En Bloc Issue 2

en bloc fiction | poetry | art | photography

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FICTION

POETRY

Jim Meirose Brenton Woodward Max Sheridan Rolli

Gerard Sarnat Elizabeth Train-Brown Peter Cowlam R. A. Allen

PHOTOGRAPHY

ART

Ollie Wood Liora Goldstein Louis Norris Anne-Julie Hynes Sean Wang Fonta Tereza Kleovoulou Frank Garland Norman Miller

Brady Izquierdo Angela Masker Todd Westermeyer Kristen DiSano Tabitha Marsh Pierre-Paul Pariseau

With special guests: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Winner Martín Espada Pulitzer Prize Winner Steven Millhauser IPA ‘Photographer of the Year’ Julia Fullerton-Batten

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En Bloc Issue 2 Print Edition 2021 Published by En Bloc Publications Ltd Copyright © 2021 EN BLOC PUBLICATIONS LTD. All rights reserved.

Printed by Pensord, Wales.

No part of this magazine may be reproduced or distributed in any form nor by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission of the copyright owner, excepting brief excerpts for use in review. www.enbloc.co.uk Bude, Cornwall.

ISSN: 2634-2294

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A note from the reader This issue, in lieu of our usual ‘note from the editor’, En Bloc is asking its readers for their words in place of ours. We’ve teamed up with writers’ charity English PEN to help writers in prison and at risk around the globe through their letter writing campaign, PENWrites.

For decades, PEN has stood in solidarity with writers across the world who have been unjustly persecuted, harassed, and imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression. Members have long supported fellow writers by offering their letters of support.

The impact of this simple gesture should not be underestimated.

These letters provide moral solace to writers being detained or living in extreme and difficult circumstance. You’ll be letting someone know that they have not been forgotten, whilst at the same time sending a clear message of objection to those that seek to keep them silent. Your words offer courage and unity against injustice.

If you would like to find out more, become a member, or to send a letter of your own to a writer in crisis, visit:

www.englishpen.org/pen-writes

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‘Each letter day, I get so many letters from PEN members and I am engulfed by very beautiful feelings...

I can feel myself with you, always, and perhaps that is why I never feel helpless.’

Zehra Doğan, Kurdish artist and writer, former PEN case.

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10 Deep Blue Oliver Wood

11 Lydd Angel Louis Norris

12 Casa Diego Riviera Blue Fonta

The Story of How We Came to América I remember the tale of my grandfather the gambler, tipped off that the cops would raid his speakeasy, selling the club to another gambler, fleeing Puerto Rico before somebody could press a gun to his skull and scatter his brains through his white straw hat.

That is the story of how the Espada family came to América.

My father once said: That never happened, and besides you should wait till people are dead to tell stories like that.

Now people are dead, and I am telling stories like that.

Martín Espada

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Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua ‘My only love sprung from my only hate!’

--Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene V At forty, I studied the mirror. I poked my mouth to free a trapped grain of hamburger, and a tooth broke off between my fingers. I felt nothing.

The dentist said: The tooth is dead. The root is dead. The X-rays show signs of trauma to the lower jaw. What happened here? I said: Donald DeBlasio.

Donald DeBlasio punched me in the mouth. I was fifteen. My lip split, my skull clanged, and my body smacked the floor like a mannequin in a store looted by rioters. He stood over me and grinned as he would grin at me for the rest of my life. Whenever I saw him, in the hallway at school or on the street, he would pump his right fist in my face, slowly curling an invisible barbell.

He was a centurion guarding the last outpost of the empire, another Sicilian or Calabrese fleeing Brooklyn for Valley Stream, Long Island, escaping the barbarians who sacked Rome, back from the dead in 1972 to steal their cars, torch their houses, piss in their swimming pools, stab the boys, and kiss the girls.

I was a barbarian drifting far from his tribe, a Puerto Rican without a knife in hand or a leather jacket ablaze in gang colors.

Everybody understood, even the teacher who glanced away the day I was late and sat on the floor, so the front row could take turns jabbing a shoe in my spine. I refused to worship their gods, Jesus on the crucifix or the Yankees in the sacred arena of the Stadium, or the football deity who could bench press 300 pounds and slammed me into a locker whenever he saw me. He never said a word to me.

I never said a word to him. I learned to swallow blood and words.

For years, I would mimic their rooster strut, the sneering lip stuck out, the bellowing battle cry of ba fangool. I rooted against Rocky in all

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the Rocky movies, cheering his choreographed pratfalls to the canvas.

When they rushed out the door of the pizza joint to gawk at the booming car wreck on the corner, leaving my eggplant parm sub to burn black in the oven, I called them goombahs and swore never to return.

I am sixty. The words flow over the wrinkled stone of my brain: Dolceacqua, sweet water, fresh water, River Nervia in the province of Imperia, region of Liguria. I stand on the bridge at Dolceacqua, the same stone arch painted by Monet more than a century ago.

She contemplates the water gushing below the bridge, and I watch at her shoulder to see the river as she sees the river, poet, teacher, amati, like amada in Spanish, the word for beloved. Her mother’s name is Giovio, Calabrese from New Jersey, her grandfather a stone mason before the beam rammed his head and the stroke crippled his right hand, her great-grandmother a girl sewing buttons onto blouses who escaped the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, as others leapt, hand in hand, eyes shut, from the ninth floor. I can no longer remember the curses in the poetry of Shakespeare and Donald DeBlasio. She takes my hand, and leads me across the bridge to the ruins of the castle on the other side of the river, through the labyrinth of stone, up to the jagged battlements, where we listen to the silence of the builders, and the birds, and the silence again.

Martín Espada

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Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn On a winter morning in 1968, my father left to walk the picket line.

He rode the elevator in his black coat, hood over his head in the hour before daybreak. On the third floor, the doors opened. A white man waiting for the elevator stood there, peered at my father in his black coat and hood, in his brown skin, then screamed and fled. The doors closed.

My father laughed on the picket line that morning. He laughed for years.

The guy thought I was Death, he would say. Death rides an elevator in Brooklyn, mugger Death, militant Death, Puerto Rican Death.

Listening to the story, as the screaming man screamed louder with every telling, I never thought that one day my father would be the man standing there, waiting for the elevator doors to open. He did not stare or scream or run. He stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed behind him.

Martín Espada

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New York State of Mind Todd Westermeyer

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Caravan Todd Westermeyer 18

Day Off Todd Westermeyer 19

Multiple Submissions Max Sheridan

They’d rejected my story at —Magazine, but they said they hoped to see more from me in the future, so I decided to submit it again.

I changed my name from Brian Spivak to BP Spivak.

Then I changed it back to Brian Spivak.

Then I pressed submit.

I checked my Twitter account to see if I had any new DMs or if anyone had liked something someone else had said about me.

Then I went to bed.

I told my wife the next morning. She was in the kitchen making breakfast for herself.

My wife said, “Can you submit the same story twice?” She was making eggs on the stove and she didn’t turn around. She didn’t say anything else either.

I said, “I don’t think so. Not normally. It’s just an idea I had.”

My wife continued to not say anything.

I made a toaster waffle and had my morning coffee.

I went to check my emails.

I’d been rejected again.

The second rejection was exactly the same as the first. As if they hadn’t

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MAX SHERIDAN

noticed I’d broken the rules. The editors, Cassandra and Micah, hadn’t even left an angry little note.

I went online again and submitted again. I changed my name from Brian Spivak to BP Spivak this time, and didn’t change it back. I altered my physical address slightly. I added a “B” to our apartment, just in case the Submittable software was rigged to catch repeat submitters after a threshold of, say, two submissions of the same material. I pressed send.

I went to find my wife.

My wife was upstairs getting ready for a video meeting. She’d put on body spritz for the video meeting. As if she could be smelt over Zoom. It’s ridiculous, I know. But life’s little pleasures.

She told me to stop sending the story. She said it’s over.

I said, “Maybe they didn’t see it the first time.”

She said, “They told you no.”

I said, “But the second time was no too.”

My wife’s name is Sarah. Sarah’s in branding. She wasn’t always in branding. In fact, that’s usually the first thing she says when someone asks: I wasn’t always in branding.

Sarah said, “I’m going to be late.”

That was funny. Late to the dining room chair?

I said, “If they said no twice, it’s as if they didn’t say no the first time. It’s like a totally new rejection.”

Sarah said, “I don’t get this. And I’m going to be late.”

“You’ll see,” I said.

And we did see.

I got rejected again.

Dear BP Spivak, thank you for entrusting us with your work! While we enjoyed Ms. Puig’s Garden, unfortunately, we can’t accept it for this issue.

We wish you luck placing it elsewhere. Stay safe and— And please don’t submit this story to us again?

The story was about a man named Wilmer “Chuck” Chuck, who is a veteran with disabilities. Wilmer Chuck is trying to make ends meet by doing handiwork around the neighborhood. One day he discovers the

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MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS

neighborhood garden he’s been tending has been destroyed. It’s actually old Ms. Puig’s garden and Wilmer Chuck isn’t sure if he destroyed it himself or if it was a vengeful groundhog or the foul-mouthed boy from across the street, Bobby Puck. But the garden is a mess and Wilmer Chuck decides to fix it. The story ends with Wilmer Chuck alone on his front porch, a humorless grin creeping over his rough, battle-scarred features, as he realizes that perhaps, just perhaps, kidnapping Bobby Puck and fertilizing Ms. Puig’s garden with his corpse is the best solution to his problem.

I submitted Ms. Puig’s Garden twice more that morning.

And received two more polite rejections from Cassandra and Micah.

I submitted Ms. Puig’s Garden again that evening.

I was rejected.

Except this time the rejection was signed by the —Magazine Team.

I showed Sarah the email.

Sarah was lying in bed listening to a podcast. Her head was propped up on a sagging pillow with a leaf pattern. There was a circle of pillow cover under Sarah’s head that was stained brownish yellow. Sarah’s head was slowly sliding off this stain. She didn’t even look at me. She tilted her eyeballs at my phone like a person paralyzed from the nose down.

I turned the phone around to make it landscape and magnified the email a bit.

Sarah said, “What am I looking at?”

Her voice was loud, like a speaker phone conversation.

I said, “Rejection six.”

Sarah pulled her AirPods out and then put them back in again. She was going to say something but decided it wasn’t worth it.

I said, “Look at this.”

She didn’t look.

I said, “Really. Look at this. Cassandra and Micah are gone” “I don’t understand.” Sarah was at least looking at the email now. But I think she was looking for a photo of people or maybe some emoji faces.

Something human at any rate.

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MAX SHERIDAN

I said, “The editors. They’re gone.”

Sarah said, “Please leave me be.”

I said, “Do you think I’m the reason for this?”

Sarah said, “Yes.” I said, “Really?”

Sarah said, “Yes.” I said, “Oh.” I went back online and submitted Ms. Puig’s Garden again.

I waited until midnight for my rejection from the —Magazine Team.

I checked my phone at 2 am and 3 am.

When I woke at 6 am, Sarah was doing home fitness. The light outside the window was groggy and grey. It was going to be another one of those days.

I started to say something, but Sarah said, “I don’t want to hear about it.

Really.” This time her voice was wispy and breathless from exercising.

I went downstairs and had a toaster waffle for breakfast and two cups of coffee.

I checked my Twitter.

I checked my emails.

I went on the —Magazine website contact page to find a work email for Cassandra and Micah, so I could find out where my rejection went.

There were no work emails, just a form.

I clicked on the Opportunities page.

I don’t know why I did this, unless somewhere in the back of my mind I was looking for opportunities for writers whose rejections had disappeared.

There weren’t very many opportunities of any kind, in fact. They were looking for a submissions reader.

I shared the page with Sarah on Hangouts.

Then I remembered Sarah had muted our family conversation.

I went back upstairs.

Sarah was choosing her work-at-home outfit.

I said, “I realize you’re not very interested in this.”

Sarah actually looked at me. This was possibly a positive sign.

I said, “Imagine you’ve never heard of my submission issue.”

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MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS

Sarah said, “Ok. I’ve never heard of it.”

I said, “Thank you. Now imagine —Magazine is looking for readers.”

Sarah said, “You mean people that choose stories?”

I said, “Not necessarily.”

Sarah said, “But people who have a voice in the process.”

I said, “Very likely, yes.”

Sarah went back to her clothes hangers.

She said, “That’s unethical.”

I said, “But you haven’t even heard me out.”

Just then Sarah’s mobile pinged.

Sarah took her phone off the dresser and looked at it.

She said, “Why did you send me this?”

I said, “You mean you haven’t muted me?”

“Find a job,” Sarah said. “Find one now.”

I applied for the position of submissions reader at —Magazine. It obviously wasn’t a “high income” job, but it did have career possibilities. Mainly, I thought, if I could somehow get Ms. Puig’s Garden past the draconian slush pile and into the hands of Cassandra and Micah, who were the real movers and shakers behind —Magazine, my Submittable bio paragraph would get a long overdue upgrade. I checked the payment rates again.

Token to semi-pro.

Token payments ranged from $5 to $15, minus Paypal fees. It was enough to surprise Sarah with a mediocre bottle of European wine.

Money. Fees. Bills. Rent.

