Rind Literary Magazine 6

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Rind Literary Magazine Issue 6 June 2014

rindliterarymagazine.com

All Works Š Respective Authors, 2014

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Editor in Chief: Stephen Williams

Fiction Editors: Johnathan Etchart Jenny Lin Melinda Smith Shaymaa Mahmoud

Nonfiction Edit ors: Collette Curran Owen Torres William Ellars Anastasia Zamora

Webmaster: Omar Masri

Blog Manager: Dylan Gascon

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Contributors

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Fiction: The Boy Who Turned Himself into a Statue/ P. J. McNeil

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The Moths/ Harry Youtt

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Cabin Pr essure/ Claire Kole

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Poets and Killers/ Wendy Scott

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The 3 A.M. Litter ateur / Tony Conaway

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Ringlet and Pinky/ Jo Heath

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My Father’s Children/ Ryan Link

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X-Ray Blanket/ Megan Dobkin

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How She Fell For Her Captor/ Megan Dobkin

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Open House/ Megan Dobkin

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Rock Show/ Megan Dobkin

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The Juror/ Megan Dobkin

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Nonfiction: Climbing That Mountain Again/ Jeff Nazzaro

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Acknowledgements Thanks to all of our contributors, past and present, because without you this publication wouldn’t exist. We are the octopus, you are the tentacles, let’s go eat some sharks together.

We’re also indebted to the creative writing faculty of the University of California Riverside, Mount San Antonio College, Rio Hondo College, and Riverside Community College. Thank you for supporting us the same way vitamin c supports the immune system.

Did you paint the next Mona Lisa and are dying to premiere it in a literary magazine? If so, please send us your artwork and photography. Feel free to contact us with any ideas or queries you might have.

Please support the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival because they are the loveliest people.

You can find out more about them at www.sgvlitfest.com.

Check us out on Duotrope, Facebook, and Twitter. For updates and general shenanigans, head over to our blog at www.thegrovebyrind.wordpress.com. Do you stay up at night, staring at your ceiling, visualizing your name spelled out in orange lights? Then become a contributor! Send your submissions to rindliterarymagazine@gmail.com.

-The Rind Staff

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The Boy Who Turned Himself into a Statue P.J. McNeil

Since the beginning of the school year, regular as daily prayer, Gerard “Pitou” Blette, imagined kissing Celeste Angelle. She sat in the front. Her father was a lawyer and they lived in one of the big new houses at the end of School Street. Sometimes he’d be aroused and he’d look left and right at his classmates sitting next to him to see if they noticed. But how could they, since he was dutifully seated at his desk like everyone else.

By spring, Sister Mary Stephen of the Stoning told his seventh-grade class that all thoughts about sex are a sin. She further advised them against attending the Friday night dances at the American Legion Hall now that they were of age, because, she said “when you enter that dance hall door, your guardian angel abandons you and the devil takes over.”

This warning about sex, the only one on the subject made by his teacher all year and the only one spoken thus far during his education entrusted into the capable hands of the Soeurs de Bon Pasteur (Sisters of the Good Shepherd) at St. Rapier’s School, pushed Pitou over the edge. Was he being taken over by the devil? Were his thoughts of kissing Celeste the dreaded ‘thoughts about sex’?

That was the day he decided to turn himself into a statue.

Statues were a big part of his life, a big part of the adult world in which he lived and in which he had very little say. His earliest memory of a beautiful statue was the Blessed Virgin on her pedestal in church towering over a little stadium of candles flickering in glass cups the color of blood.

When Pitou and three of his cousins made their First Communion, their parents assembled them in their finery like wedding cake dolls and marched them to the grotto behind their pepe’s house to pose for pictures in front of pepe’s statue of the Blessed Virgin. Most people had Mary enshrined in a bathtub planted on the lawn. His pepe had built his Mary shrine to imitate Lourdes, one of the places where she appeared to young children. It was deep in the back yard on the edge of the woods.

She was housed in an arch of mortar and stone. His pepe even diverted a little stream to go trickling past like the miraculous water of Lourdes.

Pitou’s wasn’t sure how or if he could turn himself into a statue. He’d been raised in a church that reveled in saints and miracles, so he believed pretty much anything was possible, if it was done for the glory of God. Did he want to become a statue to glorify God? Not really. He needed a time out from all this sex stuff. It would be like a magic trick.

That night, he stood by his bed in his pajamas and rattled off continuous Hail Mary’s in a 6

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hurry to get each one over with, the words stumbling, mumbling out as if he were speaking in tongues. He became dizzy and feverish.

He didn’t realize he’d actually done it, didn’t know an entire night had passed, until his mother’s terrified scream the next morning. Pitou felt bad right away about scaring the daylights out of her. He thought of Mary, being greatly troubled when the angel Gabriel told her she would be the Mother of God. He didn’t think Mary screamed like crazy the way his mother did when she discovered his little miracle.

Pitou immediately considered turning himself back into a boy, but then he’d have to confess why he did it. He wasn’t ready for that. When his mother stopped screaming, she fell to her knees, bent over and hugged herself and sobbed. He braced himself when he heard his father come bounding up the stairs. His father was a carpenter, like St. Joseph. Unlike St. Joseph, he liked his cans of beer in multiples and his mother had to continually shush his blue language.

“What the hell is it?” he yelled shoving open the door against his prostrate, sobbing wife.

Pitou’s mother got on her hands and knees and scuttled out of the way, allowing him to open the door wide.

“Jesus Christ Almighty!” he yelled as Pitou’s mother pointed a trembling hand to the place by the bed where Pitou had positioned himself the night before.

“Pitou? Pitou?” his astonished father asked, resting his coffee cup on Pitou’s dresser.

“Pitou! Pitou!” his father yelled as if saying his son’s name loud and angry enough would put everything in order.

He braced one hand on his kneeling wife’s shoulder and took a step closer toward Pitou. As his father’s outstretched hand got closer, Pitou wanted badly to blink or somehow signal his parents he was still alive. His father patted the top of Pitou’s head twice. Then he pulled back, dropped to his knees and put his arms around his wife without taking his eyes off his son.

By then Pitou realized he still had most of his senses. He could smell his father’s coffee, see and hear both his parents. He’d felt his father’s hand on his head. But he remained a plaster, inanimate statue. It was if he were there, but hiding, like the nuns tried to explain the presence of God. “What should we do?” his father asked. Pitou had never seen his father so tamed.

“I’ll call Father Bellechance,” she answered, looking up at Pitou. She pushed herself up from her knees without taking her eyes off Pitou. She was calmed. She wiped her tears with her apron, took a couple of steps back, turned and left.

Pitou’s father stayed on his knees, then looked down at himself as if he were embarrassed to 7

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find himself kneeling in front of his son. He jumped up and bolted after his wife and slammed the door shut.

Pitou spent the next hour or so (he’d lost his human sense of time completely) regretting what a huge mistake he’d made. All he’d thought of beforehand was how wonderful statues were and how everybody loved them. He hadn’t wanted to scare his parents. He’d not even considered how he would turn myself back into a twelve-year-old boy. He supposed it would require wanting to be a boy again as much as he’d wanted to be a statue.

As this weighed on Pitou, he heard the hollow uneven sounds of many pairs of feet coming up the stairs. The door opened and Fr. Norman Bellechance’s considerable bulk occupied the doorway.

The pastor’s B.O. wafted in and Pitou wanted badly to raise a hand and pinch his nose.

The priest stood open-mouthed, panting to catch his breath from the climb, a bit of drool escaping the corner of his pale lips. His normally gray, tired slits of eyes widened with shock.

Fr. Bellechance, without blinking, reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

Transfixed, he dabbed the spit from his chin, held his breath, and approached the statue of Pitou. He removed his black fedora with one hand and reached out toward Pitou with the handkerchief in the other. Pitou wanted to turn away from being touched by that handkerchief. The old priest made a fist around the handkerchief and slowly knocked twice on Pitou’s plaster head.

He backed off and pulled a little plastic bottle of holy water from his breast pocket, squirted some into the palm of his hand and tossed it at Pitou, not making the sign of the cross or anything, just tossing as if he were feeding ducks on a pond.

Finally Fr. Bellechance stood erect, his face nearly as white as the plaster that Pitou had become. He pronounced with the authority of an expert, ‘Yes, I’m afraid he is a statue.’

The housekeeper at the rectory overheard Fr. Bellechance on the phone talking to the bishop about Pitou Blette. She listened intently as the old priest’s impatience with the bishop rose to a shocking level.

“I’m telling you I have verified it with my own hand!” the pastor said, then, calmly, backing off, “No, your excellency, he appears to have done it by himself.” He concluded the call: “Yes, your excellency, I look forward to your visit.”

The housekeeper did not hesitate to spread the juicy gossip by calling her cousin Estelle who called her cousins and aunts and sisters and, like a flash flood, word that little Pitou Blette had turned himself into a statue buzzed in the ears of every Catholic in town and plenty of non-Catholics too.

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Soon the neighbors, relatives, friends, and total strangers formed a line outside the Blette home, a humble two-story apartment in a block of six mill housing apartments called a “sexplex”.

The police came to direct traffic. Cars with out-of-state plates were parked as far as three blocks away.

The first visitor was his Aunt Simone who placed a small wicker basket at Pitou’s feet with a cardboard sign “DONATIONS”. She also set up a burgundy velvet rope and two gold stands she’d borrowed from the funeral parlor in order to keep pilgrims from getting close enough to touch her nephew. Many people came and went, Pitou’s parents allowing groups of no more than five to crowd into the little upstairs bedroom on a non-descript house in Melanville that was being transformed into a shrine. People lined up for blocks, debated if it was it a miracle. Some brought young children, eager to expose them to the Church’s tradition of miracles. They were careful to keep them from going beyond the velvet rope. Visitors would kneel briefly and close their eyes, but couldn’t keep them closed long, so eager to stare at this boy-statue as if waiting for something more to happen, some further astonishment and determined not to miss a thing. They left money, flowers, rosaries, pictures of their favorite saints. It was like the impromptu shrines that spring up on the highway at the site of a fatal car accident.

A week went by. There was no attempt to move Pitou. Each evening, his mother and father would be the last ones to visit his room. They’d sit quietly on two of the several metal folding chairs someone had brought from the parish hall. He noticed they held hands when they sat there. He’d never seen them do that. After a while Pitou’s father would empty the donation basket into a sack and each of his parents would place a warm hand on his plaster head before they left and they’d tell him they loved him. They were the only ones allowed to touch him.

The bishop pulled up in his big black car, emerged from the back seat and strode impatiently toward the door of the Blette home while as his two attendant monsignors scurried to keep up with him. As he mounted the steps, he yanked a purple stole from the pocket of his black suit coat and draped it around his neck.

Pitou’s parents had cleared their home of all visitors except Fr. Bellechance in preparation for the bishop’s visit. The old pastor answered the door.

“Welcome to the Blette home your excellency, this is Romeo Blette and his wife Darlene. The boy is upstairs.”

The bishop shoved Pitou’s door open and all his hurry came to an abrupt halt when he finally faced the statue. Pitou thought he recognized this new priest from the picture of the bishop that hangs 9

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in the school hallway at St. Rapier’s.

One of the priests who entered with the bishop unhooked one end of the velvet rope and let it drop to the floor. He quickly looked around the room and then pulled a night table in front of Pitou and placed a gold vial on it, then stood straight up with his hands clasped at his belt buckle. The bishop opened the gold vial and poured what looked like cooking oil onto a couple of his fingers. The bishop began a prayer in Latin and made the sign of the cross on Pitou’s head, eyes, nose, ears, and chest. One of the monsignors moved the night table and re-attached the velvet rope.

The bishop turned to Pitou’s parents: “This is your son, you are sure of that?”

“Yes, your excellency,” they answered in unison looking at each other at such a dumb question.

“You realize I will have to inform Rome,” said the bishop as if that were bad news. “There will be an investigation.” he continued. He turned back toward Pitou. “It will take some time,” he finished, sounding annoyed.

Pitou’s parents nodded and the bishop and his cohort left the room.

“Why did he give Pitou the last rights?” asked Pitou’s father as he and his wife sat alone with Pitou. “He’s not dead!”

Pitou’s mother turned to her husband. “I’m not sure what he is,” as she began to sob.

After dark, after Pitou’s parents had shooed away the last pilgrims who’d come after the bishop’s visit and they’d said goodnight to Pitou, he was enjoying his evening privacy and the door of his room opened again. In stepped Celeste Angelle. He thought he was dreaming.

