Prose

Kristine Otero

The Boy

Reading facial cues and body language for guidance, I needed someone who would listen. Someone who would not ask questions I could not answer. Someone who would allow for a reintroduction—not force me into the dynamic that existed previously.

I found this in my cousin, and lifelong best friend. She allowed me to be changed. She allowed our reunion to unfold, seemingly without any expectation. She allowed me to verbalize what I could, when I could, and never judged.

A protector of my damaged psyche, she never allowed me to feel broken. She made unreasonable concessions for me, to everyone. Always close enough to grab a conversation when words began to overwhelm me—when the questioning would begin. She included me in everything, knowing I had unrealized limits. Giving me tasks I could handle, always ready with a life jacket, when I began to drown. 

 Most importantly, she did all of this without me realizing. I was never a problem to be solved or an inconvenience. With her grace and compassion, she provided me—a war criminal, a safe place.

I could speak freely to her about all the things I couldn’t actually talk about. Sharing my war stories in the language of truth, not expectation. From this, she helped me find the perspective from which I could articulate these ineffable experiences.

There is an unpredictability in war. Moments which soak into the bones like sweat soaks into a uniform. Unseen until they get caught in your throat. Over before you let out your next breath. There is no place on earth where the human connection we share is more visible than in war. It takes actual thought and practice to dehumanize one another, when it is far easier to love or at least not hate. It’s less visible outside a warzone, but humanity—when stripped of bias—can be beautiful.

***

We turned down the backroad of the outskirts of Tikrit. Open field on both sides before the twisting curve took us into the village. I always imagined that when Saddam was caught—less than a year ago, it was somewhere on this road. His spider hole hidden in one of the yards. The single lane was meant for smaller vehicles. From the window of my five-ton I could reach out and touch the gates lining the front of the houses. The tight curves and loose red dirt forbid speeds faster than a crawl.

I wished I was gunning, watching Iraqis was easier behind a .50. People came out of their homes to watch our convoy pass. On this route a suffocating hate hung in the air like fog. Rage and fire in the eyes of the residents as we passed. I met their rage in kind, but mine was bullshit. Weakness could get me killed, so I pretended to hate them as well.

A little boy no older than seven emerged from behind a pillar on the porch of a house. Armed with an AK47, slack on a harness—weighing him down. The breath sucked out of my lungs. Our eyes locked. He stepped out, hesitantly. My eyes softened, begging him not to wrap his tiny hand around the underside of the barrel. Checking my mirror, the .50 behind me was aimed at six o’clock—the last vehicle in our convoy. I was the only person who saw him, and he only had eyes for me.

This situation was ours alone. A child shouldn’t be armed with an AK47 almost as big as him, yet here we were. We both had a choice to make. Instead of reacting—soldiering, I lifted my left arm to show him it wasn’t on my highly visible M16. Steering the truck with my knee, I gently flipped my safety off with my right hand, exhaling as I rested my finger on the trigger.

He glanced at the rear gun truck, shifting only his eyes. Stepping back behind the pillar, emerging on the other side, his tiny hand now bearing the weight of the gun. I begged the universe to let this child be a child and not an instrument of war. Our eyes locked again, he understood this was our secret—alone—together. In no more than fifteen seconds I had to decide if I was going to shoot to kill an armed child.

In a place where I had been trained to shoot first, and think later, I was able to see the boy—the child behind the gun. I understood on the other side of the pillar, that I was willing to allow him to raise his weapon and fire at me. With our eyes locked it would have been me. I would have let him shoot first. Ultimately I would have had to return fire, and I would have. It didn’t come to that. He never raised his weapon, and neither did I. On that day, I didn’t have to kill a little boy. This singular encounter, it could have been any soldier in any war. This one is mine. A moment in time defined by thoughtful inaction.

***

The only family picture I have displayed in my home is of my cousin and me around the boy’s age. It sits in my office as a representation of our childhood—washed away by time. Our smiles are genuine, mine reaches my eyes, my enormous front teeth on display. Her long lashes stand out over her big eyes. Our long hair intertwined, we were wrapped in our grandmother’s most prized possession—her mink stole. Our world was narrow. Innocent. We knew we were children.

I cherish the smiles on those little girls. We didn’t know there was anything bigger than first world America poor. We couldn’t understand, we couldn’t care. Our minds were untainted, our self-esteem still mostly intact. One little brown girl, one little white girl—different but the same. We didn’t know we would struggle together and separate.

Thirty years later we can still look at one another across a crowded room and read each other’s eyes, with insane accuracy. We can speak without words. We are together for good and bad, sacred and trivial. We can truly rely on one another for everything this life has thrown at us.

Gratitude. These seemingly separate stories, told together, evoke gratitude—where it would never have previously existed. The orbit shared by my cousin and I exists because she allowed me to come home, broken. The story of the boy, told one day while we cleaned the kitchen, provided her a deep understanding of my war. That tiny, seemingly innocuous moment explained to her why I was different. In her understanding I gained perspective, and gratitude for my war.

The picture holds space for our lost childhood, and for the little boy. I keep it out as a reminder of the person who knew me then, and knows me now—when my burden gets heavy. I keep it as a reminder that those little girls grew into these women. I keep it as a reminder that we were never that little boy. When the ugliness of war creeps in and makes emotion feel frivolous, I remember him, and our secret.

For Deserray, with all my love

Kristine Otero’s most recent publication can be found in Proud To Be, Volume 8 through Southeast Missouri University, where she won best essay for nonfiction, in 2019. She has also been published in 0-Dark-Thirty, Kleft Jaw Press, and through the Colorado Humanities in the anthology Still Coming Home. Having served in the US army from 2003-2007, provides Kristine plenty to write about. Interested in expanding to other genres, she has begun writing short fiction and prose poetry. Kristine earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from Liberty University, and is currently working on her masters in Public Administration through American Military University. Kristine lives in her hometown of Denver Colorado with her wife Samantha and their dog, Dali.

Tina Lee

Me and My Neanderthal

I met my husband in my parents’ backyard. My father was sleepwalking and it was difficult to get his attention. The week before, the full moon had hung out with us every chance she got, but that night, she had left with only the dull, dreary beam of a neighbor’s porch lamp. My father was speaking in fits and starts, a defunct Chrysler trying to come back to life, addressing someone we couldn’t see. An elephant appeared. The elephant made no sound, just watched and moved closer, his wide white ears looming over my father like curtains. (It’s curtains for you, buddy!) Or maybe that’s too cynical of an interpretation. Perhaps he was folding my father into an embrace. My mother and I waved our arms wildly, hoping our frantic semaphore would alert my father to his imminent demise.

“Dang-shin, e-ri wah-bah! (Darling, come here!)” my mother hissed in a hoarse stage whisper that wasn’t really a whisper. It was more like shouting. She tried to not call attention to herself, but she couldn’t help it. She has always liked being the center of attention.

When my father heard her voice, he woke up and ran to the front yard. My mother fled into the house, and that is when the elephant saw me.

He lumbered unhurriedly towards the house, each step shaking the leaves on the trees like a rattle.

“Shut the door, Lucy,” my mother shouted from inside, but I froze. I was face to face with the elephant. Up close, I could see every detail of his face. Nestled in his craggy face, his black eyes sat like eggs, sunny side up, the whites reddened with an intricate lace of tiny blood vessels, each vein pulsing out an angry message. I slammed the door.

This only made matters worse. The elephant was offended. He slammed his front tusks against the ground, the house, the door.

He was so angry he turned into a man.

Well, not a man exactly, but a Neanderthal. He began yelling in a language I did not recognize. His words tap-danced between tongue clicks and gruff grunts.

When he managed to tear the door off its frame and enter the house, I drank in his fine mattress of dark belly hair. His chest was lean and chiseled like a romance hero coming to my rescue. Yes, I noticed his broad, proud nose, his sexy protruding forehead—I’m only human. He was naked and screaming, flopping his greasy top knot back and forth, only calming down when I offered a cookie. As I poured him orange juice, he flirted, lifting the edge of my skirt while I swatted his hands away.

“My parents,” I whispered in warning. The Neanderthal just smiled at me, unconcerned.

This Neanderthal became my husband.

My parents never approved. If I were completely honest, no one knew what my father thought. Everyone and their dog knew something was wrong with him, but last year, it all felt more real when a physician proclaimed him “clinically depressed.” He started a prescription he called “lobotomy lite,” spending his days in the basement, his nights perfecting the art of sleepwalking. Awake or asleep, he seemed dormant all the time.

Let’s rewind to the week before the Neanderthal appeared:

My father’s sleepwalking was getting out of control. Neighbors were calling us at three a.m. to get him. He was found slicing through their pools with his magnificent front crawl, plucking their best flowers from their gardens, decorating his dark blue bathrobe with boutonnieres of petunias, roses. Sometimes, he ate the flowers. Once he started coming home by police car, my mother decided to put me in charge of him. She didn’t care that I had college applications to prepare, plans that would allow me to finally move away from her.

This is what happened the first night:

“Lucy,” my father said. “I was a poet in school, a long time ago. Isn’t hilarious?”

“Really?” I had no idea. Neither he nor my mother ever admitted to such frivolity. As far as I knew, Dad whizzed in and out of Seoul National University, and Mom, Ewa Woman’s University, collecting flawless grades, living no life beyond books.

“Can I hear one?”

“I don’t remember any.”

“Make one up.” I wasn’t going to let him get away with this—pulling the curtain back slightly so I could see him before letting it drop forever.

He stared at a space above my head and laughed. “Okay, that’s funny!” And he began:

               “This New Jersey loneliness chokes me.
               The moon is mysterious, treacherous.
               This is the same moon I was young with,
               This is the same moon I was sane with.
               What does she know that I do not know?
               I always ask. She never answers.”

He smiled like a fox that stole an egg. The night wrapped us up in its smell of summer and steady cicada refrain. The moon swelled with pride and shone down, making our backyard a stage. My father was in the spotlight, the center of my world.

“Say it again,” I said after I clapped. The poem seemed magical, an incantation with the power to keep him with us for a little longer. Here he was—still on earth, still his witty self.

“Nahh, let’s do something fun tonight,” he said, already moving on, tapping his foot restlessly. “Let’s go swimming! There’s a pool nearby, but we have to sneak,” he whispered. At long last, we were co-conspirators.

“Why?” I whispered back.

“Because my daughter is watching us.”

The second night:

I didn’t bother watching my father. He could climb the trees and break his neck for all I cared. When my mother fell asleep, I went to my room to read. The words blurred till I passed out. 

A few hours later, there was a thunderous bang. The windows and my bedside lamp trembled with terrible knowledge.

That was the night the Neanderthal arrived.

After the Neanderthal’s snack, I ran a bath for him. He gingerly dipped his toe in the water.

“Hot,” he said in a very hurt tone.

“It’s fine,” I said, annoyed. His only contributions so far were complaints, trouble and a busted kitchen door. Still, I ran some cold water to even the temperature and that seemed to appease him. Slowly, the stink of dirt and sweat peeled away from his skin and floated across the surface of the water like oil spills. Oh god, the smell…The effect was not an aphrodisiac.

“Huh,” he grunted like a dog getting scratched behind the ears when I soaped his back. “Aren’t you embarrassed seeing a grown man’s body?”

“I’ve studied anatomy, I got an A in biology,” I said. “It’s no big deal. We’re all skin and bones.”

“How about this bone?”

He gestured to his erection emerging from the water like the broad stalk of an aloe plant. I dropped the sponge. Everything I learned left my mind. My language turned primitive.

“Uh,” I spoke to the floor.

I fled the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I patted my pockets for my inhaler and puffed for dear life: marjoram, turmeric, and maybe a touch of…gasoline? I didn’t care. Pleasant warmth suffused my sinuses; my anxieties disappeared, as did my balance. I fainted.