I logged into my Fiverr account.

My Incredible $5 Professional Logo! service had gotten a hit. A communal composting outfit in rural Pennsylvania. They needed something fast and professional. How was 24 hours? I answered back. How was that?

I realized that my message to the communal composters had just exhausted my hourly budget. I also realized that if I doubled my fee to $10, I would still be exhausting my budget.

That night we watched The Bourne Supremacy in Spanish. Sarah was practicing her Spanish. Branding opportunities in Mexico? I can’t deny

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MAX SHERIDAN

that once or twice the thought of Sarah decluttering her life drastically and eloping to the Yucatan to set up a seaside branding outfit hadn’t crossed my mind.

At 3 am I woke up.

My mobile was flashing.

I tapped open my inbox.

There was a new email. It was from the —Magazine Team. I was now a submissions reader for —Magazine, it said. My first assignment was already waiting for me. Ten new stories in our shared —Magazine Google Drive folder, aka the Slush Drive.

I hardly slept the rest of the night. I woke ten minutes before my alarm went off. My rustling noises woke Sarah. Sarah had the day off. One of her eyes opened murderously, like a crocodile’s.

I said, “Off to work.”

Sarah turned over.

Downstairs, I made a toaster waffle.

I made a pot of coffee.

I rejected all ten stories.

One, written by a man named Theodore Poppinjay, was obviously a lark.

It was about a civil servant in Hungary who disappears in his cereal bowl.

The other nine were by former MFA students of —University.

What a carefully timed ploy, I thought. Hello, Robert? Robert McDormody from Fiction 301? Listen, I’ve got the craziest idea.

I moved all ten to the —Magazine trash folder.

Then I resubmitted Ms. Puig’s Garden.

I put it in the in-progress folder. I starred it. I also commented on the title: “Intriguing. I’m interested already!” I turned the dining room chair towards the foggy window and began to read Ms. Puig’s Garden with fresh eyes.

When Sarah came down at 9 o’clock, I’d already eaten breakfast and designed two Incredible Logos for a grand total of $10, minus processing fees. I was sitting high on the hog, as they say. Sarah actually detected my financial success glow and kissed me on the lips.

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MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS

She said, “You’re looking rosy and rested.”

The truth was, Sarah was looking rosy and rested. I hadn’t slept at all. I was feeling employed though.

Sarah said, “How’d it go at work?”

I was surprised Sarah had put it that way honestly. She always said I was wasting my time making logos.

I said, “Two new orders.”

Sarah said, “I meant the other work.”

I said, “Oh.” Ultimately, I’d passed on Ms. Puig’s Garden. While it had its compelling moments, and characters of merit, I decided that in the end, it just wasn’t the right fit for —Magazine.

I wished myself luck placing it elsewhere.

I invited myself to submit again in the future.

I made a toaster waffle and a pot of coffee.

Then I checked my Twitter account to see if I had any new DMs or if anyone had liked something someone else had said about me.

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Contortion The photography of Julia Fullerton-Batten

Hasselblad Ambassador and winner of the IPA ‘Photographer of the Year Award’ Julia Fullerton-Batten shares her newest collection with En Bloc -- a stunning, carefully-considered exploration of the millennia-old art of contortion. The series is a balanced and sophisticated commentary on the extremes of human physicality, and yet, amidst delicately prescribed dichotomies and choreographed juxtaposition, Fullerton-Batten invokes the contemplation of something far beyond the mere corporeal.

Simply titled: ‘Contortion’, these photographs are within the same breath both fragility and strength, innocence and sensuality; playful and yet wildly introspective.

Against a meticulously selected background, each composition declares itself more vibrant than the last. Here, the seemingly inhuman feat of contortion reveals something spectacularly human.

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28 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

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30 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

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32 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

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© Julia Fullerton-Batten

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© Julia Fullerton-Batten

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Now Again Back Toward Past’s Day->To->Day Stress? Prayer

JewBu realizes in retrospect when a kid (veritably) I didn’t live in present moments too much but rather imagined after put in such efing effort to achieve a measure of success that future would be whole lot brighter though Ger somehow never got off damn

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sad Samsara’s dharma wheel to actually do it right.

Above might have applied only to dark educio years because once you then got into career plus single lucky loving happy marriage well as nuclear family/ close friends current cycles began to truly groove, mesh better together.

Which perhaps is starting to be eroded by our inevitable fears regards old age and sickness and approaching death amen.

Gerard Sarnat

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38 There is always a suspicion Pierre-Paul Pariseau

39 L’Actualité Pierre-Paul Pariseau

40 Beyond Comprehension Pierre-Paul Pariseau

41 The Londoner Pierre-Paul Pariseau

Gimme Some Pope Bone Jim Meirose

Welcome, James Mason. What moves you to come sit with us today?

I am looking for funding to allow me to deal with the current crisis involving the pope.

I, uh—we have no knowledge of any current crisis involving the pope.

Please elaborate.

Sure. The pope’s not only the head of a very huge church but is also a fish of the perch family, with a greenish-brown back and yellow sides pope and pope underparts pope pope pop po p pe poe pope ope pe e pop po pop p’pe epop pope pope pope. And also, it’s no coincidence that the hard whitish tissue making up both pope’s skeleton bones is called bone pope bone pope bone pop bon po bo p b pe be poe boe pope bone ope bon pe bo e b pop one po ne pop one p’pe b’ne epop enob pope bone pope bone pope bone lasso.

Okay. But, I’m a bit lost. Back up and elaborate.

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JIM MEIROSE

Sure. More’s that the fish-pope’s diet mainly consists of small aquatic bugs and larvae meat chops steaks cognac and wine such masses of which are consumed daily it’s as though theses popes are constantly crying out gimme some more pope bone gimm som more please pope bone imm om pop bon catholic chicken is imme ome po bo mme me roman guitar p b gim so pe be gime soe poe boe im’e soe ‘e gumbo pope bone ‘e me ope bon e m’ e b m’ gm’ pop one om’ po ne gim’ som’ pop one gimm’ some Charlie the chicken p’pe b’ne gimme some epop enob gim so pope bone imm om pope bone gimm ome more pope bone gimme some gimme some deep acceleration please pope bone gimme some pope gimme some bone gimme but some the popefish gimme some do you see now, lasso lasso?

It’s coming along. I think I might see, but, the viewers might need more.

As in some games’ big Cuba. Popular hereabouts. So; go on.

Absolutely. In some aquatic environments where they’ve been irresponsibly introduced the popes have become so damaging to their environment that scientists have been frantically searching for a way to bid them a final bon voyage, as Dr. Matthews-son, biologically academic big shot frontman has put it bon voyage pope bone n e gimm som b v pope bone on ge imm om o ya pop bon on yag imme ome bon oyag roman hard catholic skeleton gumbo po bo b’n vo’ge mme me ‘on ‘oyage p b nob egayov bno gim so oyaeg obn pe be ovyage ob gime soe ov-yag b’ poe boe oyage’ non im’e soe ‘e e-oyage vo pope bone yage b’ ‘e me on ope bon no eg’ e m’ ban vayoge e b nib yivoge m’ gm’ the goal is to kill off the species b0n v0yage pop one b om’ =n vo=ge po ne bin viy’ge gim’ som’ von coyage pop one bob voyagw gimm’ some simmering cooked roman gumbo anna chicken from electric buzz buz bln vl-yage p’pe b’ne cpo wpzbhf gimme some opc fhbzpw epop enob ‘p’ ‘ya’ gim so the goal is to kill off the species entirely bon voyage pope bone bon voyage imm om hey hey entirely bon pope bone hey hey voyage pope bone hey hey hey gimm ome while the gumbo is simmering remove church tissue from the danger site more pope bone hey entirely bone the gimme some cooked chicken

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GIMME SOME POPE BONE

quick and slick gimme some pope bone hey hey kill off entirely gimme some pope gimme some bone gimme but some the popefish gimme gimme remove church tissue lasso from the lasso lasso from the danger site, lasso.

In fact, the pope is the first invasive species to have been classified as a nuisance by the non-indigenous nuisance prevention and control program.

As such it needs to be killed off entirely. So, do you see? Do you?

Oh, yes—but this non-indigenous nuisance prevention and control program you mention. I have not heard of this. What of it?

What of it is; it is me all over.

All right. So then— And that’s why I need money. To begin work on a solution. An this work gimme money must bon voyage gime mony begin immediately pope bone gimm mone n e imme oney gimm som mm ne b v gime moey pope bone on ge imm because om o ya pop bon on yag imme ome bon oyag po bo b’n vo’ge mme me ‘on ‘oyage gmme mney p b e y nob egayov bno me ey gim so mme ney oyaeg obn imme because man is oney pe be gie mey ovyage ob ge my gime soe g y ov-yag b’ gi ey poe boe gim ney oyage’ non gimm oney im’e soe gimme money ‘e e-oyage gimm oney vo pope bone gimme money yage b’ gimme money ‘e me because man is in the forest gimme money on ope mm ne bon no gimme money Bambi hey Bambi eg’ e gimme money pope bone hey hey gimme some because man is in the forest Bambi gimme money because man is in, because!

I am sorry, but. Can you repeat that a bit clearer?

No; it’s as simple as pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone— Stop! Hold it—you—

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JIM MEIROSE

—pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone pope bone— Mister Mason, Plaese!

—pope bone pope bone pope bone— Hey Sal! Cut the juice right now!

—pop bone pope— Okay Jack, you’re the boss!

—bone.

Jesus Christ, thank God. Whew.

Lights out.

45

The Lost Summer of 1991 ‘Democracy, or votes for everybody, does not produce constructive solutions of social problems; nor does compulsory schooling help much.’

-- George Bernard Shaw A Malcontent A note to you goops in the staff room, Who put me up to this. I called at the minister’s House, a revival excrescence steeped in antiquity – Charcoal crags, and a sinister midnight Teetering in its towers. A gaunt elder Came to the door, with only one good ear, Which he bent to my name – name I repeated Several times.

This, the minister’s Private retreat, is his token to petty convention.

Trained penguin kept me in the vestibule, Admiring the dilution of sunshine, angular shafts Through distant roof lights, descending Through an explosion of dust on the gilt frames And facture.

I explained. I wheeze Because there’s a fug in shrouds in the staff room, And am numbed at the bedlam of morning class. I commanded: Allow me to pass those puffed-up portraits.

Lead me to the minister.

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Was the man bull-headed?

Should I mark my way with chalk? Unravel A yellow skein? First reference was a glove, Pushed down on its open palm, in its grip A predecessor’s calling card, self-reflecting in a salver, Salver on polished mahogany.

Marble, A veined omnipresence, flecked or speckled, climbed The stair. A life-size chequer-board was a marquetry Of parallelograms across the floor. Clocks were the minister’s stolidity, Pendulous, and chiming a century too slow.

Then an arch Into the air of his hat room, first flush there a brushed topper Crowning a pedestal, and broad brims and fedoras Slanting over a blank fraternity of busts.

That penguin Flapped behind me, a touchy, grey-lipped servitor, Noting I hadn’t wiped my smirk. ‘Sir!’ he intoned.

(I’d picked up a boater, incredibly Of my old school.)

The garden gave from the music room, Room plump with imperilled runs up and down the clavichord, And in there the minister’s wife – huge hands, leather tan, Head convulsing. ‘Please don’t get up.’ I had the window view From here: fruit trees, spotted in the wilds of autumn, And there was the minister, served with coffee on the terrace, His elbow to the balustrade, on his own accord stirring In the cream.

What should I do? Genuflect?

Fumble with a pocket filled with coins and keys?

47

‘Minister, We must talk.’

The Minister ‘Policy, you say, yet how shall I Make it clear? You can’t breathe An exclusive air when policy is fortune, Or share the light of another man’s future When yours is bent through a vacuum.

The world’s a gyre, floating In that question mark of cream.’

A door Had closed with a thud, as that flunkey, Now in a driver’s coat, had puckered His walnut looks and began to levitate On weightless shoes. He brought me a mug, And an aluminium spoon.

‘A schoolboy cap Was the first thing I put in my hat room, A deep maroon with russet piping.

A colour scheme I don’t expect you to know.

Reminds me eternally of “Skragga”, Teacher who stooped apocalyptically, Hands in a permanent dusting, a stub of chalk Always in his grip. He’d got a classy cough, or to quote The sixth-form rag “A hacking Peter Stuyvesant”.

Naïve, terrified and empathetic dayboys – Not a single politician among them – spluttered Through his maths discourse, a subject Riddled with too much detail. That’s something I never grasped, and especially do not now.

I gamble, but am prudent With investments.’

48

I told him his valet’s boater Bore the Skinners’ insignia, amazingly My own.

‘A tedious grammar, Wanting to be a public school. The man flopped On the rugby field, loathing the mists, the Kentish mud, The steaming cubes of lard – the hundred atavistic grunts, Sundown, scrum down. This had academic repercussions.

Gack. His name’s Gack. Never graced polished marquetry.

