’

            The voice shocks me. My shoulders lock up. I have time to think – Irish? – and then one look at his grim face, one glimpse of his axe, sends me scooting away across the floor as the fire fighter smashes through the window.

            ‘Don’t be afraid!’ he calls. When I don’t move: ‘There’s no time for this.’

            ‘But the fire escape won’t hold me.’ Stiff, but suddenly calm, I get to my feet and watch his eyes track upwards to my face. That stops him.

            ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. Tears burn my eyes as his footsteps follow Isaac’s and I’m alone again.

 

          Barnum looked me up and down like a prize sow, made a few notes in one of his books and put me on a stand next to Colonel John Nutt. The Colonel stands about as high as my knee. I’ve got nothing good to say about him, yet I’ve stood next to Nutt and smiled till my lips dried up. Every night, from my very first night in the Museum, I’ve lain curled in my bed, picturing my mother’s tearful face as I waved farewell. I’ve cursed myself as the greatest fool of a girl there’s ever been.

            They say I was just born large and kept right on growing. That it happens that way with some folk. But my family loved me. They took no more notice of my size than it took to step over my legs when I sat on the floor to eat my dinner, or when they had to wait while I stooped and twisted my way out of our cottage door. I went to school and loved it. I thought I’d make a teacher, a good one too. For that I had to go to Truro and board with my aunt. I figured that the children would stare at first but that they’d soon settle to me and I’d do fine. I hadn’t bargained for the adults. Not for the staring on the street, or the sniggering and name-calling from the men as I walked home from school. It wasn’t like the Bay where everyone had watched me grow, year after year. Father came to take me home.

            Barnum’s man arrived three months later. Of course my parents said a straight-out no, but Barnum doesn’t deal in nos. And I was seventeen, desperate for a life. I wanted to learn. I wanted to see, and if that meant being seen, well, I thought it was a price I could pay. Thought it right up until Mr Barnum gave me a quick once over and then sent me up to meet the rest of the inhabitants of the American Museum.

 

             That fireman said he’d be back but I know it’s impossible. I’m trembling. The noise and the heat of the fire are coming for me. Perhaps the best thing would be to just open the door. To let it in. To get it over with. I’ve thought about death. But I’m swaying back and forth and a painful splinter of laughter climbs up my throat because I’m beyond counting the number of times I’ve wished I was dead. I’ve longed to be away from these gross bones and distended limbs, my drooping face, my hands, my- Lord! – There isn’t a particle of flesh on me I don’t despise. Yet here is death coming for me and suddenly I’m screaming inside, “I want out! Let me out! Get me out!”[img_assist|nid=20518|title=(null)|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=300|height=385]

            Something’s happening. I’m aware of a change and it takes me a moment. Then I realise it’s the sounds from the street. The bells are not ringing. The crowd is subdued.  There’s a thin mist of smoke in the room now, but if I keep low the air is still clean enough to breathe. I crawl back to the window. Glass scrapes my hands and knees but I feel nothing. I look down again. Everything’s stopped. From building to building every particle of road and sidewalk is taken up by men and women staring up at the fire consuming the Museum. Directly below I can even make out people I know. There’s Isaac and little Colonel Nutt. There’s that Josephine with her hirsute son. Next that girl – the Circassian Beauty – I haven’t even troubled to find out her name. And Millie-Christine. Although both twins gave me shy smiles, I’ve ignored them and tried my hardest not to stare. I’ve kept myself apart. I couldn’t stand to look at them. I couldn’t bear that they were looking at me, or that we were all so different, and yet our difference was the very thing that made us all the same. But now? What would I not give to hear the Two-headed Nightingale sing, to watch men scratch their heads and peer at the Feejee Mermaid, even to stand next to ugly old Nutt while he winks at all the pretty girls passing through our halls.

            People are pointing at something on the ground. I squint trying to see what it is. The something is moving upwards. There are two men. There is a crane. The men in the crane are waving. One is tall; one is shorter, fatter, with a high bald dome of a forehead. Unmistakably Barnum. The crane grows up past my window on the fifth floor. Barnum and the firefighter are in a cage, still a floor below. But they’re rising all the time. Hope slithers into the gaps between my ribs.

            ‘Here!’ The firefighter climbs in the window. He winces as the smoke catches his throat. Barnum holds a large white handkerchief over his face. His eyes bulge meaningfully toward me but I can’t understand a thing. I stand rigid, a dumb mannequin, as the firefighter winds thick ropes around my waist and under my arms. He binds in my skirt to my ankles. Then he somehow plucks from the sky a green blanket, slung with ropes like a hammock. He pulls me towards it and I see what they mean to do.

            I don’t hesitate. I lie on my front in the hammock and it’s tied up like shoelaces across my back. The firefighter climbs back into Barnum’s basket. I hear them shout. Ropes creak. Air slips between me and the floorboards. It feels…wonderful.

