RETRO ISSUE ONE

Welcome to the first issue of Umbrella Factory Magazine March 2010 For more information and authors' bios please visit us at: www.umbrellafactorymagazine.com

Fiction John McManus The Yeomen T.M. De Vos The Germ T.L. Crum Virginia Elinor Abbott Sweethearts Nonfiction Samantha L. Robinson My Big Brothers Sort-of Super Powers Charles Malone Our Inability to Restore Dr. Elizabeth Bernays Bugs Poetry Mathias Svalina "Everything is So Terrifying" "No New Wounds Until the Old Ones Heal" "Can We Never Make Decisions" Erin Costello "Branding" "Ditch Fog" "To Sweep up a Puddle of Glass" Justin Runge "353" "352" "88" Seth Landman "My Eyes Are on Sophia" "Earl Believes" "A Helper Fit" Serena Chopra "February" "Babies" "Violet Tells a Story"

John McManus A chapter from the novel Jack Sprat’s Wife

In the weeks after Hank Hardesty was revealed as a fraud, his colleagues and other journalists tried tracing his lies back to their genesis, but it had vanished into a far horizon.

Hank knew they were calling upon his friends, his former lovers, every figure from his last ten years, but one lie still stood intact: they believed he came from the city. Never would they know to shift their gaze south to the red-dirt countryside of Moultrie, Georgia, its farms of soybeans where, fiercely curious, he’d wanted to be driven down every road in the county. No one had been willing. One day he rode his bike clear to I-75, where the sheriff spotted him and called his grandfather. That evening at home he was asked what his punishment should be. “Fifty licks with a switch,” he said, full of hope, but he was only grounded for a day.

In high school his mother enrolled him in a private academy founded within a week of the federal order to integrate. Only at the games did he see kids of color. In October of his sophomore year, Moultrie Academy played Worth County, the other undefeated team. Like most schools they’d gone up against, Worth County was black, so there was a confidence in the air.

His family along with the families of his teammates watched from the bleachers, and there was to be a party and it would be a good night not least because the halfback, Brian Townsend, had a liter bottle of rum.

Like many gay boys, he had developed an odd relationship with the idea of humiliation.

Straight kids seemed to think humiliation should be feared, but Hank knew the day would come when he’d divulge the news. To be humiliated, you had to worry how your audience perceived you. If they cared for you—which Justice Hardesty couldn’t help doing, since Hank would carry his name into the next century—they shared in the shame. So humiliating himself would be pleasurable: the old man would feel disgraced while Hank felt fine. He practiced in the eighth grade by smoking dope with the first boy he kissed, but his teachers learned only about the pot. Nevertheless his strategy caused the judge strife, even affecting his sentencing patterns, so that he grew tougher on drug dealers lest their product trickle down again into the vicinity of his family.

The pre-game sentiment was that Moultrie would win sixty to three. There was an argument about the three, unfolding as he watched his teammates change out of their clothes: Doug Hart thought it bad luck not to predict at least a field goal, but the quarterback, Chip Gillespie, said Worth County wouldn’t make it to midfield. The pace of their suiting up grew more languorous as the debate picked up steam; despite this distraction, Hank got an idea.

“Let’s whip those coons!” shouted Coach Williamson in a huddle after a prayer; then the band played and they took the field on a warm, starlit night. Hank, in a stroke of luck the likes of which he would keep having throughout his youth, found himself lining up across from a defensive back who wore number seventy, a kid with shiny coffee-colored skin. Hank stared into seventy’s eyes, and seventy stared back: there was always something deep in the eyes that gave it away.

The ball snapped. They ran forward, their helmets crashing as they gripped each other, pushing and heaving in what Hank fancied was like the intercourse of two spiders; then they were on the ground, the boy atop him. Hank didn’t let go. “What’s your problem?” he heard, then he removed his hands so they could do it over again. On the ground he breathed hard, making sure this boy was aware of his smile. He fixed his gaze on him the whole first half, and the score came to be tied. Off the field he consulted with the assistant coach: “What’s number seventy’s name?”

“Giving you trouble?” He consulted a clipboard. “Tyrone Willis.”

“Naw, Coach, I’m the one giving the trouble.”

During the speech in the locker room, which, coincidentally, dealt with shame— specifically the notion that they should be ashamed if a bunch of cottonpicking you-know-whats held them to a draw—Hank imagined how he might recount it to a multiracial group of Ivy League students. He would describe crashing against another boy, the physical force equal to that of his pent-up desire. Back on the field the whistle blew and special teams went on; then, with twelve minutes left, he lined up across from Tyrone. “Tyrone,” he said, as all around them boys crouched frozen in place. The ball snapped and he was hurtling backward. There was the sound of one clear bell ringing and a curse he heard only after he’d said, as close as he could get

to Tyrone’s ear through their helmets, “I’ll tell you our playbook.”

As they lined up behind the line of scrimmage, Tyrone sneered. “You’re crazy.”

“That’s right.” And again they ran against each other like colliding plates of the earth itself, struggling, Hank finally breaking free as the ball spiraled over his head to land in the arms of Doug Hart, in whose zigzag line Hank saw his plan die. After the touchdown Worth County failed to score twice, and Moultrie won and the boys had a beer bust; but next week was a bye, and the teammates of Hank’s who had girls at Tifton were driving up to watch Worth County play that school. He joined them for a tailgate party where they drank bourbon and sang, We laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt Got a little crazy but we never got caught.

It wasn’t just his grandfather he wanted to humiliate; it was his whole region of the world, from the tailgate of Brian’s Ram clear to the ocean. He happened to spot Tyrone smoking by the bleachers. Tyrone watched him approach, his expression unchanging even when Hank said, “Thought you might wanna meet afterward.”

All depended on Tyrone’s not retorting “What for?” If he said “What for,” Hank would have to tell the truth or reply “No reason.” If the former, Tyrone would punch him, but if he said “No reason,” Tyrone would decline on the grounds that there was no reason.

“I’ll be at the Dairy Queen. Pull through and I’ll walk next door.” Tyrone dropped his cigarette and stomped out its embers. “What kind of car you drive?”

“Trans Am,” he finally answered, and Hank recalled his grandfather’s acronym for that make of automobile: Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac. He watched Tyrone go into the stands, then rejoined his buddies, who climbed into the bleachers and paid more attention to Chip’s troubles than to the game.

“Dump her, dude.”

“But I love her.”

“She go down on you?”

“Gags.”

“Dude.”

He drank three shots to keep the guys from seeing how antsy he was. Finally Worth County won 61-16 and then there was the slow milling about, the saying goodbye. “Screw it, let’s go to Cotton-Eyed Joe’s and find Chip a girl to replace Bitchface.”

No, thought Hank as the enthusiasm spread among them; they always went to Dairy Queen. “How would we get in?”

“We’re the team, Assmunch.”

“But Chip’s got the only fake ID.” They considered this. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Hank said. “You’ll run to the bouncer and yell at him to hurry cause it’s a matter of life and death, and he’ll follow to where Chip’s lying in the car going into shock. From eating peanuts. You guys sneak in while they’re outside, then Chip recovers and gets in too with his ID.” This conviction that he mustered, along with his newfound ability to tell spontaneous, intricate lies, which weren’t lies but rather statements of possibility, helped convince Hank that night that he was coming into his own. “Fuck it, let’s go to Dairy Queen.” Where they sat in a booth eating Blizzards, surrounded by girls. At 10:32 a red Trans Am pulled in and went straight for the car wash, where it stopped next to a coin-fed vacuum. Tyrone got out and put a quarter in, and Hank walked over. He followed Tyrone’s gaze toward the restaurant, which was lit like a stage. In it sat all the friends he had in the world. “You cool with me getting in?” he asked, and Tyrone nodded. It was a ten-minute drive to the highway rest area. They parked near the pine grove. When Hank reached across, Tyrone hardened instantly. This emboldened Hank, so he took out Tyrone’s penis and saw that it stretched from his wrist to the top of his middle finger.

“You think you can fit that in that mouth of yours?”

He positioned himself over the parking brake and went down on Tyrone, tasting dirty salt and feeling coarse hairs. He had been anticipating this for a long time. “No teeth,” said Tyrone, turning on the radio. “Tonight at our midnight madness sale,” shouted a man. Hank gagged as the station changed to jazz, a gentle sax, and again to Whitney Houston, and then, as

he reached down to begin touching himself too, Tyrone exploded in his mouth.

Hank didn’t move until Tyrone pushed him away and said, “How much you gonna give me?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, sitting up. “I haven’t got any money.”

Tyrone’s chuckle sent chills through him. “Get out, then.”

“Wait, there’s a little.”

“I don’t give charity to rich boys.”

He pulled out his wallet and counted twenty-two dollars. “Guess that’ll get you back to Tifton,” Tyrone said. When Hank handed it over, Tyrone drove them back onto the highway, commenting at one point, “We’ll still beat you.”

Hank felt the stuff sticking to his throat. “It’s too late,” he said.

“Betcha twenty-two dollars,” said Tyrone, and then he laughed at his own joke for nearly a mile.

Moultrie kept winning, and Hank was profiled in the paper along with his teammates.

He drove alone down all the roads in three counties. His grandfather was in session; his mother was in Miami. He put a thousand miles on the car, deciding to apply to every Ivy League college and go to none, but instead to Deep Springs Academy where there were no women, where he could learn to shoe horses and forge the shoes in smithies of old.

Worth County was winning too. They were 7-1 and Moultrie was 8-0 the day of the penultimate game, when Hank woke up with a fever of 103. When he called in sick, they told him he was one of twelve players with the flu. For the first time in a year, he was alone with his father, who shared his view of humiliation. He pulled a chair up to Hank’s bed and told Hank that his head hurt; there were bruises on his face from where he’d fallen down the stairs.

“Take Advil.”

“You don’t mix painkillers with liquor,” Henry said, because he was careful about these things; every morning he ate a banana to replenish his potassium.

“Dad, I’m gay.”

His father blinked his eyes. “Don’t tell your mom.”

“Let’s go somewhere.”

“You have a fever.”

“Let’s just leave.”

“There’s a trip I want to go on,” Henry said calmly, as if his son’s revelation had occurred decades ago. “They make Bombay Sapphire with ingredients from all over.

Cinnamon from Indochina, lemon from Spain. Water from Wales. I thought it would be nice to go see all those places.”

“It does sound nice,” Hank said, rolling over on his side to hide his expression.

“Grains of paradise,” his father added wistfully. Hank pretended to sleep, then slept, dreaming he was running downfield in his underwear, using his hands to cover himself, so that he dropped the ball. They lost. This happened too in the waking world, so that while he and his teammates recovered in time for another win, Tyrone’s prediction of a playoff was borne out on the Friday before Thanksgiving. The stands were full, and the guys had rented a house on Tybee Island. Hank rooted in the locker room until he found a clipboard and several sheets of paper. He took them to the counselor’s office, photocopied them, and went to find Tyrone smoking.

“Remember what I told you?” he said.

“That you’re a faggot?”

“About the plays.”

“Price is up to fifty.”

“You’d do it for free.”

“I’ll mess you up.”

“Take a look.”

He handed the copies to Tyrone, who unfolded them and glanced down at a diagram of X’s and O’s on a grid that represented the field. There was a list of coded signals and the number ten underlined twice. “What are you trying to do?” Tyrone asked, and Hank heard a squeak of fear: fear that this was what queers did, this was the kind of man you were if you were a queer.

“Help you.”

“But there’s scouts in the stands.”

It was true: his friends were thrilled that men were rumored to be in attendance from Vanderbilt and Clemson. Still, they’d never have been his friends if they really knew him, and anyway they were racists. “Then you should be happy,” he said before walking away, not scared. It seemed clear, as he would articulate later in a feature forRolling Stone, that the sort of fag-bashing he might fall victim to was based on the notion that gays didn’t exist. If you were a teenaged boy, you might make fag jokes and play Smear the Queer, but the idea that real gay people were around was outrageous. If you encountered any, you got as scared as them. It was their running away that caused you to give chase. In the locker room his heart beat wildly as his teammates stood buck naked listening to Nirvana. Chip stopped the tape, rewound it, hit play.

“See, life is stupid and contagious.”

“No, I feel stupid and contagious.”

Both interpretations felt right to Hank, for the song and for their own lives. At one point Brian saw Hank staring and said, “Whatcha looking at?”

“The little blond hairs on your ass that match your eyebrows.”

The guys laughed, and the coach arrived and spoke. The part about honor. The part about God. The part about winning. On the field it was thirty-six degrees, and over the din of the marching band Hank heard blackbirds screech from floodlights overhead. His team won the toss and he took position across from number forty-nine. A swarm of bodies madly rearranged itself. Behind him he heard a thud: Chip had been sacked. They set up again and it happened again: three of the Raiders charged through the center and Chip was down in a flash for third and twenty-six. And when they tried to pass to Doug, the defense predicted that play too, which left Moultrie to punt from its own one-yard line. The shock of this probably contributed to the ease with which Worth County scored off a rushing drive during which they never lost momentum. Hank and the offense came back on field, intending a play in which they faked up the middle and threw to Brian: the third formation on the diagram sheet.

Hank crouched forward. He could feel the eyes of scouts on him from schools his opponents would be lucky to go to, as well as the eyes of his grandfather and mother. His

wasn’t the wealthiest family; some of his friends belonged to moneyed lines extending back to when the Cherokees had traded slaves in the hope that Georgia’s whites would deem them citizens. That was how Hank saw it, anyway. There was a gene for patriotism, and his tribe existed to combat that gene. He felt the scrutiny of two thousand folks who trusted him to play his heart out, and sure enough, when the ball snapped, he ran hard against the boy he’d been matched with. He brought this level of vigor to every play, as did his team. And after they were down twenty-one to nothing, they changed their playbook and achieved something of a balance from then on, but the halftime score was 28-10, and Moultrie never came closer than that eighteen-point deficit. When the horn blew, the whole lot of those sons of bitches ran onto the field whooping and the scouts went to meet them and the Moultrie Yeomen trudged to their lockers, their season over.

“Screw Tybee Island.”

“Goddamn pieces of shit.”

“Who was it?” It was Doug, Aaron, Chip, everyone until the coach, near tears, told them they were making excuses for bad play. Meanwhile Hank wasn’t feeling as he’d meant to. He changed clothes and drove to the rest area, where he sat in a toilet stall for an hour waiting for someone, anyone, breathing in the septic smell and knowing he wouldn’t get into Deep Springs. They valued loyalty. He touched himself and imagined the whole offensive line tackling him, beating him to a pulp, until midnight when he drove home to find his parents and grandfather waiting up for him.

“Hank, this may be the last time I talk to you,” said the judge, “so think hard about what you want to say.”

“Why; are you dying?”

“That must be your hope.” Then, quieter but in a timbre that scared him, his grandfather said, “I’m a man of reason and I intend to know the reason.”

In his father’s frozen stance he saw his news had been revealed. Still, he was tempted to ask “for what,” so that the old man would need to state bluntly what Hank suddenly knew, with a sponge-wringing gut twist, must have happened: in the Xerox machine someone had found a

note reading, “Yours if you’ll let me go down on you again,” and his signature below three exes. Instead, he stood proudly above the couch and said, “We’re in love.”

“You liar. You did it because of me.” And Hank’s mouth fell open, because he’d been waiting to hear “you’ll burn in hell,” or “get out of my house,” or any of the old standbys that he could retort was as big a cliché as the judge himself.

“You’ve got a bigger ego than I thought.”

“You think I’m like you!”

He stepped back and bumped into the armoire, rattling the snifters lined up behind the brandy. He hadn’t thought any such thing, but his grandfather must have been waiting all his life to imply this. Probably, having said it, he’d keel over. The secret the very thing that had kept him alive. But then, more characteristically, he scrunched up his nose and said, “Maureen, tell your son to please get out of my house.”

Hank’s mother, looking like she’d shat her pants, seemed to struggle silently between the right thing and the expected one. When she finally asked, “Do you use protection?” it was only the unexpectedness of the question that caused Hank to giggle, but that must not have been clear to her, because she stepped forward and slapped him.

“If you love black people so much,” she said, “why would you go ruining their lives?”