CV is a protracted read, ranging from life with used cars To brief success in the laundry biz. Admired my name, He said, for so long sprinkled in amber, a colouration Traced to the village pump, and evolution To the family brewery. As a graduate I sold my shares, And invested instead in all that post-war tearing out Of Albion’s timbers – the rot replaced with glass, Concrete, steel. So I regenerate myself, In towns and public concourses. Somewhere I have a plaque, to whose benefaction &c.

I like to think of flags, flamed in azure, as a universal Handshake. Tall buildings. A straight horizon.

Unadorned cornices.’

Gack retreated to the paddock, Where he unlocked the car. His minister said in passing How he knew, because he’d studied evidence, what the masses Want. His department’s social scientists had borne it up In learned tomes, ‘Too tedious to read’, but distilled By a team of researchers, and personified As Randal.

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Scientific Evidence ‘How, from these coarsened ululations, chime, or line, Vogues in social revolution, does a peasantry forgo Its village limitations? I joust with your mass-education “experts” Practically every day, who in a vent of political rage Counter my questions, with questions. They argue not the facts, But a dearth (they say) of “leadership and vision” – a phrase My advisors do not greet with smiles. The movement of capital Is the first principle in a peasants’ revolt – And is how we notate our human liberty, a point Half grasped in the covetous glare Of your pre-historic Randal.

‘He doesn’t go far With his parish blasphemies, having conjured a flimsy Mephisto, A clownish town guide for a life of Saturday nights, a binge Metropolitan in its airs, a vulgar dream of vulgar sophistication.

How you enhance the parishioner’s élan, is how you make a balance sheet Of man.

‘My cabinet colleagues analytically fret over the blips And dips shown on the Treasury’s national temperature chart.

Inflation’s our tonic, not a personal threat. Your petitions Won’t help with the PSBR. Education for all and personal growth Are not the humanising catalyst you say they are, as is shown In any statistical sample, with Randal’s social progress More properly defined through ambitions of money, leisure, Work outdoors or sitting at a desk….

A limousine, Equal to all road conditions, snaked up a rutted track (Not like our modern highways), and parked at the forge, Purring. The boy’s inhibitions, despite his smoky dream –

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Of not such a load, not such a life as this – made him resist.

In his face, this showed. It showed in how he spoke – This a parochial stammer. In such cases sedatives help – So, Randal Esq, please to roll up that sleeve.

You can make this easy by remaining calm.

My driver, Gack, reported back in a sense of something Achieved, and eased his way smoothly round the windings Of my coastal corniche, dumping the patient In my laboratory.

‘I had him anaesthetised On the table, and by it showed an “education” wasn’t out of reach.

A slight social uplift soon enabled potential for growth, the workingman Fondly adhered to tax thresholds. His new identity, his brand new Clan, is the core of the Party’s revised fiscal policy. How trenchantly He’ll guard his mortgage plot, build unlikely, flat-top extensions, Choose, from brochures, his holiday resort. Our strategy Will make him capable of choice in a range Of pensions.’

The minister’s car purred over the cobbles, His hatted driver inscrutable at the wheel. The minister rose From his table.

‘I see here is Gack.

Now, as far as I am willing, I have given you my time – please Regard it as a concession – I am now due in the House.

That point is not debatable. Now, where did I put My hat…?’

I said thank you to the minister. It had been An education.

Peter Cowlam

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52 City Life Sean Wang

53 City Life 2 Sean Wang

54 City Life 3 Sean Wang

Column Dwellers Steven Millhauser

THE COLUMNS The columns of our town range in height from 60 to 140 feet. Most are constructed of stone and mortar, though recent years have seen a turn toward concrete reinforced with ribbed steel. All columns have four sides of equal length, not less than four feet or more than five. The stones are supplied by a local masonry contractor and may be rough or smooth. Evidence of wooden columns in earlier centuries comes from correspondence studied by town historians, but no trace of any wooden structure has survived. Our columns rise from a scattering of back and side yards, from the wooded slope of the park by the river, from the thicket behind the parking lot of the mall, from the strip of lawn that borders the town graveyard. All columns are equipped with a system of ropes and pulleys to assist with the delivery of food and occasional changes of clothing, as well as the daily bucket for waste. At present there are forty-one columns in our town, of which thirty-seven are in use, and one stone-and-mortar column under construction in the backyard of a split-level ranch house on Crommelin Road.

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THE DWELLERS At the top of each column, a dweller lives alone. Ascent is voluntary, as is the decision never to return to the earth below. Although it is tempting for us to think of the dwellers as members of a fanatical sect, they belong to no church and there is no evidence of communication among them. Whether we stroll along the sidewalk of a shady residential street, or drive to a restaurant in the center of town, or shop at the mall beyond the post office, we are aware of them, up there above us, like a species of bird that has landed and will not fly away. They are in fact our sons and daughters, our friends and neighbors.

They have left us and will never return. We do not really know what they are doing up there.

VISITORS Sometimes at the base of a towering column you see a group of visitors from other towns, who talk among themselves, point up at the distant top, and hold up iPhone cameras in an effort to capture something glimpsed above.

We are of two minds about the visitors. We feel pride that our pleasant but rather ordinary town contains unusual elements worthy of the attention of strangers, while at the same time we resent that very attention, which feels like the kind of curiosity directed at freaks in a sideshow. Our columns, as they are stared at by visitors, become a form of entertainment that makes them part of the familiar world. They are slowly drained of the very sense of strangeness that drew the visitors in the first place.

THE COLUMN TOP The column top is a flat square of stone or concrete no wider than the base.

In this small space, ranging in area from four-by-four feet to five-by-five, a dweller remains until death. The earliest dwellers are believed to have sat motionless on the hard surface, with legs crossed and each foot resting on the thigh of the opposite leg. They are said to have trained themselves to

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sleep in the same position. The first overhead cover for protection against the weather is recorded in the late nineteenth century, though several of our historians believe that temporary protective structures date back at least another hundred years. All column tops are now supplied with flat-roofed huts of stone or concrete, which leave room beyond one wall for standing, sitting, or walking. One of the four walls is open but contains a panel that slides up and down, to permit exposure to fresh air during good weather. All concrete columns, as well as newer columns of stone, enclose a central pipe for the delivery of heated air during the cold nights of winter. The little evidence we possess suggests that today’s dwellers spend long hours seated inside their huts, emerging at irregular intervals to stand still or to walk back and forth slowly. Each hut contains nothing but a rubber mat. The waste bucket, with its roll of toilet paper, may stand inside or out.

ELLEN OLSHAN At the age of forty-six, Ellen Olshan had been married happily for twenty years. She was the mother of two loving daughters, one a junior in high school and one a sophomore away at college. Ellen worked part-time in our library, a job she liked in a building she loved. Exactly when the change began remains unclear. She described it to one close friend as a slight restlessness, though she immediately questioned the word “restlessness” and said the feeling was more like wanting something you didn’t have, without knowing what that something was. When she discussed it with her husband, he listened carefully and suggested that they take time off from work and go on a vacation, just the two of them. Ellen embraced the idea but within a week begged off, realizing that what she needed wasn’t a change of scene or a pleasurable distraction but something else, something else. That summer she began taking long walks.

She had always been an energetic walker, refusing to drive the ten blocks from her house to the library, but now she walked all over town, looking around at every porch and parked car as if she were searching for something she had lost.

One day she found herself standing near a column in a vacant lot out past the auto-parts shop. In the past she had accepted the columns the way we all more

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or less did, as odd but familiar features of our town. Now she began to seek them out. She would stand in the near distance and stare up at the simple hut high above, which sometimes seemed to quiver in bright sunlight and at other times to grow darker than the column itself. Sometimes she walked over to the base of a column and placed her hand against the hardness. She especially liked the many patterns of different-sized stone, which reminded her of old walls in farmers’ fields. Ellen had never seen a dweller ascend to the top and tried to imagine what it might be like. One day she returned home long after dark from the columns in the park by the river. Her husband and high-school daughter, greeting her with worried looks that changed to immense relief, said they had first called the library and finally the police. An impatience came over Ellen. Didn’t these people understand? When the decision to live above came to her, it was accompanied by a ripple of alarm, which gradually grew quiet and left only a settled calm. The night she told her husband, his mouth trembled and his eyes brightened with tears. Why? he wanted to know. Why? Ellen answered that she didn’t know why. She knew only that she could no longer continue in the old way.

HISTORY Although detailed historical records go back only to the early nineteenth century, bits of evidence from a variety of sources have persuaded most of our historians that columns were present as far back as the late seventeenth century, some hundred years before our village was incorporated into a town.

There is no agreement about what purpose the first columns served. We begin to hear of citizens mounting to the tops and living there only in the early years of the eighteenth century, at which time there appear to have been no more than six or seven columns. The custom may have had some connection with the church. The oldest of our present-day columns is believed to date back to those years. The first significant expansion in the number of columns took place soon after the Civil War, perhaps as a sign of the town’s resistance to the Industrial Revolution. Other notable increases occurred between the two world wars and in our present era. Nothing whatever is known about the first

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column of all, but one attempt to account for its origin is a tale that is said to have survived for three hundred years.

THE TALE The tale tells us that the first column was built by a young man unhappy in love, who ascended in order to spend the remainder of his days alone and in sorrow. The woman he loved, passing the column every day, slowly came to fall in love with the young man seated above, whose love she had rejected.

Now she could no longer bear a life without him. Stone by stone she erected a column of her own, not far from the young man’s, and ascended to the top.

There they sat facing each other day after day, never speaking but delighting in each other’s company high above the village. As the months turned into years, their bodies weakened but their love grew stronger. They died within moments of each other, bending forward in farewell, and were buried side by side. Historians agree that the tale has no verifiable basis in fact and cannot be relied upon to provide any knowledge whatever concerning the origin of our columns, but none of this prevents us from reciting it to our children. Even as we do so, an uneasiness comes over us, for the story reduces the mystery of the columns to a series of easily grasped romantic feelings that cannot account for what drives the dwellers to ascend, never to return.

WHAT THEY DO What do they do up there? We know that the dwellers spend most of their time sitting motionless, but exactly what they do while sitting motionless is a matter of dispute. Some say that the dwellers have given up on life and ascend for the sole purpose of dying. It’s true enough that they have abandoned life on earth, our life, but it is entirely misleading to claim that they are seeking death, since all dwellers take nourishment precisely in order to keep themselves alive, often for decades. Others say that the dwellers are misfits who are unable to face the difficult choices of everyday life and ascend in order to escape. There is little doubt that the ascent represents a refusal

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of everyday life, but the suggestion that the dwellers have chosen an easier path is impossible to sustain, since most of us can imagine nothing more difficult than a life spent alone on top of a column. It is far more likely, as many of us believe, that the dwellers have chosen a life of contemplation, though exactly what is meant by contemplation remains unclear. Are they attempting to break free of the world of sensory delusion into a universe of spiritual transcendence? Are they searching for the true meaning of life, by removing their minds and bodies from the diversions of the material world?

Are they waiting for something they believe will come to them, if only they are able to practice sufficient patience and discipline? Many of us think that any interpretation of their purpose limits them unfairly, for it implies that all dwellers have a straightforward and definable goal, of the kind we know all too well, down here in the world below.

AWARENESS We are aware of them, of course, our towering columns, with their sometimes half-visible dwellers at the top, whether we take a stroll in our neighborhoods, or go on a picnic with our families in the park by the river, or step from the hardware store onto the parking lot. Even if we pay no attention to them, we know they are there. They form a familiar and accepted part of our town, like the seven church steeples or the rows of transmission towers in the field behind the shopping center. They may even be said to offer a kind of comfort, the way all familiar objects do. At the same time, we know perfectly well that our columns are strange and disturbing objects, unknown in other towns.

What are they doing there, as they reach into the sky? And what are you doing down there, they seem to whisper, with your predictable lives? When thoughts of the dwellers pass through our minds, we wonder sometimes whether they are as aware of us as we are of them. Do they catch glimpses of us far below, pushing mowers across our lawns or blowing snow from our driveways? Do they hear our buzz saws, our car radios? Do they ever wish to join us, in our world of backyard barbecues and family birthday parties? Do they feel pity for us, down there in the little world, without the courage to break free?

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OPPOSITION Some argue that our columns should be torn down and hauled away. Such structures, they claim, serve no purpose other than to lure weak-minded citizens to their death, while at the same time they cause tremendous suffering to families and friends below. As if that weren’t enough, they are perpetual distractions from the business of real life. They are unsightly blemishes that render our town ugly and grotesque. From a practical standpoint, they take up small but valuable pieces of public land that might be put to better use: a flagpole, a gazebo, a memorial commemorating the loss of our heroic young in World War II, a statue of our one Revolutionary War general. The opposers constitute a small minority of our citizens and are regularly outvoted at town meetings, but their voices persist. We who are in favor of preserving the columns, we who cannot imagine our town without them, sometimes ask ourselves, in the small hours of the night, what it is that we are defending.

