Prose

Teri Fuller Rouse

Cly-toar-is

Over the summer, I walked into my kitchen where my older daughter was giving my younger a spelling test.

This was great, I thought. My girls were practicing spelling, and they weren’t even in school.

“Your test is ready,” the older said.

We’ll call her Thelma.

Because it wouldn’t be a stretch for them to drive a car off a cliff one day, we’ll call the younger Louise.

Louise sat down with a brand-new, sharpened pencil.

I could not have been prouder.

As they worked away, I opened the pantry door hungry for a snack.

Thelma began the test, “The first word,” she said, “is Low-bee-a.”

The younger started to write, hunching her small shoulders over the blank, lined paper, her nose gnarled up in concentration.

“Low-bee-a?” I thought.

I had no idea what they were talking about. Something from YouTube? A meme?

“Number two,” Thelma continued.

Louise nodded, ready for the next word.

“Cly-toar-is,”Thelma said, annunciating each syllable.

Turning from the pantry to Thelma and Louise sitting at the table, I said, “Not Cly-toar-us, sweetie. It’s Cli-tor-is.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Thelma said.

“No problem,” I said and then thought: What kind of a spelling test is this? I had to hear the rest of the words.

“That’s a hard one,” the younger added and sighed, pushing strands of loose, curly hair out of her face, securing it behind her ears.

After clitoris came Uterus. Menstruation. Areola. Ejaculation.

These are some hard words.

Maybe 2 out of 10 people at the mall could get ‘em right, but Louise, she got 9 out of 10.

I was proud. They were going to be master spellers—even if those words wouldn’t be featured at the local spelling bee.

Louise missed smegma.

It is a tough word, I thought.  

***

Surprisingly, testicles was not on the test, but that is the word that got my friend’s son an in-school suspension at his private Catholic school. When he got kneed in the “testicles” by the class bully, he went straight to the head nun’s office.

“She kneed me “‘right in the testicles,’” he explained.

He didn’t even say “balls,” yet the head nun gave him an in-school suspension for just saying what she called the “t” word.

Soon after, my friend withdrew his son from the school.

***

I thought back to the spelling test and the word “clitoris.”

I didn’t even know what it was until graduate school. I had a lot of firsts then. I ate Thai food, got my ears double-pierced, and dated a punk rock musician with a bad-ass mohawk. His name was Matt.

One day, Matt came over with a used, musty copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. A first edition published in ’69.

I read it. He read it. And sometimes we read it together.

The book taught me things I never learned before—not even in the sex ed class I took in high school. Junior year. All I can remember from that class was the poor gym teacher who got stuck with us who told us one thing: to NOT have sex until marriage. No one had the heart to tell him that for most, it was too late.

Our Bodies, Ourselves said to get a hand-mirror mirror and look between my legs. “Do you know what you look like?” Matt asked.

“No good god idea,” I said, and after we found a hand mirror, I saw myself for the first time in 21 years. It was a foreign landscape, but it was mine.

“That is the beauty I see,” Matt said. “That is the beauty I taste.”

***

Another graduate school first was visiting a porn shop. It was a gross and sticky with men, but I bought what the kind man behind the counter called a rabbit. That’s when I learned to never underestimate anything pink or small. The rabbit brought me to orgasm under a minute, and Matt loved to use it on me. Sex, for him, was about mutual satisfaction. He wasn’t like other boys who fell asleep or left after coming.

***

A few years later, when I got my first real job teaching college comp and lit courses full- time, I served as a student club advisor for the feminist group on campus. I helped them put on the college’s first performance of The Vagina Monologues, but we ran into some problems when we sent each other emails. They didn’t seem to go through. After some detective work, we found out that it was because our IT department blocked “vagina” from all email correspondence. “Testicles, balls, dick,” though, came through just fine.

Around that time, I locked myself out of my car while on campus. I called my grandparents who had a spare set. It was the first time they saw my office, and I took them on a tour of the campus. They were so proud. That is, until they met Kathy. Kathy was co-advisor for the women’s group.

After introducing them, Kathy smiled big, hugged them, and said, “You must be so proud of Teri!” They beamed until she added: “…because of all the work she’s doing on The Vagina Monologues!” It was as if someone farted, loudly and foully, during the most somber and moving part of a formal eulogy. Any pride they felt was not just crushed but obliterated by the well-meaning vagina bomb Kathy dropped.

***

The day my older daughter, Thelma, got her period, we celebrated. First, we went to Walgreens where we bought every type of maxi-pad, liner, and tampon they had. Generic. Name brand. It didn’t matter. We filled the cart. We had enough to last her through menopause. Then we went to the best ice cream joint in town and toasted our two-scoop cones to womanhood.

***

Unlike her, I didn’t know shit before I got my period. I knew other girls my age were starting to get theirs, and I was plain-old jealous. When I finally did, I was on a camping trip with my grandparents in Shipshewana, Indiana.

I wore brand-new white shorts that day and was looking at old postcards written in fancy cursive with black and white photographs on the front when Grandma said, “We need to get you to the bathroom NOW!” It was the type of voice people use in the movies when someone is mortally wounded, and she was using it on me. Wondering if I finally had gotten my period, I moved my hand behind the between my legs and felt what I hoped for: deep red blood. It was.

My grandma worshipped me as I did her, but she was old, from a small-town, and she didn’t have the social/emotional capital to deal with the situation. We ran through herds of people lazily shuffling from one booth to the next—all the while she shouting: “Excuse me!” until she graduated to “Move!” If it hadn’t been so traumatizing, it would have comical. The headline would read: “Sweet, polite, and usually soft-spoken grandmother bowls people over at Indiana flea market.”

Once we found the bathroom, the only public one there, there was a line, but Grandma was not going to wait.

“We must use a bathroom now!” she demanded, using that mortally wounded Hollywood voice. She took my hand and moved us to the front of the line, which included an elderly woman in a wheelchair whose head drooped to the right and bobbed up and down.

In the stall, Grandma said, “Here,” She wadded up a handful toilet paper and put it in my hands.

Following her directions, I pulled down my shorts in the crammed, claustrophobic stall not meant for two people placed it between my vagina and soaked panties.

She then took the white hoodie from Walmart that she had tied around her waist and handed it to me.

“Cover yourself,” she said, not very kindly, and I did.

***

Now that my two oldest kids are twelve, my husband and I thought we should have the masturbation talkwith Thelma and her brother. We’ll call him Cliff.

“It’s completely natural,” we told them—having separate conversations, of course. Explore your body, we said; sex isn’t bad and your bodies are beautiful.

Cliff cringed while Thelma sat straight up, looking us straight in the eye as if taking mental notes.

We were pretty proud of ourselves until Thelma started to “enjoy” her body with her bedroom door open, and Cliff began taking really long showers, neither environmentally-friendly nor cheap. After another conversation, this time awkward for everyone conversation, doors are locked and showers are quick.

***

One day in the car, when it was just the two of us, my daughter asked, “Mom, what is the best way to give a blow job?”

“No! No! No! No! No!” I thought and grit my teeth, TMJ style. “Please do not ask me that shit,” I silently begged.

I do want my kids to know and appreciate their bodies, but Mama ain’t going there.

 “I’m glad you feel able to ask me that” I said, “but you’re a bit young for me to explain that. Plus, when you’re old enough and ready, you can work that out with your partner in a mutually respectful and satisfying way.”

And with a “Cool,” she mercifully moved on.

***

While other children play baseball in their backyard or draw in their sketchbook, my kids will be masterful orthographers, taking an occasional break to play Connect the Fallopian Tubes dots or maybe even Pin the Penis on the Pubic Hair.

Teri Fuller Rouse is a proud mother, decent-enough wife, and mercifully tenured English Professor who writes a lot, including essays, memoir, short stories, and flash non-fiction. Her work has appeared in Stoneboat Literary Magazine, Tiferet Journal, Assay: A Journal of Non-Fiction Studies, Lunch Ticket, along with others. She lives with her husband and three children where the western suburbs of Chicago meet the cornfields–though the profile picture of her is confusingly not of the flatlands of the Midwest but of the mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Becca Rothfield

Faint of Heart

It is an unfortunate truth that every symptom of a panic attack is also a symptom of a fatal disease. If your palms begin to moisten and your stomach starts to clench, if something capsizes in your chest and your vision fuzzes over, well, you might be anxious, and you might be having a heart attack, and you might be having a heart attack because you’re anxious, and you might be anxious because you’re having a heart attack. Think about it this way, as she often had: you would be anxious if you were having a heart attack—who wouldn’t?—and at least one person has suffered from a panic-attack-induced heart attack—believe me, she’s Googled it—so either way, signs point to dying. And isn’t the magnitude of certain catastrophes great enough to override their apparent improbability? Shouldn’t you always err on the side of caution, just in case?

Luckily she’d thought all this out in a moment of lucidity, in fact it was most of what she thought about in moments of lucidity, in fact she lay awake picking at thoughts of it the way you’d pick at hard knots until they started to loosen, so that when the first attack struck, the attack of indeterminate nature, she’d already programmed the emergency number into her telephone and decided in advance to dial it. She was alone that first time, sitting in her living room, trying to read a book, the same line over and over, and the house was making finicky noises, the same line over and over, it was like the house had indigestion, trying to read a book, but it could—it could—have been intruders in the house. She was trying to read a book, the same line over and over, when she realized that what she was experiencing was more probably a sense of impending doom, one of the well-documented symptoms of a heart attack, the cause of death of one for four Americans. She knew this because she’d Googled how likely it was that you’d be murdered in your house and discovered a web page listing statistically likelier causes of death. The average American, it turned out, was at higher risk of being crushed by a vending machine, flattened by a widescreen television, or drowned in the shower in a half-inch of iridescently soapy water. Most probable of all was a heart attack, which felt like a fist balling up in the chest. That was what the webpage said. Trying to read a book, the same line over and over, she realized that there was a fist, a balling, a fish flopping up and flailing, and though she was trying to read a book, the same line over and over, she stopped trying, she stopped reading and—

She called 911. That is, she speed-dialed 911, availing herself of the number she had programmed in advance into her speed dial, and before the Muzak voice could finish its placid “what is your—” she gasped, “PLEASE COME QUICKLY TO 93 ROSETTA AVENUE I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK.”

But she wasn’t. At the hospital they gave her a brown paper bag and told her to lean over and breathe into it until it had inflated. They gave her a mound of Jell-O that quivered like a breast and a print-out about Generalized Anxiety Disorder that she suspected they had copied directly from WebMD. It was in the familiar font, the one she recognized from her late-night researches into heart attacks and cancers. The man who handed it to her told her that a panic attack was nothing to be ashamed of, it could happen to anyone. “But now you know,” continued the man. “And the next time you can deploy a stress management technique.”

“A what?” she asked, prodding the Jell-O.

“Like breathing slowly into a bag.”

“But I had a sense of impending doom.”

“Of course,” said the man. “That sense is quite common. Now eat your Jell-O so that we can get you home.”

She wondered if he had even read the WebMD page about heart attacks, which stated that a sense of impending doom was a symptom in the very same authoritative font as the one on the print-out he expected her to trust. The Jell-O mound juddered when she lifted the tray, and the man stood watching while she jiggled small globules with her spoon. It was in case she had low blood sugar, he explained. Low blood sugar could make her dizzy, which might in turn make her feel anxious again.

She tried to clarify that she had not been anxious in the first place, she had just been vigilant. At some point she had decided that vigilance was rational. “The magnitude of certain catastrophes can be great enough to override their apparent improbability,” she explained. For instance, did he have a big screen TV? Did he use vending machines?

“Yes,” the man answered, he did, though he failed to see what that had to do with her course of treatment.

She looked past the man, at the stupid wall, at the painting of a seaside that someone imagined was soothing, and decided not to warn him about what he was risking each time he reached for his Fritos. By the time she was discharged with the print-out—to help her develop stress management techniques, said the man with a moist little smile—and a bottle of pills—for the panic (or the vigilance)—it was late. She was the last passenger on the bus. As the lights streaked past the window, she pictured the man from the hospital pounding against a broken vending machine. He would insert his coins; he would press the buttons and wait for his Fritos (which were bad enough for the frail and frangible heart); he would reach up through the slot and wriggle his hand—and down the whole thing would topple. His doom was impending. Only he didn’t know it, and he went about unprepared.

In the coming days, the fist in her chest came unclasped, but the sense of impending doom remained. Well before the second attack of indeterminate nature, she’d decided to dump the pills. When she took them, she perceived her pain through a layer of protective padding. She would think about slipping in the shower and drowning in a half-inch of glugging water, staring at the hairs thatched over the drain, and she wouldn’t even feel demoralized. Or a chunk of her toenail would rip off in her shoe and she wouldn’t even notice until the blood had blotted her sock. The pills could only blunt her to the warning signs, to the labored breathing, to the tightness clamping around the throat. In the bathroom of the coffeeshop where she took her lunchbreaks, she emptied the bottle into the sink and watched as the tap lapped the pills into clods. A few days later, she decided to dispose of the print-out, which recommended that she take up yoga or meditation. As she flushed it, she watched the word “generalized” bobbing and whirling away. What, she wondered, was so general about it? The sensation was very specific: it was like a fist in the chest.

At work as she wandered through the aisles of the bookstore, giving the browsers a deferential berth, waiting for the grip of impending doom to loosen and wondering whether she should tell Franz that she had gone to the ER. Though sometimes she was assigned to “the floor,” meaning sometimes she had to help customers find books they wanted, usually books she would not have recommended or books she would have advised against, her primary responsibility was to stalk the aisles in search of volumes that they had misshelved. The customers put the Ps (Pamuk, Pessoa, Pynchon) with the Gs (Gaddis, Gass, Gombrowicz), or the astrology (so-called “metaphysics”) with the philosophy (real metaphysics), or the biographies with the fiction. According to the health app on her phone, she covered over six miles a day as she padded from one shelf to another, correcting the customers’ shelving mistakes. This was good, she knew, for her heart. She was standing in front of the Ks (Kafka, Kempowski) when she saw the interloper, an F (a Fairfield). The book was called “From Jumpy to Joyful in Seven Weeks,” and the “Fairfield” was followed by a smug “PhD.” She opened the book at random. “Count to ten as you inhale, then ten as you exhale. Try to imagine the air is scooping your chest deeper,” she read. She knew that From Jumpy to Joyful belonged in self-help, but she shoved it where it did not belong and decided she would say nothing, not to Franz, not to any costumers hoping to become joyful and jump-free.

And she didn’t, at least not at first, not even when Franz insisted on splitting an order of calamari. “Calamari is fried,” she protested, “which is not good for your heart.”

“You’re like twenty-four,” said Franz, “and you can’t get a salad at Cheezie’s.”

“It’s never too early for cardiovascular health,” she snapped, but Franz shook his head until she caved and consented to split the jumbo calamari bucket, reasoning (or not-reasoning), well, just this once! But as soon she began rifling through the bucket, as soon as the squiggles of tentacle began grasping at her fingers, as soon as she imagined the squid she was eating balling its arms into eight tiny fists in her chest, she started to feel that same cold fish flailing up in her throat and she panted, “Franz, I’m, Franz, I’m, Franz, I’m,” before clawing her phone across the table and pressing the pre-programmed number and interrupting the offensively tranquil operator to shout, “CHEEZIE’S, QUICK, I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!”

But she wasn’t. At the hospital they gave her another brown paper bag and told her to lean over and breathe into it, and Franz, who’d cooed consolations throughout the ambulance ride, stroked her hair while she sputtered ragged half-gasps between her knees. Then the doctor and Franz went into the hallway and conferred in grave, quiet voices while she sat roiling in the room. There was a reproduction of a painting of a bouquet on the opposite wall, and she blinked the dots out of her eyes and wondered who’d chosen this reproduction and why. The flowers in the painting were daisies with honey-yellow hearts. She hated them. She leaned over and wheezed vengefully into the bag.

In the cab home Franz made her eat a Snickers he’d purchased, despite her admonitions, from the hospital vending machine. Behind him the houses and lawns slashed past. He was bony, which she liked, and she reached over to touch the promontory jut of his cheekbone. He sighed and lifted her hand as if he were transporting an object from one shelf to another, a book from the Ps to the As, and when he’d arranged her fingers in his lap he said, “You need to see someone about these episodes. You’re diverting resources from people who really need them, people who are really having heart attacks.”

“But I could really have a heart attack,” she said. “And when I do, I’ll be prepared.”

He deposited her hand on the seat and spat, “It’s like you want to be unhappy.”

Fine, she thought. We’ll do it your way.

The next day at work she slunk back to the Ks (Kafka, Kempowski) and removed From Jumpy to Joyful in Seven Weeks from the place where she’d thrust it, the place where it didn’t belong. The book was big and glossy, full of photographs of people sitting on mounds of grass and laughing. There were women perched on one leg gazing off into the distance and men mixing big bowls of salad. At the end of the first chapter she found worksheet with a Target Fear box and a Strategies for Coping box. She did not want to pay for the book, not even with her 10% employee discount, so she stuffed it under her jacket and scuttled out the back exit.

That evening she checked her house for intruders and started to fill out some of boxes. She wrote “heart attack” in the Target Fear box and “positive self-talk, thought-picturing” in the Strategies for Coping box. She resolved to repeat to herself, “I am not having a heart attack, I am fine” whenever she thought she was having a heart attack; she resolved to visualize any Catastrophic Thoughts that might occur to her as balloons that she would then visualize herself releasing into the ether. According to Fairfield, PhD, imagining Catastrophic Thoughts as physical objects was helpful, especially if you could imagine yourself discarding them without ceremony. It was good to imagine a worry as a marble that could be rolled off a cliff, an insect that could be crushed beneath a boot, or a grape that could be mashed down the garbage disposal.  She tried to summon these images, though more often than not she saw not her fear but her heart itself gurgling down the drain, a red pat shredded alongside the silver slivers of onion.

But she had to show Franz. What she had to show him was how happy she could be. So she continued to practice. At work she inhaled for ten counts and exhaled for ten more: from A to F, where someone had misshelved all eighty volumes of the complete works of Martin Heidegger, she would puff her chest up, and from F to K she would hollow it out, until she felt a thread unspooling in her temples. She described this to Franz as Making an Effort, and he seemed impressed. At dinner he ordered her a plate of French fries and told her he was proud of her while she ate every last one of them.

She suffered the next attack, the attack of determinately psychosomatic nature, two weeks later—five weeks short of Joyful—when she was sitting alone on her sofa, trying to picture balloons rising until they were just flecks of color in a whorl of creamy cloud. She was repeating, “I am not having a heart attack, I am fine,” the same line over and over, while the chords in her chest kept twanging. She was saying the same line over and over when the words went metallic, like hooks hacked through a fish’s lip. “I am not having a heart attack, I am fine,” she was saying, while the hand in her chest thumped into a fist, while the garbage disposal was whirring, while the marble she could not quite picture was rolling towards the mouth of the abyss. “I am fine,” she was reciting, the same line over and over, until she felt one final, fatal stab—was it triumph?—as she toppled onto the floor.

Becca Rothfeld is a writer who is not in Brooklyn. See more at www.beccarothfeld.com/.

Lillian Smith

This Is Marriage Parts 1-3

Part 1: This is Marriage:

My husband has a warm presence that fills the house. When he’s not home, the house feels empty, though, my son, only a year old, has his own charisma, and seems to bring a sense of life to the house all on his own now when we are alone together in the house. It is in a different way though than the personality of my husband, who, can enter a room and everyone notices, he makes everyone laugh, he has the gift of gab, he has a certain swagger when he tells stories, and his shoulders puff up a bit when he talks, and he will take on an accent or two, or three, when he tells his stories, that make it all the bit more interesting.

He is tall, six foot four, he says six foot three, but I say six foot four, because I simply know it’s six foot four. I simply know these things you see.

His favourite spice is an All Season Spice mix that he orders online, it is a Bahamian spice mix and we can’t get it here in Canada. My husband is Bahamian. British and Bahamian. He gets a huge container of it and we decant it into little containers in our spice rack. He makes steaks with it, great steaks with it, with Worcestershire sauce, that caramelizes in the pan and around the steak. When I was pregnant, I couldn’t stand the smell of the spice whatsoever, and I’d have to leave the room for him to use it.

Our story, the one of how we met, is long, and beautiful. We met in The Bahamas one night and fell in love at first sight, getting married nine weeks later. I was a girl then, looking back on that time, that night, when I had been dragged out to a bar by a bunch of friends, and ended up meeting the man of my dreams, the time when I fell head over heels in love with this man. We had a beautiful wedding on the beach, the beach where we went on our first date, several weeks later, with six people, just family and friends.

And nearly three years later, I guess I could say that I am a woman now. In a lot of ways, I have grown up and changed in the time since I met my husband. He has made me a woman.

