41st Emerson Review

THE

EMER SON RE VIEW 2012

The Emerson Review is an annual literary journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

All genres of original, unpublished writing and visual art will be considered for publication. The reading period for the 2013 issue runs August 1, 2012 through February 1, 2013.

All submissions are handled anonymously. Materials can be submitted to The Emerson Review though our online submission manager http://emersonreview.submishmash. com. Complete guidelines can be found on our website. General questions and comments should be sent to emerson.review@gmail.com. http://pages.emerson.edu/organizations/emerson_review Printed by Excel Graphix. www.excelgraphix.com ISSN: 2156-2237 Š 2012 The Emerson Review

Staff Editors-in-Chief Diana Filar

Nicole Shelby

Managing Editor Jordan Koluch Fiction Editor Emily Murphy Fiction Assistant Vincent Scarpa Poetry Editor Brendan O’Brien Poetry Assistant Rachel Amico Nonfiction Editor Carly Loman Designers Jordan Koluch Nicole Shelby

Design Assistant Carly Loman Publicist/Treasurers Tracy Brickman

Melanie Lieberman

Readers Erin Arata, Shevaun Betzler, Carrie Cabral, Celina Colby, Jilly Connick, Michele Debczak, John Freeman, Ashleigh Heaton, Marissa Koors, Emily Lupinacci, Kayla Maiuri, Jessica Slavin, Gabriel Thompson, Elisabeth Webster

Fiction Paul Robert Chesser Mike Salisbury Jacqueline Vogtman Eric Twardzik Jill Birdsall Peter Kispert Angela Rydell

We Should Take Up Dancing 6 Dogs Can’t Swim 18 The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea Sweet 46 Salvage 68 Vestiges 78 The Search for Her Father’s Finger 94

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Poetry Nick DePascal Abigail Warren Nancy Carol Moody Jeffrey Alfier Tim Hedges

Entryways 1 Grasshopper Girl 26 Swash Zone 27 Nocturne for My Daughter’s Convoy Teenage Love Poem 90 Do Not Try This at Home 92

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Nonfiction Sarah Chaves Katie Walsh

Hello Again 42 The Father, The Son, The Daughter

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Photography Sheri L. Wright Megan Pietruszka Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Sparked 81 p&n w/v b:p1 82 Prag Tanz 83 balance with care 84 in frost 85 his is my heart 86 rain on oil 87 sour lymes at lyme 88

Spotlights Ben Brooks Elle O’Brien

Faculty Fiction 104 Undergraduate Fiction

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VOLUME 41

Entryways Nick DePascal

You let me wash your hair once more before we shaved your head — even then, clumps came out curled around my fingers, circled the drain and disappeared. ‗ A bed for you, a story, plastic tubes, a visit, a new memory — you writhe like the snakes inside you want out, sterile sheets tinctured with blood, with piss. No one should ever have to ride in hospital beds while rain and pigeon shit smear the glass of walkway windows. The lights in their fixtures flicker, but no one arrives to fix them — we should only live and live and live, always looking for the next door. ‗ A man walks into a hospital — is this the beginning of a joke

or something?

A man walks into a hospital, says, I’m converting from myth — because?

Because it sounds good —

[myth of magic fingers myth of steady hands myth of knows-allsees-all-but-can’t-bebothered-to-raise-a-singlefinger]

because this city’s a hellish shithole, sometimes, white hot garbage light choking the sky.

A man walks into a hospital but really the hospital swallows the man. ‗ Warm air, wind and you are new again, your legs well muscled, tan, alive again, pumping the pedals of your bicycle, and yes, I’m dreaming all of this again, the drugged, fluorescent lights above your bed working their black magic on my mind again, the steady drip drip drip of your IV, and then the rustling of your sheets. ‗ I tell the soul, the spirit, the whatever holds court in that mystery space in your body: I want entrance,

easy access, a way to read, an ideographic alphabet, a Braille, a way to see inside. I want permission.

If I think of you as a house, then the question becomes exactly how to enter. Do I enter through the front door key in hand, or slip around to the back, wrap my hand in a towel, and smash the glass of a window?

Or transubstantiate from person to mist and slip in through the vents? The spirit ignores me, no answers forthcoming. ‗ I’m done with the brushed nickel doorknobs, the brass knuckle nameplates decorating this place, denoting historical significance, while how many are unaccounted for? Rolling through walkways in their plastic caskets, smelling flowers on the shirts of their lovers, all the knowing whispers, the impenetrable jargon. A prayer is a glass walkway, a release, a rare rain on the stinking streets. Count them — prayers? — as they flutter, fall from fifth floor windows — a simple reminder of the slow poison echoing your veins, hammering your bones, settling as knots in the pit of your stomach.

3

‗ After four days I finally go home, visit the neighbor who watches our dog, shower, make soup and a sandwich, when it dawns on me that I’m walking between two unnamable things, two things whose meanings are as vague and ill-formed today as they’ve ever been, like a shadow or a fear, unmoored from anything the least bit real. And then, I’m on my knees, disassembling the sink, tearing out the pipes, fingering through the grease for just a single strand of your hair.

5

We Should Take Up Dancing Paul Robert Chesser

When I look out the kitchen window Tuesday morning, I see it’s snowed overnight — probably close to four inches — and wonder what it would be like to kill my wife. The granite birdbath is brimmed white like a chalice of milk. There are no birds.

I’ve just had a dream that I’m standing here in the kitchen late at night and Mary’s gone to bed already. I hear a scream next door. Julie, my neighbor Stanley’s wife. I stare out the window, and it is quiet for a few minutes. Then Stanley shuffles into his backyard with a shovel. He’s soaked in blue moonlight, and there are blotchy patches on his sleeves and face that look black in the dark. He digs and digs, the scrape of metal on earth muffled through the panes so that it sounds thin and small.

When he looks up and notices me, we watch each other through the chain-link fence for a long time. I can hear the high-pitched electronic whir of the muted television in my living room. A dog barks. Stanley stands motionless and blue-grey, his face gastric and troubled as though he’d eaten a baby. Then he rubs his head and starts digging again.

Then I feel the handle of a kitchen knife in my hand — the plastic is still cold, so I know it wasn’t there before. I think of how I left the bedroom door open so the un-oiled hinges wouldn’t wake Mary when I came to bed. And I think of the place on the right side of the settee where the boards creak, and how I could step around it. First, up the

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stairs: one, two, five, seven, eight, nine, holding the handrail. I’d bend over, pop my knees before I went. I’d bury her with the carrots under the sycamore, and Stanley wouldn’t say a word when I asked to borrow the shovel. An understanding in his eyes from then forth, a solemn pact of silence. We’d watch each other like gunslingers, high noon for the rest of our lives.

I love my wife. Mary’s got red hair, small breasts. Her jaw pops when we kiss. I prefer brunettes. But still, I surprise her with roses at work. I mow the lawn, take out the trash. I help pick out wallpaper. I smile and offer wine when her mother comes over on Sunday afternoons, bearing squash casserole. And when Mary and I make love, I tell her she’s beautiful, and I hold her back in my hands, her shoulder blades writhing and folding her skin against my palms. Rising and sinking like wings.

Acoustic guitar, cello, and piano on the radio’s college station. It colors my mood like a fat, single-fisted crayon. My Skylark’s heater’s broken, and my hands can’t feel the volume knob through the fleece gloves Mary bought me last Christmas. The sun is already out, and snow is turning to brown slush on the roadways. I drive, watching power lines dip in the gravity between posts, and listening to the sewer grates gurgling in the gutters. As always, I pass the Catholic church on 34th Street. Its steeples are flaked white, spiking high in the sky above the mud on the steps. I see a Hispanic man open the door and step out, turning up his collar against the wind.

Many times I’ve thought about coming to mass at the church on Sunday mornings. It’s the most impressive church in town, built of unpainted cypress. The circular stained glass above the door is veined and bloodshot like an eye. I seem to remember learning somewhere that circular stained glass formations are called “roses.” But I’m not Catholic; I don’t believe in transubstantiation. Mary goes to church every Sunday at the small First Presbyterian tucked behind the FoodMax on 7th. Sunday nights she dreams of angels in deserts.

This time four years ago I was living out of a Howard Johnson, subsisting on gas station burritos and hot-plate cuisine. Those were bad days between Mary and me, before we got married. In a moment of weakness, I had told her about how I lied about my virginity. It had

We Should Take Up Dancing

been a big deal — that we had both saved something special for each other. Well, it was a big deal to her, anyway. I really lost my virginity when I was eighteen to a violinist at summer camp. She wrapped her legs around me underneath the swimming dock my last night there.

We pumped and moved in the waves between the pilings, and I lost my father’s watch. The violinist kissed my shoulders and said I had eyes like the water.

Mary started seeing a guy from the office to hurt me. She says that lying is the worst thing I could ever have done to her. She says they never did anything, really, besides roll around and kiss in their underwear, and I’ve never really decided if I believe her. A problem always arises in trusting the naïve, because their truths, lies, and omissions seem equally preposterous. It’s been four years and still, when I can’t sleep, I have to fight away the images of her worming around with another man, the phone calls she made, planning their next rendezvous. Smiling in the dark, here or somewhere. One morning she woke up and missed me. Mary does not regret it — she says it made her sure of us and that she loves me more for it now. But I know there was something born between us then, something haunting and dismal, a dour remnant over even our plainer moments.

Marriage therapy on Thursday evenings is a joke. Since she says we were separated at the time, Mary does not consider what she did “cheating.”

The church’s bells begin to toll the hour. Driving by slowly, I get the feeling that something is hidden there. It occurs to me that roses have hips and I don’t know exactly where they are.

I pick up the phone to call Mary at her desk. Usually when I have nothing to say, we trade inane “did you knows” and kiss the air in front of the receiver. I was going to say did you know Tuesday is named after the Roman god of war, but I hang up after the sixth digit. I decide to tell her I tried and it was busy.

In the next lane a Suburban tries to merge but sees me at the last moment. He lays on the horn and rolls down the window just to flip me off. He speeds ahead, brown slush and icicles encrusting the fender behind his tires. It looks like excrement on the flanks of an animal. The mist he kicks up behind him catches the light and for a moment I see a perfect rainbow.

9

“Jesus, I’m tired.” It’s Mary talking. She’s at the pantry, shrugging off her blazer. It’s dinnertime and I’ve made myself a tuna salad sandwich and a glass of milk. I sit at the table, struggling over a crossword. Mary rifles through the cans and finds some chicken noodle soup. “I’m tired and I can’t sleep. It feels like I never sleep.”

My mouth still tastes of pink antibacterial soap. In the restroom at the Shell station at the end of the block, I scraped my tongue with a washrag so Mary wouldn’t know I’d been smoking cigars. I keep the washrag in my briefcase. I gargled with Listerine and soap, put on some aftershave, and I bought a mint.

“Don’t eat chicken, it’ll keep you awake,” I tell her. “You should finish off the turkey. It’s got tryptophan in it — it slows brain activity like a depressant.” I can feel her looking at me. “Or something like that.”

Her red hair is damp and crushed against her skull. She blinks at me and blows a drop of water off her lip. It lands on my wrist. For some reason I think it is sweat, though I know it is raining out. “Where’d you learn that?”

“Oh, I forget. Fish and tomatoes and stuff like that keep you awake too.

You know how they say fish is brain food? That’s where it comes from.”

What I don’t say is that I learned it from my mother — she reads dietician magazines. I’m pretty sure I’ve read something since that debunked the myth of tryptophan sluggishness, but I’m too tired to amend myself.

“You’re so smart,” Mary says and kisses me on the crown of my head.

It makes me feel eleven years old. She read something in Cosmo a month ago and started shaving her pubic hair. Going down on her is like kissing a warm mollusk. I look down at my sandwich and reach for some chips.

I wish I was more attractive for Mary. Many times I’ve almost joined the gym, but I can never justify the expense. Plus I know I’d never go.

I’ve become comfortably familiar with the fact that while I’m not perfectly fit, I am at least casually concerned about my weight. I suck in my stomach at my desk when the sorority girls come in to ask me about their papers. Looking at them in their red sweatshirts makes me want to learn guitar. I try to keep my hair imperfectly trimmed and ruffled, so I can appear “rugged.” Sometimes I can’t decide whether to dress in my nice suits or go casually. Before I go to the grocery store, I spend five minutes in front of the bathroom mirror — tucked, untucked, tucked, untucked,

We Should Take Up Dancing

tucked with a belt, untucked with a baseball cap. Flex arms, tense jaw, push out chest. And I keep a bottle of Old Spice in my glove box.

I put the cap on the Pringles and smile to myself, proud of my will.

Five down: Actor William from The Big Chill. Four-letters, starts with H. The condom in my wallet is five years old.

On the stand outside a restaurant, I glimpse through an article in the Morning Post. “Man robs two banks, steals from self.”

Mr. William Walsh of Anderson County, wanted in the state of California for seven possible armed robbery charges, robbed the Columbia First National bank last Wednesday before being hired for a second heist.

Arriving on the scene, Walsh found that his employer was in fact a Mr. Kelly Treat, the president of Columbia First National, last week’s hit. Treat, already under investigation for fraud and security negligence, had hired Walsh to replace the missing funds for a stipend of $5,500.

At 11:37 Monday morning, Walsh was apprehended by state officials while fleeing the parking lot of Realston Credit Union. Walsh had accidentally tripped the silent alarm in the vault just before forcing a clerk to fill a duffle bag with over $150,000. Realston Credit Union was the bank where William Walsh held his account, and where he had stashed the majority of the loot from the previous robbery in a lock-box. Following his capture, despite his requests, he was not reimbursed.

Walsh explained to the police that he needed money because his pregnant wife could no longer afford her antidepressant medication.

Further down the article quotes a Sheriff Yancy, who misuses impotence where he means incompetence.

I laugh and light a cigar. I feel I know William Walsh as a brother. I want to meet him, buy him a beer, and talk college football. I wonder if the nurse switched our bassinets or if William Walsh is God’s joke to me.

“This chair is uncomfortable.” The chair is uncomfortable.

“I’m trying to get you two to communicate what bothers you. It’s about you. You need to say, ‘I feel this way when you do this.’ Even if your feelings seem obvious to you, they aren’t always so clear to your mate.”

“My mate? Her name is Mary.”

“I was speaking to both of you, Joe. You have no need to feel defensive.”

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“This chair is uncomfortable.”

“Well, I’ll go. I feel unattractive when you won’t let me cheer you up about your parents’ divorce.”

“Unattractive? It’s not about that at all.” Twenty-six more minutes.

“Let her finish, Joe. Go on, Mary.”

“I feel…I feel threatened when you put your hands on me when we argue.”

“Mary, does Joe hurt you when he does that?”

“Now, hold on. I’ve never hit her — ” “Mary, does Joe — ?”

“No, just emotionally. It scares me. He would never hit me.”

“I’m not a violent man.”

“Please, Joe. Go on, Mary.” Jesus Christ.

“And I feel bad when you won’t touch me in bed. You turn around and hug your pillow and face the wall. You have dreams, and I try to kiss you, but you only get mad and wave at me with your arms.”

This is ridiculous. “This is ridiculous.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t know. Gone? Like a sister. Or a ghost. Not a wife.”

“Okay. Joe, it’s your turn. What do you feel?”

“Ow. Jesus.”

“Joe. What do you feel?”

“You know, she wants to have a baby and name it after her father. But she’s afraid of pregnancy.”

“How does that make you feel, Joe?” “Ow, dammit. This chair is goddamned uncomfortable.”

“What do you feel, Joe?” “Can you even buy a stiffer chair?”

“Joe, what do you feel?”

“Jesus Christ.”

It may be fifty degrees outside, but the air in the attic is stale and tastes of doilies and old teddy bears. I open an old box of National Geographics and it disintegrates in my hand. Mary and I are looking for Christmas decorations. She is sitting on my grandfather’s Navy trunk, and the way her arms are immersed in a black trash bag makes her look like

We Should Take Up Dancing

an amputee. Her hair drifts across a stack of article clippings, and for a moment I’m afraid the newspaper will catch fire.

“What are we looking for again?” I ask, thumbing through a ’70s issue of NG about the reefs of New Zealand. She’s pulling out notebook-paper snowflakes and doesn’t hear me. I shift to another box, and the duct tape comes off in my hand like the skin of a dead frog. But it’s only a box of summer t-shirts.

I remember the manger on the piano downstairs in the living room, stained balsa, the loft of scribbly hay. We’re looking for the little wooden Christ child. The other figures, the ox, the wise men, the camel, Gabriel, all wrapped up in bubble wrap. Mary thinks it’s my fault for not packing Jesus away with the rest last year, but I don’t remember touching it at all.

“Oh, look, Joe, remember this?” She’s holding up something white and chipped. I crawl over and take it from her.

“No. Should I?” It’s a porcelain sheep. The aluminum hook sprouts from its shoulders like an embedded weapon. Paint has flaked away, and the front leg is missing.

“It was our first Christmas ornament. Back in Portland, when you got the little two-foot tree.”

“I thought that felt Santa was our first ornament.” I look at it, and the white paint on its ears comes off on my fingers. “Maybe this was your mother’s.”

“No, this was our first.” She’s angry. “Henry Stagger gave us the felt Santa three years ago. We bought this one from that guy in front of the hardware store in Portland. The guy that sold you the pocket knife. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

I got that pocket knife at a bait shop when I was nineteen and lost it four months ago in a hotel in Boston. I don’t feel like arguing. “I don’t know what a damn sheep has to do with Christmas, anyway. I like the Santa better.”

She finds the Christ child statuette an hour later, when I’m downstairs trying to glue the arm back on her rocker. When she runs downstairs to show me, in playful pretend excitement, she leans on the chair, waving the wooden toy in my face. Wrapped up in its swaddling clothes, it looks like a pupa. I smile, but I’m angry because I know she’ll blame me when the chair doesn’t set right.

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It’s Christmas Eve, and I step outside with the portable phone to call my father. The snow’s mostly gone, and I walk in the grass. Dampness soaks through my shoes and makes my feet cold. Mary is inside stringing garland, glittering last year’s stockings, listening to Johnny Mathis.

There’s a girl in the driveway, petting the cat, and I walk over to her.

She’s Asian, sitting cross-legged in a red and green sweatshirt. Moby arches his back against her palm, his tail curling. She scratches his chin, and he purrs. When I walk up, she looks at me and smiles. She says hello and calls me by my name.

We pet the cat and talk for a short while. She was in section two of my Western Civ class, and I think I remember her.

“I sat in the second row,” she says. “My name is Mary Tanaka.” I tell her it’s a pretty name. I tell her to call me Joe. She was about to ring the doorbell when she saw Moby.

“I live down the block. Just wanted to say hi, season’s cheer. I should be going now, though. Cute kitty. I can’t have one because my dad’s allergic.” Moby rubs figure eights between her legs when she stands. It’s cold, and I offer to walk her home, not sure why I’m doing it. I put the phone in my jacket pocket, where it weighs like a pistol, and we walk down the center stripe of Kilgore Avenue like unspectacular daredevils.

Moby tries to follow us, and I have to carry him back to the porch twice. We laugh about the cat and for a while walk with our heads turned toward my house. Christmas lights glint on and off out of sync on either side of us. The houses look warm, and the stars shimmer overhead in red-shift and blue. We make small talk. Her education, my job at the university. It means nothing, but I think we’re both glad to be saying something. Our words leave our mouths in a warm smoke that I can see. Mary Tanaka says she’s Catholic, and her family is getting ready for midnight mass. “You know. Knights of Columbus and all that shit.”

I go quietly for a while, counting my steps between street reflectors.

I try to walk a little behind her to her right, to block the wind from her.

I’m glad that she walks closely. She smells faintly of cigarettes and has a freckle on her hip where the sweatshirt rides up over her jeans.

“Did you know Easter is named for Ishtar, based in the pagan celebration of fertility?” I ask her. She looks over at me and smirks. Her lipstick

We Should Take Up Dancing

is dark mulberries. “Ever wonder why we’re so obsessed with bunnies and eggs around Easter? That’s why. Pagan symbols of procreation.”

“So, what, Easter used to be a bunch of druids humping around a campfire or something?”

I laugh. I wonder if she has tan lines.

When we reach the end of the block, she points to a white house with a porch swing. When my wife and I were shopping for houses in the neighborhood, she had liked the way the elms in the backyard shaded the patio. As the Asian girl turns to me and says, “That’s my house,” the thought crosses my mind that I’ve been in her bedroom before, once, when it was naked.

I walk her to the steps and wish her a merry Christmas. She asks me if I want to come in and warm myself by the fire. I don’t remember the house having a chimney.

I tell her it sounds great, but that I’d better get back. My wife will be wondering where I am.

The girl looks at me and brushes a curtain of black hair out of her eyes. My feet are still damp, and I can’t feel my toes. There is a look about her that makes me feel like she said something I didn’t hear. Her cheeks glow red with the cold, and it looks out of place.

“Don’t you ever fuck around, Joe?” She does not blink for a long time. I look back, and my eyes are dry. I think that all the world must be watching, but I hear an airliner droning overhead, people going about their dangerous lives alone.

“All the time,” I lie. But she doesn’t hear me because she is laughing and hopping up the steps, saying goodnight and merry Christmas.

The door closes with a bang and a jingle. From its center the green iris of a holly wreath watches me without a pupil.

On the way back, I zip up my jacket, no longer sucking in my gut. I find a cigar in my pocket but don’t have any matches.

Later, when I sit on the sofa with my wife and drink eggnog, listening to Elvis on the record player, I notice the familiar way she sits with her legs bent to the side. The way she’s always held a wine glass with three fingers. There is a chicken pox scar on her forehead that I feel I knew once but had forgotten until now. My hand traces the lines of her inner

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thigh without my having to look to do it. She yawns, smiles, kisses my cheek, and goes into the kitchen. I hear her making an iced coffee and bourbon and know that she is on her way to bed. She will not have sex on a Sunday.

I wonder if the Asian girl is kneeling in prayer. I think of that red in her face made by a cold that shouldn’t touch her. She should be on some Polynesian island, brushing her hair flat and braiding it through pink spiral shells.

I imagine we two are swimming along a mirror-clear shoreline, hunting starfish. We swim further from the land until the sea is all around us. Her skin brushes against mine with algae-smoothness, and she points at the sand. A ray rustles in a murky cloud and disappears behind a reef. We pass blue-lipped clams, hundred-foot kelp forests, schools of tiny fish that dart and glimmer in front of their long tails like silver lockets. We swim above a volcanic rift, and a million starfish inch along the black floor in constellations. Through a deep fissure I can see the orange glow of a magma fire not yet squelched by the sea. As we dive, the bulge deep within the chasm pulses with gas and debris, nourishing the ocean around us like a placenta. Here we might grow, gather strength together against the chill of future seasons. The water is warm and visceral, and we could swim for hours and hours, for days and days, never tiring, never coming up for air.

The glass stirring spoon plinks on ice cubes in the kitchen. The couch still bears my wife’s animal heat — something I wouldn’t know if my hand weren’t already there, missing her.

I follow my Mary out of the living room, ceramic and grout on my feet, past the refrigerator, dark in here, to the sink. She hears me coming in and doesn’t turn around. Stepping behind her, I hug her tightly, pull in her waist, fill my lungs with her. A clock beats softly over the stove, and the moon plays through the window on all the clean, metal, manufactured things.

One of us says it, finally. “I think we should take up dancing.” I hope it was me.

We Should Take Up Dancing

17

Dogs Can’t Swim Mike Salisbury

Mona was on the floor of my living room, a twelve-pack of Snaps Gold longnecks between us. We were arguing about dogs and the things they could do, both of us on our backs, staring up at the speckled ceiling. In the apartment above me were the happy new owners of a beagle puppy.

I could hear the dog whine all day, waiting for them to return. All the thing did was cry. It got to me, made me feel down.

“All dogs can swim,” Mona said, pushing her empty glass my way.

She will only drink beer from a glass, no bottles. Says it’s not ladylike.

I wasn’t sure about the dog thing. Maybe thrashing around and keeping afloat, but swimming seemed far-fetched, especially all kinds. I reached into the pack to grab another Snaps. We lay there, air conditioning cranked, happy to avoid the heat outside.

“What about those big dogs with the root beer barrels around their necks?”

“St. Bernards?”

“Yeah, them.”

“I think so,” she said.

