Monkeybicycle4

MONKEYBICYCLE issue four

© 2006 Monkeybicycle Publishing. All rights reserved by Monkeybicycle and the authors of the stories contained within.

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ISSN:1 5 4 7 - 0 5 0 4 ISBN: 1-4243-2141-7 ISBN 13: 978-1-4243-2141-4**

MONKEYBICYCLE IS: WEB EDITORS: Matthew Simmons, Eric Spitznagel POETRY EDITOR: Jacob Smith ASSISTANT EDITOR: Laura Carney ILLUSTRATIONS: Timothy Park EDITOR: Steven Seighman READER: You

Table of Cont ntents CITY LEAGUE Chris Bachelder GOING UP TO THE COUNTRY:COMING OF AGE IN A CALIFORNIA COMMUNE Steve Almond OPERATION WILNA II Roy Kesey THE MEN OF THE HOUSE Julia Glassman CECILIA Julia Glassman GIRAFFES Steven Gillis CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST IS CONFRONTED BY HIS EX-GIRLFRIEND THE DARK OF NIGHT Samantha Hunt THE SALES TEAM Ryan Boudinot BASEBOTS: INTRODUCTION FLYING BIKE Susan Henderson STAFF MEETING Bob Arter DLOOP John Leary CATCH Todd Zuniga CREATION Bob Arter THE MAN WHO MAKES THE ROBOTS Susan Henderson ADJUSTMENT Tom Jackson THE TEAM BEE Pia Z. Ehrhardt AT BROWNSVILLE John Leary JEAN-LUC Bob Arter HUNGER Seth Shafer BALLPARK Tom Jackson PERCHANCE TO DREAM? J.C. Frampton RECIPE Pia Z. Ehrhardt WIN OR LOSE? Shauna McKenna SINCE BEFORE THEY DRAINED THE LAKE John Warner AUTOGRAPH Susan Henderson POPCORN, PEANUTS, CRACKER JACKS Shauna McKenna BOTTOM OF THE FIFTH John Leary FAT PITCH J.C. Frampton BOYFRIENDS AND SHOPPING Shauna McKenna

1 3 6 11 13 19 29 31 37 39 41 43 45 46 48 50 51 53 54 56 57 58 63 64 65 67 68 69 71 74

75 76 78 79 81 83 84 86 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 99 100 101 102 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 116

SEVENTH INNING STRETCH Seth Shafer BOTTOM OF THE SEVENTH Sean Carman PIVOT Tom Jackson CLUTCH Seth Shafer TOP OF THE EIGHTH John Leary LOVE/MACHINE Terry Bain FOUL Shauna McKenna RUSTY Scott Southwick BATHTUB John Leary RENDEZVOUS Pia Z. Ehrhardt DIXIE HIGHWAY SOUTH OF OKEECHOBEE Maureen Templeton TEMPS Lightsey Darst CARTOON FIB and BELATED Brian Beatty THE WALKING ROCK John Kistner SALSA DANCING Jessica Fuller THE BEAM Roderick Leyland SINGLE Martha Clarkson CLOUD STREETS and TAIL-END CHARLIE Lori Romero ALABAMA Jack Dee Fleischer MISERY Michael Lorne Leard STARLESS Maxfield Chandler INFLUENZA Peter Schwartz A DARK BLACK MOOD Josh Kron DEAD FLY BEAUTY Richard Fein THE MET Sarah Bridgins BAR FIGHT Tyler Smith CROSSING XXXIII Jnana Hodson EPISTEMOLOGY Ed Higgins MAZAMA VILLAGE Ashok Niyogi CONTRIBUTORSʼ Notes

CITY LEAGUE Chris Bachelder

I

n walked young Carter, late again, wanted to know had I heard about Henson.

“What about Henson?” I said. Carter’s suit was nice. Nobody ever cared that he was la late.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Do you even know Henson?”

Young Carter knew everyone, even though he was young. All day long the phone on his desk was lit up with messages. He told stories of the old days, back before he was born.

He gestured in the air with pickles from take-out lunches. He told stories about people in the room; people who had seen it all firsthand, and they didn’t correct him when he got it wrong.

“I know Henson,” I said.

“I suppose you would,” young Carter said.

