Carolina Quarterly 65.2

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1/25/16 8:29 AM

BENJAMIN GOLDBERG

Daedalus Builds a Treehouse Before my son turns six I carve his name these places: oaken rung of rope ladder, the plywood plank he paints. His fingers seek some twigs to whi!le, kindling for flames he’ll touch before he’ll make. The wind adjusts.

Nothing falls is all I say as he drops his hammer in the grass beside his shoes.

He won’t remain marooned in canopy— before the pills that douse what he can’t name, before the feather in his hand means blade, I watch him use his tongue to dab the sap from each finger and string a bow of birch for him. He chalks his palms with wings of moths he’s touched. I’m so"er on him than their dust.

BENJAMIN GOLDBERG

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This City Hands Me Myths; I Hand Them Back Today happened on accident and underground.

I spent it missing trains, mistaking brass tiles in a barrel-vaulted concourse for sound, and sound for solace. I pursed my lips, kissed a wall made of whispers, and decided to once again listen to what it told me. To leave with or be le" by the first stranger to mistake me for a pillar.

Or to be a pillar, unable to leave. Another train, another tunnel turned gospel by headlight.

According to different shades of sharpie, I’m a dirty hippie, and any trash bag swept from a storm grate can apotheosize above skyscrapers.

I swear, if I see another thing shipped to the sky.

I swear, if the sky. Say something else.

Say the stars can be as drunk with all this as I imagine.

That our windows keep a kind of time, code our longings in light—amber, bruise-colored, absence—and transmit to gaseous eyes with burning lids that close only once.

Yesterday, a man wearing a sign said, not long.

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He showed me how to make this city a garden from any angle by facing trees in the park and fencing my field of vision with my hands.

Tomorrow, I’ll go to where I laid beside a woman I’d never see again outside of sleep, to where every word we never spoke was either a city I hoped we’d live in, or a cinder dusting an ashtray whose smoke I woke to. Someday I’ll stop measuring my distance from certain memories in fire escapes.

I’ll stop mistaking a cloud for a child’s face behind roo"op playgrounds’ chain-link. I’ll walk to the edge of the garden overgrowing an elevated railway and throw down the only holy word I know.

I’ll see if it becomes a dove before it hits the pavement.

BENJAMIN GOLDBERG

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BENJAMIN GOLDBERG

Psalm for a Great Lake Ghosts of nowhere else never sang in waves.

Nor did we palm them like Petosky stones we skipped. Or, fake-sinking, tangle in them.

No vende!as against flesh grew tactile or lurked—scaled like the pike we imagined aimed at our toes, angry as the seaweed that might’ve wrangled us by our ankles into undertows. A Petosky stone, you told me, is a fossil. A fossil, no one said, is a grave whose epitaph is a skeleton. We plunged through white caps past where freshwater shelves darkened and turned us into selves. But here I am again speaking about ghosts as if we’d known them.

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PETER KISPERT

Breathing Underwater Garth had told Jay he was a professional diver on their second date, almost four years ago, and had avoided all water-related activities since. The lie wouldn’t have been a problem if Jay’s cousin wasn’t, as luck would have it, an Olympic hopeful swimmer, or if Jay hadn’t always—as he put it—loved the way a man’s body “rose and dove in a single motion” through a current, which was his first response when Garth told him, across that restaurant table, that he spent his early twenties glistening like a mirage in water shocked blue with chlorine, his body hit with those shining fluorescent lights as he shot across the black lines in record speed. Ever since, Garth didn’t have to actually defend the lie to Jay so much as either pretend to be sick, or injured, whenever swimming was called for, which wasn’t o"en. He got cramps when Jay wanted to go to the pool. He developed a convincing and unexpected allergy to chlorine.

Garth and Jay had taken their Sunday picnic from the town green to the lip of Black Lake, a body of water twenty miles inland of Cape Cod’s coast that was known for looking like a pupil from the sky. It was early summer, the grass hot and dead under the cloth. Jay moved closer to Garth and rested his hand on his thigh, biting into an apple, just as Garth noticed the small head a dozen yards into the brown water, the tiny hand slapping noiselessly. The real problem was that, so unlike him, Garth had forgo!en his lie just then. When he stood, his knee struck Jay’s nose, and Garth sensed him wince and turn away as he dove into that boiling brown water, the pebbled bo!om digging into his chin. He swam out fast and saw—a child, the body submerged, air bubbles pocking the surface of the water. What he remembered next was the cold metal of the small white lifeboat that had appeared, rocking with the lurch of CPR, and the sight of families standing on shore, and Jay, holding his bleeding nose with a cloth napkin, smiling like an idiot.

The real problem was that Jay had missed seeing Garth out there in the water—his vision clouded with tears—and that a dad on the PETER KISPERT

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beach who had go!en to Jay first was a reporter for the local paper.

The real problem was that Jay had spilled every detail about Garth, his partner—a word Jay had avoided using to describe them until then.

The real problem: Jay had unloaded all those years of who Garth was.