DANIEL FRIEDMAN The summer after law school, Daniel Friedman returned to our town to be with his family before undertaking an internship at a major firm in a nearby city. Although he looked forward to leading an independent life as an adult, Daniel loved his home and was determined to throw himself into the old routines before moving away. He remembered fondly everything about the old house where he’d spent his first seventeen years: the faded living-room rug that had once belonged to his grandmother, the piano by the fireplace, the wooden handrail on the carpeted stairs, the view of the backyard beneath the raised blinds of his two bedroom windows. As in the old days, he went with his parents to the park by the river for weekend picnics, turned over hamburgers on the charcoal grill out back, went shopping in town with his mother for summer shirts and a bathing suit, talked with his father late at night. He took up again with a few old friends from high school, who now lived in town and had started families of their own. Sometimes it seemed to Daniel that he had returned to the strange summer before college, when

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he felt suspended between the life he had always known and the new life awaiting him. Was he still that boy of seventeen? Things were on hold with his law-school girlfriend, who had taken a job halfway across the country and seemed never to be home. Daniel began setting out on walks all over town, savoring the details of familiar neighborhoods and venturing into new ones.

He loved walking under thick-leaved branches, stepping into the sun, staring down at velvety clusters of dark-green moss in the spaces between rectangles of sidewalk. One day he found himself standing not far from one of the stone columns out by the reservoir. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring up with his head bent back. As a child he had asked his mother and father many questions about the columns and the people on top, the same kind of questions he had asked about Eskimos and alligators. At the base of the column a teenager in ripped jeans and a t-shirt sat on the ground with his back curved against the stone as he bent over his iPhone. Daniel removed his hands from his pockets, kicked at a dandelion, turned away. Later that afternoon he walked up to another column and drew his palm slowly across the uneven stone. He now made it his business, during his daily wanderings, to visit every one of our columns, the older ones of stone and the newer ones of stone or smooth concrete, until they were all as familiar to him as the wooden posts and sloping roofs of the porches of his street. Exactly when he knew what he was going to do, he couldn’t say for sure. It was as if his preparation for a new life had taken an unexpected and irrevocable turn. His parents, terrified, begged him to reconsider. When it became apparent that his mind would not bend, his father accepted the decision and made a final request of his son: he begged Daniel to permit the column to be erected at the side of the house, between the strip of hollyhock and the high hedge. Daniel, who was indifferent to the location of the column, agreed with a shrug. The masonry contractor required permission from the town hall before starting work, in order to ensure that all safety regulations would be complied with. As the blocks of stone and layers of mortar began to rise, surrounded by wooden scaffolding, Daniel prepared to take leave of his house from cellar to attic, room by room, wall by wall, until it came over him that he had spent the entire summer taking leave of everything he had once loved. His real life was about to begin.

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FINANCES The earliest columns for which records exist were paid for privately. All were constructed by local masons, with the aid of one or more assistants.

An additional fee was charged for the rope and pulley system attached to the completed column, while a monthly rental cost for the use of public land could be avoided by building on one’s own property. By far the greatest expense was the food itself, which was provided twice daily and might be required not simply for months but for years. Evidence suggests that charitable institutions, usually associated with a church, contributed what they could to the maintenance of the diet. Despite the charities, the system clearly favored the well-connected and well-to-do, thereby creating the paradox of a life of constriction and deprivation affordable only by the upper levels of our society. A remedy began in the middle of the nineteenth century, when an association called Citizens Above was founded by the wealthy father of a daughter who spent her last fifteen years at the top of a column. The money, skillfully invested, produced income used exclusively for the support of column dwellers. Citizens Above, now known as the Community Service Association, or CSA, today provides all expenses necessary for the construction and maintenance of a column, as well as for twice-yearly inspections and all repairs required of older columns.

A number of local institutions, as well as private citizens, regularly contribute to the CSA, which has become one of the most profitable organizations in our town. Those who oppose the columns are particularly angered by the Association, which, they say, not only encourages anti-social behavior but squanders money better spent on low-income housing, an expanded teaching staff in our middle school, and additional downtown parking.

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DESCENT All dwellers ascend with the fixed intention of never returning. In this they have been remarkably successful throughout the course of our history.

Nevertheless, exceptions have occurred. Records show that in the year 1902, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Charles Vanderberg ascended a column in a field owned by his grandfather. Vanderberg was the successful owner of a local business that sold farming supplies and equipment. His startling decision devastated his wife and two sons, his numerous aunts and uncles and cousins, his many friends, and the community at large, for he was a respected and well-liked man eagerly sought after for every kind of social occasion. After two years seated at the top of his column, during which his wife and sons operated the business, Vanderberg one day descended on the platform used for delivering food. For six months he returned to his old life, never speaking of his two years up above. Soon he began to show a new interest in town affairs. He ran for Commissioner of Public Safety and won by a landslide. Three years later he was appointed by the Board of Selectmen to the position of Town Manager. Vanderberg devoted the remaining years of his life to the welfare of our town, throwing himself passionately into everything from building construction to education to the personal concerns of private citizens. At his funeral, one of his sons said that his father’s two years up above had somehow had the effect of drawing him closer to the affairs of the town below, though how or why that happened he couldn’t say. A more recent example is that of Mary DelSanto, whom many of us knew from school. She was a lively girl who loved to party. She also loved to lie alone in her room and read long nineteenth-century novels. As early as sophomore year in high school, Mary began telling us that her goal in life was to join the column dwellers. We laughed, rolled our eyes, and slammed our lockers shut. After high school she worked part-time in the post office while applying to colleges.

It was shortly after her first acceptance letter that she announced her decision to ascend. A group of us watched as she rose slowly on the platform along the side of the column. We continued to watch as the empty platform came back down. Shaken, we agreed to meet once a week to honor her memory. Three

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days later someone reported seeing Mary DelSanto at night through her second-floor bedroom window. It turned out that she had descended from her column on the food platform early that morning. Mary shut herself indoors for the rest of the summer, refusing to reply to phone messages or answer the door. That fall she left for college but returned home after a few months, where she resumed her indoor life and shunned her friends. Rumor had it that she was suffering from depression, from drink, from drugs. Sometimes we glimpsed her at night, walking with her head down. None of us tried to speak to her. Some said she had never recovered from her journey up above, others said she was so ashamed of her return to the world below that she was unable to adjust to her old life. One day she and her parents moved to another town. We never saw her again.

O YOU WHO DWELL O you who dwell high above us, you who have left us for another world, tell us what it’s like up there! Is it like being in our town, without the town? Do you ever grow bored? Do you ever feel joy? Have you passed beyond boredom and joy? What are you thinking? Are you thinking? Are you searching for something that has no name? Do we have no name? Are we nothing to you? Are you so far above us that you are filled with a glory we can never imagine? Do we embarrass you? Do we disgust you? Do you remember that you were once one of us? Do you ever fear that you have wasted your lives? Do you know that we admire you? Do you know that we need you? O you who dwell above, do you know that we make you possible?

OTHER FAILINGS Descent is the most decisive way of failing to meet the challenge of the columns. More moderate ways include any attempt to make contact with other dwellers, any attempt to make contact with people below, and any breaking of silence through shouting, talking, or other distracting noises.

Town regulations state that an infraction, once detected and verified, will result

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in immediate removal from the column top by trained guards. Records show that such incidents are extremely rare. Even rarer is a fall from the column, an event that has occurred only once in our history. In 1927 a young man of twenty-six plunged to his death, whether accidentally or deliberately has never been determined. The column, known as the Death Tower, remained empty for thirty years, before a young woman, unrelated to the dead man, ascended and remained for the rest of her life.

TOWN REGULATIONS From the very beginning our town has kept watch over its columns, but not until the 1950s was the decision made to formalize our oversight by recording all rules and regulations and depositing the record in the office of the First Selectman.

The largest number of regulations are concerned with safety, both of the dwellers above and the citizens below. Inspections of all columns are conducted twice a year by teams of experts hired by the Commissioner of Public Safety. No column has ever been torn down, although the town is legally entitled to do so. Repairs deemed necessary to crumbling mortar, weathered stone, and cracked concrete must be attended to promptly. Townspeople and visitors are permitted to gather at the base of a column, where there are sometimes benches, and even to sit with their backs against the base, but they are forbidden to strike any hard object against the stone or concrete. This last rule came about when it was discovered that several teenagers were visiting the columns late at night with hammers and chisels in order to sell fragments as souvenirs to out-of-town customers. Other paragraphs of the Town Regulations define the behavior of citizens with respect to the dwellers above. No communication is permitted from below, including the flashing of mirrors, the display of signs with enormous letters, and the sending of written messages by means of balloons, kites, or birds. No toy drones are permitted in the vicinity of the columns. A small number of regulations govern what might be called decorum: no paint may be applied to the columns, no posters affixed, no objects of any kind attached in any manner. To a great extent, the regulations reflect the anxieties of those with a family member dwelling above. In practice, citizens of all ages respect the columns or ignore them altogether.

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WAKING Day after day we wake from sleep. Suddenly the world streams in on us. We see! The forearm on the bedspread. The wood-shine at the top of the closet door. The streak of sunlight on the ceiling. Some say that our waking is no true waking but only another form of sleep. Is that what they are doing up there? Trying to wake from our waking?

DEATH When a dweller dies, the town is responsible for returning the body to the world below. A problem that repeatedly arises is how to determine that the dweller has fully passed over into death. The first sign that the end is near is the return of the food platform with all food untouched, but often a dweller ceases to eat for many days as life slowly departs. Current practice is to wait for a period of three days of untouched food before a doctor is lifted to the top. If the panel of the hut is closed, the doctor has permission to slide it open and examine the body inside. If, as is often the case, the dweller has not yet died, the doctor arranges the body comfortably and returns below. The visit is repeated once a day until death is complete. A frequent objection is that these visits, however well intended, destroy the privacy of the dweller, who has devoted a life to absolute solitude. Defenders of the visits argue that the body, though technically alive, is almost always unconscious. They point out that to delay the first visit for any length of time is to risk allowing the untended body to undergo visible stages of decomposition: bloating, green discoloration, leakage of blood-filled foam from the nose and mouth. Supporters of the present system argue that physical decay is a matter of indifference to the dead body. We continue to debate the issue at town meetings. Once the body is removed, a worker cleans and sanitizes the upper surface, wipes down the inner and outer walls of the hut, and replaces the mat with a new one. The column is now ready to receive the next dweller.

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JANET POWELL Even as a young child, Janet Powell loved everything about the columns. She would sit in her stroller, clutching a white bear, and raise her eyes higher and higher to the place where the column disappeared into the sky. Her mother and father, both grade-school teachers, answered her questions thoughtfully, with serious faces. By the time she entered fifth grade, Janet knew where she would spend her life, though she also knew that you weren’t allowed to go up there until you were eighteen years old. During this phase she kept trying to catch sight of a dweller, sometimes staring up for hours at a time.

Once she thought she saw a leg up there, extending from beneath a robe or gown, but a moment later there was nothing but sky. In high school she spent long afternoons visiting the columns, preparing for her new life. Toward the end of senior year her boyfriend broke up with her, complaining that she never paid any attention to him. She turned eighteen that summer, and on the morning of her birthday she vowed to begin life on top of a column on the day she completed college. After graduating from college she returned to our town, telling a friend that she had to settle a few things before leaving the lower world forever. For a while she lived with an older man, worked a number of odd jobs, joined a group that studied Tai-Chi, read books on the history of Buddhism. She decided to ascend at noon on the day before her thirtieth birthday. On that day she woke with a sore throat and a fever.

Shortly before her thirty-fifth birthday, Janet Powell spent an entire afternoon and evening seated cross-legged at the base of a column, preparing herself for the long journey. Her parents, who saw her twice a week for dinner, no longer knew what to say to her. By the time she was forty, Janet Powell’s dark hair was streaked with gray. One day she felt her first burst of anger at the columns, which were preventing her from leading any kind of life. That night she woke at three in the morning, dressed quickly, and hurried over to one of the columns, where she stood with her head bowed against the stone as she begged forgiveness. At fifty she was often seen in different parts of town, at stray hours of the day and night, standing by a column with her head bent back and her gray hair flowing over her shoulders. We wondered what drove

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her, we wondered what held her in place. Surely by now she must have known that she would never ascend. It was as if she lived in a middle world between two worlds, facing both ways. One morning at dawn a jogger found her lying unconscious at the foot of a column. She recovered, but now when we saw her around town she was bent over, feeling her way with a cane. Janet Powell died at the age of seventy-six, of pancreatic cancer, and was buried in the family plot. Those who wish for the destruction of the columns have turned her life into a cautionary tale, while others defend her as a tragic heroine. Already she is slipping into the past, as if she had lived two hundred years ago, though sometimes, walking along a sidewalk in the late afternoon and catching a glimpse of a distant column, we seem to hear a voice that whispers: Do you dare?

HEIGHTS One decision a dweller must make concerns the height of the column, which in accordance with Town Regulations cannot exceed 140 feet. We nondwellers imagine ourselves choosing the tallest column, but in fact such a choice is uncommon. In the days of private payment, it was understandable that a family might wish to save money by paying for fewer stones, but even in the present era of public financing the columns rarely rise to the fullest permissible height. What might be the reason? One man, in an interview with our local paper, said that his sister had rejected the idea of maximum height, on the grounds that such a choice struck her as boastful and competitive, as if height were a contest you could win or lose. That desire, she said, was a sign that the climber had not yet broken free from the world below. It remains true that some dwellers do in fact choose the full 140 feet, perhaps in the hope of being more distant from possible distractions below. All these considerations remind us that we know nothing about our dwellers, who hover above us at every moment of the day and night.

