Spittoon 4.2: Mudjug by Spittoon Press

Spittoon 2.4

Spittoon

Volume Four Issue Two Mudjug Summer 2014

www.spittoonmag.com

ISSN: 2166-0840

Spittoon 4.2

Fiction Editor Matt VanderMeulen

Poetry Editor Kristin Abraham

Creative Nonfiction Editor Kristin Abraham

Front cover art by Geoffrey Miller: Paris 001, photograph, 12 x 7.8 Back cover art by Geoffrey Miller: Paris 010, photograph, 8.8 x 12

mudjug (n): slang for â&#x20AC;&#x153;spittoon,â&#x20AC;? often a portable spittoon.

Spittoon 4.2

Table of Contents Jeffrey Zable

On the King Norman TV Show poetry

Travis Vick

Who I Most Admire

nonfiction

Caitlin Woolley

Spill

fiction

John Wells

The Difficulty

poetry

Kathy Roberts

My Uncle: Handyman Who Never Left

nonfiction

Camille Meyer

Mr. Melon Amy Chernasky

fiction fiction

22 23

Michael Landau

Test

fiction

Michael Lacare

Claire

nonfiction

Ricky Garni

Kissing Devices

poetry

Donelle Dreese

Temperance

poetry

Thomas Cook

Conversation with Butcher

fiction

James Braziel

Become Kindling

nonfiction

Rebekah Bergman

Stitch in Time

poetry

Rachel J. Bennett

Level Two

poetry

Spittoon 4.2

On the King Norman TV Show (Around 1959) Jeffrey Zable

I must have been 7 or 8 and The King picked me out of the audience to guess a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s weight and if I got it exactly I would win a brand new bicycle, so knowing my mom was 120, I said 120, but when the woman got on the scale she was 122, and when he handed me the consolation prize of a 10 dollar gift certificate to the King Norman toy store, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure I was disappointed, but I no longer remember. . .

Spittoon 4.2

Spill Caitlin Woolley

The Lord’s Committee for Wildlife Defense comes to us in the season when a school of whales passes our beach. Sometimes I can hear voices over the waves, over the whales. I like watching the big gray backs bob up and down in the sea. I like their broomlike nonteeth and the way they sing to each other, the way they swim together. But the Committee says that the waters are receding and soon, kelp will rise like dried trees and the rains will stop, and the blood of the fish will turn murky with salt, and our mothers will wipe sea-tears from our dirty cheeks as the whole world turns to a dusty, waterless husk. The Committee says less about wildlife and more about doom. Don't you understand, they say, what will happen to all God's creatures? Don't you understand about the end? The Committee does not tell us what will happen to our blood, to our bodies, and I am left to wonder. Our fingers are stained white with salt-water and puckered from fishing. We know the sea and the bones of all fish. We throw our dead off one cliff and catch fish from the beach under another other. The Committee is just a man and a woman, and over their dark suits they wear bright teal windbreakers. Salt air collects in their hair, clings to the woman’s skirt. They walk together along the beach and never tell us where they come from. Their voices are soft and light like they’ve never breathed salt. When they first come I am wrapped in a blanket, high up on the beach in my secret spot where I can watch the whales best. Neither the man or the woman notice me, but the bright whiteness of their skin radiates against the roughed-out cliffsides that rise over our beach and I can’t look away. The woman has hair like light; it is a color whose name I do not know. They are tall and thin and the man has a fluffy, clean mustache, and their eyes are so pale that they glitter in the daylight like scales. When the man and the woman pass me, I drop my blanket and follow. “I guess we didn’t need to bring holy water. This stuff will dry the sin out of you,” the windblown man says as they walk, rubbing salt between his fingers. His laughter carries through the salty breeze. They walk into the village together where the adults are shrouded in hot steam from the oyster pots. Strangers don’t pass through here very much and when they do we leave each other alone. We see boats out in the water sometimes, but we paddle around and ignore them. I catch sight of my mother cleaning fish with her sharp knives at the edge of the village. She is an expert fisher and spends all her time at sea, working. Now, when she sees me and the strangers, she keeps cleaning.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

I linger behind the man and the woman so they don’t see me. They are beautiful and strange and I wonder what they smell like. They stand at the edge of the village and say hello to everyone, but no one says hello back. “We are here with a mission from the Lord,” the woman says. A few people look up at the sound of her glassy voice. “The earth is drying out, and there won’t be any animals soon. We are here to help.” But people turn away. We already believe in the sea and its infinity, in its bounty, and we always have. We believe in boats and bivalves, in what we can do with our hands. When my mother talks to me sometimes she talks about the day when I will throw her into the water, wrapped in a blanket, and how grateful she will be for the rest. The adults, who already hold these things to be true, let their faces drop as the strangers speak, let their interest sag; but the woman’s voice to me is like whalesong. The surf mumbles on the shore and the air blows against our ears. It is autumn and there is a bite this close to the water. The sounds of fish work starts to hum again. Being discounted like this doesn’t seem to bother the Committee, who smile their stark smiles as faces turn away. Their bright windbreakers ruffle. The woman opens her purse and takes out a little brightly-colored box, wrapped in red ribbon. She opens it and tucks the lid underneath, offering what’s inside. “All little ones like candy,” she says, and she is right: from behind the adults little faces peer out with wide, blinking eyes. The inside of the box beams in blue, pink, and yellow. The colors are brighter and richer than most of us have ever seen. “Come on,” she says. “I can’t eat all these myself. Come get some.” Slowly, children start towards her from the village. The adults crack crab and club the heads of silver fish. I stay where I am and watch as the other children pluck them from the fancy box: they are each wrapped individually, and round like sugary moons. The newcomers introduce themselves: they are Sandra and Mitchell, and their message is good. I whisper her name to myself. “You like the fishies, don’t you?” Mitchell says gently to the children. Some of them nod their heads, marveling at the wrapping. I wonder what it tastes like but I stay where I am, snuggled into my blanket. “You count on them.” It isn’t a question. The kids nod again, and Sandra offers them more candy.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

“Then we’ll count on you,” she says. The quiet sounds of fishing carry on around us. I am still looking at Sandra and Mitchell; I have never seen skin so light and smooth, or hair so straight and fine; even the roundness of their words is new to me, the way their tongues clip and roll like they are eating candy too. Sandra and Mitchell start to walk through the village again. Some of the kids follow them, hoping for more candy. Sandra walks up to a group of women circled around an oyster pot, steaming today’s catch. When the boiling steam catches her in the face, she simply tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles. “How do you cook your oysters?” she asks pleasantly, but none of the women respond. I see their eyes linger on Sandra’s face, but their conversation with one another never pauses. She moves to try her luck with an old man who mostly ignores her too. I see Mitchell walk towards a woman with a baby, but when he starts to talk to the baby its mother turns her back to him, cracking a crab’s leg. Sandra and Mitchell try to talk with a few other people, but no one is interested in their conversation, in their mission. When Sandra runs out of candy the other children disperse like minnows and disappear back into the nooks and crannies they come from. I am the only one still listening. When Sandra begins to pull candies from the pocket of her windbreaker and drop them onto the beach, I know she has seen me following behind. I pick them one out of the sand and unwrap them, finally feeling the funny crinkle of the plastic wrap. The candy is bright pink and round like a sugary moon, decorated in little swirls, and its tartness is a shock to my tongue; but the shock doesn’t last, and in a few seconds the flavor mellows. The candy is the first things I have ever eaten that don’t taste like salt, and I find their bright sweetness a kind of mystery. My tongue turns dark with sugar. Sandra turns around and bids me come closer, gesturing with a candy-full palm. She lets me approach slowly, smiling as I come to her. She kneels and shakes my hand as if I am an adult. “What’s your name, shy one?” she asks. “Benny.” Out of the corner of my eye I see Mitchell prepare to join us, but Sandra stays him with her hand. Her eyes never leave my face.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

“I wonder if you can do something for me, Benny.” Her pale eyes glitter at me like fish scales. “Can you take the rest of these sweets? If I take them home with me I’ll eat them.” She holds out her hand to me again. The shiny wrappers crinkle, and slowly I take them from her. She smiles and her teeth are just as bright, and the hand she brushes through my hair is soft and gentle. Sandra lowers her palm and Mitchell appears at her side. “Hello, little man,” he says, rubbing his thumb through his mustache. I am just working up the power to speak when the voices of the women circled around the oyster pot grow loud and irritated. The three of us turn around at the sound. “They won’t open!” one of them shouts. “They’re all spoiled!” They grumble noisily and make one of the women, a younger girl, haul the heavy pot down towards the water and dump the cleaned, closed shells into the sea. She grunts the whole way. The other women scold her: you shouldn’t have fished so close to the shore, they say, you should have known better. Sandra places her hand on my shoulder and her touch is friendly. Where my mother’s hands are rough and thick hers are so small. I pop another candy into my mouth. “We have to go now,” Sandra says. She zips her windbreaker up to her throat. “We’ll be seeing you,” Mitchell says. They turn to walk away. “Are you coming back?” I ask, surprised at the weak sound coming from my own throat. “Oh, yes,” Mitchell says, craning his neck to answer. They walk together up the beach the way they had come before, disappearing around the bend of a rocky cliff. I suck candy and feel her fingers in my hair for a long time after. * Later I show my mother, Miriam, my red tongue. We are in the house, hanging fish from the beams to dry. I offer a candy to her and hope that she will take it, but she doesn’t. “I don’t like sweet things,” she says, and hooks a fish through its mouth.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

“They were really nice,” I say. I struggle with my own hook. I do this every day, but this fish is smaller than most, and I can’t find the right spot. “Don’t get too attached. They won’t stay long.” “But they said they were coming back.” Mother starts to hum a sailor song she likes. She takes the fish from me and thrusts the sharp hook through its mouth with ease, and hangs it from the beam with the others. * In a few days Sandra and Mitchell come back. This time they bring a big bag of beautiful oysters, cleaned and ready to cook. Their teal windbreakers are bright against our saltwhite land. I step out the front door of my mother’s shanty and catch sight of Sandra’s golden hair. I don’t like the way she has tied it tightly up at the back of her head. “We remembered about the pot of spoiled ones,” Mitchell says. “We thought we could help.” One of the oyster women, the one who had been soundly scolded, is cleaning the few that had been caught that morning, and looks up from the table where she works. Her hands are cracked and dry from cleaning the fresh oysters she has been made to catch. The light in her eyes moves like shadows, wary, uncertain; but I see them flash. Her attention has been snapped up as if by a net. Mitchell walks the bag of oysters over to her. The girl stands and when he offers them, she tentatively accepts. The other oyster women watch. There is a long silence before the girl holding the oysters speaks. “Thank you,” she says, and another woman gets the big boiling pot ready. “Can I help?” Mitchell asks, and wordlessly the girl with the oysters makes room at the work table. Farther down the beach, Sandra pulls a fresh box of candies out of her purse, and the children’s little heads all pop up just as they did before. This time the candies are made of smooth chocolate, decorated on top with glimmering silver sugar. They are gone in almost no time at all, but this time some of the children stay close to her. One of the littlest boys reaches up to touch her hand.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