He felt a ripple in his experience, as if the past had just altered itself. He’d only awarded reparations for past wrongs. It had served his own purposes, too, but you had to have motivation to work. That was why the Coach said in history class that Communism had failed: the Soviets had had no motivation to work.

But after the swirl of emotions died and he lay in bed waiting for morning, when he would go live out the semester with an aunt until boarding school began, he admitted to himself that something bad might befall Tyrone. Not at the hands of his teammates—to them he was a hero. Not at the hands of the black community. All Tyrone had done, after all, was get his dick sucked. The fag who’d done it had paid him for the chance, in currency his whole county could benefit from. No, the people Tyrone had to worry about were Hank’s own friends. They wouldn’t hurt Hank—to do so would be beneath them—but they could damn well hurt Tyrone.

He saw it happen months before it occurred. Only in this respect had he screwed up. He’d reinforced the idea of the black kids’ inferiority by showing that they had to cheat to win. It didn’t even matter that Moultrie families like his own had been cheating in every way possible for centuries, and getting away with it too: it was called cheating only when somebody besides yourself was the perpetrator.

T.M. De Vos The Germ A crowd of teenagers was gathering now, directly between them. Dave could see a broad stripe of hair on Marya’s shoulder, to the left of a boy and girl who were shoving each other, flirting.

Grand Central was getting louder and busier. The kids drifted away, staggering with laughter as they walked. Unobstructed now, he could see Marya pursing her lips over a letter.

A woman walked by, hunching under the weight of a large pink bag. A smug Pomeranian stuck its head out of the top. Marya stared after it. She liked dogs, especially the fluffy ones. He remembered how she had stopped to pet them, her hand a wistful cup as she reached for their forelocks. Someone’s Chihuahua had once jumped into her lap at a beer garden, leaving its coarse blond hair all over her sweater. She’d fawned over it anyway, like someone who knew she couldn’t choose her loves.

He was just coming into his prime—shed his baby fat and bad haircut, and was next in line for a promotion. For the first time, it wasn’t completely absurd to think of marriage and children. He liked this sunny, orderly world of just rewards and good neighbors. He needed it, to bring children into.

Marya disagreed. “The things they tell you as a kid are lies,” she said once, as they wandered through the picture-book section in the bookstore. She fingered the bright, uneven spines. “Children are protected too much. It sets them up to be disappointed in the real world.”

He tried to laugh it off. “Always the pessimist.”

In the psychology section, she picked up a case study of a man with borderline personality disorder. “Turbulent relationships,” she read from the back cover, gleefully. He could hear the bullet points as she read: ironic staccatos.“Put women on a pedestal and then knocked them down. Hypersexual and narcissistic behavior. Sounds like most men.”

“What is it with you?”

She slammed the book shut. Her eyes were full. “I imagine I haven’t been lucky enough to experience otherwise,” she retorted, and stalked off to the history section. People from other

countries had a reason—war or poverty or soldiers dragging them out of their houses. He glanced up at the “Recovery” shelf. Addicts, at least, lived for the drug and couldn’t be held responsible for anything. Victims, too: they could blame someone for what had happened to them.

Marya had some story about an ex who locked her in and kept a gun in the house. He’d never used it on her, never so much as took it out and waved it around. She’d just known it was there and been afraid. He had made her do some things, maybe, but she had given in pretty easily. He flipped through a self-help manual for rape victims: “You probably know someone who is a victim,” the back cover warned, ominously.

Ugh. He stuffed it back on its shelf and walked into the next alcove, grabbing a copy of the new baseball book from a display. He felt the old warmth seeping back in: for the game, for Marya. He could think clearly, after being separated from her.

He found her at the register, purse-lipped and clutching a large hardcover. “Here,” he offered, taking it from her. He set it on the counter. Another war memoir. She read two kinds of books, near as he could tell: books about people she felt sorry for, and books by people she was angry at.

She would read for hours, ignoring him and growing irritated if he tried to tempt her away with dinner or a TV show. “Easy for you,” she’d always say, witheringly, as if his good mood was costing someone.

She said she was political, but she had no idea about policy or even the logistics of things—how to get the surplus food she was always talking about to the people in Sudan, or Malaysia, or wherever. She took a morbid interest in who had what, and at whose expense. The raises his friends got were an affront to the homeless, the third world, and single mothers. She’d sulked for an hour once after his friend Jared’s promotion party.

“I just don’t think anyone’s time should be worth that much,” she huffed, as their cab pulled away.

“I didn’t notice you getting too political at the open bar,” he returned.

She’d muttered something, rubbing her head. Suddenly, she broke off laughing and

kissed the side of his face. He accepted, gladly.

She had an ethnographer’s eye, maybe a prosecutor’s. She could observe him for half a minute and describe exactly what he was about to do next, or what his motive was. It was like seeing himself on camera—entertaining, but a little alarming.

“That dog looks a little like the one I had growing up,” he commented on one of their walks, lifting an index finger. Marya had halted outside the dog run in Madison Square Park, and they watched the dogs chasing each other, kicking up wood chips.

“Mickey? Wasn’t she more gray around the face?”

He nodded, impressed. She also remembered which restaurant upset his stomach, the suit he wore last time he met a client, which days he’d stayed late at work during the past month, how old he was when he’d read Siddhartha, and the name of every relative in his jumble of snapshots.

“So she has a good memory,” his friend Brian said.

She had moved into an apartment in the 30s after she moved out. That much he knew.

She taught downtown, in staggered blocks that left her free at lunch, in the evenings, or in the mornings, depending on the day. Her classes were in basic English for new immigrants, depressing Slavs like her own relatives must have been.

He’d seen her with one of her students once: a plump, draggled woman. Marya nodded deeply as the woman spoke and ausculted her arm as if she were taking her blood pressure. It had touched him, at the time. Now, the gesture seemed almost vampirish, Marya absorbing the energy of the downtrodden so she could be indignant for them. He had sometimes wished she would just give away his money instead of punishing him for having it—and at mysterious times, when he didn’t understand what he had done wrong.

Marya didn’t seem young. She was pretty, prettier than most, even, but you seemed to be just catching the tail end of her. She was always tired, and said it was from work, even though she only taught about 30 hours a week.

“Prep time,” she snapped, when he pointed this out to her. She did spend hours writing out lesson plans, meticulously printing in her spiky hand, pressing hard on her

legal pads.

Her papers were all over. He’d bought her two four-drawer file cabinets, and there was still no containing them. When she was in a good mood, he could tease her about them, and she’d laugh at the way the stacks dived off the desks, scattering sheets with clock faces and color words. But some days, she’d get defensive, weirdly humiliated by the clutter.

“I stacked up some of your stuff,” he offered, one evening, after a day off. “Looked like worksheets you need for tomorrow.”

“I need them every day. I don’t get days off.”

“Maybe you need one,” he suggested. “Why don’t you call in sick on Friday? We can do something fun. Maybe have brunch, see a movie—“ “It would be more trouble than it’s worth. I have to do the lesson plans anyway.”

It rained for a week after she moved out. The edges of a hurricane were sweeping over the city. No one was out. It was impossible to get a taxi or have food delivered in under two hours. The day she left, Dave shut down his computer at lunchtime and spent the rest of the day at the movies. An action movie was playing, something about a guy who was part robot and had a vendetta against another robot. He watched it three times. A pair of twenties, and the kid who tapped his shoulder after the credits left him in peace.

He didn’t even look for a cab home. Pelted and splashing, he strode down Lexington, knowing he was ruining his suit. At home, he took the screens out and let the rain in. Something about it made the city feel foreign—industrial, like a post-Soviet town in one of those movies Marya was always watching.

He rolled his Thai menu into a tight cigarillo. Somehow it felt right to be camped out like this after she was gone. The whole apartment felt pleasant and anonymous, like a hotel room. She’d said it would be like this, when he’d asked her to move in. “Something will happen, and I’ll have to leave. I keep picturing you sending me away, in the rain, and me ending up in some horrible little room with no windows.”

He’d laughed it off. “That sounds like a bad movie. If you live here, it’s as much yours as it is mine.”

“It’s not,” she’d protested, but he’d talked her into it. He was so eager then. If she didn’t pay rent, she’d be fine—and she was. She’d even been able to save some money. But she hated her dependence on his rent money just as much as not having money in the first place. She wanted him to be angrier about how unfair it was. But he just waved it away, like a bird that had flown too close. “I’ve got it,” he’d say—about the rent, dinners out, electric bills, even her new clothes.

“Good for you,” Brian had said, when he’d called to announce their breakup. “That girl was a downer from hell.”

“A downer from hell. Thanks for your profound and worthy comments on the demise of my relationship.”

“You even sound like her. It’s for the best, man.”

He didn’t hear from her. He knew their paths overlapped—his up to Grand Central, and hers down to Soho—and he thought he might catch a glimpse of her standing on the platform as he rattled by on the express track. She was never there.

She had never even been grateful. She was only embarrassed, and he’d mistaken her embarrassment for appreciation. That was the way it was—some people had money, and the ones who lived off them had to put on the show. You traded the performance for your food, or rent, or whatever was at stake. But Marya was so angry about the whole transaction.

He tried to imagine her dating again. The guys she needed were like him: older, reliable, and able to pay her way. They might talk to her for a few dates, but they wouldn’t take her on with her attitude.

He always thought she was afraid of letting go, or even that she still had a torch lit for some other guy—something he could fight. But she had been infected by some idiot germ that made her fight off the ones who tried to save her, or at least make her life less of a struggle.

She’d die alone, poor and bitter, rationing out her medications, cutting them into halves on a plate, measuring her pain like a pulse.

He went on dates, with girls who giggled at his jokes and asked him questions about his job. He’d forgotten how many girls in the city were impressed by what he did. With Marya he’d

grown almost ashamed of his success, hiding it from her the way he did his porn collection. He didn’t ask all the new girls out again, but he liked the collective effect they had on him, as if he’d been worked on by a whole team of nurses.

That was the thing: they were all just members of a team. No reason to choose one over any other. He started seeing Lauren seriously because he couldn’t think of a reason not to. She was an optimist, like him; she wanted children, unlike Marya; she had very straight, glossy blond hair; crisp, professional clothes; and that prep-school thinness all of his friends liked. She worked in PR, had gone to a good school, and had a normal, well-off family in Connecticut— which, he noted, was within a manageable distance for shared holidays. Even the dating site had, on a compatibility test, shown check marks in every category in both “What She Wants” and “What You Want.” She was affectionate with him and asked for his opinion about everything, to a point he found absurd, if sweet. Life with her would be easy. And pleasant. She would age well and take up dignified causes with an obvious enemy. Breast cancer. Muscular dystrophy. Historic buildings.

She had moved in with him two months ago, when her lease ended. It’s time, he thought.

On his lunch hours, he let himself browse through jewelers’ websites. Just in case, he thought.

Within the week, Marya started leaving him signs. The first one was ambiguous—in the thick marker she’d used, her spiny letters looked almost like a graffiti artist’s tag: a heart with “Dave” in the center. It was next to a woman’s face on a toothpaste billboard in the shuttle underpass.

Not me, he thought disconcertedly. There were probably a hundred Daves in the station right then. More.

But there were other messages. “I miss you.” “I was happy with you.” Paying rent must be starting to pinch, he thought. But still he squinted at every piece of graffiti on the train to see if it would transform itself into a message. Lauren began to seem blearier to him, as if she’d dissolved in something.

He’d spotted Marya a couple of weeks later, striding through Grand Central, long coat flaring behind in a way that was, on her, sexy. Her eyes were lifted above the crowd, as if she were searching for someone tall. Suddenly, she jackknifed sideways, out of the crowd, and

dropped backwards onto a bench. There was no reason for her to be there at rush hour. He took a seat on the bench next to hers, leaving about five feet between them.

She didn’t speak. She just flipped through one of her endless manila folders, pulling out papers and considering them carefully. I’ll catch her eye, he thought. But she didn’t turn. She frowned one last time at the folder, tapped its edge on her lap to even up the papers that were sticking out, and stalked off with it under her arm.

What was that, he wondered, and stood up. He pushed his way downstairs and onto the downtown express train.

As he climbed the stairs out of the station, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Lauren had left him a voice mail. I didn’t ignore her, he told himself. There’s no reception in Grand Central.

“So nice to see you,” came the next message from Marya, the crook of the S curving around a close-up of a pink bar of soap.

The next week, another message, this time plastered on the front of a Ben Sherman billboard: “HB 32.” It was his birthday, his 32nd. Cryptic of her.

It was hard to sneak a look at her from the side, especially when he felt her trying to do the same. Today, she slid into her old spot and started skipping a blue pen across a stack of papers.

It was so familiar, sitting there and watching as she marked papers, the noise of the city a faint whir. He used to feel this way as a kid when he sat on the bottom of the neighbors’ pool, the noise of lawn mowers and other kids glutinous and far away.

“Dave!” A pair of dark jeans jumped into his field of vision. In them, a pair of toned legs. They could have been Lauren’s.

Close enough. It was her friend, Val. He stood up. “Hey Val, nice to see you.”

“Yeah, so what are you doing here?” A flurry of raucous giggles. Marya’s head inched up ever so slightly.

He cracked his knuckle in his palm. “Oh, I was just…I felt sick for a minute, so I sat down.” Val frowned at him, concerned. “I’ve just got a headache.” It was okay. Marya was

fifteen feet away. No one knew. He relaxed.

“Oh, you better get home,” drawing out the “oh” so that it sounded like something you’d say to a kitten. They started walking, her hand right on his bicep, the way Lauren held it. Their sorority must have taught them that.

He wanted to turn back and see if Marya had left. Maybe he could sneak back once Val caught her train up to 86th.

At home, Lauren was as solicitous as ever. “Here,” she said, putting a wet washcloth on his forehead and covering him up. “Do you want some more aspirin? Maybe a glass of water?”

“No. I’m fine.” Now he really did have a headache.

“Okay, sorry,” she fluttered in the small voice she used to let him know he had hurt her feelings. She waited a second before padding off.

Dave heard the TV go on downstairs. He drifted off to the sound of a commercial.

When he awoke, he was on his side, the washcloth clammy under his cheek and Lauren breathing shallowly behind him. He tried not to jostle her as he sat up.

“Hey,” she whispered, immediately at his back. She fell against him the way she did when she wanted him to come on to her. Her head felt light and soft on his chest, like a cat’s. Her shampoo smelled of coconut and chemicals.

“Just gonna get some food,” he mumbled. He lifted her head gently. She fell back onto her pillow. Hurt, probably.

He picked a wedge of gouda from the fridge and weighed it in his hand. Breaking off a chunk, he wandered into the living room. His chewing was loud in the near-silence. He checked the water level in the cooler and lined up the remotes to the edge of the coffee table.

Just a look, he told himself, as he slid open the closet, the door bouncing on its springs.

In a small box on the top shelf was a dark green sleeveless shirt Marya had worn. Pure silk, said the label. It had been in the dry-cleaning pile under his suits the day she’d moved out.

He pulled it down, holding it by the straps. It still smelled like Marya, her candy-scented perfume. Maybe she still smelled that way. It was hard to tell, from the bench across from her.

He reminded himself how Soviet and depressing she was, how she never smiled, as if she had

bad teeth. He draped the shirt over his arm. It weighed almost nothing. She had slept in it the night of his cancer scare. They were supposed to go out, but he’d burst out of the shower naked, panicking. She hadn’t spoken, just pulled a blanket over the both of them and held him so fiercely he could feel it even after he fell asleep.

T.L. Crum Virginia The sun had just begun to set when Virginia entered the shadowy restaurant. She let her eyes adjust, the blinding sensation of the outdoors slowly fading to reveal booths of red leather, a bar lined with twinkle lights, and walls embossed with fleurs-de-lis. A piano’s lazy melody cloaked the quiet as Virginia searched for David over the heads of the seated patrons. She peered around the room once, twice, three times, then clasped her shaking hands together and sat down near the front door. Under the watchful eye of the hostess, she replayed the conversation she’d had with him earlier that day.

“I’m getting a divorce,” she said with the firm lips of a ventriloquist.