“Fifteen, twenty years ago, I played City League against Henson.”

“I’ve heard about those days.”

“And Henson would try to cover me.”

“I heard you were a shooter.”

“They’d go box-and-one.”

“Box-and-one!” Carter shouted.

“He couldn’t cover me, but he would try.”

“There was that night you went for fifty.” Carter winked at me.

“I never went for fifty.”

“You should suit up again,” he said. “We need the help.”

One night I had gone over to the Y to see Carter play in the league. I had to know what kind of player he was; it seemed important to me. The smell of the gym was the same.

He was graceful and thought. He missed everything he put up, but it didn’t get to him.

Everyone kept throwing him the ball. He was a player — you can always tell in about five seconds. I had hoped he wouldn’t be any good. I left before the game was over and I don’t think he ever knew I was there.

“But fucking Henson,” I said, getting up from my chair and walking over to young Carter. Carter seemed to be standing most of the day. Sanding, talking, the rest of us looking up at him. My knee hurt. “Fucking Henson, every time I shot, every time, he’d put two fingers in my chest.”

I stuck Carter with my fingers. His stomach was flat and hard. “Like this,” I said.

“Every time I shot.” I poked him again, hard, and he didn’t flinch. “We were friends, we’d have drinks, then on the court he pulls that shit. Just like this, two fingers while I’ve got my arms above my head. The refs couldn’t see it or didn’t care. City League refs, you have to be bleeding.”

Young Carter laughed. “He got in your head.”

“I wanted to break his fingers,” I said.

He got way into your head.”

“I mean it. It made me crazy. I wanted to snap those fingers. What kind of a son 1|

City League

of a bitch pokes you like that when you shoot?”

“Well, he’s dead now now,” Carter said.

I tried hard not to make a noise, not to say anything. I just stared at Carter, like maybe I had already heard. But I hadn’t, and he knew it.

Carter said, “He’s dead. A month ago they opened him up, took one look, then just closed him back up. Nothing they could do.”

I sat down in an empty chair that wasn’t mine.

“And that was just a year after his wife died.”

I said, “Margaret? Margaret died?”

Young Carter said, “His second wife. Not Margaret. She fell off a horse. Two years after they got married, she falls off the horse and dies. A year after that, he’s dead. Forty-sixyears-old.”

It was quiet then. Someone rolled open a heavy drawer in a file cabinet and it sounded like thunder. I never wished for Henson to be dead; I just wanted to break his fingers. The office was so dry my throat was sore and my hands were cracked and red. Every doorknob in the place shocked you.

I said, “How do you always know this shit?”

Carter said, “God’s watching, you think that’s it?”

I said, “Shut up, Carter.”

He said, “You feel bad now, don’t you.”

I said, “Shut the fuck up.”

Carter laughed and picked up the phone on his desk. “You feel bad now,” he said, dialing. An intern tiptoed in with a lunch menu and a clipboard, and I waved him away.

Carter was right, I did feel bad about what I said. I know it looked small. I didn’t want Henson to die. But there was something wrong at the center of him. No question about that. Something was fundamentally wrong. You tell me, what kind of a son of a bitch does that in a City League game?

2|

GOING UP TO THE COUNTRY: COMING OF AGE ON A CALIFORNIA COMMUNE Steve Almond

I

n the spring of 1971, my parents loaded up their three boys into the old Volvo for a series of weekend trips up to a sprawling sheep ranch in Sonoma County, on which they and several others hoped to build a commune. My twin brother Mike and I were five; our brother Dave was seven. Our parents were both 33.

They were more than just dabblers in the counter-culture. In fact, they lived a sort of double life. They were recent graduates of Yale Medical School who had come west two years earlier to pursue their professional ambitions. My father joined the faculty of Stanford Medical School (his father was the chair of the Political Science department) and my mom, in addition to tending to three rambunctious sons, was finishing her residency.

At the same time, they were taken up by a burgeoning sense of hope. The Sixties, as such, had not yet been labeled, rendered a cutesy advertising trope. People truly believed that the evils of age could be overcome by joining together. This is what happened during World War II, during the civil rights movement — my parents had both been activists — and the War on Poverty. If there is such a thing as upwardly mobile hippies, my parents fit the bill.