“They’re awfully big,” I said. “Heavy coats.”

Women like to argue. It helps to keep attention on them. Mona would argue that the grass outside my window, the very grass I’ve walked through a million times to get my mail, was hot pink if it kept my attention on her. She’s like a vacuum. A black hole.

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When she’d first moved in next door, I thought, here’s trouble. Then I made the mistake of inviting her in. That was on me. Some women can make you abandon reason, like giving up God. Make you stand outside their apartment all hours of the night hoping they’ll answer your knocks, the words you rehearsed for them slipping away the harder you try and remember them. I’m talking about the kind of women you loan rent payments to, knowing that it’s never coming back unless sweet remarks become currency. I’m talking about that kind of woman — the beautiful kind that makes you believe you’ve got a shot with her.

Mona was that kind of woman.

“I don’t believe in dogs,” Mona said.

“You don’t believe in dogs — like they don’t exist, like aliens?”

“No, not like that. I just don’t see why anyone would want to own one; they’re so needy.”

I had a dog once growing up, a black lab named King. He used to push past me every time I opened the door to go outside and play. This dog made a break for it like an escapee, tail tucked between his legs, his ass almost out front of his nose, dodging bullets.

The only thing that could make that dog stop was my father’s voice.

Hell, he was never around, so my mother stood in the driveway reaching down deep inside her to make a big enough noise, but it just sounded strange and nothing like my father’s voice. Still, she’d stood in the driveway yelling, “King, come!” again and again.

He didn’t come. He knew the difference, as did everyone, including our neighbors who watched from afar.

At night, King would come back late and jump against the screen door until someone let him in, usually me. One time he never came back. Just like that he was gone. We didn’t really look for him either.

For all we knew King might’ve been smeared across the interstate, or he might’ve been swimming somewhere. My mother said, “He’ll come back when he’s good and ready.”

Mona picked at the label on her beer bottle. We were running low.

Humidity was through the roof. The little air conditioner in my window struggled to keep up.

On days like this, Mona usually came over to my apartment to cool off. She would bring beer, a sort of offering in exchange for the air. She’d

Dogs Can’t Swim

have her hair up with that sundress on. Always the same one, never any shoes; I don’t know if I ever saw her with any shoes on. Toenails painted chili pepper red.

Mona couldn’t afford to replace her window unit. It hung out her bedroom window like it had been caught trying to escape, frozen in the window frame by a spotlight. “In the winter, she said, I’ll just open the window and it will fall out.”

You could do that around here, just leave an air conditioning unit lying on the ground. The snow will cover everything. If she was lucky, maybe she could get someone to toss it in the pond just beyond the window. The pond was there for things like that. It had less to do with landscaping and more to do with garbage like the refrigerator door that floated around it like it was a blow-up raft some teenage girl with more cleavage than clues might lounge on.

One night I stood on the balcony and watched a couple wrestling; both ended up in the pond. That was the first time I could remember seeing anything alive in it. No fish. No turtles. Just a leggy blond in a purple tube top standing there with some guy, both of them up to their waist in that dark green pond water. Once they realized where they were, he let go of her wrists and she stopped yelling as they scrambled out. Dirty water like that has a way of putting things into perspective.

I could tell the heat was really getting to me. The beer and I were losing the battle. The sound above us was more whimper than bark. The poor puppy was probably thirsty. What wasn’t in that heat? We listened to it cry while nursing beers. That didn’t seem as cruel as it sounds now.

“You would think its voice would start to hurt,” Mona said.

We kept listening. It was like a song. I don’t remember King barking, but I knew he must’ve. All dogs bark. I should’ve told Mona that. Watch her argue her way around that point.

“You should go let him out,” Mona said.

“That so?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You could easily shimmy up your balcony and see if the slider is unlocked.”

She let the idea hang there before she said, “I bet he’s the kind of dog that could swim. We could let him take a dip in the pond and find out.”

This is how I knew we were drunk: I let myself consider this idea, and

21

it didn’t only seem reasonable; it seemed the only option. When I drink, I get tunnel vision. One thought, one way.

“All dogs can swim, ya know,” Mona said, moving her cupped hands in a circular motion. “Doggie paddle.”

When she put it that way, it seemed true. Facts are important when drinking, especially in the heat. They’re pieces of wreckage to cling to after the ship’s gone down.

“It’s a little high, you know — third floor,” I said. I had accepted the wisdom of this plan, but I didn’t want to get up.

“You were a roofer, right?” she said. “What’s height got to do with it?”

“I am a roofer,” I said. “Just not right now.”

She stood up like this was a party and there were people she needed to say goodbye to as she scanned the empty room. I watched her walk over to the balcony, fingers still firmly wrapped around her empty glass.

She was getting ready to pout. It only takes one time for you to learn that glass in the hands of an angry woman is a bad idea. She was liable to toss it, probably at the wall, possibly at me. I didn’t like my options.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll climb up there.”

All I had to do was stand on my own rail and pull myself up to the balcony above me. We were on the second floor of a three-story complex, which from the ground doesn’t look that high, but from the edge of my balcony looks about break-neck high.

A couple of thieves tried this not too long ago. They shimmied the balconies on the building across from me. After that happened, management slipped notes under our doors warning us about it but not telling us how to protect ourselves. Mona stood below me like she was trying to help, but the glass never left her hand.

I pulled myself up using the floor of the balcony above me for a handle. From the third floor, the sun beat down without mercy. It made the vein in my temple pulse. I didn’t know them, the neighbors above. I understood them by the sounds of their feet: the man stomp-walked, and the lady clicked. They had a child too that made fast squeaking sounds.

I enjoyed those the most. It reminded me of what it was like when I first got home from school. It’s the little things like that that help you get through the day while you wait for work to call back.

“Be careful,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do if you fell.”

Dogs Can’t Swim

I didn’t know how to take that. Did she mean she didn’t know what she would do without me or she actually wouldn’t know what to do in the event that I fell? It offered me no reassurance.

I tried the sliding glass door. Unlocked. I stepped into the apartment.

The floor plan was the same as mine, only nicer. It felt like the model they show you when you tour the apartment complex. There were pictures on the wall and pillows that matched the couch. Everything matched. In the corner of the kitchen, the puppy danced in its cage, doing circles of joy, barking.

“Hey, puppy-puppy.”

Outside I could hear Mona yelling up to me, her words thick and muffled by the drywall ceiling. “What are you doing?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said back. “I’m coming.”

I picked the cage up and walked it to the balcony.

“Mona, I’m going to lower the dog down to you, okay?”

“Lower?”

“Yeah, lower.”

“With what?”

I went back inside and opened the front closet door. Inside it I expected to find my own closet. But this wasn’t my place. Here were winter coats, shoeboxes and a vacuum with a power cord coiled around the handle. I wheeled it outside.

“I’m going to use this cord,” I said, as if it made it more plausible when spoken aloud.

“What?”

“Just get ready,” I said slowly.

The dog looked up at me, bent its head like I asked it a question. Its dark nose faded into white then brown — his face a landscape of colors.

He was a handsome dog, better looking than King. This one was worth searching for.

“You’ll be okay, if you can swim.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“She’s always talking,” I said to the dog. “Maybe watching you try to swim will get her to stop, but I have my doubts.”

I tied the cord around the handle and lifted the cage up. I let it hang there. Inside the dog stood as if on ice. I told him, “This will work.”

23

“Are you ready?” I said to Mona.

I leaned the cage over the side and bumped it on the railing. At first we were okay, then the dog shifted. The dog hit the side, and his weight sent everything overboard. The cord stayed fastened, but the whole cage toppled end over end spiraling towards the ground. The cord burned through my fingers and I snapped back to blow on them. The vacuum behind me sprang up as if possessed and launched towards the balcony’s edge. I turned in time for it to hit me in the chest. Hit me so hard the wind left my lungs, and I pushed the vacuum out of the way. It ducked over the rail, too. A moment later I heard the cage hit, saw the vacuum shattered against the sidewalk, parts of it going everywhere.

I tried to collect myself and make sense of the burns on my hands.

When I did look over again I saw the cage crumpled three stories below.

Inside it the puppy laid on its side as if napping. The vacuum busted at the handle and the sweeper end landed face up like it was ready to go. The rest lay scattered in plastic chunks, like wreckage from a car accident.

Ten feet further out from the building and the cage would’ve landed in the water. I might’ve been able to do something then, maybe rush out of the apartment and save the poor dog before it drowned. I looked down at Mona on my balcony, and she covered her mouth and looked up at me.

Then we both looked down again. I opened the door and used the stairs this time.

Mona was waiting for me in the hall, the look on her face pale. I wanted to wrap my arms around her. Hold her until the reality of what just happened slowed down. We stood there looking at each other instead.

“We can’t leave it there, ya know,” she said.

We went down to the sidewalk. Mona brought a broom and swept up the vacuum parts while I stared at the cage, at the puppy still inside. I couldn’t put it in the dumpster. I didn’t want them to find their dog that way.

I gave the cage a three-count, swinging it back and forth, before launching it like the hammer throw in the Olympics out into the lake. It made a splash when it landed and bobbed for a moment before sinking.

Mona didn’t say anything.

I felt all kinds of awful — this heat was getting to me. I had that gutrot feeling for dropping the poor dog. I thought about the quick steps

Dogs Can’t Swim

of that child coming home to find the beagle puppy gone. The family would get a weird feeling when they realized the cage was gone too, like the puppy had packed up and left. Like me, they’d be left to consider the mystery of whatever happened to our dogs.

Mona and I went back upstairs, finished off the twelve-pack, and watched reruns of Seinfeld until she fell asleep on the couch. I kept waiting to hear the dog whine above me, crying out from its little jail.

Instead, Mona snored like a siren. Her mouth slung open, I peered down it. I noticed her purse next to her on the floor. I dug out two twenties and left.

I paced the halls before circling the pond. I could’ve used the Mona money to buy a party sub and enough beer the heat wouldn’t matter.

I found a bench to sit on beside the pond. Part of me considered going in after the puppy, though it would mean facing the police, possibly charges of breaking and entering and animal cruelty. I knew how the people upstairs felt; not knowing was worse than anything.

I took the cash and walked it upstairs. On one bill I wrote, “sorry about” and the other, “your dog,” before slipping them under the door.

It felt like the right thing to do.

25

Grasshopper Girl Abigail Warren

A man slices open her belly just enough to reach in and pluck out two legs that spring like a grasshopper.

Hanging upside down you let out a howl of wanting back to that darkness of no yearning.

But you burst forth anyway dark eyed, veiny blue limbs unfolding and coiling back in memory of tight belly home morpho paper flower girl.

Your parents sing to you, to each other I never saw the Northern Lights… this is a farmhouse… in the promise that you’ll be alright…

Down the empty hallways women are moaning dirges as you, grasshopper girl, dry your wings in the wind.

Swash Zone Nancy Carol Moody

Breathing is primary; speech, secondary. Absent breath, speech does not occur. If the woman cannot breathe, she cannot scream. seafoam breaking on the shoreline a young girl, giggling The drowning woman extends her arms outward so that she may push down on the surface of the water, an action which forces her body upward, permitting her to breathe. This movement is not voluntary. It is impossible for her to signal for help. a gull’s outstretched wings riding the currents undulating kelp There is no evidence of kicking action, yet the woman remains upright.

The mouth sinks and reappears above the water line. There is insufficient time to inhale. 20 to 60 seconds remain. crabs burrow into shifting sand small fingers follow

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea Jacqueline Vogtman

It has been nearly thirty years since Greta last visited Scarborough Harbor, and it’s completely changed. Until her little brother’s death, she’d vacationed every childhood summer in this coastal Maine town. Back then it was quaint. Now, shops line sidewalks like shark’s teeth while tanned teenagers rollerblade by in neon bikinis, and arcades flash like ambulance lights down the length of the boardwalk, dappling the plastic palm trees that decorate the pebbled lawns of cheap motels. Greta is relieved by this new ugliness. It means she can pretend it’s a different town altogether, one that holds no memories, good or bad.

When they pull up to the cottage, all wind-washed stone and purple shutters, Ray squeezes her hand before getting out of the car, his way of apologizing to her for suggesting they come here. Months ago, they’d talked casually about a summer vacation, and he suggested this town of her childhood, this town that holds her brother’s ghost. He’d said: It’s time, Gret. You need to make peace. And she’d agreed, though she had no idea until they pulled into town how hard it would be.

Ray reaches over and rubs her back. This too she knows is his way of telling her to relax, to have a simple, fun week with their son, Will, who might never come on vacation with them again, who is going to college in the fall, though Greta doesn’t want him to, though Greta will do anything to keep him from going away.

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Kaimu still wakes up gasping sometimes, afraid he’s drowning in a dream, always the same one. In the beginning of the dream, he’s ecstatic as he winds the winch to pull up the heavy net, thinking of everything he might do for his family once he sells whatever he’s caught, a prize-winning cod, a school of striped bass, a bed of pearl-filled oysters.

He winds and winds for what seems like an eternity, his forearms tired.

The sky darkens as if it is going to storm, and he knows he has to get the net back on the boat before the storm hits, or else he’s going to have to head for dock, and he’ll lose his catch. He keeps winding, and finally the net tumbles over the side of the boat and flops aboard.

When he peers inside, he sees it’s not oysters or bass or cod; it’s the body of a boy, the bloated blue body of a boy, a pale veiny fish with bulging eyes and frozen-open mouth. In the distance a tsunami-sized wave forms. Kaimu knows in a moment it will wash over them, and he will be tangled with the boy in the net, will be dead with the boy in the net.

All of that happened, except for the tsunami, nearly thirty years ago, when Kaimu had just inherited his father’s fishing boat along with the burden of taking care of his mother. The boy in the net was Joshua Hale, a name Kaimu has never forgotten, even after raising three boys of his own with his wife, Mai. There, there, Mai says now, wiping away the sweat on his forehead with her cool, smooth palm, her sea-stone palm. There, there. It was only a dream.

Greta is fine for days, sitting on the beach watching Will jump waves, watching the back of Will’s neck redden when a couple girls approach him, watching Will through cheap sunglasses bought at the general store, watching Will through binoculars Ray used years ago for hunting until Greta told him it bothered her too much to imagine him gutting deer and moose, bringing home bloody slabs of meat, how much room they take up in the freezer.

Greta is fine, even sometimes takes her eyes off Will to do a crossword puzzle or walk down the shoreline with Ray, never too far. Greta is fine, until she hears the bells of the ice cream man.

Joshua was only eight years old, and she was twelve, when it happened. Their parents had left them alone on the beach with the instruc-

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea

tion that Greta was to watch after her brother and return home when the lifeguard left his station. But just after the lifeguard left, around sunset, with the beach deserted save for Greta and Joshua, the ice cream man rang his bells a final time, and Greta ran up the dunes toward the sound, wanting a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar. She called for her brother to follow, but he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t hear her above the sound of the waves. He had been playing at the lip of the water, bobbing his red boat up and down, burying his action figures in the sand. When she returned, he was no longer there. She called his name. She ran up and down the beach, asking the few dog walkers and joggers if they’d seen a boy with a red boat. No, no, they all said. When she returned home it was dark, and she was still grasping the unopened ice cream bar, melted and dripping through its wrapper onto the carpet of the rented house as her mother screamed and cried and slapped Greta, just once, across the face.

She never saw her brother again. That is, until his body was found by a local fisherman and readied for the funeral, fat with seawater and made up so that he looked like a caricature of himself, a dark, doublebrother Greta never knew and would never know. In her mind, her real brother still floated somewhere out in the ocean, among seaweed and coral. The boy in the casket certainly wasn’t him; Greta had been sure of it. She still sometimes entertains that idea.

She calls Will back to the beach blanket, and he runs up, sand sprayed on his shins, broad chest heaving, but still so pale and soft, her boy.

She tells him they need to go back to the house. The tinkle of the bells pricks her with anxiety, from her belly radiating through her limbs until her palms and soles of her feet tingle. The expanse of sea and sky dizzy her, and she knows only that she needs the enclosed architecture of the house. Will asks why they have to leave, says it’s only noon, says can’t he just hang out on the beach alone? He looks at her with searching eyes, eyes that reflect the whole landscape, too much of the landscape. Ray looks at her also, and for a moment she thinks she’ll calm down and let her boy run back down to the waves.

But then the bells ring again, and she thinks how Will is not a strong swimmer, how he still holds his nose to go underwater, how he still only knows the doggy paddle. She tells Will no, he can’t stay here alone, tells her husband and son they need to leave. She folds the blanket messily,

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and Will sighs, jamming his big feet into flip-flops, the ones Greta loves because they hold the shadow of his toes even when he’s not there.

After years of fishing, casting and hauling nets and winding winches, Kaimu is cursed with arthritis and has retired his business to his secondoldest son, his eldest having flown south one winter never to return except for occasional holidays. Kaimu still sometimes goes out on the boat, alone, just to enjoy the way the waves rock his body. It feels natural, the rhythm, more natural than land with its static quality, its hard flat lines.

Sometimes he’ll drop a net just to see what he’ll bring up, and more often than not it’s a plastic bucket, or a tampon, or pop bottles, or a clump of mussels twisted with fishing line. But once in a while he’ll bring up treasures. For instance, small stones that glow like honey and resemble amber. And sea glass, a huge collection of which he’s amassed over the years. It comes in all colors: blue, green, brown, red, orange, white, translucent, sometimes all of those swirled together. It can be thick or thin, smooth or sharp. Sometimes Kaimu reads faint inscriptions in the glass that has more recently been shaped by the waves: Seagrams, Jack Daniels, Wild Turkey, Jim Beam. Always whiskey, Kaimu imagines, because this must be the kind of place that calls for whiskey drinking.

He did his share of drinking those years ago, after finding the boy’s body, and not just to block out the image of the boy, so small but so heavy with water, mouth open in a perpetual plea. The other reason to drink was because they thought he had something to do with the boy’s death at first — the night he found the boy’s body they interrogated him for hours, even held him in a cell overnight, as if they couldn’t believe an eight year old boy could simply drown. Down the hall he could hear the wails of a woman, and he wondered if it was the boy’s mother. He remembers, at the time, feeling stunned how the wailing woman down the hall sounded exactly like his own mother, how she wailed when her husband died, and he wondered at the time if all women throughout history sound exactly alike when they cry, no matter their age or where they are from or the reason they are crying.

Early the next morning they let Kaimu go. He never did find out who the crying woman was.

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea

Will begs Greta to go out even though she keeps telling him it’s going to storm. It’s one of their last nights of vacation, and a strong storm is supposed to rip down the coast. Greta watches the Weather Channel a lot back home but does so obsessively when she’s at the beach. She knows how quickly these things can approach, how even Maine can get hurricanes. She lived through one, when she was a kid and her brother was just a toddler. They all cuddled on the couch, so cozy, and told scary stories when the power went out. Amazing, how even in the midst of the worst storm she felt safe then.

The Weather Channel says gale-force winds, says the possibility of rogue waves, says heavy rain and golf ball-sized hail. Will argues that it probably won’t be that bad, and besides, it might not hit until morning.

Greta knows he’s right, but there’s just no telling with these things. She says that if he just wants to get out of the house, she’ll take him out for pizza. He responds: Don’t you think that maybe I just want to get away from you for one night? And slams his door. She hates when he does that, and he’s been doing it a lot lately, when she chastises him for coming home after ten, for not calling her, for smelling faintly like smoke or beer, for not letting him go out to parties, dances, camping with friends.

The door slam is a slap in the face, effectively puts him farther away from her, in another world altogether.

He met some girls he likes, Ray tells her, quiet-voiced Ray. You gotta let him go.

Greta grabs a blanket from the couch, lays it over her sunburned knees, and puts her head in her hands. Ray shuts off the Weather Channel and opens the curtains so Greta can feel the tepid breeze. He tells her to look at the sky: it’s a beautiful dusk, not threatening. But there is one cloud on the horizon, Greta points out — a big one.

Just one cloud, he says, and you’re going to let it ruin your boy’s vacation? Just let him go for a few hours. He needs this, Gret. He’s only eighteen once.

This is the most vocal Ray has been about Will in years. Greta always decided the rules, and Ray went along because he knew about her past, about her brother, about how she spent her whole thirteenth year not leaving the house, about how after their grief subsided her parents

33

never blamed her for her brother’s death, not really, but she always felt responsible anyway.

Greta walks over to the window and leans down on the sill, inhaling.

Ray is behind her, running his knuckles up and down her spine, and she imagines herself a dinosaur skeleton, something slowly becoming fossilized. She stands up straight, goes and knocks softly on Will’s door.

When she tells him she’ll let him go out, but only for a few hours, he hugs her so tight she fears her ribs might crack. His gratitude is overwhelming — almost enough to make her comfortable with her decision.

Soon after the police let Kaimu go, they ruled the boy’s death an accident. After questioning the parents and the sister of the boy and finding the boy’s red boat washed up miles down the shore, they conjectured that the boy had chased his boat into the sea where the strong waves overpowered his weak swimming. Kaimu read the articles and watched the news casts about the case, at once relieved his name was cleared and bitter that they’d suspected him at all; he knew it was because he was Japanese, that even decades after the war those men were still suspicious of his kind, were taught by their fathers to be vindictive.

Aside from the dreams, Kaimu rarely thinks about the boy now, though some mornings when he strolls the beach after storms, wading through washed-up shells and stones to find something special, he sees something bobbing out in the gray ocean, and for an instant it looks like the drowned boy, his face an image Kaimu still can’t dredge from his mind. And Kaimu’s heart pounds, blood rushes in his ears, and sometimes he is up to his chest in water before he realizes there’s nothing out there except maybe a dolphin, and he wonders how he could have imagined the boy’s face so vividly, how a stranger’s face can be brought to mind more readily and more tangibly than his sons’, how a face can be burned into one’s memory through fear, as if fear is a soldering iron, a branding tool, something that preserves.

Greta doesn’t sleep, can’t sleep until she knows her son is sleeping under the same roof. She lies under sandy sheets next to Ray, whose snoring mimics the in-and-out of the tide, and she wonders what Will is doing. She remembers when he was a baby and how she would let him

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea

sleep on her chest, swaddled and compact, a warm stone. She wouldn’t allow herself to fall asleep, afraid she might roll over and crush him in the middle of the night. That was the year she began looking older than her real age, the year of crow’s feet and purple circles and her first grays, but she didn’t bother covering them, because she wasn’t ashamed. Love meant fear, fear meant growing old fast.

This is what Kaimu lives for now, after years of living for money and lovemaking and the accomplishments of his sons: big storms. Or not the storms themselves, but what they wash up on shore, what they knock loose under the sea.

He sits on the porch, listening to the wind pick up, skin tingling at flashes of lightning in the distance. Mai comes out in her nightgown, thin and pale as moonlight, and she asks him what he’s doing. There’s disapproval in her voice, as there always is when he’s up late at night watching storms approach, as there always is when he gets up before dawn to go to the beach and spends hours there, loading his bags with stones and sea glass and shells, wading into the waves with his casting net to drag out more. After, he dumps it all over the garage floor, picking out which pieces to keep for his collection, which to sell to the woman down the street who makes jewelry, which to throw back into the waves.

Kaimu tells his wife he’ll be to bed in a few minutes, and she grazes his wrist with her fingertips before going back inside, a gesture of tenderness or defeat, Kaimu doesn’t know. She’s complained to him for years that they don’t spend enough time together, says that retirement is the time when they can finally really know one another, but he can’t help but feel there’s always been something holding him back, with her, with his sons, with everyone.

The only one he has ever talked to about the dead boy was his mother, when she was in hospice losing her memory for good. He’d visit her every day after work, carrying the smell of salt and fish in his hair, and he’d always bring her a little present, a little token of something by the sea to keep her company, to make her remember. Of course, she never did — or rather, she remembered wrong, she thought she was back in the Japan of her childhood, thought he was her father. She became obsessed with amber, or what she thought was amber but what he knew

35

was not, since real amber has never been found off their shores. At best, he reasoned, it might be copal, young amber not yet fossilized, but he never told her this. He’d bring her small pieces of it whenever he could, putting them in a porcelain bowl on her bedside table. She was most lucid when rolling the stones in her hands, listening to him recite facts he found for her at the library, useless facts he learned by heart. For instance: amber was made of fossilized resin from an extinct conifer.

