Literary brushstrokes fall 2013

Literary Brushstrokes

Fall 2013

Cover photo: Pathway at Dawn Š A. J. Huffman

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Fall November 2013 Vol 2, No 2

~~~~~~~ ŠNovember 2013

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From the Editor When we conceived this magazine and began brainstorming ideas for its name, we thought about all the things that make good writing great. We kept coming back to the idea that good writing paints a picture in the mind of a reader. Thus Literary Brushstrokes was born.

Welcome to the fifth issue of our literary journal.

This is filled with the work of talented writers and the cover is graced by a fabulous photo. We would also like to give a big thank you to those who contributed their editing skills for the creation of this issue.

Enjoy!

Mary Mary Chrapliwy, Managing Editor www.LiteraryBrushstrokes.com

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Table of Contents Poetry Paparazzi for the Birds by Lylanne Musselman – page 6

Creative Nonfiction Homecoming by Allen Long – page 7

Flash Fiction Reveille by Albert Anthoni – page 13

Fiction Nobody’s Business by Allen Kopp – page 15 Terminal Tears by Chris Wilkensen – page 19

Artist and Author Bios – page 26

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Paparazzi for the Birds by Lylanne Musselman A tiny warbler strikes a pose high in glittery spring leaves against a turquoise sky that resembles a Kmart 1980s portrait backdrop.

An excited onlooker asks: What have you spotted?

The crowd on the boardwalk whispers, a Blackpoll.

Farther down the tree-lined runway a pair of Scarlet Tanagers wear their feathers well – bright red, accessorized with black wings and tail. Look at the Birdie.

The bird paparazzi run as if in a derby from bird sighting to bird song.

Snap, Flash, Snap, Click.

No time for plain Jays, or other ordinary wing men; birders obsess over sparse Avian stars – species that dazzle without having to: Say Cheese!

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Homecoming by Allen Long Creative Nonfiction

When Linda, my twenty-two-year old wife of three years, returned in May 1980 from a fivemonth stay with her parents in Miami, we made love in the old house we rented on a 60-acre Virginia farm. Afterward, we moved out onto the weathered porch and sat in the warm late afternoon sunlight, the lawn surrounding us ablaze with wildflowers.

I’d been filled with nothing less than ecstasy when I picked Linda up at the Roanoke Airport an hour earlier. She seemed too good to be true, but there was that dimpled smile, her hungry kiss, and the familiar scent of the castile soap she used. She also said, “Oh my God, Boois, I’ve missed you!” Most of my life I’ve been a big bear of a man, and Linda, with her background in the natural sciences, had delighted in assigning me my own genus and species: Boois Bearis, or Boo Bear for short. This pet name was silly, humorous, embarrassing, and endearing all at once, and it was one of the many reasons I loved Linda.

We’d lived together on this farm in the fall, with me attending a master’s degree program in English/Creative Writing at nearby Hollins College, and Linda, a horticulturist, working as the head groundskeeper for a local retirement home that sported a well-groomed golf course. The chief administrator of the facility promised Linda she’d perform indoor landscaping during the winter, but when the weather turned white in late November, he ordered her to spend the cold months shoveling snow.

When we learned of this treachery, we decided Linda should move back in with her parents in Miami and find a resume-building horticulture-related job while I stayed in Virginia and finished my nine-month degree.

So here we were, reunited, spent and content, basking in the sun, with Queen’s “A Crazy Little Thing Called Love” wafting through the screen door connecting the porch to our living room.

Linda stretched lazily. “I’m glad to be home,” she said. “I missed you bunches, and I love you so much.”

“Same here.”

“There’s just one thing I need to tell you.”

“What’s that?” I asked, expecting her to confess a minor indiscretion, like spending too much on a sexy homecoming negligee.

“While I was away, I slept with another man.”

“What?” I felt a sudden panic in my chest, which I hoped Linda would evaporate with a joke, like saying, “My dog, Tigger.”

“I’m really sorry, and I want you to forgive me. I don’t want this to harm our marriage.”

Of course, I was devastated, but I desperately hoped there were extenuating circumstances that might make the news easier to accept.

“What happened?”

“Remember when I went on an overnight business trip with Richard a couple of weeks ago?” she asked.

“Richard, your womanizing asshole boss you’ve been telling me about for the last five months?”

“Yes. Well, he raped me that night.”

I felt a surge of mixed horror and relief. “How did he get into your hotel room?”

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“Actually, we stayed in the same room, but in different beds. He said if we saved on the hotel bill, we could go out for a five-star dinner.”

“You stayed in the same room as a womanizing asshole, to quote your own words?”

“He forced himself on me, but I didn’t fight. He seemed so sad.”

I felt cold and confused. My mind was trying to cling to the idea Linda had been raped, but she’d just said she didn’t fight Richard, and if she’d truly been raped, wouldn’t she have told me right away two weeks ago? Reluctantly, I recognized Linda had not been raped, and I felt blistering anger. “So you had consensual sex and went out for a nice dinner?”

“No, it wasn’t like that at all. You don’t understand.”

“Yes, I understand completely—you’re a conniving little bitch.”

I stormed off the porch and waded through a long field of tall grass, then took the downhill trail to the stream where I liked to trout fish or simply think.

“I made a mistake,” Linda called. “Please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

My mind spun wildly, but then a series of thoughts snapped into place like tumblers in a lock. For example, I remembered making love to Linda at Pandapis Pond when we attended Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. As we luxuriated in the warm afterglow, our conversation often strayed toward marriage. Linda said her dream was to have an open marriage where either party could have any lover or lovers he/she liked, as long as he/she was open about it with his/her partner. She greatly admired her female high school biology teacher who’d had such a marriage.