I am not the little girl I was that night at the bar, out looking for a husband, carefree, and unattached. I am a woman with a son and a husband. I am a wife. I have a house. I have a different life than I did then, back when I was doe eyed late at night standing outside in the street looking at the palm trees lit up at night in my beat up jean jacket, out in the road outside the bar that night talking to this tall dark and handsome man. And, over time, how I dyed his laundry pink, and did the dishes wrong, and cooked the stir fry soggy, and made a bunch of first timer mistakes, but did a lot of great things too, like sabred the champagne bottle, and cooked the best eggs, and pasta with proper cream sauce and scallops, because you thicken the cream sauce with an egg and flour, that’s the proper way, and take out and sex in bed, and all the little things that were the beginnings of our romance, many moons ago now. All I knew is that I could love and I could love hard, and I would love him with all I had, and I would learn if I had to, and I have, along the way.

But this was back when I was doe eyed. When I was 29. And he was 40.

Now, I am 32. He is 42.  We are moving into our first house, we just bought it, it is a historic home. We are deciding on things like driveways, heated driveways, and kitchen appliances. Our love is older too, it has taken form and grown along with us with this time. I have a neatly organized spice rack now, something that I meticulously crafted during my pregnancy, during the nesting phase. I have bought jars and labels, and lazy susans. And I take great pride in the kitchen, as it is the center of the home. I take great pride in the medication cabinets, and the first aid cabinet, also, neatly labelled.

The kitchen was always the center of my mother’s house. She would always joke that no matter how big the house was, everyone always wanted to be in the kitchen. We loved the kitchen, because it felt like home. I wanted to make that same feeling for my family. So, when I was pregnant, about a week or two before delivering my son Harry, I went through our kitchen and decided to make it homey so that one day my son would have a loving kitchen like the one that I grew up in.

Things like this never would have never even occurred to me, years ago, when I was doe-eyed at a bar, meeting my husband for the first time, trying to push out a soggy stir fry, and secretly watching cooking classes in between our first dates.

But this was us in the beginning:

Part 2: “Days Of The Week Socks” (Age 29, 2018)

The year of twenty nine to Thirty: It all feels revolutionary, but probably isn’t.

Turning thirty has been some kind of rollicking Joan Jett-ish transformative ride into someone fairly similar to Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy. With Gordon Ramsay YouTube cooking lessons and the along the way appearance of my fantastic husband (hence the cooking lessons).

There’s a very genuine gratefulness that my husband passed the first few months of eating the food that I gave him, despite what it came out looking and smelling like. And of the times he was rather silent about the blender exploding, what with the was meant to be soup hitting the ceiling, and walls, and possibly artwork. He must really love me. Thirty seems and feels like constant real-life school, with harder and more thought-provoking lessons, better food, (if I don’t feel that day like I’m on a cooking show and experiment with the ingredients, throwing almost everything into the pot).

Generally, everything is better, but then there are a lot of days too, where everything is shit, because the problems are bigger and the only person who can solve them is you (well, me). Thirty is being ‘Happy as Larry’ and yet still spending most of my time on self-improvement projects because though I feel I have finally reached the pinnacle of life it is only an indicator of just how much higher one can climb.

He has more grey hair than me. I am reminded of this when I pick movies for us to watch at night, and he has seen them all, because he was born in 1978, and I tell him I’ll impress him one day when I bring home a dinosaur egg or reinvent fire, because he was there for that, and he tells me he already reinvented fire, and asks me if it is the purple egg, because that one was his.

1978. 1988. Ten years apart and I still manage to have lots of grey hair. And freak out over it, and then routinely look for wrinkles in the mirror on those days when I see those wisps of white grey.

I feel my skin growing thicker, like some kind of armor that has set in, perhaps replacing the other cells, those cells that change out every seven years, or whatever scientists say about the human body. Maybe it is my new birth control, but probably a result of this aging thing. That I can withstand some kind of emotional hurricane with a cup of coffee and pint of ice cream but still somehow seem to waste a pound of mascara: perhaps at forty, I will be able to hang on to that.

I spend my spare time working on something to build that I can call my life. It is harder than I imagined it would be.

It takes more patience than I have, or tend to have, (though it is increasing in intervals), and when I find I have more of it, my husband thinks I have been replaced by an alien. It takes what he calls feeling a couple humility kicks to the stomach when I’ve been wrong, and also, some kind of strength that you must only get from being on earth longer than other people.

Like I said, I spend my spare time on self-improvement projects. Things like fertility tests and reading about how to get pregnant. Pinterest. Designing our future home, for when we are booming and have the money to do everything we want when we want. I hang pictures and match curtains to walls. Things I used to watch my mother do, and wondered how she did it and made it look so easy, because god damn it isn’t.

I am learning how to apply contour and highlighter from beauty blogs and online video tutorials. I notice my cheeks have become more pronounced, as a result, and perhaps, it is just me, because humans do notice themselves as more beautiful than they are, scientifically, in fact, but, I see my face changing. I look like a woman now, not a girl anymore. And, certainly, it is my cheeks, or their bones, that have been the cause of this.

He always knows what to say, and does so in a silent, loving manner, that suggests he knows I have many quirks but that he knows not to fuss with them because he’ll get fussed right back. I cook salmon and then have fish hands and hair and my husband doesn’t mind or maybe he does but he kisses me sweetly anyway and my heart skips a beat.

When I objectively examine my life I realize that even though I feel all these ways too, to the outside world, and then also, most of the time, I look and feel like one of the people in those banana republic commercials where everyone’s outfit perfectly matches and their smiles are wide and their teeth are supremely white and they all hold hands and life is just peachy.

Because we met and two months later got married and since then my heart has been rich with love and I have lived like I’m deep in the rapture.

So, while I can’t find a way to do dishes without looking like I peed myself, I’m finding I’m also growing more and more like those people who I saw in movies, like This is Forty (but my husband does remind me that I haven’t quite reached that level of Mario yet). People who to me, then, represented adulthood, and who I had sectioned off as something that was a far off land that I didn’t have to achieve for some time, when, at twenty-two, thirty seemed like it was far enough away that I could just brush it off as, not going to happen to me yet.

You know those people. The ones in the banana republic white teeth land, those who have had kids but also balance eating Kale while having beer but also somehow brie while simultaneously finding time for exercising or, somehow not (perhaps because they carry so many kids, they don’t need to).

I used to think this was all too silly for me to ever really take on myself— that it was all just a commercial movie, and nobody really smiled that wide or ever achieved that level of matching outfits or happiness anyway. Until it became my life. At which point, I spent most of my time pinching myself.

This is the commercial life, this is my favorite part of life:

The mornings are the most beautiful. They are the warmest, the most filled with love. They are also the quietest, and so I find, it is when I can hear it all the loudest.

I catch him half-asleep muttering about his dream from the night before, in the morning squeak voice everyone has— evidence that our body is still catching up with the world. He starts telling me his dream. Something about sixty cats and a fluffy fluffy duvet. So many cats, he says, there were so many, and can we please get a cat. He misses the fluffiness and the cats. And when he was a kid, he had cats, and he rolls about, smiling, still somewhere in the fond remembrance of the dream.

Dreams do something for you that this world can’t. They give you a free twelve hours escape.

He is all tied up in the bedsheets: thick back muscles and ropey ligaments, tendons, tension. I lean over to pass him his tea, it dribbles on the pillowcases. I kiss him on the cheek and try not to laugh at his squeak voice and the thought of my six foot four husband holding court with sixty kitties and cats in a fluffy duvet.

I begin meowing at a varying range of pitches and he laughs maniacally. All to help settle him on the fact that he has his hands full as they are. Secretly, I plan to find some form of cat and bring it home to surprise him, but have no idea how to do this quite yet. We talk for all time will allow and are making our plans to conquer what we can before the day gets away with us.

Of all the moments in the day these are the shortest, but they are my favourite. The gentlest, the most innocent. All perhaps, because they are the ones before anyone has had too much coffee, or been stuck in traffic yet (he says, at least). Fresh with possibility. They are our daily matrimony.

He tells me to place his tea on the counter, and smiles, saying that his waking up is all a ruse for now. Asks how long I’ve been awake for, with a kind of knowing twinkle in his eye that tells me he doesn’t need to be asking but is doing it because he likes the answer and also being right about things. {I routinely wake up at three am and, write, because that is when I believe I do so best. And of course, it is true, because I believe it. However, unlike most humans, I also believe it is intelligent to drink a pot or more of coffee (which really helps things) from three to six am.}

And as he lies there smiling knowingly about how long I’ve been awake with my pot of coffee, I’m blushing. And I would very much like to answer him properly. But I still get butterflies and freeze up almost entirely when I see him—- having to routinely pull myself back up out of the inner core of embarrassingly adolescent girlishness to be a proper woman and wife with more coolness and self-control than that, (and, I remind myself, often, that I was cool, at one point, before I met this man who somehow took it all away from me) and, as if, I have not just lost my words when I need them most. It couldn’t be because of that, but, instead, because his mouth stole them.

Living on the ride of hungry, but full, and yet empty with a lack of sleep and somehow the thirst for forty winks has been well fed—by you. And your arms around me. And I can’t spell. Because apparently I’m a walking. What’s the word. Love contradiction. And see, my mind is now solely your—

And then the ruse is over. He picks up the tea. Asks if there are any smokes about the house, and smiles again, cause I guess he remembers that he hid some, somewhere, from me, and my fiendish coffee drunk three am writing. He has this habit of stashing away cigarettes for when we evidently will have none— in drawers, in jars, in the pasta container. Like a kind of nicotine squirrel. This time, we find a menthol somewhere loosely in the bathroom vanity next to my makeup, and decide to hang out the window to smoke it, like a couple of teenagers.

We talk about dragonfly feeders and bird feeders for our garden, what type of garden wall we will build, and how to fence in dogs. I watch his eyes as they glimmer in excitement at the possibility of such nesting projects. In these moments, he looks genuinely happy, filled with the prospect of possibility. The rise and fall of the hills, the hills as they rise and fall. It all reminds me of a carnival ride.”

It’s in those moments, the times when I’m just coming out of bed.

When my hair pokes up in ten different directions, and my scars show, and my eyeliner has somehow spread all over my face—(because I forgot to take it off), reminding us of my similarities to a ripe old panda bear.

And it’s those moments, it’s those ones when he looks at me, with the deepest, most loving eyes, and says, “Gosh I’m so lucky—- You look so beautiful right now.”

And it’s in the other moments, the ones when we don’t like each other very much.

In those ones too, I still feel it in the pit of my heart, that I’m doing this because he’s the man for me, even though he forgets his keys everywhere, or moves the toilet paper about the house so it’s never in its right place. As though he’s saving it for a rainy day or when he loses all the phone chargers, and it goes on ad infinitum with things that I’m sure there are equally as long a list of things I do too that annoy him.

— But, either way, he always makes up for it by doing other, little, beautiful things, that make life easier, just because he’s in it.

And yes I want to tear my hair out sometimes, or bang my head against a wall.

But by the end of every day and the beginning of every morning I’m reminded of this unwavering sense of how glad I am that I didn’t— because I have him with me (and he likes my hair where it is).

All of this amidst the rank and raucous combination of endless piles of laundry and dishes with hair raising sex and tantalizing takeout and walking the dog (in the rain) followed by documentaries and cackling with laughter at our shared secret language.

The truth is, I like watching him fold—it’s in the arms—Finding marvelous in the mundanity, being the toilet paper hero. Being constantly distracted by callant pheromones and the promise of pizza— and the inappropriate impromptu work emails and yes, I digress.

And the two or perhaps more weeks we spent in bed when we started dating—And how the rest of the world called it hot and heavy, wondering if we were alive or dead

Days that led unto bigger days, engaged days, married days, days where he picked me fresh flowers from the garden and put them beside my bed with a fresh plate of breakfast in bed—well syrup rashings of well conquered fluffy french toast and that  heart breaking way he would smile while watching me eat it: victorious in his act of love,  occasionally petting our wide eyed herculean dog at the foot of the four poster brown bed.

Watching the way he loves her like he loves me. As he runs with her down the beach, lays out her special pink blanket before she goes to sleep, and then kisses us both goodnight. And as he leans in, catching the smell of his fresh scented soap skin mixed with a real working man musk——————and and and and in the morning when I wake up first, seeing him as he is all tied up in bedsheets: Ropey Ligaments, Tendons, Tension.

Those moments when I bring him in his morning tea and feel badly I was rash and mean the night before, because those moments don’t matter. It’s in the gentle moments like this one. I watch him with his arms and legs sprawled about the bed statuesque and akimbo. He hears me rustling to find a lamp and opens his eyes, smiling, and says, I love you so much.

I’m sorry about last night, I say—- I was being a silly witch.

Sweetheart, He says, This is marriage—The good and the bad and the both blended in.

All of it. And, it is.

Like watching the ingredients for a batter of life blend ceremoniously in a colorful bowl of cake mix: “Thank you for doing the dishes, so I could write.”

Part 3: This Is Marriage ( This is Love )

It feels strange that it’s been nearly three years since I wrote that. But then again it doesn’t. I remember writing it in bed while he was asleep, a fresh, new, body for me to explore, when we were new to each other, and so in love. Now, we are old souls, old friends. Now, I know his thoughts, and he knows mine. I go to the grocery store and know what he would say when I look at a piece of food without him being there, his voice chimes in my head. If I look at a bar of chocolate after he has had a bad day, I know he’d want me to buy it for him. We are intimately linked now, much more than before, though, that is something I never would have understood until now, with the passing of time. We have a child together, he watched my C-section and saw most of my kidneys be removed and put back in, even though I told him not to watch. We have been through a lot in this period of time. Not only have we have had our first child, but, we have become parents together too. We have survived it. We have loved, every moment of it, however hard it has gotten at times, and the best moments, are the ones, where I see my husband playing on the floor with my son, and he looks up at me, and we catch a glance about what is going on is, about how beautiful the moment is, about our son, and my husband playing with him, and think, wow, is this really happening to us right now. Is this our life.

And sometimes he catches me in these moments of joy. He’ll see me holding Harry and he will film it, because I know that it means the world to him to see me be a good mother, to sing, and read, and laugh to our son. He sent me a text the other day of a photo of me, feeling really ill, and holding our son, in a hooded pink sweatshirt, saying “it’s hard to see you are ill, because you are so strong. It’s hard to know when you are in pain. I love you so much.” And there I was in the photo, smiling with our son on my lap, but I know I felt ill at the time, though it was a great moment for me because I got to hold my son.

It started with the spice cabinet. My spice rack centers me. I first organized it when I was nine months pregnant, huffing and puffing as I went along. I decided I was going to bring some order to it all, the spice cabinet that, when my husband and I had first moved into our rental apartment had been a total mess. We just hadn’t had the time or interest to make it nice. So, I brought some lazy susans and shelves and organized the spices. It was a moment for me, because until then, I hadn’t been an organized person. I hadn’t cared about where things belonged in the house or if things had a place.

We had been married for a year when I got pregnant. I was still in the midst of changing from being a singleton in the sense of my household habits to that of a married person’s habits. Getting rid of one’s old habits and finding the married ones—ones that suit your partner, meaning, not leaving wet towels on the floor, and dishes in the sink, or loading the dishwasher incorrectly, cups all over the house, or the microwave open, for example, and learning that, everything does in fact have a place. Becoming pregnant made this more important. I was going to be a mother. Everything had to be in its right place.

This revolutionary change in me, caring if things had a place, was important, because I had never cared if things had a place. I was a chaotic person for many years prior to getting married, and was still of a somewhat young adult when I did get married, having trouble finding my way to what many consider adult habits when the blessing of marriage found me. At that time, I for some reason still found order in my chaos.

For example, I still had a “clothes chair” (something, my husband still allows, on occasion). And, it should be noted that my husband, refuses to believe that a “clothes chair” is a real thing, but, because he is eleven years older than me, he is kind and patient with me as I grow up and past these youthful habits.

But after the spice rack, it was like a gate had broken open. Suddenly, I was organizing the house. We got a first aid kit and I labelled it neatly. There was a  medicine cabinet. I neatly labelled the pasta jar and the sugar jar and the nuts jar. The cook books had their place above the stove. I noticed that every day, my husband left the microwave just a little bit open, at least three times a day (this is his married habit) and I remind him of it constantly.

It feels weird saying this now, as I am happily settled with a baby and a husband that I love very much, but, I remember the time before this when I thought that this type of life was so strange and foreign to me. In the sense that, not that I didn’t want to be the ‘married person with kids who has an organized house with a spice cabinet’, but that I simply didn’t understand them. I felt that if I were to become like that, I would be “giving in”—giving up a part of myself. And I had always rebelled against that sense of suburban living, something, I now look forward to and dream of having—something that I now have myself. Something that I revel in. I get annoyed, now, if things aren’t in their place. I now dream of an even more organized, bigger home, with a better spice rack than I have now— or, a garden, where we can grow our own plants, tomatoes, perhaps.

Before, I didn’t understand why people wanted to give up having fun to go off and have mini vans. Now, I wonder what kind of mini-van I’m going to have… and I take great pride in the small details of our home, pique with interest at the things that they talk about on Rachel Ray, like egg timers that sing, or toaster bags, and, countertop gardens that grow your own spices. Because, like I said, this all began with my spice cabinet. I realized, one day, while cleaning the spice cabinet, that I had “made it” as one of those people that I never thought I would become, even at times rebelling against, and then, I found myself wiping down spice cabinet counters with joy, and I’d somehow transformed into one of them.

Certainly, I’d changed. Marriage and pregnancy had changed me. But this was just the start of it.

My husband, and my son, changed me in a way I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand. They, my family, have loved me so wholly in a way that I never thought I would be loved. And that complete sense of love has given me such freedom to be the person that I have always wanted to be. It has made me whole. It has made me a better and more accountable person. It has given me purpose. It has taught me so much about love, and how to be a better person for others, in return. It has made me more sensitive. It has taught me, I think, after all the broken hearts that I’ve had, where swore off men for good, that the perfect man really does exist, and he’s mine. Forever. Really. My handsome husband who is now a super-hot dad, who changes diapers, and farts, but I really don’t mind it. And he cuddles with me, and knows my favourite foods, and all the shades of my moods, and how to react to them, he knows when to be complementary, but not too complementary, and he knows when to be tough, and he knows when to be kind. He knows when to use his years and to teach me something, and he knows when to hold back, and let me learn. He makes a great steak, great eggs, really great eggs, but a great steak too. And I’ve taught him, in time, to make great salmon. I’ll take the credit for that. He knows when to love me, and he knows when to be my friend, because we are best friends, as well as lovers, and that carries us through sometimes. He puts all of his effort into small tasks so that they make a big impact, each little thing is filled with so much love. We laugh about absolutely everything together. He makes me laugh when I am crying, all the time. This is a gift of his. He is the funniest man that I have ever met, in my entire life, and I’m so glad that he is mine.

And the secret to me realizing all of this, all of this stuff, lies again with the spices. Standing in my homey kitchen, when my son was almost nine months old, I was cleaning out the spice cabinet. I picked up a bottle of cumin to cook some curry and I looked at it. I looked past the bottle and into the spice cabinet. In that moment I realized just how different I had become. I was a mom with an organized spice cabinet. A mom with an organized home. It gave me another “aha” moment of all that had happened and also changed since my son had been born. I made this spice cabinet. I made this kitchen. My spice cabinet reminds me of this all the time. Of the fact that I have accomplished, this homey, lovely kitchen, for my children, and of who I am now, married, as a mom, with a beautiful little boy, and a beautiful life. A beautiful life that I have created for my family.

Now, my son is past one year old, and I still find myself having those moments in that kitchen, however brief, of, thinking, have I really become this person? The one who knows where the Tylenol is kept and asks fitful questions at the Pediatrician office about solid foods and the right yoghurt for our son and the right Tylenol for his weight, because he has outgrown the Tylenol amount since the last time I gave it to him, and then panics that I asked too many questions. (As if children come with a handbook?)

It feels weird admitting that Marriage isn’t all hot sex and take out, like it was back then. But the better side of marriage, isn’t all hot sex and take out, life isn’t all hot sex and take out. Marriage is the good bits in between. The fact that someone stays long after the hot sex and take out, and wants to grow old with you and understand your ins and outs. That is what becomes romantic in time. As I understand it, Marriage, especially with a new baby, is hot sex when it works, when your feelings both collide, like when the kid is asleep and you are both in the kitchen laughing and cooking dinner and dancing, or quickly, while he is in the other room, or on a vacation, in the hot tub, or in your own bed, in the middle of the night, really quietly. And then there are the times when you both make dinner for each other, your favorite dinner, just because you love each other, and then you cuddle, and the day washes away with the scent of each other’s skin, watching murder tv shows, or your favorite show that you both enjoy, laughing at what is going on, in your own secret language together, curled up with your best friend, and knowing that nobody else in the world could be better at doing that than just them. At the end of the day, I want nothing more than just to be with my husband. When I have a bad day, his arms seem to make it all better, just falling into them somehow. Love becomes different because of this, love shows in other ways. You learn to love what is.