I close the door to my mother’s shanty. She left early in the morning to fish far out in the surf, as she always does, but I close it gently anyway. I walk down the beach, lingering a little until Sandra motions the box of chocolates at me. “Hello, Benny,” she says, and the sound of my name in her mouth is sweet too. A little girl with whiteblonde hair, younger than me, offers a white shell to Sandra, who seems genuinely flattered. “What a pretty thing,” she says. “Can you show me where this came from?” The little girl nods vigorously and waddles down to the water where the tide is coming in gently, quietly. She stomps in the wet sand and Sandra follows her, removing her shoes. I follow too. The water is bitingly cold, but I am used to it. I think Sandra must be too because she doesn’t even seem to feel it. Her ankles are bonewhite against the water. But because her soft feet are bare in the water, it is easy for her to miss the sharp rocks that lie beneath. She cries out when she steps on one and raises her foot so she can inspect the pad. I look over to see a trickle of blood turn the droplets of water pink. A flap of skin has curled around a dark wound, but just as blood starts to come forth more freely, the wound closes itself. It gets smaller and smaller until it’s gone. When I was littler I cut myself on a fish hook. I still have the scar on my finger, but it does not look like Sandra has scars. I watch, mesmerized. She looks over at me and extends her foot like she wants me to see it. She smiles slyly at me and dips it back into the water. A silence follows. A little candlefish swims up to my feet and starts to circle my toes. I wiggle them and the little fish pokes me with his tiny face. I giggle a little, and Sandra smiles. “He likes you,” she says. “Wouldn’t you want to help him, if he needed you to?” I told her that I would, but that he seemed okay to me. “He does need your help,” she says softly. “All the animals do.” “How come?” The little girl flops over into the sand, clapping her hands into the water. “The end of the world is coming,” Sandra says. I look out into the gray rolling sea while she talks. She says that all of us good people will go up into heaven, and a great

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

evil will come from below. The animals, she says, won’t go to heaven, and they will suffer tremendous torture after we are gone. We won’t be able to save them then. “So what do we do?” I ask. “We make sure there aren’t any animals for the Devil to hurt.” I try to imagine a world without the animals I know: fish, bugs, whales, deer, housecats, shrimp, crabs, but I can’t. “What will happen to the animals if we don’t save them?” “A whole lot of very, very bad things.” I am starting to get frightened. We need the fish to live. I like the fish, and I don’t want them to get hurt. “I want to help,” the little girl says as she rolls around in the small waves. “Of course you do,” Sandra says. “Come here. I’ll show you.” The girl rises unsteadily to her feet and stands next to me. Sandra bends down and gently scoops up the candlefish that is swimming around my toes. She holds it in her palm like precious bounty, and its tail flickers back and forth. Then Sandra smashes her palms together hard, rubbing them, grinding up the little fish in between them. She opens her hands and the fish comes apart in pieces. “Quick and painless,” she says. She bends again to rinse her hands, and the dead fish parts float at the surface. They attract more candlefish and soon, they are swarming around our feet. “Can you do that?” Sandra asks, and the little girl scoops up and smashes a fish of her own. When I crush a fish up in my hands its guts feel slimy against my skin. Its tiny delicate bones prick me, and I feel a sense of relief when it goes still. I drop its body into the water where the other fish swim to consume it. I don’t like the feeling of it, the wiggly fish, its wet insides, but Sandra looks so happy and proud of me. She calls me by name. I like to see her smile. The little girl laughs as she crushes up fishes. Sandra laughs too, and at the sound the other village children appear. Soon, all of we children are standing in the surf,

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

smashing fish between our hands or stomping them into the sand. Sandra tells us she is proud, that we are helping them. We must bear this burden that the animals will not suffer, she says. “Look at all these fish you have saved,” she says. “Tell your parents. We would like them to help, too.” We promise that we will. Silver body parts sparkle in the water, floating against our ankles, getting stuck between our toes. * That night when I tell my mother about what we did with the fish, she frowns. She is running the edge of a knife backwards over the bodies of soles, littering the table with little scales that shine a thousand colors and pop bright in the candlelight. “Uh-huh,” she says. “Don’t do that too much. We need the fish.” She doesn’t look up and her hands work like machines over the bodies. I remember Sandra’s gentle smile and press on, even though my throat feels scratchy. “But Sandra says we were helping.” “Helping?” “She says that when we all go up to heaven the animals will suffer a lot. She says that we have to kill them nicely, so they won’t get hurt after we’re gone.” “Sounds funny to me.” “It’s true!” “You believe her?” I swallow hard and realize Mother is looking at me. Her face is craggy and rough and the dark hair she keeps braided behind her is tight and greasy with salt air. Her eyes are dark. It is the first time she has looked at me today, in a week, in forever. “Yes,” I say, and my palms tingle.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

“Okay,” she says, and wipes the flat of the knife on the edge of the table to clean it. She whistles and starts on in on the flank of a different fish. “These fish are all so sick. Look at them, hardly any meat. I don’t know if we can even eat them.” She holds the frail body of a sole in her hands. Its eyes are cloudy, its color dull. “Get me that big pot on the stove,” she says. She looks intently at the fish body in a way she never looks at me. I go through the shanty into the kitchen. I grab hold of the empty pot but it seems so much heavier than I can bear. * In the morning I leave my mother’s house to walk down to the beach, but I see Sandra and Mitchell down in the village. They are surrounded by a few of the adults whose arms are folded. I see Sandra pull her windbreaker tighter against herself. Mitchell’s hands are folded neatly behind his back, and his voice is strong and clear. He is explaining their hallowed purpose to the adults, that if they save the animals for torture, they will ascend into heaven. He is talking of horrors in the world: of blood and bile and death, of a dried earth, of broken bones and souls. To his left I see the oyster girl, looking very pretty with her hair brushed and decorated in shells. Her face is white. I recognize some of the people there as the parents of the other children, the ones who helped kill the fish. The children must have kept their promise to Sandra. “This sounds impossible,” one of the men says. “The fish are all fine.” “They aren’t,” the oyster girl says. “That whole pot I pulled up was spoiled. All of them. Wouldn’t even open. That’s never happened before.” “That doesn’t mean the world is ending,” the big man says. “That’s just nature.” “Are you willing to wait and see?” Mitchell says, and the big man does not reply. “It has already begun. We’re doing what we can, spreading the message, but we need help.” “I don’t know about all this,” a woman says. “It just seems absurd.”

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

Sandra tucks her hair behind her ear. Even though her face is smooth and calm, the twinge of her mouth wriggles fast. Suddenly I find myself among the circle of adults, between them and Sandra. “My mother’s fish,” I say. “She was cleaning them last night and she said they looked sick. She had to go back out this morning to get more because we couldn’t eat them.” Sandra’s eyes light up softly at me. She is glad that I am talking, I can tell. “What was wrong with them?” the oyster girl asks. “They were all pale and fragile,” I say. “Their fins came apart like paper. We couldn’t eat them.” “Now, that is strange,” the man says. “Miriam knows what she’s doing. It’s not like her to get a bad catch.” Sandra beams at me and I feel it between my ribs, all around my heart. “It’s just a matter of time before something worse happens,” Sandra says, and no one counters her. The waves roll heavy and white beyond us. Just then, the enormous backs of gray whales begin to rise and fall in the far sea. Their bodies break the surface and send showers of seaspray upward. It sounds to me like they are laughing, or maybe crying; but they are together, moving, diving. I imagine the heft of their tails splitting the water from itself below, the giant trail of white bubbles that follow them. I wonder where they are going. Somewhere warmer, I guess, but I don’t know where that is. Next to me Sandra makes an ooh sound. She presses her pale hand to her chest and I wonder how her heart beats under her skin. I lean closer to her because I believe that she must smell good, like clean linen, like candy or sweets, but she doesn’t. She smells like nothing. “I wish I could see them better,” she says. The group gathers and we all watch the whales together from the even level of the beach. I remember my secret spot, high up, and I give Sandra’s hand a gentle tug. “You can,” I say, and while the others watch the whales I lead her down the beach toward the rocky height.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

“Where are we going, Benny?” she asks. She struggles to get up the cliff, and because I’m smaller and used to the terrain, I’m faster. I reach the top of the hill before she does, and I’m glad, because the whales look so beautiful from here. I want her to see. Finally she makes it to the top, breathing hard, and the moment she turns and looks out at the water I puff up with golden pride. The whales are playing with each other, bobbing and swirling. They’re having fun, and we can see everything from where we stand. They’re huge and familiar to me, and I can’t help but smile as I watch. Sandra’s arms hang at her sides. I wonder if she has ever even seen real whales. “God’s creatures are fantastic,” she says. “It’s so sad, really, what’s going to happen.” I don’t know what to say so I tell her how I love the whales. “I feel like they’re my friends,” I say. “I watch them every time.” She sits down on the rocks, hugging her knees. “They’re important to you.” “Yes.” “They deserve to be saved, don’t they?” she says kindly, turning her head to look at me. They do, I say. “I thought we were going to lose them. The adults, I mean. I still don’t know if they believe. I don’t know if they care about the animals like you and I do.” “I don’t know,” I say. “I heard them talking. I think some of them care.” “The oceans set to boil, the wrath of hell. That is what awaits all fish.” “That’s bad,” I say, and then feel stupid for having said it. But it is bad, she agrees, and says that it’s important that we get all the people to believe what she and Mitchell are saying. “Maybe I can help. They listened, about my mother’s fish,” I tell her. “Maybe they’ll believe if I talk to them.” Sandra looks pleasantly surprised. "You would do that for us?" I nod. "That's very kind of you." I beam and blush.

Spittoon 4.2 Woolley, Spill

She tells me she has a better idea. She tells me that, in a few days, she and Mitchell think they have something that will help make them believe. “Would you like to help?” she asks, and her fair hair looks somehow prettier in the wind. “Yes,” I say, happy that she has asked me. "It's important that you not tell anybody else about this," she says and touches my cheek. I like having secrets with her; it is sweet and new, like pink candy, and Sandra looks at me when she talks. I promise not to tell anyone. It is enough for me just to be near her. * When night comes a few days after, I meet Sandra and Mitchell down at the far end of the beach, as she asked. They are surrounded by enormous silver barrels that gleam under the silver scaly moon, whose silver color looks like it’s leaking downward into the ribbonlike waves of the ocean. It is just the three of us, and I don’t know how they lifted the heavy barrels onto the rocks between them. I don’t ask, which is alright because Mitchell lifts one like it’s a feather. He doesn’t even strain. I touch the outside of the drums: they are full of something, and I know I couldn’t lift one even if I tried. Sandra tells me it’s okay that I just watch. My being there, she says, is more important than anything, because it shows that I care, that I believe. Something is written on the sides of the barrels but I don’t know what it says. “Let's help some critters,” Mitchell says, and together he and Sandra hoist the barrel onto its side. A thick black sap spills out into the water. It smells like rubber and smoke and as I peek down over the rocks, I see in the moonlight that the water has started to cloud over, to bubble. A film spreads. “What is it?” I ask. Mitchell shifts the barrel as it empties. “It’s what will make people trust us,” he says. When the barrel runs dry he and Sandra start on a second, a third, a fourth. Along the surface, little fish bodies have begun to spring up, moonlight bouncing on their glittery underbellies. Sandra starts laughing. “It’s working,” she says as more and more fish start to pop up on the water. “Look at all the little souls we're saving.” Mitchell reaches over and grabs her hand tightly and she lets him.

