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When Julie left she took half their stuff. Leo found a checklist and a note under her key ring on the counter. Even with Mario’s help it must have taken most of the day. The note said she was leaving the car. He could make the payments or sell it, Julie’s way of being more than fair. There were several points he would have contested, but he had to admit she’d been generous. All Leo’s wives had been generous. It was small consolation.[img_assist|nid=5128|title=The Boy Had Enough by Andrea Ramirez © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=143]

 

            For days afterward Leo’s life was like a dream. He thought about Julie and Mario driving across the country. In his head they were always whooping it up. He wished them dead in the desert, their bodies black and bloated. The image so disturbed him he wished them back to life.

             To take his mind off things Leo went to a Phillies game. He brought his binoculars, a bag of salted peanuts, two joints and his Walkman. The left-hander Rivera was pitching for the Phills, big kid, clueless. Leo sat in one of the empty sections under the scoreboard. The binoculars gave him a bird’s eye view of the strike zone. From the first pitch Leo could tell the kid had it. Every fastball punched a dust-cloud from the catcher’s mitt just before the clap of leather reached him in center field. The big lug got hammered early, but for two and a half hours Leo didn’t think of Julie once.

            The following Sunday he drove to Rittenhouse Square and read the paper. The park was crowded but no one approached him. Julie would be in San Francisco by now, badmouthing him to their west coast friends. Funny, none of them had called. He pictured the other half of their stuff in a North Beach apartment, sun streaming in the windows, Chronicle spread over the sofa. He could see it clearly.

             That night Mario called. Julie had dumped him as soon as they hit the city.

            “Swear to God, Leo, I never laid a hand on her,” he insisted.

             “What are you calling me for?”

             “Hey man, I feel like a shit.”

             “You are a shit.”

             “I’m coming back, Leo. You can kill me if you want to but I can’t take it here.”

             “Come on back. I won’t kill you.”

            “Oh man, I feel like such a shit.”

            Mario showed up on Friday. Despite his rejection he looked much the same, half-drunk, pacing the kitchen berating himself.

            “I mean how could I do that to you?” he jabbed a finger in his own chest. “My best fucking friend! What the fuck is wrong with me?”

             “You’re a shit. You couldn’t help it.”

             “You’re right, Leo. You’ve always said it but now I believe it.”

            “Believe it.”

     He stayed three days then left to mooch off a cousin. Mario was related to half the wops in South Philly. Leo had never known him to have a place of his own. What had he expected to do in California?

   

            On Easter Sunday Leo walked to his mother’s. As always, he was taken by the photos on the walls, chronologically arranged portraits, Leo and his sister Gail, Gail and her two kids, over the mantel, the one of his dad in a straw hat. Gail divorced and moved to Florida two years ago leaving Leo to deal with the obligations. The tone never varied.

            “I don’t understand my own children,” his mother slipped a Camel from the pack on the table. “You father and I were married forty-five years!”

            “Thirty-five, mom, Dad died ten years ago,” Leo reminded her.

             “You should have grabbed Mrs. Ruggerio’s Eileen. She was always crazy about you.”

             “No moustaches ma. It’s where I draw the line.”

             She tilted her head back to work the bifocals “Oh sure, the neighborhood girls weren’t good enough for you.”

             He let her go on, wondering what it would be like when she died. He’d returned to Philly after her last stroke, determined to see her through to the end. Six years now and she never looked better.

             “Your father was right,” she handed him a beer from her little cooler. “You’re a bungler, Leo. You could have joined the business, but no. You had to go to California. You had to marry every floozie who came down the pike. And to think we almost gave you up for adoption.”

            Leo slid in beside her on the sofa. “You’re right, mom. I should have been a salesman. I should have married Eileen Ruggerio, but,” he held up a finger, “at least I didn’t murder my mother, like Richie Pettis.”

            “Richie was a little bastard, but he was no bungler,” she gave him a poke. “Besides, who was it sent your father to an early grave, aanh?”

             “He had emphysema, for cryin’ out loud!”

            “You know what I mean.” The bifocals gave her a haughty look. Leo didn’t know what she meant but he let it pass. The smoke from her cigarette curled into a perfect circle. He never came without a carton, hoping against hope.    

            The microwave chicken was raw on the inside. Leo could hear the clack of dentures over the talk show radio. Afterwards he did the dishes and put out the trash. Standing in her tiny yard he raised his eyes to the South Philly skies. One star, way over Jersey.

            “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,” he tried to remember the rest. The light circled slowly and descended to the airport. When he returned his mother was sound asleep in front of the TV. He leaned to kiss her forehead, slipped a twenty from her purse and let himself out.

    

            There was a postcard from Julie in the morning mail. “I love you but I don’t like you.”

 

            Benny was waiting for him at the diner. The Sheik, Julie called him, in reference to the doo, jet black and raked back like it was painted on. Not a good look for Benny, nearing sixty and putting on the pounds.

            “Where you been?” he hiked up his eyebrows. “I’m on a schedule here.”

            “What schedule?” Leo checked the clock. “The tit bars don’t open for hours.”

             “Yeah, okay, that’s funny. Sit down, would you? I got a kink,” Benny rubbed his neck.

            “Maybe you should give the girls a break for a while. Everything in moderation, eh Sheik?”

            “You only go around once, kid. Tell me a better way to spend the time?”

             Leo smiled. “Well, it’s good you found your niche.”

             “Tell me you got plasma, Leo.”

             “What I got is ceiling fans. Top of the line and in the box.“

            Benny’s eyebrows shot up higher. Everything was eyebrows with the Sheik.

             “What the fuck am I gonna do with ceiling fans? What about the TVs?”

            Leo tapped Benny’s pudgy little hand. “Next time, Benj. This time it’s ceiling fans.”

             “Jesus, Leo. Tell me it ain’t down to this.”

             “It’s down to this, Benny,” Leo flapped his hands around. “Hey it beats scalping tickets, right?”

            The Sheik sat there staring off. “I don’t know what happened. What the fuck happened?”

             “Prosperity, Benny,” Leo shrugged. “It’s a socio-economic thing.”

            “Jesus, I miss the old days. This, …” he shook his lacquered head.

            “Benny, hey, these are top of the line fans here. You want in?”

             He just kept shaking his head.

             “Tell you what,” Leo drummed his thumbs on the counter. “Give me two grand for the whole load. That’s one hundred units, plus remote.”

            “Units. God help us.”

             “I can deliver them or you can come pick them up. Your call.”

     The Sheik heaved a sigh and reached in his jacket. Leo waited but the hand just stayed there.

            “Look at you,” the old crook laughed. “Hey, this reminds me of the scene in that movie where the guy reaches for his wallet and pulls out his gun.”

            “What movie? What are you talking about, Benny?”

             “The movie where the hoods hijack a truckload of something, not ceiling fans. I forget.”

            “In or out, c’mon Benny.”

             “Coffins, that’s what it was,” Benny leaned in close. “Only some of them were occupied.”

            “Time’s up.” Leo stormed off, slowing slightly to give Benny an opening. When the bastard declined he pushed through the door and crossed the lot to his black SUV. He felt out of focus, not all there, a flash to the 80’s with his head full of Tester’s. Not like Benny to queer a deal. Sheik could move broken glass and at the lowball price he had to know Leo was desperate. What was it with the old guys that they got so goofy? The problem was who else can you go to?

            The other problem was what to do with them now. The ceiling fans. They were in Ludlow’s garage at the moment but his wife was squawking and his neighbor’s were nosey. Not to mention Leo’s cash flow problem.

            He watched Benny through the window, willing him to change his mind. For a second he thought it just might work, but the fucker sat there feeding his face.

 

            A Julie message on the machine.[img_assist|nid=5129|title=Pez Collection by Dorrie Rifkin © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=286]

             “I think you should resolve your conflict with your mother. She won’t be around much longer, you know. ”

            Leo wondered who she could be staying with and drew up a list of likely suspects. The thing that always bothered him was that he could picture Julie with almost anyone. She came late to the cheating game, but it didn’t take her long to get the hang of it. Catholic schoolgirl turning with a vengeance. He played the message a second time. The phone rang while he was looking at it.

            “Leo?”

             “Yeah Luds. I’m gonna move ‘em, don’t rip a stitch.”

            “That’s what I called about. They’re not here.”

            “What?”

            “The ceiling fans. I came home tonight and they were gone.”

             Leo pictured Ludlow’s garage, the space they took up.

             “I know you’ll think I’m getting over but someone stole them, Leo. I swear to fucking God.”

            “Someone walked off with a truckload of ceiling fans?”

             “Fucking un-believable, right?”

            Lying rat-fuck son of a bitch.

             “You don’t want to do this, Ludlow. Couple of days, they’ll pop up, right?”

            “On my father’s fucking grave, Leo. Hey, I’m out just like you!”

             Leo thought he heard someone else talking, but he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t want to think about what was happening here. Ludlow meant to beat him on the load.

             “Couple of days. Ludsy. I’ll give you a call.”

 

            The Phillies were in a rebuilding year. Except for one championship season, that shining moment decades past, the Phils had been rebuilding for over a century. Once again pitching was the problem. Pitching was always the Phillies problem, except for the odd year when hitting was also the problem. Many like Leo saw the organization as genetically flawed, those fluke years in the 80’s, just a statistical anomaly. Throw the monkeys out on the diamond often enough, etc…

            Only not these monkeys. Their record was more than a matter of bad judgment. Touted prospects shed their talent as they moved through the system. High school phenoms left their confidence and their fastballs in Spartansburg and Wilkes-Barre. Management, depending on the year and level of hostility, made one of two wrong moves. Either they let this year’s wunderkind languish in the bush leagues, tying up time and money, or they rushed him into the rotation where he was promptly battered beyond recognition. Pick a year, same story.

            That night’s pitcher was a recent pickup from Houston. Front office couldn’t resist these guys, the one season whiz with a flakey reputation, career castoffs cycling down. All too often it ended with the Phillies.

            The first pitch was a strike, triggering visions of a strikeout. The season was young and hope springs eternal. The second pitch was a swinging strike and even the cynics allowed themselves to dream. Pitches three, four and five sailed up, up, and away and the rustle in the stands set the seasonal tone. After a confab with the catcher the castoff bore down, fucking beachball coming at ya. Leo could see the batter’s eyes light up then a white blur slicing down the right field line. The game quickly settled into a rout, brutal even by Phillie standards. The fans turned ugly early, taunting the castoff with death threats, burying him in boos when they yanked him in the second. Stunned by their rage he stumbled off the field, disappearing into a dugout from which he would never again emerge.

            A parade of relievers was promptly pounded.

            By the seventh the crowd sat in grim silence, reflecting on all things Philadelphian. Leo was aware of a disturbing parallel between the team’s fortunes and his own. It was no coincidence that he spent the glory year in California, watching on TV. The implications were clear and Leo vowed never to go home again. If that was the price he was willing to pay it. Julie, of course, had other ideas, his mom had her stroke and the rest was just history repeating itself. Of the teams who excelled at futility, none could touch those Fumblin’ Phils. Losers of more games than any team in any sport.

 

            They were new and splashy, but they were still row houses. Two where three used to be, bay windows facing out on the drycleaners. Leo parked behind a row of pickups and listened for Lanny’s blather.

            “What the fuck is this? I got fucking monkeys working for me!”

            Rear bedroom, upstairs. The front door was open, the downstairs rooms were bland and tasteless. Leo’s own house had the original woodwork, circa 1917. He’d bought it for a song before he met Julie. The thing about modern, it lacked the detail. He waited for windbag to take a breath but Lanny was on an ass-chewing roll.

             “Look at this! There’s more fucking paint on the carpet than there is on the fucking wall!”

            Leo watched from the doorway. A trio of Mexicans shrugged it all off.

            “Nice ceiling fans,” he called over.

            “Heyyy! Leo my man!” Lanny broke it off and clapped him on the shoulder. “Whaddya think? Federal Terrace, my piece de resistance!”

            “Where’d you get ‘em Lanny?”

            The big man took his arm and led him to the hallway “Yo Leo, you workin’ for L and I, or what?”

             Leo hated this shit. “Tell me now while I’m still in a good mood.”

            Lanny looked more puzzled than worried. “Some guy came around. I didn’t ask questions.”

            “Know something, boss?” Leo pointed with his chin. “Those amigos can’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

            Lanny looked in on the Mexicans and smiled. “Best fucking crew I ever had. They’d paint each other if I gave them the word.”

            “Tell me about this other guy. Do I know him?”

             “I wasn’t around. Maybe Pedro here can-“

             “Cut the crap, Irish.”

            Lanny looked right through him. “I gotta tell you man, the tough stuff doesn’t suit you.”

            He really hated this. Ludlow was making some kind of move and betting Leo would roll over. Ceiling fans, for Christ sake!

            “I got nothin’ to do with this.” Lanny stood his ground. “Hey, I’m just trying to make a living.”

            Leo left a footprint on the front door

            This was serious. Ludlow had always been flakey but they’d been at this for thirty years! Leo called and got the machine. He drove over but no one answered the door. After that he didn’t know what to do. Ludlow tended bar on the Ave. The place was a dive, mostly ironworkers and off-duty cops. Not a place to start something, but what did Leo plan to start, anyway?

            He went to McGrath’s to think it through, but they had the game on and Shank was there and the night got away from him. Next morning he spotted Ludlow’s truck in the diner lot. Leo signaled to turn but changed his mind, nearly clipping a roofing truck.

 

            Julie again. Leo didn’t even play it.

 

            “Whaddya mean whaddya do? You go after him!” Mario made a chopping motion. “You make him fucking pay!”

            Leo stared at his hands. “I’ve known Ludlow all my life.”   

            Mario stumbled to a chair, winded. “Everybody’s known him all their lives. What’s that got to do with it?”

             “I don’t want to hurt him.”

             “He’s a piece of shit!”

             “I don’t have the time for this.”

            Mario gave him a poke. “That’s what he’s counting on, dude. You blow it off, you’re out of business.”

            Leo looked at him. “What business? I’m peddling ceiling fans and eating at my mother’s!”

            Mario plopped his hands on the armrests. “I’m just saying, you take it from Luds, you take it from everyone. It’s a business liability.”

            “He’s a brick shithouse!”

            “So you pay somebody.” He bent into Leo’s line of vision. “Yo, pal, this is pretty basic stuff.”

            He tried the number for the hundredth time. Ludlow answered on the fifteenth ring.

            “Yeah what?”

             “It’s me, Leo.”

             He didn’t answer.

            “We gotta talk, Luds.”

            “We got nothing to talk about. I told you, Leo, the fans were boosted.”

             Leo looked to Mario. Mario looked away.

             “Mario says I should come after you.” Leo ducked an empty beer can.

            “Mario? That fucking lowlife?”

             “But I say we can work this out. Like gentlemen, whaddya think, Luds?”

            “Tell Mario to go fuck himself.”

            “I get my half and I forget all about it,” Leo talked the talk.

            “Come on, Lip, what are you gonna do? I say they were boosted they were boosted. You can think whatever Mario wants you to.”

            “Don’t do this, Ludsy.”

            “Gotta go.”      

  

            A rainout forced a double header. Leo sat away from the crowd. He liked the new stadium but it wasn’t his stadium. His stadium was the Vet, gone without a trace. He watched the game and thought about Luds and how he should have seen this coming. Ludlow was a crook. And Mario was right. Once word got out he’d be stiffed and all accounts would go into arrears. Leo couldn’t take a hit right now. He was living on credit cards as it was.

