The Downtime Review April 2024 Issue

the downtime review

the downtime review

The Downtime Review is a new literary magazine committed to the following values and missions:

Publish works of impressive creative expression from people whose day-to-day work is not in the creative space.

Subvert the belief that you must choose between creative work and a career outside of the arts by spotlighting art created by those who are doing both.

Highlight authors whose genuine passion enlivens the work they create.

Support the improvement and platforming of emerging authors.

Learn more about the downtime review: Website: https://downtimereview.carrd.co/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.downtime.review/

Contact: the.downtime.review@gmail.com

Editors:

VJ Jones

Jack O’Grady

Graphic Design:

Ananth Udupa

Issue 02 Contributors: Gregory Byrd, Ben Davies, Alex Dodt, Susan Melinda Moree, Jaclyn Port, Angela Townsend, , Sage Tyrtle, Shannon Viola

Dear reader,

Surreal doesn’t begin to capture the way it feels to publish our second issue of The Downtime Review. We might also call it rewarding, or illuminating. While this reading cycle demanded more work from our editorial team, it was through that labor that we gained a greater appreciation for the value of genuine care in the creative process.

Since our first issue went live in October 2023, things have changed. During our winter reading cycle, we had the great pleasure of featuring in multiple lists of emerging literary magazines. This meaningful recognition brought so many more authors to our mag, a gift that kept on giving until we were experiencing an overwhelming volume of submissions.

All told, compared to our first issue, we received eight times as many stories (the majority within three weeks)—a significant challenge given our commitment to providing practical feedback on each and every submission. We took extra time to reshape our editorial process to manage the influx.

from the editors

We worked through hundreds of submitted stories and, in doing so, were given the chance to read from a diverse range of perspectives and traditions. Whether they found a home with us or not, each story we read this cycle was a meaningful work that spoke to the dedication of its author. Honoring that dedication through what words of our own we can offer is why we started this mag. To every author who submitted, we thank you for giving us the opportunity to engage with your writing.

On the other side of this process, we are so proud to present you with eight stories that speak to the transformative power of care, however you choose to direct it. In this issue you will read stories that portray moments where the most unexpected pieces of a life can change it completely: an apple pie, a little knit cat, a piece of sweet corn, or a standby vacation home. Just as a suit might make its man, the things we surround ourselves with, and how we engage with them, are forever making and remaking us. These stories inspired us to consider what it means to come of age at any age, and we cannot wait to share them with you.

Thank you for reading, thank you for writing, and thank you for continuing to make The Downtime Review a labor of true love. We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we do.

With love, VJ & Jack Co-editors of The Downtime Review

by Shannon Viola

Long Fiction

6998 Words

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Long Fiction

4100 words

Fiction

7000 Words

WHAT PRICE FREEDOM?

by Susan Melinda Morée

Iset fire to my hair once. Well, almost. I know that sounds extreme, but I had a layover in Topeka, Kansas. If you ever have to layover in Topeka, Kansas, you’ll want to set fire to your hair, too. Being in the airport felt like sitting inside a large fart cloud. And then there are these glass windows. They stretch from floor to ceiling. That way you don’t miss out on the view available. It’s a view of parched grass. There’s plenty of front row seating, too. You can just go catatonic staring out that window. The place could be a perfect insane asylum. If you’re ever feeling a little crazy, just book yourself a connecting flight through Topeka, Kansas, and you’ll be fine in no time. It’s a regular rest cure, that place is.

I was waiting to fly to Fairbanks, Alaska, but that’s a long story. A story full of drama and heartache, so I won’t go there. I’ll stick with the Topeka airport.

So here I was in Topeka, sitting in a blue vinyl chair. That chair was attached to other blue vinyl chairs in a long row of blue vinyl chairs. There were too many blue vinyl chairs. I was kind of bothered by this. So I tried to fixate on that dry grass. The grass was peaceful. But still I set fire to my hair later. Or, well, I tried to. Perhaps that’s what drove me to try to set fire to my hair, all that dry grass. Or maybe I tried it because while I sat there I realized the sky didn’t even look blue anymore. That came as a bit of a shock.

When you color in kindergarten, the teacher hands you a blue crayon and says color the sky blue. It’s always blue. So I couldn’t believe, as I stared out that window, that even the sky had changed color in Topeka, Kansas. But it had. It had this dry white look going on around the edges of the sun. And then the rest of the sky looked like the sun had maybe bleached the blue out of it, like it was washed out. Kind of faded like. Just as the grass was no longer green anymore. It was more yellow. The sun was that hot. But being inside the airport I was completely removed from all that heat. Even the sun and the heat left me feeling lonely and disconnected.

Planes arrive in Topeka, Kansas, like maybe never. So sitting there for so long

staring out that window felt like meeting up with the infinite and realizing that, hey, maybe you just weren’t that into it. A place like that works on your imagination. There are no details to catch the eye. You’re just looking at the big picture. There’s nothing to distract you from it. Could that be why I tried to set my hair on fire? I guess I had spent too much time focusing on the details of my life, so when it came time to look at the big picture, I just couldn’t handle what I could see.

Okay, enough with the philosophy major B.S. stuff. I know that’s what you’re thinking. Just get on with it. Just tell the story. Okay, fine. I didn’t want to tell this part, but here’s the drama and the heartache:

The real reason I tried to set my hair on fire was actually for the simplest reason in the world. I had gotten a bad haircut. I know you’re not going to believe me. But it wasn’t just any bad haircut. It was The Single Worst Haircut in the Continental U.S. I told the woman when I sat down in her seat that I wanted to make a change. My hair was black and I wore it long. But I had just broken up with my first serious boyfriend. He was the only person in my life up to that point who had ever told me that he loved me. I think it’s because he said it, because he said the words, “I love you,” that I fell in love with him.

All through college everyone thought we were going to get married. I thought it, too, for a while. But now that I knew that I didn’t love him, and now that I was no longer sure I ever really had, it was time to get radical. He had always liked my long locks. I don’t know if he thought I was beautiful, but I knew he thought my hair was. So I had this slightly crazy desire to cut it all off.

I had never done anything. I mean, I made good grades. I did my homework. I never cheated on a test. I never smoked pot. I never danced on a table or joined a rock band or got so drunk I rolled under a work trailer on campus like my best friend, Meredith, had done one night while I looked on. I had never done, well, anything. And now I wondered if this was my problem. I had never lived, you know? I had called the

sky blue even though it wasn’t really blue. I had never asked for a different crayon. After I broke it off with Jake I thought that maybe, finally, it was time to color the world just exactly the way I saw it.

I told the hairdresser all that while I sat staring at myself through a mirror that stretched from floor to ceiling.

I also told her that I was no longer sure what the meaning of love was or if there is such a thing as truth. It’s also possible that I told her I had bought a round the world airplane ticket and that I intended to fly the globe while reading the complete works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. I hadn’t really done that yet, I just liked saying Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

I probably told her some other crazy stuff. I don’t really remember for sure what all I said while she chopped away at my hair. But none of it matters anyway. Here’s the part that does:

She said her name was Sky and she was from Poland. But everybody in that fake place had weirdo professional names. It was a Supercuts in a strip mall so the whole place was one big box of blue Crayola crayons.

But I wasn’t very smart. I gave my hair and myself over to this woman. While she held out the long layers of my thick dark hair between her fingers, she told me about how she had come to America in 1981, while the communists were still in power in Poland. She probably told me this so I’d stop pronouncing the words “Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.”

She kept talking about the communists and what a bunch of Debbie Downers they were, but suddenly I stopped her. She held her scissors in mid-air over my temple while I interjected that I wanted her to dye my hair, too. She returned to her work with the scissors and then I settled into my chair with an air that was just completely smug. I’m ashamed to say it now, but this wouldn’t be a true account if I didn’t admit it. I was an arrogant little jerk because I had decided I no longer wanted to be raven-haired. I was going to be blonde. God, what an asshole I was. But I thought to myself, sitting in that brown chair, that at last I would find real

love. Tangible love—if I were a blonde. Love I could genuinely bite into.

Meanwhile, Sky talked about leaving her daughter behind in Poland. But since I had quit pronouncing the words “Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,” I didn’t have anything else to say. Sky filled up the silence I created with more talk about Poland.

She did not like Poland, she told me in her thick accent as her scissors snapped around my ear. Even now that the communists were no longer in power she didn’t want to go back. She liked Texans and she liked Texas, she told me. Everything was big in Texas, she said. She said she had bought herself a 10-gallon hat at the airport when she first arrived. She said other Poles went to New York City or to Chicago, but she had headed straight for Texas because that was the Real America and she said it with such emphasis I wondered for a moment if she was being ironic. Then she went on about how that was what she wanted, the Real America, and she said it with such sincerity, I decided there had been no irony intended. She said she thought she might like southern California also, but she couldn’t afford to travel there.

She was trying to save money to fly her daughter to Houston, she said.

She then told me she had had to leave her daughter behind when she left Poland 13 years before. I sat up straighter. I couldn’t imagine leaving a kid. She didn’t comment on how hard that must have been, or how important her freedom had been to her to make her leave. Instead, she just pointed with her scissors to a faded black and white photograph of a little blonde child smiling at me. It was taped to one side of the floor to ceiling mirror. Then she sighed and said that the girl was her only one. But we got no further with that conversation because it was then that she left me and my wet, cropped head, wrapped in a towel, to go mix the color for my hair. When she returned we talked about the weather.

An hour later she took out the tin foil. During the next fifteen minutes I sat there glowering at myself in the mirror every time she stepped out of my way. She twisted my

chair around and rubbed product into her hands and used a hairbrush to twist and yank my short hair into a stiff shape while a hair dryer blew hot wind against my ear and scalp and neck and I prayed that this last bit would work some kind of magic. My hair smelled about as inviting as a broken refrigerator full of hot mold. At last, overwhelming me with too much hairspray, she secured the white helmet she had created and whirled me back around to face myself so I could fully see what she had done.

She gave me what I’d asked for. She had cut away all of my beautiful dark locks. She had cropped it close to my head in a style I’d seen while flipping through a book of hairstyles earlier. Wisps of hair wrapped around my forehead and it all came to a halt somewhere around my ears. It was a hairstyle that suited the model in the book. But the cut wasn’t right for me, not with my wide eyes and long, square chin.

But worse than that, this chick called Sky had bleached my hair white blonde. I’m talking Billy Idol bleach blonde. I had been thinking Meg Ryan cute blonde—this was in Meg’s Sleepless in Seattle period. But I was most definitely not thinking Billy Idol. I looked about as cute as Billy Idol, too. I sat there staring at the mirror seeing this girl stare back at me. She was sitting in a brown vinyl chair. I, too, was sitting in a brown vinyl chair in a row of empty, brown vinyl chairs. But I could not recognize this girl in the mirror. And that girl, that girl with the weird hair—she was staring back at a girl she knew quite suddenly and quite violently she didn’t want to be.

I was so busy worrying about how important my long dark hair had been to my ex-boyfriend that I failed to realize how important it had been to me. How much it had informed my sense of self. But it was too late. It was all lying in long strands on the floor.

I ran out of that beauty shop so fast I left behind my favorite shirt, which I’d taken off before the coloring began. I jumped into my car in the parking lot still wearing the brown plastic poncho Sky had thrown around my neck. As I turned the key in the ignition, I caught a glimpse of the big-boned blonde Polish woman with the fake name staring at me from inside the glass door of the shop. Her face looked sour. I threw the transmission into drive. I didn’t pay the shop. I didn’t tip her. I didn’t stop. I spun out of there and headed to the airport. I didn’t know where I was going. I just had to get out.

I stopped just long enough in a random strip mall to run into a sports store and buy myself a t-shirt. I got a lot of stares when I walked into the store wearing that brown plastic poncho, with the ugly white helmet head, but I ignored them. I grabbed the first thing I saw—a blue shirt with the Dallas Cowboys logo embossed on the front. I changed in my car. At the airport I used a credit card my mother had given me for emergencies to buy a plane ticket to Nashville. I had no interest in traveling to Nashville. I knew no one there. But it was the earliest flight available. While waiting to board, I wandered over to the airport bookstore and I bought a Michael Crichton novel. It was his latest; I hadn’t read it. I had never read any Michael Crichton.

No one paid any attention to me on the plane. I sat between a guy in sweats who stared out the window and a woman who sprawled across the pull-down tray and slept. I kept my head buried in my book. When I deboarded in Nashville, I stopped in a tourist shop in the airport and I bought a cowboy hat to cover my head. The awful mess was now hidden. I felt some relief, but looking at the ordinary people in their ordinary clothes milling about in their ordinary way, picking up suitcases and hugging children and buying breath mints at the magazine store, I suddenly couldn’t stay. I didn’t belong amongst all those normal people. Also, I abhor country music—all that twang and clamor and whine about someone once loved or standing by a man. I had to get out of there. But instead of leaving the airport, I walked over to the ticket counter and used

the credit card and bought another plane ticket. This time—for the first time ever—I chose my destination. I decided on Alaska. But the flight to Fairbanks wasn’t until the next day.

I slept in the Nashville airport that night hugging my Michael Crichton novel to my chest with my white cowboy hat pulled low to shade my eyes as I sat hunched up on the floor in a corner behind a giant fake palm plant. A palm plant in Nashville? Seriously? In between my dozing I managed to speed read the plot points of Jurassic Park behind that synthetic tree. But because I was still reading it when I got on the plane the next day, I didn’t buy another book. I read on the flight until I had to deboard in Topeka. I put the Michael Crichton novel in the garbage before sitting in the blue vinyl chair staring out the window in Kansas. I had nothing left to do with my hands. I didn’t have anything left to read.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d kept going—if I’d made it all the way to Fairbanks. Would I have bought a ticket for Vladivostok, and so, in this way, wound up flying all the way around the globe after all? Maybe in Fairbanks I would have used my mother’s emergency credit card again to buy the complete works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. But I’ll never know because I got no further than Kansas.

After staring at that dry grass for hours, I got up from that long row of blue vinyl chairs. I passed the other rows of blue vinyl chairs. I thought briefly about calling someone, but there was no one to call. I had cut my boyfriend out of my life. My best friend, Meredith, and I didn’t talk much anymore. I didn’t have any quarters anyway. I didn’t have a plan. I had no idea what I was going to do. When I got to the bathroom, I realized the one benefit to a layover in Topeka: it’s so empty, you get the whole bathroom to yourself. And that’s a good thing when you’ve had a meltdown in Houston the day before.

I stood there, alone, staring at myself in the mirror in front of a row of bathroom stall doors. They were brown. All of them—this ugly brown. I could see through the mirror in front of me that they were all open. I took the white cowboy hat off and I set it down onto the porcelain sink. I looked at myself in the mirror for the first time since leaving Supercuts in that strip mall in Houston. I decided right then and there that I looked like an honest to God Q-tip. After all my hair had been through, it was now sticking straight up off my head and here I was, in a ridiculous blue t-shirt and faded jeans. I looked like a goddamn Q-tip! A Q-tip that was trying to disguise itself as a 22- year-old woman named Shannon with a ticket for a connecting flight to Fairbanks stuck in the back of her jeans pocket. I didn’t even have a toothbrush on me. I’m sure my breath and body odor were impenetrable.

The fact that I had somehow been turned into a Q-tip suddenly struck me as the funniest joke imaginable and I just started laughing. A month ago I was the girlfriend of Jacob Swensen. I had been a college graduate, a Texan, an American. Yesterday I was a woman with long black hair. I bent over double laughing at that Q-tip in the mirror. I couldn’t believe that this Q-tip had the audacity to masquerade as me. That’s when I pulled my cigarette lighter out of my jeans pocket. I had to get rid of that haircut before it made me completely crazy.

I didn’t actually do any damage. The only reason I got caught was because a custodian pushing a cart full of cleaning supplies walked in just as I held the lighter up to a single strand of hair. She yelled out something I didn’t catch. She turned and ran back out. About two seconds later a U.S. Airways suit ran in, her blue pumps clacking on the linoleum, her arms pumping in this odd, jerky motion within her matching blue jacket. But I was merely smoking a cigarette by then. Regardless, when the police came, they escorted me out of the airport just the same.

There wasn’t much else they could do. I wasn’t a minor and I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. I wasn’t even from Topeka. When the cop asked me why I had held a cigarette lighter to my head, I said, “If you

had this haircut, wouldn’t you have set your hair on fire?” If the guy had had a sense of humor, he might’ve laughed. Instead, he just stood there with this expression that a bullfrog might have worn. Maybe he’d spent too much time in that airport. Or maybe he’d sped through all the plot points of all the novels in all the bookstores. Or spent too much time in a blue vinyl chair in that airport. Or waited for one of those connecting flights to speed him away from this place and all the yellowed grass outside but, somehow, he had never been able to leave.

After a night of smoking cigarettes and drinking bad coffee in a Waffle House near the airport while staring out the storefront window at the cars that passed by, I considered my options. I was afraid to try to book another plane flight out of Topeka. I was paranoid they might have me on some specially circulated blacklist of nutcases who were not allowed to enter the Topeka, Kansas, airport. So soon after the sun rose, I caught a ride to the airport from one of the waitresses getting off her shift. But at the airport I rented a car.

I showed up at Meredith’s duplex in a suburb just outside of Houston in the middle of the night. My car lights reflected onto the large living room window as I swung into her driveway, causing two white lights to shine back at me for a moment from the dark glass. Despite the awkwardness between us, she let me sleep on her couch and channel surf and cry and grieve my hair and eat ramen noodles for two months so I didn’t have to venture out of the house. When my hair grew back its natural color by a couple of inches, I got a buzz cut from a guy who had the very normal name of Steve. Steve ran an old-fashioned barber shop near the university. Then with my new super short raven hair, I bought a plane ticket for Paris with some money my mother sent me as a graduation gift. I made sure the flight didn’t connect anywhere. It was a straight shot halfway around the globe. I wasn’t going all the way, as I’d once planned, but I thought half might do. I bought the complete works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and never looked back.

KNIT

by Angela Townsend

Imay have barely passed Physics, but I declare to you: there are objects larger than their size. They are seldom marquee trinkets. Diamond earrings and first-edition Whitmans attract eyes and adulation. Greater powers belong to oddfellows of no renown.

Irene is the quietest volunteer at Cat Haven. Her eyes sit quietly behind bangs so wispy that they appear to ask permission. She wears puffer vests through New Jersey’s four seasons, and she washes and folds towels that have been taxed by one hundred homeless cats. When I greet her by name, she seems surprised. When I once told her she is one of my favorite people, she said she wants to be more like a cat.

When Irene appeared in my office with a brown paper bag, I hung up on my donor. Fundraising can wait. Quiet volunteers should not.

“I hope I’m not bothering you.” She was

halfway back to the door.

“Of course not!”

Irene lowered herself carefully beside Ramona, my one-eyed feline office mate with hair like 1980s Tina Turner. “I want to show you something.” Ramona chirruped.

“We both want to see,” I laughed.

“Well, there’s a little story first.” Irene stroked Ramona’s swirls. “I won’t take much of your time.”

I wished I could surgically remove such sentences from her head, but I knew only cats have such powers. “Please, tell me.”

“So, my sister just had hip surgery. She’s a very active person, and having to sit still is killing her.”

“I can imagine.”

“But she’s following doctor’s orders.” Ramona puddled in Irene’s lap with great force. “So, she had to come up with something to stay, you know, sane.”

“You can only read so many magazines,” I empathized.

“Right. She wanted to be more productive than that.” Irene steadied Ramona, who was rolling ecstatically. “I’m the same way.”

“That makes three of us,” I admitted. “That’s one of the reasons I need to be around cats. They are born with Ph.D.s in being.”

Ramona’s delight and poor depth perception were a dizzy duo. “Don’t fall, baby girl,” Irene cooed. “Right. Exactly. So, Lizzie – that’s my sister – she came up with, well, kind of a mission.”

“I’m excited to hear where this is going.”

Irene took a deep breath and reached into the brown bag. “She’s making these.” It was as dense as a dumpling. I took it in my hand and felt theology thunder down my spine. A woman with a titanium hip had summoned white yarn in concentric circles until it formed a kitten. She had coaxed cotton into four fat feet. A wisp of black became eyes, nose, and an inverted mouth, perpetually asking: “Me?”

I may be known for hyperbole, but I scoured the star cluster in vain for words adequate to this moment. “Irene, this is one of the most magical things I have seen in my life.” I wanted to take her by both shoulders. “Do you have any idea how special this is?”