And resin oozed from trees where they’d been damaged, like blood from a wound. Resin dropped onto the forest floor and stuck to dirt, sand, clay, insects, bark, moss, feathers, hair. During storms, the sea washed up to the forest and took back with it the resin mixture which would be shaped by waves for years. Some amber is from ninety million years ago. In Japan, the legend is that amber was formed by the setting rays of the sun as they touched the ocean’s horizon. Kaimu’s mother nodded knowingly at this, as if she remembered. Kaimu would go on and on until it was his mother’s bedtime and the nurse ushered him out.

Now an old man himself, Kaimu raises himself off the rocker, knees creaking, and walks into the garage, rummaging in the dark for his cast net, his backpack, his shovel, his pail. He shakes sand and shell fragments out of his backpack, secures weights to his net. His hands understand these movements in the dark better than they ever understood how to move over his wife’s body. He sits, surrounded by tools readied for his morning search. He waits until the first drops of rain cast shadows on the stones, then goes in to try for a few hours of sleep beside his wife.

Greta has fallen asleep for two hours — only two hours and already the storm is underway, and she is angry with herself for not waiting up for Will. Ray stirs, turns over, mumbles, his voice muffled by the pillow. He asks if she wants him to get up and shut the windows.

I’ll do it, she says, knowing well that he knows it’s an excuse for her to make sure Will is sleeping soundly in his bed.

She gets up and shuts their window; already the sill is full of water.

She kisses Ray on the forehead before leaving the room, tells him she’ll probably stay up watching TV, and he grunts his approval, turns over again. She doesn’t know how he can sleep through the thunder, but he’s always been a heavy sleeper, so healthy and young-looking people

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea

sometimes mistake him for her younger brother, a comment that always makes breath catch in her throat painfully, like a fish stuck on a hook.

She closes the windows in the living room and kitchen, then tiptoes into Will’s room, careful not to wake him. He’s caught her a few times during his high school years standing over him as he sleeps, watching him, making sure he’s still breathing, and he always gets angry, looks at her like she’s violated him in some way.

He’s not in his bed.

She looks at the clock. It’s almost two. She peers out the curtains: no car. Lightning flashes, and Greta’s heart jolts. In all her years of careful parenting, this is the first — and the worst — time she’s lost her son.

Never let go of his hand in a supermarket or a crowded amusement park where most of the rides were off-limits anyway. Her mind races through the list of possibilities: car accident; drinking, pot, coke, speed, heroin, acid, mushrooms, whippits; murdered; robbed; run away; club-hopping with a fake I.D.; unprotected sex; struck by lightning; hit by a fallen tree; electrocuted by a downed power line; drowned in a rogue wave.

She won’t tell Ray because he’ll only try to calm her, and there’s nothing more infuriating in these moments of horrible possibilities than someone saying none of them are possible. Anything’s possible — that’s the most frightening thing about life.

Lately Kaimu has been trying to control his dreams. Lucid dreaming, his wife told him, something she learned about in an adult enrichment class she took the year her youngest moved out of the house. Every night before he goes to sleep he is supposed to write down exactly what he wants to have happen in his dreams, and then when he sleeps he is supposed to become aware that he is dreaming and able to control what happens, to create anything that he wants to happen, as magical or impossible as it might seem. His wife has told him that sometimes in her dreams she flies; other times she talks to her dead parents. He hasn’t had such luck; the few times he’s become aware in his dreams that he was dreaming he felt paralyzed, wasn’t even able to move his fingers let alone fly. But he keeps trying.

Tonight, he writes on the slip of paper the same thing that he writes almost every other night: I pull boy out of the ocean alive. I save him.

37

Greta leaves without telling Ray, without putting on a raincoat, with only sweatpants, sweatshirt, and sneakers, and an umbrella that remains unopened because she is afraid of lightning. The rain is hard, smacks her bare head like tiny, cold eggs, but luckily there’s no hail, not yet. Her neighbors’ houses are dark, and she imagines them inside, sleeping through the storm, oblivious to the fact that any moment their world might be destroyed, their roofs ripped off, their houses flooded.

How nice it would be to be like them, to believe in the benevolence of the world.

When Greta gets to the end of their block, she’s not sure which way to go. Few cars cruise the roads at this hour, especially in a storm, but over to her left there is a light still on, a club not yet closed, so she walks in that direction. What are the chances of Will being there? Not great, but all Greta knows is that she must keep walking, keep searching or else drown in fear.

The water bubbles up at the gutters and pools around her ankles. Her sneakers are soaked, and when she lifts her feet they feel heavier than ever. She imagines this is how her brother would feel, were he to come back to life: a new heaviness brought on by seawater, his movements slow, staggered, like a creature in a movie they once watched together, Swamp Thing, the first and last scary movie Joshua ever saw. And this is how he lives with her, still swimming through her mind even as she searches for her son, but she’s okay with it. It’s the way she preserves him.

Wind tugs at power lines and whistles past dark buildings, pushes against Greta so she has to hold herself up against the vinyl siding of an ice-cream shop to keep from falling over. When she makes it to the club, she stands outside, face pressed against the window, peering in for any sign of her son. A strong gust splays her body against the pane, and inside a man turning away from the bar squints at her, but she’s too weak to pry herself from the glass.

Before she has a chance to go inside, she hears her name somewhere beneath the sound of the wind.

She turns around, and there, at the end of the block, is Ray, barefoot, in rolled-up pajama pants and a t-shirt, completely soaked, their car parked beside him in the road. He begins to wade toward her, and she’s strangely embarrassed, wants to hide. For a moment she wonders

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea

how she must look to him, to anyone who might see her: a middle-aged woman, long gray hair dripping down a wet sweatshirt, eyes swollen and red from crying, desperately high-stepping through pools of water in the middle of a near-hurricane to look for her grown son.

Ray stops about a foot away from her, as if he knows he can’t force her to come back, as if he knows the only way for her to return home would be to ask her and for her to say yes.

He asks her to come back to the house, shouting above the sound of the wind and rain.

She doesn’t answer him right away, braces herself against another gust. Then she tells him, no, she has to find Will, that something might have happened, that she won’t come home until she’s found him.

Now Ray walks forward, grabs her shoulders firmly, seems to resist an urge to shake her.

Gret, he’s home.

She looks over at the car, the same one her son took out earlier, its headlights illuminating the rain. He’s home. Her legs weaken, feel unable to hold her waterlogged body. She wants to slip out from between her husband’s hands and lay in the near foot of water, wants to sleep there. A breath heaves out of her lungs.

He got home right after you left, Ray says. He stayed too long at the party, and by the time he left he had to drive the long way back to avoid the flooded roads.

Ray takes her arms and leads her to the car. She nods, follows, and he drives slowly back the few blocks to their house, but when they walk up to the porch she stops at the doorway. She can’t go in; she can’t face her son. She tells Ray she wants to sit on the porch awhile to calm down, and he offers to sit with her.

I’d rather be alone, she says.

She sees the bathroom light on and knows Will must be in there, brushing his teeth before bed.

Ray pauses before going inside and says, You know, you could’ve killed yourself tonight.

I’m sorry, Greta says, and she is. She’s hot with shame at the thought that Ray and Will both caught her at her ugliest, at her most desperate and needy and fearful. She feels like animals do, when they hide in dark

39

corners to die — no one wants to be seen that afraid. That kind of fear is private, more secret than sex.

You’ve got to learn to let go, Ray says. I really thought you were going to try this time. He shakes his head, and he walks inside before she has a chance to respond. She wants to tell him she will try harder. But she doesn’t know if trying is enough. In the distance, waves glimmer faintly in the dark and crash over the pier, black and shining like the one she stood on years ago, crying for hours, thinking of what to tell her parents after she’d left her brother alone and couldn’t find him.

Greta waits on the porch until the storm begins to let up. It’s nearly dawn. She takes off her shoes and walks down to the pier.

The sky is almost clear as Kaimu combs the beach, dragging his casting net behind him, carrying on one shoulder a backpack already half full with shells and stones and sea glass. His pants are rolled up and the detritus is sharp against his feet, a good kind of sharpness that lets him know he’s alive, even in a landscape as abandoned as this one, no one on the shore but him and one other person, a woman walking the pier not too far away.

He does not call out to her; anyone who comes to the beach at this hour comes for solitude. He drops his backpack on the sand and wades into the sea, up to his shins and then his knees, letting the waves suck him in, breathe him out. He casts the net and lets it unfurl out in front of him, weights sinking it so it scrapes the ocean floor, and then he walks backward, pulls it in to shore. Nothing good: broken shells, granite, a dead jellyfish. The storm wasn’t as bad as they said it would be, and Kaimu is disappointed with what it has left for him.

He wades in one more time, this time a little farther, so he can feel the water constrict his chest, cool his blood. He casts the net again, snakes it around on the sea floor, stirring sand and shells, hoping to unearth something that might be loose and ready to wash ashore.

When he goes to pull it in, the net is stuck, caught on something heavy, and no matter how hard Kaimu tugs, he only succeeds in straining his weak wrists against the resistance of the waves and dragging whatever it is a few inches closer to dry land. Out of the corner of his eye he again sees the woman still pacing the pier. She’s within shouting

The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea

distance, and so he calls to her, asks her to please come help him. Unmoving, she stares at him, and Kaimu regrets having called out to her; he seems to have frightened her, probably ruined a peaceful moment.

But then she moves down the pier toward shore and trots toward him, calling, Are you okay? Are you okay? She rolls up her pants, steps into the water.

Kaimu tells her, yes, he’s okay, he just needs a hand to drag something out, the waves are strong. As the tide is sucked in, he braces himself against the pull and glimpses something glimmering in his net, a warm color under all the cool grays and greens. He glances back at the woman, and by the way she looks at him he thinks she must have seen it too, and as they watch one another during the silent intake of the tide, Kaimu wonders if he knows this woman, wonders at her secret reason for standing on the pier the morning after a storm.

The woman nods her head, says she’ll try to help, she’ll try the best she can. She wades in next to Kaimu, and he hands her one side of the net, tells her to simply haul it back to shore as hard as she can. They separate, pulling the net taut, and tug it backwards with each wave, struggling against the pull of the sea.

As they get closer to dry sand, Kaimu sees what he has caught: amber — not copal, he thinks, but the ancient glow of real amber — and it’s the largest piece he has ever found, the largest piece he has ever seen, the size of a child’s over-inflated beach ball. He wonders, for a moment, if he is dreaming, if this is what happens in lucid dreams, but he knows this is the kind of thing he couldn’t make happen even if he tried.

He glances at the woman holding the other end of the net. She’s pulling hard against the intake of the tide, her face red and serious, but when she looks at him she laughs, shouts over the waves that she can’t believe it, it’s beautiful.

In the shallow water the amber glows, a tiny sun rising from the ocean. Kaimu and the woman breathe hard as they haul the stone to shore, and when they finally make it they collapse, tired but happy, as if they’ve been waiting to do this for centuries.

41

Hello Again Sarah Chavez

I came home from work. No one was home.

I called my mother to see where she was. No answer. Perhaps she was with Tio Marino. I called him.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

The robot woman responded.

“You have reached the voicemail box of…”

And then a real voice.

“Lino Chaves.”

I hung up the phone. I didn’t listen to the rest of what the robot woman had to say. I didn’t leave a voicemail for my uncle, or my father.

When my uncle came to live with us after my father died and started using his phone, I had mixed feelings about it. My mother couldn’t bring herself to get rid of the phone, and she continued to pay the monthly bill even though it sat on the counter without anyone ever using it. Every time it rang while we were in the kitchen, silence fell over us. We sat or stood very still, not looking at each other, waiting for the ringing to stop. When it finally did stop, my mom turned the volume on the TV up a little louder to fill the room with noise. We tried to forget that even though the phone still rang, there was no one to pick it up.

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But when my uncle started using the phone as his own, that awkward limbo of silence stopped. There was someone to pick up the phone to say, “No, Lino’s not here anymore,” with a sternness and a boldness that my mother and I could never muster. After a while, my father’s phone rang not for him, but for my uncle.

But the voicemail remained the same. My uncle never changed it, partly because he didn’t know how and probably because it would have broken him even more. My father’s voice was still alive on the recording which I helped him make years ago when he first got the phone. When I called the phone to talk to my uncle, if I got the voicemail, my father’s voice was the one that answered.

When I couldn’t bear to watch home videos, I turned to the phone.

Whenever I couldn’t get his face out of my head, either dead or alive, the sound of his voice soothed the pain. I’d call, wait for the voicemail message, listen to his voice, and hang up. Then, I’d do it again. And again. And again.

The calling became a process, an obsession. Whenever the floor fell from under me and I felt as if I were free falling into a place of pain I feared, I called. My father said he’d always be there for me. The only thing I had left was his voice, his name.

But when my uncle really began considering the phone his own by switching from “your father’s phone” to “my phone,” I had to stop calling. I called for my father’s voice, but my uncle was the one who answered. My mother constantly told my brothers and me of signs my dad sent her — a butterfly that landed on her lap while she was crying for him, a feeling of his presence in our house in Portugal. I didn’t get any of this. I only had his voice. But I lost it to my uncle. He took my father’s voice away.

Three years after my father’s death, I came home from work and called my uncle. My father responded.

“Lino Chaves.”

I stood for a moment. I rocked my feet back and forth and felt the floor come back beneath me.

I called again.

Hello Again

“You have reached the voicemail box of…”

“Lino Chaves.”

This time I responded.

“Hi Papai. I’ve missed you.”

45

Sweet Eric Twardzik

The cream leaves the nozzle in an instant hush, a sound so fragile and beautiful that unless you concentrate on it with all of your might it may have never happened. The whipped white wonder emerges slowly, a lazy descent of sugared cirrus onto the outspread palm, or perhaps finger.

Or even better, directly into the mouth. Like a suckle from the sweetest breast. A nipple of the Golden Calf. Milk and honey.

This is the thought that germinated in the head of Lloyd Adams as he pushed the walk button on the corner of Madison and 88th. Its stem broke through the soil of his brain as he put his shining wingtips on the street. It blossomed as he reached the middle of the crosswalk. By the time he was on Madison Avenue, it was feeding the bees, pollinating his nervous system, seeding his bloodstream.

Cream. Whipped cream. The kind that he used to sneak from the fridge in the linoleum land of his youth. He’d tiptoe down the stairs, hush hush so Mother won’t hear, swing open the door, and amongst the pickles and the mustards it stood, aluminum purity. He thought of his finger, how he would leave it in his mouth as he walked up the stairs, savoring every last part of the sweetness.

Lloyd removed a black leather glove and ran it through his $120 haircut. He realized that he had never been more alive than in those nocturnal moments, sneaking whipped cream in the night. His acceptance to

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Cornell, the school titles in crew and rugby, moving on top of Evelyn during their wedding night, landing his first big account at the advertising agency. None of those moments, those things he thought of as life, could hold a candle to the clandestine pinch of the nozzle at midnight. Sweet.

But why now? Surely he had more important and influential childhood memories. He didn’t even have a particular liking for the whipped stuff. He was only dimly aware it existed, and the last adult memory he had of eating it was atop some terrible pudding at an office Christmas party years ago. Yet now he needed it; he was prepared to launch into a dead sprint reserved for late boardroom appearances to get his hands on some. He just had to.

But had to? That was a phrase, a concept alien to a veteran advertising man. Everything at Pierce & Anderson had to have an exact meaning, a clear motive. They understood that consumers purchased certain products dependent on advertising, and the advertising made them buy those products because of different factors spilled over a thousand pie charts and bar graphs. No one had to do anything. You bought that bottle of Tide detergent because you were a middle-aged, middle class, suburban mother of two boys who saw a woman just like you buy the detergent on TV. Lloyd stepped inside a 7-Eleven and nodded a cordial good day to a squat, bald man poring over the paper who failed to return Lloyd’s greeting. Lloyd made his way straight to the back, to the cooler. A cylinder of Reddi-wip stood on the other side of the glass, like Snow White dreaming in her translucent tomb. He paid at the counter and was promptly on his way.

Back on the street, he wasted no time breaking the seal, twisting the cap, and shaking the can. He would like to see all those suits at the office analyze his actions now, frantically call up every consumer behavior specialist they knew to try and explain this one. He slowly squeezed a creamy dollop onto his gloved finger, and licked the black leather frosted with sugar. Yes, it was sweet. But it was not the feeling, not even close. For a moment he felt panic.

Lloyd calmed down as he remembered the vital ingredient missing from the can of Reddi-wip. Mother. Mother doesn’t want me sneaking

Sweet

down at night, being a bad boy, eating right from the can like a little Indian. The risk. That beautiful rush, ending with sweetness.

Evelyn and Lloyd ate dinner that night at a confusing Italian-Thai fusion restaurant.

“It’s quite chic Lloyd, the merger of international cuisines like this,” Evelyn said.

Lloyd bit into a Thai spring roll bursting at its translucent seams with Bolognese. He studied Evelyn’s face. She had high cheekbones, a small and elegant nose, bright eyes and neck-length blonde hair. She was beautiful, but it was a beauty so utterly predictable that it stripped the word of its meaning. Evelyn rested her fork aside the vermicelli ravioli, and pursed her lips as she fixed her hair, a gesture that Lloyd knew to precede an important statement.

“I really think that this can promote global harmony. I mean, wouldn’t nations have more empathy and tolerance with one another if they tasted each other’s cuisine? What if the Israelis and Palestinians ate the same foods?” Evelyn said.

Lloyd suppressed his desire to tell Evelyn that the evidence of hummus would shatter her utopian ideal. She used his silence as an opportunity to question why he had failed to pick up the dry cleaning on his way home from the office, as she specifically asked. He attempted a story about having to consult with a new account, a lie that faded into mumbling as he slurped minestrone from a sweet and sour broth. She asked him to stop tapping his fingers against the tabletop.

The next day at Pierce & Anderson, Lloyd hid the can of whipped cream in the bottom drawer of his desk. He had calculated his reaction time and risks to the smallest detail. It would be simple. He would buzz for Kirsten to come in and give him the details of the lunch meeting one more time.

He estimated that it would take Kirsten a good nine seconds to rise from her chair, in her ladylike fashion, making sure to smooth creases in her skirt before she walked into his office. In that brief time Lloyd would swing open the bottom drawer, withdraw the can, squeeze the cream onto the tip of his finger, drop the can back down, slam the drawer, and

49

spin the chair around to give himself extra time to suck the cream off his finger if Kirsten was being speedy.

As he moved his shaking finger to the intercom button, Lloyd realized that he could not think of a moment in his adult life that contained so much excitement. Was this how it felt to be a child? How could he have forgotten this? His heart beat rapidly in his chest, his brow broke into a sweat. He pushed the intercom button and told Kirsten that he would like to see her in the office.

“Be right in, Mr. Adams,” Kirsten replied in her corporate sing-song.

Before her tinny voice came from the speaker, Lloyd had already pulled open the bottom drawer with such speed that it slid from its track. He sprayed the cream above his right index finger, spreading it to the underside of his knuckle. As he tried to slam the broken drawer back into place, the clicking of three-inch heels approached the office door.

Lloyd swung the chair around, his back to the door, as he took his whole finger into his mouth and sucked on the cream.

Knob twisting, hinge clicking, door opening.

“Yes Mr. Adams?” She said.

Lloyd swung his chair around to see Kirsten standing at attention, her blouse cut slightly lower than average. He rubbed his chin with his right index finger, as if engaging it in another physical activity would cover up his crime. This finger? Never!

Kirsten began to give him the details of that day’s business lunch, the steakhouse’s address and the correct pronunciation of the Portuguese client’s name, but Lloyd knew these details and paid little attention. The experiment had been a modest success. The manner in which risk added to the expectation, danger, and reward of the situation had soothed his urge, if not entirely satisfied it. He let Kirsten carry on, chatter meaninglessly through her rouged lips, as she nervously wrung her hands together behind her tight skirt.

Before the monthly account meeting that day, Lloyd transported the can of Reddi-wip to the men’s restroom by hiding it in his suit coat.

He stood on the toilet and raised the drop ceiling with his fingers, then stashed the can in a corner above the ceiling. He twice excused himself during the meeting to go to the men’s room and suck from the can.

Sweet

He kept the can of Reddi-wip above the drop ceiling for the entire week and regularly returned to the stall to taste in secret. Lloyd had a clear idea of how he would look to a discoverer, an absurd image that he took some glee in. A distinguished young account man with his head above a stall, squeezing whipped cream into his mouth. On one occasion Lloyd had his hand in the ceiling when he heard the door open. He pulled the can down and threw himself back onto the toilet seat, heart pounding. Lloyd tapped his shoes on the tiles as he sprayed out the last of the whipped cream. He had to summon his greatest professional restraint to stifle a laugh, the laugh of a child. The can of Reddi-wip was empty. Lloyd waited until he heard flushing, water faucets, the swing of the door. On a sudden impulse, he placed the can in the middle of the tile floor before leaving.

Lloyd felt a strange, giddy satisfaction each time he imagined the confusion of whoever it was that would find the empty can of Reddi-wip in the middle of an office bathroom. As he walked home, an extra swing in his stride, he noticed the 7-Eleven where he had bought the Reddi-wip the week before.

The stocky bald man was in the same position behind the register, possibly reading the same edition of the paper, still not returning greetings.

Lloyd approached the dairy refrigerator and ogled the different brands.

He reached in his back pocket for change from lunch, but stopped midreach. Lloyd glanced behind him. The bald man was still reading the paper. He looked back at the Cool Whip. Once more at the owner.

In one smooth move, he snapped the seal, shook the can and squeezed a fat dollop onto his glove. Lloyd ate hungrily out of his hand, like a starving pigeon. His chest thumped and bumped. A backward glance revealed no signs of surveillance or suspicion from the owner. He put the can back in the refrigerator and noticed a smidgen of white on his chin in the reflection, which smiled back at him like a maniac. He wiped his face and licked his lips.

Lloyd waited to hear someone mention a can of whipped cream at the office the next day. It was the strangest thing, Paulson! Someone just left it in the middle of the floor! To his disappointment, he never

51

overhead a single mention of the can. As he left the office, he paused at Kirsten’s desk to ask her if she’d heard a whipped cream rumor making the rounds.

Kirsten fumbled, finding herself unable to answer a question unrelated to incoming calls and lunch arrangements. “No, Mr. Adams, I don’t believe I have,” she managed.

Lloyd walked to 7-Eleven and repeated his acts of the previous day.

He encountered three more bodegas on the walk home, and questioned if they had existed the week before. He went into each and siphoned whipped cream behind the owner’s back. Every time he glanced at the owner less, sprayed whipped cream more.

As Lloyd walked home he drummed his fingers against his legs, bobbed his head like an exposed jack-in-the-box, and stretched a smile from ear to ear. He knew he might look like a lunatic in a Zegna suit to the passerby but struggled to compose himself.

An irritated Evelyn questioned his late arrival to that evening’s restaurant, a pretentious bistro. He weakly countered with a lie about a last-minute conference call he couldn’t miss.

“Lloyd, do you know the trouble I went through to get us this booth on a Friday night?” Evelyn said, lips pursed, reigning over an untouched foie gras.

A pumping, swishing staccato came from underneath the linen tablecloth.

“Please don’t tap your foot under the table. It’s embarrassing,” Evelyn said, briefly breaking her gaze to scan the restaurant for people worthy of being embarrassed in front of.

“Lloyd, this is like trying to take a child out to fine dining.”

That night Lloyd dreamt the same dream he had had since buying the first can of Reddi-wip. Tiptoeing down the stairs, crossing the linoleum.

Reaching inside the glowing box for the forbidden prize. Fearing the discoverer, Mother. Impossibly huge in her nightgown, billowing like the sails of a Spanish galleon. Mother, the Minotaur in the labyrinth.

Lloyd picked at his dragon roll distractedly. Bored with staring into soy sauce, he decided to take another look at the woman seated across from

Sweet

him. A mixture of alcohol and unfounded affection had painted Kirsten’s cheeks the same color as the scraps of ginger that crowned her sashimi.

“Mr. Adams, I’m so glad that we finally get to see each other outside of the office!” Kirsten said too loudly, wearing too much makeup, through a mouth framed by lipstick that was far too red for her complexion. She chatted about how much they had in common, words slightly slurred from sake.

Lloyd barely listened and watched the door in fear that someone in a new party would recognize him. He had carefully selected the sushi bar for its proximity to no one that he knew or worked with. He had no intention of being seen wining and dining a secretary.