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“See?” he says to me without looking. “This is the good work you've witnessed. Those are little fishies that won’t see the great evil at the end.” Below us the bodies of fish pop up and up. A seabird tries to flit up from the surface of the water but I see its shadow in the moonlight, fluttering, failing against the sky. I hear it crash back into the ocean, croaking. The water starts to reek, to slosh thickly against itself. I feel like cloudy water too, like my underbelly is touching open air. I lick the salt off my fingers and suddenly I want to be away from Mitchell and his clean mustache and Sandra’s unsmell. The oil that they themselves put into the water will spread all night, will seep deep down into the waves. Mitchell and Sandra chatter happily to each other as they turn the sea below black, and it’s just them, they are the ones who bring the darkness; but could have been a storm, it could have been an evil, and it wouldn’t have been any different. * In the morning the beach is black and the water is greasy and slow. The bodies of birds break up the tide, soiled feathers litter the sand. A handful of people walk along the beach, waiting to see what each new wave will bear to land. Some of them are trying to wipe oil from gulls and turtles and feet step over or smash dead little fish. Not many animals have died, but as the ones that have are coated in dark, rubbery sludge that we salt people cannot wipe away. Black film floats farther away into the surf, past the land, out into the open ocean. Everything along the beach, even the rocks, are stained. It's like a picture: gray sky, dark sketch of sea, people who are ready for things to go back to the way they were. I am surprised to find my mother down on the beach, my mother whom I see only in candlelight, only as a shape in the gloomy house. She is talking to Sandra who is all whiteness and light, and next to her my mother looks dark and heavy with her saltbitten skin and sea-stained hands. When I approach them my mother reaches over and wraps and arm around my shoulders, hugging me to her. I feel cold under her new touch. “You were right to tell them about my fish,” she says. Sandra smiles at me but her smile is different, like it is satisfied, like it laughs privately at a joke no one has told. When she turns toward the sea the reflection of the tar on the ground fills the corners of her pale eyes and it looks, just for a moment, like they have gone all black.

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I glimpse a lone whale, a small straggler, struggling to breathe out in the surf. Not enough air can escape through its muck-clogged blowhole. I cry out and move, but my mother tightens her hold; she leans down to kiss me on the top of my head and it feels like my ribs are pushing in, like my tongue is lost in slippery oil.

Spittoon 4.2

The Difficulty John Wells

In the throat

pulled apart from the loins, that is, from where

the feelings fell: from where the heart struck a repose: a reposition, a consideration-again the consternation. A carnation could have done, but better. Less so the gurgle of a dream in the throat

I snooze in smut or gibbets: some gutter no darling popped in at to say hi. Some barroom claw. No forensics to defend parlance of I intend to make up for nothing.

of a thrush rustling; forgetting its wings dusted up, already, enough of the earth: sated: to lie softened in the stability of dirt much better, much

my goodbyes abiding.

Although the set of my level has erred: the spot of my middle is muck: there, where what I predicted it would be wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t: a hole the size of my fist 19

more than I now;

Spittoon 4.2 Wells, The Difficulty

carrying my other fist: in that the apology, tightly binding my equivocation when sprung, therefore: You will say: my incontinence offends you in this way: my disease has affected you in the following manner(s): my gesticulations failed to articulate. And dark is darker at night, the wind wound up tighter: a tippet of ridicule, a molecule of lice: a sea of mammals moaning in their deep incomprehension. Ergo the poke of my tongue into the snakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hole; better, I argue, than my head in to resound with all its noisy meaninglessness: dis mean iosity: misdelineation: and so forth. And looking up: the moonbeam in the owlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roost batters a wood beam: a transubstantiation of particle: a light in course literal: lightening, after repetition, as though lit but never hot enough to burn.

Spittoon 4.2

My Uncle: Handyman Who Never Left Kathy Roberts

House didn’t need fixing, but after aunt died; faucets replaced, entry tiled, floors recarpeted, walls painted, lights refixtured, tub installed, backsplash plastered, doorbell rewired. Note from non-coffee-drinking mother: “Out to coffee with a friend.” Skipped rebellious-teen phase, but turn up internet radio and glue eyes to screen to drown the sloppy suctions, labored breathing, and “We can do this together” drifting from remodeled living room. “We’ll stop if you’re uncomfortable.” Satin bridesmaid dress ordered without consent. Shapely form flattering mine, deep red enhancing facial blotches and red-rimmed eyes. * * * Now, phone is answered by: “Hello, Hello, Hello” every time. Overweight shuffle thuds not exerting effort of Ham-Quad lift; rubber-soled slippers gratedly slide — linoleum (cross into new terrain) creak aged floorboards beneath plush carpet. Stench of vinegar chips, fried potatoes, oozing sausage invading New Carpet scent. Wet smacks chomping mouthful of grease. In a different pew, he dives for bass in hymns, no idea how to use thick vocal chords, barely audible creek — haphazard jerking, like a settling house – about an octave and a fourth too low. I’ll learn to fix my own house.

Spittoon 4.2

Mr. Melon Camille Meyer

I took a walk in the garden and on the way met a melon. He offered me sweet embrace with his vines and decency with his leaves.

I took my lover in the melon patch. I laid down upon his vines and though I was not tired, he conducted the air such that the scent of the tomato plants lulled me to sleep. I awoke when the air changed. Rosemary had drifted in from the herb garden. I did not open my eyes more than a squint. I wanted to test him. I continued to breathe so he would think me asleep but I continued to watch him through my eyelashes.

Very near to the end of the hour I felt the vines stiffen beneath me. How heavy was his patience that it ended this ordeal. I opened my legs and let my lover in. Leaves and vines rushed over me. He was deafening. If I expressed pleasure I do not know it. Beneath him, as everything above him, I was deafened.

The silence became fulfilling: he blossomed minutes after entering me but I stayed longer in the garden. For forty-one days my lover did not leave me. He cultivated the shade over my arms, head, upper torso and legs. These parts of my body grew cold and parched under his leaves. Only my stomach, ever larger over time, was exposed to the sun and rain.

I am ripe between my legs. My lover waved a leaf to fan a breeze that called the-manborn-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-hand into the garden. The man came in time to see my great belly split open whereupon he dug in with his spoon and ate my melon out.

I awoke from the deeper sleep of cold and draught to leave my lover in the garden and follow my husband, finished with his meal, to the gate. I did not look back at the pieces of melon rind that fell off my gaping stomach. The pieces rot in my wake as the sun cauterizes the wound that my lover left on me.

Spittoon 4.2

Amy Chernasky Camille Meyer

I climbed over my girlfriend's hips to pray at her breast. Yet when I reached them, her flesh turned to stone. I knelt and prostrated myself before nature that was all around me. A wind blew the leaves backwards exposing their whiter undersides. For that reason I expected rain. None ever came.

I opened my mouth to tell you how I felt about you. No words came out but a Mexican tumbled forth. Weathered by the sun, he flickered black to brown as he ambled off in the direction of Ephesus. A Polish man followed. Bleached until he was fair skinned by the northern sun, he walked rapidly in the direction of Pergamum.

I caught my breath. My belly heaved a child, soft, smooth but dumb. I leaned forward and pressed my hands on the rock. I lowered my head before him and out came a Jew. He picked up the child and took him to Safety. The last exited me as if by twos. Scarcely had the first stepped over my lip when he looked back and, seeing one more behind him, reached back to lend the other his hand. They walked to Laodicea together.

My knees were weary of kneeling. I stood up and around me stone was restored to flesh. My head found repose upon your hipbone and, by your graciousness I slept.

I left my girlfriend's apartment and took the subway to work that morning with one Mexican, one Pole, one Jew with child and two Blacks. No one looked at one another. I did not recognize the expelled parts of myself. My companions became my insecurities. They were Other than me. The dawn returned the gift of our similarities for stereotypes. We all got out at 42nd street for different reasons.

Spittoon 4.2

Test Michael Landau

Evening. Elliot jackrabbits out the door of the bus and into the playground in one hop. I’m behind him but looking ahead at Tiffany. The sun’s hanging low over Bruckner Elementary and she’s on the green swings, kicking like there’s no tomorrow. And tomorrow, there’s a final in English 12. And tomorrow, she’ll earn another A while Elliot and I fail. Then we’ll head out on the 9 bus to Rockland, where we’ll unload trucks for Taylor Stores for eight hours. Toil and trouble. I reach the swings and grab the empty one next to Tiff. I swing out, flying up while she’s diving in. We’re teetertottering, a scissoring X. Elliot’s sitting on a turtle rolling a joint. I’m fixated on Tiffany’s bra, a deep navy outlined against her white t-shirt. My swing rhythm’s off and I flail instead of glide. “There’s a choppy oven rest at the lawn mouse,” Tiff says. “What?” She’s not making sense. “A copy of the test at Vaughn’s house.” On the downswing. Did she say the test? “Tomorrow’s test?” asks Elliot, mid-roll. Saying what I’m thinking. Not the first time. “Yes.” She hops off at the apex, arcing gracefully, landing like a long jumper on the hard mud. In 7th grade I long jumped for the Middle School track team. No one ever told me what place I came in. We mostly won our meets. That was before we moved to Bruckner. I never went to Bruckner Elementary, never swung on these swings or sat on the frog, the turtle, the giraffe. At Hinsworth South, the playground was just a big field of dirt with a fence around it, with a small paved area up near the school where they painted a few four square courts. That kind of setup wouldn’t fly in Bruckner, where everything had to be the best for the fine children of the finest people in New Hampshire. “Can we get a copy? Or do you have to pay Vaughn or something? That kid’s a fucknut.” Elliot and Vaughn once fought back in 5th grade, on this very playground. I remember hearing it was a draw, but Elliot’s sure he won. Tiff sits beside him on a frog and I’m pretty sure I can see her nipples, through the navy blue and everything. “No. It’s not his. Not exclusively. A bunch of them got it.”