When I have a bad day, and I can’t lie in my husband’s arms, I clean the spice rack, and it centers me. I have cleaned, I have labelled, I have reorganized and re-shelved the spices. It is, in a way, like a metaphorical peeling away of all the layers of myself that have been removed and replaced in this process of shedding and rebirthing over these last few years of marriage and kids.

I don’t know who I would be without my many selves who helped me to grow up. A woman’s heart is truly an ocean. Now that I have my own family, the time before they came into my life and made me whole feels like it was irrelevant —life didn’t seem to begin, at all, before now, with my family here, and until I had them. Until we all made our happy ending. I didn’t begin, until they came along. I am just beginning, now, and I can’t wait to see where I end up.

However many times I’ve changed as a woman, I’m most proud to be this one, the one here at home with my husband, my baby, and my spice rack.

Lillian is a contributing writer for The Mighty Site and her articles have been read and shared widely, many republished on sites such as MSN and Yahoo. Outside of this writing, she has been published for her poetry in The Eastern Iowa Review for “Sometimes I talk to you when you aren’t around.” She has also been published for her prose poetry at The Raw Art Review and was nominated for The Francis Ponge Prose Poetry Prize. She has had two pieces of memoir accepted at The San Antonio Writers’ Guild Annual Competition. She can be reached at lillianchinasmith@gmail.com.

Isabel J Wallace

To Wander in Dry Places

For P. Barclay

The house was thin but tall, like it had done its best to emulate the sand pines that framed it. Salt and the vague scent of dead things from the shoreline clung to curtains that shielded every window. With the right turn of the head, the peeling paint that crept up from the baseboards looked like writing that might resolve into words. 

The house was old, empty.

Marion had never forgiven it.

***

Marion’s grandpa used to say that a building was either alive or dead. People poured breath into them, and sometimes, if there was sufficient feeling, the buildings soaked it up until it became tangible. Their spindly ghoul of a house on Boughry Bend was undeniably alive, but it was nothing like the romantic notion her grandpa wove. 

The first morning he told her the story, they’d been sitting in the living room, behind a sheet suspended by hay-strings. Pulling the sheet closed shielded the corner where her grandpa’s mattress rested on the floor. On the other side, her parents were screaming in voices that wound together like a braid of thunder.

But, behind the partition, her grandpa told her in a whisper about enchanted libraries that absorbed into their shelves the wonder of a thousand enraptured readers. He told her about a happy cottage built into the branches of a tree, whose windows glittered with the dreams of the children inside. He was careful, so careful, to feed her stories full of hope. It was, in many ways, the only avenue by which hope was available to Marion.

That sustained her. It helped her to learn things beyond the simple fact that her parents’ eyes could scan a room and never once rest on her, or that the time between their leaving and returning was always growing.

The breath soaked up by the Boughry Bend house was noxious. The house lived, born from bitter animosity and neglect.

Marion and her grandpa spent a lot of time trying not to breathe in the same.

***

She was eleven when her grandpa fell. A shout from the front porch sent Marion running down the narrow stairs, bouncing off the wood-paneled walls, spiraling, spiraling. 

He’d slipped on a rain-slick step, and his head was wet with red, from a place just above his ear. It took an unspeakable number of minutes for Marion to realize she was sobbing, in shock and at a complete loss for what to do. They were alone, always alone. She wanted to call an ambulance, but she knew that if she did, her mother would—

There was static in her ears.

“I’m okay, kiddo,” Grandpa reassured, and it seemed like he might have been telling her that for quite some time. “I’m okay. We’ll get this cleaned up. No reason to cry.”

Later, she couldn’t remember getting him inside the house. The next thing that lodged in her mind was sitting with him on the kitchen floor, a towel pressed to his head. She folded it into a tight square and used a scarf to secure it in place.

When her mom came home, jolting into the house like a lightning strike, she said nothing about her father’s makeshift bandage, his mottled bruising, or the blood on their clothes.

Marion had gone through life unseen; she didn’t know why she expected that night to be any different. She burned herself making dinner, too gutted by lingering fear to remember a potholder. The walls of the house rattled.

***

Beneath Marion’s bed, there was a shoebox that sheltered a journal of pressed flowers and leaves. Many of them were coated in a script of black pen that, by design, was barely discernible. Every time she’d lost a tooth as a child, her grandpa left a piece of nature beneath her pillow and told her the tooth fairy traded teeth for fairytales.

He’d make a big show of adjusting his glasses and straining to read tiny fairy handwriting. Then, once the story was told, he’d show her how to fold the flower or leaf in a coffee filter and weigh it down with a phone book. By the time she’d lost all her baby teeth, she had a book of stories about knights and pirates and fairy queens.

That shoebox was one of the few things she took with her when she left, eighteen and college-bound, with a scholarship and cash her grandpa had kept hidden in the battery chamber of a lantern.

It was incredible how much guilt could be attached to one suitcase and a purse with a badly-peeling strap.

“You’ve gotta go, kiddo.” He sounded so sure of it. There was no tremor in his voice, no hint of hesitation. He was as solid as an oak in the driveway, supporting her weight while she cried the first tears she’d shed since he’d fallen on the porch. “This house had you in its teeth, but not anymore, you hear?”

But what about you? Marion wanted to ask, but he never gave her the chance. He recognized the question before it frothed up to the surface, and he talked over it every time. With the masterful turn of phrase natural to him, he redirected every possible sentence into a memory, into an anecdote with more charm than her whole life, until she couldn’t possibly think of the future.

Her grandpa wanted her to escape Boughry Bend, even if he couldn’t.

***

They talked on Sunday nights. She regaled him with stories of her roommate, Dorothy, who was more person than any person Marion had ever met. Looping arms with Dorothy was like taking a solemn oath to embark on an adventure every morning at 8am, with whipped-cream coffee, the safety to complain and mouth-off, and that spoonful-of-sugar amazement of being recognized by nearly every person they encountered.

Marion had never experienced anything like it. She wished she could feel things the way Dorothy did, the way any of Dorothy’s friends did. They laughed, and they were alive in that laughter. They were angry, and it was a vibrant slash that they could stitch up with the application of sincere words. They were sad, and they were honest; they expected change.

Beside them, Marion was built of splinters. Beside them, Marion was rotting in the ocean breeze. Beside them, she was numb. She’d never been so aware that she was a stranger to herself.

Her grandpa listened to her stories, humming with understanding and absolute engagement. He liked Dorothy, liked to hear about all the ways Marion was cobbling together a life away from Boughry Bend.

He never talked about how he was, expertly steered himself into lies of omission if Marion asked.

Sometimes, Marion thought she could hear the floorboards creaking through the phone, like flexing claws or gnashing teeth.

***

Just over two years later, Marion started working as a pharmacy tech at Brogna Pharmacy. It was a small, brick building stacked between a dry cleaners and a used book store. Brogna Pharmacy was alive, but not like the old house was. It was closer to the places in Grandpa’s stories. It was a little grumpy, like its owner, but kind and doing its best to help anyone who came through its door. The smell of dust, chocolate, and spearmint dug itself into the storefront, and it settled over her like a blanket of comfort every time Marion walked in.

When it happened, she was on shift, and the clock hands were inching towards closing time. Dorothy called the pharmacy line, and Mr. Brogna’s face paled when he handed the receiver to Marion. A nurse had called, looking for her. A stroke, Dorothy was saying, frantic, worried, hurting for her, for them. Get to the hospital, quick as you can.

She went as quickly as she could, but her car was almost out of gas, and his hospital was a county over, and it wasn’t quick enough. In a voice like a repeating radio signal, like some iterative haunted thing, Marion asked what had happened, but all the nurse could tell her was that a neighbor dropped him off. There was no family. They’d had her number on file from a previous visit… one he’d never told her about.

His time of death was 19:41. Marion’s mind refused to latch onto the fact that she hadn’t been able to say goodbye. It shunted her thoughts sideways along a nearby, peripheral path, something close to the real wound but not exact— as though that was somehow safer.

Marion hadn’t been at the hospital at 19:41, but where was she when her grandpa died? Standing at the queue in the gas station? The card reader was down again; it was perfectly plausible. Had she been driving? What song might have been playing? Did it happen while she was at the red light by the feed store?

Why hadn’t she looked at a clock? 

The next morning, while the sun was only a suggestion outside her window, tears pooled in her eyes until they tipped over and fell. Her body was still. Like a string had been pulled taut, Marion turned her head to read the tear-blurred glow of her alarm clock. It was 06:48, and no matter how much she wanted it to, that didn’t mean anything.

***

Marion reached the other side of summer. She grieved in the apartment she and Dorothy now rented, the one with the extra room that they wouldn’t use (but that, in another life, her grandpa might have).

Dorothy sat across from her. She was two thirds of the way through a story about her most recent ex, who, after months of no contact, had called and apologized for placing the blame of two people on her shoulders alone. It was a story about catharsis, about a relationship with no villains, a relationship with plenty of caring that simply wasn’t meant to be. “It’s good, isn’t it?” Dorothy said with such gentle introspection that there could only be an ulterior motive. “To get closure?”

Marion nodded, but it felt like a poorly-told lie. Who was she to answer for something she’d never had?

“You lie in the littlest ways, you know,” Dorothy observed, but there was no recrimination in it, just the golden familiarity of a friend.

“Say what you mean,” Marion whispered into her coffee.

“I’m worried about you.”

Worry. It chilled her to the bone, being worried about. Marion wet her lips, and the next words came out like a moth that had been struggling its way up her throat. “I lived next to the beach my whole life and never swam there. Other beaches, lakes, rivers, pools, sure… But never where I lived.”

“Why?” Dorothy asked, soft.

She thought of that house, lurking between the pines with dark, blank eyes and a hungry mouth. If she closed her eyes, she could see it, see the wood starting to buckle, feel the wind stick to her skin and hair and clothes and heart, hear the tide like a creature taking great lungfuls of rancid air, see the house waiting, see the house watching.

Without expression, Marion stared at her coffee and the swirl of slowly-separating cream. “I would have drowned.” She thought of the shoebox beneath her bed and of the stories inside of it, of the hope. She thought of a kind old man who had slept on a mattress on the floor. “I would have drowned, and I couldn’t leave him.” There were tears in her eyes, again. Again, again. Marion had gone so many years without crying, and now it crept up on her, a specter hovering at her shoulder. “But I did leave him, and he died alone.”

“Oh, Marion, honey…” Dorothy almost knocked over their cups in her haste to take Marion’s hands in her own. “He wasn’t alone.” She smoothed her thumbs over Marion’s knuckles. “Is he with you right now?”

“Yes,” Marion whispered. “Everywhere I go.”

“Then doesn’t it follow that you were with him?”

Finally, finally, her head bent, and the crack in the dam became insurmountable. This time, when Marion cried, it wasn’t a quiet stream being rung from a root-bound heart. It extended through her entire body. Every piece of her cried, every piece from mind to rib. She was crying for the little girl she’d grown from, and for a grandfather with brittle, painful bones who made sure she lived that long. She was crying for their past and for her future, for the versions of them who hadn’t known what was coming, and the versions of her who would remember it forever.

***

The thought came to her on a Sunday, around the time she used to pick up the phone and dial Boughry Bend. 

She couldn’t call Grandpa. She’d never hear his voice again, never ask him anything, never listen to another story, never tell one and hear the way his laughter turned into a yell when she was funny enough to surprise him. There was nothing left that they could share, but there was something Marion could do in his name.

***

It was night when Marion arrived. There were no lights. Even the big security bulb that her grandpa had installed in the treeline was dark.

She sat in the car, idling for three and a half songs that couldn’t keep her tethered. Then Marion got out, let the car door catch on the slope of grass, and confronted a monster. The scent of the sea struck her between the shoulder blades, threatened to pierce straight through her until it pushed out a torn heart.

The dirt hadn’t changed. It still sucked at the soles of her shoes on the walk up the drive. Her mom’s car was nowhere to be seen, but then again, it never was. That was for the best. She was here to make an ending for the worst chapter in her life. There was no writing an ending for a person she didn’t know.

Her hands were fists hidden in her dress pockets when she reached the porch. For the first time in a very long while, her thoughts felt ordered, clear, like she’d been writing them for years. They were easy to speak. “When I was a kid,” she started. “Grandpa told me buildings were alive or dead.” She shrugged a shoulder, and some nameless weight with it. “You’re alive, and I used to think it was my parents who made you that way. But they didn’t; how could they? They were never here.”

Marion touched the toe of her shoe to the step where Grandpa had fallen and struck his head. There wasn’t anything left of the bloodstain, and that was absurd, because had they ever really stopped? Falling, bleeding, bruising, crying out… It didn’t seem fair that the house wouldn’t remember. 

“It was me and Grandpa,” she said, and the wind carried the words, wrapped them in breath. “You fed on our fear, our loneliness, our abandonment. Well, I can’t give you that anymore.” Marion reached out her hand, fingertips barely grazing the railing. “Because the truth is… I’ve stopped being afraid of you.” 

There was a little apartment one county over, and she was sharing it with a girl she might love. No matter how often her mind tried to paint it as a lie, it wasn’t. The reality was that she had a friend. Friends, even if most didn’t understand why she was so quiet or still. The memories stretching between them were more than enough to sew a sail, or a banner in the hands of a knight, or a fairy queen’s gown. It was more than enough to warm a home. 

“And I’ve been found.” Not just by her friends, but by herself. “I’m not alone.”

Last, with all the gravity of a heavy door falling closed, Marion told it, “I’ve killed you.”

Isabel J Wallace is a queer writer and registered nurse working in the wilds of North Florida. The swamp has left her predisposed towards ghost stories and the certainty that something is always lurking just out of sight. She’s been published in Malaise: a Horror Anthology, as well as in Smitten: this is what love looks like. She can be found @izzyjowalls on Twitter and Instagram.

Nicole Beck

Hyperthymesia

They hung in the air like persistent dust. Hundreds of wraiths marking out trails from bed to bathroom, toilet to sink, kitchen to front door. I had a notion they’d started pressing together, clumping. Unless I was in a hurry, I walked around those sections. One spot in particular, by the bedroom window, bothered me.

“My wraiths are acting weird,” I said to my girlfriend that night. I hadn’t meant to say anything.  “Have yours ever gotten foggy?”

Her lack of alarm kept me calm. She was certain I was overthinking it. I inspected the layers of fingernails in hues of purple polish. I admired the gestural sweep of my hair, the gooseflesh on my breasts.

We were both relieved that I hadn’t been crying as much. Waking up one morning to a dim space, I noticed the light from that window was obscured.  I approached the nest of wraiths and put out my hand. It came away wet, with droplets of many colors quivering on my fingers. At night when we chatted, I made sure that corner of the room was off-screen.

“I’m low on cash right now, I had to get a refund for that ticket. Sorry I’m an idiot. Next month, all right?”  I told her it was okay. More time for me to figure out how to hide the super wraith. It draped the curtainless window, blocking the light. I didn’t dare touch it again.

Though the calculations were notoriously inaccurate, I estimated it was composed of something like eleven thousand impressions of me. I’d had several years to accumulate them. For months I’d been moaning about moving out.

“Hey, your screen’s glitching,” she complained. I glanced at my own face in the rectangle and hit the button to hide the video. She gave an irritated groan as I fled to the bathroom. In front of the mirror, I tugged out a section of hair to its full length. Sucked in my breath. Through the last two inches I could see the tile floor.

I moved to the threshold and peered into my bedroom. The super wraith was almost too much for my eyes to process. I crept closer. Its edges, particularly my hairline, looked more substantial than ever.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s my camera,” I called towards the screen, “Finally gave up. I’ll just watch you.”

Though she didn’t believe me, she didn’t argue. I uploaded a still image of myself and refused to turn on video. Part of me knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with a placeholder. Our nights got shorter and quieter, which suited me. As the super wraith developed, I went on disappearing.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I lost track of time. I was waiting for it to move. Waiting for the scream to fly out of my throat, for my head to drop forward and my eyes to well up. Waiting till it became solidly real, and I ceased.

Nicole Beck (she/her) lives and writes in Philadelphia, where she went to study art and never left. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, published by dancing girl press and Red Bird Chapbooks. Her flash fiction has appeared in Rue Scribe and Coffin Bell. She also writes book reviews of science fiction and fantasy for Strange Horizons. Drop her a line at nicoleelizabethbeck@gmail.com.

Matt Townsend

My Version: The Novel by Noel Lovett’s Father

Everything anyone could ever want to know about the writing life of Noel Lovett’s father, Martin Lovett, is there, accessible to read, in his novel, My Version. Applying the term ‘accessible’ to anything else about My Version would be grossly misleading. At eight hefty volumes in length, the novel is more commonly referred to as impenetrable or unreadable. My Version recounts the story of the writing of My Version in painstaking, convoluted and circular detail. A writer writing about the process of writing is not to many readers’ taste, and understandably so. Not that there isn’t a narrative—there is. And not that not being read passes as critical judgement—many of the most lauded novels are rarely read in their entirety except by the most dedicated scholars. Of those few who attempt to read My Version, most probably do so out of a passionate interest in Noel Lovett. They hope Noel’s father’s biographical novel will enlargen the picture of their idol. They are no doubt disappointed to discover a thoroughly digressive and long-winded work, opposite in style and content to everything Noel stands for. Even fewer, if any, would find their passion up to the task of sustaining readership beyond the first volume. Indeed, fans of Noel Lovett are perhaps the least likely demographic to appreciate My Version, meaning most readers who pick up Martin’s work are predisposed against it. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the rare mentions ever made of My Version are disparaging. Unfortunately for Martin Lovett, My Version is rarely read and never acclaimed. Yet there is a certain scandalous and overlooked originality to My Version, worthy of consideration.

First Attempt: Racing Against the Clock

Lengthy, and according to some, impenetrable, novels inspired Martin’s foray into writing. Through fragmented but detailed recollections (predominantly in the first half of Volume One and the middle chapters of Volume Two of My Version), the reader can piece together a picture of Martin’s precursory efforts. At 30 years of age, Martin completed a Masters in Creative Writing. More importantly, he read Knausgaard and Proust. Or at least he read several volumes of each. But he read the Proust in French which, in his view, counted for more than reading the entire oeuvre in English. The point is, he was impressed enough to want to emulate or even exceed the accomplishments of these masters. The most valuable lesson he deduced was that to write great literature is one thing, but to do so using the bare essentials of one’s own life and reflections in order to reveal a new understanding of the human condition, is altogether superior, perhaps transcendental.

Martin set about writing the failed precursor to My Version. Some of the drafts survive, sent to publishers in the hopes of obtaining an advance. The drafts reveal little more about the project than Martin describes himself in My Version. The work is pure emulation of Knausgaard and Proust, adopting all their dominant tropes, with a few minor innovations, and applying them to Martin’s own personal experience in an attempt to draw out poignant nostalgic and philosophical revelations. Martin worked hard, dedicating the majority of each day to fleshing out word after word. Financial support came from his wife, Samantha, especially once all his petitions for advances were rejected. The rejections didn’t perturb him. He knew enough about great writers’ struggles to consider the publishing establishment a poor judge of art and greatness. If anything, the rejections and a sense of indebtedness to Samantha increased Martin’s resolve.

Another practical factor encouraged Martin to work with disciplined urgency. He was racing against time—namely, Samantha’s biological clock. Older than Martin and adamant about having children, Samantha had imposed a deadline that was no longer negotiable. Sooner than he wanted, Martin would be a father, a family man. Inevitably, this would entail more responsibility and less free time. Martin didn’t consider fatherhood the end to being a writer, but he believed it could spell the end to being an aspiring writer. Without some form of recognition or establishment, how could he overcome the imposing challenges of fatherhood? He already found it terribly draining having to battle his own self-doubt. In order to persevere through the added burden of a child, he needed prior vindication. At the very least, he needed to see some worthy output, to garner some momentum, to know he was capable, before it became all the more difficult.

Panic was increasingly Martin’s driving force. His writing hours extended. He poured everything he could muster onto the page, barely revising, just relentlessly trying to write something impressive. Then the deadline arrived. Martin stopped pulling out. As the initial erotic novelty of ejaculating inside Samantha wore off, Martin realised that the deadline was really just the first step towards the next stage, Samantha falling pregnant, whereby the real deadline would be set. Every time he climaxed, Martin thought to himself, ‘Please not this one, please not this one, please not this one.’ He wanted more time, to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Sometimes he prayed that one of them was infertile. Preferably him, because then Samantha could leave him and still have children. Thereafter he would make sure to only pair with younger less family-oriented women. Then again, Samantha had been good to him, supporting his writing. There was no guarantee another woman would do the same.