His response had been unnerving. It was the opposite of white noise: the silence bounced across the walls of her office, and in the next room, the sounds of a doctor examining his patient were magnified–the opening and closing of a metal drawer; a cough produced on command, affected and hollow; a muffled conversation. She explained to him several times that her marriage had not ended because of him, that it was over years ago, but the silence. Oh, the silence. Through a suddenly dry mouth, she had forced herself to press on. Eventually, he agreed to dinner.

“There’s a restaurant near my work I’ve been wanting to try for quite some time,” she muttered to herself.

A few more minutes passed before Virginia decided to visit the powder room for a private pep talk. The restroom attendant watched out of the corner of her eye as Virginia forced a smile at the mirror–a gummy smile with small, straight teeth. She turned to her left, then her right, then faced away from the mirror and looked over her shoulder at her backside. The new cocktail dress gathered nicely on her unnaturally tall frame, casting the effective illusion that her breasts were larger than the A’s she had always wished were B’s. The A-line shape minimized her child-birthing hips, and camouflaged the rump she had spent her entire adulthood trying to downsize.

She washed and dried her hands, then searched in her purse for something else that

might occupy her time. She decided on her lipstick and leaned in toward the mirror to apply a second coat. Not bad, she thought. She counted to twenty in her head, decided that wasn’t long enough, counted to twenty again, then nodded once at the attendant before exiting the room without leaving a tip.

David was standing at the bar drinking a scotch when she returned to the main dining room. She told herself to remain calm, but she approached him too quickly and stepped on his foot as she leaned in for a hug. As they made their way to the table the hostess had saved for them, Virginia admired the sexy dishevelment of his wrinkled button-down shirt and two-day stubble.

“I made you something,” she said after they sat down. She handed him a small, wrapped gift.

Looking surprised, he carefully tore the paper to reveal a CD compilation of ten ballads that contained the name Virginia. She blushed and explained that she’d gotten a little desperate toward the end and included songs that referenced the state, not a woman, but she hoped it still had the same effect.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s–it’s creative,” he said, and raised his hand for the waiter to bring him another scotch.

Gordon was packing his belongings in the living room when she came home later that night. The music of an obscure 70’s rock band blared through the speakers on either side of the room and the bass thundered through the floors. A prickling sensation shot up through Virginia’s toes. She turned the volume down and sat on the couch opposite him.

“Is Gracie in bed?”

“She’s at my mom’s house. How was your date?”

Virginia crossed her legs, uncrossed them, crossed them again. She hadn’t told him she was going on a date. Unsure how to respond, she remained silent.

She studied him carefully as he slid a desk drawer off of its tracks and emptied its contents into a box. His cheeks were flushed and his ash blonde hair now had a golden tinge to

it from all of the bike rides and mountain hikes he’d taken with Gracie that summer. He looked healthy and she thought to herself that divorce suited him well.

“The dress is nice, by the way,” he said, and held out his hand. “Would you mind handing me those CD’s over there?”

Virginia decided then that his complacency was all a façade. She smiled and handed him the CD’s in silence. *** Virginia first met Gordon on a hike–at the summit of a 13-mile trail up Pikes Peak, overlooking Colorado Springs and the Garden of the Gods. She had just completed her Masters degree in Clinical Research, and after being single for almost five years, Virginia was relieved to find herself accepting a date from this reserved, yet kindly civil engineer as they descended the mountain together.

Gordon was a virgin when she met him. She found it endearing, and although she wasn’t as experienced as many of her peers, she liked the authority his naïveté afforded her. A few months into their relationship, he proposed. She was pregnant, and Gordon, having been a bastard child himself, refused to accept the possibility that his offspring could have the same lot in life. She found this reaction to be as winsome as his virginity, and so she accepted.

She gave birth to their daughter, and they marveled together at the perfection they had created. Such darling hands, such flawless skin, such bright eyes. Gordon was a good husband, and for almost a year after Gracie was born, Virginia felt happy. But then an emptiness began to creep in–almost imperceptibly, but she recognized it with disappointment.

She decided to seek the advice of psychics: “Music,” one soothsayer said. “I see you making beautiful music, with pianos and violins and flutes-” Excited at the prospect of a latent musical talent, Virginia bought a violin and took lessons for several months before she realized the psychic had been wrong.

For the next two years, she explored her past through genealogy. She spent hours each night searching databases and contacting various English and Dutch town record offices. She had a consuming obsession with the Royal family that stemmed back to elementary school

when her mother allowed her to watch the live broadcast of Charles and Diana’s wedding at two in the morning, and she hoped that her musings would uncover a derivation from Royalty. But alas, after two years of exhaustive research uncovered nothing but a long lineage of laborers, she gave up and put her findings away, never to speak of genealogy again.

Eventually, Gordon demanded that she seek therapy. For the sake of Gracie, she reluctantly agreed. She met with one psychologist after another, quickly discarding those whose analyses conflicted with her own. She finally settled on a psychologist who was as baffled by her unhappiness as she was, and made little to no improvement at $125 per session.

It wasn’t until she stumbled across the Mensa website that her life finally began to take shape. She had always known she was smart, but it wasn’t until she took the Mensa aptitude test and scored above the 98th percentile – a requirement for admission – that she truly understood the magnitude of her intelligence. She was a genius. All those years of despondency, those years of fruitless searching became clear: her intellect simply hadn’t been sufficiently challenged. She had been bored. She laughed at the simplicity of it all. And from that point on, she spent her nights attending seminars and colloquiums with her fellow Mensans.

At her request, Gordon took the aptitude test: he didn’t pass. “It’s just a number,” he said. “It’s not like it measures your common sense, or your ability to be a good father.” She nodded, blinked a few times, and never looked at him in the same way again.

It was at a weekend Mensa conference in Tucson where Virginia and David met. She was waiting for a seminar on pharmaceutical technology to commence when he took the seat beside her. Over the next few minutes, they discovered that they were both from Denver, both employed by hospitals as heads of clinical research, and both staying at the Marriot across the street.

That night, they met at the hotel bar for a drink. David was recently divorced, and they chatted about the various disappointments of life, about their clinical trials, about their childhoods. He shared that he was an only child, and that his parents moved around a lot when he was young, making it hard for him to cultivate friendships as a child.

Virginia commiserated with him, and explained how the kids taunted her because of her

height, and how her different way of seeing the world – due, of course, to her high IQ – caused her to feel like an outcast. Seeing herself through David’s eyes, she felt exotic and captivating.

After several hours of conversational foreplay, David invited Virginia up to his room. She used his restroom and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time. What she was doing was wrong by all societal standards; she knew that. But as hard as she tried, she couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to leave. Her thought process had become too abstract. The gray matter had taken over, the lines were blurred, and she could no longer see things in black and white. Sure, she was married and didn’t want to disappoint her little girl. But what was marriage, anyway? *** Virginia stared at the phone as she fingered through several stacks of paperwork. It was her job to create the impression–through extensive research compilation and elaborate phraseology–that the various trials performed at her hospital were both medically and socially relevant, and thus worthy of a state grant. And in the three years since she attained the job, she had successfully procured six out of six grants. Her achievements earned her acclaim amongst her peers, and made her look smart, which was even better than feeling smart. The result was a genuine love for her job.

That day, however, as the phone stubbornly refused to ring, her work merely felt tedious.

The only call she received was from her daughter: Gracie had to make a diorama for her 4th grade history class and could Virginia pick up some construction paper for her?

“Oh, and Dad said to tell you that Tanya’s coming over for dinner tonight,” she said.

Years before, her psychic had announced that Gordon was having a clandestine love affair with one of their mutual friends. She didn’t offer a name, and Virginia hadn’t given it much thought – the psychic had been wrong about so many other things. But even still, Virginia couldn’t help but notice how increasingly chummy Gordon and Tanya had become.

“Mom? Are you there?”

“I’m–of course I am; I’m sorry.” She promised Gracie she’d stop at the craft store on her way home and hung up the phone.

When David didn’t call, she decided to take action for herself. He had, after all, said he

wasn’t feeling very well when dinner was coming to an end the previous night, and it would be rude for her not to call and check up on him, right?

He answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me,” she said, explaining that she wanted to see if he was feeling any better, and to ask if he’d like to accompany her to the opera that very weekend. “If you think you might be up for it, that is.”

“Who is this?”

She waited, assuming the question was a joke.

“Hello?” he asked.

She bit her lip. “It’s Virginia.”

“Oh, hey.”

“Oh, hey,” she repeated, trying to sound as casual as possible.

“The opera, huh? Yeah, you know, my mother is actually coming for a visit and I’ll probably be pretty busy for a few weeks. But hey, I’ll touch base with you soon, okay?”

Virginia nodded and convinced herself to smile as though he could see her through the phone. She said she looked forward to it, told him to take care, and hung up the phone.

“Take care,” she repeated in a whisper. An hour later, she jolted herself out of a daze and gathered her things to go home.

That night at dinner, Virginia watched Gordon and Tanya as they bantered across the table. They giggled about ridiculous movies Virginia had never seen and passionately discussed plebeian novelists Virginia had never read. Twice during the meal, Virginia had the urge to look under the table to see if they were playing footsies, but resisted.

As they were finishing their meal, Tanya offered to let Gordon move into her apartment – “I just had a crazy idea,” she said, and began to explain to the newly separated couple where Gordon would sleep, where he could store his clothes, how they could alternate cooking every other day, who would do the dishes, and how the chores would be distributed.

Virginia watched Gracie quietly chew her yams across the table. She wondered if her daughter, who took after Gordon in so many ways, had noticed the sudden hush that followed

Tanya’s suggestion. Not wanting to break the harmonious mood at the table, Virginia thanked Tanya for her selfless generosity at such an awkward time for their family.

“It’s no big deal, really,” Tanya shrugged. “Anything to help.”

Gordon smiled. “Why don’t I move in next weekend?”

“Next weekend it is,” said Tanya with a little clap. Gracie looked up then and Tanya winked at her as she stood to clear the table.

Virginia watched the muscles on Tanya’s smooth, lean thighs elongate and contract as she gathered the plates and carried them into the kitchen. Then she watched Gordon watching Tanya’s thighs. Then she watched Gracie watching her and decided they’d had enough watching for the evening. She suggested they all go for a walk.

Bounteous. That’s how Virginia’s thighs would be depicted, she concluded, if anyone were asked to describe them. She was helping Gracie with her diorama, but the flesh on her thighs kept distracting her. She was all too aware of how easily her doughy skin rubbed together underneath her skirt, and she wondered aloud, albeit in a very quiet whisper, what size hips David preferred.

“Huh?” Gracie looked up again.

“I think this piece should go here,” Virginia said quickly, holding a scrap of paper against the corner of a shoebox.

She decided right then that she would lose those hips no matter what hell she had to go through to do it. She called a plastic surgeon the following morning and asked to be scheduled for his next available consultation.

“A little lipo goes a long way,” Dr. Grossman said as she sat before him in a backless gown. She’d had to be a little pushy on the phone, but she’d managed to make an appointment for the following day.

“Dollar for dollar, it’s the best diet plan you can go on,” he said. “Once you lose those fat cells, they never grow back. Now stand up and turn around.”

He examined her backside – squeezing a little here, tapping a little there – before taking out the washable marker and drawing lines across her hips and buttocks.

“You see, what I’ve marked here is not only the pockets of fat reserves, but also the colonies of stretch marks they’ve caused. It’s not a pretty sight, is it?”

Virginia looked over her shoulder at the full-length mirror in the corner, and what she saw was the backside of an overweight zebra. Just like that, she was sold on the surgery.

The next few weeks went by quickly. Gordon moved out, Gracie started spending weekends and alternate Tuesdays and Wednesdays at Tanya’s apartment, and Virginia prepared for the surgery that would take the child-birthing away from her hips. She exercised daily and restricted her diet to 800 calories a day. Whatever was left after the crash diet was the fat that really needed to go, she reasoned – the fat that couldn’t be erased the more conventional way.

All the while, she concentrated on the reaction David would have when he saw the new and improved Virginia. She didn’t mind that they hadn’t spoken since the day she invited him to the opera – in her mind, the silence was akin to suspense, like the tales of reunited lovers in the old Hollywood movies.

The night before her surgery, Virginia dropped Gracie off at Tanya’s apartment. She had asked Gordon and Tanya to watch Gracie for the entire week, explaining that she had to attend a clinical research convention out of town. But at the last minute, her nerves took over and she decided to tell them the truth.

“You know you’re being ridiculous, don’t you?” Gordon looked over his shoulder to make sure that Gracie was out of hearing range.

“Don’t be so critical, Gordon,” Tanya said. “If she needs to do this to feel better about herself, let her do it.”

As the nurses performed her pre-op the next morning, Virginia pondered Tanya’s comment.

“I’m not doing this to feel better about myself,” she whispered, parroting her response from the night before.

“Of course you’re not, honey,” the nurse replied, and then rolled her into the operating room to await the arrival of the anesthesiologist.

The discomfort following her surgery was unparalleled by anything Virginia had ever

experienced before. But she grinned and bore it, and with the aid of tranquilizing drugs, managed to remove her pressurized undergarments twice each day to clean her incision points, which leaked such an alarming amount of clear discharge for the first few days that she was afraid to move for fear of infection.

When the bruises began to yellow and she had successfully endured a week of sitting on an inflatable donut at work, Virginia phoned David. She wasn’t ready to see him yet, but she wanted to hear his voice.

David answered the phone on the first ring. “Dr. Jameson?”

“No, not unless I’ve gotten my doctorate and married a Jameson in the last few weeks without knowing it,” Virginia said, chuckling to herself. She was sure to repeat that line many times over the next few days.

“Who is this?” He sounded agitated.

Her smile disappeared. “It’s Virginia.”

“Oh. Sorry. I’m waiting for a call from my mom’s doctor.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s having some pain in her chest. She won’t let me take her to the hospital. Listen, I’ve gotta go.”

“Of course. But please keep me –“ He hung up.

“—posted.”

Virginia was so ill at ease that night that she didn’t hear Gracie the first time she asked if her father was going to marry Tanya.

“Mom? Did you hear me?” She repeated the question.

Virginia looked at her for the first time since sitting down to dinner. “Why do you ask that?”

“I saw them kissing last night after I was supposed to be in bed. Are you mad?”

Virginia took a deep breath and explained that Mommy and Daddy weren’t together anymore, and if her daddy wanted to kiss Tanya, that was his choice, but it didn’t mean that

they would necessarily get married, and why should she be mad?

“About me not being in bed after bedtime.”

“Oh.” Virginia refused to let herself think about Tanya and Gordon that night. After weeks of romanticizing her reunion with David, she suddenly felt that she had gone about it all the wrong way. She was losing him, and she needed to focus all of her attention on a new plan of action.

She rummaged through Gracie’s craft drawer and pulled out the leftover construction paper from Gracie’s diorama project. She started cutting and piecing the different-colored cutouts together. She glued. She taped. She applied sequins and lace. The result was a heart-shaped card that intentionally resembled the work of a nine year-old. She would win over David through his mother, and she would win over David’s mother through Gracie.

Virginia signed the card: “My mommy told me your heart was hurting. I hope it is O.K. Love, Gracie.” She quickly sealed the envelope so Gracie wouldn’t see it.

What senior could resist the sentiments of an innocent child? “Bring this darling child to me,” David’s mother would say. “I want to meet her. In fact, I want to meet her mother, too.

What a conscientious parent she must be to bring up such an endearing and sympathetic young girl.”

The next morning, she posted the card, addressing it to: “David’s Mother, care of David Stein.” The entire day, she commended herself on her ingenuity. She had a term for moments when her creativity couldn’t be contained, and she considered this one of them: Virginiaepiphanies. She also wondered if the psychic hadn’t misread her prediction about her untapped musical abilities – she was sure this project had uncovered a latent artistic talent. She made a mental note to buy some art supplies on the way home from work.

Throughout the day, Virginia imagined David’s reaction as his mother opened her handmade card. He would watch her frail hands tear the paper, would watch her burgeoning smile – a smile that healed the hurt in her chest, if only for a little while – and he too would smile, amazed at the thoughtfulness that was required for such an empathetic gesture. She prepared herself for his call.