Including, of course, how good Garth was with kids, his sixth sense for when food was about to burn, how long they had been together, and his status as once a record-holding diver, best-in-state.

———— Garth held a golden memory of his first important lie, the first time he’d ever experienced the quiet thrill of ge!ing away with something.

He remembered the way the words blurted out in a way he almost could control, how easy—even clean—it was to tell his close friend Erin that day before gym class that he could see the future, that he’d seen it before, actually. When prompted for a prophecy, Garth shut his eyes, listening to the sound of basketballs hi!ing the glossy gym floor. He concentrated on his breathing and told her she would be famous one day.

“How?” she asked, skeptical.

“I think it’s singing,” Garth had said. “Or dancing. Something. When you get nervous you sing to yourself.”

Garth had heard from a classmate that Erin had taken to singing annoyingly to herself during quizzes in English. He took the easy leap of imagining she enjoyed it, that he could fla!er her into believing.

Erin looked a li!le stunned, pleasantly surprised, and Garth felt the same about what he’d just done. What he didn’t realize before stepping off the bleachers and standing against the padded wall to be picked for so"ball was that Erin then told her friends, and they told their friends, and the next day during homeroom several others came asking. And Garth had good visions for them too, took what he knew of them and like recombinant DNA, or even magic, made whole a future in which any offer of success seemed inevitable, any good trait everlasting, glowing with promise.

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———— Garth woke to the sound of the newspaper hi!ing Jay’s pillow. It had been a long night of talking—about ambitions and feelings, the dumb pride Jay now felt for Garth—and it occurred to Garth that he should feel proud, too—or, if not proud, exactly, something good.

He should feel he had saved something, because he had, a"er all. But it registered differently for Garth, as if he’d only let something slip, like he had sealed his fate as someone who would inevitably become exposed for who they truly are.

“Guess who made the front page?” Jay said, si!ing down on the bed.

Garth sat up and leaned over Jay’s shoulder, starting at the top.

There was a spliced photograph—of him in the boat, bent over and looking like a wet, tired mess, and of the boy, Brady, a photo that must have been taken a"er Garth and Jay had le", because he was smiling.

The photo announced the boy’s status as all right despite the close call, “close call” being a phrase the reporter had used at least a dozen times to describe the incident. Garth felt those words shot back at him as he read, as if it were really his close call, and was quietly pleased he had accidentally struck Jay, kept him from seeing anything.

The article explained the details of the event. It included a quote from Garth, something he hadn’t even remembered saying: I saw something out there and something in me just leapt up. To be honest I wasn’t even thinking. He was torn between finding this quote from himself dumb and probably doctored, edited by the writer, or actually heroic, as if something about him was undeniably good, innately made for that very moment.

What convinced Garth this wasn’t true—that he was not, in fact, made for that moment—was a line that came about three-quarters of the way through the piece. His heart briefly seized at it: He used to swim professionally, a skill that certainly came in handy, Jay Glover says. The words threw him back down to earth, and he found them obnoxiously amateur, totally sloppy. “Handy” in particular struck Garth as toolbeltish and lazy. That Jay had so adamantly claimed Garth as his partner, a moment Garth remembered in vivid color, and PETER KISPERT

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was not mentioned as such in the article, came off to Garth as, at best, passively homophobic.

“They don’t say you’re my partner in this,” Garth said, lying back down. The pillow gave a deflating sigh as he rested his head on it.

“I didn’t even notice,” Jay said, which was the wrong response. And then, a"er a pause, thank God—“But you are.”

Garth considered who might call him on the lie as he tried to fall back asleep, because it was inevitable, he thought—someone would.

It was so wrong. The most sport he played in his early twenties was a brief stint as a beginning tap dancer, a hobby he gave up a"er not being the immediate best in a room full of aspiring dancers at his university. The benefit to moving far away from his home and life in Iowa to follow Jay to Massachuse!s was that Garth knew no one, which he found refreshing and freeing. But this, he began to consider, was an illusion. He realized—the birds outside cu!ing the air with their high, piercing noise, the sunlight slicing in through the blinds—that the move had only offered everything he needed to lapse into the old, well-worn habit of making things up.

———— The problem was that a"er a while, a few of the things Garth had said began to reveal themselves as true. Chad in the eighth grade made early junior varsity soccer at the high school, and Anna did get the lead in the school musical. It didn’t ma!er that these things were expected, a notion that dawned on Garth o"en, or that just as many of his peers had nothing come to fruition. The air around him began to feel vaguely dangerous, the ground beneath him slippery.

He held a kind of power, he thought, though it was false. But then, he sometimes wondered—was it?