Martin would never have to find out. First came the symptoms, then the confirmation. Samantha was pregnant. When people congratulated Martin, all he heard was, ‘Now your time is really running out.’ When they said, ‘It’s so exciting,’ all he heard was, ‘Soon your dream will die and you’ll be one of us.’ He doubled down. He took caffeine pills to begin early in the morning and go late into the night. He streamlined all his non-writing activities. For cooking dinner (his responsibility) he began to make bulk meals to last the week. The rest of the time he only ate cereal, bread and cheese, supplementing this basic diet with vitamin pills. He bathed once every three days. He took strong sleeping pills to counter the effects of the caffeine pills. He barely went out and never socialised. His behaviour and state deteriorated. Samantha barely tolerated him.

Failure

All this effort was to no avail. If anything, it exposed Martin’s shortcomings. Eventually taking stock of all he had written, Martin realised there was nothing worthy of note. He had specific misgivings about his style and form, but the problem was bigger. What was really letting his writing down, which had haunted it from the beginning and was now abundantly clear through sheer volume, was the weakness of his own memory. There wasn’t enough content. Despite all the conjectures and extrapolations, it was all too evident that the material of Martin’s past was vague and meagre. He had failed to evoke anything vivid, anything profound and revelatory, anything detailed enough to be interesting. Martin turned to books and articles for advice on summoning and exploring the memory, but nothing helped. How did Martin’s heroes do it? he wondered. They could elicit episodes in their lives down to the most minute and mundane details of dialogue and even what they ate. Had they kept thorough journals? Or did they simply possess superior minds? Martin blamed modern technology for ruining the capacity of his memory, in order to avoid the potentially more damning possibility, that he lacked genetic genius.

Martin had failed. In the throes of despair, he momentarily threw himself more desperately into the enterprise, until Samantha intervened. She told him writing was bad for him. ‘And I’m bad for it,’ Martin responded despondently. ‘You have to stop,’ she said. ‘No more.’ To both of their surprise, Martin did just that. He abandoned writing, and with it, all the bad habits. He stopped taking drugs, he started cooking and eating healthier, he exercised and socialised again, he bathed and groomed daily. He found an entry-level office job. Two weeks out from Samantha’s due date, Martin was a changed man. In Samantha’s eyes, he was more like his old self. Martin found he didn’t miss writing at all. It was exhausting and stressful. Martin looked back on the recent years like someone looking back on a bad relationship, still aware of its dangerous appeal, but most of all relieved to have escaped.

Birth and Rebirth

The call came at work. On his way to the hospital, Martin reminded himself that his writing dream was officially over. The thought evoked neither sadness nor regret. It wasn’t the calamity his previous self would have expected. His life had simply adjusted. Instead of being a writer, he would be a father. His legacy would be his progeny. The old-fashioned way. Less spectacular, but perhaps more effective.

Martin and Samantha’s child entered the world at one in the morning. Bleary-eyed and dizzy from hours under fluorescent lights, Martin was called forward to greet the newest human (among several) into the world. Reaching out, Martin recognised his nerves, and concentrated on faking steady, confident hands. Once he had a good grip, he squeezed the baby against him. Looking down, he saw an alien-like creature, a worm with limbs, its skin blotted with traces of blood and other fluids. It was terrifying.

‘You’re a father,’ he heard Samantha say. She was sweaty and dishevelled in a way he had never seen before, as strange and perplexing as the child. He continued Samantha’s comment in his head, narrating to himself what was happening. He told himself this was his child and it needed him to survive. He described the significance of the moment, the characters, and the relationship unfolding. As he narrated to himself, familiarity emerged and he felt a certain bond to this strange little thing in his arms. In the same moment, a possibility entered his mind, set down and spread roots, germinated and spawned, scattering across and colonising his thoughts. He couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to. It brought back all his aspirations, his hope in the salvation of literature. He gripped the baby ever tighter. This baby. His child. A character of his own creation, carrying his DNA and dependent on him for existence. This fragile creature, this individual to be, this being in the process of becoming, would be his literary subject. It would be his project in art as in life as in art. Martin had found his muse.

Martin, claiming a change of heart, insisted upon another name to the one previously agreed. He proposed Noel. He didn’t tell Samantha the reason for his preference, its close proximity to the word ‘Novel.’ Martin endlessly ruminated over the many potential ways of interpreting the significance of the missing letter ‘v,’ most often interchanging it with the letter ‘b,’ from which he extrapolated the verb ‘to be,’ and went from there, extending all the way through to his intended contribution to the literary canon.

The Task at Hand

Martin immediately set to work. I mean immediately. He returned the baby to Samantha, excused himself, found some paper and a pen at reception, and began taking notes. He wrote down everything that had happened and was happening. He jotted down his thoughts and feelings about the arrival of the protagonist of his novel. Everything he wrote was real and immediate. It was natural and complex. Martin had a clear mind, a clear objective and a clear strategy. The story wrote itself, because it was the story of life unfolding.

One other thing was extremely clear, even in those first moments: he had to keep the novel a secret. For one, Samantha might not welcome his return to writing. More importantly, the authenticity of the story relied on the ignorance of its characters to the fact they were being documented. Nobody could know.

While he was on paternity leave and Samantha was immobilised with Noel, Martin would regularly excuse himself to the ‘toilet.’ Samantha initially mocked his newly weak bladder, before it became normalised. Martin would also use the excuse of performing errands, disappearing for several moments to take down notes. On weekends, Martin went for a ‘run,’ really going to the local library to work.

Upon his return to work, Martin experimented with several strategies for writing in secret. Eventually he settled on—besides the occasional random opportunity—waiting until Samantha fell asleep before sneaking to the toilet. When he was more confident, he would use his study. If Samantha awoke, he would say he had gotten up to tend to Noel. Indeed, Martin readily volunteered for night duties, stealing extra moments to write. Samantha didn’t question it, eager for the extra sleep. At work, Martin was a zombie, but his tasks didn’t require much effort.

Father-Biographer-Novelist

As a baby, Noel’s development was slow and the days generally uneventful. But Martin’s scope included everything relevant to Noel’s existence and he drew in themes far and wide, from daily habits, to his and Samantha’s relationship, to modern parenting practices, to social and political events, and so on. As he considered only fair, Martin wrote a lot about himself, after all, he was Noel’s father and literary biographer. Martin wrote at length about the interaction of these two roles, and of being both a narrator and a character. He wrote about his struggles writing about Noel. He wrote about what it meant to write about his struggles writing about Noel. He wrote long transgressions on the relationship between reality and art, especially as they interacted in real time. He discussed the extent and consequences of art, of taking one’s own child as a subject. And so on. Repetition did not worry Martin, it was part of the process. In essence, all eight volumes of My Version contain endless rumination on fatherhood, writing and existence.

What holds all the philosophical digressions and conjectures together is Noel. Noel was the core, the narrative engine. Martin knew this and acknowledged it. And in Martin’s view, the father-child, author-subject dynamic gave the novel its great originality. It provided abundant material and transformed Martin into an essential omni-faceted figure, creating himself as both artist and art. It was perfect. It was all very metaphysical and impressive. From the very beginning, Martin was inspired.

Only one issue remained: when to publish. When could Martin reveal his masterpiece to the world? To delay was to withhold fame and fortune. It meant continuing in his dull job, unable to dedicate himself to full-time writing. But publishing meant revealing the secret. Samantha and Noel would discover they were literary subjects. Samantha might leave him and try to deny access to Noel. Even if she didn’t, all the natural authenticity funnelling into his novel would disappear. The enterprise would be over. Proust and Knausgaard never had this problem, only relying on themselves and their frustratingly impervious memories. But Martin’s project relied on an unwitting and innocent Noel. To publish was to lose the project’s primary resource. Martin risked sacrificing years of future material and the opportunity to definitively create an insurmountably great novel. Impossible. Martin had resolved to exceed Proust and Knausgaard at the very least in volume, knowing the important correlation with greatness.

The option of disguising everyone’s names did occur to Martin. But the inevitable success would spark immense interest in discovering the real sources. And not being able to take credit for his work seemed to defeat the whole point.

The Great Literary Project Continues

Noel grew into a child and the volumes began to accumulate. Martin faced constant challenges. He had to be adaptable. When Noel began daycare, Martin resorted to seeking regular updates from Samantha and the staff. Everyone took him for a committed, perhaps overzealous, caring father. In My Version, Martin analyses this perception made by others (Volume 2, Chapter 20). On the one hand, Martin considers that just because people don’t know the full extent of his motivations, doesn’t mean there isn’t truth in their perception. He is, after all, completely devoted to Noel, even if not purely as a ‘father’. On the other hand, considering the counterargument, Martin acknowledges the false pretence of his devotion and the hypocrisy of his double life. He expresses gnawing guilt. Of course, Martin’s guilt never led to any change in his enterprise. Nothing could sway his ambition. In the end, such moral dilemmas made for interesting material, as Martin admitted himself in analysing them. Hence the challenges could furnish as much material as direct unfettered access to Noel, and the two together provided a balance. Martin covered everything to a tireless fault.

After several years Noel grew active and articulate, providing Martin with more in-depth access to his subject and material. By the time Noel began school, Martin had initiated daily afternoon catch-ups, interviews disguised as bonding. Through these interviews Martin learnt about Noel’s daily activities, but more importantly, he interrogated and discovered Noel as a character, a character gradually developing thought and opinions, a character in the process of formation.

Time passed, more volumes accumulated. Martin managed to do more and more writing at work. He turned down promotions in order to stick to the job he knew by heart and could perform in less than half the time he was a given. Samantha never knew about these rejected opportunities.

Noel finished primary school and entered high school. The more Noel developed as an individual, the more Martin fleshed out his protagonist’s identity, together with his own role and techniques. During Noel’s first years at high school, Martin completed the draft of his sixth volume.

Martin didn’t realise until much later, but the process of writing his novel, which, almost as much as Noel, was the subject of his novel, had reached its peak.

The Unravelling Years

With puberty came Noel’s natural inclination towards independence. First Noel questioned the daily catch-ups, then resisted them, and finally refused outright to partake. This was just one of many acts of rebellion. A schism emerged. Noel was in open revolt. With so much at stake, Martin was caught unprepared. As a writer, he needed access and control. But the only authority he had was as a father, and his attempts to assert this authority were heavy handed, and, as he very well knew, inauthentic. Samantha often took Noel’s side, accusing Martin of overreacting and taking the rebellion too seriously, too personally. He felt himself assuming the role of the overbearing dolt. The harder he tried, the more Noel rejected him.

As per previous challenges, the standoff with Noel initially furnished ample material. True to his long-winded, earnestly intellectual, and self-deprecating introspective style, Martin wrote exhaustively about his own faults and tactlessness (Volume Seven, Chapter 5 – 10). In one chapter (Volume Seven, Chapter 7), he concedes it would be more strategic to withdraw and accept Noel’s rebellion, in order to establish a peace upon which to forge a new relationship. But Martin couldn’t abide by this sensible resolution. Desperation to know everything he was missing, forced him to behave with impulsive and self-defeating clumsiness.

Slowly, as the standoff only prolonged and worsened, Martin’s analysis and meta-analysis ran dry, repetitive and stale. The novel began to fall apart, too estranged from its crucial core: Noel.

Delving continually deeper into analysis, at one point Martin discovered that Noel hated him. Worse yet, he suspected the feeling was mutual. While this provided a new and interesting dilemma to extensively exploit (Volume Seven, chapters 23-39), it was only a puddle in a well running dry. Martin knew it did not bode well in the long term for an author and his subject to hate one another. It was a damning omen, suggesting the demise of a previously fruitful relationship.

A Fateful Occurrence

Several months out from Noel’s eighteenth birthday, Martin returned home from work one evening to find his laptop, and the cabinet draw with his manuscripts, unlocked and open. He had forgotten to store everything away from the previous night’s writing session. Over all the years, this was only the third time he had made such a dangerous blunder. But on the other occasions he had discovered his mistake first thing in the morning before anyone else could have noticed. Never had he left himself exposed all day. Worse yet, Noel had been home, supposedly studying for exams. It was too wishful to assume, as per appearances and common practice, that Noel hadn’t once left the bedroom. Was his secret discovered?

Martin was unsure what to do. He refrained from a hasty interrogation. Instead he hung around the kitchen, hoping to catch Noel and discern any telltale signals. At one point Martin went to the toilet and when he returned the bedroom door was open and Noel had gone. Over the coming days Noel avoided Martin. This antisocial behaviour was hardly unusual, but Martin read the worst into it. When actual interactions did occur Martin felt the usual scorn, but he also thought he detected extra condescension and spite. He was haunted by the terrible prospect that Noel knew. But it was impossible to know for sure, and he couldn’t risk a direct confrontation in which he might accidentally raise suspicions and give the secret away.

Last Days

Martin persevered as the conditions for his grand literary project deteriorated. As much as the animosity between him and Noel grew, the material withered away. Martin experimented. One experiment, of which several examples made it into My Version (Volume 7, chapters 10 and 14), involved imagining different versions of the life Noel was leading. However, Martin couldn’t stop his resentment from creeping in, depicting Noel as a caricature, a pathetic sulking teenager, unworthy as a subject of the type of great literature he was creating, and inconsistent with the Noel hitherto depicted. Thus the imaginings rang hollow and Martin addressed these failings in long analyses. The core problem remained. It was untenable and undermined everything. Martin needed access to the real Noel.

Credit must be given to Martin for his effort and perseverance, particularly during the final three years in which he battled against the odds. Over and over he reached out or tried to corner Noel, only to be pushed further away. He kept analysing and experimenting. He kept trying to rediscover the real Noel who wanted nothing to do with him. He reworked his drafts over and over again.

Noel finished school and began university, studying creative writing, the last remaining point of commonality with Martin, but of course they couldn’t talk about it. Although Noel still lived at home, Martin was by now completely ignorant of all the essential activities and personality traits of his subject. If anything, Noel’s entrance into adulthood only seemed to be solidifying the hatred between them.

After long consideration, Martin concluded that there was nothing left to do. He resolved to take the previous five or so years of writing and thoroughly edit and condense the material into a concluding volume, in preparation for publication. He was conceding defeat, and with strong misgivings. Certainly he had more than enough volume to outweigh Proust and Knausgaard by now. But he didn’t have the right ending. He laboured tirelessly to find a suitable ending out of what he had, without success. No matter which way he worked it, he found what he thought everyone else would see: a great novel with an unfulfilling ending. Falling short. Unfinished. Failing. He kept trying all he could through the editing process. Little did he know that the delay would do the greatest damage to the legacy of his work.

The End: The Subject Strikes Back

One fateful day, Martin returned home to find Noel’s bedroom emptied. On the kitchen bench, he found a gift-wrapped package and an envelope addressed to him. Noel’s note inside informed Martin of the obvious: Noel had left. Martin found he didn’t care. He had by now given up on any emotional or productive relationship with Noel. But the letter also hinted at an impending calamity behind Noel’s decision, signing off with, ‘maybe one day you will forgive me, though I really doubt it and really don’t care.’ Martin unwrapped the package which contained a book. Fresh off the printer. By a big publisher too. The book was entitled Dumb Dad, by Noel Lovett. Martin began reading.

Dumb Dad is about Martin. More accurately, it is about Noel’s relationship with and highly critical reflections on Martin. Through minimal but highly emotive language, the slim novel-memoir recounts episodes from Noel’s life, which become increasingly detailed and lucid into maturity. All the episodes draw to the book’s scandalous climax: Noel’s discovery of Martin’s secret. Here Noel uses every literary and linguistic weapon available to evoke the sense of betrayal and outrage. Noel elaborates on all the selfish, manipulative and cruel motives that can be deduced in a father turning their child into the subject of their artistic aspiration. Worse for Martin, this aspiration is deemed nothing but self-indulgent bourgeois delusion. Martin is lampooned, caricatured and ridiculed. His novel is savaged as pretentious pseudo-intellectual drivel. Noel leaves absolutely no prospect of anything remotely redeemable about Martin. As most critics recognise, one of the greatest feats of Noel’s small book is its successful rendering, through endless indignation and irreverent spite, of a thoroughly unlikable antagonist. Martin is a pathetic, grotesque mess of a figure, unworthy of the pages he is described upon.

Battling his rapidly sinking heart, Martin read to the end and fell into a state of shock. He was hurt and insulted. He was undone and outmanoeuvred. He couldn’t consider the book a personal betrayal—he was self-aware enough. Instead he saw it as a betrayal of all he believed in, all he aspired to in art. Noel’s book shunned any fidelity to the pursuit of truth, balance and dignity. It went straight for the jugular. There was no considered insight, no existential revelation. Just hatred. It made Martin out as an Iago or a Uriah Heep, when he considered himself at the very least a Don Quixote or a Victor Frankenstein.

Despite these betrayals, Martin could see, to his greater dismay, something pure and powerful in Noel’s book. It had virility and its finger on the pulse of a type of irreverent literary zeitgeist. It was electric. It would never be great literature the likes of Proust or Knausgaard, but it would be a hit.

Martin was right. Dumb Dad was a sensation, rocketing Noel to instant literary stardom. Critics called it a cult classic, which, given its mainstream appeal, must have referred to the fanatical devotion it inspired. It spoke to youth and fury. Readers, particularly but not exclusively young, were treated to a story of absolute revenge, of a child turning the tables on a despicable parent. There was abundant schadenfreude in Martin’s comeuppance, punk energy destroying pretentious intellectual art. Martin found himself the victim of the worst kind of literary infamy. He and all he believed in was mocked to bits. His literary masterpiece was pre-emptively discredited, a laughing stock.

In this way his literary project cane to an end, out of his control and with nothing to show for it—or almost.

Prologue: After Defeat

Martin still pursued publication. He hoped against hope that some readers would judge his novel on its own merits, as the revelation it should have been. After much effort and waiting, one small publisher accepted the manuscript. In the acceptance letter, the publishing house noted that despite the unwieldy length of My Version, they hoped its infamy through Dumb Dad would make it of interest to fans and scholars.

In the eighth and final volume of My Version, Martin describes the impact of Dumb Dad and his own efforts at publication. Yet he never addresses what the reader might suspect, that these inclusions were at the behest of the publisher, to explicitly draw out the connection between the two works. The final volume bears the hallmarks of serious editing and reworking towards this intention. The title, My Version, is further evidence.

Somewhat ironically, whether at the behest of the publisher or not, the ending is successful, delivering a climax and a neat, fitting conclusion. Not that anything could save the reputation of Martin’s work by this stage. My Version was published to very modest attention, all of which focused on its status as the despicable fatherly project made famous in Dumb Dad. Many critics admitted to not bothering to read beyond the first volume, in which they only found confirmation of Noel’s most scathing criticism. Some even called (perhaps just to be provocative), Noel’s assessment too lenient. A few rare academic critics posited that My Version might contain some literary merit, predominantly as a counter-text or secondary reading to Dumb Dad.

After the publication of My Version, Martin disappeared and his whereabouts are currently unknown. His secret exposed, Samantha divorced him. They sold their house and no one was informed of Martin’s new address, including his publisher, although he still receives minuscule royalties. Noel has stated in recent interviews no knowledge of or concern for Martin’s whereabouts.

Matt Townsend is an Australian writer from the Perth Hills. He completed a PhD in European Studies and has lived in France, Sweden, Mexico and Scotland. His work has appeared in Dostoyevsky Wannabe: Dundee. He can be reached at mattvtownsend@gmail.com.

Nils Blondon

Sitting at the Center of the Earth

About my brother.

They discovered him days after he stopped answering the phone. Slumped over a bed, hands clasped like a man in the middle of prayer. Overdose. Mom refused to believe it. But I had to clean his room. The things I found peppered on the floor confirmed the story.

Dirty tinfoil like the scattered links of a cheap, unpolished chain. Little needles. Belts, laces, repurposed as tourniquets. And the childhood pictures. Smiling faces. Sunbathed beaches teeming with slick, overfed bodies. Overexposed, bleached by perfect white teeth. Everything was working then. He adhered to the rhythm of the world in perfect lockstep. Then I found a book wedged between the bed and the wall. The Things They Tell You in Heaven. The only book that he owned.

The sunlight hurt that day. When I got home, I knew I needed darkness. So I taped torn garbage bags on the windows and collapsed across the cream tiles of the bathroom with a towel wedged beneath the door and my thumbs in my ears.

***

A month later someone knocks. I get up and walk over the empty bottles that lay on the floor. Mom. She plugs her nose, pulls the bags from the windows. The light hits the room like a match dropped in a pool of gasoline. I hide my eyes, grope for the nearest shadow.

It’s been two weeks since I stopped answering the phone. Mom doesn’t want to believe it’s happening to me.

She finds things.

Little baggies caked in white residue, glass stems with burnt ends. A fridge left open so long the food has rotted. Everything damaged, bloodied. The apartment an abattoir.