When three days had passed, she grew concerned. Perhaps the postman hadn’t delivered her card. Or worse, perhaps his mother’s condition was more serious than she had predicted, and she was lying in a hospital bed, attached to the drips and blips of I.V.’s and monitors. She dreaded the thought that his mother would never have the chance to read her card, and convinced herself that it was his mother’s well-being and not her own that she was concerned about.

On the fourth day, she paid him a visit. She decided that the swelling in her hips had gone down enough for David not to suspect anything, and she was afraid of letting any more time pass. She knew the way to his house by memory. Having discovered his address a month ago, she’d driven past it many times – on the way to the dry cleaners, on the way back from dropping Gracie off at school, on her way to or from work.

She stepped out of her car and sidestepped a group of children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. The children tagged each other playfully and hopped on one leg, then two, then one, until they were breathless and sweating in the warm midday sun.

The wooden porch creaked under the weight of her feet as she slowly approached the house. Her fingers trembled, casting vibrations through the flowers she carried in her hands.

Before she had a chance to ring the doorbell, the front door opened. David looked at Virginia, then at the flowers. He stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind him.

“I brought these for your mother,” she said.

“Why are you doing this?”

“What do you mean?”

“This is over the top. You realize that, don’t you? The card, the flowers. She doesn’t even know you. What are you trying to prove?”

“But you’ve explained who I am, right?”

“What’s there to explain?”

Virginia was startled by a child’s scream out on the sidewalk – a happy scream, an involuntary outburst of the pure, untroubled emotions of childhood. She looked down at the flowers in her hands.

“Please, just go,” he said. He waited on the porch until she reached her car, then disappeared back into the house.

The flowers shed their petals as she dropped the bouquet onto the passenger seat, driving past the hopscotching children and down the street. She waited at the stop sign for a car to cross, but when it was her turn to go, she was unable to move. With her foot still on the break, she rested her head against the steering wheel and wept.

Drivers honked. Children approached the car and stared at her swollen eyes and makeup-streaked face. Well-meaning neighborly folk knocked on her window offering help.

But it wasn’t until the children had stopped playing and the sun was making its descent behind the mountains to the west that Virginia finally took her foot off the brake and rolled through the intersection.

Instead of turning right at the following stop sign, she went straight. Five minutes later, she found herself on the doorstep of Tanya and Gordon’s apartment.

“Holy Christ, what happened to you?” Gordon held the door open, beckoning her to come in. He sent Gracie to her room and led Virginia to the couch where Tanya was watching television. Tanya was startled by her disheveled appearance. She offered tea and pillows, and – “Geez, what has happened to you?”

Virginia stared at the pillow on her lap for a long time. “Why?” she finally managed to say.

Gordon and Tanya exchanged a look. They didn’t respond, and Virginia quickly realized that she didn’t want to know the answer. She wasn’t even sure what she meant by the question.

She left their apartment wondering if she had ever shared her life with Gordon the way Tanya was sharing it with him now. Driving back to her empty home, she suspected that she didn’t.

That night, in her bathroom, Virginia removed her pressurized undergarments and stared at her naked reflection in the mirror. What she saw was a woman, fifteen pounds lighter, with a long, drawn face and sagging eyes. She didn’t recognize herself.

Virginia didn’t feel like a genius anymore. She wondered if she ever really had.

“I didn’t do it to feel better about myself,” she said in a whisper, then dressed and went to bed.

Elinor Abbott Sweethearts The man with a hand up my skirt and the other shoved down my blouse has followed me from the bar to the parking lot. We’re standing next to Jon’s brand new BMW. We’d been asked to leave the bar; we’d been making “a scene.” I am unlocking the doors and smoking at the same time. The man has his hands all over me, in me.

“Will you hold on a fucking second?” I say, flicking my cigarette at him.

“Ow! That’s lit! Be careful!”

I open the door and bend my body in. I look at him over my shoulder, silk stocking knees sliding apart against the leather.

“Really? How careful do you want to be?”

He makes an animal sound and somehow we become all squeezed into the car, the passenger side door opens just a crack for my foot to dangle out. He is hunched over me; his tie slides down my shoulder; I rest my forehead against the driver’s side window.

“You’re so fucking hot,” he says, yanking down my panties.

I don’t disagree. A base level of attraction is all it takes for these men, these panting, drooling, pathetic men. They’re so easy—you have no idea how easy they are. They never ask questions, they ignore the big diamond, they just want to fuck. Like dogs. They are like dogs.

He thrusts inside me with no grace or particular skill. I think of Loni, the good wife, engaging in such repellant behavior. Fucking strangers in your car just to make sure you caught the whiff of it later. Just to stick the knife in, just to egg on your self loathing.Here, honey, in case you forgot what coitus smells like.

But, of course, Loni would never do that. There wouldn’t be any need. I’m sure you still fuck like nobody’s business. You are still tender and graceful and skilled. And you love each other. There’s no need for masochism.

I grab his tie and jerk it hard.

“Hey,” he chokes, stopping. “What the fuck?”

“Don’t stop. Just tell me you love me.”

“What? Hey, I thought this was—“ I tighten my grip. “Tell me you love me or I’ll pull harder.”

“O-okay. I-I love you.”

“No, idiot, do it while you’re fucking me. Keep fucking me and then say it, then keep saying it.”

“Alright, you’re hurting my neck, please, whatever.”

He starts back up. I loosen my grip but keep hold of the tie.

“Harder,” I say.

He moans.

“Say it, say it.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t stop saying it.”

“I love you, I love you, I . . . fucking . . . love you.”

I sigh, relax, let go of the tie. You could never say it when you were fucking me.

Only later, much later, joking around, punching me in the arm like a real pal.

“I love you, Brady Bunch. You know that.”

Inga Brady. Brady Bunch. It was how the kids teased me in junior high. I don’t know why it hurt my feelings so much, hell, I don’t even know what it was supposed to mean. But you turned it into an endearment, a nickname. You took all the fear out of it and made it friendly. Like love. You did the same thing to love, Aaron.

I was talking to your wife the other day. We were walking Jenna in her stroller and she was

kicking

her

baby

shoes

high

in

the

air

and

sputtering

with

her

lips,

“Phhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwww!” Shrieking in delight. Loni turned to me with an embarrassed grin. “She’s just discovered how to do that.” She tried to sound exasperated, but she was proud of your spewing, screaming infant, figuring out what to do with its ever evolving human shape.

I looked toward Jenna and all I could see were her pink sneakers and white socks, a pucker of pink baby leg flying up and down.

It’s infuriating how I have to pretend to be impressed by your wife and your baby and

your house. How very attractive they are. How adult we’ve all become. The only reason I walk with Loni to the park on Wednesdays is because I’m dying to know what it’s like to be the spectacularly boring Mrs. Farr. The wife who lives by the park, who walks a baby, who juggles breast milk around inside a T-shirt. It amazes me how Loni has let you physically transform her.

She bubbles out life, this woman you’ve taken for yourself. Literally, she pushes it right out into your arms; she feeds it; she laughs when you jiggle her belly in the mirror while she’s brushing her teeth. Baby fat. I’ve got to lose these last ten pounds! I don’t have any way of knowing, but I imagine that’s how the two of you act. And I think she still looks pretty good for having produced another human being. She’s certainly still fuckable. And you would like that, need that, as well.

“Why don’t you and Jon have a baby?” Loni eventually said to me, which is what she has been saying for the past fourteen months, ever since she began blooming with motherhood.

I dug around in my purse, looking for my cigarettes. I smoked one without asking permission.

Loni made a face but was too timid to ask me to put it out. She thinks I don’t get it. But I get it.

I blew the smoke away from Jenna’s stroller. I’d be less of a threat then, wouldn’t I? Full up with Jon’s little creature.

“I don’t think baby having is my bag,” I told her for the fortieth time.

“Oh, come on. You’re a woman.”

I shrugged. “I like to think about naming a baby.”

Her smile grew, intensified. “Well that’s something, Inga. What names do you and Jon like for a baby?” She adjusted the little sunshield for Jenna.

I picked at my lips for a minute, pursing them, thinking.

“Yves for a boy. And Finn and Harold, oddly enough. Christina for a girl. Or Camille.”

“Harold?” Loni laughed.

“Yeah. But it’s only a game, Loni. Jon doesn’t want a baby any more than I do. It’s just something fun to think about. Like being little and picking out names for a doll.”

Loni’s smile waned on the edges and disappeared at the equating of real babies—like the one the two of you have, growing, changing, squirming—with plastic and china figurines, forever

frozen and breathless, hands half curled. I didn’t mention the one time I really thought I was pregnant with Jon, when I wandered into the baby section at the drug store, clutching my pregnancy test, and looked at all the strange things in that aisle. I looked at the snot suckers and the teething rings and the cheap fleece-footed jammies in pink, blue, lilac, yellow. I imagined a little body filling it, making it puffy, injecting reality into its pastel preciousness. Then I looked at the pregnancy test clutched in my hand. I’d squeezed so hard I’d bent it in the middle, like a girdle, my sweaty palms staining the cheerful cardboard box.

“You need to soften up,” Loni told me, earnest face full of concern and pity, stopping the stroller for some reason or other. Ah, yes, the park; we’d reached it. She was undoing Jenna’s straps. Surely Loni believed this softness I lacked was the reason you and I never made it. I could tell by the way she offered me your bonneted baby.

“Wanna carry her?”

I wrinkled my nose, flicked my long dead cigarette into the grass.

“Nah. You do it. I’ll push the stroller.”

Loni sighed. “Have it your way.”

As we walked, I remembered how shortly after you left I discovered a swollen lymphoid on the inside joint of my leg. It turned out to be nothing, stress maybe, nothing an antibiotic couldn’t fix, but my doctor screened me for everything. AIDS and the like. It was the only time I’d done one of those tests, sitting at the clinic in the florescent light, waiting for them to stick a big needle in my arm, trying not to make eye contact with the other derelicts, holding my pink sheet. When the call came back that I was STD free, I felt a little sad. I’d had my period three times since you’d gone. The dress with the cum stain on it dry cleaned. Your clothing and other items stacked in a neat little box and delivered safely to the dumpster. And now no diseases. I remember I sighed to the voice on the phone and told them thanks. Hung up. All physical evidence of you was gone. In that moment there was no way to prove to myself it ever happened at all. There was nothing left of you.

Do you think it’s funny? The way things have gone? The way we turned out? How did we find ourselves here? Friends, ex-lovers, whatever. You think I don’t see the way your eyes

go dull when I walk into a room. The way you looked at me when I came home with Loni and the baby from the park. Oh, she’s gone and spoiled it, I’m sure you thought, hanging in the back, unwanted, bangs cut blunt in front of her eyes like she was still a child. I saw the corners of your mouth go funny as you kissed Jenna and Loni. I wanted to tell you that I know all about you and your stupid face, the secrets it fails to keep, its ticks and rhythms. I’ve had my whole life to look at it. So I smiled joylessly and left you to your despicable domesticity, my heart withering, my mouth tasting smoky and unloved. It still hurts me that in the end this is all you wanted—Loni, Jenna, a fucking clapboard bungalow. I like to pick at the wound as often as I can, get down on my hands and knees, squeeze it, probe it, lick it.

Jon calls me a succubus. He says over his lines of coke or scotch on the rocks that it should have been obvious to him from the start what I was. After all, look at what I did to you.

Poor Shmuck, he calls you, poor Aaron the chump. He makes fun of you when he gets shitty. He does this little dance, cupping his balls in one hand, pretending to cradle a baby with the other. I giggle a bit, then I tell him to stop. No, really, Jon. Really. Stop. That’s enough.

But Jon doesn’t know what “enough” is. He doesn’t know when to stop. He gets worse and worse. His eyes go fuzzy, like static on TV. He throws my antique typewriter, the one you left for me, through the coffee table. He tries to smack me and I try to smack him back. He grabs me by the throat and drags me into the bathroom. He holds my head against the mirror and pulls my skirt up. He tries to fuck me but he can’t. I laugh low in my throat.

“Fuck!” he roars, stumbling with inebriation, hitting his head on the shower rod behind him. “You fucking whore! Shut the fuck up!”

I keep laughing. I can’t help it. He smashes my face into the mirror again.

“I said shut up.”

My nose bleeds.

“Whiskey dick,” I say. I smile; I look him dead in his gorgeous dark eyes. Once upon a time one look from this handsome devil used to make me curl my toes. Now he is my marionette, my clown. He can’t even fuck me anymore.

“Whiskey dick,” I repeat, but I can barely get the words out, I’m laughing so hard.

He lets go of my hair and stumbles out of the bathroom. I stand up and pull my skirt back down, wipe the painful, hilarious tears from my eyes. I take one hand and smear the mixture of blood and lipstick on the mirror. Maroon. I make thumb prints on the edge of the sink before I sit on the floor. Jon says I’ve taken his manhood away.

That’s what my evenings look like lately. We don’t cuddle on the couch and watch Grey’s Anatomy, eating spaghetti dinners off our laps. Though I think you suspect as much.

In my dreams I relive your wedding day. I stormed into your bedroom, drunk and squeezed into my dress, full of righteous rage. “You don’t love this girl. You can’t possibly love this stupid, boring girl!”

Your eyes were bright with shock, a hundred questions, but you said nothing. You sprang to your feet and clapped your hand over my mouth, your eyes close, urgent, while your other hand slipped behind me to open the door. I smelled your skin. I saw where your eyes were beginning to wrinkle from sun. I opened my mouth to speak, but you had my lips pressed flat.

You squeezed me out the door, gently, gently. I locked my grip on you, shaking my head, no, no, no.

“Shh, shhh,” You said. “Go sit down. Hurry. Go sit.”

You slipped your black clad arm away. I couldn’t hold on, it was slippery. At the last moment you squeezed my hand tight, looked me in the eye one more time. Blue. Hard. Then you shut the door in my face. That was the last time you touched me. Even years later you don’t dare. You feign a kiss on the cheek, smooching the air next to my head as quickly as you can. I don’t push my luck. I smile at your sheepishness, your fear.

In my heart, though, there are none of these boundaries. There’s no wedding, no Jon, no end. Well, maybe there’s a Jon, but only so you can come and rescue me from him. Only so you can storm into the bathroom, wrap me in my bathrobe, tell me you’ll take me far away from this place. Take me some place warm. Some place safe. In my heart we talk just like we did when we were kids, only this time we make good on all the promises. We run away to Mexico.

When you left me you said you needed to see the world. I always imagined you on a fishing boat in Alaska or on a trail in the Himalayas with a Sherpa and a yak. After I was done being

angry, I rather liked these pictures. They made sense. You, alone, staring poignantly at the sky, figuring it all out. You never once sent word, but I could live with that. I thought you must be secretly saving all the details of your life, locking them away like a diary in your head for me, the same as I was doing for you. I was storing everything for you—every scrap, every moment since we’d been apart.

But when you showed up outside my apartment, lumbering wearily out of that crappy sedan you’ve had since you were sixteen, you were wearing the same T-shirt you’d been wearing the day you left me. I don’t know if you know that, but you were. The same fucking Tshirt. It was as if we were in some horrific parallel universe where our lives were a TV sitcom and we’d just come back from commercial break.

“You’ve gotten so thin,” you said when you hugged me. I was wearing a cotton dress, no shoes. “What have I caught you in the middle of?”

“Writing,” I told you, smearing tears across my face.

You smiled and said, “There’s a good girl. That’s my girl.” You grasped me by the elbows, held me at arm’s length, looked into my face as though I was something you’d made and liked to admire.

Then we got in your car and you drove us to the old trout farm. You explained that all this time you’d only been in San Francisco. You’d gone out to meet David and gotten into terrible debt starting up your own silk screening shop. It all fell apart: the business failed, betrayed by David, the loneliness of a foreign land, all that crap. You wept and forgot to ask me how I had been. You banged the steering wheel with your fist. You’d been back in town for six weeks, broke, staying with the parents.

When we got out of the car we fed quarters into the meter and cranked fish food into our hands. I trembled with shock, trying to put on a proper face. We walked against the hot wind on the thin grates that went out across the fishery, scattering the fish food. Trout popped up from the deep, slow and sad eyed, like bad memories, and sloppily gobbled their treats.