My mother concocted the contents of my inhaler from her garden. Whenever I was short of breath, I puffed. There was a fluctuating flurry of flavors — cinnamon, ginger, other times, an entire serving of selleongtang (a calming, milky white soup made from bone marrow), and always something mysterious.        

We had the usual suburban garden offerings in the backyard—cucumbers, squashes, tomatoes. Her set-up looked normal except for a few black, gaping craters. If a head of cabbage or ginseng root did not take on the shape or shade she wanted, she splashed the gas, lit the match, and watched the plant go up in halleluiah flames.

In the very back of Mom’s garden, at the edge of our property was the water hemlock. It sat in its own watery grave with a head abundant with white delicate flowers, looking much like run-of-the-mill Queen Anne’s Lace. Yank it up by the roots, you can see its ugly pedigree more clearly — messy with dirty threads and dark knots. Mom said, the entire plant bears poison.

“To kill the enemy, you make them suffer. Hemlock is good,” she said, breaking a stalk to show me the brown liquid that oozed out. “Not just the root, but the flower, the seeds, the stalks all have poison. It makes a lot of pain. Excruciating pain.”

She recommended meat dishes from Korean cuisine like kal-bi, which she made into a stew with a sauce so thick and sweet, any bitterness was disguised. “See? You stick hemlock in, everybody is so busy enjoying, they have no idea you’re poisoning them.”

I had no idea why she thought I needed this information, unless she was warning we were enemies. Of course, I already knew that on some level. There were days when my inhaler contained items from her garden that weren’t good for me, but I never complained.

When I came to, I heard the Neanderthal rise out of the water. I hurried to stand up.

“You can sleep in my grandmother’s old room tonight,” I said through the shut door. “It’s right across the hall.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to open the door, but I held tight to the doorknob. I knew I could not face his naked body again. The hollow wooden barrier between us rattled with struggle, his will versus mine. Eventually, he gave up.

Later, the Neanderthal poked his head into my bedroom. He was wearing one of my grandmother’s floor-length, powder-blue nighties. He had pulled his newly clean hair into a neat, new topknot with one of my scrunchies from the bathroom, revealing that magnificent forehead.

“Can I sleep in here?” he whispered.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m too scared to sleep in that room. Your ancestors are noisy.”

I knew what he meant. My grandmother had been an intense presence. Her stale cigarette smoke had soaked into the wallpaper of her old room. She didn’t agree with my mother on everything, particularly on the decision to educate me at home. She always explicitly referred to a wad of bills beneath her mattress in case any young runaway needed transportation fare. When I sat on her bed, I could almost hear her rough, wretched cough.

“Goddamn emphysema,” she used to say before lighting up her first Virginia Slim of the day.

The Neanderthal climbed into my bed, cramming onto my single mattress, his feet hanging off the end, his large bumpy elbows driving into my back.

“Can I have some blanket? It’s cold.” He shivered, as if to prove his point.

“I guess.”

He helped himself to blanket. He shifted his body this way and that, until he curved and surrounded me. Then the breathing started, this heavy, steady breath right in my ear that felt like CPR, life-giving. An alarming tingle suddenly tore down the sides of my arms. I sat up for my inhaler, but the Neanderthal stayed my wrist with an amazingly hairy hand. Uncertain, I lay back down. Now his hands began to roam unhurriedly over my nightgown, like a nomadic tribe in search of water. I could feel parts of my body light up as his hands traveled. His paw crept lower and lower, finally crawling beneath the cotton. I held my breath. My heart hummed with athletic activity—anticipation took over with palpitating, leaping, jumping, racing, buzzing. I was about to become a woman.

And then it happened. He burst fully inside me, breaking down the front door with a tree trunk, ripping the first path of unbroken terrain. As I struggled to understand these circumstances, the Neanderthal was busy pulling his body as taut as a skyscraper. I could feel a tremble take over his entire size, like fear starting in a small inner city and spreading like fire to outer country. Seismic activity was imminent. Then he was done.

The next morning when I woke up, the Neanderthal was gone. In the light of day, all the events of the night seemed preposterous. There was an unfamiliar ache between my legs. On my nightstand, beside my inhaler, there was a gray rock the size of my fist. The Neanderthal’s voice drifted up from downstairs.

“I would like to ask your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

He was sitting in the dining room with my parents, wearing another of my grandmother’s nightgowns, tight as a tourniquet around his enormous figure. There was some give around the waistline, which was unnoticeable, given his enormous erection. Like a tent pole, it pulled the extra fleece fabric around his center. What a circus.   

“You,” she pointed her finger towards the Neanderthal, “you think I raised Lucy to give her away to someone like you?”

“I can’t believe this,” Mom said. “Lucy, would you really betray me? You want to marry him?”

I didn’t know what I wanted. My mother was always sure about everything. She had always made decisions for me, and she was always so loud about it that it was hard to think straight. I longed for my inhaler all the way upstairs.

“He gave me a rock.”

“Wait,” my mother paused. She looked puzzled for a moment. “A rock? Like a diamond?”

“Huh?” I said, meeting her confused gaze. “No, no, a rock, a rock! Like from outside.”

“Give me a break. No ring, no bride.”

“Let me decide. You don’t always known how things turn out.”

“You tell her, Lucy,” the Neanderthal piped up. Thankfully, at that point, his circus tent had collapsed. He leaned in to give me a high-five and knocked the light fixture off the ceiling instead.

“Idiot!”

“How can you talk to your daughter that way?”

“I’m not calling her an idiot, I’m calling you an idiot!” my mother said. “You are both idiots!”

“Stop calling everyone names!” I exhaled.

She slid her away across the dining table, knocking over breakfast dishes, and slapped the Neanderthal. I had never seen her move so fast. She leapt up and dug her nails into his neck. They went down to the floor. The broken light fixture bounced around them like a soccer ball during their match. Cursing each other, grunting, they took turns being on top. My father sat quietly and ate his bacon.

“Stop!” I tried, but the exertion of yelling took its toll. I was unaccustomed to standing up to my mother. The room seemed to spin. Light-headed, I sank to the floor.

“Enough!” My father stood up, finally finished with his breakfast. The Neanderthal and my mother halted like hunting dogs at the sound of a horn.

“Get off my wife,” my father said. “Yo-boh (sweetheart). Get off the floor.”

They both did. My father stood and bent his neck up to look at the Neanderthal.

“I want you out of my house.”

“But sir, she started it!” The Neanderthal was taken aback, a little hurt. “What about my proposal?”

“The answer is no,” my father said. “We keep our daughter.”

Later that night, there was a knock on my window, followed by a voice. When I walked over, I saw the Neanderthal on the driveway.

“Lucy, come out,” he whispered. “It’s me! Neanderthal!”

He pointed to himself, two hands emphatically gesturing to his chest, as if there were more than one Neanderthal outside my window. Should I go? Was he The One?

My mother and I never discussed what she considered a good mate. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the Neanderthal was not the son-in-law of her dreams. Things like earning potential and law degrees mattered. She was a Korean mother after all.

I tiptoed out of my room and almost had a heart attack at the sight of her.

“He does not understand our life,“ she said, wasting no time. “He did not even go to an Ivy League school, Lucy.” This was true. It was also most likely true that he did not know how to read or write either. “There are so many things about American society you don’t know. I have tried to protect you. Like all ungrateful children, you fail to do as I say.”

Neither of us, she said, were equipped with enough experience to navigate life in the suburbs, therefore we could not possibly be left on our own. I had been home-schooled and rarely left the house. Did we know where the town hall was? If we wanted to play tennis, would we know how to apply for a permit? Could we keep an immaculate lawn? Did we know how to get to the mall?

“Fine, I won’t play tennis,” I said. “People have led great, important lives without playing tennis.”

“What kind of future can you have with him?”

“A happy one!”

“With what money? Can he support you?”

“He’ll get a job.”

“He has no skills. He doesn’t even have a green card.”

“Then I will get a job, in a mall.” A moment passed. “After I find out how to get to the mall and what a green card is.”

She was right. The Neanderthal was bad-news-husband material. The mirage of marital bliss began to tremble, after only one brief conversation with my mother. She was a talented woman.

“Do you use your brain when you make decisions?”

“Of course,” I said. “How else would humans function? We’re all constantly engaged in the process of signals passing through the synapses of the brain organ, even for simple everyday tasks such as walking or going to the bathroom.”

“If you use your brain when you make choices, then get rid of he-man.”

I relied on my brain too much. What about animal instinct? There were other parts of myself lying listlessly in the dark, waiting for their turn. I was tired of having my mind constantly in overdrive, bossing all my other parts around. There are other elements of the human being that help choose your fate. There is the heart and the body and the soul.

“Lucy, if you marry this Neanderthal, you will ruin your life. Don’t bother coming home.”

If you know anything about people, you know that ultimatums can work but not necessarily in the way you intend.

I would not see my mother for more than a year.

The Neanderthal and I were getting married. I packed my books to finish my college applications. I packed my violin, since I couldn’t bring the piano. I wanted to keep up my skills to keep myself appealing to top schools. The Neanderthal had reserved a room at the Manor Inn, a motel downtown. I paid for the week with the money I found in my grandmother’s room. I felt giddy for the unknown. Being outside at night, walking with the Neanderthal to my new home was an intoxicating promise.

In the morning, we went to City Hall. The judge was playing hangman on a legal pad and the secretaries were folding paper airplanes out of interoffice memos. They hid their games and abruptly came to attention when we walked in.

“We’d like to get married,” the Neanderthal announced. The secretaries all rose from their desks, giggling, and started flirting with him, and the judge went to his black robe hanging in a closet. I dressed in a skirt for the occasion, and the Neanderthal wore the best-looking towel we could find in the motel room. The wedding was a simple affair. Other staff members appeared for the ceremony, providing us with plenty of witnesses. Everyone came to see what the fuss was about and gawked at my enormous groom. They were so awed by his height that when we finished, people asked for his autograph. He was happy to oblige and even posed for pictures.

“Do you, Neanderthal, take this woman, to be your lawfully wedded wife? To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, till death do you part?”

“Absolutely,” he said. One secretary sighed. Another applauded.

When asked the same, I heard myself answer.

“If anyone objects to this couple being united in matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

The secretaries whispered their objections only to each other, sharing what they’d do with the Neanderthal if he were theirs, hubba hubba. I looked around the hall, half expecting my mother to arrive with a shotgun against her hip, but she was nowhere to be seen. She was really going to let me do it. I couldn’t believe it. After the ceremony, we returned to Manor Inn, and I went to the front desk to inquire about work.

“What can you do?”

“Calculus. I am excellent at calculus. I plan to earn a B.A. in medieval studies with a minor in music, a master’s in anthropology. Of course, I will also probably pursue a doctorate but I’m not sure what the thesis will focus on as of yet,” I said. “Perhaps I could take care of your accounting? Or brainstorm on a branding campaign for your property?” 

He pulled at the back of his neck. “One of girls quit housekeeping yesterday. Can you get here by 6 a.m. tomorrow? You could fold towels.”

I folded towels into rectangles and swans. I stocked carts with toilet paper, tissue boxes, and a mini-all-in-one shampoo/conditioner/lotion. I burned my hands doing laundry. I developed eczema from all the bleach. Eventually, management promoted me to housekeeper. I scrubbed bathroom floors, tubs, and sinks. I wiped down desks and bedside tables. I made the beds, picked up paltry tips when guests decided to leave them. Every night, walking back to our room, I planned to work on my college applications, but fell asleep in my uniform while the Neanderthal watched TV.

“Muncha buncha muncha buncha, Crispy Crackos go with lunch.”

“Jangles go good anytime! Crunch-crunch-crunch! Jangles go good anytime!”

