Issue 38 – Fiction

A Passport to the Old Country
by Cezarija Abartis

For Serena, it was like a radio station drifting in and out over another channel – voices disappeared under the dissonance, and the piano keys turned into hammering.

Natural History
by David Ackley

Three deer have come out in the open to feed in alfalfa along the pasture woods, across acres of new-mown ground from the boy at the barn window. The cuttings are stubbled and strewn with yellowish chaff.

Olympia
by Richard Burgin

Lately, whenever I get up at night (for the usual reasons), I’ve gotten into the habit of writing down a line or two that spontaneously occurs to me as soon as I wake up.

The Swami
by George L. Chieffet

Fred Glower has the bad habit of rubbernecking beautiful women, but tonight he limits himself to one quick glance when his buddy Phil introduces Frankie Serrano-Sanchez.

Cowboys and Indians
by Donald Dewey

Playing with his plastic cowboys and Indians had relaxed Pfeiffer for more than 50 years.

Three Days Two Nights
by Barbara Westwood Diehl

In the deep end of the Satellite Motel pool after dark, after the children are asleep in sand-gritty sleeping bags on the efficiency floor, Frank and Trish hang on opposite walls and kick at the black water full of LED starlight.

Nocturne
by Okla Elliott

It would have been pleasant to spread out on the couch and read about changes in people, so she lingered, looking at herself in the mirror, hoping her husband would stop her.

Outside Wheeling
by Brandon Getz

Now, this third wife, breathing next to him in her naked sleep, what was her name anyway? It rhymes with autumn, the way the leaves rustle before winter pushes its pale belly against the back of the Ohio Valley and the cold comes and the snow.

Tulips
by Josh Gray

My great aunt Elise, age eleven, walks through the streets of her ruined city carrying a basket of food. Dusk falls over Lyon, and Elise moves swiftly hoping to finish her errand before nightfall.

The Show
by Nicholas LaRocca

Mickey was fond of telling people, “I’m sixty-nine, so…” What followed was a justification: a man’s age can inspire a liberating perspective, that virtually all behavior is practical because the punishment, by pure mathematics, cannot be worse than the crime.

The Husband and the Gypsy
by Lynn Levin

As it falls to many adult children these days, it was my duty—and particularly mine being an only child—to move my parents out of the home they’d lived in for the past forty years and into a retirement community.

Floating Out Into The Blue Night
by Maja Lukic

Lena closed her eyes, expecting darkness, but Dr. Novak's face was etched to the back of her eyelids, his mouth moving, the sound of his voice grainy like that of a doctor in a 1950s health documentary. Her eyes flew open again, and she stared straight into the sunlight.

Horses
by Anita Naughton

One Sunday, at dusk, just as we were having tea, four horseswandered through an open gate, and onto the railway tracks behind our house.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Parental Love
by Cannon Roberts

Steve paused the movie when Megan announced she still slept in the same bed as her father. He knew they wouldn’t be finishing the movie that night.

The Chill

by Richard Burgin

A man walks into a bar and decides that he will tell a joke beginning with those exact words–“A man walks into a bar.”– He feels that he’s really been a kind of crypto-comedian all his life and wants a chance to show it, if only to the people seated at the bar. Just before he opens the door, he realizes that he’ll let in too much cold air. He shuts the door before he even tells a single joke. Instead he takes a walk up Chestnut Street and thinks about his childhood as if the wind blew it forcefully into his mind. He remembers pulling his blanket up over his ears when it was cold and how he felt like he was in a tomb of ice.

One night when he couldn’t sleep because he felt so cold, he called for his father and told him his problem. His father opened his closet door and put three more blankets over him. When that still didn’t work, his father started telling him silly jokes one after another, like “Do you know why the basketball died? Because it was shot so many times.” He laughed after every joke his father told, and kept asking for more. Just before his eyes closed, he saw his father tiptoeing out of the room. It was perhaps his favorite memory.

“The wind lives in a seashell,” his mother told him at Revere Beach. “Put the shell over your ear and you can hear it talking.”

He did what his mother said and heard the wind.

“Does the wind have a family or does it live alone?”

She looked at him as if he’d asked the wrong question. He knew then that she didn’t know. That no one did.

His parents had let him go to the movies by himself in Boston. His house was only ten minutes away by streetcar but still he had the feeling of having taken a substantial journey, and because he was by himself, he felt both excited and a little nervous. It was late fall, and the wind blew leaves around the Boston Common. He knew he should take the subway home now but instead looked around at the vast green lawns of the park while dodging the leaves that occasionally flew toward him like little birds. Suddenly, he saw two teenage boys fighting a third who appeared to have a dog leash tied around his neck. Then a new figure approached him, older and larger with wild green eyes but vague features, as if his face were made of watercolors.

“Wanna take a walk with me?” the man said, holding a different leash.

He started running down Beacon Street as fast as he could without once looking back. Good thing he didn’t pick the park to run through as it was mysteriously empty except for the fighting boys and the man who was half-yelling, half-laughing at them.

The wind has its own sound but it’s also part of every other sound. The dinosaurs heard it –they just didn’t write poems about it, he thought. He remembered the way the sink faucets moaned in his parents’ cellar. It was a muted but oddly terrifying sound, like a devil choking. But one afternoon, when he was alone in the cellar, he heard it in a different way and didn’t run upstairs. Instead, he kept pulling himself wildly knowing that this time he wouldn’t stop until he exploded. He could feel it piercing forward like a hot wind building inside him. Then it spilled out onto the cellar floor. He stood over it, astonished, as if it were both dead and alive.

A man walks into a college talent show. He is a student living away from home who thinks he has a gift for making people connect through humor. He tells some mild sex jokes, some observational humor à la Jerry Seinfeld, but steers clear of politics and religion. Things are going pretty well until he starts to shiver. He becomes afraid that the audience will notice it and be distracted from his monologue. He begins to think more about his shivering than his jokes and starts to lose the audience. Later some of his friends tell him he was funny, but he knows they’re lying. It is the last show he ever performs in public.

Shortly after college, after he moved to Philadelphia and began working at an insurance company, he felt the chill again. It was as if it had been following him since his childhood and had finally tracked him down. He was returning from a restaurant when he felt it pass through him like a small, violent wind. Since there was a kind of wind tunnel near his apartment where he was walking, he didn’t think much of it, figuring it was something that would go away in a few seconds. But the cold persisted even after he walked into his lobby and paid his respects to the doorman. He self-consciously paced around to lessen the chill that seemed to have targeted him, especially his neck.

It didn’t get better in the elevator; in fact, if anything, it got worse. Fortunately, there were no other passengers, so he could press himself against the wall to try to create a feeling of warmth. Shortly, though, he realized that was only an illusion.

He wondered if anyone else felt it. The doorman didn’t look any different bent over his racing forms, but how often did he really look at the doorman in a careful way? So he couldn’t really evaluate the doorman’s behavior.

What about the people on the streets? Any unusual activity there? Again, he hadn’t noticed, but ever since he moved to Philadelphia by himself he’d followed his parents’ advice to look straight ahead and never make eye contact with a stranger, though, of course, almost everyone was a stranger.

He began using a lot of blankets at night and wearing a heavy shirt over his sweatpants, but it made little difference. It was as if, ghostlike, the wind had invaded a part of him just above the base of his neck, where it couldn’t be dislodged.

Soon he started seeing doctors. When he let each doctor touch his chill spot, or, more accurately, the chill’s ostensible port of entry (since he felt the coldness internally as opposed to on the surface of his skin), they told him they couldn’t detect any difference in temperature between his neck and any other part of him. He soon decided the doctors were as useless as rocks in the desert.

Then his dreams began, first about the doctors, then about the chill itself. In one dream he was running from the chill, looking over his shoulder at it as he ran towards his apartment. The last time he looked, he saw a face forming on it but he couldn’t recognize it. It didn’t really look like a human face and yet it was nonetheless strangely familiar. If he had a close friend in the building or even in the city or if his parents were in Philadelphia, of course, he would have screamed their name. He thought of the phrase “Life is a scream” as if it were skywriting made by an invisible plane. He pictured his doorman bent over his racing form. Everyone was always monitoring their luck. They had their luck, and he had his chill. He was running so hard now that he felt he was burning–burning and freezing simultaneously.

When he woke up and focused his eyes he was completely dressed, sitting on his couch, no longer sure if he had really been chased by the chill or if he’d dreamed it. He was breathing heavily, panting like an animal, slowly trying to retrieve his breath.

He called his friend Fennel on the phone who told him perhaps he needed to get online and meet a woman. Obvious advice, of course, but coming from Fennel, his best and only friend, it had impact–enough for him to join dating sites and to devote some free time each day to looking at profiles and sending out his own.

There was a woman named Vicky whose kind of cheerful aggression appealed to him– frankly, since he’d left home for Philadelphia, he’d lost some of his own. Also, her emails were kind of funny; perhaps she would discover his “inner comedian,” as he now thought of it.

She suggested a place in Rittenhouse Square he hadn’t heard of, but then, although he ate out at least one meal every day, he hadn’t been keeping track of any restaurant names. The place turned out to be lively and not too pricey– an excellent and considerate choice on her part.

She wore black designer jeans with a classy pink top. He could see she had a good body. She smiled and laughed a lot, but not too much. She seemed to have a lot of experience with quiet men like him. She worked as a legal secretary but wanted to write children’s and young adult books–maybe one day start a small publishing company of some kind. After a glass of wine, he admitted that he wanted to be a comedian and hadn’t completely given up the dream yet.

She thought this was “marvelous,” clapped her hands, and literally squealed with delight. Not since his mother had a woman reacted with such enthusiasm to something he said.

“You’re amazing!” she exclaimed.

Instinctively, he turned away. He didn’t want her to see that he felt he was in love with her already.

“You’re probably wondering why I haven’t said anything funny so far.”

“First of all you have–in a low key kind of way, and I like low key. And second, I know you comedians are often serious people who make comedy out of your pain.”

That seemed to open the door even wider and they began to confide more things in each other–especially her. She told him she was just starting to date again after a long relationship.

“That’s rough,” he said knowingly, although his longest relationship was scarcely a month. After two more glasses of wine he invited her to dinner.

“I’ve got an idea. My place is only a couple of blocks from here. Why don’t you let me fix you some food,” she said.

“No, I couldn’t let you do that.”

“But I’d love to. I have some Chinese and some really nice French hors d’oeuvres. Believe me, they’re too scrumptious–it’ll wreck my diet if you don’t help me eat them.”

He looked genuinely incredulous. “I can’t imagine you needing to be on any kind of diet.”

“Watch out, James, you seem to know how to really get to my heart.”

He laughed–he hoped not too loudly. When she said “heart,” he wanted to think of her soul; instead he pictured her chest that covered it. Yet apparently he’d escaped detection (after all, he shouldn’t think of her as a mind reader), and she still seemed eager to take him to her place.

Her apartment was orderly and feminine, and the colors of the living room matched well. It was lit just brightly enough to be romantic, he thought.

She motioned to a sofa and they sat down together. They spoke for a few minutes and then she suddenly kissed him and said, “Food can wait a little while, can’t it?”

He felt she was borderline drunk and that it wasn’t fair but who was he to resist her. He pictured Fennel, the closest thing he had to a sibling, telling him he was a fool to resist her.

They kissed relentlessly for a minute or two. Soon clothes started to fly off like leaves in the wind. She told him to sit on her carpet, then she slid up to him, put a hand on his head, and pointed him down to her genitals. Meanwhile, she was moaning in an oddly musical way. The singer and the comedian, he remembered thinking, as if they were a stage act.

He felt she had an orgasm in his mouth, though he couldn’t be certain and was afraid to break the spell by asking. Meanwhile, he was getting erect and a little sore in his knees so he got up to enter her.

“Stop! What are you doing?” she half-screamed at him.

“Oh, don’t worry, I have a condom.”

“Worry? I’m not worried, I’m not doing it is what’s happening.”

“But I thought–”

“Don’t think. Just listen. I’m not ready for that.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘Oh,’” she said, clearly mocking him. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, otherwise you could be charged with raping me.”

She was staring at him. There was an odd tattoo by her vagina but he couldn’t read it without staring at it and he certainly wasn’t going to do that. He forced himself to look at her eyes. She seemed a little calmer now.

“I’m sorry there was a misunderstanding,” he said.

“Yeah, so am I. You better get your things on now and leave.”

For a long time he thought about his ill-fated date with Vicky. Finally, it hurt a little less every day to remember, as Fennel had predicted. But then the chill returned, albeit briefly, not in his dreams but in his waking life.

There is always a way to reassure ourselves, he thought, hence the saying “Where there’s life there’s hope.” In his case, he thought that the chill happened much less frequently in his apartment, yet of course when he thought some more about it, he had to concede that might not really be the case, that even if it did happen less frequently in his apartment, when it happened it was often unbearably intense–so that the next time he felt it, he went out in the night as if he had no choice. He thought that if the chill were in his home then he was essentially homeless. Your home is the death of choices, he thought.

He walked a block and a half into Center City with no sign of the chill. He even undid the top button of his winter coat (which he wore although it was already early spring). He was struck by how bright and festive the city looked. Every place was intriguing and strangely filled with charm. He tried to stay calm and rein in his tendency to romanticize things. Things weren’t more beautiful than before, he told himself. He was simply able to appreciate them more because the chill wasn’t chasing him.

Another block passed. People seemed to be smiling at him–what was he to make of that? He decided, superstitiously perhaps, to stay on his same route at the same speed heading downtown through Center City. He would not undo another button, though he was tempted to, and would continue to look at his city with both admiration and trust.

But then, like the first signs of a toothache, he started to feel the chill again, and before he could walk another block it was already gnawing at him.

He broke into a trot then, soon deviating from Center City. A moment later he turned left onto a side street and ducked into a bar breathlessly, where he sat next to a thin blond man in a black T-shirt and black cowboy hat.

A man walks into a bar quasi-hysterical, he thought, and doesn’t know whether it’s worse to talk about what happened or keep it to himself.

“Hey, pardner,” the cowboy said, turning slightly towards him and in the process almost making eye contact. “You OK?”

