Bryant Literary Review, 2022, Vol. 23

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EDITOR:

Tom Roach

POETRY EDITOR:

Eric Paul

FICTION/CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR: STUDENT FICTION EDITORS: STUDENT POETRY EDITOR: DESIGN & LAYOUT: COVER ART:

Tom Roach

Megan Polun, Aidan Quilty

Layna Holk

Rebecca Chandler, beccachandler67@gmail.com

Cara Ferro, Bryant University, class of 0f 2022

The Bryant Literary Review is an international journal of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction housed in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University in Smithfield, RI. Since our first issue in 2000, we have published original and thought-provoking creative work from a wide array of established and emerging authors.

We see our purpose to be the cultivation of an active and growing connection between the Bryant University campus community and the larger literary culture.

MISSION STATEMENT:

Authors can submit their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction work here: https://bryantliteraryreview.submittable.com/submit. Limit one submission per author: one fiction or creative nonfiction piece and up to three poems. Fiction and creative nonfiction pieces should not exceed 5,000 words (give or take). We do not accept previously published work. Our reading period is September 1 to December 1.

Copyright reverts to author upon publication. For samples of previously published work see https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/blr/. Any questions can be directed to Professor Tom Roach at troach@bryant.edu.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Visit our website at https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/blr/ © 2022 Bryant Literary Review

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Table of Contents EDITORS’ NOTE .. .............................................................................................................................................................................. 6 POEMS AND SHORT STORIES

Poof! Kathie Giorgio................................................................................................................................................................. 7 God Mansplains Anger to Me Amy Lawless.. ............................................................................................................ 23 Bad Accident Amy Lawless................................................................................................................................................ 27 Coming to the End of His Triumph Amy Lawless................................................................................................... 28 Come, Gentle Night Michael Washburn.................................................................................................................... 29 Dear Breast Cancer, Clara Burghelea........................................................................................................................... 43 Thank You Terror, 1 Mathias Svalina............................................................................................................................ 44 Thank You Terror, 2 Mathias Svalina............................................................................................................................ 45 Thank You Terror, 3 Mathias Svalina........................................................................................................................... 46 Loving Algorithms P.J. Powell. . ............................................................................................................................................ 50 The Unvanquished Marlene Olin.................................................................................................................................... 54 My Father’s Last Disappointment Ellie Anderson................................................................................................ 68 Not Easy Ellie Anderson. . .................................................................................................................................................... 72 Grand Union Ellie Anderson........................................................................................................................................... 76 Beyond Poland Rosalind Goldsmith............................................................................................................................ 78 Watching My Daughter’s Tap Recital David O’Connel..................................................................................... 85 Nightly Feats of Survival Jonathan Greenhause.................................................................................................... 86 In The Night, A Song Tyrel Kessinger.......................................................................................................................... 87 Adelaster Deborah S. Prespare....................................................................................................................................... 88 Absence Doesn’t Soften the Grass Yvonne Higgins Leach. . ............................................................................... 93 The Family Bends Jason Talbot........................................................................................................................................ 94 The Family Bends II Jason Talbot................................................................................................................................... 96

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Night in the City Looks Pretty to Me Roger Logan................................................................................................. 98 A Welling Carol Ann Wilburn. . .................................................................................................................................... 110 Airborne Carol Ann Wilburn......................................................................................................................................... 111 Heirloom Carol Ann Wilburn. . ....................................................................................................................................... 112 Not a Piece of Furniture Alex Smith............................................................................................................................. 113 Live In The Mood Mark Taksa......................................................................................................................................... 122 The Cantaloupe From Peoria Dane Cervine........................................................................................................... 124 Night Terrors Patrick Bernhard. . ...................................................................................................................................... 125 I Am Here For You Saoirse E. Doyle............................................................................................................................ 132 AUTHOR BIOS . . ............................................................................................................................................................................. 143

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Editors’ Note Thank you for reading the 23rd volume of the Bryant Literary Review. As Student Fiction Editors, we chose stories that touch upon topics of mental health and emotional wellbeing. We feel that these topics are more relevant than ever in these unprecedented times of health crises and stress over the past two years. This year’s edition covers topics including mental illness, death, homelessness, morality, abuse, and suicide. We feel that this collection is an important commentary on the state of our world, and we hope that these stories help anyone struggling right now to recognize that they are not alone. If you are currently struggling with your mental health at this time, or any time, we encourage you to access the mental health resources provided below.

This edition will be the final edition that our team member, Aidan Quilty, will get to work on, as he will be graduating this coming May. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Thomas Roach for being an amazing co-editor, teacher, and role model over the course of our Bryant careers. We are grateful for everything we have learned from him both in and outside of the classroom.

Thank you again for reading the BLR and exploring the collection we have prepared for you.

Aidan Quilty, Student Fiction Editor, Bryant University ‘22 Megan Polun, Student Fiction Editor, Bryant University ‘23 Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 Bryant Counseling Services: 401-232-6045 or email them at bcs@bryant.edu Dating Abuse and Domestic Violence: 1-866-331-9474 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: 1-800-662-4357

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Poof!

K AT H I E G I O R G I O

When I was nine years old, a boy socked me on the arm at recess. He hit hard, enough to cause me to cry out, to bring tears to my eyes, though I wouldn’t let them escape. It was also hard enough to turn my skin into shades of purple and black with a deep red center.

After hitting me, he spun on his heels and ran back across the playground, joining up with a group of boys who stood clustered, grinning at me.

I didn’t know what to do. My arm hurt, but it was my voice that was taken. My best girlfriend grabbed my hand and led me to a spot under the trees, just around the corner of the school building. I sat on the ground and finally cried, my hand clasped over the unexpected sore spot on my upper arm. My friend rubbed my back, but said nothing. Her voice seemed taken too.

At home, my mother clucked over the growing lumpy bruise and she pulled an ice pack from the freezer. After securing it to my arm with an ace bandage, she sat me on the couch in front of the television and put on my favorite after-school program, a game show where people won more money than I knew how to count to. My mother brought me a plate of Oreos and some milk. Then she sat on the arm of the couch and said, “That boy…he must really like you, Faith.”

I immediately put my hand on the ice pack, my fingers going numb with the cold. “Like me? He hit me! For no reason!”

She nodded. “That’s what boys do. It means they like you.”

That’s what boys do.

Years later, boys later, men later, I stared at my bedroom ceiling and felt like I needed my mother and her ice pack and an ace bandage, even though there wasn’t a bruise. Every morning, after I opened my eyes and before I rolled out of bed, I wrapped my arms around my own shoulders and hugged myself, the way I knew my mother would hug me. The way she did hug me after that day on the playground. Carefully, to not bring pain where I was wounded, but fully, to let me know she was there and she would always be there.

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I started hugging myself soon after my first anniversary with my husband. The hugs started as an intermittent thing, then grew into routine.

But there were never any bruises. Just words. Specific words, not spoken in anger or even in surprise. Not spoken at a certain time of day or month or season or event. They could come first thing in the morning, before my husband even greeted me to the new day, or in the middle of the night or dinner or lovemaking. Once, at our daughter’s birthday, just after we helped her blow out her three candles, he smiled at me over the cake, and he said those words. Six of them.

“I’m going to kill you someday.”

The first time he spoke them, just days after our first anniversary, it was over a sinkful of dishes. I was draining the water, my favorite part, watching the bubbles circle, chasing them with the spray from the faucet, and he was drying the last fork. He dropped it in the drawer, slid it shut with a gentle slam, folded the towel neatly and hung it on the rack he installed himself after we moved into the house just a month before. Then he turned to me, kissed my cheek, smiled, and said, “I’m going to kill you someday.” And he left the room.

I laughed. I saw myself laughing in the reflection of the window. My husband just made the most outrageous joke. Maybe it was a line from a TV show he’d just watched. He liked to entertain me with non sequiturs and from-out-of-nowhere statements. So I laughed and then went to join him in the living room. I knew in an hour or so, we would have a glass of wine apiece while we read our respective books until it was time for the news. Then we’d go to bed, and if we weren’t too tired, we’d make love, attempting to conceive the baby we both wanted.

Eight years now into our marriage, seven years after our first anniversary, I sometimes heard these words even when he wasn’t home. I heard him whisper. In my car. In the shower. When I was asleep. Sometimes, months went by without his saying those six words, and I wondered if I heard him at all, but then there they would be again, in the air between us, in my presence, to my face, always when I didn’t expect it.

He never gave me an explanation. And there was something about the way he said them that kept me from asking. Except for once. We were passing each other in the 8

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hallway, me with a basket of newly folded laundry, he on his way out to pick up our everySaturday pizza. We smiled at each other, I said, “Hurry back,” and he said, “I’m going to kill you someday.”

I stopped dead. Then I turned and called to his retreating back, “Why do you say that?

Why do you say that to me?”

He didn’t stop, but looked over his shoulder, winked, and said, “Who else would I say that to?” And then he was gone.

I put away the laundry. I ate the pizza. And I puzzled, pondered and worried. At what point do non sequiturs become targeted statements, heading directly for a bullseye, and what do you do if the bullseye seems to be you?

It wasn’t like he said the words the same way each time. Sometimes, he was flippant.

Other times, the words were so low, the S in someday so sibilant, that I shivered. But there was always an air of warning around them. Don’t ask. You won’t like the answer.

When our daughter was born, he said the words a week after we brought her home.

He was holding her, singing a lullaby, while I curled up on the couch, trying to catch a fast nap. Midway through a line of the song, he looked at me, smiled, and sang with the melody, “I’m going to kill you someday,” then he returned to the real lyrics. I was so tired; I fell asleep to it. In the morning, after he left for work and I awoke to the sound of a crying baby, I hugged myself.

Our daughter was five years old now. Elizabeth. My husband and I entered the delivery room, not knowing what we would name our child. Not knowing, by choice, if she was a boy or a girl. But the moment this messy, elegant, outspoken baby was laid between my breasts, the moment I cupped my hands over her head and her bottom, her name rose up through my fingertips. “Elizabeth,” I whispered and my husband whispered it after me. I wondered how I didn’t know who I carried within me all that time. Who I whispered to for months, and who answered me with gentle stretches and head butts. There would be no shortened version of her name; no Beth, no Liz, no Eliza. She was Elizabeth.

But now, on this particular morning, when I opened my eyes and before I rolled out of bed, I hugged myself and found a new chill I couldn’t embrace away. Last night, my

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husband added five more words. New words. Words that started with a “maybe”, but that felt as definite, as solid as certainty. We were arguing over whether or not we should put Elizabeth in swimming lessons, something she begged to do. The lessons were expensive and my husband thought we should just take her for Saturday afternoons at the Y during free swim until we knew if she had an aptitude. I knew she had an interest and wanted to encourage it. Elizabeth sat on the floor, pretending to watch television, as our voices rose.

Suddenly, my husband stopped. “I’m going to kill you someday,” he said, his voice heavy with softness. But then he looked at our daughter, looked right at the back of her head. “Maybe,” he added, “in front of her.”

Then he sat back on the couch, propped his feet on the coffee table, and asked Elizabeth what we were watching. I felt the gap of seconds before she answered, animatedly describing the plot of the children’s program. That gap let me know that she heard.

So this morning, I hugged myself. And then I hugged myself again. In between, I heard his echo.

I’m going to kill you someday.

I decided to go to my parents. They’d retired several years ago, tired of the long winters on the coast of Maine, where I still lived, and moved to the gulf of Florida, St. Petersburg, to still have the big blue view they loved, but soaked year-round in yellow sunshine. It was a twenty-four hour drive away.

Maybe in front of her.

It was past time to go. I should never have stayed until the second sentence. This wasn’t what boys do. He didn’t hit me. Maybe he never liked me at all. *** Elizabeth was still in bed, but she was awake. It wasn’t yet time to head to kindergarten, but I knew we wouldn’t be going there anyway. I also knew she would protest, she loved school, so I led with a trip to her grandparents, who she loved even more. I smoothed her hair from its nighttime rumpleness. “Get on up and get dressed, sweetheart,” I said. “We’re going to see Grandma and Grandpa. Pack all your favorites in your backpack and your little suitcase.”

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She whooped, then blinked at me. “Favorites?”

“Favorite clothes, favorite pajamas, favorite toy, favorite book. And don’t forget Miriam.” Miriam was the cloth ragdoll she’d had since birth. “I’m going to go pack my favorites now too. We’ll get breakfast when we’re on the road. Sausage McMuffin with Egg? Hashbrown? Orange juice?”

Elizabeth threw back the covers and whooped again.

Before we left, I quizzed her on what she packed. When we got to her favorite toy, she explained that would be her legos, which I already knew. They wouldn’t fit in her backpack, but she had them contained in a storage bin. Then she held up her backpack by both straps.

“I know you said favorite book, but is it okay that I packed, like, ten? Maybe more? I couldn’t decide. There are series, Mama.” She dropped the backpack to the floor. “It’s sorta full.”

I laughed. “That’s fine. I should have known. And you have Miriam?”

She held up the doll.

We walked out to the car, on our way to Grandma’s house. I knew, as I locked the door, that we wouldn’t be coming back.

He must like you. That’s what boys do.

He mustn’t like me.

Years after that moment on the playground, I dated that boy who slugged me. I went to prom with him. When I asked him about that day, he blushed and admitted he did hit me because he liked me, that he didn’t know what else to do to get my attention.

I dated him for a year and we discovered lots of ways he could get my attention. Then I went to college. I dated many others. Some caught my attention. Some didn’t. Some even hit me.

It’s what boys do.

I always walked away.

But no one threatened to kill me. Not in any tone of voice. Not as a statement. Not as a non sequitur, not as a joke. Not over and over, for years, couched in declarations of love and the enjoyment of each other’s company. And the birth of a wanted child.

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Elizabeth and I would go see Grandma and Grandpa. My parents loved their granddaughter with a ferocity that would stand up to any fist and to any string of words.

Together, they were formidable. They loved me with an intensity that would never fade.

I hugged myself before getting behind the wheel. I heard his whisper as I pulled out of the driveway.

Maybe in front of her. *** Whenever we visited my parents before, we flew, but this time, I drove. It was rough, but with two nights in hotels with swimming pools and lots of videos on the iPad and Elizabeth’s precious books, we made it. I even allowed her to sit in the front seat, which she did with her eyes wide.

My phone buzzed frequently and I finally put it on silent. My husband’s voice went from friendly to strident to soft. The last message I heard caused me to stop at a Best Buy in Georgia to buy a disposable phone with a new phone number. Then I turned my old phone off, pulled out the battery, and dropped it to the bottom of my purse.

I called my parents when we were fifteen minutes out. My mother’s shock quickly turned over to surprise and pleasure. “I’ll explain when I get there,” I said. Both of my parents were standing on the front step when we pulled into the driveway.

Elizabeth spilled out of the car and ran into their arms. I walked slowly to them, enjoying the heat and the sunshine of a Florida October that was so unlike Maine’s. I tried to look happy. Comfortable. Relaxed.

But my mother breathed, “Honey,” and my father clenched his fists.

“We’ll talk,” I said.

We pulled in our suitcases and Elizabeth’s backpack. It was time for Elizabeth’s favorite after-school program and my mother set her up as she set me up, on the couch, cookies, milk, though her milk was chocolate, chocolate right from the carton, something my mother never let me have, not white milk with powder, served in a tall glass with ice cubes.

The motion of the car gone, the goal of this trip attained, it only took about ten minutes for Elizabeth to drop into sleep, her head on the arm of the couch, Miriam tucked to her

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chest. I asked if I could have the contraband chocolate milk and cookies too, including the ice cubes. When my parents and I sat down at the dining room table, the L-shaped floorplan keeping us in view of my sleeping little girl, my mother set a plate of Oreos in front of me. She still kept them at the ready in the kitchen cupboard, even though it was months between visits.

“Honey,” my mother said again.

I thought I had the words at the ready. But instead, I lowered my head to my folded arms on the table and wept.

When my voice came back, I sat up and took a sip of the milk. “This is going to sound crazy,” I said. “But I don’t know who is crazy. Me or him. Maybe I’m overreacting.” I told them everything, from my first anniversary until now. “He changed it,” I said. “The night before I left. He said,” and I nodded toward the couch, “maybe in front of her.”

My parents gasped.

“I’m not going back,” I said. My mother’s hands were pressed over her mouth. Her eyes were wide. My father’s cheeks were red. His fists clenched again.

“You’ll stay here,” my mother said between her fingers.

“You’ll get a restraining order,” my father said.

I nodded. But I knew a restraining order was impossible. My husband used only words.

Only. *** A few mornings later, my mother and I walked to the elementary school three blocks from their house. I registered Elizabeth, listing my parents as contacts along with my name, and told the school that her father was no longer in our lives for a reason, and that if he should magically appear, he was to have no contact with her. The principal wagged her head in sympathy, and then took Elizabeth’s hand and told her she was going to have a wonderful time there. Elizabeth asked about the size of the school library and how often she would be allowed to go. She would start on Monday, joining kids who had been in school since August, almost a month earlier than our Maine school system. She would be behind, but I had no doubt she would catch up, if she wasn’t ahead of them all already.

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Afterward, we visited the playground before going home. Elizabeth investigated the swings, the slide, the monkey bars. It was mid-morning and there wasn’t any recess at that time, so my mother and I stood and admired the way Elizabeth scaled the monkey bars until she sat at the top, grinning down at us. She pounded her chest and roared like a great bear. I shushed her, reminding her that school was in session. “You can roar on Monday,” I told her. “At recess, you can roar all you like.”

She laughed, then hung upside down. The skirt of her favorite pink ruffled dress hung past her head. “Look, Mama!” she called. “I’ve disappeared! Can you see me?”

“Oh, no!” I called back. “Where did you go?”

Elizabeth stretched her arms toward the ground. Her Littlest Pet Shop underwear glittered in the sun. Puppies and kittens chased each other across her bottom.

When I was Elizabeth’s age, I would have been mortified. I would never have hung upside down, unless I was in pants and a shirt that I could tuck in, never exposing my bottom or my bare belly to the air. My girl hung and whooped despite school hours. I wanted nothing more than to press my lips against that brave bare belly and blow. I ran over, did just that, and shouted, “Found you!” to be heard over her giggles.

Instead, I heard my husband.

I’m going to kill you someday.

But he wasn’t there.

Elizabeth curled herself up, wrapping her fingers around the bars and slipping her knees free. She dropped to the ground, straightened her dress, and ran over to the swings.

My mother and I slowly followed. I picked up Miriam, who’d fallen to the ground when Elizabeth was upside down.

My mother slipped her arm through mine. “Remember George?”

George was a black and white panda bear who was with me so long, I didn’t even remember how I got him. I smiled at my mother. “He’s in my suitcase.”

As we walked back to my parents’ house, Elizabeth skipping in front of us and making exaggerated leaps over the cracks in the sidewalk, shouting that she would never ever break my back, I felt that my back was indeed intact. It was strong. I could do this, even though I didn’t know yet what “this” was. I could do anything for my daughter.

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It was my heart that was breaking.

He mustn’t like me.

Or her? We both wanted her. We planned her.

Maybe in front of her.

Maybe he needed an audience. *** That night, as I tucked Elizabeth in, she grabbed the sides of my face and pulled me close.

“Mama,” she whispered. “I heard Daddy.”

I lowered myself to the bed and shifted her on top of me. A five-year old on your chest is a lot different than a newborn, but I welcomed her weight, her length, and her presence.

She kept her hands on my face so I couldn’t look away.

“Mama,” she whispered. “You know how I disappeared on the playground?”

“You mean when your dress was over your face? I could see you, honey. It was just pretend.”

She nodded. In that nod was something as old as the earth. Her torso pressed against mine, her hips too, and her legs were echoes on my thighs. In that moment, we were as close as when she was tucked deep inside of me. “I know. But Mama. You have to disappear. Like magic. Like a magic show.”

I frowned. “What? What do you mean?”

She sighed, just the way I did when I was trying to explain something right or wrong to her. It was wrong to take cookies, even if they were bought for her. It was right to say thank you for something, even if she didn’t want it or ask for it. She spoke to me in a onesentence-at-a-time explanation. “Mama, he can’t see you. Then he can’t kill you. Then I won’t see.” Her eyes teared up. “Mama. Disappear.” And then, like the child she was, she let my face go, fluttered her fingers in the air, and said, “Poof!”

“Poof,” I repeated. And in my mind, a plan started to take hold. “You want me to disappear?”

She nodded again, and the tears spilled over. “Not forever and for always,” she said, using a phrase from one of our favorite books to read together. A book where we

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declared we would love each other forever and for always. “Just for now.” She rested her cheek against my chest. “Just for now. Like a magic show. The magician always brings the disappeared back.”

I wrapped my arms around her and we fell asleep. *** I walked my daughter to her first day at the new school. I sat on a bench across the street at recess time too and I watched as she deftly climbed to the top of the monkey bars and roared the way I promised her she could. I met her after school and walked her home.

My new cell phone remained silent. My old phone was dead, battery pulled, resting at the bottom of my purse. My husband installed a GPS locater app in that phone a year ago.

He said he always wanted to know where I was. For now, I was already invisible; the phone had no power. But Elizabeth’s idea was for me to disappear. Poof! Magic.

I would do anything for my daughter. And she was such a smart girl.

On the second day of school, my parents walked Elizabeth. She looked over her shoulder at me and I knew she held back tears, the way I held back tears on my own playground years before, when I was punched. I’d kissed her. I’d hugged her. And I told her I’d love her forever and for always.

Then I put my suitcase in the trunk of my car. My parents thought I was heading back to Maine, to speak to a lawyer and to the police. I told them I wouldn’t go home, but stay at a hotel. And I would, but not in Maine. There was no magic in Maine.

I set George in the passenger seat and buckled him in. My car’s GPS was set on a path toward Chicago, a randomly chosen location that would surprise my husband so much, he wouldn’t question that I was going there, once I turned my old cell phone back on.

It was an 18-hour drive. I decided to take a day and a half to get there. When I called my daughter on the first night, I told her I was fine, that I hadn’t disappeared yet, but I was on my way to the magic show. She told me a little girl came home with her after school. My mother gave them Oreos and chocolate milk. With ice cubes. Before she handed the phone to my mother, I said, “Poof!” Elizabeth echoed, “Poof!” and then added, “I love you, Mama.”

My mother asked how I was.

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“I’m fine,” I answered. And then I said, “I love you, Mama.”

She loved me, the way a mother does. With an intensity. In the days to come, she would look at my daughter and understand.

Poof. *** In Chicago, I found a cheap motel room. I called my mother. In the background, I heard my daughter and my father laughing. The sound made me smile.

“So listen, Mom. He left a lot of threatening text messages and voicemails before I shut my old phone down. Tomorrow, I’m going to mail you that phone. I’ve taken the battery out, and it will be in the envelope too. When you get it, keep it in a safe place. If he comes for Elizabeth, you can put the battery back in and play the messages for the police and show them the texts. It will be proof that he shouldn’t have her.”

“Okay,” my mother said slowly. “Honey,” she said, “when will you be back? Why not keep the phone with you? You might need it, for the lawyer.”

And so I lied. Magic. “I forwarded everything to my new phone, Mom. I have it. But I want you to have it too, for Elizabeth’s protection.”

We said goodnight and I shared poofs with Elizabeth. “Mama,” she said, “I miss you.”

“I miss you too, sweetheart,” I said, and then I panicked. “Do you want me to come back? Maybe I’m disappeared enough there, with Grandma and Grandpa.”

I heard her breathe. Then she said, “Mama, you have to disappear. He can’t see you.”

Her last word squeaked and shattered and I knew again that I would do anything for my daughter.

“Poof!” I said.

“Poof!” she said, and then hung up.

I heard him then.

Maybe in front of her.

I searched through Google for where I would go next. I found what I was looking for in Wyoming: the Jenny Lake Trailhead, near Jackson Hole. If I wandered off the trail at some point, I’d soon be deep in the woods. Deep.

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And there were grizzlies, among other wild creatures. Magicians of the forest, that roared like my daughter did on top of the monkey bars. They could make things disappear.

It would be another 21-hour drive. I hugged George, my panda bear. Then I turned to CraigsList. *** The next morning, I turned on my old cell phone. I was immediately deluged with text messages and voicemails. In some, my husband rambled. Some of the texts were incoherent, a string of symbols, like when a comic strip character swears. The last dozen, both voicemail and text, were simply his routine statement, and that new phrase he added which caused me to leave, though it was intermittent.