———— Garth learned the boat outing was meant to be a celebration, a thank you, held by Brady’s parents. The two had come over several

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nights a"er the rescue—that was their word for it, “rescue”—and offered Garth, among other things, money. Lee and Louise, a stockbroker and an art teacher at a private high school, bled apology and gratitude in a way that unse!led Garth. But there were moments, as they all sat down to a dinner of homemade pasta, during which Garth could shake off his concern before being snapped with the force of a whip back into it. Lee and Louise explained the plans for the boat party, that all the details were planned, and that it was meant to be a surprise but that Jay wasn’t sure when Garth would have to be at work again—so they came out with it. Garth felt briefly locked into something, then soothed himself with the reminder that he would not have to swim, and that it was a kind, benign gesture. He thanked them and said they were looking forward to it, a nod toward their now-labeled partnership.

“We weren’t even sure where he’d gone,” Lee said a"er a while, slapping a spoonful of sauce on his plate. “If it weren’t for you—“ his eyes met Louise’s. Lee had said these words, or words like them, dozens of times in the twenty minutes the four had been eating, and Garth could sense it affecting him.

There was a pause as Jay poured wine, an expensive bo!le Louise had handed him when they walked in. In the past, Garth had been wary of Jay’s drinking. It was true that Jay once had a “drinking problem,” which was how Jay described it, something Jay had told Garth a"er several dates. Garth had never seen anything concerning, no behavior to suggest the problem even as he o"en found himself looking for vestiges, proof of it. He appreciated that Jay was forthcoming even as he envied the ability to be so open, gratingly honest.

Louise moved her napkin to her lap. “How far down did you dive?”

“It wasn’t that far,” Garth said.

“He told me Brady was a ways down,” Jay said, coiling the pasta around his fork.

“It was kind of far, hard to remember,” Garth said. He felt the authority of fact slipping away from him and added, “Maybe a few yards.”

He remembered as he took a sip of the wine, nodding across the table at Lee, who held his wife’s hand tenderly, that it was barely a PETER KISPERT

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couple of feet. He could see, in a strange flash of clarity, that moment at which he had arrived, breathing labored, the brushing of stirred-up detritus on his skin, and the shock of blond hair waving gently under the water, sinking into darkness.

Jay gave up trying to maneuver the pasta onto his fork and picked up his knife. As he cut, the metal made a short scream against the plate.

———— Garth figured out, now secure in being validated by these small fortunes coming to light in his classmates, that he could choose to see far into the future without repercussion. Amy would get into a top college for acting; Brad would drop out of high school but for something much be!er—Garth couldn’t see what yet, something to do with cars? He began to favor the phrase “Years from now” and see that, in fact, people were wearing their futures on their sleeves, or even someplace more obvious—it just took looking at people the right way. He felt strange, though, walking through the halls of the school, feeling the exerted pressure of the lies around him, tightening the air.

Sometimes when he was certain he would be revealed to be a fake, a total liar, he asked himself why he had ever bothered entertaining the lie to begin with. He se!led on two reasons before dismissing both: a!ention, and to be liked.

One morning, Rafe, a younger boy with a snaggletooth who was new to the school and generally unliked, came to Garth crying. Garth was walking up a flight of stairs when he heard the so" sobs behind him and turned to see the boy’s small eyes watering with tears. He had stopped even though it disrupted the flow of other students trying to make homeroom.

“You were right,” Rafe said.

Garth didn’t even remember what he’d told Rafe, but he leaned in for a hug, assuming the worst.

“I know,” Garth said, then turned and disappeared into the crowd.

————

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It was a large boat, white with golden lines circling the hull, adorned by an enormous white sail that waved in the breeze as if in slow motion. Garth regarded it from a distance, pinched with excitement, as Jay followed. He considered reaching to hold Jay’s hand but decided not to, focusing instead on the hot summer day around him, the sweet smell of salt chalking the air, the gulls moving in slow orbit overhead, the dull and distant pang of call bells.

“It’s a friend’s boat, to be honest,” Lee said. He had dressed in bright red shorts, a beige bu!on-up short-sleeve shirt, and sunglasses—an overthought outfit, Garth thought.

“It’s great,” Garth heard Jay say from behind.

“How far are we going out?” Garth asked, walking up the wooden ramp.

“We’re thinking of docking on the Vineyard,” Louise said. She had already boarded and looked elegant, relaxed, in her wide hat. She leaned against the railing, and Garth saw Lee watching her, so obviously, publicly smi!en. “Some great swimming,” she added, “if you’re up for it.”

———— When Garth went to college away from home, in New Jersey, he had quietly resolved to become truthful—which was itself the boldest lie. The simple question Where are you from? was met with duplicity: Arizona. A small town in Kentucky. Even as he detected a fresh shame, the fear he had not yet come to realize as fear was laid bare before him: it didn’t ma!er where he was, it didn’t ma!er what he wanted.

He couldn’t stop.

———— They stopped near the tip of a dock that stretched nearly a halfmile out. The rest of the boats were out se!ing lobster traps, the ferry gone, the whole beach vacant except for a few small boats tipped on their sides. The water reflected the sun in a harsh, white shimmer.

PETER KISPERT

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The smalltalk from the Cape had been in turns enjoyable and unbearable for Garth, the heat of the day stinging him as Lee had poured them glasses of red wine and relaxed, talking about the weather, plans for the holidays. Garth wanted badly for Jay to say something, to prove his forethought aloud, but Jay only sat and occasionally sipped from his glass, the wine staining his upper lip a line of dark purple.