“Sure. Why do you ask?”

“You look like you just seen a ghost. Other than that, no reason.”

The cowboy was smiling although he couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, only that they were part of a smile in progress. He forced himself to laugh strictly to be polite to the cowboy before realizing that now he’d have to say something at least remotely true about his general condition.

“Well, I guess you’re right.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Are you shivering because it’s cold or ‘cause it isn’t?”

“It just hasn’t been the best night of my life.”

“Sometimes you gotta fish for a long time before you feel any kind of tug on your line.”

He looked hard at the cowboy in the half dark of the bar and thought maybe he really was a cowboy. The way the light in the bar was, the cowboy’s head seemed still and strangely suspended, like the work of a taxidermist.

“This your first time here?”

He felt his heart beat as if the chill were already hovering nearby in the bar.

“Why? You come here often?”

“Yeah. That’s why I asked you if you’ve ever been here before. I figured I would have noticed you one time or another if you had.”

Was there something extraordinary about this place, he wondered. He noticed then that it was entirely populated by men, some of whom were being overtly affectionate. Oh that, he thought. He’d have to make it clear to the cowboy where he stood on the issue.

“Sure. That makes sense,” he mumbled.

“Care to dance?”

He wasn’t even aware that there was music.

“No thanks, I’m a little tired.”

He didn’t feel like getting into the fact that he was straight. He saw a quick image of the boys in the park and their wild-eyed master.

“Sure, I get it, I’m a little tired too. Truth is, I’m exhausted.”

“Why’s that? Hard day at work?”

“Wasn’t work so much as what happened after work.”

“Oh. Feel like telling?”

“I did some running. Serious running,” the cowboy said, looking at him incriminatingly.

“I admire you guys who stay in shape like that. Yeah, I really admire you runners.”

The cowboy held up his hand in protest. “I didn’t say I was a runner. Never said that.”

“Oh?”

“Just that I was running today.”

“Where to?” he asked, immediately thinking he was being uncharacteristically nosy. Maybe escaping the chill had affected his behavior.

“I was running after someone, tell you the truth.”

Of course he wanted to know why but he held his tongue. For several seconds they sat in silence.

“Bet you want to know, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t, would I?”

“I don’t know. There are so many different opinions about what makes someone human these days.”

“I hope in any group discussion on the matter I’d get voted in?”

“To what?”

“Humanity.”

“Oh. You never know about things like that. People are so. . . slippery.”

He smiled, not sure if he should laugh or not.

“Anyway,” the cowboy said (he noticed that his Western or pseudo-Western accent had temporarily disappeared), “I was actually running after you.”

He stared at the cowboy intently and then turned his head away as if he’d just looked too directly at the sun.

“What do you mean?”

The cowboy smiled thinly while a series of peculiar expressions seemed to fight for supremacy on his face.

“Can’t say it any more clearly. Hasn’t anybody ever run after you before?”

His immediate temptation was to say no but then he thought about that man in the park back in Boston.

“But why would you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Run after me? Did you think I’d dropped my hat or something?”

“No.”

“I mean, you don’t even know me, so why would you run after me?”

“I didn’t say I knew you just that I ran after you. Did the other people who ran after you all know you?”

A valid point, but one he didn’t feel like pursuing. Maybe the cowboy was only acting out some fantasy, or making some kind of avant-garde pass at him. It would have been much easier to have just danced with him.

“I seem to be making you uncomfortable,” the cowboy said.

He shrugged.

“I’m going to use the men’s room for a minute, but don’t worry, I’ll be back, and we can talk some more about this.”

“Sure,” he said, as neutrally as possible.

He was afraid to look in the direction of the bathroom, afraid to see the cowboy moving or perhaps in some way to see only the wind. Maybe the cowboy thought he was someone he knew. If he saw either of his parents in Boston he’d run after them. Perhaps that’s what happened to the cowboy.

But that line of thought balanced against the cowboy’s behavior wasn’t really reassuring. It was preposterous and simply an unrealistic conclusion to reach. Wasn’t it more possible, since he’d already asked him to dance, that the cowboy was trying to intimidate him in some way that would impress him, that he simply wanted him sexually? He himself had lived long enough to know that people of all kinds were capable of acting that way, though he had never been that aggressive. His night with Vicki was proof of that. He was always the pursued and never the pursuer.

He got up from the bar then and walked to the door. Fortunately, he hadn’t bought a drink yet so he wouldn’t have to be delayed by paying for it.

For a block, he walked at full speed, then broke into a run. He didn’t hear or feel anything but the sound of his running, the strange music his shoes made on the sidewalk. He remembered as a kid trying to outrun a dog that eventually bit him. He always thought he could have avoided the bite if he’d just run a little faster.

Colors streamed by him like water as he ran into the wind, his eyes tearing like little windblown ponds. He had no concept of direction. Soon, it was like running into a blizzard. For a long time he ran this blind blizzard run, then finally he saw his building tall and proudly monolithic like a fortress at the top of a hill.

The doorman gave him a funny look as he walked by but what did it matter? People could only really judge you if you let them.

When the elevator came he was ready for it. A woman from his floor who rarely talked to him felt an impulse to quasi-acknowledge him with a nod which he happily returned. It was strangely reassuring. There was no ensuing conversation but that was OK, perhaps better to protect the moment which words so often destroyed.

A muted chill crept somewhere between his neck and left shoulder but it wasn’t freezing. Now it felt more like a cool spot in a warm desert.

When he got inside he went directly to his room. On the bureau were two 5” by 7” silver framed pictures of his parents. In one his father was wearing shorts that showed his hairy legs. He was smiling at him. His father had even taken his glasses off for the photograph. In the other picture, his parents were kissing while he sat in front of them, no more than three years old, playing in the grass. He thought of calling them but they were probably already in bed. Instead, he sat on the edge of his bed and stared at his parents. It was odd to stare at them but it was also calming. A moment later he realized the chill was gone, and then, with all his clothes on, he lay down for a minute and fell asleep. When he woke up he felt he was in a warm green park shaped like the yard of his childhood, a shining blue sky overhead. Peace is temporary, he thought, but always blessed.

Apsis

by Billy O’Callaghan

After the dreams have come, the mornings feel like glass around me. Everything looks too bright, too well preserved. My way of coping is to sit in the kitchen in silence and try to wait it out. I don’t close my eyes because the faces hang there, in that darkness, ready to loom, faces that will make me smile to see again but which will also bring deep sadness, knowing that they’ve been lost, that I have let them go. The house is always still then, silent apart from the acceptable sounds, the clicking of pipes in the walls, water running at a murmur, the paper-weight of my own breath and Barbara’s as she idles about small chores, maybe rain against the glass or the crack of snow shifting its weight on the roof. While the coffee percolates, I sit and try not to move or even think, knowing too well the traps and pitfalls that lie in those directions.

I like to watch Barbara buttering toast. It’s a small thing, but it softens the solitude. She scrapes the slices with a knife, then cuts them into triangles. We’re middle-aged, and have dug our rut. But plenty have it worse than us. In a lit kitchen, Queens can be almost anywhere, and the missing things matter less. The butter is a chemically correct shade of yellow and easily spread, but is actually a type of low-salt-content, sunflower-oil substitute. All along its packaging it boasts in outright lies about the remarkably comparable qualities of its taste. And, in keeping with this trend, the bread is not real bread either, at least not my definition of real. Finger-thick slices the colour and flavour of dust, with an elasticity that bloats with every chew and which leaves grains of itself on my tongue and in my teeth even after swallowing. Lately, Barb has been pushing for a switch to one of those pro-biotic spreads. The change will make no great difference, since it is all just pseudo-magic anyway, and empty promises, and I’ll probably give in, but not yet, because I’m stubborn. Healthy diets are all the rage, even among the dying, but I still hold out on a few of the details.

The way my father and my sister live on in my mind is the way I saw them after I’d broken the news of my going: the old man at the table, head bowed over a mug of hot tea, and across the room, in the chair beside the unlit fire, Áine weeping, her fist clenching and relaxing around an old handkerchief that she held pressed to her lips in an effort to quell the tiny rumblings of her sobs. She was already married by then, and pregnant to a point that was just beginning to show; barely twenty but bulked and rubbed to a state of middle-age. Her hands shone pale and alabaster-hard from cold-water work, and her hair, the blackness of soot and wild as briar, hung long to her shoulders. Tears came, in a strained, wrenching way familiar to our kind, and she let them fall.

We waited until she’d gone home before starting on the whiskey. We had a night in early April, the waking part of the season but with the blanched colours of winter still holding sway. Rain had come in with the evening, following a watery sun’s slow traipse across the sky and infusing my last Inishbofin dusk with an ochre tinge that I’d always remember, but it was a soft rain that thinned out with the last of the light and by eight or so there was only darkness. Even the wind had fallen.

I was sixteen, and already broad across the chest, inflicted from time spent on the water and squatting in field corners with a measured stillness and an appreciation of balance in all things. I felt set for the world, innocent enough perhaps to believe in dreams but capable on a blood level and beating like a drum to run, to see cities and know the press of crowds, to meet and dance with women, to drink, fight, work and swear.

At the fireside, I watched pale, powdery beards of ash fringe the turf. A settled redness offered heat but little else to the room, but the level of dark felt right, somehow. Better to keep the details hidden, in case minds should change. I could hear him lumbering through into the pantry for a bottle, the rubber soles of his boots sucking up damp notes from the flagstone floor, every step laid down heavy.

“Here,” he said, his voice all crust, pressing the space. “Get this down you, boy.”

His best whiskey. Two years locked away and still with its seal unbroken. I took the offered glass and raised it for the filling. He poured in splashes, then hauled the other armchair in close to the fire. We’d not long finished clearing the back field of rocks, an acre and a half that had taken the better part of a month, and the pull of such work still lay heavy in our bodies. So it felt good to sit.

“Easy with it,” my father said, watching me in the dark. “Don’t force it down. That’s the trick. Let it find its own way.”

For a while, we drank. I held myself close to the fire, taking the heat against my face even after my skin had acquired a papery stiffness, and tried not to look at him because even in the dark there was too much to see, too many marks. When we spoke at all we kept mainly to the subject of the weather, how bad the winter had been for the fishing and worse, with so much wind, for the soil, our occasionally murmured words rising up in hesitant jabs and then, out of embarrassment, falling away again. The sense of goodbye lay within the night’s grain, and the silence made that a sad thing to bear. But the silence was still easier than words. I was new at that time to whiskey, and it burned and then soothed his mouth. In the low firelight the glass glowed, and the whiskey, warmed from the outside in by the casual inductance of my cupping hands, tasted unexpectedly sweet. Through the fusions of raw and malted barley, a terrific watery cleanness, and then the peaty aftershock. To the end, I braced himself for what I felt certain had to come: the plea to stay, its tune infused with threat or blackmail. But the matter was already decided. By morning, no matter what was said, I’d be on the boat across, and then Dublin, perhaps London, perhaps, in time, New York. No set plans, beyond the running.

It’s natural, of course, to reminisce, especially as we age, and regret is a flavour familiar to anyone who has ever fled one life in the chase for another. I was sixteen when I left, and mired in some half-formed state between childhood and the ways of adults. Most of the time, I cling to this as my excuse. And, most of the time, it is enough. But the truth is that I’d already felt the loom of an end.

Some weeks earlier, we’d been down in the bottom field, laying out a turf rick, and the old man had straightened from his stoop, tossed down the armful of clods that he was holding and went to lean against the wall. His mouth hung open and his staring eyes shone dark against the waxy flats of his face. Weariness was part of it, but levels of exhaustion were facts of our lives and this was something more convoluted, something vampiric.

“We’ll stop a while, boy,” he said, once he felt sure of his breath. “Sure, there’s legs in the day yet.”

His voice retained an element of composure but seemed detached and not quite natural in how it used its air. I averted my gaze, electing instead to consider firstly the rash of cloud that cloaked without quite obliterating the colourless smudge of sun and then, when that wasn’t enough, the rough-cut chunks of turf which lay scattered around my boots. I longed to sit too, and the support of the stone wall looked inviting, but I allowed myself only a minute’s pause before bending again to the chore, knowing that the day would not end for us until the work did. I gathered up the bricks of turf, stacked them as I’d been shown so many times, laying them into place thick-side down, sod-side up so that the rick could waterproof itself over months’ worth of drying time. Working steadily and without much thought, focusing on nothing but the order of the job, focusing least of all on the ache that sunk as a chill into the low of my back. Cold grey mud packed the folds of my neck and coated my hands like a leprous second skin, and I tasted and breathed it, feeling the sourness of its soupy grit between my back teeth whenever I clenched my jaw. There was no way to erase what I’d seen, but island boys and men know well enough what fits the silence and what does not, and the shadow that greyed and blunted him seemed a harbinger, of sorts. My father did not die that day in the field, or even that year, but with the benefit of hindsight, he did seem to skirt a bow of some hill around that time, because what followed was degrees of slow, meticulous disintegration.

That day, stacking the turf, I considered the old man’s blanched expression, the accepted horror within the down-turned eyes, the mouth that sucked and bubbled like a stab wound, rabid for the cold refreshing air, and the image that stormed my mind was of my mother laid out in a lamp-lit bedroom, dead at barely thirty and looking as if she had never lived at all. An aneurysm of some sort, a sudden thunder crack that ripped her from the world and reduced her to that smoke-yellowed mannequin state, mute as space and stiffer than any bone, her raven hair unnaturally flat without the pull of wind to turn it feral, tendrils of fringe boxing in her broad forehead. Because I’d been so young, the details that I remember seem detached from one another and have to be stitched together with lines of logic. After the sun went down the house had quickly filled, but through most of the night people continued to arrive, women carrying cakes or plates of cold sliced meat, men laden with dark unmarked bottles and jugs of stout or hauling sacks of pigs’ trotters that would be left to boil for hours and soften to a state of almost unbelievable sweetness.