“Barbecue Breakfast Burgers Bla-a-a-a-a-st off your day! ”

He had taken to singing along with the commercial jingles. It was annoying. It was annoying when I tried to review my notes. It was annoying when I tried to sleep. His voice was in my head, even when he stopped crooning crackpot tunes. He was naked all the time, always ready for sexual action, beckoning his Mount Kilimanjaro at a moment’s notice to poke, poke, poke me for attention. I was exhausted, but couldn’t refuse him every time, could I? Isn’t marriage about compromise? On one hand, I could understand—he was stuck in the room all day, watching TV, pulsating with unspent energy. On the other hand, I was beginning to hate him.

The other housekeepers came from other towns on buses before dawn and probably didn’t see their homes until after sundown, so really, I had no right to complain, but at least, they had each other. They told jokes I didn’t get. They were all around the same age, had children, and seemed to be originally from Bolivia. I didn’t have a prayer of making a friend. At the end of each day, we folded towels with crier-callused hands. I would sit in the middle of the sweat-lodge laundry room, a room lousy and loud with grating machine noise, and catch the sound of an occasional laugh. It made me wish I studied Quechua instead of anthropology. It made me miss my inhaler. The loneliness hit me so intensely at times that I just wanted to be knocked out to forget. Maybe I’d write about these women one day, I thought, and they will want my autograph.

My asthma disappeared, but my brain atrophied. I was forgetting everything I learned: algebra, sciences, philosophy, literature, history, and music. Did I still know twelve times twelve? Did I know why World War II started? Could I still play the piano? Chopin required a finesse: rubato—the trick of playing your heart out and breaking every rule keeping in the restrictions of four-four time. I used to be good at it.

As months went by, my energy dwindled. Strange twinges of pain would appear and disappear. I was mysteriously sleepy all the time. Maybe I was becoming my father.

“No, no, not tonight,” I said. I plastered myself to the bed as soon as I came home one night. The Neanderthal followed and clung to my side. “Please, I’m too tired.”

“You’re always tired,” he complained. “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

“I can’t be pregnant.”

I was pregnant. We bought a test from the lobby gift shop. A thin blue line slowly appeared like destiny. The Neanderthal was so overjoyed he bought a bottle of champagne with my credit card.

“We have to celebrate!”

When I informed him pregnant women shouldn’t drink, he looked crestfallen, but perked up after a few healthy chugs.

“I feel funny,” he said. “I feel funny.”

Say it one more time, I thought, and I will swing this chair across your exceptionally large forehead.

I turned up the TV to drown out his voice. With a child, there really wasn’t going to be any more time to think about college. My entire waking life would be consumed with taking care of two babies.

“I am so happy!” he yelled over the six o’clock news. “Having a child is the most pure thing in the world!”

“You need a job! I can’t clean pregnant! How will you support me and the baby?”

“I’ll come up with something!” The Neanderthal smiled broadly, revealing a generous view of his dirty teeth. They were small and stubby, with wide landscapes of blotchy red gum in between. The hair trapped in his everyday topknot was greasy. “I’ll find a job!”

“How? Do you have a green card?”

“Of course not,” he said, gazing at me softly. He turned down the volume. “But I can make you a green card. And a yellow card, a purple card and a red—“

“God, no! You don’t get it. A green card, it’s this thing the government issues aliens so they know you’re here.” By now, I had learned a thing or two about the world, and it frightened me how much I sounded like my mother.

The next day, the Neanderthal had already been up a few hours, hard at work, and dressed (in a towel) by the time I got out of bed. There were sheets of motel stationary filled with furious scribbling on floor. Pacing back and forth, the TV on mute, the Neanderthal was bouncing a pen off his head, presumably thinking.

When I returned from work that night, there was a sign above our door made of poster board and Magic Marker:

NEW JERSEY NEANDERTHAL, PHOTOS $5!!!

The scrawl looked like a child’s or a serial killer’s. I was not comforted.

“Hi!” said the Neanderthal. He had long since abandoned the towel skirt he had been wearing that morning and greeted me buck-naked. Empty tiny bottles of liquor had emerged from the mini bar, lying on our bed helter-skelter. “How’s the mother of my firstborn?”

He licked my cheek like a dog. He came over and started massaging my shoulders. I waited for him to stop, to see how long I could stand it before I snapped.

“I just want to shower and hit the sack.”

“Tonight, we have to celebrate!”

“Why?”

“My new business. I’m in entertainment now! Didn’t you see my sign outside?”

If you ignore things, sometimes, you don’t have to pretend you care.

“I’m so excited, Lucy. I just got an idea when I was watching ‘American Idle’ today. Just watching, watching, watching, and then BLAMMO!”

“Wait a minute, have you thought through the details? Do you have a camera?”

“I have some instamatics.”

“Where did you get them?”

“The lobby gift shop. Did you know we could charge things to our room?” he said. “They have a lot of great stuff. You should check them out!”

“People take their own pictures with their phones. What about social media?”

“I think it’s going to work out.”

“Great,” I said. “Very creative. I’ve got to get ready for bed.”

“Already?”

“Tomorrow, another work day you know.”

I dodged further kisses and mammoth hugs on my way to the bathroom. “Congratulations!” I said through the shut door. At least I could be alone in the shower. 

The next morning, we were woken up by a knock at the door. A policeman. Something must have happened to my father, I thought.

“Uh, hi,” the cop said, coughing. He looked at the ground and scrapped the floor with his shoe, like he was scrapping gum off the sole. “Sorry to be calling so early.”

“Is there a problem?” I pulled my robe together tighter.

“I was just wondering, is this, uh,” he pulled his collar away from his neck. “Is this where the Neanderthal lives?”

“Is he in trouble?” I knew it. I had married a criminal.

“No, nothing like that,” he laughed. “This is so stupid. Look, I just wondered if I could get my picture taken.”

He left an hour later, after taking sixty photos with his phone and the Neanderthal’s instamatic.

“Three hundred dollars, one hour,” my husband said. “Not too shabby. Why don’t you tell your boss you’re not coming back tomorrow?”

“It was just one customer.”

“Wait, Lucy, you’ll see.”

The police officer came back with his friends. Some of the secretaries from City Hall showed up, some folks who worked downtown and saw the Neanderthal’s sign also swung by. Then the tourists started to arrive. A few at first. Then a bus tour, then more bus tours. Hundreds and hundreds of people from out of town, from all over the country and Japan. (In Tokyo, there was a trend among young men to wear their hair in a style called ネアンデルタール  バン (Neanderutāru ban/Neanderthal hair bun). The Neanderthal got so popular he hired a photographer, a publicist, a manager, and a stylist. Patrons started lining up in the parking lot before we even woke up, even in the rain. Soon, he couldn’t operate from our motel room. Team Neanderthal™ leased an office and storefront on Main Street. Photos with the Neanderthal™ shot up to twenty dollars, then fifty. One hundred dollars got you a photo and fifteen personalized minutes. His team allowed customers to post images on social media, which only increased his wild popularity. His instamatic originals sold on Ebay in furious auction wars. Companies could also rent the Neanderthal™ for office functions at an extraordinary price. The Neanderthal now wore a leather skirt made from goatskin designed in Barcelona as his work uniform. His hair was always gleaming with expensive conditioner, cut in exquisite layers but still long enough for his trademark topknot. Off-duty, he no longer went without pants. He began to show up at the motel room in fitted silk suits with Italian ties and fine suede shoes. A limousine waited for him every morning.

The onslaught of out-of-towners brought on a boom for every local restaurant and hotel. Taxes were lowered, funding increased for the public elementary school and the library. The mayor was thinking about declaring the Neanderthal a living town monument. There was even talk of the Neanderthal running for public office.

“See Lucy, what did I tell you?” He said this with a cigar dangling dangerously from his mouth, patting my swelling belly.

“Secondhand smoke kills,” I said.

We rarely saw each other. After his hours at the storefront, he networked well into the evening. During his days off, he worked out and focused on his tan (“My public really likes me with a tan”) or saw clients. I quit my cleaning job and stayed inside, and the Neanderthal stayed away.

I wish I could say this was the moment that I returned to my college applications. I finally had the financial support and time to pursue what I wanted. This was the time to finish my essays, to follow my dreams, whatever the hell they were. I brought out my books again, my notes. I stared at blank paper, and…nothing. Nothing came to mind, no ideas; I was empty of the desire to create. I stopped reading, my vocabulary dwindled. Huh? I always said, or Yeah, I said, chomping down cheesy snacks in front of the TV. Commercial after commercial, old reruns of has-been stars, dramas of violence, and sitcoms with cheap sexuality filled me up.     

In my ninth month, I ballooned. The once firm lines of my slender arms and legs had disappeared into thick, flabby trunks. My face had softened; the border of my chin had blurred into my neck like an elderly woman’s. Not only was my middle pregnant, but my rear and my hips and my thighs grew pregnant too. My body was large enough that I found all clothing constrictive. I ended up not getting dressed in the morning, preferring to wrap the bed sheet around me like a toga. I couldn’t stand looking at myself in the mirror, knowing there was this little thug growing inside me, turning me into some animal as enormous as an elephant, and he was the only one I could talk to.

Baby, I said. What happened to me?

Relax, Mommy. We’re rolling in dough, we have it made, Baby said.

So what. Is this it? I ran away from home for this life?

Mommy, really, you think too much.

Huh?

Life is meant to be enjoyed, not suffered through.

Yeah.

Why don’t you work on something, Mommy? said Baby. Finish your applications to attain that elusive college acceptance letter. It could alleviate your terrible ennui.

Maybe, I said.

I sat at the desk and pulled out the motel stationery:

Dear Baby–

Life is meant to be enjoyed, not suffered through.

Love, Mommy

The Baby clapped his little fins inside of me.

There was a fist banging on the front door.

“Team Neanderthal™ moved downtown!” I screamed from bed. “Go away!” Sometimes, the sightseers from out of town were confused. They would stand there like deer frozen in shock, staring at me, even after I gave them directions.

The knocking continued.

“Hello? Are you deaf?” More knocking. Slowly, I sat up and swung my considerable legs to the floor, heaving up my formidable heavy-with-child form to stand, lurching towards the door.

“He’s not here, people.” I opened the door and cried out.

“Mom?”

We were both shocked. She stared at me, speechless. My hands wobbled like cellophane. I tucked them in my armpits.

“You,” she said. “You look so different.”

I could have said the same. Her hair had gone gray and wavy. Her skin tone had faded to an unearthly translucence.

“You wear nothing to answer the door?” she said. “Cover yourself!”

I looked down. My sheath of sheet no longer glowed clean-white and fell loosely. One breast peered out, curious about our surprise visitor. Blushing, I adjusted myself.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“This is awful. How can you bear that monkey-child?”

“Make your point fast, Mom.”

Two seconds passed. That’s all it took for my mom to get my blood to simmer and rise. Mom was like a lumberjack at a local carnival, slamming her hammer at High Striker, launching my heart like a puck, sending me to hit the top of the tower and beyond, shooting way out into outer space. What right did she have to judge me? I made it without her.

“Look at you! You married that dumb Planet Ape and this happens?”

“Dumb, huh? If he’s so dumb, why do people come to see him from all over the world?”

“I don’t care about the world. You are the one I care about.”

“Oh,” I said. This kindness confused me.

“Have you made any friends out here?”

“I used to have a job. I saw a lot of people there.”

“The world is not so great. I told you.”

“I’m doing okay.”

“How? You’re alone. You’re fat.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re not supposed to gain that much weight.”

“Easy, Mom.”

“Move back. Daddy misses you.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t tell if she were serious or if I wanted her to be. “Really? Did he say that?”

“You win. You prove your point. Now we would like you to come home.”

She handed me a paper bag, inside was a Tupperware container filled with kal-bi.

“Mom?”

“I know you are unhappy, anyone can see that. Get rid of chimp log. Be free.”