Her left hand on the doorknob, she stepped into Pitou’s bedroom, and like every other firsttime visitor, stared, her mouth slightly open. She moved toward him, and folded her hands in prayer.

She unhooked one end of the velvet rope and dropped it on the floor without taking her eyes off his.

Pitou wondered if she could feel him staring into her eyes the way she was staring into his. She stepped beyond the rope, close enough so Pitou could feel her breath and smell her perfume.

“Everyone said you turned into a statue. When did you come back?” she asked.

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In my Chest By Stina Stjernkvist

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The Moths Harry Youtt

"I don’t know what you think about them, but I disdain them all." Charles was talking about moths, making one of his sweeping proclamations. Gwen wasn’t responding. To say anything would only encourage him. "Given the chance, all of them will seek closets and chests and have at the wool of a jumper or a fine pair of trousers." He rattled the ice in his drink by swirling the liquid with his fingers. "The tiny ones will lead the way, but the larger ones will follow. And devour." This is the way Charles thinks, against the grain of reality, but why should that matter.

They’d been sitting at the rough wooden table, just outside on the patio at the edge of his tiny garden -- last night when the lights were lit inside. Charles had hurried to slide shut big glass door that opened from the kitchen, against his imagined invasion of the dreaded fluttering beasts. She’d been contemplating the stone wall at the back, and the new fig trees that had only just been planted, so that you could see the dug earth fresh and banked against their roots.

In her silence, she was contemplating moths that carry souls of the dead seeking solace, seeking light, some that flicker, some that flash, even only a glimmer that might points to some kind of hope, inside and out of reach -- frustration of a window screen, or a glass door to beat questing wings against. The frustration!

Even the next morning, Charles continues about the moths, even though they were nowhere to be seen, having stolen away to fix themselves among the branches to claim shade and quiet for the day's duration.

"You never know," Charles tells her, sliding closed the door to the garden, this time from inside.

Now they sit in Charles' dark dining room. Another table, this one long and trestled. A plate before her is about to be filled with something Charles prepares. She sees him in the kitchen. He pulls a square package from a grocery bag and pops open the thin cellophane covering. Two cold croissants nest inside and seem almost to rattle when he moves the package. Not that they are stale. It is only that they seem never to have been fresh. Like this place, she’s thinking. They seem to have been born inside some gray and brittle space, and there they continue to dwell, waiting dutifully and moth-less to experience the fate of whatever is to be accomplished in this existence, in this case, to be eaten.

He crinkles both croissants from the package and shovels them directly into a toaster oven.

He selects two and places them onto separate plates. "Do you take butter?"

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She nods.

From the corner of her eye, though she never says a word to him, she watches a quietly fluttering two-winged thing as it crosses through the sunlit kitchen and seems to be meandering its way up the stairs, and the shadows, to Charles’ bedroom.

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Climbing that Mountain Again Jeff Nazzaro

Thereʼs a Japanese proverb that says something along the lines of “Everyone should climb Mount Fuji once, but only a fool would do it twice.” My ex-wife told me this just before we got married. In Japan, the formal marriage ceremony takes places at city hall, and, so long as everything is in order and there is no wait, occupies all of ten minutes. Okay, so count on at least an hour, but when everything is ready and your number is called, you donʼt have to say anything or even sign your name—just use your inkan (personal rubber stamp) to seal the deal. Family registers (or register if, as in our case, only one of you has one) will be updated and you will be officially married. At some point thereafter, most young Japanese couples, like young couples anywhere, have lavish wedding ceremonies and receptions. My new wife and I were not so young, added to which our families were separated by half the globe and not rich. My father-in-law was a citrus farmer in Ehime Prefecture and a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Japan, who made ends meet doing accounting work for the local agricultural co-op. He would treat us to a nice little dinner party a few months later, but for the time being we were on our own.

My idea was to take the Shinkansen to Shizuoka Prefecture after getting married at city hall in Fukuyama, a mid-size city in Hiroshima Prefecture famous for roses and steel. We could stay in a ryokan for a couple days and climb Japanʼs biggest and most famous mountain where atop which we could exchange our wedding vows in a private ceremony. She loved the idea and relayed the proverb about climbing Mount Fuji. Then she told me sheʼd already climbed the 12,000-foot peak three times.

I had no idea what Japanese wisdom might have to say about that, but I went through with it anyway.

“The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it,” Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life. Of course the mountain, and the desire to see it, preceded by thousands of years humans who could in fact see it, to say nothing of the very notion of the city. This is undoubtedly one reason why views of Mount Fuji in art, photography and personal anecdote probably outnumber views from Mount Fuji by at least a million to one. But another reason would surely be sheer practicality. The traditional way to climb Mount Fuji is to start in the evening and climb all night in order to reach the summit before daybreak. This carries with it an obvious aesthetic, if not spiritual, payoff, albeit one predicated on the rather chancy condition that the weather is clear.

From the top of Mount Fuji on a clear day one can see the Korean peninsula, China, Russia, and of course past Tokyo and out over the Pacific Ocean. It is a view, a culmination that thousands each year suffer through an hours-long trek in the dark, a sleepless night, a prodigious drop in temperature, 14

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and aching muscles, to see.

Considered in terms of deep time, the mountainʼs existence on the planet is at most of minor duration, while eventual human interaction with it would take up barely the blink of an eye. In terms of symbolic importance to a people known as the Japanese, however, its presence is incalculable. It was indeed, though I did not process it in such terms at the time, within these competing contexts that I endeavored to climb the mountain. Marrying a Japanese woman had been for me one more step towards staying in the country, towards submitting in substantial ways to the culture. What concerned me even then was my ability to function within that culture, while also maintaining my own cultural integrity and freedom. What better act, in what more appropriate setting could there be for the consummation of this stage of my life than this most essentially Japanese act of scaling Mount Fuji?

We started around eight-thirty on a clear night that was, typical of a Japanese summer, hot and humid. I carried a black Maglite flashlight made in Ontario, California and purchased at my neighborhood Daiki home improvement center. My new wife wore a headlamp and hiking boots. We both carried backpacks with water bottles, snacks, and extra layers of clothing to throw on as we made our ascent in weather that would change from muggy to cold. Interestingly enough, though I had lived in Japan for more than two years at that point, I had never actually seen Mount Fuji. I always flew in and out of Kansai International Airport in Osaka for my trips to and from the United States, taking the Shinkansen southwest to Fukuyama. On the only occasions I had had to pass within viewing range of the mountain, it had been too cloudy, though once I apparently dozed through a clear opportunity on a Shinkansen ride to Tokyo. Even on this post-nuptial trip to Shizuoka by train and then bus to the usual climbing embarkation point a third of the way up the mountain, oddities of geography and simply being too close prevented me from seeing the thing in its cone-shaped majesty.

Thus it was that roughly eleven hours after starting my climb, I would be able to say that I had been up and down, on top of and all around Mount Fuji, but had never actually seen it. It has never eluded me that this could, in some way, serve as a metaphor for the eventual twelve years in total that I spent in Japan.

On the way up the mountain, not too far from the summit, the single file path wending its way through the rocky alpine terrain suddenly ground to a halt. And there I was, at three oʼclock in the morning, stuck in a human traffic jam on the side of a 12,000-foot dormant volcano. De Certeau might be interested to know I was once also stuck in a human traffic jam on a Manhattan sidewalk— it was rush hour on a cold, snowy day and the concrete path had been reduced to single file through the accumulated snow and ice. Only in New York, I thought then, though surely weather-related pedestrian traffic jams happen in other cities from time to time—Toronto, Moscow? But three in the 15

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morning near the peak of a massive mountain? Surely this phenomenon is unique to Japan.

We had plenty of time to make it to the top before sunrise, however, and the traffic jam provided me with an excellent opportunity to stop and look around. Prior to that we had trudged onward and upward in order to ensure that we would not miss the big event, but now there was little choice but to follow the pace of those in front of us—and that group consisted of a very large contingent of elderly climbers. In a way not wholly dissimilar to de Certeauʼs description of viewing Manhattan from the World Trade Center observatory, the view below showed an expanse of lights that picked up force at a distance from the base of the mountain and then extended as a mass of traffic lights, vehicle lights, shops, restaurants, corporations, advertisements—a mass of illumination interrupted only by the intrusion of Tokyo Bay. The view was far older, more natural than that from atop any manmade structure, and thus serene, not dizzying. The angle to that which was most interesting to see was far less severe than that from the observation deck of the tower, which I did many years ago have occasion to visit. What do I remember of it? The height? The view? Aside from that extreme, really, and there are buildings of similar height, the experience can be replicated from almost any tall building in any city in the world, and what remains with me today from that experience is mostly the fact that those towers are gone.

Standing on the side of a very tall mountain with a view of a tremendous urban sprawl was something else altogether. Aldous Huxley writes in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that “nature is blessedly non-human; and insofar as we belong to the natural order, we too are blessedly non-human.” From this we can readily conclude that nature is the desired state, and equally desired would be a somehow non-human sensibility. Climbing Mount Fuji—stopped in flux on the side, shivering in the cold, surrounded by darkness, part of a ritual, en route to take part in a personal ceremony that is part of a far larger human ritual—I felt my humanity come face to face with what Huxley might call my “blessed non-humanity.” This was a moment of clarity wherein I felt the power and the beauty of my extreme geographical location, the peace and serenity of the escape from the sounds of industrial and vehicular traffic, and through which I felt a distinct longing to be back in the city. The sidewalks and the convenience stores beckoned—I could make out the distinct blue and green bands of a Family Mart—offering freedom and warmth, hot coffee or cold tea and the distinct pleasure of not being stuck in a line on the side of a mountain.

When we reached the top it was still dark. We had plenty of time to get a hot bowl of ramen and relax a little, then find a spot on one of the many low wooden benches facing to the east. As advertised, the sun rose from that direction and the collected souls gasped and cheered, ours among them. We got a good few minutes with which to see the lit up Pacific and Lake Yamanaka, and then 16

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the sky clouded over to groans, a momentary lift in voices as the clouds thankfully relented, then a group lament as everything washed out to a final grey. My wife and I did indeed exchange vows shortly after sunrise. It felt forced and unofficial. It wasnʼt the kind of thing I usually went in for, and she didnʼt seem to know what to make of my words, or what to say when her turn came. After, we walked around the summit, my wife enlisting strangers to take our photograph at various spots. The wind had really picked up by this point and it started to rain. I was exhausted and cold, shivering with a headache, and just wanted off that sleeping old volcano. When men in windbreakers started waving fluorescent flashlights, announcing that a typhoon was rolling in and imploring everyone to start back down, I was ready. My wife wanted to stay, however, take more pictures, see more things. What was there to see? How many pictures did we need? Ahead of us we had a four-hour trudge down the mountain in the driving wind and rain of a typhoon. I suppose in retrospect that fifteen or so more minutes wouldnʼt have mattered, but, of course, neither would they have mattered. It was time to start our blessedly human descent.

Unfortunately for my efforts to assimilate into everyday life in Japan, at least in some kind of middle ground manner, culturally speaking, notions of deep time did not hold much currency in everyday life for the average foreigner—which is what I was. My first child was born about eleven months after that trek up and down Mount Fuji, and two more followed in three-year intervals. I taught English conversation at a private university, buying and moving into a brand new house after about the first five years. But I never got too comfortable, either with living in Japan, or with being married and having children—at least not in the situation in which I lived.

“For modern man,” Huxley writes, “the really blessed thing about Nature is its otherness. In their anxiety to find a cosmic basis for human values, our ancestors invented an emblematic botany, a natural history composed of allegories and fables, an astronomy that told fortunes and illustrated the dogmas of revealed religion.” This was the type of what I consider to be rather spurious endeavor that Iʼd instigated with that trip to Mount Fuji and the exchanging of wedding vows, somehow trying to force a livable existence on myself through someone trying to do the same thing from cross-purposes.

Iʼd stumbled into a battle of wills I had no way of winning. In fact, Iʼd wanted to leave Japan after about six months, and had actually secured a new job at a university in Thailand. In the end, however, I considered the level of comfort involved in both countries, the level of pay, and, since Iʼd met and was communicating with my future wife, figured I could make a go of it in wealthier, safer Japan.

Still, whatever illusions Iʼd arrived in the country with were long gone.