“They’re cute, right?”

“They’re more than cute.” I couldn’t explain what I was feeling. “There are more?”

“She made thirty.” Irene paused. “She wants to keep going. Do you think anyone will want them?”

I scraped the limits of language. “Do you think cats like cheese?”

Irene laughed, my greatest accomplishment of the week. “The idea was that Cat Haven could sell them to raise money. Lizzie doesn’t want any acknowledgment or anything. She was just hoping they would help.”

I couldn’t stop looking in the knit cat’s eyes. “Irene, there is something about these that is…”

“They’re cute, right?”

I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I decided there was everything right with me. “They’re…more.”

“You can have that one.”

“I wasn’t going to let you take it back,” I confessed.

I paid thirty dollars for the cat and felt guilty it wasn’t more. I called the management team into my office. “Look what Irene Jennings’s sister made.”

“It’s cute,” Katherine nodded.

“My daughter would love it,” Rachel agreed. “Or is it meant to be a cat toy?”

“NO!” I clutched the cat to my heart, where it belonged. “No, it’s a treasure, it’s—”

“—we can probably get ten bucks for each one.” Katherine was Director of Operations for many fine reasons: pragmatism, understatement, relentless responsibility.

I was Director of Development for just one: free-roaming enthusiasm. “They’re worth more than ten dollars. They’re going to touch people’s souls.”

“You’re a goober.”

“That’s a fact. But mark my words.”

We agreed to $20 per cat. We agreed to sell them at our annual “Catoberfest.” I agreed with myself that it is appropriate, at age forty-two, to carry your white crochet cat from room to room for the express purpose of happiness.

And you look them in the beady eyes and feel better.”

Nobody believed me. I accepted this. As with their real-world inspiration, the cats would have to do the work themselves.

They were eighty strong by Catoberfest, a kaleidoscopic pyramid in a picnic basket big enough to tote a human. If you were a person who has ever had a single dream, you could find a cat in coordinating colors. Quietly, collectively, they asked: “Me?”

I knew Lizzie Jennings on sight, and we embraced like full sisters. “My favorite artist!”

“You love my cats!” Her eyes filled with tears. My eyes filled with tears.

“The world needs your cats. I can’t explain it. How’s your hip?”

“The best thing that happened to me all year!” She giggled, turning as magenta as the cat at the top of the pyramid. “Without the surgery, I wouldn’t have met them. Made them. But also…met them. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes magnificent sense.”

Meanwhile, Lizzie Jennings and her gleaming hip raised the commodity rate of cotton. The next time I saw Irene, she was riding a laundry cart into my office like a chariot. She was unrecognizable. She was sinking into a ball pit of technicolor dumpling cats.

“Lizzie made fifty!”

“Lizzie is going to make history.” I had to grip my chair for composure. They came in magenta and cerulean and rollicking rainbows. There were stripes and speckles and at least one wearing suspenders. Ramona fell off the edge of my desk. I did not blame her.

“Lizzie wants to meet you.” Irene whispered. “I’m going to get to meet Lizzie?”

“She’s coming to Catoberfest. I told her all the nice things you said about her cats.”

I told my mother about the cats. “They sound cute,” she had said.

“Do you think they’ll make Cat Haven any money?”

“Yes,” I set my answer like a jewel in a caveat. “But that’s the least I expect from them. And I say that as the lady in charge of raising money.” I hesitated. “You’re going to think I’m a feral lunatic, but I think these cats are going to go forth and accomplish good in this world.”

“They’re not cute.” I did not understand people, not even my favorite person. “They’re extraordinary. They make you feel better about absolutely everything.”

“Sweetheart. You always loved stuffed animals.”

“They’re not stuffed animals.”

speaks at town hall meetings about the plight of the homeless and the need for more butterfly way stations. Today she whispered.

“If I never see these guys again, I’m going to feel sad. Does that sound ridiculous?”

“That sounds positively sage.”

Harriet bought three.

“They will comfort me!” Lana, the biological incarnation of an exclamation point, couldn’t decide between her top five. Lana was Cat Haven’s comforter, burbling Broadway show tunes to cats with kidney disease. “They will yell at me until I laugh!”

There were only eleven left when my mother arrived. She bought T-shirts and made donations and visited Ramona and my boss. She interrogated me – “Are you staying hydrated amid all this hubbub?” – and she smuggled me Diet Cokes while I listened to donors’ stories of cats and husbands past and present.

The strongest woman I know glanced in the direction of the cats and staggered.

Lizzie smiled. “I will make more.”

I watched my mother walk the labyrinth of crochet rows, hypnotized by soft spirals. I watched her follow the concentric circles to the little mouth: “Me?” I watched her pace slow from Manhattan to Eden as she picked one, no, two, identical rainbow cats.

“You have the white one?” she confirmed.

“I do.”

I told the supermarket cashier. I told the elderly neighbor who kept me posted on his “prostrate.” I offered to mail one to my halfsister in Wisconsin.

“What do you do with them?” she asked. “You love them. And you marvel at them.

We witnessed the knitting process all day. Brenda, one of Cat Haven’s surliest donors, took an orange dumpling and held it above her head. “I’m going to name him Galileo.” Brenda has an MBA and a seat on the Board of Merck. She excoriates me for my overuse of adverbs in acknowledgment letters. She donates several towels each year and once requested a private meeting with our Executive Director to explain the absence of her name from our Benefactor Wall. “This little guy is going to make me happy every time I look at him,” she sighed. Harriet, who lives on my heart’s crowded podium of favorite volunteers, did not intend to buy any of the cats. She had been in the “cute” camp, inoculated against enchantment as she stacked them in their basket. But as Catoberfest spent its oompahs, and the pyramid shrank, Harriet’s eyes were opened.

“I realized something,” she whispered. Harriet stands six feet, two inches – taller in her perpetual peace-sign ball cap – and cannot get her volume below a nine. Harriet

She held the twins to either side of my cheeks. “The white one is you. These are your Pappy and me. And we will always be hugging you.”

“They’re cute, huh?”

She scrunched her mouth. “There’s something about them.”

At the end of the day, Irene ran to me, so warm she’d taken off her vest. “Daisy! We sold them all!”

“Of course we did!”

“But there’s one more!” She was laughing, breathless. Lizzie caught up as quickly as she could. They looked at each other, coconspirators in huggable victory. Irene nodded. Lizzie reached into her purse.

“It’s Ramona.” She presented me with a oneeyed cat, embellished with golden fringe.

“It’s everything right in the world.” This was not hyperbole.

The sign on the basket said “Knit Cats.” Next Catoberfest, I will use my power as Development Director to impose a revision. We can call them Cosmology Cats. We can call them Comfort Cats. We can call them Lizzie’s Life-Changing Love Offering. And we will charge at least $30 per “Me?”

THE POLITE KID

by Shannon Viola

Pigeon-toed, dirty dishwater blonde Summer Simpkins was the polite kid at her school. She never felt the compulsion to speak her mind or offer her opinion. She only opened her mouth when a polite token was required of her. Like a please mumbled after a request for the bathroom pass, a thank you uttered to the cafeteria lady, or an Excuse me? when a classmate forgot to give her a worksheet they had been handing out to the class. To Summer, silence was as necessary as having a blanket balled up and tucked under her chin at bedtime, but it repelled her classmates. Many of them unconsciously registered the occasional shifts in the tone of her silence from sniveling to malevolent. These shifts occurred whenever Summer would violently twist a lock of hair, the telltale sign that she was ruminating too deeply on the fact that everyone who was supposed to be her friend was satisfied only knowing her as “the polite kid.”

Her older, golden blond brother, Ash, was the only person Summer did not unnerve. Ash saw how loud and fun Summer was when she was catching fireflies, playing Monopoly, and hauling in lobster traps with their dad. He saw the Greek mythology books piled up on her nightstand and listened to her retell those myths when they went camping. In the darkness of their tent, her voice, cataloging glens and grayeyed goddesses and serpents, seemed to be coming outside of the flapping plastic walls. It was like her voice was intertwined with the wind. How does she do that? Ash would wonder. He was always in awe of her.

And because the kids at school were in awe of Ash, and his effortless athleticism and his golden hair, they did not follow through on their threats to Summer. Devon Cutter threatened to tie Summer to the schoolyard’s chain-link fence if she did not stop staring at him, but Ash had been there to break Summer’s stare. Catia Nelson once stole Summer’s lunchbox when she was in the bathroom, and Ash wrenched it from her small pale hands and returned it to his sister.

Once, during a fire drill on a chilly day,

Josh Seward was laughing and pointing at Summer’s chest because she had refused to wear her training bra that morning, and so her nipples were obvious through the thin film of her blouse. When Summer folded her arms over her chest, Josh laughed louder, pointing at her as if she were a court jester.

Summer decided that if this is what puberty got her, then she didn’t want it at all. Josh’s dopey laughter ceased when Ash stepped forward and draped his jean jacket over Summer. Ash told Josh to fuck off, and he did.

To Summer, Ash said, “You can just tell him to fuck off next time. If you don’t say anything, they’ll never leave you alone.” “No, thank you,” Summer said. What she didn’t say was that it was different for Ash. When he spoke, kids listened. When she spoke, they mangled her words and laughed at the mess they had made of them, as if she had made it herself.

#

Ash had to graduate to high school eventually, leaving Summer defenseless in eighth grade. Summer began her vulnerable year bearing the burden of an existentially complex July and August.

She got her period in July. Her mother had noticed a brown blotch on Summer’s shorts when they were in the grocery store. While her mother rushed around asking every woman whether she had a pad, Summer plopped down in the peanut butter aisle and cried so hard her nose bled. She realized that she was bleeding from top to bottom, and that made her kick a jar of Skippy.

Her period split her in two. She was both the girl she always had been and always wanted to be, and the woman lurking behind that girl. Her first period kicked off a long battle in which Summer would fight to keep the girl and the woman ignorant of each other.

August’s existential crisis was due to the visceral realization that Ash would not be at school to protect her. She knew that there was a latent hatred coiled in the scary kids from school, and it was constricting tighter

with each passing day. When the fear of the expulsion of all that compressed hatred blurred the words in her books, she played with her Barbies. She made chitons for them out of old T-shirts and made them act out Greek myths. If the scary kids at school saw her playing with Barbies, they would flay her alive. Yet somehow, doing something in secret that was flagrantly unacceptable in their eyes dampened her fear. #

When Summer walked into her eighth grade classroom, she heard a girl laughing the laugh that girls her age forced just so that someone, anyone, would notice them. The laugh was coming from a girl she had never seen before.

Summer could tell the girl was from away because her hair was long and flatironed, unlike the girls in their town who learned long ago that the Atlantic winds constantly whipping the sea salt in the air would destroy any heat styling within minutes. This girl had a plastic baggie of make-up on her desk and was coating her eyelashes with Great Lash mascara. Girls from their town didn’t wear make-up because their mothers sneered at things like concealer and glitter. The girl was prattling on to Ash’s old crush, Briella Rhodes, who was hardly listening because she was so enraptured anticipating what color goop the girl would put on next.

Summer scanned the room for her nametag on a desk and saw that it was next to the new girl. She sat down quietly.

“Hi, Summer,” Briella said. Briella wasn’t one of the kids who had haunted Summer’s nightmares these past months. But Summer still never spoke to her, because Ash used to be in love with her, and she didn’t want to say anything to Briella that would make Ash angry. Briella smiled sweetly. “I like your new shoes.”

This required a polite response, so Summer coughed, “Thank you.” She picked up her brand new Pink Pearl eraser and began pricking it with her thumbnail.

Without taking her eyes off of the compact mirror into which she was applying the umpteenth coat of mascara, the new

girl said, “I’m Mia Millet, I’m new. My family comes here every summer, because we used to live in Virginia, but my dad said he was tired of the rat race, so he wanted to move here.”

Summer, head-bowed, kept pricking her velvety eraser.

Mia whipped her head toward Summer. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes, sorry,” Summer said. She looked up, to see whether Mia was mad.

When their eyes locked, Mia said, “Oh my God.” Mia pronounced God as Gawd. “You have the most perfect lips I’ve ever seen. Don’t you think?” she asked Briella. Briella nodded fanatically.

“I have exactly what you need, hold on.” Mia pulled a jelly green lip gloss out of her plastic baggie. She held it up to Summer. “Come here.”

Summer glanced at Briella. She looked jealous. Summer leaned forward and let Mia shellac her lips. The lip gloss smelled like apples. Summer noticed that the fingernails on Mia’s hand that held the lip gloss wand were painted gold, and that the fingernails on her other hand were bare.

“Now, like this,” Mia smacked her lips together.

Summer mimicked her.

“Why is your other hand not painted?” Briella asked.

Mia’s brow furrowed in confusion for a second, and then she rolled her eyes playfully and stuck up her bare hand. “I’m so weird, I finish one hand, get so totally distracted, and forget to paint this one. It’s weird, but it was kind of my thing at my old school.”

All day long, Summer felt the gloss soaking into her lips molecule by molecule. The house was empty when she got home. She rummaged in the darkest depths of her mother’s bathroom cabinets to find the one bottle of nail polish that had ever existed in their home. It was sparkly red. Her aunt brought it from Boston many Christmases ago, and now Summer found it toppled over and pooled in its own gummy spillage. She pried it off, grabbed a toothpick from the kitchen, and brought them both into her room. She chose the Barbie that looked the most like Mia and took her chiton off and changed her into a dress and high heels. She dipped the toothpick into the nail polish and gingerly painted the Barbie’s fingernails.

Once one hand was painted, Summer wandered around her empty house begging something to distract her to her core.

#

From that first day of school until late October, Summer became less interested in Greek myths and more interested in absorbing Mia’s every move.

Mia would walk up to kids and introduce herself by purring, “Mia Millet, charmed, I’m sure,” and then cock an over-plucked eyebrow at whatever gawky kid was left scratching their head trying to figure out what they were supposed to say to that. Before they could open their mouths, Mia would order them to add her on Facebook. No one in the class knew what Facebook was. It was 2009, and they had all just recently been allowed by their parents to use AIM. And then Mia flounced in, smelling like the mall in New Hampshire where there was no sales tax, bragging about how many likes she got on her profile picture, and suddenly, everyone wanted Facebook.

Tansy Grey was the first to make a profile, and the day after Mia had accepted her friend request, Tansy came running into school with the Nutrigrain bar she always ate for breakfast and fell into her desk in front of Summer. Tansy leaned over to her desk buddy, Kyla Wendell, and lilted, “Well last night you know I got Facebook, right?” Kyla was ravenous for more information. Tansy explained that when she was checking out Mia’s profile—here she giggled so hard that flecks of the Nutrigrain bar flew out of her mouth and onto Kyla’s hand—when she saw what Mia put on her profile—she banged her head on the desk, still giggling— she was like, no way!

Kyla said, “Spit it out, woman!”

“Mia is FIFTEEN!” Tansy yelled, and Kyla howled, and then they bent their heads together to look at Facebook on Tansy’s iPod Touch, so Summer couldn’t hear what they were saying anymore.

By recess, everyone had heard that Mia was old enough to be in high school. What was even funnier was that she would turn sixteen in December.

That afternoon during silent reading, Summer saw Tansy write a note on a Post-It. Tansy folded the note, tucked it into a fist, and threw one arm behind her on her chair and twisted her spine as if trying to crack her back. She turned the other way and surreptitiously tossed the note onto Mia’s desk at the same time.

Summer peeked at the note as Mia unfolded it.

Y r u so old? Not trying to b mean btw. Just want 2 kno.

Mia wrote back, no worries :) i got held back alot.

Mia didn’t bother folding the note. She got up, placed it on Tansy’s desk, took the bathroom pass, and left the classroom.

In band, Summer was forced to sit next to the scary girls because she played the flute like them. Summer heard Catia tell the others that her brother said that Mia had taken off her shirt for the redheaded pimply boy who worked at the deli on the wharf. At the actual deli? No, at the shipyard next door. Bra on or off? On. Was Mia even dating that guy? No, she’s just a whore. He’s such a creeper though, what the hell!

Summer saw that the gossip buoyed Mia. She met the questions about her stupidity with her chin held high and a canned response about her possessing a unique mind. Once the eighth grade boys heard about the redheaded pimply boy, they began asking her out, but she knocked each of them down like dominos, declaring loudly that they were little boys. She dangled her alleged promiscuity over the boys so that they gave her their Vitamin Waters or fetched the fork she had forgotten in the lunch line. She used her advanced age to assert dominance over the girls. Mia commandeered the handicap stall in the girls’ bathroom as her own and told them no one was allowed to use it but her, and they fell in line.

Like a dictator doling out carefully curated clemency, Mia picked one of the girls to be her best friend every few weeks. Mia would braid her hair during lunch. Every recess, they walked around the yard with their arms hooked together. Every hour, Mia drenched herself, and the girl she was currently attached to, with Burberry Brit, so even if you had not known which girl was Mia’s best friend at that moment, you could’ve sniffed her out.

Summer watched Mia suck girls in and then fling them out of her orbit. Eventually, Mia would pick her. There were only so many girls in their class. By Summer’s calculations, even if she was the last girl to be chosen, she would still be chosen by mid-March.

While she waited, she acted it out with her Barbies so that when it happened, she would know exactly what to say.

The only respite Summer got from thinking about when Mia would choose her was when she went to Ash’s soccer games and cheered and stomped her feet on the bleachers like everyone else. Ash would wave to her while jogging down the field. In the bleacher in front of her, the skinny girls who were all Mia’s age turned around to see who Ash was waving to while the bleachers

were still shaking and the people were still cheering. In those whirling moments, Summer wasn’t scared of high school anymore.

On the first day everyone was wearing their fat winter coats, Mia stomped up to Summer at recess in a cloud of Burberry Brit and candy corn.

“What’s up?” Mia asked, smacking the candy corn into a visible sludge in her back teeth.

Summer stopped twisting a lock of hair and cleared her throat to say the line she had rehearsed through the mouth of her Barbie the night before. “Nothing much.”

“I found your brother on Facebook.” Mia grinned. “I think he’s my soulmate.” Mia hooked her arm through Summer’s forcefully. Summer was worried she wouldn’t know what to say as they strolled, but she was pleased to find that Mia did all of the talking. It was easy to talk to Mia because Mia would not accept detours in a conversation. Mia would hop right over any obstacle Summer had thrown into her chain of thought and continue plodding on toward the conversation she wanted to have.

Their friendship began.

Summer went to Mia’s house almost every day after school. They swigged chai concentrate right from the carton and collected seashells on the private beach that abutted Mia’s house. Summer made a Facebook account under Mia’s supervision. While lying on the white wall-to-wall carpet in Mia’s room, they read the Clique books out loud; Mia read the dialogue for every member of the Pretty Committee while Summer had to read the lines for Claire.

Whenever Summer was left alone in Mia’s room, when Mia and her mom were fighting downstairs or when Mia was in the kitchen making microwave popcorn for them to toss in each other’s mouths, Summer pretended that she was Mia. She retained the quiet, erudite wisps of her soul while stealing the broad, brash strokes of Mia’s. Cloaked in this hybrid personality, she’d prance around the room, lie on the bed, and stare at the bookcase, with all of the knickknacks and Halloween candy wrappers and YA novels, and think, I’ve had this bookcase since I was a baby in Virginia. She’d plunge her hands into the jumbled underwear drawer and massage the bras and no-show socks and thongs and think, I should do laundry soon. This was Summer’s favorite thing to do at Mia’s house.

One day, they had just gone up to her room after eating three bologna sandwiches each, when Mia lifted her leg like a flamingo and ran her hand furiously along her calf. “I need to shave my legs, like, so bad, so I’m gonna go do that.” She shut herself in the en suite bathroom.

Summer stood up straight and threw her shoulders back. She wiggled her toes on the plush carpet. It would take Mia a long time to shave her legs, because Mia didn’t stop shaving at her knee like Summer did. She took advantage of this time to investigate Mia’s closet.

Upon opening the closet, Summer realized she had found the epicenter of the smell she associated with Mia’s house. Summer knelt down in the piles of clothes and felt around, filling her lungs with the smell. As she crawled deeper into the closet, Mia’s sloppily-hung dresses grazed the top of her head and sent a shiver down her spine. She sat against the back wall and tucked her knees up.

There was a hatbox to her right. Summer opened it.

