Cabildo Quarterly. Issue #11 -- our fifth anniversary! Pittsburgh PA; Cape Cod. Labor Day Weekend 2017. I try to work and I keep thinking of World War III.
Howl by Gale Acuff I'm not scared of death--it's resurrection lays me low. Yesterday I buried my dog and last night I dreamed he rose again and slipped through the unfastened porch screen-door and came up the stairs and into my room and jumped on the bed. I buried myself under the blankets while he pawed and scratched at me, like an old bone gnawing at him. When I woke I couldn't claw my way free at first and when I finally did it was still dark. I'll never pray that prayer again: O Lord, please don't let him be dead really. Please bring him back to life. Amen. I went to bed again but not before I turned on the light, then went to inspect his grave before breakfast. No disturbance there on his mound. I wished he'd never been born so that I never would've died. Gale Acuff has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). His work has appeared in Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, and many other journals.
Park Closes at Dusk by Brendan Kiernan I lost my wife in Glasgow Botanic Gardens. We had been watching two old ladies playing with the sound tubes in the children’s play park. The one with the cardigan – it was July, but the natives knew to wear layers – was clearly the joker of the pair. Goofy tombstone smile, huge glasses, and a sweater that makes me want to scratch even now. The other one was nothing. Or a raincoat. I do remember a morbid raincoat. It could have been red once but had turned to rust. Cardigan’s cardigan was covered in cat hair – or maybe made out of it, it was difficult to tell where the wool ended and the fur began. Naturally this made me put my hand down my shirt to scratch, where I discovered I was sweating. I asked my wife if she was hot. What I said was, “You feeling it, honey?” She wasn’t there. * Cardigan put her mouth to one end of the tube. The sound she produced was like a garbled train announcement. She even added the static and feedback filling the space between the words. Station to CHHH university CHHHH closing. The length of tube sticking out of the ground was toddler-sized, but Cardigan was able to crouch as easily as someone half her age. Next to the tube was a slide connected to a jumble of tunnels, bridges, and climbing bars. The sound traveled underneath this contraption, then over an area of wood chips and fake, cushioned blacktop, where the tube reemerged before going under again, finally coming up at a distortion mirror. Here Raincoat pressed her ear to the announcement. Presumably, Cardigan was being funny, but Raincoat didn’t smile. I thought maybe she had little sense of humor, or was tired of the same repeated acts of silliness from her friend. Also I was staring at her. “Excuse me,” I said. She smiled. It made her look even older. Wrinkles grew wrinkles and so on to infinity, giving her face a cavernous depth. I thought of the Grand Canyon from above, just the kind of thought I’d share with my wife, if only. * I have no medical training. But putting your mouth or ear to a piece of playground equipment is risky. There are plastic parts, heated and frayed by the sun. Worse, child spit. And wildlife piss. Moist wood. Diaper leak. I have a longer list. Station to CHHCHHH west end next stop CHH-KUHHH. “That’s dirty,” I said. It was nerves. What I meant to ask was whether she had seen my wife. * Raincoat looked at me quizzically, weighing whether or not to answer. “Excuse me? I didn’t get that quite,” she finally said.
“She’s pretty,” I said. “My wife.” “Gloria!” she shouted into her end of the tube, touching her lips to strep, snot, and staph. But Cardigan had already reached us. I could see her moccasins on the other side of a raised crawl tunnel connecting two trampoline segments. Then, again with impressive dexterity, she ducked under the tunnel and popped up between us. “Problem?” she said. She was looking at me, but speaking to her friend. An act of defense. “I can’t find my wife,” I confessed. They looked at each other. There were rustling twig sounds, children’s voices, and the motion of a safety see-saw in the corner of my vision. “How do you mean?” It was Cardigan. I half-expected her to speak in the voice of a comically garbled train announcement through a sound tube, not like a normal Scot, not that there was much difference. My throat caught. “What does she look like?” she tried again. My wife claimed not to look good in green. She said it made her look like puke, or like she was about to puke, I always forget which. Regardless, she believed anything green did something terrible to her appearance. “Sky blue blouse, jeans, shoulder-length dark hair,” I said, indicating her height with my hand. “Sky blue,” repeated Cardigan, looking up. The sky was still sky blue, but turning down for the evening, even though it was already almost nine. My wife and I had been expressing to each other our amazement at the endless daylight. The week before we had been to the outer islands. We finished dinner at midnight, went outside, and stood on a white sand beach where the one thing incongruous with daytime was the moon, only noticeable by the way it perched above some ruins. “At least it’s not green,” I said, sweeping my arm toward the tree- and shrub-filled perimeter of Glasgow Botanic Gardens. “Easier to find.” “Unless she’s been kidnapped,” said Cardigan. * I hadn’t considered that. Raincoat giggled. I didn’t see the humor, and told them so. Their faces changed. Serious. Concerned. In retrospect I should have kept my anger in check. Maybe Raincoat had giggled at something unrelated, an old joke floating up between the two of them. Many times I had had to remind my wife of the whole cause vs. correlation mistake, yet there I was forgetting it in a time of stress, just when it was most important to keep it in mind. Cardigan approached. We locked eyes as much as was possible given the thickness of her lenses. I took the ambiguity as a spark – the closest I had come to companionship since losing my wife. Scientists have been known to place strangers in facing chairs and observe them while they gaze at each other in silence. Alleged results include the choice to fall in love. * “So, let’s sum it up,” said Cardigan. Raincoat swung on a too-small swing, fading in and out of the hedge shadow. Cardigan sprawled on a slide that fanned out like a shell. I sat cross-legged on the wood chips, trying to slow my breath and ignore the pain radiating from hips to groin – I’ve never been able to tolerate that style of sitting, but had been told by my wife that it cultivated calm. “Wearing a not-green, but rather sky blue, blouse,” she continued, as I nodded at each point. “Dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Fivetwo, one-hundred-and-perfect. Walks with confidence. Last sighting at a pub near a body of water, smokestacks, and possibly a museum. Although pretty sure was here ten minutes ago, too. Any ideas, Madge?” “Ain’t exactly Nancy Drew, is it?” Cardigan stood up and gazed at the horizon behind me. She was halfway between looks – the one that said There’s a whole city full of people out there, and one of them’s our killer, and the one that said We don’t have much light left, we’ve got to move, or find shelter. “I need the loo,” she said. * If I was placed in a bare room, the size of a sound booth, facing a stranger, and ordered to look at them in silence for ten minutes, I would cry. * Raincoat straddled a springy horsey while I paced and watched the restroom door. I was anxious to get started, which made me more chatty. “So, how do you two know each other?” “Ah, who remembers these things?”