Every time Linda brought this up, I told her I had no interest in such a relationship, which sounded like a good way for everyone involved to get deeply hurt. Eventually, she stopped talking about it, and I assumed she’d put the idea aside.

But I was wrong.

We married in 1977 between our sophomore and junior years in college. Back then, unmarried couples living together were a fairly new phenomenon, at least for college kids.

Although this is what we wanted to do, our parents were dead-set against it, and we had great faith in our love and decided to marry instead of warring with our parents. The irony is, if we’d lived together, we never would have married because I would have discovered Linda’s unfaithfulness in short order.

A trout splashed in the water beside me, and I glanced at the tire swing hanging above the stream from the old oak, and I wished I could transport myself back to childhood, where this kind of jealous pain was milder. I could barely bring myself to picture Linda having sex with a middleaged, womanizing man who didn’t love her. I realized her betrayal greatly devalued me—I was her age, I was her husband, and I Ioved her, and yet these facts had done nothing to deter her infidelity. I was bewildered and deeply hurt, so much so that anger was almost a secondary emotion.

I thought about betrayals I’d experienced as a child. My fourteenth birthday sprang to mind. I’d been so excited that day, looking forward to spending the afternoon swimming with my girlfriend April, my two best friends, Van and Scott, and my younger brother Danny. Topping this off would be a late afternoon party at my house.

My only responsibility that day was to wash my parents’ candy apple red Buick Skylark with Danny. As we laid out our cleaning supplies, our father came outside and glared at us.

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“You boys put a single scratch on that Buick and you’ll live to regret it,” he said.

We knew he meant business. Our father frequently spanked us with a thick oak paddle he’d made, and he hit us about a dozen times with nearly all of his strength, and many times he made us strip naked beforehand to maximize our pain. Our mother did nothing to protect us. In fact, she was often the one who suggested the nude spankings.

So we diligently washed the sedan, going to great lengths not to harm it in any way. The temperature and humidity in Arlington were in the nineties, so we were soon overheated and soaked with sweat. As we finished up our work, I couldn’t resist squirting Danny in the back of the head with the hose. He picked up the soapy water bucket and chased me until he sloshed some on my fleeing back.

“Hey!” our mother called from the kitchen window where she’d been watching us.

We immediately cut the horseplay and dried the Skylark with our chamois cloths until it shone brilliant and spotless in the September sun.

Just as we headed inside to shower and change clothes, our mother came out of the house carrying her purse. “You boys get in the car,” she said. “We have an errand to run.”

When our mother pulled up in front of the barber shop, Danny and I knew what was coming. Usually, our parents made us wear crew cuts, but that summer they’d allowed us to grow our hair a bit longer. I’m not talking about the Beatles, more like Beaver Cleaver.

Our mother told Bob our barber, “Cut off all their hair. They don’t deserve it.”

Danny and I spent the rest of the morning in our rooms, sick with humiliation.

My girlfriend April was a slim girl with luscious breasts. I loved her luxurious chestnut hair, her affectionate brown eyes, and her radiant smile—my own teeth were a combination of dull off-white and gray, the result of taking too much tetracycline for frequent ear infections as a child. (One of my first acts as an adult was to cover these ugly teeth with white veneers.)

More importantly, I treasured April because she was the first girl to look into my eyes with love, touch me romantically, and tease me in a gentle way that made me laugh while feeling special. Also, she made me feel handsome, despite my pimply face and unsightly teeth.

And April made it clear she’d make love to me if I so desired, but I wasn’t emotionally ready. I just wanted to be with someone who loved me whom I could hold and touch. My two best friends, Van and Scott, constantly reminded me they would have sex with her in a second if she were available to them.

At the pool that afternoon, Van and Scott teased me mercilessly for getting “buzzed.” Poor Danny was so embarrassed that he refused to leave his room to come swimming with us. I was so proud of April when she shamed my friends into silence. Way to stand by your man, I thought.

Later, at my party, I watched helplessly as Van and Scott played a tickling game with April that involved plenty of handling of her breasts. She giggled gleefully, and I experienced my first romantic betrayal. I just stood there feeling a river of enraged hurt rushing into my chest. When everyone left, I listened to the angriest rock and roll I owned with my headphones on full blast and tried to feel clean again. Those feelings were just a shadow of what I felt now over Linda’s unfaithfulness.

Shortly after we married, Linda and I drove from Blacksburg to Miami to spend spring break with her parents. During this visit, Linda, her older brother Mason, her former high-school boyfriend Carter, and I spent several days sea-kayaking in the bracing salt air along the coast of Sanibel Island.

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“If Carter asks me to make love, I’m going to do it,” Linda said.

“Please don’t,” I said. “You’ll badly hurt me, and you’ll ruin our marriage.”

When I couldn’t persuade Linda to back down, I told Mason about the situation and asked for his assistance. At first, he was incredulous “that old flame was still burning,” but I convinced him, and he scolded Linda for making me so miserable and helped me ensure Linda and Carter didn’t slip off together.

Later, Linda screamed at me for causing her to be humiliated by her brother. Apparently, she had no regrets about her plans to violate our wedding vows and their impact on me. Linda had a sense of entitlement that was unshakeable. At Virginia Tech, we’d been kicked out of a ballroom dancing class because Linda refused to stop leading. Our angry teacher asked me if he might cut in. When I assented, he aggressively waltzed her all over the ballroom. Then he deposited at the door and asked her never to return. Later, Linda’s mother told me her daughter had never subjugated her will to anyone, ever.