            The Phils scored in the first. He thought of dropping a dime on Luds then ruled it out. Then the cop are in and everyone’s pissed and he’s out of business anyway. Should have gone to college with the rest of the goobers. Should have joined the fucking business. Had to be a hustler, no nine to five for Leo the Lip. Now Ludlow wanted to muscle in. Who muscled in on ceiling fans?

     Pittsburgh scored three in the fifth and the Phils yanked the starter. Leo spotted Pete Newlin but pretended not to. Predictably, Pete waved his arms and started over.

            “HEY LEO! HEY, RIGHT HERE!”

            “Hey Newlin, I’m kinda busy right now.”

            “I just wanted to tell you, that Jackie Ludlow is an asshole.”

            “Thanks.”

            “I told Dooley and them. I said you’d beat the balls off him.”

            “Again, thanks.”

            “That fucker will rue the fucking day, yo!”

            Pittsburgh scored three more in the eighth. Leo didn’t stick around for game two.

 

            Luds’ truck was in the driveway. Leo circled the block a few times then parked in the church lot.

            “Okay, Now what?” he asked himself.

            Butch Isler had called offering his services. Not out of loyalty, he’d said, Ludlow just pissed people off. Leo said he’d get back to him but he knew he wouldn’t. Even if he wanted to he couldn’t afford it. Big Butchie was top of the line.

            By now the news was all over Pennsport. The early line gave Leo the nod with an assist to Butchie. Every passing minute made it worse. If the other shoe didn’t fall soon he wouldn’t be able to show his face.

            And Ludlow was crazy. Once Leo made a move it would be his turn and it wasn’t hard to guess where the money would go on that. Which left what?

            Dory answered the door, walked him to the yard like she didn’t have a clue. Who was she kidding? Ludlow sat at the picnic table talking on the phone. He saw Leo in the doorway and rolled his eyes.

            “Yeah, I know, that’s why I’m calling,” he growled into the phone. ”You’re damn right I’m pissed. Now how do you want to do it?”

            Leo sat opposite. Ludlow yacked and yacked. Leo reached over and pressed the button.

            “Hey Leo, what the fuck?”

            “Sit down, Luds. You’re neighbors are gawking.”

            “Fuck them and fuck you, too.”

            “What are you gonna do, hump around to every job site in the city?”

            Ludlow smirked. “Face it, Leo, you’ve lost the touch. You let that old dago, Bennie jerk you around for nickels on the dollar. I get forty a pop for ‘em.”

            “Okay, I see your point. Give me my grand and go peddle your wares.”

            “Or else what?”

            Leo watched a small bird hop across the driveway. He thought of Julie lying in the sun on Goat Rock Beach. He got up from the table and shoved his hands in his pockets. 

            “Yo Luds. That’s it?”

            “Hey, we can go around and around but basically, yeah.”

            Leo left by the side gate. He could hear the big fuck laughing on the phone as he crossed the street. In his head he saw himself go to the car and get his gun. One to the chest, one to the head was how you fixed these things. Only Leo didn’t have a gun. The only time he ever shot a gun was on the boardwalk in Wildwood. Plus, if he killed Ludlow he’d have to go to prison. No fucking way he was going to prison over ceiling fans.

            Still he thought about it.

            On the way home he passed Zero and Lou on the Quarthouse corner. They fell all over themselves pretending not to see him.

 

            In the morning Leo woke with a rock in his gut. He wondered about the way it was here, the deep end as the standard course of action. It wasn’t normal, it couldn’t be. This was as close to murder as Leo would get, but he knew it wasn’t all that close. He could handle himself in a spot but he didn’t have a murder in him. He knew it and Ludlow knew he knew it.

            If there was a way out Leo couldn’t find it.

    

            “So I’ve been thinking.” Julie paused.

             “Okay.”

            “We could try it again, Leo. I know now that I need you.”

             “To what? Help you move?”

            “Okay, I deserve that. I know I was a shit about Mario, but he’s so–”

            “You gotta stop calling Julie. Please.”

            “You miss me, Leo. Marianne told me you hardly ever come out of the house.”

            Leo unplugged the phone. The next day he sold the SUV.

 

            “Leo, hey! Jesus Christ! What’s it been, ten years?”

            “How are you Len? You look good.”

            “Hey! I heard you got married a while back. How’s it working out?”

            “It didn’t,” Leo shrugged. “I make a lousy husband.”

            “Tell me about it. I get a different set of kids every freaking weekend.”

             Leo took the chair across the desk. “I see your mug in the papers, real estate broker extraordinaire. You’ve done well, Len.”

            He gave his paunch a pat. “Well, I can’t complain. But you didn’t come all the way down here to sing my praises. What is it I can do for you, Leo?”

            “I want to sell.”

            Len looked offended. “Your place? It’s a jewel box, man. I can’t let you do it!”

             “Got to. I owe some money. Plus I think my ex has her eye on a slice.”

             “Well, she’ll get that, friend. Community property.”

             “Maybe not. It’s still in my name. ”

            Lenny’s gaze dropped to his shoes. “Jeez, I don’t know, Leo. It sounds unethical.”

             Leo pulled a wad from his pocket and slapped it on the desk. “One thousand up front. Plus five percent.”

             Len didn’t look at the money. “Maybe we can finagle something.”

            “It’s gotta be fast. All offers considered, I’ll take the hit. And I’d like it to be someone, you know, … responsible.”

            “I have that someone in mind as we speak.”

            “And no sign. It’s gotta be discrete.”

            “I think I can handle this for you without much problem, Leo.”

            “Like I said. Extraordinaire.”

 

            Leo walked away with 150 thou. Not bad for the old neighborhood, bless the Irish and their woodwork. He left a message on Gail’s machine and stashed 50 grand in his mother’s account. When he got settled in he’d send his address. Palm Beach, maybe, hustle the widows. Or Tempe. He heard it was nice in Tempe.

Tom  Larsen  was  a  journeyman  printer  for  twenty years before scrapping it all for the writer’s life. His work has appeared in Newsday, New Millennium Writing and Antietam Review. His short story "Lids" was  included  in Best American Mystery Stories – 2004. Tom and his wife Andree lived for ten years in the Pennsport section of South Philadelphia. "The Lip" is one of six stories from his South Philly collection "Downtown".   His  first novel "Flawed" will be released this fall.

Bridget is in the giftware section of the department store, running her fingers over the deeply discounted snow globes, when she feels [img_assist|nid=5124|title=Scooter by Thomas Johnson © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=133]the constriction in her chest—her first bodily evidence that the heart, indeed, is a muscle. A muscle, not some stationary white fist captured on an x-ray.  Not pain exactly, but a rude clamping down, like the cumbersome, post-coital weight of an inconsiderate lover– or the burden of an unhappy childhood.  

     Her breath is short, her thoughts fugitive. Help me, Help me. And then she imagines being helped by shoppers and clerks, who are surprised, annoyed, and then concerned, some hero among them quick to call 911.  The ride to the hospital, her hospital, would be humiliating– her shameful stretched-out bra, the chaos of her purse.  And to those in the store, she would be a nameless lady, crumpled among snow globes, a topic of Christmas Eve dinner conversation.  No, she is fine, fine–lub-Dub, lub-Dub, she urges her heart toward routine iambic beats.  Longevity on both sides, assorted cancers, not heart disease, cholesterol levels near perfection. I am only 54, she reminds her heart, though on some days that number has seemed excessive.

     She palms the glass snow globe on the display counter.  Inside, fake flakes have settled on a Hummel house and figurines, a Swiss boy and his Swiss dog, a Swiss sleigh.   Like Swiss cheese, she thinks, trite and maudlin and untrue.  Even her mother, the great pretender and for one desperate moment the intended recipient of the globe, would have to agree. The sign reads 80% OFF! The subtext, the pre-holiday chicanery, reads Economy in the doldrums, We understand, and the real price of the globe is printed below in a small, hum-drum font, the insult of which is enough to shock her heart into normal sinus rhythm. 

 

     Back at work, Bridget can’t deny the aftermath, the sensation like a bruise purpling in her chest. And earlier in her office, as she hung up her red coat, hadn’t she felt an ache in her jaw, tracked its radiance northward to settle into the crook of her T-M joint?   Working in a hospital predisposes one to hypochondria, she knows, and is alert to the condition.

     She is alone now, stamping and processing x-ray films the old-fashioned way, in a darkroom, and glad to be there among ghosts. Those are what she’d thought of thirty-three years ago when, as a student, she developed and then clipped a skull and hand series of radiographs to a view box. Ghosts.  She had created ghosts from living flesh, a conundrum that the inverse square law, calipers, and step-up transformers would later dispel. 

     Here, in the acrid, blue-lit blackness, she can gloat in private.  As Chief Radiology Technologist, she’d argued that the darkroom be maintained for instances just such as these, when the two automatic processors were on the fritz—one darkening the films into missed diagnoses, the other, the newer one, chewing them up. Dr. B was surprised at her bold insistence in the face of hospital administrators, in the face of He Himself, who wanted the darkroom turned into a doctors’ lounge—a tertiary diagnostic conference room, as he’d proposed it to the facilities planners.    No, she’d stood up for herself without anger or aggression, stood up for common sense, for the techs who but for her would now be loading heavy cassettes up five flights to the OR processor, which is jam prone itself. Yes, she supports the techs, treats them justly, but she is glad not to be among their ranks.  There they are, on the other sides of the darkroom, positioning bodies into painful angles.  Pain, physical, mental, she tends to take it all in these days, like she used to. No, she being one of the few who still know how a darkroom functions, is glad to be away from them, invisible. The lead-lined doors into which the techs deposit the cassettes into the black hole of the darkroom are sticky but functional.  For an afternoon, on the eve of Christmas Eve, she gets to bask in righteousness, in a rote job for once, slamming doors on all four sides of her, the process smooth and orderly, like blood flowing into a healthy heart.

 

     Bridget’s Center City townhouse is only a quick bus ride from the hospital.  In fine weather she often walks to keep in shape, but it is cold and damp, the twilight murky.  She dozes on the bus, misses her stop, has to backtrack two blocks on foot.  The wind is cold and painful.  How dare her heart have behaved so badly?  She walks, she exercises at the fitness club, not enough, but who does?  She buys expensive, organic produce and avoids fast food, most of the time.  

     Ahead, the lambent light from the marquis of the Ritz Theaters gives her an idea: movie tickets and a gift card for dinner at the Chadds Ford Inn.  Practical gifts, certainly, but for her parents, just as strange as the snow globe. Had they ever eaten in a restaurant together in peace?  She can imagine them sitting across from each other, observing the other diners, hating themselves, hating that reflection of self in the other.  But lately—

     Last week her mother had called and persuaded her to spend Christmas Eve with her and her father in Chadd’s Ford. 

     “I’ll make bacon—Canadian– and eggs in the morning, organic, and waffles with blueberries.  I bet you don’t make that for yourself, do you?     I wouldn’t.  And Christmas, you and Brian and Sheila, the kids, and Aunt Jane—eight of us.”  Bridget envisioned her mother counting on her wrinkled white fingers.

     “Filet Mignon, Shop-Rite has them on sale this week—scalloped potatoes, asparagus, salad, and turkey, of course. Whole grain bread cooked in clay pots. Did I tell you?  Your father went out and bought a turkey fryer?  On his own.  They say they make the moistest meat, though we don’t eat much meat these days.”

     For the first time in many years, Bridget’s circle of friends, mostly colleagues turned friends from the hospital, are all going out of town for the holidays, and she has to work the day after Christmas.  For her, there is no where else to go but home.

     Four brick steps lead up to her front door.  Bridget had festooned the wrought iron railing with swatches of evergreen and red velvet bows.  A fresh green wreath circles the pineapple knocker on her front door.

     Inside, there is little evidence of Christmas. Her house is a solace to her, and she wants to keep it that way.  A few antiques, expert reproductions of pie tables and highboys, a modern kitchen.  The place was gutted during the Center City gentrification twenty years ago when she and her second ex-husband bought it cheap, and now even with the housing slump, its value is up.  More people than ever moving to the great old East Coast cities.  Every weekend and summer evenings, horse-drawn carriages clomp down her cobblestone street, suburban tourist craning for a glimpse into others’ lives. She usually keeps the drapes downstairs cracked an inch or so, but tonight she draws them tight.

     For dinner, a salad with balsamic vinaigrette and wild salmon.  Take that heart, she taunts it. After stacking her few dishes in the dishwasher, she takes her cup of green tea into the living room and settles on the sofa.  Her chest feels empty now.  Normal. 

     Most evenings she attends class or studies, but last week she handed in her portfolio—a chapbook of ten poems.  Supposedly she is on her way to a Masters of Science in Communications, but lately she has chosen rogue classes, for which the hospital might not reimburse her.  And so what?  She reminds herself she can afford it.  Professionals such as herself deserve to be compensated well—making more now than she ever thought possible when she began her career.   The hospital would not close its doors, as it threatened to do five years ago, the thought of which had sent her heart into palpitations.  Not like today, and those flutterings could as easily be attributed to peri-menopause as to loss of income.  She is beyond all that blood and money, she tells herself, though in her poetry class she’d written an ode to hot flashes, delighting the younger members of the class.  For other poems, she’d rummaged through the detritus of her unhappy childhood to rediscover and expose her parents in images.

     Her father, a mechanic, his face as grim and immobile as George Washington’s as he scribbles expenses on the back of an envelope at the kitchen table.  Every night, another envelope, more figuring, her father is an alchemist trying to change the rules of mathematics, and he tells his wife he is sorry he married.  Her mother is sanitized for the poem but still capable of calling her only daughter a lazy slut.

     Once, her father threw a burnt biscuit at her mother, but they normally battered each other with words—“You said,” “I never,” [img_assist|nid=5125|title=Altered State by Suzanne Comer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=156]“You always,” their accusations crystallizing in the cold air of the large house, ricocheting off the windows and walls to hail down on the petrified bodies of their two children.

      For amusement, Bridget would sneak her mother’s hand mirror from her dresser and walk around with the house with the mirror pointing towards the ceiling and held close to her face.  The house was better, safer, somehow upside down.

     Instead of uniting against the onslaught, she and Brian mimicked their parents.  As adults, they got along by rarely speaking, gibes and eye rolls accessories in their awkward conversations. And now, out of nowhere, her parents’ battles seem to have ceased. To say they even bickered the last time she saw them—a year ago? –would be an exaggeration.  It has been going on for too long to ignore it—this, this mutual, gratuitous kindness.  She suspects dementia or Alzheimer’s, a reciprocal alignment of disease. Folie a deux.

     Tomorrow, she will have to make sure her father doesn’t set the house ablaze with the turkey fryer. She’ll suggest, subtly, that they book appointments for CT scans and have Dr. B, a great diagnostician, despite his bullying and pouting, take a look at them.

     Dr. B,  her relationship with him mirroring that of her first two husbands, mirroring that of her parents.  Passivity, first, playing house, pretending, like her mother, then, and also like her mother, for years an unleashing of the furies, though Bridget reversed the process with her husbands.  With the first, a resident in urology, she’d gone beyond nag, bellowed at every slight and then kicked him out of the apartment she’d had the good sense to lease in her name.  With the second, a dosimetrist in the radiation therapy department at a neighboring hospital, she’d caved and then caved some more, until she was hollow and hardly noticed his departure.  With Dr. B, a flimsy truce ruled now, borne out of exhaustion and perhaps even boredom, not forgiveness on either side, she knows. 