In receiving my certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at the 17

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University of California, Riverside, I received no small amount of instruction geared towards making me realize that my language, though the reigning international language of record, and my culture, though the reigning international pop culture of record, were in no way superior to anyone elseʼs language or culture. But if the implications behind the words forming the TESOL acronym werenʼt enough, the sensibilities Iʼd acquired from a liberal arts education at a state university in Massachusetts in the early 1990ʼs more than compensated. At UMass Lowell I minored in something called Peace and Conflict Studies, an interdisciplinary program that allowed me to take classes on subjects like the Vietnam War and Native American culture. Outside the classroom I had friends whoʼd been born in Laos, Cambodia, Hungary, and Haiti, to name a few countries, all where English language instruction was and remains in demand. While in Riverside I met, studied with, tutored, taught and befriended folks from Korea, Japan, Brazil, Egypt, and Russia. True, all of this took place in the U.S., but still I thought I was prepared for life abroad, for life in Japan. I was not. I was told before I left that “they love Americans over there.” To put it simply, this was an oversimplification.

The education I received traveled through such seminal postcolonial texts as Edward Saidʼs Orientalism and Robert Phillipsonʼs Linguistic Imperialism, neither of which, interestingly enough, has much of anything to say about Japan, though Said at least mentions it. I was struck years later in reading his definition of Orientalism, by the idea that if you make a few keyword swaps, like “Japanese” for “European” and “non-Japanese” for “non-Europeans,” the text remains equally valid: “the idea of [Japan is] a collective notion identifying ʻusʼ [Japanese] as against all ʻthoseʼ [nonJapanese], and indeed it can be argued that the major component in [Japanese] culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside [Japan]: the idea of [Japanese] identity as a superior one in comparison with all the [non-Japanese] peoples and cultures.” The one difference would be that to the extent Japan tried to export and exert its culture on others, its imperialistic mission never achieved anywhere near the record as those of its European counterparts. To be fair, European (and now American) culture has never achieved anything close to hegemony in Japan.

These are important points because, unbeknownst to me, I was heading into a world as hegemonic and “culturally superior” as the one I was coming from, yet no one had seemed to relay the message within Japan that such attitudes were no longer cool. The phrase “We Japanese” is a common conversational preface, and everything from language to local produce is held up as fundamentally different and superior to everything foreign at every turn. A colleague whoʼd invited me to his home for dinner scoffed at my reluctance to eat my sukiyaki with a raw egg: “Japanese eggs are fresh,” he said. There was clearly cultural disconnect, owing mostly to the importance of raw eggs in our respective national diets, something I would grow used to. And while these instances were frequently 18

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benign, as in the case of the eggs (I grew to love raw egg as an accompaniment to many dishes), whatever the ultimate political reality, the reality on the ground for the average, non-military foreigner living in Japan is that of disenfranchised minority. The largely elevated statuses of the individual Westerner, both in terms of where they come from and where they stand in Japan provide good buffers, especially in terms of financial security, but constant reminders in the form of anything from cultural slights to outright insults find a way of working themselves through this built-in defense.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, a lot of the slings and arrows I received revolved around food.

During the first of my twelve years living in Japan, being alone, I ate out quite a bit. Kaiten (or conveyor belt) sushi was a staple, as were ramen and Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. For most of this time, however, I scrupulously avoided the most popular restaurant in the country, which is, here and for the world, McDonaldʼs. One fall day, during one of my long weekend shopping excursions Iʼd take by train and foot (shopping along with eating being one of those universal human activities necessary for survival and requiring minimal linguistic and cultural skills), I did succumb to a certain homesickness or nostalgia, some kind of craving for comfort that I knew the eternal consistency of the humble yet mighty McDonaldʼs hamburger—that inimitable mix of salt and pepper, ketchup and mustard, diced onion and sour pickle—would deliver. It had actually been several years since Iʼd eaten at a McDonaldʼs, having forsworn the place for healthier, or at least more interesting, options, but now I entered, placed my order in my heavily accented, deficient, but in this case passable Japanese, and took a seat by a window.

For some reason, just prior to taking my first bite, I happened to glance up and out the window, across a narrow concourse and into the window of a slightly upscale café that specialized in tea and pastry and lunch-sized pasta dishes. Quite to my surprise, I noticed a woman, her two teenaged children, and the children’s elderly grandmother all pointing and laughing at me. At first I thought I must be mistaken, overly self-conscious or even paranoid, but as I kept watching I saw the older of the children, a boy, holding his hands in front of his face as if gripping a hamburger, his mouth agape as though ready to chomp; I saw his mother slapping the table, her other hand covering her mouth; I saw his sister clapping her hands together and shaking her head back and forth; I saw his grandmother throw her head back and howl. Then they saw me seeing. They laughed even harder.

Unbeknownst to them, the joke was doubly on me because Iʼd entered that McDonaldʼs thinking something along the lines of: Iʼm gonna be all over this hamburger like Ralph Ellisonʼs Invisible Man on a “hot, baked Carʼlina yam.” Iʼd put in my time. There were several McDonaldʼs restaurants in the small city in which I lived, not to mention the many cities Iʼd visited, to say nothing 19

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of the years back in the States in which I hadnʼt gone at all. Iʼd hardly touched any “American” food since arriving in Japan. Sure I'd occasionally eat potato chips with my sushi, but they had interesting flavors like wasabi beef and sour plum. Mostly I bought and prepared Japanese food. Iʼd watched with some envy a few months before an American colleague order a burger and fries (it even came with a miniature plastic Stars and Stripes mounted on a toothpick stuck in the bun, in case you'd forgotten the country most famous for the hamburger sandwich) at a family restaurant while I got a negitoro-don. This man had lived in Japan for ten years at that point, and was past caring about such things, but I was actively creating my new identity, that of outsider doing his best to assimilate. So, as Ellisonʼs famous protagonist had earlier in Invisible Man passed up the pork chops and grits breakfast special at a diner, Iʼd added the raw egg ordered à la carte (Japanese eggs are fresh), swirled in some soy sauce, added a squeeze of wasabi, and dug my chopsticks with gusto into that raw tuna belly, rice, and green onions. Not so my burger. No freedom, no exhilaration, no nectar, as the Invisible Man experiences walking down the sidewalk, munching his hot buttered yam. I felt the pinch of shame at the back of my neck, my cheeks flush and my brow constrict because, unlike Ellisonʼs narrator, I did have to worry about who saw me and what was proper—or stereotypically funny, as the case was. Ellison sums it up with these deprecatory lines, which I imagine spare only those lucky souls without any self-consciousness, or perhaps self-conscious souls lucky enough to live in a place where their group decides what is funny: “What a group of people we were, [the Invisible Man] thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. Not all of us, but so many.”

I count myself as an honorary member of that club. Coming from the dominant culture of not only my only country, but arguably the world, shielded me from the more petty slights, what might in todayʼs parlance be referred to as microaggressions—the numerous times I was told I liked hamburgers or asked whether or not I ate them every day, for example; or constantly being complimented on my ability to use chopsticks or eat raw fish. But the direct insults, the ones that canʼt be excused even on the grounds of ignorance, hurt like I imagine Ralph Ellison, among millions of others, knew all too well: the hurt of not only being “the other,” but of being taunted and ridiculed for it.

I once went with my wife and children to the home of a man I played softball with. He invited a friend who had lived for a time in the States and spoke excellent English. The man, who had worked as a cook in Atlanta, prepared barbecued chicken wings and brought beer. “Letʼs drink!” were the words he greeted me with. I sort of chuckled and apologized and told him I didnʼt drink. He seemed hurt or embarrassed. “Is it because of God,” he finally asked me. When I laughed out loud 20

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and started to explain how I had given up alcohol for personal reasons, he cut me off with: “I donʼt care about you,” and sulked. Later, when the chicken wings were nearly finished, he kept pushing the plate towards me: have another, have another. When a single wing remained he became especially insistent. I knew what he was doing. I knew it was considered rude to eat the last of anything unless it was clear it would otherwise go to waste, at which point if you did indulge, you were to apologetically excuse yourself. Partially to appease him, partially because he was somewhat aggressively forcing the issue, and partially because in my culture if you are hungry and there is food and no one else seems to want it you eat it, I ate it. “See?” he said, sitting back, “You like it.” I knew from his tone and the look on his face he meant: American pig! You think you have self-control because you refuse to drink alcohol with me, but I have proven you wrong. I have located your weakness. You are helpless to control yourself when fried chicken wings are involved! Good thing I didnʼt bring hamburgers as well. Youʼd have really made a fool of yourself!

I knew the whole thing started from a misunderstanding. In his excitement for the gathering, perhaps a chance to speak in English of his experiences in the States (I did, after I polished off his chicken wings, entertain some of his stories about living and working in the South, and touring the States on a motorcycle) he'd overplayed his hand, was strangely direct and insistent, and felt embarrassed by my rebuff. What bothered me much more than the fact that he would then resort to such blatant insults and not allow me an opportunity to make up for what had transpired, was that neither our mutual friend nor my wife intervened in any way. After the fact, my wife made it seem as if nothing had happened at all, as if the man had been very polite and only wanted to offer me food.

This was the kind of thing I dealt with frequently in Japan, from my wife, from colleagues, superiors, students—the idea that because I was other than Japanese, I couldnʼt possibly understand anything that happened in Japan, or any of my dealings with Japanese people. If I had a problem, the problem must be with me, including on the handful of occasions when people called me “stupid American” right to my face.

Going back to that day sitting at McDonaldʼs, I was first stunned, then filled with rage, then I just felt stupid and hurt. I ate with my head down while stifling the urge to flip the family off, smack the café window and curse them out, or worse. As time wore on, as the insults piled up, I wouldnʼt always be able to stifle or control violent urges. Most of these incidents were confined to verbal outbursts in my university classroom, where I attempted to teach English conversation to often unruly, uncooperative, and sometimes unfathomably insolent freshmen and sophomores. I once balled out a young man in the train station after he stared at me for the duration of my thirty-fiveminute commute, aping my confused gestures when I grew frustrated with it. Worse than that I 21

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pushed a pre-teen boy too hard (I knocked him to the ground, though thankfully he wasnʼt injured) who as I ate dinner with my family harassed me through a window, undeterred by threatening glares, amused by an angrily extended middle finger. Twice I pounded my fist on car hoods after vehicles came dangerously (and intentionally) close to striking me in crosswalks. The second incident caught up with me, as the young man driving the car noticed a tiny dent on his car and filed a report with the police. An officer ambushed and arrested me on my way to work, and I was held at the police station by detectives until my wife came and a settlement of approximately five hundred dollars was agreed to. It didnʼt matter that it was his word against mine, that where I came from there would have been no way to prove his case, no chance police would have even gotten involved, much less assigned a uniformed officer to pull me off the street and a detective to coerce a confession and a signature on a settlement out of me. I tried to argue that the driver should be cited for driving into the crosswalk while I was walking in it, but apparently he had violated no traffic rules. I suppose I was lucky not to have been killed, not to have been charged more money for damaging the car. Or maybe I should have felt lucky that my wife handled most of the difficult stuff, including meeting and paying (with my money) the young man; or that the young man was taking unpaid time from his hourly job while I got a day off from my salaried position. These things offered no consolation, really, the bottom line being that I was getting worse the longer I stayed, and that it was pointless to try to blame the entire nation of Japan. For all intents and purposes it was all my fault, and the more I fought it the more I became the worst version of myself. I was confirming the xenophobesʼ stereotype, that of a screaming, snarling, violent foreigner, the barbarian from “over there” who canʼt understand or cope with Japanese culture or Japanese ways. It is easy to empathize with James Baldwin, as noted by Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwartz in their introduction to America and Beyond, that “his having to leave America in 1948 was due to a fear that he might be killed, or kill himself, an apprehension that should not be taken lightly.”

It is a fear I know well. I was always amazed by the degree to which people who had no reason to fear me (old ladies on trains, single schoolgirls on the other side of the street) did, and those who probably should have feared me (guys I outweighed by fifty pounds trying to stare me down on trains or spitting on the sidewalk at my feet, obnoxious kids) absolutely did not. The quote from America and Beyond above continues by citing Cheryl Wall later in the book suggesting that “Baldwinʼs quarrel with America was ʻultimately personal.ʼ” And why shouldnʼt it be? He was born there. But must one be born in a place to feel the sting of otherness? I donʼt think so. And what else are such instances but ultimately personal? I told myself so many times not to let things bother me, not to take it personally, and I largely succeeded; but as a human being who is also a person and 22

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wishes to remain one, how else but personally can you really take things?