Several days after our kayaking trip, Linda’s parents invited a couple from church over for dinner. The job of us high-school- and college-aged kids, which included Linda’s two younger sisters, Eva and Katie, and Carter, was to entertain the couple’s mentally challenged teenage son, Mark. We ended up playing a card game I can’t quite recall with Carter as the dealer. The deck was new, and the cards snapped crisply in a pleasing way. We played out on the patio in the growing dusk. Above us, the canorous cries of tropical birds filled the air as they circled and settled into their nests.

Every time Mark came close to a victorious hand, Carter peeled the winning card off the top of the deck and placed it underneath. He did this in a deliberate way so all of us except Mark could tell what was going on. Carter’s amusement increased with Mark’s frustration. Carter looked at Mark with great sympathy while casting conspiratorial glances at the rest of us. Disgusted, Linda’s sister Eva and I soon left the game. The others continued to play for another hour, with Mark moaning and striking the table in frustration every time he experienced a near-win. Indoors, the adults were oblivious.

I couldn’t believe Linda had dated Carter, a cruel predator, throughout high school, had assumed she’d marry him, and still wanted to have sex with him.

As I sat on the damp embankment in the cooling air, I wondered, based on Linda’s latest revelation, if she’d ever had sex with Carter after she’d become my wife. At first, the answer was a comforting no; then the last tumbler clicked into place, and I knew the answer was yes. About a year after the Sanibel Island and crooked card game incidents, Linda went home to Miami to stay with her parents for a couple of weeks while I attended summer school at Virginia Tech.

When she returned, she refused to make love for several weeks.

“Hug me instead,” she said. “I like hugs the best.”

At the time, I thought she was experiencing a mysterious female mood I hoped would soon pass. However, I realized now she’d had sex with Carter without birth control and refused to make love until she knew whether she was pregnant.

And this afternoon I’d just learned she’d had sex with her boss, Richard Johnson, and there was no way he raped her. I suddenly understood Linda was living her open marriage dream, only there was nothing open about it, and it hurt even more than I’d imagined.

I wondered if my behavior in any way could have driven Linda into the arms of other men.

My conscience was clear, but I remembered how Linda had wanted to join the Peace Corps when

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we first met, a long-time dream, apparently. After college, that organization rejected us because my B.A. in journalism was of no use to it, although the Corps was hungry to hire horticulturists.

Unintentionally, I’d smashed one of Linda’s foremost dreams.

As these thoughts came together to form a coherent picture, I realized I needed to decide whether to divorce Linda and cut my losses or forgive her and try to pull the conventional life I’d dreamed about back together. Would I be a breaker or a healer? I certainly had some angry thoughts of divorce, but I also loved her intensely and was reluctant to let her go.

When I left high school for college, I had mixed feelings toward my parents. On one level, I loved them and considered them nearly ideal parents; on another, I hated them for physically abusing my brother Danny and me as children (They stopped mistreating us shortly after we became teens.) When I fell in love with Linda, I felt I’d found my life-long love and the person who would stand beside me against the evils of the world, including my parents. I also had a naïve, romantic notion that one only finds true love once in a lifetime, and I thought that person was Linda.

Weary, I cleared my mind and listened to the chorus of spring peepers that sprang up around me in the gathering dark.

Maybe because I was considering ending my relationship with Linda, I thought about how it had begun.

I met Linda at Virginia Tech our freshman year in 1975. I first noticed her in my English class, where I thought she was a pretty blonde with a nice smile who seemed down-to-earth, unlike many of the stuck-up good-looking and popular girls who’d attended my high school. And I liked her style. She wore her golden hair long and straight, and she sported a fawn corduroy blazer over a multi-colored flannel shirt, producing an intriguing mix of formality and comfort.

In junior high, after a brief disaster of my mother selecting embarrassing outfits for me to wear, I wore nothing but blue jeans and flannel shirts. In college Freshman English class, I continued with this wardrobe, and I also had long hair and a beard and sat on the far right of the classroom facing the wall, determined our instructor would not embarrass or ridicule me for being smart the way some of my high school teachers had done. Since Linda didn’t know me well when she developed an interest in me, I liked that she was willing to hook up with a bad boy or save a lost soul, whichever was the case.

We shared two classes, ate in the same dining hall, and lived in adjoining dorms. We kept crossing paths. At one point, I learned Linda enjoyed Fleetwood Mac. I liked them too, and my cousin Jeff, who lived in my dorm, owned all of their albums, so I invited Linda to my room on a Saturday night for a Fleetwood Mac fest. She accepted, we sipped cheap red wine while we listened, and I kissed her after I escorted her back to her dorm.

She seemed surprised but pleased. “We’ll see about that,” she said as the door closed behind her.

Christmas break followed almost immediately, and we exchanged silly postcards. We both had long-distance lovers with whom we’d rendezvous over the holiday, but those romances hadn’t been going very well, and we knew our kiss was the start of something special.

However, when we returned to school, Linda was solemn. She’d had sex with Carter over the holiday without birth control, and she was terrified she was pregnant. She told me this as we stood in the courtyard between our dorms one evening when the temperature was in the teens and the wind whipped wildly about us. I held her for hours, comforting her, and when we finally parted, we were in love.