It was full of Barbies.

Mia’s Barbies were dressed in what looked like bespoke party dresses, bikinis, and skinny jeans. Most of them, however, were naked. Every single Ken doll was naked. Summer sat a naked girl with braids and freckles on top of her knees. Summer was rubbing the nub of the Barbie’s nose with her fingertip when Mia burst into the closet with legs gleaming like dolphin skin.

“Um, hello?!” Mia shrieked. Furiously, she parted her hanging clothes, and a belt fell on Summer’s head.

Summer hid the Barbie behind her back.

“You nosy freak!” Mia yelled. “Get out of my house!”

“No!” Summer sat up on her knees, and she scooted toward Mia. “No, wait, I actually have an idea! We can use the Barbies to act out how you’re going to ask Ash out. Please, it’s a good idea!”

Her knees lost strength, and she fell forward at Mia’s feet.

Mia loomed, smelling like baby oil and spinning a story about why the Barbies were in her closet in the first place. She hadn’t played with them since she was, like, five, but her oldest brother had a long-term girlfriend that he was totally going to marry one day, and Mia wanted to save the Barbies to give to them if they ever had a baby daughter. Technically, they weren’t her Barbies, (because she had already bequeathed them

in spirit to the forthcoming niece), so maybe it would be a good idea to use them to learn about Ash and practice asking him out. As long as Summer never, ever told anyone about it.

“I never talk to anyone,” Summer said. “I only talk to you.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Mia said as she sat down. She took a brunette Barbie wearing a daisy sundress for herself and gave a naked Ken to Summer.

At first, their play was strictly professional. Summer spoke as Ash through Ken, and Mia spoke as her most confident self through Barbie. But then, they got silly. In response to Summer-Ash-Ken’s “Hi, Mia,” Mia-Barbie said, “Hey there, big boy!” Which got Summer giggling hysterically. Mia-Barbie then said, “Take me, Ash Simpkins, TAKE ME NOW!” and Mia-Barbie threw herself on top of Summer-Ash-Ken, and wiggled around a bit while panting, and then she lifted herself up and said, “And then he got her pregnant,” and then introduced another Barbie as the “two-timing hussy” that threatened to tear their love apart.

Once the two-timing hussy got involved, Mia and Summer were officially in the throes of imaginative play. They cycled through the story. Sometimes, the twotiming hussy wanted to take the baby. Or there was a catfight.

In every iteration, however, Mia always said, “And then he gets her pregnant.”

Eventually, Summer asked her what she meant by that.

“Um, do you not know?” Mia asked.

In sixth grade, Summer’s mother had refused to sign the permission slip that would have allowed her to participate in the single day of puberty and sex education. Summer stayed home that day, and she and her mom had gotten a haircut together.

Mia filled Summer in. While digesting this knowledge, Summer could not stop thinking about the redheaded pimply boy at the deli.

When she was done, Mia said, “Do you want to keep…” She couldn’t choke out the word, “playing,” so she just glanced at the dolls in flagrante delicto on the floor.

Summer did want to. She never wanted to stop.

They were still promenading and braiding and playing Barbies well past Thanksgiving, and even past Christmas. Summer had been Mia’s best friend for the longest out of any other girl, and yet, Summer had never slept over at Mia’s house.

All of the other girls had slept in Mia’s bed. Summer heard them talking about how Mia wore her older brother’s boxers as pajama shorts.

One night in early December, Mia and Summer were messaging on Facebook. Mia said that she was having a New Year’s Party. She wanted Summer to come over early and help decorate.

Mia Millet: n bring ur brother 2 da partee! I want to meet himmm

“Why?” Ash asked. Summer and Ash were in their basement, illuminated by the glow of the family computer. Ash was looming over Summer, who was sitting cross-legged in the rolling office chair.

Summer answered Mia.

Summer Simpkins: Why?

Mia Millet: bcuz i think we mite be meant 2 b.

Mia Millet: he accepted my fb friend reqwuest

Mia Millet: i stalked him last nite and hes suh cuhyuuute

Ash shook Summer in the office chair. “Tell her I don’t like her like that! Everybody adds everybody on Facebook, and I heard about her, she’s a freak.”

Summer started typing exactly what Ash had said, starting with, He thinks you are— “No!” Ash groaned. “Don’t say that exactly! Say something else!”

Their mother called Ash upstairs. He told Summer that when he came back down, it was his turn to use the computer.

Summer Simpkins: He’s not really looking to date anyone right now. Mia Millet: aww…bcuz i wuz gonna ask u 2 sleep over b4 da partee.

Summer’s mouth filled with drool. She could sleep in Mia’s bed? Only if Ash would come to the party? Summer asked if she could sleep over anyway.

Mia Millet: nah, i dont think its wurth it. Bcuz if he comes im gunna need like alot of time for u to prepare me 4 how i can impress him and we wuld need a hole sleepover 4 dat

Summer’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

Summer Simpkins: I’ll make him come.

Mia Millet: promise?

Summer Simpkins: I cross my heart and hope to die.

Mia Millet: perf

Summer approached the recruitment of Ash to Mia’s party with the level of fervor her mother wished she would show for singing hymns at church. She kicked her socked foot against his locked door with the same unbridled force with which her father wished she’d kick a soccer ball. She begged him with the self-assuredness her teacher wished she would apply to algebra. Ash, who usually melted to his little sister’s whims, was steadfast in his refusal. A few of his friends had gotten mixed up with Mia, and he didn’t want to be her next target. Frustrated by Ash’s uncharacteristic refusal of her, Summer resorted to a coping mechanism that always got her out of singing hymns, kicking soccer balls, and algebra: she cried. She pitched her body against his door and slid down to the ground. She wailed open-mouthed against the hardwood floor. Ash opened the door and said he’d only stay an hour. Summer sucked up her snot, grabbed onto his ankles, and thanked him profusely. Ash shook her off. For the first time in his life, he was wracked by the repellent chill that his friends said they felt whenever Summer looked at them for too long.

On New Year’s Eve, Mia told Summer to sit on her bed so that she could help her figure out what to wear. While Mia stripped down to her underwear, Summer stared at the closet door, which was ajar and leaking Mia’s smell. They would play Barbies soon. Summer was sure of it. They had been playing Barbies, for an hour or for just five minutes, every time she came over now. But first, Mia had to do something so performatively teenage that it would cancel out the Barbies. Today, Mia was trying on dresses she had gotten for Christmas that still had the tags on, and they had to debate over which one was slutty enough to turn Ash on, but not so slutty that her mom would demand she’d march right back on up to her room and change.

After concluding that a beige sequin dress was too much for a basement party, Summer stood up to go to the bathroom (and steal a lick of Mia’s toothpaste while she was in there). She had just stepped away from the bed when Mia squealed.

“Did you just get your period on my Pottery Barn white duvet?” Mia pointed at a maroon, pebble-sized spot on the duvet. Her dress was halfway down her torso, exposing a pink leopard print bra trimmed with black lace that was obviously a few cup sizes too big.

Summer buckled underneath a rush of hot embarrassment. Her vision went hazy. Before she dropped dead, she was able to eke out a polite response. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, sweetie pie.” With the dress still hanging off of her, Mia hugged Summer. The black lace itched Summer’s neck. “The first time is always scary.”

“It’s not the first time,” Summer said.

Mia pulled away. Suddenly, she seemed to remember that she was half-naked, so she shoved her arms back into the cap sleeves. Mia had shown disgust at many things— slugs, Michael Bublé, and brown mascara, to name a few—but the shade of disgust consuming her face now was hateful. It was the look of disgust Summer had expected when Mia had found her digging through her Barbies.

Mia’s mouth gnarled into a nasty pucker. She hugged herself and gripped her upper arms so forcefully that the skin around her fingers turned white. “I need to paint my nails now.” Summer watched Mia sit at her vanity and open her Tupperware of nail polishes. Mia lined the bottles up on her vanity one by one.

“Um…” Summer said.

“What?” Mia spat.

“Please may I borrow a pad? I’ll bring you back a replacement, as soon as I can.” “Go ask my mom.”

“May I please use one of yours?”

“I said, go ask my MOM!” Mia yelled. She only yelled like that when her mother asked her to empty the dishwasher.

Summer endured another hot rush of embarrassment when she asked Mrs. Millet for a pad. She took it back to Mia’s bathroom. Summer thought that maybe the reason why Mia didn’t have any pads was because she used tampons, and maybe Mia got angry because Summer was babyish.

Summer looked through Mia’s bathroom cabinets. Mia didn’t have any pads or tampons. Summer understood, with what was her first burst of womanly intuition, that Mia still hadn’t gotten her period even though she was sixteen. The look of disgust she had shown wasn’t due to the stain; it was due to Mia’s horrific realization that someone as diminutive and juvenile as Summer was a woman, and Mia herself was not. Mia had been disgusted by the capricious joke life was playing, with Summer as its proxy, against her. #

Mia decided on a black bodycon dress. She said it was “simple, classic, elegant.” She had painted one hand gold.

In the basement, Summer sat on the floor, dipping her tongue in a plastic flute of sparkling apple cider and twisting a lock of hair, while the party eddied around her. All of her classmates, the redheaded pimply boy and his friends that reeked of cigarettes, and a few high schoolers she recognized from Ash’s soccer games guffawed at their phones or pig-piled. Summer found it hard to breathe. The basement was dingy with the stench of stale cigarettes, Cheetos dust, and the Bath and Body Works oeuvre.

Mia had masked her bad mood and played the hostess-with-the-mostess once the guests started arriving. As Mia flitted around the room with the bottle of sparkling apple cider, Summer’s feet spasmed, because she couldn’t decide whether to get up and trail after Mia like she usually did. She was afraid that someone, especially the high school boys, might smell her period blood. Each time it dribbled out of her, she thought she smelled something that reminded her of the wharf at low tide.

Once everyone had their sparkling apple cider and was pretending to be drunk off it, Mia squatted near Summer. She said, “Ash isn’t here yet.”

Summer squirmed. “No, I’m sorry.”

“You promised me he would come.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If he doesn’t come,” Mia smiled and squinted, “I’m never talking to you again.” One of the high school girls called Mia over. Summer took her phone out of her sweaty palm. She texted Ash to ask when he was coming. She texted him fifteen individual exclamation marks until he responded: something better came up!! i’ll make it up 2 u.

Summer curled herself into a ball. Within the darkness she had built with her own body, she deleted all of the messages between her and Ash.

Mia pulled Summer’s head up by her scraggly ponytail. She said, “Everyone wants to know where Ash is?”

“He’s sick.”

“With what?”

“Swine flu.”

“I can always tell when you’re lying.”

Summer smelled low-tide.

Mia pivoted towards the party, picked a wedgie, and clapped. “Okay, everyone! We’re playing Truth or Dare. Circle up!”

The boys groaned, but Mia shushed them.

The game started innocently. Those who picked Truth were asked how many times they peed the bed, or if they had ever eaten a booger. Those who were dared made the fattest, wettest fart sound they could, or prank-called someone’s uncle. Everyone was laughing, and Summer thought it was funny too, but she didn’t want to laugh out loud just in case she laughed too loudly and someone noticed her and picked her next.

Then, Mia gave the game a sexual bent. She asked Catia whether she had ever seen her parents naked. She dared Briella to slowly suck on the redheaded pimply boy’s tobacco-stained pinkie. Kids started getting up to get a snack when it was Mia’s turn. They all avoided her gaze. Summer stared at a brown-black crumb stuck between the yarn loops of the carpet. Mia, inevitably, zeroed in on Summer. “Truth or Dare, girl?”

Summer picked up the crumb and rolled it between her fingers while she decided. “Too long,” Mia said. “You took too long, so I get to choose, and I choose Dare. Go hump that chair.”

Everyone chuckled, less out of hilarity and more out of relief that they weren’t dared to hump a chair.

“Go on,” Mia prodded Summer’s knee.

“No, thank you,” Summer said.

“Is it because you’re on your period,

Summer?”

“Oh shit,” said the redheaded pimply boy.

“Who’s Summer?” one of the high school girls said.

Pointing at Summer, Tansy said, “The quiet girl.”

The embarrassment in Summer’s body was white-hot. It was licking underneath her eyelids and melting her collarbone, eating down to her ribs.

“Summer doesn’t want to hump the chair,” Mia’s voice crackled with laughter, “because she’s on her period and she doesn’t use tampons. She only uses pads!”

“At least I have my period,” Summer murmured to the crumb in the rug. The heat of the embarrassment had loosened her vocal cords.

“What did she say?” the high school girl asked Tansy.

Mia lunged forward at Summer, landing on her hands. She was on all fours. “Excuse you?”

The heat had broken open Summer’s ribs. She yelled, “You’re jealous because I have my period and you don’t!”

Laughter, smelling of apple cider and tinged with secondhand embarrassment, erupted. There was a ringing in Summer’s ears as she scrambled up on her feet, which had fallen asleep. The laughter, like an encroaching flood, shoved her up the stairs with a primal, intrinsic need for survival. She opened the basement door into the Millets’ kitchen.

Mrs. Millet jumped a little when she saw Summer. “Oh, honey,” she said as she put down the cupcake she was frosting, “you scared me.”

Mr. Millett peered up at her from behind The New Yorker. “This one’s like a ghost moving around the house,” he said. “You never know where she’s coming from or going to.” “I would like to go home, please,” Summer said. Her chest sputtered with a suppressed sob.

Mrs. Millet clucked. She came over to Summer and bent down, her bejeweled hands on her veiny knees. She fixed Summer with a look of pity. “Is it hard for you?”

“Is what hard?”

“Making friends.”

Summer realized that Mrs. Millet’s body, dimpled and shaped like an amphora, was hideous.

Summer said, “May I use the bathroom, please?”

“Yes, honey,” Mrs. Millet straightened. “You know where it is.”

As she waddled away (the pins and needles in her feet had returned), Summer heard the weak snap of a page in The New Yorker turning, and Mr. Millet said, “That’s one polite kid.”

Summer floated into Mia’s bathroom and shut herself in. She had come up here to gulp in the last of Mia she’d ever get, but now Mia’s curated environment did not feel as fertile as it once had. In the mirror, Summer’s reflection wasn’t glowing anymore; now, it was marred by flecks of dried toothpaste that had flown off of Mia’s electric toothbrush and onto the glass. She could hear the kids in the basement laughing even though she was on the top floor. She sat on the tiles, wanting to curl up into a ball again, but she ended up on all fours, like Mia had been in the basement, listening to them all laugh. She silent-screamed against the floor, mouth gaping, strings of spit flying, blood rushing to her face as she strained to keep the scream down. She silent-screamed so hard she got a nosebleed.

She stuffed her nose with toilet paper and marched into Mia’s closet. She unearthed the two Barbies they always played with and gripped them upside-down by their legs, one in each hand.

She ran down the polished wood circular staircase, and on the landing, she slid a bit in her socks, but righted herself quickly. She was proud of this maneuver, as it was the most athletic thing she had ever done.

She ignored Mrs. Millet’s worried warbles as she ran past the kitchen and threw the door to the basement open.

“Look!” Summer screamed as she came down the stairs. Her voice hit an unholy pitch as she screamed, “Mia still plays with Barbies!”

At the base of the stairs, she realized that the toilet paper in her nose had fallen out and that blood was dripping down her lips and chin. Summer flipped the Barbies right-side up and shook them and yelled, “This is the evidence!”

Summer could never remember whether the kids looked shocked, or were laughing, or were even paying attention to her. All she can remember is Mia rushing through the crowd with the intent to murder her.

Summer dropped the Barbies and ran upstairs.

Summer weaved through the living room, skirting around floral couches and dusty bookshelves, trying to find a hiding spot as Mia, blubbering, chased after her.

Mia could not run fast in her tight dress. Summer realized that the safest place for her to go would be her own house. It wasn’t so far away. She could run there.

Just evading Mia’s grasp on her hoodie, Summer opened the French doors in the living room that led to the backyard and the Millets’ private beach. The purple-black of the sky bled into the blue-black of the ocean. The vigilant beating of the waves against the rocks propelled Summer’s sprint around the corner of the house.

“I’m going to rip your hair out!” Mia screamed. Her sobbing made her voice sound like an actual eighth grader’s. “I’m going to scratch your eyes out and kill you!” Summer wasn’t scared. How could she be, when she was flying over frosted grass in her socks, running as fast as she ever had? How could she be scared when it was so much fun to be chased? It was like how she would chase Ash when they were little. Except this time, Summer was the one being chased.

Once she reached the driveway, Mia’s ragged breathing was close behind her. “You need to be locked away!”

Summer was running down the long twisting driveway, skidding on ice, sucking up frigid air, panting, tripping, laughing. She could lose Mia, of course she could! All she had to do was turn right at the end of the driveway, and she knew her way home.

“Fuck you!” Mia screamed.

“Fuck you!” Summer screamed back. The words came out of her in massive puffs of hot air. She laughed to herself, mouth open so wide that the cold air chilled her gums. She was a few bounds away from the road now.

Summer veered right expecting to coast into the endless darkness, but her socks slipped against a patch of black ice and the top half of her body vaulted forward and her head made a thick thump against something cold and hard. Oh yeah, she thought. The mailbox. While falling backwards, she slipped on the black ice again, and then the back of her head hit the ground and it was pinging, thrumming, the skin on the back of her neck crystallizing against ice and grit. Now that her feet were still, she felt how cold they were.

While drifting off to sleep, Summer wondered whether Mrs. Millett had heard her say “Fuck you,” and if she did, whether or not she’d tell her mom. #

Summer’s synchronic dreams, each with their own storyline, morphed into each other balletically against a flat black stage.

In one dreamlike projecture of motion, she could breathe underwater. She’d dive into the ocean, swim around, and then climb back up onto land, and lie on the rocks and cry because she couldn’t find Ash, not on land, not even in the water. In another, she was living in the world of a fantasy audiobook she liked to fall asleep to. She lived the adventure of the book as the princess whose identity had been stolen, striving to reclaim it. In another, she fell in love with a man she felt she had known before, and they got married and had twin baby girls and a big backyard from which she harvested acorns and dandelions to feed her family.

Every now and then, she would hear someone from her old life. Ash’s voice, echoey and omniscient, flowed down from the sky as he read her favorite book about Greek myths while she milled acorns from her big backyard into flour. Then, her parents’ voices, embedded within a ringing in her ear while she rode side-saddle through an enchanted forest, listing all of the funny things she did as a kid.

Once, while swimming through coral reefs, she felt a wetness distinct from the water around her on the fingertips of her left hand. She thought she could hear someone talking to her, but the water warped the voice, rendering it alien.

The coma felt like a handful of lifetimes, even though it only lasted a week. Each dream was as rich and nuanced as Summer’s real life. When she could finally feel the scratch of the breathing tube in her throat, she tried to take a souvenir from those dreams with her, but as soon as she cupped them in her palm, she forgot why they were important.

The first thing she saw when she woke up wasn’t her father, sleeping and slumped in an armchair in the corner, or the bouquets, or the whiteboard on the wall that read, Summer Mae Simpkins, DOB: 07/21/1996. Her head was turned slightly to the left, so when she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw were her fingernails, painted gold.

She turned her head to the right. The fingernails on her other hand were bare. She could not remember anyone she knew who would get so distracted that they’d forget to paint the other hand.

*

HOMESTEAD

by Gregory Byrd

Of all the things he remembered about his father, it was the feeling in his mouth of eating corn on the cob, part of it chewed already by his father’s dentures and some deep intimacy in sharing the same food.

They were in Homestead, on the mainland just above the Keys, and they had driven up to South Miami to deliver a truckload of furniture. Ed couldn’t imagine why anyone up there would want to buy a bedroom suite from their store when they could surely buy something just as well in Miami, but his father had just started into the furniture business so he would deliver wherever he could. It was on a Saturday, and they woke up early and made it to the store where they packed the white Ford pickup full of the bedroom suite. His father could pack a truck so full that there was no empty space, like a set of kids’ blocks when they came new and then it took all day to put them back in the box in the right order. Years later, Ed’s wife would remark on how he could pack so much into small spaces. Something in the DNA, she said.