“That’s wonderful, Kirsten,” he said, eyeing the entrance nervously.

She stained his white collar with lipstick in the taxi ride back from the sushi bar. Lloyd directed the taxi driver to drop them off a good five blocks from his apartment, to avoid giving himself away with the sound of an engine. Kirsten stumbled out of the cab and into his arms.

She kissed him on the lips wildly and without technique. Suddenly, she pulled away from Lloyd.

“Lloyd,” she began, her eyes widening to saucer size, mouth forming a mild pout, “don’t you have a wife?”

Lloyd, who had never thought Kirsten was capable of forming independent questions, was taken back. He paused to think about it, in the same way someone pauses to think if they ordered the wrong pizza topping.

“Yes,” he said with a shrug. “But she’s not home tonight. She’s skiing.

With the parents.”

Kirsten responded to the lie by kissing his neck. He wondered if bleaching the collar could save it. As they reached the door of his townhouse, Lloyd pressed a finger to his lips.

“We’re alone tonight. But I’d still like you to be quiet as can be,” Lloyd said. Kirsten nodded meekly.

“It’s romantic,” he added as an afterthought.

She walked about the unlit living room, admiring the hung paintings and choice items from Evelyn’s antique collection. She formed her lips into a wide O, whose sound production Lloyd aborted with a quick finger to her lips. He told her to undress.

“Don’t you want to go upstairs?” Kirsten asked.

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“I want you on the love seat,” Lloyd said. He paused for several moments and added “That’s why they call it that” with a note of uncertainty.

Lloyd had no desire to watch Kirsten strip off her dress, no desire for any part of the young woman. As she disrobed, he walked to the kitchen and approached the refrigerator. He opened the refrigerator and looked at the can of whipped cream, in perfect position behind the gates of pickle and mustard.

The rushes had stopped coming to Lloyd. He had begun to shoplift, stuffing cans of Reddi-wip into his satchel at 7-Eleven. He would quietly leave Evelyn’s side in the middle of the night, tiptoe downstairs and walk the streets until he had consumed half a can of Cool Whip in the aisle at 7-Eleven and retreat back upstairs to hold Evelyn with his sticky fingers. His actions had less thrill, less reward each time, no matter how much he pushed the risk. But he couldn’t let that feeling of bliss, remembered nineteen days ago at the corner of 88th and Madison, to slip away from him.

Lloyd had made a plan. He would try to recreate the perilous whipped cream gauntlet of his childhood. Mother, so large and terrifying to the small boy, was gone forever. Evelyn could never match how she towered over him, intimidated him as a little boy. How could detection by Evelyn while sneaking Reddi-wip from the fridge even constitute a risk?

She would think it strange and offer some bitchy words, but how could he properly fear her as he crossed the kitchen? Mother, the X of the formula, was gone.

Unless he added another X. Now, that X was in his home, taking her clothes off in the living room as his wife slept upstairs.

Lloyd boiled with adrenaline as he stared into the refrigerator. His palms grew warm and sweaty, sticking to the aluminum handle. He walked out of the kitchen, stuck his head into the living room and mouthed to Kirsten that he would be right back.

Lloyd tiptoed up the staircase, one step at a time. He slunk though the hallway, and gingerly opened the door to the master bedroom. Evelyn lay sleeping on the linen, her back to the door. He watched her chest lightly rise and fall with her breath. Lloyd walked to the edge of the bed and climbed atop the sheets on his hands on knees as if navigating thin ice. He lay on his side, away from his wife.

Sweet

It was a vital part of the formula, being in bed, pretending to sleep.

Just as he had done on those nights so long ago. He could remember lying on his side, watching the wall as the clock ticked. He would hear mother coming up the stairs, opening the door, and casting her enormous shadow against the wall as she peered into the bedroom.

After several minutes had passed, Lloyd rose from the bed as carefully as he had entered it and made for the door. From the landing he began his descent down the stairs, treading as lightly as a boy of six.

Kirsten was somewhere in the darkness, waiting for him.

Ending his descent, Lloyd crept into the kitchen. Each of his fingers shook with a different rhythm, his heart thumped against his chest like a man buried alive. He paused to wipe the sweat pooling above his brow and catch his breath.

Everything in the kitchen seemed much bigger to him, as if it had grown. He walked to the refrigerator, stood on his tiptoes to pull open the door and reveal the box of light. His hands awkwardly groped around the pickles and the mustard, set on a shelf out of his reach. He pulled out the beautiful, perfect cylinder.

He twisted off the cap and held it as high as he could above his head.

As the muscles in his index finger contracted to pinch the nozzle, he heard a crash. When he had removed the whipped cream he dislodged a horizontal bottle of chardonnay, which had burst against the granite tile. The sound resounded through the still townhouse.

More sounds followed. A gasp from the living room. The swing of an opening door from upstairs. Feet running down the staircase. Lloyd shut his eyes as tightly as he could and held down the nozzle. Whipped cream fell into his mouth, on his cheeks, above his eyelids, and around his feet.

Lloyd heard the sound of someone trying to force the front door open from within, and then his wife shrieking. Another voice countered it.

The high-pitched, ugly sounds came closer and soon filled the kitchen, infecting his bliss.

This was supposed to be perfect, the moment that he reclaimed what was once his. It was being destroyed, torn from him by two voices.

No, it was one voice. Mother. Minotaur.

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Lloyd was oblivious to the shrieks of the women in the kitchen. He didn’t feel Evelyn hitting him with the flat of her hand. Marriage and professional life were foreign concepts to him. He was just six years old, sneaking whipped cream out of the refrigerator, in bliss with the froth and the foam. Sweet.

Sweet

57

The Father, The Son, The Daughter Katie Walsh

When my dad was a little kid, he had difficultly learning to spell. “C-AT,” “R-A-T,” the words he was supposed to be learning at school never seemed to stick. One day he brought home a spelling quiz he had failed.

I don’t know if he tried to hide it, or if my grandfather, Ed, demanded to see it right away. Maybe my dad’s great-aunt, Auntie Grace, or his grandfather, Pa, tried to protect him, as they often did. But once Ed saw the grade, he dragged my dad into their kitchen and pinned his wrist down on the cutting board so that his hand was splayed like how you trace a turkey on Thanksgiving, like a pale starfish against the nicked wood. Then my grandfather grabbed a butcher knife and pressed it to my father’s wriggling, terrified flesh, and told him that if he didn’t get better at spelling, and quick, he would cut his goddamn fingers off.

When I first heard this story from my mother, she told me that Ed had done this because he caught my father picking his nose; however, when I finally gather the courage to ask my father, he tells me it was because of the words, the cat, rat, mat. “Let me tell you, my spelling sure improved after that!” Dad laughs, somehow. I mimic a smile and quickly look away, because the thing is, my father’s never been good at spelling. Ever since I was little, he’s asked me how to spell even simple words that I know he knows. He’s so unsure of himself. Still.

And he’s so amazed by me and everything I do, as if it was all in spite

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of having him as a father instead of because of it. Because do we ever truly escape our parents?

I’m young, maybe five years old. Mom’s busy, and Dad has one of his weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, so there’s no one around to watch me. Dad’s simple solution is to take me with him.

With the group’s permission, I sit at my father’s feet within the circle of chairs, enjoying the feeling of the cool tile on my small fingers and bony knees. My legs are so long and skinny that when I wear shorts Dad calls me “Bird Legs” because he says I look like a baby heron. Normally I’m not allowed to sit on the floor of a cafeteria like this, and the novel vantage point feels like a whole new world. It’s everything I had hoped it would be.

I stretch out with my crayons and paper to draw, utterly consumed as I outline a figure on the page. I’m oblivious as people start to go around the circle, saying their names and talking about their struggle with alcohol abuse. However I do vaguely notice that the group chants back a response to the speaker when they introduce themselves. I want to join in, to be like the grown-ups.

“Hi, my name is Phil, and I’m an alcoholic,” a tall, shivery man says.

“Hi, Phil!” the group calls back to him.

“Hi, Phil,” I mumble to my crayons, just a beat after everyone else.

Phil goes on to describe when he hit rock bottom as I search for my blue crayon. I find it under someone’s chair and begin filling in the blank space above the grass in my portrait of Dad. As I rub the crayon over paper, the cracks between the tiles I’m drawing on create the impression of cracks in the sky that surrounds him.

I’m just finishing my drawing when it’s Dad’s turn to speak. He asks if he can hold it up, and I hand the paper over because people usually think I’m pretty good at art. He tells the group that the picture is of him and jokes that I’ve kindly given him much more hair than he has in real life. Everybody laughs, and he tells them that I’m the light of his life.

Combined with all the attention, this makes me squirming-happy, and he gives me back my drawing with a smile, his grin full of crooked teeth and silver fillings. I start on another picture as he begins telling the

The Father, The Son, The Daughter

group how he used to “drink like a fish but hasn’t touched it in twenty years.” I know to feel proud of him, even if I don’t know exactly why.

My grandfather, Ed Walsh, died when I was ten, but somehow I don’t remember his face. The only memories I have of him are the times when my dad asked me to play “Danny Boy” for him on my flute. Once was in my grandparents’ house in Weston, Massachusetts, with Ed sitting in his usual spot, the blue armchair in front of their ancient TV with its black knobs and wicker-covered speakers.

That TV was one of the few reasons my sister and I conceded to visiting my grandparents because somehow the thing got cable, and the only station we got at home with any regularity was Telemundo. The other reason was the M&M’s that always filled the crystal candy dish. They were old and chewy, but as children who were consistently denied the colorful chocolate bars that tempted us in the checkout line, we couldn’t bring ourselves to mind. To us, my grandparents lived like royalty; the only problem was that we didn’t really like them, even if we didn’t know why. The house smelled strange, and the toys in the attic seemed to all have strange eyes, painted wide-open and staring. My parents acted different there too.

Ed was Irish, and I think maybe Dad wanted to impress him with the Celtic songs I had learned. I assembled my pre-owned flute with care, wiping the tarnished mouthpiece before I placed it just below my lips.

The metal felt cool and familiar on the dip of my chin, but Ed’s presence made me nervous, and the first couple of notes were nothing but wispy, pitiful air. I stared resolutely at my music, determined to get this right for myself and for Dad, and the music trickled out as I eventually forgot my grandfather was there. Maybe that’s why when I try to remember his face there’s just a blankness.

Every time I see the photo of my grandfather rubber-banded to the visor of my dad’s car, I might as well be looking at a stranger. He looks odd in that picture, with a wild, bushy beard, staring at the camera with a bewildered expression and clutching the leash of a mangy dog that growls at the photographer. I have to assume it’s Ed, because the sight of him beckons no shy memory to the surface from the hiding place of

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my mind. His face means nothing to me, and meant nothing to me even before I knew what he did.

My mom tells me that I played for Ed often, especially when he was in the nursing home; Dad didn’t feel very comfortable visiting him, and as long as my fingers worked their way over the flute’s keys, no one had to talk. The last time I remember playing “Danny Boy” for Ed was at his funeral. Upon request, I walked up to the foreign, imposing Catholic altar. I was wearing an ugly, navy blue dress that I didn’t like because of the huge bow on the back. I played it for Ed again, one final time.

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

From glen to glen, and down the mountain side,

The summer’s gone, and all the flowers are dying,

‘Tis you, ‘tis you must go and I must bide.

Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

My dad always says there wasn’t a dry eye in the house and I think, Except for mine.

I didn’t cry when Dad told me that Ed died, either. I remember him sitting me down in the living room on our big tapestry armchair. The sun was setting, light filtering through the golden leaves on the ancient maple in the backyard and streaming through our windows. That giant maple is why my parents bought the house; it was so beautiful in the fall that they could ignore the giant hole in the kitchen floor, big enough to install a fireman’s pole down to the basement. The sunlight illuminated dust mites that danced in the air as my father knelt at my feet and said, “Honey, Grampy passed away last night. So if I seem sad in the next couple of weeks, that’s why.”

“Okay,” I said. I later worried if I should have cried, but Dad wasn’t, and I didn’t particularly feel like it.

My sister, Maggie, and I are driving around in our family’s minivan, circling the local roads as she smokes a cigarette. It makes me feel older and elegant when she brings me on one of these cigarette cruises, all the windows down so the breeze can whisk away the smell of smoke. She abruptly turns onto a small side street, and when I ask what she’s doing, she says, “Did you know that this is where Grampy was buried?”

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My brow furrows as I look about in disbelief, searching for something familiar. I go past this street almost every day, and yet I have no memory of this being the cemetery, of pulling through those gates in a long line of limos. I do recall being really excited to be in a limo, though, and that during the funeral there was a bagpiper playing on a green hill. I’m surprised Maggie hadn’t remembered this before being told by our mom because she was twelve when he died; we’re both in high school now.

We drive around the cemetery, looking for my grandfather’s grave, and we never ask each other why we feel this compulsion. We simply drive in silence, winding over hills on the thin, paved road and squinting at gravestones black from the rain. They jut out from the wet grass like teeth, all blocky molars and jagged incisors. There are those chipped slate headstones you always find in New England, dating back to the 1700s and marking short and brutal lives, but no sign of my grandfather.

It feels like we’re grasping for something that’s not there, like the smoke flying out the window. We don’t know much about our grandfather, other than that faceless figure in the blue armchair, but we won’t find him here. We give up after about an hour, embarrassed of ourselves, and continue on our way, never to speak of it again.

It isn’t until my freshman year of college that my mom tells me what Ed did to his children, including my father, while they were growing up. We’re in the car, talking about my boyfriend at the time who grew up with a father that drank himself to death and a mentally ill mother.

Mom tells me how my boyfriend should get into therapy now because growing up in that kind of environment will come back to bite him in the ass, like it did with my dad.

“What do you mean, like with Dad?” Then she tells me about the time Ed grabbed the butcher knife. She tells me about one Christmas Eve when my dad was four, how one of the kids did something to get in trouble with Ed. As punishment, my grandfather took his shotgun, loaded it, and sat down in front of the fireplace all strung up with stockings. He told my father that because of what he had done, he was going to kill Santa and that my dad would be to blame for the end of Christmas, everywhere and forever. Ed sat there with his gun all night, no matter how long my dad pleaded.

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I sit, horrified, as my mom tells me all of this in a sort of matterof-fact tone, as if it wasn’t my father that this happened to, wasn’t my grandfather that did it. I blink back tears and bite my lip, not wanting to cry in front of her for some reason. It isn’t until she drops me off at the T station and I’m seated on the train that my shoulders start to shake. I stare at my own blotchy reflection in the scratched windows, strangely fascinated by the physicality of my own sadness and a face that in no way resembles my father’s.

In looks, I am all my mother’s: blond hair, big eyes, toothy grin. But in personality, I am my father’s, for better and for worse. I know I’ve inherited his attention span, however little of it there is. ADD didn’t exist when he was a kid, so people came to the conclusion that he was just stupid. They told this to the boy that would be my father until he believed them. At sixty-seven years old, he still believes them. I was diagnosed with ADD in middle school, before which I thought I was just stupid too. I still do sometimes, but I’ve been far luckier with the people in my life than my dad ever was.

Not to say that there were no good influences in my father’s childhood.

His Great-Auntie Grace and his grandfather, my great-grandfather, Pa, loved him very much, but Pa had his own past, his own responsibility to bear for what my father went through. For much of Pa’s life, he was “a falling down drunk and a terrible father,” as my mother tells me. Pa did quit drinking on his own in his sixties and was a wonderful grandfather to my dad, but his mark had been made on his own son, my father’s father. Maybe that’s why, once Pa sobered up, he tried so hard to protect my dad and his siblings, because he knew it was in part his heavy hand that had been Ed’s making. And surely Pa didn’t learn his brand of love from nowhere. Like the alcoholism, this hard kind of love also seems to be passed from generation to generation, like poison in our blood.

Same as my father, I can charm the room at a party, but only as long as I have a drink in my hand; and I’m always the last one left standing, still awake, still drinking and wondering where everyone’s gone. I’ve inherited my dad’s ability to make people laugh but pay the price by sharing his tendency towards depression and a strange kind of loneliness that I know has plagued him all his life.

Sometimes, late at night, I can feel that confusing loneliness rising

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within me, a hunger in my gut that grows fat on my fears, biding its time. And I wonder where my father got it from.

Mom tells me that Ed was a surly bastard who had flashes of goodness, glints of gold in a pan full of dirt. He would buy a suit for a man down on his luck and take him job hunting but was incapable of saying a good word to his children. He sent all five of his kids to private Catholic school when he didn’t have to, so they could have a better education, but if they struggled he would beat the information into their heads.

My uncle Michael remembers being sure that Ed was going to kill my dad one time when he chased him through the backyard with a shovel.

It was so bad that my grandmother, who usually couldn’t be bothered, finally intervened to save her son’s life. Mom says Ed was like King Midas, who meant well but screwed up everything he touched. I want that to make it less cruel, but I’m not sure it does. How do you forgive a man who nearly killed his son?

For the most part my looks are my mother’s and my personality is my father’s, but somewhere along the line I got tall and green-eyed. I tower over my blue-eyed parents, my sister, my mother’s parents, my dad’s mother. I don’t know where it comes from until Mom tells me that Ed was a very tall man, physically imposing. A looming silhouette in a backlit bedroom doorway. I don’t know the color of his eyes.

Dad tells me that for his fifth step of AA, years ago, he decided to make amends with Ed. Even now, my father’s hesitant to blame the horrific nature of his childhood solely on my grandfather. He tells me, “It wasn’t dysfunctional in spite of me; it was dysfunctional because I was a part of it. I was drinking too, and some of those fights I started.” I can’t find it in myself to blame him because he couldn’t have been more than a teenager even then, but I nod anyway.

“So you made amends with Grampy?” I ask. I can only bring myself to call Ed “Grampy,” like my sister and I used to, when I’m talking to my dad. Other than that, I haven’t called him anything resembling “grandfather” since I learned about everything that’s happened.

Dad nods. “I went out to see him while he was working in the garage, apologized for everything I did.”

“And what’d he say?”

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“He said, ‘We’re both responsible for our own stuff.’”

For everything that happened, that’s all my father got. “We’re both responsible for our own stuff.” It makes me so angry I could cry.

When I learned about what happened to my father, my imagination wouldn’t leave it alone, this terrible skeleton in the family closet. My mind still can’t let the dead body rest. I can hear that child screaming, round cheeks red with tears as he scrambles to break free from my grandfather’s grip, whose hands have been transformed into iron bars after years of work as a machinist. I can see that child clawing at my grandfather’s forearm as he forces the grubby little hand onto the butcher block. I can feel the nauseous terror in my father’s stomach as my grandfather raises the knife. It makes me feel sick, but I still dwell over these memories that were never mine, the way some might prod at a bruise.

There’s part wonder and pride though because my father did what so many couldn’t. All the years of pain and fear, the burdens of generations, he bore it on his own back. He faltered and slipped and needed help, but he did what his father and grandfather couldn’t. Ultimately, he ended it.

I can hear Maggie and Dad fighting in her room. Usually it’s her and Mom who get into these rows because it takes a while for Dad to get yelling-furious, but Maggie can do it like no other. Her family nickname is “the Crocodile” and has been since she was a baby. I’m standing indecisively in the hallway, torn between my adopted mantel of peacemaker and my instinct to avoid crossfire. I can see the golden light that comes from Maggie’s room, thanks to that giant maple tree. It makes everything glow warm like firelight. It’s beautiful, and it’s now that my father slaps my sister.

I didn’t hear what she said that pushed him over the edge, that made him for a split second the man he never wanted to be, but the sound of hand against flesh is like a cracking whip. It’s unfamiliar, sharp, and heavy, filling the room and the hallway, pushing out all the gold and the air until it feels like there’s no oxygen left in the house. I can’t breathe, and everything feels muted, like a bomb’s gone off. I can hear my sister screaming and crying as I scramble back into my room and lock the

The Father, The Son, The Daughter

door, sobbing in sympathy, fear, and anger. I can’t remember Dad ever hitting us before, ever being this angry, and therefore, this man is not Dad, and I don’t know who he is. There is a stranger in my house, wearing my father’s skin. It’s my worst nightmare, the one that wakes me up screaming at night.

I hear a knock on the door. “Katie?” A male voice seeps in through the cracks, low and controlled. “KK, please open up.” I press my body more firmly against the door, as if the lock on the knob won’t hold.

“No!” I sob. An ugly little part of me, a secret, dark thing that has no place in a child, knows that the sound of my crying, my fear, hurts him as much as a slap in the face. I’m still scared, but I’m not crying only from that anymore. I’m punishing him now, shaming him. The hardwood floor digs into my knees, and my heart feels like a hummingbird, beating itself into a frenzy against my ribcage.

“Katie, please…please open up.” Even his voice sounds like a stranger’s now, like a plucked string, a wire tightrope wobbling under an unsure performer who has suddenly remembered his fear of heights, who’s forgotten how to walk the thin line. “God, Katie, please, I promise…” The tightrope walker falls as his voice snaps and breaks, and I can hear the tears in his throat. “I promise I won’t hurt you. I will never hurt you.”

I feel a sudden certainty, and I know he never will hurt us, neither Maggie nor me ever again. Something has shifted, and I feel older, and I now recognize the voice as my father’s, though it seems like a child’s.

He sounds more afraid of himself and angry at himself than I know how to be because no one ever taught me; so I open the door.

67

Salvage Jill Birdsall

One day my husband took a wrong turn and wound up on a dead end street on Half Shell in Old Nauvoo, smack in the middle of a salvage yard called The Way It Was, a place he revisited daily thereafter. Some people bring home strays. My Joseph brings salvage. Gifts, he says.

Happy birthday. The salvage is for me.

It started with a scale.

He said he was trying to calibrate it, but I knew he was really monitoring my weight. The same time every morning he called me into our bathroom where I’d helped him haul it.

“Don’t forget a penny!”

It was a full-size step-on scale made by the Public Scale Company in Chicago. Six feet tall, a bright blue porcelain beauty. Across the top read: What You Should Weigh with a finger pointing to a slot Drop Coin Here.

The face of the scale was round like a lollipop with a bright red arrow that showed your weight. Below the face of the scale was another sign with another finger pointing up. This said: You Should Know Your Weight.

I was surprised the first time Joseph brought food into the bathroom.

This wasn’t like him. He didn’t believe food should be anywhere but in the kitchen. There he was, though, biting into a sweet roll. He stood closer to me than usual. I was hungry from not enough food the day before

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and the buttery smell of the roll made my stomach growl. Actually, my stomach turned over sort of, which is why I turned my eyes to the scale.

The numbers on its dial stopped at 280, which made me wonder what this meant for people who weighed 281. Should they not know their weight? Obviously their weight was considered what you should not weigh.

I handed Joseph the penny to feed into the slot, and this is how we started watching my weight, which was always either up or down a pound from the day before. That scale was vintage salvage, but was it reliable? Who could say?

“It makes no sense,” I said when I knew the previous day I’d eaten only a grapefruit and a thin bunch of celery.

When I lost five pounds in a week, I thought the scale must have scared the pounds off me. Otherwise, Joseph did.

On Friday, he made a ring with his thumb and forefinger. He fit this snug around the top of my arm then squinted his eyes briefly. When I stepped off the scale I almost blacked out. I reached for him to steady me. My eyes cleared, and I saw Joseph looking up and down my body in rhythm with the needle on the scale, his eyes and the needle traveling first one way then another.

After the scale came the camera. It was a beauty. Its case was dark mahogany, its stand iron. It felt rich and masculine, a sturdy, refined camera, one you could count on for a long time.

Then he had me carry it up to our bedroom with him, and I began to worry. What? Why? He nodded for me to open the door to our closet.

Let him through. I did.

It was late afternoon and the sun had gone down so there was little light left in the room, even less in the narrow closet. What I could see was a gleaming copper plaque that said Ansco. A creased black cloth hung limp from the back of the camera. Joseph ducked his head under the drape of the cloth and the whole scene would have been as sweet as the sepia of an old portrait photographer in his studio, except that we were surrounded by stacks of pants and belts and a long row of shirts, jackets, and skirts.

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Joseph adjusted the lens several times to make sure it was just as he wanted.

While he worked the camera, he spoke to me. “We’ll shoot you in a dress first,” he said.