They planted a garden and canned preserves and made candles at home. They dabbled in psychodrama and recreational drug use, and took part in anti-war activities.

One of my earliest memories is of my father sitting us boys down one evening and explaining that he might be gone for a few days, and that we needed to behave for mom. The next morning he marched off to Moffett Field, a nearby Air Force base, where he was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War. (He was released that same afternoon, and I can still remember the confused joy I felt in seeing him appear, in a suit and tie, on the front walk.

“What happened, daddy?” I said. “I thought you were going away to jail?”)

They also made music, quite beautifully. My mother was a pianist, my father a singer. It was at one of their concerts that an old friend of theirs, a charismatic woman named Geraldine True, told them about the commune. Her pitch was expertly calibrated to appeal to their dual identity: they could join the cause and write a book about the experience.

Again, it is difficult for the people of this era to grasp, but back then the notion of returning to the land was not some crunchy cliché. People truly believed that the urban and suburban life had become atomized and spiritually corrupt, and that the most alluring solution was to find a patch of arable soil and a loving community, and start over again.

It didn’t hurt that the arable soil, in this case, was located up north, on the eastern slope of the Coastal Range, just inland from the Pacific. Nor that it was gorgeous, rolling terrain with a creek nearby for fishing and swimming. The plan, as such, was for the group to design and build a communal dwelling. In the meantime, they would live together in a small farm house. There was a cow for milking, chickens to provide eggs, and a garden. Geraldine would teach the women to weave. Children would play together, hopefully with some supervision. Life would be simpler, more spontaneous and cooperative.

This sounded awfully good to my parents, who were themselves overburdened by professional duties, the rigors of child rearing, and activism. So they ponied up their share of 3|

Going Up to the Country

the cost (less than $2000) and decided to spend their summer of 1971 on what became known as The Land.

It quickly became apparent, though, that many of the settlers — there were about twenty, mostly couples — viewed the Land in different terms. It was not just a retreat from the highways and supermarkets, those dependable hobgoblins of the dominant capitalist culture, but from responsibility. Thus, my parents were quickly forced to revert to their role of duty-bound parents.

My mother, for instance, organized a children’s dinner dinner, because the kids were not always getting enough nourishment. She made it a point to get us eggs every morning, which meant rising early, as some of the other adults were gathering eggs (and eating them) before the kids had eaten. Both of my parents spent a good deal of time organizing outings for the kids, who were often left to wander the premises, sometimes naked, often bare-footed. (Perhaps sensing what was to come, my parents had sent Dave to spend the summer with his maternal grandparents back east.)

This is not to say that the months we spent on the Land were dreary or miserable. Just the opposite. There was a sense of adventure to the place, of the unexpected. My own memories of the experience are more like the dream states,, intensely detailed, but lacking aay sense of content — pretty much what you’d expect from a five year-old.

I remember taking a bath with Mike one evening and looking up to find a man called Big John (there was also a Little John) standing in the doorway. Our mother had gone down the hall to fetch towels.

Big John looked at us and smiled. “That looks nice.”

“It is!” Mike told him. “Would you like to take a bath with us?”

He nodded shyly, then proceeded to climb into the tub with us, all six-foot-four of him, and we splashed happily about, his jeans staining the bath water brown, until our mother returned. The look on her face was one of almost immeasurable dismay. She knew what we did not, which ich was that Big John was in the midst of an acid trip. This was the same group trip, in fact, during which one of the adults, a fragile young man with a history of psychiatric troubles, suffered a psychotic break.

Another day, a sweet woman named Robin took me down to the creek to fish and we returned with a giant caviar-filled trout. And I remember someone, a man with a mustache — I’m not exactly sure who — giving me a Jew’s harp as a gift. I was fascinated by how it ffelt to pluck at the thing, the way m my teeth reverberated as I twanged along to “American Pie.” I remember running down the dirt path that led to the farmhouse to meet my uncle Pete — he later took us kids into town for ice cream — and watching big kids jumped off the rope swing into Austin Creek.

Over the years, when I’ve told people about the Land experience, I’ve tended to portray myself as a timid suburban kid out of my element: how embarrassed I felt by all the nudity, how I cried when the cow stepped on my toe, how freaked I was to discover that the fresh milk poured onto my bowl of Corn Flakes contained tiny chunks of cream. (The horror!) The truth is these were just symptoms. The real problem, as my parents quickly discerned, was that the Land — for all the freedoms and ideals it represented — was even more chaotic than our home life.