I’m going to kill you someday.

I’m going to kill you someday.

I’m going to kill you someday.

Maybe in front of her.

I’m going to kill you someday.

I checked to make sure the GPS app was turned on. Then I set my phone on the bedside table. My mind became annotated, a list of bullet points. Do this, do that. Turn my phone on. Get a different car. Pay for the motel room. Turn my phone off. Leave my car and the motel behind. Go to a post office. Put my old phone and the battery in a padded envelope, mail it to my mother. Get on the road for Wyoming.

Going to the motel office, I booked the room for three more days. Then I took a bus to meet the man I spoke with an hour before. He had an ad on CraigsList for an old car.

I paid cash, then drove the tiny car, a 2004 Toyota Corolla, back to the motel. I had an affection for this type of car; I learned to drive in one, and called it the Toy Car. I transferred everything I brought with me to this new Toy Car, patted my own car goodbye after leaving the keys in the ignition and locking it, grabbed my old phone and turned it off, pulling the battery, and then drove away.

George was in my front seat. After I left the post office and headed out of town, I pretended he was Elizabeth and we chattered about the landscape, the things I saw out the

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window, our favorite book. I filled my mind with Elizabeth’s voice, with what she would say, with what I would answer. We didn’t let my husband speak.

But I felt myself growing cold.

I was disappearing. Poof.

Magic.

He mustn’t like me.

Or her. *** I checked into yet another small motel, but this time, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was already breathless with the beauty of the place, and even though I knew how tomorrow would end, I still looked forward to heading out on the Jenny Lake Trailhead.

This motel was different from the others, in its emptiness. All I had left were the clothes I wore, my new cell phone, and a length of rope from a local hardware store. And George. Along the way to Jackson Hole, I’d stopped at a variety of Goodwills, Salvation Armys, and St. Vincent de Paul’s. I donated a few of my things at every place. I still had a few dollars on me. My wallet, filled with all but one of my credit cards, I dropped through a sewer grate in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. It was a place called What Cheer, and I liked the name. It seemed like the perfect place to leave behind the last vestiges of my identity, though for now, I held on to my driver’s license. Just in case, though I drove very carefully.

When I called home, I got my father first. “He called here,” he said, before he even said hello. “When I told him you weren’t here and we thought you were on your way there, he started to say, ‘I’m going to —’ and I told him to knock it off.” There was that gap of seconds that let him know I heard him. “Honey,” he said, his voice soft, “did you ever tell him to just knock it off?”

I hadn’t. But it was very hard to imagine that it could ever be that easy. Not when a certain set of words, said in a certain order, strike a fear in you that runs deeper than your heartbeat. Deeper than your child’s heartbeat.

I’m going to kill you someday.

Maybe in front of her.

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I just couldn’t imagine that Knock it off could ever wield that much power. There just wasn’t that much magic in the world. Poof.

When I talked to Elizabeth, she told me that her school wouldn’t let her check out as many books as she wanted from their library, or at the grade level she asked for. “They say I’m only five, Mama,” she said, and I could hear her hands on her hips. “I am only five, but I can read older!” She said that her grandmother was going to take her to the bookstore to stock up on more reading material. I told her to find books on magic.

Then I said, “Elizabeth, tomorrow, I’ll be at the magic show. Okay? You won’t hear from me.” I nearly added, “for a while,” but I couldn’t. I used magic to lie to my mother. I wouldn’t, to my daughter.

In the gap of seconds, I knew she heard me. I felt that she also heard what I didn’t say.

“Poof,” she whispered.

“Poof,” I answered. Then I hung up the phone, held George, and cried.

I’m going to kill you someday, my husband whispered. Maybe in front of her.

I would never give him that chance. *** The morning was beautiful. The air had a snap to it, and I knew my cheeks would redden as soon as I stepped onto the trail. The sky was endless. It felt like a big blue ceiling. There were mountains that actually matched what I thought of, dreamt of, as mountains. I stopped at a McDonalds and ate a breakfast in honor of my daughter.

Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Hash Browns. Orange juice. But I added coffee for myself.

I drank it slowly.

There was a parking lot near the trailhead. The man I bought the car from signed the title over to me, but I didn’t use my real name when I signed it. I was disappearing. I left the title in the glove compartment of the car, then, again, put the keys in the ignition and locked the doors. I patted its hood. It did a good job.

I tucked George under my arm and followed the signs to the trail. It was a quiet morning, but there were several people starting off, tying their hiking boots, adjusting their backpacks. I hoped I didn’t look too strange in my sneakers and hoodie, carrying a stuffed panda bear. But no one seemed to pay me much attention as I started out.

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I walked until the sun was fairly high, and I was beginning to feel hungry again. I looked behind me and found the path empty. Taking a deep breath, I stepped off the trail.

Fall’s leaves immediately crunched loudly under my feet, though I tried to walk quietly.

Within a few minutes, I could no longer see the trail. There were only trees and more trees.

They surrounded me and I was grateful to not be alone.

I pushed ahead for about an hour. With each step, I could feel myself becoming more invisible. When I stopped and listened, I only heard the calls of birds, the rustle of leaves, the snapping of twigs, and my own whispered, “Poof!” No other voices. Not even my husband’s. I began to look for the perfect tree. The magic tree.

It didn’t take long, not really, and in some ways, I felt disappointed. It seemed like it should be a special tree, unique, different from all that surrounded it, a magic tree with magic leaves and special colors. But there it was. While it was colored like all the rest, its leaves still intact, ablaze with red and orange and some yellow, it held out its branches like strong, strong arms. Arms that would hold me, like my mother would hold me. Until it was time to let go, as all mothers have to do. There was even a boulder next to it that I could step on, which would boost me high enough to reach a branch and pull myself up.

But first, I took out my phone. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see there was no reception, but I was. I teared up; I wanted to send my mother an apology. I wanted to tell her to say to my daughter, “Poof!” I wanted to tell her that my husband mustn’t like me.

I told myself my mother loved me. With intensity. She would look at my daughter and understand. All mothers have to let go.

The ground was softer near the boulder, and I found a loose stick and dug a shallow hole. After turning the phone off, I buried it, along with my driver’s license and last credit card. Then, I hoisted myself into the tree.

Now, everything was about the annotated list and the bullet points. My body sweated in panic, but my mind ticked off the next thing, and the next thing, and directions on how to accomplish what needed to be done. The steps to the magic act. It was an act that would keep me invisible, keep my husband searching for me, and never ever find me. If he was searching for me, he would leave Elizabeth alone. By the time I tied the rope around a

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strong and steady branch, a branch that reached out to hug me, a branch that would drop me to the perfect height, the sun seemed to be going down. It was growing dark. The wild sounds were increasing. It wouldn’t take long, I thought, before I was found by the forest magicians. The ones who would complete my disappearing act and set my husband on a search that would never end. Grizzlies. Mountain lions. Wolves, maybe. I sat down on the branch and swung my legs. It seemed such a far way down. I decided, like my daughter, to beat my chest and roar. Even though I didn’t feel mighty at all.

I’m going to – “Knock it off,” I said out loud. I said it for my father.

George was tucked under my hoodie and I hugged him against my bare skin. I wished he could blow on my belly, the belly that was trying to be brave, and make me giggle. Then I tied the noose and slid it around my neck.

My husband would never ever find me. He mustn’t like me. He mustn’t like her.

I loved my daughter. With intensity. Forever and for always. I would do anything for her.

Even magic. Poof!

I disappeared.

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God Mansplains Anger to Me A M Y L AW L E S S

Tracy Jordan: I’m just going through the classic stages of grief, fear, denial…horniness, wisdom, sleepiness, and now depression.

Kenneth: What about anger?

Tracy (yelling, angrily): Nooooo!!!!! I don’t want to do anger! You can’t make me!!!!

– 30 Rock God mansplained to me that I’m too old to act this way. God turned to me and mansplained quite adequately about the aging female body, the graying hair and having fucked up eggs. God mansplained it was over, essentially for mankind in general, but this time, sooner, for me in particular.

He mansplained that the virus gets to live and replicate nicely going forward, and everyone online and in my friend circles gets to procreate, and share pictures of their adorable (screaming edited out) children, just not me, not this time.

He also mansplained the virtues of oily hair, the virtues of trees and moss, and how coffee might not be good.

continued on the next page

POETRY 23

These are things I already knew.

God mansplained and that was that.

He took the form of white man emoji with the mustache and said: “We ain’t gonna stand for some weirdness Out here” straight from Camp Crystal Lake.

And then God mansplained mansplaining like I didn’t already know shit was stacked.

Why do I have to sit here and listen to the things I already know?

The population of my dreams: 1.

The population of my bed: 2.

The population of my apartment forever: 2.

God spoke like it was before the pandemic when problems were …

I dunno, less deathly?

You’re doomed if you stay here, God said, and it was clear he was someone else dressed like God. Like the man with the grand piano under his coat. Or like when Miss Piggy dressed up like Kermit for Halloween.

No one’s fooling anyone.

But God, or whoever he was really, said it to all of us not just the ones among us with shitty ovums and a basic bitch PSL perspective on what a good life offers.

You’re doomed. You’re all doomed,

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continued on the next page

he said before he rode off on his little bike.

Can’t you fly? Or turn into green smoke on exit?

Amy, when you read this poem out loud, say it like the voice of the comments on the internet.

Use condescending phrases that start “Well actually…”

That’s how I hear God’s voice when God in the form of Tony Shalhoub talks to me about my life.

What did God get right despite his tone and condescension? Well, actually, quite a bit: the flow of wet wax down a taper candle’s length, the smile on someone loving you, a whistle that’s also a song, a spread of purple fall flowers over the lawn that’s made of thyme instead of grasses, music in my dreams, these sonic dreams that let me asleep through the alarm. It’s like my brain pressing snooze for me, amazing, rain on my face, birds singing, the smell of warm pie that someone else made, cooling sweat, learning all the names of the owls, and the way a villain can sniff out sin.

God mansplained the beginning.

Let it be, mansplained the Beatles.

Then God mansplained the end. continued on the next page

POETRY 25

I’m at the sink washing my hands when I hear the death rattle.

Come on you guys. We aren’t virgins anymore.

The light changes from red to green.

You can talk to me like I’m an adult before the fork falls upon me two steps from Pacific Avenue and Skin City.

Tell me that dinnertime is over.

Grab this fork out of my forehead, I mean cleaver.

Ten years ago in the East Village we used to call it God’s Hammer.

But now that I know God, I know that the word fork is more accurate to his vibe.

He knows I’m gonna get it right one of these days.

He knows I’ll stop fucking around in this clown car and just drive.

He puts his hand on the side of his face, shakes his head, smiles, and says I know you’re gonna get the hang of it someday, Amy.

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Bad Accident A M Y L AW L E S S

I lose touch with reality. I reach my arm out to my future, to the myself who knows there’s no trace of cancer, the benefits of preventative care, the past is in the past, the complete competence of his medical team, but I don’t reach back. I sit at my computer and make myself sick with the news: sipping, sipping, sipping disturbing image after disturbing image. When I know he’s on his way home, I jump in the shower, and wash the wasted morning off of my body. Nothing got done, there was nothing I could do. There was a ton to do. The internet was a stand-in for thinking about our mortality. I’d rather sip the sewage than contemplate or plan for our uncertain futures. My therapist calls this disassociation. Hours later, the blood tests come back clean. But how will I do this every six months? I am going to learn some new magic tricks. The ships might look safe in that port, but the waves are harsh. I pull flowers from the air, coins from behind your ear. In parts of the sea without light, beings still live there. We act insane without light.

POETRY 27

Coming to the End of His Triumph A M Y L AW L E S S

I’ve watched the YouTube video Primož Roglič Bad Accident many times. This event led to his switch from ski jumping to cycling. Ski jumping, to a wimp like me, is the essence of dare devilry. I am particularly interested in the moment before bad. To watch a ski jumper airborne is to watch a person flying.

As Roglič fell out of the sky, his ankle turned, something looked wrong. I like to watch the first half of the video again hoping for a different ending. I do this with the video of The Challenger Disaster. I don’t mute it. I want to see when the world changed. I want to know the precise moment I learned about nakedness.

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Come, Gentle Night M I C H A E L WA S H B U R N

Arthur took one look at the forlorn stranger standing by the stone wall at the base of the hill in the cool evening and thought: Gordon Comstock.

As a teacher and a wide reader of fiction, Arthur thought of literary analogies often at odd moments of the day and night, but this one seemed particularly apt. The man in the black leather jacket and worn jeans gazing up the slope of the hill, rubbing his hands together, and shivering a bit in the gust brought to Arthur’s mind the protagonist of Orwell’s early novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. That was one of Orwell’s least-read books, but Arthur thought it contained fine writing and keen observations. Yes, Arthur decided.

The stranger was kind of like Gordon Comstock, the hero of a forgotten novel.

Arthur would not have drawn the parallel just on the basis of this stranger’s appearance. He had a hunch as to why the man waited here all alone. Living here on Slough Road, on the upper floor of the building at the base of the hill, over the past two years, Arthur had gotten more than his fill of the neighbors who dwelt in the bigger house up the hill, toward which the stranger gazed. How Arthur wished those people had never moved in. The Waltons were crass and decadent and ugly as only the nouveau riche can be. They had been rude to Arthur and treated him as a social inferior, especially after his separation, and on a couple of occasions they had nearly killed Arthur while shooting down the hill in their sleek black Alfa Romeo as he tried to cross the street. He had jumped out of the vehicle’s path just in time, landing awkwardly on the far sidewalk. Arthur wondered whether the car’s occupants noticed or cared.

Gazing now at the stranger, Arthur imagined that the Waltons had done to him exactly what a snooty family in Orwell’s novel does to hapless Gordon Comstock. They had issued an invitation and then canceled or changed the date without bothering to let the poor man know, leaving him to wait all alone on the fringes of their property in the cold while they were off having fun somewhere. But of course this was surmise.

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Having just gotten home after a particularly demanding day at the school downtown, Arthur was ready for a pint. In the few weeks since the separation that in all likelihood would officially become a divorce, he had begun to feel desperately lonely. The thought of sitting by himself in the pub again while people around him had a good time was too painful. He approached the stranger.

“Good evening,” Arthur said.

The man looked at him, it seemed with mild surprise and a touch of annoyance, as if he thought Arthur wanted to bum something off him.

“Evenin’, sir.”

The accent wasn’t from these parts. It sounded like a Derry accent.

“Got some business here?”

“Ah, yeah. D’you know when the people who live up the hill will be gettin’ home? I mean, what time they usually do?”

Arthur laughed.

“Oh, those rich hedonists. Aren’t they some of the craziest people I’ve known in my life. They leave you in the lurch here?”

“You might say that. I thought they’d be home by now. I’ve been standin’ here a half hour already.”

“It’s sick. Ask me what I hate more than anything else in this part of the world. It’s the social snobbery. Adults who just never learned how to treat other people.”

The man nodded, then looked back up the hill toward the big house where no lights were on.

“Hey, listen, mate. It’s getting very cold out here. I’m going to the pub right across the street, if you’d like some company until they get home. We’ll sit right by the window and you’ll see the car pass by and start up the hill.”

Again the stranger nodded, with a bemused look.

“Don’t like drinkin’ alone, is that it? Hell, I could use a pint about now.”

“I’m Arthur.”

“Pleased to meetcha, sir. Robbie’s my name.”

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They shook hands with vigor. Then the new acquaintances crossed the road and entered the pub, which had drawn a modest early-evening crowd. A few of the patrons gorged on greasy food and beer while some looked up at the game playing on screens around the place. They sat down at the bar. To their right the big window in the pub’s façade offered a view of the road and the base of the hill. Leaning back on your stool, it was possible to see the house up the hill, the site of a party Arthur had attended months before.

Arthur ordered a Guinness and Robbie asked for the same. Jim Morrison’s voice came from the speakers, singing about breaking on through to the other side.

“Do you like this music, Robbie?” Arthur asked.

“Not local, but yeah. Best band ever.”

“I guess I’m more of a Beatles fan.”

“Oh man, I love them too. ‘Norwegian Wood.’ ‘Paperback Writer.’ ‘Strawberry Fields.’

‘Hard Day’s Night.’”

“All good songs. But the one I keep hearing in my head is ‘Got to Get You Into My Life.’ McCartney said it’s about smoking pot, but to my mind it’s a song about meeting a person and not knowing where the experience will take you and feeling totally overwhelmed with it, in a good way.”

This is how you break the ice with a new acquaintance, Arthur thought. The more highbrow references can come later. But Arthur knew that all too often he forgot to try to be relatable.

“You’ve got great taste, Arthur.”

“You seem like a decent guy, Robbie. I’d be lying if I said I’m not curious about how you know the people up the hill.”

“Fair question, mate. The man up there is friends with the boss of one of the construction firms I’ve worked for. I met the man at a party once.”

“What did you make of him?”

“A bit of a blowhard, if you ask me, but not so bad overall.”

Arthur nearly spat up his beer.

“A bit of a blowhard! Well, anyway, tell me about your construction gig. I wouldn’t

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have guessed. You must have some pretty damn powerful muscles beneath that leather jacket.”

“You wouldn’t have guessed? Tell me about all the other reliable sources of employment for a young bloke in this miserable country. Anyway, yes, it has made me pretty strong, though it nearly cost me my life.”

“Accident?”

“Yes, of the most freakish kind.”

Robbie held up his right arm.

“Broke my wrist in the oddest way. You’ll never guess.”

“Tell me.”

“So I’m standing with four guys at the base of this enormous tower, with the beams and rafters all bare in the sun like giant Tinker toys, and we’re talking about our work assignments for the day, and I hear this scream from the other side of the lot. It’s one of the other workers. He goes, ‘HOLY CRAP, ROBBIE, LOOK OUT!’” Robbie said the words so loud that a few people in the pub turned their heads.

“And just as I turn around, I see this huge fuckin’ thing comin’ down, and I jump up and thrust my hand out to block it. You know what it was? A bloody toolbox from almost the very top of the structure. You have no idea how much force somethin’ gains, from a height like that. So I hit the damn thing and it sails right past the head of one of the other guys and lands in the dirt. I saved a man’s life but it broke my fuckin’ wrist.”

Arthur pondered this act of heroism, for which he knew he could find few parallels in his own life. He ordered another round for the two of them. Robbie glanced through the window at the empty street.

“You’re a hero, Robbie. I can’t say I’ve ever spent a minute in the hospital.”

“Never?”

“For my own sake, I mean. I was there for weeks on end when my dad was sick. God rest his soul.”

“Sorry about your dad, mate. Anyway, this was far from the worst injury I’ve ever gotten. My own father used to beat the livin’ crap out of me and my brothers, even for

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pretty minor things like neglected chores. He was mean with the belt. And once when I broke a window and he wasn’t wearing a belt, the man used a goddamn pipe to smash me in the ribs. I went in the bathroom and threw up and there was blood in the puke.”

“He sounds like a monster, Robbie.”

“No. Well, kinda. I don’t know. He came from a certain world.”

“That story about the toolbox is incredible.”

Robbie grinned.

“You think I’m connin’ you, dontcha? Getting a bloke to buy me a round with fake stories of heroism.”

“I like your stories, though of course you could be a fabulist. Tell me another.”

“I went to a pub in Derry once, a place kind of like this one. And who comes and sits down next to me but one of the loveliest beings I’ve ever laid eyes on in my life, and I’m sittin’ there, not in my leather jacket but in a tank top, and every time she turns her head my way, I can tell she’s admiring my muscles. And we start to talk and she lets me know that she recently came out of a really bad relationship, and what does she do, she holds up her left hand so I can see she’s single. I can tell she likes me and finds me sexy as hell, and she keeps smiling in a coy way. So, where do you imagine things end up that evening? She lives on the upper floor of a house by the beach. She takes me into her bedroom and the kisses begin, but she keeps pausing to offer me a drink or a smoke and to show me these sketches and paintings that she’s made of the beach and the ocean and the cliffs a ways off.

The lady doesn’t totally lack talent, but my mind is elsewhere, if you know what I mean.

And finally we get back into it and really get worked up, and then I hear footsteps comin’ up the stairs! The lady told me she wasn’t married. Well, no, she didn’t say it in as many words, but maybe you can forgive me for makin’ a certain, what’s the word—” “Inference,” said Arthur.

“Inference! Thanks, mate. For guessin’ she was unattached. So I hear these steps comin’, and luckily I’m still mostly dressed. It’s only my tank top that I have to grab off the bed and pull on. And the steps are comin’ and I still haven’t said a word, and have no idea what to say to her or him or anyone, and so I yank open the window, and she gives me this

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look that says no, don’t do it, you crazy fool, you’ll die. But it’s like, choose your poison, right? And then the footsteps stop and the doorknob turns and I jump!”

Arthur looked at the young man in disbelief.

“And I land on the rocky slope. I come down so hard it knocks the wind right out of me and I’ve got about five different sprains and dislocations. But I know I can’t stay there. I take off like fuck right up the coast until I know no one can see me from the house. I don’t get to a hospital for three hours, and surprise, I don’t have any insurance. The bills damn near cleaned me out.”

Arthur drank some more beer and looked around a bit as he pondered this tale. Now the pub was fuller and a few of the young women at tables around the place had noticed Robbie. This was the best company Arthur had had in a while. He believed Robbie about the abusive dad and the falling toolbox and the broken wrist, but this tale about jumping out the window to avoid a cuckold’s wrath just sounded a bit too much like a story you tell to get a rise out of people. Yet he found it hard not to admire someone who had clearly had a hardscrabble life. He just wondered what Robbie made of him.

“As I said, I’ve never gotten seriously injured. But please don’t think I’ve never taken a risk or faced the possibility of harm. Quite the contrary, Robbie. I know you’ve heard about the troubles in these parts.”

Robbie snorted.

“I’d have to have been livin’ in a cave not to.”

“Right. Well, I don’t like to get involved but the sight of schoolgirls getting heckled and insulted, and sometimes threatened, as they walked to school was too much for me.

So I went out to help escort them as they walked past those hostile crowds, and I must say the sight of grown men threatening little girls made me physically ill. At one point when things got especially bad, and there were men on both sides of the moving column jeering and flinging things at the kids, I moved right into the line with the kids and I dared the aggressors to do something. Dance with a man for a change, you know what I mean?”

Arthur thought this might impress Robbie, but the young man gave a nonplussed look.

“Well, good for you, mate. But even those of us who weren’t in the thick of things then

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knew that the cops were out in force, overseeing every move and every action. You can’t have been in any serious danger.”

Arthur had been enjoying the evening so much, developing such fondness for Robbie, and now it was as if something in the tone of this remark challenged his right to have a good time. Then again, maybe his own touchiness, not the other person’s conduct, was the problem here. It would not be the first time.

Robbie appeared to take note of Arthur’s momentary discomfiture. He glanced out again at the bare road.

“Hey, that’s really a noble gesture you made there, mate. I guess you did put yourself in some danger, even with the police there. The larger point is that you aren’t one of those heartless bastards who couldn’t care less about other people’s woes. You have a big heart.”

“You’re damn right I do, Robbie. I haven’t even begun to tell you about my work in the schools and the parent-teacher association. You have no idea how much money I raise for youth activities to keep kids out of trouble, for social workers, civic organizations, legal funds. I’m eloquent, if I may say so. People listen to me when I get up and talk, and then they reach for their wallets.”

Robbie replied in a tone markedly different from before.

“Now that I truly admire. And you do it in the face of all this rhetoric that says you shouldn’t try to help others. I know I don’t strike you as an intellectual or nothin’, but I think about this stuff a fair amount. And you know, it’s true, there is somethin’ obnoxious about the way they demand your compassion. They pursue it and they bloody well expect it like they’re collectin’ taxes. ‘Hey, a father of three lost his life in an accident on the road, won’t you chip in? Don’t be a callous bastard.’ But you didn’t know the bloke. You don’t know what sort of human being he was. It takes a peculiar kind of mind to be able to look past the possibilities and see the humanity of a stranger or a whole bunch of strangers and act on your sense of that humanity. Your shared humanity. Know what I mean?”