“We need to help you,” she says. Her face bares new lines. Deep fissures like the potholed city roads. She runs the shower cold. The water is liquid fire. The shower head a dragon’s mouth. As I stand beneath the running water, I worry I might burn to death.

“I’ve made the call already.”

We get in the car.

My mother. She flinched when the phone rings.

All this time, and she still speaks of my brother in present tense. I’ve caught her in the closet with her nose on his clothes. “I love that smell,” she’ll say through a face full of fabric. “He’s still here. I can smell him.”  

She stops in the middle of the road and grabs my arm.

Drivers lean on their horns, cursing and spitting. Mom eases into traffic and drives between lanes. We cruise down the hill. The skyline is a pastel sketch smudged into the clouds. I know the hospital is nestled somewhere in that skyline. I’ve seen it before. It occupies the block like a saint between sinners.

“It’s a good place where we’re going,” Mom says. “They have a nice ward there. I’ve heard good things. My friend’s son is like you, and she says it helped him.”

Like you.

I wonder, what am I like?

Then she says, “Do you even remember calling last night? Do you know what you said?”

I don’t.

Her eyes are desperate. She keeps tightening her grip, asking what I meant.

“You said you dreamt about him. You said he’s in a cave. Why would you say that?”

She goes on like this, weakened by tears. An ambulance speeds past.

“You said you dream about him? Can you tell me about it, the dream? You’re so lucky to dream about him. Share it with me, please?”

***

Nightcrawler.

That’s the first thing I notice as the doors close and the lights dim. It’s scratched into the paint-by-numbers piece bolted above my bed like an artist’s signature.

They confiscate your sharps as soon as you arrive. Pat you down and delouse you like a creature with mange.

My nerves feel inflamed, dragged across a bed of nails. Then the valiums hit like a beam swung from the stained ceiling panels. There’s a finality to the feeling, a death without the afterlife. I sink into the bed, following my brother’s voice as it creeps from the mouth of the cave.

***

It’s hard to mourn what hasn’t left. While his body was eaten whole by the crematorium fires, his voice persists in the ditches of my subconscious.

 In the dream, I cup my hand around my ear and place it to the pinhole opening of the cave.  His voice is a dull echo muffled and stretched along its cool, damp contours. What he’s saying isn’t clear.

He calls out, I answer back, and he calls out again. His voice trembles like a streetcar through the sediment and rock. Why won’t he leave the cave and join me aboveground?

Maybe death’s a better deal than we’ve been led to believe.

***

Nightcrawler.

I run a finger over the word as though interpreting brail. Every noise is elevated. The humming of the lights, the un-oiled gears shifting and turning at the base of the city, as if these sounds originate inside my body. The red blinks from the camera in the corner. For a second, I imagine the scene as a kind of art installation. An exhibit at the center of a contemporary gallery. People coming and going, snapping pictures, pointing at the ill man at rest beneath the painting.

The staff took my pulse when I arrived. They grimaced and frowned and whispered amongst themselves. A man with hands like wax and veiny red skin wheeled me to the psychiatric ward and plopped me down. Gave me valiums. They waited by the bedside like pale-faced vigil-goers.

With all that attention, I felt like the last man alive. Then I faked a shaking so severe, I swear, the entire room shook. They pumped me with a fistful of those magic blue pills. I woke to a nurse with her thumb on my wrist. The energy between us was a splash of rosewater in a mug of rubbing alcohol, raw and sweet.

She visited my room with a smile and damp eyes.

Now when the doctor leaves and the staff in training retires to the observation room in the back, she’ll knock on my door and ask how I’m doing. She has an angel tattoo on the back of her neck. Its wings look worn, a shade too dark.

“I like your tattoo,” I say one day.

“It’s shit. I know it is.”

“It’s not shit. It’s fitting.”

“Are you telling me I’m angelic?”

“I’m not sure.”

She draws blood and plunges the needle deeper than before. My blood is a dense wine in the body of the syringe.

“You look familiar,” she says. She pulls the needle from my vein, applies a cotton swab with tape.

“I can’t figure out who you look like yet.”

The days pass. I watch her with other patients, fighting with hot pangs of an unwanted feeling. The longer she stays with them, the more it makes me sweat. My body tingles when she sits at the edge of my bed.

“You’re looking better,” she says, making her notes.

“I know I look like shit.”

“Like my tattoo?”

“Worse than your tattoo.”

She invites me to the staff room to meet with her friends. A thin nurse with fleshless hands taps the keyboard. Another sits texting in the corner. TV monitors line the far wall, broadcasting the goings on in each room in the ward. A patient rocks back and forth at the end of his bed. One sleeps.

I ask, “Is this where you keep the drugs?”

The thin one says, “He does look familiar, doesn’t he?”

The other nurse looks up from her phone and shrugs.

“This is where we keep the drugs, and this is where we watch you all to make sure you’re behaving,” the nurse replies.  

“What if we get out of line?”

The thin one pushes herself up from her seat. “We strap you down and electrocute the crazy out of you.”

My nurse shoves her friend. “Jesus, Laura!” Then she taps a smoke from her pack, shooing me from the room.

***

I sit against the wall beneath the painting with the lights off. The nurse opens the door and says: “Me and the staff were chatting. Trying to figure out why you look so familiar. We think we figured it out. You know who you look like?”

“Who?”

“Ryan Gosling.”

“From which of his roles?”

“Half Nelson,” she says laughing.

“I’ll take it.”

My heart regains its wings until the doctor interrupts, and it sinks back to the place where it’s been since my brother died.

The doctor asks, “How are you feeling?”

He never looks up from his phone.

“Not good.”

“Good. Good.”

He taps the face of his watch, picks at some food in his teeth with his tongue.

“You’re on track for discharge.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“That’s all right.” His fingers dance across the paperwork.

He asks the nurse to take my vitals and leaves without letting me know why.

She takes a blister pack from her pocket and pops some pills into my palm. They make the ward float inside a blue-and-beige cloud. I think, This is how my brother must feel in that cave. It makes a lot of sense that he won’t resurface.

***

The nurse wakes me up. Her hair’s unbound from its standard high bun. It hangs down the slope of her back like a floating shadow. She pulls smokes from her pocket, asks if I’d like to join her. I get up and follow her toward the burning-red exit sign at the end of hall. Patients snore, cough, cry from behind locked doors. We buzz out of the ward, into an elevator, shaking lower and lower through the guts of the building.

She puts a smoke in her mouth, bites it. Through clenched teeth, she says, “This is my secret spot.”

We reach the basement, walk through more doors, past musky sleeping mops and lidless garbage cans. The smell is like my grandma’s basement after a rainstorm.

A tremor passes underneath us. We stop. I catch my breath. She arranges a bit of disused scaffolding into a bench.

We smoke beneath the weight of the hospital. It’s a good feeling, to watch the smoke hang in blue halos at our faces. Captive to the disobedient spirit that led us here. She inhales, exhales, nods to herself. It’s like she’s coming to terms with a longstanding dilemma.

Another tremble rumbles by, louder this time. She asks me if I feel it. “We’re right above the subway,” she says. “Standing over half the people in the city.”

I put my hand on the floor, then push.

I feel them.

A million people, maybe more. A million faceless bodies crisscrossing just below. And now, with the nurse at my side and the smoke in my eyes, I detect my brother’s voice issue from the cave. See his face in sharp relief. The angular contours of his cheekbones, the way his stubble always seemed to stay at just the right length. His words right there, just beneath my palm. But while I feel them, and feel them deeply, they’re still incomprehensible. Notes without form. We must be very close to the cave he lives in now.

“Isn’t it cool?” the nurse says. “I love that rumble. I love to just close my eyes and think about all those people, what’s on their minds, where they’re going…”

I’ve never known a sensation as calm and pure as this.

With smoke leaving her nostrils and her eyes on the floor, she says, “You know, I read your file. I’m sorry about your brother.”

I take my hand off the ground.

“It’s okay.”

“It was an overdose?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

I don’t say anything.

“It’s such a sad thing to happen to a person,” she says.

“I guess so.”

She runs her hand across the space between us on the seat.

“Don’t you worry?” she asks.

“About what?

“That you’ll die like that. ”

Did I worry? Never.

To worry was a privilege. It implied there was a better future just behind the curtain. A city made of flowers and light instead of harsh brick. Worry meant a future that I hadn’t considered. My life was subjugated to the impulse of the moment.

“I guess I don’t really think of it much. Besides, who’s to say it’s so bad, dying the way he died? There are worse ways, right? Maybe he ended up someplace warm and safe. I mean, I have this dream about him—”

“How often?”

“Every night, pretty much. I don’t remember all of them, but I know he’s there.”

She pulls another cigarette from her pack, lights it with the still-glowing butt of the last.

“This isn’t your first time here either, is it?”  

“No.”

“Do you think it will be your last?”

“Who knows.”

“I hope it’s not.”

“Are you allowed to say things like that?”

“It’s a joke. You need to work on that sense of humour.”

“I’ve always thought I was pretty funny.”

“You think a lot of strange things.”

Drafts whistle through the brick. The air is cool, and it makes my arm hairs stiffen, but the feeling in my chest is one of safety and warmth. There’s a flicker in her eyes like a sparking lighter at the end of a dark alley. It feels like being a kid again. Me and my brother stealing cigarettes from Mom to smoke under the damp shade of the bridge. When the summer air was sweet with the smell of gum-stained asphalt and sweat hanging on to perfumed collar bones. Right now, it’s like we’re sitting at the centerof the earth.

She flicks a loose hair from her eye. The picture on her ID badge betrays a less burdened face. I inch closer until I feel her ribs rise and fall against mine. I’ve discovered my confidence. It was waiting for me in the underground hallways of the hospital. Not far from my brother, very close to his cave.

I slide my hand over hers.  

She pulls away.

I get up.

She follows, saying, “I can’t do this.”

I wished that I understood.

She adjusts her shirt, tucks in her ID badge. She turns and presses her forehead into the wall. I see that tattoo on the back of her neck.

“I’m sorry. This shouldn’t be happening,” she says.

“What shouldn’t be happening?”

“Being down here with you. Showing you this space. I was trying to be kind. I’m sorry.”

“You have been kind. You’ve been kind and it’s helped.”

“Maybe I’ve been too kind. That’s always been my problem. I’m too kind and people get the wrong idea.”

I tell her I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just been so long since I’ve had this kind of contact. I blame the valium, the sleeplessness.

I blame the grief.

My bulletproof extenuation. In his death I’ve located an immortal excuse.

She pins her hair back into its standard high bun.

“I’m always too fucking kind.”

She falls back onto the scaffold bench, undoes her hair.

The rumbling of the trains stop. Her head is in her hands. She looks up, smiles, starts to laugh. She doubles over. She looks up again, her face red and wet. I’m unsure whether she’s laughing or crying, but that the feeling in my chest is right. That her outpouring isn’t synthetic, and right now, it’s the only thing except the dream I feel connected to.

She gets up, thumbs the moisture from the edges of her eyes where the little wrinkles coalesce. Her hair is a tangle of brown tendrils reflecting the crude overhead light.

I imagine her with me at the entrance of the cave. Her warm body next to mine, wading through the breathless shallows of the dream. My brother calling out, her interpreting his words.

She embodies resolution. Her presence is an answer.

She says, “What am I even doing here?” through little fits of laughter.

“What do you mean?”

She turns to the wall and puts her hair back in the bun. I see the angel on her neck. I want to touch it. I want to sleep endlessly in the ward next to her, the painting hanging over us. Doors locked. Cameras off.

“This is ridiculous,” she says.

“What’s ridiculous?”

“All of it.”

Then she grabs my hand and squeezes. The feeling is like that first night in the ward. When my blood stewed in weeks’ old booze and fresh valium. That night, when the door locked and the camera hummed like a child intoning a song, I forced myself to stay awake just to loll in the buzz.

She squeezes harder. The look in her eyes is an unfinished poem. I’m collapsing into her, but she backs away before our bodies make contact. Lets go of my hand.

Soon we snake our way through the basement and head upstairs.

***

Back in the ward patients walk as though suppressed by the weight of their pasts. A new kid with greasy skin and hair that looks cut by a butcher knife leans into the corner phone. “I’m sorry, Mom. I know I fucked up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The nurse goes into the office where a new hire’s with the manager, being guided through a lifeless review of protocol. The door snaps behind them. The lock bangs on.

For the first time since I’ve arrived, I want to call my mother. Not out of my typical guilt or a sense of obligation but because, in this moment, it feels like the right thing to do.

I wait for the phone.

The new kid drawls through apologies. There’s a little puddle of his sweat and tears on the table. His soul is much older than his body, I can tell. Another patient in a room a few doors down argues with a nurse about his smoke privileges, shouting, “This is inhumane, you know, really fucking inhumane. You lock a guy in here against his will and don’t let him smoke for the first fucking two days? That’s criminal!”

The new kid gets up, drags by me. I wipe his sweat from the receiver. The phone rings. Mom picks up.

“Why haven’t you called? You’ve been gone all this time and no call. I tried calling, but they don’t let people where you are accept calls.”

I say, “I’m okay. I just wanted to let you know.”

It takes her a minute to find, what I assume, she thinks is the right question.

“Is it clean? Is your room okay?”

“Yes. It’s okay. It has a painting.”

“A painting?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” I hear the film reel in her mind’s eye rewind. “Your brother loved paintings.”

I don’t say anything.

“When are they letting you out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Soon?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I love you.”

***

I’m sprawled across the bed picking little bits of valium from my teeth and swallowing. The pills aren’t hitting like before. That deep-red wave has been reduced to a slow lapping. My brother always told me that the saddest part about any binge is the beginning. That first shot from the bag, the first pull, the first line. Implicit in the start of any drug run is the end. For men like us, the horrors start at the first realization that the magic and brightness would have to end. That our dreams, enhanced by colours that we stole from the clouds, would be scaled back again, stripped down to grey and black. That was our reality. I stare at the painting, aware again of the “nightcrawler” insignia. For the first time I notice the content of the piece. A beige beach bleeding into a long, flat ocean. Tiny white ships hung where water meets the sky. Yellows and reds imply that somewhere, maybe behind the quiet grey clouds or perhaps even off canvas, the sun gives what little light it has to the water.

The nurse walks in. The top three buttons of her shirt are undone. Her hair is unclipped. She’s wrapped her ID badge around her fist. A hospital cart screeches through the hall.

I haven’t asked for it, but she gives me another valium. This time without recording the dosage in her logbook. She circles the room in silence like a stray cat sizing up a stranger in the distance.

She looks at the painting. I ask her, “Do you see that?”

“What?”

“The little scratching in the corner ‘nightcrawler.’”

“Yes.”

“How long has it been there?”

“You know…” She puts her id badge in her back pocket. “You’re the first patient to notice.”

“I like it. It gives the shitty painting character.”

“Thank you. I’m glad someone appreciates my brilliance.”

“You did it?”

She nods.

“Aren’t you scared you could get fired?”

“I guess I don’t really think of it,’” she replies in a mock deep voice.

“I sound that stupid?”

“No, not that stupid, but close.”

***

The ward’s emptying out. Cars buzz beyond the window. The sound is a lullaby. I hear the hospital yawn as the sun sinks for the day.

I can almost hear my brother’s words in the dream. It’s like eavesdropping on my parents’ arguments as a child, lying with my face pressed to the floor, ear to the vent. Some words made it all the way through the ducts. Others suffocated before reaching. That’s how it is with my ear to the cave.

I walk to the nurse’s office to bum a smoke. A heavy man with a bald spot that looks waxed sits at the computer toying with the mouse. He’s got beat-down eyes, a face that could be attractive if not for the greyness and the bloat. I ask for the nurse. He says, “She’s on leave. I’m filling in for her. Please only knock during the appropriate hours.”

I flick the lights on in my room, jam my thumbs into my temples. The doctor intrudes, followed by the heavy man carrying a toolbox.

“Yeah, that one,” the doctor says, pointing to the piece above my head. “Just unscrew it and bring it out back.”

The heavy man sweats and huffs as he maneuvers the nightcrawler painting through the door. With it gone, the doctor turns whatever’s left of his attention to me.

“We’re discharging you today,” he says without looking up from his phone. “I’ll have the clothes you wore when you came in removed from the locker and brought to the room.”

“Where’s the nurse?” I ask.

“The nurse?”

“Yeah.”

He takes a quick call, snapping orders, fingering the wrinkles on his forehead.

“Anyway, like I said, we’re discharging you today. But first I have to check in with you about some things. Look, in a perfect world we’d have went through this earlier. How long have you been here now, three days?”

“A few weeks, I think.”

“Okay, a few weeks. So, in your file it says something about your brother dying. There’s also notes about nightmares. You’ve got nightmares?”

“They’re not really nightmares. It’s more just a dream about my brother.”

“Okay, okay,” he says with as much detachment as a waiter bringing the bill. He scribbles across a pad and slaps a prescription on the table. “These pills should help you sleep. They’re not valiums, you know, not the ‘hard stuff.’” He winks. “But they’re the next best thing.”

“Thank you.” I fold the prescription into itself as many times as the paper will allow.

“I’ll have my assistant bring you your things shortly.”

“I just have one question,” I say. “The painting, are you throwing it out?”

For the first time since I’ve arrived, he looks me in the face.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s being thrown out.”

I want to say: About my brother. I heard him from the cave days after he was found on the bed. I’m closer to him now then we’ve been since it happened.  

Instead I say: “Is it okay if I take it with me?”

Nils Blondon is a writer and educator from Toronto, Ontario. His work explores the people, places, and things he has encountered, and the beauty of the human condition at its most raw. His writing has appeared in Montreal Writes, Palooka Magazine, Yolk Magazine, NOW Magazine, and other journals and publications. He is presently working on his first novel. Contact Nils at nilsandrewblondon@gmail.com.

Julia Ballerini

Breathing

Silvery lines insist oxygen into her nostrils. Breathing is hard. Not like when she used to run, run fast and faster, head of the pack, win, win, win, first to cross the finish line. Back then, chest stretched taut to bursting, gasping for air, she wanted it wanted it wanted it. And back home panting for air his big belly heaving onto her, sweat and slither pant, gasp and grasp, wanting wanting. Precious bitch my love he’d grunt as he rolled to her side and lay like a beached whale breathing hard. Love. Precious bitch. Love. Love. Wanting it. Wanting it.

Breathing was hard after he left. One hand on chest, the other on belly. Equalizing the in and the out, smoothing away jagged gulps of air. Breath in. Breath out. Let. Go. A mantra from a yoga teacher. Let. Go.

Running, sex, yoga long time past. Let. Go. New definition according to a body immobiliized in a cranked-up hospital bed, breathing insisted into her lungs. Let Go  the labored flow of in and out. Whoosh.

Her doctor tells her that when a patient is breathing his or her last, he switches off the monitor screen. Families and loved ones fixate on it, not on the dying, he explains. True for her. As her mother died, she stared at jagged multicolored lines on a machine and at numbers on a green square on the upper right. She watched her mother die in decreasing numbers and lines scurrying across a black screen.

Let Go. She wants to see her letting go, see the pixilated signs of her own last breaths. She looks up at the electronic tracks of her pulmonary output. Let go, she murmurs. Let Go. The lines zigzag, jagged Everests and Grand Canyons vanishing stage left. Numbers in green go down, down. Alarms screech and beep, beep, LOUD. LOUD. Let go. let go. Let go before nurses come racing in, breathing hard.

Julia Ballerini is a writer living in New York City and can be reached at www.juliaballerini.com.

Hayley Davis

The Treachery of Objects

Ceci n’est pas une histoire d’amour.

Birthday Wish

The boy sat on the red and white blanket.

His toy cars carefully laid about him, and

his toes stretched forward, allowing the grass to tickle his feet.

He’s heard the ice-cream van, but this is not the van

that he’s waiting for.

BOY:

I had woken up when it was still dark, because it was going to be a good day, the best day. I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep. I tried, so hard, to be extra quiet as I peeled back the covers and got out of bed. I was wearing my best pyjamas; they were blue and had dinosaurs on them. Triceratops. Here are three things that I know about the Triceratops:

1. Triceratops means three-horned-face in Greek.

2. Triceratops were herbivores, meaning they ate plants and not animals or meat.

3. Some Triceratops may have had as many as 800 teeth.

We learnt these things on our school trip to the museum. I liked the museum because they only had the best things on display. The things that someone had decided were the most important, so that they had to be kept in a place where we could look but were not allowed to touch.

It was going to be a good day. I was so excited, that I wasn’t hungry, but I knew that I had to eat breakfast, because it was a special day and I had to be good. Earlier, I’d heard the click of the front door as Dad left for work, but Mum was still asleep in bed, so I went down to the kitchen, holding my breath as I took the stairs, missing the last step because that was the one that squeaked. The sun had started to come up and the light was bright orange as it came in through the kitchen window, through the blinds, criss-crossing lines of light and shadow across the kitchen cabinets as I opened a door to get my Coco-Pops.  I lifted out my favourite bowl, the green one with the purple rings around the top. It was perfect because it was not too deep, not too wide and it held just the right amount of milk and cereal.