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Soon after these memories drifted into the dark, Linda arrived, her face and silken hair soft in the moonlight. She snuggled against me, wrapped us in a large quilt she’d carried down to the stream, and said, “I’m so sorry. I promise never to hurt you again. Please forgive me.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, but after a long while, I put my arm around her, and she pressed even more tightly against me.

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Reveille by Albert Anthoni Flash Fiction

In the early morning Lawrence got up and made himself ham and eggs. They crackled in the grease of the pan. He sat down to wait for the coffee to brew when a man with a leather knapsack rapped on the half open door. “Hello, anybody home?” He seemed to be standing at attention.

“What’s up fella?” Lawrence asked, as he got up and marched over to the door.

“I’m hungry.” It was a man dressed in a tattered leather vest with a red and white shirt under it. His worn and faded Union cap covered his long jet black hair which dropped down over his shoulders. But the most unique thing about him was that he had no right hand, just a nub and he saluted with it as he stood in the door.

“You don’t have to salute me soldier,” Lawrence said.

“Sorry. It’s a habit,” the soldier said. Sensing he had done something horribly wrong he turned and started to leave, because other homes he had been to, quickly shooed him away.

“Where you going? Come on in.” Lawrence pushed opened the squeaky door.

Surprised at the hospitality, the soldier at the double turned back around. “Thanks, my stomach was a-grumblin’ something awful!”

It was the sadness and pleading that came through his eyes that pulled Lawrence toward him. He had seen plenty of severed arms and legs in the war, that’s not what impressed him, it was the hopelessness that was reflected in the man’s grey eyes.

The pine chair squeaked on the wood floor as Lawrence pulled it out. “Here, Sit,” he said.

As the man sat down he reached into his pocket and snapped a three-cent coin on the table. “Is that enough?”

“Put your money away soldier. I’m not a sergeant quartermaster in the Army anymore, this is free.”

Lawrence slapped a slab of ham on the plate and then slid five fried eggs next to it. He smiled as a warm feeling welled up in his chest. The stranger bowed his head and blessed himself with the nub that used to be his hand.

“Where you from “Billy Yank?” Lawrence asked just as he sat down.

“My name is Zack Kearney. I came from around these parts before the War of Rebellion.” He took a deep breath as he looked at his plate and then laughed. “Looks good. Army food was so bad it was enough to make a mule desert.”

“I remember,” Lawrence frowned imagining the faces of all the starving haggard men.

The breakfast was over and Zack stood up, seeming to snap to attention. But realizing what he was about to do, stopped and pretended to adjust the straps on his pack. The hunger had drained from Zack’s eyes and satisfaction had replaced it.

“Take some food with you,” Lawrence said.

“Gee, thanks mister.” Lawrence opened his backpack and put in biscuits, eggs, bacon and a bag of coffee.

“There you go Zack.” Lawrence’s eyes sparkled with delight, and then he shook the stump

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of his right hand before he left. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw tears in the soldier’s eyes before he went through the door.

Lawrence watched him awhile as he paused at the edge of the woods. Zack whistled and five scruffy people emerged from behind the oak trees. A woman with a little girl hugged him and the others patted him on the back just before they vanished through the curtain of the forest.

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Nobody’s Business by Allen Kopp Fiction She had learned to make a good cup of coffee, although she never drank the stuff herself.

She put in one spoonful of sugar and a slip of milk, just the way Mr. DeSantos liked it. When she took it in to him, he was so busy he didn’t even look up.

“Did you get those letters ready for me to sign, Irene?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Bring them in to me right away.”

When she retrieved the letters from her desk and took them in to him, she had to wait while he signed them. There were about ten of them, so it took a few minutes. He was awfully slow and couldn’t seem to get his ink pen to work right.

“I spilled a little coffee on the lapel of my jacket,” he said. “Will you take it to the lady’s room and see if you can get it out before it sets?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“I’m surprised he can wipe his own backside,” she said so that no one could hear her as she dabbed at the coffee stain with cold water. “Next thing I know, he’ll be calling me in to the toilet to assist.”

She knew it didn’t matter that he stained his jacket. He had so much money he could throw the jacket away like a used Kleenex and buy a new one. He could buy five hundred jackets, a thousand, and never miss the money.

When she took the jacket back to him, he smiled, showing his unnatural-looking false teeth.

“I need you to take these letters to the post office,” he said, “and get them off by special delivery. On your way back, stop and get me a cheese Danish and a pack of cigarettes.”

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Make it two cheese Danish. I didn’t have any breakfast.”

Every day it was the same thing. He was like a spoiled baby with his needs and his whims.

She wondered how his wife could stand him. Oh, yes, that’s right. She couldn’t. She left him. Wife number four. He was already on the lookout for wife number five. He fancied himself quite the smooth operator with the ladies. A gift to the women of the world from on high.

She had worked for Mr. DeSantos for two years. She had lasted longer than most. Some of the “girls” had lasted only a few days. If they weren’t able to get his coffee or his snacks just right or showed a reluctance or an unpleasant attitude toward any of his demands, he made no qualms about firing them. One of them he fired after two days because she used a perfume he didn’t like, another for having a limp that he hadn’t noticed before he hired her.

She never flirted with him or allowed him to flirt with her, although he would have liked her better if she had. She let him know from the very beginning that she was having none of that. If he suspected that she was cold, frigid even, or hated men, then so be it. That was her protection.