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“Got it? Like, how? How did they get it?” I ask, thinking Mrs. Marston would be impressed at my asking for a better verb. “Get” didn’t tell me anything. “They just got it,” says Tiff, emphasis on the got. “They stole it,” says Elliot, with certainty. But he didn’t know; if he did, so would I. “From…Mrs. Marston?” I ask. “What, did someone snatch her briefcase and run?” Tiffany reached for Elliot’s joint and he slapped her hand away. “Some of them got it from the office. The teachers have to file a copy for the School Board, I think.” She wouldn’t let go of got. Elliot pats his jacket pocket for his lighter. “They stole it.” “It’s at Vaughn’s house if you want a copy. They said anyone could come over,” says Tiff. “If everyone’s an accomplice, no one’s a rat,” says Elliot. He wasn’t going to Vaughn’s. This I get from the way he said “accomplice”. But he wouldn’t anyway, given that he finds Vaughn revolting, which is easy to do, given the way Vaughn likes to torment certain 6th graders at the bus stop by pulling over his Monte Carlo and rolling down the window and asking them—particularly Eddie McWilliams and Jerome Parenteau, who wait at the same stop as Alicia Fernald and Vivian Lockwood—how big their dicks are, something he does at least weekly, on one occasion holding out a ruler to them, asking if they wanted to measure, making Alicia and Vivian giggle and Eddie and Jerome turn red. We heard this from Vaughn’s usual accomplice, Keddie Markham, who wore polo shirts with the collar up, but we didn’t need this story to know that Vaughn was a shithead. It did serve as confirmation. “You’re not gonna rat,” says Tiff. “Are you? If I thought you would I wouldn’t have told you, you know.” Save Tiffany. As if she needed saving, from going to Colby in the fall, where she would begin studying environmental global economic micromanagement studies, spend four years taking notes in lecture and acing tests, upon graduation getting (not earning, maybe stealing) a job making a lot of cake. Elliot and I will be lucky to be at State. We’re the bottom 2% of our class, probably, because most of the Bruckner student body is always sucking up for grades and worrying about Harvard.

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Elliot lights up and gets off the turtle. He walks toward the slide, which is old fashioned and not even painted a color. “Won’t have to, Tiff. Those fucking tools will get caught.” Tiffany looks slightly worried. She’s wound up about school. Her mom’s a divorce lawyer and puts a lot of pressure on her. Elliot’s dad does the same to him but he doesn’t give a shit. He told his dad he wanted to be a mechanic. His dad flipped his shit. Eventually he told Elliot he’d only pay for college if he went to some school in Rhode Island that trained you to be a Mercedes mechanic. Elliot reached the top of the slide. He sat down. “Seriously, Tiff.” “Seriously, you’re not going to rat.” “If Vaughn’s really saying anybody can come over, up to and including fine ruleabiding daughters of Bruckner such as yourself, don’t you think Spencer’s gonna hear about it?” Spencer, the assistant principal at Bruckner High, served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Unlike the clueless principal, Mr. Conyers, who was a math teacher, Spencer knew what was going on. If someone toked up at the high jump mat behind the gym, he’d smell it, even if he were sitting in the caf with his coffee, shooting the shit with some kids about last night’s Celtics game. It would set off some kind of internal klaxon. “What is your problem, Elliot?” asks Tiff. She’s still on the frog. “No problem, Tiff. Just don’t get so overcome with gratitude that you let Vaughn put his hands on your tits when you’re showing him flash cards of the answers.” He slid down, not smoothly, being careful with the joint. “Fuck you, Elliot.” “Fuck you, Tiff, why don’t you just fucking study?” She gets up off the frog. “I already did!” I’m pretty sure Tiffany’s mom wanted her to go to law school. She worked in a law office last summer, filing things and carrying thick books around. I visited her once thinking we could get an ice cream or something. She didn’t have time for that. I sure hope she learned stuff, because it didn’t look like a fun job, the way delivering pizzas or even working the tilt-a-whirl at Anawam Lake were.

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Elliot sits at the bottom of the slide, his feet kicking the loose dirt. Tiffany heads for her car. It seemed unlikely we’d get a ride home. I watch her ass disappear across the parking lot, and whether he’s pissed or not I know Elliot’s watching too. “I’m guessing we’re not going to Vaughn’s,” I say. “Fuck no,” says Elliot. “Those jokers will get busted for sure. I don’t really feel like spending a week in in-school with Vaughn and Markham.” “But that’s not why we’re not going.” I’m not pushing. Elliot can get riled up in a hurry, it’s true, but the test thing seemed to piss him off extra. The next bus going the other way would be a while and I wanted to know what the deal was. He looks over at the see-saw. “Because it’s not fucking ethical,” he says. He takes another hit, leans back, crosses his arms behind his head, looks around. “Do you think all high school kids get high on their elementary school playgrounds?” I did think so. I knew my cousin Matty did, anyway. “You sure it doesn’t just happen in towns with rich shits like Bruckner?” he says. It’s funny, but I don’t think ethical is a word that gets thrown around a lot at Elliot’s house. People viewed his dad as being a bit on the shady side. Once, our buddy Allen’s dad, after five or six Coors Lights, referred to Mr. Terry as a crook, and Elliot didn’t argue with him. No one’s really sure what the guy does. Once Elliot said it “had to do with cash inflow and outflow”, but that’s pretty broad. Clerking at Store 24 has to do with cash inflow and outflow. For our cash, Elliot and I have been working at Taylor’s since October, when we both turned 18. We unload trucks on Friday and Saturday nights---well, mornings, actually. We get there at 10 at night and push freight around the store for three hours, then we unload new freight off the trucks. Well, the conveyor belt actually unloads the trucks. We take boxes off the conveyor belt and put them into piles---one pile for housewares, one pile for domestics, one pile for seasonal, et cetera. They’re pretty fucking heavy, the boxes. Sometimes I think I’d rather be one of the people at the end of the belt, the ones who take the clothing and hang it on rails and rip the plastic off. But Elliot says that’s for wusses, and it’s better to lift things and put them in piles. My mom says I’ll be able to afford college, but I’m not sure I believe her. That’s why I work at Taylor’s instead of Bagel World or something—night shift pays more. Ten bucks an hour, and they pay like six or seven at the fast food joints. I put most of the

Spittoon 4.2 Landau, Test

money in the bank. Not much else to do with it when you work on Friday and Saturday night and then sleep all day Saturday and Sunday. “Let’s go,” says Elliot. “Where?” “To Vaughn’s,” he says, and I know he’s up to something, because he didn’t suddenly decide he liked Vaughn, or wanted a copy of the test, so if this was a sequel to the 5th grade fight I’d better have his back, in case I needed to knock Keddie Markham on his collar. *** Last Thursday my mom made the excellent lentil dish I like, with summer squash and this rainbow chard and all these Indian spices. You might think lentils weren’t something to get excited about, but my mom’s in this phase where everything she cooks is from this book called The Indian Gourmet that Amazon.com recommended to her, which meant dinner was usually spicy, which I like. “Computers don’t recommend books, Ada,” said my dad when confronted with one of her spicy cauliflower recipes. “It’s not a computer, Jerry, it’s a website.” While I understood her point, his was that eating cauliflower for dinner twice a week was a bit much. I wasn’t big on cauliflower either, but the lentils were really good, actually, and up against some of the other selections from The Indian Gourmet it may as well have been filet mignon. Although I had a Physics test to study for, I helped load the dishwasher. I was rinsing silverware when my phone started ringing, “Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional, the song that’s programmed for Tiffany. So I tossed the forks down and checked the text message, which said I’m outside, so I texted back I hope you’re wearing a coat because it was pretty chilly that night, the way New Hampshire can be in December even before the first snow. Outside your house was the message back, and I felt bad that I’d been a smartass, but there was really no way I could have known what she meant just from I’m outside. I went out the back door and around the side. Tiff’s car, a 1998 Dodge Neon with a spoiler, sat parked in the street and she must’ve been inside because I didn’t see anyone in the driveway or anything. I headed straight for the passenger side door and got in.

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It looked like she’d been crying, or maybe she was going to cry. A tissue box sat on the dashboard. I never knew what to do when girls started crying, which seemed to happen pretty often. Luckily there was music playing from the car’s CD player, or maybe the radio. It sounded like Bright Eyes or something. Later I’d learn it was Owen, who’s from Chicago, which is near Omaha, so Bright Eyes wasn’t totally off the mark. The music made it so I didn’t have to talk immediately, which was good, because I had no idea what was going on. Her red hair was all messed up and dangling in front of her face, so I couldn’t see if tears were falling. She sniffled a little. In my head I saw her lean over, press her head to my chest, and begin sobbing, and I’d put an arm around her and smell her hair and try to stay very still. But she didn’t lean over and I couldn’t exactly ask her to, so she stayed on her side and sniffled while I looked blankly at the radio. “Is everything okay?” I asked, which was really stupid. I could hear the voice in my head saying stupid move, Aaron. Stupid move, genius. Tiffany grabbed a tissue and brushed hair away from her cheeks. “What’s the big deal about epidemiology?” she asked, spitting out the “oll” part like it was a wayward anchovy on her pizza. “Just because you study diseases doesn’t mean you’re going to cure any of them. It’s like she invented penicillin or something. But she’s just a fucking freshman.” Tiff didn’t swear much. She was really pissed. “Your sister?” I asked. It was kind of rhetorical. She nodded. “Big deal, she got into Brown, I’m happy for her. I really am. But my mom…” A lot of times I’d complain about how it sucked to be the oldest. My little brother got away with everything. Once he fell on the coffee table playing indoor football and collapsed the thing, but he was only grounded for about 15 minutes. Still, following Tiff’s sister Bethany could not have been fun. She was the kind of girl who didn’t need a copy of the final. She didn’t even need to study. She just woke up, got out of bed, and knew all the answers. All those As in all those classes. Field hockey, all state. Oboe, all state. Tiffany grabbed one of the tissues and blew her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be telling you my whole life story. All the drama.”

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“It’s okay,” I said. “This is the stuff you’re supposed to tell your friends.” She looked across the front seat at me and smiled and it felt like the car was moving, like we were driving somewhere really fast. *** We walk into Vaughn’s and there are maybe eight of them sitting around drinking beers on these couch things, sectionals, I think they’re called—they were big in the 80s. Vaughn’s mom works a lot. I’m not sure what she does. She must be a waitress or something because she’s always gone at night. People are always going to Vaughn’s to party, or just drink and hang out. I went to one party here in 10th grade where a kid passed out with his head in a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. It’s very different from Elliot’s, where his dad has people over for martini lunches. They’re all here, Keddie Markham and Bob Meecher and Daryl and Tom and Jim Gerard. They’re talking about important things like if they should start playing Beirut and whether or not Ginny Nilsson’s coming over with her stupid friends and their Coach bags. They’re all drinking beer, Natty Lights and Keystones, except Keddie who has a bottle of something since he’s too good for cans. They’re all basically the same guy. Most of them were on the soccer team together. They party but they still got good grades and wear Ralph Lauren and drove their parents’ Audis. They’re stealth douchebags. Their parents and teachers all think they’re “good kids”, and I always wonder if they lived in trailer parks and wore black t-shirts like some of the fuckups down in Canaan if they’d still be “good kids”. Bob Meecher looks at me suspiciously, like I’m a narc or something. It’s as though he can smell it on us, how we’re not really part of the gang. Which we’re not. We spend our Friday nights at the doughnut shop in Canaan, or on the top level of the parking garage, or driving around wishing we had somewhere cool to go. I don’t know how Elliot managed to grow up in Bruckner and not become one of them. That’s strength of character. Elliot makes a beeline for Vaughn and starts asking him about the test. I look around but don’t see Tiff. I don’t want to talk to the douchebags. “From the office, man. Some people got it from the office. You know,” I hear Vaughn say. “That’s crazy,” says Elliot. He’s playing the that’s-so-crazy-I-can’t-believe-it card, which can be interpreted a number of ways. That way no one can tell what he’s getting at. Smart kid, Elliot.