So Ed and his father drove north on US 1, over the 18 mile stretch between Key Largo and the mainland, parallel to the only pipe carrying water to the Keys. Sometimes there would be a bad accident and a semi or something would go off the road and break that water line and everyone would have to conserve water and buy bottled water until the Aqueduct Authority repaired it and even when it was up to pressure you couldn’t drink it for a couple of days. Most of the road went through Everglades swamp but sometimes there were roads that cut straight out into the emptiness. One ended in a limestone quarry that you could see far down the road and that road made Ed think of the one time he went hunting with his father. It was five years ago, when he was maybe thirteen, and they’d driven the Econoline panel van his father still owned from when the store serviced televisions down a rutted muddy road into the Everglades. They brought his father’s friend Rick Wardell, who was a plasterer with a receding hairline, a drooping black mustache, and a hooked

hawk nose. His sons called him Rueben the Cuban and Ed had heard stories about Rick being a commando of some sort. Before the hunting trip, Ed and his father had gone to Rick’s house where Rick took his guns out of the garage — a pump shotgun, the carbine Ed would carry, a 30-30 like they carried in Westerns and a big, black .45 automatic. The men looked at it with a sort of dangerous reverence. Rick dropped the clip and cleared the round from the chamber and handed it to Ed’s father who measured its weight and feel in his hand. They did not hand it to the boy and Rick put it away. They decided that the shotgun and the rifles would work and that the boy could shoot the carbine.

They didn’t shoot anything in the Everglades. It turned cold, freezing cold, and they stood outside the van, the men smoking cigarettes and passing around a flask of bourbon which made Ed cough, though he tried hard not to. After they went to sleep in the van, it rained all night and they heard swamp buggies growling through the mud and automatic weapons being fired. In the morning, the sun was out and the rain had stopped, but there were no deer. They found that the van was stuck in mud up to its axles and his father walked a few miles to the outpost for help. While he and Rick waited at the van, Rick brought out the .22 pistol he had carried on his hip. He impaled one of the paper plates they’d used that morning on a stick and jabbed it into the mud 15 feet away.

“Here,” he said to Ed. “Let’s do some target shooting. You ever fire a pistol?”

“No. Just my BB gun. I shot a rat once.” Rick placed the pistol in his hand. It was black and squarish like the .45, but thinner and, he imagined, lighter than the bigger gun.

“Here’s the safety,” Rick said. “Flip it off, then pull the slide back to chamber a round.” Ed did so, the action sliding smoothly and quietly. It smelled of oil and felt somehow clean. Ed aimed down along his arm. “Now aim down the barrel and squeeze the trigger.”

Ed expected the gun to jump and scare him when it went off, but it seemed hardly more of a shock than his BB rifle when he

had it pumped up a lot. He fired again and hit the edge of the plate. Another shot hit closer to the center. Rick stepped back and lit a cigarette, watched Ed fire the pistol.

“It holds ten rounds,” Rick said, and soon Ed said, “Well, I’m all finished.”

“Are you sure of that? Did you count each shot?”

Ed remembered exactly how that moment felt. He was sure. He’d counted. He thought for a moment of showing Rick how sure he was. The pistol hung there at the end of his arm, empty, and he thought about raising it to his head and pulling the trigger, hearing the click of the hammer and smiling at Rick. Instead, he pointed at the paper plate again, pulled the trigger. He jumped a little when the gun fired — not so much from the sound of the gun and not so much from the surprise of there being a bullet in the gun, but from the immediate understanding that he had come very close to killing himself. Somehow, he felt that Rick knew what he had been planning to do.

“Well, that’s it,” Rick said, and put the pistol back in the holster and stowed it in the truck. They waited and drank instant coffee until Ed saw the swamp buggy come growling up the road with his father sitting on the top next to the men in their camo shirts. He wondered how his father had talked to them, if he had paid them to come out or made it a sort of bet or if it was just

the sort of thing that such men would do. Once the van was free of the mud, Ed and his father and Rick rode in the van as it was pulled back into Florida City, his father steering and the van bumping along.

As Ed sat in the pickup next to his father, heading through the same part of the Everglades, he thought of how he never told his father about the incident with the .22. Thirty years later, Ed’s father would die not knowing that he’d almost shot himself. He knew his father would call him an idiot for thinking of something like that. Or maybe he would just shake his head sadly. Or maybe he would say, “Damn, Ed, what were you thinking? Didn’t I teach you better than that?” So he never said anything. They often didn’t say much when they were working together. Sometimes his father would tell him stories about Key Largo in the sixties, and the people he met. He would talk about working at Ted Williams’ house. After his father died, Ed wished he’d written down a lot of those stories, but they were gone. After the stroke, when his father imagined strange things, Ed removed his loaded .38 from his bedside table.

The house where they delivered the furniture was a townhome and his father backed the truck up onto the lawn astride the sidewalk. It was a Cuban family — there were lots of Cuban families in Miami — and the older son, maybe Ed’s age, translated for his mother, who was excited about the new furniture. When they drove up, Ed had noticed the old bedroom suite sitting on the grass and he pointed to the house, “That has to be the one, Dad.” While his father talked to the mother and the son, Ed worked on untying the ropes that held the furniture down. His father had taken all of it out of the boxes so it would fit in the truck, then padded it here and there with furniture blankets and tied it so it would stay put as they drove along at 70 miles per hour. One time, Ed was tying down a refrigerator in the back of that same truck and his father yelled down from the loading dock, “What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

Ed yelled back up, “You taught me how to do this. If you have a problem, come down and do it yourself.” His father put his hands on his hips, then turned and went back inside. Ed’s knots were odd combinations of hitches and sheepshanks but they always held and he never lost a load.

Ed walked through the house, clearing the path where they would bring the furniture. They had delivered appliances and furniture many times before and he got

to know how much space was needed. He moved a red velvet easy chair. He had one of the daughters remove a Lladro figurine and put it in another room. He imagined them bumping the sideboard and the figurine dashing on the floor. Two burly men in their twenties arrived and talked with the mother in Spanish. They huddled near the truck and eyed Ed’s father with his big belly and Ed, a skinny runner who maybe weighed 130 though he was six feet tall. One of the men reached for a nightstand and Ed’s father called out.

“What are you doing there?! Hey!” “Me and Manny are here to help. Then we take the old furniture back to my house.”

“We’ve got it. Me and my son. You go ahead and load up.”

They looked curiously at Ed and his father, then sat and watched them carry first the side tables, then the big dresser without its drawers, then the short dresser and finally the big bedstead. They only had to look up and see each other’s eyes to know if something should be carried higher or lower, faster or slower, if one of them needed to rest. While his father made final adjustments in the bedroom and had the mother sign the invoice, Ed loaded the mover’s blankets and the ropes to the truck. He slammed the tailgate and watched Manny and his friend lashing the old furniture onto the back of their Toyota pickup. It was a confusion of shapes with legs sticking out here and there and things jammed wherever they might fit. There was a lot of yelling as they passed ropes back and forth over the top of the furniture and tied them to the undercarriage of the truck’s bed.

Ed’s father came out to get in the truck and Ed could see that the mother was following him out. She was smiling. She handed Ed’s father two five dollar bills and said, “Muy Bueno. Gracias. Thank you.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” his father said, and started the truck. He handed Ed one of the fives and they pulled out of the new subdivision of townhouses, back towards 836. Ed didn’t pay attention to where they were going, but sat back, the summer’s soft breeze cutting through the fly windows, his arm on the window of the truck, five dollars in his pocket, knowing they had done a good job. It had been a day where they looked in each other’s eyes and knew what to do. There had been many days where they would argue about chores or how to do things or what Ed should be studying instead of English, but today it was good. They turned further west and the city turned into fields.

They were in Homestead and it was not like Miami at all, not like a city, and it seemed more fitting to roll along those roads in the pickup, which rode easily now that it was unloaded. Times like this, his father would whistle and Ed would know he was happy and that the worries of the store were far away. Ed rested back and let his eyes close, drowsing in the heat and the sweat cooling on his shirt and his face.

The truck bounced and Ed opened his eyes to see his father pulling off the road. Ahead was a produce stand with a hand painted sign that said “silver queen korn.” In this part of Homestead, small produce stands lined the roads, spitting distance from fields where corn, tomatoes and all sorts of produce grew. A table made of plywood was painted blue and stacked with corn in the husks. Tomatoes were stacked on another table and a big cooler was filled with ice and sodas. Ed sat in the truck and waited and soon his father came back with a paper grocery bag filled with corn and a Royal Crown Cola for each of them.

“You ever had Silver Queen corn?” he asked Ed.

“I don’t know. Is it just like corn?” He figured his father would put a big tureen of salted water on the stove and boil it up like he did when they had barbecues. But his father reached one of the ears of corn out of the bag. He pulled the husk back almost like peeling a banana. He put the truck in gear and pulled onto the highway. As he drove, he bit into the corn, raw. Ed had never seen anyone eat an ear of corn without cooking it and he knew his mother would never ask him to eat anything that way. He watched his father gnaw the fresh white kernels off the cob, mashed bits of corn mixing with the wire where his partial attached. When he had eaten halfway across the cob, he handed it to Ed. He looked briefly at the cob, where it was all chewed. His father was watching him. He bit into the next row, felt the softness of the section where his father had chewed and felt how the sweetness of the raw corn burst into his mouth as he rode along in the pickup truck with the windows open in Homestead. They shared the raw ear of corn, passed it back and forth until it was finished and his father flung it out the window into a fallow field. Ed kept the feeling of the corn where his father had chewed it, that sort of closeness almost that married couples have. He didn’t know that feeling on his lips and teeth would linger so far into his life.

THE ONLY ONES WHO STAY

by Sage Tyrtle

After swimming me and Heather sit on the dock even though it’s cold. Twain doesn’t mind it’s cold, he has fur. He’s lying on the dock and cleaning his paws. “If you ate Twain’s toes they’d taste like jellybeans,” I say.

Heather doesn’t look up. She is drawing a girl with a square head. I like watching Heather draw. I like how her hand goes all over the page and you think she’s just making scribbles and then, boom, there’s a girl with a square head and a city behind her and everything. She says, “Twain’s toes would taste like blood and dog.” She draws a cartoon Twain with her littlest ink pen on the girl’s T-shirt and sometimes I think my sister might be magic. Really truly magic.

We’re the only summer people who stay for September. We used to come here to visit Nana before she died, and September is still the best time. The lake is so still it’s like the bony trees on the other side of the water live in the lake too, except they have blue leaves and you could just dive in and be there and never have to go back to Chicago. In September no one has a motorboat or is shouting, “WHOO!” like how the kindergartners are always shouting, “LOOK AT ME!” But I’m big now, I’m in first grade.

Twain lets me lie down with my head on his belly and he is very warm. I sing a song I made up myself and it goes, “Lake, Lake, I love you Lake, you have trees and you have waves, Lake, Lake, I love you Lake,” and Heather is kind of singing along.

She holds up her sketchbook and the square-head girl has flashlights for feet with a lot of scribbles around her that look like snow in the dark. “You could see at night,” she says, and I wish I had flashlights for feet. She goes back to drawing and when she’s drawing it’s like she’s gone to the lake place, where the leaves are blue.

Heather is her best Heather at the lake. In Chicago her and Mama and Daddy look at their phones a lot, a lot. Heather looks at drawings of stuff that’s made up. Like people eating hair for dinner or a beehive made of skeleton bones. She is always sighing and saying, “What, Anna,” when I talk to her. But here she’s different. Everybody is different. Only phones that plug in the wall work and there’s no internet and today she even asked

me to go swimming with her.

Mama says that we came here when I was two and when we all got in the car to leave I started to cry. But not a little bit, a lot a lot. It was pretty soon after Nana died so Mama didn’t yell, she just cried too and Heather was only eight so she cried. And Daddy missed Nana so much he cried and we all sat in the car and cried and cried which turned into laughing of how silly it was. And Daddy said What If We Stayed Longer so we went back inside and stayed for all of September and now we always do. I go to Waldorf School and Heather goes to a school for drawing so we just start late every year. Mama says it’s okay.

Under my head Twain is breathing. Mama and Daddy are inside. There’s no TV so they are reading books and making dinner and sometimes they read parts out loud to each other. They smile, too. In Chicago they smile like Emma R. does at my school, like if they don’t smile they might scream. This morning though I got woken up by Daddy’s deep laugh and Mama’s twinkle laugh mixing together. It was good. It was a good way to wake up.

I close my eyes and sniff big. In Chicago it smells like hot dogs and cigarettes and cars, but here the lake smells like it’s just about to snow. The frogs start saying cheechee-ee, chee-chee-ee, and that’s another thing about when the summer people go away. You can hear the frogs tell you Listen! The Sun Is Going Down! like they think you wouldn’t know if they didn’t tell you.

Up the hill the screen door opens and it’s like a hug from the house, that sound. Like how I think Nana must have been. Daddy calls, “Heather, Anna, dinner’s ready,” and the door bangs shut just how it always bangs shut. Heather stands up with her sketchbook and pens but I roll along the whole dock until I get to the grass to make Heather laugh and she does. She helps me up even. “C’mon, dork.” Twain runs up the hill ahead of us.

Then she holds my hand! All the way up to the house! And I have to tell myself over and over to let go when we get there so she doesn’t feel like I am being clingy because that is the worst thing in the world to be. I could probably smash Chicago with a tornado and as long as I wasn’t being clingy

everybody would just say, “Oh, okay. Clean up Chicago after the tornado’s done.”

Inside Mama is changing the record. She’s putting on my favorite one, which is Carole King, the one where she’s sitting at a windowsill and there’s a cat. The light coming in at the window makes it look like the picture got taken right here in the lake house. I wish we could live here all the time like Nana used to. But we can’t because There Are No Good Schools Up Here Anna, And Besides How Would We Get To Work?

Next to the record player there’s a picture of Nana and me. She’s holding me in one arm and stirring something in a pot on the stove with the other and even though in the picture I’m just a baby I look so happy. Sometimes I pretend that she didn’t die, that she is still here. That every year we come to visit her.

Twain does his smallest bark and I do it back. He comes over and I gobble up one of his soft ears.

“Gross,” says Heather, but she pets Twain on her way by.

We have tuna noodle casserole for dinner and Carole King sings about being so far away. In my head I think about how we are so far away from Chicago. And far away from Chicago is my favorite place to be. At the table I don’t touch Heather’s foot with my foot because that’s being clingy but I could. (At Chicago the dining room is made for eight people except it’s just the four of us. So even if I stretched my arms out as far as they go, I couldn’t reach anybody.) On my other side is Mama and she’s in her fuzzy duck sweater that she only wears here. I wait until she isn’t looking and I pet the sleeve so light she can’t tell.

Twain sits on the floor next to Daddy and does his medium-size bark. Daddy says, “You don’t like tuna,” but in a nice way. Twain wags his tail his hardest and Daddy says Twain can have a pea, except then it turns out that Twain loves, loves, loves peas and even though in Chicago Twain isn’t allowed in the dining room at all, here he gets to have more peas.

After dinner Daddy is washing dishes and it’s Heather’s turn to dry. Mama is turning the record over when she says, “Oh hell, I was supposed to call Mary.”

I feel like I have to pee and I don’t know

what to do. Mama is walking over to the phone and she can’t pick it up, she can’t, and I say, “Wait!”

Mama turns. “What?”

“My stomach hurts!” I say, even though it doesn’t hurt at all. I try to catch my breath but I can’t.

Mama sighs.

“It hurts a lot,” I say and now I feel all sweaty because if she thinks I’m really sick she’ll want to call the doctor and that would be worse. I hold my arms out and she comes and sits next to me on the couch. Right next to me! “It’s... kind of here,” I say, and point to my belly button.

She presses soft on my belly, on the sides mostly, she keeps saying, “Does this hurt? Does this hurt?”

I nod at some presses and not at other ones.

Daddy calls from the kitchen, “Everything okay in there?”

Mama says, “It’s not her appendix.” She boops my nose. “I think it was too many green apples from the apple tree this morning.”

I don’t lean towards her or hold her hand because that would be clingy but I smile big so she knows I like the booping. “I had lots of apples,” I whisper (even though I only had one because Heather’s had a worm in it which was very, very gross and I didn’t eat any more after that).

“How about we get you to bed and I read you to sleep? And I bet you’ll feel fine tomorrow.”

Upstairs I get on my bumblebee pyjamas. I don’t make buzzing sounds because I’m supposed to be sick but I wish I could. I feel like a bumblebee, buzz buzz, Mama is going to read to me. I ask for a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle story and when it’s done I ask for another one to make sure she forgets to call Aunt Mary. But she doesn’t forget. After she goes downstairs I can hear her telling Daddy that the phone isn’t working. I get out of bed and tip-toe to the door. Mama is saying, “It’s just so odd. When we had the storm last year there was that beeping sound, remember? But there’s just nothing.” Daddy says, “I’ll head into town tomorrow, talk to the phone people.” He yawns. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

I can hear Mama picking up the phone and putting it down. “I need to check in, let her know we’re coming back on Saturday.”

“Oh, who cares about Mary,” says Daddy, and Mama laughs. “Come sit over here with me.”

And she must go sit with him because

there are gross kissing noises. I run back to bed and go under the covers, all of me, even my head. I thought I had longer before they tried the car but Daddy says he’ll go tomorrow. I lie under the covers and I think that I’ll be awake the whole night. But I must fall asleep because when I open my eyes I can see it’s light on the other side of the blankets. There’s pancake smell coming up the stairs.

My hands start going flutter flutter all by themselves because I remember about the phone, and the car. I go downstairs and the whole stairs are golden, like they got painted by pancake smell. At the table Heather waves her fork to say hello.

Mama pats her lap. She pats her lap! I run over before she can change her mind and put my head against her. She smells like her shampoo which is spelled Jo-Jo-Ba but you say it Ho-Ho-Ba, I don’t know why.

Daddy is at the stove and he says, “Hey silly rabbit, how many?”

“Seventeen!” I say and everyone laughs and I am so happy he’s talking about pancakes and not the car or the phone. I move to the chair next to Heather and Mama pours Log Cabin on her pancakes, which is not even real syrup, and everyone else makes EW sounds at the same time and even Heather laughs and for a while we are just a good family eating breakfast and loving each other.

While Daddy does the dishes, Mama looks in Nana’s blue sugar bowl by the front door which is where the keys and old batteries are. Then she goes upstairs and comes back and checks again, and looks between the couch cushions, and asks Heather if she saw the car keys. Every time Mama checks the sugar bowl Twain thinks it’s time for a car ride and he gets more excited every time. I am wishing I didn’t have pancakes because every time she checks the sugar bowl the pancakes in my belly get squishier.

Mama almost trips over Twain by the front door and says, “Christ,” and Twain does his medium bark. “I know I put my keys in the sugar bowl,” says Mama. “But they’re not there. She points at the ground. “Twain, sit. For the love of god.” Twain stops wagging his tail and sits.

Daddy turns off the water. “I’ll get my keys,” he says and now my stomach really does hurt not like last night. But I know it’ll be okay. After I explain my plan and everything. I drag the step stool over to the sink and wash the last plate and fork and I don’t even break anything. I can hear Daddy

upstairs looking for his keys and I’m putting the step stool where it goes when he comes back down.

Poor Twain is chasing his own tail now. I want to take him outside but I’m scared to miss anything. So I sit on the couch and pat it and Twain comes over and flops next to me and sighs just like a person sighs.

“I looked everywhere,” Daddy frowns. “I mean, everywhere. I can’t find my phone either.” Mama goes to the coat closet and looks in her coat pocket and then turns and looks at me and Heather.

Mama says, “If you two are playing a joke, it isn’t funny.”

Heather wipes eraser bits off her paper. “I don’t know where my phone is either,” she says. She draws a nose on an elephant and it looks so real, so real that you could pick the elephant up off the paper and it would be the size of a mouse and so soft. Mama and Daddy look at each other and say stuff without saying stuff. Daddy comes over and crouches in front of me. “Kiddo. If you know where the keys are, you have to tell us. It was a fun trick, but the phone isn’t working and we’ve got to go to town to tell someone so we can get it fixed.”

I don’t say anything. My pancakes are having an angry dance in my belly.

Mama sits on the couch, but far away. She says, “What if something happened? What if Twain got sick? We couldn’t call anybody. We couldn’t take him to the vet.”

Heather looks up from her sketchbook. Twain feels too hot against my leg. The whole room feels too hot and I open my mouth to say that but I throw up in my lap instead even though I didn’t mean to at all. Heather says, “Oh gross,” and I can’t help it, I start to cry.