     She blames her parents for her difficulties more than is healthy, she fears now.

     Her thoughts drift back to the hospital where she has spent so much of her life. “To Forgive is to Heal,” reads a plaque she allowed one of the techs to hang in the Special Procedures room. Yes, but childhood traumas stay with one forever, reads the invisible plaque beside it, and then on the other side, forming a triptych of advice, Only so much damage can be undone, as the x-rays taken in this room will demonstrate. In fact, the very room attests to the difficulty of forgiveness.  The quagmire of steely instruments on metal trays, the looming X-ray tubes, and the cold hard table all hiss, rant, and bellow of the resentment that clogs the arteries and thickens the blood. And perhaps bitter anger is karmic justice, croaks some rusty voice from the haz-mat containers.

    Damn her parents to think they can sweet talk their way into her forgiveness.  After all, she reminds herself, if people forgave so easily, if she had turned out unscathed, why would people like her parents ever be motivated to change their ways?  To motivate others to change? If she has to die of a heart attack, she hopes it is in her old bed, where her parents will find her cold body on Christmas morning.  Think of it as a gift, she will write on a note beside the bed.  But they won’t get it.

     In her Jetta, Bridget eels along Route 1 towards Chadd’s Ford, past the Brandywine Battlefield where Cornwallis and Washington battled it out on a misty day. Unlike today, which is cold and bright.  Her parents live on the Knoll, a subdivision of colonials, in its heyday a rural Shangri-la for the upper middle classes.  They moved here from an apartment when Bridget was six but unlike the neighbors, they could not afford it.  The house was a major theme in the parents’ disputes.  At the end of month, at the paying of the bills, the specter of the poorhouse lurked in every room.  In her room, Bridget battled with sleep, dreamed her bed was poised at the edge of some rickety lean-to in the slums of Calcutta, where her father swore they were all headed. 

     Now, the mortgage is paid, and the last time she was here she noticed her parents were beginning to replace the second-hand furnishings.  Retired from their jobs—her mother had been a cashier at a gift shop—they spoke respectfully to each other, and to her.   Can everything be boiled down to money, she wonders incredulously, as she brakes down her parents’ sloping driveway.

      The garage door opens.  Her father, dressed in a light blue sweat suit, is standing by the turkey fryer, parked to one side of his old Impala.

     “Costs a pretty penny, too,” he yells, patting the fryer.  As he walks toward her car, she scans him for the listing, tell-tale gait of the demented.  But he is plumb, upright as an elm.  He takes her bag and puts a hand on her back, directing her past the turkey fryer and the Impala to the inside door, which he opens with one hand.  “Bridget’s here,” he calls into the house.

     Her mother, dressed in a white sweat suit, hugs her, her long arms vice-like in their grip.  “It’s been too long.  I’ve missed you,” she whispers into the hollow of Bridget’s neck. Her father stands behind them, grinning, rubbing Bridget’s arm.  

     Not so long ago, Bridget reminds herself, she would have carried her own bag into the house, and her mother would have stayed put in her comfortable chair, their daughter’s visit no big deal.  Did they know it was she?

     “We were just doing Tai-chi,” her mother says, pulling away.  “Let me show you the tree.”

      Her mother takes her hand and leads her up the three steps into the kitchen, where spaghetti sauce simmers on the stove, into the living room, scented with evergreen. Ribboned packages are tucked beneath a lush tree.  Tai Chi? 

     Her parents point out the ornaments, the old ones, the new.  The blue bells with silver stripes that Bridget can not remember.  The old red balls with the snowflake centers look vaguely familiar, but the trees of her childhood had been thin spindles dying in some cold corner.

     “These I got at Pier 1 last year,” her mother says about the bold colors and designs that speak of Mumbai, Tangiers, and Marrakech, Christmas balls of sienna, chartreuse ruby and ochre.

     “We can sit in here,” her father pipes in, pointing to a new sofa and chairs, “or we can go down to the rec room where I got a fire going.  What do you think?”  He looks to his wife and daughter for guidance in this matter of what to do with their bodies.

     Bridget notices for the first time that her mother has had her white hair cut in the trendy angled cut of news anchors. Her father’s hair is still mostly dark.

     “We could,” her mother answers after a pause, “but maybe Bridge wants to take a nap before dinner?  You look beautiful but a little tired.  The hospital is probably working her too hard, Herb.  Laying off people left and right in this economy and expecting others to work as if they’re three people.  But you know more about that than I do, Bridget.  Would you like to take a nap, dear?”

     She would.

     Up in her old room, she sinks into the twin bed and wonders how she can possibly sleep here, but her body remembers the old contours of the mattress.  A nap, so rare, would have been such an affront to her former mother. 

     She dreams of other houses, with hidden rooms and trap doors, people who morph into her parents, her friends, Dr. B, the custodian who solemnly cleans her office.

     It is one of the shortest days of the year, and she awakens to darkness.  Downstairs, she watches her father take a fork and fish a spaghetti noodle out of a boiling pot.  He breaks it in two and peers into the center. Who knew he could boil pasta? “Done,” he proclaims and then turns around.  “Oh, you’re up.  How did you like the new bed? Got it last week.  Still a twin cause your mother wants to put in a craft table. Dinner’s almost done though—you’ve got good timing.”

     “Not always,” she answers, though she could detect no snideness in his comment. She sits down at the same battered table that darkens her poems, though her mother has covered it with a cloth patterned with crimson poppies.

     “What do you mean?” her mother asks, coming into view now as she closes the refrigerator. “I always thought you had good timing.  You got a job right after—“

     “I mean you—both of you.  Like you are now, if it’s real.  This is the home I should’ve been born to.”

     Her parents exchanges glances of collusion.  She hates it when people do that.  Do they think you are blind?  Or are they aware you’ll notice and are belittling you without words?

     “Well, let’s eat now before the spaghetti goes starchy,” her mother finally says.  “I thought we’d eat in here tonight, tomorrow, of course, in the dining room.”

     With her husband’s help, her mother pours the sauce and the spaghetti into bowls and sets them on the table.  Their movements are harmonious, as if they’d been cooking side by side for decades. Her father sets a bowl of freshly grated cheese on the table and inserts a fancy spoon.  Also new.  Seldom cheese on the old naked table and if so, the generic kind shaken out of a green box, and her father bitching about how much even that cost.

     “Oh, the bread!” Her mother rises from the table in alarm. I baked it in clay pots, like I told you, Bridge. Whole grain.”  

    “Sit down, Susan, I’ll get it.”  Her father is up, places his palms on her mother’s back to ease her down.  He leans down and says “Excellent sauce, by the way. Perfect combo of sweet and spice.”

     “You helped.  Thank yourself, too.”

     “Okay.  Thanks to me, too.”  He grins at Bridget, and she fears for a moment he might wink at her.  It would be another first, and she is grateful he doesn’t.  Still, she wonders how she can possibly summon an appetite at this table.  Their behavior, both in the past and now, like a barbell dropped on her chest.

     But her father is right—the sauce is divine, caramelized with garlic, onion, morel mushrooms, and fresh basil, the spaghetti, whole wheat, cooked al dente.  The meatballs and sausages are crusted with a thin layer of flavor, olive oil, the meat inside moist and tender, the two textures mingling exquisitely on the tongue.  Her father cuts and lathers a slice of warm bread with herbed butter and places it on her bread plate. She eats it.

     For dessert, frozen pineapple mousse with a swirl of crème fraiche and shredded coconut on top.  Bridget can not turn it down. 

     “First time I made it—recipe in an old cookbook my mother gave me for our first wedding anniversary,” her mother explains.

     Bridget spoons the last dollop from her parfait glass.

     “Good?” Her father smiles, a proud boy of nearly 80.

     “You never—“  Bridget frowns at her mother.

     “I know,” her mother answers, her voice scratchy.

      Bridget looks at her father. “You always–”

     “I know,” he says, though she does not know how she is going to finish.  So how can he know?  She tries to summon anger about such easy confessions, their “I knows” usurping the ugly details of her complaints against them.  She blames her quietude on the postprandial lull that has dulled her senses.  They know, sure, and of course they didn’t mean to.

     “We know,” her mother says, “and we’d like to make it up to you.” 

     Her father pulls an envelope from the flannel shirt he has changed into for dinner.  “An early Christmas present.”    

     She opens it slowly.  Inside, is an airline voucher for a ticket to Spain.  How did they know?  When had she told them?

     “You said you wanted to go.  For you, not your brother, because you got the brunt of us,” her father says. “You being older.”  He scratches at a drip on the tablecloth.

      Her mother takes her hand and says, “And tomorrow, we’re giving everyone a ticket on a cruise, ourselves included—even Aunt Jane.  I thought we could work out the dates tomorrow.  You and Brian, I mean.  We’re free whenever. But we understand if you don’t want to accompany us.”  The collusive looks again, though her father nods at Bridget.

     “How can you afford it?”

     Her father has brought a tray set with cordial glasses and a bottle of crème de menthe to the table and pours for three.  He sits down again and looks down into his drink.  “I’m not sure myself.  For starters, we never lost money in the stock market like most of the people around here.  I never believed in it.”

     “We never spent much,” her mother adds.  “Not on you or your brother, like we should have—“

     “And then we both worked for years past retirement age, collecting social security.”

     “Your father left us a CD, too, don’t forget, Herb.” 

     “Well, yes, and the point is we forgot it and didn’t spend it, and there it was, in a box collecting 9% interest locked in for 20 years.  And your mother, your grandmother, left us the silver and all her awful—“

     “Ugliest, gaudiest jewelry you ever laid eyes on.  The house was just as awful.”

     “But profitable.  We sold when gold and silver and real estate were at the highest in a hundred years.”

     “So all of a sudden, we realize there is money, and the house is paid off.”

     “And then you decided you didn’t have to hate each other and your children anymore?”  Bridget notices her mother and father are both wearing red shirts.

     “Not at first,” her mother says.  “Though I never hated you.”

     “Took a while to settle down, to sink in,” her father adds.

     “And then we read this book.  Train Your Brain and End Your Pain. Only takes about two weeks.”

     “Two weeks only, and you can instill new habits.”

     “Diet and exercise, and new ways of thinking.  New pathways in the brain.”

     “Neural connections.”

     “Neurons in the brain make new connections.”

     “And your brain forgets the old ones.”

     “By not thinking about things the old way.  Replace them with new thoughts.”

     “We were forgetting about things anyway.  Who did what to whom, where I laid my glasses.”

     “So we decided to love each other again, because the alternative wasn’t working very well. Longevity on both sides of the family.  The thought of another twenty years—so, we rewrote our life, made a new narrative, as the book said.”

     “Who ever thought that loving could be a habit?”

     “Now, we work as partners. He wouldn’t want to live without me.”

     “And vice versa.”

     “We didn’t forget we weren’t good parents, though.  We were the worst. We want to make reparations.”

     “We got you the book for Christmas, too, so you understand.  For the first time in this house, there is a twinkle in Santa’s eye.”

     “We have more presents tomorrow. More surprises,” her mother sings and bounds up from the table to grab plates.  Her father joins her.  “Oh, and your father got a movie for tonight.  Something indie, well-reviewed.”

     “We’ll get this cleaned up, Bridget.  Go sit, relax in the rec room.  You work too hard, and we hardly work. You deserve a break.  The fire’s still going pretty strong.”

     One, two, three steps down to the rec room, where her father has preceded her and is stacking another log on the fire.

     “Relax,” he says, pointing to his comfortable chair. He trots back up the stairs, though she detects stiffness in the hinge of his hips.  She has seen spry men his age topple over, suddenly.

     Bridget falls into the sofa instead, her muscles relaxing in the heat, her mind beyond thought.  She slips off her shoes, sets a foot on the coffee table. On the end table is a travel magazine, opened to a view of the Caribbean.  Pages and pages of beach, sun and happiness. 

     She can hear them in the kitchen, a pair of magpies.

     She flips through the pages again and then closes her eyes, the dazzling water and skies seared onto the retinas.  She is skipping along a sandy pathway to the beach, a white-haired parent on either side of her.  It is a long stretch to the sea, though, and they all wander off the edge of the photograph. Her parents are soon exhausted, they’ve let go of her hands and she, too, is moving at a slower pace.  Still, she is the first to reach the water, warm as a baby’s bath.  Her parents trudge behind, growing feebler with every step.  She fears they will begin bickering soon.  And she lunges into the blue sea, her body going down, down, to cooler water, toward the murky gradations of water and ocean floor, cobalt and baby blue, the world turning around.

Pamela Main lives in Wilmington, Delaware and directs the Writing Center at Penn State Brandywine, where she also teaches creative writing.  Her previous publications include The Greensboro Review,  Louisiana Literature, and Puerto del Sol. One of her stories will also appear in Clapboard House in the fall.  She is working on a novel set on an imaginary island off the New Jersey coast.

In the Bagel Omnibus, Sweeney pumps his fourth mug of mocha java with his fist. On the walls loom pictures of surfers in dune buggies with bagel tires, lovers leaping into bagel volcanoes, and more trick photos that show lean physiques and lots of dough, suggesting you can eat all the cream-cheese-slathered goods in the place and not gain a pound. Sweeney comes here every day to write the Great American Creative Nonfiction Novel, which will win him the love of millions who yearn for enlightenment in this techno-dystopian world, and secure his status as the Global Village Bard.

He returns to his favorite table and trusts zoom of pen over page without stopping or reading what he writes or sweating punctuation grammar syntax or pedantic rules like when to use lie and when to use lay and boy, would he love to get laid, it’s been a long time, this dry spell he equates with the African Sahel drought from over-cropping, to ironically imply man’s rape of Big Mama Gaia!

But Sweeney doesn’t rely too much on metaphor, not wanting his future readers to mistake his moon-aimed finger for the moon. Clearly, Sweeney does not stink of Zen. Though he stunk of it once, he doesn’t stink of it now.

     A very pretty girl enters and sits at the table in front of him, blocking his view of The Hula Bagel Chicks Get Down. Sweeney takes one look at her and knows he won’t try to describe her for fear of stretching his mythopoetic member from his lap to hers. He recalls Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, when Hem sat writing in a Paris café and a very pretty girl entered and Hem wished he could put her in his Michigan story. Oh the frissons of lust Hem felt but largely omitted, forcing readers to surmise the subtext! But unlike Hem, Sweeney won’t stingily compare his very pretty girl’s face and hair with a newly minted coin and crow’s wing, for he’s got the bigheartedness to let her divine aura flavor his magnum opus—besides, she’s a redhead.

Nevertheless, he partly steels himself to the telepathic kudos she sends him through the curling steam of her latte. She smiles and bites into her bagel. He chugs his mocha and hurries to the men’s room.

    Now Sweeney is one to piss largely, having never divided his Rabelaisian visceral gusto from his transcendentally attuned Emersonian life, thus avoiding duality. But the trickle from his throbbing member drowns his union with the cosmos . . . Cosmos? Cosmos, indeed! He, Sweeney, will shake the last drops from his cock—Cock? No, DOWSING WAND OF THE IMMINENT RACE OF EARTH STEWARDS!—and march back out with a Buddha smile at his very pretty girl and everyone else. He will write his composed compassionate ass off, singing his story, her story, and the stories of all living beings in a marriage of body and soul that’ll make Billy Blake cheer from his grave.