What scared me the most I think was not the fear that I might hurt someone or be hurt myself, but the personal place from where that fear emanated—the hatred I felt growing within me. I had different ways of dealing with it. I had access to a small but rich collection of English language literature in the university library, there was Major League Baseball via satellite TV in my apartment, and I had an Internet connection. In my first year I fell in love with the J-Pops band Judy and Mary and their cute-but-tough singer Yuki. The more I listened and the more Japanese I learned, the more I picked up bits and pieces from the lyrics. I caught a staggering number of references to the wind and the four seasons. But I didnʼt really understand and it didnʼt matter. Music is universal and transcends lyrical comprehension. How else did Bennie and the Jets make it to number one? Listening to songs like Sobakasu and Brand New Wave Upper Ground allowed me to connect to Japanese culture on my own terms. In darker moments, though, I would go off on private rants, exploiting my nationʼs prior military conquest of Japan and sometimes formulate in my mind horrific atomic diatribes laced with bigotry to unload on would-be persecutors. (I never once resorted to racial attacks in any way, and never “buck-toothed” or “slant-eyed” anyone, though I did on two occasions get “round-eyed,” a truly unsettling reversal of racial othering).

I could have of course found a way to leave, even after Iʼd had a family, even after Iʼd bought the house, but there was a reason I had gone there in the first place. I had a good job that I mostly enjoyed and my otherness brought with it a lot of perks. I got positive attention I otherwise would not have, and I got paid a lot of money just to sit and speak with people in their homes. I liked helping people, or trying to, and I liked feeling different or even special. And thatʼs why I would get so mad when people mocked me and laughed in my face, or threatened to hit me with their cars; and why I didnʼt mind so much times like when an older woman stroked and plucked at my forearm hair on the train and (not imagining for a second I could understand her very simple Japanese phrase) called me disgusting. She spoke to me in a kind voice, engaged me personally, warmly, and it was easy to sort of convince myself that maybe she was calling herself disgusting for intruding on my personal space, for bothering me uninvited like that on a train. It was better, in any case, than some group of teenagers shouting “hello!” from across the street and then breaking up into laughter when you turned your head like a dog to a whistle.

As Baldwin states in the “Stranger in the Village” chapter of Notes of a Native Son, “The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being. This is a very charged and difficult moment, for there is a great deal of will power involved in the white manʼs naiveté.” I find some interesting 23

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personal parallels here. Of course, the woman on the train was Japanese, and there is no way I was the first white man she had seen; and in any case I was a very different sort of white man than the one Baldwin writes of: “The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned.” No, after my liberal education in the 1990s, though admittedly somewhere in between the two extremes, I was more like how Baldwin describes himself: “I, without a thought of conquest, [found] myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.” Well, beyond the fact that I like fried chicken wings and hamburgers and have hairy forearms.

I donʼt feel like I relate these things cynically. I encountered many people at work and at academic conferences in Japan, sometimes Japanese, sometimes foreigners like myself, who tried to play the “linguistic imperialism” card, and who offered no shortage of methods for the politically correct way to teach English, but I think thereʼs a reason Phillipson doesnʼt touch on Japan in his influential work. At the street level, every Japanese person I came into contact with who was interested in learning English, wanted to learn first and foremost from a native speaker of one of the “prestige brands,” of which American English topped the list. I did encounter resistance from college students required to take English conversation, which I partially understood. I would have preferred only students who wanted to study English, and felt all should be given the choice to study Chinese, German or whatever foreign language they wished instead, how tough really is a year of mandatory beginner level conversation study when you've had at least seven years of instruction already? For the most part, everyone I encountered was secure in his or her cultural and linguistic identity, first world citizens of the worldʼs second (later third) largest economy.

It is from twelve years of this perspective, after years of post-Said education that I first encountered Orientalism, and while, given the title, I was surprised at the lack of reference to East Asia in general, and Japan in particular, in reading the introduction it became clear as to why. Said writes, “The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient.” As far as Japan goes, however, with its rich literary and artistic traditions, and its own history as colonizer, I can only answer that it can and does represent itself. Perhaps, as Said earlier in his introduction suggests, the Orientalist does make the Orient speak. But who makes the Orientalist speak? The Orient! This is what Bruce Robbins picks up on in his essay “Moralizing in Deep Time” when he notes that Said does not let Eastern cultures represent themselves: “When these cultures do speak for themselves,” Robbins notes, “there is no 24

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guarantee that they will sound any more secular, or humanist, or humane in what they say about the West, or about each other, than the West has sounded when it talked about them.� I read Orientalism from the dual perspective of the academic and my own lived experience. For that reason I appreciate both its vital function and its inherent limitations, and that realization causes me to look inward, and recognize those things in myself as well.

Eventually, I succumbed to the pressure of being perpetually the Other. I lost my job, my wife, my kids. I gave up my house and my home. I live in a small apartment in the Westchester section of Los Angeles, not far from LAX. Seated at my desk I watch the planes make their final descents into this metropolis teeming with diversity, sprawling from ocean to desert and mountains. I talk to my children on the phone once a week, using a mix of simple English and poor Japanese and imagine they will one day be on one of those planes flying in from Asia, bringing us together again, if only for a few days. I imagine deep time as a violent and chaotic geographic struggle, plate tectonics and volcanism, and life clinging fragilely for millennia in order to burst forth into its nail file stroke of glory. IĘźm sure I am nothing but a fool, but it is with this image in mind that I start my climb back up that mountain.

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Works Cited Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.

Huxley, Aldous. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Other Essays. New York: Harper, 1952. Print.

Kaplan, Cora and Bill Schwarz, eds. James Baldwin: America and Beyond. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Print.

Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print. Oxford Applied Linguistics.

Robbins, Bruce. “Moralizing in Deep Time.� Postcolonialism and Ethics. MLA Annual Convention. Sheraton Hotel and Towers, Chicago. 10 January 2014. Address.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print.

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Cabin Pressure Claire Kole

“Come on, it'll be fun. You know you want to,” he teases.

I roll my eyes. We've only been seeing each other for three weeks and if his parents hadn't canceled their trip to San Diego at the last moment, leaving two free plane tickets at our disposal, I wouldn't find myself here in seat 8C, by the window, sidestepping his raunchy idea.

“It's just so cliché,” I tell him.

Having sex is not the problem. Squeezing ourselves into the miniscule airplane bathroom, which can barely hold one average-sized person on a good day, and finding a way to actively move in such a confining space (which happens to be right behind the cockpit) is the problem.

“You see it in every movie. There's a reason it's called 'the mile high club.' It's stereotypical!”

I say.

He can't hear me over his enthusiasm for the idea which I think tickles him just as much as the promise of feeding his libido. He's already unbuckling his seat belt.

“Just follow me,” he whispers with a conspiratorial grin.

He doesn't notice my lack of smile or hear the unusually large breath I draw into my body, almost like a reverse sigh.

So cliché, I think to myself. The bathroom at the back of the plane is too far not to render us conspicuous, so there's really only one choice. I slip in first, unnoticed by the other passengers, now dozing or engrossed in their iPads. The flight attendants are ambling through the aisle, dispensing ginger ales and miniature pretzels.

“You're welcome,” they'll chirp as they flash insincere smiles.

I look ahead of me—beige. The lid of the toilet is up and though there's nothing inside (where does it get suctioned off to anyway? When I was a teenager I pictured a shitstorm falling to earth) I start feeling queasy. With the tiniest edge of my fingertip I flip the lid and let it slam shut. To my right is the small scale sink and mirror. Tissues. Esta prohibido fumar. A bathroom for elves and their sprite girlfriends. Definitely not, however, made for two people who weigh over one hundred pounds each and who both eclipse five feet. I run the water briefly; brush my damp hands on my skinny jeans.

Another cliché, I think, followed by, whatever. I'm on a roll now, I can't stop.

The door flies open and he steps in, still grinning, and slides the lock into place behind him.

Ocupado. Our fronts are scrunched together like a peanut butter and honey sandwich and I find 27

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myself silently wondering about the square footage of these cubicles. His eyes look shiny and I recognize the somehow careless intensity in his gaze, a look I've seen often in the past three weeks.

Like someone who's finally had the first bite of pie and is savoring it before devouring the rest of the piece. It says, I got what I wanted, but not all of it.

Clumsily, we do-si-do around until he is sitting on the lid of the toilet, fly undone, air pressure clearly not constricting blood flow. Undressing in this bathroom that is smaller than an actual dressing room is challenging and I make minimal effort, leaving everything above my hip bone on as well as my sandals. The plane hits some unexpected turbulence, briefly, and to his pleasure, pushes me further down on him. I swallow and feel him driving through me, sharp, but not painful. The whole event takes no longer than ten minutes, so as not to arouse suspicion from the hundreds of eyes we'll have to face after leaving the bathroom.

At the end he lets out a shudder and growls, for the first time, into my ear, “I love you.”

I inhale raggedly and, staring at the beige wall over his shoulder, whisper, “It's just so cliché.”

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Poets and Killers Wendy Scott

New York, November, 1945 “Hey Doll.”

Eva stopped in her tracks on the sidewalk in front of Waxman’s Deli. There was only one person who always called her Doll, but it couldn’t be. She turned and took an involuntary step back when she saw who was standing right behind her. His slicked back hair and pitted face were exactly as she remembered them. Despite--or maybe because of--his somewhat sinister looks, there had always been something about him that that she found hard to turn away from.

“Deke,” she said, as if it was inevitable for the two of them to run into each other despite having no contact for the last five years. She wondered what he wanted from her. Deke had always wanted something from everyone.

“Heard you was a new widow,” he said, as direct as a bullet. “Figgured you might be interested in makin some extra dough now that your man’s not around to support you.”

“How’d you know I’m a widow?” Her round blue eyes narrowed with suspicion. Deke was just about the last person she wanted knowing her business.

“Word gets around,” he said with a shrug and a vague wave that managed to conjure up a network of informers in her mind. “My condolences, by the way,” he added with a smirk and a tip of his imaginary hat.

She tucked a stray strand of blond hair back into her chignon and gave him a curt nod, figuring the less she said, the sooner he would go away. She waited, the silence between them building like a thunderhead, pushing away the noise of the traffic and shoes shuffling against the concrete and rumblings of other conversations until it was just the two of them, squaring off in the purpling twilight. His eyes slowly appraised her as if she were a horse at auction. Discomfort fluttered in her belly and she felt heat rise to her cheeks. The old Eva he had known with low-cut dresses and tight sweaters was no more. She pulled the edges of her coat together and tightened the belt.

“I see you’re as charming and well-mannered as ever,” she said, her voice sharp in the chilly air. “I can’t say that I’ve missed you.” God, this man always did manage to provoke her.

To her surprise, he laughed. “You always had brass. Glad to see that fancy pants you married didn’t take that away from you.”

But Kit had taken plenty away from her before the war took him. Her mind’s eye filled with 29

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images of his fists striking her and she could almost feel her flesh splitting and bruises blooming beneath her pale skin. She shuddered and saw Deke’s eyebrows rise. “Just a goose walking over my grave,” she said, damned if she would let Deke have the satisfaction of knowing what her marriage had cost her. Her trembling fingers snugged her coat a little more firmly around her, as if to ward off a chill. “I have to go, Deke,” she said. “See you around.”

Slouching against the brick wall of the deli behind him, Deke ignored her farewell. “I heard you was back livin here in the old neighborhood.” He slowly picked something out of his teeth with a fingernail and gave it a quick glance before flicking it away. “I didn’t believe it but I guess it’s true, huh?”

“So what?” She scowled at him.

“Back when we was growin up, I always thought you’d make somethin of yourself, with your looks and smarts and all. When you ran off and married that swell, I figgured I had thought right.” He barked out a laugh. “But I guess that just proves what a fathead I was ‘cause here you are, back where you started. Like you never left. Like me, only I’m on the way up and you…” his thin lips curled in a smile as he took in her threadbare second-hand coat and scuffed shoes, “…well, from the looks of ya, you’re on the way down, Doll.”

She stiffened at the insult and fought the urge to slap the smirk off his face. “At least I was something,” she leveled a withering glare at him, “but you’ve always been a nothing.”

“A nothin, huh?” He smiled but something hard glittered in his obsidian eyes. “Y’know, it’s funny if you think about it. You coulda had a go-getter like me,” he said as he pointedly adjusted the band of his gold watch that peeked out below the cuff of his wool coat, “but instead you snared some rich guy who goes and gets himself killed and leaves you with nothin.”

“He didn’t leave me with nothing,” she said, her chin jutting out in defiance. Her eyes took in the cut of his suit and the soft nap of his coat as she thought about her empty refrigerator and the pastdue rent notice she had found taped to her apartment door the day before. She had spent her money-what little of it there was--on doctor’s bills and a second-hand crib. “What do you know anyway, Deke? I’ve got enough to get by.”