“I could get you a job,” I offered, not knowing what else to offer, feeling bewildered and jolted by your return into what had become my empty world, where I passed the hours

nostalgically and romantically mourning your absence.

“You could? Who with? I’m not working in a bar again.”

“No, no. I know this guy. Jon McCourt. He’s successful—he’s got a graphic design firm.

Honestly, I could hook you up. He always needs more talent. He’s always going on about it.”

You stepped from your grate to my grate in one giant leap, everything shook. It scared me. It had always scared me, this place, with its dark pools full of scaly fish. I was always afraid of falling in.

“So,” you said. “You’ve got yourself a fella.”

“Who? Jon? I don’t know.” I looked away, across the fishery, out toward the fields. You kissed me on the forehead the way a brother might.

“Of course you have.”

“Well, what about you?” I stammered. You weren’t listening.

“Do you remember the first time we came to this place?” You sighed.

I shook my head in frustration. “Yes. I remember.”

The memory was stuck to my head like some terrible cheesy Polaroid. We were fifteen.

It was after hours and we snuck in with a half empty bottle of vodka you’d lifted from a sibling.

We collapsed next to the ponds and listened to the bubbling sound of the fish breathing. You let me lay on your stomach and count all your eyelashes.

You looped your arms around me and rested your chin on the top of my head.

“It’s good to see you, Inga.” You squeezed me. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I blurted it with much more force then I meant to. You didn’t pay any attention.

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she? In San Francisco?”

“No, no.”

You were talking about Loni. You’d already met her. Only six weeks in, and you’d found the woman you would wed. You were supposed to come to me first, didn’t you know? Didn’t you know, Aaron, that I was waiting?

After I kick the man with a tie out of the car, his duty performed, his stupid dopey sex smile on his face as he lopes back to his own car, wife, drugs, drink, whatever, I fix my makeup. I cup my hand and smell my martini breath. Not too bad. I open the glove compartment and get out my perfume, spritz it twice, open the window, and light a cigarette. I adjust the crotch of my panties and smooth my dress. I check the time. I am meeting Jon at your place for dinner with the wife. The baby is staying at Loni’s mom’s. Jon caught a ride with you from work. I am twenty minutes late.

I come in unannounced, seeing the three of you through the front window, standing around, holding drinks.

“Hello!” I wave casually and start to slip off my shoes. No shoes is a rule in your household. You and Loni wander around in slippers, what you call “house shoes,” a habit picked up on your honeymoon in Germany. Jon looks silly with his fancy trouser socks slipping over his toes. I notice a small puddle of blood in the back of my left shoe, no doubt the result of peeling the skin off my heels, something I’ve done since childhood in times of stress. I do it all the time now. Jon never notices, not even when I’m mincing to bed on tip toes because my heels are torn to shreds. I feel a hot flash of embarrassment.

“Do you mind terribly, Loni, if I keep them on tonight? They’re brand new and hurt like hell. I’m afraid if I take them off my feet will start to swell and I won’t be able to put them on again. I’ve got to break them in.”

Loni waves her hand dismissively. “Sure, of course. Have a drink? What can I get you?”

“Scotch and soda. Same as Jon.” Jon comes over and kisses my temple. I can feel him lean in for a second to smell my hair.

“Where’ve you been? We’ve been here for a half hour. Meeting go late?”

I nod and take off my large, heavy earrings, put them in the pocket of my dress.

“Meeting?” You smile in at us. Jon puts his hand around my waist.

“Yeah, our little Inga’s got herself a literary agent. Been about six months now—he’s got her in some good anthologies,” Jon brags. He wouldn’t know a literary anthology from his

elbow. Not even in the days of our blushing courtship could I get him to read more then a paragraph of anything.

“Oh, Inga!” Loni says, waltzing in from the kitchen in her house shoes, cold drink in hand. “I’m surprised you haven’t said something!”

You nod your head, say, “Yeah, I didn’t have any idea you were taking it that seriously again. Next time you get something in print, tell us; we’d love to get a copy.”

“Mmm.” I smile and tug at my hair.

Jon grimaces and says, “I’m pretty surprised she didn’t say anything to you, Aaron, little braggart that she is. She’s always so eager for your approval.” He squeezes my ass. I stumble, surprised by this action, and everyone is embarrassed. Everyone except Jon, who jingles the ice in his empty glass, indicating he wants more.

We make it through dinner without choking to death on awkwardness. We do this every once in a while, the four of us. Loni and I plan it, pasting together the polite details, the feigned interest, the niceties. I think Loni does it for the same reason I do: it is a test of endurance. How will the worker bee family impress the big boss man and his bride? How will the exes react cooped up together in the same space? How superfluous is the drunken, impotent husband?

How stuffed into her role is the little wife? We shiver in anticipation.

I think that is why, for no good reason whatsoever, Loni has placed the giant blue crystal punch bowl, empty and dusty, that we gave you for your wedding, in the center of the table.

Your face is partially obscured by it, the right half of you rendered stretchy and strange. I imagine I must look the same way. The punch bowl is in the way of everything, the food, the drinks, the conversation. You offer once to move it. Loni tells you not to but gives no explanation as to why the punch bowl needs to be the in middle of the table. Something in her face makes you stop with the questions. We eat around it, shout around it, peer over it.

You and Loni had a simple wedding, in your mother’s backyard, overlooking the lake. I lost my virginity in the shed behind your arch of wedding roses. The glow from your father’s security light above the garage would occasionally pour through the window exposing us. The light would go red, blue, red, blue, green. Then white for fifteen seconds. Your mother put up

with that shit for almost a year before she made Gary remove it. And then we had the dark.

That’s what I thought about through your entire ceremony, rocking miserably back and forth on my white plastic chair, fingers clamped to the sides. In front of me you held hands with some chubby-faced girl in a white gown, declaring your virtuous love. In my mind you took my jeans off and sputtered bullshit teenage kid reasons why we didn’t need a condom: you would pull out before you came, it was the last day of my period, whatever. I didn’t care. I stared up at your father’s shovels on hooks, trying not to embarrass either of us by looking directly at your penis.

My heart was all goose feathers. I’d been waiting my whole life for this.

My wedding, you remember, came swiftly after. I pulled a straight Scarlet O’Hara on you, but I’ll be damned if you noticed. It cost twenty times your wedding—it made a mockery of your wedding—of you and your girl in her simple gown with her home-baked cupcakes. I wore Vera Wang practically right off the runway. We rented the entire Avery Mansion. All thirteen fucking rooms. All filled with lilies and orchids. I had the orchestra string section to walk down the isle to. There were four butter cream cakes, each with seven tiers. That was the tiniest I’ve ever been, a size two. I looked resplendent and cold, like a marble bust in a museum.

I made Loni be my “bridal assistant.” I made her get my shoes and fetch me mochas, cinch my gown, put lip gloss on my bridesmaids. I wanted to humiliate her. For a wedding gift she made us the most simple, beautiful blue and white quilt. I wept when I opened it. Jon didn’t understand why I was crying. I said I was happy. Later on, I threw it away.

Jon and I did a pile of blow just before the ceremony. He walked in to my waiting room and said I looked nice in my dress. I told him it was bad luck to see me beforehand. He shrugged and took a little bag from the inside pocket of his jacket and strode over to the bathroom and opened the door. I don’t remember seeing you that night. I remember trying not to see you. I remember a shock of blonde hair and a tuxedo jacket, swirling away on the dance floor with a girl, but that might not have even been you. Hell, maybe you skipped the whole thing, I wouldn’t blame you. I meant for it to repel you. I created it for your disgust.

We somehow manage to make it through the rest of dinner, despite the punch bowl’s blue presence. I am tired from fucking and drinking, feel a headache coming on, want to get

away from the smell of your baby, which fills my nostrils at every turn. You get up to clear the dishes; I offer to help. It’s not much, but I try to snag small moments when I can. I can see the exhaustion creep into your face as I stand to grab the wine glasses. The glance you throw Loni does you no good; she and Jon are heatedly discussing something political that neither you nor I appear to give a shit about, and she offers no help.

I follow you into the kitchen, trying to stop myself from coming too close, from grabbing your shirt and sticking my face in it just to make sure that you are not also poisoned forever with the baby smell. I want you to smell like I remember you smelling—like grass, like cold milk, like summer.

“So, you’re picking your heels again,” you say flatly, without turning to look at me. My mouth falls open.

“What?” I say.

Then several things happen at once. The first is that the comment catches me off guard and I stumble when the heel of my shoe catches the corner of a tile. The stumble turns into a fall. I open my arms and am close enough to the counter that most of the wine glasses land there, safely. But one wine glass falls with me, situates itself beneath my palm, which smashes it into a thousand pieces as I jut my hand out to catch my fall. The pain doesn’t come right away. First the noise comes. Then the blood.

There is a lot of blood. I lift my right hand and a large piece of glass sticks out of the middle. Stigmata! some part of my brain cries cheerfully as the blood pools and spills out of my palm. There is glass all around me; I don’t move a muscle.

I look up at you with eyes full of tears. I am twelve years old and have just fallen off your deck; I am seven and have skinned my knees learning how to ride bikes with you in my parents’ driveway; I am twenty-two, have just learned of your engagement to Loni Watts—the voluptuous owner of a local coffee shop—and am staring up into your face trying to figure out how to stop making a blocked, choked sound, like a record after the music’s run out.

“Aaron?”

You bend down on broken glass with a dish towel ready. I know you have no idea what

you are doing, but I trust you completely. You yank out the huge piece of glass and press the towel tight over my throbbing hand. You come closer, pressing the towel harder; one hand slides under my elbow to support my outstretched hand; you gently raise it. I cry out and then clench my lips, afraid of the sound of my own pain.

“Don’t do that,” you say. “You cry out if you need to.”

We are the closest we’ve been in almost ten years. I can see in your eyes that you’re scared. It suddenly occurs to me that Jon and Loni have been standing in the kitchen doorway for some time. We turn and look at their revolted faces. Loni asks, “What on earth is going on in here?”

Samantha L. Robinson My Big Brothers Sort-of Super Powers Vaughn shuts down pain in ways that can kill. I don’t trust him at all—not anymore —but heroes are tricky business. Hard to abandon. I once thought my big brother turned the world in his hands.

Master of Solitude It’s mid-June, 1974, and my half-brother Vaughn’s second birthday’s coming up fast.

Grandma McKinney wants to ask him what flavor cake, frosting, and ice cream he might like for the family party, so she wipes her bony gardener’s hands on her floral apron and approaches him. He’s seated on the creek bank, dangling tiny-tennis-shoed-feet over the edge and tossing loose rocks into low water. He reminds her of our father—the curly hair, the prominent nose, the tendency to play alone.

“Vaughn Lee,” she says, stooping down to meet him eye level, “somebody’s got a birthday pretty soon.”

Without lifting his eyes from his meticulous pebble dropping, he wipes that Robinson nose and says, “Fuck off, Grandma.”

She covers her mouth and runs to the house. She doesn’t want him to see how hard she’s laughing. He’s a child. Her only great-grandchild. He hears things, and there’s no harm in hearing.

Giant Brain When our father and his first wife, Debbie (Vaughn’s mother), divorce in 1975, threeyear-old Vaughn divides his time as he is told. Weekdays with Debbie and her boozing, much younger boyfriends, weekends with our father and the woman who will, ten years later, be my mother. But when my parents marry in 1976, Vaughn proposes an idea. “Why can’t we all live together?” he asks. “Why can’t we all just live in this house?”

Daddy and Mother and Debbie and the boyfriends, he means. More people at whom he can “Ping, ping!” fake pistols. More people to read bedtime stories, he figures (and he can convince them each to read three apiece before lights out). Later, he teaches me that it’s lips

pursed loosely, roll the eyes upward until you feel the tears sting, then sigh like you’re trying for no one to hear it. I once got a pair of gleaming red patent dress shoes using exactly that technique.

Nobody has an answer for his question—nobody wants to tell him that they’d kill each other if they had to occupy the same space—so our father buys him tickets to Six Flags in St. Louis. Debbie lets him stay up late to watch The Wolf Man. * His mind comes up big in the story about the new shoes, too.

So Vaughn’s in first grade, slinging an empty backpack over his shoulders, running from the bus to Debbie’s townhouse with a Mississippi-wide smile. He’s wearing used-to-be-black dress shoes rubbed paper-thin at the heels, sporting holes in the toes, caked with recess dirt, laces fraying, soles tearing off.

“I just got you new shoes!” Debbie scolds, twisting him around to assess the damage from all angles. “What the hell did you do?”

Debbie calls my future parents, and when they arrive on scene, on the couch, the truth unfolds. No crying from Vaughn. He knows he shouldn’t be in trouble anyway. He got the other kicks from a friend at school, he says. Skinny black boy named Scotty Hardiman who lives out on State Street. They traded shoes on the playground. Scotty’s family, Vaughn says proudly, “doesn’t have no money” (later, he tells me, “If you’ve got enough, why not just share?”).

And so comes the second late-night showing of The Wolf Man, complete with popcorn and root beers, and my parents spend the night. Everybody under one roof. The dream.

Meditations Vaughn likes my mother and calls her “Shirl” and sometimes “Shirley Magee.” She takes him mudding on the four-wheeler when Daddy’s busy coaching Babe Ruth League. They sing Michael Jackson songs into hairbrushes and practice his moves in front of the hall mirror, and when they tire of that, he plays He-Man to her She-Ra. When he’s got homework, she checks it. When he’s got respiratory infections (common in our family), she plugs in the humidifier and makes tents out of blankets and afghans to trap the moisture and open his lungs.

When I’m two or three or so, Vaughn tells me that my mother’s got guts, and when I ask why and what "guts" means, he tells me about the time the two of them spent in the McDonald’s drive-thru box. For a while (and maybe still, in some places) McDonald’s had a section of pavement marked square with yellow paint, and they called that "the box." You parked your car there if your order was large-ish and the line behind you considerably long, and after no more than five to ten minutes, someone would bring your food straight to you.

On one special occasion in 1983, five to ten minutes becomes twenty-five to thirty.

Greasy fried hamburgers don’t warrant a half-hour wait then or now, and after fiddling impatiently with the air conditioning knob and turning down the shrieks of Motley Crue (Vaughn’s second favorite band after KISS), Mother says something to the effect of, “I’m givin’ ‘em one more minute.”

Vaughn’s interest is sparked. He wants to see Shirl yell at somebody.

He gets his wish. Mother exits the car, her purse thumping her back as she speed-walks, and Vaughn’s an arm’s length behind her, his eyes glowing. They reach the counter. Mother demands her food, but the teenage boy manning the cash register blames rush hour and asks that she wait in “the box.” Mother says, “Oh, we’ve been in the box. We’re done with the box.”

“But ma’am,” the boy says, and Mother says, “I’ll take the food or the money. Your choice.”

After a second, much more strained “Ma’am” from the gangly youth, Mother smacks the countertop with an open palm and shouts in a register only dogs should hear, “The food or the money!”

They leave with a bag of six burgers (twice what they’d ordered).

Vaughn takes this fierceness to heart without hesitation and studies it. Nine-year-olds are impressionable, and this impression’s probably worth keeping. * When Vaughn is in the fifth grade, Debbie (then Meeks) packs as many of his things as she can fit in his school backpack and a spare suitcase and heaves both bags to the sidewalk outside their home. It’s a gorgeous yellow-lit day, but chilly, and Debbie wraps her arms across

her stomach and shakes her head over and over while her son watches her face. "I can’t deal with you," she says. He’s come home with another black eye (this time for punching some kid named Tommy for saying, "Robinson runs with the niggers."). She says again, "I can’t deal with you anymore."

Our father and my mother take Vaughn on full time, and he doesn’t speak a word of how he feels about the arrangement.

Days-Long Daydreamer By the time middle school hits, straight A’s don’t have the same appeal. Too many journals, Vaughn says, about feelings. His sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Doughty, makes the class write personal reflections about their home lives every Monday morning. What would he have written? Everybody works, my stuff’s always in duffel bags, mom’s an alcoholic and got raped in the Laundromat by a guy with a knife who said he knew my name and what time I got off the bus, Dad quit baseball because mom asked him to even though he had a chance to play for the Pirates and now they’re not even together, I have to sit here when I’d rather be dead.