    Sweeney sits at his table, pushes his cup aside, and takes up his pen . . . Oh God, his very pretty girl is shooting him the sex eye, the ravish-me-on-the-spot eye, but she’s so young and vestal, no that’s not right. Rather she’s so beguiling in an insouciant sort of way that-that—hell, that’s not it either! Time for his Writer’s Block-Busting Mantra—

    The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy zebra. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy zebra. The quick brown fox almost jumps over the lazy zebra, but almosts don’t count. The quick brown fox lands on the lazy zebra where it’s black and white but better than a zoo. Goddammit, his mantra’s not working!

    He looks up, she winks, and he dives back into the page. The quick red fox and the lazy zebra breed a black-and-white-with-a-slash-of-red unicorn. NO! The pole-vaulting fox clears the rearing giraffe, then examines his pole with the help of a huge mirror. NO! The caped fox flies over King Kong as he straddles the Empire State Building, flailing his fists and eating Air Force machine-gun bullets. NO! NO! NO!

Holy shit, she’s standing before him now, asking questions, so unlike Big Mama Gaia!

    “Hi. Whatcha writing?”
    “Baby zebra humps red fox,” Sweeney mutters, bent to his notebook.
    “Erotica?” she giggles.
“Bestiality,” Sweeney says. His tongue burns, his heart pounds in his throat. He swallows hard and tries with all his might to stop his pen and look up at her.

Robert Hambling Davis has published his work in The Sun, Antietam Review, Homestead Review, Aura Literary Arts Review, Memoir (and), Santa Monica Review, Yoga Journal, and elsewhere.  Bob has received three Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist fellowship grants, two for fiction in 1989 and 2002, and one for creative nonfiction in 2009. He was a semifinalist in the 2002 William Faulkner Creative Writing Contest, and his story, “Death of a Deer,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers. Bob lives on his family’s farm in Newark, Delaware, where he teaches yoga and leads a monthly writing critique group. He looks forward to using his Philadelphia Stories prize certificate at the Belgian Café.

[img_assist|nid=4680|title=|desc=|link=url|url=http://www.bigmonkeytalk.com/|align=right|width=150|height=235]When Ed got home, he turned on the late talk and fixed himself a bowl of ice cream. He slumped on the couch and let the vanilla melt as he flipped, finding nothing comprehensible. Humans in ties laughed or insulted each other but he could not get the earlier argument out of his head.  If it had been his dining room, he never would have let Chekchek through the door.

Out his window, next to the tv, a streetlight burned at eye level, washing out the moon he’d passed on the way home.

He could see, in the shadows, other Improved Apes in the trees, crouched, sitting, staring at the same moon that rolled above Africa, Madagascar, Ceylon. He could walk out this window and join them, but he wouldn’t be sure he had joined them. There was no way to tell if this new language meant the same to all of them.

He lifted his spoon and swallowed his ice cream like a good boy.

 

Chekchek sat in the tree in his backyard, fuming at the mortgage rates around here. Backyard trees had become a hot commodity since the neighborhood went Ape. Still, he liked his ranch house, and it was convenient to Interstate 95.

The moon seemed another trick to him now that the humans had explained what it was – an airless ball of quiet dust, chipped in a thousand places by other chips of rock and ice. He could not articulate to himself what he thought it was before the operations, but it was better than that.

In the next house he could see that the good professor’s wife had gone up to bed. The professor himself seemed to be stalling in the kitchen, weakly filling ice trays.  He kept meaning to climb over and see what happens behind the upstairs curtains, but he resisted, not wanting to risk trouble with the human police before he had a chance to complete his plans. When the time came, he imagined the joy of tearing down those ugly brown-flower curtains and scaring the bejabbers out of Cogitomni and his wife. He bit into another of his fresh-baked madeleines and chewed silently, lost in thoughts of his plots and remembrance of what was half known in the first place.

 

Harold Pryce Cogitomni, Doctor of Gerontology, Professor of Cellular Biology, Doctor of Large Animal Veterinary, Professor of Tweaked DNA at Princeton, filled the ice cube trays very slowly from a tight trickle of pure spring water out the jug dispenser in his kitchen and thought, too aware of the obvious metaphor, of how impure the world was, of how he had muddied the waters between the species. They did not need ice, but he was the only one to ever fill it, and he was grateful for the small responsibility, the incredible insignificance of the work.

He pulled his robe tight. There was a chill in the vinyl tiles under his feet. Fall approached. The night rustled. He looked to the full moon out the window, above the trees he assumed were filled with his new neighbors, though he rarely spotted them even in daylight. Someone had proposed banning tree-climbing at a neighborhood meeting, but legal questions aside there seemed no practical way to enforce it. His wife had hung thick curtains over all the windows except for this small one over the kitchen sink, and he found himself drawn to it now on these nights when he could tell himself he knew his audience was out there, watching him, judging him, struggling for a verdict and then a punishment.

He poured himself a glass of water from the plastic jug and added one of the fresh ice cubes he’d popped from the trays. He told himself he could taste the purity, though of course he could not; there is a taste to impurity, and it is sometimes what we want.

 

He heard a sound beyond the curtains and he moved to the french doors to see a great silverback gorilla, almost white as the moon and streetlights reflected, leap from tree to tree. He had stripped off his human clothes, playing in the night’s yard. The apes wore human clothes not out of humiliation or vanity but because they had come to understand it gave them portable shelter in a cold climate, and all the freedom pockets can bring. But in the night, in the undressed distances, in the proper lighting, they could not stand to ape us. They remembered what we had made them think unimportant. We wanted them to type, we wanted them to speak, and we did not care about trees to their way of thinking. Cogitomni watched the great muscled back disappear into a pine and thought We cannot explain ourselves to them either.

 

Chapter One

 

Lucy took the oxygen tubes out of her mother’s nose and turned off the tank so they could share a last cigarette together. Marge’s last cigarette.  It was October 30, Mischief Night, the day her mother Marge had chosen in the hope of being buried on All Souls’ Day.  She chose the time, around 11:15 p.m., so that she could watch the lead story on the 11:00 news; she no longer cared to hear the five-day forecast.

They sat in the dining room, which had been converted into a makeshift hospital room with an adjustable bed, a commode, a TV tray covered with prescription bottles, and the oxygen tanks.  Lucy held the brown cigarette to her mother’s mouth.  The smoke hung about Marge’s face.  Her lungs could barely pull it in or force it out, but she still enjoyed the smell and taste.

The lead news story had proven a disappointment.  The “werewolf boy” from South America had plastic surgery at Children’s Hospital to remove the thick hair covering one side of his face; skin grafts were required.  Instead of after pictures of the boy’s face following the procedure, they aired pre-surgery video.  Dr. Eugene McCormick, a man in his early fifties wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white medical jacket, outlined an area of the boy’s face with a black marker, while the anchorwoman stated that the boy was recuperating and in stable condition.

“He is the same,” Marge said through parched lips, as she turned her face away.

She had motioned to Lucy that it was time.  Reluctantly, Lucy let go of the aluminum foil-covered antenna of their old television.  She didn’t want to kill her mother.  She didn’t know whether she could kill her mother.

Lucy took a drag and then offered the cigarette to her mother again.  Closing her eyes, Marge parted her lips and sucked ever so slightly on the filter.  She opened her mouth to let the last of the smoke escape and studied its rise.

Then Lucy tapped out the cigarette in the ashtray until every ember was extinguished.  She went into the kitchen to empty and wash the ashtray, a ritual Marge insisted upon after each cigarette.  One that Lucy was grateful for now; it gave her a just few more minutes.   “Smoking doesn’t have to be a dirty habit,” Marge would say.

As Lucy returned to the dining room, Marge pointed to her purse.  Lucy knew what she wanted-the index cards with Marge’s final to-do list.  Each step of her mother’s death was printed clearly, ingrained in blue ink, on its own index card.  In the past few weeks, she’d meticulously jotted down notes while watching reruns of Columbo and other detective shows. From these notes, she created the concise, detailed to-do list.  For as long as Lucy could remember, index cards were how Marge ordered the days, weeks, and seasons of her life.  She kept all but these final ones in a recipe box on the kitchen windowsill.  Mostly they were instructions on keeping house, some recipes-Marge’s parting gift to Lucy “so she wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every morning.”

Protest was futile.  Lucy cautiously brought up that some in the Church might consider it a mortal sin.  Marge said, “I’ve got that covered.”  Lucy pleaded that she wasn’t up to the task, maybe there was someone else, perhaps Marge could do it on her own?

“I gave birth to you.  This is the least you could do for your poor dying mother,” Marge replied. The conversations ended always with Marge’s standard end-of-discussion scowl.

Lucy sat next to her mother and when Marge nodded, she read from the first card:  “Number one.  Place pillow over my face and apply firm but gentle pressure for a minimum of five minutes.”

Marge reached for the pillow behind her head.  Lucy took it with one hand and looked for a place to set the stack of index cards.  Finally, she decided to put them on Marge’s lap, then she stood.  She wanted to say something or do something meaningful but Marge seemed eager to get on with it. Afraid she’d fail her mother, Lucy started, “Mom . . .”

Marge calmly waved her off and motioned for the pillow.  Lucy took a deep swallow, put the pillow over Marge’s face, bending its ends around her head, and held it tight.  Her mother’s body became rigid.  Her fists pushed into the mattress.  Marge had warned Lucy not to break her nose.  People would suspect foul play.  And she didn’t want black eyes for her funeral.  “It’s not that I’m vain,” she’d said, “I just want to be presentable.”

After a few moments, Lucy’s hands were wet with perspiration; her joints ached from the pressure, the tension.  Her mother lay still.  Lucy had forgotten to check the time before starting.  How did she get stuck doing this?  Who else would do it?  Her father was dead.  Her sister Anne would never have agreed to this; and Marge would never have asked her.

Lucy lifted the pillow.

“Mom, are you there?”

Marge’s eyes opened, startling Lucy, then Marge began coughing.

“Are you okay?” asked Lucy.

Her mother moved her head.  Lucy couldn’t decipher if she was shaking it or nodding.

“Do you want a glass of water?”

Marge’s coughing subsided and she glared at Lucy.

“Get the egg timer,” she whispered with what was left of her voice.

When Lucy returned, Marge set the timer for five minutes.  Pushing aside prescription bottles, she positioned it on the TV tray next to her.  Then, she pressed the button to recline the bed.  She motioned for Lucy to place the pillow over her head again.

“I’m not sure I want to do this!”  Lucy started crying.  Marge patted her daughter’s shoulder and reset the timer.  She pushed the pillow to Lucy.

“Okay, okay,” Lucy mouthed.  Right before she put the pillow over her mother’s face for the second time, she noticed Marge blowing air out of her mouth.  Her hands lay across her chest, her gnarled fingers neatly intertwined and pressing down.  Death could not come fast enough for Marge.

Her mother had been ready for death since her husband Joseph died twelve years ago.  She’d curled into herself like a pill bug only her armor left showing.  Marge never forgave Joseph for dying so unexpectedly, so poetically, and so well before her.  His dying was not in the plan.  He’d broken their agreement.  He’d abandoned her.

Joseph Pescitelli was a house framer.  One day on the job, he stopped hammering, clutched his chest, and slid down a wood stud until his tool belt clunked against the plywood floor.  It was all one fluid motion.  He died with one hand on his chest and the other still holding his hammer.

Theirs had been a May-December romance.  Joseph was twenty-two years older and a confirmed bachelor when he met Marge.  But he had always acted younger than his age and she, older.  It was as if, in marrying Joseph despite her family’s disapproval, Marge O’Connell had committed her one act of youthful passion and been done with it.  At the young age of fifty, Marge seemed to welcome the cancer, having grown bored and frustrated with living.  She was furious that she was confined to a hospital bed with oxygen tubes up her nose, peeing in a pot in the middle of the very same dining room in which she conducted Christmas and Easter celebrations for thirty some years.  Her dying was neither poetic nor quick.

The egg timer ticked the seconds.  Lucy stared at the white pillow covering her mother’s face until she saw spots.  Then she looked to the window and saw the reflection of the simple circular chandelier, hovering in the darkness.  A lone white feather that must have escaped the pillow slowly swayed back and forth making its way to the bed until Lucy blew it away.  Marge’s body was tense and shook slightly.  Lucy stood, her arms straight, pushing down.  Her elbows and knuckles ached.  The dark hair on her arms stood on edge in contrast to the brightness in the room.  Everything seemed alive and watchful.  The egg timer, the feather, the chandelier-all witnesses.  Lucy turned her face away and stared at the twisted zigzag lines of the television screen.  Her vision was already blurred with tears as she tried not to notice her mother’s feet twitching under the blankets like two land-bound fish.  Voices from another channel cut in and out.  She couldn’t make out what they were selling.  The health reporter spoke with great earnestness about the merits of drinking tea.  The elderly British people she interviewed proclaimed that their religious consumption of tea was the reason for their longevity.  Many had grandparents who had lived well into their nineties.  The Pescitellis were coffee drinkers.  Marge’s body jolted, once, twice, three times.  Lucy held tight onto the pillow letting her tears fall from her jaw.  Her throat ached, trying to release a cry.  She swallowed.  Next up on the news was a man who had invented a device for yanking trapped plastic bags from tree limbs.  The news took a break to advertise the following day’s 6:00 news.  The egg timer buzzed, rattling against the metal TV tray.

Lucy lifted the pillow and held it against her chest.  Marge’s milky blue eyes were open.  Lucy hadn’t expected that.  She waved her hand in front of them; they didn’t blink.

“Mom?  Mom?  Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Are you dead, Mom?”

Number Two:  Make absolutely sure I am dead.

            Lucy lay her head on her mother’s chest.  Sometimes when she was little, Lucy woke up to the sound of her father snoring in the front bedroom and the noise of the television downstairs.  There her mother had fallen asleep in her recliner, the flickering light on her still body.  Quietly, Lucy climbed on her lap and listened to her mother’s heart beating, her soft murmuring in her sleep.  Now, there was no sound, no motion.

As instructed, Lucy placed a hand-held mirror in front of Marge’s nose and mouth.  It didn’t fog up.  She couldn’t make the call to the doctor unless she was absolutely sure Marge was dead; her mother had emphasized that several times.  Lucy checked for a pulse in her mother’s wrist.

“Mom?  Are you there?”  Lucy stood above her and gently shook her shoulders.  Marge’s body was limp.  Lucy placed Marge’s hands on her chest, as they did at the funeral home where she worked.  Her mother’s hands were rough.  The perpetual cycle of scrubbing, washing and scouring had left her hands with the swollen, bruised look of a fisherman’s face after decades of exposure to salt air.

Number Three:  Place pillow under my head.

            After closely inspecting the pillow for any traces of bodily fluid, Lucy returned it to its place under Marge’s head.  She straightened Marge’s faded strawberry blond hair with traces of gray.  The muscles in Marge’s face were relaxed, but Lucy could still see the line between her eyes.  Oddly, in death Marge appeared younger.  For a moment, Lucy considered holding her mother in her arms, embracing her, but her mother’s eyes were still watching.  Instead, she quickly kissed her forehead, something she would never have done while her mother was alive.  In her mother’s house, love was clean underwear, not hugs and kisses.  When she stroked Marge’s cheek, she was surprised by its softness and the light peach fuzz.  She assumed her skin would feel more like burlap than silk.  Her sister Anne bore a very strong resemblance to Marge-tall, slender, and fair with freckled skin and thin lips.  Lucy took after her father, which meant she was shorter, rounder, her skin olive.  Her dark hair was noticeable on her upper lip and sideburns, more pronounced on her arms and legs than the average woman’s.  Lucy couldn’t help but wonder if Marge’s interest in the werewolf boy was an indirect slight at her.