Once I’d prepared my breakfast, I made my way into the living room. I climbed onto the grey sofa, in the spot where the arm was frayed from where Dad plucked at it whilst he was watching the football. I found the remote and turned on the tv, turning the sound down so that it was just a whisper. Once I had found Thundercats, I silently spooned cereal into my mouth. I allowed myself the quickest glance, a flicker into the corner, just to check. Maybe a peek of silvery wrapping paper, a strangely shaped lump, a piece of furniture which had been put back in the wrong place, trying to conceal a large box. There was nothing out of place. Everything sat where it should be. So, I went back to my cartoons and my cereal and I waited for my day to begin.

From: keith@carstogo.co.uk

To: salesteam@carstogobham.co.uk

Mon 26th Apr 2017

Dear Team,

Just a quick email!

As we go into a new week, let’s keep focused and remember,

we have to remind the customer of the WHY.

WHY they deserve the car.

WHY they can afford the car.

WHY they cannot leave our showroom without having signed on the dotted line.

Sales mean bonuses!

Let’s make this week count!

Regards,

Keith.

BOY:

I’d watched my cartoons all morning and I’d scrapped the last of the cereal from my bowl. I could hear my mothers’ footsteps as she got out of bed. I pictured her as she moved about her bedroom in that way she did, as she began her morning routine. I didn’t have to move from the sofa, I saw each step in my imagination, I had watched it over and over since I could remember.

First, she would take her bath, tendrils of rose scent curling up from the water as she bathed. When she was done, she would dry and then wrap herself in her green dressing gown. The gown was chiffon and light as sea foam, the edges were hemmed with ostrich feathers, fluff that swayed with each huff, puff of wind. When my Dad bought it for her, he had said that it made her eyes even greener, like the emeralds he promised to buy for her one day. Then she would sit at her dressing table and begin her ritual, always in the same order, always with the same items. She would brush her hair with the paddle brush, the one with the tortoiseshell handle, using a precise number of strokes so that her long, black hair would spill over her shoulders like ink on polished mahogany. Then she would apply her makeup carefully, rim her eyes in kohl, coat her eyelashes in mascara, a spray from a glass bottle containing her signature scent.  Only once she was perfect would she make her way downstairs.

When I was really good and she was in a good mood, she would let me help her choose a piece of jewellery to wear for the day. When this happened, I would pretend to take a moment to consider which sparkly thing I want her to wear. I wanted to extend that moment, where I was next to her at her dressing table. I wanted to take in all of the detail, so that in the future, when I took this memory out of its box, I could examine its sharp or curved edges, run my fingers over the texture of it, as I would a family heirloom.

As I looked over the tray of jewellery, picking up the brooches, the earrings, the trinkets that she had collected, I already knew which I would choose, the same as always. The pomegranate seed bracelet. Not real pomegranate seeds of course, but a bracelet made from red gemstones, cut to make them sparkle when the light caught them. Each stone looked like a single juicy seed plucked from a ripe fruit. I remember the day that my Dad had given it to her, the way she had looked at him. She had fixed him with a gaze so full of her love that I could almost feel it as a physical thing in the room, and I remember the way that he had returned that look back to her.  She would always giggle when I chose this bracelet, always.

That day, when she came downstairs, she was smiling, that smile that seemed to be able to warm me from the inside.  She had the front of her long hair piled high into a half beehive, whilst the back hung thickly over her shoulders. She was dressed in a pale green shift dress which ended mid-thigh and the peep toe mules she wore added at least two inches to her already substantial height. She liked to dress like this, not in the familiar shell suits or shoulder pads, but from a time when ‘style meant something.’

‘You’re up early, my love.’ She said, ‘Excited, I bet?’

I nodded, not taking my eyes off of her as she moved around the living room, opening the curtains fully, to let the light in.

‘I bet your Dad will have something special for you, he’s so good at buying presents. Why don’t I get started on your cake?’

She caught sight of herself in the mirror above the fireplace, leaned in close to check her eyeliner, she used a little finger to neaten the line at the outer corner of her left eye. Once she had finished, she gently ran her fingers over the mirrors’ gilded edge, admiringly, lost in thought. She noticed me looking at her in the mirrors’ reflection. Lowering her hand, she met my eyes in the mirror, flashed that white hot smile.

‘Why don’t you have your shower then you can play outside until he gets back, it’s a lovely day outside. It would be a shame for you to waste it indoors.’

I got up from the sofa and moved to the living room door. As I passed my mother, she stopped me and took my face in her hands, knelt down until her face was level with mine. I could smell the heavy, sweet scent of her perfume and see that, today, she had chosen not the pomegranate bracelet, but the silver stag brooch, instead. She paused for a moment looked into my face, taking me in.

‘Seven years old, who’d have thought?’  she said.

Then she kissed my forehead and disappeared into the kitchen. I went upstairs to take a shower.

MAN:

Tuesday 27th April 2017

I smashed another day at work today. Mike was so sure that he’d closed the sale when I just happened to casually drop into the conversation, in passing of course, that the Audi would actually be a better option for the customer ‘considering the recent issues’ with the model that Mike was suggesting. There’s no way that I’m not going to make salesman of the month.  Mike can’t even complain to Keith because he’ll just pull out his favourite catchphrase ‘I don’t care who sells the car as long as it’s sold.’  I know exactly what I’m going to do with my bonus, once I add it to my savings. A new car. I know that Dad is going to love it.  It’s not a Ferrari, but it’s nice. It’s a big outlay in terms of cost, but as Dad would say, ‘you have to pay for quality.’

BOY:

When I had finished getting dressed, I decided to choose some toys to take outside with me. I walked over to my toybox and began to riffle through its contents.  I already knew which I would choose.  I had managed to acquire quite a collection of Matchbox cars, after Dad had bought me the first, a red Ferrari GTO. He’d come home from work one afternoon, proudly taken it out of the box to show me, held it up in admiration, turned it over in his hand so that he could see all of its angles before passing it over to me.

‘Now, this is a car.’ He had said. ‘One day, maybe I’ll have one on the drive as well.’ He’d passed the car over to me, never taking his eyes off it. Once it was in my hands, he’d walked across the living room to where my mother stood by the dining table, he’d wrapped his arms around her waist so tightly and with such enthusiasm that he had almost lifted her from the ground. He said nothing, just stared. Then he kissed her, gently, like you would something rare, something precious. I watched from across the room.

I remembered this as I took the cars from my toy box. I had made sure that I retrieved the Ferrari and the other cars that I had begged from friends. Once I had selected my cars I went and sat outside and waited for Dad to get home. I knew the sound that his work van made as it rounded the corner at the end of our road. I could recognise the deep growl of its engine and I knew that he wouldn’t be back for a little while yet. I sat and waited. Mum came outside sporadically, to ask if I wanted a sandwich or a drink. I wanted to be outside when he arrived so that he could see that I had waited for him, that we could only begin to celebrate once he was there.

Eventually, I heard the low rumble of his work van, watched it pull up to the kerb. As Dad got out of his van and collected his coat and lunch box from the passenger side, I searched his body with my eyes, looking for a box or a parcel.  He opened the front gate and began to walk up the path towards the front door. When he noticed me sat on the grass, he stopped.

‘You alright, kid?’ He bent down to pick up one of my cars, the Ferrari.

‘Absolute class.’ He said, before placing the car back down. 

I looked up at him, hoping for a flicker of something, a clue that he was playing a trick on me, a sudden exaggerated remembering of the occasion.  He looked at me, touched the top of my head lightly and continued to the house. I watched as he went in through the door, then I got up and moved closer, to the window, so that I could see inside.

He was talking to my mother, she was speaking quickly, her arms moved up and down, gesturing towards the front garden. My Dad stood, one hand on his hip the other moved from his forehead to the back of his neck, as if he was trying to wipe something away.  Then suddenly he moved, headed back towards the front door. I ran back to my place on the blanket, just as the front door swung open and my Dad marched out, followed by my mother, who stopped and stood in the door frame. My Dad continued to the van, opened the back doors and rummaged in the back, through boxes and trays. He found something, curled his fist over it, before he closed the doors and walked quickly back to me.

‘You thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?’

He looked over my head to where my mother was standing, winked at her.

‘I’ve ordered something really special for you, but it hasn’t come yet. So, for now, there’s this.’ I looked at his hand, it was still closed but there was something inside, something hard and white. I thought about the Matchbox security van that had been released that week and my heart beat a little faster. He unfurled his fist to show me my present.

A Golf Ball

A golf ball is hard, white and dimpled.

I imagine that it would taste of mint if only I could fit it entirely, into my mouth.

It comes in other colours, pink, yellow but the white ball is the most familiar.

Inside, concealed beneath the hard coating,

hiding,

away from prying eyes,

only discovered by those willing to look

 or careless enough to the hit the ball hard,

so as to crack its protective exterior,

lie a mass of rubber bands wrapped tightly at its core.

It is within this bundle of bands, this diligent layering of rubber, that the golf ball’s resilience lies. Formed to withstand the swings and knocks that it is destined to endure throughout its life, by way of simply existing as a golf ball.

Layer upon layer of rubber, to deflect these blows, absorb shock and help prevent irreparable damage. Like neoprene or sprung steel.

Or a smile.

Or a kiss.

MAN:

I watch as you drink your beer, slowly, mechanically. You’re looking, not at me, but at the tv. You’re not really watching it, it’s more that it provides an opportunity to avoid acknowledging me. I wait until I can see that you are about to raise the glass to your lips, and I take my own glass to do the same, so that we are in unison. I notice your eyes dart, only slightly, catching our momentary connection, before returning the glass to your knee.

‘I made salesman of the month, Dad,’ I say and wait.

‘Means I got a nice bonus,’ I wait.

‘I’ve got you something, come and look out of the window.’

 I get up and move to the window at the end of the living room. I carefully move the curtains so that he can look outside, onto the driveway. I wait.

Eventually he gets up and walks over to stand next to me. He looks out of the window, at the brand-new car that I have parked outside.

‘It’s yours.’ I say.

He stares for a while, and I am unable to decipher the expression on his face. Finally, he speaks.

‘Your mother would have loved that.’ He returns the curtain to its place and moves back to his seat in front of the television.

I follow him to his chair, pause. Finally, I place my hand on his shoulder, squeeze it gently.

‘Happy Birthday, Dad.’ I reach for my glass of beer, drain it and leave.

Hayley Davis is a writer and performer who is based in Birmingham, UK. She uses storytelling for a variety of mediums. Hayley has shown work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Birmingham Film Festival where her short film won Best Local Film. She recently finished her MA in Creative Writing at University of Birmingham. You can find her work in various places, including her website and Substack newsletter.

Nardine Taleb

Half human, half falcon

the god half

Jay pulls me into his lap. Devours me like a cup of tea. You’re so beautiful, you’re so sexy, he says. I remember suddenly drinking tap water in Cairo, Egypt, where my parents are from. On my last visit, I had consumed only a cup and spent the rest of the day with stomach pain. Now, Jay takes the God of Horus, hanging on the end of my necklace, into his palms. Where did you get this? he asks. I tell him about the boutique in Cairo, how Horus is half god, half falcon. There is much I leave out. How I couldn’t properly speak Arabic to the man I bought the necklace from. How he recognized I was an American and increased the price. How I miss Cairo, but she spits me up, vomits me, like I am foreign tap water. I look like her, but I am not of her god.

the falcon half

At the grocery store, I see two young Arab girls with hair jetting from their heads, straight and black. Their mother, in a white hijab, glances at me and gives me an acknowledging smile. I smile back, with some nervousness. This is how my mother and I must look when we walk together. Jay also notices the woman and, holding my hand, greets her. Hello! he says, in a too-friendly manner. He is trying. We walk home together. Many people look at us as they pass and I read in their faces how intrigued they are: Jay’s skin the color of a blank page, my skin the color of a hungry desert. He seems content with the attention. He pulls me to his body and rubs his palm against my arm until I rust. I call him habibi and watch his eyes light up like comets. You’re so beautiful, so dreamy, Jay says. He asks to come in, but I tell him I’m tired. He leaves my front porch, for what he doesn’t know is the last time. I make a promise to tell him that it’s over tomorrow morning.

***

I confess: I don’t know all of Um Kalthoum’s songs. I pray five times a day but do not know the Arabic word for “belonging”. Pharaoh history is lost on me: I forget everything. My skin is gold like that of my ancestors but my belly dancing is off-beat. I carry my family name on my passport but I let people mispronounce it. At home in the suburbs, the walls of my room hold the Egyptian flag. I drink tea at night like my parents, with milk. I drink coffee like my girls, with pumpkin spice flavor. People stare at me as I walk past, a gold-skinned girl adorned in Tommy Hilfiger. I see my people suffer on TV an ocean away and call them my people. I see my people march for black lives and LGBTQ lives and I call them my people. It has taken years to become proud and unconfused. It has taken years to become proud even when I still crave somewhere to belong to. I am translated every day of my life. I flaunt the pride, though. I am a god. I put lipstick on my beak.

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer and speech therapist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review. She is also a Brooklyn Poets fellow and has forthcoming work in Emerge Literary Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. You can find her at the following social media platforms: Twitter: @nardineta / IG: @nardineta.

Beth Manca

The Newly Single Gal’s Guide to Cleaning the Apartment

Day 1: Sweep the floors

Hear the scratchy swish as the broom bristles traverse the wood floor.  Feel the slight pull when a bristle catches in a crack but do not slow down.  Even after a long Monday at the office, you’re strong enough to pull a bristle over a crack.  It’s not exactly a job for Wonder Woman.  Muscle through.  Imagine you’re sweeping away a vast mandala of multi-colored sand, a Technicolor version of the Om symbol on your ex-lover’s favorite black and white tee shirt.  Do not think about how perfectly it hung on his lanky frame or how well it complemented his little white ponytail and salt-and-pepper beard.  Forget how he’d surprised you that time, loading the mantra-generating @hOMe meditation app onto your phone so you could start each new day with peace of mind just like he did.  Sweep it all away.  Om.

Marvel at how much cat hair accumulated under the furniture in the six months since your ex moved in, laid off from his coding gig and facing a big raise in rent at the end of his lease.  Be glad for yourself that he took his cat when he left nine days ago.  Be glad for him that he found new work after just a couple of months even if that meant he soon was able to afford a first and last month’s rent and a security deposit for a small studio.  He missed his own space, he explained when he told you about the new lease.  After months of forced intimacy, he guessed it was time for a fresh start, he said, parting the air in front of him with his hands as if pushing something out of his way.  Though sometimes his gestures were hard to decipher, this one was clear as day.  He meant “fresh” in the sense of “without you.”  Think about how you won’t be stuck sweeping up his cat hair any more.  Do not think about how the cat would curl its little gray body between you both in bed at night and purr itself to sleep.

Wish you had some wine in the apartment.

Look at the pile of cat hair and judge that it’s almost big enough to make a kitten out of, ha ha.   Shape the pile of hair into two balls, a larger one for the body, a smaller one for the head.  Push the balls together and when they fall apart find an old bobby pin in your makeup case and try to connect them.  When they fall apart again, give up.  Place the two blobs of cat hair in the bedroom wastebasket.   Do not meditate.  Pull up Mozart’s Requiem on your phone and lie on the bed for an hour listening even though the blobs were not a legitimate kitten.

Day 2: Vacuum the carpets and under the furniture

When cat hair mysteriously reappears the next evening, retrieve the dusty vacuum from the back of the closet.  Run the vacuum over the wood floors and carpets.  It must have been the cat hair stuck on the carpets that redistributed itself onto your clean swept floors.  Remember how after your mother had cooked and cleared dinner every night she’d vacuum under your and your father’s feet as you sat watching television.  You’d wondered why she didn’t vacuum during the day when nobody was sitting on the couch with their feet in her way.  Begin to understand the concept of rage vacuuming.

Be glad that your ex is no longer messing up your kitchen with his elaborate dinners.  Do not mourn the jars of curry paste, harissa, and nuoc mam moldering in the fridge.  Your take-out fare over the last seventeen days has been economical, one salad’s leftovers stretching into three meals.  The variety of takeout salads is endless, but you’ve alternated between chicken Caesar and Greek to keep things simple.  You’ve always found comfort in routine.  And you’ve dropped a few pounds without having to fork over for a gym membership.

Vacuuming is good exercise, too.  Squat to vacuum under the furniture as far as the intake port will reach.  It never reaches all the way back.  Some cat hair will always linger in the corners.

Remember you meant to get wine.  It’s only 8:00.  Grab your messenger bag and take a short walk to nearby Nimbus Wines.  Spot the white cat napping in the Zinfandel grape box in the window. Though a small sign encourages you to pet Nimbus – he’s friendly, let the sleeping cat lie for now.  Resolve to buy red, which won’t need to be chilled.  Ask the guy behind the counter if they have any wines with cats on the labels.  Say it’s a gift.  Notice that the guy’s name is actually Guy.  Wonder if it’s the French Guy, pronounced “Ghee,” which would not seem out of place in a wine shop.  When Guy/Guy shows you the Moselland Black Cat Riesling, rethink your resolve regarding the red.  Shell out $14.99 for the white because the opaque black bottle is shaped like a willowy seated cat gazing up at you with a friendly tilt to its head.  Ignore the bottle neck protruding from the cat’s right ear.

Nestle the cat bottle into the messenger bag.  Envision nestling it in the freezer next to the ice as soon as you get home.  You are flexible enough to change plans when the perfect opportunity presents itself.  Your ex hadn’t taken a drink for almost three decades by the time he met you, having struggled with alcohol right after college.  He always attributed his preternaturally smooth skin and his clear gray eyes to extended abstinence.  But there’s nothing to stop you now.  Speculate that with his ruddy complexion, Guy/Guy looks like he knows how to enjoy a glass or two of wine. 

Arrive home.  Wrestle the vacuum back into the corner of the closet while the black cat shivers into potability in the freezer.  The wine is still warm when you close the closet door, but so what?  Clink a few ice cubes into a glass and open the bottle anyway.  Take pride in your resourcefulness.  When the bottle is empty, you can’t bring yourself to toss it into the recycling.  Perch it on a bookshelf instead, where it can keep an eye on everything while you sleep.

Day 3: Wash the floors

Notice the floors are now covered with a thin layer of dust no doubt thrown into the air by the cheap vacuum.  Ghostly traces of spots where the cat threw up reappear.  Buying a mop has been on your to do list since you moved into the apartment two years ago to be closer to your ex’s place.  At the time the plan had merit for two loners like you.  Evenings together could spill into the night and you could walk home afterwards for a good sleep in your own beds.  If you could no longer walk to your paralegal job in Boston each morning, no matter.  Walk to Walgreens now and buy a mop.  Feel proud when you also purchase a bucket and a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap.  Just because you’ve never mopped before doesn’t mean you don’t know how one ought to mop, which props are required.  Buy a big bottle of Murphy’s.  You will keep those floors clean from now on.

 Enter Nimbus Wines.  Give Nimbus a little scratch behind the ears and watch him stretch in ecstasy before settling back to his nap.  Turn and discover that Guy/Guy has found a cat-label red for you.  He leads you to it, mimes a little ta-da upon arrival.  The Cenosilicaphobic Cat, it’s called.  Examine the wine’s label, which features a black wine glass, its bowl a faceless black cat head with whiskers and ears.  A red slash cuts across the middle of where the cat’s face should be.  Read the descriptive sign under the stack of bottles: The mouthful of a name simply means “fear of an empty glass.”  Dig through the tannins to taste the dark cherry, wallet leather, and purple flowers that lurk beneath.   Sigh because at 45 you are tired of digging.  Especially after all the sweeping and vacuuming.

Guy/Guy is standing there, awaiting thanks.  Thank him.  Notice how his pupils melt into black-brown irises, same as yours.  Standing shoulder to shoulder he’s almost exactly your height, unlike your ex-lover who’d towered above you.  Follow him back to the register.  Note how the little gold hoop in his left ear complements his shaved head.  Wonder if he has a hidden tattoo, a glass of something with half full inscribed underneath perhaps.  As he rings you up, convince yourself that a $30 wine will be transformative.  A life-altering experience.

Fearlessly empty glass after glass of the red as you mop.  Finish in no time.  When you bring the mop and bucket down to your basement storage unit, notice that your ex left a few things behind.  An old uncovered litter box he replaced with a covered one, an inch or two of clean litter still inside, and a blue plastic food dish with two compartments he swapped for two stainless steel bowls.  Wonder if he’s missing his old stuff but doubt it.

Day 4: Declutter

Be glad that the cabinets and drawers and closets are one-third emptied out already.  This will give you space to store other things away, out of sight.  Recall that old expression, out of sight, out of mind.  Marvel how expressions that aren’t true malinger on through the ages. 