She turned and left. 

Back in the room, I could not stop shaking.

Mommy? asked Baby. Why are you crying?

Nothing, I said, It’s nothing.

There was no fooling Baby, what with the walls of his world heaving with spastic convulsions. I turned on the TV, cranked the volume to 10 to hide, but it didn’t work. I was still a mess and the old familiar light-headedness was encroaching. I sat at the table and put my head down. I was not sure to do with my mother’s gift.

Mommy, I’m hungry.

Okay, just wait a second.

Hungry. Really hungry. On the verge of starvation.

You’re always hungry!

I’m a growing baby! We’re supposed to be hungry.

Well, you’re going to have to wait.

How about that bag of meat by your feet?

Not now.

I had chosen the wrong path in life. What was I supposed to do now? Being an adult means making choices, and I hadn’t made any on my own. I had just fallen in line, following whatever steps my parents set for me, whatever my husband wanted. Who was I fooling? I was never going to finish my college applications; television did not count as research. I did not love my husband, I don’t know if I can love my baby, and as I struggled to breathe at that table, I realized I hated my mother.

She was right. I was not made for this big, bad world. I had failed to make any mark, affect any change. As much as I despised the Neanderthal, at least he was touching people’s lives. People liked him.

Please, Mommy, I’m hungry. Meat in the bag.

That’s not for you.

Those were the wrong words to say to Baby. They began an epic maelstrom of kicking and screaming. He did not like being denied.

I want the meat!

Baby, I already told you–

Meat! Meat! Meat!

Wow, kids are annoying. I couldn’t think straight with him shouting like that. I opened the lid. I could tell my mom had just made the kal-bi because the container was warm. The stew was dark brown, with little bits of garlic and bone and secret ingredient apple sticking up from the surface. I smelled it—warm and inviting and delicious, not remotely suspicious. One small taste, I thought, that won’t hurt anyone. I dipped my fingers. I tasted the scallions, the soy sauce. The tender meat fell apart in my mouth. There wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Even the aftertaste was sweet. My mother was a genius.

More, more! Baby said.

As much as you like!

I started eating faster and faster, smashing chunks of beef down my throat with a messy fist so fast I could feel the pieces bruising my throat.

Eventually, Baby stopped talking, stopped moving. I stood up when I had finished the meal, my belly full of poison. I ran my hands over my heavy sac, sharp pains pinning the sides. Air. All of a sudden, I needed air.

Let’s go out and see.

Nighttime: the sun had set over an hour ago. The stars were faint, fading in and out, a temperamental signal from outer space. I opened the door. The air felt wonderfully refreshing, cold, and the streets were quiet. People were all home having supper. Would they welcome me if I crashed their family feasts with my mammoth middle? I carefully placed one swollen foot in front of the other down the steps. Reaching out to the railing, I caught myself from falling.

“Okay,” I said. “This is okay.”

I remembered my father and his stupid poem and prayed for a little magic for myself. Finally lying down on flat ground again, I sighed. And just then, the moonlight seemed to bounce off the motel walls so that the entire parking lot seemed lit especially for me. 

A writer since the age of eight, Tina Lee discovered her love of acting while procrastinating in graduate school for fiction writing. Publication credits include anthologies, Joyland magazine, River City Journal, and Kalliope magazine. In New York, she has written and performed one-person shows at the HERE/Lincoln Center Theatre’s American Living Room series, The New School, Dixon Place, the NuYorican Poets Café, the Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca, NY, and the YWCA, among others. Her screenplay “The Midas Touch,” (Fluid Motion Film.) has played film festivals. She has written a young adult novel and is currently at work on a play on robots that take over our lives. She has a BA from Yale and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Michelle Bellman

Able

I hear a knock on the door as my very pregnant and very pretty gynecologist comes into the room where I sit on the hospital bed, pants less and covered by a thin sheet of paper. She gives me a big smile as she reaches out her hand to shake mine. She is my new doctor here and I feel my cheeks flush, the routine of these visits slightly disrupted by her warm presence. I have been in and out of this office so many times, I’ve started to notice the little details. They use sensitive AstroGlide lube. There is a poster detailing the chances of pregnancy with each form of birth control and one explaining the different trimesters and embryo stages. I like children, babies even, but embryos always scared me. The thought of something growing inside me, developing bones and teeth. Even the word, fetus, sounds alien. When I was pregnant, for a short time, that was all I could think about.

“Hi Ziggy, how are you today?” She reminds me of a girl I had a crush on when I started my job years ago. Rebecca. The crush never amounted to anything. I met my ex-husband, she met hers, and she became an old friend. Someone I follow on Facebook and that pops in my dreams every so often. But she had that same warming presence, the kind that made my cheeks flush too.

“Oh, good. You know, as good as you can be before getting a speculum put up your vagina.”

She sits on her rolling chair, putting a hand on her giant belly. “I know what you mean. You never get used to it. I am Dr. Stevens, by the way, but just call me Jill. Helen gave me your file. I’m taking on all her patients since she retired, until of course this little guy comes out, then you’ll be seeing a nurse practitioner for a few months. Is that all right?”

“Sure.” It’s hot outside, so the A/C is blowing in this small room and I shiver. My temperature is never normal, I’m either too hot or too cold. Since turning forty-five, I’ve had episodes of hot flashes and erratic periods, acne, and my mood changes that switch every few hours. I feel like a teenager again.

“Good, I’ve read over the nurse’s notes. I just want to make sure I understand everything and get you what you need. It seems you’ve gone to a lot of doctors for a hysterectomy.”

I squirm a bit, trying to get comfortable. My bare butt sticks to the paper on the table they change in between patients. “Yes, for many years now. It started when I got off birth control in my late twenties. That’s when I was diagnosed with endometriosis.”

“And that was around the time of your miscarriage?” she looks down at her notes that has my medical history typed up neatly, like an exam sheet.

“Yes, I was around thirty then.”

“Now you are in the early stages of menopause. I see you are also having some trouble with irregular periods, mood swings, hot flashes, all that good stuff.” I nod. “I’d like to give you a routine checkup and some tests. Please lay back on the table and scoot to the end. Feet on the stirrups.”

“I know this by heart now.” I joke, feeling the nerves set in. I don’t think anyone particularly likes a stranger near their private parts outside of a hookup, but I really don’t. Despite having been going to a gyno since I was first having sex for pap smears, birth control, and yeast infections, I’ve never gotten used to this. I don’t like that part of my body and it’s odd having someone focus on it, looking at it, talking to me about my day as they scrape cells from my cervix and stick their fingers up there for an exam. When I was first diagnosed with endometriosis at thirty after years of being on the pill that quelled the symptoms, I had to come in often. My husband and I were trying for a kid at the time and I was in constant pain. The doctors would say everything matter of fact, as if my pain was just checking a box for a diagnosis.

“Move down just a little bit more and good! I’m going to touch now, okay?” Jill has a nice voice. She reminds me of a nurse I had when my miscarriage happened. I was far enough along that they had to perform a surgery to get the fetus out. She talked to me about our favorite movies, we both were suckers for romance, and held my hand.

“All right, the speculum is going in. You’ll feel some pressure.” I look up at the ceiling and count the number of tiles, trying not to focus on the pressure or coldness of the metal. “I’ll take a few swabs for some tests.” When the nurse was taking notes at the beginning of my visit, I had to admit that I had several new sexual partners. After years of the same man, my ex-husband Travis, I found myself not caring too much about loving the person I am sleeping with anymore. Sometimes I don’t even like them. But I am too paranoid not to use condoms. Even though I’m infertile, menopausal, and forty-five, I don’t take any chances.

“About the hysterectomy.” I say as she takes the first of the tests, using a cotton swab. That’s the part I hate the most. It feels like a throat swab, but inside your body. Invasive and strange.

“Yes, of course. The first time you were rejected one was when you were diagnosed with endometriosis and miscarried?”

I pick at my nails, chipping off some of the nail polish I put on for a date I had the other night. “Right. I’ve been told no many times by many doctors. But yes, that was the first time.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you no. It’s your body.” Jill says, nonchalantly. “Okay, I’m taking the speculum out now.” She turns to put the swabs into their own containers for testing. “I’m going to use my fingers to check your cervix, all right?”

Her gloved fingers have that AstroGlide lube on them that is always too cold. She’s quick about it. “Good. Now for the breast exam and then we can talk about that procedure, all right?”

*

Jill showed me empathy I wasn’t expecting. She apologized for doctors in the past who told me no and said the pain I felt is valid and felt by so many women that get overlooked. Or something that like, she was very eloquent and kind. Maybe I was just developing another crush. If I believed in angels, I would assume she was one, or possibly the Virgin Mary sent down in her pregnant form to give me what I need. My uterus taken out. I sit in my car after, at the Dunkin drive thru, stunned. I hold the piece of paper in my hand that tells me the date of the procedure and the steps I need to take following up to it. It is only a month away. I wish I had someone to tell the news to right away. I don’t think the Dunkin employees would appreciate that much personal detail through the drive thru.

I order myself a drink with lots of sugar and caffeine and drive around for a bit. Back when I was pregnant and then after my miscarriage and realization that I was most likely infertile, I took a lot of drives. I work as a bus driver, at the local school, so driving is my job. But when I do it for fun, turn on the radio and don’t pay attention to where I’m going, I actually enjoy it. Sometimes I think about my ex, Travis. He wasn’t a bad guy at all, we just didn’t work out. There is only so much grief and pain two people can have together without becoming different people. I’m not sure who changed first after the miscarriage. We grieved differently and our styles of showing comfort changed too. He looked towards the future, where things would be better. I stayed in the present, refusing to think of anything else but the day ahead.

But when we were first together and in that honeymoon stage, in our late twenties, we would take drives out to the country and talk for a long time. He was a science teacher at the local high school and would tell me how things worked. When we decided to have a baby, he taught me about Punnett squares and for fun we’d fill them out with our genes, and roll dice to pick out the random traits for our make-believe baby. I don’t think I was ever honest with him during that time: I was scared of pregnancy, I had crushes on women too, my body didn’t feel like my own. It was betraying me, and I was angry. He was the one to bury the baby I miscarried. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl. If it was developed enough to see what traits of ours it had.

I don’t like to think about sad things for too long. I turn the channel to Classic rock that plays songs I remember listening to as a kid, making me feel old. The sun is bright, so I put down my visor and reach to grab my sunglasses from my dash. That’s when I see it. I break suddenly and veer to the right. Dust flies into the air as I skid off the side of the road, avoiding something moving that I can’t make out. My heart is racing. What dumb teenager is out doing dumb teenager things? Working as a bus driver I am always seeing the worst in them. Pranks and bullying, new hormones raging through their bodies making them intolerable to be around. But when I see the thing, I realize it isn’t a teenager. It isn’t…human at all. What did they put into my drink? Was I having a reaction to the AstroGlide lube?

“Hello, human.” The alien says, walking closer to my side of the car. He is tiny, about four foot five, and green. He looks like the stereotypical Martian from those old movies. He is naked but has no genitals, for some reason my eyes go there first. His head is big and so are his eyes, buggish almost. When he comes closer to me, I tense.

“Oh, I am sorry. How rude of me, my name is Able. I picked it because that means I am able to do things and the word also sounds very nice. What is your name?”

“Uh, Ziggy.”

“Hello Uh Ziggy. I did not mean to startle you or to cause you to drive your vehicle off the road. I just happen to be lost and the locals out in the country are often friendly to me. My kind prefers the Midwest, actually.”

“Oh.” I look over at my purse where my phone is, thinking of calling someone or taking a picture. But then I look back at Able and find him sort of cute. His voice is a little high, like a middle school boy, and he is just standing there lost. “Are you…real?”

“Ah, a philosopher I see! I am as real as you or myself can perceive me to be!”