“You put that beautifully,” Arthur said, though he knew he was patronizing Robbie.

The young man got up and went to find the restroom. Looking around at the bright vibrant space, Arthur didn’t want the evening to end. He ordered another round so Robbie

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would have a fresh drink ready as soon as he came back. Then his gaze wandered and he found himself gazing in a ruminative state of mind through the window, at that house up the hill. Memories came of the party he attended, in the days before he began to develop strong feelings about the Waltons. They were new neighbors then, and the daughter had turned eighteen. Sandra, her name was. The hosts and a number of the guests wore the most elegant black garb in deference, Arthur guessed, to the girl’s taste in fashion, and an ambient electronic score issued from the mikes as people milled around sipping wine. As often happened when he tried to unwind and be social, Arthur drank too much, taking one glass of prosecco after another from the roving trays, and the figures moving around him in the tastefully furnished room soon became a blur. At that early point in their acquaintance, it was not hard to believe that the Waltons were generous and outgoing, the cream of the nouveau riche who made this city feel less of a provincial place by the day. He drank and drank, enjoying the smiles and kind words from the shapes circling him, until he realized that if he opened his mouth he would make an ass of himself and the sense of fun faded.

Robbie came back and sat down again.

“Time for a third round, eh? Awfully generous of you, mate.”

“No, I like your stories. I’ve never been in that kind of danger.”

“Oh, man. That time I jumped out the window isn’t even the most dangerous situation I’ve been in. There are some people out there, I’d honestly rather they not know where I am,” Robbie said, with a look at the dark street and the base of the hill.

Now Arthur really wondered whether he should keep believing the guy, but he wanted to hear more.

“Go on.”

“Here’s yet another story that begins in a pub. Like many of the world’s great stories, am I right? Of course it doesn’t actually start there, except from a certain viewpoint—how should I put this, Arthur?”

“Except on the most immediate level.”

“There you go. The most immediate level. And not only that, but the story involves another universal. A couple with some weird stuff going on.”

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“The same couple as in the other story?”

“No, Arthur. How creditable would that be?”

“How plausible.”

“What?”

“A better way to say it is, ‘How plausible would that be?’ Or how credible. Not creditable.”

“Ah, right. How plausible would it be. I’m not sure you find anything I’ve told you this evening plausible, but you are clearly amused.”

“Without question.”

“So, I’m in this pub called Langan’s, way up north, and there’s this regular there, Bill O’Keefe, and he’s stormin’ around the place, drunker than usual. He rants about how his fiancé left him and he would like to kill the—I’m not gonna repeat what he called her, Arthur. He’s furious at her for suggestin’ that Bill’s no good, that he’s into shady stuff, and that was why she got up and left, when really the motive was just money. To hear Bill tell it, she was money-hungry and made off with a good part of his wealth. But from what I understood, the woman said Bill had been helpin’ himself to her inheritance from a rich uncle, and she wasn’t gonna put up with it anymore. Bill insisted that was all lies. He was furious and he would kill any son of a bitch who came between him and what was his.”

“He does sound like the man in the other story.”

“You do like your comparisons. Anyway, some of us decide we can’t let him cow everyone into silence. We get into a long argument about the politics of the region and which side has more blood on its hands. It’s a lively exchange, as you can imagine. We argue and drink for hours until the barman kicks us out. I’m not even sure I’ll make it to my car, the way things have gone with some of the crazy bastards in that place. When certain topics come up, they forget what it means to be a civilized person.”

Arthur nodded.

“I’m struck with how much we have in common, Robbie. You must understand my motives in trying to protect those schoolkids, even if you don’t think I did anything particularly heroic.”

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“Of course, mate. So, I went around all next day feeling like a marked man. It’s not a nice way to feel, let me tell you. But that’s just the beginning. On the following day, I’m driving on a lonely road way out in the country, on my way home from a construction shift. The sky’s been so cloudy so long you might forget what color it normally is. Then up ahead on the road, I spot this solitary figure walkin’ along. Not even on the shoulder but on the road, because there’s slightly less mud there. I slow down to get a look at the stranger wanderin’ out here, so far from anywhere. It’s a woman, about twenty-eight, with long dark hair and pale skin like that murky sky. And she turns and says, mister, I’ll name my first-born after you if you can take me far from here, and do it pronto. And, one more thing, please don’t ask any questions, just get me out of here. How can I say no, Arthur?”

“You’re telling it well, Robbie. I feel like I’m there on that road, meeting that woman.”

“Don’t you wish. So, she gets in and I try to keep my promise not to ask any questions.

But you know I can’t hide my curiosity for too long.”

“As Henry James said, writers are always observing. And you’re a born storyteller.”

“Right. So, I keep asking her if everything’s okay, and she knows what I really want to know, and so finally she indulges me. But come on, you can guess what lurks at the back of my mind. What sense, what suspicion. She’s on the lam from Bill O’Keefe.”

“The unexpected inevitable.”

“The what? So, anyway, I happen to know of a farm about as remote as anyplace on this earth. I’m workin’ for the owner three days a week, and I have a key to a little house at the outer edge, hidden by a big row of hills. There’s a family called the Tyrells in a house nearby but that’s pretty much all. I tell her she can rest there and figure out what she wants to do. She can’t stop thanking me.”

“You acted selflessly.”

“Did I? Of course I wanted the company of a beautiful woman, maybe as badly as I think you wanted company tonight, Arthur. Anyway, like I said, she’s burstin’ with gratitude. She asks me to drive real fast. It’s clear she wants to get away from some people pretty bad. We drive through the countryside until we get to the farm and then we get out and I unlock the little house and let her in. She says, please sir, don’t open this door

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for nothin’ or no one. I’m gonna get cleaned up now and then if you can help me get even further away, you’re an angel. So she goes inside and takes a shower and I stand guard out there, only, I don’t make like I’m standin’ guard, oh no, not at all. I walk around smokin’ and actin’ like I’m on a break from doin’ the menial things I normally do there.”

Robbie’s eyes darted again at the big window. Still the road outside was bare.

“For about an hour, it’s fine. Then a pickup pulls up and these two men I’ve never seen before get out, and they’ve both got rifles hangin’ from straps, and they ask me all kinds of questions. Have I seen anyone on the road. Passed anyone, given anyone a ride. And I’m like, no, fellas, I hope everythin’s all right. It’s private property and they know if they force their way into the house I’ll call the police. Guess they could shoot me dead, but the Tyrells are within earshot. They don’t want to try to kill all of us, that’s crossin’ too many lines, even for thugs in the employ of Bill O’Keefe. Not once do I look at the little house.

I know if I do that, they’ll immediately want to go inside. But they leave. Only they don’t leave. I’m smart enough not to go back to the house even when I think the truck is gone.

Because I know the trick they’re pullin’. And, sure enough, three cigarettes later, I see one of them lurkin’ behind a tree on a hill on the far side of the road, watchin’. So I have to wait. Night will come, night will save us.”

“I know exactly how you must have felt, Robbie. Waiting for night, the deliverer.

‘Come, gentle night.’”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a quotation from Romeo and Juliet.”

“Nice. Thank you. So, when night finally arrives, I open the door so discreetly and stand there in the dark whisperin’ to her. And then she comes out and hides in the back seat of my car and I drive her right out of there to a point deep in the woods. We sleep there, in the car, me with my hand on the wheel and my foot poised on the gas. I’d be lyin’ if I said certain thoughts didn’t come to me, Arthur. I could tell she found me attractive.

But the terror was so severe that neither of us could act on what we were feelin’. So at some point I doze off, and when I wake in the early light she’s gone. The sky is much clearer than the day before, and she’s gone like a wisp of smoke. But that’s not the end of it.”

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“What, then? Maybe you heard her singing somewhere off in the woods.”

“Are you crazy? She was so desperate to get out of there. To sing would invite a bullet, Arthur. No, what I mean is, there’s more that happened to me inside. I thought of her out there, in the woods, wanderin’ in the light comin’ through the tops of the trees, looking up at God, thanking God. Alone. Free. As we were all born to be,” Robbie finished with a sweep of the arm.

“Oh, Robbie. It’s just like in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. When Gordon and Rosemary go out into the woods and they can’t get it on. A scene that prefigures one with Winston and Julia in 1984, except it’s worse, it’s even more tragic, because Winston and Julia can connect. The malformations wrought by capitalism are even worse than socialism—oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get on this.”

It had gotten so loud and crowded in the pub, but there were things Arthur wanted to tease out.

“I’ve got vodka and peach schnapps in my fridge,” he told Robbie.

“Sounds good, Arthur. Just give me a minute.”

Robbie hopped off his stool and went over to one of the young women who had smiled at him earlier. He talked to her, his back turned to the bar. Arthur did not hear what he said, but the woman laughed. Just then a memory came, unbidden, unwelcome, of that party months before, of forms in elegant black dress circling around the inebriated guest, who felt that giddiness that is the curse of a man who knows how badly he wants to have fun. Then the waiters pushed carts out onto the floor and guests began to take an interest in the heaps of white powder made available to mark the birthday of the household’s youngest member. A few of them turned to the guest. Do you party this way, Arthur?

These days Arthur thought of himself as akin to the great critic Lionel Trilling. He had an ambiguous relationship to drinking, but could do it with enough élan to prove he was cool. Robbie seemed to think so. Robbie must know he was not anything like those evil people up the hill who flaunted their wealth and wallowed in excess to no end.

Minutes later Arthur opened the door of his flat and they walked inside. When the light came on, the brightness of the pristine white spaces hurt his eyes a bit. Robbie took in

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everything with admiration. Arthur went to the fridge and poured a couple of drinks, and then he and Robbie stood by the tall window that looked out on the house up the hill.

“I can’t really tell you what I’m feeling right now. Two strangers have met and bonded on the fringes of those awful people. I don’t think you know how awful they are. They don’t even bother to keep you up to date about plans. Who treats a guest that way?”

“Nope. All I was told was, go and meet that bugger at the last house on Slough Road, Tuesday at 6:00 p.m.”

Arthur had a strange unnamable feeling as he looked at the stranger.

“Ah, Robbie.”

“Yeah?”

“This is the last house on Slough Road.”

“What?”

Robbie appeared faintly startled.

“That house up the hill is on Holly Crescent. Slough Road ends here.”

Robbie had a blank look, and then his features curved into a broad grin.

“Oh, now it all finally makes sense.”

“Come again?”

Everything in Arthur’s torso felt ten times heavier than normal. He dropped his glass and shards burst across the polished floor.

“You shoulda frisked me before you let a stranger into your flat, Arthur my boy.”

“We’re not strangers, Robbie. We’re friends. Moved by the same spirit of decency—” “And charity. Right. I know exactly who you are now and why they sent me to find you. The legal funds that you raise money for finance the defense of loyalists who blow up buses and kill the organizers of charities that feed the desperately poor families here in the north. They’re animals.”

“Robbie—” “Animals, Arthur! Bloody beasts. The only thing worse in this whole world is a man who dares put his tongue to work to raise cash for them. You, sir, are scum. Vermin.

Human filth.”

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Arthur lost control of his bowels, too terrified even to scream.

“I almost forgot to thank you for the drinks. Let me do that right now,” Robbie said, just before reaching into his jacket.

Only now did Arthur realize just how lean his guest was and how much space was in there.

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Dear Breast Cancer, CLARA BURGHELEA

You smell of clean skin, cent-free armpits, choked-up, hard to swallow nausea, bubble gum flavor in the hair from the 11-year-old in the car. You see we drove 200 miles, woke up at wee hours to ditch traffic, had breakfast in the car, cold waffles, gulped on bad coffee, rode the highway on TikTok noise, before I knew it, I had arms around my shoulders, chewing gum love next to my right ear.

You deserve this attention, you have grown from bean to coin, two is your number, almost a toddler, mine was naughty and curious, are you bent on exploring nearby issues or feel lost, stuck. Post mammo, son gets a celebratory BST t-shirt, what for? you kept me awake this morning, alive, alive, alive, whispers the throbbing left temple, can we hurry up home, I want to play the new Fortnite season, and arms wrapped around the neck again, I need some V-bucks, can I, please, I nod, dear breast cancer, because I need to, at least, save that virtual world if I cannot fluke a thing in here.

POETRY 43

Thank You Terror M AT H I A S S VA L I N A

Let’s make a here out of the edge of the curtain, out of what we need to find.

Please, let us survive our own attempts at understanding.

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Thank You Terror M AT H I A S S VA L I N A

If one is lucky one will find a bit of one’s life on the street balled up & intimate as lightning.

If one is not lucky one might switch the lightswitch off & the lights stay on.

I’m picking pieces of lives up off the streets & pasting them together like a dead cat.

We ask a favor from each risk.

We each break what no one else can break.

POETRY 45

Thank You Terror M AT H I A S S VA L I N A

I’ve had this phrase stuck in my head, for fifteen years or so: blank domino tile, tenderly.

I thought it first in the airport in Omaha, waiting for a delayed flight.

I forgot a blank domino tile was as a real thing.

I just liked how the words felt.

I have put the phrase in a poem every now & then, for the last fifteen years, to see if it might fit, to see if there could be a line between what I think I was & what I am.

Every time, though, I cut the phrase before the final draft.

I should have known I’d never find a place for such a phrase, no matter how much sugar I lick off the birdhouse floor.

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continued on the next page

The sounds the mouth makes to attempt to make meaning lure me from heartbreak with their cemetery fog.

I want to chug them like a blank face, to drown beneath their one blank face, & then, there it is again, a blank domino tile, flawless, saying nothing but meaning as much as nothing can.

It’s like when I see a movie & the people in the movie make me want to see myself.

I am afraid of the escapes I find helpful.

In the car the other day I asked Levy, who is two years old, if she believed in god & she did not respond.

But when I asked her Y’all ready for this? she said, somewhat resignedly, Yeah...

I guess I’ve got to keep blank domino tile, tenderly in this poem now.

But really, I hope I won’t.

continued on the next page

POETRY 47

I hope I am still in that airport Waiting for that person, who I loved, Who loved me, I think, from year 1998 to the year 2004.

I’d like to be waiting there forever for that moment of first seeing their face turn the corner into the long hallway where I waited on the other side of security, before all the inevitable stuff happened.

Join me there.

It is 2004.

But we can stay there forever.

Watch them walk that long walk toward me & walk it forever.

I hope it is just after midnight, wherever you are, whoever you are reading this, just after midnight, no matter what the clock says.

I hope the sun never rises.

I hope the dark holds us forever like this in its blank face.

continued on the next page

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I miss you.

Whoever you are, you perfect blankness reading this I hope I can be tender with you, how words make meaning out of distance.

I would like to be your fan, to be a moment in time that continues after the moment has stopped.

I wish I knew something I could say that could help.

POETRY 49

Loving Algorithms P. J. P O W E L L

My husband and I were watching TV with my mom late one night when my phone rang. It was her doctor calling to tell me we needed to take her to the hospital—now.

“She needs a blood transfusion. Her bone marrow has shut down,” he said.

“I don’t want to die,” she said fearfully, gripping the edge of the couch. That was my mom, always the melodramatic one, but after a lifetime of her overreactions I could respond by rote, even as I shoved my own panic aside. “You’re not going to die. We’re going to the hospital so they can make you feel better, and we can learn more.”

Learning more is how I solve everything—how I love, even. Gather data. Connect the dots. Draw a conclusion. Apply the data-driven solution, taking comfort in the certainty that it will provide relief, if not happiness. This was my scientific training in action, reimagined as a life skill.

Solving problems was the main way I knew how to show my mom I loved her.

Wielding information to destroy her uncertainty and allay her fears had worked my whole life. Especially after the Internet matured, I could address any of her concerns almost instantly. I could google her tech problems and help her troubleshoot her way to a missing file or a more cooperative printer. Disconcerting email forwards were my specialty. She once worried that because of the new “Doorbell Tax” someone was going to show up and hand her an enormous bill from the government. A quick search on Snopes banished that boogeyman. From squirrel warfare tactics to self-care tips, I was always just a phone call and an Internet search away.

“You always make me feel better,” my mom would say, and I would know she had received my love. But that tool for loving was about to be taken away, leaving me without a replacement.

With my reassurances about the hospital that night, she relaxed and let me throw some things into a backpack and bark some orders at my husband. I could see through the data

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like Neo looking at the Matrix in code, the path forward obvious: I would take her to the hospital, and he would stay put and take care of her dog through morning. We would fix the immediate issue by getting her the blood transfusion and finding out what was going on, then define a course of action and get through this so we could get back to helping her live the best life she could, given her dementia.

Alzheimer’s—now there’s a problem you can attack with information. There are currently few treatments and no cure, but unless the person becomes violent, there is a treasure trove of occupational therapy and other accommodations you can learn to help your person balance autonomy and safety, all while increasing the quality of your time with them. You can remodel their bathroom to prevent falls, encourage grooming, and minimize toileting accidents. You can buy an automatic pill dispenser with a lock on it that will remind your person—and you—when they need to take their medicine. You can take photos of the outfits your person assembles each day to make it easier for them, and later, for you.

I was never so naive as to expect that journey to be easy, and it wasn’t, but the comfort I could get from data, the speed with which I could get it, and the comfort I could give to my mom from the solutions lulled me into a sense of complacency. I had gotten so spoiled using Google and YouTube to help myself and my loved ones map the world that I was illprepared to face the powerlessness that was about to arrive.

During what turned out to be more than a trip to the ER, we got the terrible news that my mom’s clock was ticking in overtime and had maybe three weeks left on it. I choked on those words as she burst into tears, but I still had faith that the right information could keep her alive. In the spirit of the most targeted Google search in human history, I pictured a flurry of tests followed by my mom’s team of doctors hurrying into the room immediately to tell us what the findings meant we should do.

But unlike my high-speed Internet connection, the corridors of the hospital couldn’t deliver information that fast. The lab was closed for the weekend, so the flow cytometry test my mom needed to verify blood cancer would have to wait. It would take another day or two beyond that to schedule and complete the bone marrow biopsy that would help

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clarify treatment options. All told, it would take about a third of my mom’s remaining time before the hematologist would have the data needed to determine the right starter regimen, time counted not in hours but in units of blood that might carry my mom to the starting line of treatment.

I could, with some difficulty and frustration, translate this information for my mom, show her how much I loved her and how I was fighting to get her answers that would help her fight too. But she had her own information to provide: data in the form of her wishes.

Her dementia was not yet advanced; while she could no longer understand the layman’s version of cancer biology, she could tell me she wanted to enjoy the time she had left.

She could express that she absolutely did not want to undergo testing and chemotherapy, consistent with her years of vehement support for a person’s right to die. And she could also tell me that she did not want to beat the cancer only to face certain decline from dementia. “When I go to be with Ralph and my baby and all my little animals, I want to leave knowing who you are,” she told me.

With those revelations, all of human history’s acute medical expertise became irrelevant. I would no longer be able to consult an expert or reason our way out, no longer be able to Google-care for her. Our data-driven preparation for her long journey with Alzheimer’s became a short sprint into death. I drifted untethered into the unknowable, giving up my go-to method of expressing my love.

Except not everything was unknowable. I still had a search engine, and she was my mother. What was important to her for me to know before she slipped away into the gray space between life and death and could no longer tell me? That was my query, and she slowly compiled the search results, little by little, over her remaining lucid days.

“Please tell the Senior Center I can’t come back.”

“If people want to make donations, please tell them to give to hospice or St. Labre’s Indian School.”

“Please keep Grandma’s dishes. Please keep my dog.”

“I would like to be buried in South Carolina instead of Florida.”

“Could we put my teacup collection out so I can see it from my bed?”

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“When I’m gone, would you re-cover the rocking chair I never got around to restoring?”

“Here are the people I would like to say goodbye to, and I might need your help to get to all of them.”

“Oh, and I want to be buried in a new dress. Could we look for something online?”

While I grasped and flailed in a free fall, she became the one connecting dots, compiling data as an anchor for me while giving me tasks I could complete to show my love for her. And by being my search engine, she was using my original method to love me back, sifting her own life’s database to aggregate a list of what was most important to her, because she knew I needed to know.

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The Unvanquished

BY M A R L E N E O L I N

“Retirement is overrated,” said Morris.

He looked out his window. No matter where the old man gazed, the buildings seemed the same. Red-tiled roofs and sand-colored walls. Wrought iron bars caged the windows.

“And you know what else is overrated? said Morris. “Your so-called senior communities. Your so-called Valencia Villas.”

His son Howard lived thirteen hundred miles away in Long Island. Morris glared at the handset and yelled. “You park us in these parking spaces, these holding cells, these… these Pritikin prisons. Then you hope we shrivel up and die.”

As usual his son spoke in starts and stops. Like he wasn’t paying attention. Like he was typing on the computer, watching TV and talking to his father at the same time.

“You’re eighty years old, Pops... You been there what? Six months? Give Boca Raton a try.”

Somewhere down the hall Morris heard moaning and groaning of unspeakable sorrow.

“I’m aging in dog years, Howard. Six months to you is an eternity to me.” *** Three blocks away from the retirement community sprawled a lovely gated development.

Each house boasted a large patio, a swimming pool, the accoutrements of a life well-lived.

At first glance, these homes also looked the same. Manicured hedges. Long driveways.

Porte cocheres that blocked both the rain and the sun.

Only on closer examination, hidden behind the doors and drapes, were there secrets.

In the house at 100 Andalusia, only half of the rooms were occupied. Two of the bedrooms were unfurnished. A spanking new swing set went unused. Like an abandoned plan or a forgotten book, something that once held promise was now neglected. The curtains were drawn, the lawn uncut, the pool a pile of leaves.

“Put the shoe down, Chip.”

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It was and will ever be a mystery. From the moment Chip was born, Marianne’s sweet loving baby refused to act like other babies. He never curled his little hand around her finger. He never glanced into her eyes and smiled.

Now he was six and liked to chew. Today it was a tennis shoe, gummy and sweaty and sitting in her husband’s closet for God knows how long. And whenever Marianne tried to exchange it for something newer or cleaner, the boy would bristle. Let’s be honest. Not so much bristle as growl. Then he’d swat her hand, narrow his eyes, and scamper to his room.

She had different voices. A whole wardrobe of voices. Next she tried on the one from the autism guidebooks, the one where the mothers speak calmly and capably, the one where they dangle treats and plead the commands.

She walked to the bedroom. “Here’s a cookie, Chip. Wouldn’t you like a delicious cookie?”

Professionals may have considered him deficient but Marianne knew better. Chip was smart, whip smart. Smart enough to jam his body under the bed smack in the middle where she couldn’t reach him. Smart enough to lose himself in places she couldn’t find. He was gnawing on the shoe now. Threading the laces between his teeth as if they were dental floss.

“I want you to open your mouth, Chip. I want you to drop Daddy’s shoe right now!”

Whatever plans she had for the day were suddenly erased. Saturdays were usually set aside for grocery shopping. Sometimes they’d take a nice stroll to the park. But now they’d spend the whole day in the house, the boy yipping and yapping under the bed, sneaking in toys when she isn’t watching, scurrying out to pee in the backyard underneath his favorite bush. Sometimes, if his mood were right, he’d sit in her lap and sniff her hair. Sometimes, if his mood were right, he’d even drop the shoe.

Sighing, she remembered another lifetime. A lifetime of tennis games and highballs and let’s do Neiman’s for lunch. *** A mile away, in a smaller house, in a house in need of new paint and a sweep, a teenager worked at his desk. In the kitchen, his mother was sipping coffee, buttering toast, starting her morning. Saturdays were always busy, the day she’d be gone from nine to five showing

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open houses to her clients. Jackson listened for the squeal of her car on the driveway. Then locking his door, he performed the ritual.

Every morning, the minute he had a moment’s privacy, the routine was the same.

Slowly he peeled off his clothes and stood naked in front of the mirror. Then he examined his body from head to toe. Hairs were sprouting in places where hair wasn’t supposed to grow. Above his lip, the slightest of shadows bloomed.

It was time, he knew, for time to stand still. There were things you could do to stop the progression. Hormones. Chemicals. Injections. If only he could have a little more time!

But his parents refused to see the doctor, his counselor at school refused to talk to his parents, and everybody else just thought he was gay.