Open a cabinet intending to pull out a trash bag.  See that your ex used the last trash bags to pack his stuff.  Understandable.  The eclectic mix of products he employed to moisturize – face, hands, body, feet, hair, beard – would fill a bag all on their own.  Close the cabinet.  Lean your forehead against the door and listen for a moment to the silence of the empty space. 

It’s raining outside.  Opt to drive back to Walgreens and purchase a box of big green heavyweight bags.  On your way out the door, reach for the bowl where you keep the keys.  Your ex had thrown that bowl the day you met in a pottery class sponsored by the local adult ed center.  You’d had to settle for a pinch pot when your hands couldn’t control the shape of the clay on the spinning wheel.  He’d admired your little pot (“So primitive!”) and even copied your paint design on his bowl at the next session, a bright orange with random white spatters.  Later you’d realize this was an out-of-character color choice for Neutral Man.  At the third and final session, a cocktail hour where everyone brought snacks to fill their newly-glazed bowls and then wandered and shared and oohed and aahed, you’d arrived separately and left together.  At the time you were so relieved at finding someone else who didn’t continually demand eye contact that you didn’t suspected his motives in complimenting your pot.  Did he just want  to get laid?  If so, the laugh was on him.  After you’d gone to bed together that third evening, he’d been stuck with you for years.  Detect that his bowl is gone now when your reaching hand touches nothing. 

Remember that the car, his car, is gone too.  You will walk.  Open your cheery sunflower umbrella and enter the storm.  Feel satisfaction at your green lifestyle choice.  Feel the humidity unravel your Blowout Burgundy bob into a tangle of brambles despite the umbrella.  Buy the bags at Walgreens.  Decide a little vino is always nice at the end of the day.

 Enter Nimbus Wines.  Take a second to try and smooth your hair.   Guy/Guy is freshening Nimbus’s water dish and you both give the cat a brief simultaneous pet, head and tail,  when he takes a drink.  Smile when Guy/Guy announces he has just the thing for your water dish this evening.  Laugh when he leads you to a bottle of something called Bare Cat Blush.  Find the hairless howling cat on the label humorous, not sad and creepy.  Don’t think about how it must shiver with cold and envy other cats their cozy fur, the common tabbies, the mottled tortoiseshells, even the unlucky black cats.  Learn from the back label that the horrifying naked cat’s pink wine is light, pleasantly sweet, and refreshing to the palate.  Hand over $11.95.

When you return home with the big box of bags and the pleasant, refreshing wine, stand in front of the used bookshelf your ex had painted a lilac-gray called Muted Melody as a house-warming gift when you moved.  See that the shelves are one-third empty, like the closets and drawers and cabinets.  You do not have to declutter.  Spread your things out on the shelves instead.  Take up space.

Uncover a cat toy hidden behind some books, a catnip-stuffed brown-spotted gray tick you’d bought for your ex-lover’s cat.  “It’s a tick,” he’d complained.  “It’s ironic,” you’d tried to explain.  Place the toy next to the black Moselland cat bottle.  Take in the glassy happiness on the cat’s face as it looks tilt-wise at you, as it chooses you over the toy.  Leave the toy there anyway.  The cat seems less lonely that way, the shelf less empty.

Pull the Cenosilicaphobic Cat bottle from the recycling bin and add it to the shelf with Mosey (as you now call her).  Decide you will call the second cat Sili for short.  Empty the last drops from the bottle of Bare Cat Blush and position it on the shelf between Mosey and Sili.  Will they accept this weird, wailing creature?  Praise them when they don’t hiss or attack but sit alongside it in harmony and equanimity.  Good cats. 

Day 5: Dust

Dusting is thirsty business.  Bike to Nimbus Wines before you even start.  Today Guy/Guy pulls a bottle of Sweet Red Cat from under the counter and presents it across his arm like a sommelier.  Examine the label, which shows a red tomcat in a hot tub drinking a glass of red wine while a white lady cat stands off to the side, gazing at the sweet red cat from behind a fence, showing cleavage, two red hearts floating above her head. 

Learn from the back label that this wine is for those who are tired of White Zinfandel and pairs nicely with spicy cuisine.  Ignore the warning to pregnant women on the bottom.  Be glad that you’ve never needed to heed warnings to pregnant women.  Wonder where Nimbus is hiding himself.  Hope he’s okay.  Pay $8.99 for the Sweet Red Cat.

Riding home consider how uncomplicated it is to navigate the streets alone.  Your ex was always pushing through lights as they changed to red and running stop signs.  “Nobody was coming,” he’d argue.  “It’s the one you don’t see coming that knocks you down,” you’d reply.  Try to forget how he presented you with your bicycle when you were feeling your lack of city mobility in his near suburb after your move, how he repainted the rattletrap used bike Passionate Plum for you and wove little silk forget-me-nots through the basket.

Cross the threshold into your apartment and dust until the bottle is almost empty.  Recline on the sofa to enjoy the last glass.  Wonder why the lady cat doesn’t climb into the tub with the sweet red cat.  Estimate how much more quickly the bottle would empty if two people were drinking from it.  Twice as quickly, you guess.  Be glad that Sweet Red Cat is affordable enough to buy a second bottle simultaneously with the first.  If you ever need to.

Picture Guy/Guy reclining on this very sofa with you.  You face each other on opposite ends, sipping cat wine together.  His little earring twinkles in the light from the setting sun.  Your foot grazes his by mistake.  Rise to place the empty bottle next to its feline comrades on the bookshelf and wiggle the catnip tick next to Mosey as a joke.  Imagine her springing to life just long enough to swat the toy to the ground before hardening back to sleek stasis on the shelf.

 Get an idea.  Pick up the tick, lie back down on the couch, and smile like a Cheshire Cat until everything else disappears.

Day 6: Sweep the floors again

The motes raised by dusting have gravitated to the floor.  They gleam in the Saturday afternoon sun like bacteria stained to visibility under a microscope.  You will need to sweep again. Understand that cleaning your apartment will be an ongoing process.  Consider that it may never in fact be clean.

Sweep later.  You deserve your day of rest.  More sweeping will only lead to more vacuuming which will only lead to more mopping, and so on and so on ad infinitum.  Screw that. 

Slip the catnip tick into your messenger bag and head out.  Buy a bag of cat treats at Walgreens.  Back at the wine store, purchase the bottle Guy/Guy has procured for you today, Le Petit Chat Malin, another white.  The label shows the back view of a tiny striped cat sitting on an egg, tail dangling, and reads:  An easy drinking wine from “the cunning little cat” meant to be enjoyed all year round.  You get it.  The petit chat is “cunning” because he plans to nurture the egg until it hatches and then devour the birdling when it emerges.  Watch Guy/Guy take another customer to the back of the store and busy himself with her, pulling bottle after bottle from the shelves only to have each one rejected after laughing consideration.  Watch her touch his arm as they laugh. 

On your way out, dangle the catnip tick over Nimbus’s box.  When he swats at it, drop it to the floor and let a few treats fall for good measure.  When the cat jumps down from his perch, bend over and whisk him into your messenger bag.  The bell on his collar tinkles but is drowned out by the door’s long electronic beep, meant to alert Guy/Guy whenever someone arrives or leaves.

On the walk home, hold the bag close against your body with one hand and pet Nimbus through the opening with the other.  Feel him settle right down, lulled by the swaying.  Good cat.  You know there are plenty of cats in the world.  But Nimbus is a fluffy white cloud in a blue sky on a sunny day.  You wanted this cat and now he’s yours.  Carry him back to your clean apartment and set him loose.  Watch him sniff around the perimeter as if he could figure out what the future held by scrutinizing the past.  Wonder if he can when he perches like a miniature sphinx on the arm of the sofa, perfectly balanced.  Uncork le Petit Chat Malin.  Raise a glass to yourself for a job well done.

Beth Manca is a Latin teacher living outside of Boston with her one-eyed tortoiseshell rescue cat, Angelina, a prolific shedder. Her short fiction has appeared online in Carve Magazine, Scribble, and Howling Mad Review. She can be reached via email at bmanca123@gmail.com.

Lucy Gram

Night Driving

The van looked like something you would get kidnapped in: big, forest green with a tan stripe, ugly as sin, a gas guzzler; and when we girls piled in at night I sometimes felt like I was being kidnapped, whisked off to a land of laughter and endless freeways, never to be returned and happy about it, as long as Colin was driving and he had some destination in mind, often the beach; Zuma, to be exact, north on the 101 and through twisty Malibu Canyon or Kanan Dune Road, nothing to see outside but roads and trees passing by, nothing to listen to but someone’s story we’d heard before and Rufus Wainwright on the radio singing California, California, such a wonder that I think I’ll stay in bed, and some nights we agreed and some nights we wondered why we’d ever stay in bed when we could be out in the world – but it didn’t matter either way, what we had was the freeway, the wheels beneath us, the radio, and the group of us determined to enjoy the night, looking forward to the moment when the Canyon opened up before us and all we saw was sky and water – when we’d clamber out of the car and feel the sand still warm under our feet, the cool salty breeze on our upturned faces a relief from the stuffiness of the van packed with girls, the shock of the cold water if we even bothered to stick our feet in, the sound of the waves (nature’s radio) filling us up until we got cold and piled back into the van, huddling together for warmth, turning Rufus back on, heading back through the canyon, back on the freeway, back with Colin’s sure hands on the wheel while we girls leaned our heads against the windows, watching the dark city go by, waiting to roll to a stop, pile out, head home.

Lucy Gram is a writer, photographer, and theatre artist. Her nonfiction work has been published in The Exposition Review and Howlround. She is a graduate of Ithaca College and a passionate New Yorker, but a part of her heart will always belong to her hometown, Los Angeles. You can find her online at www.lucygram.com and on Twitter @lucy_gram.

Linda McMullen

Harriet Simmons Also Rose

The Simmons public library had once hosted one of the earliest civic meetings in the thirteen colonies, and now provided a historic refuge amidst a de-gentrifying neighborhood.  Harriet Simmons had first toddled through the library’s great oak doors in a real mink mantle.  Now, she stole toward the computer nearest the massive brass-plated heating vent, shivering in her insufficient trench coat.  But the Simmons name still counted – and Miss Watson, the librarian, nodded almost deferentially.

After what felt like days but was perhaps an hour and a quarter, Harriet completed her unemployment filing.  Miss Watson’s diminished knees clattered as she rose from her desk and hobbled toward Harriet.  “Miss Simmons,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I’m afraid we have a bit of a line today –” She gestured toward a politely distant semicircle: a rosy-cheeked, expensively dressed, but still frowsy young mother; two slouching, insolent-eyed teenagers; and a muttering, flannel-clad older man long estranged from his hairbrush and razor. 

Harriet knew she lacked her grandfather’s gravitas; replying with his classic “And?” – would tilt toward snotty, not haughty.  But blood would tell.  “I’m not quite finished,” she replied, and her eyes met Miss Watson’s.

“I… understand, Miss Simmons, but we do have a thirty-minute limit and –”

 “And have any of these…” Harriet paused. “…people… been waiting for thirty minutes?” 

Miss Watson flushed, emitted something in the negative.

Harriet made a show of setting her watch timer for precisely nine minutes and forty seconds, then turned back to her screen.  Miss Watson backed away, gesticulating helplessly.  Harriet could feel the edges of the crowd’s resentment pressing against the back of her neck; their resentful growls reached her ears.  Let them bark, she thought, and she passed on to her email (nothing of interest), several news sites (likewise), and various social media platforms.  She drank in the familiar blue-light glow of Facebook memories: prom, in a Monique Lhuillier gown.  Her sister Beatrice’s wedding on Oahu.  Her own graduation from Barnard…

Her timer jingled.  Harriet signed out of her accounts, closed her browser windows, and flounced away from the seething proletariat.  She claimed an unoccupied chintz chair and curled up with a well-loved, hardback copy of The Age of Innocence. 

Her father had invested in coal and oil; green energy and a heart attack conspired to carry him off after several inequitable years.  She hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye, but their call the week before the event had concluded with her saying “I’ll see you very soon,” and him replying, “That’ll be pleasant,” and she decided it would do.  Her father’s lawyer served as the executor; he terminated his duties with impassive precision: the cottage and boat had gone, immediately, followed by the second and third cars.  That might have disencumbered the Simmons estate, except for her father’s medical bills.  The antiques and furs went next, and the jewelry; subsequently many of Harriet’s trim designer dresses appeared on consignment shop mannequins, alongside her mother’s.  Now the pair of them haunted a fraction of the creaking Victorian, each with a book and a space heater in tow. 

Harriet read until Miss Watson’s electronically distorted voice announced that the library would close in ten minutes.  She paused at the notice board, basked for a few moments within the furnace’s blast radius, and exited, passing briskly beneath the rear guard of withered leaves. 

Then: home. 

The odds of producing something appetizing from cabbage, onions, and whatever freezer-burned protein still lurked beneath the ice trays diminished daily.  Her mother would offer her classic moue (first proffered during a long-ago summer soirée, when young Harriet had dripped chocolate ice cream all down her rose-colored frock).  She would ingest enough to stave off starvation, then turn her attention to the diminishing remains of the wine cellar.  But at least she had stopped asking about Harriet’s job hunt.  During the last discussion, Harriet had fired a conclusive shot:

“When are you going to work for the first time in your life?”

Harriet excavated an ancient bit of corned beef and did her utmost to inspirit the cabbage.  Her mother picked at everything.  “I just wish you were… settled,” she declared.  This meant that Harriet was an ingrate for having refused Joe Thorndike’s ‘eligible’ proposal two years before.  The fact that Joe had bragged about never having read a book that wasn’t assigned hadn’t fazed Harriet’s mother at all.  His business connections, quarterback’s grin, and country club membership had, naturally, redounded to his credit.  Harriet said, “I think there’s a little bit of ice cream left.”

“You always did want it,” said her mother, pouring herself a healthy glass of port.

“Miss Watson’s retiring,” Harriet said. 

“And?” replied her mother.

Harriet withdrew early, worked a while, pulled on two extra pairs of socks before succumbing to dreamless sleep.

In the morning she returned to the library – dodging, just outside, the men’s outstretched calloused hands and the mother pleading mutely for the listless infant in her arms.  Noblesse might oblige, but the grocery, and the power company, and the county (responsible for water and trash collection) had long since depleted Harriet’s worth.  She performed the Times New Romanization of the résumé she had cobbled together in pencil and perspiration the night before, highlighting her ivied BA in English and a publishing internship.  (Cut short, of course: the call, the train, the funeral.) 

Harriet opened an email several days later inviting her to an interview, replied immediately.  She donned her funeral dress.  She mentally rehearsed a “tell me about yourself” response that traipsed lightly from Austen to Rushdie. 

Miss Watson, it transpired, had received orders from the Board to conduct the first round of interviews to find her own replacement. 

She addressed Harriet as Miss Simmons, and asked about her knowledge of research.  Harriet described her undergraduate thesis at length, portraying her intimate, nuanced familiarity with academic resources.  Then Miss Watson posed questions on digital reference and cataloguing, fair use, copyrights, management, budgeting, statistics, taxes… and community resources for those in need.  Harriet’s blood rushed to her face. 

“I’m a quick learner…”

“Miss Simmons,” Miss Watson said, gently, with a Lilliputian smile, “I’m afraid this position really requires a master’s in library science.  But I’m glad you’ve come today; the Board recognizes that the Simmons name means a great deal.” A pause.  “And I wanted to give you your thirty minutes.” 

Harriet could have struck her without regret.  Instead, she drew herself up and strode out of the library, heading downtown.  She had set aside bus fare for her return trip, but the money would do just as well for ice cream.

Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over sixty literary magazines, including Drunk Monkeys, Storgy, and Newfound. She can be found on Twitter @LindaCMcMullen.

A.M. Henry

Proof of Janice

Lauren can taste the raw iron of a hangover on her tongue when she wakes, feel the rough surfaces of her eyes pressing against swollen lids. She looks at clock on the nightstand. She is due at the park in two hours.

She moves slowly to the bathroom and takes a scalding shower until the water tank runs empty. When she emerges, she stands with a towel wrapped around her, staring at the fuzzy outline of her body in the fogged mirror. The air is so thick with moisture that her face is obscured, her hair matted against her ears and neck and shoulders. She wonders how many faces she could transcribe onto the image in front of her.

–

Two months before, a despondent T-Mobile employee thumbed the screen of her new, refurbished smartphone and asked if she wanted to port her number.

“No thanks,” Lauren said.

“You wanna transfer over any numbers? Any contacts?”

“No.”

He glanced up at her as his thumbs stayed in motion. “Ohhh-kay,” he said, followed by a long sigh, handing her back the phone and a receipt.

She’d not even made it to the bus station, not even stopped hearing the jingling of the bells on the front door, when the phone began to ring. 216-555-0806. Her fingers shook as she rushed to decline the call, her body electric and small.  

–

She’d planned to rent a studio apartment in Cleveland but had done so little research that she was surprised to find she could afford an entire house near Parma. She knew nothing about the neighborhood, or even, really, the city. The house itself was poorly kept, dirty, and already had a chilly draft in late October, but it was a house with a landlord who accepted payment in cash.

And now, it was her home. After returning from T Mobile, she sat on a decaying couch left by the previous tenant, scrolling through Craigslist postings on her new phone. She jumped when it rang again, 216-555-0806 flashing across the screen. She pressed END and paced the living room as she considered the flurry of messages coming to her old phone, now sitting somewhere in the silt of the Duwamish River. A courtesy reminder for her balayage appointment the next week. The dentist’s office, encouraging her to schedule her next cleaning. An urgent text, come on, where are you?

–

Later, as Lauren ate straight from a can of lukewarm Chef Boy-ar-dee, the phone rang for the third time in the eight hours she’d owned it. 216-555-0806. With a shaking hand, she began typing a text.

• I’m sorry you have the wrong number.

She hesitated before pressing “send,” then deleted the note and sent:

• Who is this?

She shoved the phone under one of the couch cushions and went to get herself a glass of water. This was new since she’d arrived on the Greyhound in Cleveland: an almost unquenchable thirst. Whenever her stomach started to wrestle with itself or her ears rang with the fear that someone was just behind her shadow, her throat felt raw and her skin dry.

After she’d finished gulping the glass of water, she went back into the living room and circled the couch. With one arm crossed around her ribs, the other propping her fingers up to her chin, she stared at the cushion covering the phone until she was brave enough to retrieve it. Bravery is a muscle, she told herself, exercise it.

• It’s Bill

She couldn’t think of any Bill’s she knew. Maybe someone at her old company, but none she could think of who would notice her absence.

So maybe it was her relief that it was the wrong number, or the loneliness that had begun to creep up on her, or just a strange, new recklessness that prompted her to type:

• How are you?

Lauren stared at the screen for long enough that her neck started to ache. She set the phone down and went to get ready for bed. In Seattle, this used to take half an hour. Here, she simply swept her limp hair into a ponytail and brushed her teeth and, if she was feeling ambitious, splashed water on her face. She felt both dirtier and cleaner all the time in Cleveland.

She walked back downstairs in time to hear her phone chime twice.

• OK. Snowing in Montana.

• I sure miss you Jan.

She sat down on the couch and looked at the two messages and imagined a hundred landscapes filled with people named Bill and Jan and snow and mountains, and soon, she drifted into a rare, easy sleep.

–

In the morning, Lauren unwound herself from the cramped embrace of the sofa. The shades covering the big, drafty windows were open and dull light peeked through the glass. Even the insides of the windows were marked with the icy stamps of snowflakes.

As she scooped two tablespoons of instant coffee into a saucepan of boiling water, she heard the phone ding. 

• Good morning.

Lauren smiled. 216-555-0806—Bill. She entered his name in the phone. It was the only number recorded in her contacts, a single syllable.

• Good morning!

• How’s the weather in Cleveland?

It took her a full, terrified minute to remember she now had a Cleveland area code, that of course Bill would expect that Jan would be in Cleveland.

• Cold but not snowing yet. What about Montana?

• Still snowing. Pulled out this morning. Hoping to make it to Scottsbluff by sunset. Snow might not help!

She couldn’t place where Scottsbluff was. It felt vaguely western to her, somewhere in the plains, closer to the Rockies than the Mississippi.

There were so few reasons she could think of that someone would drive from Montana to Scottsbluff, wherever it was. She wondered if he had been living in Montana but was coming back to Ohio, if he was a traveling salesman, if he was a truck driver.

Lauren looked out again at the looming gray sky, the lone similarity between Seattle and Cleveland. She stepped onto the porch and the crisp air stung her nose and cheeks.

• It might snow here later this week.

• Driving in the snow always makes me think of you.

At the same moment that Lauren smiled, there was a faint pull in her throat. It felt so tender to be thought of, and then so unkind to steal tenderness that belonged to someone else.