“No…I mean,” I shake my head. “I didn’t think aliens were real.”

“I am real as you are! Here, I know you humans greet each other by shaking hands. Would you like to shake mine to solidify my realness?” he reaches out his hand, which has only four fingers. I reach out and shake it. His skin is smooth and cold, but oddly…human.

“Do you need help?” I ask. “It’s hot outside today. I can get you some water.”

“I do need help, thank you. The human species is known to be terrible war mongers, but individual humans always seem to be nice. Except for some young boys who threw rocks at me once. They were not nice.”

“I’m sorry they did that. That’s horrible.”

“Yes. I cried for a long time. I cry a lot on Earth.” He is fiddling his fingers together. “May I get into your vehicle?”

“Um sure, just put on your seatbelt.” I watch as he walks around the front of my car and to my passenger seat. He struggles with opening the door and after he finally does get in, he lets out a long sigh. I turn the A/C up for him. He is fascinated by it, putting his hands in front of the vents and eventually his whole face. I don’t know why I keep calling him “he”, maybe it’s the voice or the name. I start to drive, occasionally looking over at him.

“I like this song. Humans have such great music.” He says as we make a turn back into to my condo. I live in a small, hick town in the Midwest. I go into the city next to us for my doctor and shopping. But I like the peace this place brings. When I got a job driving a school bus in my mid-twenties, I considered it a pause in my goal to go back to school and become someone smart. But then I just stayed. I like that this place has a routine. Everything is the same, year by year. I guess, except for this alien in my passenger seat.

He reaches for the paper I put on the dash. I start to tell him to stop, but he’s already reading it. “Hysterectomy. What is that? That is not a human word I know. Surgery I do. Are you sick?”

“Oh, um, sort of. There is something wrong with my…uterus. It needs taken out.”

“Uterus. Where the females of your species grow fetuses and have monthly cycles. I find your species so interesting. Our kind does not have the concept of gender. You guys seem to care about it a great deal. I am sorry there is something wrong with your uterus. Are you going to miss it when it’s gone?”

“What?”

“Well, I know you humans get attached to things very easily.”

“I don’t really know…can we talk about something else? Where are you from?”

“I have made you uncomfortable. I apologize, I am a new scout. That is my job. I come to Earth to take notes, observe, and collect. I am from somewhere you do not know. I do not like my home very much. I prefer Earth. It is green, like me.” He makes a noise almost like a laugh.

“Do you have any family?” I ask, realizing how odd my day is. From the gyno to talking with an alien. I don’t know if I truly accept that this is happening, but I’m here and mine as well be polite.

“Yes. However, you would not understand the concept of our families. A way to compare would be I have many siblings, but no parents. I understand you humans ask each other the same questions back. Do you have any family?”

“Um, I do. My ex-husband was my family for a long time.”

“Is he deceased?”

“No, he…we broke up.”

“Ah, yes. We have that concept too. You humans call it a broken heart. You have the best metaphors and words for feelings.”

“We do? I guess I never thought about it.” I notice that he is doing something like dancing. He moves his body to the beat of the song and taps his hands on his legs. I reach down and turn the music up. It’s “Heart of Glass”by Blondie. Able closes his eyes.

“A lot of your songs are about heartbreak too. As a scout, I record information about your species. Both culturally and biological. I find everything so fascinating.”

“That’s cool.” I nod. “I’m a school bus driver.”

“Those are the large, yellow vehicles that take children from school to their homes? I saw one once, when the kids hit me with rocks.”

“Right. I’m sorry, kids can be mean.”

“I have not been around many human children. Do you have any?”

“Nope.” I look at my Dunkin drink, half gone. “Do you eat or drink anything? Can you even eat or drink our food? There is this movie, Signs, where the aliens come and drink our water and die.”

“That is horrifying.”

“They were bad aliens. You know, the kind that killed us.”

“Your entertainment is so violent. No, our species takes precaution with us scouts. I take what you call medicine that allows me to drink your water and eat your food safely. In fact, our biology is similar. I drink water like you do. I love sweet things. I do not like salty food too much.”

“Me too.” I smile slightly. “I have some ice cream at home. I have some clothes too if you’d like them.”

“Oh, yes, thank you. I understand nudity makes humans uncomfortable. I have also always wanted to try on human clothes. I think they are pretty.”

I park in my garage at home so my neighbors can’t see Able. I live in a neighborhood that are all duplexes. We keep to ourselves and judge each other over unkept lawns and how many Halloween decorations we put out. I don’t like to stir trouble or bring attention to myself, and I’m sure Able would do just that. He follows me inside and I take him to my room where I dig through my closet for my box of old clothes from when I was thinner. I’m not very tall myself, so what I used to wear should fit him. As I go through the box, Able goes around my room touching things. He turns my floor lamp on and off, straightens the books on my shelf, and wipes at the dust on my windowsill, looking at his finger at the residue. He mumbles to himself and is extremely fascinated by my bed. It is messy and unmade because no one ever sees it but me and the men I bring home don’t care too much. After rubbing his hands over my comforter, he goes over to my messy nightstand.

“What are these?” he asks, pointing to a bottle of pills. He picks them up and rattles them.

“Oh, painkillers. For my…what I’m sick with. It’s called endometriosis.” I don’t know why I’m telling him all this personal stuff. He’s like a little kid, discovering everything for the first time. It’s endearing. “The other pills are to help me with going through menopause.”

He sets them back down and fiddles with his fingers again. “I am sorry if you are in pain.”

“Oh, I’m okay right now.” I take out the clothes that should fit him and push the box back in my closet. “Here, I found some stuff.”

Even though he’s naked, I give him privacy to change. I go into my kitchen and grab the tub of ice cream, scooping it into two separate bowls. The sheet of paper with the date and instructions for my hysterectomy lays on the kitchen counter. With a magnet, I hang it on the fridge like it’s a report card with straight A’s. Able comes out of my room, rubbing his hands all over the clothes. I gave him my old T-shirt from when Travis and I went to Niagara Falls and a pair of athletic shorts.

“These clothes are very nice. Very soft.” He looks up at me. “Thank you.”

“No problem. They look good on you.” I push the bowl of ice cream towards him. “Would you like to try some?”

“This is ice cream.” He says matter of fact.

“Yes. It’s strawberry, my favorite.” I take a big scoop. He sits on the chair next to the counter and pulls the bowl towards him. He mirrors me, taking a big scoop and sticking it into his mouth.

“It’s cold!” he says, surprised. “Oh, this is very good. It’s sweet!”

“Yes! It’s full of sugar.” I smile, eating more.

“Ouch. Ouch.” He puts a hand up to his head and winces. “My head hurts very much.”

“Brain freeze. I didn’t even think you could get brain freeze. Here, do this.” I take my thumb and press it the roof of my mouth. He does the same and after a few moments, stops wincing.

“This is food is dangerous.”

“Only if you eat it fast. Take it slow and enjoy it.”

“I am learning a lot about humans. We do not measure how we eat our food by speed.”

Able and I eat our ice cream and watch TV. He sits in my comfy chair with it reclined, his tiny legs propped up. I flip through the channels, looking over to see if he’s interested in anything. When we land on the Discovery channel, he makes a noise. It’s a nature documentary.

“Can we watch this?” he asks me.

“Sure. I like these shows. Except for when they show an animal dying or getting eaten.”

“I do not like that part either. However, that is the way of nature. Even where I am from.”

I want to ask him where he’s from again, but don’t want to be invasive. I’m enjoying his company. I let myself become immersed in the documentary as the British man takes us to jungles and mountains and under the sea. When we get to the Antarctic I point to the TV.

“Oh penguins! They’re my favorite. Do you know about penguins?”

“I have a fellow scout who is stationed there. I have never seen one myself. They seem what you humans call cute. Fat and cute.”

“I’ve loved them since I was a kid. My parents took me to this aquarium, when it first opened, and I got to see real penguins. Some were sleeping, others were preening one another, a little one was playing in the water with his toy.”

“You spoke of parents. You have them?”

“Oh, well used to. They passed away.”

“That means death. What were they like?”

“Loving. Nice. They really loved one another and me.” His buggish eyes are looking at me, as if examining. It reminds me of the short time I went to therapy, during my divorce, and how I didn’t go back because I hated being observed like that. “Able?”

“I sense that I made you uncomfortable, I do not know why. I believe it is because the death of your parents. Death in my culture is not something that is sad.”

“That must be nice.” I look back at the documentary to see a lone penguin on a piece of iceberg, drifting away from his family. The iceberg has broken off because of climate change and the British man is warning us that this is our future. The little penguin decides to be brave and jump into the water after his family, unknowing there is a leopard seal. A predator. I turn it off, quickly, before I can see the penguin’s fate. Maybe he made it. But I do not want to take the chance. Able holds out his bowl to me.

“May I have more ice cream?”

I scoop Able more ice cream and let him take control of the TV. I explain how it works and he picks it up quickly, telling me he always wanted to try one out. He tells me his culture values education over entertainment and has always wanted to watch a soap opera. I leave him be and head into my room. Driving a school bus means I must get up in the early morning and go to bed before toddlers even do. As I’m getting ready to turn in for the night, I have the urge to call Travis and tell him I’m finally getting my uterus taken out. When we were married, and doctors told me I needed his permission, he would get so angry. A life lived as a man didn’t prepare him for things like this. He learned quickly how unfair things were and that anger is often the only thing you can do about it. The doctors at the time still saw me as a young woman with the possibility of becoming pregnant again. They would never sterilize me, a word they would not even say.

After my miscarriage, I became very open with him. Years of my mother teaching me to keep periods and my body private from the men around me were gone. I didn’t care. When I bled on our sheets from heavy and irregular periods, I asked for help. When I couldn’t move from the pain endometriosis causes, I told him about it. I didn’t diminish it like I learned to do my entire life. I talked to him about the dirty stuff too: the blood clots, my anemia that came along with my periods, the fear that I will bleed through my pants as a thirty something old woman, my fear of being pregnant.

I felt guilty because I hated being pregnant and I felt like that hatred traveled through me and into my evil uterus, poisoning our kid. I told him I was done, that I didn’t want to be a mother ever and wanted the bad organ out of me. We became very close for those few years of doctors’ visits. But then we grew apart. We stopped having sex, we only small talked and went about our days like we were following the same routine over and over. He was the one to break it off with me. He said he found himself developing feelings for a teacher at his work and didn’t want to hurt me, that it wasn’t fair. I said I understood even though I really didn’t. I hoped he would find happiness, which is true. I don’t like to think about these things for too long. I back out of the message app on my phone and set it down. I hear Able out in the living room, changing the channels on the television. It is nice to hear someone else in this house again.

Able watches me as I make us dinner. I have frozen chicken in the freezer and cut some orange slices. I want to feed him something healthy, after all that ice cream. I put on some Blondie for him and he bounces slightly to the beat.

“I have to work early tomorrow. Would you like to stay here, at my house when I’m gone?” I push the bowl of orange slices towards him and he takes one in his fingers, examining it.

“This is fruit. I have never tried fruit.” He eats a slice and closes his eyes. “Food on Earth is so good.”

“Able? Would you like to stay here? Do you have to go home at all?”

He opens his eyes and pauses, then shakes his head. “I do need to go soon, to complete my job as a Scout. However, I would like to stay. You are a nice human. I consider you my friend.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” I say, turning to put the frozen chicken in the oven. “Sure, you’re my friend too Able.”           