“It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it?” Louise said.

“It’s very nice,” Lee added, taking off his shirt. A sweaty fuzz of grey hair slicked his back, and Garth flinched at the sight. But then there was the splash and mist of Lee jumping in, and Louise preparing to go in a"er him. The amount of fun they were having seemed, to Garth, to border on caricature.

Garth moved closer to Jay, si!ing next to him in a way he felt would force Jay to either take his hand or acknowledge an active decision not to. But Jay only looked forward, past him, at the island rippled with trees swaying in the calm breeze, the warm day.

“This is so nice,” Jay said. The moment felt avoided to Garth. He felt the sweet wine in his stomach, the warm air made invincibly calm around him. He wanted to prove something to Jay, to seal his lie as true while he still could. He stood and walked to the side of the boat.

Louise and Lee were treading water, their arms moving in wide arcs.

Garth li"ed his shirt over his head, making a point not to turn toward Jay. It was true he had told that lie about being a professional diver in order to level what he had then considered a physical difference he couldn’t reconcile—how, he o"en thought, could a guy like that like a guy like him? Garth wasn’t out of shape, but his body sagged slightly, which hadn’t even been unseemly to anyone he’d dated before.

Garth aligned his toes against the edge of the boat, steadied his breathing, and briefly imagined himself as Jay saw him. The thought pushed him forward and up, drawn as if by some invisible line, arcing down slow into the bright water. But as he hit the surface, he had taken in a breath, accidentally—a sour pressure pinched the bridge of his nose, and the water tickled his throat, he coughed, and then there was the cold water in his mouth, and he was choking. He couldn’t control his arms, and through his panic it occurred to him how strange he

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must have looked. What Garth remembered next: Jay’s hands on his ribs, his legs finally working to tread water, unable to breathe without coughing, the terrified, childish look on Lee’s face, which bobbed on the surface feet away, Jay’s warm body behind him, and Louise asking from what seemed like a great distance, Is he all right? Is he okay?

———— Years later, a"er Garth would se!le down with another man, a polite biology teacher named Charles, in a small town in upstate New York, he would walk daily to a pond a half mile from their home. He would go there early in the morning, when the fog li"ed off the water with an ethereal shine, and the years would melt around him to reveal the memory of that moment at Black Lake: the sun slanting down in a single cu!ing ray, the thud of his labored breathing in that boat, the silver whistle swinging from the lifeguard’s neck, the held breath of everything as Brady choked out that first living sound. The pond would be the only body of water for miles, which Garth would enjoy.

At some point amid the quiet, he would lose that ability to patrol the border of his lies and surrender himself instead to the calm truth.

Some spring mornings the fog would come down from the mountains to meet the mist at the water’s edge, and when it did, it gave Garth the impression of entering a dream—or, he sometimes thought, of finally waking from one.

PETER KISPERT

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BRANDON AMICO

What’s Your Sign?

Mine’s ibis, mine’s three strikes, mine’s the turtle on its back, crenellated and fuchsia, mine’s the book swung open, sexual in its promise of knowledge.

Here’s the thing about an open book: le" open, the ink will fade as the sun reads it and reads it and assumes because it’s read it so many times over that everyone else must’ve as well, so it li"s words from the page, a butcher slicing only a thin layer atop. Let us, as a people, blame the sun. Let us be brave enough to keep the skin that peels away from exposure, build children, build sandcastles, never leave them una!ended at high tide.

Mine’s syllabic, mine’s alto.

Mine’s No Dogs. Mine’s jigsaw, deer, mine’s ampersand.

Water is the new sex, I’m told. Cola the new Coke, or the old one, rather, old the new new. Etcetera, etc.

The ampersand disbanded, &c. transmogrified finally into three discrete markings, same change that shook a limb off Generation X, the vestigial tail fallen off then brought back out for a farce, jokes explained in the appendix.

Millennials love a reference we get, that isn’t so complex as all else, that isn’t shaking with forewarning of disruption, war, collapse.

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Mine’s slingshot, mine’s eye-well, canary.

The revolution that created me, that eats its own tail—what am I if not a disturbance in the ether?

My existence: objective, my atoms are blips, checkmarks in the Great Summation, echoing: I am as those who made me, who I make again. My shadow: Ibid.

Mine’s abacus. Mine’s cross. Mine’s joke.

The hollowed chasm covered by the joke, a suspicious cover of leaves.

Here’s a joke for you: What has two legs and doesn’t finish what it starts?

BRANDON AMICO

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Church, how he was somebody you could talk to and he’d listen. I was too shy to ask her for a date. I was too shy to ask anyone for a date. I just liked her, liked talking to her, and looking at her, she was so pre!y.

———— I didn’t see much of her a"er school started that fall. She showed up now and then on the steps to chat, but I had to wait until a"er football practice to deliver my papers, and it was too cold by that time for si!ing around.