Number Four:  Reinsert oxygen tubes.

Lucy released a heavy sigh, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.  The tubing rested on Marge’s throat.  Lucy carefully inserted the prongs into her mother’s nostrils and turned the oxygen tank on.  When Dr. Cuchinnati arrived it was to appear as though Lucy was so in shock that she left her mother untouched.

Number Five:  Open window and release my soul.

            Lucy opened the window next to the bed.  Marge had told her to say a prayer for both of them.  Lucy heard the Million Dollar Movie theme music coming from the TV.  Beyond the alley, in the moonlight, the clothesline shimmered,  a shooting star against the cinder block walls of the backyard.  In the upper pane of glass, she could see her own dark reflection and the white brightness of her mother’s blankets behind her.  If she stood perfectly still and concentrated hard enough, she thought she might see her mother’s soul leaving her body.  “God forgive us,” she whispered.  A chill traveled up the length of her spine.  Had her mother left?  Turning away from the window, she watched her mother’s motionless body.  She grabbed the index cards and her mother’s purse from the foot of the bed, then slowly backed into the kitchen.

Number Six:  Call Dr. Cuchinnati.

            Marge’s purse was heavy, twenty years old and camel-colored faux leather.  Sometime during the Seventies it was available for purchase exclusively on television.  It had compartments specifically designed for a matching checkbook, address book, cigarette case, and key chain.  When Marge saw it, she knew it was the perfect purse for her- a place for everything and everything in its place.  The pages of the address book crinkled like old parchment from the stress of Marge’s printing as Lucy searched for the doctor’s information even though she knew the number.  She needed the prop. The line rang and rang and Lucy envisioned the octogenarian slowly making his way to the telephone.  Finally he answered.  She could hear her mother’s voice in her head as she recited her lines:  “She went peacefully in her sleep during the 11:00 news.  I called to her from the kitchen to see if she wanted anything and there was no answer.”

 

With Marge’s purse in tow and the index cards folded into her palm, Lucy waited for the doctor on the front stoop.  Being alone with her mother frightened her now, despite her years of practice keeping the dead company.  Since the doctor lived several blocks away and stubbornly refused to take a taxi, Lucy knew she’d be waiting for some time while he hobbled over.  The coolness of the marble step seeped through her threadbare sweatpants.  She reached into her mother’s purse and pulled out the matching cigarette case.  Some of its color had crumbled away.  Her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette.  Then, she began to pull at the hair on her forearm; the pain grounded her.

She looked over at the darkened row houses across the street.  Her entire life had happened on this narrow street in South Philadelphia.  She knew every neighbor at least by sight.  The houses were all the same-two-story red brick fronts, a bay window on the first floor, two windows on the second.  Tonight, they resembled yawning faces.  Some neighbors had opted to install aluminum siding over the brick front; others stuck artificial grass to their steps, perhaps in an attempt to bring some green to the lawnless neighborhood.  While Marge disapproved of these embellishments, her pet peeve was the adornment of the bay windows with Virgin Marys, or cat and dog figurines, or plastic flower arrangements against white vertical blinds.  The Pescitellis had sheer curtains and heavy, dark mustard-colored drapes.  A single crystal lamp lit the window.  On this night, many houses had seasonal cardboard decorations of ghosts, witches, and black cats taped to the windows.

Only a few trees were on the block.  In front of their house, at the base of their stoop, was a square of mismatched cement.  When her father lived in the house alone, before he’d met her mother, a tree grew there.  In the spring, it produced white blossoms.  Marge had it removed, fearing it would fall on the house or tangle its roots around the sewer pipe.

Lucy slipped off her black flat and stubbed out her cigarette in its soft foam sole, which resembled a waffle from wear.  Marge didn’t like butted cigarette marks on the sidewalk and Lucy didn’t want to reenter the house alone to retrieve an ashtray.  Through the vertical blinds, Lucy spied the purple-pink light of televisions in some of the houses.

The street was quiet.  She lit another cigarette and stared at the burning embers and the smoke drifting up.  Since it was Mischief Night, she thought she might see some kids making mischief.  At twenty-nine, she’d never seen it happen.  But every Halloween morning, without exception, she awoke to see soaped-up car windows and doorways and store fronts splattered with over-ripened tomatoes and raw eggs.

A couple approached; they weren’t from the neighborhood.

“Those’ll kill ya, ya know,” the woman commented as they walked by.

“Yeah,” Lucy said, “I know.”

She took a deep drag, then blew the smoke out in a steady stream.  So far the day had gone exactly as planned.  In the morning she had finished some minor household tasks before the visitors for the day arrived.  Fr. Reed heard Marge’s confession, gave her Holy Communion, and seemed to suspect nothing out of the ordinary in their behavior.  Jack Kelleher arrived in the afternoon.  Marge had respected and trusted Jack as a friend and a lawyer and because his aunt, Mrs. Garrity, who lived across the street, was her best friend.  Jack was in his late thirties and had gone away for law school but returned to the neighborhood.  Something graduates rarely did.  He was the opposite of her sister Anne who only returned for funerals.  Lucy lit another cigarette with the last one.  The folded index cards were damp from being clenched in her fist.  Despite this, the lines and dots Marge had embedded into the cards still felt like Braille.  When Marge first reviewed them with her, Lucy felt demeaned by their simplicity and repetitiveness, but they had proven a comfort this night, allowing her to focus on tasks, not the implications of her actions.  She unfolded them.  The next card gave instructions for calling Anne.  Lucy wasn’t to do this until Marge’s body had been taken from the house.  Marge didn’t want Anne coming over and asking questions while she was still there.  Lucy flipped to the last card.

Number eight: Destroy to-do list.

            The final item.

St. Peter’s loomed large over the squat houses.  Its muted bell rang out midnight.  Her cigarette had burned down to the filter; it singed her fingers.  For a moment she absorbed the pain.  Then she ground the butt into her shoe and shoved the cards into her pocket.  The sound of footfalls echoed down the deserted street and Dr. Cuchinnati’s elongated shadow appeared before he turned the corner.

 

Excerpted  from When Love Was Clean Underwear by  Susan  Barr-Toman  (www.susanbarrtoman.com), winner of the Many Voices Project’s Fiction Award 2007. The  novel  will  be  published  by  New  Rivers  Press  in October,  2009.

 

Susan  Barr-Toman  teaches  writing  at Temple University and  holds  an MFA in Writing  and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

[img_assist|nid=4777|title=Eddie by Jayne Surrena © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=269]Tupperware, Ziploc, Rubbermaid. Circle, square, cube, cylinder, shallow rectangle, deep rectangle, long rectangle, almost-a-square-but-not-quite rectangle, big circle, small circle. Circle with the little spout thingy. Rectangle with the clicky edges. Green, orange, clear, clear with blue tint, clear with green tint, translucent blue, sickly sea green. Permanent, disposable, semi-disposable, Chinese soup takeout. Warped, melted, scratched, grated, scraped.

It was inevitable, but all the same he hadn’t thought they would get there so soon. Not one lid would match up with one receptacle. They had reached perfect Tupperware entropy.

Let’s make sure I’m not being premature, he thought, and so began to sort into the broad categories. Circles on the stovetop, lids on the right front burner. Rectangles on the kitchen cart, lids propped between the trivets and the cutting board. Squares on the little strip between the stove and sink, lids balancing in a pile over the edge.

He’d have to be careful not to knock them over.

He knocked them over immediately.

He picked the lids up and put them on the little bit of dishwasher that projected from beneath the microwave instead. The deep ones he piled by the coffee maker on the other side of the sink, lids propped between the olive oil and vinegar.

He stood in the center of the narrow galley that they pretended was a kitchen, all of them laid out within his reach, and checked them. He checked each circle container against every circle lid, and even when it was obvious that it wouldn’t fit, he went through the motions, pressing lid to container lip despite the inches that gaped between them, just to be sure.

But it wasn’t quite as precise as all that. The lids for the squares might have been rectangles, and the deep cylindrical containers could also be circles, so those all had to be cross-checked as well. There was one circle that kind of fit, and might even have been the original lid—he checked, and the brand was the same—but it had been so warped and stretched that he couldn’t make them come together.

Actually he could, but the slightest touch popped them back apart again. 

And so, half an hour after he had started, he gave up and put them all back in the cupboard.

And that was when it hit him. Even if they got a new piece now, it would have to go back in that cupboard. Even if she found one—and she would find one, briskly, efficiently, in those early hours before he was even awake—it would eventually go back into the cupboard and be lost to him (if not to her). All he could do was shove them back into that space where they angled and jostled against one another and the rest of the dishes, big lids below and small lids tucked in on the side, always threatening to spill over and knock the drinking glasses to the floor.

He could take them out and throw them all away, but they were hers, really. So many of them had preceded his residence in the house, so who was he to relegate them to the trash? What if a lost lid turned up in the dishwasher or under the kitchen cart? There might still be one that fit, and his rashness would have lost it.

Twenty or thirty pieces. Two people. Ten years. Moderate use. Potlucks, takeout, Christmas cookies from one or the other set of parents. And none of them fit together any more.

He thought about chucking them all and going to the store to get new ones, but then he realized that in another ten years he’d be right back in the same spot, so why bother? And the next ten years would go by faster than the last—a smaller fraction of a life, after all, a more-or-less quarter versus a more-or-less third. And once another decade had gone by, he would be standing in the same spot looking for lids, wondering where this one had come from, how this other one had gotten so badly mauled, why none of them would fit, and how she kept finding ones that did.

He opened the cupboard again. Cramped kitchen, cramped cupboard, the house itself too small. It had always been too small, though it hadn’t seemed that way back when they still came together with a satisfying snap on the sofa, at dinner at the kitchen table. When they still fit so well together in the bed, arriving at the same time, the bedtime ritual after the late news and maybe some stupid show with cops and lawyers or a bunch of doctors whose names she could remember but he never could, the do-si-do in and out of the tiny bathroom, the arm that fit beneath the pillow, the nose that fit into the small hollow at the back of the neck, the hips that pressed up into hips from behind. The fit of his dreams and her aspirations, hers still well formed, his scratched and warped and melted and maybe not fit for fitting anywhere anymore.

Laptop, cellphone, camera bag, hard drive. Car keys, office keys, passport, wallet. Toothbrush, medicine, deodorant, toothpaste. Sport coat, rain jacket, winter jacket, sunglasses. Underwear, trousers, jeans, socks, dress shirts, t-shirts, sweater. Manila folders, books, notepads, manuscript. Pocketknife, favorite pen.

J.A. Klemens  is  a biologist who lives in Philadelphia.

[img_assist|nid=4528|title=Who Do Your Think by Kristen Solecki © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=284]I went to the beach in a blindfold today, because once you asked me to. I wore the scarf you chose for me by touch: the one I wore often. The same one I told you I loved, and never mentioned the garish pattern made me cringe. Tied around my eyes, I could not see the pattern any more than you could when you chose it. It was a fitting penance.

After writing nearly forty pages this morning, I needed to go out and get some air. No one opposed me. I could not stay in the house a moment longer. The glaring hole in the line of books on the shelves marked the former resting place of your Braille poetry. The furniture was rearranged. The pages of my manuscript stretched across the floor from my desk to the living room.

Guiltily, I turned to neaten the house. But then I remembered it wasn’t necessary anymore. I was free. I was so selfishly free. No one would slip on the pages. There was no dog to wrinkle them. The stereo remote sat on the kitchen table. No one would complain. I could safely leave a dirty carving knife from dinner last night in the sink.

Every object oppressed me. Each change I have made since you left weighed on my conscience. I had tried to change; did I really try hard enough? Maybe I am selfish. Maybe I pushed too much for what I wanted.

Your last morning here, when I finished work, I should have offered to read to you. I knew you hated the dry computer voice of your electronic reader, and that you got a headache from your headphones. I needed silence to write, so you had no opportunity to use the stereo.

But I wanted sun and wind. I didn’t feel like escaping from the pages of my own book to be imprisoned in someone else’s. So I suggested the beach, wheedling and cajoling while you stood firm. I pushed too hard. You raised your voice.

“If you want to go to the beach, I certainly can’t stop you. I wish you could see how it is for me. Go to your beach once the way I do; see how much you like it then.”

And then I made my last mistake. Apollo, uneasy at our argument, barked loudly. Thoughtlessly, I crouched down and held out my hand. He walked away from you to receive the caress from me. I soothed him without thinking, sliding my tired fingers through his inky black hair.

You froze. I saw your discreetly grasping fingers register his absence. You knew what I had done. I made him my pet, depriving you of your guide. You could never forgive me that.

Some days I wish I hadn’t petted Apollo. I wonder how it would have been. Some evenings I fall asleep wishing I had conceded more, wishing that I had tried harder to change. But some mornings I wake up feeling liberated.

When I stepped outside the car, the heat baked me in a moment. Barefoot, I shuffled awkwardly to the cooler surface of the steps. The wood of the stairs crunched loudly, like when I spill sugar on the kitchen floor and am too busy to clean it up. You always told me I should be neater, and I did try. Stepping off the bottom stair was like landing on the moon: a bounce and a quiet “whooph.” But if the sand is sugar, the moon is flour. Or at least, that is what I imagine, but I do not know any astronauts to ask. The sugary powder beneath me shifted with each step, creating an unaccustomed strain from ankles to calves.

Coming around the dunes, the wind hit me like a punch, abrading my face with tiny stinging missiles. I kept walking, and after the first attacks, the wind became docile and refreshing. I heard a throaty chuckle, which became a series of staccato shrieks as the gulls swooped in. I smiled up at the hungry gathering that wheeled in the air above me. Each pass of a seagull intercepted the sunlight on my face, a shadowy caress.

Further down the beach, I caught the hiss and lap of liquid fire. The damp chill came seeping up from the sand between my toes. I flinched when I stepped into a slimy mound of seaweed. You always kept your shoes on at the beach, because you were afraid of fishing hooks and washed up syringes. Peeling it from my toes, I cast it aside like a discarded streamer, and approached the water’s edge. The sand changed to pebbles beneath my feet.

My heel was pricked by a sharp edge, but it was not the cast-off of some junkie. It was a shell. Groping in the sand, I picked up clam castanets, which I clacked together while improvising a flamenco dance. No one was there to laugh at me. The empty shells withstood the abuse for a few minutes, and then the last filaments were torn asunder. I held two halves in my hands and they stank of salt and decay.

Then, a roar! A hissing angry snake of water boiled around my legs, and numbed them instantly.  I felt it shove past me impatiently, charging up the beach, and then return to flirt with my feet, trying to lure me into the ocean. Standing there I remembered that poem you loved, which was too long. “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me.” They did not sing to me either, though I stayed all day, blind and alone.

I have a confession to make. The sunset was not the same when it was merely waning warmth on my skin, and I did not love it as I usually do. But I did not hate it either.

 

 

  Mary Kate O’Donnell is a nineteen-year-old sophomore English and biology major at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. This is her first published piece.

