Noam Jacobs: “Untitled

(Untitled) by

Noam Jacobs

A giant moth In the middle of the road You swerved to avoid it as I Coughed stage blood All over the mirrors Upholstery I’m sorry I’ve been feeling strange all day

These shapes are not okay they’re Wrong But Oh my Oh Well I think I’ve lost my body Can’t Comfortable I’m sorry Upholstery

I’ve been feeling In the middle of the Strange All day

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Marble Boy Catches a Break by

John Baum

The economy was in the dumper and buying a house worried Ashley, but soon after their wedding, a huge, late-summer affair, Mike and Ashley moved into a white cape cod with enough problems to make it affordable, at least on the front end.

Mike didn’t believe in signs like Ashley did—he was more of a curse and conspiracy kind of a guy.

While they unpacked, the widow who lived in the house behind theirs fell down her stairs to the basement and died. She was eighty-two.

They joined the group of neighbors on the sidewalk in front of the widow’s house, watching as the EMT workers took the body away. A cop asked them questions. Had she been out at all? Had anyone spoken to her? Her children?

Mike told the cop that their yard abutted the widow’s.

“Did you hear anything?” the cop asked. “See any lights on or off during the night?”

“Do you think someone might have pushed her?” Mike said to the cop. “Foul play?”

“Mike,” Ashley said.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” a youngish woman in an exercise outfit said.

Later, as she sliced through packing tape on a box marked Living Room, Ashley said, “Less than twenty-four hours and someone dies. Terrific.”

Mike said, “Not a big deal, cosmically speaking.”

On the back porch, they ate cold pizza from the night before, and while they ate, a photographer from the local community newspaper asked permission to take some pictures from their backyard, a mess of ivy and stunted trees, explosions of weeds and honeysuckle that threatened to choke the widow’s yard, a clean rectangle of des-

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iccated, straw-colored grass.

“I follow the police blotter,” he said when Ashley asked how he knew about it.

He walked to the fence and his feet disappeared in the carpet of dark green English ivy.

“Our first guest,” Ashley said. “Death photographer.”

“Just about twenty-four hours ago when this pizza was fresh,” he said, looking at the house. “She was still there.”

“Don’t be so morbid,” Ashley said. “This is awful.”

“Would we have seen some sign if we’d really been paying attention? Maybe a shift in the air, a momentary cooling? Something, I don’t know, otherworldly?”

“Momentary cooling would be nice,” Ashley said.

Their air conditioning, an ancient system, hardly emitted a breath from the vents while wallpaper the color of boiled cabbage seemed to radiate humidity.

“The House of Tragedy,” Mike said, looking at the widow’s house through the scrim of overgrown brush. He smiled at Ashley and with some hesitation, she smiled back.

“So wrong,” she said. The smile stayed put.

When Mike and Ashley were living in an apartment and shopping at Discount Grocery, they named people they saw routinely—joggers, the grocery checkout girl, dog-walkers— and discussed them as if they were acquaintances:

“Intensity Joe was squat thrust lunging across his front yard today.”

“I saw Russian Big’uns at the store, organic food aisle.”

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“Vet Lady Di got a new bike.”

This playful tic in their relationship had been nudged from their conversations by the tension of planning a wedding, buying a house, teeing up a life.

Now they had a name for a house.

Later in the week, an ambulance wailed into the neighborhood just before sunrise and stopped at a ranch two doors down from The House of Tragedy. The delivery guy had found the old man who lived there, a lifelong bachelor, slumped over on the bench where, each morning, he waited for the paper.

Mike suggested they’d unpacked a curse from one of their boxes. “In the tranquil suburban world of casseroles and PTAs, lurks the curse of the new neighbors. No cul-desac is safe, no strip mall secure.”

Ashley said he was not funny, but there, again, was that smile.

That night, Ashley dreamt. She walked out the back door and beyond the reach of the outdoor light and its cloudy halo of moths. She walked through the English ivy to the widow’s house, up the steps to her back deck, where she looked in to a clean kitchen and saw the two people who had died that week, sitting at the table, a half-empty wine bottle on the table between them. They looked dusty. When she tapped on the glass, they didn’t turn her way. That was just fine. If they had looked her way, she may have screamed even if it was only a dream.

The next day, a neighbor who resembled Meryl Streep in a distant kind of way brought them the welcome gift of a peach pie, and told them about the baby down the street, barely a year old, who turned blue when a marble lodged in his throat.

“There was some confusion about administering the Heimlich,” she said. “He’s fine, it was over a week ago, but the mother hasn’t slept at all, checking in on him every five minutes. She’s practically delirious.”

After she’d gone, Mike and Ashley briefly tried to recall the woman’s name. Sharon? Shannon? They couldn’t remember but it didn’t matter—she was Peach Pie Meryl.

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They sat on their front steps after dinner and ate slices of the pie with vanilla ice cream.

“If death happens in threes,” Mike said, “then Marble Boy caught a break.”

“Our first house,” Ashley said.

Mike waited for her to say something else.

They went on as before, labeling lives they did not yet know, the tension of that missing third hanging in the air like the final note of a symphony that ends a measure too soon.

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