Initially, I’d had a place to sit, a piece of couch cushion that I was forced to share with Áine but which still afforded comfort. Then, as the space thinned, I was moved and resettled on the flagstones beside the empty fire and given no choice but to stand. Áine kept me at her side and held my hand, with our fingers tightly entwined. Her intent was to discourage thoughts of escape, but it was an unnecessary precaution. Fear kept me still, fear that was different from the anxiety I felt for strange soundings in the night or those things the darkness masked. Because this time the worst had already happened, and the aftermath lay before me as a hole in the world, gaping and immutable.

My mind that night of my mother’s wake was full of many things, but heaviest in my thoughts was a memory of something she had once told me, months or a year earlier, her voice exasperated and yet full of compassion as she knelt before me and wrapped a piece of cotton gauze around yet another of my badly skinned knees: “You know, Billy,” she’d said, “if you don’t run so much, you won’t fall so much.” Standing holding hands with Áine in that crowded living room, I let those words roll through me again and again, and there was still a sense of calm to be had from the gentle remembered float of her voice. But from the little I’d glimpsed through the bedroom door, the previous night and again that morning, stillness seemed to me a far worse fate than falling. Surely there were times when the feel of all that chasing energy was more than worth the tumble, and the skinned knee. I didn’t fully understand what had happened but sensed enough to realise what death must mean, and it was the reverence that the word earned which made me feel so afraid. Beside me, Áine’s breathing had the thin, put-upon texture of shocked calm, and her fingers between mine were cold and dry, as if some essence of who she was had retreated, taking all her heat with it. But I was glad of the touch, glad of the promised reassurance offered by skin against my skin. We stood there, breathing the good wintry aroma of the sweet-boiling trotters thickening the air and insinuating every pore, afraid to speak but watching the tide of faces that we knew well, neighbours bunched in groups, their cheeks reddened from whiskey, their mood sombre, especially as the light softened and was lost and the time came for lanterns to be lit. Each was sincere in his or her grief, but it was different for them, a passing thing. They were saddened that one of their own had been lost to them, but the equilibrium of their world at least held its level.

Across the room, ignored by everyone, my father sat on the edge of a hard chair, head bowed, weeping. Sometimes, when the packed bodies parted just enough, I could see his big shoulders heaving against the punch of tears, and whenever the murmured conversations hit a lull, the sound of his pain carried throughout the house, forlorn as the lowing of something bestial across a span of valleys and fields. That weeping continued for hours, and through the terrible days that followed. It shook him and shook us all as we huddled together at the heart side of the sloping graveyard’s opened ground while rain lathered our faces, and it continued after we had returned home and were swallowed up once more into that small house’s dense gloom. But at some point it did soften and eventually it stopped all together, to be replaced with the kind of silence that told its own story.

Glimpsed through a doorway left ajar, death for me is and will always be a curtained bedroom yellowed and set off kilter by a burning lantern, and on the bed a face too still, known but no longer quite right, the muscles too relaxed, the shape pulled slack in every wrong direction. Calm, but too still. Once seen, it had felt a thing impossible to forget, or deny, yet somehow and for a long time I managed to find a way of doing both. But that day in the field, the month or so before my leaving, there it was again. Not the same, but with enough similarity to make me remember. I laid the turf in place and thought of how things would be a year from now. And then I thought about running.

People die every day; the world is full of little voids. My mother had slipped from a living, breathing, laughing state to a still and yellowy husk, and part of the overgrown hillside, tucked beneath the winds and crooked stones. And not alone either, but there with her people, the old stock who lived and died before my time as well as the minutes’ worth of nameless younger sister that I’d seen only as a dreamy blueness through a grey, threadbare bed sheet and in my mind, in the darkness, can sometimes see still. That hillside bulged, with my mother and the rest, but still the shadow roamed, insatiable, seeking and marking out, separating weaklings for the cull.

In a city like New York, in a city like Dublin, even, no one thinks this way, not like they can and frequently do in country places and on islands. In the cities, steel and stone are the tangibles, and death is just death, a fact of life and an end to things. No hoods, no scythes, no shadows, no capital letters. In the cities, stories are for the pages of books. Told sometimes to pleasure or to scare, but not believed, at least not to a level where belief gets to dictate. Neither ides nor omens for New York, London, Paris, Dublin, only facts. It has to do with different sets of freedoms.

On those mornings after the dreams have come, Barbara brings coffee and sits with her back to the windows, facing the open kitchen door so that she can see through into the hallway. Always waiting for something, some news from afar, even if it’s just the morning paper. Sometimes she hums little snatches of whatever song she has woken with in her mind. And when the stillness becomes too much, she rises again, and switches on the radio. It is always the same, a grumbling of static, music jerking in and out of tune, and then either a news station or something gentle and innocuous, ’sixties and ’seventies hits, but with the volume kept low. We listen, finish our coffee and toast, then reach for bowls and the cereal. These days, we eat muesli. Eggs are high in cholesterol, and bacon has become like a swear word, but muesli is meant to be good for the heart, or the bowels, or something.

The whole thing is a farce, shadow play. After the dreams have come and the bounds of time have been broken, what is gone feels far more immediate, more enlivened, than what tries to count as the here and now. And such mornings fill me with the sensation of having been cast adrift. I sip the coffee and quietly digest my breakfast, knowing that I properly belong nowhere. As good as New York has been to me, I’ll never understand the city on a conspiratorial level. I was not born for these streets. Barbara, who is full of her own concerns, seems content in leaving me to my silence, but I know that, were she to press me into conversation, my words would come only and ever in Irish.

This would probably amuse and then frighten her, and the thought of it frightens me too, because I sense that once I started there’d be no stopping, that it would be like splitting an artery. I chew the muesli and keep my eyes open, inhaling with care because the bare stone walls of my father’s cottage feel suddenly only a breath away, the small kitchen window coated with the salt and grit of the sea wind and whistling drafts where the sealing putty has crusted and turned to powder. If I try at all, I can feel the heavy wool of an old sweater across my back and shoulders, a thing passed down, the thick shape of it sagging around me several sizes too big, but its weight comforting against the bleak days, its odour filling my mouth with sooty, slightly gamey sweetness, a familiar taste that itches my tongue and lights a fire deep down in my throat. And when the wind catches just right in the eaves, it can pass, almost, for the high keening of Áine, deep in one of the ancient laments she so loved to sing, as she busies herself with collecting breakfast eggs from the small coop or struggles with a slopping pail of water from the communal pump at the bottom of the hill.

Inishbofin is home, even still, but the connections to the place are too long lost, the damage irreparable. My father dead within two years of my leaving, Áine also gone. There were the boys, her sons, my nephews, three of them, steps of stairs, but they are grown men now and have themselves long since abandoned the island. They have my address but none of them have kept in touch, as so often happens. They can’t be blamed. They don’t know me. I’m a name, that’s all, a nowhere man and a nobody. Someone they will have heard their mother mention, someone to look up if they ever happen to find themselves in New York, who can speak, if pressed, as they do and who will offer food and a bed, money, if needs be. I am nothing to their lives, but even though I only know them from the flattened expressions of the photographs that Áine used to send every Christmastime without fail, they are, in a way, everything to me. Because they remain the last surviving links to my past, to who I was before I started trying so hard to be someone else.

Stinkman

by J. T. Townley

Then Jonathon’s up and over the railing, crimson cape flapping in the September breeze. He falls farther than he expects before hitting the warning track; on impact, he grunts, dropping to a knee. He eyes the vivid expanse of green stretching out before him, the bright chalk foul line, the red clay of the warning track. The gravelly surface prickles his open palms. The air smells of new leather, sweat, and garlic. Everything seems bigger from this angle.

He’s about to make history.

With Fisher’s help, Jonathon did his homework: Dodgers vs. Giants, both on a pennant run; Saturday night capacity crowd; warmest part of the cold San Francisco summer; seventh-inning stretch, just after the singalong; national TV coverage. Fisher even studied the stadium layout, determining the smartest entry point to be down the first base line in right field, between the bullpen and the ball boy. Jonathon leans into the shadows, hugging the wall, grateful no one’s noticed him. He takes a deep breath, then another, listening to the last sour strains of singing.

“Hey, buddy,” calls the ball boy.

Jonathon hunches over his knees, hoping his cape will cloak him in invisibility.

“You can’t be here,” he says.

“It’s now or never,” Jonathon whispers.

Then he blasts onto the field, nothing in front of him but meticulously trimmed Bermuda grass. But he doesn’t make it ten yards before the ball boy screams:

“Come back here!”

The kid’s stronger than he looks, more agile, too. In one swift movement, he picks up his chair, flips it over, and slings it at Jonathon. Before it hits him, he dives out of the way, rolling over his right shoulder and coming up on one knee. Crouching in the outfield grass, he surveys the scene: ball boy straddling the foul line, chair flung and broken. The roar from the stands dies down for a moment, as if spectators are all holding their breath. He knows he’s been spotted.

There’s no turning back now.

Jonathon trots down the foul line toward the infield. It’s not part of the plan, and he’s not sure what he’s doing. But he’s not ready for those acres of empty grass. He wants to be near the empathetic gazes, or gawking stares, of the crowd in the stands. Security will think he’s taunting them. As he wanders past the bullpen, the fans go wild, screaming and laughing, elbowing their friends and pointing, snapping photos with every imaginable digital device. Yet the behemoth, Viking-bearded men in the bullpen seem much less enthused. They glare and growl, flexing their pecs and deltoids and biceps, tattoos stretching and swelling. Or, worse, they may not be flexing at all. Without taking their eyes off him, they stuff their mouths with sunflower seeds, one bag after another, till their cheeks puff out like chipmunks’. Fisher, strategically positioned in right-center field with his ultra-zoom video camera and bag of crimson-dyed baseballs with the Stinkman logo, must be cursing Jonathon’s headlight-stunned stupidity.

Although the first baseman and umpire both laugh when they notice him, Jonathon takes off before he makes the edge of the infield, running back up the foul line. He’s about to break for the outfield wall when something stings him. First on his right thigh, then his neck and cheek and arm. A quick glance over his right shoulder; an involuntary wince as he’s stung all over his face. Wasps? Killer bees? Nano-techno security drones? Jonathon squints and blinks just in time, as he’s pelted in the face with a cluster of wet sunflower seeds shot from the mouths of relief pitchers and backup catchers like rounds from a Tommy gun.

He flees into the deep, green sea, settling into a strong rhythm. He’s glad to get moving, too. It’s not warm out here. He never should’ve listened to Fisher, who insisted that the Stinkman costume he’d designed—jeans and retro sneakers and vintage t-shirt to go with the cape and mask—was fine for the graphic novel but wouldn’t work for the Great Streak, as they’d come to call it.

“You gotta spice it up, bro.”

“What do you mean?”

“Show some flesh!”

“What for?”

“That’s what streaking is, man.”

Not that Jonathon was about to ditch his Stinkman costume. Parading the character in public was at least half the point. Fisher cooked up all sorts of alternatives—opaque body paint, a flesh-colored full-body stocking—but Jonathon felt squeamish about getting naked in front of thousands of spectators and millions of TV viewers.

So he replaced the retro sneakers with his good running shoes. He chucked the t-shirt, substituting his bare chest covered in a giant, crimson S! The jeans went, too, and Jonathon’s glad about that, since they would’ve severely restricted his range of motion. Of course, he might’ve done better than a jockstrap dyed crimson to match the cape and mask. But at least he isn’t parading his junk around in public, and he had the tear-away pants for pre-streak warmth. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco: He’s heard the quip a thousand times, but only now, running across the outfield grass, does he truly understand what it means.

Although he’s a little disoriented, Jonathon points himself toward right-center field. That’s the plan: aim between the two outfielders and rendezvous with Fisher. He’s already wasted precious moments dawdling over by the bullpen, so he picks up his pace, from jogging to running, though not sprinting. He has to keep his legs fresh while he can—for security. He blows past the right fielder, a gangly All-American with legs like a horse who must be six-five. When he spots Jonathon coming, the player smirks and nods, then goes right back to throwing long toss. Jonathon cuts to his left, angling toward the warning track. The outfield smells of cut grass and Neatsfoot oil. His pounding pulse and heavy breathing drown out the swelling crowd noise. The centerfielder all but ignores him, and he makes the outfield wall more quickly than he expects. Fisher’s right where he’s supposed to be, video camera in hand and rolling.

“What the hell, Jonny?”

“I am Stinkman!” Jonathon says, hamming it up. “Now drop the stash!”

Fisher passes him the bag, organic cotton dyed Stinkman crimson. It’s full of baseballs.

“Chop, chop, bro,” says Fisher, gazing back toward the first base dugout. “Cavalry’s coming.”

Jonathon takes a quick glance. Fisher’s right: grounds crew is on their way. What’s taken them so long is another question; guess he caught them back on their heels, swilling Gordon Biersch and munching garlic fries. He drags the ball bag, which is heavier than he anticipates, along the wall toward centerfield. Trotting into the grass, he faces the crowd, then starts chucking crimson baseballs into the stands. They’re on their feet, arms outstretched, beckoning. Every time fans come up with a ball, they hold it high, like a trophy. They don’t always catch them cleanly, and there’s a minor melee as men and women, from their fifties on down to their teens, scramble for each crimson Stinkman souvenir. Jonathon hurls them as quickly as he can, launching baseballs throughout the outfield stands. He even chucks one to each Giants outfielder as a peace offering. They study the balls, gaze at Jonathon, then toss them up into the stands.

When the grounds crew goons start to close in, Jonathon lobs a few balls toward them. The fans think it’s funny; the goons see the balls but not the humor. This side of second base, the three of them spread out, one to right field, one to left, the third headed straight toward him. It’s a well-drilled maneuver designed to hem him in from all sides. But Jonathon isn’t the easy prey they’re used to. He’s been a runner for years, even had a scholarship to UCLA, almost, only by then he was sick of the competition and wanted to go to art school. Jonathon never quit running, though, not even when his artist friends gave him hell. “It’s meditative,” he’d say. “And when you get lung cancer from all the cigarettes, I’ll be running marathons.”