The end.

He starts skipping classes. Teachers send notes home: Vaughn is rarely prepared for class. Vaughn asked to be excused to the restroom and never came back. Vaughn is exhibiting a hostile attitude toward me and my colleagues. Vaughn’s grades are slipping. Vaughn no longer seems interested. To that last one, our father asks, his hands clasped in his lap, “Interested in what?” Mrs. Doughty lets her glasses hang from their chain and says, “Anything, Mr. Robinson.

He isn’t interested in anything.”

But that’s not true. He likes KISS and Star Wars and growing his hair out long in the back because it makes people notice him.

Super Strength (My Hero) From my birth in 1985 until I am three-and-a-half, Vaughn visits Debbie only on the weekends she invites him. She does not like his friends, but I think Teddy Thompson and Brian Doerner are gods walking. Neither as supreme as my brother, but deities of a secondary order all the same.

These boys teach me these things: Darth Vader is far cooler than Luke Skywalker Dipping sweet pickles in sour cream (or butter) isn’t half bad Ordering a zombie-on-the-rocks at Darryl’s restaurant at age two will illicit laughter from the grown-ups Dogs are better company than any person you’ll ever meet How to whistle How to snap How to lie and keep a straight face I teach these boys these things: Tea parties are not girls-only Parading through the house listening to Christmas cassette tapes, looped, helps pass the time any Saturday afternoon Dancing can be spur-of-the-moment Apple juice is king of beverages I wasn’t running out of questions any time soon * Teddy even takes me out of my carseat if I ask.

My family treats me like I’m the center, the fabric, of their existence, so I milk that.

When we arrive home from shopping or eating out or a doctor’s visit or a day at the Mesker Park Zoo, I select who carries me out of the car. I choose at random, and one day in the sunlit garage I see Teddy Thompson washing his father’s Pontiac with a giant blue sponge. He’s very tan and dressed in a bright orange tank top, and I have a crush on him, so I call out his name. “I want Teddy to get me out!” I cry. Mother’s and Daddy’s lines of reasoning for why this request is extreme fall on deaf ears. Vaughn removes his Gators baseball cap, scratches his head, and yells louder than I did, “Teddy! Get your ass over here and get this kid outta the car!”

My big brother never questions my spoiled-rottenness. He feeds it. He believes that your feelings are more important than the inconveniences they might create for somebody else.

* I learn “ass” on the day Teddy carries me back to the house, and I learn “shit” shortly thereafter. Evidence of my learning this word happens on a rainy day in July ’88: I’m seated near the sliding glass door reciting by memory the story of Little Red Hen, Mother’s washing dishes nearby, and I ad-lib, saying in a sing-songy voice, “Not I said the duck, not I said the pig, and the cat said ‘Oh shit!’”

Mother lets a clean plate plunk back into sudsy water, walks to Vaughn’s bedroom door, and asks him if he taught me that, and I hear him say “Not on purpose.” I can tell that’s a sly maneuver. Vaughn doesn’t believe in bad language, and to this day, I don’t either. * These examples show the difference, according to my big brother, between a fib and a lie: A lie: Vaughn’s accused of spray-painting some curse word on a school-owned building and says he didn’t do it.

A fib: Vaughn’s accused of spray-painting some curse word on a school-owned building and says he didn’t know the school owned it.

The fib, no doubt, lessens the duration of his grounding.

Another lie: Vaughn and I slip a raw egg in Mother’s dishwater just to see what happens, and when she crushes it and throws a fit, we say Daddy did it.

Another fib: Vaughn and I slip a raw egg in Mother’s dishwater just to see what happens, and when she crushes it and throws a fit, we say we must’ve dropped it in there accidentally when we were making breakfast.

The fib, in this case, makes my parents laugh. I learn fibs are like jokes. Everybody’s smiling. * Vaughn and I play memory games. We play the traditional memory game where you place face down cardboard squares labeled with koalas or picnic baskets or playground slides and then try to remember where each of them is hidden. Reading’s a game, and as he says the words, I stare at them. By age three, I have memorized verbatim twelve Golden Books. We also

play a game with his Star Wars figurines, and in this one, he lines up Yoda and Obi-Wan and Luke and Chewbacca like soldiers and tells me their names while pointing to them. At the end of the line, it’s my turn to recite. I never miss even one.

I don’t think he lied when he said he wanted everyone to know I was special. * Some people say you can’t remember as far back as I can, in strong detail, but they’re wrong. I know all of my locker combinations throughout school, the name of every crayon in a 98-box of Crayolas, the sixteen digits on a plastic credit card that came with my toy cash register the Christmas I was six, every AKC-registered dog breed in alphabetical order and by group, the outfit my best friend Ashlee Huff wore for second grade picture day, the first and last names of each of my fourth grade classmates’ pen pals, and a hell of a lot more. In part thanks to Vaughn, I have a brain that takes permanent pictures. It’s not bragging. It’s conditioning.

I bring up this memory thing because I want you to know that I’m serious when I say I can still see Vaughn standing beside my crib when I’m just big enough to stand up in it. Red rims his large brown eyes, but I’m one-ish, so I don’t see this as indicative of pot-smoking. He takes my hand and rubs my fingers. He may say, "G’night, kiddo" or "Get some sleep, girlie". My memory’s not quite sharp enough for the dialogue, I guess. I’m hooked, though. I know that even then. He’s tall and imposing, but he smiles at me even when he won’t so much as look at anyone else, save to spin a story. He’s not my half-brother. He is the God, walking.

Dark is Edgy At the start of Vaughn’s freshman year of high school, Mother gets pregnant with the twins and we move to a bigger house in Owensville, population 1200. Vaughn rarely sees Debbie and is not invited to attend her third wedding. He changes schools, and he quits baseball because Daddy wishes he’d practice more. He changes friends. And these are the charges brought against them, 1988-1989: Constant truancy (the least of their worries) Breaking and entering (three homes that we know of) Theft (one television, one stereo system and speakers, contents of a liquor cabinet)

Vandalism (“Fuck You’s” graffitied on the walls of the Montgomery Township fire house) Public intoxication (they’re minors, too) Grand-theft auto (some old man’s Firebird) Possession (of what I’ve never found out) One night Vaughn and these new boys decide to run from the law with beer bottles still in their hands. No footage of this exists, of course, so I picture them long-armed and clumsy, wearing T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, bolting in a clump from the oldest kid’s mother’s car.

They head for the closest thing Owensville has to an alley, and over the wall they climb, giving each other boosts as needed. One boy rips his sleeve on the way down. Another half-laughs, half-curses and abandons the group for the safety of his two-story-plus-basement home three streets away. And then our town’s only two police vehicles block both paths out of this pinch; blue and red lights illuminate flushed faces forced into belligerent, alligator-like smiles. OfficerI-Wouldn’t-Know cuffs Vaughn. He takes a fistful of his long-in-back hair to shove him into the cop car’s backseat.

Clairvoyance—or Mind Control Psychologists and psychiatrists at the Mulberry Center in Evansville can’t figure Vaughn out. At each appointment following the patients’ riot, my big brother sits, sometimes grinning and responsive, sometimes sullen and distracted. He has no nervous habits: chewing fingernails, drumming fingers incessantly, tapping his feet, whistling, humming. Troubled teens are supposed to show signs of something. When you persuade fellow juvenile detainees to storm nurses’ stations with raised fists and turn over cafeteria tables and demand civil rights, you’re supposed to show signs of lots of things.

One psychologist, whose name I will not disclose, sits on the edge of his desk one Friday morning and stares at Vaughn sitting quietly opposite him. “Do you think it’s time you went back to school, Mr. Robinson?” he asks, fidgeting with his tie. “Because only you know when the time is right.”

“When the time is right,” Vaughn repeats back, gazing out the double-paned east window to his left. He has a way of looking through things. Straight through them. People,

too.

“Have you given it much thought, Mr. Robinson?”

“Much thought,” the doctor’s mimic sings back.

“Mr. Robinson, please. This is serious, you realize. Your parents are worried. Your teachers are worried.” The shrink is ruffled. He takes off his glasses and wipes them with his shirttail. “Aren’t you at all worried, Mr. Robinson?”

“No sir,” says Vaughn, flashing the gator grin. “School’s important shit. Wouldn’t wanna disappoint anybody.”

Mulberry calls my very pregnant mother to come pick up her stepson. They’re releasing him that afternoon on good behavior. As he walks past the check-out desk with his duffel bag over his shoulder, he says to no one in particular, “I came in here smarter than you, I’m leaving here smarter than you, and the saddest part is, you know it as well as I do.”

Time Traveling I’m not sure when, chronologically, Vaughn starts trespassing on farmers’ property at night to raid anhydrous tanks for the production of homemade methamphetamines, but that’s because when Vaughn turns sixteen (five months after the twins arrive), he gets emancipated (with no protest from any parent but my mother) and takes a road trip with five friends to Washington state. He steals thousands of dollars he didn’t earn. No phone call. No note. For a while I think if I wish hard enough—if we all combine wishes or wish at the same exact time— he’ll come back, but he doesn’t. I become a realist at age four. I block out his absence and focus on the babies, one boy and one girl, who have taken his place as my siblings, full-blooded. I make it my mission to become their best teacher.

So the meth might start when he’s on the West Coast, then follow him back to Indiana like a shadow. He’s nineteen when he finds himself in corn country again, and he marries Lisa Greer (of the black Greers, not the white ones). My paternal grandfather spouts that it’s Lisa and “her people” who started Vaughn on this “drug thing.” Grandpa Dave never saw the red-rimmed eyes, I take it. My half-brother can pull Mulberry-tricks on anybody in the free world.

Immortality

It’s late November 1991, below freezing, and Vaughn’s knocking at the door cradling a squirming, pink-blanketed Genesis Nicole. Her skin is like silky cocoa, and her nose is like ours. Like mine and my half-brother’s and our father’s and our father’s mother’s.

My parents only let him inside because he’s got the baby and it’s cold. We sit on the couch. He asks if I want to hold my niece. I’m six years old. I’m not going to say no.

When they leave and the back door clicks closed, my three-year-old sister says, “Daddy, who was that man?” * When I’m eight and press my mother for details about Vaughn’s latest arrest, I learn that he has antisocial disorder (he was hastily diagnosed during his stint at the Mulberry Center), and this doesn’t mean he hates crowds or tends toward introversion, like me. My mother says that it means he has trouble distinguishing between right and wrong in the way that most people can. That his conscience is skewed, if not somewhat absent in select situations, and always has been. He craves immediate satisfaction of all his desires. Things should happen like they’re supposed to. Consequences are theoretical and don’t apply to him. High is high, low is low. All in between is myth.

Villainy—or is it?

When you’ve stolen money from your parents that wasn’t set aside for you to begin with, you become the family pariah. When you drink more Budweiser than a body can rightly hold and then slide behind the wheel of a buddy’s SUV and decide red lights are for the timid, the law revokes your license and locks you up for as many nights as it takes for some Robinson or Meeks to bring your bail. When you hustle like a little boy on Christmas morning to make your own meth in the two-car garage after dropping your daughters off at Brumfield Elementary, you can expect to lose teeth eventually. And when you believe in your own invincibility, it lands you in prison, no chance for bail for a very long time.

In my parents’ house, on holidays, no one mentions Vaughn. We assemble, put away inordinate amounts of pie, watch football (the guys) or talk about how much we hate football (the girls), hand wash the dishes, reminisce as I assume all families do when gathered as units.

For them, the picture’s complete: father, mother, eldest daughter (valedictorian; the example), the twins (very smart; surely going places), grandmother, one aunt, two uncles, three cousins of several (our athletes). It’s the picture I know best, so I say nothing. But I don’t want to give up on him. * Vaughn’s Grandpa Elam dies in August 2007, and as I read the obituary, it hits me that I remember him. Bald, wheelchair-bound, and incomprehensible thanks to two strokes. He’s the only person in this world I ever let call me "Sam". I buy a pale blue sympathy card from the Dollar Tree and mail it to Vaughn L. Robinson, Inmate 187, c.o. Gibson County Jail, 207 W. State Street, Princeton, Indiana, 47670.

“This came in the mail for you,” my roommate Ann Marie says, tossing a sloppilyclosed, too-long envelope onto my bed in our Forrer Hall dorm room in Lexington, Kentucky. She says nothing about the warning label stamped next to the return address: Gibson County Jail is not responsible for the contents of this correspondence. What do they think inmates send their half-sisters?

The letter reads: Samantha Hey there well I sure didn’t expect to hear from you thank you for the card. I miss you too I know it’s been a long time since I saw you and hey it wasn’t the best of circumstances anyway but I do miss you. The girls are fine Lisa’s working at Toyota Gen’s on the basketball team and man is she good Kennedie’s a pistol what can I say. I think it runs in the family. These are some pictures of our house and the girls and our dog he’s a miniature pincher I know you like dogs you always have.

Between you and me I’m sick of this drug stuff. It messes you up and I know that I always did know that and this jail thing makes me feel old I just feel so old. I’m done with this. You’ve always been the smartest girl I know so keep doing good in school I never was any good in school but I know you won’t make my mistakes. I cut out news about you and the kids in the paper and I’ve got them here with me with the girls’

pictures and stuff you’ve done real good. I’m proud of you it’s Dad I don’t understand because he never goes to any of Gen’s ball games and I don’t know why.

Listen I get out Tuesday September 7 and I’m going back to Evansville with Lisa and the girls you should call the home phone and we should get together sometime. I’ll buy you lunch. Write me back if you have any free time I know you’re at school so put that first.

Love ya, Vaughn I’m wiping at tears just as fast as they fall, but all I can think is that his rotten sense of punctuation hasn’t changed a bit. * In January 2009 I draft a letter to Vaughn telling him about my boyfriend David. I have an overwhelming sense that big brothers—even the absent kind—need to know when their baby sisters are in love with someone.

I put the pen down and picture the wedding I imagine I’ll have. No lacy veil, no preacher presiding, no stained glass windows, no doves, no feeding one another square-cut bites of a cake that costs money I’d rather send to the ASPCA. I want family there. I want to see faces I know when I promise, to the best of my ability, to meld my life with someone else’s.

Inviting Vaughn would hurt our father, shock my cousins, set my mother to sobbing for good and for bad. I have no idea what to do about that, but I do make this deal with myself: I’ll mail him my letter if I have any stamps. Turns out I had several left over from Christmas.

Invisibility I have 2002 newspaper photo of my orange-jumpsuit-clad half-brother (his second possession charge of the new millennium) tucked in my billfold just in case I don’t recognize him. We’re set to meet at the McDonald’s on Richland Drive in Princeton. I don’t have a license (they say it’s too dangerous with my anxiety disorder), so Mother drives me to the parking lot, silent. Still seated on the passenger’s side, I keep looking in my purse to make sure I’ve packed my cell phone. I check at least six times.

“So you’ll call me when you’re done?” Mother asks, her hands tapping the wheel in no particular rhythm.

“Yeah,” I say. “Probably won’t be long. We’re just grabbing burgers and catching up.”

But we’re not catching up, and I know that before I step out onto the blacktop and scan the lot for cars inside which I think my half-brother might look normal. He already knows I’m an English major and a sort-of-socialist and that I cry at Humane Society commercials. I already know he’s got two gorgeous daughters with Lisa and a two-year-old daughter with a woman I’ve never met and that he’s gained twenty-odd pounds since they put him away for possession and resisting arrest in Texas in ’05. We’re not catching up at all. We’re just seeing each other.

We’re just reminding ourselves that we’ve got the same nose and the same sense of humor and the same ability to lie to people point blank, straight-faced, if the situation warrants it.

But today I can’t do it.

I’ll call Lisa’s home number later and say something came up. "Family emergency" won’t sound good, though, I realize, so it’s back to the drawing board as I sit stiff in the passenger’s seat and stare out the window at rows of green corn flashing by. He, in part, taught me this kind of story-spinning, after all, so leaving without word and lying without remorse is kind of like an ode or an offering to a great master. And maybe great masters—our gods—are better off invisible.

Charles Malone Our Inability to Restore For décor or a sense of local color the restaurant owners framed an old local newspaper from January 2nd, 1920. It’s artifact as art on the wall of the men’s room. The parched page hangs above the toilet where I have no choice but to read. A small paragraph far from the top of the page has the title "Five Men Blown to Atoms".