Flirting wasn’t the only activity she didn’t engage in. She refrained from talking about her personal affairs. She believed that her private life and her business life should remain separate. In all the time she had been with Mr. DeSantos, she had never divulged if she was married (she didn’t wear a wedding ring), where she lived, if she had a family, how she spent the weekend, what kind of car she drove or what kind of music she liked, who she voted for, or where she went on her vacation. It was just a matter of principle with her to keep those things to herself, especially with

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someone she had come (secretly) to detest.

Not that Mr. DeSantos had any reason for complaint. She kept him and his office functioning smoothly. When she had started with him, everything was in chaos. She instituted a “business plan,” a new way of doing things. She organized the files and kept accurate records of everything that went on. She dealt with clients, arranging appointments with the right ones and politely turning away the others. She was able to turn a flailing business into a thriving and efficient endeavor. If she ever bothered to ask herself if she was appreciated, though, she would have known that she was not. Mr. DeSantos would have wanted the world to believe—and believed it himself—that he had done it all on his own through his personal charm and business acumen.

One Friday afternoon at the end of a particularly hectic week, Mr. DeSantos called her into his office a few minutes before time to go home. He needed a book from the highest shelf, he said, and wasn’t able to climb the ladder because of a flare-up with his gout.

She positioned the ladder underneath the book he wanted and climbed. When she was on the top step and reaching above her head, Mr. DeSantos crossed the floor to the ladder and put his hand up her skirt and rested it on her thigh just above the knee. Pretending not to notice, she pulled the book off the shelf, heavy and solid as a brick, and let it fall on his head.

“Son of a bitch!” he said. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, sir!” she said. “It just slipped right out of my hand.”

“Ow, my head is killing me!”

“Do you want me to call the doctor?”

“No!” “Would you like an aspirin or anything?”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you did that on purpose!” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she said.

“That’s all. You may go.”

“Thank you, sir. I hope you enjoy your weekend.”

She didn’t bother to go to work on Monday and Tuesday, the first days she had missed since she had worked for Mr. DeSantos. On Wednesday when she returned, he was sullen and aloof and refused to look directly at her.

A couple of weeks later the knot on his head was gone and he seemed to have forgotten the incident with the book. He called her into his office to take a letter and, instead of having her sit across the desk from him where she always sat, he asked her to sit on his side of the desk with nothing between them.

After he had dictated a few sentences of the letter and she had taken them down in shorthand, he stopped and seemed unable to continue.

“Let’s just cut the crap!” he said.

“Did you forget what you wanted to say?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t forget.”

He reached out his hand and put it lightly on her knee. “I have a need,” he said, “and I’ll bet if you were entirely honest with me, you would admit that you have a need, too.”

“Do you need a cup of coffee?” she asked.

“You are a little tease, aren’t you?”

She wanted to remove his hand from her knee but didn’t dare touch it. She stood up, letting her pad fall to the floor, and moved away from him, around to the other side of the chair she had been sitting in.

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“That’s not what I’m here for,” she said.

“I’m all alone now,” he said.

“That has nothing to do with me.”

“We could have some good times together if you would just let down your defenses.”

“I have no intention of letting down anything.”

“You don’t like me just a little?”

“It doesn’t matter if I like you or not. I’m your employee and nothing more. Personal feelings do not enter into it.”

“You are a hard woman,” he said.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Look,” he said. “I’m going to New York for a few days. It’s partly business but mostly recreation. I’d love it if you’d go with me. Nobody has to know about it, and so what if they do? It isn’t anybody’s business but yours and mine.”

She went out of his office, put on her coat and hat and went home, even though she had two hours to go before she was supposed to leave.

The next morning he greeted her effusively, all smiles and good cheer. He got his own coffee and left her alone throughout the morning to do her own work without asking her to do anything for him. At lunchtime he offered to take her to lunch but she declined.

“I’m not going to try to get you to change your mind,” he said. “I just wanted to apologize for yesterday. You were right, of course. I had no business suggesting such a thing.”

“We need speak no more about it,” she said with a tight smile.

A week later, on the day before he was due to be away for two weeks, he called her in to his office and gestured to her to sit in the chair facing his desk. He sat down in his big chair and lit a cigarette and blew smoke out over her head.

“I don’t quite know how to say this,” he said with an air of abstraction.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“It’s the Ruben account.”

“What about it?”

“You’ve made some serious mistakes with it.”

“I’ve never touched the Ruben account. You said you wanted to handle it yourself.”

“Your bungling will end up costing me at least a hundred thousand dollars.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.”

“I’m ending our association.”

“You’re firing me?”

“I want you to get your personal belongings and get out.”

She stood up and returned to her desk, where she took from the drawer the small handgun she had taken to carrying. With the gun concealed in the palm of her hand she returned to Mr. DeSantos’s office.

The door was partway closed. She pushed it open silently and took a few steps into the room and pointed the gun at his face. He was fumbling with a whiskey bottle and a small glass. He hadn’t taken to drinking directly from the bottle yet.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said when he realized she was standing there with a gun pointed at him.

She shot him between the eyes from about five feet away. He lurched forward and then back in his high-backed, padded chair. The chair came to rest at about a forty-five degree angle, as if he had decided to take a little snooze in the middle of a busy workday. The tiny bullet hole

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between his eyes oozed blood as if his head had sprung a leak. His eyes were still open but he was dead. Very quick and clean it was.

She returned to her desk and tidied up the same as she would have done at the end of any work day. Then she looked out the window to see what the weather was like. The sky was overcast and threatened rain, so she made sure she had her umbrella. She put on her coat and, turning off the lights, left the building for the last time.