Jonathon has serious stamina, and he’s too smart to let himself get cornered. He sprints for a gap, splitting their attack, then he keeps them moving. Two of the three look fit, if not exactly athletic, though judging from his love handles, the third, who seems familiar somehow, doesn’t keep himself in shape. From the beginning, the idea was always to stay out on the field as long as possible. Jonathon would simply wear them out, a war of attrition. And it’s working. He keeps the goons at a safe distance, running them all over the outfield grass. For a while, he worries that one of the players will grow annoyed with his hijinks, tripping or shouldering him down as he lopes by, Stinkman cape aflutter. To Jonathon’s surprise, they seem amused by his antics. When they’ve seen enough, they trot to the infield for a team conference behind the mound, while the pitcher tosses a few to stay warm.

He keeps the grounds crew at bay for a long time. Longer, he imagines, than anyone expects; much longer. Makes them look like the Three Stooges. With the adrenaline surging through his system, he could run all day, or night. Time seems to slow down and almost stop, and between one passing moment and the next, Jonathon dreams of Stinkman stardom. Thousands, maybe millions of hits on the website, courtesy of the promotional crimson baseballs. Millions more thanks to the video Fisher’s shooting of the Great Streak, which they’ll imbed on the website. It will, as they say, go viral. His teaser panels from the graphic novel-in-progress will wow his new fans. Publishers will follow the buzz; a bidding war will ensue. When it’s published, Stinkman will be met with rave reviews and massive sales. Jonathon can see it now. There’ll be so much hype, the movie producers will come knocking, and before he knows it, he’ll negotiate a full-blown Hollywood deal for Stinkman: The Movie, complete with megabuck tie-ins, maybe even Stinkman action figures.

The crowd is still with him, drunk, laughing, enthusiastic about the sustained diversion from this low-scoring pitchers’ duel. Their clapping and chanting swells: Stinkman! Stinkman! Stinkman! Though it almost sounds like Streakman? Or maybe Stickman? A few even yell Stanfordman, owing, Jonathon guesses, to the S! and the color and the campus’s close proximity. Anyway, it’s not important, none of that matters right now. Once they go to the website, they’ll understand their mistake, then fall in love with the coolest, most original superhero to ever grace the silver screen. That’s how fast it’ll all happen. A complete whirlwind.

The longer he spends on the outfield grass, the more frenzied the crowd’s support becomes. They love when the goons lunge at him and miss. Along with stamina, Jonathon has lateral quickness and agility. He can dodge left or right, or feint right and go left, freezing them in their tracks like some star NFL running back. When he realizes how into it the fans have become, he waves his crimson cape with a flourish, like some crazy matador. ¡Olé! they yell as another goon whiffs at him, then stumbles and face-plants into the left-centerfield grass, while Jonathon dashes to open ground.

He can’t remember the last time he had this much fun!

Jonathon came up with the idea for a graphic novel when he was seventeen. It’s taken him all these years to create a simple character with profound, unexpected powers: the ability to sniff out lies, deceit, and betrayal, the stink of society. It’s a feat of imaginative genius. Yet in the end, Jonathon’s an artist first, a writer maybe never, and though over time he’s filled out Stinkman’s backstory, he’s struggled to find the central narrative that could drive an extended storyline. The eureka moment came last week when Fisher took Jonathon out for his thirtieth birthday.

“Dude, get a grip,” said Fisher, fiddling with his long blond locks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve been working on this thing for like ten years.”

“Closer to fifteen.”

Fisher slurped from his fifth pint, then said, “That’s what I mean.”

“So?” Jonathon’s tongue felt fat. “It’s a labor of love.”

“You finished art school, bro. You’ve got a sweet job designing for Quake City Skateboards with me. Time to let it go, right? Live a little.”

“No, Fish, just the opposite. I’m getting old, man. It’s now or never. And I’m almost there. I’ve refined my style, and I’ve even got a great arch nemesis.”

“Super-hot super-chick in skin-tight spandex?”

“Blacks and grays, very Goth. She’s called The Fog.”

“Nice.” Fisher took another gulp of porter. “But let me guess: you’ve got no plot.”

“Nailed it in one.”

Fisher didn’t hesitate: “Write your own story.”

“Come on, Fish. Gimme a break, it’s my birthday.”

“You’re not listening, bro. Just model the thing on your life. Keep it simple. Thirty-something dude—”

“Just turned thirty. Today.” Jonathon slumped on his stool. “I’m fucking prehistoric, man.”

“Hey, everyone,” Fisher slurred. “Meet my good buddy Gerry Hattrick.”

Jonathon faked a laugh.

“Seriously, you’ve got this thirty year-old dude, still lives in his parents’ basement in Berkeley—”

“It’s not that pathetic. The rent’s cheap.”

“You want my help? Or you gonna keep interrupting?”

“You’re right,” said Jonathon. “Sorry.”

“Make him this average dude just like you, Jonny. No offense. This art school runner guy, loves to draw and paint and surf and skate. He’s got a good life, or not bad, but he longs for something more.”

“The graphic novel.”

“Yep.” Fisher chuckled. “Only he can’t come up with a story.”

“Thanks for the help, bro.”

“Take it easy, Jonny. Let me finish. Until he comes down with your dude’s disease.”

“Condition. Phantosmia.”

“Fucking drives him nuts, till he realizes he’s not hallucinating. The stink is real. It’s everywhere.”

“And so I, or my character based upon me, I become—”

“That’s right.”

Jonathon stood behind his stool and flexed. At the top of his lungs, he yelled: “I am Stinkman!”

After bobbing and weaving for a while, toying with the grounds crew, Jonathon sprints for a patch of open grass, then gazes up into the stands. By now, he’s over in the left field corner. While he hadn’t noticed it before, everyone in Section 137 sports a Stinkman costume—even the women! He thinks maybe it’s the glare from the stadium lights, or even lack of oxygen from so much running.

Only his vision isn’t impaired.

And he’s not even breathing hard.

He dodges one goon, then another. The third grounds guy, the one with the love handles, has all but thrown in the towel, giving half-hearted chase, buckling over, trying to catch his breath, clutching at a side-cramp.

“Have a heart, Steckman,” he says.

Jonathon does a double-take, stumbling a little.

“Holy shit, he yells. Flooty?”

“The one and only,” the goon gasps. “Give us a break and come along quietly, okay? You’re holding up the game.”

Jonathon thinks he’s losing it, right here in front of forty-plus thousand people. Because that’s where the name originally came from.

Fucking Aaron Flooty.

Sacramento High. Flooty was captain of the varsity football team, Jonathon a clueless freshman. It happened in the locker room: Flooty smashed him against a locker, shoved him to the floor, and pinned his arm behind his back. Another knuckle-dragger whipped it out and pissed all over him. They all laughed. Then Flooty said:

“You stink, Steckman. So that’s your new name.”

Stinkman.

And it stuck. For years. Which really stank.

Later, after Fisher bails him out, Jonathon will tell him all about Flooty.

“He was this bully fuckhead, used to taunt me back in high school. I was just a scrawny little cross country twerp, man.”

“Tell me about it,” Fisher will say. “Back at Stockton High, I was a little emo musician wannabe. Carried my guitar with me everywhere, one of those backpack gig bags?”

“Aaron fucking Flooty.”

“Dude give you swirlies, stuff you in your locker, that kind of shit?”

“Something like that.”

“Knock you around in the hallways, break your guitar, screw the shy, sexy girl you had a monster crush on?”

“Take it easy, Fish.”

Fisher will slow in Bay Bridge traffic, looking pensive. “Hey, man, at least you reclaimed the name, right?”

When Jonathon glances up, the dozens, or maybe hundreds, of Stinkman lookalikes are still there, cheering and high-fiving as the real Stinkman, the original, works his on-the-field magic. Then a tall, lanky man of indeterminate age—also sporting Stinkman regalia—comes loping up the third-base line and along the left-field wall. On stilts. He sticks to the warning track so he won’t sink into the soft outfield turf. Fans cheer and holler, though it’s a mystery why, since the guy’s clearly a poseur. And he’s stealing the limelight, the thieving bastard! Jonathon wishes he had a crimson baseball or two to knock the guy off his twelve-foot pedestal.

But any publicity is good publicity, right?

Now here comes an old VW Beetle, right across the grass. How did it even get onto the field? Jonathon’s sure it must be a security detail sent to crush his shenanigans so the overpaid athletes can finish their game. Until he notices the bug’s paint job, a floral motif in primary colors. The car stops in dead centerfield. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the doors open, and clown after clown emerges, too many for Jonathon to count on the run. Yet these are no ordinary circus entertainers. Maybe they wear multicolored rainbow wigs and bright red fake noses, crazy red-and-white makeup and white gloves. Some even carry honkers. But none of them lumbers about in giant shoes and oversized one-piece jumpsuits with stripes or polka-dots and ruffled collars. No, they all wear matching crimson capes and eye masks, jock straps and running shoes. And they sprint around their little car like someone called a Chinese fire drill. Then, more quickly than they arrived, they all pile back into the car and putter across the outfield to a gate in the right-field wall.

Soon everyone will sport superhero crimson.

The network cameramen follow Jonathon’s antics with a keen eye, though it’s policy never to broadcast streakers, lest they become a nightly occurrence, given people’s deep, inexplicable yearning to see themselves on TV. Their footage won’t play so well for Jonathon on the late-night sports highlights. He’ll watch it all, eyes glazed with wonder, from a hard bench against the wall of a holding cell of the Southern Precinct station, just him and a pair of patchouli-reeking vato thugs with baggy pants and neck tattoos. It won’t start out so bad. They’ll play an opening montage that casts Stinkman in a positive light: his speed and agility, his strong throwing arm, his ability to make the stadium security detail look so bumbling and foolish the whole thing almost seems rehearsed. There will even be a slow-mo sequence of Jonathon the matador, waving his cape, side-stepping a goon, every fan in the frame cheering and laughing.

But none of that’s what people will remember. The end of the highlight reel, which is actually more than half of it, is what will stick. Those broadcasters will fixate on his eventual apprehension. They’ll revel in the ways he’s attacked and taken down and hauled off the field. They’ll play the inevitable conclusion to his streak forwards and backwards, in slow-mo and freeze-frame. It should all be humiliating, especially with those two thugs in the holding cell laughing it up all the way through. That’s really you, homes? they’ll say. Man, you got jacked! No one will remember his name either, since among all the possibilities—Stinkman and Streakman, Stickman and Steckman—the broadcasters can’t get it right.

But after what Jonathon’s seen, none of it will matter.

Someone upstairs has had enough. Maybe the Giants front office, maybe all of Major League Baseball, though more likely the execs from the network broadcasting the game. They’re on the phone not long after Jonathon darts onto the field, a secret cabal of corporate bigwigs by conference call. He’s making a laughingstock of them. After much hemming and hawing, they send out six more guys from the grounds crew. These goons look meaner and more focused than the three who’ve been chasing him around for the past ten minutes. (A record!) More athletic, too. Jonathon fears they’re taking his extended presence in their outfield grass much too personally. For some reason, Lou Seal, the Giants’ beloved mascot, squeezes through a hidden door in the corner of the left field wall and waddles toward him, waving to the crowd. More ominous still, a couple of uniformed security guards—or are they actual cops?—trail after the seal, not exactly running, but still covering ground, fists gripping Tasers and Billy clubs.

For a moment, Jonathon tells himself he has nothing to worry about. He’s a superhero, right? I am Stinkman! Maybe he’s been in character too long, or maybe it’s just the adrenaline talking. Soon, though, he recalls that his power to sniff out deceit won’t be much use to him in his current predicament. Still, he’s quick, maybe even uncatchable, so he figures he’ll juke and jive for another few minutes at least, crowd roaring. No such luck. The goon squad circles him as if they’ve done this a million times before, then closes in on him. Panicked, Jonathon sprints for a gap that isn’t there. And he’s blindsided by what feels like a dump truck rolling down a steep hill. He goes down hard, mask askew. The rest of the goons pounce on him, pinning his arms behind him, crushing him into the field. Lou Seal even does a victory dance over him, all gray fur and orange sunglasses, stepping on his head more than once. He’s overwhelmed by the smell of sod and fertilizer until someone, probably Flooty, starts choking him with his own crimson cape. A policeman cuffs his wrists. The goons soak him with obscenities, then hoist him to his feet.

And the crowd erupts.

As the security guards march him off the field, from far left all the way across to first base, the spectators are on their feet, clapping and whistling, hollering and chanting. As if they understand what he’s about. As if they know what he stands for. Jonathon tosses his head back, basking in the delighted glow of thousands of fans. They’re now his fans, he realizes. He would throw his arms up in triumph if it weren’t for the handcuffs and the bruising grips of those meaty paws.

Then comes the sinking feeling, an aching hollowness in his gut. What if they’re cheering because he was caught? Maybe they’ve all had it up to here: Enough already! Let’s finish the game! Maybe they think he’s the worst flop of a streaker to ever highjack a professional sporting event. Even Fisher might think he’s taken things too far.

The goons shove him through a gate, down some steps, and into a tunnel beneath the stands. He’s out of breath. The crowd noise is muffled. He squints in the dim light.

It’s worse than he expects. Stadium security locks him in a room alone, handcuffed to a chair, for forty-five minutes. It’s more like a closet. His eyes ache in the fluorescent glare. He wraps his cape around himself the best he can manage.

Then begins the interrogation, right there on the spot. It goes on for more than an hour. Although the guys questioning him flash badges, they’re dressed more like rumpled college professors than cops. And they’re both midgets, or dwarves. Little people. One sports an Amish-looking neck beard, the other a faux-hawk. They chain-smoke Marlboro Reds.

“Who planned the attack?”

“Do you realize how much damage you’ve caused?”

“Who’re you working for?”

“Do you know how much sod it will take to repair the outfield grass?”

“Who are you?” Jonathon interrupts, chuckling. “John Deere?”

“Seriously,” says the neck beard. “Enough about the grass.”

“But the field is trashed!” the faux-hawk exclaims. “You saw it. And that was beautiful grass, was it not?”

“That it was,” the neck beard agrees.

“That it was,” echoes Jonathon.

“Keep your mouth shut!” they both yell.

Jonathon does his best to allay their fears about terrorism and lawn destruction. He has to assure them, again and again, that he has no ties to any anti-government agencies or organizations, including the Lawn Liberation Front, or LLF, whose mission seems to be freeing lawns from their masters. It all seems insane.