The memory that stands out as most significant took place during a trip to the beach.

Most of the adults had taken some kind of psychedelic drug, including my father. He was lying 4|

Steve Almond

on his back and talking in a strange,, associative wa way that worried me. So I took his head into my lap and told him that I would be his doctor and take care of him.

He was deeply touched, I suspect. But also aware that a five year-old, even an eager one, probably shouldn’t be saddled with such a burden.

As perilous as it may sound, the Land did not become our family’s Waterloo. At the end of the summer we packed up the old Volvo and headed back down to Palo Alto. The communal welling had been designed, but only half-built. The book about communal life didn’t get written either, though my mother did receive some much-deserved credit in her psychiatric residency.

My parents continued to visit the Land, with less and less frequency over the years. The grand utopian plans were scaled back, then quietly abandoned. Most of the couples who had moved there in the salad days broke up, or drifted away, or both. Like so many of the projects that bloomed during the Sixties, the Land collapsed under the weight of its own expectations. But I’m not sure that makess it a failure. I can say say, for instance, that the Land had a profound effect on me. And though I don’t live on a commune — nor do I wish to — I have spent much of my adult life attempting to build communities, ones that might help their members bear the loneliness and dislocation of modern life.

In some sense, the most effective one I’ve been able to find is literature itself, which does not require milking cows or dropping acid, but which does invite members to consider themselves as part of a larger family — the family of man — and to embrace the joys and duties of consciousness.

5|

OPERATION WILNA II Roy Kesey

W

hen I was little I wanted to be a garbage man because I thought all you had to do was go around giving people as much garbage as they needed for the week. I found out the truth from my big brother Cole who gave me noogies all the time for being stupid.

Anyway, for the next few years I wanted to be the usual things, an assassin or a shepherd or a clerk, but somehow they never worked out.

You wouldn’t believe what people throw — trophies, canned hams, clothes with hardly any rips or tears. While the stuff is in the garbage can it’s private property, and once it’s in the truck it belongs to Tri-County Waste Removal, but me and my partner Luddy came up with a way to keep things without breaking the law: you can’t touch anything in the cans or in the truck, but whatever you catch in the air in-between is yours fair and square. I never cheated a single time until I had to for Operation Wilna.

We’ve been working together for over a year now, me and Luddy. He once caught a necklace that turned out to be real gold. My best so far is this Ginsu knife, except it cut through my glove and I had to get stitches. What makes the game so exciting is all the danger — mean, it’s not like you can just stand there and expect to catch a Ginsu. You have to climb alongside the lifts, lean way inside, and reach out. If your boots slip, you fall into the truck, and ten-to-one says you land on a fondue fork or a broken umbrella. People are always throwing away perfectly good fondue forks, and I’ve caught more than my share.

Not counting right now, the last time I can remember being really truly afraid was on my way home to Fallash after visiting Wilna in Weott about three months ago. It was late at night, and I was on a Greyhound because my El Camino was in the shop getting its flywheel resurfaced. I’d brought a magazine along, and I was halfway through an article on adjusting your throttle when I noticed the woman sitting across the aisle. She looked like she was pretty sad about something, but she was holding this old guitar in her lap, and I’ve always liked people who take guitars on bus trips, so I asked her if she’d play.

“He went away,” she said. “Went away and didn’t ever come back.”

I figured she hadn’t heard me right so I asked again, but by then she was too sad to even answer me. Her eyes were open and it looked like she wanted to answer, but she was just too sad to move her lips.

I tried to get back into the article, but I couldn’t hold the magazine steady enough to read. When we got to Fallash I jumped out of the bus and ran the entire way back to my apartment. I popped open a Pabst but my hands were shaking so bad I spilled most of it on my shirt. I didn’t calm down until I realized that I could always go crazy if I had to. Uncle Milt gets free food and free drugs and his only job is watching television all — the ward’s designated watcher.