Then one a"ernoon a"er practice, Joey Kinser, a ninth grader and the j.v. quarterback, started talking about how that new girl, Brenda, was a hot ticket. He said he’d taken to going to her apartment a"er practice, and her mama worked, so she wasn’t home. They’d drink lemonade or something first and pretend to do homework. Then they’d start French kissing.

“No shit!” Bobby Crumpton said.

“Scout’s honor,” Joey said. “She starts it. She drops her pencil or something and slides over close to me to pick it up. Then she takes off my glasses and says, ‘You got such blue eyes, Joey.’ Which makes me turn and look at her. Then she laughs and looks closer, right into my eyes. I get the message she wants something. So I lean forward and put my hand on her tit. You know.”

We didn’t, but we wanted to.

Joey held back a minute, pulling us in. “Aw, I shouldn’t tell you this stuff. She wouldn’t like it.”

So we begged.

“You get a hard on?” Bobby asked.

Joey laughed. “How else do you think I get it in, dickhead?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. I thought of Brenda and how pre!y she was and how much I liked her.

“You’re such a kid, Gordy,” he said, “She loves it.”

“Where’s her dad?” I asked.

“I never saw any dad,” Joey said. “I don’t think she has one.”

“She does,” I said, but nobody listened.

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———— A"er that I’d see them together, in the halls at school or a"er the games. I’d see her rushing onto the field with everybody else. Joey would be all sweaty and his uniform would be muddy, and he’d put his arm around her shoulder and walk off the field, waving at his friends like some hero. And she’d be looking up at him and laughing.

I wanted to kill him.

No, I wanted to tell her what kind of things he was saying about her. All the lies and bragging. But I didn’t get a chance, because Joey’s mama put an end to it. Somehow she got wind of what Joey was up to and started making him come right home a"er practice. I still didn’t believe him, but then other guys, Bobby Crumpton and Billy Sizer and others, guys whose mothers didn’t go to First Baptist like the rest of us, started talking.

“You going up to Brenda’s today?” one of them would say.

“Nah. It’s your turn.” And they’d laugh.

Bobby would look at me and say, “How ’bout it, Gordy? All you have to do is tell her you love her. And then watch out for your braces.”

I hated him.

But it started me thinking. I’d never kissed a girl, never even had a girlfriend. Maybe Brenda was the place to start. She was the only girl I’d ever felt comfortable just talking with. I thought I might tell her what the guys were saying and promise to set the story straight.

But if she was the kind of girl they said, maybe she would kiss me too.

———— So I worked up my courage and the next time I picked up my papers at the Langston, I rang the doorbell of her apartment. A"er a long time she opened the door. She was wearing a blue terrycloth bathrobe.

She took one look at the stack of papers in my arms and said, “Oh. It’s you.”

“Who’d you think it was?”

NANCY BOURNE

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“Nobody. Never mind. Want to come in?”

I’d never been inside her apartment before, and I was surprised at how empty it was. There was a sort of saggy brown sofa and a couple of chairs. A TV, of course. But there were no pictures on the walls and no lamps or rugs or figurines. Just a bare wood floor and a ceiling light.

She walked over to the sofa, sat down, and pa!ed the cushion next to her. I pretended not to notice that the belt on her robe had come untied and I could see her leg all the way up to her underpants.

I sat down next to her, my bundle of papers in my lap. “Were you expecting Bobby Crumpton?” I asked.

She laughed. “Maybe. It’s OK. I’m glad to see you. It’s been awhile.”

She nodded toward my papers. “Look, you want help with those?”

“Sure,” I said and handed her a stack.

We sat rolling papers while I worked up my courage. “Look,” I finally said, “I don’t want to upset you, but I thought you should know.

Bobby’s been spreading lies about you.”

She sat up real straight and pulled her robe around her. “What’d he say?”

I took a deep breath and blurted out. “He says if he comes here and tells you he loves you, you’ll . . .” I couldn’t say the words, “let him do things.”

The silence was awful. She just kept staring at the rolled up papers.

Finally she said, real low, “Do you believe him?”

“I said it was lies.”

She turned toward me. She looked so good, si!ing there like that, in her blue bathrobe, her brown eyes so dark and wet looking.

“You’re really pre!y,” I said. I didn’t know it was coming; it just popped out.

“You think I’m going to let you do things now?” she asked, laughing a kind of nasty laugh.

I felt my cheeks ge!ing hot. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?” She looked suspicious.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I just mean you’re pre!y.”

“Wait a minute,” she said and got up and le" the room. I sat there for about ten minutes, wanting to leave, not wanting to leave.

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When she came back, she was wearing a blue and black plaid skirt and a red sweater, white socks and brown loafers. Her school clothes.

She sat down on the sofa facing me and put her hands on either side of my face. I could feel her so" fingers on my cheeks; she smelled good, like Ivory soap. I wanted to kiss her, to touch her. I’d never felt this way before.

It looked like she’d been crying. At least her eyes were red. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there hoping she wouldn’t move her hands.