Outside, on the street, she took a deep breath of the cold air that smelled of bus fumes. She hadn’t had any lunch, so she stopped at a luncheonette and spent a pleasant hour eating a tuna salad sandwich and a piece of cherry pie and chatting with the waitresses. When she left the luncheonette, she was delighted to see that a movie she had wanted to see since reading a review in the newspaper was playing at a nearby theatre. She paid her admission and went inside and took a seat. As the lights went down and the movie began, she tried to think how long it had been since she had treated herself to such a pleasant afternoon.

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Terminal Tears by Chris Wilkensen Fiction SATURDAY Jake’s mother wasn't the first person to cry in this driver’s cab this year. She wouldn’t even be the last one this weekend. She was the eighth different person to cry in his car through the middle of August. Most of the other crybabies were drunks.

“Couldn’t you have at least waited until we got to the terminal to start crying?" Jake’s dad asked his mother.

“Can’t you ever be quiet?” She asked.

Through her tears she realized this was what she wanted for her son. She wanted her son to be just like the man she married. She wanted him to be happily married one day. She wanted him to be in a taxi taking her then-to-be grandson or granddaughter to an expensive, prestigious university. He was her only chance, her only child. These were tears of optimism.

The cab was quiet for a while, until Jake’s phone began vibrating, irritating his mother.

“Can you turn it off already?” she asked.

“I want to see how many times she’s going to call today. Maybe it’ll be over a hundred. She called me fifty-nine times yesterday. Fifty-nine,” Jake said.

“Jake, turn off your phone already,” his father said from the other side of the backseat. He took the phone out of his pocket and powered it down.

The last time Jake and his ex-girlfriend, Amy, communicated was Wednesday via Facebook.

“I don’t think we should talk for a while,” Jake wrote. He hadn’t answered any of her Facebook messages, texts or calls since.

The taxi was silent, until his father used his managerial skills and suggested the better route, his route. The cabby began to speak, but a car cut in front of the cab. No turn signal.

Someone on his cell phone. Someone in a hurry, someone who wasn’t paid by a meter.

The driver honked as he braked. In all of his years on the job, he had never been in an accident. That wasn’t going to last forever. He wasn’t Speed Racer, and sometimes shit happened.

He knew that better than anyone.

Things made by men never lasted. The only thing guaranteed to work the right way all the time was a machine made by a machine of a machine’s descent. Men were corrupt; machines were correct. That was why the driver made it a habit of waiting at least two seconds before accelerating when the lights changed. He wasn’t Speed Racer.

“Goddamit,” the dad said. Some of his coffee splashed onto his black dress pants. “I just got these cleaned.”

“You took them to a dry-cleaner. You didn’t put any real effort into it,” Jake said.

His mom laughed and hit her son’s arm.

“Don’t laugh at the way he’s talking to me,” his dad said.

“But that’s why I’m going to miss him. You could lighten up sometimes, dear.”

The cabbie parallel parked near the American Airlines terminal. Everyone got out. While the driver was getting Jake’s luggage, he exchanged hugs with his parents.

“I’ll be okay. Don’t worry.” Jake rolled his luggage toward the entrance. Once there, he turned and waved. The parents got back into his cab, on their way to see the wife’s sister in a

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nearby neighborhood.

While waiting for his flight, Jake recalled the beginning of the end of his relationship with Amy. She had overheard his parents talking in the kitchen, unaware of her presence. Their house was big enough to hide in plain sight.

“He has to concentrate on school, not be distracted by overly needy girls. All she’s doing is using him,” his mother said.

“My mother must have said the same thing about you if she ever met you,” his father replied.

“No one’s perfect.” She slapped him.

A worried Amy told Jake, perhaps only for his reassurance that his parents had issues.

“That sounds like my dad. He definitely crossed the line there. Most of the time before, she threw alcohol on his face. It hurts more,” Jake said.

“How would you know?”

They both laughed.

“Don’t worry about what my parents say. They fight more than they agree. And they usually fight about me. They’ve been married for over twenty years. A fight is not a big deal. It’s normal. It happens. ” “That sounds like something a therapist says. I hope it never gets like that with us, but maybe it’s too late. I hope you don’t believe what your mom said about me.” She began to cry.

Her comment stuck in his head for the rest of the summer. He interpreted everything differently, depending on his mood.

His parents chose the universities he applied to. His opinion didn’t matter because he didn’t know what was best for him, as they did. His father reminded him that he wasn’t paying the tuition, so he shouldn’t complain.

Jake wasn’t forced to attend the elite university several hundred miles away from his childhood home. He went because he would be far away from his parents. Jake felt that being an only child was more of a curse than a blessing. His parents had an odd obsession with him and wanted to control his future.

His mother obsessed on his educational progress in high school. Her husband was usually too tired to check on his son’s grades, so she took it upon herself to upgrade his son’s class rank and GPA on a consistent basis. When he had a good semester, his parents rewarded him, whether it was a new phone, computer or a stash of spending money.

She had in-depth conversations with Jake’s teachers during parent-teacher conferences for tips of how Jake do better. By the end of his senior year, he was in the top 10% of his class. That was the same year he began dating Amy. His parents didn’t have nice things to say about Amy. His mother had said “girls like her can be trouble.” Girls like her, who didn’t have it easy as others. His parents said he needed to focus on school, not crazy girls.

“In college, you’ll have a chance with a new girl every weekend. Don’t focus on just one girl.

You’re only young once,” his dad had said when they were alone.

“I can’t believe you’re saying that,” Jake said.