When I wake up in the morning for work, I find Able curled up in the blankets I left for him on the couch. His breathing is deep and one of his tiny hands is draped over his face, covering his eyes. I don’t know how well he can read, but I write him a note telling him when I will be home, where to find food in the fridge, and how to use the TV in case he forgot. I’m not sure how he uses the bathroom or showers or if he even needs to, but I draw a little map of my house just in case. I pour myself a cup of coffee and head into work. As I make my rounds to the kids houses on my route and back to the school, I think about my procedure. I don’t know what to call it: procedure, surgery, sterilization, a miracle. So many words for it sound clinical and cold. In the morning, the children are very quiet and tired. The ones on my route range in age, from little children to teenagers. I wonder if any of them are the ones to throw rocks at Able. When I park the bus at the school to let the kids out, I look over at the parking lot wondering if I will see my ex’s car. If I will see him and shout out to him, “I’m finally getting my evil uterus taken out!” But I don’t do those things. I park the bus, lock it up, and make my way to my car to head home for the few hours in between me dropping the kids off at school and coming back to pick them up.

I stop by the local grocery store and buy more ice cream for Able and some deli meat so we can have another decent meal for lunch. When I get home, I find him watching TV and crying. I didn’t know what to expect from an alien crying, but he looks a lot like a little kid.

“Hey, what’s wrong Able?” I ask, going over to him. He looks up to me and wipes his buggish eyes.

“I am watching this soap opera, Nights of our Lives. It is very sad. Humans like their entertainment to make them sad.” I look over at the TV and see he’s watching some dramatic show on a channel I never go to. There is a woman crying over a picture of a handsome man. She looks quite beautiful despite crying and she lightly wipes at her eyes with a tissue. She reminds me of Rebecca, the girl I had a crush on.

“It’s just a show. It’s not real.” I say to Able who keeps looking at the TV as if the scene he is seeing will change.

“I know, but it makes me so sad. The human man and woman will not tell each other how they feel, even though they both love each other. They make themselves sad. I do not like it.”

“Well…that happens sometimes with us humans. Love is messy.” I take the remote and turn the TV off. “I bought more ice cream. Would you like some?”

“Love is messy.” He looks up at me and wipes at his eyes again. His tears are slightly green just like him. “I would like ice cream, thank you.”

Able eats the ice cream as I make us some deli sandwiches. It’s still fairly early in the day, but I’m worried about how often he eats. Occasionally, he will reach his hand up and wipe at his eyes. I think of him crying by himself when those horrible kids threw rocks at him and how alone he must feel here on Earth.

“Are there any other scouts here? Or are you by yourself?” I scrape the mayonnaise over the bread and look up at him. He has some ice cream on his mouth and reaches up to wipe it.

“There are a few other scouts on Earth, but I am the only one here. I am learning a lot.”

“Are you lonely at all?” I lay the turkey over the bread.

“Yes.”

“It sounds lonely.” Lastly, I put on the lettuce and the second piece of bread. I cut the sandwich in two and put it on a paper towel. Able looks at it, poking at the bread. “This is a sandwich?”         

“Yes. Turkey.” I start to make myself one. He eats his quickly and I realize how hungry he is, so I make him another. We sit there, eating the turkey sandwiches, the bread sticking to the rooves of our mouths in between sips of ice-cold water. I ask him if he is full and says he doesn’t understand, how can someone be full of something? I explain that I’m asking if he has had enough to eat. He asks for more ice cream. So, we sit, eating more strawberry ice cream, and watch something happy on the television. We choose a baking show where they make sculptures out of cake, colorful cupcakes, and different types of garlic bread. Able is fascinated, muttering to himself as the bakers explain their recipes and measure out the ingredients. The turkey sandwiches and ice cream have made me tired. I recline my chair and lay back, lulled by the sound of the mixers on the TV and Able’s movements.

When I wake up, the sun outside has shifted, and I know I have slept through my time to pick the kids on my route up from school. I sit up frantically, saying “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” I grab my purse and my shoes. My phone has multiple missed calls from the school.

“Able, I’m so sorry. I need to go back into work, I’m really late.” I look up and notice the spot where he was sitting is empty. The television is turned off. In the sink the bowl he was eating ice cream out of is clean. On the counter are the clothes I gave him, neatly folded. I see the note then. His writing is clear and neat. I don’t know how it looks so nice with four fingers.

“Thank you for letting me stay with you. I am a new scout and get lonely. It is nice to not be so alone all the time. I am glad we are friends. I need to go and continue my job now. Thank you for the ice cream and turkey sandwiches. Please watch the soap opera I was watching because I really want to know if the man and woman get back together. I also hope the doctors take your uterus out safely and you become less sick.” – Able

I fold the note up and put it in my purse. My home feels quiet and empty. When I rush to work, I will apologize to the teachers waiting with the kids to be picked up, I’ll take the kids home to angry parents, I’ll bring the bus back to the school to lock it up and not look at the parking lot for my ex’s car. I’ll come home and look at the paper on the fridge detailing the steps of my hysterectomy and I’ll be alone. Maybe I’ll go for another drive. Get another sugary drink and listen to the radio station that makes me feel old. Maybe I’ll find those kids that threw rocks at Able and tell them to go to hell. Or maybe, I won’t do any of that at all.

Michelle Bellman lives in Bowling Green, Ohio where she is an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Bowling Green State University. She is originally from Wapakoneta, Ohio. She has been published in Running Wild Press, New South Journal, and Prairie Margins. Her email is mrbellm@bgsu.edu. You can also follow her on Twitter @Michelle_R_B or Instagram @MichelleBellman2015.

Ted McLoof

Rumspringa

Lately, Adam was becoming a problem.

He woke me up on my birthday in 2006 and said, “Come outside.” I checked my bedside clock.

“It’s 5:30,” I told him, but he was fully dressed, standing over me, with car keys jangling in his fist, so he must have been totally conscious of the time. “Where are we going?”

“I have a birthday surprise,” he said. “I made coffee.”

“That’s not a good enough surprise to get me up at 5:30.”

“The coffee is to wake you up. The surprise is outside.”

“Outside?” I asked, but I was already stumbling out of bed, slipping on a hoodie and flip-flops. I’d known Adam since we were kids and I knew how futile it was to argue when he had a plan.

We slept on mattresses in our walk-up studio, two blocks from East Harlem, our sides of the room separated by a sheet, Greg-and-Marcia-Brady-style. It’s all we could afford. Or all I could afford, anyway. Adam’s father owned Reilly Plumbing, North Jersey’s largest septic company, which Adam called the Shit Dynasty. He was destined to take it over once he turned 21. Adam worked constantly and had oodles of cash, all of which he put into our apartment. I could only imagine what he’d done this time.

I expected to come downstairs to the smell of brewing coffee, to have a few minutes to get my bearings, but Adam handed me a Styrofoam cup from the bagel place across the street. The words “birthday boy” were written on the side in magic marker. “I thought you said you made coffee.”

“Made, bought. You have coffee. Come outside. Trust me, it’ll be worth it,” he said.

.           .           .          

Adam had always been an eccentric. His high school bedroom in his parents’ basement looked like a hipster’s loft, a fifties beatnik paradise. When we were drinking stolen bottles from our parents’ liquor cabinets, Adam was drinking coffee. When we smoked pot, Adam rolled his own cigarettes. When we threw parties in the woods, Adam drove into the city to talk his way into outdoor clubs. After graduation, the town emptied out. It was the kind of Jersey town Springsteen was always singing about. But Adam had to stay to learn the ropes of the Shit Dynasty—“It’s my birthright as Poop Prince,” he’d say, “I’m number two at the company”—and I couldn’t afford school, so the two of us stayed behind and grew closer. Adam taught me how to line up trick shots in billiards; I designatedly drove us over the GWB. The only two people left in town splitting rent on a place seemed to me nothing more than a practical move, but as with everything else Adam did, he treated it like an adventure. He knocked on the doors of everyone in our building that first week and asked their favorite drink, then provided them a full bar with their names labeled on bottles at our housewarming. If I mentioned I liked seafood, he’d find a speakeasy that served sushi you wanted to propose to. If I mentioned I liked movies, he’d find independent film houses. He found hole-in-the-wall used bookstores, weekend street sales pawning black market goods only Manhattan could offer, and when it wasn’t in Manhattan, we’d leave the city like there was no one holding us back, because no one was.

But then I got a late acceptance to Ramapo College on a scholarship, and Adam’s behavior went from eccentric to erratic. He’d come home at four in the morning with an armoire and an oriental rug he bought from some guy in Connecticut and make me haul it upstairs with him. His road trips became less focused, more one-sided: he’d get a sudden urge to road trip to Syracuse or camp in the Catskills, always dragging me along. I don’t know when he slept. He bought an easel and canvas and decided he was a painter—no, now he was a wine connoisseur, getting me drunk during tastings before I had to drive us back home. No, now he was a bass player, practicing the same Cure riff until daylight. And I would have put a stop to it. But I had an inkling what was behind it all, and was about to find out I was right. 

.           .           .          

“Happy birthday!” Adam said. We were looking at the back of an open U-Haul, at what he’d bought: a full-scale antique living room. Matching plaid sofa-and-love-seat set. Dialed TV complete with rabbit ears. Oak coffee table. And the coup-de-grace, leaning against the side, a stone slab pool table.

“It’s from 1906!” he said proudly. “It turns 100 this year, and you turn 21.”

“It’s…” What was there to say? “It’s stone. It must weigh 400 pounds at least.”

“That’s how they made them back then. We’re going to have to caulk it if we want to shoot straight, but it’ll be amazing once it’s finished.”

I wasn’t sure where to begin. “Adam—how much did all this cost?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s your gift. I just want to make the place nice.”

“The place barely fits us with the stuff you’ve brought home already. Where are we putting it?”

I wished immediately that I hadn’t asked the question. Adam got the look on his face your aunt has when she’s really psyched about the socks she bought you for Christmas. He pointed diagonally toward our building, just above our apartment, which was on the top floor. I looked back at those stone slabs and thought about our elevatorless building.

“The roof?” I said to the pool table, and he smiled. Like I said, Adam was becoming a problem.

.           .           .          

Adam was a born-again Christian, but during high school, he’d exercised his family’s faith in name only. We’d all get high together and ask him what Jesus would do and he’d say, “He wouldn’t bogart that joint.” During prom weekend he got hammered down the shore with the rest of us, but he woke up Sunday morning to visit whatever church was closest to the motel.

Lately, though, ever since my college acceptance arrived, I’d gotten the feeling his father was expecting Adam to adopt the family’s zealotry as much as his role in the Shit Dynasty. As we’d grown closer as roommates, Adam had asked me if I wanted to attend one of his dad’s sermons.

“Sermons?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Adam said, shooting the eight ball into the corner. “He’s a preacher.”

I was confused. “I thought he ran the shit company.”

“He does. This is just…an interest of his.”

“Like stamp collecting,” I said, but he didn’t laugh. I knew why. Adam didn’t invite anyone to his church. Our small town had all kinds of churches but Adam’s stood out even among those. It was spooky. The entire building was the size of a Cape Cod. People called it the Fancy Hat Church because the women would file in in these giant, feathered hats straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story, six days a week. We couldn’t figure out exactly what they believed in. I knew inviting me was a big deal. “Hey, sure. When’s the next time he’s—sermoning or whatever?”

.           .           .          

The TV was easy to get up the four flights of stairs. The coffee table took a little more work: we had to unscrew the legs and take it up piece by piece. By the time we brought the cushions up, it was 10 am and we needed a break. We sat on the cushions and Adam handed me a Corona.

“Thanks,” I said, annoyed, popping off the cap. “How the fuck we getting the rest of it up here?”

He walked to the edge of the roof, looked down at the U-Haul. “Initiative.”

“Great,” I said, and checked my watch. “You think we’ll be done by two?”

He rectangled his hands and closed one eye, like a director getting the right angle. “You know, I bet we could pull the love seat up the side of the building. I’ll run to the store for some rope…”

“Adam—”

“…and the sofa, we can pivot it through the thresholds and get it up here, no problem.”