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“Yeah, pretty fuckin’ crazy,” says Vaughn. He’s feeling all kinds of good about himself. Like he ate a goddamn canary. He’s so full of himself he’s not even suspicious, but then, I’m not even sure what it is he should be suspicious of. I can’t read Elliot either. “Aaron, you seen Tiffany?” asks Jim Gerard. He’s deep in a maroon Laz-E-Boy, smoking an Old Spirit and looking like he’d been in the chair most of the day. “Ah, not very recently,” I say, which is true if you think about it. I’m hoping Elliot gets the copy of the stupid test quickly so we can leave before she shows up, because I don’t really want her cross examining Elliot about his motives in front of Vaughn and Meecher and Gerard and the rest. Meanwhile I’m standing in the living room uncomfortably with all the dumb chimps. Sometimes I wish my parents had stayed in Hinsworth, but if they had I wouldn’t have met Elliot. Or Tiff. So some things about Bruckner didn’t suck. “You want a beer or something?” asks Gerard. “I think there are some Natty Lights in the fridge that are for whoever.” I’m trying not to give a smartass answer when I hear the crashing in the kitchen. *** “It’s a walking town,” is how my mother put it, and she kept the phrase handy for the aunts, her cousin Arlene, and the people she worked with at Armitage Corp. “You can walk to the store, the post office, the school—the entire downtown.” She did all of these things. My father’s concern involved “those Bruckner kinds of kids”, which, as far as I could tell, was exactly the draw for Mom. She wanted my brother and me to develop super mutant brains, National Merit Scholarships, and entry into one of the prestigious schools of New England. She didn’t focus on any one career, the way Tiff’s mom was all gung ho about law, or the way the Carmonas, next door, were all about engineering. That was one reason I was convinced that, for Mom, the name of my future college was for the consumption of the aunts, Arlene, and the tea drinkers at Armitage. As a dutiful son, I should just work my ass off for twelve years and attain this for her. For all that, it was a walking town, so Elliot and I make our way down High Street, away from Vaughn’s and toward home. It’s easy to see that people have been mowing lawns even though the snow’s barely melted. In Bruckner, attention was paid to lawns. This one guy on our block set up this elaborate sprinkler system on a timer to ensure that every area of his lawn got an equal amount of water. We walk by this

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one house where the owner’s positioned all these lawn gnomes around the yard, one of them holding a lantern, one of them tipping his cap, et cetera. There’s a rip in Elliot’s shirt, towards the back, from his tussle with Vaughn. The fight, if you could call it that, was pretty brief, mostly a lot of rolling around on the kitchen floor clutching at one another like boxers in the 10th round. It didn’t seem like Elliot had his heart in it; I’d have expected him to beat the crap out of Vaughn. Vaughn, for his part, was just saying “What the fuck? This is my house” and it looked like he was just trying to get Elliot off him. I figured he’d smoked a few himself and wasn’t up for violence at the moment of his great test-stealing triumph. When we reach Elberry, Elliot turns right. “That’s not the way home,” I point out helpfully. “I know that, dumbass. We’re not going home.” “What’s this we shit?” I ask, but I stay a couple of steps behind him, watching his baggy brown corduroys, left, right, sure, steady. He wants me to ask, but I have an inkling about our destination. The exact why, not so much. I could only read 60% of Elliot’s mind. He doesn’t seem pissed about the tussle with Vaughn. I wonder if Tiff is upstairs with Vaughn yet, or if she’d save that for Saturday night. Or tomorrow, I guess. Every night at Vaughn’s, a fiesta. Elliot goes left at the front driveway, a semicircle for buses to drop off and pick up. He doesn’t head for the front door, instead hopping the curb onto the lawn, starting for the side of the building. Built sometime in the forties, Bruckner High looks old fashioned, a little bit like a library, or an elementary school. Elliot calls it the Texas Book Depository, but he never explains why. He stops at a window that doesn’t look any different than the others, but he turns, places his palm under the top of the window sash and gives a firm shove upward. The window raises. He turns to me smiling. “Old building.” “Uh, what exactly are we doing?” I ask. Emphasis on exactly. “Breaking and entering.” “Great.”

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“We won’t be stealing anything,” he assures me, already shimmying on his stomach into the classroom. He knows I’ll follow. Miss Lamarque’s French classroom. Paris Match magazine covers on all the walls, along with some photos she took when she visited Paris once, back before she had three babies and settled into a pattern of regular verbs. Also, projects: tourist pamphlets for cities in France, Morocco, and Martinique, all in French and illustrated with colored pencil drawings of berets, camels, and umbrellas. We did those in French II. Once we make it to the hallway it seems obvious Elliot is making a beeline for the office, which didn’t seem too worrisome because he said we weren’t stealing anything. Plus, the office doors featured locks that worked. He couldn’t just shove them open. “Elliot, what are we doing here?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. He just crouches down beside the office door. “Is this how they got in?” I ask. “I might point out that the exam is already gone. It’s at Vaughn’s house.” “I said we weren’t stealing anything,” says Elliot, taking out his Bruckner Public Library card from his wallet—they’re purple with green writing on them, distinctively ugly. He started sliding it into the door near the doorknob. The door itself looked like it was from 1930. I suppose the school budget doesn’t include door replacement. Pretty soon I hear a clicking noise and the door opens when Elliot turns the knob. Elliot flicks on the fluorescent lights and walks purposefully towards the filing cabinet behind the secretary’s desk. It opens right up. I walk up beside him, but I can’t help looking behind me every now and then. We look at the open drawer, all the folders with their little tags, teacher names on them: Williams, Thomasson, Kriegs, Marston. Just an ordinary filing cabinet but Elliot grins like he’s found the ark of the covenant. “Anything Vaughn can do I can do better,” he says, still grinning. “I thought we weren’t stealing anything.” He raises a finger. Then he reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a Bruckner High ID card. He holds it up to the light. “No. We are making a deposit.” Vaughn’s photo ID did have a bit of a mug shot quality to it, and as it leaves Elliot’s hand and falls into the stuffed folder labeled “Marston” I picture Vaughn emptying

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his pockets onto a desk and Officer Clayton, who sometimes came to the school to lecture us about how bad drugs were, putting Vaughn’s wallet and pocketknife and ruler and other personal effects into one of those gray plastic trays you saw on CSI. Then the prosecutor would come to his cell and ask him who else was involved and Vaughn would name half the senior class, which wouldn’t be too farfetched after half the senior class got As on Marston’s final, which legend held was a bitch no matter how much you studied, and Mrs. Marston would catch on. She’s sharp like a lawnmower blade and she’s used to cutting. That’s where the whole pyramid would crumble. She’d be marking a 97% on Keddie Markham’s paper and thinking about what a stupid ass monkey he is and how there’s no way in hell he could get a 97% without the answers, and then she’d start looking very, very closely at things. She’d grade all the exams and see all the As and be sure something was up, and then she and Spencer would check the file drawer, find Vaughn’s ID, drag his ass to the station, have him empty his pockets, and ask him to rat, which he would gladly do to save his skin even though in the end it wouldn’t help. Elliot closes the drawer and surveys the room. “We could light a jay and leave it in Conyers’ coffee mug. They might bag him for that too.” While I walk home I wonder if Tiffany would get caught, and if Elliot would feel bad if she did. The silence of the Bruckner streets covers everything. A couple of the Bruckner Mountain College students jog by me in hoodies and iPods and I wonder what they were like in high school, if they were Vaughns or Elliots or something in between. From the end of my driveway I can see my mom at the computer in the den and my dad in the living room reading a huge book on some Civil War general, both of them totally unaware of what was going on at Vaughn’s, which was fine because that kind of thing was taken out of their hands a long time ago.

Spittoon 4.2

Claire Michael Lacare

So my parents sell the place we call home since I was four because the economy takes a shit and my father can’t find work. This is 1989. Long Island. Somehow they believe Florida will be the answer to their prayers, and the next thing I know the moving truck is pulling up to the house and purging it of its contents. Although my mother begs me to come with, I politely decline, since I am in my freshman year as a film student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and there is nothing for me in Florida. It is a place of sunshine and beaches and palm trees, where postcards are plucked from convenience store racks depicting large women sitting in their ill-fitting bathing suits, sporting sunglasses, soaking up the sun, while above their heads, floats a dialogue bubble with the words, Having a whale of a time. Wish you were here. On the day my parents get set to depart, my mother takes my face between her hands and says, “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” She gives me a peck on the cheek and presses me close to her, as though I am journeying off to war in a distant land. It is my father’s turn. He embraces me and the familiar scent of English Leather after shave wafts into my nostrils. “We’ll call when we get there,” he says and pulls out a hundred dollar bill from his wallet. “Here. Just in case.” I watch the taillights of their Ford Taurus recede into traffic. This is the first time I will be living on my own. I am officially an adult now. Later that evening, as I am exiting the grocery store, I realize I’ve locked my keys in the car. I phone a locksmith. He charges me one hundred dollars. I take the job because I am broke and because I am fortunate enough to be hired on the spot. An up and coming video chain, spreading across the country like a plague, with its vibrant blue and yellow logo, staking the hearts of the mom-and-pop shops, leaving the dead piled in great, heaping waves. “Are you closing tonight?” This is Claire Laskins. She is five feet six inches, slender with auburn hair that falls

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

past her shoulders. She is nineteen, mild-mannered and has difficulty maintaining eye contact with me for more than a few seconds. She nervously plays with her hands. The store closes at midnight. Every night. Weekends too, including holidays. By the time we are done counting out our tills, vacuuming and shelving the returned video tapes, it is almost 1:15 A.M. before we walk out. It is cold and Claire hasn’t brought a coat. We stand outside the store, small white puffs of vapor leaving our mouths. She has her hands stuffed deep into the front pockets of her loose fitting khaki pants. “Where’d you park?” I ask. “My boyfriend is picking me up,” she says. I glance at my watch. “You can go ahead,” she says. “You don’t have to wait.” “I don’t mind.” Claire shrugs. “Suit yourself.” “Do you like it so far?” “This job?” I nod. She thinks about it for a second or two. “It’s a job.” A police cruiser strolls past and the cop inside nods in our direction. “You want to hear something funny?” Claire says. “Sure.” “When I first saw you, I thought you were one of the managers.” “Really?” “I don’t why, but I did,” she says.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