            And it is wonderful. I’m fearful: slung like a sausage, five floors up, swinging out of a window over a crowd of hundreds. I’m afraid: the ropes might fray, something could rip, I could slide from my casing and plummet into the ground below. But beyond that, it feels wonderful. I’m weightless, a feather. I am nothing and everything. I’m the great proud figurehead of a galleon setting sail from her harbor for the very first time. It’s the longest, shortest, coldest flight any Swan has ever taken. As I bump down amongst the hands and hollers of the firemen I’m gasping and laughing and coughing and shaking and smiling. I’m alive.

            ‘Annie!’ ‘Anna!’ ‘Anna!’ They’re all here. I’ve never felt this way. It’s as if everything inside me is broken and mended in the same moment. The others clutch at me and I cling to them. I’m beyond thought, oblivious to the fire and the work going on around us trying to save the building.

            Someone puts a blanket across my shoulders. One of Millie-Christine’s hands holds mine. A scalding cup of tea is pressed into my

other hand. Hot and sweet, it settles me back to earth.

[img_assist|nid=7085|title=Soon Forgotten by Kristen Solecki© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=249|height=166]

            Then: ‘Hush up, girls.’

            We all turn at the sharp sound of Isaac’s voice. Only a step away I see the pale balding head framed by baby black curls. His back is straight, his arms spread wide. A press of reporters leans in to hear him. Barnum lets them have it in style.

            ‘Here’s your headlines, boys. Here’s the news. Just write the name Barnum. P-H-I-N-E-A-S, T. Barnum. And ask your readers this boys! Ask them who else could find a crane so fast in New York City? Who else could set that crane to winch a girl measuring seven foot tall and weighing too many pounds out of a burning building? Who else boys? Why – nobody else, that’s who. Only Barnum!’

            Then he strides off into the crowd, crushing hands and nodding, balling his fists on his hips and shaking his head.

            Slowly it comes to us that we have nowhere to sleep, no work, no American Museum and yet we know we’ll be all right. We have Barnum.

 

 

Kate Braithwaite was born and grew up in Edinburgh. In 2010 she won the Random House Canada Student Writing Award and a novel excerpt, Charlatan, was published by the University of Toronto.  Her current project is a novel about murder and terror plots in 17th Century London. Kate and her family live near Kennett Square.

It was mid October when Stan found himself on the move again, towing a U-haul trailer through North Carolina and on to Virginia, destined for Maine. He had driven through the night and into morning, enjoying the calmness of the empty highway as it bent and bowed by small towns and hilly fields. These were the drives that Stan liked best. He felt unrushed, free to go as slow as he pleased, to savor what he suspected to be the last of such journeys. In Maine, a woman waited for him and for the ring he had promised her.

 

The Virginia border was an hour behind him when the traffic emerged, a body of short temper and patience that Stan felt no desire to be a part of. He ate breakfast at a diner in Richmond and watched the stream of work-bound men and women through picture frame glass, a cup of coffee in his hand. They seemed too young, like children who had wandered away from their parents’ grasp only to find themselves running libraries, selling cars, answering phones, too frightened or cowed to admit that there had been a mistake. Stan wondered if any of them would see him through the window or if they’d only notice their own reflection, their eyes shining with prospect. It had been men and women like them who had forced him to retire, their talk sweeter and outlook brighter, their presence too encompassing. From his forties into his late fifties he had managed a small brokerage firm in Atlanta. Now he did nothing.

The food was a disappointment. The eggs were overcooked, the bacon under, but he ate them without complaint and tipped well. This was his idea of grace. He drove on through the morning and into the afternoon, making a lunch out of a couple granola bars and a handful of cashews from a can he kept in the glove box. It felt good to make good time, and he admired his own restraint, though he could feel the beginnings of a shake in his legs, a touch of weakness in his grip. Pulling off now would be too costly; another hour lost to waitresses, booths that were made for two and people who would only look at him as long as he wasn’t looking back. No, at this rate he’d be in Scranton by evening, and that’s where he wanted to be. It had been there, more than forty years ago, that he and his first wife, Rachel, had wed, and thirty six since he’d been back.

The thought of visiting her had come to him as he had driven through South Carolina, the stillness of the night having given his mind ample room to wander. At first the idea had seemed impulsive, crazy, but he hadn’t been able to deny its appeal. Something had stirred inside of him, the itch of curiosity, and it was this compulsion that drove him as he steered onto the exit for Scranton. As his truck coasted down the ramp, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was a bug being sucked down a drain. That, even if he turned around now, the current was going to draw him back to this place and swallow him in its depths.