He gestured with no more than the hint of his brow toward a dress I hadn’t worn in ten years but had kept like a memory behind my everyday clothes.

I suggested we eat dinner and come back to this later. I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and I could smell the cinnamon buns he’d brought home from his bakery run, and these made me hungry.

“Can we come back to this later?” I asked.

But he shook his head no, his concentration too deep for talk.

I looked around the closet, my own mind skittering across the surface of things: a pile of Joseph’s wrinkled shirts, a jumble of shoes behind the door, hems and buttons needing my mother’s fingers back in the days these lived nimble and ready.

Glancing at me, Joseph closed the door.

“The blue dress,” he said.

The camera’s lens pointed at me, like an old man’s eye coated in cataract. It didn’t blink. I stood trapped in the middle of our clothing, one of my hands caught in a knot of mismatched socks. What followed was a silence so long I pulled the blue dress over my head just to cover my ears.

Under the drape he rummaged.

I tried to fit into my old dress, but even with the weight loss since the scale, I couldn’t, not comfortably anyway. I squirmed and smoothed. I tried.

“No,” he said. Or I thought he said this. In truth he might not have said anything. It was like that between us. He didn’t speak. I knew when he was thinking no. It was a certain pattern of breathing. Later I might say, “You said.” He’d say he didn’t. Technically he’d be right.

He left the camera and approached.

“Try the green skirt instead,” he said, his walking the beginning of my action.

While I changed, he took my chin and turned my face.

I didn’t look at him. I stared blankly.

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I was only half dressed when he repositioned the rest of me, adjusting first my hips, my waist. He pulled me close to him.

I stopped thinking, breathing. Everything inside me waited for his next move.

He let me go. Like the air let out of a tire, I breathed out, but just for a minute. Back to the stand. He needed to adjust it one more time. When he returned, with one finger this time he tilted my chin a fraction of an inch higher until I appeared to be looking up at him.

“Like this,” he said, “Stay like this.”

I was against the wall already when he pressed closer. A metal hanger bit into my back. It wasn’t the camera but his eyes that zoomed in. They landed on my neck. He touched there, then my shoulder. But it wasn’t me. His eyes traveled my skin, my wrist, my belly. He was touching all over. I wasn’t there. Places to go, things to do. I was out and about. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel right. It just felt like he was taking what he wanted, thinking this was me. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me.

But I recognized this man who did this. In the dark I remembered him, and I didn’t like him. So I waited it out. When he was done and the air cleared in front of me, I opened my eyes, but all that was there was one very old camera.

We were already out of space in our two-bedroom house when he brought in yet one more piece of salvage. This one was different. First off, it was wide as a wall and high as a ceiling. It was made of white oak, an oak so heavy I didn’t know how we’d move it.

“We carry it in sections,” Joseph said.

I wasn’t objecting. It was the first thing he’d brought home that interested me. What prompted him to choose it, I didn’t know. It made me hopeful, though. I wanted to think we might be drawn to the same things even if what he saw had nothing to do with what made me want to keep it. He touched its trim in awe. He raved about the artistry and craftsmanship.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“We’ll find a place,” I said.

Together we carried it into our living room. Moved the sofa and tele-

Salvage

vision out from the wall and then pushed it, first one section, then the next, and the next, into place. We each held a side, moved together, much like we’d move any hutch or desk, left then right, forward a little, careful not to chip a corner or loosen a bolt.

It had traveled all the way from a small village in France. “Detail work like this isn’t found local to us,” I said.

We were moving well, I thought.

Until he said, “Slowly,” as we rounded a bend. He stopped short, correcting what he considered a reckless pace.

I didn’t want to scratch something that had come from the hands of artisans in the 1800s, I told him.

“You’ve got to watch,” he said.

It was tiring, lifting this confessional booth with Joseph. I just wanted to sit with him for a minute afterward to smooth over the difficulty of working together. But he was shuffling his keys in his pocket, which meant he was on his way out again.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

Before leaving, he cut a slice of German chocolate cake. It was a large slice, I noticed, too large for one person. He laid this on a plate carefully, licked his fingers, then headed toward the garage, leaving the cake behind. Turning back, he paused a moment, then nodded his head toward the living room.

“You should see the wood inside that booth,” he said.

Then he left me alone.

I walked around it first. The priest’s chamber was at center; a ceramic plaque above his door read: Mr. Le Cure. There was a green light above, lit only when the priest was inside ready to hear confession.

I stepped closer. The hand-carved arches overhead felt like arms about me. It was déjà vu. The grain of the wood and how it was worn, the smell of dust mixed with candle wax. I felt as if I’d not only seen it before, but it held a larger place in my memory. I knew all that had been around it — the red of the carpet that had been under it, the royal blue and yellow gold glass above it, the long plaintive sound of bells ringing on steps leading to it.

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The booth had two side chambers for sinners. While one person confessed, the other waited in a separate compartment. Meantime, the priest slid brass screens open and closed between them, one on each side of his chamber, another light, this one turning red over the door of the sinner who was confessing.

Out of habit, I covered my ear with one hand when I passed. Even with my ear covered, I heard Joseph in the garage. I knew it was him by his keys. He had returned and would be in the house in just a minute.

First thing he would want to know: Where are you? Inevitably, there would be something he considered pressing to be done, something to carry, move, or repair.

I touched the wood of the confessional door. It was soft and felt like the flesh of a warm hand. Before Joseph could open the door to the house, I opened the door to the confessional and slipped into its darkness. Carefully, I drew that old door closed behind me.

No sooner was I hidden inside than his shoes hit the floor and he was calling for me.

There was nowhere to turn. Not left or right. Only straight ahead. I dropped to my knees opposite the priest’s compartment. I was grateful for the old kneeler. Cushioned, it greeted me kindly.

“Hell-o!”

His word hung stubbornly in the air. It remained dangling there, teasing me to come out and catch it.

“Where a-r-e you?”

Overhead he walked to the bedroom, into the closet. Back and forth then down the stairs again. He wasn’t calling now. But his shoes hit the floor. Click. Clack. Click. On the first floor in the kitchen again. Clack.

Then suddenly there was nothing. I listened, but all I could hear was quiet. It was like this for a long time, interrupted only once by water gurgling through a pipe in the ceiling.

I touched the walls on either side of me, their wood as soft as the sides of a familiar face. This booth was full of its own sounds. Sounds of those who’d knelt here before — their secrets, their sins. Their residue remained. I could smell the warmth of their skin on my skin, their breath on my own. Empty and weak, I needed food, and my head dropped into my hands on the ledge in front of me.

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I was asleep and didn’t realize he was in the living room until I lifted my head. He may have heard my movement because only when his breathing halted did I realize he’d been right there, all that time. Then I remembered: The red light was lit. Of course he knew I was inside.

The same walls I’d touched earlier closed in now. I sunk lower on my knees. After a minute or so, I heard a metallic “ting” like a bolt settling into place. I covered my mouth with my hands. I tried to turn the knob from inside but it wouldn’t move. Not right or left. I pushed with my body but the door didn’t budge.

“Joseph!”

I pushed and pushed, but the door didn’t respond. It was locked. He’d locked me inside. I told myself this plainly, without emotion, because I already knew. It was no surprise.

“Please, Joseph! Let me out!”

I looked for a hole in the ceiling or floor. A trap door. There was only the screen that separated sinner from priest. I grabbed hold of this and shook, thinking if I could loosen it, I could climb through. But I wouldn’t fit. I could never fit in such a small space.

So I waited until he entered the next compartment.

He opened the priest’s door, and there was a cool breath of air, much like a whistle or a breeze that brushed my heated face. At the same time, a sliver of golden light filtered through. When the screen scraped open, I could see only a shadow of him. He was exactly opposite me, his features sharp, exaggerated.

“It’s gone,” he said.

Was that cake he was eating? Yes, he’d brought a piece of cake into the confessional with him. I could see him lifting the fork to his mouth.

I could hear him chewing.

The palms of my hands were wet from sweat and kept slipping from the rail in front of me. He was waiting for me to say something. There was a long silence.

I could smell the chocolate on his breath. A creamy, chocolate milk smell. Sweet and warm enough to make me dizzy.

“I didn’t,” I said, forgetting the question.

He moved closer.

Chocolate wafted through the screen. The smell filled that small

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booth. Dark chocolate. Black forest German chocolate. I breathed in and thought I might pass out, it so overpowered me. My eyes blurred.

My hands trembled. I hadn’t tasted chocolate or anything sweet in so many months.

“You were the only one here,” he continued.

But I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t know what was gone. Of course I was the only one here.

“Unless you weren’t. Maybe you weren’t alone,” he said taking another bite.

“I was alone,” I said.

I didn’t even know what we were talking about.

Until I knew. Of course I knew. He was talking about the cake, the slice he’d cut before leaving.

“You enjoyed it,” he said.

He looked directly at me now. Through that screen, I could see one of his eyebrows was raised.

“It’s impossible,” I said.

My throat was dry.

“You did,” he said.

I looked through those brass grills for him. I searched for his eyes but where they should have been I could see only shadows.

“You did,” he said.

I did?

“You did.”

He leaned back, done with his cake. He could leave, if he wanted, but I was still locked inside. If I said I did, he’d see me as fat. If I said I didn’t, he’d say I lied.

“Forgive me,” I said.

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77

Vestiges Peter Kispert

I have dreams where I kneel over a grave: grateful, unbothered by wreaths and plastic flags, by marble-carved dates. I touch the ground where I imagine my mother’s hand to be. She is whole, preserved, tended to. I breathe in, exhale. The memories collapse into one another: two pinches of perfume on Sundays, the soft buzz that’s occasionally there when I listen, an ashless urn in the trunk of my minivan, tipping and clinking with each turn through the verdant countryside.

When I wake, I remember: she is buried nowhere. My mother is adrift at sea, a million blackened pieces of dust.

It wasn’t even a nice vase, but Lily needed something to hold the geraniums. There it was, collecting dust in the thick musk of the antique shop, ribboned with tiny blue veins. It was spring. She was young, alone. Everything was marked down; the place was closing. How was she to know about the residual film of ashes inside?

Lily placed the vase — Urn, she thought. Fuck, I bought an urn — outside, under the sill. It collected rain through the spring, filled with leaves in fall, froze but failed to crack that winter. She kept hoping the ashes would find their way out naturally, carried by a procession of ants, displaced by a clot of stubborn ice. She returned to it the next spring, but there it was, a crusty shadow enduring with intractable permanence.

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The next day, she cleaned it with a hose, a garden shovel; blackened chips rinsed under the porch, where weeds grew tall and lanky, like the arms of malnourished men.

She was twenty. She had the rest of her life to care about people, love their warm faces and pale stomachs. She wasn’t supposed to be holding them in their final handfuls. Not yet.

Vestiges

Sheri L. Wright Sparked

Megan Pietruszka p&n w/v b:pl

Megan Pietruszka Prag Tanz

Eleanor Leonne Bennett balance with care

in frost Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Eleanor Leonne Bennett in frost

Eleanor Leonne Bennett his is my heart

Eleanor Leonne Bennett rain over oil

Eleanor Leonne Bennett sour lymes at lyme

Nocturne for My Daughter’s Convoy Jeffrey Alfier

There is a road your convoy follows back from Bagram, past women banned from the waters of the Arghandab, down where tribes slumber beneath cloth-and-stick lean-tos hung like garlands in the wind, native wares spread on carpets before them.

Astride the river, your truck’s mine-sweeper forages for the earth’s most latent anger.

Emerging from a souk, a four-year-old hits your truck’s gunner in the face with a stone.

When you see the boy’s father smile approval, the butt of your M-16 wants his teeth.

On Sanibel Island, I watch my daughter’s son sprint over trackless white sand. We pause to free shells from driftwood, some as lustrous as the Kandahar orange groves you write home about; all those mollusks, clams, and conches wrapped inside their shimmering secrets.

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Teenage Love Poem Tim Hedges

“I wanted to tell you But the cafeteria was too loud.�

Oh, heartbreak.

Oh, love.

Scratchy words on blue striped page.

Sometimes crumpled, sometimes clean.

Lines slide down the middle like an unclothed model in a drafty room.

Words fall into place like a seven period day.

Always and forever: the size of the moon.

True love an empty locker, a thousand crickets, an hour past curfew.

Nine times out of ten the theme is full of stars, as in: You are the snow and I am the sun.

As in: You are my Orion, your belt contains my heart.

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Do Not Try This at Home Tim Hedges

For Ralf Bialla After being shot for the ninth time, most magicians cancel the tour, retire to a secret chalet and cultivate a family of orchids.

But you, always the showman, staggered onward, catching bullet after spinning bullet, spitting each one gracefully into a chipped saucer as the audience exhaled. Whenever the mischief misfired, you removed your shatterproof spectacles, gritted your steel-plated teeth, and politely asked your assistant to lower the curtain.

You feared no ghosts: fathers shot by sons, a Frenchman bludgeoned

with his own trick pistol.

You scoffed at the coroner’s ready verdict: Death by misadventure.

You had your pride! Your chainmail vest!

No gimmickry, no squibs, no titanium boxes beneath your tongue.

But, alas, the dizziness, the cliff.

The final legendary plunge.

And as you approached the earth, flying toward your final mark — aces fluttering from sleeves, perhaps, a dove escaping your cape — I dream you conjured angels to bear you from the stage.

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The Search for Her Father’s Finger Angela Rydell

Olivia searches for her father’s finger in the sawdust-coated garage, one hand groping at the dusty floor in front of her, the other holding a plastic bag. In it are two small Ziplocs, one half filled with ice, one without, and a clean wet dishcloth. Her mother entrusted her with it before driving off to the hospital with Olivia’s father, leaving her with his moans still echoing in the cold cement room and his finger out there somewhere, rapidly losing blood. In a corner, under the lawn mower, atop the garbage can lids, under the jigsaw table itself, somewhere within the loose layers of red-flecked sawdust. Anywhere.

She will find it. She is a big girl, like her mother said. She’s ten, almost eleven, and can be alone now, is old enough. Concentrating, she shakes off the confusion of sharp, scattered dream fragments and the screaming that woke her followed by her mother’s frantic yells. The bags. Ice. “Take this. I’ll be back.” Or someone will be back. Was she coming back? To get her? She was going to drive as fast as the minivan would let her. “They wouldn’t stop me. They wouldn’t dare.” This was said with that steely in-the-courtroom frown Olivia has seen out of the courtroom as well, whether her mother is opening her briefcase, filing her nails, drinking a diet soda, tidying her papers, coordinating her wardrobe, organizing the house. Taking control. Which she does in every part of their home except her father’s woodworking garage.

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The room is filthy. Layers of dirt, grime, sawdust thick as an inch of snowfall in places, a dusting in others. There are cut beams, jagged boards of plywood. A clumsy woodpile stacked in the far corner.

Innards of toolboxes scattered across the floor, bolts orphaned from screws, bent nails. A flashlight, which works. She puts it in a pocket.

Then, afraid one hand isn’t enough to search with, she stuffs the bag she’s been holding in her other coat pocket, removes her shoes. What if she steps on it? It’s safer this way. Yet more dangerous.

Moving forward gingerly, anticipating the soft piece of flesh at each pass, every lump of finger-sized wood, every chunky wrench or screwdriver scattered here and there on the messy floor makes her body tremble more. She imagines herself blind and searching for something precious, using her sense of touch to see her way through this room still vibrating with the noise of just five minutes ago. Ten? Now she hovers over the grill, has an urge to take off the lid and look inside. But of course it wouldn’t be inside. How could it be? A highpitched, wild giggle echoes through the room, and she puts her hand to her mouth. The sound must have come from her but she doesn’t remember making it. Dizzy, she bends to steady herself, touches the dusty floor carefully with her trembling knees, sees a splatter of blood, a hint.

You can do this. Can you do this for me? She swallows back nausea and tries to remind herself that this is what she is supposed to see. It will lead her to what she wants. Won’t it? But the finger’s as far flung as its blood.

There’s a light spattering all over the room. Blood drops false clues.

She imagines she is on a quest. The Quest for the Scarlet Digit. She’s played computer games that award points for finding heaps of treasure.

The speakers pipe out tinny, bright crescendos when she wins and distort with low, gloomy chords when she loses, falls into a pit of quicksand, through a hole toward scorpions, into a swamp with alligators. Or the clock runs out and the small, Lego-like stick figure she has become freezes mid-stride. Unable to reach the end in time. She keeps thinking of fairy tales she’s read where the hero finds the gold too late and it turns to coal.

Searching, she holds an image of the cut-off finger in her mind’s eye, but the image keeps changing. Will it be straight and rigid as the finger

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pointing “go to your room?” Curved taut like his hunter’s finger she has stared at in awe and dread as it lies cocked on the gun’s trigger?

Her father is a man of few words. Tall, gangly as a teen who’s never quite grown into his height, he speaks in quick, jerky actions, rarely touches her, makes beautiful things in the midst of this jumbled messiness. She has seen him stroke his chairs and tables like he would the good son he never had. Always an urgency, as if each thing he did was done not for the sake of doing it, but to get to the next, whatever will be better. She has watched him polish a piece with compulsive fervor, squinting intently at what looks to her as elegant, perfectly formed, deserving of praise, then stand back and frown, shrug, shake his head, his long fingers already reaching for the next piece.

Those fingers. Will it be the longest one, the shortest, the one with the golden ring?

She will keep it perfectly preserved, just as her mother said. “Put it in this bag. Do you hear me? Olivia, Livie, you must do this. Are you awake? Yes, you are. You are awake, God damn it. The ambulance is coming. Do you hear me? But I can’t wait, it’s too long of a wait out here.

Why the hell did I agree to move out here? In the goddamn woods. Oh, look at me, Livie. Look at me. The finger goes in this bag first. You have to put it in the bag without ice, the empty one. Just for it. Then put it in the bag with ice. Okay? Can you do that for me? For your dad?” He was crying, moaning, his body pushed up against the wall as he held his hand elevated in front of him, staring at it with too-round eyes, red as a torch wrapped in a brilliant swath of cloth on fire and getting brighter.

She was about to be sick, but she knew her mother would be angry, already was. Furious. She could hear what she was thinking. She’d said it before: What a stupid man her father was! So careless. Absent-minded. And Olivia, so like her father. How often her mother said to her, “Where’d your mind go off to? Wherever your father’s goes! Olivia, are you even here?”

Olivia repeated the instructions back carefully, trying to get them right. Her mother wasn’t satisfied with what she repeated back, grabbed a fat black marker and wrote “finger” on the bag she would place it in, wrap it in. She was to place the wrapped finger in the other bag, the bag

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with ice. Or else it will be lost. Found but lost, ruined. Impossible to reattach. She had to get it right. Had to pay attention.

Her mother left before she could repeat it back.

In the garage, Olivia can see her breath, white puffs like miniature clouds, and she walks through them, onward. She’s been alone before, her mother always busy with the caseloads, with the people who need her, people who can’t take care of themselves and she has to fix their lives, called away even in the middle of the night like this. Now Olivia will be the one to fix things. The one who makes them whole again.

Except time is running out. She imagines it draining from an hourglass the way blood drains from a finger. And the hands moving through the grainy sawdust are not her own anymore, just objects moving. Her feet might as well not be there, they aren’t needed anymore, she just needs to float and search, float and search. Looking at the garage from above, the red spots spattering the work table have become a familiar pattern, some forming a bloody constellation in the shape of a hunter, she sees it now. Remembers when her father took her out early one dark morning to see the stars. He let her lean against his long legs as he pointed out the dipper, the hunter, the bear, the dragon, the swan.

But they were already fading, disappearing, before she could get a good look, really see them at all. She has since forgotten which was which. No one has gotten around to helping her remember.

She is touching, now, the place she has been to twice, under the woodpile where there is a trickle of blood but she can’t see its source. The pile built up at the start of winter is depleted, and this is all that’s left, a cluster of small logs braced together loose, precarious. Sirens whisper in the distance. She is afraid to move the pile to look more closely, so she lies flat, her whole body pressed against the cold hard sponge of the cement, the flashlight pointed in. The sirens hiss in her head. And she can see it now, her father’s finger. There inside the center of the pile, too far in for her to reach. She shines the light directly on what looks like the tip, a pale nail crusted with dirt. Reaches in, almost but not quite able to touch it with the tip of her own finger. An inch or two away.

She gets up and hovers over the pile, circling, studying the mound carefully. Keeps shining her light in but cannot see the shape it makes.

Nor the severed side — nerves screaming for the rest of the body, nerves

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she wants to somehow soothe. They have been calling to her. Like the sirens so close, nearly upon them. There’s no dizziness, no nausea anymore, just curiosity and an urgent love for this poor, lonely, cut off part, needing her to bring it back where it belongs.

But she can’t get close enough. Move one piece and the whole pile could fall, crush the finger. She could find it but lose it. Ruin it all.

And they are here, sirens stopped, doors slamming. But shouldn’t she be the one, the first, to hold it close, the missing part? It’s been entrusted to her. She is to bring it to her mother in the labeled bag. It’s her job. A hot flash of anger rises through her ice-cold body. They wouldn’t dare.

She could move the top pieces, couldn’t she? Without harming anything? Then just reach in and pluck it out. But they’re knocking on the door.

“Olivia?” she hears her name, more pounding on locked doors. Her mother must have told them to get the finger from her. Said she was the one who would take care of it, let them in.

“Paramedics!”

In a panic she lunges towards the pile, plucks off the topmost log, and there it is, her father’s finger, grey, still, exposed to the cold light.

She almost expects it to curve, beckon her closer. She touches the tip.

It feels cold, not rubbery like a doll’s finger, but soft, almost velvety.

Flesh strangely loose around the bone. Olivia pulls gently. But it doesn’t move. The rest of the pile is surprisingly sturdy, so firm around the finger it’s wedged in tight, pointing at a straight angle like a soft, rigid sliver, half embedded within.

She pulls again. Then Olivia has a strange urge not only to free the finger but tuck it away in her pocket. Say it was impossible to find. Never give it back.

But the finger refuses to budge.

“Olivia?”

Her stomach lurches. She draws herself up, and the room seems to have shifted center. The whole bright space curves around the finger.

This missing piece that will make her father whole. A missing piece that’s not her own.

She runs to the door, opens it, and begins to speak so fast one of the paramedics puts his hand on her shoulder. “Slow down.” He has large

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glasses with brown plastic rims, and she can’t see his eyes, just herself reflected back. Shrunk to a tiny dot. “Do you have it? We’ll take care of it. That’s a girl.”

She is crying, repeating, “Is there time?”

“There’s still time,” they tell her as she points with her own cold finger to the hapless pile, shines her light one last time on the waiting finger.

It looks like it’s pointing straight back at her. Accusing? Or simply acknowledging yes, she’s there. There for her father. She’s done what she set out to do.

All three paramedics surround the pile. She watches them deftly pull her father’s finger out, stuff it in a Styrofoam box while she stands with the bag held out, the bag her mother gave her, until the man with the glasses bends down to her. “We have it now. You can put that away. It’s okay. We’ll get this to your father, to the hospital. Don’t worry, Olivia,” he says. “The doctor will do him up nicely, won’t he, Jeff. Your father’s in good hands.”

And he is leaving now, they all are. Doors slamming. The ambulance driving away, sirens blaring. Didn’t her mother tell them to take her?

But she is alone in the empty garage, this time really alone, not like before, though she thought she was. The finger is on its way back to him, away from her. She hears the sounds of the computer game, the heavy dark organ tones of a game she almost won but didn’t quite. She found what was lost. But it’s still missing.

Olivia walks towards the pile, broken into six cut logs, all so equal in shape and size and texture they must be of the same tree. She kneels, running her hand over the bark, has an urge to put them back together, as if the tree trunk could be reassembled, as if she could make it whole.

They’re too heavy.

With a sigh, she sits down on one of the logs, finally feeling the sting of cold, and again sees the trickle of blood the finger left. It will leave a stain, she thinks. She hopes. Takes comfort in the evidence. The constellation speckling the garage no longer looks like a hunter, no. Some drops are gone, leaving a lone swan, just a hint of a swan made of drying blood drops, floating in a pale sawdust sky. The blood drops hold its loose figure together just enough. The swan’s barely discernible, not quite there. Won’t be for much longer. Soon it too will fade away.