“Do you go to school?” I ask. Claire shakes her head. “I want to though. One day.” “What do you want to study?” “Anything,” she says. Fifteen minutes later a green Chevy Nova pulls up to the curb. The windows are tinted making it difficult to see the driver. “Gotta go.” She pulls open the passenger door. I catch a glimpse of the “boyfriend,” the small patch of a tattoo on his forearm, his wrist resting limply on top of the steering wheel; his eyes focused on me, boring into me like lasers. And then the door shuts. I feel like he is still looking at me through the one-way glass. The car screeches away. My apartment is located precisely twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds away from the video store, give or take, depending on traffic. I know this because I’ve timed it several times. It is a one bedroom with hardwood floors and reeks of stale cigarette smoke. I do not smoke. I have trouble sleeping and I write in my dairy until the red digits of the alarm clock flash 3:56 A.M., and as of today I dropped out of film school because I am convinced that it will not contribute in any way toward my career as a screenwriter. The telephone rings. “Hello?” No answer. “Hello.” Click. It takes me another thirty-five minutes before I succumb to sleep.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

Claire is checking in the returned tapes when I enter the store. She barely acknowledges me. The Store Manager, Sal, is working the register. The moment he lays eyes on me he says, “Michael, get over here and take over.” The trailer for the movie, Ghost is playing on the monitors throughout the store. The part where Patrick Swayze is sitting behind Demi Moore at the pottery wheel comes on, Unchained Melody spills through the speakers, and I feel like puking because it runs on an endless loop and I’m sick of it. Claire keeps to herself for most of the night. At the end of our shifts, I find her in the tiny break room, punching out. “Hey,” I say. “Hey.” “Glad it wasn’t so crazy busy tonight.” She flashes a half-smile, and then just like that Claire buries her face in her hands and begins to sob. It is the longest two minutes of my life. Finally, she grows silent and lifts her head up. Her eyes are red and swollen. “I’m sorry,” she says. I do not know what to say. Claire rises out of her seat and makes for the door. “Wait,” I say. She freezes, but does not turn around. She stares at her shoes. “Are you all right?” “Nothing you need to worry about,” she says and walks out. It is 2:37 A.M. and I can hear my neighbors arguing in the apartment next door. The words, “Liar” and “You make me sick” are being tossed about, and then the sound of doors being slammed. The telephone rings.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

“Hello?” No answer again. Breathing. Someone is there. “Who is this?” Click. I leave the receiver off the hook. I wake up on the living room floor, the sun shimmering in through the window. The receiver is resting beside me on the floor. I replace it and the moment I do, it rings. I hesitate to lift it. “Hello.” “Michael, it’s Sal.” “Hey.” “Can you come into work a little earlier?” “I guess—” “See you at two,” he says, cutting me off. When I punch into work, Sal follows me into the break room and says, “That fucking Ethan is fired. Second time he’s called in.” Ethan is thirty-five and going through a divorce. The first time he calls in he tells Sal his wife slashed all the tires on his car. “The excuse this time is that his wife slipped him a sleeping pill in his orange juice this morning and there’s no way he can drive. Do you believe that? He’s so full of shit.” I peer at the schedule pinned to the wall and notice that Claire is not on it. “Claire not working tonight?” “What? No.” Sal walks back out onto the floor.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

At the end of my shift, as I am walking back to my car, I look up and notice a vehicle with its headlights on parked on the other side of the lot. It is sitting there with its engine running. I climb inside my car. The other vehicle pulls away and I could swear it is a green Chevy Nova. 3:18 A.M. My neighbors are arguing again. Something smashes against the wall. I wonder what it is they are always arguing about. Should I call the police? I stare at my phone. It rests on a tiny end table I purchased at Consumer’s, but it wobbles because it is missing a screw. When I wake up someone is knocking on my door. Two women with dark hair are smiling at me and holding out a pamphlet. Jehovah Witnesses. I take it and glance down at the words. Can the dead really live again? Would you say…Yes? No? Maybe? There is an illustration depicting a man and a woman, their backs to me, her head leaning against the man’s shoulder. They are looking at a framed picture of what appears to be the little girl they recently lost hanging on the wall. Still smiling, one of the women says, “Do you have a moment to talk to us?” At the end of the night, Claire says, “Why did you ask me if I was going to school?” “I don’t know.” “Are you?” “Film school,” I say, not bothering to tell that I stopped going. She looks up at me and flashes another one of her trademark half-smiles. She plays with her hands. “That’s cool.” I tell her that I’d heard that LL Cool J had been a member here, before he moved out to California and made it big as a rapper. She nods and says, “Cool” again, and that she’d heard from one of the other employees that some of the Baldwin brothers were too, but not Alec.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

I make a mental note to look them up in the computer. We are standing outside and Claire’s boyfriend is late picking her up. “Must have fallen asleep,” she says. “He’s always doing things like that.” “You can catch a ride with me,” I say. “I better not,” she says and plops down on the edge of the curb. She picks up a pebble and traces faint figure eights into the sidewalk. “I’m sure he’s on his way.” Almost forty minutes later, a pair of headlights turns into the plaza and the green Nova halts in front of us. Claire stands up, dusts off the back of her khaki’s and opens the door. She leaves without saying goodbye. Sal walks out and locks the door. “What are you still doing here?” “I was waiting for Claire’s ride to come get her.” “Oh. I’m going to meet Barbara at the diner,” Sal says. “You can meet us there if you want.” Barbara was his girlfriend of almost ten years. “Sure,” I say, even though I don’t really feel like it. Although it is past 1:00 A.M., the diner is busy. Sal and Barbara (she reminds me of the actress, Elizabeth Montgomery), are already there. Barbara is picking at a plate littered with French fries and gravy. “Hey you,” Barbara says and watches me slide into the booth across from them. Sal is holding a cigarette in between two fingers and blowing the smoke away from me. “Ethan called me today,” he says, “practically begging for his job back.” “You didn’t give it to him, did you?” Barbara says. Sal shrugs. “I don’t know. I might.” “Jesus, Sal,” she says. I glance out the window. I think about telling them about Claire and how she broke down and cried in the store, but somehow it doesn’t seem right. By the time I get back to my apartment, it is almost 3:30 A.M. and the neighbors are at it again. The woman is screaming at the top of her lungs. When I open the door to

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

my apartment, I scribble a note and affix it to the neighbor’s door. It reads: Other people live here, you know. At 3:47 A.M. my telephone rings. I do not answer it and it rings eight times before it stops. I peer between the slats of the blinds. My view is that of the parking lot. As far as I can tell, no strange cars are idling. For now. My clothes smell of smoke. I shed them and climb into the shower. While I’m in there I think I hear something. I wait. Nothing. Just for the hell of it I call out, “Hello?” Then: “Is someone there?” Sometimes I hate living alone.

Claire calls in sick to work today. Sal is not a happy camper. “She’s never called in before,” I say in defense of her. “I don’t care,” he says. “It’s Friday and we’re going to be slammed tonight.” Fridays and Saturdays are our busiest nights. The store usually rings up ten thousand dollars or more. “What did she say?” I ask. “She said she was sick.” “Did you try calling in Ethan?” Sal shoots me a look.

After work, Sal and I head to the diner again. Barbara is there and she is smoking a cigarette. “Busy?” she says.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

“That’s an understatement,” Sal says and orders a Coke. Forty-five minutes later Sal picks up the check and I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow. “No you won’t,” he says. “I’m off.” “Lucky you.” “When you grow up someday to be a Store Manager,” he says, “you can get a Saturday off too.” The heater in my car stops working and I tremble all the way back to my apartment. I end up having to park beside the dumpster and the aroma burns my nose. While I’m fumbling for my keys, the neighbor’s door opens. A tall man wearing a robe that has partially come undone is standing in the doorway. He is wearing tightywhities. “Hey,” he says. “Did you put this note on my door?” In his hand is the piece of paper I used to write the message. “I’m asking you a question.” I find my keys and insert it into the lock. “No,” I say and rush inside. I lean with my back against the door, my heart hammering against my chest. I peer through the peep-hole. He is standing right outside my door. “Maybe you should mind your own business,” he says and punches the door. My mind is racing. Maybe now would be a good time to call the police. And then I think to myself that that would only aggravate the situation, so I let it ride. I look through the peep hole again. He must have returned to his apartment because no one is there and his door is closed. The following evening Claire is back at work. “Hey,” I say. She looks at me. “Hey.” “What happened yesterday?” “I was sick.” A customer asks her where he can find a copy of Blue Velvet. Claire takes

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

him to the film. “Are you feeling better?” I ask. “Yes,” she says and wanders off. I catch up with her in the documentary section, where she begins to straighten out the videocassettes. “Someone keeps calling me,” I say to her. “In the middle of the night, but they don’t say anything when I answer.” “So?” “It’s weird.” A couple seconds pass before Claire says, “Maybe you should change your number.” Claire steps out of Sal’s office. “Have a good night,” she says. “Wait for me,” I say. “I’ll walk out with you.” She turns to look at me. “I better wait alone this time.” Ten minutes later I walk outside and find Claire sitting on the curb again. “He’s late again, huh?” She glances at me but does not say anything. Her arms are clasped around her knees. “Maybe he should invest in a watch,” I say. She looks away. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did.” “I don’t want him to see you standing with me,” she says. “Please, just go.” I am tempted to stay, but I don’t know what this guy is capable of and so I concede. “See you tomorrow.”

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

2:52 A.M. I’m awake and my thoughts drift to Claire. Is she in an abusive relationship? I wonder what they’re like at home, how they interact. Do they spend their time arguing like my neighbors? I picture Claire as a wallflower, absorbing all his faults. I have trouble falling back asleep. I jot down my thoughts about Claire and her boyfriend in my journal. I turn on the TV. I watch thirty minutes of a documentary about Mike Tyson’s sudden rise in the boxing world. I swallow a second sleeping pill. I hear a noise in the bathroom. I mute the television. I wait. The second sleeping pill is beginning to take its affect and I am scared to get up and look. Sometimes they make me hallucinate. My eyes are slits and I don’t remember the remote control falling out of my hand. Is someone there? I want to call out, but it’s like the words are frozen in my throat. And then just as sleep embraces me, the door to my bathroom slowly closes. In Sal’s office, there is a two-drawer metal filing cabinet where the employee files are kept. Through the one-way glass, I can see Sal in the front of the store, talking on the phone. I pull open the top drawer and quickly search for Claire’s file. It’s filed alphabetically by last name and she is just after mine. I quickly jot down her phone number. An hour before she is due into work, I call from the telephone at the front of the store, next to the registers. The number has been disconnected. Claire is late for work and when she arrives, Sal chastises her. “I know,” she says and, “I’m sorry.” “A call letting me know would have been nice,” Sal says. Claire does not tell him that her line has been disconnected. She spends the rest of the night shelving the returns. There are a lot of them. Later I watch her go into the restroom. She does not come out for what seems like an eternity, and when she does her eyes are moist and red.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

“Ever feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and you’d be better off dead?” “Yes,” I say. She barely utters a word the remainder of the night. The next day I notice that her hands are shaking as she punches in. Sal is off today. We have a new Assistant Manager, who’s been transferred from another store. His name is Wade and he spends the majority of his time in Sal’s office, on the phone. A uniformed police officer wanders into the store and begins to speak with Claire. They step outside. He is making notes on his pad. When Claire walks back inside, she looks scared. “Is everything okay?” I ask. “They’re fine,” she says. That’s funny, I want to say. They don’t look fine. My neighbors have stopped arguing. At least, I have not heard them raising their voices in quite some time. When I return home one evening, there is a woman dressed in a black skirt and white blouse knocking on my door. “Can I help you?” She turns and looks at me. “I’m looking for Jodi.” “Jodi doesn’t live there.” She seems confused. “Oh.” “I do,” I say. “That’s funny. I was just here a couple of days ago.” “You must have the wrong place.”