“Oh, it is insane,” faux-hawk concedes.

“But insanity is the new black,” says neck beard.

Jonathon whimpers. His wrists burn from the cuffs. A headache blooms behind his eyes.

“It was just a prank,” he tells them, “a publicity stunt.” He details the whole plan, over and over, until he finally convinces them—and himself—that he’s just your average wacko streaker.

After another twenty minutes of breathing the midgets’ secondhand smoke, two uniformed cops guide Jonathon out an unmarked exit. One of them sports an emerald eye mask. As they direct him toward their parked police cruiser, Jonathon says:

“Is there a reason you’re wearing a mask?”

His eyes brighten as he glances at his partner for confirmation, who gives him a quick chin nod.

“It’s for Mardi Gras,” he says.

“But that’s not until February?”

“I’m a little early. So shoot me.”

They lead him to the car, mumbling about the worsening fog. Maybe they mean in the mornings? Because right now it’s so clear you can almost see stars, despite the ballpark lights and circling 747s. Mardi Gras steps around to the driver’s side door, while the other officer shoves him into the backseat. Jonathon catches a flash of cobalt spandex protruding from the cop’s uniform sleeve.

“Do you have on a superhero costume?” he asks.

“What, that?” The officer pushes his sleeve up and smirks. “Just my union suit, is all. You know how cold summers are here.”

The other cop, the one in the emerald mask, grins at him in the rearview. “And we all know,” he says, “how bad The Fog has become. Right, Stinkman?”

Jonathon feels his eyes saucer. The cops laugh, though they don’t seem to think anything’s funny.

Then Mardi Gras cranks the engine, and they speed off down King St.

Shiny

by Tina Tocco

They were meeting me at school, Dad told her, so Grandma looked for her favorite shoes until she cried. Even if she’d found them, she could never miss what else had gone missing. The packs of Poise lined along the top of the linen closet. A week’s worth of housecoats. A week’s worth of socks. Her heaviest sweaters, crowded in her bottom dresser drawer, now boxed and labeled at the back of the garage. Even the Salvation Army mailer — free pick-up six days a week!! — sitting too long by the phone would not have helped.

After dark, I plucked the silver tangle from the kitchen garbage, my stepmother’s project from the night before, her gloved hands needling each strand until Grandma’s hairbrush seemed new. Maybe that would have flicked something on, glanced across Grandma’s mind. But the kitchen had scared Grandma for a while, and Kathleen making things shiny was not unusual.

Winning Prisoner

by June Sylvester Saraceno

Of the indoor games we played in winter, Prisoner was one of Dare’s favorites. One late afternoon when I had been tied to the small ladder back chair in Dare’s room for what felt like hours, it became my least favorite. The light had leeched away leaving me in a gathering dusk. At least he hadn’t blindfolded me, though he had gagged me and it was causing my jaw to ache. I squirmed more and tried to loosen the various cords holding my hands behind the chair. My wrists were chaffed and my armpits and shoulders throbbed from the slung back position.

I hate this game, I thought in red fury. Dare always got out of my knots in a matter of minutes, no matter how tight I pulled or how many times I tripled them. I never win this game. Never. I could hear the muffled sound of TV voices coming from the living room and knew he was in there watching some show while I was still tied up, now on the verge of tears. I hate him I thought, imagining him watching television while I was about to be sitting alone in the dark.

I made muffled gagging sounds in my attempts to scream but knew even as I did, that he’d never hear over the TV. I’d already tried stomping the chair around but it only hurt my armpits more. It was his room so no one would think to look for me there. But then, he’d have to go to bed sometime, and so would I, and then Mother would ask where I was. I tried to resign myself. Looking around the small room I remembered why there were two twin beds in here.

Granddaddy had slept in one. I was only little then, but I remembered him. I remembered his rough, stubbly cheek when he would put me to bed or lift me out. He was a gray man, gray hair, gray cheek stubble, even his skin seemed grayish. He sang songs to us and gave us candy. We used to raid his possessions hunting for hidden candy, digging into the deep pockets of his overcoat, going through his medicine drawer. Sometimes we found it. Most of the time, we had to wait for him to decide when we’d been good enough for some. I knew he had died but I couldn’t remember how. It had to be while he was living here in Dare’s room.

I tried to think of what had happened and I wished Dare would come in and untie me because he would know, not to mention I was sick of this dumb game and I would never, ever play it again. My arms really, really hurt, but a shadow was starting to take shape.

We were sitting at the table but not eating and Daddy was telling us about heaven. He was telling us Granddaddy had gone there. I remember now. I had been paying more attention to Dare because he was biting his lip like he did when he was trying hard not to cry and I was wondering why he was almost crying and whether he was in trouble. But then Mother started to cry and blew her nose in a handkerchief and just about then Dare broke down. I started crying, too, because everyone else was and I just couldn’t help it.

What Daddy had been saying was Granddaddy was dead. Why hadn’t I remembered that before? I must have noticed he didn’t lift me out of bed anymore or say prayers with me. I tried to think of what happened. I couldn’t remember ever going to a funeral for him. It was like there was this blank screen in my head. I looked around the room and I could re-furnish it with his stuff. He had half the dresser top and on his side was a comb, a razor, a framed family picture of him and his wife and their kids, and one of those kids was my mother. He would hold it up for me as he rested me on a hip and point her out saying something like that I was the spittin’ image of her. He said it a lot. We did this often. I’d ask to see that picture of when Mother was little and he’d bring me in and show me.

He smelled like Aqua Velva. He always wore long sleeves shirts. I heard Mother one day explain to a neighbor lady why he’d wear long sleeves even in the dog days of summer. She said he had gotten a tattoo in his young days but once he was born again he was embarrassed about it. I thought about Uncle Erskine’s tattoo and wondered whether Granddaddy also had a bare naked mermaid on his arm. I started to feel bad about how I’d forgotten about him and about how much I couldn’t remember still. Had I even seen his tattoo ever? What was that song he used to sing when he was getting me to fall asleep …I see the moon and the moon sees me, down through the leaves of the old oak tree. That was one of them. Folks still sing that to little kids.

He had half the closet, too. I could only remember that big black overcoat, though, because sometimes it had candy in the pockets. Heavy. Wool. I could hear him and Dare sometimes talking in their room nights when I was in bed. I started to feel scared then. The room was completely dark. I felt like I could cry. What if other people die – would I just keep going along as if nothing happened, as if they had just been visiting? Where was I when Granddaddy was buried? I don’t even know where his grave is I thought miserably.

And then I did start to cry. It started to feel like everyone was gone and I was just tied to a chair for no good reason and I would die there too. Then I heard Dare turning the door handle and a slice of light came in from the hall. He stood there laughing, which made me cry harder and I started feeling like I was choking. He came around and untied my feet, then hands, but waited a long mean minute before he undid the gag.

“I hate you,” I spat, wiping my face with my shirt.

“Same to ya.”

“I been in here for hours.”

“You’re such a cry baby. You been in here maybe one hour tops.”

“I saw Granddaddy.” A sudden panic shot through me. Where had that come from? Why did I say that?

Dare flicked on the light and looked at me hard. “What did you say?”

“I saw Granddaddy.”

“LIAR!”

If I had been planning to back out of the lie somehow, I knew now it was impossible. “He was wearing a long sleeve plaid shirt all buttoned up even though it’s hot in here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He was looking for you to tell you to stop messing with me.” It was coming back, the way he would say Don’t momick your little sister like that, son. You’re her older brother — you got to look after her. I could almost really hear him say it. I could almost smell Aqua Velva. “The whole room smelled like Aqua Velva when he was here.”

Dare sat down hard on the bed. He just stared at me like he was looking right through me. Then he sort of shook his head a little and said, “You’re making it up,” through gritted teeth.

Rubbing my sore wrists and getting up from the chair, I said, “He said he was sorry he didn’t have candy. He couldn’t bring it with him from where he was.”

I saw with alarm that Dare was biting his lip. Granddaddy and Dare had been real close, everybody knew it, but it was another thing I hadn’t spent much time thinking about. I understood with a mix of panic and triumph that I’d shaken him, that he still hurt about Granddaddy dying. A few minutes ago I hated him and would have done anything to hurt him, but now I felt a little scared and I also felt like I was missing something inside. Why didn’t I want to cry over Granddaddy? It made me more curious than sad to think about his dying. Was I heartless? That was it! He had had a heart attack. I couldn’t remember how I knew but I did. And all those medicines, they were his “heart pills.”

I took a few steps toward the door but Dare wasn’t looking at me. Then, out of nowhere, I turned around and said, “He was holding his heart. He told me it hurt his heart to see me all tied up like that.”

Dare blinked hard about six times and stared at me like I was a ghost. Sounding just about like a frog croaking he said, “Get out. Get out of our room. I ain’t playing with you, Willie.”

He got up like he might smack me. But he stopped and stood completely still. He had said our room and I knew he was now sharing it again with Granddaddy in his head. I was at the door in a blink and before I closed it behind me I hissed through the crack, “I ain’t playing that dumb game ever again.”

When I got to my room I didn’t even turn the light on. I sat on the edge of my bed looking out the window, thinking about what I’d done. It was mean, but so was Dare. Served him right. He thinks he’s so tough but he’s probably in there crying like a baby. Then I felt a stabbing in my center. Why wasn’t I that upset thinking about Granddaddy? Didn’t I love him too? How could Dare, mean as he was, love somebody more than I did? I even had more leeway to cry since I was a girl but here I was completely dry-eyed just wondering about details like what did that tattoo look like. I started humming …and the moon sees me, down through the leaves of the old oak tree, please let the light that shines on me shine on the one I love. That made me feel a little teary but I was still having to work at it. I thought of Dare in his room and I knew he was face down in the pillow, stifling himself so no one would hear him crying. And from some icy, dark place a knot slipped and I thought with pure cold meanness I win. And I didn’t even try to feel sad after that.

Solomon

by Ryan Napier

From the journal of Solomon Godfrey, captain of the Industrious Cousin, a whaling ship out of New Bedford, Massachusetts:

Sat., Jul. 1. Early this morning, there was fighting below deck. The two combatants, Thomas Parker and William Boyle, were restrained and brought into my cabin.

Both were to be punished for fighting—ten lashes for fighting with a fellow sailor—but another question required my judgment. They had fought over a small leather purse containing twenty-five dollars—several years of pay for men like these. Who should get the purse?

Parker said he had been wearing the purse around his neck while he slept and Boyle had cut the strings and stolen it in the night. Boyle said he had been wearing the purse around his neck while he slept and Parker had cut the strings and stolen it in the night.

I ordered Second Mate Delano to bring me the purse.

We waited. I thought of my namesake, the wise king Solomon, and the famous story of the two harlots who had appealed for his judgment. A child was brought before the king, and each harlot claimed it as her own. Solomon pulled out his sword and threatened to cut the child in two, one half for each harlot. The lying harlot agreed: better, she thought, for the child to die than for her rival to have it. The truthful harlot recoiled and asked Solomon to give it to the other: better that her child be allowed to live with another woman than to die. Thus wise Solomon discovered the true mother, and gave her the child.

The captain of a whaling ship is no equal to a king of Israel, but he should still strive for kingly justice in his little floating realm.

Second Mate Delano brought the purse. I opened the porthole, took the purse by its leather strings, and dangled it over the waves. I asked the men whether I should drop it.

“No!” they both cried out together.

I asked again, and again they both cried, “No!”

I explained to them the problem. “The lying man,” I said, “should agree to let me drop the purse; the honest man should object. You both object. By Solomonic logic, both of you own the purse. But this is impossible.”

“Let us do it again,” said Parker. “This time, Boyle won’t lie.”

“I wasn’t lying!” Boyle said. “Ask us again.”

“Shall I drop it?”

“No!” they said.

“One of you is lying,” I said. “At least one of you. But the case is far more serious than that. This test comes from Scripture, men. It is holy. If you hinder it in any way, you are mocking the word of our Lord. That is a very serious action. On my ship, a man who fights with a fellow sailor gets ten lashes, a man who lies to his captain gets fifteen lashes, and a man who blasphemes against Scripture gets marooned on a treeless island. When you both say ‘No!’, you are saying, in effect, that the great king Solomon was a fool and that Scripture is nonsense. Is this what you believe?”

“No,” said Parker. “Great king, he was.”

“Very great king,” said Boyle.

“I’m glad to hear it. Now, I’ll ask you again—and keep in mind that treeless island—shall I drop this purse into the sea?”

“Yes!” they both said at once. They looked at each other.

I had found them out. “Both of you,” I said, “would have me drop the money—which means that neither of you are the true owner. You’ve stolen it. You were partners in this robbery, most likely, and you fell to fighting over the spoils.” I ordered Second Mate Delano to ask among the crew and find the purse’s true owner.

This task took him some time: he called men down from crows’ nests, and up from the lowest decks. Again, we waited. I placed the purse on the table and looked out at the sea. I hoped to spot a little sandbar on which to maroon these men, if the situation required it. After a few minutes, I heard a loud sound.

Boyle had collapsed to the floor. Both men had been wounded in the fight—Boyle’s chest and cheek were slashed, and Parker’s right ear was severed—and much blood had been lost, judging from the considerable gore on the deck of my cabin. (The ear, apparently, had not been found.) I had hoped to resolve the judicial question before the medical one, but Boyle forced my hand. I called the surgeon, who treated their wounds and revived Boyle with smelling salts.

Second Mate Delano returned. None of the men had claimed the purse. Half said it was Parker’s, half Boyle’s. Second Mate Delano suggested that, in absence of an answer, we should confiscate the purse and give the money to a charity when we returned to New Bedford, or even use it to furnish the ship’s mast with certain necessary repairs.

“You can’t give my money away!” said Parker.

“You can’t give my money away!” said Boyle.

“Men,” I said. “no one is giving anything to charity. Second Mate Delano simply needs to have faith. Justice will prevail. Now, one more time.”

I picked up the purse and again held it out the porthole. Before I could pose the question, however, the purse strings slipped from my fingers. Parker and Boyle ran to the porthole and watched the heavy coins sink.

They both demanded I give them the twenty-five dollars.