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Spotlights From the Emerson Community

Ben Brooks Faculty Fiction Spotlight

Ben Brooks has taught at Emerson since 1998, and has been Writer-inResidence at the college since 2006, where he teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He is the author of the novel, The Icebox, as well as over 80 short stories in literary journals. His stories have won an O. Henry Prize and a Nelson Algren Award, among others; and he has been awarded grants by the state arts councils of both Massachusetts and Arizona, by the Fine Arts Work Center, by the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and by other cultural organizations. Stories have appeared in such journals as Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Mississippi Review, Notre Dame Review, The Florida Review, Other Voices, Crab Orchard Review, Story Quarterly, Confrontation, and Writers’ Forum. He has a B.A. in English from Harvard College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.

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Tomcatting

I want two wives. I have Rita — Rita’s fine, she’s cool. I like Rita, I do.

But I want more. I want two houses, another place to go when I get tired of this one, or when somebody’s yelling too loud upstairs, or the doors start slamming, or somebody’s crying goes on too long. I want a second house, a house that’s different from this one in every way possible. Different roof, different basement, different underlying smell in the air, different colors on the walls, different furniture in the bedrooms, different views out the windows, different people in it. I want two of everything. Or more — four. Four wives, can you imagine that? I might not see any of them more than twice a week, not if I didn’t feel like it.

Rita, I could say, this week I’ll see you on Tuesday and I’ll see you on Friday, and that’s it. That would be up to me. They would be special occasions, those two days I saw her, and Rita would treat them that way.

She wouldn’t want to waste them. She’d make special meals those two days. And there would be special plans for later, secret and elaborate plans for when the kids were asleep and it was time for us to go on up to bed. I’m greedy, I want more of everything.

Rita says I’m greedy, that’s why I know I am. She says I want too much. She says I’m spoiled. She says it’s because of my mother, even though my mother’s been dead now for fourteen years. But when I was little, Rita says. That’s where it comes from, that’s where everything

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comes from. When I was little I would tell my mother what I wanted, and if she could give it to me she would. If she couldn’t give it to me right then, she would tell me she would give it to me as soon as she could. She would tell me I deserved to have it, whatever it was, and whether it was something she could give me or not, because I was the best boy in the whole world, the best and the sweetest and I loved my mother the very most, which was a sign of how good I was, so whatever it was I wanted I should most certainly have, and she would try with all her strength and with all her determination and with all her might — with all her mother’s might — to get it for me. She would get it for me if she had to steal it, she would get it for me if she had to kill someone for it. That’s what Rita says. But Rita doesn’t know, Rita wasn’t there. She wasn’t even in the same state as me and my mother. I was in the east and Rita was in the west. I faced the Atlantic and she faced the Pacific. She doesn’t have any idea what I said to my mother or what my mother said back to me, there were all those miles in between us, all those cities, farms, mountains, deserts, rivers, plains. Rita just thinks she knows. She says because she knew my mother before she died, even though we weren’t married yet, but because she had met her once or twice, that was enough, she can tell the whole thing from that, the way it was, the way it happened, the way I turned out. A mama’s boy, she laughs. Spoiled, she says, you’re spoiled rotten, that’s what it is. She pours more coffee into her mug, dumps in the sugar, the milk, stirs, sips. Her eyelids come together to keep the coffee steam out. Any time you see something that’s the least bit shiny, you want it for yourself. You want it and you think there is absolutely no reason in the whole world that you shouldn’t be able to have it. You’re greedy, she says. That’s what you are. Spoiled and greedy.

Then one of the kids starts up. It doesn’t matter which one — let’s say Kevin. He doesn’t want to get ready, he doesn’t want to go to school. If Daddy’s not going to work, he says. That’s his reason — if Daddy’s not going. Look, I tell him, my stomach hurts. What’s wrong with you? — I’m not just staying home because I’m lazy. Daddy’s sick. Daddy can’t go to work. Does your stomach hurt? Yes, he wails, my stomach hurts, too.

He holds his belly with his hand, and his face looks suddenly like it’s going to be sick, throw up. Your stomach doesn’t hurt, I say. You go get ready for school, you go upstairs right now, get your pants on, get your

Tomcatting

shoes on, brush your teeth. But Rita looks at me over the top of her mug, and she looks at Kevin, and she laughs. She throws her head back and laughs like something’s a real riot, like it’s the most riotous thing she’s ever heard. He’s not going to put his shoes on, she says. Look at him. Daddy’s lazy and his stomach hurts, that’s what your old man’s saying, she tells Kevin. Daddy thinks that what he wants he gets and what he doesn’t want he doesn’t have to have. Is that what you think, Kevin? That’s Daddy, but I’m not sure that’s going to be Kevin, she says, no sir. Is that going to be Kevin, too? Yes, he says, that’s going to be Kevin, too. Rita throws back her head and laughs again. Great, she says.

Figures. Like Daddy, like son. She sets her mug down on the table. She sets it down hard, practically slams it down, and for a second I think the mug will crack, shatter, and the table will splinter. That’s when I want another house, another table, another mug, another wife, all of them different from what I have right here. You see? she says. She narrows her eyes at me. You see what you’re doing? It goes from generation to generation, just like I said. They’re all going to be like Daddy. They see how greedy you are, they see how spoiled you are, and they want to be the exact same way. Just like Daddy. They want what they want, and they want it now. Good work, she tells me. I hope you’re satisfied. I hope you’re happy.

I’m not happy. It’s true I don’t want to go to work, it’s true I want to stay home, but I don’t want to stay home with Kevin. I thought maybe Rita would stay home a little bit with me, call in to her work and say she was running late, say you know how it is, the kids, they’re running late so I’m running late, got to get them set, got to make sure they’re off to school, I can’t just leave them. Make the call, drop the kids off, then come back upstairs with me, and then go do her work. But she can’t do that, she can’t do any of that, because one of the kids is going to be home with me now. Let’s say it’s Kevin. It’s Kevin or it’s Millie or it’s little Charlie, and it doesn’t really matter which one. I picked the wrong day. I picked the wrong day for my stomach to start acting up.

Or maybe I should have waited until they were all off to school before I said something about it.

If you weren’t so greedy, she tells me. Now when she laughs she doesn’t throw her head back, she looks like she wants to stab me, her

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eyes look that way, like I’m lucky they’re eyes and not knives. But she laughs. She has her coat on and her purse over her shoulder, and she has two of the kids with her, one in each hand, and she laughs. The third kid is upstairs, he’s in his room. His stomach hurts. Let’s say it’s Kevin up there. Doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere, Rita tells me. Not that one.

Not today. Good thing you’re going to be home because if you weren’t, with him so sick, I don’t know what we’d do. The eyes stab in, they stab out, they flash like knives with light on them, or with the sun.

If you weren’t so greedy and if you weren’t so spoiled and if you weren’t such a stupid little baby about everything. If you weren’t such a dumb shit, too. Here’s the thing, she says — you get what you deserve.

She lets go of one of the kid’s hands, let’s say it’s Millie’s, so she can point at me. And this is what you deserve. You thought you were going to have a free day, but there are no such things as free days. You don’t even know that, do you? You don’t even know that you pay for everything. You don’t know because you’re spoiled, and because you’re a dumb shit, you don’t know anything. You thought you were going to go tomcatting around today, didn’t you? See what you could hook up with. You thought you were going to get on down to The Hole at eleven o’clock in the morning when it opens, and have the first draft of the day, the first brew, didn’t you, and then go tomcatting. It’s not just her eyes, but her finger could be a knife now too. The one pointing at me, going through me, stabbing me all the way to the bone until I agree with whatever it is she’s saying. But you’re not going anywhere because now he’s home too. He wants to be just like his Daddy, and he is. He’s home, and you can’t leave him alone, so you aren’t going to be able to do any tomcatting around or any drinking down the first draft at The Hole.

You’ll be right here, you and your poor sick stomach. I ought to take the car keys away from you, that’s what I ought to do, she says. I ought to put one of those radio things on you, clamp it around your ankle, like they do for child molesters, so you give off a signal wherever you go and I can keep tabs on you. That way I can track you down if you decide to leave him alone.

Then she’s gone, dragging two of them out the door with her but not the third. The house is quiet, which is what I wanted all along, but it’s

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not really quiet because he’s home, too. I can feel him up there. He’s not making noise — not yet — because he knows he’s supposed to be lying quiet, because his belly is supposed to be aching, aching too much for him to go to school. But at some point it will start to feel better, I know that too, maybe in ten minutes he’ll be all cured, or fifteen, and then he won’t be so quiet. Let’s say it’s Kevin up there, but it doesn’t really matter which one it is. And if I had the four wives, say, and if I had three kids with each, then there would be twelve of those altogether, and it really wouldn’t matter which one. Or eight wives, twenty-four kids. I wouldn’t be able to keep them straight. But I wouldn’t have to stay home with one of them either, when he pretends to be sick, because I could just skip on over to the next house, or the one after that, and there couldn’t be one pretending to be sick in every house, could there?

Nor would I have to go tomcatting around, as Rita puts it, not with eight of my own houses to go to, a wife waiting in each one. How would she like that? Not that I do so much anyway, act the tomcat, and not that Rita even thinks I do, but she thinks that I might, she’s not sure, and she knows that I think about it, because who doesn’t? But with four houses, four wives, eight houses, eight wives, who needs to be a tomcat?

There wouldn’t be any radio things clamped around my ankle, chains locked around my neck, kids up in the bedroom howling like coyotes, pretending to be sick, pretending to be quiet until it’s too late to send him to school, then letting it all out the way a wild animal will when you’ve got him trapped, no place to run to, no way out, all hell, I want this, Daddy, I want that, Daddy, go get me this, I need it right now, and no Mommy in sight to help either, no, she had the sense enough to get off to work.

I sit and listen, I sit and wait, there’s only so long before a trapped coyote will howl. Ten minutes, fifteen. If I leave, he will know it, and if he knows it, she will too. Maybe not now, but she’ll know it when she gets back home. Mommy, Daddy left me by myself. My tummy hurt so much, and Daddy wasn’t here. I got sick all over myself, and Daddy didn’t clean it up, it’s still in my bed, it’s still on the floor, some of it’s on the rug. The door is shut where Rita walked out, Rita and the kids. And in the other house, the other wife, she leaves, too. They all do.

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He yells. Not yells exactly, but calls. It starts. He says something, I hear him. The door is closed up there, and I don’t hear the words exactly, can’t hear what it is he wants, but it’s something. I know he wants something.

If it goes from generation to generation, then what about Rita? That’s what I should have said — what about you? I can tell her later, but it won’t be the same. Why is it only me? I can say. It’s you too, isn’t it? As much as they get from me, they must get just as much from you. Right?

So why am I the one to hold responsible for the way they turn out?

Maybe with Kevin he gets my sensitive stomach, but with Millie and Charlie, it’s something from you. Something just as bad. You’re not perfect either, I can say. I’ll turn her around, take the upper hand, get it all out before she can answer. You have your imperfections, your foibles, your blemishes, right? Don’t you? So if that’s true, if you have them too, why would they only get mine? We made them together, didn’t we? And we’re raising them together. So they’re as much yours as mine, aren’t they? Whatever they are now, however they turn out later, whether they go to school or howl upstairs like coyotes, it’s as much you as me, right?

Then another yell. Call. I can’t hear you, I yell back up the stairs.

Damn it, if you want to talk to me, open the door, open the door and come down where I am, we’re not a pack of wild animals here, are we?

We’re not a bunch of coyotes howling through the walls at each other.

Something about sick, he yells. Then a minute — it’s silence but not really silence because really it’s just waiting for the next call to come. Something about hurt. Daddy, I don’t want to be sick. Well no, I wouldn’t think you’d want that. And Daddy, I don’t want it to hurt so much. No, that’s right, you wouldn’t want that either, who would? A boy after his old man, he doesn’t like the pain. But open the door, I tell him, just open up the door a crack, damn it, so we can talk and actually hear what the other one is saying, instead of guessing. That’s what we do around here.

That’s the way your mother and I do it, and it’s the way we expect you to do it too. All you kids. There are certain things we do in this house and certain things we don’t do. We don’t howl like coyotes, we open the door and talk to each other.

He calls again. Let’s say it’s Kevin. From where I am on the sofa I can tip my head back and look up the stairs and see the upper corner of the door to his bedroom, closed, and from behind there, behind

Tomcatting

that door, somewhere, that’s where his voice comes from. Maybe he can’t get up and that’s why he doesn’t open the door. Maybe he’s lying in it already, right in the middle of a puddle of it. The vomit. Or not vomit — blood. Maybe a blood vessel burst somehow. Maybe from his yelling, from getting so stressed, so tense. Maybe the blood vessel was only in his nose — the mess terrible anyway, all over the pillow and the sheets, soaked into the mattress, and on the floor too, the rug. But even with the mess, if it’s just in the nose, the damage can’t be so great, the danger can’t be so high. If it’s just the nose, it’s more scaring him than killing him. But what if that blood vessel is somewhere else? It could be anywhere. The blood could be oozing out of his ear, pouring out, a blood vessel sunk deep in there somewhere, something that connects his ear to his brain, and it pops, it bursts, a pressure valve from the brain flying open, with all his yelling, all his straining, all his tension about where is his Daddy, why isn’t he coming? If that’s where the blood’s coming from, the ear, then this could be a different story. A very different story.

Or suppose it’s not his ear either, suppose the blood’s coming out of his eyes, in place of tears.

Another call. I can’t hear you, I yell. This could go on the whole day, or until one of us moves. Would you open the goddamnn door? I yell.

What the hell do you want? What are you bothering me for, you little faker? You know your stomach doesn’t hurt. You know it’s fine. You know you just wanted to stay home from school. Well, it’s different for Daddy. You might not appreciate it, but it’s different. You might not think your father can actually be sick, but he can. My stomach really does hurt. I really am sick. I’m not a little faker like you. I’m too sick to go running up the stairs every time you decide you want something.

Too sick to be your little handmaid all day. Open your door. Don’t be a pest. Open your goddamnn door and try telling me again what it is you want.

Because everyone wants something. Those are the words I say next, yell up the stairs, the words I send shooting out of my throat, aiming them right at the door, through the door, right through the wood, so he will know it, know that one thing for sure, let’s say it’s Kevin, so Kevin will know that one thing for sure, and know it from his father. Try telling me again what it is you want because everyone wants something, I yell.

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I want two wives, that’s what I want. I said that already. That’s where it starts. I want two houses. I want two of just about everything. Two sets of this and two sets of that. Rita says I’m greedy, I’m spoiled. And she might be right, who knows? I want more things, too. What I want is, I want two lives. Or four lives. Or eight.

The door opens and out he shuffles, let’s say it’s Kevin, still in his pajamas, still with nothing on his feet, his hair still rumpled, uncombed, down the stairs, descending the steps slowly, almost like an invalid, limping one step at a time, his arm curled around his belly, cradling it, protecting it. He has a worried look on his face — not pained, not sick, not scared, but worried. His look makes me laugh. He smiles back and says, Daddy, will you make me oatmeal? Oatmeal? I say, I thought you were sick. I slide to the side of the sofa, press against the cushions, and make room for him next to my legs. Two people taking the whole day off, and we have so many hours to go. Two fakers, that’s what Rita says. Two fakers, and how we deserve each other. So what do you want oatmeal for? He rests his cheek on my knee. Oatmeal’s good for it, it’s plain, he tells me, my tummy needs something plain. That’s something else Rita says, he gets that from her, she always makes oatmeal when someone gets sick. I know it’s plain, I answer, I know it’s good for it, but you already ate, didn’t you? Didn’t you have breakfast, or was I just imagining that? I’m hungry again, he tells me, I want oatmeal for lunch.

I ask him to get me some juice, let’s say it’s Kevin — let’s say Kevin’s recently learned how to pour without spilling. I ask him to bring me the newspaper, careful not to mix up the pages. He goes upstairs to my room and fetches the pillow off the bed for me. He’s hungry and stays close by my side and tells me what he wants — what he wants to eat, what he wants to do, what he wants to have.

What else? I ask him. What else do you want? Tell me everything.

That’s how we’ll fill the hours — tell me everything in the whole goddamn world that you want. Do you want two Daddies? Is that it? Do you want still more?

And one by one, the hours do go by. They slide by, freshly oiled, without sputtering, without squeaking, in a line, bolted one to another like the cars of a train. At noon, on her lunch break, Rita calls to see how we’re doing. My boys, she says, I wanted to see how my boys are. Is that

Tomcatting

a snicker I hear, I ask, is that a snicker in your voice, Rita? Me? she says.

Me, a snicker? Are you kidding? I’m concerned, that’s all. My two big, brave boys, both of you so sick, poor things, your poor tummies, your poor upset tummies, bellyachers, my two big, brave bellyachers, and you think I’m snickering? How’s Kevin, you treating him okay? Kevin?

I say, Kevin’s all right. He’s up in his room now. I don’t think he’s really sick, Rita. The kid’s a faker. Like father, like son, she tells me, the old one-two. You know about the old one-two, don’t you? I’m sure you know about the old one-two. I know about the two, I tell her, the two and only the two, and she snickers again.

The light softens, not quite night but not quite day either, and he sleeps, and then I sleep. He sleeps on the floor, and I sleep on the sofa, arms crossed over my chest. In my dream it’s not two wives I have, it’s not two houses, not two lives, but it’s two spiders. Everything comes in pairs, I think, dream-think, that’s the rule ever since Noah. Two large brown spiders crawling up my legs, one per leg, headed straight for my groin. I am naked from the waist down. I am in the cellar, no flood of Noah, but my feet are in rancid water to my ankles, small black and silver things swimming in the water, or floating belly-up, things buzzing and flying about my head too, cobwebs hanging thick from the pipes, dim light in the cellar, and I watch the two spiders making their way up past my knees, onto my thighs. Rita is there. She’s somewhere, but I don’t see her. She’s calling me, her voice is loud and urgent, insistent, she’s yelling for me to hurry up, come upstairs now, quit fooling around, but I don’t know where she is, and I don’t dare move. I don’t want to startle the spiders — if I move my legs, so much as twitch them, they’ll strike. I’m certain they will bite me. Their venom is deadly, that much I know, and they will sink it into my legs and my legs will swell up to triple their size, and I will fall into a fever and die. Rita’s voice, I can tell, is angry. She thinks I’m hiding on purpose. She thinks I’m playing a game.

I shout back to her, but that only scares the spiders, as I’d anticipated, it makes them act, and they take their bites, both at the same time, vicious bites, one out of each thigh. I wake up though before I get sick and die.

So how was your day? Rita asks. She’s still in her coat, standing over me. The other two are beside her, one on each side, let’s say Millie and Charlie, also still in coats, also staring down at their father. Kevin is gone,

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he’s gone from where he was sleeping on the floor. So did you do anything exciting? Did you get down to The Hole for that draft, that brew?

Did you get in some of your tomcatting? she asks, but she’s got a smile on her face, and it’s only partly mocking. Partly mocking and partly fond, I think, despite it all. Despite everything. I never heard the door open, never heard them come in, and the rest of the house is quiet. So did you two boys have fun? she asks. Come on, what did you do, tell Mama. Tell me. Did you impart great wisdom to your son? Did you tell him every single thing he needs to know about the world?

I shut my eyes then, and Rita’s gone. They all are. I’m in a different house, I think. With a different underlying smell, different furniture, different views from the windows. And there’s a different wife talking with a different voice, a set of different kids. With my eyes shut I see it all so clearly. It’s close enough to touch, close enough to grab. I smile too. It’s not so much, I think, and it’s all I want, a modest enough request. But before I can take hold, a hand shakes my shoulder. I squeeze my eyes shut another second, another beat, and then I look. I expect it will be Rita shaking me, stirring me, but it’s not. It’s one of the others.

Let’s say it’s Charlie.

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The Curse of the Scarred Mummy

There were always three things to be scared of. One year it was wolves, stampeding elephants, and crocodiles. Wolves could be wild dogs too, with wet yellow eyes, tainted by rabies, hiding under the trailer at night.

Snakes and spiders didn’t bother me then. Bats in the dark gave me the flutters, but it wasn’t the same thing as being scared — I didn’t know about bloodsucking vampires yet.

Marshall was like a crocodile. He wasn’t green and his skin wasn’t so hard, but his eyes were like slits and they slanted up at the corners. He was slow and watchful, but when he finally moved it was so quick he startled you. He had a big wide grin you couldn’t trust that he always put on when he knew something and you didn’t. In that grin his lips pulled back but his teeth stayed locked together — only you never knew if they’d open and shut so fast they might chomp off your arm. That’s what happened to Captain Hook in the story.

I was nine years old. Marshall was two years older than me. It was the year my mother died. I was scared of cancer too, but cancer didn’t have a shape, it didn’t growl or snap at you. It ate through you but you couldn’t see it. That’s what my uncle told me. It was invisible. I worried about cancer being in the air in our trailer — hanging there like the spray my mother used to use to make the kitchen smell better — something that might coat over my clothes and then spread onto me too.

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For three months I never saw my mother out of her bed — either at home or in the hospital — except when someone was helping her get to the bathroom. She couldn’t walk anymore. She was a load. She’d sag over — it was like the bones in her legs had dissolved. Three months is a long time. Nobody ever told me, but all that time I knew she was dying.

I wanted to go to Rehoboth Beach that summer like we did the other summers, but we didn’t go, not even for a week. We didn’t go anywhere.

My Uncle Jerry came to live in my house while she was sick, but not my aunt. My mother never got along with her sister, and later I found out that it had something to do with Uncle Jerry, her sister’s husband, something that happened before I was born — some night they all four of them got drunk, my father too. That was before my father left. But I didn’t know anything about it then.

My aunt would come by some mornings to clean a little or cook something, but she wouldn’t stay. She said she had to take care of things at her house, but it wasn’t so — there weren’t any kids there. My uncle said it was because Aunt Christine didn’t like my mother telling her what to do, bossing her, but that wasn’t it either. For one thing, my mother was too weak that summer to boss anybody, even me. She was helpless.

Her eyes had this pleading, begging look all summer. There was some other reason Aunt Christine wouldn’t stay, but nobody was telling. One thing about that summer though — there wasn’t a single real fight with any of us.

Marshall lived two streets over. I played with him a lot, but I kept a distance. I was wary of those jaws opening and closing, those teeth. I watched his eyes. We set up jumps for our bicycles on the road, long thin boards leaned up onto stacks of bricks, two jumps next to each other, and had races to get over them. He was bigger and older than me, but I won the races. I got to my jump first, and then when I went over it, I always jumped farther. It was like I was galloping on a horse, and then the horse suddenly got wings. Marshall warned me not to tell anybody I was better, and I didn’t.

When cars came we’d leave those jumps in the road and skedaddle.

The drivers would slam on their brakes, then get out and kick the jumps over, or once in a while move the boards and bricks to the side of the road one by one and re-construct them there. One big black car drove

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right over my jump once. The board split in two and the bricks went flying, there was a big thunk also, something on the bottom of the car. We were watching from behind a hedge. The man sprang out of his car and started over in our direction, but we took off on our bikes. After that I had to go steal myself another board.

I found a ring in my mother’s room that I’d never seen before. My mother had taken all the usual rings off because when she first got sick her hands swelled up from some medicine they gave her and the rings cut into her fingers and made the skin turn green. But this was a different ring, it wasn’t one she ever wore, at least not that I noticed. It was gold — a thin, plain band — with a blue stone embedded in it. The stone was tiny, highly polished, so bright it looked like it had a laser glowing inside.

I was fiddling around in the boxes she kept on top of her dresser.

She might have been asleep, she was so quiet, but I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was watching me. I turned the boxes over one by one to see what all she had in them. And then there was this ring I’d never seen before. When I picked it up I heard her make a sound like a gasp. She’d been pretending to be asleep, but all along I knew she was watching me.

When I looked over I could see she’d started to cry.

Later I went back into her room when she really was asleep, and I took the ring. I showed it to Marshall. Marshall wouldn’t come into our house because he didn’t want to catch anything. His mother told him he shouldn’t bother us, it wasn’t a good time for my family. I heard her say that once. “Marshall, you leave Jimmy and his mom be, you hear? I don’t want to find out you’re over there pestering. The Lord knows they have enough troubles in that household without you.” I’d be right there in the room with them, and she’d tell him stuff like that, like I didn’t have ears. His mom’s slit-eyes slanted up the same exact way Marshall’s did, only I didn’t worry about her being a crocodile. I never saw her move quick. I didn’t think of her as any scary animal, I just wished if she was going to talk about my mother, she’d say something nice.