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

“Did you just move in?” she asks. “No,” I say. “I’ve been here for awhile.” Her brows furrow and she wrinkles her nose. “Are you sure?” Then she laughs and points at me. “Are you fucking with me?” “No.” Her smile fades and I walk past her, shoving my key into the lock. “See?” I walk inside and close the door. I count to ten and peer through the peep hole. The woman is still there. She knocks on my door. I answer it. “Are you Bryan?” she asks. Claire has called into work again. Sal has the day off, so she lucked out because Wade could care less. He is in the back office, on the telephone. The same police officer from the other day comes into the store and inquires about Claire. I tell him she called in. He then asks me if we have another way to get in touch with her. “I’m sorry, we don’t,” I say. “Let her know I stopped by,” he says and walks out. “That cop came by yesterday,” I say to Claire as she grabs a basket full of returned tapes. “Jesus,” she says. “Really?” I follow her to the Horror section. “Is everything cool?” “The guy’s a whack job.” “What do you mean?” “Nothing,” she says. “Forget it.” “The cop’s a whack job?”

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

She rolls her eyes and sighs. We are now in the Drama section, which I find appropriate. “Big time.” “I don’t get it,” I say. She sets the basket down. “The other day, I call the cops on my boyfriend and this whack-a-doodle comes out. He starts asking me all these questions and the next thing I know, he’s as crazy as Billy.” Billy? “Billy?” “My boyfriend.” “What happened?” “I think the cop’s stalking me,” Claire says. “No, what happened that you had to call the cops on your boyfriend?” Claire hesitates and says nothing. Then she rolls up the sleeve on her left arm. There are several small, round singe marks on her skin. “What are those?” I ask. “Cigarette burns.” She swallows hard, holding back tears. “It’s something he does,” she says, as if she is referring to a simple hobby, like stamp collecting or building model train sets. “Jesus Christ.” I am practically at a loss for words. “It’s not your problem,” Claire says and heaves the basket toward New Releases. “Looks like I’m trading one psycho for another. Story of my life.” “What makes you say that?” She turns to peer at me from over her shoulder. “Because he’s relentless.” “What happened to your boyfriend?” “He ran off,” she says. “They’re looking for him.” The cop is waiting for Claire when she gets off work. He is in his cruiser. She gets into the passenger seat and I watch them pull out of the parking lot.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

Three days later, Claire informs me that her boyfriend has been arrested. He is caught hiding in a closet in his mother’s house in Lindenhurst. She will have to testify against him in court. I ask her how things are going with the officer. She shrugs and says, “They’re going.” Claire tells me that he finally left his wife, and that they have since moved in together into a tiny studio apartment across town, with tiled flooring and a view of the park. “What’s his name?” I ask. “Ted,” she says. Ted has twin boys, age five. A grin tips one corner of her mouth. “You want to hear something funny? He told me that he’s in love.” I want to say things like, This is sudden or, Sure feels like it’s moving fast, or Are you happy, but I don’t. “Crazy, right?” she says and shakes her head in disbelief. Claire has not shown up for work in over a week. She has never updated her contact information, so there is no way to get in touch with her. Sal has written her off, especially since it is company policy to consider it job abandonment after three days. Another week. Three weeks, four. No word from Claire. It is like she never existed. It’s funny how you get to know certain people you work with, and then one day, they are gone and their faces begin to fade away. Two months, three months, four. Sal hires a new girl. Her name is Samantha. She is fifty-seven years old and originally from North Dakota. “The older ones are more responsible,” Sal says. Maybe, I think. Maybe not.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

A friend of mine says I’ll be able to rent a room at his house for half of what I am currently paying for my apartment. That’s the good news. The bad news is I have five months remaining on my existing lease. “Break it,” he suggests. When I inquire about getting out of my lease early, the leasing agent tells me I’d still be responsible for all five months, plus I would lose my security deposit. They are so nice when you are contemplating renting, I think to myself, but so nasty on the way out. I make plans to ditch the place in the middle of the night. On the way home from work, a cop flips their lights on and pulls me over. I wait forever for the officer to get out of his vehicle, and when he does, I notice it is Ted. “Hey,” I say. “License and registration, please,” he says. “Remember me? I used to work with Claire.” “License and registration,” he says again. I hand them to him. He uses a small flashlight to inspect the documents. My stomach is in knots. “How’s Claire?” He glances at me, then at my paperwork and then back at me. “I wouldn’t know,” he says. “What do you mean?” “Claire left me.” “When?” “Two and a half weeks after we moved in,” Ted says. “I don’t know where she went. Stay right here.” I watch him return to his vehicle. I wait as he checks my identification. I still am not sure why he pulled me over. When he finally makes his way back to me I say, “Did I do something wrong?” He passes me my license and registration. “When you changed lanes back there, you failed to use your directional signal.”

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

Really, because I think that I did. I always utilize my directional signal. Something tells me he is making this up. I am already having difficulty paying my auto insurance; a ticket would be the equivalent of a stake in my heart. “By the way, those burn marks?” he says. “On her arm?” Burn marks? Then I remember he is referring to Claire’s scars, the ones made by Billy and his cigarettes. “Yeah,” I say. “She did those to herself.” What is he talking about? How could she have possibly done that to herself? No one burns themselves with cigarettes. “Are you sure...? “She’s ain’t all there,” he says. “The girl’s got issues.” He tears the ticket from its pad. “You have thirty days to pay. The address is on the back where you can send in your payment, or you can go down directly to the clerk’s office and pay it there.” Ted heads back to his cruiser. I toss the ticket onto the passenger seat. I wait for him to leave and then I pull back onto the street. 4:21 A.M. I have not been able to go back to sleep since the sound of the neighbors fighting again woke me. I eat a dish of ice cream and jot down a few lines in my journal. They are mostly about my earlier encounter with Ted. I could not, for the life of me, get out of my mind the things he said about Claire. Is it true? Had she burnt herself? Could she have been making those lies up about Billy? It’s possible. What if Billy had been the victim all along? Wouldn’t that be something? And then it occurs to me that perhaps Ted’s got it all wrong and he is bitter, and the only way he can feel better about the entire thing, is if he spouts awful things about her. That’s possible too. The telephone rings. Once, twice, three times.

Spittoon 4.2 Lacare, Claire

“Hello?” No answer. “Claire?”

Spittoon 4.2

Kissing Devices Ricky Garni

Including but not limited to: a pillow a rag doll a photograph a fruit or vegetable a shoe a mannequin a brown chair a stupid memory a teardrop shape a very fast car a dream a goodbye goodbye farewell farewell

Spittoon 4.2

Temperance Donelle Dreese

Today we drink gunpowder green with grainy buckwheat pancakes spouting steam, instead of fried bricks for breakfast, when the pounding of desire is a secret and unraveling church stomp or a construction zone, the head briefly conversing with jackhammers, asking if that thunder on the road is where the heart will be if we don't wrap the long shawl around our shoulders and leave the short term sugar for hummingbirds.

Spittoon 4.2

Conversation with Butcher Thomas Cook

Good morning. Good morning. What can I do for you today, young lady? Do you have an entire calf? I have a full and dark mustache. I come from a place where people want both meat and bones. Do you see this sign? Yes, I do, but I guess I’m here because I’d like to buy a young calf, as much as you can sell me anyway. I’m not scared of skin or teeth or those little buds of horn. I don’t need the eyes or the hooves. You can keep the hooves, but I bet you don’t get those anyway. The tongue is important. I tell them to keep the hooves in the hutch. I tell them, I don’t want these calfs to so much as whiff grass. You look like a young woman with a fine hutch for your mail, not a hutch for the hooves of young calfs. You have a letter-opener in your hutch. I’m very intuitive. I bet that in your bedroom you have a clock that winds up. I was born in Essex, but I moved to Paris because I wanted to live at eye-level with a sea of mansards. The only way I could get my hands on meat was to be willing to work with bones. You have a boyfriend you’re cooking for? I’m willing to comb your mustache. It looks like you don’t comb it, and it is a fine mustache. I have just the little brush for the job. I like how clean your apron is. It makes you look tall. I didn’t bring the brush with me. My sister used to live with a man who let her comb his mustache. Every week he would buy her chocolates and she would comb his mustache. They would sit on the divan, and she would comb his mustache and nibble chocolates until dark. Then they would prepare a light dinner and he was happy enough to have his mustache combed. I’m not sure if my husband is dying or dead. The man my sister lived with was fair-skinned. The fair-skinned and pale live closer to death. Pallor mortis can be a distinguishing characteristic of death. He may have allowed her to comb his mustache because he knew he was dying. He imported. I don’t

Spittoon 4.2 Cook, Conversation with Butcher

have a woman, or perhaps she could comb my mustache. I would let you comb my mustache, but I don’t have a divan. I think of the sunburned skin and the skinned knees of fair-skinned children as they stand next to their bicycles in parking lots. So it is a husband. The demi-glace is first, because its color has been on my mind. There will be a flame for three days. On the way to demi-glace, I’ll make espangole, which must be a little thicker than blood, but browner. I’ll skin the calf and extract the bones I can use. I need the tongue, cheeks, brains, ribs, mesentery, and liver. We just got this new table. I will also need additional bones to begin, probably thirty pounds. You know, in the West, death has no mother tongue. All the daughter tongues converge at a hard, flat, consonantal sound in the early thirteenth century. In each language, the consonant sound of the word for death is followed by a vowel sound, which is the tongue stopping the fricative of the consonant. Death. Say it. This is the shape of death in the mouth. Death is a variation on other shapes. Is that your cat? Speaking of death always betrays the opacity of the concept, I find. The spirit of this opacity, in both the speaking of the concept and the concept itself, survives in the false sound, the thud, the inaccuracy we all detect in the pronouncing of someone as dead. In a declaration of death, one is declaring an end of personhood. That is my cat. See how he winds stiffly up the table leg? The thing is that he could be dead already. He was writing a paper about sugar in England at the turn of the seventeenth century when I left. I don’t know what he is doing. Every time I see him he has his head in his desk. The first place I worked in Paris had a wooden killing floor with a hole in the center. As I butchered, I slid all of what we did not sell into the hole. Where do you go to have your teeth cleaned? I don’t go often. I like carrots. I imagine you are going to cook all of those bones with carrots. And onions, yes. You can do anything with an onion. I have an onion right now. It is tied to the bottom of my foot curing a bunion. The problem is that science does not understand consciousness, where it originates and its limits, so views about existence and nonexistence become shadowy. I am a butcher, for instance, and I may understand as

Spittoon 4.2 Cook, Conversation with Butcher

much as any man about consciousness. Everything I touch is already dead by some definitions of death but alive by others. Have you pulled calf brains out a skull? I get an electric shock. Drawing medical boundaries around death requires drawing conceptual boundaries. I don’t draw conceptual boundaries. I cut meat and bone. The sauces that I have to make all begin with an espangole. That is the mother sauce. I hope you can sell me tomato paste, garlic and thyme. You will also need a split pig’s foot. I can split it. Thousands of people are buried alive each year. I have great knives. I never let them dull. They sing as they splinter bone. I can splinter the bones for you, and I can certainly split a pig’s foot. A cube has six sides, and all of them are of equal importance. Mark was writing about sugar cubes. At the very same time, we are talking about brain activity. The importance here is to emphasize the impossibility of a point when death occurs. So the question was, why a cube? See how he does that? I don’t understand how that happens, that wrapping. He lifts himself off the ground by his tail. I think he smells blood. That isn’t dripping, is it? There is no correct name for what Mark is. He doesn’t speak. Mark is conscious, I tell myself. This isn’t dripping. I have plenty of paper. My concern has little to do with the termination of biological functions. One cause stills another. The calfs arrive with lots of blood. I hang them for two weeks to collect the blood in the organs and the muscle. The idea is not to drain them. They should collect. It makes the flavor magnificent. Declaring death by heartbeat and breathing alone is naive. This morning I held a mirror to his mouth. Nothing.