            He used earth words and planted gardens and liked going down south and road trips to nowhere. He had tattoos of the Devil on his forearm, and looked like God, with big gentle blue eyes, open, steady and true, able to see beyond the simple human spirit. He was a great kisser. Like me. But quiet. And deep. Not deep in a click-your-fingers-at-a-coffeehouse deep; and not the kind of temporary deep you think you see in the face of a student of philosophy. He was deep like rivers that cut through canyons as old as the brachiopod lingula and the horse shoe crab.  

            I met him when I was young. In a bookstore. Buying war novels for my father. I liked to call him Mr. Smith, but his name was Steve. His hair was long and kinky and I remember I could smell his clean, hippy, 25-year-old smell as he flushed spines in the history section.  He said: “You see, you have this calming affect on me. I actually want to struggle with you.” And I thought to myself, I want to run my fingers through the algebraic recipe that cooked up the lines of your hair. I was on fire. I perused picture books of the American desert and listened to Navajo tunes. I bought a dress covered with flowers that came down to my ankles and I wore sandals.

            He struggled with me. And then he took off. Restless. One day in May. He rode with some friends in an orange VW bus out to a reservation in New Mexico to study art and history and eat mushrooms and pledge a vow of celibacy to the Great Spirit in hopes that one day he would understand the differences between love and lust.

            I waited. But he didn’t come back. The Spring was over. The warm, tired, lovesick days of August too, and eventually the fall and then the winter.

            I fell for a waiter. I made love to a Jew who became a Rabbi. I danced meringue with Paul Garcia in a club named Brazil. I kissed Doug, Scot and Eamon and the Twelve Apostles and a Moroccan named Arie. And I gave myself to a drummer one Leap Year because I lost count on how many times he said: you are so beautiful, baby.

            I married a Spaniard who barely spoke English and barely brushed his teeth. He was tall and lanky and had a long face like El Greco and chased me around the bedroom. “Come here, wife. My sex is hard for you.” We lived in a piso on the 4^th floor of a rundown building in Vallekas, a gypsy suburb of Madrid. I made tortillas and arroz con leche and sometimes crouched on the terraza under the hot sun and watched stray cats fuck on rooftops. I cried for home. And dreamed of humidity and the green, oxygen pine trees and grass that grows with dew stuck to each blade like a rock climber descending a cliff.

            I became a woman. Desired. Pedestaled. Unwoven. Torn. Shredded. Real.

            I made two babies. Moved to Jersey. Bought a home. Divorced. Years passed. In the Spring of ’04 I spread my father’s ashes across the jetty down on Nebraska Avenue. Saying goodbye to the man who taught me how to love. Boyfriends came. Boyfriends went. Sons grew up.

            I bumped into Mr. Smith at a record store one night in February. He was buying vinyl and I was perusing the CDs. I barely recognized him without his long hair. But he still talked smooth and his tattoos were all black and green. And I thought, if I had my own tattoos they wouldn’t be the face of the devil. They’d be words. Words that save me from myself, where God, not man, is the Second Coming and the Third and Fourth. Words when strung together become the only thing in life that’s real—forming a straight line like Time to a Westerner.

            We talked about books for a while. The west.  He didn’t remember much. And so I shrugged when he asked if I wanted to go for a drink. No, I said. Maybe another time.

     

Tracy Shields graduated from Rutgers University, magna cum laude, with a degree in English Literature and Journalism. She has been Concept Editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly since 2001. She’s been published in Word Riot and is a continual contributor to six sentences. She currently works and writes from home in NJ and has two beautiful sons, Daniel and Julien. Please visit her at http://sevenperfumes.wordpress.com

 

[img_assist|nid=4529|title=Blue Mist by Lee Muslin © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=267]They woke together at a rest stop on the interstate, car windows dimmed by frozen breath and through the glass, anemic blue dawn swelling over Wyoming.

She struggled out of the sleeping bag, wrestled with the nest of blankets and pulled at the door. She poured herself out into the empty lot and shuffled a few paces from the car before she buckled over a strip of grass and vomited. It slapped the ground and steam rose from it. The man got out of the car and went to her and put his hands on her shoulders to steady her, to hold her. She heaved again, just water and foam.

"Get your hands off me."

"What can I do?"

"This isn’t your problem." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Drive. We shouldn’t have stopped."

They got back into the beaten silver Saturn and pushed the blankets to the back seat, which was piled with unpacked clothes, some still on hangars, some tangled at the floorboards.

"Jesus, Peter. Why don’t you just hate me?"

He started the car, which struggled in the cold. The engine knocked and shuddered. He drove.

*          *          *

She slapped his hand away from the radio and it stung, and when he pulled away it made him swerve over the line, into the red gravel shoulder, which probably made her hate him all the more.

"Christ. Learn how to drive."

"You hit me."

"I hit your hand."

"I was turning it off."

"I’m listening."

"There’s nothing to listen to, Annie. It’s just Jesus radio. There’s nothing there."

She folded her arms and turned to the window and was sullen for a while.

"I thought they might say something about it."

They were silent for a long time more, listening to AM static rise and fall because Peter was afraid to touch the radio and upset her again, and Annie was too proud to admit that she had been wrong and there was really nothing on the radio about this horrible thing that had happened. Just hallelujah. Just praise the Lord. 

And so it was the End of Days through the long Wyoming desert.

Eventually, when the voices faded, Annie turned off the radio and there was only wind and the hiss of the road.

"This is crazy," she said.

"Yep."

"Yep? What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I was agreeing."

"Yep. Are you a fucking cowboy?"

He didn’t answer. He shifted and drove with one hand.

She didn’t look at him. "Which part?"

"What?"

"I said this was crazy and you agreed."

"Yep."

"Which part did you agree to?"

The road was empty and wide, and so he turned and stared at her. "All of it," he said.

"Keep your eyes on the road."

He turned back.

"And that isn’t an answer. Tell me what you think is crazy."

"That there are no radio stations. That we haven’t been through a town in sixty miles. There’s a storm coming and we don’t have anywhere to stay. Everything."

"What’s everything?"

"Everything that’s happened. Every goddamned thing, Annie. You and me. New York. All of it."

She nodded. That was enough.

Then it was back to the radio.

Annie hit scan and it rolled through the entire AM band without stopping. It started again and stopped on static. She switched to FM and hit a station. Christian. Like everything.

The voice was rattled. It said, What will become of the children?

There were coughs in the pause and shuffling papers.

In the final days when God’s wrath is descended over the Earth and the horsemen have strode among us. What will become of the children?

Annie drew back her hand.

Some say that children are the innocent, but God almighty, the child will pay for the sins of their fathers and death will befall them as it did the children of Pharaoh, and locusts will consume their flesh and flies will fill their eyes.

"Jesus Christ, Annie. Turn it off."

"No."

Peter flicked his finger over the volume knob and the radio went dead. He looked at her and waited for her to scream or hit him again. But she was silent. And then tears came.

"I hate you," she said.

"That’s probably true."

"This is such shitty timing."

"The worst."

"We can’t have a baby now."

He took his hand from the wheel and shifted it toward her. He put it on her leg, covered by the bloated down coat, which he loathed, and had always loathed. She put her hand on top of his and they held each other this way while the long desolation passed outside, while miles of fences flickered by and the morning sun settled on the land like ash.

"I still love you," he said. "I don’t know if that makes any difference, but I do."

"It does." She squeezed his hand. "I don’t know why, but it does."

*          *          *

Miles piled upon miles, and the exits were useless and barren.

"No Services," he said as another sign slipped by.

"How can there be no services? How do people live here if there are no services?"

"I think they drive a long way for services."

"Stop saying services."

"Sorry."

"Fuck this place."

"We’ll find something."

"Fuck you too."

They were quiet for a while.

"I’m hungry," she said.

"Me too."

"I mean it. I’m really hungry."

"When we get to an exit, we’ll see if we can find some services."

"Go to hell." She folded her arms and leaned against the window. "Why didn’t we bring any food with us?"

"Because we were in a hurry. And yesterday I didn’t think we’d have trouble finding some."

*          *          *

They did come to an exit, which wasn’t a town, just a clutter of lots and gravel to either side of the highway, two gas stations, a junkyard, and a McDonald’s.

It was a nameless settlement that had sprouted simply because one old local road rambled out of the country and crossed the interstate.

They came off the highway and crept to the top of the ramp, slick with ice and snowblown. The car slipped and then caught the pavement again.

The station at the end of the ramp had put out orange barricades and a slab of plywood that said NO GAS. They turned left and the tires slipped as they moved onto the overpass and skidded down the other side.

At the other station, a long line of pickup trucks had stacked up at the pumps.

"There’s a McDonald’s," she said.

"You never eat that shit."

"I need to eat. I don’t care what it is."

The snow on the local road had gathered in eddies and he drove slowly over black ice where the tires had no grip. He turned into the parking lot and turned off the engine.

"I don’t want to get caught in the storm," he said. "I think we can make it to Laramie before it hits. If we hurry."

She nodded. "Yeah. Alright."

They got out and the dry wind bit them. Snow blew around their ankles and packed in dusty drifts at the edge of the lot. They shuffled for the door.

Inside, it was yesterday in America. Yesterday, when nothing had happened at all.

Annie ordered breakfast, but the kid behind the counter, an Indian with long black hair and bad skin, told her that it was too late, so she muttered under her breath and walked away. Peter ordered for her.

The kid disappeared into the back and Peter waited. The place was bright. The place was warm. It was good to be warm after the bitter winter night at the side of the road.

Annie sat in a booth against the front window, staring at her open hands. She pulled off her dowdy knit hat and frazzled hair splayed out in wild directions. When Peter had met her, she had been so prim and ordered. Her hair precise, her clothes immaculate, her body angelic.

But this had changed and she had become tangled and wrecked, as they together had wheeled wildly off the rails, and whatever they’d been once, they were no longer.

At the end, they cheated on each other ferociously, for vengeance, to push the other away, to disgust the other and bring the thorny bramble of their undone love to a permanent, fiery end.

And it had worked, and they had ended, squarely and without remorse.

Then on Monday came into their lives news of the baby.

Then on Tuesday came the end of the world.

The kid came back to the counter. "Sorry it’s taking so long. A lot of people didn’t show up today."

"It’s alright."

"We don’t even got the guy that cleans the shitter."

"Damn."

"Just didn’t come in." The kid looked around to see if he was being watched. He leaned in and almost whispered. "Hey. You heard anything?"

Peter shook his head. "No."

"They don’t let us turn on the radio or nothing. So I ain’t heard. But if you heard something–"

"I haven’t. Sorry."

"Okay. Yeah. I’ll bring it out to you in a minute."

[img_assist|nid=4536|title=Untitled by Nicole Koenitzer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=255]Peter left the counter and walked to the table by the window. He hung over Annie for a while. She looked up at him, regarded him, exhausted and confused, the same way she had looked at her hands. Perplexed by her appendages, baffled that he was still attached to her, and she to him.

He sat across from her. "I have a plan."

She stared.

"We eat. Then we find gas. We can wait in line over there. Then if we drive all day, we can make it to Omaha. If we drive hard, we could make it to Chicago by tomorrow night. We’ll be there for Christmas. Everything will be okay when we get home."

"That isn’t a plan, Peter. That’s just what we were doing anyway."

"It makes me feel better to say it."

The kid came over with a tray of Big Macs in their greasy boxes.

"Sorry it took so long. Some of ’em might be a little fucked up because the guy who knows how to put them together on Tuesdays didn’t show up today, so I just guessed from the pictures."

"It’s okay," Annie said, which was unusually kind.

He lingered, then shuffled back to the counter.

There was honking. A lot of honking and Annie craned her neck to see over Peter’s shoulder.

"What is it?" He turned.

At the gas station, two men were scuffling. One pushed the other and a clumsy swing landed them both in a pile of snow.

From the passenger side of one of the fueling pickups, a woman dropped down, drunk and morbidly obese, shouting incoherent obscenity. While she ranted, she pulled the nozzle from the tank and dragged the hose to the opposite side of the pump island, dousing the truck that was parked there.

A couple of burley men tried to stop her, but they were driven off by a spray of gasoline to the eyes. They howled and scuttered away. She grabbed at one of her breasts. She flipped her middle finger as the gas pooled around her.

Peter switched places at the table. He sat next to Annie so he could watch.

The rest of the pickups in the line started to scatter, banging into each other, honking, jamming up against the wall of the station, against the pumps and islands, steel slapping steel and glass snapping.

The woman chased a few trucks to the extent of the hose. She turned circles and wrapped her legs in it. She fell, struggling, rolling in the gas. She untangled herself and stood and held a lighter to the grill of the truck.

One of the men in the snow, all battered now and dripping with blood, stood up and yelled. He might have been trying to reason with her. She couldn’t hear or didn’t care. She sparked the lighter and lit the pickup on fire.

The flames flashed back up her arm and burned the gas that had soaked into her sweatshirt. People ran from the tangle of trucks as fire chased out over the slicks that had gathered.

The woman screamed and ran and flailed her arm, but the fire jumped to her hair and covered her body. She set fire to the ground as she ran.

The next pickup in line caught fire. The station was a roiling black cloud, a filthy billowing torch, all alight in the snowy morning.

The bloody man tried to stop the burning woman, but she was frantic and slapped at him, and some of the flame jumped across to his coat and his hair.

He tried to get away, but walls of fire rolled up from the pools on the ground. He ran through it but was consumed and collapsed into the snowbank. The fat woman fell behind him and burned.

Annie had taken a bite of the Big Mac. She put it back in the box and pushed it away.

"Why is this happening?

"Why’s what happening?"

"You know what."

"They’re fighting over gas."

"Not that. All of it."

"The usual reasons, I guess."

Annie took the Big Mac and bit it. She stuffed her mouth with it.

Peter felt the heat of the fire on his face through the glass.

He said, "If it would have happened a month ago, would we have broken up? Do you think we would have been so terrible to each other?"

She worked pieces of food around in her cheeks as she thought. "No. No, I don’t think so."

"Why not?"

"We need different things now. Things are different."

"What things?"

"We have new priorities." She looked at him and wiped her mouth with a bunched paper napkin. "It changes everything."

The glass rattled and rumbled. A broad and sucking bulge of fire rose up over the gas station.

"So what do we do?"

"We do what we have to. We make it work."

"Wait," he said. "Wait, are we talking about the bomb or the baby?"

She shook her head. "We’re talking about us."

*          *          *

They left the place behind. The fire department never came. As they slid by the gas station, Annie pressed her hands over her eyes. The burned bodies stuck in Peter’s periphery like shadows, black and stiff against the snow which melted around them in the heat of the soaring fire.

They crept out onto the ramp and back to the interstate.

"We can make it to Laramie," he said.

"Don’t you think we should find gas?"

"Look at the gauge."

"It’s on E."

"Exactly."

"Exactly what? That means it’s empty."

"No, it means we probably have sixty miles left on this tank."

"Sixty miles? It’s on empty, you asshole."

"We’ll be fine, Annie."

*          *          *

At the side of I-80, where the car had run out of gas, Annie paced along the muddy red gravel shoulder, clutching her hands and doubling over, and cursing in a way that kept her warm with hellfire.

Peter sat in the car and waited for her rage to pass.

"You stupid fuck!" She kicked the ground and a hail of gravel hit the car. She turned and walked off.

On the crests of the rocky brown hills around them, pumpjacks nodded in slow succession, draining oil from the earth, scattered across the washes and ridges.

[img_assist|nid=4532|title=Repose by Suzanne Comer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=257]He watched her walk away and thought, as terrible as she was, as bad as they had been to each other, she was the most important thing left in the world.