The phrase lingers in my mind. I turn it over. I shake it looking for an image: Lips pursed before white dandelion.

Erector set models of molecules.

Toothpicks through gumdrops.

Concentric circle diagrams of electron shells.

Chemical equations like 10 KNO3 + 3 S + 8 C → 2 K2CO3+ 3 K2SO4+ 6 CO2+ 5 N2.

In my head a phrase loops: is survived by, is survived by, is survived by, is survived by, is survived by, but the article is no article, just a paragraph. The subject is not the men, not the victims but the blast’s force. Sensational. There are no names in the article other than the name of the mill, Hagley, and the name of the owners, DuPont.

The phrase “blown to atoms” has such a sheen to it. So the newspapers use it, and use it, until the science runs out.

See: The New York Times. “March 27, 1888, 8:15 am. A dynamite factory near Ardsley Westchester County, NY. Stickney’s Aqueduct Powder Works. Two Men Blown to Atoms.”

See also: “Blown to Atoms. Three men killed. Four men injured. Lima, Ohio, Nov. 14. 1890.”

The New York Times again.

Maybe it’s the same writer, and he never imagined someone would search the archives for that peculiar phrase. I can forgive a writer this laziness.

More to the point, can we forgive an increasingly wealthy company something else? I absolutely mean to lead you with that question; I’m just not certain where.

Collecting all these fatal turn of the century industrial accidents turns those first five

men into symbols. Nameless, they stand for something and beg me to chase.

At the Hagley yard owned by the DuPonts there was an earlier explosion in 1864 in which ten men, John Dougherty, Edward O'Donnell, Thomas Hennessy, Michael Deary, Cornelius Carr, Michael Haslett, Dennis Collins, Patrick Deary, Thomas Gill and Charles O'Neal, were killed. The Times writes: “The loss of the mills to Messrs. DuPont is nothing; the loss of life is the only thing which sinks deep into their hearts, from their inability to restore it.”

Again, October 22nd 1959 seven men killed at the Hagley yard that now houses a museum dedicated to the legacy of the DuPont Family. I add their names to this list: Moran, Sweeney, Sebar, Jacobs, John Welsh, Michael O’Donnell and E. Dougherty. A list sinking deep into their hearts I’m sure.

I write to the museum dedicated to the legacy of the DuPont family about the 1920 explosion because I can’t find the names and I want badly to know them. I want to feel like the people who died are as important as those they worked for. The people whose bones, tissues, lungs, and families were instantly shattered must be as important as Judge Bradford whose windows were badly damaged by the force of the shock.

As important as the odd fact of the 1959 explosion: a horse tied to a powder-loaded cart immediately next to the source of the blast miraculously survived, is survived by, is survived by, is survived by the explosion which singed its hair, punctured its eye, and broke its leg. The rescuers were quite surprised to find this horse alive wandering the destroyed mill and they carefully resolved to relieve him of his suffering with a relatively minute proportion of gunpowder.

The horse gets several paragraphs.

I still can’t find these names and I check my mail every day. I do find such lyrical phrases as those in the December 24th 1864 Milwaukee Sentinel: “great heavy beams were lifted up like rushes to the air, whirled distances, sometimes, of over 300 feet, and imbedded so deep in the ground, frozen hard as flint, as to stand firmly on end. Great hollows were scooped in the ground by the mere concussion, seemingly, and timbers scattered in profusion over the fields around. Not a vestige of some of the exploded mills remained, save the foundation walls

and scarred earth. The heat generated by the sudden ignition of such a large quantity of powder was so sudden and so intense as to char great trees in a twinkling-the moist green bark burning readily as tinder, but coming to burn when the last rumble of the roar of the explosion had died away.”

I look at these dates; I count back and forth to World Wars. I want to think all this gun powder is for hunting. I want to think this gunpowder keeps the world free. This is the gunpowder that will defeat Hitler. I want to weave a new story. I want to imagine this is the gunpowder of the Mexican Revolution.

Around the time of the 1920 explosion, Woodrow Wilson collects his Nobel Peace Prize.

Babe Ruth gets traded to the Yankees.

Syria and Charlie Parker are born. Max Weber dies.

And almost exactly a year prior two soldier-policemen are killed while transporting barrels of gunpowder to British forces occupying Ireland. The IRA is born in an eruption of violence over a few barrels of gunpowder. I don’t want to think that our five men manufactured these particular barrels.

The Atlantic Ocean is very large.

As Dan Breen recalls it: “Quick and sure our volleys rang out. The aim was true. The two policemen were dead.” The horse is dead and five plus ten plus seven men in Delaware and so many others and now my story is growing in a dangerous way. It has become volatile.

This is the begetting of powder. The word accident rings thin. Pathology feels closer. Such great profit to be made and such strong women, or possibly shattered women, left behind to raise so many children. Walls, foundation, scarred earth. The word I want for them is caryatids.

Architectural supports carved in female form. Silent. They are holding us up. Supports standing in dust and smoke. The aftermath and hail of splintered buildings, sulfur and nails in the air.

I want their voices.

Finally a letter arrives from Delaware with the printed microfiche pages of the Wilmington Every Evening a long article including the names: Calvin Smartwood, Antonio Granguillo, Giovanni Martini, Thomas Anselmi, and Lumm Pinder.

I know nothing of Mrs. Smartwood and her child. I know nothing of Mrs. Granguillo and her two children. I know nothing of Mrs. Martini and her four children. I know nothing of Mrs. Anselmi and her three children. I know nothing of the women who made Lumm Pinder possible. Caryatids.

Now I have the names and I feel less haunted. Now I have names and I can say victims.

I am not comfortable laying simple blame. The pathology has deep roots. If it is a virus it may mutate. The reporters’ odd attentions and recycled phrases have echoes.

Now at desks, at dusk, tied and tight-skirted, shirted reading promptly the new names, new shiny phrases: bail-out, crisis, crunch, meltdown. The nuclear lingers. Messrs. CEO. The loss is nothing because it isn’t their loss. Operation this-and-that. Insurgencies and occupations.

And, I am soon to be unemployed. I can say for certain we made this, and we made this. We make powder and money out of the labor and lives of others. We made this, and we made this.

This is the line I mean to draw: between men and women, words and time; across the wide gap separating news and truth, between classes where “equality” is spoken with confidence, spoken perhaps by a Jazz-Age American visiting Paris and the sites of revolution. I mean to see a long way. I am squinting. There is a dust cloud and the windows shake and break.

This is a brand new decade and The Wilmington Every Evening estimates that the census may show as many as 112 million American people. These were only five and now I have their names. Why in any psychological framework, or logical fashion should I feel less haunted by recovering five names, ten or so words. They are no resurrection, no redemption; no final punctuation. I am not equipped to write these epitaphs, or any for that matter. Having the names I feel better but I shouldn’t. Maybe now I have what I need to ask a question; I have another phrase to begin turning over, to begin shaking or mapping out. Already I wonder in what ways we are answering this question I can’t articulate and why I hesitate to do so.

Dr. Elizabeth Bernays Bugs I am nine years old. I run round in circles on the back lawn. Papa mows the grass and Mama plants the pansies. I like bugs. They jump up at me with all their colors; iridescent greens and blues, deep reds, yellows and oranges, striped and spotted, embroidered and painted. They grab my attention with big green wings, delicate shining membranes, black horns, clubbed feelers, jeweled torpedo bodies, feathery texture, cold solid greenness, light spots blinking in the night. I think I am attracted to small things.

I like to watch the ladybird beetles, satisfying red roundness with black dots walking over and under leaves. I let them walk onto my hand and see the little legs like tiny toy mechanical ones, and I sing to each of them as Mama taught me: Ladybird, ladybird, flyaway home, your house is on fire, your children are gone.

And more often than not, the little beetle opens its red half balls, spreads out the thin black flying wings and jumps into the air.

I see hairy caterpillars feed on the white cedar tree down on the second terrace, and sometimes they crawl down the trunk in long processions. The bold leader steps out, the next one has its head touching the leader, and third touches the second; there may be thirty or more in line. They reach the ground and the leader takes them in one clear direction, as if it knows exactly where it is going. The white cedar tree still has leaves and there isn’t another white cedar for miles. I get a stick and direct the leader to turn left until eventually its head makes contact with the back of the caterpillar at the end of the procession. It stays there, still walking, and the whole tribe of them now walk in circles. Mama calls me in to lunch and when I come back out afterwards they are still doing it. The circle is about a yard across, and the light brown very hairy caterpillars keeps moving all afternoon and they are still going when I am called to bed. Next morning there is no sign though I search all around on the ground and up the trunks of nearby trees.

The oleander by the back door is covered with chrysalises in summer, hanging like silver ornaments on a Christmas tree. They came from striped caterpillars that feed on the leaves, and

they turn into butterflies with whitish wings crisscrossed by lots of velvety black lines. Uncle Chisholm says they are called crow butterflies. The shiny chrysalises reflect the sunlight and like tiny curved mirrors sometimes give me a picture of funny curvey leaves. Mama lets me cut a stem with one of them hanging and I put it in a jar in the kitchen so we can have the butterfly when it emerges. I am hoping I will get a butterfly net soon. We watch it come out, Mama and I; the damp crumpled thing pushes out of the bulge at the top, then after a while turns upside down, holding on to the old shell, while it puffs and pants to spread out the wings until they are flat. It rests like that all morning and then begins to flutter. Mama said it was unkind to keep it in the jar so we went out into the garden and opened the lid. In a minute it is free and flies dreamily over the grass, lands for a little while on a flower of the quisqualis bush, and then disappears across the gully.

In the evenings I sit with Mama and Papa on the western verandah where they drink a glass of rum. There are lights on in the house and because we have no screens moths fly in.

Some of them flutter round the lights and sometimes the small ones get right inside the round lampshades of the ceiling lights and there they die. Mama has to take the globes off and empty them out. At night as I do homework they land on my desk under the light and show off their greens and browns, yellows and grays. Some have long fringes on their wings; others have feelers like combs with long teeth. There is a common silvery one with white furry legs and a long spine on each back leg.

The big moths land on the walls and just sit there most of the time, but when we go to bed the really big brown bat moths fly around in the dark and quite often onto the bed, into our faces. When this happens and I brush it off, lots of tiny little scales come off and we call them “goofoo feathers.” If you turn the light on there is a gray patch of scales on the pillow or sheet.

My sister Jennifer screams, “goofoos, goofoos.” She hates those moths and sometimes I get a chair and catch them on the wall for her before she goes to bed. I put a glass over it then slip a piece of cardboard underneath and push the moth away from the wall. She wants me to kill them but I don’t like to squish such a big thing with its wings like bits of lovely patterned carpet. I take it to the back door and let it go.

I do learn to kill the big grasshoppers that eat Papa’s vegetables. They are huge – as long as my nine-year-old hand. They sit there in the foliage with their big bulging eyes made up of lots of little eyes. They have no eyelids and they stare coldly. But if you creep up on them very slowly they don’t seem to notice and they sit quite still. When you get close to one you can make a quick grab and catch it. You have to get it round the middle. It you get it too near the front end the long spiky back legs kick and scratch your hand. If you catch one by a leg it escapes leaving just a leg in your hand. So you catch the grasshopper in your left hand and then cut it in half with secateurs in your other hand. I don’t like doing it but Papa says it can really help him if I could do it and anyway, we have to save the plants. He says just do it quickly and don’t look at it afterwards. There are good and bad insects and sometimes you have to kill them.

There are other killings I help with. With my finger and thumb I squash the greenfly covering the buds on Mama’s roses because she doesn’t like getting the juice on her fingers. I help to pick inchworms off the lettuces and drop them into soapy water where they drown. I step on stinkbugs that Papa shakes off the sweet potato and tomato plants. I spread flowers of sulfur on the azalea to kill masses of tiny little mites that have eight legs you can see if you get a magnifying glass. Sometimes I look at them in the sun, and the sun’s rays all get collected in the magnifying glass, which come out of the glass hot, so when they hit the mites, they fizz.

The insects we all kill are mosquitoes. We have mosquito nets over our beds and we burn mosquito coils to try and keep them away, but sometimes you just have to kill them. They like to hide under the bed and then at night they can get up under the net, so before we go to bed we get the sprayer with DDT in it and give the handle a few pushes under the bed. Mama says it's not good to use too much. Sometimes they are really bad under the dining room table and we slap our legs to kill them as they feed. One night at dinner my older brother Barton kills lots of them and heaps them up beside his place mat, and that makes Papa laugh and we all start doing it to see who could get the biggest pile. Barton always wins things like that; he loves competitions.

I am eleven. In the new house there are races with rhinoceros beetles. They fly onto the big Western verandah with a heavy thud in midsummer, often falling like stones onto their

backs and having trouble getting back up the right way. They are shiny and black with one or two horns sticking forward and curved upward. I hold a big beetle with my left hand and wind cotton thread round the horns a couple of times with my right, leaving inches of free thread on either side. Their spiny legs work overtime to get away and they make a peculiar buzzing sound that makes my sister put her hand over her mouth and pretend to be sick. The matchboxes are ready with holes in them so that the cotton harness can be pushed through and tied in a knot to make the cart, then whoa beetles, see how fast you can run across the verandah! They never take off and fly and I think they need to jump from high up, but they walk all over the place, often not getting to reach the end place I set them. There is something about having a competition that really appeals to me, though I don’t want to be in any competition myself, in case I am no good.

When the rhinoceros beetles fly is the same time as when Christmas beetles come. These are shiny and silvery and dozens come onto the verandah. Papa says that in the grub stage they live inside the trunks and branches of trees and probably that is why some of the gum trees have dead branches.

My school friend Leigh gets a load of silkworm eggs and gives me half. I am lucky because we have our own mulberry tree at home. I pick some leaves and put them in a shoebox with the eggs. I miss them hatching and first see holes in the wilted leaves. After that I “do my worms” every day. I take each caterpillar out and put it in a dessert dish while I empty the box and put in some fresh leaves. They are whitish and smooth and every now and then they molt, each time getting bigger.

One day I take my worms to school and show them around. Most of the girls say “Yuk,” or “Pooeee.” Miss Ramsay sees me looking in the box during class and makes me put the box outside, and I can’t listen any more to what she is saying because I am worrying. The head teacher comes past the door but she doesn’t stop at the shoebox with holes in. I wonder what she thinks. At recess I rush out to check them and take them to the cloakroom.

After about two weeks they are over an inch long and they stop feeding. First they poo a lot and get a bit smaller, then they start spinning silk and cover themselves completely. The silk

is cream colored and when the job is finished you have a little oval cocoon of soft silk.

You wait a couple of days then drop them into boiling water to kill the caterpillar inside.

You get an old cotton reel and put a thin round pencil through the hole. It has to be loose. Then you hammer a nail into each side of the reel, so you can more easily turn the reel round and round. You have to find the end of the silk and start winding it onto the reel, but once that is done you turn the reel, winding silk while the cocoon bobs about below, and in the end you get a reel about quarter full from just one cocoon. We are supposed to sew something but that never happens. The fun is getting the silk from the cocoon.

I spend hours watching butterflies landing on flowers, opening and closing their wings.

They look so dreamy but I can see their long tongues uncurling when they land on the heads of lantana flowers, but they only stick it down into the yellow flowers in the middle and not the red ones round the outside. I guess the yellow ones have more nectar. Such knowing insects.

How do they find out?

Mama and I enjoy the garden together every Saturday morning, looking for butterflies as we ramble up and down the terraces, past the rose beds, along the path of the azalea walk, under weeping willows and jacaranda trees, through her patch of “Australian natives,” in and out of Papa’s banana and citrus groves, down beyond the mangos to the chicken yard. I discover many types of caterpillars and learn to identify which ones gave rise to which butterflies. I love every black and sky-blue melissa flying high, green triangles closer to the ground, and the gray-blue hairstreaks puddling in patches of mud, and the great birdwing butterfly–three-inch-long emerald green and black wings, golden yellow body. I don’t think about anything very much and I don’t care if I am no good at schoolwork. I don’t care if Jennifer says I am creepy or if Barton calls me a drongo or a dill. Mama and Papa know I love flowers and insects so it’s alright. I think Mama is happy that I am interested in something, because of my failure in school.