Wilna’s a librarian who’s on time for everything. Also, she never wears jewelry: as I recently learned, she’s afraid of getting pulled into machinery, so I guess whenever I get around to proposing to her I should give her a new toaster-oven instead of a ring. She’s always saying how she’d love a new toaster-oven. Breakfast is Wilna’s favorite meal.

6|

Roy Kesey

I get a postcard from her every Monday, and write her back a letter every Tuesday.

There are simpler things in the world than writing to Wilna, but when I’m on the job, as long as the lifts don’t jam — they do you have to kick them until they start working again, which is why we wear the heavy — get into a sort of rhythm: swing the can off the ground, swing it onto the lift, reach out and hope to get lucky, swing the can back down to the sidewalk all empty and light. Once I get that rhythm going, everything in my head gets a chance to settle.

See, thoughts are like leaves in a swimming pool. If you try to grab them while you’re roiling around in the water, you can’t ever quite get hold of them. You have to get out of the pool, lie down on your towel or maybe go look for your flip-flop which the dog took, and after a while you go back, and the leaves are sitting quiet at the bottom, and you can look at each one for as long as you need to.

Most of the thoughts I’ve been looking at lately have had to do with that last postcard I got from Wilna. It said she wasn’t sure if we were still seeing each other, because she’d gone out to dinner twice with this guy Ted who sprays her duplex for roaches every other month, and both times she’d let him kiss her goodnight on the side of the mouth.

Right up to yesterday, whenever I went out walking at night the stars would connect up into pictures, but they weren’t all the ones you’d expect. First, where Orion usually is, I’d see a short skinny guy named Ted kissing my Wilna. Then in place of Cassiopeia I’d see Ted locked in the back of his roach-control van with the insecticide hose rammed down his throat; he’d thrash around like a snake-bit badger, slump over into the Big Dipper, twitch a few times and go still.

Wilna and I first met about three years — was on a Greyhound too, now that I think about it, back before I bought the El Camino. I was bringing the last of my stuff to my new duplex in Weott after nine years of living in Lompoc with my Uncle Milt, who’d finally checked into the sanitarium. (Uncle Milt’s the one who taught me the names of the constellations. He never does anything until the stars tell him to.) I found out later that Wilna, who’s lived in Weott all her life, was coming home after a Librarians of America conference in Oxnard that had been trying to decide if the Dewey Decimal System is fine the way it is, or if, as Wilna firmly believes and will tell you so, it should evolve to provide better referential support.

When I saw the Weott Waldo’s go by, I walked up to the yellow line you’re not supposed to stand in front of: I always like to be the first one off the bus, which after all is nothing but a sideways garbage can on wheels. Then the bus hit a pothole, and I fell into the lap of a stubby old man.

A woman who turned out to be Wilna was sitting right behind him. She leaned forward, picked up his hat which I’d knocked off, set it backwards on his head, and asked me why I was in such a hurry. I re-set the man’s hat and asked her where she’d learned to dress people.

She got all flustered, pushed her glasses up higher on her nose and said, “Aren’t we lucky it isn’t raining, because most Februarys Weott gets more rain than London, but less than Crescent City.” I told her I’d never been to Crescent City, and then the bus pulled into the station.

Wilna and I got our luggage, started walking in the same direction, and turned onto the same street. I laughed right out loud when I walked up one duplex sidewalk and she walked up the very next one. She looked over at me, and she didn’t laugh but she did sort of grin.

7|

Operation Wilna II

Over the next few months I got to talk to her quite a — came over to borrow cooking ingredients maybe once a week or so. I knew she liked me because whenever I asked her what she was making, she could never remember. I started hanging out at the library on my days off; mostly I sat in the corner and read the magazines. Sooner or later she’d walk past me with her arms full of books and ask if I needed help finding anything. I’d say I could never think of anything to look for, and she’d hand me a book about medieval warfare or deep-sea fishing or the history of tractors. I’d look at the pictures for a while, and they were fine, but the best part was just being around her, watching her move all those books.

Finally one day I asked her if maybe she’d want to go out on a date. She asked me when and where, and I said I was thinking Bud’s Steak House on Friday at eight, and she said she’d love to except Friday was Bridge Night, but Annette Seagle had been throwing up all week so they needed a fourth and would I like to come play.