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OUR TOWN WITHOUT COLUMNS It is possible that, at some time in the not too-distant-future, our columns will be taken down. Perhaps a fatal accident will prove decisive, or perhaps a new generation will turn against these all-too-visible structures that rise up like unpleasant reminders of a rejected past. When we try to imagine our town without columns, an anxiety comes over us. It isn’t as if our town would then become like other towns. Rather, our town would cease to exist at all, as if life in our streets and shops and living rooms can take place only in the presence of our columns and their dwellers. And what if our town itself were to disappear, leaving only the columns? Wouldn’t they gradually fade away? Don’t they depend on the town being here, in order for them to be our elsewhere?

A LATE SUMMER WALK IN THE PARK A few days ago I took a walk along one of the wooded trails of the park by the river, stopping at the base of a column in a clearing not far from the shore.

This spot is one of my favorite places in our town: the sounds of children, on the other side of the trees, playing in the water; the column of stone and mortar rising high above the tree-tops into the late afternoon blue of the August sky; the familiar shape of each reddish-brown or speckled gray stone in the column’s base. In the warm shade I sat down with my back against a broad oak, facing the column. At this angle I could not see all the way to the top, which was just as well, for I had no desire to catch a distant glimpse of the upper hut, or to think at all of the dweller living high above. Half asleep in the late afternoon warmth, I imagined myself at the top of the column, sitting straight-backed with each foot resting on the opposite thigh as I stared out through the raised panel of my hut. It was an image I’d often had as a child, and it had begun to return recently. After all, I was fifty-nine years old, not far from retirement. I had had a good life, all things considered, but apart from my marriage I had pursued no passion to its conclusion. It was not too late. Even as I sat there dreaming my way to the top, where I would live far

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above the trees and the river and the rooftops of our town, I understood that I was not destined to be a dweller. But my understanding in no way interfered with the pleasure of the imagining. I would spend the rest of my life up there, opening myself wide to whatever might await me. At last I would discover what it was that some of us searched for, high over the town. I must have drifted off, for I was startled awake by the sound of voices. A young couple, holding hands, stood talking and laughing at the base of the column. I rose, wished them a good day, and left the clearing. As I continued through the park, I passed two other columns, but no need came over me to stop again.

In my own way, I had just spent a lifetime at the top of a column. It was one of the things we liked to do, we people who lived below, we who loved the feel of the earth under our feet. In the warm air, heavy with the scent of pine needles, I could smell the river. I turned, saluted my distant column, and continued on my way.

71

72 Untitled Liora Goldstein

Amongst the shadows Liora Goldstein

73

74 Flying Lessons Kristen DiSano

Merlot I am drinking wine

while my housemate shags upstairs and I will write poetry before the night is through. there is red wine

on an unfinished essay and reheated pasta that’s already gone cold.

I am bleeding red wine between my legs and some point this week I must wash the blood from my sheets and hang them over our bannister to dry.

Elizabeth Train Brown

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76 Stairs Tereza Kleovoulou

Lines and Angles Anne-Julie Hynes

77

Salton Sea Elegy Brenton Woodward The car broke down thirty miles out of Indio. The lake—the Sea—came up out of the dead fields on the right, and you were staring at it, thinking about all those millions of gallons of chemicals and fertilizer and sewage deadending right there in that psychotically blue water with its white shores and its sour smell seeping in through the vents, and then the car shuddered and died in the middle of the highway and wouldn’t start—wouldn’t do anything at all, because I never fixed that oil leak and you never checked the oil level and you drove it bleeding for three hundred miles until the engine seized—and you had to put it in neutral and get out and push kind of diagonally against the asphalt with your feet slipping in those ratty high-tops, both hands on the steering wheel, so you could get the thing off the road before somebody came along and smashed right into it.

Not that there was much danger of that, though, which you realize while you’re sitting in the shade of the passenger side. Nobody coming either way, no traffic at all since Indio. That godawful smell all around you, like potatoes rotting in a bucket of semen.

You take the envelope out of your back pocket. It’s warm and limp from the long drive, and the card pokes out at the corners where it’s worn through the envelope. You flip it over. Your address—our address, the address of the house we both grew up in and that you might someday come back to—is penned in neat block capitals in the middle of the envelope, so familiar it’s invisible. You read the return address again:

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Norman Rathskeller 307A South Flamingo Lane Bombay Beach, CA 92257

You’ve never met this man. Our grandfather. Never spoken to him, never seen him, only gotten these lame grocery-store birthday cards every year, same as me. Seventeen of them, all signed “Love and God Bless, Grandpa R,” all holding one fresh five-dollar bill. Apparently him and Dad never got along. It’s strange the things you never think to ask about. And by you I mean me, I guess. But you never asked either.

Bombay Beach is still twenty miles away, your phone says. Too far to carry all the shit you brought with you—everything you thought you’d need, plus all your tagging “equipment”. A couple rattle-cans and a cardboard stencil, but who am I to judge, right. Maybe it’s art after all.

But then somebody does come along, of course, in one of those maroon minivans from the nineties. Half the windows are flapping plastic sheets and the tailpipe is smoking like a go-cart’s, but they stop when you wave at them. A guy about your age sticks his face out the driver window as you walk up to the van.

“You’re not a chick,” he says.

“Nope.”

“I fuckin’ told you that was a dude, you fuckin’ idiot,” you hear somebody else yell from the backseat.

You stand there looking at the guy, his hair spiked up all crazy and so shiny black he might have painted it, and there are safety pins hanging out of his earlobes, and he’s watching you, and you’re not really sure whether you want a ride from these people or not, but then the guy says, “Where you headed?” and you tell him, “Bombay Beach.”

He cackles and his big black spiky hair shivers.

“No shit!” he says, and pulls his head back in to tell his friends. You wait, looking down the highway. Nobody else coming. The sliding door opens and another face pops out to look at you, grinning.

“Get your stuff, man, come on,” he says. This one has a shaved head

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and a mark on its cheek, a smudge or birthmark, you can’t tell. You get your backpack and paint gear out of my ruined car—nobody’s car now, another abandoned junker for Caltrans to tow away in a few weeks. They back the van up with the rear hatch open, like a hippo coming at you with open jaws, and the guy in the backseat is almost vomited up onto the hood of the dead car when they jerk to a stop two feet from its front bumper. You put your stuff in the hippo’s mouth next to a car battery and go to sit in the back.

“Ah ah, stranger, you’re sitting up front where I can see you,” the spiky-haired driver says. The passenger door has one of the plastic sheets for a window, and as you’re about to open it a third face jams itself against the sheet, tongue slathering, nose snubbed. You jerk back and they all laugh.

The passenger door opens and a straggle-bearded guy with bright blue eyes steps out. He’s easily six inches taller than you. His oversized black shorts flap around his shins as he shuffles to the sliding door. You get in. The van pulls onto the highway.

“What’s your name?”

“Carl,” you say, even though Mom and Dad named you Christopher.

“Well, Carl,” says the driver, “I’m Keeler, that’s Packrat and Greg.” He gestures toward the backseat. “What the fuck brings you to this shithole?”

“Looking for my grandpa,” you tell him.

“What’s his name?” somebody calls from the backseat. “We probably know him.”

“What do you mean, probably?” Keeler says. “There’s two hundred people live in this fucking shithole and we know every fucking one of them.”

“Norman Rathskeller,” you say, twisting around to look at the guys in the back. The one with the shaved head—Packrat or Greg?—turns out to have a homemade tattoo on his face, not a birthmark. You aren’t sure what it’s supposed to be. Keeler howls from the driver’s seat and pounds on the steering wheel. When you make eye contact with Packrat/Greg he looks away, out the side window. The wispy-bearded guy is staring past you, his blue eyes fixed on Keeler. He looks more like a Greg.

Keeler is still banging on the steering wheel and the right-hand tires hit the rumble strip. He yanks the van back over.

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“Ol’ Ratshit Rathskeller? You Rathskeller’s people?” he says. “I didn’t know he had people. Thought he was a faggot.”

“You know him?”

“Nah. He and my dad went to the same church, but that was before he died. Ratshit, I mean. I’m not that lucky.”

“What the fuck,” you say.

“Excuse the fuck out of me, man, but we don’t all have Barney the goddamn Dinosaur for a dad.”

“I know that—” you say, and what’s more you actually think you do, that’s how naïve you still are, but Keeler cuts you off.

“Some of us have fucking Nazi pig sheriff’s deputy dads who should do everyone a favor and take a fucking bullet. Okay?”

“I think he meant about his grandpa,” one of the backseaters says, the one that looks like a Greg.

“Well shit, that’s what grandparents are for. Fucking dying. Get over it,” Keeler says.

“What the fuck,” you say again, mostly to yourself. Nobody answers.

You stare at the gray highway and the blue water and don’t really see either of them. “When did he die?”

Keeler looks back at Packrat and Greg. “A month ago?”

“Uh huh.”

You pull out the envelope and stare it, then wave it in Keeler’s face.

“Then how did I get this last week? Who mailed it if he was dead?”

Keeler swats it away. “Fuck off, man, I’m driving. Probably him. Shit takes a long-ass time around here, you know?”

You pick up the envelope off the dashboard and start seeing the landscape again. Vague rock formations on the horizon, white dirt on both sides of the highway. That electric water. You can’t even call it a wasteland— more like unfinished. An unfertilized egg of a landscape. Not that you think of it this way, not in these terms. You think of all that blank canvas waiting for bold stencil lines, maybe. Acrylic neoglyphs staring from the sides of boulders.

“Hey, check this out,” Keeler says, pointing to a fanned splatter of old blood as it rushes under them, roadkill long eaten. “Biker got their period.”

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He howls again, laughing, Packrat and Greg joining him. Keeler punches your arm. “Huh?”

You grit your teeth in a sort of smile and nod at him.

“Lighten up, Carl. You’re killing the mood.”

Keeler parks the van in front of a sun-peeling single-wide trailer.

There’s nothing in the lot besides the trailer and the white dirt and some railroad ties half-buried in the ground to mark out a driveway. Keeler, Packrat, and Greg get out and you follow them. The Goose Hole is written in black spraypaint across the cracked siding next to the front door.

“Welcome to the only punk house for fifty miles,” Keeler says.

“You guys live here?”

“Yeah, I mean, sometimes. Most of the time.”

They show you inside. It’s hot and smells like mildew. At one end is the kitchen with an attached closet that might be the bathroom. An orange cable snakes in through a hole in the windowscreen above the sink and ends in an outlet next to an old couch. The rest of the trailer is an empty brown-carpeted room. Greg flops onto the couch and drums on his thighs. Every wall has some sort of message or insignia spraypainted on it. FUCK THE PIGS. Kill the Govermint. Bomb the BEACH. A few swastikas, a crude female torso. A childlike outline of a lizard, maybe a gecko. On the ceiling it says hell is in my head.

“We’re gonna have bands come play here. Maybe in a couple weeks,” Keeler says, looking around and then at you. “You should feel special. Nobody but us has been in here before.”

“Cool,” you say. You point at the gecko. “You guys ever heard of Banksy?”

Greg shakes his head and Packrat stares blankly at you. Keeler snorts.

“Sounds like a eurofag DJ or some shit,” he says. “We’re trying to get, like, hardcore bands.”

“Right. Never mind,” you say. “So can we—”

“What, you wanna smoke?” Keeler says.

“No, man, I want to go see my grandpa’s place,” you say, and your

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voice cracks and they all snicker but fuck it, you never knew the guy and now he’s dead and you don’t know what’s going on and maybe you made a mistake, taking the car and blowing off your final exams, maybe this isn’t going to solve anything, is what you’re thinking. So maybe you’ve got some sense after all, or at least a sense that someone who did have some sense wouldn’t be doing this shit. Which is true.

“Okay, prettyboy, let’s drop everything and do what you want to do,” he says, kind of yells, but when you go back outside him and Packrat and Greg follow you.

The lake smell, the liquefying produce and cum and cat piss now, too, is somehow worse after the mildew smell of the trailer. Packrat notices your face and winks at you. The little tattoo scrunches up and down.

“The smell?” he says.

You give him a no-shit look. “Let me guess: you get used to it.”

Packrat laughs and shakes his head. “It changes all the time. You never stop noticing it.”

You walk with him and Greg around to the back of the trailer where a faded green Kawasaki quad is parked. There’s a little curling script painted on it next to the gas tank that it looks like someone tried to scratch off, but you can still tell it says Chive Onion. Next to it is a car battery on a charger that’s plugged into the orange cable from the window.

“This is Keeler’s, but we all use it,” Packrat says, pointing to the quad.

“For, like, dunes and stuff?” you say.

Now Packrat gives you a look. “We’re not fucking dirtbiker bros. It’s for getting around the Beach.”

Greg is rubbing at a scuff on the plastic fender. He straightens up and makes eye contact with you. “Gas is expensive, but electricity is free,” he says seriously, like this is something he’s thought about and been waiting to explain to someone.

You must look like you don’t quite believe that, because then Packrat says, “They never shut off the power after that Mexican family left that was living here.”