Daddy gets a wet paper towel and cleans up my mouth, then Mama lifts me up like she’s rescuing me from a fire, on my back you know, and carries me upstairs to the bathroom. I keep saying I’m sorry and she says, “Everyone throws up,” and turns on the shower. She helps me get my gross clothes off. After my shower she puts her hand on my forehead and it feels so nice, so nice, I could stand here in the bathroom forever if she just didn’t go away. But she goes away and gets the beepy thermometer and asks if I still feel sick. I say yes even though the only sick I feel is that they won’t understand about the keys or the phones or anything. Downstairs I sit on the couch and I pretend I’m reading The Patchwork Girl of Oz which was Mama’s book when she was little. But she keeps checking the sugar bowl, little

clinkings by the door. And going upstairs and looking in the kitchen cabinets and I’m at the part with the cat made of glass when I hear Daddy saying in a low voice, “I turned her room upside-down. The keys aren’t in there.” And my feelings are very, very hurt but then my face goes bright red because he’s right and the keys are a thing I did.

Mama goes over to the sugar bowl for the billionth time and not even Twain thinks Mama’s gonna go outside but this time she picks something up and makes a funny gasping noise. I look over but she’s already run to the screen door and opened it. “Heather! Inside, now!”

I sit up fast and look at Daddy. He shrugs.

Heather runs up the hill because that Mama voice means NOW and Mama picks up the phone and pulls the cord that attaches it to the wall, but it isn’t attached to the wall. It’s cut right before the attachedto-the-wall part. “Who did this,” says Mama, and the phone cord dangles in the air.

“Jesus,” says Daddy, and he doesn’t sound mad, he sounds scared. I never heard Daddy sound scared before. Twain noses Daddy’s hand.

Heather is standing in the doorway. She says, “What’s going on?”

Mama holds the cord in her fist and her hand is all white from how tight she is holding it. “Someone cut this,” says Mama, and I wish she would shout because her quiet voice is a lot more scary. My body is shaking and shaking.

Heather scratches her arm. “Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t me.” She and Daddy are like the lake. They are calm, calm, even when motorboats are vrooming across them.

“Goddamn it,” says Mama, and her teeth are all gritted together.

I take a big breath and say, “It was me,” but no one even looks over because my voice was too little. So I have to clear my throat and say it again.

Mama slams her fist down on the kitchen counter so hard that Nana’s mixing bowls jangle. She says to Daddy, “I can’t,” and she gets her coat and slams out the front door even though We Do Not Slam Doors In This House Anna. Twain jumps on the couch next to me. Heather and Daddy look at me like I’m a tiger who got out of her cage or something. When Daddy doesn’t say anything Heather says, “Anna, what do you mean it was you?”

“I cut it. With scissors.”

Daddy rubs his mouth with his hand.

“Tell me where the car keys are. Right now.” He says it in his Chicago voice.

I pretend like I didn’t hear him. “I just... I want us to stay here and not go back to Chicago. Ever ever.”

Daddy grabs my wrist too tight. Twain does his medium bark. “Anna. The keys.”

I whisper, “In the lake. The phones, too.”

Heather looks at me with big eyes and Daddy runs outside to the water. Twain nudges my hand with his head in his pet me way. I can tell everyone thinks I threw them in from the dock, but I didn’t. When me and Heather went swimming yesterday I had all the car keys and all the phones in a bag and I had my water wings on so I could go out really far, almost as far as Heather. And I dropped them in, one by one, and at first I could see them falling, then they fell into the part of the water that was too dark.

Heather is still acting like I’m going to bite her or something even though I am six and don’t bite anymore. I can hear Daddy jump into the water outside. She says, “Anna, why would you do that?”

I want to put my head inside my shirt so I can’t see her looking at me like that. “I cut the phone line so they couldn’t — so they couldn’t call a taxi,” I say, but out loud it doesn’t sound like the smart plan it did in my

head.

“A taxi? Why would they call a taxi?” She’s talking slow, how she talks to Twain sometimes.

“Because of no car keys.”

Heather runs to the screen door and hollers for Daddy. I can hear him splashing. I slide off the couch and go to Heather and I don’t touch her because she doesn’t like that. But I get close and say really quick, “Everybody is so happy here! If we stay here we can keep being happy! Heather, right? Right?”

But Daddy’s already almost all the way up the hill. Mama’s not with him and I hope she doesn’t come back until she’s not mad. She is so scary when she’s mad. Daddy stands dripping just outside the door and asks Heather for a towel. She goes upstairs and gets him one. Daddy doesn’t say anything to me. He doesn’t even look at me. When Heather comes back Twain gets off the couch and sits between me and everybody else.

Daddy dries his curly hair then puts the towel on the kitchen floor and stands on it, his T-shirt and shorts drip dripping. His shoes are wet too and I guess he just went in the water with them. He takes a big breath and I think he’s going to say something but he doesn’t. I don’t think he’s mad. I think he’s just... smaller. After a long time he says, “I’m trying to figure out why you did this, Anna.” “I want us to stay here,” I say, and bury my fingers in the fur on Twain’s neck to have some of his bravery. “Not go back to Chicago.”

“But why the hell did you —” Daddy stops and rubs his mouth with his hand. “Okay. Okay. What’s wrong with Chicago?” “You’re always on business trips, and Heather’s always on her phone, and Mama, she’s — you don’t talk to me! No one does!” Heather and Daddy look at each other and say words without saying words. I stomp my foot and Twain gets startled and stands up in front of me. “Like right now! How you’re saying things but not to me! But it’s good here, everyone is different here —”

“Kiddo, it’s hard to be the littlest, especially when Heather is so much older than you —”

I feel a bomb explosion building up in me and I’m scared. I’m scared like I’m pretty sure Mama was scared before, when she left. I think she left because she was worried she would go BOOM. Like in Chicago when I was singing during her Important Work Call. I take a deep breath like Daddy says to, to calm down, but it just makes the fire bigger.

“It’s about fighting all the time! In Chicago no one even likes each other!” I think maybe they’re going to go away because We Don’t Yell Anna but they don’t. They actually don’t. I want for them to say something but no one does and I don’t know how to say it but this is part of being here. They are there behind their eyes. In Chicago if you zoomed into their heads you would just find a sign that said “Back Later.”

Then Mama comes into the house. At school we have big yellow faces on the wall for Emotions and her Emotion is ANGER with the eyebrows pointed down the middle and mouth in a frown. She says to Daddy, “Did you find the keys?”

I don’t mean to cry but I do. She says it like she hates me. I say, “Mama — ” but I sound like some baby kindergartner. “Mama, I dropped them in, in, the middle of the lake. The middle, not by the dock.” Mama’s face gets really red. “I had my water wings! I was being safe!”

Daddy whispers a swear word. Mama points to the stairs. “Get in your room. Do not come out.” Her voice is low and mean. Me and Twain run to my room together and I close the door, not slamming it because slamming is not allowed. I crawl under the bed. Twain peers at me and tilts his head and then he crawls under too. He lets me hug him very tight. I whisper, “When they stop being mad at me, we are all going to be so happy. Me and Heather won’t have to go to school and we can take you on walks all the time and when the lake turns into ice we can go ice skating.” Twain sniffs the ceiling which is the bottom of my bed and the dust makes him sneeze. I laugh a little bit even though I am still crying. Downstairs is Chicago yelling. It’s so loud I can hear it with my door closed. Mama says, “We’ll just attach the telephone cord to the wall —”

And Daddy says in his meanest voice, “Great, I’ll just look up a Youtube video to explain how to do that!”

I feel so sad. We never had Chicago yelling here before. One time last year on the highway they were having a fight about who was more important because they both had to go on a business trip at the same time except they couldn’t both go and I didn’t say anything because It’s None Of Your Business Anna but I wanted to say we could just stay with Aunt Mary and then everybody would be happy but then we turned onto the Old Harvest Road and the argument faded away. Pretty soon we were all singing along to Stevie Wonder on the radio. Like there was

some kind of magic circle around the lake house. Except I guess there wasn’t.

The front door slams and I quickly get out from under the bed and look out the window. I can see Daddy on the driveway and at first I am scared that he found the keys somehow but he has his backpack on, the one he takes when we all go hiking up in the mountains, and also his jacket. I want to bang on the window but I’m not allowed and I want to yell but I’m not allowed so I just watch with my heart beating so fast. Daddy goes walking down the long driveway and around the corner and I can’t see him anymore.

And even though Mama said to stay inside, I think of a good reason to open my door that she can’t be mad about. So I say, “Twain, c’mere,” in my smallest voice and he scoots out from under the bed. He comes over to the door and I open it and say loud, “Heather? Twain has to go pee,” and to him I say walk and he goes downstairs wagging his tail big.

I can hear Heather let Twain out the screen door and then after a little while she lets him back in. Then they both come up the stairs. I feel like there are a thousand butterflies inside my head because she must still like me, right? Or she wouldn’t come see me? She knocks on my door and I let her in. I want to hug her so bad but I go sit on my bed so she isn’t afraid I’ll touch her. “Where did Daddy go?” I ask.

Heather closes the door, quiet, and sits on my floor. She says, “He’s walking to the town.”

And I feel that explosion feeling again. Because I GAVE them staying here! I GAVE them no keys and no phone! And they aren’t glad at all! I do the thing Daddy said to do which is if I have to hit a thing to make sure it’s a soft thing and I punch my pillow on my bed a bunch of times. Heather waits. I like that about her so much. She doesn’t leave, she just waits. I say, “It’s too far. He can’t —” There’s a noise from downstairs and me and Heather stare at the door but nothing else happens. Heather says, “All the other summer people are gone. There aren’t neighbors who are home, so he had to walk to town. That’s what he said to Mom.”

“But we were going to stay here forever. And play Candy Land.”

Heather says, “Anna... what would we eat, when we ran out of food?” and she says it so nice. Way nicer than she should.

My face goes bright red, so red people in a space ship could see it. I didn’t think of that! I forgot to think of that! I’m so mad

I want to smash myself and I run to the wall and hit my head on it and it hurts but it makes me forget how dumb I feel for a second. I hit my head on it again and then I feel Heather holding me in a hug, both of her arms around me very tight. I try to hit my head again but she’s holding me too far away. I try so hard to not cry again but I can’t help it. “I’m so stupid,” I say, over and over, and she keeps holding onto me and I think maybe she is crying too.

“You’re not dumb,” she whispers. “You’re just mad. And you didn’t know what to do.” She rocks me. “Want to know a secret?”

She never said that to me before. I nod fast before she changes her mind.

“I don’t know what to do either. I’m mad too. I’m mad all the time.”

We sit on the floor together and I feel my heart swelling from how it feels to be held. I don’t know why I’m the only one who likes it. Heather told me once that when I was a new baby and I cried all the time at night that Mama got me a stuffed bear that had a heartbeat sound and after that I would hug the bear instead of crying. And everyone said Yay We Have Fixed The Problem but what I thought when she told me that story was, how come nobody picked me up? I think that if I heard a baby crying I would go talk to it and pick it up. But Mama saw me crying and went and bought a stuffed bear. When Heather lets me go we both sit on opposite sides of my bed.

I’m scared she’ll leave if I ask but if I don’t ask now I won’t ever. So I do. “Why are you mad?”

Heather hugs her knees and puts her chin on them. She says, “Because... it is different here.”

My hands and feet go tingling, like when the campfire goes crack and a spark goes in the air. I thought it was just me. “Really?”

“Yeah. In Chicago it’s like they wish we would go away. So they could just work all the time.”

I stand up on the bed and shout, “Yes! Yes!” and Heather shushes me but she is smiling.

“One time in Chicago,” I whisper, “I almost flushed all of the phones down the toilet.”

Heather leans close. “What? Why?”

“It was so late in the night, I woke up to pee and I thought that I knew where all the phones are and I could get rid of all of them and then maybe breakfast would feel like it does here.”

Heather looks sad. “Oh, Anna.”

“But then I thought that no matter what I did to the phones Mama would just buy new ones.”

After a little while Heather nods.

“Do you think... that sometimes it feels like —”

Twain stands up really fast. He isn’t wagging his tail. Then he does his big bark at the door, his biggest bark, the one that he only did one other time when a man stopped in his car and asked me and Heather how to get to the Navy Pier. And Twain lunged against his leash so hard and so fast Heather almost didn’t catch him in time but she did and the man drove away not looking at us at all.

The hair on the back of Twain’s neck is going up, up. I have just a second of thinking that a robber is here and I ruined all the phones, but then Mama opens the door. I think that when Twain sees it’s Mama he’s going to calm down but he doesn’t! He does his biggest bark again!

Mama doesn’t smile. She is standing there in the door with her T-shirt that says she went to the University of Chicago and her light blue sweatpants and she doesn’t smile, she doesn’t smile, and Twain is between me and her, and he growls. Twain never ever growls and Mama says, “Anna, I am really angry with you,” and then she says a bad word, and I can see that Twain is trying to make himself bigger.

Then a thing happens that never happened before and it is so nice, so nice that I want to cry all over again of how good it is, which is that Heather comes over and stands in front of me. She says in her most grown-up voice, the one she uses when me and her go to the movies and she orders popcorn, she says, “Mama... maybe you could go downstairs? And we could come down in a little while? Then we could talk and stuff.”

Mama was never mad when we were at the lake house before. I did this. I did this by trying to make it so we could stay. I know what Heather’s doing, she’s being the Daddy-person right now. Daddy is very good at when I go boom and he’s very good at when Mama goes boom, he is just calm and slow. I know how it feels to be in Mama’s head right now. Like a bomb in Bugs Bunny and the fire is running down the rope to the bomb part where it will explode unless someone does something.

But even though Heather is doing her best, she isn’t Daddy. And Mama is so mad, so mad that she comes towards me to — I don’t know what, I don’t want to think about

what — and I’m so scared that I run. I just run out of the room and Twain comes with me, still barking his biggest bark. I’m running down the stairs and I can hear Heather trying to talk to Mama, but she comes after me, she is so big and I am so little, but maybe being little will help, and I run, I run down the stairs, I run past the couch and Mama is yelling at me but I’m not listening, I’m not, I won’t hear what she’s saying, I won’t, and Heather is still trying to get Mama to not chase me but she’s too far away and I wonder for a second if I can hide but Mama’s too close and somehow she got between me and the screen door and I’m in a corner by the bookshelves and I stop and I’m telling Mama to stop too and she’s coming towards me and Twain is barking his biggest bark and — and — just before she gets to me Twain bites her on her leg. He bites her hard. He bites her and it’s so loud, it’s awful, awful, Mama falls down really hard and Twain lets go right away and I can tell he’s sorry and I don’t want to feel glad that Twain bit Mama but I do.

I do feel glad.

Because the way that Mama is mad in Chicago, the way that she’s mad when Twain is at Doggie Daycare and Daddy is at work and Heather is at her art classes, it shouldn’t be here at the lake house. It shouldn’t be where Nana held me. Where Daddy was a little boy.

Mama’s face is pale. She isn’t crying, because she doesn’t cry. She sits up but doesn’t move her leg. Her sweatpants on her bitten leg aren’t blue anymore, they are dark red. And there is a part of me that is thinking that we can’t call anybody, and Daddy isn’t here, and there’s no car, and that’s my fault, my fault, and I want to bang my head against the wall again but I can’t because I have to help.

Mama says in a gaspy voice, “Heather. Get me a sheet from the linen closet.” Heather runs.

I try to go to Mama but Twain gets in front of me. He feels bad, I can tell, but he still gets in front of me.

“I was his favorite before you were born,” says Mama, still in that gaspy voice. Heather comes back with the sheet. It’s got sunflowers on it. Mama says, “Tie it around my leg, okay? Under the knee. As tight as you can. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

Heather nods and her hands are shaking very much. She puts the sheet under Mama’s leg and brings it up around on both sides. I want Daddy to be here more than anything.

“I mean, I think that’s what helps…” says

Mama, but to herself. “That’s what they did on St. Elsewhere.” She almost laughs. Now the carpet under her leg is going red too. Heather starts tying the sheet like shoes and Mama says a bad word. There’s more red. She says, “Anna, get me a towel.”

I try to go around Twain and he won’t let me. He even does his medium bark.

“Oh for crying out loud,” says Mama. “I’m not the boogey-man.”

Heather bites her lips hard and pulls the sheet tight around Mama’s leg.

Mama’s face goes twisty. “He slept by my feet for six years,” she says, “and then you were born and he was like, Wait, have we met? And he sat outside the door of your nursery the whole night. Didn’t even lie down.” The red isn’t stopping. “Heather? I need you to tie it again. Even tighter.” Heather re-ties the sheet. It helps a little bit, I think.

“I’m sorry,” I say, putting my hand on Twain for bravery. “I’m sorry for the phones and the keys. And for making you mad.” Mama doesn’t say anything.

Heather looks at the red that won’t stop and says, “Mama... how long will it take Dad to walk to town?”

Mama sighs. “He thought four hours.”

I don’t know what to do and I don’t think Heather knows either. Mama leans back against the couch and closes her eyes. I have to pee really bad and I point upstairs so Heather knows where I’m going. Twain sticks to me like we are superglued together, he waits right outside the bathroom for me. I stay in the bathroom as long as I can, because maybe things will be better when I go back down. It’s starting to get dark and I can hear the radiator coming on.

But when I get downstairs there’s more red on the carpet. Mama still has her eyes closed and I’m happy she’s not talking to me but I feel like a bad person for being happy and Heather is crying but without making any noise. I want to hug her so bad but she would hate that so me and Twain just go sit next to her and I whisper-sing a song which goes, “Heather, Heather, I love you Heather, you are smart and you are good, Heather, Heather, I love you Heather,” and she crylaughs and says, “Me too.”

Outside it starts to snow, all white in the porch light. I don’t think about Daddy. I don’t. I don’t. Me and Twain go get Mama the fuzzy green blanket from Nana’s wooden chest. Heather helps me put it over her, but Mama doesn’t even notice. Me and Heather look at each other and her eyes are so big. She shakes Mama, a little bit at first and then

a lot. We both say “Wake up,” quiet and then loud. We get so loud that Twain does his medium-bark to join in. But Mama doesn’t wake up.

Heather puts her hand under Mama’s nose and has a big sigh of relief. “She’s okay. She’s okay. I think, just, she’s passed out.” My voice is shaking. “Like too much wine at night?”

“Kind of.” Heather puts her hand under Mama’s nose again even though she just did and nods to herself.

I say, “Couldn’t we help her? What if we put water on her like in a cartoon?”

Heather sits on the couch far away from Mama and so I do too. “I think we just have to wait for Daddy. And he’s a fast walker. Remember on the hike?”

“When he said we should put him on a leash so he didn’t keep going too fast for us?”

She nods but doesn’t smile.

“Heather? You’re not scared, right?” Heather is never, ever scared. Not of anything.

After a long time she says, “I’m scared. But it’s okay. I’ll make sure you’re safe.” And her voice goes all cracking. Twain nudges Heather’s leg and wuffs at her.

I whisper in my smallest whisper because I don’t want to say it but I have to. “Mama is going to be alive, right?”

Heather says, “Yes. Yes. Mama is going to be okay.” But she doesn’t look under the blanket for more red so I don’t either.

We sit together on the couch and wait for Daddy. We listen to the radiator tick and Twain panting and Mama breathing.

The snow keeps coming down. Mama keeps breathing. And a long time later, I think I might hear a car outside. A car, or the wind.

The End *

APPLE PIE

by Jaclyn Port

All floods are inconvenient, but this one particularly so. The annual Edgerton pie competition was only a couple days away and Muriel was determined to snatch the crown from Greta, who had won first place for the last four years.

Greta was a retired nurse, former school board member, and community theater art director on leave. She began competing seven years ago when a fractured hip left her confined to the house and had risen steadily through the ranks since then. Muriel, the previous reigning champion, initially welcomed the challenge. Still, Greta’s winning streak was starting to vex her, as was the growing popularity of her food blog, which bumped Muriel’s out of the

Top 10 Edgerton Websites list last year. No. She couldn’t resent Greta for her online success. Muriel had stopped posting to her blog, too occupied after Robert’s diagnosis with treatments, hospice care, funeral preparations, and the long, dark time after.

She was driving back (slowly, to stop too much water from splashing up into the undercarriage) from running errands around town. Butter and flour for the pies. Toilet paper. And a hammer, as she wanted to hang up a picture and couldn’t find Robert’s. It was possible he lent it to someone, or, more likely, his organizational system in the garage was simply beyond Muriel’s understanding. Either way, the painting was gifted from her

nephew’s wife six months ago, and it was time to do something with it.