He opened the door and called after her. She stopped and turned back.

"What are we going to do, Peter? We don’t have any gas."

"We’ll wait for somebody. We’ll wait for a car."

"There are no cars. There’s a storm coming. Nobody’s driving except us."

"We’re not driving either, actually."

She bit down hard.

"It’s warmer in here," he said. "Just get in the car."

*          *          *

The storm did come, and it consumed them.

They sat together in the back seat on their clothes, bundled under sleeping bags and blankets. The car rocked and shuddered in the wind.

The last pale sun came through the deepening snow on the glass, blue and icy light.

"There’ll be a plow through soon. Or maybe highway patrol. We’ll be fine."

"It’s getting dark."

"It’s just the snow on the windows."

"No. It’s late. The sun’s going down and it’ll get colder."

"We’ll be alright. We can still make it to my mom and dad’s tomorrow night. We’ll have Christmas. It’ll be normal. Everything will be O.K. when we get home."

"It isn’t fucking normal."

"I’m glad you’ll get to meet them."

"Were you ever going to introduce me?"

"Of course."

"When? We’ve been together for eight months."

"They live fourteen hundred miles away."

"You could have figured something out."

"What about you? I’ve only met your mother once, and she lives in Vegas."

"Once is enough for anyone."

"I liked her."

"That’s because you were both drunk and disgusting."

Annie shifted and brought herself closer to him. "Do you think she’s alright? Do you think she’s safe?"

"Definitely. She’s on vacation."

"So?"

"She’s out of the country. I’m sure everything’s fine in Europe."

She put her head on his shoulder, heavy and smelling of wool and sweat. The ridiculous ball on top of her hat tickled his cheek.

"What if they don’t like me?"

"They’ll like you."

"But what if they don’t? Or what if I don’t like them?"

"Annie, everybody is going to like everybody else. Everything is going to be fine."

"But that isn’t true, is it." She slid her arm behind him and held him. "Everything isn’t going to be fine."

"Things will be different, that’s all. It might get harder for a while, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. It doesn’t have to be."

"Are you talking about the bomb again?"

"No. The baby. Weren’t we talking about the baby?"

"I’m cold," she said. "Do you want to make love?"

"What?"

"Do you?"

"I didn’t know that was still an option."

"Well, it is."

"Then yes. Yes, I do."

*          *          *

They did make love, with their clothes mostly on and swaddled in blankets. The windows gathered fog, which froze and glowed in the dusk.

When they had finished, and all of the light had gone out of the sky and the snow that covered the glass had gone dark, they sat together and thought of home.

Sound came from behind them. A slow vibration in the ground became a shudder and a quake. The growl from the highway became a torrent of raging engines and rattling steel.

"Jesus, what is it?" She sat up and scratched at the ice on the rear window.

Headlights burned through the snow and filled the car. Peter wrestled with the blankets and pushed his shoulder against the door to break the seal of ice that had formed. Clumps of snow fell over his freezing hands.

Standing in the gravel with his back to the wind, he watched the tanks pass with armored trucks and Humvees heading south. The headlights on the highway snaked back along the road for miles.

Annie climbed out, still wrapped in her blanket. They watched the convoy pass, too loud to speak over the whistling and growling and screaming of machines.

Annie waved her arms. She moved closer to the road, but none of them slowed.

Eventually, when the end of the convoy came, and the road was silent, a few military semis brought up the rear. A tanker passed, and another pulled to the shoulder and stopped behind them, flooding the place where they stood with light.

[img_assist|nid=4533|title=Guggenheim by Gary Koenitzer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=202]The engine rattled and knocked. The driver dropped down.

"Are you in need of assistance, ma’am?" The soldier jogged toward them with hands deep in his coat. "They called back and said you were trying to flag us down."

"We ran out of gas," she said. "What’s happening?"

"Gas? Not a problem." He turned and shouted into the light. "Diaz. Grab a gas can."

The passenger door opened and slammed and there was a shuffling in the gravel.

"What’s going on?" Peter said.

"Can’t say."

"Do you know anything about New York?"

"Really can’t say."

The other soldier hustled toward them lugging a brown plastic gas can. She was small and wore thick glasses.

Peter had to pry the frozen gas tank door with a key.

He twisted off the cap and the soldier started to pour.

"Where are you two headed?" she asked.

"Home," Peter said.

"Where’s home?"

"West of Chicago."

"How far west?"

"Suburbs."

She nodded. "Where you coming from?"

"Salt Lake."

"You picked a very bad time to take a very long road trip."

"We’re going to see his family for Christmas," Annie said.

"Have you spoken to them?"

"We couldn’t get through."

The soldier who had been driving scraped his boot in the dirt. "No one can," he said. "Are you married?"

"No," Peter said.

"You two should get married. Make it right in the eyes of the Lord."

Annie took Peter’s hand.

"So," he said, "you planning to take I-80 all the way?"

"Yeah," Peter said.

"Well, maybe when you get to Des Moines, you should quit the interstate."

"Why?" Annie squeezed harder.

"I think you might find the old U.S….uh, the old U.S. highways a more scenic way to travel."

"We’re kind of in a hurry."

"Then you better quit the interstate at Des Moines. You follow?" He stepped closer. "This thing ain’t over, brother. Do yourself a favor and stay off the highway."

He turned and headed back to the truck.

The other one finished with the gas can and put the cap back on the tank.

"I don’t know what kind of mileage you get, but that should get you to Cheyenne. You can find gas there."

"Why are you doing this?" Annie said.

"We’re just here to serve, ma’am."

"That isn’t true."

The soldier stood for a while, quiet and staring, the last of the snow falling between them.

"Sins," she said.

"What?"

"It was Jackson’s idea. To make up for the sins we gotta go do now."

"Diaz! Let’s roll."

"What sins?"

The soldier turned away and jogged back to the truck.

"What fucking sins?"

"Annie, shut up."

"Why?"

"I don’t know. Just shut up."

The engine growled and knocked and the truck rattled back onto the road, heading south.

They stood alone in the dark at the roadside, smelling ice and sage, silent for a while. Too long.

"Start the car," Annie said. "I’m cold."

"I love you," he said.

"I’m cold," she said. "I love you, too."

*          *          *

They sang. They were beset by the madness that comes on long ribbons of American road. They sang through the snarled and snowblown streets of Cheyenne, they sang through the last of Wyoming and six more hours into Nebraska. They told stories about their lives all the way to Omaha.

They laughed and were giddy and then fell into silence in a 24 hour Wal-Mart parking lot which bustled and hummed through the night as lines backed out of doors for generators and palettes of bottled water and Band-Aids and all of the other things that had suddenly become the stuff of life.

They slept in the white glare of mercury vapor lights and in the morning Annie was sick again before they set out at dawn.

Civilization began to coalesce along the road, exits with new frequency, populated by chain restaurants and big box stores.

The radio, which had possessed her the day before, was silent. They had decided, without saying so, that neither cared to know what new and terrible things had happened to the world in the night. All they needed to know of that came from emergency vehicles flickering past and clusters of military trucks at intervals on an otherwise vacant highway.

At the edge of Des Moines, she said, "You never asked me what I was going to do."

She fiddled with the vents and the heat controls.

"Do with what?"

"If I was going to keep it."

"I just assumed."

"How could you assume something like that?"

"I don’t know. I just did."

"You were right. I just mean that I’m curious. That’s all. Why did you think that?"

"It was the way you said it."

"How did I say it?"

"You didn’t say, I’m pregnant. You said I’m having a baby."

She shook her head. She flicked off the heat. "No, I didn’t."

"Yes you did."

"No I didn’t. I said we’re having a baby."

And that was true. She had.

*          *          *

They came to signs that warned of a roadblock. Not the usual orange construction fare, but olive and white military signs which were clearly not suggestions of caution, but statements of very serious intent.

They left the interstate, off onto the snowy, vacant surface streets of the suburbs. The soldier in Wyoming had told them to quit the interstate, and from an overpass, they saw why.

A tangle of trucks and flickering lights scattered across cordons. Semis were being searched, minivans turned inside out. An entire living room had been assembled on the side of the road from a moving truck that was being taken apart. Lamps and sofas and an oversized television in proper arrangement in the snow.

*          *          *

On old U.S. Highway 30, things were clear. The wind had kept the snow off the road, blown into drifts and culverts.

They drove all day through old America, town after tiny town forgotten when the interstate had opened and sucked away what traffic had flowed through these old veins. And surrounded by wide, white fields were main streets lined by storefronts, now vacant, and other streets that crept off to the edges, shaded by broad old oaks that covered dignified, forgotten houses.

The sun fell behind them and winter dusk came early again, and then finally they came to the Mississippi and Illinois beyond.

They stopped so that Annie could piss.

There had been no town for miles, and there wouldn’t be for miles more, and even when they found one, nothing would be open. So this place was as good as any.

She walked away from the road, crunching snow out into a field. Peter leaned against the car and looked down the road, out into the strange silver dark, which wasn’t dark at all. The light of unencumbered stars and sliver of moon on the snow which had gathered against the broken stalks of harvested corn, and in the still he heard in the air a river of traffic from the interstate, two or three miles away, a brief stretch of reprieve, unhindered by barricades after Davenport.

It was this way that he remembered home. Still and perfect in winter, the smell of snow, if there was such a thing, and the rush of traffic somewhere out in the dark.

And then a light swelled in the sky.

The sky went blue like day. Annie was forty feet away, squatting in the field in sudden noonday. She fell backward and scrambled to her knees and then the light faded. It drew back across the sky, painting stars again as it receded to the east.

He heard Annie struggle in the snow, then saw her again, jogging toward the road.

"What the fuck? Peter, what was that?"

He listened.

"Peter?"

He listened and watched the sky, but there was nothing. She moved forward and fell into him. He held her, squeezed her in his arms. She was shaking.

He had stopped counting by thousands when the sound came, a low roar a minute late, which was the end of Chicago.

*          *          *

They drove and said nothing.

They drove until the places they passed by and through became familiar to him, became places he had been before, roads he had driven once, roads he had crossed twice, and then places that he called home.

They stopped in front of his house, which was an average sort of American house in an average American suburb, part of the sprawl pressing fingers out into the fields.

The lights were still on. That was good. Strands of Christmas lights lined the eaves and angles. A tree glimmered in the window. The lights wouldn’t stay on forever, but tonight at least, they were bright, and they were home.

A woman came to the glass and cupped her hands over her eyes to see outside.

"Is that your mother?"                                                    

"Yep."

"Fucking yep. Honest to God."

"Don’t be nervous."

"I’m not nervous. I’m scared."

"Yeah. Me too."

They got out of the car and walked together toward the house. His mother disappeared and he could hear her yelling to his father somewhere inside.

To the east, the sky was burning red, and at its edges, orange light broke through strange clouds, all black and scattered out over the horizon.

A breeze had swelled toward them, but it would shift by morning. He was sure that it had to. He was sure of it.

"Everything’s okay now," he said. "We’re here."

"Yes," she said. "We’re here."

"We shouldn’t stay outside though."

"No. We shouldn’t."

"Come in."

She took his hand. She squeezed it. They walked together out of the cold and into the house.

DJ Kinney is the author of The End of Oranges, an unpublished collection of short stories which examines themes of love and calamity under difficult, often surreal circumstances. Stories from The End of Oranges have been published in Eureka Literary Magazine, Eclipse, Puckerbrush Review, Allegheny Review, Vincent Brothers Review and others. DJ lives and works in Portland, Oregon with his miniature dachshund John R. Crichton, Jr.

 

There is a homeless man living in our house.

I can’t really complain, I suppose, since we walked away from the house two months ago, and when the gavel falls at the Lancaster County Courthouse in another ten days and turns it into the property of JeffFi Mortgage, it won’t be ours anymore. But until that happens, my wife and I are still on the deed, and it’s still our house, on what was our block, where our son played in the backyard with our dog Libby and our neighbors’ kids. We used to live here, in this house, on this block, in this development across from a retention basin where frogs make froggy noises at night. Hence Jeremiah Place: our developer thought naming the development after the old Three Dog Night song was the height of cleverness.

But even though it is narrowly, technically, still our block, I’m not sure what to do about the homeless man living in our house.

That’s not entirely true. I do know what to do. I can call 911. Or I can call JeffFi, assuming I can ever get someone on the phone who isn’t from Bangalore and knows what to do when I call. Hell, I could just walk in the door. After all, I still have the key, since JeffFi was too stupid to change the lock even after I sent them two letters saying change the damn locks and winterize the damn house—it’s the middle of February, you asshats.

Just to clarify: I did not actually use the word “asshat.” It’s a word I learned from my 16-year-old son. But, given the circumstances, it seems to fit.

Eight months ago two guys in khaki colored shirts and brown pants served Gwen the foreclosure notice at 9:15 in the morning. Gwen worked for County Children and Youth, and she’d been up all night, taking an abused child into custody. She’d not quite fallen asleep, and I had told her when our financial problems first started that nobody would ever be coming to the door like this, that I’d take care of it before things reached the level of sheriffs and courthouses.

When we’d received the first notice, the one that my lawyer called an “Act 91” letter, I tried minimizing its importance. This was not easy, given the fact than an Act 91 was designed by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking to be written in a manner precisely so you will not minimize its importance. It’s meant to make you piss yourself.

But I’m good. I brushed it off. So I figured I could do it again when she came to my office.

Here’s how that conversation went:

“I almost hit a duck.”

 “Gwen?”

“A duck. I almost hit a damn duck.”

“Gwen, what’s wrong?”

“You told me this wasn’t going to happen.”

I guessed this had something to do with the mortgage even before Gwen said that, but I didn’t let her know. Denial is a gas, a vapor. It seeps into everything if you let it.

“Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

I meant the exact opposite of that. Don’t talk to me. I will only have to find some other form of emotional defense.

“We’re fucked. We’re fucked. We’re going to lose the house.”

When Gwen gets angry, she mixes crying and rage into one, mashed-up, superheated emotion. She tears up, but she doesn’t cry, exactly. No sobbing lamentations, not even understated sniffling. The cry does not move one inch beyond her tear ducts. At the same time, she shows me the serrated edge of violence. Maybe she’ll throw something. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll just slam shit around. Like the paper in her hand, thick with legal-sized documents folded to fit the letter-sized pleadings they were attached to, making the whole of it look thicker, plumper, and all the more intimidating—like its accusatory language couldn’t be contained on mere paper but needed to spill out and beat me up.

“We are not going to lose the house. Jesus, Gwen, I work at a bank. I know how this goes. I know how this game is played.”

Which was true. I did know how the game was played. I knew we’d lose the house.

Now that we no longer live there, there’s no reason to drive past our house except anger or revenge. It’s not near any of my life’s touchstones anymore—not where I worked, not near the house we now rent, not near Jason’s school, not especially close to anything, really. Which is why I’m surprised to see anyone living there in the first place.

I drive past, slowly but not too slowly, like a stalker whose heart isn’t quite in it. I had left the basketball stuff in the driveway, thinking that the ghosts of Jason and his friends might still want to shoot a round of H-O-R-S-E, but now the only thing there is a mid-80’s Buick. So I pull up behind it and get out of my car, but then what? What do I do? What’s the protocol? I’ve been going to work earlier and earlier so Gwen won’t have to look at me, but for Squatter Guy I have no coping mechanism.