“How could I give either of you any money,” I said, “after what we have seen here? One of you may have owned it, both of you may have stolen it—the fact no longer matters. God has judged that neither of you deserve the money, and he has taken it to the bottom of the sea to keep it from you. You may have lost your money, but you have gained a far greater thing. You have seen the hand of God.”

I ordered the two men taken away and lashed. I was alone, and my thoughts were as deep and as heavy as those coins at the bottom of the sea.

I had seen the hand of God. And what had it done? I was supposed to be a Solomon, but God had literally taken the matter from my hands.

I prayed, and there was a second miracle. I had an idea.

I found Second Mate Delano and told him to search below deck for Parker’s missing ear. A few hours later, he brought it to my cabin. It must have fallen through a hatch during the fight: Second Mate Delano found it in the blubber room. It was oily but otherwise intact: Boyle had made a good clean cut. I soaked the ear in good Formosan rum, and dried it with my own velvet cloth.

I hid the ear into the pocket of my coat and went below deck to the gallery. The cook’s boy gave me a jar of brine, and into it I placed the ear. This will keep off the rot. I will keep the jar in my cabin and monitor Parker’s conduct. If it improves, he shall have his ear again. Justice is more than punishment: it must also include forgiveness and redemption.

(I have consulted with the surgeon, who claims that he cannot reattach an ear after so long a time. He is far too humble: I have great faith in him.)

Boot Camp

by Michael P. McManus

Near midnight it was raining and everyone had left Brian’s going-away party. Brian was gone too, and no one ever knew how long he had been missing in his neighborhood of million-dollar homes. A few friends had gone searching for him, only to return with nothing but reassurances that I would find him. Later, I found him sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, his gaze directed at the wet concrete as if he was seeing his reflection.

Maybe he believed it, he was that drunk. I started to believe the universe was spinning out of control, we were falling from its graces, and it was necessary to find him shelter from the storm responsible for the flash flood alerts on my iPhone. Then there was the lightning: frightening apocalyptic flashes, like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel, followed by the near-simultaneous thunder, which convinced me that someone or something was zeroing in on our location.

Brian was so sopping wet it was almost sexy. The black curls of his hair were flat against his head and his Portugal. The Man tee shirt fit his muscular upper torso like a second skin. Pathway lights along the sidewalk leading from the street to the front porch made everything look surreal as if we had landed in a strange new country. Then a 7-series Beamer approached in the street and slowed to almost a crawl. The soft glow inside it showed a woman’s ghost-like face looking out the passenger window. She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips as if she believed that she was witnessing the moral decline in her neighborhood.

I gave her the double-barrel treatment: both middle fingers and my best Lindsay Lohan scowl that followed like a sniper’s scope until they were gone.

“Brian, you’re drunk. Come on, we need to get you inside,” I said, knowing damn well I couldn’t lift him. With the added weight of my rain-soaked sneakers, Levis, and Old Navy V-neck, I weighed one-hundred and ten pounds.

“Lenny, Lenster, the Len-A-Reno,” he slurred in his old-school Saturday Night Live imitation, whose reruns we had watched the previous night.

My real name’s Lisa, but Brian named me Lenny on the night I refused to fuck him. That never changed, but his juvenile attitude did, and our friendship regained its equilibrium. Sometimes there were other guys who, because of hyperactive imaginations and testosterone levels, became jealous when I only allowed Brian to call me that. When they wanted to know the reason, I’d smile and say it was my middle name and he was paying for the permission to use it. That sounded absurd enough to make it true, which was probably why they never asked again.

Many other girls would and did have sex with Brian. His family was super rich and as the only child, one day he was going to become rich the old-fashioned way—through inheritance. One night after drinking a few beers, well, maybe more than a few, my dad called Brian’s parents shoeshine republicans. This meant they expected everyone to shine their shoes just because they were rich, all because Brian’s dad, who spent his days watching stock market shows on the cable news, had inherited a vault full of cash and blue chip stocks from his parents.

Brian drove a powder blue, white pinstriped Mustang convertible GT. It had an aftermarket Alpine stereo with Bose speakers. He lived with his parents in a Tudor-style three-story, complete with conservatory, wine cellar, and inground saltwater pool. They had more Mexicans at their disposal than the Tijuana police and kept them busy doing lawn work, cleaning the pool, and the never-ending marathon of vacuuming and dusting the house.

It was never fair to compare my family to Brian’s, but his other snobby friends sometimes did, even though we would never be mistaken for characters from the The Grapes of Wrath. My father, a Liberal Arts graduate from Penn State, was content in corporate America, working for UPS as a supervisor, a job that afforded us to vacation each summer at the Outer Banks, and provided me with a comfortable childhood growing up in a remodeled Foursquare.

Brian’s parents had the money and the influential connections and the three-story beach house at Myrtle Beach. It seemed logical then that Brian, who was all-everything in high school—both in academics and athletics—would matriculate to the Ivy League to study business so he could return home to claim his rightful place in the mahogany-walled den, watching the stock symbols move across the big screen, and calculating how much his fortune was increasing by the hour. However, two months before our high school graduation, aside from a mix of jingoism and patriotism—two dichotomies that Brian confessed to—his parents never learned why he walked into the local Marine recruiter’s office and told the King-Kong sized Gunnery Sergeant that he wanted to enlist.

One week later, he became government property. A sweltering summer followed. It convinced most of us that climate change was real. Too soon it was the final week of August and the night before the morning Brian was scheduled to leave for boot camp at Parris Island. His departure seemed less likely to happen if I didn’t get him into his bedroom at the end of the hall on the second floor.

The house was empty because his parents had decided to forego the going-away party by first giving the Mexican staff a week off so Brian would have to cook and clean for himself, and then jetting to the Hamptons for a stay in a sprawling Greek Revival inn overlooking a pond. It was, in many ways, a puerile way of disagreeing with Brian’s decision, or, as my father framed it—old money talking and turning a deaf ear to the world’s reply. After his enlistment, Brian told me his mother subsisted for two weeks on Scotch and valium, leaving the room each time CNN broadcast news about another dead service member. Once, when I mentioned my full scholarship to UC, Berkeley, she excoriated me with her chestnut-colored eyes until Goosebumps rolled across my arms, as if my only right in life was to make assistant manager at Hobby Lobby, marry a forklift driver, and spit out five kids like watermelon seeds.

I almost told her about my grandfather, a World War II Veteran who, as a paratrooper with the U.S. 82nd Marine, had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, and fought the Germans from the coast to Rambouillet. There, in the bomb-damaged lobby of the Hotel du Grand Veneur, he met an overweight, middle-aged Hemingway who was on assignment as a war correspondent. After exchanging war stories, Hemingway invited him to his room on the second floor where late into the night they drank enormous amounts of wine and whiskey until the number of Germans they claimed to have killed became too great for either man to believe.

As a child it was difficult to imagine my grandfather as a man who was capable of such exploits. His body had failed him many years ago; his arms and legs had become nearly muscleless and covered in scaly lesions that necessitated daily applications of ammonium lactate lotion. One morning, however, after my persistent naïve badgering, he made me bring him a shoebox from the bottom of his closet. Inside it, among other things, were his Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and crinkled, faded picture of Hemingway with my grandfather. Between them stood a blindfolded German Prisoner, a fair-skinned, blonde-haired boy who appeared to be no older than Brian was. When I asked what had happened to the prisoner, my grandfather’s jaw clenched and his breathing quickened in a way that first frightened me, only to soon realize that he was angry with me as if I had knowingly breached some unspoken etiquette that brave men shared. Moments later, when his anger subsided, in a soft voice, he asked if I would return the shoe box to his closet.

He never talked about that war again, only Iraq, about which he could be heard mumbling a string of expletives about American Imperialism. After offering such opinions, he displayed a strange tic that saw him slide his hand across his wrinkled head. I imagined him believing that he could brush away his liver spots, with his uncut fingernails sometimes flicking at the skin in one habit. After that, he would always spit a bullet of Skoal into a paper cup and go to cussing again.

My grandfather’s interest in Brian changed after he learned of his enlistment. When Brian came to visit, Paps would struggle up from his recliner and plant his cane into the carpet and inch forward to embrace Brian long enough it made me jealous. Then there was always Pap’s soldierly suggestion that involved them sipping a wee bit of Scotch. Mom knew Paps would sanctify many occasions in order to have a drink, so those times when it happened with Brian, because of the obvious age issue, which included Pap’s failing judgments, she assumed the role of a pleasant mediator who, for Brian’s sake, always replied, “Paps, why don’t we wait until Brian comes back from the Marines.”

“Damn it, Brian. You’re a moose,” I said, grunting from my Sumo crouch, forearms under his armpits for leverage. Brian had been working out for the past six months and weighed almost two-hundred pounds, and my repeated attempts to lift him were futile. The rain showed no signs of ending and when lightning struck nearby that was it for my GI Jane impersonation.

“Bury me with my boots on. Bury me with my boots on. Bury me with my boots on, so I can keep on kicking ass.” Brian could never hold a tune and his drunkenness made it worse. Another car drove past. I couldn’t tell if anyone saw us because the S-Class cruiser had tinted windows and since I couldn’t see inside, it provided a false sense of comfort.

“Brian, get your ass up!”

His head rolled. He turned to see who or what was standing there. “Lenster, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. Now come on. Please, come on.”

“Lenster, I love you.”

“I love you too, now come on.”

“No. I’m staying here.”

“Oh, come on. Get up.”

“No. I said no and I mean no.”

My hair was dripping wet across my face, my bangs in my mouth as I began to speak. “Why are you acting this way?” I asked, tired of arguing with a drunk.

“Because you don’t love me. Because you don’t, you don’t, you don’t!”

“Of course I do, Brian. I love you.”

“No you don’t. You won’t sleep with me and in the morning I’m going off to die.”

“You’re going to boot camp.”

“But that could be the first step towards dying.”

He had a point and I knew it was no use engaging in some type of philosophical rhetoric. “Okay. So what now?”

“I’m going to stay right here unless you sleep with me. That’s the least you could do for a dying man.” He rolled over on his side, assuming the fetal position with a big, childish grin on his face. I debated leaving him there, but respect for his family and my own personal responsibility prevented me from doing it.

“Okay, I’ll sleep with you.” My answer woke him like a hit of speed and he groped towards my face for a kiss. “No, not out here. Inside. Let’s go inside.”

I thought I was going to strain my lower back. He kept swaying back and forth and it was everything I could do to keep him from knocking over his mother’s ubiquitous Tiffany Lamps once we were inside. “You’re so hot, Lisa.”

“Thank you, but let’s get you upstairs.”

I might as well have been climbing Everest without any oxygen. It seemed like fifteen minutes before we reached the second floor where he lurched towards the hall bathroom. I heard puking in the toilet until he was dry heaving. I almost left then, but he stumbled out without his shirt on, grinning after brushing his teeth and gargling with mouthwash as the time had come to consummate our relationship.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re so hot, Lisa.” I guided him into his bedroom.

“Whatever, Brian.”

“God, you’re so hot. I can’t wait to tell all my buddies in boot camp about you. I always knew there was a little slut in you.”

He started slid down his shorts and before they were off his ankles, I rushed forward and slapped his cheek as hard as I can. He laughed and tossed his shorts.

“I like that. I like that a lot.” He fell on his back in bed, looking through me with his blue eyes glazed over, as all the pictures he would see that day were going away. I had begun to cry. I wanted him to say he was sorry, but then, with the quickness of one who receives the anesthesia, he feel asleep. I stood watching him, wiping my face with my forearm, before turning his head to one side in case he vomited. His loud snoring comforted me, but when he started to piss the bed, I stepped back, covering my mouth.

I came back with clean towels and positioned them around his body. I wondered how anyone could work in a nursing home, cleaning bedpans and pissy sheets.

In the morning, I returned to wake him up. I could feel his hangover as he moaned and rolled from bed, which I stripped the sheets from and along with the towels carried to the washer at arm’s length. Once he was in the shower, I scrubbed my arms and hands for five minutes with the tenacity of a surgeon prepping for surgery, and went to cook scrambled eggs and bacon. He drank water and orange juice. Afterwards we drove in my Prius to the airport. Inside, at the TSA security screening area, he turned and we hugged.

Soon I was sobbing on his shoulder. In spite of his money and the life it afforded, I believed the world had abandoned him. His hands slid down my back to cup my ass through my shorts. People were watching but I never made him move. We stayed that way for a long time. It was the patriotic thing for me to do.

Ghost Lines

by James McAdams

“Remember Tour of Duty?” Clyde asked. He filled his glass straight from the tap without removing his eyes from the bar’s TV.

The man sitting next to him finished his beer, his back humped over the vinyl counter, cracked and appearing vaguely tectonic in places. They wore sweatshirts advertising local sports teams with wrinkled slacks and sneakers, looking in parallel vectors at satellite footage of ammunition fire between rebels and police officials in the Middle East. There were tanks, helicopters, dusty men in beards retreating into alleys, shooting. The screen was tinted neon and crossed with jiggling eerie patterns or ghost lines, either because of a weak satellite signal or the old cathode-ray TV’s over-heating. Sometimes the Vietnamese owner climbed up the ladder next to the sink full of dirty glasses and cigarette butts to slap the side of the TV, which made them laugh cuz who is so short he would need a ladder to reach the TV. The owner was in the basement checking inventory, while his two children sat in their reserved booth in the back by the restrooms, sipping from juice-boxes and looking in parallel vectors at a Vietnamese broadcast of Sesame Street, neglecting their spelling homework. The TV said, “Ma” means “ghost” in Vietnamese.

“About the war,” Clyde continued. “Vietnam. Late-80s, like that period after Stone made Platoon and everyone was doing Vietnam stuff.”

“I remember Cruise as a cripple in that July 4^th movie, Robin Williams as a radio guy screaming. I was working for the power company then, still with Angela, that bitch.”

“But this show was about a commando troop or something in Nam blowing up villages, fucking Gooks, getting high. It was real anti-Reagan shit. Anti-war.”

“In prison, I knew this dude, big dude, black, had this necklace made from Gook ears,” he said.