All that was from the shopping center at the edge of town. She would head to Main Street later to get everything else she needed.

The news on the radio ran in the background while she drove, but Muriel gave it little attention, instead pondering the filling she would make this year. Greta won last year with a strawberry rhubarb pie. One of the judges had a soft spot for rhubarb, but Muriel loathed the vegetable. Still, cooking it didn’t mean she had to eat it. “-unseasonal rains combined with an early snow melt in the mountains-”

Her cherry pie was a big hit at

Thanksgiving last year. She had experimented with adding dried cranberries to the filling. Once you mastered the basics (which Muriel had, everyone raved about her crust) the judges appreciated a bit of creativity and risk-taking.

“-advise against non-essential trips-”

Robert, of course, would have suggested blueberry. His favorite. He liked it with the crust more buttery than flaky, with thick granules of sugar sprinkled on top before baking. He didn’t even care if the filling was from a can.

“-not at this point predicting power outages or a boil water advisory.”

Then there was the classic apple pie. Muriel had used the apples off the tree in her backyard one year, to woo the judges with a “Bake Local” theme, and even cut out little leaves of dough to decorate the crust. Greta won that year with a pumpkin pie.

She pulled into the driveway of the light blue bungalow she once shared with Robert. The floodwaters were shallower here, and the house was on enough of an incline that it was dry. For now.

Bingo greeted her as soon as she stepped through the door, stuffing his head against her feet and into every bag she set on the floor, as if she hadn’t already learned the protocol for bringing food into the house. The groceries bag was set in the sink, safe from his efforts until she could unpack them. Bingo then set off into the house, lapping round and round the kitchen, living room, and dining room, and then down into the basement. Muriel couldn’t walk Bingo as much as he needed and the excess energy was diverted into frequent escape attempts and destructive impulses. All her shoes were locked in a cabinet now, and nothing was stored on bottom shelves. Muriel’s nephew offered to help her adopt the dog out. Bingo was always more Robert’s than hers, but after Robert passed, she couldn’t bring herself to give him away. Bingo was a clumsy rescue dog of indeterminate breed and age and Robert loved him deeply.

Muriel set about making a cup of tea (no milk, just a pinch of sugar). She was flipping through her recipe cards at the table when Bingo came up from the basement and jumped up on her, planting two wet pawprints on her dress.

Wet. Why was Bingo wet?

They had experienced basement flooding before. Muriel flicked on the landing light and looked down the stairs. Most of the space was occupied by Robert’s model train displays, but she could see the shimmer of a

few inches of water across the floor.

Bingo squeezed past her legs and banged down the stairs again, prancing merrily in the waters and taking a drink. Muriel couldn’t see where the water was coming from, but it didn’t smell like a sewage back-up.

Bingo bounded back up the stairs and paused in the kitchen, motionless for the first time since she got home.

Oh no. “Bingo, no.”

He dropped his head and started wiggling his butt.

“Bingo. No.”

He shook. Water spattered across Muriel, the shopping, and the kitchen counter. Then he scampered out of the room.

Muriel sighed. She would have to swing by the hardware store to buy a sump pump when she ran her afternoon errands. She firmly closed the basement door and sipped her tea, cold now but mercifully spared from the dog water. No point in cleaning up until Bingo was dry. #

Muriel usually called to book an appointment at Antonio’s Fine Ladies Garments. Antonio was a high-strung man who disliked pumpkin spice-flavored anything, the color orange, and surprises, but she had decided on short notice to visit him, so she would have to risk raising his ire. Just in case, she wrapped a couple of her chewy chocolate brownies, which had a good track record of improving his mood.

Muriel always went to Antonio’s for a new dress for the competition. He also had an impressive selection of pantsuits, but Robert hated pantsuits on women. Greta wore one every year, also from Antonio’s, though, unlike Muriel, she strived to match her pie. Muriel thought the pantsuits looked quite nice (though Greta would look nicer if she smiled). But Muriel would still get a dress this year. Antonio sold nice dresses.

She checked the basement quickly before leaving, as the rains were coming down harder now. It was hard to tell if there was any change in the water level. She wondered if she should try to move up some of Robert’s train things to keep them safe, remembering all the hours he spent painstakingly painting the houses, planning out the layout of the village. But going up and down the stairs so much would be hard on her knees.

Sucking a lozenge from her purse, she darted through the rain to her car. The gas tank was only a quarter full, but that was

plenty to get to Main Street. Hardware store and gas station on her way home, then.

Muriel carefully eased her car down Main Street, which was experiencing the worst of the flooding, the murky water spilling out over the sidewalks. It had been a while since she was in the center of town, and she couldn’t quite remember the location of Big Bertha, the town’s notorious pothole.

Taking a chance, she parked directly in front of Larry’s Groceries. The lights were off, and a large sign in the window declared “Sold Out of Toilet Paper Water Pasta Everything, what the hell, it’s not the apocalypse people.” Oh dear. So much for buying baking apples. Muriel mulled through her options. She had a couple of cans of blueberry pie filling but, as much as Robert liked it, the judges were more discerning; she might as well forfeit. Her only hope would be the apple tree in the backyard.

Muriel opened the car door and stepped down into the water.

And down. And down. Ah. Here was Big Bertha.

She pulled ahead a few meters, then got out, sloshing her way across the street and up the steps to Antonio’s. Soaked to her shins, the umbrella felt perfunctory, but she used it anyway.

Antonio’s Fine Ladies Garments had a bit of a facelift since Muriel last visited (as had Antonio a few years ago, though he always denied it). The sign was missing some of its letters, now declaring it to be the home of Ant ’s in Ladies Garments. Despite the OPEN sign, the door was locked.

She knocked on the door. “Antonio,” she called. “Antonio, it’s Muriel. I brought brownies.”

She heard some clicks and rattles before the door opened a crack. A sliver of Antonio’s face appeared and his hand thrust out a towel and a pair of plastic booties. “If you don’t mind.”

He let her in once she was dry (or, more dry). The store’s interior was dim, with the only light coming through the remaining glass windows and an LED lantern on the floor next to the door. “My apologies for the shop’s appearance. We lost power just a few minutes ago.” A shotgun sat propped up next to the door, which startled Muriel slightly.

“Muriel, it is so good to see you again,” said Antonio and wrapped her in a tight hug, which startled her even more. “What a surprise! It has been so long, not since the…” He trailed off.

Muriel considered rescuing him from the silence, but couldn’t think of what to say or do, beyond thrusting the brownies into his hands. Her eyes drifted back to the gun. Antonio followed her gaze. “There have been lootings a couple towns over. Can’t be too careful. Besides, it’s broken. I can’t load it. Well, I can’t figure out how to load it. It may not actually be broken.” He followed her path into the store with a mop, soaking up errant drops of water. “What brings you to my shop today?”

“The Edgerton Pie Competition is tomorrow.”

“Of course! I have these new dresses in from a designer in Calgary, one in what I would call a “blueberry pie” blue-”

“I was thinking a pantsuit. This year. Actually.” Muriel didn’t know she was going to say that until she did. She was sure her own face mirrored Antonio’s surprised expression.

Antonio processed this a moment then slid back into his sales persona. “Of course.” He scooped the lantern off the floor. “Right this way.”

Muriel found three suits she liked the look of, as near as she could tell in the light, one of which fit perfectly.

Larry wrapped it in paper, and then plastic and tape to keep it dry. He undid the locks on the door, but paused before letting her out. “Muriel?” He squeezed her arm. “It was really good to see you.”

The next stop was the hardware store. The gas gauge shifted a bit lower. Robert was always fastidious about keeping the tank full. Left to her own devices, Muriel would get stranded on the side of the road. Which she did once, before she met Robert.

She flicked on the radio for the company.

“- working around the clock, but expect the power outages to persist-”

She had an electric oven. Hopefully the power would be back on by tomorrow.

“-meanwhile, High Creek has been evacuated, as-”

Refrigeration was going to be a problem too. The butter needed to be cold for a proper crust.

She pulled into the parking lot. The hardware store was still open, but, like Larry’s, sported a large sign in the window. “No Sump Pumps. No Water. No Masks. Sorry For The Inconvenience.”

“-declared a moratorium on the sale of gasoline to the general public, to be reserved for essential vehicles only-”

Muriel pulled away and eyed the gas

gauge. It was enough to get her home, for sure. Hopefully the morning brought better news.

#

The next morning brought the day of the pie competition but no electricity.

In an ideal situation Muriel would refrigerate all her dough ingredients before making the dough and then the dough itself for three hours before rolling it out. She would blind-bake the bottom crust, weighing it down with dried beans wrapped in parchment, so the filling wouldn’t make it soggy. The filling itself would be parcooked, with the resulting juices reduced in a saucepan and poured back over the apples. She would use a mix of Granny Smith and Golden Delicious apples: Granny for their tartness and how well they held up in the pie, and Golden Delicious for the sweet aroma they added. She would give a bit of the dough and the par-cooked apples to Robert to taste, not for his discerning judgment, but because, no matter what, he would kiss her cheek and tell her it was wonderful, as he would with the final baked pie, which she would have to defend from his fork if it was destined for competition. But this was not an ideal situation, and Muriel was not going to dwell on what she didn’t have. It was 6 am and, with the competition at 2 pm, it was time to get started. Apple pie (done right) is a day’s labor, as much waiting as working. Muriel took the phrase “as easy as pie” to mean something that is misleadingly simple.

The basement flooding had accelerated overnight. The water was now inches from the tabletops, and soon the little miniature town would look just as Edgerton did: submerged. At least Robert wasn’t here to see his work waterlogged, but those thoughts pained Muriel, so she closed the door and put it all from her mind.

First task was getting the apples. Bingo was gleeful at the sight of Muriel in the backyard, likely thinking he was getting a long overdue walk. He bounced circles around her and occasionally jumped up. This wasn’t going to work at all, especially not once she was on the stepladder. She needed a way to distract him.

In the kitchen, she opened a can of liver pate and scooped the contents out with a spatula. After checking a few rooms, she also found his damp, dirty rope toy and took both spatula and rope out into the backyard. Bingo bounded up to her and, as soon as he spotted the toy, jumped out and bit on, leaning back and ready for a game of

tug-of-war.

Murielf took the opportunity and, her arm darting out with the spatula, smeared the pate on Bingo’s tail.

At first, Bingo stayed latched into the rope, his eyes on Muriel. But then his grip released and he started chasing the one thing he has never been able to get his mouth on.

Muriel grabbed the step ladder and slid it under the tree. She paused there a moment to watch Bingo in his endless spin. She thought back to those summer evenings with Robert, drinking on the patio, watching Bingo catch sight of his tail and slip into his single-minded pursuit. Nothing could entice him away once he got started, not cheese or a bit of meat from the barbeque, until he tired himself out.

Muriel climbed up the small foot ladder (carefully, there was a reason her and Robert started hiring the neighborhood children to pick the apples) and started filling the pockets of her robe, easier than trying to hold onto a basket and the ladder at the same time. There were not as many apples as she had hoped, but more than she had feared. With limited space in her pockets, she picked without regard for worms or rot. Her knees whined and complained all the way back down the ladder and into the house, Bingo still focused on his neverending chase as she closed the door.

After catching her breath, she peeled the apples, thinly sliced them, and left them to rest in a bowl with cinnamon and nutmeg (not too much), lemon juice (to prevent browning), tapioca and cornstarch (for a thick, glossy syrup), and brown sugar. The cold butter was cut into the flour with a few spoonfuls of vodka to get it to adhere into dough (the secret to a flaky crust and the only reason she kept it in the house) which was next wrapped in plastic and placed in the chest freezer to soak up the residual cold. She then drained the juices from the apples and poured them into a small saucepan, which she placed on the electric stove.

She had become so settled into her routine that she had forgotten. And as she turned on the burner, it all came surging back again. The power outage.

Her back-up plan was the barbecue, another one of Robert’s things still left around. Muriel did the bulk of the cooking, but in summertime Robert would take over. Hamburgers and steaks on the grill and, later, after coaxing by both Muriel and his doctor, vegetables cubed and skewered

and charred slightly. They would eat on the porch, Robert sipping a cold beer and Muriel a cider, looking out onto the yard in that comfortable silence that comes with years of marriage.

Now it was only fired up when her nephew came over in the summer. Muriel didn’t know how to use it.

She dug into those early memories. Pressing on a wound she was still nursing. Robert prepping the barbecue while she wiped down the porch furniture or repaired the fence around the garden. Bingo eating something in the grass. Robert turning on the gas, sticking the lighter in the side and fiddling with a knob.

She found a lighter in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and twist-ties (she had thrown out little since the house became all hers). And, with her phone at 32% (bless her nephew for getting her a phone with a good battery life), a video talked her through the rest. Muriel was skeptical about the accuracy of the temperature controls and worried that the grill would impart a smoky flavor to her pie, but it was hot and reduced the apples juices in the saucepan, warmed a biscuit for breakfast, and would hopefully cook her apple pie, bundled as it was in foil to stop the crust from burning. While she waited, she watched Bingo. He had finally, after all the years of trying, caught his tail. He lay on the ground, with it in his mouth, looking up at her with his big, brown eyes.

#

The gas in her tank brought her to about three kilometers from town hall and every joint in Muriel’s body protested over the last leg of the journey, even her elbows from the weight of the pie. She rolled up the legs of her pantsuit as best she could (varicose veins on display for all the world to see), but they still got wet from errant splashes as she sloshed her way down the street.

A familiar SUV pulled up next to her. Muriel tried to ignore it at first, but her legs pleaded for a rest, so she stopped and turned. Greta rolled down the window and forced a smile at her. Her normally perfectlycoiffed hair was a bit flat on one side, but her lipstick was still on point. “Here for the same reason as me. I presume,” said Greta. Muriel looked in the truck window. Greta was wearing a blue pantsuit. A blueberry blue, if Muriel had to give it a name. “Lovely pantsuit, Greta.”

The smile left Greta’s face like it was no longer needed. “I didn’t match this

year. Didn’t have the opportunity.” Greta unlocked the passenger door. “Let me give you a lift. I don’t want to have to wait for you.”

Muriel gratefully accepted the ride, her knees sighing with relief and soothed by the heat of the pie sitting on her lap. The two of them rode the rest of the way in silence.

Only two of the judges managed to make it and only three contestants, but the third was disqualified for serving a pie that was only partially cooked. Muriel had checked hers with a meat thermometer. She was less worried about serving a raw pie and more worried about unwanted flavor notes the barbecue might have imparted. And, of course, about what Greta hid under her foil. Which was a rhubarb pie, this time with raspberries. Greta was sure to tell the judges both rhubarb and raspberries were from her own garden, calling the pie “A Garden Party.” Muriel thought she might have used that name before, but the pie did smell good.

Muriel was next. “I present to you ‘A Summer Evening,’” she said, and cut each judge a slice.

One judge leaned over the slice and gave a big inhale. “Well, I certainly smell a classic summer barbecue.” She took a bite. “What an interesting depth of flavor.”

It always felt like ages when the judges conferred. Muriel looked out the town hall windows, which faced the roundabout with a flower garden now faded in the autumn weather. Main Street branched off the side. It was a familiar view and one, she realized, that she had missed. It felt good to be back. The judges waved Muriel and Greta over. “It was a hard decision, but this year’s winner was the pie that brought back memories. Happy, summer memories. Congratulations Muriel!”

Muriel took her ribbon and went over to shake Greta’s hand.

Greta smiled at her. Real this time. “It is good to have you back. I’ve missed you.” #

The train set was wrecked, as were the boxes of Robert’s old engineering school books, and the clothes Muriel had set aside for donation. She waited until the waters subsided completely, then hired a disposal and clean-up company to deal with the mess. Frederick & Sons was emblazoned across the side of their van, and their coveralls were labeled appropriately too, with the oldest gentleman sporting Frederick on the front of his, while the other two had Son and Grandson in the place of names.

“Frederick” was an older man, much older than she’d expect to still be in this profession, at most only a couple years younger than her. A thick shock of silver hair covered his head. He was probably quite the heartbreaker in his prime years. Could still be now, in the right retirement home. He sat with her on the front step to complete the paperwork while the “sons” worked to clean up the basement. Bingo sat with them, in rapt attention at the comings and goings, and Muriel gripping as tightly as she could to his leash.

“You’ve been busy. I bet it’s moments like these you wish you retired,” Muriel said. Frederick laughed. “I did. But they needed the extra help this week. Could you sign here?”

Muriel’s grip slipped, and Bingo took the opportunity to escape. He bounded toward the truck and jumped into the cab, perching on the front passenger seat.

“I am really sorry,” said Muriel. She could see a thin line of drool making its journey toward the upholstery. “I’ll-”

“No worries. He looks content there.” With his hand on her back, Frederick guided her to sit. “It’s a lot of dog to handle, too.” He looked at the house. “You have anyone else around? To help you?”

“No. It’s just me.”

“Just me at my house now, too. You know, I have an acreage outside of town. Lot more space for a dog like that to run off its energy. I could take him off your hands. Wouldn’t mind the company, either.”

Muriel felt the same response she gave her nephew on her tongue, but caught herself. She looked at the truck. Bingo now had his paws on the dashboard, tail beating against the seat’s headrest. “Yeah. I think that would be good for him.”

He pulled out his wallet and a pen. “Here’s my card. And my personal number on the back. If you ever want to visit him. Or if you’d just like the company too.”

Muriel helped him pack up Bingo’s dishes, dog bed, and toys, though she was certain they missed some of the latter that would surface over the next couple weeks. Maybe she would have to visit to drop them off.

Now that the power was back on and Bingo off to a better home, she could clean up properly. Pour a hot bath to relax her joints. Maybe roll out some pie crust, enough to make a few small quiches or tarts. She wondered if Frederick had a favorite filling.

BREAK

Dear Babbo

by Ben Davies

17th March 2021

Dear babbo,

I am sad for not writing sooner. Things have been a little tough at the shop with far lower sales than predicted. We’ll turn it around, we always do, so don’t worry. I just keep wondering what you would do. Though even as I write that I know you’d never have got us in this position in the first place.

The competition is just so fierce now, so many new businesses within the city walls. Our work is still wonderful but is there the appetite for such high quality, expensive suits anymore? Especially with the economy as it is, not to mention all the cheap imitators on the market, selling suits for half the price. No doubt half the working conditions for their makers, but the buyers choose to ignore that even when they cry green. Oh, the hypocrisy of today. It’s not hard to imagine you ranting about it too if you were here. Anyway, I will write something longer soon with some real, shop-unrelated news.

Tutto il mio amore,

Gio

Dear babbo,

12th May 2021

News at last. I am sorry for taking so long since the last letter, this one will be longer as promised. You know how it gets with the shop. You’ll be happy to know that things have been better this last month – it’s a relief to have wedding season here. We had clients from Rome, Naples and a lot from Florence. Some Lucchesi but that’s been less recently, I think due to the economy. Sad. I blame the new mayor, despite his growing popularity. It’s true there are more tourists now but is that a good thing? I think every business has a different opinion.

I guess there are some positives as even we had some Inglese in the shop this week. Very rare these days. Friendly people who brought those famous Inglese habits with them. I will tell you about them as I can just picture you and mami smiling when you read this. It will also be nice to write about something that isn’t the state of the shop for once, even though I know it’s what you want.

So they came to the shop on Tuesday at around midday. The husband, the wife and the six-month-old baby. For an hour the husband tried on suits while the wife nursed their baby in the corner of the

shop. He was a sweet bambino with long curling eyelashes. Irene was besotted with him as I’m sure you can picture. Anyway, after multiple tries to find the right suit, we settled on a classic. One of yours. A deep blue linen jacket matched with some white, slim fit trousers. He wanted blue trousers but I convinced him into white, an Italian style for an Inglese. I even added the cream white pocket handkerchief for a final touch, folded in such a way to create two triangles peeking out from the rim of the pocket. Just as you taught me. In that moment I was reminded of what you always said, the quote you stole from your great hero: to create something exceptional your mindset must be relentlessly focussed on the smallest detail. The line you used to say to me again and again and I finally think I am living it true. That I have learned. Of course the husband loved these added touches and the suit in general, and so did the wife. I think she was even happier than him. He was scruffy when he walked in, yet now he was transformed. Even I couldn’t imagine the impact the suit would have on him. Raggiante is the only word I can think of and it reminded me why we do this work. Why you worked so hard

to build this business from the ground up when everyone told you no. The endless power of beauty and what that can do to people. How even the brutish Inglese can be overwhelmed in joy by what we create. It really is testament to your legacy. Anyway, I’m off topic. My hand is tired from the day’s work, so these letters take me longer than they should.