Being fifteen years old was a nightmare. He switched on his computer and turned to his only companion. In a world filled with enemies, he could always count on the chat room. His fingers flew over the keyboard as he texted once more for help. *** Morris’ Saturday excursions required the logistics of a military assault. It took him a good five minutes to slather sunscreen on his arms, legs, and face. Then after positioning his behind on the sofa, it took another ten fifteen minutes to loop the laces on his goddamned shoes. How he hated his hands—the spattering of brown spots, the gnarled knuckles, the mooned nails.

Shaky and unreliable, who would have guessed how his hands would betray him!

It took another ten minutes to round up his stuff. Nitro pills. Check. A UV rated hat.

Check. Cane. Check. Where the hell did he put his wallet, his wallet was supposed to be on his desk, the goddamned housekeeper probably stole his wallet. After finding his wallet on the top of his bureau, he clenched his yoga mat under his armpit and proceeded out the door. *** By lunchtime, the smell of grilled cheese frying on a pan lured the child from under the bed. If Marianne were lucky, there was still time to go grocery shopping.

As usual, he sat under the kitchen table. The sandwich lay in his hands (twelve hundred dollars of therapy but worth every penny) as he nipped and licked the bread.

She cleared her throat. “I need to go to the store, bud.”

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Grrrr.

A list materialized in her head. Milk. Bread. Peanut butter. Staying home was no longer an option. Why should she spend another day stuck at home? Warbling in a singsong voice, she channeled Dr. Seuss.

“How ‘bout if we go to Publix, Chip? How ‘bout we grab our shoes and socks and head right out the door!”

The boy looked up.

“You can sit in the cart, Chip. You can sit in the cart and eat carrots and dip and count the square tiles on the floor!”

He stopped in his tracks. When he opened his mouth, her heart lurched.

“Park,” said the boy.

She held up her fist. Yes! The word, when it came out, always surprised her. Low, guttural, more of a grunt than a word. It was a victory to be savored.

Let Mommy do all her shopping, let Mommy buy all her stuff! Then we’ll go to the park and frolic and play. I think that will be quite enough! *** His favorite chat room was quiet. Instead, Jackson let his fingers jump from link to link.

Soon he found himself in a different chat room, a chat room with funny sounding names.

Captain Underpants. Long John Silver. Mighty Joe Schlong. Jackson was savvy enough to be wary. People faked where they live, what they looked like, even what they ate. But when you’re fifteen years old and lonely—hope’s not easily vanquished.

He glanced at his bedroom door. Sometimes his mother dropped by for lunch. He pictured the two place settings on the table, the water pitcher, the creases in her smile when she asked about his day. Nothing could be more depressing.

Once more the screen flicked and flickered, beckoning like a lover. And even though he knew better, even though one part of his brain was shouting Don’t be a moron, Jackson!

Don’t be a fool! he was desperate. Any proffered hand was better than none at all. ***

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Just driving to the park made Morris’ heart race.

Ever since he discovered the yoga class two months earlier, his life had forever changed. The park was huge, a little city really, a maze of bike paths and lakes where people rented paddle boats and canoes. The flyer had said the class was taught in Picnic Area Four, and it took Morris nearly twenty minutes to locate a map and another twenty minutes to find the small shelter with a 4 painted on a post. The class was already in progress. A dozen plastic mats had been laid on the grass. Eyes focused. Bodies moving in sync. There were people of every persuasion. Long-haired hippies, middle-aged housewives, college kids. And canopied by oak trees, a ray of sunshine lighting her face, was Cheryl.

Though Morris prided himself on keeping fit—a two mile walk every morning, twenty sit-ups, a stab or two at push-ups on the floor—he had no idea what yoga entailed.

Sure he had tried other classes. A stint at Zumba. That Karate disaster. But yoga seemed bulletproof. The chances of stumbling, of crashing into your neighbor, of embarrassing yourself by tripping or falling, were practically nil.

And even though there were a dozen other people that first day, he could swear the instructor was talking straight to him, barking commands in her husky voice, shouting over the children playing and the mothers yakking and the teenagers laughing in the shelter across the lake.

“Now breathe in, lift your spines, and reach to the heavens…”

Blond. Tanned. Her exercise clothes fit like a second skin and whenever she raised or lowered her arms, her nipples followed. And even though she walked the rows adjusting arms, legs, and hands, only when she reached Morris did her touch seem to linger.

Afterwards, he stood in the shadows while she smiled to the others and said goodbye.

Then offering his other armpit, he carried her yoga mat to her car. He figured she was fortyish or fifty, but who could really tell?

“Maybe one day we could get a cup of coffee?” said Morris.

She clicked open her car. Over their heads, kites were flying and birds were swooping in the blue clean air.

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“Coffee?” she said. Opening her purse, she fished out a pack of Lucky Strikes. Then she pulled out a cigarette, struck the lighter with a practiced flick of her thumb, and slowly inhaled. “Sure. One day coffee would be peachy.” A few seconds later, she pressed down on the gas and was gone. *** It was three o’clock by the time the boy and his mother arrived at the park. The season had jumped straight from summer to winter as a sharp brisk wind cooled the air. Nothing made the child happier. Silver green leaves dropped from oak trees, twisting and turning in the breeze. Marianne knew the routine. She sat on a bench and waited while the boy tilted his chin. Then she watched his upturned nose twitch and tremble, taking in sights and smells.

“Now remember the park rules, Chip.” It was her NCIS voice, grim and policelike.

“First we stand tall.” Inside her purse, she pulled out a tennis ball. She paused as the boy cupped his hands and brought them together. Then she grinned as he inched his way toward her until they stood just a few yards apart.

“Now remember. I throw and you catch.”

The trick, she had learned, was to aim right for the depression between his palms.

Meanwhile the boy stood motionless, watching the ball as it arced in the air and landed at his feet. It was the ritual, of course, that soothed him. The cupping, the arcing, the retrieving. No matter how many times his mother threw the ball, he was perfectly happy just to scoop it up, trot over to the bench, and leave it by her side. *** The man named Slim Jim claimed he worked at a hospital. Jackson was smart enough to realize that he wasn’t a doctor. Why would a doctor stick his neck out pilfering drugs?

And then there were the nosy questions. Have you transitioned yet? What do you look like? How about if we hang out?

Of course Jackson added six years to his age. A lot of douchebags hung around the Internet—kid snatchers, perverts, the kinds of guys who live under bridges. And when Jackson lied, when he told the man that he was twenty-one, he could swear the guy was disappointed. Like Dr. Strange pictured him riding a Hot Wheel with his dimes and nickels saved up in a jar.

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“Look,” typed Jackson.” Do you want to sell me hormones or what?”

“Like I said,” the man typed back. “A thousand bucks for a three-month supply.”

For months Jackson had been saving, and what he hadn’t saved he stole. His grandfather’s watch. His mother’s necklace. “If you’ve got the vials and the syringes,” wrote Jackson. “I’ve got the cash.”

There was a long pause. Dr. Strange was clearly thinking it over. And for a brief moment, Jackson both hoped and didn’t hope that the guy would change his mind.

“You know that park on Poinciana and 12th? The one with the lake and the picnic tables?” wrote the man. “There’s a baseball diamond and a dugout. Look for the guy with the Red Sox hat. That’ll be me.”

Jackson never expected for it to happen this fast, this soon. He glanced at his closet.

The front end was loaded with his school uniforms—khaki pants and button down shirts.

The middle part was stuffed with the sport coats and slacks he wore to church. Hidden in the rear was his secret stash. His heart was thumping as his fingers typed. “Look for the vintage Madonna tee-shirt. You know, the Blond Ambition tour.” *** Morris was nothing if not persistent. His parents were immigrants, fresh off the boat from Poland. And with nothing in his pocket, without so much as a high school degree, he built a one-man paint shop into Woodmere’s biggest construction company.

Morris was nothing if not stubborn. His son liked to patronize him, to treat him like an imbecile, to file him under “DIFFICULT” and throw away the key. But Morris wasn’t ready to take marching orders, especially when they were dictated by Howard. Howard!

That Cheryl, she was a gift. And for some unknown reason, in the autumn of his life, when the clouds nearly blocked the sun, the two of them were brought together. When she refused his entreaties, he grew more determined. He asked her out again and again until she finally said yes.

First it was coffee. Then club sandwiches at the Cheesecake Factory followed by sixty dollar steaks at The Capital Grille. Morris bought himself a new Italian wardrobe. At a fancy hair salon, they buffed his nails and tweezed his wayward hairs. With Cheryl by his side, age no longer mattered. The future was a wide open road.

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Was it only a month ago? They had been sitting in a leather banquette. The lights were low. Frank Sinatra was singing while the candle on their table flamed and flickered.

“Now let me get this straight,” said Cheryl. “You get three squares a day, free maid service, a complimentary barber, and bingo every Sunday afternoon.”

Morris counted down on his fingers. “The food has no taste. The barber’s a butcher.

The maid steals your money, and the bingo’s rigged.”

Cheryl pushed aside her plate. As usual, she ate half of her meal and saved the other half to bring home. “You know what’s overrated, Morris? Cleaning. Cleaning, vacuuming, dusting. And you know what else is overrated? Schlepping that mat to the park twice a week for fifty bucks a pop.” *** Marianne glanced at her watch. They’d been at the park for an hour and still the boy showed no signs of tiring. She was scrolling her phone with one hand—a game of Candy Crush, a few email responses, checking her Twitter feed and her Facebook page—and throwing the ball with the other. The boy’s energy knew no limits. And if she didn’t tire him out at the park, she’d get nothing accomplished at home.

The list in her head was long. She had dinner to cook, a pile of toys to pick up, a load of wash wrinkling in the dryer. Without realizing it, she threw the ball further. Beyond the bike path, through a grove of trees, past a shelter marked #4. *** Jackson pulled up to the bike rack in his ten-speed. Far off, past the picnic shelters and a stand of oak trees, he could see the wooden bleachers of the baseball diamond. He locked his bike then swallowed hard. His lunch jumped in his throat.

If his mother found out, she’d kill him. She didn’t understand what it felt like. The feeling that you’re stuck in the wrong body, that your life was a nightmare and there was no waking up. And the more he tried to explain, the more she pushed him away. Now she was dragging him to church on Sundays and to special sessions with the Pastor after school.

Jackson hugged his jacket tighter. Though the sun glinted overhead, it was cool out.

He stared and squinted until his eyes focused. In the distance, he swore he saw a red hat

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bobbing in and out of the dugout. Even though he got to the park early, the guy was even earlier. This was actually happening. Help me, Jesus. Did I really want this to happen?

Could he, would he learn to inject himself? The Internet was both his teacher and his muse. Could he, would he endure an operation? He imagined the most horrific pain in the world and wondered if he could bear it. Could he, would he want to have children? No one seemed to know the long term side effects of the hormones. In fact, no one seemed to know a lot about anything. *** As usual, Morris arrived at the park an hour before yoga started. The tai chi class was just wrapping up. Even though it was sweater weather, the instructor wore a tank top and bulging shorts. Morris waited in the shadows and watched the group until they finished.

It was like a TV show, the way that man showed off, flexing his biceps and flaunting his abdominal muscles. The way the women craned their necks when he passed by.

Morris patted his pocket. The diamond ring cost a fortune. And he paid retail!

Whatever could have possessed him to pay retail? But Cheryl, he was convinced, was worth every penny. Together, they’d find an apartment. Something classy with a view of the ocean and a string of lawn chairs on the beach. Howard would rant, his accountant would protest, his lawyer would absolutely explode. But Morris was one hundred percent positive. Today assisted living. Tomorrow the nursing home. *** Marianne traced and retraced her steps. She had thrown the ball south. She was sure it was south. Then her phone pinged with an instant message. She only glanced at it for a second.

Her friend Marcy had another life crisis, another drama queen near death experience so of course Marianne had to reply. She laughed. She chuckled. Her fingers danced. Another ten fifteen seconds probably passed before Marianne remembered the boy.

She looked around. Since when had the park gotten so crowded? Teenagers on skateboards.

Dads with coolers. Moms toting birthday gifts with one hand and their toddlers with the other.

To the south, a dozen people in a yoga class were bending, touching, stretching. A blondish instructor. An old man. A bunch of college students. The picnic shelter was empty,

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the boy nowhere to be found. Beyond the grove of trees the park opened up in all directions.

On her right was a playground. Would he head to the playground? On her left, around a hundred yards in the distance, was a deserted baseball field. Four dusty bases, a pitcher’s mound, and partially hidden below the ground, what looked like an abandoned dugout. *** Jackson couldn’t help staring at the strange boy. Every few minutes, a tennis ball rolled onto the grass, and wherever it landed—under a bush, on top of a picnic blanket, between a grove of trees—the kid fetched it.

A cute kid. Moppy hair. A Life is Good tee-shirt. He didn’t so much run as scamper, head forward, shoulders tilted, hands reaching. Instead of slicing the air he leaned into it, like he was one step from falling forward all the time.

Something about him seemed different. Most kids had shit-eating grins on their faces.

They acted goofy or stupid or mean. But this kid looked hypnotized. Like nothing existed but him and that ball. Back and forth. Back and forth. Sitting on his haunches, Jackson followed the two of them wherever they went as if he were hypnotized, too. *** His forearms straining and his hamstrings cramping, Morris lifted his ass into the air.

“Downward-facing dog,” said Cheryl to her class, “stretches your spine while it flexes your muscles.”

Once he raised his ass, Morris always forgot how to lower it.

“Breathe in. Breathe out. Feel the tightness in your lower back just disappear.”

Though every bone in his body ached, Morris soldiered on. Right or wrong, he was committed. He’d give Cheryl the ring as soon as class ended. The air was crisp, the grass was green, the sun was shining. The moment was nearly perfect.

Then suddenly a tennis ball rolled by. A few moments later he spotted the child. He was chasing that ball as if his life depended on it. Tongue out. Hands fisted. Determined.

It was just outside his grasp, nearly inches from his hands, when some wiseacre from the tai chi group kicked it further down the field. Laughing. Sneering. Thinking it funny to torture a kid.

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Looking back, Morris could have ignored it. Looking back, it may have been the smart thing to do. But out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cheryl laughing, too.

Morris knew what it was like to be frustrated. Just when you figured out the game, people liked to move the goddamned goalpost. Anyone could see that the boy was running out of steam. Red-faced. Flailing his arms. Tripping. The poor kid was holding his crotch as if he had to pee.

“Now let’s try the cat/cow stretch,” said Cheryl.

Morris looked around. Surely, he thought, the child must have a parent, a mother, someone! But the more the goddamned ball rolled, the more the kid chased it. Somehow Morris managed to stand up. Then he grabbed his cane and started walking down the field. *** Her first instinct was regrettably wrong. The moment Marianne realized her son was missing, she headed toward the playground. An assortment of boys and girls were climbing monkey bars, zooming down slides, digging in the sand. A line zigged and zagged in front of an ice cream truck. A kite bobbed and weaved among the clouds. Looking back, she should have known better. What was she thinking? Another child might have headed for the playground. Most children would have headed for the playground. But the boy, of course, would have followed the ball. *** Jackson was dumbstruck. Seconds before the kid grabbed the ball, an asshole punted it.

He held his breath as the ball looped in the air and rolled further and further away. Instead of stopping, the yellow ball just picked up momentum—feet, then yards, out of the boy’s grasp.

Faster and faster rolled the ball. And all of a sudden Jackson noticed that the baseball field was set in a slight depression. Like a crater, it sloped downhill from the surrounding ground. For a brief moment, his imagination wandered. He pictured a baseball diamond filled with players while a row of bleachers cheered them on. The ball passed the shortstop, meandered between the pitcher’s legs, and missed the catcher’s mitt. On and on rolled the ball until it hit the dugout. Then in a flash it simply vanished. *** 64

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First the ball disappeared into the dugout. Less than a minute later, in went the boy. Morris dropped his cane. He felt a spring in his step and the wind at his back. He was running now. It was like God lifted the Earth and tilted it toward that baseball field. Faster and faster he flew—his arms swinging, his chest pounding, his feet moving like lightning.

Nothing mattered but that ball and that boy. For a brief, shining moment he felt young again. His age no longer defined him; his frailty no longer confined him. And even though Valencia Villas was where he parked his hat, his prospects, he realized, were limitless. *** Marianne ran with the phone in her hand. Sure she had lost the boy before. Around the aisle in the grocery store. Playing in the neighbor’s sandbox. But never had he disappeared so completely, so utterly without a trace. She backtracked her way to the yoga class and headed for the baseball field. Lord please let him be in the baseball field!

Then all at once she spotted a family dressed in bathing suits and flip flops on the bike path. Lugging towels and beach toys no less. The lakes! My God. There were lakes!

Punching the numbers as she ran, she dialed 911.

“Yes, this is an emergency. I’ve lost my son somewhere in Poinciana Park…Where in the park? Am I at the park now? Of course I’m at the park.”

Her calves pumping, her mind racing, she stopped to catch her breath. “How old is he? Chip’s six. Six years old. I have no idea how tall he is or what he weighs. I mean I did yesterday but I don’t know now. You’re asking me what he’s wearing? How I am supposed to remember his clothes?”

She couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe.

“Please find my son. He’s just a boy. He’s just a regular little boy.” *** The old man already had a head start when Jackson decided to run. Not only had the boy disappeared, but the red hat had disappeared, too.

“That kid,” said Jackson, “did you see the kid?”

The old man was huffing and puffing like his chest was going to burst. Nodding, he pointed to the dugout.

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The closer Jackson drew, the louder the screams. *** Morris had no feeling in his feet. He put one foot ahead of the other and willed his heart to beat. A few yards away, he heard sounds from the dugout. Peculiar sounds. Like growls and muffled moans. *** The sirens whooped from blocks away. Minutes later, an entire cavalry seemed to descend on the park. Everyone was running toward the baseball field. Patrolmen with guns on their belts, policewomen with billy clubs in their hands, the noisy onlookers that trailed them.

As Marianne neared the dugout, she hoped and didn’t hope that her son was there. Whatifs flew from all directions. What if the boy had been injured? What if the boy had been whisked away by some sex perverted stranger?

Her run slowed to a walk as she inched forward. Then she came to a stop. If her ears didn’t deceive her, a child was laughing. A light-hearted laugh. No. It was more like a giggle. *** A lady looked down into the dugout. Thirtyish. Maybe on a good day she was pretty, even beautiful. But now she looked like she’d been in a hurricane. Her hair was matted to her head. Leaves seemed glued everywhere.

“You the mom?” said Jackson.

The guy in the red hat was surprisingly easy to take down. Three four bite marks were streaming blood. Jackson wasn’t sure what the creep had in mind but he sure didn’t find what he was expecting. First the kid. Then a few karate moves courtesy of the Gender Bender website. The old man who called himself Morris was sitting on the ground.

Weakly, he waved a hand and smiled.

“Chip’s one tough dude,” said Jackson.

At first, he had no idea who was scarier. The vampire boy with blood on his mouth or the guy in the red hat. But when you ruffled his hair, the boy giggled. Jackson liked to ruffle his hair.

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The mother’s eyes were darting back and forth, taking it all in. “You know his name?

He said his name?”

Jackson gazed at Morris then back again at the boy. Perhaps they were stuck in the wrong bodies, too.

“Sure he knows his name,” said Jackson. “He knows hand signals, too. He was signing your cell phone number just when you showed up.”

Some conversations, thought Jackson, take a while to get started. And suddenly the decision seemed obvious. That night he and his mother would talk. Really talk. Because if you thought about it, a whole spectrum of choices was out there, an infinite number of options just waiting to be explored. Why draw dividing lines? Maybe life’s not meant to be programmed in binary codes.

The old man stood up. His voice was stronger. The color had crept back to his face.

“You know what’s overrated?” said Morris.

“What?” said Jackson.

“Yoga,” said Morris. “Yoga is tremendously overrated. I’d try something else if I were you.” n

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My Father’s Last Disappointment ELLIE ANDERSON

He had a name like cashmere, Kazimierz, but changed it to Charles (and went by Charlie) so people could pronounce his name, so he could leave Poland behind.

Which he did, almost completely.

Only his accent stayed, his ideas of things that mattered.

He had to have a hat with a feather in the band; a sharply creased, dark gray suit; a starched white shirt; an expensive gold watch to wear on Saturday night.

He’d scrub himself rosy taking care to remove the dark circles of coal dust around his eyes.

Then he’d get dressed and go to the bar to sit with his friends, Jack Moore and Ignatz Matchiofski.

Sometime during the evening, Dad would pull his sleeve up, the cuff crisp,

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to look at the time, like someone important, with a schedule and places to go.

Right before he died, someone stole his watch.

He wanted a new one, wanted to know the time, so important now that it passed in tidal waves of morphine sweeping him over reefs he never knew existed.

But my brother didn’t think we should spend the money.

“He’s dying,” he said. “Why should we spend $400.00 if he’s only going to use it for a few weeks?

“It’s his money,” I said. “It’s not like it’s your’s and you have to sacrifice.

He’s dying, and he wants to know what time it is. For Christ’s sake. Go buy him a watch.”

So my brother bought him a travel alarm clock whose digits glowed green in the dark.

Daddy’s face. Oh god. His face when he saw that clock. His eyes so large and dark in his thin, thin face. continued on the next page

POETRY 69

His disappointment, his dying.

“We were afraid to buy one for your wrist,” I said. “You’re so thin. And you throw your arms against the wall.”

It wasn’t true. We’d never discussed it.

I wasn’t afraid to buy a watch for his wrist.

He fell back to the pillow, closed his eyes. He knew.

I sat in a chair by his bed.

He would wake in the night, sit up suddenly, ask, “What time is it? Oh, four o’clock.

Is it night?”

The day he died, I took that clock, put it in my pocket.

I made my brother look for it, made him say, “Where’s that new alarm clock? Someone stole it. Someone who came for the funeral? One of our friends.”

I still have that clock. Fifty years and the screws that held it up, have fallen out.

It doesn’t matter. continued on the next page

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I have never wound it.

But I often need to know the time in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I sit up so suddenly from a dead sleep that I strain the vertebrae in my neck.

And so, I write this to tell you that I said I would have done anything for my father as he lay dying.

But I didn’t move from the chair by his bed.

I was chasing away the angels who came for his soul and now, cannot be forgiven for this clock.

POETRY 71

Not Easy ELLIE ANDERSON

I was talking to my father, “Don’t call me ‘the kid’ anymore.

Not Cisco. No Billy. You know my name.”

I was fifteen.

Daddy said he knew me, named me in fact, held me when I was born, washed my face in wine, then drank the wine.

“I know everything about you,” he said. “From Bee Bop to Elvis to blouses with small flowers. I was the first one on this earth to see the mole in your armpit.”

I never could tell him about Donny meeting me at the train wearing a suit and no socks.

“Where are your rubbers?” I asked him.

He giggled and leaned against the conductor. “You’re not my mother,” he said.

In the middle of the sixties, In the middle of the plains between Regina and the Rockies,

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Donny dropped acid.

He said it was easy, that fallacy was spelled “phallusy.”

Six months later I tried to explain to Daddy about acid, mind expansion, blowing out.

But Daddy kept waiting for Donny to come back. He talked to him, sang, imagined looking in his eyes, waiting.

Daddy never called me ‘the kid’ again.

Just outside of Red Deer, snow driving out of darkness, a white horse appeared in our headlights and then went down.

They black-listed Harry Bearkoff so he couldn’t buy booze in our small town.

He was too proud to ask his friends.

He hung himself in his kitchen and Daddy cut him down, laid him down with the belt around his neck, laid him down in a litter of empty bottles of vanilla and aftershave lotion.

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POETRY 73

At home, afterwards, Daddy stood at the window, and shielded his eyes with his hand.

I didn’t wonder why he didn’t move away from the brightness. I smeared butter on the wall, made a spot that came through every coat of paint.

“It should’ve been easier to die than that,” Daddy said.

I didn’t know there are a lot of ways to die and you don’t always stop breathing.

Not many years later, in a house out on the edge of the tundra, he said the morphine made him cold.

He asked for extra blankets.

He said it would be easy.

When you freeze your blood slushes your veins, you sleep, and stop breathing.

But I think of him now, whenever I hear a siren, whenever I hear the words: shooting up, shooting star. continued on the next page

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We held him back blazing thrashing.

We kept him from falling out of bed.