“I know everything,” Deke said as he abruptly came away from the wall, his dark eyes turned dangerous. “For starters, I know you ain’t ‘gettin by’.” With one step, he was close enough for her to feel his hot breath on her face. Sparks of fear danced up and down her spine. “You always hafta make out like you’re better’n everyone else.” Looming over her, he looked down at her through narrowed eyes. An electric current of hostility crackled in the air. She took a step back, her guts twisting.

“Admit it,” he snarled. “You’re flat broke.”

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He took another step towards her and she cringed, throwing her hands up in front of her face and squeezing her eyes shut. Her heart hammered in her chest, the sound of her pulse whooshing in her ears as she waited for the blow to come. Seconds ticked by. She cautiously opened her eyes and lowered her hands, flinching when an icy blast of wind hit her face. She was relieved to see that Deke had moved back against the wall. Shivering, she slowly put a gloved hand up to her cold cheek, as if gingerly examining an injury. She took a deep shaking breath, reminding herself that Kit was gone, he was gone and never coming back.

“So that’s how it was,” Deke said softly and she saw a cunning look of calculation dart across his face.

“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, hating the tremor that had crept into her voice. She needed to pull herself together, to be more like the old Eva. Giving Deke even a little bit of power could be a dangerous thing. Squaring her shoulders, she said, “I have to go.”

She turned to walk away and he grabbed her arm, stopping her in her tracks. Her breath caught in her throat as his blunt fingers dug into the tender flesh at the crease of her elbow. “C’mon, Doll,” he said, his voice a soft caress. “I’m sorry if I came on too strong.” His grip loosened and his thumb rubbed lazy circles on the inside of her arm as he ventured a small smile. “Don’t leave just yet?”

She felt the pull of his dark charm as he looked at her, his eyebrows raised in innocent inquiry and his head tilted slightly to the side like a little boy begging for a sweet. “I was thinkin us runnin into each other here, maybe we could be friends again.”

“Friends?” Exhaustion was starting to seep in, leaving her mind feeling sluggish. She couldn’t summon the energy to play his games anymore. “What do you want from me, Deke?”

“Who says I want somethin?”

“You always want something.” She pulled his hand off of her arm. “Listen, I—“ “What if I tell ya I got a business proposition for you, Doll?”

“Not interested,” she said. “I-I really have to go. I’ve got someone waiting for me.”

“What if I tell ya you can earn more money in a week with me than you can in a month at whatever sorry job you can get through the wants?”

She paused. A month’s salary in a week? She thought about the yellowed linoleum in her miserable apartment, curling up at the corners. The scritch that whatever was living in her walls made at night. The ever-present sour smell of piss in the stairwell that she had to endure during the entire climb up to the fifth floor. She thought about the doors that had one by one closed in her face again today, each time with a regretful, “Sorry miss.” She thought of the near-empty Mason jar in the top 31

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kitchen cabinet that held the last of her savings. But above all of that, she thought of her baby growing up in squalor, of her fear when his croupy cough had returned last month because she had no money to pay a doctor again, of his pitiful cries that tore at her heart when there wasn’t enough money for food or heat, of all of the opportunities she would never be able to give him. Her son’s sweet trusting face rose up in her mind. How old would he be when his trust in her faded away?

When his smile disappeared into bitterness born of constant want?

Eva turned back to Deke, one thin elegant eyebrow raised. “What did you have in mind?”

“Whyn’t you and me go have a cup of coffee and I’ll explain.”

The vinyl booth in Waxman’s Deli groaned in protest as they slid in on opposite sides of the scarred laminate tabletop. The vinegary tang of sauerkraut and spiced scent of salted meats hung in the air and Eva’s stomach rumbled in response. She tried not to think about how long it had been since her last meal as she pulled her gloves off, laying them carefully on the table to hide the hole in one of the fingertips. Deke signaled the waitress. “Hey Dolores, how ‘bout bringin me and this pretty lady some coffee?”

“Sure thing, Deke,” Dolores said, then shuffled away to get the coffee, her orthopedic shoes squeaking on the waxed checkered floor.

“You know her?” Eva asked, not bothering to mask her surprise. Deke didn’t seem the type to hang out with old ladies.

“Dolores? Sure,” he said. “Used to come in here with my old man when I was a kid and get root beer floats every Saturday until the old man took a walk one day and never came back.” He looked out the plate glass window next to their booth as if he expected to see his father. “Yeah, the old man didn’t stick around, but Dolores, she’s been here forever.”

The waitress returned with a tray and set down two cups and saucers with a rattle, along with the luxuries of real cream and sugar. Her knuckles were swollen with arthritis and her hand shook a bit as she poured. The pungent scent of strong black coffee made Eva’s mouth water and she could almost taste the thick cream as she poured a liberal dose into her cup followed by two heaping spoonfuls of sugar. A small sigh of satisfaction escaped her as she took a sip.

“Getcha somethin else?” Dolores asked, scratching at her nest of gray hair.

“Nah, just the coffee for now, Dolores,” Deke replied.

“Alright. I’ll just leave you two alone for a bit,” she said with a wink, perhaps imaging they were on a date, and walked away.

Eva waited until Dolores was out of earshot and then pounced on Deke. “So what’s this 32

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business proposition?” She wrapped her hands around the warm mug, hoping it would still her shaking hands. “This better not be another one of your schemes, or so help me—“ “Relax Doll,” Deke said. “All I’m askin you to do is hear me out. If you’re not interested,” he shrugged, “no harm done, right?”

“I-I suppose.” Eva reluctantly nodded.

“Good girl,” he said as he settled comfortably against the bench’s backrest. “Alright, so me and this lawyer, we served together and we got to be sorta friends, ya know? So he calls me up outta the blue one day and says ‘Deke, I gotta job for you’ and right away I tell him I’m interested--only job I could get after the war was in a lousy factory as an assembler.” He slurped his coffee from the thick white lip of the cup then set the cup back on the saucer. “Figgured the war didn’t cost me an arm or a leg, but that factory job just might. So I jumped at it, without even knowin what the job was.”

“Could you get to the point already? I don’t have all night.” She had left her son with a sitter during her futile job search and she could almost feel the money slipping through her fingers the longer she sat there.

“I’m gettin to it. Jesus.” He slurped some more coffee, then continued. “With the war over, business has been boomin and we’re expandin our operations. So when I saw you, it was like fate or somethin.”

“What business? What exactly is it that you do,” she asked, “and what does any of this have to do with me?”

“What do we do?” He leaned in conspiratorially and his coffee and stale cigarette breath washed over her. “What we do, Doll, is set people free. And you,” he said, “you’re their key to freedom.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Lemme explain. See, in this great state of New York, you can’t get a divorce unless you have one of two things: a lot of money to go to a place like Nevada or proof of adultery. Our clients can’t or don’t wanna go out of state,” he shrugged matter-of-factly, “so we help them with the other.” He leaned back in the booth and stretched his arms across the seat back, as if to let his revelation soak in.

“I see,” she said stiffly. She picked up her gloves and handbag, clenching her fists around them, and began sliding out of the booth. How dare he? What was it about men? Was she nothing more than something to use, to control? She had already let one man abuse her--two if she counted her father. And now another wanted to turn her into a whore.

“No, no, you got it all wrong. No one’s askin you to do any cheatin.” Deke held up both hands 33

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in a surrender gesture. “All we’re askin is for you to make it look like there’s cheatin. You pose for a couple a photos with the unhappy husband and me and my buddy, we work out the rest. Everybody’s a winner, Doll.”

She hesitated at the edge of the seat. “I just pose for a few pictures and that earns me good money?” She could feel an angry heat rise to her cheeks. “Don’t try to play me for a fool. What’s the catch, Deke?”

“There’s no catch, I swear. But I should probably mention that you’ll be wearing a little less in the photos than you are right now.”

“You’re a real piece of work, stringing me along like this.” Her voice quivered with rage. “I knew I should have walked away before.” She could feel her fingernails cutting into her palms as her fists tightened around her purse strap. She slid out of the booth and stood up. “I don’t know what’s worse, you asking me to do this or you thinking I’d agree to it. Goodbye Deke.”

“So that’s it? Guess I had you figgured wrong.” His gaze rooted her to the spot. “You’re just gonna be one a them, huh?”

Against her better judgment, she paused. “One of what?”

He leaned forward in his seat. “See, what I learned in the war is that in this world, there’s poets and there’s killers. People are one or the other. The ones who survive are the ones who are willin to do whatever it takes to win, the strong ones. The killers. Not the poets,” he sneered, “the weak sentimental saps who just take what they’re given and spend their time dreamin and hopin that this sick world will get better.”

He looked over his shoulder at Dolores. “You wanna be like her, Doll? Workin for peanuts every day, strugglin to make ends meet? And for what? The satisfaction of knowin you did an honest day’s work, whatever that means? For goin home every night with sore feet and achin knees until you’re too old to be useful and they throw you out?” He had crumpled his paper napkin into a ball as he spoke and now he tossed it to the side where no doubt Dolores would pick it up later and dispose of it. “So how ‘bout it Doll? Do you have what it takes to be a killer? Or are you just another lousy poet?”

She stood there, absorbing his words, trying to picture herself thirty or forty years from now, old and worn out. Her eyes fell on the napkin, as wrinkled and used up as Dolores, a throw-away just like her. It wasn’t fair. The whole damn thing just wasn’t fair. All she wanted was a chance to make a better life for her son--he deserved something better--but she couldn’t catch a break. Then a realization hit her: if the game was stacked against her, maybe it was time to make her own rules.

“Alright Deke.” She slowly sank back into her seat, laying her gloves and handbag next to her. “Tell 34

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me exactly what I need to do and how much it pays.”

Exhaling slowly as a relieved smile spread across his face, Deke relaxed against the seat back, the vinyl creaking in commiseration. That’s when she realized that he needed her to say yes as badly as she needed the money. He needed her. For the first time in her life, she felt a small but tantalizing current of power fizzing though her.

“That’s my girl.” He laid his hand on top of hers.

“I’m not your girl, Deke.” She very deliberately pulled her hand away from his and leveled a steely gaze at him. “I’m not anybody’s girl. Not anymore.”

She walked home after her meeting with Deke, slightly dazed. She thought about their discussion as she put her key in the outer door of her building, bracing herself for the smell that always hit her when she opened the door. As she slowly climbed the dimly lit stairs to her floor, she thought about the fickle hand of fate, giving and then capriciously taking away. She had been given an opportunity and was going to have to make the most of it while it lasted. She passed the door to her apartment and knocked on her neighbor’s door.

“Who is it?” a querulous voice demanded.

“It’s just me, Mrs. Kamisky.” Eva heard the snap and snick of locks being undone and the door opened, revealing a shriveled old woman holding a baby. The old woman handed her the baby, and just as Eva had a few months ago when he was born, she marveled at this tiny perfect creature in her arms. She held the baby close as she handed the old woman a few bills and thanked her.

The old lady’s door closed behind her as she opened hers, breathing in the scent of her son’s hair. She felt the familiar tug of love that had been with her ever since she had found out she was pregnant not long after Kit had come home on his last leave. It had been her third pregnancy and she had been determined not to let Kit destroy another life growing inside her.

She remembered the day almost a year ago that a uniformed man had knocked on the door with a telegram and condolences. With the telegram clutched in one trembling hand and the other hand curled protectively around her belly, she had realized that for her, the war was over. Kit was dead. She had been set free and most importantly, her baby was safe. They had survived. Her son was born five months later on VE Day, May 8, 1945. She named him Victor.

Two Years Later - New York, November, 1947 The hotel room door clicked shut behind her as Eva entered the room. The man--client, she mentally corrected herself--stood in the middle of the room looking uncomfortable in nothing more 35

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than his boxers. Deke, with his fashionable fedora tipped back on his head, already had his camera trained on the man as she walked over to him. She gave the man a smile and a reassuring pat. “Just a couple of minutes and this will all be over,” she said, as much for him as for herself.

She slipped off her fur-trimmed coat and laid it on the bed next to Deke’s. She took a deep breath and then, in a practiced motion, she let her dress slip to the floor. The strobe of the flash captured her nakedness on film, her hair a blonde waterfall tumbling down her back, the side of a breast as she turned to the camera. She counted the bursts of the flash, knowing how many shots Deke normally took. Only a few more to go.

She was careful to keep her face turned away from the lens. Other than her body, her anonymity was her greatest asset. After all, it wouldn’t do for the same woman to appear in multiple divorce cases. The client’s identity was all that mattered--and that he was photographed with a naked woman who was not his wife, of course. The client stood still, stiff and awkward, as she moved closer and placed a hand on his shoulder and hooked a leg around his. He seemed unsure where to put his eyes or what to do with his hands during the last brief seconds while the shutter clicked and the flash popped. Then it was over.