“Hernandez,” Greg says. He looks sad.

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“I hope those beaners are still fucking paying for it,” says Keeler as he comes around the side of the trailer, cackling. He shoots a glance at you and you smile to be polite. He’s carrying another car battery and he sets it down next to the charger. He takes the jumper cables from the first battery and uses one of the clamps to scrape chalky corrosion off the new battery.

“Keeler’s dad fixed it up to run on batteries,” Greg says.

“That was nice of him,” you say. You’re thinking it’s like when Mom bought you that Power Wheels thing that you drove around the yard until Dad made her return it.

“Yeah, it’s cool. Don’t have to drive over to Ni-town for gas as much.”

“Fuck that place,” Packrat says.

“Fuck my dad,” Keeler says, bent over the battery.

Packrat snickers.

“Fuck you, too,” Keeler says. He waves a hand at the quad. “This thing doesn’t mean shit.”

You watch him scratch at the battery terminal a last time and then connect both the clamps. He stands up and looks at you.

“Even Hitler was nice to his dog,” he says.

The three of them get on the quad: Keeler in the middle, driving, and the others on either side—Packrat’s left leg and Greg’s right leg hanging off over the rear tires. Keeler twists around in the seat.

“Get on the fucking quad, man.”

You sit on the back, balancing with the taillight jutting out from your crotch and the big knobby tires next to your calves. The quad starts rolling and you watch the trailer recede ahead of you. You’re not going very fast, and the quad is whining like a hairdryer. You’re on a dirt road between rows of empty lots. Some of them have burned-out trailer shells sitting in them, splaying luridly. There is no vegetation. Everything in front of you disappears into the dust raised by the quad, and you can’t hear anything but the dentist drill sound of its motor, like its coming from inside your head.

You turn down another road, past a cluster of corrugated iron shacks that might once have been fruit stands or something. Headless stalks of palm

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trees line both sides of the road now. The charred and broken remnants of a few more lie haphazardly across the road. You jerk to a stop and Keeler points to them.

“We burn one every year for Ronny,” he says.

“What happened to Ronny?” you ask.

“He died, dipshit.”

“Like my grandpa,” you say, just to say something.

But Keeler turns around to glare at you. “No, not like your faggoty-ass grandpa,” he says. “Ronny didn’t hang himself in his fucking trailer. Ronny didn’t bake for a week with his pants full of shit and his skin rotting off before my dad found him. Ronny was a badass. Okay? Fuck your grandpa.”

Keeler looks ahead again and the quad shudders into motion. Packrat leans back and mutters into your ear.

“Ronny was Keeler’s brother. He OD’ed on meth,” he says. “Three years ago.”

“Bad ass,” you say, and Packrat gives a lopsided shrug.

“If it’s that or hang yourself…” he says.

You think about that as you pass more inhabited-looking trailers.

There’s a shopping cart full of old towels in front of one trailer, and a tiny dog barks at you from inside it. The water is always in the background, flashing and stinking, hidden sometimes behind dunes or trailers but never absent.

Grandpa R’s trailer looks like all the other ones: whitish-tan, old, little pieces chipping off of it. It has one of those old-style TV antennas on the roof, but it’s bent at a weird angle. Greg taps you on the shoulder and you jump: he moves quiet for a big guy. He points at the cockeyed antenna.

“Your grandpa tied the rope to that and pulled it down through the skylight. To hang himself,” he says.

You just look at him. “Why would you tell me that.”

Greg shrugs. “Thought it was interesting.”

“We going inside or what?” Keeler calls, muffled. He’s at the front door trying to look in through the grimy window.

“Not you guys.”

Keeler turns to the others, arms raised indignantly.

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“After we rescue your dumb ass off the highway, and show you The Goose Hole, and bring you here? Aren’t we buddies now?” he yells at them.

Greg nods solemnly. Packrat is watching you, not blinking.

“Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Whatever, man. Go crazy,” Keeler says. He steps aside and you try the door.

“It’s locked,” you say.

Keeler grins. “You want the key?”

He pulls a worn little key from his back pocket.

“Why do you have that?” you say.

Keeler narrows his eyes. “I’ll tell you later, maybe,” he says.

He pushes past you and unlocks the door, then holds it open and beckons you in butler-style.

“We shall wait out heeya foh mawstuh,” he says.

I don’t know what you see in there, don’t really want to guess. They probably didn’t clean much up, for one thing. I’m sure all the valuables were gone. I know the police took the rope for evidence, and that they didn’t find a note. Mom told me once—something like eighty percent of suicides don’t leave a note (why did she tell me that?). But you must find something, something you expected or something you didn’t expect, I don’t know, but you call me from county jail the next day to tell me you were there, in Bombay Beach, and Grandpa R killed himself and something weird is happening and you’re going to find out what it is. Like you’re some fucking detective. Like you don’t have actual shit going on that you should focus on, maybe, perhaps, like school, for instance, or your Ace Hardware job where you said they were going to make you assistant manager pretty soon, or talking to Mom about why she won’t talk to Dad. Not to mention being arrested three hundred miles from home.

You come out of the trailer and they’ve fished a quail nest out from under it. Keeler and Packrat are huddled around Greg, who has one of the little speckled eggs in his palm. It looks like a piece of candy. Greg takes a folding knife from his pocket and opens it one-handed while Keeler fidgets next to him.

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“You gotta just tap it. Just a tap right in the middle,” he mutters.

Greg ignores him. He puts the point of the knife to the shell and twists it slowly back and forth. You walk over to them, not quite sure what they’re doing. You’re still thinking about what you saw in the trailer. Greg puts his knife away and you can see a dribble of fluid ooze from the little hole he made in the shell.

“What are you doing?” you say.

They don’t even look over at you. Greg presses a thumbnail against the hole until a seam is visible in the polished, spotted shell. Keeler sucks in a hissing breath, his face inches from Greg’s hands. Packrat stands on Greg’s other side, his arms crossed over his chest, his neck stretched out to see. You lean in, too. Greg gently pulls apart the shell, revealing a naked purplish chick.

Its body is bruise-colored, its sealed eyelids dark and bulbous. Greg slides it from the shell into his palm. It doesn’t move. It shines wetly in the sun.

Keeler lets his breath out in a rush that startles you.

“Not ready yet,” Packrat says. Keeler makes a noise like he isn’t sure but he doesn’t care to argue. Greg drops the thing and wipes his hands on his shorts. You stare at it, lying dark and limp on the white dirt. You want to cry, you can feel it in your throat. The others share some sort of look or signal, maybe, and they all slouch off toward the water. You lock the door of the trailer and follow them. You don’t know what else to do.

You’re standing with them at the water’s edge, the shore all white gravel that hurts to look at. There are dead fish everywhere; they don’t seem to be rotting, just mummifying. The smell is lodged in your throat. There’s an old upright piano standing a couple inches deep in the water. You walk over to it, trying not to get your shoes wet. There’s a rim of white crust around the base of the piano. You tap on the keys but they only thump woodenly.

“Fucking tweakers ripped out all the strings and shit to sell for scrap,” Keeler says.

“Wasn’t it your brother and them did that?” asks Greg.

It sounds like Greg gets punched, but he doesn’t react.

“Shut the fuck up. My brother wasn’t a tweaker.”

“OD’ing on meth sounds like some tweaker shit to me,” you say, just

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to make him mad.

He walks over and you get ready for it: the fight, the chokehold, whatever. You’ve done this before, I know that. I know how it is—high school is like prison, and life is like high school, forever.

But Keeler just sort of smiles.

“You know, Carl, you’re right. But like I said, Ronny wasn’t a fucking tweaker.”

You’re nodding now, watching his hands from the corners of your eyes.

“Can I trust you, Carl?” he’s whispering now.

You nod again. He leans in real close and you brace yourself, draw one foot back a little. Keeler’s got his head on your shoulder, practically, his breath warm on your ear:

“It didn’t happen like they said. Ronny wouldn’t do that. I’m trying to figure it out. Okay? They killed him. Somebody. You’re not from here, I can trust you—you gotta help me. Okay?”

And you just nod, and you’re still ready for it, but it doesn’t come.

You look past Keeler’s hands to the bright ground and you realize the white gravel is fish bones: you’re standing on a beach lined with generations of dead corvina, catfish, and tilapia all ground into little bleached pieces. Not that you know their names.

You get back on the quad and Keeler drives everyone back to The Goose Hole.

“You can crash here if you want,” he says.

You look at your phone. “It’s, like, six o’clock,” you tell him.

He shrugs. “We gotta go do some stuff. We’ll swing by tomorrow.”

They file out of the front door. Greg waves as he ducks under the doorframe and stomps down the metal stairs.

“Is the water hooked up?” you call after them.

“No,” says Packrat, not turning around.

They creak away on the quad and you watch the raised dust fade slowly behind them.

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You must see something in these assholes that I don’t. They’re the kind of losers you’d make school-shooter jokes about with your friends at lunch.

If it’s, like, anthropological, I guess I could see that: you don’t know anybody like them. SoCal white trash in denial. But you could have asked me about punks, about anything, I’d have told you. I will. When you get back.

But I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, so I know you don’t sit by yourself in that crumbling trailer, sweating and thirsty, until they decide to come get you. You eat the snacks you brought and drink the last of your bottled water and go out to catch the last of the daylight, and maybe after that to tag some of those deliciously blank trailers you passed on your ride around town. And the smell does hit you the same as the first time, and you think about how they could weaponize that smell, concentrate it into little canisters and fire it at crowds for riot control.

You wander around for a while, the half-empty spraycans boinging together in your grocery bag. You only paint in monochrome. Bold, stark, solid-color images. Minimalist but realist. A lot of intricate stenciling. I don’t know where you learned it—well, I do: on the internet, like anyone learns anything. And you’ve watched the fucking Exit Through the Gift Shop movie about fifty times, and you don’t even fast forward through all the boring shit about the French guy. But we don’t have that kind of thing in our town.

It’s all gang signs and crooked swastikas and Brad loves Julie, trashy middle school shit. And that’s what they had out there, too, in Bombay Beach, until you got there. You’re gonna show them real street art. This is virgin canvas, the whole place. The most exciting, terrifying thing there is. You don’t paint anything yet, it’s still light out, but you’re making mental notes of some nice, abandoned-looking, flat-walled trailers. You don’t bother with the corrugatedmetal ones, all those ridges fuck up the outlines if you don’t tape the stencil down, and you didn’t bring any tape. Didn’t even bring a change of clothes.

There are still plenty of spots to choose from: a block or so west of The Goose Hole is a double-wide standing alone in a gravel lot. Straight, flat walls, cracking beige paint-job. You look in the window. Empty. You have three stencils with you, but you’re already planning a new one. Something

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to show them. Something worth seeing. You keep walking and more of the trailers have cars next to them, charcoal grills standing in circles of rusty dirt, tattered umbrellas leaning against porch rails. You don’t see any people until a girl about your age jogs past you in a neon sports bra and shorts. She’s got her earbuds in and she doesn’t acknowledge you. After she disappears around the corner behind the next row of trailers, you follow her. There’s a general store underneath a billboard that says ‘Welcome to Bombay Beach’. The palm trees are alive now, most of them, and you avoid walking directly under them.

There’s other trees you don’t know the names of. Willows and eucalyptus. Dad told us once that scorpions live in the tops of palm trees and drop on people.

You’ve never been stung by one but you’re pretty sure it would be serious, like an ER-type situation, probably. Necrotic wounds, black swollen limbs.

The billboard, once you’re right up under it, feels sort of obscene. It can’t be from the fifties, the paint and the metal supports are too new-looking, but someone tried really hard to give it that vintage look. Flowy script font, postcard-style golden-sand beach backdrop. Maybe that’s where the skeezy feeling comes from: standing there looking up at some PR company’s idea for tourism revitalization—aloha vibes for drive-in prices—when the proof of its impossibility is climbing up into your sinuses. The store under the billboard has a huge faded-pink-and-blue poster of a jetski in the window. There’s a printout taped up next to it that says RENTALS $5/HR. You walk in and an older guy wearing glasses looks up from his phone. He’s sitting in a lawn chair in front of the counter, and he has a big gray mustache. You’re still holding the grocery bag, and he looks at it and then back at his phone. He’s peering over his glasses and stabbing at the screen with a thick finger.

“What can I do for you, young man?” he says, still looking at his phone.

“I need some tape,” you say.

“Don’t have tape.”

His phone makes a chirruping sound and he swears under his breath.

You look around at the metal shelves lining the walls. Mostly canned food.

There’s a fridge behind the register with three cans of Miller Lite in it and a row of glass-bottle Cokes. At the other end of the store, a propane tank is

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propping open the back door, and you can see something furry hanging from the awning outside.

“I’ll take a Miller Lite,” you say, because if there’s anywhere that your tender seventeen years are enough for a beer, it’s this place.

The guy looks up at you, his eyes blank behind his glasses.

“Those aren’t for sale,” he says.

“A Coke, then.”

“All right,” he says, but he doesn’t move. He keeps watching you, like he expects you to say something else.

“What brings you to the Beach?” he says finally.

You could have lied to the guy, what the fuck business is it of his anyway, but you don’t. You tell him you came to see your grandpa, Norman Rathskeller.