I threw my bottle cap at his head but missed, and it went sailing over the side. “I’m supposed to meet Kayla. She wanted to take me out for my first legal drink.”

That got his attention. “The girl from the train?”

I’d met Kayla at orientation. She was a pretty girl, the first I’d ever met who I hadn’t grown up with. We’d scheduled some classes together and taken the train home to Grand Central. Every question she asked signaled my new life, away from my hometown. “Yeah,” I said. “That one.”

He pushed the lime through the neck of his beer and walked to the unplugged TV, fidgeted with the antennae as though he were trying to get a clearer picture. “Tell her to come here. By then, we’ll have this all set up. It’ll look great. A birthday party for three. I’ll make burgers.”

“She’s a vegetarian,” I told him, but he was already escaping down the fire exit.

.           .           .          

When I’d shown up, Adam’s church looked bigger on the inside than the modest exterior suggested. It reminded me of the establishing shots in Friends, when the actual crowded New York buildings never quite matched the lavish space of Monica and Rachel’s. I’d shown up alone, in a tie but no jacket, just to make sure no one thought I was actually taking this seriously. The people spoke to each other like neighbors, which is weird because none of them was from our town. I hadn’t been in a church since I was a kid and couldn’t hide my discomfort. Every inch I moved felt blasphemous. I kept telling myself not to think about sex and then I’d picture priests fucking nuns reverse-cowgirl style But I liked the camaraderie of the place at least. Everyone smiled at me as they entered the pews.

When Adam’s father came out, the crowd shut up. It felt so theatrical I expected them to applaud, for the pit to strike up the overture. He walked to the podium, Adam following behind, head bowed, a miniature version of his dad dressed in an identical suit, like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“I want to talk today about forgiveness,” Adam’s dad said. No other lead-in. Just that. He looked at Adam. “You all know my son. He’s been part of this parish since he was born. He’ll be up here talking one day.” The congregation murmured approval but quieted down when he spoke again. Adam’s dad wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to disobey. “My son is part of a generation I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. A generation maybe you’ve all been thinking about, too. I know some of you have kids his age. He’s a good kid. The influences around him, though…” he patted his forehead with a handkerchief, and I almost laughed. It was like a pantomime of a televangelist, what you’d do if you wanted someone to guess “preacher” in charades. I looked at Adam to make him laugh, but he was looking at the ground. “My son is going to face some hard choices in his next few years. It’s tempting to see the world. To leave your family, your responsibilities, your church. It’s tempting to follow the path your friends go down.” I blushed. I wasn’t sure whether Adam’s dad knew I was coming that night but it sure felt like it. College was on the horizon. Things were looking up. Adam’s dad placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder while looking at the crowd. “But what we need to remember is,whatever their transgressions, we need to embrace our children. To bring them back to the light. To practice forgiveness. In the name of the Father…” he finished. He and Adam hugged.

I wanted to punch his father for embarrassing me, even if no one there knew who I was. I wanted to hit him for talking about his own son like he wasn’t in the room. And then I wondered whether Adam knew about tonight’s sermon, whether there was a message in there he wanted me to hear.

.           .           ,

By noon, we’d gotten the sofa to the top and I was ready to kill him. Our neighbors had caught on to what we were doing and gathered in front of the building to watch as we hooked up Adam’s makeshift pulley to the love seat. It fell right away on our first attempt. On the second, it was halfway up before it fell crashing to the ground. “It’s salvageable!” our downstairs neighbor Suzanne shouted after inspecting it, and our neighbors cheered. They strapped it up again for us, and this time we got it all the way to the edge of the roof, grabbed both ends, and pulled it over.

Adam lifted my hand over his head like a prizefighter and the crowd went wild. I wanted to feel triumphant, but I looked up at my watch and winced. “Shit. It’s almost two.”

“The pool table,” he said, like I’d left the dinner table eating hors d’oeuvres but not the steak.

“That’ll take hours. Days,” I said and he said, “An hour, tops,” and I told him, “We’re gonna have to bring each piece up floor by floor and stop at the top of each stairway,” but he wasn’t having it: “Just tell her to come later.”

“I have to shower. I can’t have a girl over like this, I reek.”

He turned, shouted down to our neighbors, “He doesn’t think we can get the pool table up!”

“Boo!” they shouted. “Last piece!” “Birthday bitch!” “Pool table! Pool table! Pool table!”

He looked at me, took a swig of his fourth Corona. I wanted to push him off that ledge. I called Kayla and told her to come over that evening. She agreed. “Let’s go, asshole” I told him.

.           .           .          

Adam had been the one to find the place. When I suggested we live together, he became obsessive about it. He’d call me with ten places a day. We’d drive past them after we were both off work. Since we both worked in Jersey, I asked why he was so set on a place in Manhattan. “Rumspringa,” he told me.

“Isn’t that for Amish people?”

“Ceremonially, yes. Self-imposed, no.”

“You’re enacting your own personal Rumspringa? Because what, after a year you have to take over your father’s business? Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Sure,” he said back darkly.

I don’t think I’d picked up on the tone of his voice until we had the final stone slab on the fire escape. “Adam,” I said, under the wright. My arms felt like rubber bands by now, my fingers raw.

“One more push!” he shouted at me. He was on the roof, pulling it up, and his face was purple. I was afraid he’d pass out and the slab would fall on me. But somehow we got it over. The crowd had dissipated, so there was no one to cheer us on, and whatever satisfaction I’d hoped to feel from finishing didn’t come. I just looked at the ground, pissed. We lay there beaten, sweaty, as though we’d just been in a fistfight, which is probably why I said: “You’re a dick.”

I placed a beer from the cooler on my forehead. When the words came out I recognized how much I meant them. My 21st birthday had been taken from me by yet another one of Adam’s stupid impulsive schemes disguised as being for my benefit. “Did you hear me?” I asked. Adam didn’t say anything. He just lay there like he was about to make a snow angel.

“Whatever,” I said. “I’m showering.”

It took me longer than usual to get ready so I was grateful that Kayla was late. I didn’t want to have to talk to Adam and I wanted to look good for her, so I spent an hour in the bathroom. Kayla knocked on the door just as I was getting out. She looked—collegiate. I was psyched.

“What took so long?” I asked her, and she looked at me and said, “You’re kidding, right? I’ve been waiting all day,” and blood rushed to my face. “What took you so long,” she asked, and since the beers were still in the cooler on the roof, I figured I’d bring her up there, take her out of my cramped shithole apartment to show her the dilapidated junkyard we’d turned the roof into.

Only when we got up there, the roof wasn’t the roof anymore. Not the one I’d left an hour ago. The furniture was set up as neatly as a homey living room, way more comfy than any room in the house I’d grown up in. Adam had strung white Christmas lights along the roof’s edges and set up tiki torches in all four corners. He’d used an extension cord to hook up the TV and a stereo. And there he was, flipping burgers—two beef, one veggie—on a grill next to the stone slabs.

“This is amazing,” Kayla said. Adam turned around and they introduced themselves.

I sat on the couch, speechless. “You’re going to Ramapo, too?” Adam was asking Kayla.

“Yup. I might do a semester abroad next summer with my roommate. Ramapo has a great Communications program.”

He handed her the veggie patty and said, “That sounds nice for you,” and then handed me mine and said, “Both of you.”

I handed out three bottles and said, “Next year,” but trailed off. It suddenly occurred to me that Adam wouldn’t be here next year. Or the years after.

“Happy birthday,” he said, taking his glass from me, and Kayla said, “New friends,” and raised hers. We played beer pong by the firelight. We danced to the new Killers album. We jumped on the couches. We did the things you do when your life is starting, and when it got too late, Kayla and I went to bed, but Adam stayed up there all night, sleeping under the stars.

Ted McLoof teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Associative Press, Kenyon Review, Louisville Review, Juked, the Los Angeles Review, Juxtaprose, and elsewhere. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. Follow him on Twitter @TedMcLoof.

Sarah Berger

I’m Just Here to Eat the Bruises

We’re at the beach in this one. This is the summer I had a sprained hand, from a car crash with a texting driver just ten days before our scheduled beach week. The crash was the real deal — airbags, seatbelts ripped from the upholstery in the performing of their duty, noxious fluids leaking from the steaming scrambled front of the totalled car. The kids walked away unharmed, their booster seats put to the test. I was unharmed except for a little garland of contusions on my arm and chest, and a badly sprained right hand.

I rented a car and drove the kids and me to the beach, the same as usual except for the rental car, to do the moms-and-kids week with Fran as we’d done for years. But this became my one-handed summer. On the second day, Lou and Leo ran for the bumper cars at Funland, hastily pairing off with Fran and her kids. Leo slowly realized he was left without a partner. The youngest of the group, he was at least a summer away from being able to reach the pedals and drive on his own; so, after having joked with a friend before the trip that the bumper cars were the one ride I would definitely skip this time, I rode with Leo. I cradled my splinted hand against my chest as laughing youths T-boned our little car. No one took pictures of that moment, when I sat hollow-eyed and grimacing, Leo beside me. I never checked in with him about whether he thought that post-real-life-crash bumper car ride was fun. I was too busy warding off nausea. I had seen the silver sedan pull out. I had braked, but I had known what was coming. “Oh my God,” had torn from my mouth, not theirs.

So this picture is from after the bumper cars. The kids are on the boardwalk with the ice cream that wouldn’t stop melting. I had skipped the ice cream for myself, the better to document, one-handed, the kids’ genius at licking the melting mess into submission. They went to work on the ice cream in spite of the fantastic distraction of the people one bench over, who with their tossed french fries were the darling of the seagull ball. It was a frenzy, but Lou is looking away, up at one brazen bird, captured rising from a victorious dive. She analyzed the gulls’ personalities and movements. She called that french-fry victory flight the “upwing.”

It was early in the trip. I hadn’t unclenched and allowed myself to lean into letting the kids and Fran help with everything, from opening bottles to carrying beach chairs to cutting up the enormous watermelon, the one which had seemed like a good thing to let the kids pick out and haul to the car from a farm stand on the way to the shore. Everything was overwhelming at the beginning, and yet that summer it was just my hand. I didn’t know it was practice for later.

Here’s one where I’m holding a banana to my ear, with a theatrical curiosity on my face. This is from about a year earlier. The light from the kitchen window is bright and lucky, breaking up into star-lines which only the camera lens could see. I was about to peel that banana and slice it and put it on hot toast with peanut butter, with a chocolate chip under each banana slice.

“So that its butt can melt!” Leo said with glee.

“That’s right.”

“It’s not going to melt on a cold banana!” he said with the firm cadence of party dogma. I smiled. I could tell I must have said this exact slogan in the past.

“You got it,” I said. “You’ve really got your finger on the pulse of banana dynamics.”

Leo watched me as I sliced it. I got to the mushy, light brown end of the banana, and I popped it in my mouth. He made a face.

“I’m just here to eat the bruises,” I said.

“Ew Mom!”

“Well, who else is going to eat them?”

He couldn’t answer that. He thought a moment, and a faint recognition-moonlight rested on his face. The moon waxed, and in a time-lapse the light rushed over him at once: the realization that, maybe, parents do things they’d rather not do. They’d rather not take out the garbage. They don’t like yelling at the kids in the backseat. They might not like cleaning up, or cooking meals, or killing centipedes, or turning socks right side out, or waiting in the carpool line.

And then, sudden and total, an eclipse. “But Mom,” he said flatly. “You don’t have to eat them. No one has to eat them!”

Little boy.