“Good work, Doll,” Deke said as he put down his camera. His eyes lingered on her for a moment too long even though he had seen her naked enough times to have memorized every feature.

She stepped back into her dress, pulling the straps back up over her shoulders, thinking that every time she got dressed, for Deke, it was like the curtain closing on his favorite show. She picked up her coat and put it back on, belting it closed firmly, and the client hastily dressed while Deke packed up his camera and snapped the case shut. The two men shook hands, and then she and Deke left. In a matter of minutes, another set of matrimonial bonds had been broken.

Eva and Deke walked down the carpeted hall to the elevator bank and she pictured the client, alone in the hotel room, maybe wondering how things had come to this. Better than most, she understood how a marriage could become a cage. While she didn’t know if she would ever get used to what she was doing, she at least found solace in knowing that she was the key that unlocked the door for countless unhappy people. It was like Deke had once told her. They set people free.

In the elevator, Deke peeled some bills off of the roll he took out of his trouser pocket and handed them to her. She took the money without a word, carefully tucking it into her handbag. The elevator arrived at the ground floor and the two exited, the image of respectability--she in her elegant coat and matching handbag and pumps and he in his tailored suit and silk tie. They crossed the marble-floored lobby, the high-pitched tap of her heels alternating with the low notes of his wingtips.

He gestured for her to go through the revolving door ahead of him. The door started to turn and for a 36

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brief moment, she was caught between two panes of glass, insulated from the ugliness on both sides of the door. But the door kept moving, inevitably spitting her out on the dirty sidewalk.

She pulled the fur collar of her coat up against the chilled air as Deke emerged behind her. “Until next time,� he said. She inclined her head with a small smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, then they headed their separate ways. It was early evening and the streets of New York were busy.

The line of yellow taxis at the curb tempted her, but cab fare was an unnecessary indulgence. She made her way to the subway instead, the noise and exhaust fumes fading as she descended into the tunnels below the city. Although several men sent admiring glances her way, she noticed none of them. She was lost in her thoughts, picturing the soulful brown eyes, dimpled cheek, and mischievous smile of her little boy. She quickened her pace, eager to get home to see the one person who never failed to bring a genuine smile to her face.

37

1

The 3 a.m. Litterateur Tony Conaway

The snow reflects the moonlight and the sound of my boots. “I am,” I mutter to myself, “Zhivago, tromping from Yuriatin back to Moscow in the unforgiving Russian winter.”

She has a chain link fence around her place. It’s little more than waist-high; meant to keep her dogs in, not people out. In my condition, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to traverse it.

After several attempts, I manage to fall on the inside of the fence.

Now, how to awaken her but not her roommate?

I am incapable of action unless I’ve first read about it. Words are my guide. In stories with similar situations, the protagonist usually hurls something at a bedroom window to wake up the occupant. For instance, in Brady Udall’s story “Night Raid,” the protagonist tears a tar shingle off of a doghouse and throws it like a Frisbee at a window. There was also a goat involved in that story, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t throw the goat.

There’s no hard object handy, because there’s over a foot of snow on the ground. It takes me a few minutes to realize I can use the snow. I gather up a snowball and pitch it at her bedroom window.

I have to hit her window three times before a light comes on. I’m not going to tell you how many snowballs it took for me to hit that target thrice.

“Deanna,” I shout, forgetting my intention to be quiet. I go for Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Instead, I sound like Woody Allen whining. “De-ann-uh-huh-huh!”

She opens her window, pokes her head out. She is a vision of loveliness in her lingerie. (If you can call a high-collared flannel nightgown lingerie.)

“Tony?”

“Deanna! I need you. I should never have broken up with you!”

“I broke up with you, Tony. And you don’t need anything except your typewriter. That’s what you said, Mr. Profound-Observer-of-the-Human-Condition. Now go home and write about rejection.”

“I can’t. I’m too drunk.”

“You’re not drunk.”

“Yes I am!”

“You start vomiting after three beers.”

“Which is why I had two beers and a Benadryl. AND a double espresso at Starbucks!”

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“Great. Caffeine, alcohol, and an antihistamine. Stimulants and depressants. In a normal person, they’d cancel each other out.”

“I’m not normal! I love you!”

“SHUDDUP OVAH DERE!” The houses were close together. Apparently I’d awakened a neighbor. I shouted back to him: Dangerous Bolsheviks out here! We’re going to overthrow the Czar! Better call out the Militia!

“Thanks, Tony. Like I need more trouble with my neighbors.”

This wasn’t going according to plan. In my mind, I searched through dozens of stories about drinking. Maybe Robert Stone’s “Fun with Problems” would work. The protagonist gets an alcoholic to fall off the wagon so he can sleep with her.

“Have a drink with me.”

“You know I give up drinking for Lent. There’s no alcohol in the house.”

“We’ll go out.”

“It’s 3 am, Tony. The bars are closed.”

“That after-hours club—“ “The private club? They won’t let you back in. You’re banned.”

“Just a misunderstanding---“ “When you found out the club didn’t have any black members, you stood on the bar and gave your Atticus Finch speech!”

“Did it work?”

“No, the club is still segregated. But they got the local school board to remove To Kill a Mockingbird from the required reading list.”

This isn’t going well. I try to think of something, anything. I remember a line Lorrie Moore wrote: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

I have a great laugh. I give her one of my best, a full basso-profundo. Santa Claus has nothing on me.

My laugh has the usual effect: it awakens every dog in the neighborhood. Deanna’s own dogs, slug-a-beds though they are, can’t ignore this.

“Better start running,” Deanna says as she closes the window.

It’s fortunate that I’m wearing a winter coat with thick insulation. I lose some of the left sleeve to a ferocious beagle before I tumble back over the fence. On the way over, my face scrapes against something.

Then I’m lying face down in the snow, bleeding from a small scrape. I search for a literary 39

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precedent. Again, I think of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago: the young revolutionary, Pavel Antipov, is left bleeding by the slash of a Cossack’s saber. Or was that just in the movie version?

Well, those beagles definitely had a Cossacky look to them. I rise unsteadily. I’m filled with the desire to write. My prose can make this a noble defeat!

Better yet, I’ll rewrite this as a victory. Which it will be, if I can manage to remember where I live.

40

Somewhere Over By Eunice Beck

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Ringlet and Pinky Jo Heath

Seen from across the room, they were obviously identical twins; what made it hard to believe they sprang from the same sperm and egg was that Ringlet feared nothing and Pinky had the courage of a strawberry. Their odd nicknames arose when their parents couldn’t tell the baby girls apart except that one was slightly pinker and the other had a curl at her nape. When the pink and curl disappeared, their parents learned to examine their facial expressions to see which was the daring extrovert, and which the cautious introvert.

They were more than close. Once, in first grade, Ringlet had been kept in class to print, “I will behave,” one hundred times while Pinky played outside. Suddenly Ringlet felt her twin’s distress, and she ran outside to see a bully threatening Pinky. She positioned herself between them and dared the bully. “You hurt Pinky, you hurt me. Is that what you want to do?” The bully walked away and didn’t bother Pinky again.

When the girls grew into women, Ringlet decided to become a policewoman. Pinkie, needing another protector when Ringlet entered the academy in Montgomery, married her onagain-off-again boyfriend Carl, who moved her to his trailer in north Alabama. Pinky and Carl never invited family to visit, but the twins exchanged emails almost daily.

Ringlet loved guns, partly because she’d learned from watching movies that a woman with a gun could handle anything, and a woman without could only shriek for help. She practiced at the shooting range more than any other rookie, and by the time she graduated, she never missed the bull’s eye.

Later, after five years of good solid police work, Ringlet was stunned and unprepared to learn from her doctor that the knot on her spine was cancer. She listened for hope, as the doctor described the long odds against her and the short time she had to live, but heard none.

Knowing she was the only one in the world who could give Pinky the courage she would soon need, Ringlet decided she had to say goodbye in person. She had the day off, so Ringlet left immediately for the long drive to north Alabama.

It was almost midnight when she arrived, uninvited of course, at Carl’s trailer. She parked behind their pickup truck and, moments later, knocked on their door. Pinky was delighted to see Ringlet and opened the door wide for her.

Carl, right behind Pinky, grabbed her shoulder and threw her down. “What the hell are you doing?” he roared at Pinky. Pinky didn’t answer.

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Then he turned to Ringlet who stood in the doorway. “Nobody invited you, girl,” he growled.

To his surprise, Ringlet pushed him aggressively into the room. “Go sit in my car, Pinky,” Ringlet said. “Carl and I need to talk.”

Avoiding Carl’s boots, Pinky scrambled across the floor to the door, and she said on the way out, “Be careful, Ringlet, he has a gun!”

As she ran to the car, Pinky quivered and mumbled under her breath, “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” She climbed into the passenger seat and shook uncontrollably as she listened to her sister and husband yell at each other. Pinky tried to tame her trembling by holding her arms tight.

The loud crack of a gunshot hit Pinky’s ears. She felt Ringlet’s agony, and Pinky howled in despair. Carl had shot her sister. Her other self was in pain. Pinky howled again, louder.

Ringlet’s distress stopped cold. Pinky felt angry, and to her surprise, she felt calm and confident.

She opened the glove compartment and removed the police gun before climbing out of the car. When she got to the living room, Ringlet’s still body lay in a large pool of blood.

“Move ass, Pinky, we got to get out of here and fast,” Carl said. “Pack us some clothes and get the money out of the attic. Check the bitch’s pockets for cash too.”

Pinky shot Carl squarely in the chest, and his body crumpled to the floor. Pinky put the gun, wiped clean of her fingerprints, into the right hand of Ringlet’s body, and sat down to think. The local police would assume husband and wife had a gunfight and both lost. The body on the floor looked exactly like Carl’s wife.

“I know you’re in here with me, Ringlet, and I’m pleased to share this body,” Pinky said aloud to her sister. “This will be exciting.” She retrieved the money from the attic and wandered around the house collecting a few keepsakes before she returned to the car for the drive south.

When Ringlet and Pinky got home, she reported her police gun stolen.

43

Watchers By Sherry Carter

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My Father’s Children Ryan Link

The stench of a dead man hung in the air. The house had probably remained sealed since the body of my father had been removed, so the odor had been given plenty of time to fester. I coughed and stepped outside for a moment. After readying myself for a second time, I dove back in.

The kitchen spread out before me. It was odd to think that everything was as he had last left it, each item touched and placed in unknowable finality: a yellowed drinking glass on the counter, an outdated TV Guide on the breakfast table, a polished wooden cane leaning against one of the barstools. Would he have changed anything—cleaned the place up—if he had been told that he was about to die? Likely not; at that point, why bother? I smacked my mouth, trying to evict the staleness that had crept in. Everything just looked so old. Dust was ubiquitous, and squadrons of dead crickets lay scattered on the floor alongside the baseboards.

Fighting the urge to sweep them up, I wandered into the living room. Thick brown carpet squished beneath my feet as I made my way to the center of the space. I stood there for a while, taking it in. Ten whole years had passed since I had last been in the house, and yet . . . nothing had changed.

I could have easily stayed away longer, though, and without much remorse. In fact, my father’s death was the only reason I was there at all. I would have left it to my sister to sift what remained, but she cared little—even less than I did. When I had asked her to join me she had flatly refused. “Surely, you’re joking,” she had said. It seemed only right, though, that someone should be here to look through all of it at least once before we junked it.

The house hummed in silence as I headed back to the master bedroom: his room. A bubble of nausea swelled up as I turned the corner and looked at the bed. That was where his neighbor had found him. The bed was unmade, sheets strewn about on the floor. There was still a dent in the pillow where his head had been. I hadn’t expected that. At the sight of it, I wanted to leave. It seemed a kind of death cast—a fossilized imprint of his demise; all that was missing was the body. The distaste I already harbored at the thought of sleeping in the house was amplified. I had committed to it, though.

After all, it was only one night, and the nearest hotel was probably forty miles away.

Setting to my task, I burned away the hours of the afternoon, sorting through years of accumulation packed away in the various dark cabinets and dulling furniture of the common rooms.

Most everything I encountered I set aside as fodder for the liquidators. But a few items of my mother’s I kept—some jewelry I found in a broken music box, a dull leather bible, and a picture of 45

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her.

It was the picture that stirred me the most. In the image she was young, probably in her twenties, standing on the shore of an indigo lake. It was midday, and she shaded her eyes with her hand. A band of algae covered the worn-smooth rocks along the rim of the lake. Her hip was cocked up to one side, and the opposite leg was slightly bent at the knee. It could have easily been my sister; the likeness was stunning. But my mother was more beautiful—something in her eyes, or maybe the way she was standing, I couldn’t tell. I stared at the photo for a while, wishing—unforgivably, I am sure—that it had been her who had lived to old age instead of my father . . .