Marshall said the ring was interesting — it probably had a history. It might be something passed down through the ages, maybe even something that carried a curse with it. Like the Curse of the Scarred Mummy, or the Curse of Five Thousand Years. Maybe the ring was even what made my mother get the cancer so bad.

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It was worth him holding onto a while to give it some serious thought, he said. He had a friend in a pawn shop who could appraise it for us, and maybe even figure out how old it was and where it came from. I watched him stick the ring in his pocket, and that was the last I ever saw of it.

It was my Uncle Jerry who asked me about that ring, a week later. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about it, but I didn’t want to rush Marshall’s investigation. Also, I wanted to see if my mother got any better with the ring out of the trailer.

There were only five people who ever went into that bedroom of my mother’s, and Uncle Jerry knew it wasn’t him or my mother that took the ring, and he must have known it wasn’t Aunt Christine either. That just left me and the nurse, and I guess he trusted the nurse more than me. He was pretty upset about it. I could tell he wanted to yell, but he kept his voice down — only it shook on him. After a while I could tell he didn’t want to just yell, he wanted to hit me one. I thought maybe he’d get so upset he’d spill the secret of the ring, but he didn’t. I just kept telling him I didn’t remember any blue-stone ring, but somehow he knew that I did. We’d started talking about it in my mother’s bedroom, but then when her wheezing picked up, we moved to the kitchen.

Uncle Jerry made me sit at the table while he asked over and over — it seemed like hours.

I told Marshall I needed the ring back, but he said he didn’t know where it was. He said it was gone. He said he must have lost it, or else its rightful owner had come back in the middle of the night as a spirit and snatched it up. The Scarred Mummy. I didn’t trust Marshall, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I had already denied so vehemently knowing anything about it to my uncle, I couldn’t now change my mind and say that Marshall had stolen it.

My mother didn’t get any better without the ring there. If anything, she got worse. Her face grew so thin you could see the knobs of the bones in her cheeks, and trace right around the sockets of her eyes. She looked at me like her heart inside was shattered. I wanted to ask if it was the ring that did that, but I didn’t dare.

My uncle forgot he was supposed to be angry at me and started to take me on his lap to tell me stories, even though I was too old for that.

He told me how good my mother always was, and sometimes I saw him

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wipe a tear away. He was nicer about her than he was about Aunt Christine. It was a hard time for all of us. Some evenings went by when nobody would say a word. Other times Aunt Christine would join us for a while, and she and Uncle Jerry would go into the bedroom with my mother to talk. I’d sit and watch the fireflies through the screen. Some nights it would stay hot, and I’d remember all the things I was missing at the beach.

Marshall told me that if you plucked the light off a firefly while it was lit up, that the light would never go out — but every time we tried it we messed it up. You had to snatch it off quick, in one motion. We’d put the fireflies in a jar, but without their lights they weren’t very interesting. I was always surprised how slow they moved, how easy they were to catch.

Sometimes I’d hold them inside my hands a while to see when their lights were visible through my fingers. I could feel them fluttering around in there. Then I’d hold them by their legs and when their lights came on again, give a pluck. But the light always went out first, it never worked.

One summer there were wild dogs reported in our neighborhood, and people said that before you went up to your door at night you should shine a flashlight under your trailer. If any of the dogs were lurking under there, the light would reflect off their yellow eyes. My mother left a baseball bat by the mailbox when we went out in the evening, for protection, in case we ever lit one of those dogs up when we came back home. Marshall said the dogs traveled in packs, and that one bat wouldn’t do much against a whole pack of them — but my mother said otherwise. She said once we knocked the head off the first one, the rest would high-tail it away.

The dogs were the summer before, when my mother wasn’t sick yet, but I remembered it and I lay stiff in bed the summer my mother was dying too — listening for the howling of wolves. There were coyotes around, and I could never tell the difference. And even dogs in people’s yards sounded like wolves to me when I was in bed.

Once I heard a call, I’d listen for it to get closer. I’d lie there waiting for the growl by my ear. Marshall told me rabid dogs foamed at the mouth. If their teeth broke through your skin, you were a goner. You’d go as crazy as the dogs before you died, howling up at the big sly moon.

The last time my mother went to the hospital, they wheeled her out of

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the trailer on a table. Two men carried the table down the steps in front with her strapped onto it, then they pushed her across the yard. Outside she had her head tipped back so she could see the trailer as long as possible. The skin around her eyes was saggy and purple. I stayed up on the steps with Uncle Jerry, who held on tight to my hand. Aunt Christine and the nurse rode in the ambulance with my mother. Before they left they turned on the siren and the flashing lights.

After we couldn’t hear them anymore, Uncle Jerry and I went back inside. We packed all my mother’s things into suitcases and boxes. My stuff we packed too, because I was moving over to their place now. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Christine lived in a real house, one that was built into the ground. They didn’t have to worry about wild dogs down underneath at night, trying to claw through the floor with their rabies.

There were stampeding elephants though, knocking over trees in the woods out back, leveling the land. They’d escaped from a circus where the trainer made them stand in black tubs of boiling water, one tub per foot, and held torches of fire to their tails. You could see the dust their stampeding made rise over where all the new houses were going up.

Marshall said that once they got you in their sight, you were as good as finished. One day we dug an elephant trap together and covered it over with sticks, but we never caught anything in it.

I went to see my mother every day, but after a while she didn’t say anything to me, she just slept through. She was in a bed with barred sides like a crib, and she had tubes and wires attached to her everywhere. I wasn’t allowed to touch the tubes because Aunt Christine said they might come out. I’d go with her or Uncle Jerry, and when we went into my mother’s room, the nurse always left. It was different nurses than the one that used to come see her at the trailer. My mother’s eyes looked better closed up, and in a few weeks the dark purple color around them faded a little bit.

Nobody told me she was getting better, but now that she was in the hospital I thought maybe she would. Nobody said that it would never happen either. All Aunt Christine would say was that she was resting comfortably again. I thought maybe the tubes and wires were replacing her insides with new insides that didn’t have the cancer, but when I

The Curse of the Scarred Mummy

asked about it, Aunt Christine said, “We’ll just have to see, honey. God’s watching over your mother now. We’ll take it a day at a time.”

She didn’t get better though. She went into a sleep so deep, Aunt Christine said, that there weren’t any dreams there, not a single one.

Instead of black, the color of that sleep was pure blue, the same color as heaven’s glow. Clear and blue, bright and shiny, like it had a laser burning inside — I thought of the ring I’d taken from my mother’s dresser earlier in the summer. I’d stopped asking Marshall about it, and Uncle Jerry had stopped mentioning it to me.

I couldn’t forget the ring. I couldn’t forget the Scarred Mummy. Whoever wore that ring would have the foul curse laid upon them, the putrid ooze of a body wrapped up so tight that it rotted forever without ever just drying away. I was glad the ring was gone. But I’d touched it before I knew about it, and now I looked for marks on my hand, signs that the curse was beginning in me. We looked at Marshall’s hands too. He had a wart that summer, on the side of his finger, and he couldn’t remember exactly when it had started. We shut our eyes and held our breath, and with our lungs closed tight, chanted a tune together. The words were nonsense, real words sung backwards, that were supposed to drive the curse backwards too, out from the flesh back up into the air.

Uncle Jerry put signs around, and one afternoon he sold the furniture from the trailer while my mother was still away in her blue sleep. He said there wasn’t enough money to pay all the fees on the place, and they didn’t have room in their house to move the bigger stuff in. Besides, he and Aunt Christine didn’t need another television set, or sofa, or giant bed. He said they were putting the money from the sale aside to pay some of my expenses.

Before the sale, Aunt Christine went through the kitchen and kept what she liked of the dishes for herself. She inspected every piece of silverware, to see if it was real or junk. My mother didn’t have much that was worth a lot because after my father left there was never any money past the trailer fees and the food. But some of the things Aunt Christine called “sentimental,” and she put them in a bag to take home with her.

One day in the hospital, I heard Uncle Jerry ask my mother to forgive them both, him and Aunt Christine — but she didn’t give a sign that she

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heard, or that she would forgive anything. He touched her hand, and I heard him promise my mother they would do right by her boy. Now, Aunt Christine said, we were all “just waiting.” The hope that I’d had that my mother would get better was finished, but I didn’t know where it had gone. It had come from nowhere and gone back the same place.

I tried to imagine a world all blue like hers. Some days the sky was like that, when there weren’t any clouds at all, but you had to squint hard to squeeze out the trees and the tops of the houses — everything except the blue air. Marshall said he pictured heaven as red, not blue — the way your eyes got when you pushed on them with your fingers. Blue was the true color of ice, he said, ice colder than what anyone could make in a regular freezer. My mother might be in a world that was all blue — like my uncle said — but that only meant she was cold, not peaceful.

Crocodiles have that way of being still, hiding under the marshy surface, but when something crosses nearby, they strike. If it crosses in front it’s their jaws, and if it goes back behind it’s the tail. Marshall was born the son of a crocodile, he came thrashing out of a giant egg. He told me heaven was red and wet, like warm spilled blood, not blue at all. He saw it in a dream he had about him and God. You stay in the blood all the time, up to your neck, suspended, and when you’re hungry a bird flies by overhead and drops something through your lips. The section of heaven you go to is where all your own people are. When I die, I’ll be floating in blood next to my mother. Uncle Jerry will be there, and my father and Aunt Christine, and within shouting distance will be Marshall too, and also his mother. Only Marshall didn’t intend to die for a long time yet. He had things to get done on Earth. And warm blood gave Marshall the shivers, he wasn’t that eager to get dipped in. But when he did go up there, it would be somewhere near me.

They talked a lot about the tubes and the medicines, and my mother’s long, deep sleep. Aunt Christine cried into her hands, and Uncle Jerry put his arm around her shoulders. The doctor was there with us too, not just the nurse. “It spread way too fast,” the doctor told us. “We couldn’t have cut even if we’d wanted to.” He was wearing a white gown over his clothes, with his tie showing through. “But she’s not feeling any pain, hasn’t for a long time. Believe me on that. Look how peaceful she is.

Where she is now, nothing could possibly hurt.”

The Curse of the Scarred Mummy

Uncle Jerry cupped his other hand on the top of my head, where it covered the whole thing. His thumb was warm on my ear, rubbing back and forth. My mother’s eyes never opened — they never even flickered. The liquid in the tubes was as clear as tap water, and you couldn’t tell whether it was going in or out of the bottles, one way or the other. They might have drained off all her blood, replaced it with the sugar water. The doctor said something more about cutting, but I didn’t catch his meaning.

From my uncle’s yard, I listened to the elephants smashing through the woods. Their legs were as thick as the tree stumps they left behind.

Where the trees had been, new houses were going up. On Sundays when the elephants didn’t come, I went into the woods with Marshall. We had contests throwing bricks across the unfinished floors. Aunt Christine said that if they had known a development was going in, Uncle Jerry never would have bought there. Stampeding elephants were fine with him, but he got restless with people around. He didn’t mind wolves or wild dogs either — his house was safe from them since they couldn’t slip under. It was deliberate that they lived on the last street before the woods started. They didn’t need more neighbors, they had enough.

My uncle’s restlessness didn’t apply to me. He’d hold me on his lap and tell me how great my mother was, for hours. And how lucky I was, too, to have her. His eyes would fill up, and Aunt Christine always said that was the summer he started to look old.

I went to the hospital with Uncle Jerry every day, and we’d stand by my mother’s bed and watch her sleep through the tangle of tubes. I wasn’t clear whether she was in heaven yet or not — steeped to her neck in warm blood, or out floating in the frozen blue ice-air — or just there on the bed resting, like it appeared, gathering her strength back so she could come home. But now there wasn’t a home. Someone else lived in the trailer, and all our things were sold except what we’d moved over to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Christine’s along with me.

At the beach I built mounds in the sand and dug tunnels down through them that the incoming water swept into. I caught snails and green crabs and tied them together with strings of seaweed. My legs turned pink from the sun and got all caked up with sand and grit. When I got hot I dove head-first through the white foam of waves as they broke, and when I wanted to be alone I floated out on a raft and watched

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the sea gulls up against the clouds. But there was no beach that summer — only when I stayed in bed in the mornings and pondered how the season had passed on by. There was just the new room in the new house, and my mother not there, the dogs back under our trailer and the elephants crashing through the woods.

Marshall started up with school, but I didn’t go back yet. It wouldn’t be long, my aunt said, keep patient, just a little bit more. Some days Aunt Christine stayed at the hospital with us too. When she was there, Uncle Jerry didn’t talk so much to my mother. We all just stood by the bed and looked.

The Scarred Mummy could see through its foul wraps into the future and the past at the same time — cast an evil eye forward on me, or backwards to the very beginning of the planet. Five thousand years ago, a prince plunged to the bottom of the Nile in Egypt and snatched out the blue ring — then was clawed to death by crocodiles on the way back up. The cold blue water turned to warm red blood as the prince’s corpse floated down the whole length of the river to the sea. The ring was bound up in the dead mummy’s rags, but at the last minute a slave slipped it out. If you shone the ring into a pack of howling wolves, the beam of blue light would paralyze them to silence and you could go up and yank on all their tails. The ring ended up in a box on my mother’s dresser, and my mother got the cancer. I handed the ring to Marshall, who pulled his lips back in a grin and squinted his slit-eyes down at me.

I got rid of the ring to Marshall, but it was just too late.

It was just too late. We went to the hospital and my mother was no longer in her bed. The doctor came to talk to my uncle and my aunt.

Uncle Jerry bowed his head and wept into his fingers. But my mother’s sister took hold of his arm and told him no, stop. She said to stop right now. She said it was time for us to look forward again, for all of us to get back to normal.

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Elle O’Brien Undergraduate Fiction Spotlight

Elle O’Brien’s first short story, “The Mermaid,” was completed in 1997 after receiving full access to her 2nd grade classroom’s scented marker stores. It was received with great critical esteem in the recess circuit, which encouraged her to pen her second work, “The Mermaids: A Sister’s Story.” Since then, Elle has branched into the non-sireniform fiction scene, but still names children’s fantasy and detective stories among her main influences – that is, besides a healthy dose of O’Connor and McCarthy, as she one day hopes to join the ranks of such creepy Irish scribes. This is the first time her long-form fiction has appeared in print; her flash fiction, “Iota,” “Chew and Spit,” and “Cooking Lesson” have appeared in The Battered Suitcase, Pill Hill Press’s Daily Flash Anthology, and Emerson’s Stork Magazine, respectively. Outside of Emerson, she has read at Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge for the Papercut Zine Library’s Grand Reopening, and occasionally writes horoscopes for the Boston community zine, “High5.” She is currently working on her BFA thesis in fiction.

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For the dying, the old people said, bury a rosebud under the quartermoon and hang a wishbone over the sickbed. To stave off a witch, nail her kitten to an oak tree. Sing her away with the gospel. Tell a demon by the mark on his wrist, like a little burn, or by the golden pin he wears: that’s the token of his inner eye, which he must hang on the lapel of his coat to walk with the living on Earth, they said. The old people warned of spooks in the tower, werewolves in the woods, sprites who lived beneath the ground and could drag a child down by her ankles if she woke them. They warned of magicians and gypsies and elves and imps, each with a certain type of hellishness, each with their own cruel cunning that could enslave a soul forever. Minuet in the underworld, went the adage, and they will snatch you from your shoes. They will drag you through the forest like a side of venison, girl, believe it.

This is how Nadine had it from her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother; this and the little tin memory box being the only things she carried from the fire that ate her father’s house, a tragedy she often recounted for the cleaning ladies until she wept — her sobs interrupted, now and again, by the gentle snake of her tongue as it leaped to catch a tear at her lip. She was good, see: she tried.

She tried for God and for the poor gum-smacking women scrubbing her sinks, and for her husband Mister Wicker, who owned several hundred

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acres of undeveloped commercial land from the west river to the hedge of mountains in the north, and she tried for that whore’s son, Charley.

Just nine years old and already a stain she could never remove. She didn’t like to hurt him, though she knew his heathendom deserved it, and often when her hands would plunge at his back Charley could feel the crucifix at Nadine’s neck swinging to prod the spot also.

Most everyone knew the business with Charley and Nadine and how his mama got sent away. Even Mister Wicker, a silent mammoth in black corduroy who kept an ill distance from his wife’s superstitions, couldn’t ignore the truth of it. Though Charley’s mother — a barrelhipped Ireland-via-Chicago maid who’d lived in their spare room for years — lent Charley her elfin nose and pallid skin, it was unmistakable: looking at the boy was like looking at a bad reflection of the Wicker husband. And so Nadine prayed; she did the rites; it was all she could do that made sense. Over her kettle, like some medieval apothecary, she hung the spoils from the day: wishbones, beaks, the claws of wild turkeys. Fire glared in the hearth like a penitential eye, shutting out the devil and the wilderness, signaling away the dark. A smear of pigs’ blood on the doorjamb for health. Rosemary hung at the front gate, tied up in a ribbon, to ward off strangers.

Everyone calls you Nadine except for Celia, beautiful Celia, who named you Naddy when you shared a room at the start of college. Celia was like that — a compulsive abbreviator. Buying donuts for breakfast was ‘goin for dones.’ Watching a movie was ‘putting a move on.’ Showers were ‘shaus;’ dinner was ‘din,’ and you were Naddy. She calls you up from the house her father bought her on the other side of the city. You can hear her gum cracking behind the receiver. She spits it out in an audible smack, and after that a lighter goes as she begins a cigarette.

I’m bored, she says, terribly bored, but there is a party tonight if you wanna go.

You want to go. You are young and there is time and just because you walk with Christ doesn’t mean you can’t have a few drinks with some people your age. Okay, you say, we’ll leave together.

The city is agape with neon and steam. Hand-in-hand with Celia, afraid to separate in the Saturday night crowd that pushes along the

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main avenue, you look up at the swelter of car exhaust and the sky stretched above it, and it’s like you’ve been asleep for a long, long time.

These were the things that kept Nadine awake at night: coyote calls, cricket trills, Mister Wicker’s coughing, her aching feet, the window that wouldn’t shut, the window that wouldn’t open, the chirping mice, the spiders on her headboard, hunger, persistent urges to urinate, the uneven mattress, grief for her father’s house, grief for herself, grief for the cleaning ladies, suspicions of witchcraft, the unwelcome addition of weight at her hips, the long melting shadow little Charley cast when he stooped to stoke the Wickers’ bedroom fire. She studied his back as he pushed the iron, embers erupting at his feet, thinking: that horrible bastard, Charley. She’d have cast him out the first chance she got if she weren’t pregnant at the time. Horrible Charley, with his tangled hair and Mister Wicker’s jawline in stunted, unmistakable miniature, like an emblem of — something. She couldn’t compose a word for it. Thinking of a word for it too was something that kept Nadine awake, as she stared at the blank undulating rim of Mister Wicker’s form as he slept.

If you want to fight the devil, here is what you must know: The devil is not a capitalist. Currency is a human burden. Rather, the devil barters; he exchanges; he only asks for what is owed. All those hours spent gazing at souls through his spyglass, and he’s learned the system of the earth; he knows that everything — everything — is a response to something else. The flowers respond to sun. The rabbits in the grass, nibbling them, respond to the flowers. Humans respond to the rabbits, skinning them and stewing them with shoots of lemongrass, the lemongrass a response to the field that launches up their necks from the earth in slender shoots, the earth a response to everything, a response to itself, and a response to its response, flinging life away and dragging it back down again and away and again and away. Dollars are nothing in this balance — you cannot pay the devil off. The only thing that responds to money is money. What are you saving your riches for? There is nothing for sale in the underworld.

It was August. He appeared at the front gate dressed like a wandering

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stranger with the brim of his hat angled low across his brow in a sharp gash. He fingered the pale strands of rosemary and its bleached wilting ribbon as he looked on toward the house. It was morning: only just so.

The horizon grew red with sun, a smear of marrow at the bottom of an urn, and as he unlocked the gate and began up the path the wind shook the dust in from the fields and lifted it over him like an old pall.

“Proud to meet you, ma’am,” he said when she opened the door, Charley peering from behind her as if he’d never seen a stranger before.

The man shouldered past Nadine into the entrance hall, surveying it: the great glass cupola through which the sunlight bled, the imposing plaster bust of Jesus that descended, woe-eyed, from the ceiling. His clothes were unfit for the heat, with his thick woolen trousers and shirt cuffs folded at the wrist, and a jacket buttoned all the way to his languid lark’s neck.

“It’s a pleasure,” Nadine supposed. “My husband’s been gone for a few weeks. Making some development deals a state over. Are you looking for him?”

“Oh, no, no, forgive me,” the stranger said. “I used to work for the man who owned this place” — here he removed his hat — “But that was many years ago.” He frowned and a long white scar, like a fragile strand of lace, deepened in his cheek. “My mother died last Tuesday, and we’re compiling her estate. But there’s a piece of jewelry missing that we haven’t been able to locate. I think the last time I had it was here, during one of my shifts.”

“Well, come in then,” Nadine said, though he was already in: his jacket unbuttoned, the door shut and locked behind him, though she couldn’t recall locking it. “How long ago did you have it?”

“Honestly — ” the stranger rolled his eyes — “I can’t believe my carelessness. Twenty-five years, maybe. So this is all probably very silly. But suddenly my sister tells me that the one item missing is the one item worth the most, and she’s got kids in college, you know. Really smart kids too. One’s going to Princeton in the fall, though I don’t put much stake in the Ivy League. At least not how they used to be. How do you feel?”

“I don’t quite remember college,” she said.

“Exactly.” He nodded, though she wasn’t sure why. “If you don’t mind, though,” he asked, “Could I look around?” She saw now that he

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carried nothing with him — no briefcase or satchel or wallet, even — as if he hadn’t traveled a very long distance.

“Of course,” Nadine said, her mouth in a taut underscore. “Do you remember where you were when you last had it?”

“The kitchen, I think,” he said. “I worked in there the most. Second to the personal chef.”

“The kitchen,” she repeated, turning away. “Well, you’ll remember where it is, then.” She placed a stern hand on the boy’s head and steered him along with them. “Come, Charley.”

“After you.” He winked, but she gave no sign in return.

Nadine led him down the main hallway, a great cavernous marble thing that wound past the library, the sitting lounge, the piano room; each one’s doors were kept propped open on either side, their electric lights at full illumination despite the approaching morning. Sheets of plastic guarded the velvet chaises and mahogany rockers from dust, and the tapestry curtains that dripped at every window were shut to the sun in blank contempt.

“So you’ve kept things the same, then?” he asked. She was walking at a clip before him, her shining black braid swinging like a severed noose behind her.

She raised an eyebrow, though he couldn’t see. “I wouldn’t know,” she answered, excavating a massive key ring from her back pocket. The stranger studied a lone column built at the end of the hall, the plaster bust of a eunuch crowned in laurel propped with much ceremony atop it. He picked it up, examining it. It was light: the weight of Styrofoam.

He set it down.

“How long have you had the place?” he asked.

“My husband’s had it for three years.” She unlocked the last door at the end of the hallway, which emptied onto a courtyard through where the kitchens and servants’ quarters could be reached, though the latter was abandoned centuries prior in the wake of abolition. Just entering one of the squat molding rooms, Mister Wicker once told her, felt like crawling inside dead skin. The beds were heaped with rotting, moth-sucked burlap that rained centipede carcasses when shaken; the windows were black with dust; they bled the suggestion of wrongness or deadness or decapitation, the invalid spaces like bodies untethered

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from their brains. The cleaning girls avoided them altogether, preferring to keep the quarters locked, but Nadine had a fondness for their bleak emptiness that was difficult to disguise even from Mister Wicker.

There’s something historical in it, Warren, she complained. What if we tear them all down and ruin something important?

The stranger terrified Nadine when he touched her shoulder. “I just wanted to say,” he began, “that my name is Ned.” Her shoulder burned beneath his palm. “Ned what?”

“Ned Lawrence.”

“It’s familiar.”

“It’s common.”

“Mm.” “What’s your name?”

“Rhonda Dudley.” She lied. She shook her head a little, and the braid took up its slow pendulum again.

“And what’s your name, little one?” The boy made a fist and bit it.

Small lingering bruises, yellow and blue, swarmed on his forearm and disappeared into his sleeves.

“His name is Charley,” Nadine said.