I found out bridge takes a lot more planning than most things are worth. We played for three-and-a-half hours. When all the sugar cookies were gone, Mrs. Barker, whose house it was, said she was afraid it was time to break up until next week. She and Mrs. Helman were both very nice, asking me where I’d learned to bid and making me promise to come again soon.

When Wilna and I got out to where her bike was leaned up against the hedge, she said she was sorry I’d been so bored, and she thanked me for being such a good — thinks being a good sport is the best quality a person can have. I didn’t go to any more Bridge Nights but I did take her out to Bud’s that Saturday. From then on whenever she came over to borrow cooking ingredients she’d remember what they were for, and she’d invite me over to have some if it was something I liked.

We went for walks along the railroad tracks, picking blackberries and counting the cars of the trains that hammered by. We went to the Back Forty Nursery to look for plants for her duplex, and to decide what kind of cactus I’d be needing once I bought a house. All told, Wilna and I were together for almost nineteen months, and it wasn’t perfect, but it was comfortable.

Then I got transferred down to — waste removal is the wave of the future, I guess, but it’s hardly fair the way they bump you around without even asking. And they promised me it was temporary, three months maximum. Three months turned into six months, and six months into a year. The days dragged and the weeks weren’t in any hurry either, but the months jogged by so quiet that I didn’t even hear their — I’ve got twenty-twenty hearing.

We talked all the time on the phone, and she asked me over and over when I was going to fix things so we could be together, but Tri-County Waste runs the whole show from Cobb up to McKinleyville, and the folks at the Fallash Library told me they had all the help they needed, so I couldn’t move up and Wilna couldn’t move down and there was no easy answer at all.

Then I got that postcard. And I got scared. In fact, I got more than scared: I realized that losing her to some moron exterminator is the thing I’m most afraid of in this whole shoddy world. I had to cheat all week at the garbage game to get the things I needed for my plan, which pissed Luddy off something awful, but by Friday I had everything ready and on Saturday night I pulled the search-and-rescue mission. It went like this: First I organized my equipment: a bowling trophy, a nylon stocking, a cardboard 8|

Roy Kesey

pirate’s hat, a canned ham, a thing of purple lipstick, and a frilly blue dress with just the one little rip in the armpit. I threw in your usual rescue stuff, pliers and rope and thumbtacks and whatnot, then went over to Luddy’s and asked if he’d sell me that gold necklace he’d caught. It took some serious begging, plus a hundred bucks, plus a new set of tires for his Firebird, but he finally gave in.

I made it to Weott in two hours and forty-four minutes. Parked in front of my old duplex was a white van with ‘Ted Filbert’s Roach Control’ written on the side in big idiotic orange letters, and next door, Wilna was standing on her front porch, hugging some guy in a greasy gray suit. He was a lot taller than I’d imagined, and not at all skinny, and his fists were — had no idea exterminators have such big hands.

After the guy drove off, I waited a couple of minutes and then knocked on Wilna’s door. When she answered I pretended like I hadn’t seen anything; I asked if she’d gotten my letter, and she said yes, and that she was still considering it. I handed her the necklace, which is when I found out how scared she is of jewelry. She apologized for being that way, and I told her I’d take it back to the store and get her something she’d really like. Then I said I had to go.

She said: You drove three hundred miles just to give me a necklace?

And I said: Yup. I kissed her good-bye, a real kiss square on the mouth. I fired up the El Camino, found a gas station with a telephone booth, grabbed the phone book and whipped through the pages, and like a miracle there it was: Theodore Filbert, 53 Swayback Lane.

I parked a few blocks away and walked up slow, carrying my box of stuff like I was some innocent garage-sale guy on his way home after hitting it big. Ted’s yard had a hedge running all the way around it, just the one opening at the sidewalk, and the van was parked on the street with the insecticide hose coiled up in back like a badger-hating rattlesnake. I put the bait-ham on the ground on the driver’s side of the vehicle, and hung the pirate’s hat from the antenna. Then I doorbell-ditched him, hunched down behind his hedge and pulled the nylon stocking over my head.

Sure enough, Ted opened the door, came out onto the porch, and was just about to turn back when he saw the pirate’s hat. He glanced around, went out to the van, pulled the hat off the antenna and, just like I knew he would, he took a quick look around the vehicle just in case. When he saw the ham he sort of smirked for a second like he was maybe on Candid Camera. Then he bent over, picked it up, and carried it into his house.