Stan didn’t recognize the town. He remembered flatness, simplicity, but all around him buildings rose into the evening sky, their shadows long cast. They weren’t the skyscrapers of Atlanta or New York, but the burgeoning offices and apartment complexes were enough to make him feel smaller than he had felt as a child. Every now and then he’d see something he remembered: the street corner where he had won his first fight, the one where he had lost the second and third, but these memories, once momentous, now seemed like marbles cast on the sidewalk. He turned down Lackawanna Avenue and drove past what used to be the Thrift Discount Center, now a Rite Aide. It was there he had had his first job and kissed his first woman, a girl named Debbie who chewed peppermints and had refused to call him anything other than Stanley. She meant nothing to him now, but there had been a time when he was convinced he would marry her, a time before he had known Rachel.

The sheer unlikelihood that Rachel still lived in town didn’t faze Stan. Though he could feel the sweat on his fingertips and chin, a calmness overtook him as he drove past the water tower and vacant lots. He recognized more and more, driving by the old homes and neighborhoods, the houses of friends he had used to know and women he once loved. He mused that, in his young life, it must have been his lot to love every woman. He had adored all of the girls in his high school, their differences in countenance and body thrilling him. Some even returned that affection, and it was times like those where he felt he had discovered a great secret, something dark, too great for any one man. It had scared him.

The house sat at the end of a long, oak-lined cul-de-sac. It startled Stan to see that it had grown, an addition sprouting from the left side, a two-car garage from the right. He had remembered it as quaint, cozy even, but now it appeared lifeless, its red shutters perfectly level and aligned. The lawn was as trim as the neighbors’–better than the neighbors’–and the rose bushes had bloomed brighter. Even the sun seemed to favor this house above all others, the gentle light of the early evening cradling it in its arms, the house that Stan had once called home.

He parked in the street. It would have been too brazen to park in the driveway, especially if it wasn’t Rachel who lived there now but a family he had never met. To him, it seemed impossible that the house could be Rachel’s. She had been simple, liked simple things, and the house spoke of complication, sophistication even. This house was not Rachel. Still, he decided that he would knock, to be sure that his suspicions were correct, and then leave.

The man who answered the door was lithe, skeletal, but tall. Stan had never considered himself short, had in fact been as tall or taller than any of the people he had worked with, but this man towered over him, the top of his head almost grazing the door frame. Opening the door seemed to be a struggle, and Stan watched the muscles of the man’s forearms as they tightened, as if the door had been hollowed out and filled with lead plates. He couldn’t have been older than fifty.

“Hi, sorry to bother you,” Stan said. The man now looked down at him.

“It’s no trouble. Can I help you?” the man said. His voice surprised Stan. It was gentle.

“I don’t think so. I used to know somebody who lived here but I think they’ve gone,” Stan said.

The man’s brow furrowed. “Are you looking for the McCafertys? They’re next door.”

“No, no. Her name was Rachel.”

At the mention of her name the man’s face began to sag. The corners of his mouth drooped. “So you don’t know,” he said.

The words came out quietly, somberly, and Stan could feel a rushing in his ears. All around him the world rustled in the breeze. The trees were swaying, the roses crumpling under the soft press of the wind, but all Stan felt was the concrete under the soles of his shoes.

“She died,” the man said. “Two years ago.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Stan said. The words felt empty, an offering of something he didn’t have to give. Stan felt detached, as if it had been he who had delivered the bad news. His back ached, but his heart did not, and it was this coldness that bothered him as he watched the eyes of the man in the doorway. How dull they looked.

“Come in. I was just about to open a bottle,” the man said.

Stan followed him inside. The house was neat and clean, obsessively almost, as if every surface had been scrubbed and sprayed. Pictures hung on the walls but none were of Rachel. They were of young, smiling faces that bared their teeth at Stan as he passed through the foyer and into the living room. When the house had belonged to him, it had been a dusty, dimly lit place, but now no shadows hid in the corners. There were lamps everywhere. All of them were lit. The man pulled a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers from a glass cabinet in the dining room and motioned for Stan to have a seat in a large, overstuffed recliner.

“How did you know her?” Stan asked as he sat.

“She was my wife,” the man said, placing the bottle and tumblers on a glass coffee table. He poured the drinks with a steady hand, though the weight of the bottle seemed to be pulling him over.

“I’m sorry,” Stan said.

The man nodded. “ It’s Paul, by the way,” he said and handed Stan a glass.

“Stan,” he said.

Paul paused for a moment. “Stan Richardson?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Stan said. At first he had considered giving a fake name, to pretend to be an old friend, then excuse himself as soon as possible. But he was stubborn and unwilling to anger the dead. He had decided to face this head on, but he felt the first twinge of regret in his chest.

“So, you’re the boys’ father,” Paul said.

“That’s me,” Stan said. He didn’t want to think of his sons, Greg or Daniel. In his mind they were still nine and seven, watching him pack his truck, sobbing.