He dug holes in the wall with his fingers.

Donny and I held Daddy in his blankets and flashed through the streets in an ambulance.

In the hospital, Donny shredded the sheets between his fingers.

And that night we shot Daddy down with morphine.

We let him go.

And it wasn’t easy.

Has never been easy.

POETRY 75

Grand Union ELLIE ANDERSON

I have a photo of Daddy in front of the Grand Union Hotel.

I had dragged him out of the bar.

He stood in the sunlight blinking.

His arms crossed to close me out, he looks annoyed. He left a beer on the table.

He died a year later, leaving me with no place to put my feet.

He came to me in dreams, holding out his hands as if to placate me.

Twenty years later, to the day, to the hour, I sat on a dock in the sun watching light flicker over the water.

When I looked up, he walked toward me, wearing his suit, his hat with a feather in the brim.

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He holds his hands out.

I am still alone, still stumbling for a footing but I am not ready to take his hand.

He smiles, and I let him go, again.

POETRY 77

Beyond Poland

BY R O S A L I N D G O L D S M I T H

Her body can’t escape the cold but her mind can. It casts up through the night, scattering itself into the sky over the Atlantic Ocean. It leaves her here – on this bench in the park – shivering, hugging her coat tight round her chest.

She came here when the last of her ran out: laid off, out of cash – and now, evicted. In all her life, she never imagined this could happen – no warning, no hearing, no chance to explain.

The landlord – thumped on the door til it rattled, then shoved his way in with two policemen. Told her she was trespassing – in her own home – she’d lived in this apartment for twelve years.

“I’m not leaving,” she said.

They gave her enough time to pack a knapsack. Then the two officers grabbed her and held her arms above the elbow. Gripped so tight. Dragged her down and out onto the street. The street that was dark and led nowhere.

They threw her clothes out the window. She stood by and watched as they fell like empty bodies from the third floor to the ground, no resistance. No substance. Limp.

She watched until the last of them – a red shirt she used to like – twisted and fluttered its way down to the sidewalk and lay there, dead. She picked it up. Dropped it. Walked away.

Alone.

Nothing. Only her knapsack and eighteen dollars cash in her pocket. She was hungry, found a variety store. Walked the aisles. Inspected and chose: Three bags of sour cream and onion potato chips, four Mars bars – calculated – put one back. Three Mars bars and three cans of Coke.

She carried the items to the counter and laid them out in a neat line. Order here at least, in the shape and pattern of these things. “Is that all?” the cashier said.

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It was bright in the store.

This man. He looked like a good man. Kind eyes.

The man said again: “Is that all?”

And she said: “Yes, that’s all. Thanks.”

It was a good, deep feeling to have this little exchange. Just like that. Meant nothing – this man didn’t care – didn’t know a thing about her or what just happened to her. The man uttered a few words, a simple question. But – The words stayed with her, settled soft in her mind.

He had a warm, deep voice that seemed to come out of some distant place – to comfort her, to let her know – that – yes, there were good people out here, and yes, they did speak in a decent and good way.

Not all people were out to take away her job. Not all wanted to abandon her, evict her – throw her out onto the street. The dark street that led nowhere.

Those few words – they shone – beads of glass in a desert, scoured brilliant by the wind that blew the sand away – the wind that washed the words and left the words shining in the sun.

And yes!

She was young! Forty-three wasn’t old. She could go on. This wasn’t the end, was it?

Couldn’t possibly be.

She could take action: look for a new job. Find a place to live. Of course – but not a horrible shelter – a nice apartment, maybe smaller, yes, but that would be ok. Would be fine. Even just a room. She didn’t need much. Didn’t need anything.

She paid for the chips and the Mars bars and the Cokes and took her change: eightynine cents, put it in her pocket. Tied the shopping bag to her knapsack. Before she left, she said, “Thank-you” and smiled as a gesture of hope and good will toward the cashier man behind the counter.

Silently, she wished him a good life, cradled and held fast by kind people who loved him. She wished him a life with a solid home, a level foundation and windows that brought in true light.

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The man behind the counter didn’t look at her again. But the kindness in his brown eyes was glorious and warm, insistent – like a memory of summer.

The door swung closed behind her. A soft little bell rang. And now: The street. The street that was dark and led nowhere. But: wait.

Human beings had long been nomads, and that’s what she was now: Linny, the Wanderer. A survivor in these cold, dark streets. Ok, this was – new – a tough break – but she could adapt. Adjust. Get strong. Begin again. Of course.

She was, after all, a creature of ingenuity. Resilient. Resourceful. She – as this creature – could find a way to go on. She’d scrabble in the dust if she had to, scavenge in the dead fields, unearth black roots and husks of seeds. Hunt rabbits, moles, even pigeons. Pursue.

Kill. Live.

She’d start by finding a place to rest tonight. Sleep and dream hopeful. And tomorrow, the world would look different. Shock had cauterized her vision, that was all. In the morning, she would see clear and new and apply herself to the situation. First: look for a job.

And so, as darkness settled in, Linny found this bench in the park. She sat on its green metal back, ate a few potato chips and drank a can of coke. The sweetness on her tongue.

Oh. She retied the bag to her knapsack and put them both underneath the bench.

She swept the bench with her hand to clean it, wrapped her coat around her body against the cold. Lay down on her side, bent her knees fetal. The bench was hard. Hurt her bones – her hip and her shoulder.

Closed her eyes. But sleep was nowhere. Sleep was back in her apartment, in her home that was taken away from her. She’d left sleep there, curled up cozy on her soft bed.

Now she was as cold as a fish on a stone. Knife poised above her gut. Cold as death.

Gasping air. Glass eye of a dying fish.

She thought of the landlord and the two policemen who threw her out that afternoon.

Felt again the shock of it in her stomach: swift plunge, hollowing out – the dread of losing her place under the sun. The dark street calling to her but leading nowhere.

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And the cops had said: “You’re being evicted” in their cold, hard voices – evicted – and the word measured her failure and redefined her in an instant as an unwanted thing – as useless, as unbelonged.

Severed. Evicted.

She threw up when they grabbed her. Her stomach betrayed her as it always did when she was anxious. Vomit down her coat. Humiliated. They took her down to the street – held her by her arms – above the elbow – gripped hard, dragged her out of her own apartment – a criminal. For God’s sake. She’d done nothing wrong. For God’s – a scruffy old neighbour was watching out her window, peeking out from behind her curtains. In her witnessing face, the glee.

People on the street watched as her clothes – her own clothes – tumbled out the window and twirled like shot birds down to the street. Her red shirt lying there – the one she used to wear when she went dancing at the Copa. What did her neighbours think of her? That old woman – everyone knew now. She was evicted – an evict – like a convict. Or a derelict – she belonged nowhere.

Only the street. The dark street.

She tried to wipe the vomit off her coat. But it stained yellow. Stamp of disapproval.

Stamp of the reject. Mark of disdain.

On the bench, reliving all this, she turned herself over so as to put the pressure on the other side of her body. Her back ached and her right hip hurt. Her hair felt dirty, greasy.

She pulled her coat up to her chin, the smell of it made her feel sick, but she dozed off for a few moments and saw – a vision – the moving, variegated silhouette of a crowd moving into a massive stadium for a concert.

An opening and then a bright flood of light.

The people – their shadows – were opening their arms wide for her. The shadows held her close and she felt herself rising.

They lifted her high and she surfed the crowd, laughing, floating forward on thousands of hands. They carried her to the front of the arena, cheering. Then they laid her down on a flat stone. She opened her mouth to plead with them to lift her up again.

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But the crowd dissolved into a dark blur.

She opened her eyes, conscious of where she was – on this hard bench in the park at 2:00 in the morning. And it was cold so cold, and her back and neck hurt her. She was hungry. She looked down under the bench. No oh no. Her knapsack her bag the chips and chocolate bars and cokes – gone!

She sat up. Stood. Peered round in the grubby lamplight. Pulled her coat round her and began to run – first one way, then another – shifting shadows of trees chased her – she had to find her knapsack and her bag of chips and chocolate bars and cokes.

The thieves – it must have been a few minutes ago – she only just dozed off – why didn’t she hear them?

She ran, rushed all around the park through patches of darkness, pools of light, back and forth down the street. Saw no one. Nothing.

Day broke cold.

She was limp with fatigue and sat down on the sidewalk outside a grocery store. A man walked by. “Do you have any change?” she said to him as he passed.

Linny had never said these words before in her life. They came out of her mouth like cockroaches she’d swallowed in the night.

The man didn’t even look at her.

The stink of shame was all that was left of her now, the stain on her coat.

She gagged, she cried. Her mind shivered, dissolved into droplets and scattered over the sidewalk in front of her. Tiny globes of quicksilver were spilling onto the tarmac of the street. The dark street that led nowhere.

Her body sobbed and shook. It rattled the loose change in her pocket. Rattled the loose thoughts in her head. Cut free and drifting away.

She knew she could never say those words again. And if not? Then what. What would it be like to starve? She’d lived her life belly full til this day. But even now an alien bitterness scraped at her guts. From the marrow out cold.

And tomorrow?

She started to yell as people walked by her on their way to work. She bellowed out from the pit of her hunger and from a slaughterhouse of fury.

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If anyone heard her, they didn’t show it. They walked by. She had no money and no place to live. She didn’t exist any more. Yelling, she made no sound. She was a stain on the sidewalk. A mark on the cement.

A security guard was standing in front of her. “You can’t stay here,” the guard said.

“You’re trespassing.” He picked her up off the sidewalk and held her arm above the elbow.

She tried to shake herself free, but the guard gripped her arm hard – as if she was a criminal. As if she never had a mother and a father, never wrote a story when she was six about a bear on water skis, never got an 88% on a math test in Grade 10. She was society’s garbage. An evict. Nothing more.

The guard dragged her down the street. Loosened his grip as they came to the corner.

“Don’t let me see you again,” he said.

She walked away, fast, trying to think. Looked in shop windows for Help Wanted signs. Nothing. Picked up a discarded half apple. Rotten. A crust of bread with a thin line of mayonnaise along the edge. She ate that. Sat down at a picnic table and rested her head on her arms. What could she buy with eighteen cents? She walked again and walked the hollow darkness in.

And here she is now, back on the same bench in the park, this iron bed. This unforgiving cold. Lying here in the night. Shivering. Knees curled up. Dozing in and out.

And it is now – this second night – that her mind lifts up. It casts wide over the Baltic Sea and beyond Poland. She feels the cold like rivers of ice flowing over her – but she breaks off from the pain, and flies with her mind to wherever it might go.

It sails free and skyward far away to an Ultima Thule, where fields of ice and blown snow wait for her.

The cold now is colder than any she’s known – even worse than last night. Her skin shivers, her bones shake and her lips turn blue – but the sweetness is, here in this place, in these fields of snow, she can’t feel the shame any more, nor the fear. And now she can no longer even feel the cold.

Through drifts of snow, she sees a man approaching her. He’s walking on snowshoes, using poles to pull himself forward. His head is down against the wind and he’s moving

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slowly through swirls of white. Appearing then disappearing. Treading the flat round nets of his shoes on the sweeping drifts of snow.

The man comes up close. He stands above her and looks down at her. He’s wearing a heavy coat with a fur-lined hood, and icicles hang from his eyebrows. His breath puffs up – clouds of white against the dazzle of white snow.

The ice man leans down low over her, and says: “Is that all?”

Oh! She feels the warmth of that voice and knows it instantly! And she sees the kind brown eyes too. The man is here to rescue her! “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll go with you.”

But the man turns his back, lifts his poles and walks away from her, disappearing into the blind drifts of snow.

She feels cold again, sheets of ice on her flesh.

Now, a lamp glows in the distance. In its dim light, Linny can see her red shirt flying up into the sky, winging its way down the street, carried off by the wind. She watches until it disappears, until the thieving night snatches it away, until all that’s left is the long, dark street, calling to her.

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Watching My Daughter’s Tap Recital DAV I D O ’ C O N N E L

I think of Mrs. B, my typing teacher that summer before high school, and how my mother would drop me off those too-bright Saturday mornings to slump before a Smith Corona in the cool, tiled basement classroom of the all-boys prep, and I remember the satisfying snap of the letters hammering the ribbon to the clean white page, tattooing their gibberish (asdfg) amidst the dropped-coins clatter of my classmates, all of us stumbling to keep up with her endlessly patient encouragement to work the pinky, semicolon P, semicolon P, over and over in a gently lilting cadence coaxing those synapses that free me, thirty-odd years on, to type without hunting or pecking or ever much considering (her routine over, we’re wildly applauding) those drawn-out hours, that once hypnotic voice.

POETRY 85

Nightly Feats of Survival J O N AT H A N G R E E N H AU S E

The infinite sky’s shrunk into a rectangle of wan light, the earth cradling the captive like a clam clasps its pearl, like a saddle the horseback. Guards French-kiss walkie-talkies, the distance between their mouths & ears perfectly measuring this man’s imprisonment, orders trembling before vaulting from lips like skydivers, like the stillborn laugh at a funeral’s pregnant pause. At twilight, luckless mosquitoes compose a symphony of notable splotches on the tents’ canvas flaps, gruff settlers crawling into makeshift sleeping bags like hermit crabs sheltering within jetties’ crags, in the brief oasis of a tidepool. At dawn, they plan to drag him to a 1-ring circus town packed with spoiled brats & 2-star hotels, to collect the finder’s fee, a shower of bills like bats dazzling them with their acrobatics, their looping feasts nightly feats of survival; but instead, bullets whiz by like blackflies, the ambushed dusk delivering him into a dizzying tapestry of pinprick stars.

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In The Night, A Song TYREL KESSINGER

I wish I had the kind of shadow that would carry my darkness instead of only being its shape.

Is my shadow all mine or just another repurposed handful of all whatever came before and of course, what will remain after?

A bit of dinosaur and peanut butter jar.

Those rare metals used in smartphones.

The clipped half-moon toenail of a Viking sailor.

Funny how I’ve fooled myself into thinking my suffering is unique.

Outside the wind rushes through everything and tree limbs scratch a caliginous song on the window.

Let us in, they sing, let us in.

We all need something to grow not around us but all the way through us.

In the middle of the night my dog barks into the darkness and I think he is on to something.

Some things don’t have an answer until they do.

POETRY 87

Adelaster D E B O R A H S . P R E S PA R E

To prevent herself from slipping into another chaotic downward cycle of panicked anxiety, she squashes the rising tide, drops in the toilet her pill-shaped companions, and sizing up her failing reflection, chooses the last-ditch, arduous path left to an imprisoned soul.

Knowing her likelihood to fail, she checks herself into a clinic, signs letters of a name—Ad-e-l-a-s-t-e-r, then F-e-r-n-g-u-s—a name that has lost all meaning to her—and follows as her hosts lead her through rooms that are bright but isolated, where she can hear lonely whispers of dampened despair.

The days at the clinic, it turns out, are much like days anywhere. A routine is established. She gets up. She smiles. She speaks when expected. She eats. She bathes. She goes to bed to get up again.

The therapists tell her she’s having breakthroughs. There are moments when she thinks they may be right. She is, after all, able to talk of her father for the first time since his death last year.

The therapists want to know how talking about her father, a famed botanist (as famous as botanists can be), makes her feel. Sad, she says. They want her to explain what sad means. She shrugs, then cringes inside when she sees the disappointment on their faces.

She knows that look. She’s been the cause of it for him countless times.

As she answers their questions, she sits on chairs and couches, stretches on yoga mats, and walks along the center’s bark mulch forest trails. The therapists take turns with her, compare notes, and discuss strategies, trying to find the right degree of pressure to apply to open her up. On a forest-trail walk, the therapist trying to crack her open today, Dr. Stevenson, who insists on being called Rachel, asks her about her mother.

“She died when I was two,” Adelaster says.

“How does that make you feel?” Rachel asks.

“Sad.”

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Rachel nods, and they walk.

“Do you know if your dad and mom were close? Were they happy?”

“He never spoke of her.”

“That could mean anything really.”

Adelaster nods, and they walk.

“What does happiness mean to you, Adelaster?” Rachel asks.

“Not being sad.”

“Could you describe that a little more?”

Adelaster points to a path beyond some trees that seems wider and wilder. “Is that part of the trail?”

“That used to be a road. It was closed some time ago. Not sure why.”

“Where does it go?”

“It dead-ends.”

“That’s probably why it closed.”

“Probably.” Rachel studies the abandoned road. “Would you like to walk it a bit? It doesn’t seem too overgrown.”

Adelaster nods, so they step off the center’s sanctioned path.

“Why did you check into the center?” Rachel asks.

“It felt like the right thing to do,” Adelaster answers, admiring the weeds and flowers that have clawed their way through the forgotten asphalt under their feet.

“When did you start taking valium?”

“I answered that question before.”

“You did. Let me rephrase. Why did you start taking valium?”

“Why does anybody?”

“On the surface it might seem like the reasons are the same. Anxiety. Sleeplessness.

But those feelings impact people differently. Why did you feel like you needed help with your anxiety?”

Adelaster shrugs, then looks up and breathes in the forest air.

“Being in the woods is nice, isn’t it?” Rachel asks.

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Adelaster nods. After a few more steps, she stops.

“What is it?” Rachel asks.

Adelaster points again, this time to what halted her mid-step. A tree up ahead is devouring a faded yellow sign. The tree’s bark is ingesting the tops of what look to be the letters D, E, A, and D. Below the halfway eaten “DEAD” is “END.” “The dead-end sign,” Rachel says, stating the obvious. “Nature’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“When a plant does that, it’s called aphercotropism.” Adelaster starts walking again.

“Sometimes an organism moves away from an obstruction. And sometimes an organism consumes the obstruction.”

“You learn that from your dad?” Rachel asks, following her.

“No,” she says. “I read it in a book. A lot of the books we had were books for my dad’s work, so I know some things about plants.”

“Do you resent him for that?”

“For what?”

“For not teaching you about apher—whatever that was?” Rachel asks.

Adelaster shakes her head. “It was better that way.”

“Why is that?”

“He liked to be with his plants. I liked books. We both got to do what we liked.”

“Is there anything else you like?”

“The quiet.”

Rachel nods, respecting this like of hers for only a few steps more. “Should we turn back? The weeds and grass are getting thick. I didn’t think about ticks.”

“I’d like to see where this road leads,” Adelaster says.

“It dead-ends.”

“Into what though?”

“Okay, we can walk a little more if you answer a question for me.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have any regrets?”

“I’m not sure.” Adelaster thinks about this for a few minutes.

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“Everyone has regrets,” Rachel says.

“I wish I never took valium. It’s better not knowing how relaxed you can feel.”

“There are other ways to feel relaxed.”

“So I hear.”

“Looks like the road dead-ends into the woods,” Rachel says. “Let’s turn back.”

Adelaster sighs, thinking even the path less taken led her to more of the same: nowhere to go but back to where she started.

They make their way to the center’s trail again. Rachel asks her questions about her childhood, questions she’s been asked before—what’s her happiest memory? The saddest one? What does she mean her father set up challenges for her?

“He made me read the entire encyclopedia set one summer.”

“Sounds like a productive challenge. And you like to read.”

“I do, but other kids went to camp or spent their days at the pool.”

“What else?”

“He ran experiments all the time.”

“Like what?”

“One week, we only ate white or beige plants. The next, only green. One week, only red. Purple was hard. Eggplant, purple cabbage, purple potatoes.”

“What was the purpose of this experiment?”

“He measured our moods, energy levels, bowel movements, and frequency of urination throughout the day. We felt the best during green week, but toward the end of the week, even that got hard.”

As they walk, Rachel asks more questions, and Adelaster answers them, wishing for some insight to spark, but nothing comes, not until they approach the center, that is, and it isn’t the questions that spark insight then, but rather it’s the appearance of a daytime moon.

Rachel sees her looking up. “Neat, huh? Being able to see the sun and moon at the same time.”

Adelaster nods. “My dad and I were driving once. At night. I don’t remember where we were going. I remember the moon. It wasn’t like this though.”

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“How was it?”

“It was a sliver. A crescent. I said that it looked like a giant bit his nail and spat it in the sky. My dad said that was incorrect. He knew why the moon was shaped like it was and explained it to me in detail.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“I can’t remember how it made me feel then, but I know how it makes me feel now.”

“And how does it make you feel now?”

“Sad for him.”

“Why is that?”

“He may have been right, but I like my story better,” she says, and surprising her, her lips push up into the shape of the moon from that night long ago.

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Absence Doesn’t Soften the Grass Y V O N N E H I G G I N S L E AC H

Seeing that my dog is old and dying, my neighbor said: That’s why I never got one. Truth is, they always die before you do.

And so, I walked Gus over to him, close enough for his furry head to meet his calloused hands. With a wet-nose nudge, Gus looked up in an act of faith and the dead bird inside my neighbor’s heart broke open.

POETRY 93

The Family Bends JA S O N TA L B OT

I. Evenings, sitting quietly with grandpa his hands, too much for mice and rabbits.

Many mornings when the fog would dip its toes into the lake my grandfather paced the yard with his thumb rubbing over the leather of his temple.

II. One time I knocked over his jar of pennies, a doorstop put there by God. That night, a threnody to the make-do movement of The Great Depression.

III. Running in circles screaming

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at the piles of goose shit and bits of stale bread left there by the grandchildren.

An electric volcano stationed, waiting to be charged.

IV. I blinked and waited for him to blink and when he didn’t blink I started leaking and watched as it spread like oil pooling on the dirt driveway from his 1983 Dodge van.

V. My rubber-balled head, bouncing through the wet cement of the tepid lake.

Cold white and blue, like the flood lights of a search party, folded between the pauses of trees.

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The Family Bends II JA S O N TA L B OT

Hands once swollen in prayer, and arms stiff like branches, whipping papier-mâché heads. * Little milky clouds spinning like fragile plates. * A song moans across the water, flat and wide like early fog and familiar like the warble and flutter of an old cassette playing on slow motors and mucked-up tape heads from a yellow Sony Walkman, 1984.

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* Lungs, like orange swimmies.

Heaving warm water.

Fish shit. * A lost tongue, hanging like a strop.

I’m bent like an ostrich with its bronze beak buried in sand.

POETRY 97

Night in the City Looks Pretty to Me R O G E R LO G A N

Allison was trying to come up with a version of that old joke. A kangaroo or whatever walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Say, we don’t get many kangaroos in here.” But the only version of the joke Allison could think of for the stranger sitting at her bar, eating a steak and reading a book was, “Say, we don’t get many literates in here.” But that was maybe harsher than the town of Slick Rock deserved and even in the glittering cities Allison knew she over-idealized, most bars probably weren’t reading hotspots.

Anyway, if she tried that joke it would probably make the guy at the bar more selfconscious than he already was. He was shy, not saying much, smiling nice, not from around here for sure. Shane she decided to name him, after the mysterious stranger in that old western. Girl bartender’s instinct—for flirtation, trouble, both—she could tell Shane was watching her when he figured she wasn’t looking. Unlike Alan Ladd in the movie, this Shane wasn’t wearing a fancy fringed buckskin shirt. But his neat white shirt, with actual buttons on it, stood out in Slick Rock. Shane was what she thought of as city slender, cute in a quiet way. Not as beautiful as Alan Ladd, but then who is? If the stranger was going to be Shane, Allison was changing her name to Marian for the night, after the character Jean Arthur played in the movie.

Shane was very polite when he finished eating, arranged his silverware like a gentleman, piled the used paper napkins and curly foil butter packet tops neatly on the plate. He was probably more of a tipper than the usual in Slick Rock. The highest percentage tip Allison had ever gotten was from an Australian guy on his way to climb in the Mogollon mountains. He’d said in that jokey accent they have, “In Australia you don’t tip unless ya wanna sleep with the waitress,” then put down a 15-dollar tip on a 19-dollar

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tab and looked winningly at her. She’d ignored him. She was pretty free and easy, but preferred a little more romantic chit-chat than that.

Shane got another Wild Turkey, asked Allison for change and went to look at the jukebox. The first song he played was that Jimmie Dale Gilmore song that starts Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night? / Well Dallas is a jewel, oh yeah, Dallas is a beautiful sight. Then he went to the 75-cent pool table, looked around to make sure no one else was looking to use it and settled in to play eight ball against himself.