So the couple were happy with the suit, it just needed a few tweaks to get the length of the leg perfect. Three fingers from the floor of course, the only way. It’s sad how I was so nervous when I used to say that. I’d watched you do it so many times yet it never felt my advice to give. It felt so you and for so long I never felt like I’d earned the right to say it myself, however much you encouraged me. I think that’s why so many people, especially Lucchesi, questioned me at the start. They could sense my nervousness. I’m almost embarrassed to look back at the suit seller I once was. How different to now. They tell stories of me in the streets these days. I’ve even overheard some myself when they don’t know it’s me listening. The flamboyant, eccentric Roberti with the Principe Azzurro hair. You must

go see his shop, even if just to meet him. Probably un finocchio they say, even though everyone in the city walls knows Lili and the bambini. Italians love to gossip; I can’t moan about that. In truth I think it helps sales in the shop instead of damages them. How different from what they used to say. The boy living off his babbo’s hard work. Desperate to learn the craft but no skill, no confidence…

Ah, I go off topic again. It must be the wine talking. Lili is already asleep and the bambini too. I probably should join them, but it’s so hard to go from the adrenaline of the shop straight to bed. I know you felt the same. One needs this time to decompress and writing to you helps me do that. I just apologise for how long it’s taken and now the rambles of this letter, though I guess you’re used to them by now. Part of the charm I hope.

So, after sending the suit off to be tailored we agreed upon a time for them to return to collect it. The only one available was at seven the next day, not long before we closed. I told him I couldn’t wait to see him and even gave them a discount, though I made it look far greater than it was. Again, just as you taught me. After that I gave him my card and my personal number. Yes, this is something new that I am doing.

See next week they are off to a wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral – a real favourite of yours. I have always loved it, too. Do you remember when we visited it together, one of our last trips? For an hour we just stood there and looked at it, taking it all in. Christopher Wren, though I know you know that. He may not possess the attention to beauty as some of ours, but he was so prolific. That man designed and built over fifty churches after the Great Fire of London. A fire that destroyed a city and yet out of it came such art. Such greatness rising from the ashes. I’ve always found that so powerful. So poetic.

Now back to this wedding at St. Paul’s. See this is one of the great changes from when you were in charge: social media and the internet. Now business cannot survive without it. I am still an amateur but I try to adapt and this man gave me a chance. I asked him to take a photo at this wedding next week in front of St. Paul’s wearing our suit. He will then put it on his social media and do something called a taggare of our page. The knock-on effect of this post is that it will hopefully bring more people to us and our work. Crazy right? How times have changed, yet now it’s the most effective

way to sell. No longer can we rely on simple word of mouth… Sorry babbo, I promised to not talk about the shop and yet here I am. Like father like son, as the locals say. I will try again.

So we agreed upon seven the next evening and the husband was good to his word. He arrived at exactly the right time, very Inglese of him, though this time he was alone. Where is your wife and child, I asked, almost worried.

The man did not think much of the question and just replied, back at the hotel.

But why not bring them with you, I probed with more urgency or flamboyancy as they say. I could tell Irene was disappointed not to see the little baby again as I know she wants one of her own soon. What Italian women doesn’t? I hope she finds the love she deserves.

My wife must be in the hotel room while the baby sleeps, the Inglese continued. Sleeps, I questioned, it’s only seven

Then the man looked straight at me, his expression one of confusion. Exactly, he said, the baby went down nearly one hour ago.

Is he ill, Irene now interjected, concern on her face.

Ill? Not at all, the Inglese responded, that’s just his bedtime. He goes to bed at six every night. He’s on a good schedule, so my wife stays in the hotel room with him.

Six! Can you imagine! You should have seen the look on Irene’s face. Astonishment, outrage and more. Babies going to bed at six in the evening. In Italy! I’ve never heard of such a thing. After the man left Irene was still in shock. Brutta, brutta she kept saying on repeat. The Inglese are so funny. Always different to the rest, like it’s a badge of pride they like to wear.

Anyway finally I got there, the end of my long story. I hope it provides you some smiles when it reaches you. Please share it with mami too. I miss you both more than you can imagine. How I wish you were here with me to help sail through these windy seas we face. I know you’d adapt to the social media thing far better than any of the other older makers in town. That’s what always stood you out from the rest. That ability to adapt.

On that note, I will leave you both but another letter will follow soon. Hopefully with even better news and stories.

Tutto il mio amore, Gio

Dear babbo,

Again, a long time has passed. I’m so sorry. The bambini are growing fast and although they don’t know it, they miss your presence very much. I can sense it. A hole in their life without the regular contact with their nonno and nonna. That is life and there’s nothing much we can do about it, but I miss you, too. My heart aches daily, especially when the shop struggles. I feel I damage the family name, even when I give it my all. Who’d have thought that when I was that young boy travelling the world, walking out on the family against all your pleading asking otherwise, that I’d now miss you so much? Not only that, but how I might bring more shame to the family name now than I did back then.

It’s sad to think of all the arguments we had. We were both different people who then mellowed with age – wouldn’t you say? Mistakes were made by us both, although I still stand by what I did. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I did not make my escape leave. I wouldn’t value family, kindness and compassion like I do now. I needed those travels, even if they hurt both you and mami Your lack of support wounded me also. I love Italy and loved Italy back then but I also needed a break from it, from the city walls. Now I value how close families are here. I still see so many friends living near their genitori and then to their nonni and their cugini and it’s a wonderful thing. Something I did not understand when I was young. But also there is space for exploring and finding out things about yourself away from the family nucleus and I needed to do that. I found it so hard that you couldn’t empathise with those thoughts.

I always remember the realisation that hit when we watched the motorcycle travel film about Che Guevara together. It was like a rocket shot through me and all I wanted to do was travel and uncover more about the world. Your instant response was a negative one, siding with the communist miners in the film and their surprise that people travel to just travel. What a luxury you said, a rich man’s fantasy, as if you were the same as them and not a business owner selling high-end suits to the rich holidaying in Puglia and Venice. It was a hypocrisy I couldn’t bear and, all combined, it eventually led me to leave. I would never take back that decision even though I know what hurt it caused. In fact now I can see how clearly it actually helped me follow in your footsteps, just as you dreamed. Without

that trip it would have been impossible. Like a man who sleeps around before he settles down and marries, I had an itch I needed to scratch and scratch it I did. I never got to tell you about those trips and that was your fault. Your old man stubbornness. You were a wonderful babbo but also had such a simple, narrow view of life and I feel sad that you never got to experience some of the things I did, or at least experience them through me. You could never allow yourself and subjected mami to the same rules, even when she desired more. Maybe that’s why you were so successful in the shop whilst I struggle? You were so determined to succeed, so focussed on one thing and I lack that, though is that a bad thing? I don’t want to be in the shop until ten at night and not say goodnight to the children. Did you once make that sacrifice? Sacrifice. I laugh only because the existence of that word in your vocabulary, in your everyday defence of your actions, should never have existed. I choose my family and would do every time though I do wish the shop would flourish, too. Maybe those two things cannot exist together like you used to allude to. That you have to choose one. I will work my best to challenge that narrative. To be a good babbo and a good business owner at the same time. Let’s see which one of us is right. Does Italy allow a true, modern, feminist man? I am not sure.

I also fear things may only get harder with what’s happening next door. There’s been movement for months in Signora Andrea’s old shop. I feared what it might be and yesterday had it confirmed. A new suit shop. A chain that runs through Rome, Florence, Naples and even Milan. Let’s just hope the quality is like some of those other chain stores. It’s that and only that which helps us survive. I’ll keep you posted.

Tutto il mio amore,

Gio Dear babbo,

24th July 2021

All our worries have come to life. Not only is the new chain store next door a far cheaper alternative than what we offer, the quality is surprisingly good. I went by earlier this morning and have rushed back to send this. The linen jackets are so fine and light yet also inexpensive, which makes me wonder how? The answer lies in Asia, of course. I thought the changing world and so-called commitment to a green future could help us

but it feels like that hasn’t hit Italy yet. Late as ever.

At least we have Irene who is still far better than any other seller in town. You trained her so extensively. Together, I still think we have a fighting chance. As you often used to say; while there is life there is hope. The thought of you barking that loud as you stomped around the house still brings me great comfort. More news coming soon.

Tutto il mio amore,

Gio

Dear babbo,

3rd October 2021

So long since last I wrote you. As I’m sure you have already guessed, it’s because of the shop. We’ve been doing longer and longer shifts late into the night, throwing everything we can to turn things around. I won’t lie, it’s been hard and it terrifies me. Irene had to ask for a week off as she’s so exhausted, so this week I worked alone. Lili brings the kids into the shop to spend time with me there because I am returning home later and later (though luckily they don’t get to bed as early as un bambino Inglese!). I still refuse to make the same choices you made but now perhaps understand you better now.

Meanwhile, next door the customers stream in even though the summer season is over. On a site called Instagram – one of these social medias I told you about –they have over seven hundred thousand followers. We have four hundred and fiftytwo. So many staff, so many resources behind them. It’s like Juventus against Atalanta. Let’s just hope their Juventus gets caught in some financial difficulties or cheating again, otherwise I worry we are done.

As to the bambini, they’re growing fast. Matteo is nearly one now and Monica is three. They both smile a lot though Matteo is growing more and more stubborn, just like his Nonno. In the city walls life remains the same though a new restaurant has opened near the shop. We went last week and although the food was fine it lacked the same kind of attention and care as some of the older restaurants. On the surface the place appeared stylish and fresh but the food felt rushed, a crust undercooked, a sauce overcooked. Almost symbolic of everything inside the walls these days. It just means I go back to the established places outside where the care remains. Let’s just

hope those favourite spots don’t become too popular and fall to the same kind of failings as a result.

That’s all for now, back to work.

Tutto il mio amore, Gio

Dear babbo, Buon Natale!

26th December 2021

Where has this year gone? I guess the answer to that lies in the shop. To say we are really struggling is not a classic dramatisation of our family, it’s sadly the truth. Irene and I are in there day and night and it’s not nearly enough. Next door are killing us and they seem proud to do so. Two weeks ago the manager came by the store with a card for Natale. He was polite and friendly and asking us how we are doing, but I saw laughs behind every question. When I said things were bad, he just said: I did wonder why it was so cold in here. And then he took that as his time to go. Can you believe it? Businesses in Italy used to support each other, used to look after each other, even under the dark days of Mussolini. Now no more. They want to see us fail and failing is exactly what we’re doing. I am so sorry babbo, to be in charge of this descent down to the underworld, but I have not given up hope yet. We keep fighting, as shown by our latest sad news to share…we sold the family home.

Again, I’m sorry babbo, but it was getting to the stage that I was having to think about letting Irene go. I saw no other way financially, even though alone it would be impossible. However, instead of losing her, Lili and I made another decision. We just couldn’t face letting her go, not only as a worker but also as a dear friend. She is too important to us and so material things must go first and the only real financial alternative was to leave our place in the city walls. I know how important that home was to you, yet I also know the shop is more so and this was the only way to keep Irene. The house sold for more than expected, the city is such a growing tourism destination these days, so that was a welcome boost. We’ve now moved a fifteen-minute drive outside the city to one of the small, picturesque little towns. It’s so peaceful out here and maybe I even prefer it, even if our place lacks space. There is lots of nature around us and the bambini have room to play outdoors. It’s so much cooler, too, I never realised. The

house itself is small, but part of an old farm. Nothing is growing there, but I have dreams of starting it again. We could make our own oil, wine, grow fruit and vegetables. It shouldn’t be too hard to set up, I just need time. Time I sadly don’t have right now.

Living around us are lots of Italians, families that have lived here for a long, long time and they welcome us like one of their own. Some even know of you. The famous Roberti they say and they tell me stories of your life in the shop but also before that, when you were a young man causing mischief. A young man who never worked they said, partying and eating and sleeping his way across the city. Stories I never knew but wish I did. In honesty, I’m sad you never shared them with me or showed compassion and understanding when I was that same young man. Instead you put water on my youth and tried to tie me down. It’s upsetting to think of all the good times we could have had and I only know that because of these new neighbours I’ve only just met. It’s not just them who live around us however, the area growing more diverse by the day. This new wave of immigration has hit Toscana too and somehow, some have ended up in our town. Not many, but a few. There is one man here called Hassan who lives with his two sons. When he is settled and has enough money he hopes to bring his wife and daughter here. You should hear the stories of this man babbo, the things he has been through just to be here. To be alive. It’s made me realise that however bad things get with the shop, I also need perspective. We have a house, have a business, a beautiful family and I must remember that, even when I despair. This man helps me grasp that, though I worry about Lili. Her previously restrained anxiety can be resisted no longer. Even though she tries her best to hide it, she never can. At night she has stopped sleeping. At four she will be up, busy in the kitchen, unable to sleep, unable to sit still. Remaining busy because what else can she do?

To help with money she has picked up some cleaning work for one of the nearby houses. A website called Airbnb that’s everywhere now. People renting out their houses at the weekend and charging a fortune to Americans for them. Americans who have a great, great, great, grandfather that was Italian and now they’re searching out their bloodline for any hint of Italian, proud to discover it. If only your uncle was around to hear that after all his troubled years in America, where he did his best to

hide his roots. What was the name he chose again? Charlie? The Italian Charlie! I laugh just writing it. Changing his name so no one knew, even though it was obvious. Now they do the opposite and want everyone to know, all naming their children something Italian. I saw Luca is the thirtieth most popular baby name in America now. Society changes fast. Anyway the work helps her, keeps her busy, but the money isn’t enough.

If only you were closer to help. We need it now more than ever. I keep telling myself it will get better, that it will change. I just need the perspective that my new neighbour’s life gives me. Though at night, with a glass in my hand, I can’t help but think what life was like before this shop next door arrived. How it was so much easier when it was Signora Andrea’s little place. How life would be so much better if this shop was gone, vanished. Based on the customers I see leaving, a suit in their hand, I can’t see that happening any time soon. I can dream though. I can always dream.

Tutto il mio amore,

Gio

Dear babbo,

10th March 2022

A short letter as nothing positive to share. Barely any sales, low season lower than ever before. Not sure how much longer we can last but Irene and I are trying. I’ll write a longer letter soon.

Tutto il mio amore,

Gio

Dear babbo,

28th March 2022

This is the letter I never wanted to send. It’s hard for me even to write this but there was no other way – I had to let Irene go. We just didn’t have enough to pay her. Even with Lili’s job and selling the house, it still wasn’t enough. There was nothing I could do. I think she knew it was coming but it didn’t make it any easier. I told her slowly, holding both her hands, promising her a job when things got better. At the start she took it well and her expression never changed. She just listened and nodded and told me she understood. I was relieved, expecting worse. Then a customer walked in but she couldn’t bring herself to face them. Instead she darted out back and while I tried to sell a suit – and

failed because the price was apparently too high – I could hear her cries. Sobbing at first and then louder and louder. Luckily the customer left quickly and so I rushed to find her curled in a ball on the floor, her whole body shaking uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to do babbo. I’ve never felt so awful and so alone. Did you ever have to let anyone go? I doubt it, after all you were the one who hired Irene all those years ago. All I could do was get on the floor next to her. I wrapped my arm around her and held her tight and told her it would be alright, but I knew that wasn’t true. And in that moment it hit me,too. And so while she cried, I cried. Not as loud, but just as hard. A wreck, both of us. I just hope a customer didn’t walk in then and hear us, but guess who soon did… Next door’s manager. It’s like he knew the news before I even delivered it. He of course knows quality when he sees it, I’ve seen him watching Irene from the window. Anyway once Irene and I had tidied ourselves up and gone onto the shop floor, he was there waiting. Offered her a job on the spot. Imagine my feelings. Anger and relief at the same time. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. Just looked at me, her eyes needing an answer as she couldn’t say yes on her own. And what could I say? The reality is we would need something spectacular to hire her again. That’s the truth, but I couldn’t say it in front of this man. So I told him to leave, lashed him out of the shop. Not very professional but I’m broken. Then, when he was gone, I gave Irene my blessing. I had to. I’m actually pleased this opportunity came, even if it breaks me. It means we can stay close, that her and Lili can remain friends. And that was that, we were done.

Then the next day I went to work and just as I was entering I saw Irene enter their shop. Saw her nervously make her way in and it killed me. I had to turn away, concentrate on opening the shutters, unlocking the doors and then went to work in silence. Complete silence. I put music on just to stop the thoughts in my head getting too loud. The anger and the hatred. It’s like all my failings I now blame on this shop next door because I don’t know where else to direct them. Where else can they go? Towards Italy?

Towards me? Towards you? Every night is the same, I’m as awake as Lili now. Working, drinking, despair. I’m not sure how much longer I can last.

Tutto il mio amore, Gio

Dear babbo,

3rd May 2022

I dream every night that you are well and happy. That you and mami are laughing and drinking and eating good food. That the air is warm and the company you keep is pleasant. Sometimes I wish I could be there too and maybe that day isn’t so far away. Every day here is worse. People barely enter the shop anymore and I understand why. It’s a mess compared to what it used to be. Everything is on sale now which means we sell, but the margin is so small it’s pointless. At least the few customers we have are happy. I can barely sleep anymore, unless I drink enough and then I just wake up tired, grumpy and irrational. I think Lili might leave me soon. I can sense she has had enough and I can’t blame her. I’m not the person I was or want to be, but I can’t change it either. I’m so lost, more lost than I’ve ever been. Where has the fun-loving traveller gone? The happy husband and father? The flamboyant suit seller? All memories now.

Gio

Dear babbo,

23rd June 2022

No good news, so no reason to write. The money has stopped completely. Lili and I just argue now, no love left. Neither of us have the energy. The kids can feel it too, they’re older now, more aware, especially Monica. I barely see them even though when I’m in the shop I barely work. Just sit and stare. Sometimes I close up and go to the bench in front and sit and watch the people stream into next door. Irene is in there every day, she looks happy at least. Once she saw me and waved though I couldn’t bring myself to wave back. I need it all to change but I don’t know how. Where are you to help?

but I can’t. And you know the reason why? You babbo, you. Always you. Pressuring me, asking more of me, demanding more of me, even from where you are now.

Babbo,

2nd January 2023

The sale has happened, the shop is Roberti no longer. I hand over the keys in just over a week. Finally I feel some sort of relief but that is always masked by what you must now feel. Well that is my problem no more. I am a free man now.

Dear babbo,

28th August 2022

Sad days, dark days, laughter all gone. The only thing that now brings me joy are the smiles of the bambini and the food and wine of the countryside. Everything else brings darkness, even the suits. Now when I look at them I just see what they’ve done to me, to us, to my family. The pain they have caused and for what? The famous Roberti name? I want to give it all up, I need to give it all up,

Babbo,

14th November 2022

Lili has left me. She had to. We couldn’t go on any longer, neither of us had anything left to give. It was unfair on the bambini, unfair on her. They’ve stayed in the house and I sleep in the shop now. It’s like a prison I can never leave. At night I bring the shutters down and sit in darkness, waiting for morning to come. I can’t remember the last time I slept a night through. The only time I leave is to bring these letters to you.

Babbo, Buon Natale.

25th December 2022

I’m sorry. Sorry for the son I was. For the failure I have brought to this shop. To our family. To our name. The shop is no more, I don’t even open it for customers. There’s no point, the bills are too high. I’ve spoken to next door and the manager is interested in buying it as he naturally wants to expand. I think I am going to say yes.

My friend Hassan, the man I told you about, has said I can stay with him and I write this from his home now. I am near the bambini and that brings me joy, even if nothing else does. Lili does not want them to know about our separation yet and refuses the idea of divorce, purely on how it would look within the community. Emotionally, however, we are divorced and I feel empty inside as a result. Broken. A hollowed-out carcass in comparison to the individual I once was. What sad news to share on this special day – one I celebrate with a family who only do so out of a kindness to me and all I’ve been through. I’m not sure where I would be without them. Such a show of generosity from foreigners whilst I am deserted by my own. It’s hard to know what to make of it.