“And what do you do?” The horsey creaked, in need of oil. “Avoid men looking for their wives.” No matter what I tried the answers were similar, or silences. I was forced to change the subject to me. My wife and I had had wonderful Peruvian food the night before, who would have thought, ceviche and empanadas in Scotland, right? (Eye roll.) Had she ever eaten a coronation chicken sandwich and swigged Columba Cream with her love while waiting for the ferry at Stornoway? (Stared, then slowly blinked.) Did she know that if two strangers are placed in a small room and told to stare at each other in silence for ten minutes while scientists watch them, they can prove that love is an action? (Puffed her cheeks out, adjusted the tongue on her trainers.) What’s so funny about kidnapping? (Giggled.) “Really. I’m being serious. Do you think we’ll find her?” “Oh, I’m sure of that.” Her tone translated as Fat chance in hell, Yank. It was the obverse of my connection with Cardigan. Because there was a dim spark here, too – only it was something that glowered. She wanted me gone. Preferably disappeared into the shrub-formed hollow behind the horseys. On the other side of the Gardens my wife and I, on the way in, had passed a bed of night flowers that were probably blooming just now. I imagined the wind bringing them over the spiked fences and through the curlicued bench rails, sweet and shaded. The toilet flushed. Cardigan came out of the loo. She had buttoned up the sweater and was using it to clean her glasses. Without them, the harsh light of the restroom entrance made her ancient and diaphanous, like someone ghosting in the background of an antique photograph. She put her glasses back on, returning to the present. “Now, let’s take this logically,” she said. Raincoat rose from the horsey, which groaned. “First show us the last place you’re sure you saw her, and we’ll start from there.” Cardigan said this with real sympathy and an air of competence – No reason this can’t be done, Yank – which gave me real hope. I followed her, following Raincoat, down a hilled pathway. * “No way it was kidnapping,” my wife said one time right before a huge fight. We were watching an hour-long docudrama about a doctor and his missing mistress. Clearly the mistress had been kidnapped, just not by the doctor’s wife’s college roommate – a total red herring from the show’s producers – but by her own stepfather. It was like my wife and I were watching two different shows. I told her she was wrong, and doubly wrong to be so sure about it, green face. * “Just a little further,” Cardigan kept saying. It occurred to me that I should be the one leading the search, but the impulse faded. We came to a vast lawn. On the other side were two glasshouses separated by a series of circular flowerbeds. “How about this way? Have you looked over here?” It was Raincoat calling this time. The grass was wet. I could smell the River Kelvin and the night blooms again. An airplane crossed a wisp of cloud. The foliage bordering the lawn glittered. We crossed between the glasshouses – first Raincoat, then Cardigan, then me – and emerged at the empty play park. They went for the sound tubes. “No!” I shouted. * There was a bottleneck as we came to the exit. I wondered at the disappointment I felt that we hadn’t been alone, only spread out. “Wait here, there’s an officer,” said Cardigan, leading me to a bench. I had nearly collapsed after my outburst. “Brochure,” said Raincoat. She walked in the direction of the Visitors Center. Cardigan followed. There was no officer, only a slowing stream of park visitors and tourists. Next to the Visitors Center was a hut. Its door had a beveled glass window with lettering too small to make out. Raincoat and Cardigan entered together. I watched their silhouettes gesturing to someone inside. Then the gesturing stopped as they listened to whoever was responding. With a huge thrust – an energy I thought was gone – I stood up. I passed the hut and entered the Visitors Center. I imagined a witness telling them, “I saw him go in right here,” and walked straight across the hall to the doorway mirroring the one I had entered. * I headed in what I thought was the direction of the hotel. Petals fell from tendrils reaching over the Gardens’ walls. Branches sagged and twisted in car headlights. I crossed the street and walked along the river. I came to a narrow footbridge where the water turned. It led me into an older neighborhood. The streets were narrow, a few had cobblestones. I kept my path as straight as possible and found an in-