“Aw, shit,” the guy says. He shakes his head and puts down his phone.

“That whole thing—I mean, you know, right?”

You just look at him, waiting for him to say it, and after a moment he does.

“He passed, son.” He shakes his head again. “Can’t tell you how sorry I am. Didn’t know he had family.”

Fuck beating around the bush, is what you’re thinking. Fuck these hokey small-town facades of neighborliness and solicitude and born-again we’re-all-in-this-together-until-the-Rapture-comes-and-maybe-after-that-too bullshit.

“Why’d he do it?” you ask.

He acts like he doesn’t hear you, goes back to messing with his phone.

You stand there for a second, staring at him. Then you walk down the aisle to the back door, trying not to let the cans bang against each other in the bag. The furry thing outside is a coyote pelt. There are three of them, tacked up by the forelegs to the wooden frame of the awning. You touch one. The skin under the fur is like old cardboard.

“You shoot these?” you call back to the man.

His head comes up, and he smiles over at you from his chair. “Sure did.”

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He tosses his phone onto the counter and gets up, but not using his wrists the way old people do. You notice, now that he’s standing up, how big he is. He ambles down the aisle to you, hitching his pants up and smiling to himself. His name is Ed Mull, and he’s the one that reports you to the sheriff’s department for being “a smartass little punk and definitely a graffiti painter, I could practically smell it on him.”

He smiles, looking out into the afternoon glare.

“They were eating people’s dogs,” he says. “And cats. But people shouldn’t have cats out here anyway.”

He stands next to you, hands on hips, mustache cocked to one side.

He reaches up and pulls one of the pelts from the awning.

“This sumbitch,” he says, “was digging through my trash back here one night. Popped him right here,” and he shows you a hole in the pelt between its ears. “Then everybody was calling me all the time, saying you gotta get ‘em, you gotta shoot all those sumbitches so I started staying up waiting for ‘em. Got two more before I quit.”

“The police make you stop?”

“What, Ernie? Hell, no. He’d have been sitting right here next to me if he could. Beer and ky-oats, all night.”

A couple good ol’ boys. A whole little trailer park town full of them.

You’re not quite sure what to make of it; we never watched Dukes of Hazzard.

Not even that remake with Jessica Simpson, which we’ve got on DVD somewhere. A last-minute bargain-bin gift from Dad, probably.

“So what made you quit?” You ask.

The man puffs out his cheeks and his mustache ripples. “Oh, I got tired of losing sleep, is all. Gotta run the store.” He hangs the pelt up again and frowns at you. He opens his mouth and then hangs his head and sighs. “I can’t tell you why Norm hung himself,” he says. “But I got a suspicion. And don’t go spreading this around, all right? Come over here.”

He walks back to the counter and you follow him. He picks up his phone and taps at it for a long time. You’re starting to think he forgot you’re even there, but then he holds it out for you to see. 24% of all male suicides-byhanging may be accidental, the headline says. You look at the man and he raises

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his eyebrows.

“I don’t get it,” you tell him.

“Look,” he says, and he scrolls a little with his index finger.

It is estimated that up to 60% of deaths ruled as suicide-by-hanging among males aged 16-25, and as much as 30% of all such male suicides, are in fact accidents related to the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” you say, and you knock the phone out of his hand. It clatters on the floor, but you’re already on your way out.

“I swear to God, son, if you broke my phone—”

It’s almost dark out, now. You walk fast down the broken asphalt and then the dirt road back to the Goose Hole. You still don’t have any tape, but that doesn’t matter: this bullshit redneck pervert scum-pit doesn’t need clean, finessed lines. It needs dirty, loud decals. Fuck these people. Here’s what you’ll do: make a new stencil. It won’t be too hard, you’ve got some blanks in the bag. You can cannibalize the ones you already made if you need to. You’ve got your Mona Lisa now, your own design to rival Banksy’s Balloon Girl. You can see it, every cut and fold in the splattered cardstock. Like when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to that peasant guy, it’s that kind of moment.

You run most of the way back to the trailer. Open your pack, get out the folding knife I gave you for Christmas last year. Mom threw kind of a fit over it, but you were sixteen already for shit’s sake, and she didn’t live with us anyway.

It looks like this: a man hangs limp and straight from the end of a noose. His clothes are rumpled and nondescript. He’s barefoot. He has the head of a coyote, its tongue hanging swollen out of its mouth. It’s perfect.

It’s almost too good to waste on these shitstains, but it’s not like any of them are going to rip you off. You won’t have that problem until you get home, start doing it for real, you think. Everyone’s going to bite your style, it’s unavoidable. You just have to be better than all of them. Rise above. Hanged Man is only the beginning for you, you’ve never felt so sure of anything.

You bring your stuff into the bathroom, where the only working lightbulb is.

When you’re done you look up and it’s dark—like, you can’t see your hand in front of your face when you turn off the bathroom light, so you turn it back

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on and look for the flashlight you didn’t bring.

Outside isn’t much brighter. There aren’t any streetlights. But, God, those stars: you’re walking toward where you’re pretty sure the first canvaswall is, neck craned back, grinning to yourself. You hear a splash to your left and then you’re terrified that you’re walking into the lake, that you’ll slip in the fishbone grit and be sucked under and drown in the cold dark, in that fleck of ocean in the middle of the desert. You stop walking and look down at your feet, around at the pale square trailers, trying to see. Half a block away, the stars jitter on the surface of the water.

You’ve got your phone sticking out of your front pocket with the flashlight on, you’re taking your time and making sure it comes out right. The thock and rattle of the spraycan is loud in the dark. You’ve got a three-piece stencil going because you didn’t bring any sheets of cardstock big enough to do the job, and it’s hard holding everything still with one hand and no tape, but you’re managing. Nice, even passes. That delicious smell going right to your head. You’re almost done—and then a car pulls up and everything is bright white and you squint against the pain. It’s a spotlight, a cop car.

Motherfucker.

Ernie Keeler, Imperial County Sheriff’s Deputy, listed vandalism, trespassing, and vagrancy on his arrest report. It’s the only arrest report Ernie wrote that month, and it’s, like, five pages long. He wrote on the back of the sheet and then took the note pages of two other blank reports to finish it. He wrote in block capitals, but they’re kind of smushed and connected together. Wanted to get it down while it was still fresh, probably. Generate some paperwork to make up for his lack thereof up to that point in the fiscal quarter. Vagrancy isn’t even a prosecutable offense in Imperial County, but he sure as shit wrote you up for it and a half-dozen other things, too.

Ernie starts talking as soon as he gets you in the back of the car. He doesn’t say “watch your head” the way you thought all cops did every time they put someone in the car, but he does kind of guide your head in under the doorframe with his hand, like he’s putting you to bed after reading you a picture book. Then he buckles your seatbelt and pulls it snug. All your stuff, the cans and stencils, your phone, your keys, everything’s in a paper sack in

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the trunk, and you’re sitting on this hard plastic benchseat hunched forward so you don’t squish your hands cuffed behind your back. You’re not the tallest seventeen-year-old, I’ll say that, but your knees are pressed against the hard plastic back of the passenger seat. You want to be angry, this feels like the time to be pissed off about things, but you’re not. Something about the buckling in and the gentleness of it, the efficiency, makes anger seem excessive. You arch your back and look around at all the molded black plastic. Must be easy to clean, you think. If somebody pukes or shits or bleeds back here, they can just hose it out. Good to go. The big grinding machine of the law churneth onward.

“Now why would you do a thing like that,” Ernie is saying. “Show up here and piss all over everything. Like you’re a goddamn dog at a fire hydrant. This is a nice little town—” and then you laugh in his face, or at his face, through the black mesh separating you from him. Maybe you are a little angry. He glares at you in the rearview and doesn’t say anything for a while.

You look out the barred window but it’s too dark to see anything.

“How far is it?” you say.

“A ways,” the cop says. He sighs and gets going again. “It’s shitheads like you who are killing that town. Show up and think they can do whatever they want. Take pictures of themselves lighting trailers on fire, all kinds of shit. Swear to God, you’re worse than the beaners. It’s like,” and he pauses, you can see him thinking even from just the back of his head.

“Like when people go on tours of somewhere there was an earthquake or a tornado. That, uh—” the cruiser hits the rumble strip and he jerks the wheel. Your head thumps against the window. “That place in Virginia where all the coal underneath it is on fire, you know, and they evacuated everybody.”

“Pennsylvania,” you say, but he doesn’t hear you. You wanted to go to Centralia last year, see all the graffiti, but Mom said no.

“But people still live here, this is people’s home,” he says. “You understand?”

You roll your eyes, not that he can see you doing it, but then you peel your forehead off the window and look at him, the little sliver of his face that you can see.

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“You’re Keeler’s dad,” you say.

The cruiser hits the rumble strip again and Ernie jerks the wheel again.

“His name’s Clive,” he says.

“He doesn’t look like a Clive.”

“And you don’t look like a fuckhead vandalizer,” he says.

You don’t have anything to say to that.

After a while, he says, “You meet those two assholes? Greg and Parker?”

You think about that for a second. “They were good guys,” you say.

“They’re a bad influence.”

County jail is technically called the Regional Adult Detention Facility.

Ernie explains this to you like it’s important. He tells you that when you get there, he’ll stay until the intake officer is done and then he has to go back out on patrol. He says the intake officer will sign in your stuff, take your shoelaces and belt, and walk you into the holding area. Then you’ll get fingerprinted, mugshotted, and wait to be arraigned. “It’s like the DMV,” he says. “Keep your head down, don’t talk to the gang-bangers, and you’ll be fine.”

And it all happens like he says. After the fingerprints and the mugshot they take you through a heavy door into a big open room. It’s bright and cold.

There are a few cops standing around, watching. The intake cop tells you not to speak to or make eye contact with the females. He points to a bench in the corner where two women are sitting. One of them is crying. Around the edge of the room are windowed cells, or interrogation rooms maybe. One of them has a man in it with a cast on his arm. He thumps his cast on the window until a cop ambles over and goes into the room, then the thumping stops.

At some point you figure out how the phones work and leave Mom a voicemail on her landline. She called me probably four hours after you got there. You can imagine how that conversation went. So then I was driving east on I-10 and hating you the whole time, not even hurrying, because I figured having to sit around at county jail for a few hours might be good for you or some shit. I don’t know. But by the time I got to Indio it had already happened: there were cops everywhere, they’d blocked the road up to the jail, practically screamed at me to turn around and leave. Nobody knew anything,

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or would tell me anything. I called everyone I could think of. When the sun came up I was sitting in a motel parking lot with the car running and my phone plugged into the cigarette lighter. There was one news blurb on the web about a “disturbance” at the RADF. Story developing. Awaiting details and confirmation from authorities. I’d forgotten my wallet at Mom’s house. I slept in the car, and when I woke up nothing was any different so I drove back to LA.

It took a long time to wade through all the bullshit and collect all the records and statements and reports, but this is what I know:

When Ernie Keeler left the RADF that night, he called his son Clive Owen Keeler to ask about how you and him met. Clive believed his dad had arrested you to prevent you from helping solve the mystery of his brother Ronny’s death, and considered his suspicions about his dad’s involvement in Ronny’s “overdose” to be confirmed. He called Parker “Packrat” Mull, 19, to enlist his help in breaking you out of county jail, but Parker declined. So did Greg Massey, 21.

Ronald Gregory Keeler was 23 when he died of an amphetamine-induced heart attack.

Clive called the RADF, posing as his father, to request that an inmate be transferred to the Imperial County Sheriff’s Department station in Niland for questioning. When they asked for this inmate’s name, he hung up. Clive then called his father and asked if they could visit you. Ernie Keeler felt, as he later stated, that this represented “a good chance to show him where he was headed if he kept hanging out with those ******* losers in Bombay Beach”, and was not thinking at the time of the ethical and legal breaches he would be committing in bringing his son to see a pre-arraignment inmate at the RADF. Norman Rathskeller was 78 when he committed suicide. The autopsy showed early signs of Alzheimer’s.

Once inside the holding area, Clive took his father’s gun. A hostage situation ensued, but nothing I can find mentions who the hostage(s) was/ were. The standoff escalated into a small riot, which spread from the holding area to the rest of the complex. Four correctional officers and two sheriff’s

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deputies were injured, including Ernie Keeler. Two inmates were killed, and Clive Owen Keeler was fatally shot. Tragic accident is the phrase the media settled on. Even the LA Times picked it up. One op-ed called it a bizarre twist on the familiar refrain of police brutality. The only mention of you in all these write-ups was “one detainee remains missing”.

It’s possible that you escaped in the chaos. For a while that’s what we thought happened, and we waited for you to show up somewhere, even here. Call us from a truckstop or another jail cell. There’s a warrant out for you. Mom putting up MISSING posters and the cops putting up WANTED ones. But nobody’s seen you.

Dad got the call about Grandpa R a week after you went missing.