“College is a whole different world, son. But don’t take my word for it, not that you would anyway. You’ll see for yourself.”

“I don’t want to get a new girl. I want to stay with Amy.” “I know how you feel. I was your age once too. But you’ll find someone new. There are plenty of fish in the sea in college. And at that college, they’re all quality catches.”

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“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jake asked.

“Maybe you don’t understand now, but you’ll understand later.”

Amy later told him everything would be fine. She wanted to follow him to that school, but it was too unrealistic. Then, she said it would be okay if they had a long-distance relationship. They could see each other on holidays.

Jake spent most of the summer making a choice. One or the other. No compromises. He could upset his girl, who gave him his masculinity. Or, he could piss off his parents, who gave him everything else.

SUNDAY On Amy’s way out, she walked past Max, the creep who always hit on her. He lived on the floor above her and attended a community college a twenty-minute drive away. Community colleges were supposed to be two-year schools, but he was already into his third year. If he were sober more often, he probably would’ve been able to finish and wouldn’t have been kicked out of that four-year school.

“When are we going to hang out?” he asked.

“When you get an Associate’s Degree.”

“You’re funny. So, where are you going?”

“To see my boyfriend.” She walked faster.

“Do you need a ride?”

“Not from you.”

“I am 100 percent sober now. I promise you that.”

“Then, you should study for your summer classes so you could actually pass them.”

“You should help me study. You could see how hard it is. Hard, in a good way.”

“You realize that can’t happen, right?”

“Have fun with your boyfriend.”

She took a bus to the subway station. Finally, she got to the airport. Two-hours from startto-finish. In a car, it took twenty minutes.

She had seen the plane ticket on Jake’s computer desk last Sunday. She snapped a picture of it on her cell phone. Prom felt like years ago. He was really leaving.

She had to see him. In many of the romantic-comedies she’d seen in her life, the final scenes were usually at an airport. She would find him before his flight and explain to him. At the very least, she had to try.

Amy’s mother warned her to be careful of the opposite sex. She thought her mother was too hard on her father because he left. She thought her mother was cynical after they hadn’t heard from him for a few years. It was almost like he never existed.

“Guys will fall for you. They will come to you. All you have to do is wait.” Her mother said on several occasions. Amy assumed all mothers told their daughters something similar.

“Guys will always try to pick you up. The only time you have to pick them up is when they fall for you.” Her mother said that often too. When Amy realized how much more often guys talked to her than other girls, she knew her mother was right.

Amy was a good listener with kind eyes, but most guys didn’t look into them when they talked, except Jake. He put up with her complaints about her mom’s money problems, and he spent time with her outside her apartment to help her forget typical teenage struggles. Sometimes, Amy thought it was too good to be true.

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When she cried to her mother about Jake’s college decision, her mother caressed her until she said, “I told you this would happen. Have you ever listened to anything I’ve told you?”

Amy arrived at the airport three hours before the original flight was schedule to leave. If she saw him, she’d make it a scene he would never forget. If he ever did love her, then he would be moved to tears by her insistence to stay in Illinois.

Two hours flew by at the airport as she prepared the speech in her mind.

“You’re going to miss your flight,” she texted him.

Five minutes later, Jake texted. The first communication from him in days.

“I’m there already. And I have a date tonight. I’m sorry. I’ll shoot you a message when I’m less busy.”

Little did she know, the flight was rescheduled. His parents changed his flight to yesterday.

She wouldn’t even get a chance to see him. In many of the tear-jerking dramas she avoided, one person was at an airport waiting to be caught, although there were no miscommunications like in real life.

Half-an-hour flew by with her crying. Security guards asked if she was okay. Then, they told her she had to leave.

“Guys will come and go,” she could hear her mother say. “You can never get rid of them.”

The urge to get drunk stormed into her mind. She knew the guy who had the supplies.

She called Max. It was never as fitting of a time until now.

He didn’t answer at first, but he called back within the minute. She started to cry, telling him everything.

“How do I know you’re really at Midway?” Max asked, toward the end of the talk.

“I’ll take a picture of the terminal.”

She took the picture and sent it to Max, but that wasn’t the reason she snapped the shot. It was the end of her first love, her first terminal relationship, like a terminal illness in that it was destined to die. The text message proved it was already over. She saved the picture to dwell on it.

Max was on his way to pick her up, and Jake was already in Pennsylvania.

“Guys will come and go,” her mother would say.

She spotted Max in his shiny black car that his parents bought for him. Unfortunately, they didn’t pay for plastic surgery or style.

His balding head and perpetually broken, crunched nose made him look like a human eagle from the young girl’s 20-20 bird’s eye view. She was this eagle’s prey, a naïve girl who just wanted someone to complain to.

Her upset heart ruined her thinking and caused her to make the mistake of calling him. She didn’t even want to be seen in public with him. She couldn’t even bear to look at him.

Max kept slamming down on the brakes, inching closer to the car in front of his until his fender touched the other’s bumper. He got out to investigate at the damage. None. The other driver got out too.

“Dumb ass,” the other driver, a shirt-and-tied 40-something, said to Max. “Shut up. There’s not even a scratch.”

The other driver went back into his car.

Max was drunk or high, maybe both, at 4:00 on a Sunday, although hours before he claimed he was sober.

Amy witnessed this, but he didn’t see her.

Max called her.

“Where the fuck are you, Amy?” he asked.

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“I don’t want to ride with you today, “she said.

“What’s the matter, Amy? You don’t want to hang out anymore?”