“What do you like to do, Charley?”

The boy bit his fist again.

“He helps his stepmother,” she said.

The stranger smiled. “That’s wonderful of you, Charley.”

“Thank you,” Charley told the tile. The stranger waited until Nadine turned away to unlock the kitchen; he took a flat chocolate bar from his pocket and dropped it down the front of Charley’s tucked-in shirt, then put a finger to his lips.

The boy let one hand drift to the shape of the bar in his shirt. He pinched the corner and let his hand drop away again.

Nadine held the door for the stranger, watching him as he searched the kitchen, but it was fruitless. He wandered into the pantry and flicked the light on and off. “I don’t think there’s any heirloom jewelry in here,” she told him. “Anywhere else you want to look?”

The stranger scanned the kitchen once more. There was something like an extinguished expression on his face, but he shook his head.

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They crossed the courtyard. “Now, Ned,” Nadine began, “Excuse me, but why did you bring your mother’s jewelry to work?”

He shrugged. “Showing off. I was trying to impress a girl, one of the maids.” He smirked. “I can’t even remember her name.”

Nadine sniffed. They walked back along the hallway in silence.

“Well, this has been funny,” the stranger said.

“What has?”

He shrugged. “Maybe nothing.” Charley looked at the stranger from over his shoulder, Nadine gripping his slight wrist. The stranger winked in response.

Nadine guided him into the entrance hall. “If you think of a new hiding place, don’t hesitate,” she said because it was hospitable.

“It’s funny,” he said again, sliding his spindly right arm through his jacket sleeve. He was looking at the tile. “I didn’t find what I was looking for.”

“Do we ever?” Nadine slid.

“Well, I could have dropped it somewhere else.” He looked at her with expectation, this aging gray-haired stranger, standing in one sleeve with the rest of his jacket sliding from his shoulder.

“That’s very true,” she said. She placed a hand on the doorknob.

“But,” he sighed. He looked as if he were trying to perform some grand silent calculation. “Maybe you’ve seen it?”

“You haven’t told me what to look for,” Nadine said. She unlocked the door and turned the handle.

“It was a gold pin,” he said, fingering his lapel, his bent white fingers flickering like beetles’ legs. “Like one you’d put on a jacket.”

It was strange: how when everything was finally broken, the threads all undone, it could be so very very quiet. “The world is full of gold pins,” she said.

“Yes, but not my mother’s gold pin.” He moved toward her, just a half step. He looked into her grey eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, bristling a little. “Anyone could have taken it in twenty-five years.”

He was silent. Charley looked between them — the stranger with his wild, dead-dandelion hair springing backward from his brow; Nadine

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with her ring finger quivering at the hollow in her throat. It drifted against the chain on her neck, down to the flat matrix of her crucifix, and pressed the shape deep into her skin: deep, deep.

“Maybe I haven’t been so honest,” he finally told her. He was replacing his hat. With one sweep of hand he straightened the brim across his face. “I know you’ve kept it. I thought it would be easier to find. I’m very good at sensing these things out.”

“That’s nonsense,” Nadine said. “Get out of my house.”

“Not if I have a debt to settle,” he said. “It’s just the one thing, Rhonda. You can do it.”

“Take anything else,” she hissed. “I don’t have it. Take something else.”

Charley kept very still. He stared at the stranger’s shoes: black leather, unsoiled, with long tassels flowing down to the toe.

“I said you can have whatever you want,” she told him.

“Except what belongs to me,” he said. “Will that do?” The stranger slid a thumb along his cuff. “What do you think, little boy?”

This party is its own horror show. You have drunk too much, Nadine, have you trouble finding the bathroom? You just want to sit down where it’s quiet, but the music pulses like a desperate headache invading everything. Where is Celia? Celia’s ashtray is on the glass patio table, her boots tossed beneath it, but you can’t make out her posture from the balcony. It seems she is not there. In the grass, almost inscrutable, lies a half-sucked cigarette delicately burning as if it were just dropped; a blue-gray tendril of smoke swims in air above it, then blossoms like the hood of a grim jellyfish. You press your stomach into the railing to keep yourself from getting sick. There is a hand on your shoulder: are you lost, he asks you, and you’re like: yes. Like that: yes. Because it’s so relieving to have someone worrying about you.

Come, he says. He turns away and you follow, kicking away the debris of cups and ash, slicing through an orb of kids passing around several joints. A record spins itself out on the turntable; all of a sudden everyone wants to know where the Zeppelin went. The room melts and separates before you: images split into doubles, then triples, then sink together in an ill meld until all that’s there is him, one blond point jutting through your black vision like a bone through skin.

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You are in a bedroom now. The noise of the evening is shut away; the quiet is thrust on you like a mantle. He sits.

I’m Jeffrey, he tells you. You know he’s pretending, so you say: Gaia.

Hello, Gaia. Hello, Jeffrey. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.

And then you lean forward, the vomit leaps into your throat, there is a private bathroom beside the closet: you go to it. You heave and heave.

He knocks.

Are you sick?

Yes. He opens the door. Can I come in? He’s already in.

Yes, you say.

Then it’s nothing. He gives you a glass of water, and soon you are saying things you would never say, the alcohol making a slick liquid of the ends of your words. You tell him about the old people, all the stories your mother gave you, your love for Jesus crashing down on you all at once like a mile-long anchor until it’s so sublime you cannot stand it, have you ever loved something like that, you ask him, have you — I love you like that, he says, his eyes like two lanterns pitching in his tilted head.

Really?

Yes, Gaia, he says. I love you so much. We’ve just met and I love you, is that possible?

Maybe, you say. Your back is to the toilet; you shut the lid and lay your head on its surface. But I could believe it, you say. I guess it happens.

Would you believe it if I kissed you, he said, and he does: you have no response except your body’s, your back stretching like a tightening bow, his invading tongue like a dull arrowhead as he flattens atop you.

You crane your neck to reach his lips again. There is a pain in your chest; you ignore it: it continues. He closes his eyes and rests his face against yours, not moving. It seems he is inhaling you, or sensing you in some way. You look down to where your chest aches, and see it: a round golden pin on his lapel, its edge burrowing into the top of your breast.

Nadine, you stupid minnow. His eyes are closed on your forehead.

Breath steams in small bursts from between his teeth. You knock your head against his and tug at the pin, its edges so sharp it cuts you; you

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grip it between two fingers and slash his cheek open like an envelope.

He blinks and opens his eyes. They are two poverties. They hang over you like a constellation when you run, down the stairs and across the street and to your apartment at the other side of town, where you bound in and lock the door and sit in the dark, quivering. If the pin weren’t flashing in your hand then no one would know you were there at all.

The child buried its head in the stranger’s jacket, the stranger’s hand pressing — so gentle, now — against its downy hair. The front door was open; the entranceway, beaming with eastern light. Out in the day they could hear the world turning over in its sleep. The stranger adjusted his coat and went down the path just as he’d come.

Nadine stood behind the door with her eyes shut, breathing. She could hear the cleaning lady dragging her bucket like a bum leg down the hall.

“Lidia,” she snapped. “Will you please keep it down?” It wasn’t really a question. Nadine swept from the foyer and climbed the staircase to her bedroom in silent condemnation. She hated the boy, but what would she tell Mister Wicker? His disapproval would destroy her.

Dear God, Nadine thought, how you challenge me.

It was Lidia, pushing her lame mop on the tile, who watched from the front window as he unlocked the front gate and turned from the house.

It was strange to her; the Wickers never entertained. Invitations and letters were shredded in the downstairs office until they stopped coming. Former friends of Mister Wicker, she overheard, left the house feeling disrupted or unsettled, peeling their coats away from their bodies, complaining of oppressive heat. Lidia understood; she always wished they at least hung the exaggerated bust of Jesus somewhere else, or not at all. It gave one the impression of being appraised.

She stooped to slide the bucket near her, flattening a crumpled business card on the hall’s floor. Ned Lawrence was the only text printed on the front — on the back, two phone numbers were scrawled above an inscrutable name.

Lidia wrenched open the door and sprinted down the street, where the stranger was unlocking his car.

“Hey, wait up,” she called. He stopped, midway into the driver’s

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seat, and saw her. His jacket was unbuttoned; the child, like someone drugged, slept against his chest.

Lida almost faltered at the sight, but the stranger hauled the child closer with one capable arm and greeted her with the other, openpalmed, like someone with no secrets to veil. His smile leaned across his face, uneven but long, like a reverend’s incantation. She offered him the card without a word.

“Ah, yes.” He seemed to grin wider. “You have been a saint this morning, my girl.” He took the card from her and shut the door, rolling its window down. He lowered the child into the back seat and buckled himself in with his right hand; the left he raised in salutation. “Tell your boss I said that too.” And he pulled away.

The car was red, shiny, like someone blowing a kiss. She watched its right turn-signal flash like a mad eye before hooking around the corner, the morning closing on it like a talon.

No — that wasn’t it. She stepped toward the estate, then turned to examine the space where the cab was waiting just a minute prior. She followed its ghost down the street, thinking. There was something else, there in the dark; a little mouse of truth guiding its nose in the air. What did Nadine always say? What was there to be reminded of?

Lidia couldn’t remember, even though walking back toward the gate felt like something growing, a world in slow illumination like an infinite twilight, the house itself seeming to bristle; but if she could remember — all the lore Nadine spoke, all her rituals and prayers — it would have shot through Lidia like a nauseous wave of bass, the uncanniness of it all, the familiarity: the left hand. He waved with his left hand, the stranger did. His pale wrist floated from the cuff, a delicate peel of nimbus; and on it, a mark, like a little burn.

Nadine dreams of the old people: They say: he will come for you, little girls, believe it. Maybe now, listen: do you hear? Maybe he’s got a sneering Cadillac, white as gristle.

Maybe he smooths it into your daddy’s driveway like he’s ironing a flaw; maybe he lets the motor jaw before stepping out with the sun. Maybe the Cadillac’s seats are leather and maybe the radio is low and maybe it’s eking a sort of guitar that tumbles out like drawer of knives: maybe.

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Maybe he doesn’t have a car. He walks. He crosses the lawn in neat steps. He drags his thumb on the doorbell — maybe he waves through your window. Or maybe the car is just a long-nosed station wagon, wood-sided, trusty. A car your mother would buckle you into. A little dog barreling around in the back, executing plush toys.

Maybe he dances. He paints. He has a villa on the ocean; won’t you see it? Maybe his palms enchant yours; you’ll go in the night; you’ll take the highway; it is autumn again. See an arrow of birds alight in the dawn, see how they cut their wings on the heart of sky. See how it is like your heart.

She shivers from this dream in the pre-dawn, the sun raising its head to honey the earth, the moon’s sickle fainting in the new light. Mister Wicker kicks in his sleep. She is looking at the ceiling. It looks like everything missing at once.

Her eyes closed, she slides a hand beneath her pillow, drifting her palm on the corner of the memory box. By now she can unlatch it blindly, behind her head: she does. And in that sable swatch of anti-morning she smiles to feel it still there, sunk in a bed of clean cotton: the round golden pin, like an eye shut forever.

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daughter

Daughter, My mattress in Kenmore is palm-bare and though it’s December, I sleep without a sheet. I’m lying beside a woman who is not your mother because your mother — like you — is gone. I met this woman on the street. I didn’t pay her or anything. It was just late. I stay out late, now, kicking at the snow, my hands in my pockets and my head down, trying to lose my own scent. The streets in Boston are a loom of one-ways and dead ends and sudden curves; they jut like starved hips, and each turn leaves a bruise, not like in some other cities, where the curbs are so rigid and the streets so straight you can see a mile beyond where you’re headed. That’s not how things are supposed to be.

I should tell you, daughter, how things have changed. We now have a permanent circus of mice who perform great feats — but only in the dark — and one circling fly I cannot kill. Your raincoat hangs in the shower. I broke the toilet while trying to fix it last week, so mostly I piss in jars and crowd them on the bookshelf. The television has come down with old age, tremulous and barking with static on the three-legged night table; the pictures are unhung; the floor, a splay of mirror shards and Zebra Cake wrappers and half-killed packs of discount beer. Your mother’s blue scarf forms a lone tributary in the wash of debris. I feel myself older.

The pipes cry your name in their sleep.

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In case you’re wondering, I registered Independent this year. They still haven’t found Tupac, but I read an article by someone who spotted him, alive and well, in Tucson. I’ve given up red meat.

The woman next to me snores. I rise beside her and stand, trying to remember her last name, toeing a fragment of glass. I plot the way to your bedroom, past the columns of soiled shoeboxes and canned fruit in the hall, past the blue suit hung on the coat rack, the suit I wore at your funeral. The sleeping woman turns over, clutches at the naked bed, grasps her calf and releases it. I must travel light, quiet, before she wakes to see me. I don’t want to be seen. I must be a ghost; I must be made of air.

The window in your bedroom is open when I enter. The last leaves of autumn lay curled on the sill like severed tongues, and your journal lies face-down, undisturbed. Remember when you asked so many questions we couldn’t stand it? Remember when we made you write them down instead? Like, Daddy, what if we had trees for arms? What if we fell backward and grew into the ground? And what if I lived in a tree?

And what would you call me then? And what is God and what is the sun and who made me? And who made you? And how will I remember it all?

You carried them like an acolyte. I never knew how to answer.

In case you’re wondering, last month I saw a man hold up a convenience store with just a lit cigarette. He got thirty-six bucks. I asked him outside, when he was finishing the cigarette. He gave me a dollar.

I want to tell you that we would have done better, eventually, your mom and I. We would have loaded our junk into the back of a rental truck and gotten a country house and our own mailbox, two mutts and a bristling cat — maybe a spry, mean chicken — and a stone path and a drinking well and a bicycle shed. We could have taken walks in the summer and swung in the elbows of some ripening oak. But now all the trees are barren with winter, and in the slender hours they stoop like witches nodding shibboleths in the smog. The city scrapes up the saw-toothed wanderers. Graffiti spoils in the bellies of bridges. The taxis are slow sharks on the night and the CITGO sign flashes its voltaic eye and the sky draws its wing on the world.

In the quarter-light I survey your squat, concrete bedroom. We would have built you a better one, daughter, eventually; I would have drawn you a blueprint, see? Here I’ve made a wall of double-hung windows

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dripping with lace curtains and bronze hooks; their hems glide quietly up, useful for when you start sneaking smokes while your mother goes to work and I toil in the garage, torturing the car’s transmission. Keep a towel rolled beneath the door, and while you lean from the window remember that sometimes movies can lie and no boy will ever stand outside your room blasting Peter Gabriel, no matter how many times you ask him to, and if you have to ask him, he definitely won’t. Get used to the gawk of the empty lawn, and when it’s not empty, when you finally have that visit, at least know enough to sneak him onto the fire escape.

When he comes upstairs, don’t be surprised if he draws a thumb along your bookshelf and asks you how you got so smart. Don’t be surprised if he talks too loud. Turn on the television so we don’t suspect a thing.

Here I drew the closet, where you’ll keep your shoes in a manicured line until they start to creep out, pair by pair, heaping oppressive on the floor. If you’re brave, you’ll hang a mirror in the closet; if you’re afraid, you’ll keep one in a desk drawer.

Remember that you can be afraid, and remember that, no matter your age, you will never finish a tube of chapstick because it will never be in the same place you left it. Remember to be five minutes early and to keep an extra key and that someday you may have a daughter and that daughter will most likely grow to know things you never told her, like how to recognize the difference between Turkish Silver and Turkish Gold, and how to give a blowjob, and how best to leave a stranger’s room in the morning, and how to cheat on a chemistry test.

In case you were wondering, a woman on the Orange Line read my palm. She said I’m getting married soon. I don’t think she read it correctly.

Remember that we wanted to protect you. We checked your Halloween candy for razor blades and conducted taste-tests for cyanide and arsenic. We bought Mr. Yuck! stickers for the cleaning detergents, made you memorize our address and phone number, called your third-grade teacher on her landline when she made you walk home too late, sent venomous looks to strange men who sat too close on the train. But most of all, remember that day on the airplane, the flight attendants all weeping in their uniforms — how I performed the rite of securing your seatbelt and putting you in an oxygen mask all while holding your mother’s hand. Remember the accident of hearing the pilot whisper his prayers

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on the loudspeaker, and the curious way you looked at me when the nosedive came. How you raised your little eyebrow as the wing went spiraling and how you patted me on the thumb. How you knew it would be alright because everything must be — it is.

In case you were wondering, the woman in my bed has a name. Her name is Lucy. She grooms cats.

Anyway: if you want the answers, you can come back and get them — they’re here. So listen, daughter: if we had trees for arms we couldn’t shake hands or pet dogs or hold ourselves, waiting at a bus stop in the rain. If we grew into the ground they could make us into firewood and then we’d just be little leaps of flame and the ash would collect in our mouths. If you lived in a tree you would get pretty hungry, so I would call you in for dinner. And I don’t know who made you or who made me or if anyone did at all, but I’m pretty sure that God is the sun, and the sun will rise, indeed, but not before the moon — bright as bones, arcing east — sinks her coffin in the endless deep.

daughter

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Acknowledgments

The editors and staff are very grateful to Richard Hoffman and Melissa Gruntkosky for their help in making this book possible. For their support and guidance, the staff and editors would also like to thank Sharon Duffy and Steven Martin at the Office of Student Life; the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing; and the Student Government Association.

Colophon

This issue of The Emerson Review is set in Josefin Slab, Josefin Sans, and Georgia. The Josefin twins have been known to have long, drawnout arguments about who is the better display font. They are using these pages as the ultimate showdown. Georgia has been traditionally considered a screen font. Since appearing in this book, he considers himself as having moved on to bigger and better things.

Contributors

Jeffrey Alfier is a 2010 nominee for the UK’s Forward Prize for Poetry. His latest chapbook is The Torch Singer (2011), and his first fulllength book of poems, The Wolf Yearling, will be published in 2012

by Pecan Grove Press (US). He is founder and co-editor of San Pedro River Review.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a sixteen-year-old internationally awardwinning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic, The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, and Papworth Trust, among others. Her photography has been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website, and on the cover of books and magazines in the United States and Canada. She has shown work in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, and The Environmental Photographer of the Year Exhibition (2011), amongst many other locations.

Jill Birdsall’s previous publications include stories in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gargoyle, Iowa Review, Kansas Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, and Southern Humanities Review. New work is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Gargoyle, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Story Quarterly.

Sarah Chaves is a first-year MFA grad student at Emerson College.

For the past four years, she has been working on her memoir entitled Don’ Be Scare’ about the sudden death of her father. She hopes to make her mark in the literary world with this memoir, but to also put her

stamp on the Portuguese literary world as well. Once the memoir is published, she hopes to have it translated into Portuguese so that all of her family may read it.

Paul Robert Chesser studied comparative literature and creative writing at University of South Carolina Aiken and Texas Tech University. Recent publications featuring or due to feature his work include Copper Nickel, the minnesota review, Nashville Review, Underground Voices, and others. Chesser writes out of Lubbock, Texas.

Nick DePascal currently lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his wife and son, where he’s working towards his MFA in Poetry at the University of New Mexico. His poetry has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Sugar House Review, Adobe Walls, and more. His book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Rain Taxi, Rattle, The Colorado Review, Tucson Weekly, and more.

Tim Hedges holds degrees from Cornell, Ohio State, and the University of Michigan, where he now teaches writing. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals such as the Gettysburg Review, Third Coast, Sycamore Review, and Harpur Palate. During his seven-year run as an English teacher near Boston, the Red Sox won two championships, the Patriots won three, and the Celtics won one. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really care for parades.

Peter Kispert’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK Magazine, Baltimore Review, and others. He will soon be headed to earn his master’s in fiction writing. More from him can be found at peterkispert.com.

Nancy Carol Moody’s work has appeared in The MacGuffin, The New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, Salamander, and The Carolina Quarterly. She is the author of Photograph With Girls (Traprock, 2009) and has just completed a new manuscript, Negative Space. Nancy lives in Eugene, Oregon, and can be found online at www.nancycarolmoody.com.

Megan Pietruszka is a Philadelphia-suburbs-to-Boston transplant who has no idea where she’s headed next but wouldn’t mind if the people there spoke German. She likes to take photos when she’s not busy losing her cameras, likes to read books when she’s not busy wasting time on the Internet, and likes to sell vintage clothes when she’s not busy buying them for herself. She deejays at WZBC under the generic name “Megan.”

Angela Rydell’s work has appeared in The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Inkwell, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals. She is a recipient of Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

A Michigan native, Mike Salisbury’s fiction has appeared in Avery Anthology, Black Warrior Review, and online at Life With Objects and Susurrus. Currently, Mike is pursuing an MFA at Pacific University. He lives and works along the front range of the Rockies.

Eric Twardzik is a junior pursuing his BFA in creative writing, and is having great difficulty deciding between fiction and nonfiction. Eric comes from the Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania and owes his writerly ambitions to the storytellers in his family. Notable among these sagas is the collegiate epic cycle of his uncle Bern and the WWII yarns of his similarly named grandfather. If Eric can one day write stories that match those told and retold at eternal Thanksgivings and family birthdays, he’ll feel damn proud.

Jacqueline Vogtman’s work has appeared in Avery Anthology, Copper Nickel, Drunken Boat, Versal, and Vestal Review, among other journals. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she served as an assistant editor of Mid-American Review. She writes and teaches in New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and her dog.

Katie Walsh is a writing BFA student at Emerson College with a focus in nonfiction. She has also been published in Stork Magazine.

Abigail Warren lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and teaches writing, literature, and poetry at Cambridge College. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Monarch Review, Ducts.org, Forge, Pearl, Brink Magazine, and others. She also participates in the publication 30 Poems In November, an anthology of poems to benefit Center for New Americans.

Pushcart Prize nominee Sheri L. Wright is the author of five books of poetry, including the most recent, The Slow Talk Of Stones. Wright’s visual work has appeared in journals such as Blood Orange Review, The Single Hound, THIS Literary Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Blood Lotus Journal, and Subliminal Interiors. More examples of her work can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherilwright/.

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Executive Staff

Rachel Amico is hyper-critical of everything on the earth, especially young adult fiction fans, poetry about beautiful things, and when characters survive. This year, she has only been impressed by a few things: Soulja Boy, Fireball whiskey, and the Chicago Bulls. She has long hair, and she does not care.

Tracy Brickman has written three of these bios for the Emerson Review now, and thinks she definitely peaked in her junior year. All that she has left to say is that she treasures the time she has spent on staff and knows she will continue to fall in love with the work that the Emerson Review publishes.

Diana Filar will always tell people that working on the Emerson Review was one of the greatest learning experiences of her college career.

Outside of the magazine, her interests include eating french fries, biking around Boston with Nicole Shelby, and watching bad romantic comedies with Tracy Brickman. She recently applied to graduate school in comparative literature and started an anti-dating blog.

Jordan Koluch likes sad stories about little brothers, even when they aren’t very good. She also likes songs she should have stopped liking at least five years ago, which definitely aren’t any good. The only good things she really likes are her own little brothers and brushing her teeth.

Melanie Taryn Lieberman is pursuing a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The Connecticut Review, The Emerson Review, and Boston Common

magazine, and she has received national and international recognition for her fiction, poetry, and playwriting. She was born and raised in Connecticut and is excited for further adventures in the literary world.

Carly Loman is the nonfiction editor of the Emerson Review. Her interests include creating a personified character for her dog Lucky and “just chilling.”

Emily Murphy is the fiction editor at the Emerson Review. She is a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major, and she plans to graduate in 2013 with a BFA in nonfiction and a minor in psychology. Currently, she is also an assistant lifestyle editor for the Berkeley Beacon and the marketing intern for Ploughshares. In the future, Murphy aims to pursue a publishing career, preferably working with magazines.

Brendan O’Brien is a senior Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. He likes burritos and hip hop music. You may know him from his experimental dance performance from World Perspectives in Dance entitled “Wilt Chamberlain Once Scored One Hundred Points In A Single Basketball Game.”

Vincent Scarpa is a fiction writer whose story “Projecting” appears in plain china: Best of Undergraduate Writing 2011. He is a Diet Coke enthusiast and thinks that “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” is a criminally underrated song. He doesn’t like to be hugged. (Yes, he does.)

Nicole Shelby is just biding her time until she can move to the woods and live with a dozen horses and the biggest dogs you’ve ever seen.