“Ain’t that something,” Paul said. He stepped toward Stan, as if to take the chair next to him, but instead walked across the room and sat down on a couch.

“Are they all right?” Stan asked. It was the wrong question, he knew, but he didn’t want to appear uncaring. He didn’t want to see himself in that light.

“They didn’t take it well,” Paul said.

“Of course,” Stan said.

The two men sat quietly for a moment. Stan could hear the barking of a dog and the wind whistling through the shutters, the hum of a dishwasher in the kitchen. All he wanted was to be out of there, driving into the night where no eyes watched him and nobody knew his name.

“You really screwed them up,” Paul said.

What surprised Stan was the lack of anger in the man’s voice. There was no outrage, no condescension, just sadness.

“It wasn’t supposed to be that way,” Stan said. He wondered why he had come, or rather why he now stayed. There was no retribution to be had or wrongs to right. It had been far too long for that, time burying it so deeply that he would never be able to reach. Paul downed what was left of his whiskey and got up to get another. Stan filled his glass.

“It was cancer, if you wanted to know,” Paul said, returning to his seat.

“Jesus. What kind?”

“Ovarian. They didn’t catch it until it was too late,” Paul said. He smiled. “Well, obviously.”

Stan didn’t know if he was allowed to laugh. “I wish I could have been there,” Stan said. Two years ago he had been wrapping up his divorce with Michelle, another chapter of his life he would rather have kept closed.

“It was better this way,” Paul said. “She went quietly.”

“Yeah,” Stan said. He knew he would have had nothing to offer, no words of comfort, or a kiss on the cheek. All it would have been was more pain, memories of the life she was about to leave behind.

“So, where are you headed with that?” Paul asked. He pointed a thumb out the window behind him, towards the truck and trailer. Stan explained his trip. The twenty years in Atlanta and the woman he had come to love in Maine. Her name was Trisha, a masseuse he had met while on vacation in Augusta.

“Well, she prefers ‘physical therapist,’” Stan said. He left out what would be considered less savory: that he had been married at the time. That she was almost twenty years his junior. That he had lied about being married before. He didn’t know how he felt about getting married again. It just seemed like the thing to do.

“You’ve been driving all day?” Paul asked.

“For the most part. Was hoping to spend the night somewhere around here and pick up again tomorrow,” Stan said. He realized how presumptive that would have sounded if it had been Rachel he was talking to now. How see-through and wrongheaded.

Paul seemed to study him for a moment, swirling the whiskey in his glass. “ You can stay here if you want. Not many nights I have a drinking buddy,” Paul said.

Stan wanted to say no. He felt like an intruder, barging his way back into a life he had no business being a part of, but there was a sincerity in Paul’s voice that made him feel responsible, a tired look in his eyes.

“All right,” Stan said.

Paul seemed to brighten at this and downed the last of his whiskey before getting another. They finished the bottle and Paul went down to the basement, returning with a glass jug of moonshine.

“Rachel loved this stuff. No idea why,” Paul said, but Stan knew. Her grandmother had told him in a faraway kitchen, almost half a century ago, about how she used to rub Rachel’s gums with moonshine while she was teething. She had boasted about how quickly it calmed her down, and Rachel had blushed, admitting that she still had a taste for it. He took a strange sense of pride in remembering this, as if in some way it vindicated him.

“We’ll do shots,” Stan said.

The night disappeared along with the liquor, the two of them going back and forth, shot for shot. Paul, despite his slight build, held it well, and Stan worried that he might lose the unspoken contest between them. He wanted to believe that he was made of strong stuff. That he was a real man’s man, but he could feel himself slipping, sinking deeper and deeper beneath the waves.

 

It was only when he was on the road again that Stan could begin to make sense of the night before. He had awoken around noon to an empty house and Paul’s car missing from the driveway. There had been no note or keepsake left behind for Stan’s benefit. No empty gesture to bring him comfort he didn’t need. It appeared as though Paul hadn’t thought about it at all, but had just returned to his routine. There had been some cold coffee in the pot and the last bit of eggs in the pan, but other than that, no indication that he had been there at all. At first Stan had thought about wandering about the house, to rummage through the rooms that he vaguely remembered, but realized that there was no memory of him left there, that forty years had swept him from the stoop like dust. It would have been a desperate act, to dig through the closets and crawlspaces, and so he decided to leave. All he left was a scrap of paper on the coffee table. “Don’t tell them I was here.”

The sun was shining as he left Scranton, just as it had the day he left thirty six years before. He hadn’t thought of turning back then and he didn’t now, content to disappear just as suddenly as he had come. There was nothing left for him in this town, and so he would forget it, just as he had forgotten so many people, so many places. By nightfall he would be in Maine, unpacking his life into a new house, though he doubted it would be his last.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Hicks was born and raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh and is working on his first novel.