I am thirteen. I go to stay with my friend Leigh at her grandmother’s place on Moreton Bay at the mouth of the Brisbane River. There are oyster beds, a pier, and beaches. The land part is very sandy with tee-trees growing in some swampy areas. Leigh’s forty-year old cousin

Patricia comes to stay. She is tall with very thick wild short gray hair. She wears great baggy khaki trousers held in at the ankles with rubber bands, and very loose cotton shirts. She has a sleeveless jacket with lots of small pockets that she wears on top. She can be rather fierce with us if she thinks we are silly but she has a big wide smile and speaks with a lisp, and she like explaining things to us.

Patricia is an entomologist and professor and she comes to collect tree hole mosquitoes.

Tee-trees branch a lot, and in the forks there is often a depression where water collects and these are the tree holes. She explains that some mosquitoes specialize in tree holes, laying their eggs in the water there, and it isn’t known yet what all the species are and how the larvae, or wrigglers, grow and whether other insects or tadpoles get in there and eat them.

Leigh and I walk around with her and help. She had a special thing for sucking up some of the water and getting the mosquito larvae and she puts the larvae in a preservative solution.

Then she has a little cup to take out more of the water and put it in a wide white shallow bowl.

That way we can examine everything she collects like little beetles or worms or other larvae.

She keeps some of them and then throws the rest out. Then she keeps a sample of just the plain water to do some chemistry later.

Patricia tells us a lot about mosquitoes. Some of them like salty water, some like it acid, some neutral. They lay their eggs in groups called rafts and the larvae live by gathering up little particles from the water with whirling mouth brushes. At intervals they have to get to the surface and put a little breathing tube into the air to get more oxygen and if you put oil on the water it messes up the top of the tube and they can’t get to the air. This way you can kill lots of them and that can be good especially against the kind that carry diseases.

I think a lot about Patricia. I have never met anyone like her. None of Mama’s friends wear pants or have such wild hair and no makeup. Patricia’s baggy khakis things are kind of funny. In any case, I love the fact that she doesn’t follow fashions or talk about boring things like weather and shopping. I love it that she bothers to explain so much to kids like us. I figure doing all this stuff with mosquitoes is related to her not getting married and wonder if she cares.

I can’t imagine doing the things she does for a job. She teaches at the University and we don’t

know anyone else there, and I know that for me and Jennifer, the big thing we will do is get married and have children.

From the kitchen window, I watch Mama work in the garden. She wears an old brown corduroy skirt and heather sweater darned at the elbow, old brown lace-up gardening shoes, cotton stockings with long ladders mended. She kneels on mown lawn by the long flower garden, and with a small fork turns black soil, pulled out grass and weeds–nutweed, pigweed, fat-hen–into a heap on the lawn. She stops to gaze at the tall delphinium spike, lean over to smell mauve and dark royal blue, look away into the dry western bush by stringybark gums and brown river. Then she sits back and lets the fork drop. She is a rough stone statue, and late sun turns her gray hair to a veil of bronze. She wipes steam from her rimless trifocal glasses and I seem to hear moaning sounds of pain, shocking, not the physical kind, and I can’t understand. A bright yellow pierid butterfly lands on a wallflower nearby and she smiles and digs some more.

Patricia is like a schoolteacher. She wants to explain things and doesn’t like it if we don’t pay attention when she is talking. But she is really nice and lots of fun and Leigh and I really love going on expeditions with her into the bush. After the holidays she invites us to go on a weekend trip with the Queensland Naturalists’ Club. She is president and had organized a visit to the Bunya Mountains northwest of Brisbane. We stay at a forestry station in the Bunyas where we are in cabins complete with double bunks. There are barbecues and carbide lamps. I find out that the people in the club are called nats, and they are all kinds of people, mostly not anything to do with the university. All of them like something–rocks or birds, flowers or insects.

Patricia leads walks in the forest and we look all around about for birds and spiders and different kinds of mosses. Different people point out things–a trapdoor of a spider, millipedes under logs, the fallen fruit of the bunya pines and the toe holes made long ago in the bunya pine trunks by aborigines who climbed to harvest them.

Two entomology graduate students are on this trip, Ian from Brisbane and Saran Singh from India. They are collecting all kinds of small insects in the leaf litter, under logs, beneath bark, as well as sweeping the vegetation with their nets. They look at every tiny specimen, and to pick them out of the net they have something called a pooter. This is a glass vial with two

pieces of glass tubing pushed through holes in the cork top. One of these has a short rubber tube and another bit of glass tubing at the end. The other has a long rubber tube. You suck the end of the long rubber tube and put the short glass tube of the other piece beside a tiny insect, and it gets sucked up into the vial. Lots of insects can be collected in a pooter before it needs to be emptied into a killing bottle.

At the end of the day, when most of the nats are exchanging stories or examining bits of rock or snail shells, Ian and Saran are busy with their catches. They empty the killing bottles out onto big pieces of blotting paper and begin the setting and pinning. There are long sharp pins for bigger insects and these have to be pushed through the chest or thorax at just the right place.

If the wings are to be set out they are held with strips of tissue paper, which in turn are held down with short pins called lills. Very small insects are impaled on very tiny pins called micros and the micros stuck into strips of pith on big pins, and this is called double mounting. Finally, the minutest little parasitic insects and flies are too small even for micros. For them a tiny speck of special glue is placed on the extreme tip of a small triangle of card and the insect touched to the glue. The card itself is pushed onto a big pin.

We help Ian and Saran with their work. They give us starter materials at the end of the trip and we go home to begin our own collections. How very exciting it is to have a project! I quickly need more things. Patricia lets me have a box for storing specimens, Mama buys me a butterfly net and my older brother Barton helps me make boards for setting out wings of butterflies and moths. Now my homework at night by my lamp is mixed with moth collecting and setting, and my weekends in the garden and bush is busy with searching for new specimens.

At school, Miss Gray encourages and helps me. I learn the orders and families of insects by myself, and I spend hours making tiny labels with a fine black pen. I am in love with zoology, and especially insects, and I watch behaviors and learn about evolution. I enter the Queensland School’s science competition and win a prize. It is my first entomological success.

I am eighteen now. I go to university–a new experience in our family and Mama has the vicarious pleasure of it. I will become an entomologist and Mama will be so proud. Now I know that during all those years of bug love Mama took her joy from my joy, and the butterflies

soothed her twice over. Her mournful happiness is mine now as I seek to take in nature as deeply as I can in this short life. I think, even back when I was nine, the attraction of flowers and insects was comfort against all the sadness.

Mathias Svalina Everything is So Terrifying Everything is so terrifying, but also eyelashes & the tiny bones of words buried below highways.

There is a yellow house in Delaware of tangled yarn & grass seeds, & the rice that fills the little girl’s pockets.

The little girl raining irises, how a flat hand touches oak bark & then suddenly there is a new calendar where the old calendar used to be.

Check your todo list, dip your cold fingers in silver to light the tunnel that leads to the blast furnace.

The little girl holds her hands to your eyes & the box unfolds, then iris & iris.

I count every paperclip that thorns from the calf’s fur as a lucky thing.

I sit still so long I become kind of barky.

And I think of saying that to you & I laugh.

I write a little book & send it off to all the agents.

I would like you to read it some time.

It’s all about you.

It’s a clean blue t-shirt, fresh from the dryer.

That little girl is in the book.

She trails rice wherever she goes.

She’s symbolic.

Mathias Svalina No New Wounds Until the Old Ones Heal No authority of weeded fields or bulbous sockets & vice versa, though the rain delays be ruinous, though the looks you get from the locals could make of your body a stone.

No clarinet reeds discarded behind the bathroom stall.

No business cards with your name spelled out in smiley faces.

No names for imaginary insects, no names at all.

Only a tiny tomato plant growing in the eye socket of a sewing machine.

When the old wounds heal you’ll be long gone for the family farm, hanging steel chairs from oak trees in hopes of bringing the factory down.

Why do we have to turn the dirt so early in the groaning?

Why does the dirt have the texture of a lost suitcase?

Can you hear me? I’m that sound of rubber soles on the back of my throat.

A little mouse head beneath the clean pillow.

We end up in Bucharest, accidentally.

We end up with our slacks shredded by the barbed wire fence.

Out past the pastures the cows dwindle into canker sores, the long hair sweeps itself from the young boy’s eyes.

Please call me. Please tell me you are all right.

I’ve been so worried that I’ve started imagining things.

I’ve imagined you were stuck inside the wolf’s stomach & no woodsman remembered to replace you with stones.

Mathias Svalina Can We Never Make Decisions When I think of a man holding a cigarette to his excavated trachea I think of how I once saw a red-headed woman in two consecutive commercials.

In one she was a herpes sufferer riding rear on a tandem bike; in the second she sang gospel with a black woman & a Latino woman.

Three rubber banded bunches of lavender sprung from a white vase atop the baby grand.

The president looks grim on TV, He hunches slightly forward & looks into the center of the camera.

He says “Pity begins at home.”

He pauses, grimaces, "In bed."

In a hoarse whisper he says “I want to kiss you so hard.”

I hate to see the dead soldiers in the Hollywood blockbusters faintly stirring with breath. ˜ Would you rather fold a paper napkin lengthwise or dip the burlap sack, squirming with kittens, into the green water?

Would you rather hold your breath until your blood vessels burst or pet a sleek black horse’s shoulder?

Is that word you’ve tattooed on your dog’s ear destroy or destiny?

The world is growing smaller, the sound of the night simmering into itself is the sound of a tractor choking on another mountain lion carcass.

I am like the plain brown bird renowned for nothing but its excruciating scarcity. ˜ If he refuses to eat then the infirmary will tube his nose & force-feed him.

If he refuses to pray the infirmary will shoot him up with tranquilizers.

If he refuses to shatter the bathroom, then he must use the window. ˜ Would you rather strum this out of tune guitar or puncture your thumb-pad with this shiny new nail?

Would you rather fold this sheet of corrugated cardboard into a diamond or listen to the sun-warped cassette tape of the National Anthem?

I have spent days trying not to open my eyes.

The curtains twitch like screwshafts.

The carpet whispers knots.

The sunwarmed glass holds the city like a pillowcase. ˜ Glass is time's inability to understand love.

You can see right through it, right to the end.

Glass is that which falls faster to the floor.

In the distance I see a horse & carriage stop at a redlight. Glass is not the tightest knot.

I woke like a salt-soaked slug in sweat-soaked sheets & could not remember if the dream about you & me strolling the crooked cobblestones of Mexico City was a dream or a memory.

You sucked your blue Icy Pop, the sky looked like rain. ˜ It’s lovely, how your glasses slip down your sweat-wet nose; how you wipe your red forehead with a dark blue handkerchief; how you rub the back of your knees after sitting on the steps of the wooden porch; how you sweep the broken glass into a pile but do not pick it up.

Erin Costello Branding He told me I am public enough. Here and there he runs up buildings to catch himself on the return flight. It is cold in ounces. Anything that can be weighed in air is an open space.

Flawlessness, the powder peach with mica. She is the rubbing beneath the page. Whether or not she returns through flight or foot, depends on the atmosphere. Is it bright.

I am already here, clinically proven. I fit nicely into rooms with doors shut. Allow me to be where I will be already, near the bed, between the furniture, in the clothes I look down.

Ditch Fog The neighbor leaves his wheel chair in a ditch leaves, asphalt acreage.

Double yellow lines lead to a creek it uses landscaping and rain ditch fog on the neighbor.

Horse hooves on asphalt we aren't walking hills to the horse pen.

To Sweep up a Puddle of Glass Sharp hands hold together the sliding doors of each meal to sweep up a puddle of glass the chair reclines or falls.

Jumping up and down on the glass father fell right through the floor driving up the steepest hallway, a window lit up the way.

Red rock is tumbling over quail brother is shooting it all, asking for more food is kept cold, at my distance there is no leaving.

Seth Landman My Eyes Are on Sophia My eyes are on Sophia Because really that’s important She came right down and I swapped my hands for echoes I don’t know if I really have a car That’s true can I start it for you I think I’m so tired that I feel I don’t know whether or not to take the painting down Where the river wears a cap Hey remove your hat please Awful you’re an awful lake But I’m the one And I know better I’m a gift to it It’s better Where is Arizona Are you right here But I’m the one Either way I’ll say that’s fine I’ll say Somebody’s a spicy saint You asked me what I think In your voice We move the genre and we’re okay I like to stay quiet It’s slippery now Oh you got a haircut Whoa we let it go You like this annual thing Details checked out You drive out to details Arizona is similar to hear

Seth Landman Earl Believes That there’s the literature’s rapport within him, that there’s advising in advising, that he’s an alerted and potential person, that it’s the center of people occurring in the face, into arrival.

That in taking action, the pioneered us blends trouble with resistance in distance, that we are echoes of a power outage.

That holding hands within the institution, we are here on a huge field.

That these eyes are your eyes and this is your brain, that we filter learning into science to make out something bigger.

That when our lives are over, we call them up to reason away.

A Helper Fit I am moving over the face so long.

Signs that guide us through to sight.

I react and go to a bridge; everything moves. I believe these are the generations of everything moves. It is exciting, like performing, buzzing on cheeks and nostrils.

A mist over the whole face.

I think about human company when it comes. To name after no one all the living, going up to watch the divers vanish. To be the tiller, the tongue that runs the whole mouth.

Justin Runge 353 Now, a water tower bullies the scape. This one, in hot air balloon getup.

Quickly, fast food options, Stanchion sky.

Windbreaks along parcels say we got you surrounded in a posse drawl.

Lots of ammo in the big box store. Parking lot perforates a barn shape.

Still, corrals.

Carts a sparse livestock loose, just periphery.

Off-ramp motel chains. Days, Motor, Comfort Inn. Truck grunts can’t pass the ply of curtains.

Smell of all the invisible gas expelled without an airship to buoy.

Sour cubic tons.

Scratch ticket mutilated, so soon useless,

papier collĂŠ against gravel.

Stop for snacks.

Unisex bathroom, humid as June.

352 Kid Platoons in a cornfield, detasseling.

Their hands, like locusts, fidget plague.

Set the stalks to blossom.

Idle pivots are plesiosaur skeletons sat in the field, fluke echoes of here’s actual natural history. Once a sea. Rain runoff coughs flecked eras.

Weapon tips, behemoth bone shard worked back like seeds into soil, under sneaker soles.

Noon held aloft. The hay stacked with sack lunch ate bleeding from razorlike leaves.

Four dogs

running rings into the dirt driveway where a bus idles evenings for the flood of preteens.

Dust plumes with departure, a dissolve.

88 Rigs sleep like steeds hitched up.

Pneumatic snort. Semis are waking with sound like neighs.

A feeding teen, spray of sunflower seed shells from inside a cargo van.

Driver deep knee bends and ambulates mid-marathon while a game of tag swarms around steel community college art— here made oxidizing wreckage (an incident

of aesthetic to interrupt the flushing toilet white noise). Ears pressed to crooks, how one uses sea shells, for a shh.

Passengers, their cubist necks bent.

A hundred miles, then next rest.

Serena Chopra February

Swarming the roof fell caving and crawling the flames sunk shattered glass and popping like ice raw bluehanded moon those screams were for real relentless for real afternoon cravings for yellow pop-eyed birds: Her little bird bones quivered I thought I’d crack down in the orange alley light although it was morning the sun could not see us although the kisses the cold tiles, the brutal were all so light.

Babies He mentions and she never wrote me back. This story is true. Though I wanted both and they came. Though I wanted both. Milkman, milkman: the baby killed itself. The baby of dead guilt wilting like a poppy, like the bastard light of a flame: When the dust came out kicking I shouted Holy hell, beast beast beast!

And all cowered in the rain, the wet sap of mud.

Violet Tells a Story Something stands on its head. Something stands on my head. It’s the world crumbling through my hair, and if there ever was a story it’s one that can no longer be said. A grumbling phonics, a sterile verb— A moon is a moment. A color breathes once. The car can crash. It will crash. And I suspect that none of these forget as a cloud can.