My eyes closed for a moment. Indeed, the past was a callous thing. I knew I couldn’t afford to linger, though; I had to shake it off and continue on. So, placing the chosen items in a corner of my suitcase, I did just that.

By nine P.M. I had torn through a greater part of the daunting horde of stuff that filled the house. My eyes burned red, and my fingers were tacky with the surface grime of a thousand things.

But I was glad at what I had achieved. Only two rooms still remained untouched; and though I approached it with especial dismay, I was bound to finish the most difficult of them that night.

With a clenched jaw, I entered again into my father’s bedroom. It was only now, as the outside darkness peered in through the window, that I noticed that the blinds were missing. I felt suddenly vulnerable, as though I was being observed by some hidden onlookers, shrouded in the unseeable night. Distant forms, leering and snickering and plotting some nebulous harm took shape in my mind and danced on the dark canvas of the glass.

I growled at my paranoia. What madness! The nearest neighbor was a half-mile away.

Shaking my head, I strode to the closet door and yanked it open with renewed purpose.

Maybe I was simply too tired, but my vigor faded instantly. Once more I was stalled by the hard grasp of the past. In front of me hung the full array of my father’s clothes—the same ones he had been wearing for decades. And near the front was the shirt I had last seen him in alive—a plaid dress shirt with shining pearl buttons. I felt at the fabric, cool and smooth, and I remembered the day of our final meeting: Thanksgiving, five years ago. My father and I had been the only two from our side of the family at my sister’s house that day, and it was only out of guilt, I believe, that she had invited us at all. Granted, the three of us had been friendly enough with each other throughout the day, but in the end, I had left with a lingering sadness. After my mother had died, our family had simply failed.

Dropping my hands to my side, I decided then to call an end to my toil, and started for the 46

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hallway. But as I passed my father’s desk, I noticed a set of loose Polaroids lying under his watch.

There were four in all, each one nearly completely black. I studied them for a moment. In two I could barely make out tree tops, silhouetted against the deep purple of an evening sky. In the other two I saw only the image of a full moon.

They were curious, to be sure, but I could garner nothing of their purpose. I was about to set them down when I flipped one over, almost as an afterthought. I halted, my jaw flexing to the side.

My very own name was scrawled over the back in pencil along with a date—a day only four months prior. Two of the other photographs were similarly inscribed, and the final bore the name of my sister. I sat down at the desk and stared at the wall for a number of minutes. The feeling of being watched through the bare, inky glass across the room returned as I mulled what I had found. What had the old man been up to? Were these photos just a product of his dementia? At length, I forced myself to decide that that was, in fact, the case. My father must have been more mentally broken than I ever gave him credit for. With a snort, I closed my eyes and laid my head on the desk, facing the naked window.

Fatigue overwhelmed me. The overhead light shone uncomfortably through the backs of my eyelids, and I thought to get up and go to bed. I promised myself that I would . . . in just a minute.

Instead, I slept.

The moment of my waking was separated from the moment of my terror by the smallest of margins. As I came to, I felt a tenderness in my cheek, a product of the hard wooden surface it had been pressed against. Then I opened my eyes. The sight that greeted me sent me reeling back from the desk, toppling over the chair and landing on my hands and knees. A child was standing at the window, looking in at me. Darkness surrounded the nude form—a boy. He was covered in a layer of dirt and filth, but his skin shone pale and glowed in the escaping light of the room.

I reached out a hand and tried to speak. A withered shriek was all that emerged. Hearing that, the boy’s eyes widened and he fled, leaving an evaporating handprint on the glass. In the seconds following, I scrambled to my feet and dashed to the window. My face pressed against the pane. I struggled to see something—anything. I called out, “Hello! . . . Hello!” The words reverberated on the surface of the window, but no one answered.

Still coming to grips with wakefulness, I turned and stumbled down the hall and through the kitchen. As I reached the back door, I swatted at the light switch for the outdoor floods, but nothing came on. So I dashed into the dark. Sticker burrs nipped at my feet as I ran around to the bedroom window from the outside. There, I called out again. My breathing slowed as I listened. Crickets 47

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chirped in the lawn, and the breeze filtered softly through the trees, but any suggestion of the boy was gone.

I turned to look in the bedroom window. Every detail within was clear. A stark uneasiness overwhelmed me as I stared at the spot that I had been sitting less than a minute before. How long had the child watched me? Had I even seen him? Had he really been there, or was he just some relic of my unconscious mind, pursuing me out of sleep? I searched the window and the immediate area, but found nothing to hint at another human being. Still, I felt the weight of his eyes—a distant but intense scrutiny. I faced the night.

“This isn’t funny!” I cried out. But just as they emerged, I realized the absurdity of my words.

It is a rare prankster that carries out his deeds in the nude—certainly not a child. And his expression had been so fearful . . . longing even, that I could not believe he was hoaxing me.

There was little else that I could affect, however, especially at such a late hour; so I wandered dazedly, much like the victim of a car crash, back into the house, securing the door behind me. Only after an hour or so had I relaxed enough to lie down—and only then on the hard and lump-ridden bed in the guest room. I refused to return at all to the master bedroom even to extinguish the light. That night I slept little, and the rest that I did seize was fitful, marred by the lingering image of the boy.

By midmorning the next day I was exhausted; yet I had achieved nothing. The hours since dawn had been spent sitting on the back porch, drinking coffee and thinking about the child. Bit by bit I had been convincing myself that I had seen nothing but a trick of the eye. As I sipped at the stale black fluid, I began again to rehash the encounter, highlighting in my own mind the utter absurdity of every detail.

My endless reverie was broken, however, by an approaching visitor.

A long baby-blue Lincoln rumbled down the driveway and kicked up a storm of dust in its wake. As the vehicle pulled alongside the house, I rose and shuffled over, waving tentatively. A tall man—much taller than me—stepped from the car and eased the door closed.

“Hi, you Harold’s boy?” he asked, walking towards me. A bushy white mustache hung under his nose.

“Yeah, what can I do for you?” I asked. He held out his hand, and I shook it.

“I’m Charles,” he said, gripping with uncomfortable pressure. “I’m sorry about your dad, son.

He was a kind man.”

I smiled curtly. “Thanks.”

Charles nodded. “You know, I was the one that found him.”

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I almost cringed; I had hoped never to meet this person. “Oh, that must have been horrible.

I’m sorry that happened to you.”

He raised a plump, snowy eyebrow. “Yeah, well, not too many other folks came to see him— just me and the grocery lady. It had to be one of us two.”

I thought I detected a note of contempt. He kept looking at me, unflinching. “I suppose you’re right,” I finally said.

Charles scratched his chin. “Well, anyway, I saw the car in the drive, and I just came down to drop off the key to the house. I assume I won’t be needing it any more.”

“Oh, sure. Thanks,” I said, reaching out my hand.

“Him living alone and all, he wanted me to have it,” Charles said. He made no move to give me the key.

I retracted my arm. “Yeah, that’s understandable,” I said, nodding.

“Mmm hmm.” He turned his head for a moment, and then looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “Your father was not fit to be living alone. You know that?”

The man in front of me was a stranger—he was no one to me—but, still, I felt exposed, embarrassed. I felt judged. Yes, of course I knew that my father had been unfit to live alone. But I had done nothing about it. I was an awful son. Is that what you wanted to hear, Charles? I pursed my lips and said, “No, I didn’t know . . . The last time I saw him he seemed fine.”

“Yeah, well, things change over the course of a number of years,” Charles said. He softened slightly. “He talked about you a lot, you know?—you and your sister both.”

“Oh really?” I asked with genuine surprise.

“Sure did. Of course, by that time he was half crazy.” Charles laughed. “He kept saying how you were coming to visit, and he had to get you some apples. Said you couldn’t get enough of ‘em.

Must have been something from your childhood that stuck in his mind.”

I pursed my lips. “That’s odd. I don’t remember . . .”

Charles waved his hands. “Ah, like I said, he was pretty far gone by then. Hell, he didn’t know who I was half the time.” He smiled and handed me the key. We shook hands again, and he started back for his Lincoln. “Anyway, take care. I’m real sorry about your dad.”

I waved and said, “Thanks.” But just before Charles got in the car, I called out, “Hey, by the way, do you know of any kids that live near here? Young kids . . . maybe six or seven.”

Charles took on a thoughtful expression. “No, I can’t say that I do. Nearest family I know of is up at the highway, but that’s a good ways off. Why?” I realized that I hadn’t thought of an excuse for asking. I was not about to recount my 49

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experience to Charles; he already seemed to have a fairly low opinion of me. “Oh, I was just wondering . . .”

Thankfully, he cut me off. “There was, a few years ago, a family living over behind your dad’s property in Mutt’s old cabin . . . but they skipped out of town a while back. They were transients, you know? Never did pay him for the last few months. But they had a couple of kids as I remember.”

I smiled and waved again. “Doesn’t matter. Thanks for coming by, Charles,” I said.

“Yep. Good luck to you.”

That afternoon I pushed through fatigue and finished the final assessment of my father’s possessions. In the end I decided to keep little—just what I had saved the day before. Even as I looked over his most personal items—watch, money clip, glasses—I felt no need to preserve them.

Only the dark photographs gave me pause.

As evening approached, I sat down in the living room. With an extended exhale, I tipped backwards onto the couch. My self-ascribed mission was complete. I toyed with my car keys as I lay there, considering my moment of departure. The conversation with Charles had almost succeeded in persuading me that my experience the night before had been an illusion. I assured myself again that the child had been a phantom—a fabrication of my mind. There was no reason to linger. I could leave. Still, I decided to abide another night in the house. The drive was long and I was tired, but I knew deep within that I was not staying to avoid the trip back home.

Late that night, I tossed about on the bed, only drifting to sleep in tortuously short intervals.

Around two in the morning, I gave up, and in a stupor, made my way to the master bedroom. My finger fiddled with the light switch as I watched my reflection appear and disappear in the glass of the undressed window. Finally, I left the lights off and slumped into the chair at my father’s desk. I stared into the night. Distant tree-tops rocked in the breeze, shining in the silver light of the moon. I don’t know how long I kept awake.

A sound roused me. The earliest hint of dawn lit the sky, painting it a deep violet. I listened ...

A voice!

My heart leapt to my throat as I raced to the window and peered out. The child—and not only one but two—stood about fifty feet away, knee deep in the field grass. The second child was a girl, much smaller, at most five years old. She was likewise filthy and wore the tatters of an old T-shirt.

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The boy cupped his mouth and called out again.

I strained to hear. “Old Pa,” was it? I silently mouthed the words. The boy turned his head to look at the girl, leaving his hands hanging. She motioned, as if urging him to abandon his cries, but he yelled again.

I pulled outward on the window latches, having to force them at first. They swung open simultaneously, affecting a loud crack. Both of the children crouched down at the noise. The little girl moved softly up behind the boy, like a preying cat, and placed her hand on his back. I eased the window open—enough so I could fit through. With little grace, I crawled outside and found my feet.

As I stood, the children stood. We stared at each other in the cool humidity of the young dawn.

“Hello,” I said after a moment. “What is your name?”

They did not reply.

“Where are your parents?” I asked, stepping towards them.

They backed away in unison for a number of steps, and then they turned and ran.

“Wait! I’m not going to hurt you!” I called out after them. The children didn’t look back but continued to flee toward the distant woods beyond the field. After a few halting starts, I committed to following them and broke into a run. The grass was cold, and the morning dew clung to my bare feet, nearly causing me to slip. A barbed wire fence confronted me at the edge of the lawn, and I bent and contorted my way through. A metal prong caught my ankle as I lurched into the field, leaving behind a warm trickle of blood. I grunted through it and kept going, doing my best to keep up with the children. They were fast, though, like a pair of jack rabbits.

Reaching the woods first, the girl plunged into the darkness of the trees without an instant of hesitation. The boy, however, glanced behind. For a second he met my eyes, casting me a look of apprehension. I perceived, I thought, the slightest vacillation in his steps. But then, he too dove between the trunks of the towering oaks. After fifty or so strides, I followed.

The meager light of the open field perished at once. For a moment I was running blind, and had to slow. I was guided only by the soft sounds of the children, weaving through the vegetation ahead of me. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the dim shreds of dawn sifting through the canopy, and I increased my pace. Limbs and leaves swatted at my face and arms. By this time, I was breathing heavily.