“Not when you’re like this.”

“I try to be friendly to you and all you do is fuck with me. I’m sick of it.”

“I’m sorry. It was my mistake.”

“You’re sorry? You really think I believe that? You must think I’m stupid because I go to a community college.”

He saw her across the parking lot. They made eye contact. She hung up the phone.

Amy powerwalked toward the first cab in the long line of cabs. Max was yelling her name.

She looked behind him. He was still calling her name when she got into the cab.

Amy popped into the same cab that her boyfriend did yesterday. Being in the same cab was the closest she came to meeting him. But she would never realize that.

“Go, go, go,” she said when she got in the cab.

“Hold your horses,” the driver said. “Where to?”

“How do I lock the doors?” she asked.

The driver was often asked how to unlock the doors by moronic passengers, but no one ever asked how to lock them.

“Did you ever lock a car door before?” he asked.

“Never mind.”

Amy told him the suburban address.

“It’s extra to go to the suburbs. Look at the back of the passenger’s seat for the rates,” he said.

“I don’t care. Just go.” She had no choice to pay the overcharged rates. There were more important things on her mind. She kept flicking her thumb up-down, left-right, to avoid the phone from going to its black screen.

The driver’s hands opened and closed every minute like a late metronome. He was oblivious to this idiosyncrasy after six years on the job.

“I drive to and from the airport all the time, but I haven't flown in years.” The driver peered into his rearview mirror, waiting for a response. Her eyes fixated on her phone.

“Can you go a little faster please?”

He was not Speed Racer.

“I can. And I can also go a little slower too. This is a good speed,” he said.

Amy’s phone vibrated.

“You know I’m going to get you. Just wait,” Max’s text stated.

He knew where she lived.

She dialed Jake’s house.

Jake’s mother answered.

“You know what I told you about calling here,” the mom said.

“Listen, I need to come over.” She was breathing too hard to talk coherently.

“He’s not here. He left yesterday.”

“I know he’s not there. I just need to come by to get something I left there.” The girl was too scared to care.

“You left nothing here. Nothing at all. I know what girls like you want. You only want the rich boy to save you from your humble life without deserving any better.”

At this point, she started to cry.

“Please, I need to come by. Can I just come over?”

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“Why? You really are a strange girl. I knew something was wrong with your mother, and you probably have the same thing, whatever it is. I have enough stress as it is. Don’t call here anymore. Or, I’ll call the police.”

After Amy heard that, she dialed 9-1-1.

“Well, where are you going? What suburb now? Is everything okay?” The driver asked.

She didn’t get a chance to respond.

The driver looked into his rearview too late. He got into his first accident, although he didn’t do anything wrong. Rear-ended on the interstate, the driver almost forgot protocol. He hit the brakes and then pulled to the side of the expressway.

Max pulled to a stop, with some sense finally popping into his head. He stayed in his car and wouldn’t communicate with the taxi driver who was swearing at him on the side of the highway.

The cabbie called the cops, who arrived five minutes later. They performed a field sobriety test on him. It would take some time for Max’s rich parents to bail him out after his second DUI. If enough people petitioned, they could even evict him from the apartment building. She stayed in the backseat, on the phone with her mother. At least she was safe. The worst was over.

Max helped her forget about Jake.

“I knew that boy was trouble,” her mother said.

Amy cried, only out of relief. It could’ve been so much worse. She was the ninth person to cry in the cabbie’s car this year.

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Bios Cover Art: A.J. Huffman’s photography graces our cover. She has published six solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her seventh solo chapbook was published in October by Writing Knights Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest. Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

Writers: Albert Anthoni (pen name for Albert Ruggiero) writes now that he is retired and loves it. He writes about what he believes is important in life: respect, love, sacrifice and the awe that he sees in the human spirit. He has been published on the Writing Tomorrow web site, Riverbabble web site, and last but not least in Literary Brushstrokes. He currently has a book of short stories published called The Curious Boy. Allen Kopp lives in St. Louis, Missouri. His fiction has appeared in The Penmen Review, Skive Magazine, A Twist of Noir, Danse Macabre, Short Story America, Midwest Literary Magazine, Dew on the Kudzu, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Eastown Fiction, Wilde Oats, Subtext Magazine, Superstition Review, Santa Few Writers' Project Journal, and many others. He welcomes visitors to his website at: www.literaryfictions.com.

Allen Long’s memoirs have recently appeared in The Copperfield Review, Eunoia Review, Milk Sugar, and Scholars & Rogues. Allen is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. Allen lives with his wife near San Francisco.

Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet and artist, who lives in Toledo, Ohio, with her three cats, Graham, Tink, and Fiyero. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pank, New Verse News, Literary Brushstrokes, Cyclamens, Swords, Bird’s Eye reView, and The Rusty Nail among others. She is the author of three chapbooks: Prickly Beer and Purple Panties, A Charm Bracelet For Cruising and Winged Graffiti, and a co-author of the book: Company of Women: New & Selected Poems. She teaches writing of all stripes at Terra State and Ivy Tech Community Colleges, and is diligently working on a full length poetry memoir.

Chris Wilkensen is a scribe whose heart lives in Chicago and body survives in Asia for the moment. He passes the time by blinking his eyes and flipping through fine fiction. His work has appeared in Thoughtsmith, The Rusty Nail, The Story Shack and others.

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Literary Brushstrokes Submissions to: www.LiteraryBrushstrokes.com

ŠNovember 2013

Photo by Mary Chrapliwy

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