Shane had left his book propped open on the bar. A novel called Refracted City. Allison had never heard of the title or author, but that was hardly a surprise. It’s not like she got the New York Times Book Review and this wasn’t the kind of thing the doublewide Slick Rock library was likely to spend budget and shelf space on. She leaned to read the excerpt on the back cover. It was that headlong young guy writing, made you wonder how they could even keep up with themselves. But it was edgy and city feeling and she liked that.

Shane glanced over, saw her looking at the book and made a kind of be my guest motion.

So she opened the book and read at it some more, between getting drinks.

Shane kept playing pool and feeding the jukebox. Songs like that Lucinda Williams one about the small town waitress who sells everything to move to the city and the Tompall Glaser version of “Streets of Baltimore”. Glen, her boss, had gotten this new internet jukebox service. Instead of just the usual Nashville crap, you could find just about any song ever and Allison wondered if the Blue Dog Bar regulars had gotten so sick of hearing her moon on about moving to the city that they’d sent Shane in here to play every city lights song there was, just to rag her.

Around 9:00, when the last other patron had left, Shane asked, still shy, if she wanted him to go so she could close up. Allison told him Glen didn’t like it if she closed early.

Sometimes, even on a Tuesday night in Slick Rock, New Mexico, people showed up late, up to God knows what. About 9:30 Blue Dog wandered in, to mooch some food. Allison got him a couple of burgers and some fries, hold the trimmings, because what does a dog care about pickles and lettuce?

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Dog’s head and didn’t try to move him, even when he was in the way of a shot. She walked over with a couple glasses of that expensive Bookers bourbon Glen had gotten in for some rich hunter. Shane was leaning on the cue stick, looking down at the balls on the table like they were a long way off. She touched his arm to get his attention, handed him a glass of Bookers. “On the house,” she said. “Better than that Wild Turkey you’ve been drinking, so as not to seem too stuck up for us hicks.” She smiled and touched her glass to his, to make sure he didn’t think she was being catty with that remark. She hoped Shane might be able to appreciate irony more than a lot of people around here.

He smiled back, looked her right in the eye for the first time, said, “Thanks.”

She pulled three quarters out of her jeans pocket and with conscious drama slammed them down on the edge of the pool table. Shane didn’t seem to know what that meant for a moment, but she could see him working it out, looking from the quarters, to the table coin-slot, to her.

“I’m not very good,” he said and he wasn’t. She beat him every game, but he didn’t seem to mind and she appreciated that.

“What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” she asked as she leaned to line up a shot, while Shane pretended he wasn’t looking at the curve of her body. “Not even hunting season.”

“Just seeing country,” he said. He seemed bashful that he didn’t have some more practical, less poetic answer. “’Seeing country?’” she said. “Sounds like a line from a western. So you’re just the mysterious stranger traveling around?”

“Not sure how mysterious I am. I don’t mean to be.”

“When you’re Shane you don’t have to try to be mysterious. It’s just the way it is.”

“Shane? That’s a lot to live up to. My gunfighting skills are a little rusty. And I don’t have a fringy leather shirt.”

“I noticed about the shirt. But it’s more about the coming into town and being something new for the homesteader’s wives than it is the gunfighting. My name’s Marian.”

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“Just like Jean Arthur in Shane.”

“Just like. Don’t go falling in love with me now.”

“If I recall the movie right, Shane falls pretty much in love with everybody in Marian’s family and everybody in the family falls in love with him.” He looked around at nobody but him, Allison and Blue Dog in the dim barroom. “Is Van Heflin going to come in and brood menacingly at me for chatting with his wife?”

“Afraid he never showed up in the first place to marry me. A few have tried. One of them keeps at it and I guess it’ll probably be him in the end.”

After Allison shooed Blue Dog outside and locked up, she and Shane walked down the empty highway through what there was of town, across the bridge, creek running loud with spring thaw, feeling their way toward the Wrangler Motel where Shane was staying.

The moon wasn’t up and there were no lights on in town. The canyon was pretty narrow here, so the stars were just a bright band across the top of the sky. She took Shane’s arm, to make sure he didn’t fall off the road into the creek or something.

“Must be a change from the big city,” she said.

“How’d you know I’m from the city?”

“Seemed like a good guess. I’ve got this thing for city lights.”

“The movie, the bookstore or just the lights?”

She thought about dropping his arm, turning around and walking back to her car at the bar. But she guessed she’d started this whole allusion thing with the Shane stuff, so maybe she should give him a break, not assume he was mocking the dumb country girl for what she didn’t know. Maybe he thought she was better at this than she was. That would be kind of a compliment. “Remember,” she said, “I’m just the girl who’ll likely end up some homesteader’s wife. I wish there was more to me than that, but I’ve never heard of a movie called City Lights, never been in an actual bookstore and never seen any city lights for real.”

Shane must have felt her tenseness, because he dropped her arm, turned and put both hands soft on her shoulders. She could barely see his shape in the dark. He said, “Most people I know in New York wouldn’t know what I was talking about either. I do kind of chatter on.”

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“You don’t seem that chattery to me so far.” She touched his invisible cheek. “So enlighten me.” She could feel his face crease as he smiled and she realized her pun. Maybe he was right and she was better at this than she thought.

“City Lights is a Charlie Chaplin movie,” he said. “And the name of a famous bookstore in San Francisco. I’ve never been in that store either. And honestly, much as I like New York, the lights can be a pain in the ass sometimes. You’re just trying to look out the window, see the night sky and there’s glare everywhere and red lights from a cop or ambulance flashing in your face.”

Allison felt his cheek slide against her palm as he tilted his head to look up at the stars above the canyon. “This is a pretty little place,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “You want it?”

“I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

As they came into his room he reached to turn on the lights. “No. Leave them,” she said, not wanting to see any more than she already had of the insides of Wrangler Motel rooms. She kissed him, moved them towards the bed.

The lovemaking was nice. Better than it probably should be for a Wrangler Motel shackup. She’d thought Shane might be a little diffident, but he wasn’t. Wasn’t bossy either. He went down on her, something most of the cowboys around here didn’t seem to be able to imagine happening outside of a porn video. She liked the way he touched her, not just trying to get her revved up, but as if he actually liked exploring the whole body of her.

Later on when they were dozy, Shane reached his arm around and scooted her over so her head rested on his shoulder. His collarbone was sharp against her cheek. A coyote or something ran through the parking lot, triggering the motion sensor, so the pole light outside went on, shone through the thin brown curtains, turning the acoustical tile on the ceiling an even dingier yellow than it was.

When Shane’s breathing got even, she eased away and stood up. Hunting for her clothes on the dark floor, she kicked something, bent to feel the book he’d been reading at the bar, picked it up. He stirred and there was the shine of his eyes as he looked at her in the dim light.

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“Well,” she said softly, weighing the book in her hand, “I’ve got cattle that need feeding.”

“No one’s ever said that to me before,” Shane said. He motioned at the book. “Keep it.”

“Thanks. I will. Don’t get much new out here.” She moved to where he lay, kissed him briefly.

He said, “There’s a card in there I was using for a bookmark. Has my email and phone number and non-Shane name and everything. Look me up if you’re ever in New York.”

“I will,” she said. “If I’m ever in New York. My non-Shane name is Allison.”

“Pleasure to meet you Allison. It’s a prettier name than Marian.”

“It’s the one I’ve got,” she said. As she opened the door, she reached over and turned off the poisonous old gas flame wall heater. “You’ve got to be careful sleeping with these,” she said, speaking toward the dim shape of him in the bed. “They suck all the air out of a room.”

She walked back to the bar parking lot, the town utterly still around her. By the weak dome light of her little Ford, she read the excerpt on the back of Shane’s book again.

Fucked up like this I can’t go back to Rachel’s, so not knowing what else to do I stay on the subway, standing at the front, watching the lights rush at me in the tunnel. When the train comes out of the ground, onto the Manhattan bridge, the whole skyline is blazing over the black river and it’s like I can see the light from every window spearing at me through the night, like the whole city is glowing and alive, just for me.

Allison cranked the Ford’s engine until it finally started, with a clatter of noisy valves. She locked it into second, keeping the revs up so the headlights wouldn’t dim, headed up the canyon. The road twisted with the creek, new buds on the aspens glinting red in the car light. She cranked down the window to feel the air, hear the sound of the creek over the rattle of engine. At the dirt road turn off toward her place she stayed on the county highway. There were no cattle left to feed, no particular reason to go home.

Where the road came out on the ridgetop, she pulled to the side, sat on the warm hood, listening to the engine ticking as it cooled, wrapped her arms around her chest for warmth.

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East, below the ridge, flat desert and starry sky stretched to the horizon, not a light to be seen. She sat for a while, then went to the trunk, got the fifth of over-proof Jim Beam and a plastic thermos cup. She sat back on the hood, poured a slug of bourbon in the cup, sipped and watched the empty desert.

She thought about driving fast and wild down the switch back road to the bottom of the ridge, then going faster and faster on the straight desert highway, car rattling around her, until the glow of some city began to show in the distance. She remembered an old Chevron roadmap of California she’d found in her father’s stuff after he died. There was a drawing on the cover of the map. Nighttime, high on a ridge, a long white convertible pulled to the side of the road, a man in a sport jacket leaning on the car, arms around a woman in a tight waisted dress, both of them gazing down at the beautiful lights of a city spread out below.

The gas gauge in the Ford was broken. But it was Tuesday and unless something different had happened, which it hadn’t, the twenty-five dollars she put in every Monday to go from work to home and back would mean enough gas in the tank now to go 100, maybe 150 miles into the desert. Nowhere. She guessed everything in her cabin was worth something like six or seven hundred dollars, but who would buy it? She’d let the grazing lease go back to the Forest Service while her father sat on the porch and died, cattle sold off to pay doctor bills. No one was going to take the place off her hands for any reason she could see. There were the mineral rights, but there was nothing around here except granite. She’d seen pictures in magazines of granite counter tops, but she didn’t think someone was going to pay money to dig rocks out of her meadow. She had 217 dollars in the bank account, maybe enough to get somewhere, but not enough to stay alive there until she got a waitressing job or something.

Two winters ago, she’d spent all she had to get down to Hobbs, by the Texas border, see if she could put together enough money to leave Slick Rock for good. A wildcat oil driller who’d known her father gave her a job, doing clerical stuff in the office. She’d earned a little and tried to save, but just getting by in an oil town had eaten up the money about as fast as it came in. In the end, too many wells had come up dry and the driller had shut down, owing everybody money, including her.

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She’d never been much of anywhere, but even Allison had known that Hobbs had to be one of the ugliest places on earth. She remembered spending New Year’s Eve in her room in the Scotsman Inn, bathroom sink full of ice and cheap beer, watching some movie about well-off kids trying to make it in Chicago. The glow out the motel room window had been the sulfur gleam of venting gas burning off refinery stacks, not any pretty city lights.

She leaned back against the windshield of the Ford and stared up at the same endless stars fading with dawn. There was a rose glint showing over the desert to the east, but that wasn’t any city lights out there either, just another day coming. If she didn’t have the gas or money to get anywhere, maybe she ought to just drive down the road toward the desert, then keep going straight at one of the switchbacks, fly out into all that open. She imagined the small puff of orange as her car exploded way down on the flat.

She hopped off the hood and got Shane’s book off the front seat, found the card he’d told her was in there. She didn’t look at the name or anything, just poured over-proof bourbon on it. She couldn’t be bothered to buy cigarettes anymore, but there was still a lighter in her jacket pocket and she used it to ignite the whiskey-soaked card. It didn’t burn as fiercely as she’d hoped. She dropped it when the flame was about to reach her fingers.

It’s pretty clear she’s not going to be looking anybody up in New York City or anywhere like that.

Then she poured bourbon over the hood of the car and tried to light that, but beyond a couple of fizzling blue sparks, nothing happened. Bourbon hadn’t done the paint job any good, but it wasn’t much good already. Bottle in one hand, book in the other, walking on the double yellow in the middle of the road, she headed down toward the desert and the rising sun, taking occasional contemplative sips from the bottle.

After she’d walked about half a mile from her car, there was a dazzle of red and blue lights on the pavement in front of her. She looked over her shoulder to see the cop car coming slowly towards her, light bar flashing. Rick. She couldn’t remember if she’d told Shane Rick’s name last night, when she’d said she would probably end up with this one guy who kept on trying to get her to marry him. Rick had a good job with the state police and maybe if they got married, he would take Allison on vacation to LA or somewhere.

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If they made it to San Francisco, she could look for that City Lights bookstore Shane had told her about. But likely once they were married, the babies would start coming and she and Rick would never get farther than Vegas. From what Allison had heard that was just the lights, no real city to go with them.

She stopped walking and turned around to face Rick’s cop car. He killed the light bar so as not to blind her. He pulled alongside, said through the open passenger side window, “Saw your car back there. Figured if you’re going to walk all the way down to the desert, I’d follow along behind, keep you from getting run over.”

“Not a lot of traffic through here to worry about,” Allison said. She put the bourbon and Shane’s book on the cop car hood, leaned her arms on the windowsill to look in at Rick. “Still,” she said, “that’s awful considerate of you.”

“Well mam, ‘A Safer New Mexico’ it says right there on that door you’re leaning on.”

“Does it? I never noticed.” She considered standing back to look, see if she could make out the words in the rising light, but decided she was too tired for that.

“Rough night?” Rick asked.

Allison thought about that question. Rick probably didn’t know about Shane last night, because he didn’t spy on her, but for sure he knew guys like Shane happened. Rick didn’t seem to mind the Shanes, not that it was his place to mind. She’d hooked up with Rick from time to time too, but he knew what that meant and what it didn’t mean. It seemed kind of foolish for Rick to care so much about her when she kept telling him she didn’t want to marry him. But he was for sure not a fool, so maybe it was just the way it was. She guessed Rick’s love was imperturbable. No, that wasn’t quite the word, but her powers of recall weren’t at their best just now.

“Rough night?” she said. “Not really. I did try to burn my car.”

“How come?”

“Thought it might make a pretty light for bit.”

Rick thought about that. “Well,” he said, “I’ve seen a few burning cars on this job.

They can look pretty from way off. Not so much up close. And there’s a nasty smell from all that burning plastic and tires and such.”

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“Yeah,” Allison said. “Where’s the romance in that? Anyway, it didn’t light. I think I might have gotten ripped off with this bottle of over-proof bourbon. It doesn’t seem to work as an accelerant.”

She turned to look at the half ball of red sun coming over the eastern horizon. One time on an internet map program she’d drawn a line straight east from Slick Rock. If you kept on going, didn’t deviate at all north or south, no matter what mountain or river or whatever you ran into, the first good sized town you’d hit would be Lubbock, which hardly seemed worth stopping for. Next real place would be Birmingham Alabama, then Atlanta.

Atlanta at least was pretty big, but from what Allison could find online it didn’t seem to have much of a real city downtown to it. Maybe they’d never rebuilt after Sherman burned the place. West wasn’t much better. Besides Phoenix which didn’t appeal to her for more or less the same reasons as Atlanta, it was empty desert until the California suburbs and the Pacific Ocean. North and South? Forget it. Empty US then empty Canada or Mexico, until you hit the Arctic Ocean or the Gulf of California. So that was it for finding city lights along the cardinal directions from Slick Rock.

She got the bourbon bottle off the hood, took a sip, offered the bottle to Rick, who shook his head politely no. She tossed the bottle into the brush by the road, last of the whiskey arcing out in a brown glint. The bottle didn’t break, so she walked over and picked it up, came back to the car and handed it to Rick, who put it in a black garbage bag.

“The State of New Mexico appreciates your assistance in keeping our highways litter free,” Rick said. He looked at her with his quiet smile. He wasn’t wearing his hat and had a cute little tousle going on with his hair. It appeared he would be content to sit here for as long as she felt like leaning on his car.

“Implacable,” she said. “That’s the word I was looking for. You’re implacable.”

Rick thought about that. “I’ve probably been called worse,” he said.

It was driving her a little nuts, the way she felt like it was inevitable that someday she would give up and come around to saying alright to Rick. When she did, there would be no more Shanes, because when you’re married that just means you’re trashy and there would be no more mooning after city lights, because that would just be mean to Rick. The

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way it felt like this was all just going to happen to her, no matter what she did, made her want to grab the cop car shotgun out of its clip on the dash, blow out the tires on Rick’s car, blow a lot of little holes in the Safer New Mexico decal on his door. Not put any holes in Rick of course, just see his eyes get wide and shocked. Something different.

Instead she said, “Nothing wrong with being implacable. Just sometimes, it’s so, I don’t know, implacable. You know?”

“I believe I do,” Rick said, smiling kind of sad. “Just don’t know what I can do about it.”

He got out of the car, leaned against the hood and looked out at the new day’s colors on the desert. “I imagine,” he said, “I can be something of a burden. If you want me to never do anything again, except nod politely at you across the barroom, I’ll do that.” He turned to look at her. “No more cow eyes.”

Allison laughed and God damn it if he hadn’t done it to her again, reminded her why she liked him as much as she did and how stupid she probably was not to like him back as much as he liked her, instead of having her dreams all off in some imagined city of lights and people who read books on the subway.

“Cow eyes?” she said almost giggling. “If that’s what you call making cow eyes, no wonder nobody wants to marry you. Those eyes are like twenty miles of hard shale road.”

She got serious and said, “I wouldn’t like you to do that. To just treat me polite, as if you don’t care. I’d understand if you did. I imagine I can be something of a burden too.”

“Ah, hell,” Rick said and for a moment there he almost did have cow eyes. “We’ve all got our foolish dreams.”

But that’s where he was wrong. Most people around here didn’t bother to have foolish dreams, beyond maybe winning the Mega Millions. But it wasn’t so easy being someone’s dream. Maybe New York and Paris and cities like that found it hard being so many peoples’ dreams too.

It was a wonder Rick had turned out to be so decent. Allison had known his father from in the bar and he’d been pretty thoroughly an asshole. One of those guys who’s jolly one minute, then suddenly his eyes go mean and there’s a broken beer bottle in his hand. Allison had no way of knowing and she’d never asked Rick, but she imagined his

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father had been an even meaner bastard at home. Certainly Rick’s mother looked a lot more chipper since her husband had rolled a tractor on himself four years ago. Rick’s little brother ran the ranch now, but Rick felt like he had to be around for his mom and brother and even if he did agree to move to some city with Allison, it was hard to imagine him being who he was anywhere away from southwest New Mexico.

“It is a conundrum,” Allison said.

“Yeah, it is.” Rick looked at his watch. “But even out here in the back of the beyond we’ve got to at least pretend we’re contributing to the economic life of this great nation.

Much as I’d like to stay and chat forever, I’ve got to get working.” He smiled, just a big goofy smile. “I suspect your skills at the moment are more attuned to vocabulary than driving slightly scorched old Fords. So maybe you’ll let me drive you home. I can stop by later and run you back up here for your car before you need to get to work.”

Allison nodded and touched Rick’s arm, got in the passenger side of the cop car. She spent the day on the cabin porch, reading Shane’s book and napping, until Rick came to take her to her car, then she drove down to another night at the Blue Dog bar.

n

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A Welling CAROL ANN WILBURN

I embrace the lightness of this Kentucky March wearing not the edges of a dim January but the fertile shoots of April.

An evenness seeps in as I let cares fall away in this place I call home, enfolded in the familiar and family. When I leave that spring behind to return to Ithaca, a late snow, sudden and overabundant, surprises, grabbing onto everything it can, tree limbs, new blades of grass— even the laughing Buddha’s face, its garden smile a perfect blur, clutched in a crystalline frieze.

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Airborne CAROL ANN WILBURN

Every change below tells me I’m farther away from him.

The coastal mountains drift into a flat patchwork then upward to glimpses of peaks tinged still with late snow.

Our last drive his eyes are hidden behind dark glasses though not covering the edges of our departure.

The mosaic below mingles with grief’s circles, lines on his face a terrain haunting every lover alone, traversing distance.

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Heirloom CAROL ANN WILBURN

She lets go of her secret long held prisoner by the mahogany four-poster struggling with the lovely weight of her childhood unraveling in disorder.

She tangles

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with darkness tossing this way or that, nightmares of scraps of paper in the wrong hands.

She longs to sleep there, unburdened from her past make peace long past

Not a Piece of Furniture ALEX SMITH

On the first day of the first job I got after Javier was deported, I tried to ignore the couple’s fighting.

“Sarah, Sarah! Honey!” Mr. Belmont shouted at his wife. But it didn’t stop her. She stomped upstairs, her stilettoes slapping each step. The glimmer of her sequined cocktail dress reflected the setting sunlight in the stairwell behind her, shooting out rays of color like a burning disco ball. “Don’t you walk away from me!” he said. “Don’t do it. Not now!”

I was young. Afraid and alone. I stood aside, thinking about my daughter. She was with Rosa, the kindly old woman in the apartment across the hall from mine. Rosa lived alone. A widow. I met her while moving in after I had to leave the two-bedroom I’d shared with Javier because I couldn’t afford it anymore. I worried that my daughter missed me. But she was with Rosa, and I knew everything would be okay.

“Sarah!” Mr. Belmont shouted. His voice rose as he emphasized the second syllable of her name.

The Belmonts’ townhome was nearly the size of my entire apartment building. It had three floors plus a basement for storage and was located just one neighborhood to the northeast of my building. I walked there, but it was a world away. Everything was new.

The floors. The paint on the walls. The appliances were state-of-the-art. My job was to clean the entire home twice a week. The cleaning company dispatcher allotted me five hours each shift. The company had given me the job to cover for the Belmonts’ usual cleaning lady who’d left to visit family in Guadalajara for two months. It was a temporary assignment, but it proved just enough time for me to become a valuable employee.

I flipped on the Hoover and vacuumed the rug under the glass coffee table. I pressed the bumper of the vacuum up against the front skirt of the Victorian-style couch. I raked it back and forth over the living room rug, hoping that the hum of the machine would drown out their arguing. Maybe even help calm them down. It was making me uncomfortable. It didn’t work. They acted as though I were invisible.

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“Don’t you walk away from me now,” the husband repeated, louder now because of the vacuum. His voice carried like a foghorn.

“I don’t care about the benefit,” she finally replied, turning around on her heel. “What does it matter now, Charlie? Why pretend?”

Mrs. Belmont spoke with tears in her voice. But I could hear the anger there too. “You can’t deny it, Charlie. I caught you.”

“I am not denying it,” he said. “But it was a mistake. A stupid thing. It meant nothing.

She was no one to me. Can we just move on?”

“Oooh,” Mrs. Belmont groaned as if she’d been stabbed.

I kept vacuuming when Mr. Belmont ran upstairs. They rushed me out soon after that.

“But I didn’t even get to the kitchen,” I objected.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Belmont said, a mascara streak on her cheek. “The cooks will just mess it up anyway.” She thrust a wad of money at me. I didn’t count it until I got to the car. It was twice what I was owed.

That first day of work taught me a lot. The Belmonts didn’t expect me to partake in their squabbles. I’m divorced from their daily lives, their problems. In a way, I do become part of the house for the clients. A piece of furniture. They value privacy and want to be able to live without worrying about a nosy housekeeper. So I let them, and I got paid for every word I did not speak.

After my first shift at the Belmonts’, I couldn’t wait to get back to Maya. I walked home clutching my purse, which carried the cash payment. The sun was setting in front of me. I had to squint and cover my eyes it was so bright.

I remember the first time I met Rosa. Maya had been crying the entire day we moved.

She hadn’t wanted to leave our other apartment and was too young to understand what had happened to her father and why we suddenly had to move across town. She was four.

I must have climbed the stairs up and down a dozen times moving our clothes and Maya’s toys into the new place. Rosa’s door had been shut throughout, but on my final trip upstairs, she was standing in the doorframe of her rental. “What a gorgeous child,” I remember Rosa saying. A floral scent wafted out of her open door. The rosy smell was

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bright and welcoming, like springtime in a bottle. Maya pressed into my sweatpants. She wiped her tears and snot on my leg and reached for the hem of my t-shirt, signaling to me that she wanted to be picked up.

“Don’t be shy, little one. I won’t bite,” Rosa said.