“Fuck if they could show that on TV now because of PC shit. Even with Reagan in power then, all that PC shit started and it was every white male American for himself. You couldn’t mention the Gooks and Spics taking over America.”

He looked over his shoulder at the children’s bent backs but didn’t lower his voice. It was only the five of them there. LBJ Elementary had issued a half-day because of inclement weather so the children needed to be at the bus stop outside the MoneyMart at 11:37. The foggy snow outside resembled the ghost lines on the bar’s TV.

“My dad campaigned for Reagan before the cancer.”

“He in the war?”

“Korea.” The man sounded proud. “Three tours.”

“I meant Nam, Korea wasn’t a war it was a conflict. It’s all different man—”

“He was shot at, that enough?”

Clyde rolled his eyes and made a kind of calm down gesture, lighting a cigarette and changing the channel to a bass fishing broadcast. He had spoken to the man beside him many times in bars throughout the town and seen him in St. Catherine’s AA on Wednesdays but couldn’t recall his name.

“He was in Nam,” Clyde said. “I had this world map Mrs. Hendricks gave us for winning Geography Quest in ’73 and Ma put it up on the wall in my bedroom with push pins, to follow him sort of.”

The other man whistled and pointed at the TV, saying, “Damn sucker’s gonna break his line there.”

“When we received letters from him about the battles, she’d tape a Monopoly piece to its location. For the victories she taped the hotels, they were red, and for the losses she taped the houses, they were green. Onto the map with scotch tape folded over behind itself so you couldn’t see. So there was all this red and green, but mostly it was red. Red for winning, because of Gook blood. That was the idea, Ma said, that we were winning. That Dad was winning. Mostly the whole map was supposed to represent American victory and to remind me of Dad, who left for the war when I was two.”

“America. I’m with you.”

The two children worked on their spelling. The girl had a red backpack and the boy had a blue backpack. Both backpacks had American flags stitched above the children’s last names. The girl, who was older, erased a word on her brother’s Steno Pad: he had written “appel,” which she corrected to “apple.” Then she corrected another word: he had written “gost,” which she corrected to “ghost.” The last name on their bags was “Ng.”

“All those years I thought my dad was a hero, even after he returned home and got laid off cuz of the twitching, and started drinking all day and watching John Wayne movies with an empty .45 in his hand pretending to shoot at the Indians and Mexicans. He’d hit my mom when she came in the room which caused the hip thing, the hitting and knocking down.”

“He hit you?” the man asked, filling his beer from the unmonitored tap, splashing beer onto the linoleum floor where the owner’d slipped that one night and they all laughed and threw peanut shells.

“When I was home I’d get in between them and take it. Once he swiped me with the gun.” Clyde pointed to a scar above his temple with his glass and the man whistled approvingly. “My dad said the map was bullshit, ripped it up and made me re-paint the walls where the push pins fucked them up. But when Ma died I was talking to my aunt Lydia…”

He ground out his cigarette into the ashtray and grabbed an open Fritos bag from next to the register. There was a little jar there with a coin slot and a stickered Habitat for Humanity label next to brochures for the upcoming elections on the register’s base. Clyde stuck a handful of chips in his mouth and said, “Liddy, she found the ripped map parts in the basement, we were cleaning out the house after Ma died, and when I told her what it meant she looked at me weird like a dumb bitch and said didn’t I know my mom was color blind?”

The other man crunched loudly on the Fritos and licked the orange crumbly glaze from his fingers. “I used to call my Mom ‘Mother’ when she was alive but it’s like I call her ‘Mom’ now, when I think of her. ”

“Color blind means green and red are the same. They’re like brown or something. Different colors for different people.”

“Your Ma saw three browns.”

“Point is the reds she put up for Gook blood victories and the greens she put up for American losses were all brown to her. And it was only once when I was in rehab for the second time and watching Tour of Duty that I remembered this and realized that Nam was just one big clusterfuck and Ma was wrong, that my dad lost all those battles, he lost everything, that America lost everything: the map, it just mapped failure. That he drank everything until there was nothing left to fuck up anymore. That our family was fucked from the get-go.” He spit on the floor covered with peanut shells. “This was after the time I broke Shirley’s clavicle.”

“The time the cop was a fag and you—”

“What was most fucked was when I realized all this, sitting on one of those moldy rehab couches thinking of this (he gestured to his beer), two base-heads listening to nigger music were playing Monopoly under a map or poster thing of the 12 steps, but they were playing with that tweaked hustler rule where landing on Free Parking gives you all this money, like it’s fucking welfare. I wanted to go bust the table over my knee but there were two security guys there too, so it was just the five of us in the room. I left the next day.”

The children’d heard Gook before and spelled it, not on their Steno Pads with their used Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, but on recycled bar napkins in crayon, but they spelled it “cook,” as in “Cookie Monster,” the girl explained, nodding up at the furry blue figure on the screen. She was older than the boy, who sometimes called her Mommy in his sleep. The girl had seen pictures of her mommy in the scrapbook Daddy’d brought over, and couldn’t wait to grow up and be pretty like her and possess–she thought the word was “aura,” what Daddy said Mommy had, and because of this “aura,” he’d explained, Mommy was always around, watching over them and protecting them. The Daddy, who was summoning the Mommy’s soul or whatever while doing inventory on the Budweiser and Milwaukee’s Best pallets, recalled her straight black hair and white smocks and furtive, barefoot movements, her reputation as the greatest beauty in her smoldered village, and thought again then of her aura radiating like a gentle beam or line through their children’s eyes, as if she were an angel or beatific ghost, hovering around them in a different dimension.

“That bass must weigh 35 pounds or I’m a shitkicker,” mumbled the man whose name Clyde couldn’t remember, his mouth full of Fritos and beer. “No way any one line can support that.”

In the Cooler at Little Macedonia

by Sandra Kolankiewicz

For the months I lived in the City, I worked in a small restaurant called Little Macedonia. The neighborhood had dirty brick buildings with little markets on street level, markets without splashes of flowers for sale out their front doors or exotic tropical fruits and vegetables lined up in crates along the sidewalk outside.

Little Macedonia served tavche gravche and sarma, and like nearly every little restaurant, cappuccino and alcohol, but Sonja and Branko’s place offered the added attraction of Turkish coffee served in little cups with saucers or, if you were special, in Sonja’s grandmother’s tiny china cups.

Macedonians in their mid-thirties, they had grown up in Skopjme. First Sonja had come to America, having met and married, without being able to speak English, what she thought to be an American businessman, only to discover when they returned to Manhattan that he was really a white, trust-funded Rastafarian who promptly grew his hair, stopped combing it, and dumped her after she refused to wear skirts and refrain from meat. They did stay married long enough for her to get a green card. Afterwards, with her sponsorship, Branko, her childhood playmate, son of her mother’s best friend, left the Macedonian army and came to America.

Sonja and Branko fought as only two who love each other like brother and sister can: dirty, with insults, name-calling, the dragging up of each other’s past in front of customers and employees. My first day, Branko instructed me not to call Sonja by what he called her ‘Christian’ name, but instead to call her ‘Butch’.

“She’s more aggressive than any man,” he said, the ends of a bandanna he had wrapped around his head flopping as he –whap! whap! whap!– tenderized a piece of beef. “She catches them, wraps them up, and devours them like a spider.” Whap! Whap! Whap!

“You prch,” Sonja had said to him, and then to me, “Don’t listen to him; he’s just a goat, he just likes the kind of womens he can boss.” Turning to the customers in the restaurant, who were all listening, unsurprised, who perhaps had heard the story before, she said, “But Vesna! Vesna got away from him!” She waved her arms in the air and yelled at Branko, who was ignoring her. “Vesna got away from him because he treat her like shit! And you know what? He cried like a baby!” She finished gesturing and turned to someone who had just walked in.

“Would you like a menu?” she asked sweetly.

The man had shrugged. “Well I didn’t come in here for the company,” he said and unfolded a newspaper.

“Give him water and a menu,” she told me, disappearing into the back. All had gone back to whatever they were doing before the fight, and the man ordered a Brankoburger, sliced sausage with sautéed green peppers and onions in a hard roll.

People liked to work with me because I did more than my share. Since arriving in New York, I hadn’t been able to stand still. When I wasn’t wiping tables, delivering lettuce-less sandwiches of stacked meat, or reorganizing the cooler, I found myself entertaining because of my accent and the fact that I was a good listener.

I told a good hill tale too, about the corpse candles, the tomb of General Solomon Lowe, the great mine disaster of 1914, in which nearly every family in Reunion, Ohio, lost a man. I respun legends I had heard since my childhood, but I rarely told my own stories. I didn’t have any yet. In fact, I was even still a virgin, the last one in New York from what I could tell.

Connie’s Obsession

In the early evening, when people who have been working hard, with not a moment to think about themselves or their lives, when they pause to imagine what awaits them beyond the dusk, in that moment when the self of the day stops and turns toward the self of the night, there is always an image toward which they feel joy, indifference, or dread.

Those who want to be in the place that their thoughts direct them hurry home. The indifferent ones sniff the wind. The ones with hearts full of dread linger, looking desperately for a distraction, anything to keep the momentum going, prevent the vacuum from descending.

Right before dusk, a city feels deserted, as if taking in one long, sweeping breath that will exhale and become the night. Every evening, we inside Little Macedonia felt the moment like a sigh. Sometimes Sonja spoke, or one of the customers who had nowhere better to go. Perhaps the mailman talked, or someone who’d just stepped in to buy a newspaper. It might have been Frank, the other cook besides Branko, or Hymen, the nearly-blind cab driver. Someone always needed to break the silence.

On days when Connie talked, she always brought up Paolo. Connie was the other waitress, forty-one years old. After many experiments with her hair in an effort to regain her substance after Paolo left her, she had come to prefer the color black, the texture kinky. She wore black clothes and eyeliner as a uniform. Unlike most of the people in Little Macedonia, she had just one story.

“I guess I’m not going to hear from him again today,” she’d sigh at the end of each day, and smile apologetically. We were supposed to laugh at her joke then, but none thought her funny by that point. According to everyone, including Connie, she’d been saying the same line for over a year, ever since Paolo, a twenty-nine-year-old Italian from Brooklyn, told her he didn’t love her anymore.

At first she’d said it in disbelief, like she expected him any moment to walk through the door of the restaurant as he’d done every night at dusk for the three months he’d courted her. He’d seemed so dogged and smitten that the whole restaurant became involved in their affair, encouraging Connie to go for him. After they became lovers, when he strolled in, he stopped her at whatever she was doing and kissed her, greeting the room.

However, one day after a fight, which he had lost because he had been wrong, he just ceased coming. He didn’t return her calls, and when she went to find him, he wasn’t home. Gradually, with each evening he did not appear, as the months and months passed and one season turned into another without his return, her “I guess I’m not going to hear from him again today” became a restaurant joke. Every day at that hour Connie’s mood turned blue.

Usually she could hold her tongue, swallow that feeling she got when she thought about Paolo, the hugging, kissing, rolling around the floor before she’d got sad and serious, wanting to talk all the time. Her need to discuss her feelings, the state of their relationship, which after its blissful beginning was beginning to sour, her need to talk had eroded his love for her.

At dusk every day Connie was forced to realize again that Paolo’s courting and abandonment of her had, indeed, happened. She felt stunned, stuck, and used, guilty because he blamed the death of his lust on her, as if she had somehow undone herself. All of us had heard her story over and over. She clung to certain details of the affair like they were jetsam, replaying scenes over and over, spending and recharging herself.

“I just don’t understand what’s wrong with me,” she’d curse. “I can’t get over this.”

“I’m not ready for commitment,” he had admitted at the end, when she’d finally caught him at home. He wept because he “really hadn’t meant to hurt her.”

“Then why did he go to my brother about me!” Connie always wanted to know at that point, pale face twisted as if the breakup had been recent. “Why didn’t he just leave me alone in the first place!”

None of us ever had an answer. Sometimes a person who hadn’t heard the story would say, “Forget about him, he’s not worth it.” You might as well have just told Connie not to breathe. She might as well have been one of my teenage girl friends at home.

“I keep thinking he’s going to come back,” she’d confess. “I keep thinking that he’ll realize he still loves me.” She’d stand at the counter then, a dreamy look crossing her face.

“For God’s sake!” Sonja would remind her then. “You knew him only a few months! He didn’t love you! He didn’t even know you! He just wanted to fuck you! He would have told you anything you wanted to hear! ”

Connie never became angry; in fact, she usually agreed except for when the sun was setting, the evening drawing in its breath. She’d flash then for a moment on the little apartment where she was headed. Her thoughts would immediately turn to Paolo, the memory of his leaving her as if it were an involuntary vesper to her daily agony. Some days she would even cry a little while we politely ignored her.

But I had learned to be careful in the cooler at those times because she might catch me alone. I’d have to listen to her run over and over the details about a man she had known and slept with nearly every night for only two months, a year and a half before.

“He used to say ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ to everyone we met,” she’d insist, standing between the door and me. “When I couldn’t be there, he’d sleep with my nightgown.”

Branko thought Connie a fool and thus took every opportunity to remind her that her loyalty was wasted. He’d stand in the doorway to the kitchen, cleaver in hand, half-diced lamb on the counter behind him, and remind her that she’d been working for them for over five years; he had a right to tell her this. Then he would lean forward on his toes and point to his temple with the tip of the cleaver, his face becoming wide and round, as if he were simple.

“Only a person with no brain,” he would say, crossing his eyes, “would throw away her time. He tricked you; he tricked all of us. Put him behind you.” When she became sad, Branko lectured Connie, a look of disdain on his dark, handsome face as he told her that she should just face reality and get on with her life. And she should probably read the Bible, that was one of her problems.

However, if he rode Connie too hard, Sonja interceded, always by distracting him with his own past. She’d stop in front of whomever she was serving, or turn toward him, a check in one hand and the other poised to ring open the cash register. She’d lean at Branko over the counter and hiss, “And what about Kalina! You don’t eat or sleep for three months because of Kalina! Kalina the bitch!” Then she’d gesture to anyone who was listening, “The worst she treat him, the more he lay around for her like a dog!”