Anyway, that is all for now. Buon Natale, I hope your day is brighter than mine.

Tutto il mio amore, Gio

12th February 2023

Oh babbo. A new year brings new news. Dark, sad news. What I write now is perhaps the most difficult letter I’ve ever had to write but also who are we as humans if we don’t face up to our mistakes and where we have gone wrong? And face up to them I have, with everyone but you. The hardest person I must tell.

There is no simple way to say it, so here it is: the shop is no more. It is gone. Forever. The Roberti stronghold vanished from history and not in the way you must think. I am glad I cannot see your face when you read this, but I know I must write it. To tell you the truth. The thing is, I lost everything. Everything and everything they stole from me with their cheap suits and busy shop and expansions. The shop, Irene, the house, Lilli and the bambini. They took them all and so I did something back. An eye for an eye as the Bible says. Was I wrong to? Maybe, but life is not always possible to live in the glow of hindsight and so I did what I did and that is the end of it. At least I can write with clarity of mind now, something I lost these last few months, and with that clarity I only ask that you can forgive me…

It was my last night in the shop, the night before they took it for good. I wanted to sleep in the shop that night, not at Hassan’s even though I have been staying there a lot. That last night I wanted to be close to you for one final time, to our legacy. Do you understand that? So I locked up early, closed the doors and breathed it all in. The suits were still there as I had agreed to sell them all to next door too, at a discount of course. So it was just me and all our handiwork, our ideas and designs. Surrounded by beauty, by our craftsmanship, our history. I soaked it all in for the last time, drinking more and more as the night went on. In many ways it was the perfect end.

At one point, maybe three in the morning, I decided to venture outside as I needed the fresh air. It was a cold night, quiet in the streets. Empty. I stumbled out, drink in my hand and out of nowhere tripped, lurching forward until I crashed to the floor. Down in the cold on the cities’ cobbled streets. A sad sight, Gio Roberti fallen so low. And then from my broken position, a wretch of the streets sprawled across the floor, I looked up and there it was before me. Laughing at me like it has ever since it arrived. The shop next door. Silently taunting me.

And in that look, in that hate fuelled glance, an idea came and I did not have the composure to say no. My mind had floated back to the Inglese I told you about before and to St. Paul’s and Christopher Wren. Of how beauty rose from the ashes and how that could happen again. And once the thought was there it just took over me and there was no other way. So I rushed back in the shop and got to work. Did you know linen was so flammable? I found out once at a wedding. A cigarette to my arm, a suit ruined. The memory had stayed with me and so in the shop I got out the scissors, the same blue-handled pair you had when you were a boy, and began to cut. Tearing suits off their hangers and slicing into the beautiful fabric. In a craze I worked, chopping, chopping, chopping. Then I picked up all the rags and began shoving them into two half-drunk bottles that littered the shop floor. Alcohol you would be ashamed of. No fine wines anymore, just potions made to help you forget. You know them of course, but only because we used them once to make Limoncello. You and I in the shade of the garden on a warm summers’ eve, picking our lemons while mami smiled on. Pouring that toxic liquid over those ripe Sicilian lemons to make our special drink. And now I used that same alcohol to burn. A Molotov cocktail they call it, originally from Finland, from the war, though you know that. I walked outside with two, one in each hand, then stood to face the shop next door. I almost wish someone had seen me. Two arms raised like Christ on the cross. A flaming bottle in each, Cattedrale di San Martino behind me. One breath, two, and then I threw them. Threw them both with all I had and watched as they crashed through the shop window. Watched as next door’s cheap suits took the flames. It wasn’t long though before the fire roared, eating everything inside. Flames licking every part of the shop and I let out a strange guttural scream of delight. I had done what needed to be done. Justice for everything they’d done to me. Or so I thought. In the end, who am I to give out justice? Just a man who the world owes nothing. Justice is not for me to decide.

See, as the flames roared they roared too high and when the fire grew it took our dear, little shop, too. Took it all in a second. I ran inside to try and save it. Ran to get the fire extinguisher buried under the counter, but what can a fire extinguisher do against fire like that? And what can a man do? The fire took me, too, burning up my arms, smoke consuming my lungs. I sprayed the extinguisher wildly in all directions as I tried to make my exit but I was nothing compared to what surrounded me. All the flaming haunted suits silently mocking me. Then I crashed back out onto the street, no longer cold but ablaze in heat like a summer’s day. And there I passed out, passed out thinking of you and of mami and of all I’ve done wrong.

The police took me first thing, though it’s not like I tried to fight it. I was there and waiting in my half-burned suit, my arms raw, my eyes stinging. Irene saw it all happen, tears streaming again as I got put inside a car. Another job I’ve stolen from her. Driven away to where I have been for the last month now, sat in my cell in a thin piece of cotton, cheap and ill-fitting. No more suits for me. Lili refuses to visit me so I’m not sure when I will see the bambini again. All I have now are these letters, letters that never get returned. The guards said I need an actual address for this letter to be sent to you and that they won’t hand deliver it to your grave. That it’s not possible and they mocked me for even the suggestion. Truthfully I feel relief if you don’t read this. I’m not sure I could deal with you and mami learning of what I’ve done from wherever you now are. In writing it I have tried though and in the shop I tried, too. In my marriage, with Matteo and Monica. Just sometimes trying is not enough. That is life’s sad reality.

I hope one day you can find forgiveness for me like I have for you. Because you are part of this, it’s just taken me a lifetime to realise that. See you made the cocktail with me. I’m just the man who sparked the match.

IN SOMEONE ELSE’S HANDS

by Alex Dodt

You know the story: a stranger comes to town, and the stranger is your recently widowed and soon-to-be-joining-her-in-thegrave father-in-law.

“Len, honey, you might be the stranger here,” Marg liked to say, then she and Pops would laugh at her twisted version. She was funny like that, always telling tall tales. When we first met, she said, “I don’t date fishermen,” and stood in the bar doorway like a teapot. I wasn’t a fisherman, I was a dockhand, but Marg knew that. I told her, “I haven’t caught one in years,” and we both laughed.

She still wore her fingernails long then and by the end of her shift they would be packed with the peanut scraps customers were encouraged to leave all over the table. Every afternoon when I walked in, Marg would be wiping down another table and Pops would be propped up behind the bar telling his regulars jokes that made the dog tags around his neck bounce across his chest like lottery balls. After one crabbing season passed, he finally let me drive his only waitress home.

“Paul Newman or Robert Redford?” Marg asked as we pulled out of the parking lot that first night. “You can only choose one.”

I chose Newman and Marg shook her head, tapping her nails twice on the dash like ashing five skinny cigarettes. It went on like that all the way to her house. I listened, learned some names, voted my preference when it was time. I chose Cher on our second date and Marg wouldn’t let me hear the end of it. She had an opinion on all of them, formed during years doing hair and makeup on movie sets in California. None of the names she asked about ever had their hair in her hands, and if they had, she may have never let them go.

The first time we agreed, it was on Bob Hope. I could watch him forever, Marg said. That was her idea of heaven, plopped on a couch with me and her cold whiskey. I couldn’t imagine Bob Hope’s idea of the hereafter involved singing and dancing for some strange couple. I got stuck on the details. I said maybe we will have to settle for a duplicate, an impersonator or someone like that, but no. Bob Hope can do what he pleases in his dreams and he can perform

in ours, Marg said. That was the logic of her dreams.

We were each other’s third, that elusive charm, but seeing as Marg’s first was her high school sweetheart and her second lasted twenty years and brought three children, well, the odds weren’t in my favor. Her mother Jean would say my first two marriages “bore no fruit.” But she and Pops eventually came around. There wasn’t much else to do. At our age, no one rushes the altar to object to the union.

Two-thirds of Marg’s fruit had rolled along by the time I came around. Marg insisted on keeping their rooms just like they had left them in case they ever turned up unannounced. Sometimes, in conversation with strangers, Marg will mention the kids’ names and remind me she hasn’t made them up as part of some trick she’s playing.

Olive was twelve when I moved in with Marg. I did my best dad impression. I sang songs on her birthday and surprised her with the double-pump zebra pattern Skechers she wanted for summer camp. I drove her to school each morning. In the beginning, I would put on a chauffeur’s cap and a black tie, tip my hat as I opened the door for her, and Olive would say, “Thank you, Lenny.” She never really took to me, you could say, but I would rather say we kept it professional. Kept it simple. For six years, we did that — now, tell me what kind of stranger-in-town does that for six years — until she moved to Anchorage for college.

After that, Marg and I really settled in. I learned when it was time to stop talking about work and how brown to cook the crust on her green bean casserole. She learned when to roll me on my side when I had been snoring too long and when to switch me from cocktails to highballs. We had our nightly routine: big-talk sagas about the Wild West, made-for-TV movies starring greasy-haired detectives Marg always fawned over, VHS tape recordings of eighties American sitcoms that little Marguerite watched religiously after Pops moved the family to Germany when she was nine. There was always something to watch.

Then, one day, with no notice as far as I could tell you, Pops appeared on our doorstep.

I moved to the loveseat so he could sit

with Marg on the couch. I spent more time in the garage. We adjusted. We rolled around the house a while, airtight balls of arms and legs bumping into each other in the hallways like the handheld stocking stuffer games my grandmother gave to me and my brother each year, the background image a Christmas tree with little holes where each ornament should be, the objective of the game deceptively simple: tilt the screen this way and that until you roll all the silver plastic balls into the indentations and get them to stay. Once we had it right, we would shake them loose and start over.

#

If I had been the lost and lonely traveler, not Pops, our house wouldn’t have been the first I looked to for refuge. It was the only two-story house on the street, the second story shorter than the first, stuck together like a disemboweled wedding cake, the middle layers thrown away and the top, still imprinted with the feet of the bride and groom statuette, slapped down cockeyed on the wide bottom.

We made it work. I converted my den into a bedroom. A necessary sacrifice, Marg said. The night Pops moved in, Marg and I stood against the door of the den as he sat on the mattress I had dragged in from the garage that morning. We talked about the room, how he liked it. We may as well have been standing in Olive’s dorm room on move in day, Olive fidgeting on her bed, staring at the door that Marg held onto hoping it might not open again.

I asked Pops how long he would be staying and he pursed his lips as though he might whistle his response. “Can I smoke in here?” he asked, pulling a plastic baggie of thumb-shaped green stems from his pocket and placing it on the mattress. Pops could have never asked and Marg wouldn’t have known better. Her nose had been molded by thirty-five years of Marlboro Reds and was never able to zero in on foreign scents. Sometimes after I had spent the afternoon in the garage, I would indulge. Marg would never notice, asking me only about the boat and whether I thought it was seaworthy yet, holding my latest model in her palm and turning it over and over like it was weathering a storm.

#

Marg hadn’t agreed yet to move Pops into a nursing home when the flyers started coming in the mail. I must have subscribed to some list, I told her. She would throw the flyers in the trash can in our bedroom and tell me that we would talk about it later. But sometimes we ran out of things to say after dinner was finished. Pops would sit on the couch and Marg would be in the kitchen bent over a yellow legal pad of Jean’s recipes scribbled in blue felt pen, studying them like scrolls. I figured it was something to talk about. Pops probably had an idea anyway.

One flyer was designed like a beforeand-after ad for a weight loss program. The man forking spaghetti into his mouth in the first photo looked like a younger Pops. The second was a close-up of a spartan kitchenette with two slat back chairs around a corner table set for dinner. Become this stainless steel silverware set, it seemed to say.

Pops didn’t get upset when I showed him the flyer after dinner. The old man always kept his humor about him. I liked that. I told him, “You could model for their next campaign!” and we both laughed.

Marg didn’t agree. “You weren’t hired to deliver that message,” she told me, pouring another glass of Tennessee Honey and spinning two fingers in it until a pin-sized whirlpool formed amid the circle of ice cubes.

There were so many delicate messages to transmit in a marriage. Often, Marg and I could exchange them without speaking. There were bound to be breakdowns, though. Middle-age marriages required extra care. There were the usual turnabouts to navigate, but there were also foreign traditions initiated long before you and family reunions where an aunt or a grandparent will toast to the family, but mostly to the kids, kids brought into the world by someone whose memory still squats at the end of the table. “And we’re so glad Marg has found Lenny,” the toast will end, and I raise my glass to life as a rescue.

Marg folded the flyer, placed it in the trash, and walked with her drink to the couch. I wasn’t hired to deliver that message. She was right. I was self-appointed, hiring myself off to anyone in need of assistance, messenger sometimes of even my own thoughts. He didn’t mean it that way, I report.

Christmas came and Olive returned home for two weeks. That balanced us out. She and Pops would sit on the porch drinking

hot chocolate talking about God knows what. Christmas also meant the return of Marg’s carefully scripted holiday traditions imported from a childhood spent with Pops and Jean on Air Force bases from L.A. to Ramstein. Frank Sinatra’s croon replaced the hum of the heater as background noise. Christmas cookbooks were unboxed and laid on the kitchen counter like a missal stand. I fired up a new Hallmark love story on the TV whenever there was a lull. I knew my marks and I landed them.

On weekends, we drove around town marveling at all the lights and the heights people had gone to in order to line their roofs with them. I placed a string of red and green blinking lights across the windshield and plugged it in. Sometimes, gaping at a well-lit house, we would see people appear in the window staring back. We would sit very still like they couldn’t see us and they would point as if to say, Look at that house!

The search for the perfect Christmas tree was our most well-rehearsed tradition. One of the first trees Marg laid her eyes on would always be the one we ended up taking home. She will point at it and say, “Wouldn’t it look wonderful?” and Olive will jump up and down and talk about how many presents we could fit underneath it. But we have to be drawn back to the tree first. That’s the process. We have to visit a second, a third, a fourth tree lot, me playing the skeptic all along, gently questioning her latest selection, waiting for the right moment to give in.

“Tree is a monster,” Pops said, spinning a tight figure in his wheelchair like he wanted to dance with it, maybe the tango or the jitterbug, something quaint that called for a partner.

“It’ll fill up the whole room,” Marg said, running her fingers across Pops’s head between the plush brown antlers hanging down over his ears like bent antennae. No one asked for clarification. He was excited and could no longer be bothered with the detail of this or that tree, his desires now universal, indistinguishable.

The afternoon snow had hardened over the morning’s asphalt stew and we moved across it like it was Opening Night again and Marg and I were limping to center ice to try a slap shot for five dollars. Finally, we made it back to where it had all begun. Marg’s eyes got wide again at the sight of the heavyweight whose long branches we had caressed the first time we visited that lot. It was a Douglas Fir and just getting near it felt like dunking your face in one of Jean’s

mint juleps.

“That one’s been sold,” said a man holding a clipboard and pointing to a tag tied on the backside of the tree. The man’s hands looked familiar, his fingers gnarled at the tips. I told him about the season I had spent crabbing. He told me how he got into selling trees. Fish in the fall, trees in the winter, retirement in the spring. It was impressive how he found ways to get through the seasons.

Marg’s face looked stalled by the cold. Even when people use the best words they can muster to describe what they want, there’s still interpretation to be done. Without words, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. Marg and Olive walked on toward the next row of trees. My guess then was that traditions remained traditions until something severed them and that severing was a choice. Then tradition would be just a curiosity, indexes of how time had been passed, nothing more.

I grabbed the trunk of Marg’s chosen tree. Already cut, tagged, and ready for the taking, it seemed to grow taller as I held it like Marg when she’s had one too many Honeys and stands on the couch to leap onto my back. The fisherman had retreated to a yellow tent that sat opposite the parking lot. I watched him place his hands over a rusted barrel with a fire burning inside. I placed the top of the tree on Pops’ lap. He didn’t say anything, no objections or recommendations, and that made the whole plan feel like it was preordained. We knew what we had to do. Our path back to the truck looked clear, and after a quick threecount, I gave Pops and the tree a shove. The tree lot sloped downward toward the parking lot and we picked up speed without trying. Rolling backwards gripping the branches like handlebars, Pops’ chest began rumbling with laughter. We sped up. He hunched over as though he could exist beneath the wind.

It was the sound of Pops falling that got everyone’s attention. We almost made it to the truck. The fisherman would have had no idea. We hit a pothole and the tree and Pops fell at once. Before I got to him, he had rolled out from under the tree and began brushing himself off.

The fisherman stood over us and shook his ungloved fingers like fish out of water. Marg wasn’t impressed with our defense of tradition. In her version, tradition was ruined. Tradition never involved getting kicked out of a Christmas tree lot, she said. After we died, would Olive and her kids want

to repeat this night?

Pops looked happy though, happier than I’d seen him since he moved in, maybe since Jean died. Jean would like that, I said. Marg didn’t share my interest in interpreting the feelings of the dead. I imagined that when I die, people will ask Marg, “What would Lenny want?” and she won’t have an answer.

#

At the last road between the tree lot and home, I turned. Pops sat in the backseat with Marg and Olive on either side. The road dead-ended at a meadow that in the summertime is filled with knee-high purple fireweed. A short walk from the truck, I found a grizzly bear of a tree nearly the height of the one Marg had wanted.

As I moved the saw through the trunk, slivers of bark hit my cheeks. I could see Marg waiting just beyond the range of where the tree would fall. Pops had come out to where the meadow began. Olive stood beside him. Behind them, I could see the lights flashing in our windshield.

It wasn’t the same tree, it wasn’t tradition, but it was something. We had to have a tree, I knew that. The ornaments were already unboxed on the kitchen table. We had to have a photo in front of a fullydecorated tree so that Marg could include it in the Christmas letter she would send out to family of hers I have never met. We would get a tree and we would do it together.

Finally, the tree yawned around the saw’s teeth and landed in an embankment, spraying a burst of snow into the air. Marg raised her hands to her head. I thought I could hear Olive and Pops let out a cheer. Through the swirling flakes, they looked like figures in a snow globe, Marg crouched in the center of the scene reaching for the treetop, Olive and Pops arm in arm at the edge of the meadow, and I was in there too, leaning against the cold sphere of glass, pointing at the tree’s wide trunk, wondering how we would ever fit that monster through the front door, while in someone else’s hands we were shaking. *

about the authors

Susan Melinda Morée is a poet, fiction writer and playwright. Her words have appeared in 2River, Word Riot, Piltdown Review, Bulb Culture Collective and in several anthologies. She has received grant support from New Mexico Writers to support a book-length series of poems about a wolf. She has also received funding from Montana Arts Council. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she received the Louis B. Goodman Creative Writing Scholarship and was both the editor and drama editor of The Brooklyn Review.

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Lake Effect, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, Pleiades, The Razor, and Terrain.org, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.

Shannon Viola works at an art gallery in London. She grew up on the coast of Maine. Her work has appeared in BarBar, Soliloquies Anthology, The Bookends Review, and Cleaver among others. She writes a newsletter, little dog, at shannoneviola.substack.com.

Gregory Byrd’s poetry and prose has appeared widely, recently in Tampa Review, Willow Springs, and Baltimore Review. Greg’s poetry chapbook, The Name of the God Who Speaks, won the Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press. He grew up delivering and installing appliances and teaches at St. Petersburg College, a community college in Tampa Bay.

Sage Tyrtle’s work is available in New Delta Review, The Offing, Lunch Ticket, and Apex among others. She is the author of the novella The King of Elkport. Her words have been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS. Read more at www.tyrtle. com.

The Only Ones Who Stay

Jaclyn Port is a Canadian writer currently living and teaching in China. She enjoys reading, hikes and long walks (getting lost optional but frequent), and on occasion makes her own writing notebooks. She has work previously published in Flash Fiction Magazine and Corvid Queen. Someday she hopes to write a story about things that actually happened, but, for now, will have to settle for writing truths tucked away in fictions.

Ben Davies is a writer based in California. Originally from the UK, Ben has had fiction published or forthcoming in LeftBrain Media, Fiery Scribe Review, MiniMag, Firework Stories, Unlikely Stories & more, with articles published in magazines including Huck, Lost and The International Times. He is currently finishing a short story collection, And So I Took Their Eye. He is the co-founder of Guatemalan artist-in-residence programme, Studio Luce.

Instagram: @benjamindcrisp

Twitter: bendaviescrisp Dear

Alex Dodt is a philosophy teacher in Phoenix and founder of The Grief Commune, a zine and community group focused on the politics of grief. His previous work has appeared in Ghost City Review, Qu, Barely South Review, and Devastation Baby. In

the downtime review

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the downtime review