Rosa seemed to almost always be home and would greet us whenever she’d hear me struggling with Maya on our way in or out. She’d smile and cheerfully call to my daughter in Spanish, Hola, chula. It took Maya some time, but soon she warmed up to the old woman. Now, whenever Maya saw Rosa, she’d leave me and run to Rosa, calling her Abue!

Maya would wrap her thin, hairless brown arms around Rosa’s leg and press her cheek to her thigh with a toothy smile on her face.

One week after I’d moved into the apartment and still hadn’t found a job, Rosa invited me over for tea. Rosa’s apartment was decorated with a mix of colorful Mexican art and photos of her sisters and their children. The black and white photos were from Rosa’s childhood. In one, she and her sisters posed with gloomy expressions in front of an adobe wall in her Mexican hometown. The ground was dirt, but the girls were dressed fine in buckle shoes, cotton dresses, and bows tied in their pigtails. She’d never had little ones of her own but played the role of granny about as well as any true abuela. After I landed my job with the cleaning company, Rosa offered to watch Maya, saving me hundreds in childcare. She refused payment, claiming that playtime with Maya was payment enough.

But I knew that wasn’t entirely true. Maya could be a handful. I believe Rosa wanted to help a young mother struggling to survive the cruelty of American life. To pay it forward and lift another person up.

Over the next few years, I worked hard. I cleaned all sorts of homes across town.

Although none were as extravagant as the Belmonts’. And while many just wanted me to clean and get out, I had a few clients who’d rather I listen to them talk than do the cleaning I was hired for. They were always married, and they always talked about their relationships. Their husband. Their wife. Their in-laws.

“I just don’t know what to do,” the young father confided in me. He blocked the bottom of the stairs, preventing me from continuing my work on the first floor. It wasn’t

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aggressive or anything. He wasn’t trying to intimidate me. I felt for him, but he had me stuck on the stairs carrying a mop and bucket. “She’s just not the same since her mother died. When I talk to her, it’s like she’s not there.”

The clients who wanted to talk never wanted my advice. I nodded along as the man spoke, because he would have stared blankly at me if I’d offered more than a reply acknowledging his predicament. He just needed his words to go into a pair of human ears and settle in another person’s brain. It was a type of test, a trial run, before he used similar words to speak to his wife. That was fine with me. I learned that I’d get paid whether I cleaned or listened. Occasionally, more for the latter.

But I never had any client quite like Maria. I was assigned to her home years later when Maya was an adult. Maria was young, much too young for what she needed to face.

And she worked hard. She was a single mother of two young twin girls. Their father died in a car accident a year before I started with her. Four months after the crash, Maria received the check from the life insurance company. I never knew the exact amount, perhaps $100,000, perhaps $250,000, but it wasn’t much considering her responsibilities.

A large chunk of the payout paid for her husband’s funeral expenses, which had gone on her credit cards. She used the money to move into an upscale neighborhood with a good public school system and prepaid two years of rent. The rest she saved for an emergency.

I came into her life after she found work at an office twenty minutes away in downtown and could no longer raise her daughters and care for a house and work a full-time job all by herself. Her job was very demanding, and Maria had to work twice as hard as the white people at the firm.

I never felt right taking her money. They were a beautiful family. Broken but beautiful nonetheless. Life can be so unfair. Their situation was just so sad.

“Maria, please. You can’t afford this,” I said. Over the years, I’d gotten very good at what I did, very efficient and thorough, and my services weren’t cheap. I was almost old enough to be her mother and knew she was struggling. At one point, I even offered to clean her house at half my usual rate. But she refused.

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“Don’t be stubborn,” I said. But she’d continue to give me the sealed white envelope each week with the full amount in cash.

“What would I do without you?” Maria told me. There was truth to that. Her house would be a disaster. Her twins loved to play. They got into everything. Toys would be everywhere. Pots were pulled out of the cabinets and left on the kitchen floor. They spilled their drinks and spread sticky messes and dropped crumbs everywhere. But they were sweet. So sweet. They reminded me of Maya when she was their age.

On days when work kept Maria later than usual, I pretended to be slow as though I hadn’t yet gotten around to cleaning everything yet. I would make up some excuse for the extra time and refuse to take more than my usual rate. I wanted to keep her daughters company until their mom came home. It was important to me. Her life as a single mother was in precarious balance. I understood. I wanted to be there, to be a steadying force for her. I knew her girls never saw the hardship that made their mother squirm. Maria wanted it that way. I did what I could to make it easier for them like Rosa had for me.

Every Thursday I came to clean Maria’s house. I worked four hours. I made sure her two bathrooms, the two bedrooms, the living room, dining room, and the kitchen were spotless. That meant I vacuumed and dusted and deep-cleaned whatever needed it. I would sometimes do the laundry and the dishes if they’d gotten backed up. I always made sure I was in the living room when the bus was scheduled to drop Maria’s girls off. From the living room, I could see the street. It made me feel better knowing that I could watch to make sure they made it into the house safely. When they got off the bus, Maria’s two girls would see me in the window and start waving their arms and run to the door.

“Hello, girls,” I said when they got inside. I’d bend my stiff knees and wrap the pair in a hug. I loved feeling their four small hands on my arms and back.

“Janis, guess what we learned in school?” It was a thing we did. I’d offer some paltry guess, then they’d correct me and tell me something new they learned. Usually, it was something in math class or history. Today it was science.

“Some bugs can walk on water. The bugs use the surface tension of the water to glide along it.”

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“And they keep their feet dry,” the other girl added.

“Very interesting,” I said. “You girls are very smart.”

We’d go in the kitchen where I’d make them a snack. Then I’d set them up to do their homework, without letting on that that was what I was up to. Remember, I was there to clean the house, not watch the girls. It was kind of a game for me, and I knew that Maria would appreciate all the little things I did without being asked. Not that I was seeking her gratitude. I wasn’t. I just wanted to help.

By the time Maria got home, the girls would be all hers. They wouldn’t have any chores to do or any more homework left. I wanted Maria to have as much time with them as she could. These years were so important. And every time, she would be smiling when she slid me my envelope.

A few weeks later, Maria called me on her way home from the office. She was running late.

“Can you stay with the girls for an extra half hour tonight? I’ll bring pizza.”

I loved how she tried to bribe me with food. But I would have stayed anyway.

“That was your mom. She’s bringing pizza.” The twins were exuberant.

I could tell something was on Maria’s mind when she pulled up forty-five minutes later. She had a smile on her face, a pizza box balanced on the palm of one hand, and her work laptop carrying case slung over her shoulder. She was more frazzled than usual. It wasn’t like her.

That Friday, she called me.

“There’s been some movement at work, Janis. I don’t know who else to call.”

“Is everything all right?” I looked at the clock. It was after eight. I was in bed, home alone. My daughter had moved out years before.

“Nothing like that,” she said. “It’s just,” she paused. “There is talk in the office.”

“Yes?” “A new position is opening up. There’s talk that I’m being considered.”

“That’s wonderful! They’d be fools not to hire you.”

She didn’t feed into my excitement. Instead, she was silent on the other line.

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“It’s good news, Maria,” I said reassuringly. “Right? Or is something wrong?”

I heard a crack on the other end of the line. It took me a moment to realize the sound was her crying.

“It’s just... my girls,” she said. “It’s not how I wanted it to go.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re doing a wonderful job with your daughters.”

“I work so hard,” she said, sobbing. “But what for? I feel I don’t get to see them enough as it is. I just know that if I get the promotion, I’ll have to work even later some days.”

“I’ll help,” I said without thinking it through.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll help. I’ll come by every afternoon and be with the girls until you get home.”

“That’s crazy. I can’t make you do that.”

“Why not? My daughter’s moved out. She’s got her own life now.”

“But you have a life. You have other clients. You have... ” Maria trailed off.

“It’s okay. I like you. Let me help.” And I wanted to help. After what she’d been through, I felt it was my duty to help. “You deserve this. You’ve earned it. You’ll take home more money. You’ll give your daughters an even better life. I won’t charge you much. I love your girls.”

I heard another crack on the line. Maria cleared her throat. “You’re my hero. Thank you.”

A month later, I showed up at Maria’s on Monday afternoon. I let myself in with the key she’d given me and made a pair of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the girls.

When the bus arrived, I was in the living room watching Maria’s twins as they ran to the door.

“Janis,” they cried. “Mommy started her new job today.”

“I heard. You must be so proud.”

They nodded vigorously.

“I made you snacks.” They followed me into the kitchen. Their sandwiches were cut in halves and plated and waiting for them on the counter. I grabbed two glasses from the cabinet, loaded them with ice cubes from the fridge, and then filled them with filtered water.

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“Guess what we learned today?”

“That atoms make up molecules?”

“No, we learned that last month. Remember?”

“Then what?” I asked.

Maria’s daughters took turns explaining the math, finishing each other’s sentences like only twins can. It was familiar. Perhaps, it was a lesson I’d learned in my childhood town’s hobbled, multicolored schoolhouse along the dusty road. This was years before Maya, years before Javier even. The other girls would pick on me for my curly hair. My mother wanted me to straighten my hair while my abuela taught me ways to deal with the other children’s taunts. But I handled it my way. I would focus on my future escape. In those days, I knew without an ounce of doubt that one day I’d leave my dusty hometown for a better life in America. Now, my childhood naivety nearly made me laugh.

After the twins ate most of their sandwiches, leaving the jelly-stained crusts they’d scalloped with their teeth, I helped them with their homework. I loved watching their identical small round faces fill with focus as they completed their assignments. I sat back on the couch feeling enveloped in its soft cushions as I gazed at them. When they were done with their homework, the girls drew shapes and practiced their handwriting. Words and diagrams filled up the colored construction paper I’d taken from the bookshelf. I felt warm, and my eyelids started to get heavy. The girls were in their own world, speaking with one another in efficient bursts of communication as their crayons scratched across the rough paper. They reached for more sheets and filled those, too.

My eyes fluttered closed. I saw a flash of Rosa. She was seated in her apartment – the very one I’d spent many hours in after Javier was deported. She was laughing and had my daughter on her lap. Then, just as suddenly, she was gone, and my mind filled with the noise of the Belmonts shouting. I felt like cringing and saw myself cowering around their couch. Bright colors and geometric shapes bombarded my mind’s eye. My eyes shot open.

A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. Maria’s girls were still quietly playing with the paper and hadn’t noticed my restless snooze. Their mother would be home in an hour.

“Your mom said she’d be coming home with pizza.”

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The girls both looked up from their doodling, eagerness all over their faces. “Cheese?”

“Yes.” I removed two fresh sheets of construction paper from the bundle. One was pink and the other red. I held them out to the girls. Each took a sheet.

“Why don’t you each make your mom a card for her first day on the new job?”

“Okay,” the girls replied. They folded the papers in half and started drawing different colored hearts on the front of their cards. Two minutes later, the fronts were filled with dozens of hearts. Then they wrote sweet notes inside.

I let my eyelids turn to lead, and my head fell onto the couch’s back cushions. But rest eluded me. The girls kept vying for my attention, yanking me back from the ethereal world I kept drifting to, showing me their cards and reading me what they’d written to their mother.

When they finished, I assured them that their cards were beautiful and stood up from the couch. The girls filled my vacancy, settling into the warm dent I’d made. I turned on the television and found some cartoons I knew the girls liked. I tossed the uneaten ends of their sandwiches into the trash and loaded the plates into the dishwasher. Maria should be home any moment now.

The girls called for me, begging me to “Come look!” at something on the television.

“Be right there,” I called from the kitchen.

I washed a smear of jelly off my finger, smiling to myself. I dried my hands on the kitchen towel and then went to be with the girls in the living room. I took a seat on the armchair. The girls vigorously pointed at the cartoon, highlighting the predicament of the main cartoon character. I smiled and nodded, enjoying my role in this small, lovely family. I heard the key in the lock.

“Mommy’s home!” the girls cried. They bounded from the couch, dashing to the front door.

Maria stepped through the door, carrying the large pizza. The girls each took an end of the box and brought it to the kitchen table. I rose from the chair and gave Maria a hug.

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Live In The Mood M A R K TA K S A

My toes under a bench, I could be floating as I watch breeze bend the passersby.

I consider reports of grin engineers who have warned that feet-cluttered cities are causing tight lips. Surplus pavement, the news has concluded, could prop greater grinners.

My anxiety about the pavement crisis narrows to an unbent wanderer across the street.

She perches her foot on a stair to a trolley, chairs empty.

The lightness of her step hardens my bench.

I cross the plaza, tell her that travel by body brings the bump, bang, and rattle of nearly perfect wheels over random cracks in specific ground, that quiet travel resides in the many rooms of mansions where lazy moods await the wanderer to float in a conversation with a portrait.

Her gaze is tight with thought. I have no mansion.

I invite her to merge with my look into a museum canvas. She steps from the stair, grins and blushes as if I have lifted her from bathing in a tub brimming with uncertainty. She places her hand, stronger than her thin wrist hints, in my hold.

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We leave to live in the mood of old pictures where untrampled floor waits.

We escape pedestrians walking up and down the boulevard as if, no matter how they change their stride, their moods will be as fixed as a butcher’s window carved, by archaic hands, with an advertisement for parts and poultry no longer sold.

POETRY 123

The Cantaloupe from Peoria DA N E C E R V I N E

In 1941, an Oxford policeman, while pruning his roses, scratched his face on a thorn. Ignoring the slight cut, it grew infected, spread, taking his eye and bringing him close to death. The doctor had only a trace of penicillin, because it was still difficult to produce. The sample saved the poor gardener till it ran out, and, like the dead roses, he became mulch.

As World War II unfolded, the Brits stopped producing penicillin, so the quest moved to Peoria, Illinois. Secret soil and mold samples poured-in from around the world to help, but to no avail. Till Mary Hunt bought a cantaloupe one morning from a local grocer, shared it with her lab colleagues, having first saved the “pretty golden mold” from its skin for study. It became the most potent penicillin ever, all of it descended from the single random cantaloupe Mary bought from the now anonymous grocer. Saving multitudes. Including my daughter after her appendix burst when young, lying in our bed upstairs while I gave a poetry reading downstairs thinking she only had a tummy ache. A thorn, a cantaloupe, a daughter—the miracle a detail makes.

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Night Terrors PAT R I C K B E R N H A R D

Kara turned away from the TV and glanced at the glowing wall clock. 2:56. She had now passed her previous record for staying up watching Night Terrors, which was 2:37. It was Saturday, or now technically Sunday morning, so she wouldn’t have to deal with Mrs. Vervaline scolding her for repeatedly nodding off during Language Arts and then lecturing her and the rest of the fifth grade how important it was for their young, developing selves to get their proper rest.

“You’ll end up stunting your growth!” Mrs. Vervaline said on Friday, her stringy hair flinging bits of dried hairspray as she nodded righteously. Mrs. Vervaline was very short, and Kara was tall for her age, so it didn’t really make any sense. Plus, Mrs. Vervaline probably slept in a bundle with her bony husband and the ugly tabby cats whose photos were all over the classroom, warm and farting together peacefully. Mrs. Vervaline didn’t have to worry about footsteps thumping back and forth in the hallway all night as her parents played defense with her older sister Rikki, trying to coax her into her bed and pleading with her to please close her eyes for just a little while, using voices that scared Kara with how small they sounded. Her sister’s voice was different too, a hiss like a punctured gas tank in an action movie. Out of this hiss came arguments and threats that made no sense and that Kara’s parents told her to always ignore because they weren’t real, even though they could hurt like a real threat and made Kara hate her sister. She knew that hating Rikki was breaking the rules, but after the most recent time, this past evening, she didn’t feel like pretending otherwise anymore.

Kara reached for the remote, which was thick with electrical tape for keeping the broken battery compartment closed, and turned up the volume, trying hard not to think about Rikki’s latest episode. A flash of pixilated oranges and charcoal blacks swirled around the television screen before settling into a deep crimson, lighting up the room with the gruesome sort of red that Kara would see when she pressed the lit end of her father’s

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gleaming Maglite hard against her palm. A skeleton’s index finger reached up and traced an “N” in the crimson. The rest of the script gradually glowed to life after the “N” was formed: “Night Terrors.” The opening of the late-night horror movie program always gave her a prickly run of goose bumps up her back, no matter how bad of a mood she was in.

Kara thought about her parents. Her dad was supposed to be across the country in Trenton this week, servicing a group of industrial boilers. The week before, he’d been helping set up a new boiler system in a recently constructed high school in distant Maryland when he got the call from her mother about Rikki’s latest hypomanic episode, one that would have landed her in the hospital if not for her parents watching her constantly, day and night. Her mother had been home for nearly two weeks, beyond where the sheet metal plant she worked at could tolerate, something she heard her parents speak about in the basement while they ran the laundry, their voices streaming through the vents easier than the heat.

Tonight’s movie was Castle Blood, one of her cheesy favorites. It was something the eerie, disembodied voice of the host called a mid-80s cult thrill ride. Kara shifted to the side of the chair that she normally sat in, and she stuck a few strands of her dark hair into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Rikki had taught her how to translate the late-night movie descriptions a couple of years ago, when Night Terrors used to start at 10 PM. “Cult hit,” Rikki had said, “That just means that the movie had been a box office flop, if it even showed up at the box office to begin with. No money.” The age gap between the two of them – 10 years – made Rikki seem grown up, but in the coolest way possible.

“Oh, ‘thrill ride.’ You hear them say that? Means that the bad actors were trying too hard to cover up the even worse script. ‘Graphic depictions?’ Like a slit throat that was kinda shocking back when Mom and Dad were in high school? You would probably think it was funny.” She slapped her forehead in mock resignation. “Ah, what else?”

“Hurry up, the movie will be back on,” said Kara.

“Just one more, Miss Pushy. ‘Shameful display.’ A classic. That’s just a ploy to get sixteen-year-old dudes to stay tuned in the hopes of seeing someone’s tits during the movie.”

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“Rikki!” said Kara, giggling.

“It’s the truth. Partial nudity guarantees at least some viewership.”

“Gross!” she said so loud that they both began to laugh and shush each other at the same time, afraid to wake up their parents.

There were others. Even “mid-80s” had its own connotations: starring either an old actor or actress trying to jumpstart a career, a popular young actor or actress that would grow obscure following this movie, and someone old or young getting killed with an eating utensil. Rikki would list them, lightly bending back her left index finger with her right every time she named another one for Kara. She liked noticing how comfortable Rikki always was, slumping over the sides of chairs and couches, at least one arm or leg constantly touching the ground. Their dad liked to say that Rikki spilled instead of sat.

The host, an older man with a shrunken head necklace, cackled, snapping Kara out of her memory, before he finally stopped trying to build up the movie, and it began with a crash of synth percussion that marched it through the title credits.

So eighties, thought Kara, spitting out her strand of hair she was chewing in her mouth.

She had seen it at least three other times with Rikki. It was about a family whose house’s interior morphed inexplicably into that of a vampire’s castle. First the walls began to sweat and drip like old stonework might. Then, after the family dismissed the bewildered plumber, cobwebs that were immune to vacuums started to pop up, followed by the shades drawing themselves shut every sunrise and opening at every sunset. Then, pale, red-eyed people started to appear in the hallway, beckoning before disappearing in flashes of lightning. Kara sat back down and inched herself forward in the chair, still very awake.

Kara wished Rikki, the old Rikki, was able to watch it with her; she would’ve been proud to know how many clichés Kara remembered, from the “new move, fresh meat” opener to the square parents to the fact that the main character hated his family and wanted out. Instead, she had the new Rikki, the Rikki that had to leave college “for a while,” the one who, when she wasn’t rearranging her room for the seventh time in a day or standing in her closet and screaming at nothing, laid, not spilled, on the couch, arms

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crossed in a classic mummy pose, rigid and staring at Kara as if she was something she needed to discard but hadn’t the energy to yet, her mouth resting open. She had always been a nose breather before; Kara hated how her sister’s slightly crisscrossed bottom teeth would turn foamy with spittle when she now left her mouth open too long. It reminded her of the choking foam that appeared whenever somebody in a Night Terrors movie was dying of being poisoned by cyanide or a toxic mushroom hidden in ravioli.

Tonight, though, she would’ve been thrilled with Rikki only lying rigidly on the couch. Instead, Rikki spent most of the night kicking her door or the walls around the house, wearing the last pair of Doc Martens she owned; at one time, before she threw them all away in a fit of manic cleanliness, she collected them. She marched back and forth in the hallway, their parents following her like servants, pleading with her to calm down, to at least sit down for a change, maybe watch a little TV, muttering to one another in between their begging, wondering why the medicine that was supposed to help her relax wasn’t working faster. Kara buried herself under all of her pillows and comforter, which caused her to sweat heavily, but it was better than hearing all of the details. Once, she came up for air and heard her mother calling Rikki her nickname for her, String Cheese, in such a shaky way that Kara dove back under and wedged herself between the mattress and her wall until she felt like a headboard, hating her parents for being unable to do anything.

Suddenly, the sleepiness that eluded her earlier rolled onto Kara, but she wanted to finish the movie. She moved herself closer to the edge of the seat and lightly slapped her cheeks, right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand. Even if she lingered on an eye blink for too long, she was risking sleep. That mistake had almost been made on Friday, this time during Vocabulary, when Kara had taken too much time to stare at the word “illustrious” on the board and had closed her dry eyes to clear them. Luckily, Becky Strom had kicked her calf before Mrs. Vervaline could turn around.

No good. Even sitting was too tempting. Kara stood up again, did a few jumping jacks, and began to pace slowly in a crooked oval around the living room furniture. Watching the movie was getting too difficult because her eyes were only fixed in one place; she had to

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keep twitching and twisting her neck back and forth like the Bride of Frankenstein, one of the few films on Night Terrors that had been legitimately good.

Kara tried to use her frustration to stay awake as she sat herself back down on the easy chair. She allowed herself the blanket that her father used and leaned a little bit backwards on the cushion. If she could stay a little angry for the rest of the movie, she’d be all right.

There were plenty of things to be mad about. Mrs. Vervaline. Her well-rested classmates.

Her parents and their begging and bags under their eyes. Her sister, a bad drawing of who she used to be.

Her eyelids suddenly shut for a few seconds on their own. She wedged them open with her fingers. A new strategy formed in her head: maybe if she just closed them for even a little bit, they would stop forcing themselves down for a while. She stopped fighting them momentarily. This worked for longer than she thought, as she was able to develop a sort of rhythm: eyes shut for ten seconds, then open for about twenty.

Kara managed this for a couple of minutes before snapping her eyelids open midrhythm. It felt too tempting to slip off into sleep with her eyes closed even for a little while.

She could feel the dreams reaching for her even in that brief period.

The television screen flickered back to the Night Terrors host. Kara squinted at the screen.

“We’ll be returning to Castle Blood soon, brother and sister ghouls! Keep your bones chilled!”

Kara picked up the remote and began tossing it to herself over and over again.

Immediately, it was clear that the concentration that it took to catch it was the best strategy for staying awake yet, so she continued to throw it higher, catching it with two hands, than one hand at a time, left and right. Then she made a game of trying to throw it so that it would nearly touch the ceiling in the space between the still ceiling fan. This was successful for a couple of tosses, but Kara hung onto the remote too long on one toss, and it went flying backwards too far for her to reach, far enough that it entered the kitchen behind her and clipped the edge of the dinner table, which caused the batteries to fly out.

The empty remote and batteries all clattered loudly in the silent house.

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Kara froze, feeling ashamed. She was less concerned about the remote – her dad dropped it at least once a week – and more worried about waking her parents up. The two of them had been averaging less than four hours of sleep a night trying to watch over Rikki, whispering in the toughest moments the hated word, “Hospital.”

That seemed like a good time to end the night. Walking over to pick up the remote, which was miraculously unbroken, she stuck the batteries back inside and turned the TV off and tiptoed over to the couch to set the remote back down when she heard a soft step from the hallway.

The dim light of the table lamp showed the hair plastered to the right side of Rikki’s head where she had been laying as she lurched into the living room. Kara remembered hearing her parents beg Rikki to take a shower earlier that evening. The hair covered up one eye, and the other focused on Kara with what looked like anger to anyone else but what Kara knew had no real name. She even stood differently, with one foot turned sharply inwards and both shoulders resting slightly lower than usual.

There was a heavy gasp that made Kara brace herself for a yell, but none came. Instead, Rikki took another couple of steps into the living room, blinking slowly, looking around, appearing both rigid and on the verge of tipping over as her mind battled the medicine meant to help her drift off.