They’d already cremated him and everything. He still hasn’t told Mom about it. They talk more, now, but it’s only about you. What the next move is. Have they tried this agency. Called this department. Looked in this place. I couldn’t take it, it was worse than the months of no contact had been, so I took off the way you did. Just the same way. Found where you left the car, more or less. Found The Goose Hole, and the half-finished coyote man you put up on that trailer. Found the guy that owns the general store. I wanted to shake him, to smack his stupid drooping mustached face for getting you arrested, for making all of this happen. But he started talking about the dead kid and how sad it was and how Ernie wasn’t the same and on and on until I cut him off to ask whether that Miller Lite was for sale.

“Well, sure. Three dollars,” he said, and I gave him the money and walked out with the beer and drank it with that godawful smell in my nose until I couldn’t even taste the beer anymore, just those miles of fish bones and crumbling trailers, and you weren’t there, not in any of those trailers or in any drop of that dead water. Greg and Packrat had both moved away. Maybe you wondered what it takes to escape a town like Bombay Beach, and I guess that’s it: your best friend shot to death by his own dad. I saw the jogging girl, the one in the neon sports bra. “How can you live here?” I said. “Don’t you want to go somewhere else? Before this shithole swallows you?” But she didn’t hear me, she kept jogging.

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99 Funhouse Frank Garland

100 En la cuerda floja Brady Izquierdo

Sembrando Brady Izquierdo

101

Upstairs Dust motes on the windowpanes refract April’s slanted rays, all but obscuring his view of the kidney-shaped pool below, rain-filled and choked with duckweed.

Two winter’s worth of windblown leaves lie in slopes against the garden wall.

Dust on the blinds.

Dust (unreachable) atop the armoire, Dust-fustiness rising from the pages of the book in his lap. Gibbon: II. Copyright 1952 All rights reserved He’s scarcely turned a page all afternoon.

What was that noise down in the kitchen?

The visitation of a memory?

A delusion born of longing?

He tries to remember exactly when she took that tumble down the stairs.

R. A. Allen

102

103 The Fire

Tabitha Marsh

The Last Time I Saw Mama Rolli

“Damn you, Louella!”

Mama come at me with an empty Pall Mall carton, twisted it in my face. I politely suggested she exit the room and fuck herself. She was wearin’ her platinum wig, so I should’ve known better.

Her eyes lit up like cigarette ends.

“Girl, I have raised you single-handed. I have sacrificed.”

Lord, drop a boulder on me.

Mama ran the bases. Pitched in a few tears for effect, and finished with: “You know why I done all that? Why I slaved and sacrificed?

I said “Why?” to keep the sweet charade rollin’.

She grabbed hold o’ my wrists.

“I done all that,” she said, shakin’ me, “so I could raise a fine daughter” (shakin’) “who one day” (hollerin’ down my throat like it was a well-hole) “would pilfer my goddamn cigarettes!”

“I didn’t take ’em,” I said.

“Thief and a liar,” said Mama.

“I’m not lyin’.”

Mama laughed. She laughed and she threw my arms back at me.

Instead of whuppin’ me—charity begins at home, I s’pose—she just stood

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there glarin’ till her eyes burned out.

“Sometimes I worry ’bout you, Louella,” she said, at last.

I worry ’bout me too, Mama. I thought. I worry plenty. * Danville Cemetery’s on the west edge o’ town. Whenever I got worn slap out from arguin’—damn near every day, that was—I wound up there.

Pedaled through the gates one blazin’ May afternoon, set my bike against Helmut Flazgraff.

Daddy was sprawled under the big willow, book in his paws.

“What you readin’?” I asked, lyin’ beside him, firin’ up a Pall Mall.

“High Lonesome,” said Daddy, flippin’ a page.

“You ever read Where the Long Grass Blows?”

“Just last week,” said Daddy.

He smoothed his ‘stache. Glanced at me.

“Mama?” he said.

That hit it on the head. I shook mine.

“I just can’t suffer the woman.”

Daddy rubbed his neck, said in a sawmill whisper, “I never could suffer her, neither.”

“You got it easy,” I said, heavin’ a sigh.

Daddy sat up straight. Shut his book up. Looked me in the eye.

“Peaches,” he said, “you’ll be fine.”

“How do you know that, Daddy?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Got a feelin’,” was all he said. Winkin’.

A long while back, I decided… He had the kindest eyes, my daddy. On this earth. One good look at ’em was all I needed. To fix what was vexin’ me. To get my ass off the grass.

“Thanks, Daddy,” I said.

“Anytime, Peaches,” he said, crackin’ his book.

I gave my advance apologies to Mr. Flazgraff, stubbed my cigarette against him. Climbed back on my bike. And strummed its pedals hard, home. *

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Flighty as a barn swallow. That’s Mama when she lacks companionship. A redhead Monday, brunette Wednesday, and Friday she’s choked up ’bout Oklahoma. So when she drug home the butcher for supper, I cheered, damn near. Judson wasn’t handsomer than a pork loin, but we had meat seven days a week for a year. Best eatin’ I had in my life till then, and the most peace, easy.

Course Judson keeled over—when I’m happy, the good Lord’s inconsolable— and we was back to beans. Only good that come of the affair was the wagon.

Mama was entitled, in her mind, to Judson’s station wagon, and nobody dared contradict her. Not when she had on that platinum wig.

First road trip we took was to Ponca City, where Mama went to kindergarten.

Climbed a hill with our picnic lunch. When Mama looked down at the river...

Her ecstasies was audible a mile off.

“Couldn’t you just live here, Girl. Isn’t this just paradise?”

It was pretty. But I didn’t say nothin’. I knew better.

Hour later, we brushed the crumbs off ourselves. Mama lit up a cigarette, took a last panorama view.

“Lordy,” she said. “What a dump.”

I asked the Almighty to strike me kindly with a thunderbolt.

Then I followed Mama back down the hill. * Mama teetotalled—from time to time. It was only when she was skunkdrunk that I ever brung up Daddy.

One night when she was cork-high and bottle-deep—course she was in her ginger wig—I gathered up the gumption to ask her: “Why’d Daddy hang hisself?”

Mama rolled her eyes.

“How in hell can that matter? You didn’t even know your daddy.”

“You did, Mama.”

“Nobody knows nobody on this planet. If I unzipped that pretty skin o’ yours…”

She plugged her lips up with a cigarette, howled at somethin’, stretched herself flat on the sofa.

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“But you must have an idea, Mama?”

“Don’t know what’s the matter with you, Girl. Askin’ questions like that. It ain’t healthy. You wanna drink?”

Lord, I coulda used one. But I stuck to my sweet tea.

Mama sat up again, opened the jug o’ Royal Red. I opened The Tall Stranger.

“Just look at you. Sittin’ home on a Friday night readin’. You need to get out there, Girl, find yourself a man. You got potential. I had potential—before I met your no ’count father…”

She brung her legs up beside her. Ran her fingers through her false hair and guffawed.

“Charlie Martin. Most popular boy in Jonesboro. Perfect manners. Body to match. We was gonna get married…”

She chugged half a glass. Stared at nothin’ like it was somethin’ till her eyes was so heavy I reckoned they was gonna slide off her face.

“So what happened?” I said.

Mama blinked and said: “He got killed. House fire, at his folks’ cabin. One of those ol’ tinderboxes. When they told me…”

She shook her head. Took a real long drag. Leaned back. Closed her eyes. In a minute, she was sleepin’.

I took the cigarette out of her hand, snuffed it.

“Night, Mama,” I said. * William “Billy-O” Collins Crawford. Mama set her eyes on him in July and we was settled in his farmhouse by Labour Day.

My bedroom was in the basement. So was an aquarium stocked with blowfish, a bar with you name it. I had nothin’ but peace for a week— till Billy-O and Mama started pourin’ downstairs at all hours, tryin’ their damnedest to outdrink the fish.

We was on thin ice, all of us. Billy-O stomped on it, Mama skated back and forth sportin’ wig after wig, and me… It took all the flexibility the Lord gave me to sidestep the eggshells. I didn’t need no crystal ball to tell me this was gonna play out poor.

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One night… I was halfway through Hanging Woman Creek when Mama hollered “Fuck you!” and Billy-O hollered “Fuck you!” and somethin’ glass smashed against the basement wall and my picture of Glen Campbell plopped down on my bedroom floor.

I apologized to Glen. Pinned him back up, flopped back in bed.

“Snake in the grass!” yelled Billy-O.

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Mama.

They went on like that. Lord, they went on. Mama’s fluty-toned voice and Billy-O’s baritone. Back and forth, like ping-pong.

When they ran outta breath, I cracked my book open again.

A bigger glass somethin’ crashed against the wall.

Down came Mr. Campbell, onto the carpet. This time, I left him there.

I dove deep into Hanging Woman Creek.

Lord, I thought. Let me drown. * I dreamed ’bout Daddy.

He was slouchin’ against the willow tree trunk, readin’.

I sat down beside him. The Haunted Mesa—that was the book. Had a rope ’round his neck, like a necktie. I jerked my thumb towards it.

“I’m at the end o’ mine,” I said.

“Moonshine,” said Daddy.

“Lord, I could use some.”

“Don’t you worry, Peaches. Don’t you bother.”

“Cuz you got a feelin’, Daddy? Well, I got one too.”

Daddy just tapped his nose.

“Things’ll come up roses.”

“I’ll be pushin’ up roses. Like father like daughter.”

Daddy slung his arm ’round my shoulder. Looked me in the eye.

“You wait for those roses, Peaches. One more minute. And there they’ll be.”

I was gonna say, “If there was roses in this world for me, they’d’ve sprung by now.” But Daddy’s eyes was so kind, I just smiled.

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Daddy slapped my back. Adjusted his tie. Plucked up The Haunted Mesa.

“Red roses,” he said, findin’ his page. “Red roses—and blue skies. Just you wait and see.” * “He’s dead,” said Mama, shakin’ me awake.

A woke person’s woolly for a long minute. I blinked till Mama snagged my hand, drug me out the front door in my PJs.

The wagon was sittin’ in the driveway. Runnin’.

My lights finally flicked back on.

“Who’s dead?” I said.

“Billy-O,” said Mama, depositin’ me by the passenger door. She straightened her wig—her black one. Rarest of ’em all.

“Shouldn’t we call the police or an ambulance or—”

“What, to put a cork in his forehead? He shot himself, Girl.”

Somethin’ electric went through me. I held onto the roof of the wagon. I held onto myself.

The whole back half of the car was packed to the roof with suitcases.

“I’ll buy you new clothes,” said Mama, jumpin’ in the driver’s side.

I was still holdin’ on. Just barely.

“Get in the car, Louella.”

My hands was stuck to that roof. Holdin’ on.

“Get in the car!”

I held onto myself.

“Get in the goddamn car!”

That’s when it all swamped me. That’s when it knocked me down. I fell down. Mama screamed and her tires screamed and that’s the last time I saw her face till it come on the TV screen at the hospital. Then it was my turn to holler, till the night nurse stabbed me with a syringe. After that, I stuck to books. Lonely on the Mountain. Ride the Dark Trail. They was what kept me livin’. While I tiptoed my way back to sanity. *

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THE LAST TIME I SAW MAMA

Opened up my eyes in Ward C one mornin’ and a broad-shouldered lady in hair curlers was grinnin’ down at me.

“Aunt Joan,” she said.

I gawked at her stretched-out hand half a minute.

“Mama didn’t have no siblings,” I said, at last.

The woman stuck her hand back in her pocket. Sat on the edge o’ the bed.

“Well, your daddy did,” she said.

I sat up. Drew a breath to keep my head from spinnin’.

“I never even seen a picture o’ my daddy,” I said.

“Well, you’re awful like him. ’Cept for the ‘stache. He and I was two peas, we was fraternals. Bet you didn’t know that, neither?”

“Mama … didn’t say nothin’ ’bout that.”

“Honey, I reckon there’s a mess o’ things your Mama didn’t tell you.”

My brain was still tender, so I kept my questions to a minimum.

“Did my daddy… He have kind eyes?”

My guest grinned.

“Kindest you ever seen,” she said.

Aunt Joan took her hand back out of her pocket.

This time, I shook it. * Aunt Joan’s bungalow’s up in the hills o’ Ripley, Mississippi. From her front porch, you can see the whole damn town, the lake. Big garden in the backyard, flower garden. Bluebells, marigolds, roses. First time I laid eyes on her place…

Thought I’d gone straight up to Paradise.

Carol Anne—that’s a girlfriend of Aunt Joan’s—owns the big greenhouse on Main Street. I got a job there, PT, weekends. Took me a year, but I saved enough for a Dodge half-ton, an ol’ beater. Drove it out to Danville one Sunday. I didn’t go right into town—I ain’t one for carnivals—just to the cemetery.

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Daddy was up in the willow, this time. Like a schoolboy. Beak in a book.

I stood at the foot o’ the tree, lookin’ up.

“Blue sky and red roses,” I said.

“Blue sky and red roses,” said a voice in the leaves.

“Just like you told me.”

“Just like I told you, Peaches.”

Gush of wind blew through me. When the leaves quite rattlin’…

There was no more sign o’ Daddy.

I fetched the pot o’ daffodils from the passenger’s seat. Set in against Daddy’s headstone. Stood there more than a minute.

Then I jumped back in the truck.

111

112 Becoming Angela Masker

113 Crumbling Facade Norman Miller

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114

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115

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