Ahead, I caught sight of the phantom form of the boy, lithe and agile, flickering between the trees. The girl was a ghost, even further ahead. She flitted in and out of my vision like the glint from a polished stone, a pale gray flash among the leaves and trunks. I was wearing out; my lungs burned 51

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and my feet throbbed from the pounding. Still, I carried on, falling behind the children little by little.

After what seemed an endless slog through the woods, a slit of purple sky opened up ahead. A few moments more and I emerged from the trees, stumbling from the gloom and into a clearing. In the center stood a cabin of sorts, a sad weathered rectangle of wood that leaned in on itself. I bent over and placed my hands on my knees, gulping at the air. Sweat dripped from multiple points along my brow. My ankle burned, and debris clung to the matted trails of blood leading from my wound. In the distance the children slowed and stopped, turning to watch me. I could pursue them no longer.

At length, I stood upright and walked toward the cabin. The roof was little more than a layered collection of corrugated metal sheets, some of them rusted through in irregular shapes. The walls of the dwelling were fashioned from rough-cut logs, piled on top of one another. In one spot there was a cutout for a window, but the glass was missing. As I approached I looped around to the short side of the structure. There, I found a doorway, which, like the window, was only a shape hewn out of the logs. Before I stepped inside, I glanced back at the children. They were watching me still, from a considerable distance, unmoving but keenly observant.

The floor of the cabin was dirt, peppered with broken chunks of concrete. Along one side, I found a blackened stone hearth and a few wooden chairs, rotting from the ground up. The smell was musty and earthen, but not foul. Above, the sky peeked through the holes in the roof. In the opposite corner, I saw a bed—a dried-out heap of grass, really. I noticed that there were footprints in the dirt; they were small, the footprints of children.

I turned and walked back outside, looking at where they had been, but they were gone.

Around me day was breaking, and the sky was turning blue. The ghastly pallor that had presided over my dash through the woods was falling away. Limping slightly, I made my way around to the far side of the cabin. There I saw that a long hole had been dug about six feet out from the wall. Mounds of apple cores and a few plastic packages littered the trough. I knelt down for a closer look, finding a multitude of broken acorn shells and the bones of various small creatures mingled throughout.

As I stared, I noticed a lightly worn path leading from the cabin into the woods near where the children had stood. With grim curiosity, I followed its lead. The path took me across the clearing and beyond, a number of steps into the woods where it emptied into a bald patch of ground. At the far end of the patch, about six feet from me, lay two small mounds of stones, set four feet apart. A single stick had been wedged into the center of each, clearly a sort of marker. Despite its humble trappings, I knew I looked upon a gravesite.

I sat down at the dining table and laid my head in my arms. The midmorning sun set the 52

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drapes aglow, casting a warm, diffuse light on the room. My walk back to the house had been long; many times, I worried that I had lost my way in the woods, as my path had been indirect at best. But eventually, to my relief, I arrived at the familiar field behind the house.

My feet had taken a considerable beating, however. They were raw and bruised and cried out in pain, even on the carpet. My cut was deeper than I had thought and continued to weep through the bandage I had affixed. A lifetime of wearing shoes had softened me, it seemed. I rubbed my heels, thinking about the children.

During my trek back, I had firmly resolved to call the police, but once faced with the reality of it, I had found myself unable to. It felt an uncaring thing to do, even cold-hearted. What a trauma to be plucked from your home—surroundings, rather—and thrust into a strange world—a world that would no doubt be filled with people in uniforms and scrubs and strange machinery. I struggled to search out an alternative.

Brooding, I drifted about the house, lingering here and there in front of a piece of furniture or a hanging photograph. Inside the dusty, nicked frames I saw myself, my sister, and my mother and father all looking back at me, suspended in time. I wondered what my father had thought when he last looked on them. Had these images haunted him? Had they reminded him of his own useless pride?

Had he felt the same shame that I did now?—the shame of the gulf left between us. It could never be bridged . . . we had waited too long. A heavy weight descended on my heart as I roamed the silent rooms.

Guided, I suppose, by my own remorse, I found myself again at his desk, the dark photographs in front of me…pictures of his children. I flipped through them over and over, and in that mundane action, my decision took form. Though I didn’t know what I would do tomorrow, or any day after, I knew then what I would do that night.

I waited outside near the bedroom window as evening approached, sitting on an overturned plastic bucket. The air was still, and the heat of the day had ebbed. Every movement of the grass or lower reaches of the woods captivated me in uneasy anticipation. I sat and watched until twilight had stolen all but the most prominent features of the landscape.

It was then, at the final moment before nightfall, that a form rose up from the grass just beyond the fence. I could tell it was the boy. Somehow, in total shadow, he appeared even thinner and more skeletal. I stood up and raised my hand in greeting. He moved toward me warily, seeming to hover just above the field as if borne by the air itself. Once he reached the fence, he hopped over in one swift motion, leveraging off a post. We stood about thirty feet apart.

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“Where’s Old Pa?” he said in a strong but trembling voice.

I thought a moment and said, “Old Pa is gone . . . he died.”

The boy looked down and thought for a minute. “Like my mom and dad?” he asked.

“Yeah, like them,” I said. He must have watched me as I had stood over the graves. “My parents are dead too, you know?”

“Who are you?” he asked abruptly.

“Well, I’m Old Pa’s son; he was my dad,” I said. “Did you visit Old Pa?” “Sometimes. But then he stopped coming out to see us.”

Movement, yards behind the boy, caught my eye. It was the tiny shape of the girl-child, gliding toward us through the swaying field-grass. At the edge of the lawn, she took to her belly and rolled under the lowest rung of the fence. Standing, she cleared her hair from her face and stole over to the boy. Their hands slid together as a key in a lock.

“Hi,” I said, looking at her, but the little girl remained silent.

“She only talks a few words,” the boy said. I nodded.

“Did Old Pa give you food?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the boy said, stepping forward one pace.

“Are you hungry now?”

“Yeah.”

I lifted up an apple and a package of hot dogs. “I’ve got some food you may like.”

The boy turned to the girl, knelt down and whispered into her ear. She nodded once, and then the pair walked toward me, stopping at a distance of about ten feet. I could see their faces now, in the light of the bedroom. Their cheekbones cast deep shadows that grew and shrank with every move of their heads. The girl peered around the boy with wide, nocturnal eyes.

I threw the apple. The boy caught it with the swift motion of a single hand and gave it to the little girl, who bit into it without pause.

“You must be Stephen,” I said. “My name is Stephen, too.” I looked to the little girl. “And you’re Anne . . . I have a sister named Anne.”

The boy smiled. “Yeah, that’s what Old Pa called us. But my real name is Boy.” He jiggled the girl’s hand, looking down at her. “My sister, she ain’t got no name.”

My lower lip began to shake. “Well, she can have Anne if she wants. Do you like that name?”

The boy nodded, but the girl still did not respond. By now, she had almost finished the apple.

“Do you want to come inside here tonight?” I asked, motioning behind me.

The boy thought for a long moment. I wondered if he understood, but finally, he said simply, 54

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“OK.�

I led the two around the side of the house to the back entrance. They followed, but at a good distance, and they halted when I stopped and opened the door. Stepping into the house, I motioned for them to come. The children turned to each other in a wordless exchange. Then, the boy came forward, his sister clutching his arm as she followed behind.

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End of the Road By Sherry Carter

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X-Ray Blanket Megan Dobkin

Lena always had a thing for X-ray blankets. All that heft and weight laid on top of her body made her feel contained and safe. She doesn’t imagine that her leg is broken this time. She really has to come up with a better story than “tripped over a manhole.” Maybe something about saving some kids from a burning church. The technician lays the X-ray blanket on top of her and she closes her eyes and once again goes back to the night she lost her virginity. It was a school night. She always thought that made her seem naughtier than she actually was. Her boyfriend at the time was a nice boy. She noticed that night that being naked under the covers with a boy can sometimes feel like flying.

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How She Fell for Her Captor Megan Dobkin

Her Hero Good Guy told her it would be safe to go into her childhood home. But as soon as they entered, they saw the pack of wild hooligans ravishing the place. Her Hero Good Guy abandoned her there. He just didn’t have the strength to protect her. She was brought to the leader of the hooligans, a slight but menacing man with stubble and a receding hairline. He had set up camp in what used to be her backyard. In exactly the place that she and her little friend once planted chocolate to grow a chocolate tree. She knew that, after passing her around for a bit, the hooligans would most likely kill her, so she decided to take a tactic with the leader. “I cannot wait to submit to you. I belong to you and you alone.” He looked up from the raw chicken he was slicing up and eating. He motioned to the house and replied: “There is darkness here. Can’t you see it?”

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Open House Megan Dobkin

Marcus wonders what it is about real estate agents that make them think we give a rat’s ass what they look like. He takes a store bought cookie and explains that the two bedrooms would be for his kids, who he will have every other weekend. Today he started his search. Marcus’ parents were architects, so he feels at home in open houses. Wandering through other people’s spaces was actually a Sunday morning family ritual. His sister and he would rush to look at the pools, while his parents tried not to think about where they spent their Saturday night.

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Rock Show Megan Dobkin

“Of course this would happen to me,” Astrid notices how filthy she is getting, sandwiched between the parking lot cement and the underside of this car. “Riot” isn’t the term that most would use to describe what happened in the parking lot after the rock show—the event that separated Astrid from the group that had invited her out. But, it will not stop Astrid from referring to it this way. The incident of the riot-at-the-rock-show will be the impetus to countless nights at home eating pizza and smoking weed out of a Diet Coke can with punched holes in it. She will put herself in debt due to the rock show. She will be unable to get a job in this recession due to the rock show. After the high school reunion she missed due to the rock show, Astrid’s fellow concert-goer shot her an e-mail asking after her and reminiscing about the most exciting night of her young life.

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The Juror Megan Dobkin

Everyone who reported that morning was scrambling to find the reason why they would be a bad match for the case. Everyone except Ilene, that is. Ever since her youngest told her that his therapist said he needed to draw some boundaries and move out, Ilene has had to re-assess her daily rituals.

Drawing some boundaries seems to Ilene like code for “skirt obligations.� She is his mother. She has always been there for her son for free, not for $150/hour. It feels nice to Ilene to have something present itself that she feels she could excel in.

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Contributors Claire Kole is the author of one book and has been published in several magazines and journals. She holds a BA in English and is finishing her MFA in Creative Writing in June 2014.

Harry Yout t is a frequently published poet and writer of fiction and non-fiction.

He’s the author of nine collections of poetry, including What My Father Never Knew I Learned From Him, Even the Autumn Leaves, and I’ll Always Be from Lorain. Harry is a long-time instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where he teaches courses and workshops in fiction writing and documentary narrative non-fiction. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed international Journal of Consciousness, Literature and the Arts.

Originally from the Boston area, Jeff Nazzaro lived in Japan for twelve years before moving to Los Angeles, where he is pursuing an M.A. in English at Loyola Marymount University. In addition to his girlfriend and two cats, he loves hamburgers and fried chicken wings.

Jo Wharton Heath was once a math professor and is now a writer, as evidenced by her novel "Sarah and Alice." She lives with her husband Bob in a house in the woods just across the interstate from Auburn, Alabama.

It wouldn't be the first time that Megan Dobkin over-thought things, but she is secretly concerned about the day her small boys ask what Mommy writes about. For, one day, they will learn to read. And to Google. And they may very well trip across the various literary journals and anthologies in which Mommy is published. If you want to see for yourself the other dark matter that Mommy works through during carpool drop off, you can find some at megandobkin.com.

P. J. McNeil is a cuddly curmudgeon father of eight, pepe of eight, plus one on the way and a recovering French-Canadian/Irish/Scottish Catholic peace activist.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Tony Conaway has written, co-written, and ghostwritten everything from blogs to books. His fiction has been published in two anthologies and numerous publications, including Clever, Danse Macabre, Linguistic Erosion, qarrtsiluni, and the Rusty Nail.

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Ryan Link is a native Texan who lives in Houston with his wife of eleven years. He works as a modeling and simulation analyst in the energy industry and holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston. Some of his favorite authors and influences are Frank Herbert, Alastair Reynolds, George R. R. Martin, and H. P. Lovecraft. You can visit him for more at: https://sites.google.com/site/rlinkauthor/ Wendy Scott has always had a story in her head or in her hands since she can remember. A voracious reader and self-described Renaissance soul, her eclectic interests are reflected in her fiction. Her most recent short story was published in the anthology It’s a Crime. She lives in Florida and writes from there or wherever her travels take her.

Untitled By Chandler Mead

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rindliterarymagazine.com

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