“The lights are on, and you are awake, and you are making noise,” came the hiss from Rikki’s mouth.

“Please go to bed, Rikki,” Kara whispered.

“No.” Rikki wavered briefly.

Rushing over to her, Kara threw an arm around Rikki’s torso to steady her, feeling her sister’s ribs poke her through her thin t-shirt. Rikki smelled like the hand towels in the bathroom they shared. “Here, it’ll be easier if we go together.”

“No,” Rikki repeated, but turned easily as Kara steered her back towards the hallway, holding her breath as they passed their parents’ bedroom. She realized that this was the first time she’d touched her in weeks. “No,” Rikki continued to say softly. “No.”

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The nightlight was on in Rikki’s room. Kara hung onto Rikki’s forearm before she tucked her into the bed, bringing the sheets up to her neck just as her parents always did with her. “Just close your eyes for a few seconds.”

“No.” “Just like five seconds. Then you can open them back up again, okay?” She reached again for Rikki’s forearm, clutching it outside of the sheets as Rikki closed her eyes and immediately fell asleep just as she was starting to form the word ‘No,’ too exhausted to resist Kara like she did their parents earlier. Kara stood there a minute longer to be sure, then went back into the living room to turn the lamp off.

It was starting to get light outside, bright enough that Kara could see, through the living room window, that the misty figures of the bushes at the edge of their backyard and the lines that their lawnmower left in the grass were beginning to reveal themselves. She remembered herself and Rikki sitting out on the lawn, back when she was very young and Rikki was still in high school. On days like those, the sky was so blue that she always felt the need to grasp the neatly trimmed grass of their lawn if she bent her head back too far, afraid some force would draw her right into the center of that unthinkable sky. Kara and Rikki would sit out there for over an hour at a time, rolling in the thick summer grass and pointing at each plane that flew overhead on those June afternoons while saying to each other “There goes Dad’s plane. There goes Dad’s plane,” sure that one of them contained their father, always on his way out of the state to service another boiler. Every jumbo jet, single propeller Cessna, and occasional cargo plane from the nearby naval base had its progress traced by two index fingers and labeled in similar fashion.

Sometimes there would be a plane that was flying closer to the ground, usually on a descent into the airport just twenty miles away, and Kara would jump up and down until Rikki held her up so that she could frantically wave at its silver belly, shouting as it flew out of sight. “Daddy!” Kara would shout so loud that the blue jays would flee from their hiding places in the dying oak on their front lawn. “Daddy! We’re down here!” Kara believed that when her sister held her up, their father could more easily see her. Rikki never told her otherwise.

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I Am Here For You S AO I R S E E . D OY L E

Had someone met my six-year-old self at that sacristy door any one of the hundreds of times that neighboring farmer shoved me out when he was done, I would likely have fainted.

With relief, I’d like to think.

But that is not true. That is a made-up story.

It has nothing to do with this moment. Where everything but the actual goes.

The actual a pilgrimage of fact that demands to be written back in.

Right from the heart of the unspoken, and the unspeakable.

In pursuit of that actual, the picture of a girl fainting reveals the glib wanting of a grown-up, not yet recovered, prone to nostalgia, or puerile review. A poorly traveled retrospective imposed on to a wholly distorted child. Maybe not just nostalgia then.

Worse, mawkishness. Contrivance.

Can I even find the right descriptor for the pretense we try to revise into memory?

Because that is what it is.

A shortcut.

A con.

A swindle.

The act of a needy adult who swipes from that child what that neighboring farmer has already taken with both his fists.

Her truth.

Her dignity.

Her right to define herself exactly where she is. In all her complex anguish.

To say then, in that imaginary moment, were an adult to greet me, meaning her, at that sacristy threshold (with a view to interrupting the violations, one would hope), that I would have been capable of feeling relief would be to say something utterly untrue.

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Of that child.

And therefore, of me.

Also, I am not sure there would have been anyone in my family, my village, or my parish capable of such an interruption. An intentional one, that is. I know this fact because no such axe ever dropped on his hand from the many sharpened bog-cutting blades or spud-setting spades, even when it became a common spectacle to see a child follow a grown man along a single village lane over and over to that church, that sacristy, that cowshed at the back of Auntie’s, that garage across the way from our house. Many spots where something terrible came in and something actual left.

So, no. No relief for that girl at the prospect of an interruption. Even less likely to have that imaginary person show up at that doorway in the first place.

Can you see how far the boat gets shoved from shore with just one memory of one moment of one story? A child walking out a door.

In fact, a child being shoved out a door.

The truth boiled down to single verbs.

Girl shoved from door.

Boat shoved from shore.

Even before that girl has bobbed down on one knee. Before that golden tabernacle.

Already, her truth reframed (by she who writes this) more times than the half dozen steps that girl has numbly taken.

Numbly. An adverb not randomly chosen.

Adverbs should never be lightly used. Meaning used lightly.

Each word a universe in its multiplicity.

This, the actual burden of truth being storied: accuracy. Not that we can speak such precision into every affair. An impossible task to set for any human. And yet, such duty at the core of all things sacred. All things worthy of recording.

Word as God. God as word. ***

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Here is the truth.

Had someone—anyone—come to that sacristy door, I would have fainted from shame.

And not just shame, but blame.

Every woman knows this blame. At least, every woman to whom I have ever spoken of this exact after-moment of violation. That blood chill of instant dread. That knee-jerk knowledge of her soon-to-be vilification. That split-second internal refrain of instigator, not victim, a parade of you asked for this through the veins of every girl, as though encoded to the pulse as cardiac systole. And not just from within, but from without, where life itself has run afoul of truth as collective duty, and misogyny struts its cocky way toward legend—all hail the conquering male hero.

So, yes, had I been met at that door by anyone, I would have pissed on myself from fright. At six years old, already a graduate of my own girlhood as causal. Fluent in my heavenly downfall.

What did my six-year-old self know then of abuse but the guilt that wound its way around her person like the laces of her dance slippers ’round her shins, the very ones designed to raise her high on her feet, twirl her to the reel music so that she could feel she was born spinning.

Which she was. Born spinning. Spinning into places that had no names.

What do you call the place on the knob of your knee that eases into the meadow-green carpet of the altar while a grown-up locks an arched doorway behind you?

What do you call the important key that belongs only to men like him, the one that opens and closes the sacristy door for men’s business?

It has a special name. Of this, the girl is certain.

Did she once hear skeleton key? On Columbo?

Is that what it is?

A key that opens everything.

If so, she wants one.

What do you call a farmer, not an ordained priest, who still carries with him something of that exact sacrosanct maleness?

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Hard to know if questions like this register in that girl’s mind as she lowers her thin leg in genuflection. Or if the metal twist of that key in the cradle compels her mind to capably splinter. The angry catch of that lock delivering its heated message.

You filthy thing.

The Yale latch snapping shut on the back door, the door meant only for the priest, who slips in unseen from his shiny car to the sacristy, only to emerge onto the altar, bedecked in dazzling finery. That door, clacking closed behind that farmer, its thwack akin to the confessional window smacking shut on the woeful sinner.

Now, the patter of his Wellington boots, rubber soles plunking assuredly along the tarmac. Seagulls overhead squawking their predictions, loudly, then softly, tossed and dropped by Atlantic pockets of gale and imminent rainfall. Shafts of splintered light through the gable-length stained glass, daubing splotches of rainbow-purpose on the wall and altar. Archangel Michael traversing choppy water toward the great Skellig Rock, his iridescent portrait dwarfing the seven-hundred-foot protrusion of mid-ocean granite just off the coast of their village. Rising winds from above shuffling slates like friendly card games of patience. Cold air so piercing that her bare arms pimple and bristle, pig’s foot reminders that she is here and beastly.

Is there a name for such temporal distillation?

This place where soul leaves, and something else remains.

Time its own quarrel of rigid and infinite. That which exists only in this unbearable moment and that which has existed all along. Two strangers, side by side, on the Dublin train.

What, then, of the comfort that comes from the Sacred Heart lamp on the sidewall of the altar? Pale red glow merged in her mind as the steady companionship of the Savior.

This exact lamp its own constant in every house the girl has ever visited, every sparse yet well-appointed sitting room awaiting its next station Mass, that blinking red eye on freshly papered walls, reminding the gaggle of stout-sipping men and tea-drinking women of God’s invisible presence. The framed Jesus, heart ablaze, palms outstretched, message simple: I am here for you.

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Beveled shade, on brassy saucer, the side-altar buoy to which this girl now clings.

Surely there must be a word, maybe in her father’s gold-rimmed dictionary, for that throbbing want, so alive a creature, so much the head-to-toe of her, that if she trains her desperation with all her might at the wavering flame of the Sacred Heart, surely it will manifest the bearded Jesus Himself fresh from heaven.

Then, in that then of her breastbone-imploration, its ache so great in skin and breath it is the only feeling she knows, which surely must be prayer most powerful, then Jesus will stand before her. Tell her one true thing.

His one true thing will make her better.

She has no thought of what better is.

But Jesus will know.

He knows everything.

He lives everywhere.

In every house.

She waits. *** Here is another truth: This girl cannot move.

Her genuflection has petrified into beggary.

Begging to be taken.

Rescue, or maybe escape, as verb, noun, adjective.

Personified in her supplication.

How to lift her knee from that meadow-green carpet, its dented nap a sanctuary in which she had once found comfort. Seconds ago. Comfort too soft a word. No. Hiatus.

Hiatus of person. What else to call that stretch of breath that shuffles the nerves back into place even as the slates settle along the eaves? How to take her leave from the whispering wind who has ceased its racket to be with her? Its sudden quietude an act of gentleness that prickles her eyes with unreachable tears.

How does that girl—in that skin—rise from that carpet?

Make no mistake. This is a territory. Of negligible square footage, yes. A life ring round

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her waist would depict its circumference. But it is hers. This nameless place where no one even knows she has emigrated, and no one will stand quayside for her return. Only the gulls and their endless prophesies.

How to depart this hidden land. The land of the invisible.

Make of life a forward motion.

Not an invented life, one conjured by some well-meaning adult whose condition of forgetting makes that girl’s lived substance a dull note, barely audible. Not that life.

Instead, the life of fact. The fact of a family and parish awash in its own discipline of amnesia. A population tossed, for centuries, out of their own lived skins.

Such a speculation of ancestral ousting, even by she who writes, a dangerous proposition for a people primed to denial of their own collective impairment: Us? Nothing wrong with us. Only all that’s right with us. What missing skins are you on about?

Rubbish, you simple thing.

How, then, does that girl stand back up?

This labor of the bent knee made upright less about limb and more about instinct.

How to resurrect the rustle of life’s impulse to carry on even in the absence of animus.

Here, I might offer her a noun.

Spirit?

Enough to flood vein and artery with meaning. Make of that genuflection a bucket to a well, filled afresh with fortitude. Some attitude of the elders at Sunday Mass, beaten as they descend to one crippled knee, resolute as they spine-straighten to standing.

But that girl might politely decline.

On a good day such as today, when I can stay long enough in her skin to hear her speak, she might simply say she doesn’t understand spirit. That all she did was wait for Jesus to show Himself. And when He didn’t, she stood up.

Reluctantly.

She won’t know that adverb. But she will feel this reluctance in the stiffness of her knee. How unwilling her calf, how unfriendly her thigh to any demand.

Reluctantly, she will rise.

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Relinquish her citizenship within that period of reprieve where the sacristy door had been locked, and that farmer had been long gone down the side yard.

No more for now, her boiled-down thesis.

Even that will not be a solid thought.

More the animal shake of a stray dog running from the waves, needles of seawater flung in all directions.

Slowly, she will reverse her way past the altar, down the steps, to the white tile floor, eyes glued to the Sacred Heart lamp in case Jesus might land with her back turned. *** Now, the exodus.

An exercise akin to the intricate step-work required to put together a slip jig or a hornpipe. Every flex of the soft shoe, or hard, an opportunity to express progress. Every twist of heel and toe a journey unbolted. Not a word uttered, yet a full story told.

Within this girl’s steps from the church, a dance without language.

What I mean to say is, she has no language. Not yet.

Not a syllable to hand to a single soul had they bothered to ask her: What’s wrong?

And where have you been, child?

Maybe, again, I could retrofit to her lips a mumbled appeal from that once-bent knee: Oh Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee.

Or plump her vocal cords with a Thanks be to God as she passes Saint Anthony.

Or better still, have her say, even in her silent and hidden mind: That man over the old road did something terrible to me.

But none would be true.

Instead, in the choreography of that exact moment, the girl might offer the clap of her sandals on the stone floor, each slap of leather a feat of her own creation. Her, the maker of echo. She might nod to the octagonal lid of the slate-gray baptismal font in the alcove next to the altar, make of its squatted plumpness a hat-wearing elder proud of her devout exit. She might trace, with her mind’s eye, the old lettering over the confessional—sagart paróisde—and wish for a time when such native script was commonplace. Her gut might

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churn from some terrible knowing, her gaze now fixed on each flourish and curlicue, each character distinctive in its nameless symmetry. Close now to the porch doors, her focus might return to the lines where each tile meets, imagine ripples of still waters that greet each footfall. Nail-bitten fingertips might skim the first kneeler on the women’s side, its rail slippery-clean and solid.

Each thing observed becoming, by magic, the observer, heads that nod from packed pews, aunties who wink or sneeze, candles that flicker in admiration, statues that track her just a little with their gazes.

Some natural faculty, even in the absence of language, rising to find what is missing.

Some animal wisdom sufficient to vivify wood and brick, make of a lost scarf, a prayer book, a hair clip, the givers of lavish witness. Every part a player in this redrafting of her makeup, this impossible heave toward fact, a form of actual whose loss must be conjured from a place within that knows little of the thing it is conjuring.

How does she even know to go toward a spot on some inner map when no one has fully shown her the destination—by which I mean mercy, or protection, let alone the map, by which I mean, decency.

Yet, there she is, pressed down, shaken out with rabid purpose.

Tenderness, I might offer.

She might cock her brow, not in rejection but in subtle recognition.

Even in its lived ignorance, this single word rings a bell similar to the eucharistic chimes. How she envies those altar boys on a Sunday who grab that shiny gadget with its easy grip, the four brass cups singing their delicious devotion to God made flesh.

Does tenderness fit? I might ask again. Is that what you’re looking for?

Again, she will shake her head.

No, she will say. Things are alive. That’s all.

She might not even say those words. Instead, she will transmit from her insides the kinship of the inert. The salvaged spark from the seeming lifeless, enough to light up the trammeled chambers inside her, awaken faint sensations she will later match to words from psychology books or novels: nurture, support, trust, affection. Beneath those, so many more: crime, testimony, shame, blameless, absolution.

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But for now, she will make of her exodus a concoction of childish longing. By the time she reaches the outside door, she will have sat fireside, a dozen times or more, within the family of the inanimate. Each spectator—bench, pillar, kneeler, statue—an ally now taken and tucked into the lodgings of her broken mind. Into spare rooms she never knew existed. Each room a shelter of the forgotten and the remembered.

Her palm on bubbled glass a daydream. *** At last, the open air. Cold and bracing.

Her old friend, the wind, full-throated in its welcome.

Bathing her in the outside of things to wash away the inside.

Before her, the concrete font, stout and constant, will beckon her to dip her fingers into blessed waters, drench her forehead with clemency.

Without even thinking, she will douse her whole fist, then trace a sopping line from scalp to eyebrows. One more dip to draw the horizontal.

Hello yourself, the mossy font will whisper. She will nod. A small nod. She will doubt the font has really spoken. The inanimate, in the outside of life, calcifying once more to mortar and stone. Still, the sound of anything—even imagined—such a balm, she will wish to God every blessed thing ’round her would reveal their secrets. Prove their aliveness before she leaves here.

Pauline, the tufts of grass along the tarmac’s edge, might beckon. Pauline, talk to us.

Visit us, the pebble-dashed walls might chime in. Do you think we need to shave?

They might laugh. Meaning, they might try to make her laugh.

Me, me, the metal crucifix might cry from its rooftop fixture. Are my screws loose? Will I fall soon?

Me, the chimney might shout from the cottage across the way. Check my flue.

She might smooth the coarse walls with a palm-stroke, tell them they are as soft as a baby’s face. She might whisper to the rusting cross that it’s well bolted. Going nowhere.

Signal to the cottage chimney that it was fixed last week. Pat the head of the wiry grass. Let it know she won’t trample it.

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A man will approach from the west. She knows west because the sun slips down behind that mountain each fine day. His feet will hit the tarmac of the churchyard. He will clear his throat. Preparing for prayer. Or maybe simply to let her know he is there. He is that sort. Mannerly.

She knows this man well.

Short. Old. Lively.

Once a footballer.

Now, he roars at the television during All-Ireland finals. The whole village hears him.

She sometimes plays with his niece. He and his wife are childless. Yet, they mind that girl in a way that tells her they should have had a half dozen. Their niece visits once a month from ten miles away. Gets a room all to herself for the bother. Dolls that stay there.

Clothes in the wardrobe. Her own shoes under the bed. More than one pair.

A very rich business. This only-child affair.

The man will jaunt by.

Surprised to see her, as though she had appeared from thin air, he will laugh. A nice laugh. Half-embarrassed. He had just been talking to himself.

Poll, he will say.

Her nickname.

Some people call her that like it’s a joke.

Others like she’s a newborn.

He will say it the nice way.

She will know this.

Poll, he will say.

And he will smile at her.

Hello, she will say, her voice low, like her sister’s radio at nighttime.

Did you say a prayer for me? the man will ask. For all of us?

By now, he will be trotting past, his tiny frame covering ground as though pulled along by his drag-racing greyhound.

Yes, she will say.

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She will mean it. Though she said no prayer. None that she can remember.

I wouldn’t doubt you, he will say, his back now to her. He’s in a rush. Maybe to the shop. Or over to the harbor.

Good girl yourself, he’ll toss behind him. Some invisible doorsill over which she can now step.

Threshold, you might offer.

No, she will say. Nice man.

Nice, the feeling she will carry. Enough to tether her. Though I dare not ask to what.

She is returning. This is what matters now.

You will marvel that such a child has the God-given capacity to spot the difference between that old man and the farmer. Can still see the harmless in one after the sacrilege of the other. But she has that in her. Enough insight to take this old man’s praise as welcome.

Granted, she will never trust a man again. Not for as long as she lives. But she will always know the difference. And sometimes, despite that, maybe because of it, when she is older, she will invite the bad ones in.

But for now, her mind has dropped new anchor.

Good girl yourself.

Those words have a nice feeling to them. She takes it.

She will tilt her head toward her own chimney top in the fifty-yard distance.

Out of the blue, another good thing comes to mind.

The Brady Bunch.

Her heart pounds.

She takes off running.

Thirty whole minutes somewhere else.

She runs.

Fast.

Faster.

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Author Bios has published mostly short fiction. However, she has poems in current

ELLIE ANDERSON

issues of Caesura, The San Pedro River Review, Deep Wild, and 3rd Wednesday. She is a Canadian living in Bellevue, Washington with her husband Shane and a stray cat named Mooch. To read more go to: elliejanderson.com PATRICK BERNHARD

is a native of the Chicago suburbs and received his BA from Oberlin

College and his MFA from Northwestern University. His work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Maryland Literary Review, quip Literary Review, and Funny In Five Hundred. He currently teaches English at College of Lake County.

CLARA BURGHELEA

is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi

University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her second poetry collection Praise the Unburied was published with Chaffinch Press in 2021. She is the Review Editor of Ezra, an online journal of translation.

DANE CERVINE’S

latest book The World Is God’s Language is published by Sixteen Rivers

Press (2021). His poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, The Atlanta Review, Caesura, and appear in The SUN, The Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Visit his website at danecervine.typepad.com. ÉANLAÍ CRONIN’S

writing has appeared in Agave Magazine, White Wall Review, Sweet Tree

Review, String Poet, Peregrine, Sinister Wisdom, Big Muddy, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Courage to Heal, Entropy Magazine, and The Magic of Memoir. She enjoys photography, searching for the elusive “perfect chair,” and public speaking.

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KATHIE GIORGIO

is the critically acclaimed author of five novels, two story collections, three

poetry books, and an essay collection. A novel, All Told, will be released in 11/2021, and a poetry chapbook, Olivia In Five, Seven, Five; Autism In Haiku, will be released in August 2022.

ROSALIND GOLDSMITH

lives in Toronto. She has written radio plays for CBC Radio Drama

and a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival. Her short stories have appeared in journals in the USA, the UK and Canada, including Litro, Fairlight Books, Chiron Review, Into the Void, Stand and Fiction International.

JONATHAN GREENHAUSE

won the Telluride Institute’s 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize. He has

poems recently appearing or forthcoming in FreeFall, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, The New Guard, New York Quarterly, Poetry East, and RHINO. This is his 3rd time appearing in Bryant Literary Review.

YVONNE HIGGINS LEACH

spent decades balancing a career in public relations, raising a

family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. Her first collection of poems is called Another Autumn. Her latest passion is working with shelter dogs. She splits her time living in Vashon and Spokane, Washington. For more information, visit yvonnehigginsleach.com.

TYREL KESSINGER

is a stay-at-home dad of two wild animal-like things. His work can be

found here and there and most recently in Washington Square Review, Crab Creek Review and Wilderness House. To read all his many viral tweets look no further than @KessingerTyrel.

AMY LAWLESS

is a poet living in Brooklyn. She is the author of the poetry collections My

Dead and Broadax, both from Octopus Books, and a chapbook A Women Alone (Sixth Finch). She is also coauthor of the book I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected from Pioneer Works Press. She was the recipient of a NYFA poetry fellowship.

ROGER LOGAN

lives in Woodstock, Vermont, with his spouse, cat, dog, and at the moment a

lot of chickadees and titmice. Roger is a freelance digital marketer and business writer, but now spends most of his working time writing fiction, which is a lot more fun.

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DAVID O’CONNELL’S

work has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper

Nickel, and North American Review, among other journals. His first full-length collection, Our Best Defense, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press. You can find more of his work at davidoconnellpoet.com.

MARLENE OLIN

was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University

of Michigan. Her short stories and essays have been published in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Catapult, PANK, and The Baltimore Review. She is the recipient of both the 2015 Rick Demarinis Fiction Award and the 2018 So To Speak Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of The Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories.

P.J. POWELL

has been published in Across the Margin, Evening Street Review, Valparaiso Fiction

Review, Youth Imagination and other places. She co-hosts a podcast about writing and books called “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at creatorology.com.

DEBORAH S. PRESPARE

lives in Brooklyn, New York. She completed her undergraduate

studies at Cornell College and received an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in Menda City Review, Potomac Review, Red Rock Review, Soundings East, Third Wednesday, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and several other publications.

ALEX SMITH

is a writer from Providence, RI. His fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction

Magazine, Into the Void, Arc{hive}, the Creative Writing Outloud podcast, and in his book, The Perfect Man and Other Stories of the Supernatural. In addition to fiction, he is a freelance writer for CVS Health.

MATHIAS SVALINA

is the author of seven books, most recently a collaboration with the

photographer Jon Pack, The Depression, published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. He also runs a dream delivery service.

MARK TAKSA

has poems appearing in Quiet Diamonds, Blue Unicorn, and Trajectory. Higher

Than Fear, his eleventh chapbook, has recently been published by Orchard Street Press.

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JASON TALBOT

is a writer, tattooer, sound artist, visual artist, father, and husband residing

in Richmond, VA. Jason holds a BFA from The Massachusetts College of Art. After a tenyear hiatus from writing, Jason is now back at it and excited to begin the process of having his work published.

MICHAEL WASHBURN

is a Brooklyn-based writer and journalist and the author of the short

story collections The Uprooted and Other Stories, When We’re Grownups, and Stranger, Stranger.

His story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction contest, and another of his stories, “In the Flyover State,” was named a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2014 by Best American Mystery Stories.

CAROL ANN WILBURN

is compiling her first chapbook. She studied poetry at Cornell

University with poet and fiction writer Robert Morgan. Select poems were published in While You Wait (2021), a Santa Barbara, California poetry anthology. Her poetry will also appear in January 2022’s special edition of Live Encounters: American Poets & Writers.

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