She looked right into my eyes and said, “Will you do something for me?”

“Sure.” I didn’t care what it was, I’d do it.

“Promise?”

“Of course.”

“Okay,” she said, “I want you to take me to that church of yours.”

Just then the door burst open and this short, stocky man walked in. He had on a blue business suit, like my dad wears, but I thought he could use a haircut. He smiled at Brenda. She looked down at her lap and she wasn’t smiling.

“Well, who is this?” he asked, nodding his head in my direction.

“It’s Gordy,” she said. “A friend.”

“Nice to meet you, Gordy,” he said and reached out to shake my hand. His hand was so"er than I expected and I noticed his fingernails needed clipping. But he seemed pre!y nice.

“I like this one,” he said.

I looked over at her. But she just sat there, which I couldn’t figure out, because her dad was watching her like he was waiting for her to say something.

“I be!er go,” I said.

“Yeah,” the man said, “You be!er go. It’s ge!ing late.”

As I was heading out, Brenda suddenly looked up and said, “Remember what you promised.” Her voice was cool, like it didn’t really ma!er what she said. But her eyes looked different. She was begging me.

———— NANCY BOURNE

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So that’s how she started coming to First Baptist. In the beginning Mother was against it.

“How come she wants to go with us?” she asked. “Where’s her family?”

“I guess they don’t go to church.”

“Well, I don’t think much of that,” she said.

“Look,” I said, “Jesus welcomes everybody. Reverend Keeling is always saying that.”

“Yeah, but I’ve heard rumors about that girl.”

“Maybe she wants to change.”

“Maybe she’s a"er you.”

I could only hope.

———— The next Sunday morning we found her waiting on the steps in front of the Langston Apartments. She had on a blue wool coat I hadn’t seen before and a li!le rose colored hat with a veil and white gloves.

She thanked Mother for picking her up and sat in the back seat, real still, all the way to church.

First Baptist is the biggest church in our town. Of course, like any town, there are Methodist and Presbyterian churches, but they’re pre!y small. Most people go to First Baptist, and that’s because of Reverend Keeling. He’s a big man, real tall, and he says complicated things in a simple way you can understand. You can tell him anything, and he says no ma!er how bad it is, Jesus will forgive you if you are truly repentant. We all sit there every Sunday in this big sanctuary, with flowers on the altar, the sun shining through the stained glass window of Jesus with the lambs, and we just feel good. I know church is boring for most people, but First Baptist is different.

The first time Brenda came, everyone was staring, trying to figure out what she was doing there, especially with me. But she paid no a!ention and just smiled and sang the hymns and bowed her head when we prayed. So a"er awhile folks stopped staring.

Meanwhile, back at school, Bobby Crumpton and his buddies were complaining.

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“Brenda’s got religion. She’s no fun,” they’d say.

Bobby claimed he still went to her place a"er school and messed around, but I knew he was lying, because I was there. A"er I delivered my papers every a"ernoon, I’d ring her doorbell. She always met me dressed in her school clothes. I never saw that blue bathrobe again. We’d do our homework or play Monopoly or just talk. I told her about my mama, how she had to work as a nurse since my dad died. She liked hearing about her. But when I asked her questions about her mother, she just said she was a secretary and then changed the subject.

The first time she let me kiss her, I got all dizzy and didn’t know where to put my hands. All I could think was how so" her mouth was. How much I loved her. But that was it. If I tried anything funny, like pu!ing my hand on her chest, she’d push me away.

“Come on. You let Joey.”

“Look, I’ve been bad. I admit it. But Reverend Keeling is going to cleanse me of all that.”

So I held back. I tried to tell her how I felt about her several times, but she told me to hush, she didn’t want to hear it. So I held it inside.

———— I always tried to leave before her mama and dad came home, but every once in awhile her dad would show up.

“Hi kid,” he’d say and mess up my hair or give me a mock punch in the chest. “How’s Brenda ge!ing on at First Church?”

“She’s doing great, sir,” I’d say, feeling confused. There was something about him that seemed to be making fun. But he was friendly enough and he was awfully fond of Brenda.

“How’s my girl?” he’d say.

I always packed up my books when he showed up, and le".

I never saw her mama. Not once.

———— NANCY BOURNE

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As I said, I had made the decision to take Jesus as my personal savior and join the church the summer I met Brenda. The time for my baptism had now come. It wasn’t actually such a big decision. Everybody in our town joined the church when they were about my age, fourteen. But Reverend Keeling didn’t just let you join up; he made sure you understood the step you were taking. There were Bible study classes you had to a!end on Friday a"ernoons, and you had to have a private conference with Reverend Keeling. Finally, there was the baptism, total immersion.

On the first Friday of Bible study, I rang Brenda’s doorbell a"er I’d delivered my papers to tell her I couldn’t see her that day. But when she opened the door, she had her coat on.

“I’m going too,” she said. “I’m joining the church.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “You’ve only been going about a month.

Most people take longer than that.”