Spittoon 4.2 Cook, Conversation with Butcher

When my sister died, she had not done her taxes. It was March, and she typically would have completed her taxes by this time, but she had been dying. That her taxes still had to be done was not the first thing Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d thought about. The man whose mustache she combed could not be found anywhere. Our philosophies about death and vitality have not advanced so far since the appearance of the sugar cube, Mark tells me. Vitality seems like a rather hazy concept. Electric activity in the brain is what constitutes being legally alive or legal personhood, and electricity is what was postulated then. When I finally clean the calfs, he likes to lick up as much blood as he can before I wash it away. Blood is good for him. When Mark speaks, he will look up from the desk and ask me questions like, If electricity constitutes consciousness is electricity consciousness? Then he will marvel over the sugar cube. Death, or transcending death, is a central aspect of religious belief and philosophical enquiry. And senescence is boring. Let me explain it this way: Death is a suspension of consciousness. I suspend arguably dead calfs to collect their blood before I butcher them. They are often still warm when they arrive. How permanent is the suspension of consciousness in death versus the suspension of consciousness in sleep? Markâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death would not be the result of suicide, homicide, or war. Cats and goat are the domesticated animals who return quickest to a feral state. All these concepts like feral are terms about phenomena on one hand, and on the other they are like blood. I grow this thyme. War is always intentional, in a round sense. Physiological death is less an event than process. The cat is licking your leg. There is a loss of ability to heal wounds, fight infections, gestate fetuses. I like it. And clinical death is not legal death. Death is death when the cerebral cortex dies, which sugar alone prolongs, as long as you can get it down your throat.

Spittoon 4.2 Cook, Conversation with Butcher

A possession of brain activity is a necessary condition of personhood. Persons who come back to life do so most often when embalming begins. To avoid such a circumstance, coming back to life during embalming, you could use vinegar and peppers, hot pokers. I’ve never heard a calf scream. In life, there are longer periods of apparent death before death. The pork rind should be blanched in the espangole. He’s had ample waking time. The liquid level should be double enough to submerge the rind and the foot. Roux appears in cookbooks for the first time in the late sixteenth century. Before that, we’re still sprinkling flour into sauces. Take this chinois. What would demi-glace have to do to be promoted to a mother sauce? Of course, but let me tell you one more thing about my life. It seems you have never been to a field where you might find a calf but you are ready to enjoy a bag of bones. I imagine you have sauces to make and a list of people to invite to your home to enjoy these sauces. I once had a home full of people also. This is a long time ago, and in a different place. We went to the regatta. I knew a man in the race with a sailboat and a large white sail. When I came back from the race in the evening, the people had all cooked me a meal. They said, we bought you a ticket to leave tomorrow and don’t bother arguing with us because you will do quite well and there is nothing else you can do here.

Spittoon 4.2

Become Kindling James Braziel

On the way to work we pass the flame of Tarrant. It comes out of a long steel pipe into the sky from the ABC plant where coal is distilled into coke. My son and I are building a cabin in Remlap, Alabama, and usually, he’s barely awake, figuring out how to avoid the sun’s sharp angle when we pass. It has been a dry fall, and that, too, that feeling that everything could, if the flame of Tarrant were to jump, become kindling, is something I feel in my fingers as if they are matchsticks caked in gunpowder, numb from lifting wood and tapping on the steering wheel, accessories to a crime about to happen. Nearby is the home of Shur Fine Foods with its endless loading dock of combustible semis. Across the street, Quick Motors with a billboard made in part of Christmas light wheels that flicker fast at night as we drive slowly home. The other landmark on this small stretch is a fiberglass man who hovers as tall as a fiberglass dinosaur, his forearms extended at right angles from his sides, his hands turned upward to gather us in. He wears a shirt with the initials of his tire company, GCR or something like that, the company’s flattop factory across the parking lot behind him. They have given his face devious eyes. Everything here has three initials. And if the flame were to jump, were to break like a sun flare and hurl down, everything in this small neighborhood would catch. There is, I must tell you, something about the flame’s intentions that draws all of us down on the road in. One morning, the ABC smokestacks flung buckets of smoke up and out, grooving together a cloud. The cloud drifted over the lone smokestack that carries the flame. The flame cut into the cloud being made, but the smoke pushed ahead, rising over gravity to be with the other clouds made of that other substance, water vapor, zephyring by, disappearing. It is something to see, the clouds we make. Something, too, how quick a flame we start can go from a small thing barely lit to raging. The other night as we passed back after a day of building the east wall of the cabin out of two by sixes—a wall that should’ve been built days ago, which left me anxious, worried we wouldn’t get the cabin finished before winter—the flame shot so high, pieces broke off, heading straight for the moon’s belly. The rest of the flame grabbed at what it had lost like a bear claw, not wanting to lose anything more. I tried to focus on the road, my son again asleep. I tried to keep at attention, but I kept looking back, waiting for the flame to reach high enough to touch the edge of the moon, one of the paper craters, and catch the whole night on fire. What is it about uncertainty

Spittoon 4.2 Braziel, Become Kindling

that mesmerizes us so? Makes everything we create fragile, even a little foolish, and yet, the act of making all the more necessary and real? The moon wouldn’t catch, so I let my son sleep. I drove home. I didn’t pull the car over, didn’t wake him as the burning above us took the last layers of air from the earth, didn’t watch his eyes and mouth pool in the new light.

Spittoon 4.2

Stitch in Time Rebekah Bergman

an old woman knits baby mittens on a bench forever worker ants mate and then drop dead. gum on every shoelace untied and untidy. forgot exactly when the watch stopped ticking a pendulum tangled in the carpet. bedbugs in the sock drawer. “if you move the thread from needle to needle, then you pass down the stitch, invisible, from color to color” something about the broken gears the bees the bees the games devolving from chess to checkers, all the kings move backwards if you please pickle the fireflies for heat. stained sheets with the scalp oils untied and untidy sometimes leaving the door unlocked and make pillows of naivety sometimes dropping dead to mate on boards of chess and checkers with tufts of infant hairs the curtains might make a wonderful dress if only the moths would stop fluttering through the legs in a web in the threshold of a studio apartment: “she has six legs more than I do (but still, she must live in her own saliva)” “someone should tie his rising to the sun” arachnids and arithmetic in every twitching seven swollen raindrops on matted lashes looking for a perch in the fireplace finding the ashes of one stocking on new years several earthworms cusped in oblong ringlets untied and untidy “a shame you were not born a seamstress, today’s forecast called for finer fingered hands.”

Level Two Rachel J. Bennett

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something you should know about the programmers: they want us to lose. All our offerings will be returned rewritten. I wanted a city, they gave me the power to never be satisfied, wanted a field of wheat and unearthed a cracked recording of my childhood. I found myself giving thanks for fireballs that work underwater and sore feet always ready to leave. They say I must love the breath-giving landscape, pack only whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s essential and bury the rest with my language and kin. But I found a code to punch to skip every level: Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s never meet. The programmers know this is hard to say. My gold and night sky are stacking up, these avenues teeming with battle cries. It was easier when I still believed in leather and volition. Before I fell in love with your voice and they sent me out for your head.

Contributors

Jeffrey Zable’s most recent work can be found, or soon to be found, in Toad Suck Review, Clarion, Edge, Mas Tequila, The Alarmist, Skidrow Penthouse, Futures Trading, Vayavya, Dum Dum, Snow Monkey, and many others. Travis Vick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as H_NGM_N, Booth, Nano Fiction, Word Riot, and others. He lives a blue-collar life in Texas. Caitlin Woolley is a second-year MFA student at the University of AlaskaFairbanks. She is originally from Seattle, Washington, and living in Alaska has taught her that it is okay to be cold.

John Wells is an Ohioan in North Carolina with his delightful wife and daughter. His MFA in poetry is from WVU. Over the years, he’s changed/stayed the same. Kathy Roberts is currently studying English at Cedarville University. She is honored to have this be her first publication. You may contact her at KRoberts123@cedarville.edu. Geoffrey Miller's fiction recently appeared in Ginosko Literary Journal, Pank and The Journal of Micro Literature or visually Paris has eight pieces waiting - we0c0u@gmail.com. Camille Meyer grew up on a farm in Rhode Island. She is not the fairest of her parents’ four daughters. She welds her words to make them last longer. She responds to creilly.meyer@gmail.com. Michael Landau lives the quiet life in Vermont. His fiction has appeared in Farfelu and Carve Magazine. Michael Lacare grew up in Long Island, New York, and moved to Florida when he was twenty-one. His essays and stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He lives in Florida with his wife and children, where he is currently at work on a novel. You can follow him on Twitter @mikelacare.

Ricky Garni’s work is widely available on the Web, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on five occasions. His latest collection, Hey, is dedicated to the memory of the gentle Faye Hunter. Visit his website: www.tortillaexmachina.blogspot.com or email him at rgarni@gmail.com. Donelle Dreese is the author of two poetry chapbooks and a novella. She teaches literature and writing at Northern Kentucky University. You can read more about Donelle at http://www.donelledreese.com. Thomas Cook lives in Massachusetts. He is co-editor and publisher of Tammy. James Braziel is the author of two novels with Bantam—Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road. He blogs at Southverve (http://www.jamesbraziel.com/press/) and lives in North Alabama with his wife, poet Tina Mozelle Braziel. Rebekah Bergman writes short stories and poems. Her first book of poetry The Body Theater will be published by O Balthazar Press in 2015. She lives in Brooklyn and is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the New School. Rachel J. Bennett’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including elimae, inter│rupture, Permafrost, Salt Hill, Similar:Peaks::, Sixth Finch, Smartish Pace, The Portland Review, Toad, Verse Daily, and Vinyl.