And that was pretty much the end of Operation Wilna. See, I could have whomped Ted on the head with the bowling trophy, and then, Phase B, I could have rolled him over, pulled his keys out of his pocket, opened the rear doors of the van and loaded him in, ducttaped his hands and feet and mouth, slammed the doors and headed back to Wilna’s for Phase C, the lipstick and frilly blue dress, but somehow, in the second or two that it took Ted to pick up the ham, I just knew that Phase D was too complicated to work. I mean, how many tries would it have taken me to get the rope up and over the streetlight? Would it even have held Ted’s weight long enough for Wilna to get a look at him dressed as a big fat stupid upside-down Ethel Merman? And what if at some point he’d woken up, and gotten his hands out of the duct tape, and slugged me, that big old fist of his taking up my whole face? If that had happened I would have landed hard, and the top of my head might have chucked the edge of the curb, 9|

Operation Wilna II

which would have been the worst noogie of all time: a nuclear noogie.

Still and all, just because Operation Wilna didn’t work out so well doesn’t mean I’ve given up: if there’s one great truth on this ass-wipe earth, it’s that life isn’t worth spit if the one you love is kissing an exterminator. Also, Wilna called this morning to thank me again for trying to give her a necklace. Her voice was faint and kind of staticky like she was phoning from Los Angeles or the moon, and even though I couldn’t get my mouth to make the shapes of actual words, I know she could tell how happy I was to hear from her, and it even kind of sounded like she was thinking of maybe suggesting that I head up to Weott again as soon as I get the chance.

All of which leads to this: Operation Wilna II is a whole lot simpler than the first version. I’m thinking this Ginsu isn’t going to need too many more hours on the whetstone, which is a good thing, since I can’t get my hands to stop shaking and I’d hate to get cut by the same knife twice. I’m thinking tomorrow, or the day after, or next week at some point. I’m thinking definitely soon.

10 |

THE MEN OF THE HOUSE Julia Glassman

T

hat morning I woke up completely on fire. Not really. As I surfaced I could feel flames sputtering around my hair and smoothing themselves over my skin, eating me alive in my bed. This is it, I thought. I lay with my eyes closed and waited for the fire to eat me up but when the minutes started passing and I became more and more awake, I took a peek at myself – that wasn’t what I’d wanted to do, no one wants to see themselves in flames – and saw that there was no fire, no heat, just me in the bed with my arms and legs straight out. As soon as I saw myself the feeling stopped. It was one of those dreams – the ones that make you think you’re climbing up when really you’re just floating beneath the surface.

2 I went downstairs and my mother was throwing biscuits at the dogs again. She was sitting on the couch and watching TV while our two big boy-dogs – she called them her men of the house – stared at her with their ears raised. The biscuits were in her hand, the ends sticking out so the dogs could see them there, and when they got antsy she would transfer a couple into the other hand and – Whoosh! Send them sailing. The dogs went nuts and raced after them and then fought over them when they landed with a bump. They were growling at each other, their tails wagging and hitting the wall.

“I set you up with one tonight,” my mother said.

I was still in my pajamas.

“He’s really looking forward to meeting you.”

“I’ll meet him,” I said. My mother had been setting me up on blind dates for the past eight months. Handsome men she found on internet dating pages. She was ashamed, I think, of the fact that I was thirty years old and still sleeping in a twin sized bed.

Whoosh! The dogs went crazy. “You’ll really like this one,” my mother said.

2 So I went. I sat in the club that she told me to go to and I wore boots that made me look taller. I wore a skirt that had bunches in the side, flowers cascading down my legs.

When he showed up, I compared him to the picture I had and he turned around and looked straight at me. We stared for a bit. He turned away and I realized that he didn’t recognize me from whatever picture my mother had given him – I didn’t even know what picture of me she was using. She could have edited it to make me look prettier.

My flowers wiggled and shook as I shifted.

That night, I stared at him for an hour. I cupped a drink in my hand and ignored the men who sat beside me and gave me looks.

What would have happened if I had gone up to talk to him? What if I had strolled up and tried to look sexy, my flowers jiggling around my legs? We would have talked for a 11 |