“I want to be really saved,” she said. “I want Reverend Keeling to wash away all my sins forever.”

So, every Friday a"ernoon for the next two months, we met in a Sunday School classroom with about ten other kids to prepare to take Jesus as our savior. We learned about twenty Psalms by heart and played this game where you would open the Bible at any place and read the scripture out loud and try to figure out what it meant.

Brenda was a whiz. She memorized the Bible passages faster than anybody else in the class, and she never goofed off.

On the last a"ernoon of Bible Study, Reverend Jones asked us to come back to the church that night so that he could meet with each one of us separately. He said he was going to ask us about our lives and why we were making this decision. He talked about the seriousness of the step we were taking and how proud he was of all of us for choosing the Christian path and how he expected us to hold fast to our faith. He said the Baptism would take place on Sunday night.

Then he gave everybody a Bible with a red leather cover.

I walked Brenda home as usual that Friday a"ernoon. It was March, the beginning of spring, and you could smell apple blossoms and the air was warm and sweet.

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“How come you’re so quiet?” I asked her.

She looked down and mu!ered something under her breath.

“What’s that?”

She still didn’t look at me, but I heard her this time. “I’m afraid,” was what she whispered.

Now that surprised me. She’d never struck me as scared of anything. Certainly not a pool of waist-high water.

I’d seen dozens of baptisms and had studied the way it was done.

We don’t go to a river to be baptized in our church, like the primitive Baptists out in the country. We have a baptismal font right at the front of the sanctuary about the size of a bathtub, only deeper. Most of the time it’s empty, but when they do baptisms, they fill it with water.

They do the baptisms on Sunday nights a"er the sermon. Reverend Keeling and all the people being baptized wear choir robes over their underwear. But Reverend Keeling also wears hip-high rubber boots under his choir robe; he showed them to me once.

“Look, Brenda,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. When it’s your turn, Reverend Keeling will take your hand and lead you down the stairs into the water. Which is warm, like in a bathtub. He’ll take both your hands in his and say, ‘I baptize thee, Brenda Hill, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,’ then he’ll put his hand over your face. You’re supposed to hold your nose with your fingers, which are under his, and he’ll tip you back into the water until it covers you.

He’ll bring you right back up and say to the congregation, ‘Lord, it has been done as Thou hast commanded and yet there is room.’ That’s it.”

“I’m talking about tonight.”

“Tonight?” It made no sense. “We’re just talking to Reverend Keeling tonight. You’re surely not afraid of him?”

“Suppose you’re too full of sin even for him,” she said.

“That’s why you get baptized,” I said. “To wash your sins away.”

“Suppose they won’t wash.”

“But they will. That’s the whole point. You’ll feel be!er a"er you talk to the Reverend tonight.”

She smiled then. “Promise?”

“Promise.” I kissed her then, just on the lips, and she kissed me back.

NANCY BOURNE

43

———— That night I went by her apartment. I waited a long time, and finally Brenda’s dad opened the door. He was in his undershirt, and I realized it was the first time I’d ever seen him without the blue suit.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I came for Brenda.”

He smiled this strange kind of smile. “She’s not going.”

“But the conferences with Reverend Keeling start in about fi"een minutes.”

“I heard,” he said.

And then I saw her. She was standing behind him in the dark living room.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice sounded strange. “I can’t.”

“Why?” I asked, peering around Mr. Hill to get a be!er look.

“She’s not going,” he repeated and shut the door in my face.

———— She didn’t show up on Sunday night for the Baptism either. I was so sick at heart I could hardly pay a!ention. I do remember the water being colder than I expected. I kept trying to concentrate on Jesus, but I couldn’t stop shivering and all I could think about was Brenda.

The next day at school she acted like she was avoiding me. So I waited by her locker a"er school.

“What happened?” I asked when she finally showed up.

“I told you before.”

“You said you were afraid. But there wasn’t anything to be afraid of.”

“You don’t get it.”

“You would have been fine. Reverend Keeling would have held you up the whole time.”

“Nobody’s strong enough for that,” she said. “Not even Reverend Keeling.”

“What do you mean?”

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She looked away. “Gordy,” she said, “you have no idea.”

That a"ernoon, when I rang her doorbell, nobody answered. I even thought I heard voices inside, so I banged on the door and called out to her. But nobody came.

A week later, when I went to pick up my papers, there was a moving van out front.

I went into the building. Brenda’s front door was wide open, and the living room was full of boxes. No furniture. I was about to leave when I saw something red sticking out of a pile of trash. I dug out Brenda’s Bible and stuffed it in my jacket pocket.

I managed not to cry then, but that night at home, in bed, I cried.

And that wasn’t the only time.

I loved her so much.

NANCY BOURNE

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JESSE GRAVES

The Residual Site Whereupon the stars cast down their blacked out husks, so the mountain lets drop what fails to hold sap.

Trees revise their histories each year, clean growth scripted in roots weaves a branch narrative, new leaf, new bud, story old as ash hand-dabbed by torchlight along a steep underground seam.