When Sonja brought up Kalina, they would immediately begin arguing in Macedonian, and Connie would be safe in her obsession. People were, for the most part, kind and loving toward her. Each had experienced at least one obsession of his own.

The Brass Ring

There is hardly a person alive who cannot look back at someone he thought he once loved as if his soul depended on it, only to see the relationship now as freakish or, at the very least, absurd. At the time the liaison ends, or when we are forced to finally admit that its beginning will never occur, we are struck at once breathless and reeling. We believe that without this person, the sun will never shine again.

Sometimes we get drunk; other times we get fat, we start sleeping with any substitute at all, or making phone calls in the night and hanging up when someone answers. Others of us are lucky enough to compartmentalize and put thoughts of the person aside completely, but only when we’re so busy we don’t have time to think.

Then one day we glance back and find that not only is it okay that the relationship didn’t work out, but it had been a ridiculous thought to begin with! We look out over the wave of the past and realize there’s no way in a dead rat’s ass that we would now even want to be with that object of our relentless desperation, and we examine ourselves in wonder, asking, “Did I really do that?” “Did I really want her?” “Did I have to think it was him I needed?” Because, of course, what we thought we wanted was never the person.

No. Otherwise, instead of shock, shame, embarrassment, or absolute disbelief, we would feel grief, we would be thankful, or we would feel nothing, nothing at all– the person would have disappeared from our memories, rarely to return until we were old and suddenly wanted to remember a name again, how we’d met. And then, of course, it would still not be the person we would be remembering, but perhaps the hair.

What was Connie wanting from Paolo? Who he was? Or what he said he wanted from her: stability, security, sex whenever he asked for it, even when the sex was just her letting him watch her naked body while she slept? She never saw Paolo at work; she never met his family, never saw how he acted with a waiter, whether or not he tipped a bartender or said Thanks for things. She had no idea how he treated animals, if he was in debt.

She had wanted the dream he wove for her late at night after making love, while they were smoking cigarettes and staring at the ceiling, her head on his shoulder; how they would save their money and go somewhere, how he’d love her even when her breasts were shriveled and her still-firm ass a memory, even when no one would believe in a million years that she had once been beautiful, and their granddaughter would ask her such things as, “Why are you so old?”

She loved the dream, not Paolo. If only she’d really looked at him, she would have decided very differently, but he had held out the dream. For weeks he had strolled into Little Macedonia and dangled that brass ring in from of all of them, as Connie and the rest of the folks in the restaurant circled and circled on the crazy carrousel, on their way to work, lunch or back from an appointment with the dentist.

Paolo had hung out that eternal brass ring for them all to see, and each had jumped at the prospect of someone’s really finding love. All had said, “Connie, grab that ring before it gets away,” and next time she got ’round, she caught it.

If she could see Paolo now, who would he be?

We all look back and lament, “How could I have thought I was in love with that!”

Even Branko laughed about it. “That Kalina,” he’d say at the end of the day, “You know, if I like a woman, it is a sure indication that she is a bitch.” And Sonja would agree.

“Butch,” he’d say to her reflectively, leaning back against the counter, his arms folded, legs crossed at the ankles, his face genuine in its disbelief. “Can you believe you thought you were in love with that narcotics agent, the one with the skinny shoulders and big head?”

Everyone laughed at the folly of it all, especially Sonja.

“I’ll be saying “Seventy-five and still single,'” she’d joke as a way of lightly ending her stories about a failed romance, but always the person from the past that she recalled for us in Little Macedonia was someone she now recognized as a man not to have loved, not to have cried over, not to have tortured herself with, stayed up all night and grieved for, not a man on whose account to stop eating, not someone to have taken away that new American smile she had porcelain-crowned into her face for what she called ‘tousands’ of dollars.

Nevertheless, like most of the people I have observed, she picked what amounted to the same person over and over even though she knew how our lovers use us as mirrors to reflect what they want to see about themselves. As soon as we flash back a clear picture, they dump us. They disappear from our looking glass like vampires before a mirror.

The Four Stages of Obsession

As far as I can tell, there are four stages to obsession: Excitement, Mania, Dread, and Depression. The Excitement Phase lasts only until you sleep with the object of your obsession, which immediately puts you into the next phase: Mania. It took all of two evenings and an afternoon to lose what I’d been trying to protect for what seemed, at eighteen, all of my life. His comment after it was over was, “Now you’re not in the dictionary anymore.” He’d lit up a cigarette then and stared at the ceiling, pleased with himself

“What do you mean?” I’d asked, the afternoon sunlight hitting the end of the bed, my hair all messed up as I took in the vision of my black clothes recklessly tossed onto the floor, crumpled and silly-looking now without my body inside them. He had turned his head toward me on the pillow and exhaled into my face, an act which thrilled me at the time.

“Under ‘virgin,'” he explained and drew on is cigarette again, leaving me to ponder whether having lost my previous classification were something desirable, and whether I would have a new one. Non-virgin? Slut? There didn’t seem to be anything between the two.

So I didn’t stay long in the Excitement Phase, except for a trip to the Guggenheim, a couple of cappuccinos, and some carrot cake, a walk through Washington Square. In retrospect, however, I realize that prolonging the first stage might have prevented movement into the second: once you take the time to get a good look, you usually will turn and run. ‘Checking someone out’ is what the Excitement Phase is supposed to be about.

When my roommates, Sara and Cam, found out I had had a few dates with E–, they were shocked.

“My God,” said Sara on the phone, the morning of the day I lost my place in the dictionary. “You picked the biggest asshole at the party.”

I’d said something really lame, like, “But I really think he cares about me.”

“Listen,” warned Sara, suddenly no nonsense. “This one’s just a salesman.”

And sell he did–how I had loved it! He trashed everyone, all the great thinkers of the world. Socrates was a bum! James Joyce was an idiot who didn’t know anything, and Shakespeare was just a dead poet.

The Manic Stage

I should have prolonged the Excitement Phase, milked it for a little more fun, because of the Manic part one remembers merely a rush of scenes that later, in the Dread and Depression Stages, he’ll replay over and over. No matter how long the Manic really lasts, whether weeks or months, it’s still too short. When you’re through, you have a feeling of missing time, of alien abduction, or you torture yourself with a series of ‘if only’s.’

What a thrill it was, really, to be in the Manic Stage of obsession for the winter holiday in New York City! What everyone dreams about, the stuff of Fred Astaire movies! For four days we walked everywhere, held hands constantly through the perfect snow, big dreamy flakes until at last, with no pressure at all, I gave it up.

Somewhere in there I worked, but he would never pick me up there. He didn’t like, he said, to ‘get close to a bunch of people he didn’t know.’ The commonness of my job appalled him, though he was always throwing Marx’s name around, because I wasn’t just playing at being a waitress while someone paid for my schooling.

He claimed that his main reason for not going was that no one there at Little Macedonia would have anything interesting to say.

“Discourse,” he would announce and get this serious look on his face, like he was about to say something profound, “is the stuff of life.”

Perhaps I have made him sound like too much of an ass, myself too much of a fool. After all, the reason I had sex was the oldest in the world: after two nights and a day, his spending a little bit of his parents’ money, bandying smatterings of his knowledge about coffee shops while I listened intently, with a rapt gaze, he told me he loved me. Then I existed: ping!: like that.

I walked around Manhattan that Christmas with the daze of the newly born, following him around like a gosling. In Little Macedonia, they recognized the signs.

“Oh my god,” said Sonja. “Get me the t’ermometer. This girl has the fever.” They claimed they could tell about me by the way I now dressed, not just black now but overtly sexy, more like someone else than myself.

“Is this what love does to people?” Branko asked me one day when I showed up in another tight black outfit. “The guy’s a creep if he lets you out in public like that. Besides looking like a prostitute, you are going to freeze.”

When one is manic, one doesn’t listen; neither does one feel the cold. I thought them all wrong and only myself right. Only myself and him.

Connie tried to warn me as well.

“It’s just like cocaine,” she said. “The higher up you go, the further you have to fall. You should listen to me; I know.” But I thought I knew better.

In total, my first love affair lasted less than two weeks. I found out later that a month was about as long as it ever got with him. I used to know precisely how many days our affair lasted; like Connie, I used to be able to recite the litany of our contacts and torture myself with the details once the ‘affair’ was over.

For fourteen days, three or so in Excitement and then several in Manic, we walked around, held hands every where we went, kissed in public, and made love whenever we were near a bed. His roommate was gone for the holidays, and we had their apartment to ourselves, as if I lived there with him. We never slept and were always a little drunk.

Then one morning as I was throwing on clothes to go to work, I disagreed with him about something. The jig was up. He rolled over and refused to answer me when I left for work.

Dread

The third stage of Obsession, Dread, starts with a feeling in your solar plexus, a cold anxiousness that sits as heavily on your chest as a cat in your worst suffocation nightmare. There’s no waking. You carry the dread with you everywhere because in your heart of hearts, you know the affair is over.

As I sat there in Little Macedonia, after less than two weeks of what at the time I presumed to be bliss, I knew I was tied to the telephone, that I would barely eat or sleep and merely drag myself through the motions of working and living until I heard from him again. As I forced myself to wait on tables, I felt a tremendous sympathy for Connie and regretted begrudging her those moments in the cooler when she talked about Paolo.

The most I could do at home that night was lie on the couch and fall asleep for a few hours, sleeping fitfully, waking with night sweats. Sara and Cam tiptoed around me from what had become their shared bedroom.

Every morning for days I went to E–‘s apartment before work. Each evening when I was through, I’d stop by again. Sometimes I’d go at night, before I went to bed, around midnight. He was never home.

Neither did he frequent his usual spots. When I asked his friends where he was, they would flick an eye at each other knowingly but say they had no idea.

I stopped eating and sleeping. I took up pacing as my recreation. When I wasn’t waiting on someone, I wore a track from one end of Little Macedonia to the other, back and forth like a duck in a shooting gallery, reliving everything he and I had ever done together, my brow creased with effort. Folks in Little Macedonia exchanged looks, every one extra nice to me, in an embarrassed way.

Finally, I caught him at home. True to the rest of the cliché, he was with another woman, an ex-girlfriend that he had complained bitterly about to me in some cafe. Now she wore the smirk of the successful repossession man, and she made sure to let me see that she was naked under his bathrobe.

And so Dread turned into Depression.

Depression

The Depression Stage begins when all the fears in the Dread Stage are realized. Yes, he has left you. Indeed, she never loved you. Everything he promised is a lie. Yes, you are too old, your ass is too big, the color of your hair drab, your nose too long. Yes, you still have to drag yourself through the day with everybody knowing; you have to find a reason to pull that comb through your hair. In the Dread Stage things are dying; in the Depression Stage, everything is dead. You become Connie in the cooler, boring everyone, torturing yourself with your memory of the details. You become me and go back home.

A Treatment for Obsession

If I could see Connie now, all of them from Little Macedonia, I could tell them how to treat Obsession when it is confused with love. You have to stop watching television and going to movies, I would say, give up listening to the radio or any other music with words, cease glancing through magazines and checking out the ads, stay away from most novels, ignore billboards.

You must change your topics of conversation, develop hobbies that have nothing to do with the outside world. You must cut yourselves off entirely from popular culture by having no friends and living in a box with no doors or windows.

But one day, perhaps only when your hormones have faded and you can finally think and see at the same time, when so much track has been laid down behind you that the past seems like a dream, some day, even though that person once hurt you terribly, you’ll no longer feel the pain and, even better, you won’t care. When the sun goes down, and dusk exhales like a sigh becoming the night, you won’t be anxious. You’ll make your way home gratefully, joyously, even though you’ll be there alone.

Per Contra

An international journal of the arts, literature, and ideas.

Tag Archives: fiction

Issue 38 – Fiction

A Passport to the Old Country
by Cezarija Abartis

Natural History
by David Ackley

Olympia
by Richard Burgin

The Swami
by George L. Chieffet

Cowboys and Indians
by Donald Dewey

Three Days Two Nights
by Barbara Westwood Diehl

Nocturne
by Okla Elliott

Outside Wheeling
by Brandon Getz

Tulips
by Josh Gray

The Show
by Nicholas LaRocca

The Husband and the Gypsy
by Lynn Levin

Floating Out Into The Blue Night
by Maja Lukic

Horses
by Anita Naughton

What We Talk About When We Talk About Parental Love
by Cannon Roberts

The Chill

by Richard Burgin

Apsis

by Billy O’Callaghan

Stinkman

by J. T. Townley

Shiny

by Tina Tocco

Winning Prisoner

by June Sylvester Saraceno

Solomon

by Ryan Napier

Boot Camp

by Michael P. McManus

Ghost Lines

by James McAdams

In the Cooler at Little Macedonia

by Sandra Kolankiewicz

A Passport to the Old Country by Cezarija Abartis

Natural History by David Ackley

Olympia by Richard Burgin

The Swami by George L. Chieffet

Cowboys and Indians by Donald Dewey

Three Days Two Nights by Barbara Westwood Diehl

Nocturne by Okla Elliott

Outside Wheeling by Brandon Getz

Tulips by Josh Gray

The Show by Nicholas LaRocca

The Husband and the Gypsy by Lynn Levin

Floating Out Into The Blue Night by Maja Lukic

Horses by Anita Naughton

What We Talk About When We Talk About Parental Love by Cannon Roberts

by Richard Burgin

by Billy O’Callaghan

by J. T. Townley

by Tina Tocco

by June Sylvester Saraceno

by Ryan Napier

by Michael P. McManus

by James McAdams

by Sandra Kolankiewicz

A Passport to the Old Country
by Cezarija Abartis

Natural History
by David Ackley

Olympia
by Richard Burgin

The Swami
by George L. Chieffet

Cowboys and Indians
by Donald Dewey

Three Days Two Nights
by Barbara Westwood Diehl

Nocturne
by Okla Elliott

Outside Wheeling
by Brandon Getz

Tulips
by Josh Gray

The Show
by Nicholas LaRocca

The Husband and the Gypsy
by Lynn Levin

Floating Out Into The Blue Night
by Maja Lukic

Horses
by Anita Naughton

What We Talk About When We Talk About Parental Love
by Cannon Roberts