I stand by my car for maybe 45 seconds. I fiddle with my BlackBerry, looking for some newish email to distract me. Finding none and hoping it’s not because they cut my service, I put it back in my pocket and start heading towards the door, trying to walk very softly, then realizing that it’s still my house and I’m not the trespasser here.

I don’t go to the door, though. Instead, I cut across the lawn, which is just starting to look unkempt, to the window. Squatter Guy has the blinds pulled down only half the way. I walk right up to the window. Torso up, I see a vague silhouette of a man, like the blinds are keeping him in a witness protection program. Torso down, gray sweats.

I stare at the window, waiting for him to pull the shades in either one direction or another. He doesn’t. I spend about 45 seconds like this then walk back to my car.

 

I had seen plenty of legal captions and documents before, but never one with my name on. I’d always wondered what it would be like, but now I didn’t have to. I stared at the paperwork that Gwen had thrown on my desk moments earlier, reading that caption, over and over again:

In the court of common pleas of

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Civil Action-Mortgage Foreclosure Charlotte National Bank, As Trustee of Jefferson Financial Corporation, Asset Backed Pass Through Certificates, Series 2005-r-7 Under The Pooling And Servicing Agreement Dated As Of September 1, 2005 Without Record

vs.

You, Seth Weinstein and Gwendolyn Weinstein,  Deadbeat Losers, Who Took Out Too Much Loan Than You Could Possibly Afford And You’d Have Known That  If You’d Have Not Had Your Heads Up Your Ass And Actually Looked At The Adjustable Rate Which Was Going To Go Up To 9.5% On A $388,000.00 Mortgage But You Figured You’d Be Able To Refinance It Because Housing  Prices Always Go Up And Ha, Ha, Ha You Sucker, Lost That Bet Didn’t You, But So Did We Because We Sold That Mortgage, Then Sold It Again, And Now  Jeff Fi Is In The Crapper Along With Everybody Else, So We’re Both In This Together, Aren’t We?

Husband and Wife.

  

When we moved into the house in Jeremiah Place, Jason was nine, I had just jumped from residential to commercial, and Gwen was working as a sales rep for a company that sold used construction equipment. She drove to various places in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland, often wearing her trademark hard hat with a Hello Kitty decal on the front. She made more money than me, more money than any of the men who were sales reps at her company, and, with all that, we could finally afford a really great house.

Two years later, she was back at school, finally completing her Bachelors Degree at Millersville, then driving back and forth to Temple to get her Masters, all so she could work more hours for less money—way less, gaping chasms less—doing what she really wanted to do, which was to rescue kids with cigarette burns on their genitalia in the middle of the night. 

I could have had a conversation with her back then. I could have pointed out that we’d purchased a whole lot of house. That we needed her money to afford it. That what she wanted to do didn’t make sense unless we sold the house, took the equity we had, and put a really big down payment on a smaller place. It’s what the lending officer in me would have done. Here’s the thing, though. The socially unacceptable secret. There aren’t many ways to randomly display testosterone when you’re a middle-aged loan officer with bad knees and a receding hairline. But they do exist. In my case, those ways involved home equity loans. And credit cards. And refinances. And credit cards again.  Debt was great. Debt was wonderful. Debt allowed me to be both stoic and supportive. Debt rocked. 

[img_assist|nid=4526|title=Leap by Jayne Surrena © 2009|desc=Jayne is a Philadelphia native who has been actively showing her art since she graduated from the University of the Arts in 2006 with a BFA in painting. She has recently returned to UArts to receive her masters in Art Education.|link=node|align=right|width=344|height=604]

  I leave early again. Gwen doesn’t ask why. She’s in the kitchen, pouring cranberry juice. Jason—I’m not sure where Jason is. In his room, maybe, with the boxes from the move still mostly filled with stuff.  Gwen kept telling him, half-heartedly, to unpack them before she finally gave up. Only the computer and the Game Boy have seen light. The sheriff’s sale is nine days away.

I drive from this house that I rent—a house that I will not call “our house,” or “my house,” not yet, not today, not tonight—and pull to the end of this development, which doesn’t have full-grown trees. Granted, my old development didn’t have full-grown trees, either. But here I notice and resent their shortness, their lack of maturity.  There’s lots to resent here, including the fact that I took this place so Jason would graduate next year in his same school district and on his same basketball team, and I thought I’d get some kind of credit for that.

I am about to confront a strange man in a familiar place. I pull up in the driveway. This time, if there are any ghosts still here, I imagine my tires rolling over them, cracking their incorporeal bones. I get out of the car.  I consider honking the horn, announcing my presence, but decide against it. I don’t need to announce my presence. This is still my house.

I then notice that Squatter Guy’s car is not in the driveway. Or maybe I noticed it subliminally, as I was pulling in, and the thought that nobody would be there to confront me made me fearless.  Regardless, I’m here. I pull out my key, wondering if it will work.  It doesn’t. I stand in front of my door, hovering between panic and rage.

Then I turn the doorknob without thinking. It opens.
I’m in my house. Again. Still.

There is furniture in my house. Not mine. A loveseat by the wall where my bookcase used to be—greenish, worn, kind of velvety. A thirteen-inch TV-VCR combo, early 90’s vintage from the looks of it, sitting on a wooden chair—also greenish, but with some sort of yellow in the paint mix. A coffee table, oddly placed closer to the TV than the loveseat.  Recent copies of People and Sports Illustrated, and a not-quite-recent copy of, what, The Weekly Standard? What the fuck? Do I have a neo-con squatter here?

Into the living room. A card table, two chairs, both the same as the wooden chair the TV was sitting on. More magazines. Another People, a Rolling Stone. Against a wall, two boxes, long and narrow—one lying on its side against the molding, the other vertical, its top resting where a picture of Jason hitting a three-pointer used to hang. IKEA boxes. I look inside, trying to figure out what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled, but I can’t tell. It’s just a bunch of birch.

I start to look into the kitchen but stop. I am close enough to see a white refrigerator, but I don’t want to look further. I’m suddenly afraid of looking at his refrigerator magnets.

I leave my house. I try to lock the door behind me, fail, then run to my car. 

   

I’m worthless at work. I want to lash out at someone, but I am not a lash-out kind of guy. I have a software financing package on my desk, and some lease syndication deals that need attention, and I really wish I were a lash-out kind of guy. It would help me, I think. I could do all sorts of rage.  People would live in fear, trying to work around me, manage me, plan things so the rages didn’t happen, but, of course, none of those coping devices would work because I’d be as unpredictable as a tornado, a tsunami, a housing-price-fueled recession.

But none of that is true, so I settle for being useless.  And if I’m going to be useless, I may as well be useless at my own house.

I get in my large, red, stupid, SUV. There is a duck—one single, loveless duck—standing in front, staring at the grille. I honk the horn. I wait for the duck to honk back. He doesn’t. He just stares. I honk again. Nothing. He is not moving.  He just stands there in the parking lot, daring me to make him move. I could back out. There is no car in the adjacent parking space.

Instead, I inch closer. I think to myself I am playing chicken with a duck. I smile at that thought. It’s the most confrontation I’ve had with any creature in months, maybe years. I kind of like it. But only for a second. Then I start to feel something truly awful. I’d like to say it’s compassion for the duck, and revulsion at the thoughts I just had towards it. I know neither of those are it. I back out through the adjacent parking space, and I head to my house.  

[img_assist|nid=4544|title=Brooklyn Bridge by Greg Lamer © 2009|desc=Greg graduated from Montclair State University. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri where he sells books and takes photographs of people and buildings|link=node|align=left|width=450|height=299]

Today, I have it mapped out.  I am going to confront this man. I have an outline, a plan of attack. I will grab something, something heavy and capable of causing a body to gush blood, and stick it in the back of my car. I will pull into the driveway. If Squatter Guy’s car is in that driveway, I’ll box the little fucker in. I will go inside. I will tell him he has to leave. I will not have to use the heavy object. Displaying it will be enough. That and my forceful presentation. I am a peaceful guy, but I am capable of faking menace.

He will leave. I haven’t figured out what happens after that, but he will leave.

By the way, if you’re ever thinking of getting a homeless guy out of your abandoned house by force, cars don’t have crowbars anymore. I find this out when I go to check the trunk. Nothing heavy. Nothing metallic and unforgiving.  My car knows me. It knows I have a cell phone and a Triple A card. Crowbars are only for bad movies now. I shut the trunk. I open it again, thinking I might have missed some other dense object, but no, not unless I want to throw a miniature spare tire at Squatter Guy. I shut the trunk again. If it were my old house, I’d look in the garage for something, but I don’t have a garage. I look in the back seat. There’s a clipboard. On the floor is a pen with no cap and a large paper clip. I think about fashioning them into weapons, then smile, then laugh, then abruptly stop laughing.

Just me. It will have to be just me and Squatter Guy.

  

I am here. It is 11:30 in the morning. In two hours, the county sheriff will ask if there are any bids to my house. The only one who will bid will be the bank’s attorney. A gavel will hit a wooden plate, not too firmly, not too softly, somewhere between a click and a pound, because there are 41 houses on the list today and a guy could get carpal tunnel if he kept swinging that thing too hard.

That’s okay. I don’t need two hours for this. I will be back at my office soon. This will only be a long lunch.

I pull behind the old ’80s Buick. Right behind it. Practically grinding against its bumper. I walk away from the driveway, onto the grass, which is starting to look a little ragged.

I knock on the door

I wait. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.

I knock again, then hit the buzzer. I’d forgotten I had a buzzer. I never had to buzz my own door, I guess.

Seven, ten, fifteen seconds. Buzzer again.

I hear muffled sounds, speaking, footfalls. The door opens. Squatter Guy is real. He is taller than me, which, admittedly, isn’t saying much. He’s younger, but not by much, either. More hair, less fat. Round-rimmed John Lennon glasses. T-shirt with the insignia of the Iowa Hawkeyes and blue gym shorts. As a Penn State grad, I have an immediate, visceral dislike of that. He doesn’t deserve to be wearing a Big 10 t-shirt.

 “This is my house,” I say, in a voice that may or may not be calm 

 “Come in,” he says, in a voice that’s definitely calm. I resent that even more than the t-shirt.

I look around. He has started putting together some of the IKEA stuff, but it’s only partially assembled. I think it’s a bookcase. Or maybe an entertainment center.

 “How long have you been here?” I ask him.

“A while, a while,” he says. I focus on the accent. Not Central Pennsylvania, not at all. A little bit Jersey, north but not too far north. He sits down on the loveseat. “Do you want a tour?” He smiles. It’s not a nasty smile at all. That unnerves me even more 

“Look, this is my house. You don’t belong here.”

 “You won’t either soon.”

I start to pull one of the empty wooden chairs towards the loveseat, but stop. Instead, I take the thirteen-inch TV off the chair it’s sitting on, put the TV on the ground, and use that chair.  “I want you to leave. Now.”

 “Aren’t you the least bit curious what the hell I’m doing here?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to ask.”

“Why not?” He leaned back, practically being swallowed up by the loveseat in the process.

 “This is my house. For the next 90 minutes, it’s my house. I want you out of it.”

 “I’m not going. And you really can’t make me.” He has the same tone of voice I used when I was denying someone a loan. No, more than that; when I was denying a customer who was already into us, who needed more money, just a little bit more to cover expenses, a little extension on a line of credit, and I’d say no. We can’t. We just can’t. It’s not personal. Though I’d never say that last part, because I was already condescending to them just by the denial itself.

I get up and walk towards the pile of IKEA wood. I grab a plank of something light colored and smooth, and begin smacking it in my hand. “Look, you’re trespassing. I want you out of here now.”

“I’m not going until the sheriff comes and changes the locks.”

Still no anger. Still no reaction. 

God, I want to hit him first. I want to hit him with this goddamn Swedish wood. I want to crack his head open with Blaarg or Kräppi.

“I think you should leave,” he says in a voice that seems almost kind.

I swing the piece of wood, aiming for the television, but I have to aim low since I placed it on the floor. The mechanics of my attempt at destruction throw me off. I hit the side of the TV, not the tube. As my right knee buckles, I pitch forward, onto the top of the TV, into the coffee table, scattering books and magazines.

He grabs me while my head is spinning, and I’m still in a daze, not sure if he’s helping me up or throwing me out. I get my answer when he lifts me under my right arm, opens the door with his left and gently deposits me, standing, outside. I think I hear him say “I’m sorry,” but I could be wrong.

I crumple to the ground. I’m dizzy, and I notice blood coming out my nose. I stay on the ground a while, a long while. I want to throw up, but I can’t. I want to cry, but I don’t. I just pant and gasp and stay down, down so far I don’t even notice a township police cruiser pulling up in the driveway, and a cop walking up to me.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“What?”

 

[img_assist|nid=4527|title=Wayne by Corey Armpriester © 2009|desc=A native Philadelphian, Corey Armpriester grew up in a military family bringing new places, people and influences frequently into his life. At the age of fifteen, photography became his medium of expression.|link=node|align=right|width=375|height=562]

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I look at the kid in front of me. Can’t be more than 23, 24. Tall, about 6’3”, he’s leaning over me, trying to figure out whether I’m a victim or a perpetrator. Maybe I’m giving off the vibe of both.

“I’m alright. I just, well, tried to get into my house.”

“What do you mean?” I sense a shift in the cop’s voice. I realize I’d better pull the threads of middle class respectability together quickly. I stand up, haltingly, with some imbalance and fuzziness, but I stand.

“This is my house. I left it. I’m being foreclosed on. Today. In about 45 minutes, it won’t be my house, since it’s going to sheriff’s sale. But I just wanted to look around one last time.” I feel something in my eye. I hope it’s dirt, and not tears. I pull out my driver’s license, showing him both the old address and the little slip of paper from PennDOT showing my new address. He glances at them, hands them back to me, and stares at me.

“Is there someone in that house?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We’ve been having a problem with people moving into foreclosed houses. Bandos, they’re called. Short for abandoned.”

I didn’t realize I was part of a trend.

“Is there someone in that house?” he asks again. “Is that how you got hurt?”

I think for a moment. No, that’s not true. It’s not really thinking. It’s synapses reacting, firing madly and off-key.

“No. Nobody’s in there.”

“Then how come there’s two cars in the driveway?” 

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But there’s nobody in there.”

“Well, if you say there’s nobody in there, and it’s not going to be your house soon, I guess I’ll leave you here.” Pause. “You sure I should go?”

“You can go. I’m okay. I just—well, I just got sick, looking at my old place, and I sort of passed out. I hit my head and passed out. I’m okay, though. You can go.”

And he does.

And I stay until he leaves. Then I get in my car and drive to the courthouse.

I walk through the metal detectors, and then over to the old, ceremonial courtroom where they hold the sheriff’s sales. I’d been here before, as my bank’s rep, telling the attorney how much to bid, how high to go. Now I just take up space in the back row, all scratched and bleeding and beat up. I wait for my house to go on the block. The bank bids its costs. Nobody else says a word. The sheriff bangs the gavel.

I don’t know what comes next.

As an attorney practicing consumer bankruptcy law in Lancaster, PA, Mitchell Sommers may be one of the few people in America to benefit from the economic policies of George Bush. Mitchell received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his law degree from Penn State Dickinson School of Law. He has had op-eds published in numerous Pennsylvania newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has had short stories published in Ellipsis and PHASE. He is currently fiction/non-fiction editor of Tatanacho, an online literary journal, and is working on a novel. He can be reached at sommersesq@aol.com.