Sequoyah walked among ancestors of these woods, his eyes following the curving symmetries lineated in tu"s of shag bark, earth verse newly translated to a syllabary.

He made a travelling tongue, talking leaves that could carry a message farther than the wind.

Ground water can sing its cold song forever, but human codes go quiet a"er fading out, a"er losing pitch to the ears of the young, leaving a whole turn of mind, way of being, with no voice in the world, no way to reveal its secret truth. The mountain speaks for itself.

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Cavern Ice finds deep pockets, sunless crevices frozen until late spring, earliest summer.

Ground surface relents, but underground holds clusters of crystalline slivers, procession into further depths, sickles hanging like porcelain fangs.

Wind practices its crude archery here.

Sha"s of bi!er sting fired at random, taking down whatever finds itself crossed between slanting currents.

Song sparrow on the ground, struck against some unseen field of force, quivering on the lip of the cavern, beak working up soundless monosyllables, wings tremble without li", without surge.

It still moves, that stirring form which will emerge, momentarily visible, into the light, claim what feast air sacrifices to ground.

JESSE GRAVES

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Substrata So much time for dark envisionings, Rock crystals forming in the mind, Solidifying into permanent structures.

To survive February is an accomplishment In your family, the future hiding behind Banks of fog, only the unknown ahead, Green bo!om-fields covered with water, Ice along the edges, where the past looks Like a pasture with fat grazing ca!le.

Eastern hardwood forests cast shadows Over whole lifetimes, even if they are short, Even if we are outlived by the overhanging trees, Their shadows following us underground, Deep into the substrata, the water table Rising around our bones, all our sodden parts.

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MICHAEL DERRICK HUDSON

Blaming Everything on Science at the Turn of the Century So. Everybody else has somewhere else to go, it seems.

She’s in New York now, via Athens and Budapest. Here in my kitchen houseflies brutally colonize Thursday’s carryout carton of Mongolian beef and its vast archipelagos of jungle fuzz. One of the cats wanders by, searching for pathetic fallacy. The wall clock struggles to keep me apprised of this sad situation but the General Theory of Relativity only inches me an hour. So they’ve proven: a trillion years of past with the stars all now making perfect sense. And here I lost half the morning to another one of their immaculate yeses.

MICHAEL DERRICK HUDSON

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Threnody for Sophia on the Last Day of Winter Great stuff here. All the trees are so tree-y. And that scraggly cat is such a cat, crouched so baleful and orange beneath the rear axle of my snow-andsalt blistered car. My hope is Sophia loved the whole world despite the cynics, so I’ll love everything too: frost-heaved sidewalks and paint scabbing off the fire hydrants and goofy Rapunzel turrets on the Victorian houses. I’ll love even the whoops-a-daisy scrimmage of my favorite decaying memories: Gee, that one time I kissed Sophia sure zings me now! Damn you, Too Late World! I wonder if Sophia would’ve told me a Too Late World is much be!er than no world at all and twenty-six-years-ago kisses are still kisses even if recalled in a prospect of bird crap and busted-up sidewalks traversed by gimpy orange cats and the sun like God’s own utility warming us all higgledy-piggledy free of charge. Gone! Gone! I used to cry like a ghost hooting from the drains, dragging the basement with my sinner’s chains while counting up the bones. What a mope! Now I sell myself on a fairy tale

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princess in the brick Rapunzel turret of next door’s decrepit Victorian pile. Under the broken slates she plays harpsichord or sings a Korean folk song and spins burdocks into gold. She’s a willing-to-forgivealmost-anything princess, a princess who’d forgive all of her Prince Charmings and whatever fools they turned out to be.

MICHAEL DERRICK HUDSON

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KYLE ELLINGSON

Our Employer Used to be, at bedtime when he couldn’t sleep, our teenaged employer would page our poolside locker room, greet the six of us as brudes (his affectionate mashup of brutes and dudes), and ask if he was interrupting anything important. He never quite was. “Cool cool cool,” he would say, or coo, then faux-solemnly apologize in advance for obliging us to peek at the camera feed and report how many unchaperoned female fans, 18 to 45ish, were loitering at his gate.

———— Our employer’s mod cli$op manor was 4 stories tall, built in the shape of a white 6-sided die. Each side was dimpled with a single dot: if you could roll the house, it would roll only 1’s. The house was optically engineered to appear infinitesimally readier and readier, on consecutive viewings, to teeter off the cliff and into the bay.

“So does my house count as a symbol of something? If so, what?” our employer asked anew each time his long chopper tilted in homeward descent and his manor appeared below, shrunk by distance to the usual size of a die.

The six of us declined to comment. It was his house, and we felt that gave him first dibs on deconstructing its imagery.

———— Our employer’s parents parentally detached years ago, going absent.

Few gi"s, fewer thank-you cards.

They lived back in Montana, were superficial Mormons fixated on floating a second, sexier child star across the headwaters of Mormon TV, down the tributaries of Disney, and into the kaleidoscope of the secular mainstream.

————

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