• I think of you every time it snows.

She vowed that this would be true, that even if she was thieving in his emotions, she wouldn’t lie about this one thing. Every time it snowed, she would think of Bill, who had been in Montana, calling a number in search of someone named Jan.

• Remember when you drove the route back home with me from Sarasota?

Truck driver, she thought, and felt that now she had solved one small mystery, she had earned herself another exchange, another lie.

• Of course.

• Sunny and eighty when we left in the morning, snowy and twenty when we pulled into Cleveland.

• I couldn’t believe it!

It was only a conversation about the weather, but as the late-fall winds tapped against the windows next to her, she felt warm. 

–

She woke with a cavern of worry in her body, a feeling that greeted her after fitful sleep each morning, setting in before she even remembered where she was. Waking up meant unfurling her fingers from the tight clutch of her palms; unraveling her knees and arms from the ball she slept in. Instead of her usual first memory, of quietly leaving their condo in Seattle one morning for good, she thought of Bill, of the new series of lies she’d begun to craft. She winced when she went downstairs and turned the phone on, only to find there were no messages.

She began drafting an email to potential house cleaning clients off Craigslist to distract herself. It was the easiest way to make a steady income under the table, she figured, and it couldn’t be that hard—though she’d had a high threshold for dirt and grime back in Seattle, her tolerance for filth a source of his ever-escalating rage.

In her emails, she tried to pitch herself as the type of person who took cleaning seriously, who considered herself custodian of a home, imagining what a certain man back in Seattle would have wanted to read when looking for a maid. She wondered, briefly, if he’d hired one in her absence. As she gnawed on her thumbnail, her phone hopped with a text message alert, and she jumped along with it.

• You’ll never believe where I’m headed after Scottsbluff Janice. Your favorite place!

Janice, not just Jan. Her relief that Bill had written her was swiftly replaced with anxiety that Janice had a favorite place—one Bill knew and Lauren didn’t. Janice and Bill, she thought, and now imagined two people, plainly dressed, sitting on a Cleveland front porch. They were older than her, she decided: he texted in complete sentences, and she realized she did now, too.

She set the phone down next to her and walked back to the window, staring out at the blank, high sky, then paced back to the couch. Where would a woman named Janice, who lived in Cleveland, who was probably older than her parents would have been, love more than anywhere else? With a clenched jaw she wrote back,

• Which Target do you mean you’re going to?

Only a few seconds later, the phone chimed.

• Ha! Ha! I meant Branson, of course!

Lauren blushed with relief.

• Make sure you say hello to an Elvis impersonator for me!

• I always do! Getting back on the road now.

• Drive safely, she wrote, because she would now be custodian of both heart and home.

–

It took Lauren two buses and ninety minutes to get to the house cleaning interview. She was tired enough to feel dizzy as the bus toddled along the city streets, the houses and parks growing larger and cleaner as they moved north and then east. When she arrived in Shaker Heights, she knocked on an oversized wood door three times. A few seconds later, a woman answered.

“Janice?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Lauren responded.

The woman and her family had recently moved from the east coast with her husband for his job, and though their housekeeper had initially moved with them, she realized she missed home too much to stay. Lauren said she understood. She had just moved from Sarasota back home to Cleveland, leaving a family she’d been with for nearly ten years. The woman, who seemed hungry for someone who spoke of loyalty, hired her on the spot three days a week for cleaning and “light housekeeping,” agreeing to Lauren’s terms of a cash payment each week.

All the way home on the bus, Lauren wanted to text Bill to tell him Janice got a job, and she felt an unbearable weight in knowing it would be a mistake. It was the loneliest she’d ever remembered feeling, even compared to those closing days of her old life, when she’d long stopped seeing friends, stopped socializing at work, too small, too quiet, to reach out.

To distract herself, she began to catalog the things she’d learned about Bill in the past few days. He was a fifth-generation Clevelander, a long-haul refrigerated truck driver, a Browns fan. Some of the information he transmitted to her easily, like when he told her he was watching the football game on his phone. And sometimes he seemed to prod her about things, like when he asked her if she remembered that they had been together when the space shuttle crashed, or that his mother had passed in ’97. She craved more, like she wanted to drink down every fact he could give her about himself, about Janice, about him and Janice.

When she arrived home, she sank into the couch and wrapped herself in blankets, hoping to fall asleep. But she was restless, her throat tight and her limbs jumpy. She regretted the text even as she sent it:

• I want to hear your voice again. Call me tonight before bed?

Instead of tossing the phone away like she’d done all the other times she risked losing Bill, she held it in her palm, staring at the screen, willing a response. She watched the digital clock click forward three minutes, then seven. Twenty-eight minutes later he responded:  

• OK. Call you around 9 your time.

She felt expansive.

–

At 9:04 Lauren was frantic that he wouldn’t call, but she knew that if he did, within a few seconds, if her voice was too distant from Janice’s, he might never talk to her again.

As soon as she felt the vibration against her leg, she accepted the call. “Hello?”

“Jan? It’s Bill.” Bill. A heavy, gravelly voice laced with years of cigarette smoke. He sounded older than she’d pictured. She adjusted the mental image she’d crafted from Bruce Springsteen to Tom Waits.

“I know who it is,” Lauren said, and she could hear the smile in her own tone. “I was expecting your call.” She winced at the long pause that followed.

“It’s good to hear you,” he finally said, his raspy voice now softer.

“Where are you tonight?”

“Juliette, Georgia,” he said. “Very romantic.” He chuckled at his own joke and she laughed, a sound she realized she hadn’t heard since long before she left Seattle.

“Where is Juliette?”

“A little north of Macon,” he told her. She didn’t know where Macon was either. “It’s been a long time,” he said. Lauren wondered if it had been years since he spoke to Janice, if that was why he didn’t immediately realize he was talking to a fraud. And she was transfixed by the easy kindness in his tone, his willingness to hear Janice no matter what she sounded like.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

“The whole time?”

“Most of it,” she said, and Bill unleashed a burly laugh.

“Well, you sure haven’t lost your sense of humor.” There was another long pause, but this one didn’t feel so agonizing. Be brave, she thought to herself. Don’t be small.

“Let’s play a game,” she said.

“A game?” he asked, and she thought maybe Janice didn’t play games, but she continued:

“I’ll ask you a question you have to answer, and then you do the same for me.” 

“Sounds dangerous,” he said, but his tone was playful.

“I’ll be kind, I promise,” she told him. “Okay. Tell me your favorite place you’ve ever driven.”

“You know that answer,” Bill said, and Lauren bit her lower lip, nervous. “Nothing better than driving back home.”

“Cop out.” He laughed, and she forgave him. “Your turn.” As she said it, she realized the trap she’d laid for herself. “Something you don’t already know.”

“All right. What’s your favorite place you’ve ever been?” After a brief pause while Lauren considered, he added, “I know you haven’t been outside the US.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “I went to the other side of Niagara Falls since you saw me last.”

“I can hardly believe it!” he said, his voice jovial. Then, “I always thought I’d go with you.”

Lauren almost responded with a joke, telling him you snooze you lose, but there was a sad weight to the way he said it that told her she shouldn’t.

So she continued the game. She asked his favorite movie theater candy (Mike & Ike), the name of his second grade teacher (Miss Lewis, he was almost sure), and the most surprising thing he had in the cab of his truck (a copy of War and Peace, which she suspected was a lie). In response, she told him that Janice’s favorite breed of dog was a maltipoo, the site she wanted to see the most was Big Ben, and that the best dessert she’d ever eaten was a chocolate cream pie at her great aunt’s house.

“Last question,” Lauren said. “Then I have to go to bed.”

“Me too,” he said.

“What’s your favorite thing about Juliette, Georgia?” She envisioned Bill crawling out from the bunk area in the back of the truck cab, peering out the window for a landmark.

“Easy. Can’t think of nothing better than talking to you.”

–

At first, they planned the calls each day, and then they entered an unspoken promise, one of them ringing the other sometime around 9 each evening. The hours between when she left Shaker Heights and when she heard Bill’s voice were the most tremulous of her day, old fear making her shrink into herself as the hours ticked by.

One afternoon—so dark as fall closed in on winter that it might as well have been midnight—Lauren walked home from the bus stop and she pictured Janice, sitting in an easy chair somewhere in Cleveland, knitting or coupon clipping, wondering if Bill would ever contact her again. Lauren felt another surge of guilt, for taking something from Janice, for what she was taking from Bill.

Her feet led her to the corner liquor store, which she discovered was two small, musty shops. One carried wine and one carried beer and all she really wanted was vodka, but she settled for a $7 bottle of cabernet blend. For a moment she worried she’d get ID’d and have to make up an excuse about why she didn’t have one, but the clerk barely glanced at her.

At home, Lauren stared at the bottle for a few minutes before unscrewing the lid, commending herself for how many weeks she’d gone without alcohol, resenting that he’d ever made her count, smiling faintly as she imagined his disbelief at her tenacity now, drunk in the Midwest, impersonating a middle-aged woman.

She drank half of the wine by the time Bill called right at 9.

“I should tell you,” she said, her cheeks warm, “I’ve had a few drinks.” Bill gave a deep and uproarious laugh, and Lauren thought that one of the things Janice must love about Bill was his generous laughter. That, and the elasticity to what she could say to him, like they had already had every fight they were going to have, already dressed every wound.

“Maybe I’ll have a beer then.”

“Wine for me,” Lauren said.

“You’re usually a beer girl,” he said, and even in her slightly drunken haze, she tensed.

“I’ve always liked a good glass of cabernet, though,” she insisted.

“Sure,” Bill said. “Do you remember that little lounge we went to once, near Edgewater?”

“Of course,” Lauren said. She swirled the Dixie cup filled with wine and took a sip. “It’s closed down now.”

“Figures,” he said. “We were the only ones there.”

“All the lounges are dying out,” she said. “We were keeping them in business.” Bill laughed again, still deep-bellied but lighter. She heard the crack of him opening a can.

“You love your lounges. I’m surprised you haven’t kept them going on your own,” he said. She heard him take a sip and then emit a soft sigh. “That green dress you used to wear.”

“Yes,” she said, the wine making things fuzzy.

“You know, the one with the buttons up the back.”

Lauren flushed and wondered if he was leading her somewhere explicit. She wasn’t entirely unwilling, not because she wanted it, but because Janice might.

“Of course,” she said. “Your favorite.”

“Yes,” he said. “And yours. Your favorite color. Green.” Lauren paused at this repeated recitation of facts about Janice, wondering if Bill was drunk already, or if he was reminding himself, or if he was doing something else altogether.

“Yes,” she said. She thought only for a moment of the risk involved in the strange wager she kept making. “The green dress with the white sash around the waist.” Bill made a soft noise, somewhere between a sigh and a cough.

“You looked good in it, Jan.”

“Why do you think it was my favorite?” she asked. They laughed a little together, though something heavy burdened the sound. “Tell me about that night at the lounge again.”

Bill took a deep inhale and then began the story of a rainy spring evening, unseasonably cool, and how they’d run into the lounge to get dry, gotten drunk on martinis they couldn’t afford, inhaled a dozen cigarettes each, their smoke fresh against the stale, forgotten smell in the carpet.

–

Soon, more nights than not, she was tipsy by the time they spoke on the phone, and when they hung up, she fell into a long, easy sleep, her limbs stretched out wide over her bed. In the embrace of beer—she now drank exclusively PBRs, even as she longed for vodka—she didn’t worry if she was wrong about any history or fact, she knew that whatever proof of Janice she offered would satisfy.

The alcohol also helped dull the fact that Christmas was closing in on her. She’d arrived in Cleveland during the long lead-up to Thanksgiving and barely noticed it, but now the December holiday was staring her down with surprising ferocity.

“Do you get to come home for Christmas?” she asked him one night, and blushed when she heard the slur in her own tongue. Her employer had tucked an extra hundred dollars in an envelope labeled Janice before heading back east for a long holiday, and that, she supposed, was the totality of her Christmas festivities.

“Just a quick one. Forty-eight hours.”

When she was Lauren, she would have feigned offense, asked when he planned on telling her. But even drunk, she knew this was outside the silent rules of the world they’d built. Instead she thumbed the hem of the green dress she found at a thrift store and asked where his next stop was.

–

The week before Christmas, she stopped in the doorways of churches as their choirs practiced for Midnight Mass, sucking in the sound to store it up inside her. She sang in choruses until college, all of which put on a Christmas show. She’d never missed singing, but in Cleveland, at Christmas, she fiercely missed the arc of shared sound.

At 8:30 on the 23rd, she called Bill, four beers in.

“You’re early,” he said brightly.

“I wanted to surprise you,” she said. She could hear the involuntary, hopeful flirtation in her voice. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Near Myrtle Beach.” She heard a click followed by a deep inhale. At first, she pictured him smoking in the cab of his truck, but with a blink, she placed him outside, leaning against the trailer.

“Is it warm there?”

“Sixty degrees!” he said. He took another long inhale. “I’ve had a few. Stopped driving around six.”

“Me too,” she said. “You know I was thinking last night about that lounge again, the one in Edgewater,” she closed her eyes, which had begun to burn. “I can’t even remember who was playing.”

Bill laughed, phlegmy, followed by a quick cough. “There was a piano player there for a bit, but we ran him out of there, and then they took our requests to play over the sound system, remember?”

“Of course,” she said. “I can’t believe I forgot.” She put the phone in the crook between her shoulder and ear while she reached for a fifth beer and pulled it open. “And they played our song.” Her heart beat deep, a low thud tapping against her eardrums.

“A few times,” Bill said. His voice was near a whisper. “A few versions even.”

She brought the beer to her lips and took a long sip, then set it down and lay back on the couch, smoothing her free hand over the pleats of the green dress’s skirt. She pressed her eyes closed.

“Sing it for me,” she said, her voice as quiet as his had been.

“Sing it?” Bill said, with an uncomfortable laugh. “You know I’m a terrible singer.”

“But I love when you sing,” she told him. She could hear the thoughtful inhale and exhale of several drags off his cigarette.

“All right,” he said. The line was quiet long enough that she would have wondered if he was still there, except for the soft sound of his breathing. Finally, he began. “Moon river, wider than a mile. I’m crossing you in style, someday.” She hadn’t heard the standard in years, maybe over a decade, but she knew it almost by heart. It took her a moment to remember that it was a song she’d performed with her tenth-grade chorus

Bill’s voice fit somewhere between Frank Sinatra’s and Louis Armstrong’s; his off-key rendition melancholier than either of theirs. “Oh, dream maker, you heartbreaker. Wherever you are going, I’m going your way. Two drifters, off to see the world.”

She pictured Bill, bearded and tall, a broad grin showing his yellowing teeth, dancing with a woman she could only imagine from behind, his arm wrapped around the waist of her green dress, his other hand holding hers as he led her across a dance floor.

“My huckleberry friend, moon river and me,” he finished, his voice a note off and a beat too long. “Is that the end?”

“I think so,” she said. “That was perfect.”

Bill chuckled. “Thanks. Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn?” she asked. “To sing?”

“Yes,” he said. “Sing our other song.” An insistence in his tone she hadn’t heard before.

She realized then that her lips were numb, and whether it was from the alcohol or fear, she didn’t know.

“Okay,” she said. She sat up and cleared her throat and tried to conjure what else she’d sung in chorus. “We only love songs about the moon,” she declared. Before he could react, she sang, “Say it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea.” She fell into the harmony because that was what she’d practiced as an alto in the risers at her high school’s auditorium, all those years ago. “But it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.”

–

In the morning she was hungover and everything felt and smelled sour. It took her until she got to the bathroom and was brushing her teeth to remember the way they’d ended the conversation the night before, complimenting each other on their little performances, declaring their exhaustion, promising they’d talk later, barely even noting that Bill would be coming into Cleveland that day.

She tried to chalk up the ugly feeling inside of her to the hangover, but she couldn’t eject it. After scrubbing her face nearly raw, she went to her phone and texted him to meet her at the park by her house at ten the next morning. Then she turned her phone off and vowed not to look at it again until the following afternoon.

–

The walk to the park is weighed down by the hangover, the first time Lauren’s body stings from vodka in Cleveland. She thinks of how alcohol had quieted her in Seattle, made her silent so she didn’t make him angrier; and how here it has emboldened her, let her sneak into a life that is bigger than her own.

At the park, she wipes the dusting of snow off the top of the picnic table, then rubs the hem of her coat along the surface before she sits down. Her eyes begin to water, and she tells herself it’s the cold, closes her lids so the moisture doesn’t freeze on her face. There’s a storm in the forecast, one promising inches and inconvenience.

She sees a flash of color ahead at the edge of the park. There is nothing surprising about the outline that begins to approach her. A little shorter, a little rounder, a little grayer than she’d pictured. But the sketch she’d drawn in her mind is mostly right: the thick beard and hair, the staggering gait, hands tucked into the pockets of his too-light jacket.

When they make eye contact, he nods at her, a not-unkind little smile on his lips.

“Bill,” they say at the same time. She’d wondered if they would shake hands, but it feels all wrong. He sits down on the picnic table next to her, both of them facing forward.

“It looks like the snow will start soon,” she says.

“It does,” he says.

They are silent for a long time. A pause that would have made her uncomfortable with anyone she’d known before, but here, now, feels like its own communion. There are dozens of questions she wants to ask him. Most are answers she doesn’t deserve to know, things about Janice and Bill and whatever twists of romance had led him to play this game of pretend.

“When did you know?” she asks finally, staring straight ahead. She tucks her mittened hands into her jacket pockets.

“For about half of a second when you first texted, I thought maybe all the hoping I’d done made some kinda miracle. But I guess I knew right away.”

Lauren looks up at the sky, wishing that the storm will drop onto them soon, that it will be violent and icy and unforgiving.

“Do I sound like her?” she asks. Bill laughs, the hearty one she’s grown used to.

“Janice started smoking two packs of menthols a day in high school. This husky old voice.” Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him smile. “And you’re clear as a bell.” She hears him sniff, the cold air making both of their noses run. “That shoulda been the end. It shouldn’t have been fun to keep pretending after that.” Her throat tightens, feeling betrayed though she knows it is true. He turns and looks at her, taking in her profile, and she keeps her eyes forward.

“Are you married?” she asks.

“No,” Bill says. “Never.” A few little flakes begin to twirl down around them, so few and so gently that it might just be the wind nudging old ones off tree branches. “You?”

Lauren rubs her hands on her cold thighs. “Not really,” she says. Their eyes meet for the first time since he sat down next to her, his deep with sympathy.

“She had a husband. He turned the phone off after she died. I’d call to hear her on her voicemail. I guessed he’d finally gotten rid of the line but I didn’t know it’d be the last time I heard her voice when it was the last time, so I kept calling, hoping it was a mistake, you know?” Lauren nods, making a list of all her mistakes that have become facts. “He called me when it happened, from her phone. Just said, ‘it’s done,’ and hung up. At first I thought he meant the affair.”

“When?” Lauren asks. She looks over at him and his eyes are on the ground.

“A little over a year ago, if you can believe it.” He shakes his head and gives a little half-chuckle. “Just like that. ‘It’s done.’ Guess I appreciate his courtesy.” She knows he is sincere, because even though he joined in this deception with her, he is good where she is not.

He brings his hand up and runs it across his nose. “She got sick maybe four, five months before that, as well as I can figure. I last saw her a few months before that even. She didn’t tell me she was sick. Just stopped calling.” He scratches the side of his face and shakes his head, wondering up at the branches of the tree nearest them. “Maybe she thought she’d be fine. Maybe it finally all got to her, all the guilt.”

In another life, or another version of this one, she would put her hand on the sad, old man’s knee. But the greatest kindness she can offer is controlling the shaking in her voice as she asks, “How long were you together?”

“Forever,” he laughs. “And never. Met in high school, never wanted anything to do with one another unless there was a good reason to stay away from each other. We’d get together, she’d say she was gonna leave him, he’d find out we were back at it, she’d stop returning my calls. She always showed back up though.” He catches her eyes again and then looks away quickly. “Thought she’d show back up again, I think.”

Lauren’s jaw begins to tremble. It feels more agonizing to let go of Janice than it had been to let go of herself, to now replace a woman she’d never known with the only one she’d ever been.

Fat, soft flakes of snow begin to fall, staying alive on their shoulders for barely a second after landing. Lauren closes her eyes and feels them land on her lashes, feels her nose run under the stinging cold and the relief of the fulfilled threat of the storm. She feels tears slipping out of her closed lids. She sees them from above: him, waiting, forever, for a woman who will never come back to him; she, fleeing from a man who’d made her insignificant. Lauren offers Bill her gloved hand, palm up, and feels the icy prickle of every snowflake that rains down on them both.

A.M. Henry is a writer and consultant living in the mid-Atlantic. Her work can also be found in LampLight Literary Magazine.