When I was in elementary school, I got a scolding from a lunch lady with the most conically-brassiered breasts of all time, mountaining forth under her burgundy polyester button down dress. She caught me throwing my cup of district-issue chocolate pudding — everyone knew it tasted like soap — into the big cafeteria trash can. She might not have seen exactly what I’d thrown as I threw it, but she’d been close enough to the trash can to sense the precise wet density of the object as it thudded deep against the inside. She had her finger on the pulse of trash can dynamics. She asked me if I knew how many starving children there were, halfway across the world, who would appreciate the food I’d just thrown away. I replied, from my good heart and so-smart brain, “Well, can we send it to them?” Her bosom heaved in outrage. There’s no picture of that, either. That was from a grainy, underexposed time.

So no, little boy. Maybe I don’t have to eat the bruises. But, I do.

I look up a video from that sprained-hand Funland summer.

(I know videos are a rabbit hole. I know I shouldn’t.)

I couldn’t stomach the bumper cars, but since I’d had a near-death experience just one week before, I rode the Superflip 360. Fuck you, scariest ride in the park, I thought. When am I ever going to feel this gloriously contemptuous again? It was a compulsion perverse and complete. I handed Lou my bag and Leo my flip-flops. Lou didn’t say a word, no protest or plea to see if she was tall enough to ride too. Leo stood very still. He held the flip-flops like a bouquet and looked up at me with wonder. I wanted to throw myself around him, sob and smother him. Instead, I handed myself over to the Slovenian teenager named Magda whose job it was to help me into one of the ride’s awkward hanging diaper thrones and click my shoulder harness into place. The kids sat down nearby, on the bench by the helicopter ride. Leo held the flip-flops, and Lou solemnly held up my phone and made a video.

I will never, of course, ride it again. Like chickenpox and inappropriate crushes
and a list that unspools ever longer, it’s best dealt with when young. Some of the
sensations offered by the Superflip 360 are of the brain leaving the skull and the soul leaving the body and the body leaving the diaper-throne. But the dominant sensation, as you hang upside down, rotating lazily and catching a glimpse of the upside-down ocean before shooting into free-fall, and then swooping up again, all the while holding your splinted right hand rigidly just outside the padded chest harness, is unspeakable pressure pushing you through a dark channel, squeezing you, forcing you to a place you’ve never been before.

It was the sensation, I felt certain, of being born.

This picture came later. We’re at a petting-zoo type farm. It had to have been for
Sidney’s birthday — Mark and Janelle’s baby — when she turned two, and the kids
basically did me a favor and came to this thing. I couldn’t go alone, and lots of relatives wanted to see Lou and Leo. This birthday party was about everybody but the two-year-old, who I’m pretty sure would have taken as much delight in pulling the dog’s tail at home as in petting a goat at a farm. This particular party was about Lou and Leo and me. And you.

Anyway I could barely do it, I was just raw meat that day, and the kids were not
thrilled, and I didn’t help by yelling at them in the car about I don’t know what stupid thing. But Leo was in a rare light mood in spite of everything and oh, Love. This picture. Leo and Lou are gawky and lovely, holding Sidney’s hands as she toddles in her purple dress, her hair in little puffs. They’re walking along a road with trees on one side and a fenced field on the other, and they’re swinging her between them. They’re stooped over, their three bodies making a calligraphic W. I followed them, snapping pics. I was thinking that’s one of the perks of the first-born: being swung between grownups — or these dear proto-grownups. We did it with Lou. I don’t remember doing it with Leo. Then (I know it’s so stupid) I added swinging Leo between us to the list of things we’ll never do. It’s hard not to think about things like that. It’s hard not to go down rabbit holes. Leo’s taller than me now. Are they grownups yet? I measure Lou by me: she’s like a three-quarter-size me. How do I measure Leo?

I was the record-keeper all along, making our little photo books. I’m sure I was
looking for certain things when I chose which pictures I wanted to print and put into collections — variety, focus, an even distribution between the two kids — but I can’t remember that process now. I just know that the printed ones were always the highly favored ones, our permanent record, our Gutenberg Bible. Did I print them because they were special, or did they become special because I printed them? (Did I choose enough pictures with you in them?) These little albums are the ones I made for our parents, so they’d have books, devotional texts on their grandchildren. They were our devotional texts too. The kids would run to the table next to Grandma’s couch and pull open the drawer to reveal decks of cards and the little photo albums. These kids have scrolled and swiped through hundreds of thousands of pictures on screens, but they prize the ones in books. Someday, so much of our lives will be in the cloud, long after we’re all gone. But we want a thing to touch, pages to turn.

You’ve got Leo in your arms here. He’s long enough, leggy enough, that he doesn’t look like a baby, but he’s in his little white underpants and he’s got his legs wrapped around your waist. You two are in the kitchen, a few feet from where I stood later with the banana in the gorgeous light. You’re looking at Leo — into him, scooping him up with your eyes. He’s talking, looking up through the Victorian fringe of his eyelashes as he tries to find a word or a memory, and you’re listening and watching. You look as if you might have dressed hastily, or as if someone else dressed you, possibly by force. It’s probably just the way Leo is slung around you, but it looks like your shirt is misbuttoned. This is definitely your classic rumpled look, but exaggerated. Maybe I thought it was funny, and that’s why this photo got my attention and I threw it in the to-print folder. More likely though it’s your face, the way you did for Leo every day with your simple attention what I couldn’t do — like when he was standing there clutching my flip-flops — which is love him extravagantly. You were always more in love with him, with both of them, than I was.

When I was pregnant with Leo, I was prickly hot for 42 weeks in a row. (You
know this. You bore it too.) That baby would not leave the luxury hotel that was my
uterus. Around week 41, in order to complete some task like folding dishtowels one morning, I lowered myself to the kitchen floor, because standing hurt so many of my bones, and sitting on a chair hurt different bones. Leo caused me to become unnaturally acquainted with my bones.

When I tried to stand up again, none of my undignified shenanigans got me
upright. I sweated and swore. I gave up. I rested on my hands and knees amid the
dishtowels, and I wept.

On the rare occasions when I would do a set of pushups — before pregnancy or
since — the cat would invariably appear and walk under my body and make me laugh and fall. It wasn’t the cat just then, but two-year-old Lou who came to me, when I was on my hands and knees on the floor, not to walk tail-tall under me (my belly left no room anyway), but to lay her arms across my back and ask brightly, “Mama okay?”

There’s no picture of that, either.

There are so many no pictures.

When you were gone, the kids seemed to know what to do. When I cried on the
kitchen floor again, they came to me, again. They put their arms across my back. I don’t know if they were at a developmental pivot point and they found some new gear of graceful maturity; or if they’re like you, and they have reserves of gentleness and love that I don’t understand, because I am hard, because I have never been an extravagant lover. It’s a terrible possibility, that I may have put you in the ground without having loved you extravagantly.

This is the last one, for now.

This one is the kids in the barf seat of the Sea Dragon. (Okay, every seat on the
swinging Sea Dragon is the barf seat.) I mean one of the end-most benches, the one most likely to induce, and fling far, the vomit of motion-sensitive children. We’re back at Funland. It must be the same sprained summer, when Fran and her kids would leave later in the week and you would drive on your own to meet us, and stay a few days and then we’d caravan home. When, all during the week, we would save up things to tell you about, and shells and drawings and puzzles to show you, and at that point in the week what I wanted most was to sit in a beach chair and watch the three of you battling the white broken tops of the waves. I snapped so many of those wave-battling pictures, and all the other ones: Leo the meatball baby in the sand, Lou standing in the chest-deep hole she dug as she held high her shovel, Leo looking hilariously sour in the moment he realized that flying a kite is much more about discipline than about imagination. Always under a dense, cloud-etched Atlantic sky.

Back at the Sea Dragon, watching the kids, I sat on the nearby bench between the
basketball hoop game and my old friend the Superflip 360. I could hear screams coming from it, and even — I’m sure I could hear it — the shocked, sucking silence of people being born.

Not tall enough for the bumper cars, Leo was tall enough, for the first time that
summer, for the Sea Dragon. Leo is electrified, just beaming, the camera can plainly see. A little harder to see in the picture is Lou’s hand on Leo’s arm. I can’t tell whether that’s Lou protecting her little brother, or Leo being the solid presence against which Lou is steadying herself. Either way, they’re doing okay. They were okay in the barf seat of the Sea Dragon, headed for the upwing; and I think they’re okay now.

Sarah Berger is a writer and classical singer living in Baltimore. Her essays and stories have been published in Shards/Glass Mountain, Prometheus Dreaming, and Big Whoopie Deal. She is writing a novel about a cohort of music students graduating in the year 1965, and she is currently a student in the University of Baltimore’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts. You can read more of her writing, and hear some of her singing, at www.sarahbergersoprano.com. 

Mickey Greaves

Ice

Once, in my thirties, I cut a man down-to-size. He let me.

An Adonis, he stood 6’4”, and I had never seen him stoop, not even on the subway. Yet he looked up at me that evening from half his height, palming a square-cut diamond that glinted, frozen, beneath a November moon.

I had broken off our 5-year romance that summer.

So I said no. Then I said, “Wait.” I knew I’d never see another engagement ring. I wanted a retinal burn.

“You’ve ruined me for other women,” he said.

Mickey Greaves’ creative non-fiction work will appear in Poydras Review in December. Her writing has appeared online and in Spoonfed, and Cross Cultural Poetics. She has read at downtown New York venues, the open mic at St. Mark’s Church, and by invitation at Zinc Bar and Poets & Writers. Follow Mickey on Instagram at @mickeygreaves and see other work at www.mickeygreaves.xyz.

Nashu Zahir

The Itch

It’s like an itch, that’s how you’d describe it later, an irritation in the mind, something grazing a tender spot, its nature veiled, and you ignore it and think instead of your work which you resume. The hours pass by and you sense that it’s gone. It is a mystery, but you don’t dwell on it.

And the years seep into your muscle and bone, the hair and beard begin to show flecks of white. And one day, while you smoke pot in a park far from home, huddled in your goosedown jacket, a cold sun sloping towards the west, the itch resurfaces. It chafes, and there is a little flicker, a relic being brought to light, and it takes a moment, the world dims, and you gasp – there’s a face with a tawny beak! It makes a sound, like a parrot, like a kiss, and your heart gets too big, wanting to break free of your ribs. Now you’re on your knees, the sound still in your ears, faintly human.

Then someone says ‘are you alright, mister?’ and you nod, your hand on your chest. When you glance up, their beak is half-open, tongue languid and lolling like a child on the sand, and as a scream takes shape at the bottom of your throat, the face becomes a stranger’s, beak becomes mouth, the eyes turn dark, hair breaks out in cornrows, corn for the bird says the child in your head over the parrot’s kisses, and you tremble and say ‘yes, yes, I am fine, thank you’, and stand, and the sound is gone, a bird of prey that’s dived into a fish-filled lake, now it’s only the sparrows in the winter-nude trees, chirping, chirping.

Nashiu Zahir lives in Male, the small capital of the Maldives. He writes on tourism for local media and reviews music and food for fun.

Christina MacKinnon

Bugs and Bones

I sit wedged in the backseat of a car crowded with teenage girls, thinking about my mother’s corpse. The air is teeming with a bottle’s worth of pink-smelling body spray. Morticians put perfume in corpses, I think, to keep them from rotting too soon. I press a button to my left, and my window lowers half-way. The desert night air comes whipping in. It’s warm and dry, holding a light scent of eucalyptus and cow shit. It smells cleaner to me than the body spray.

“Hey, close your window, asshole!” Kayla yells, even though she’s sitting right next to me. Kayla has been inviting me to things since my mother died. I suspect her parents told her to be nice to me.

The other girls in the car are not smiling. They are clutching their hair to their faces, grimacing at the wind. I flick the little button up, closing my window.

“Sorry.”

Sam, our driver, starts up a conversation about Kayla’s ex-boyfriend, who will be at the party tonight, and who we are not allowed to talk to.

“Don’t even look at him. He’s dating some freshman now. Fucking pedophile.”

Conversation erupts.

It’s been a week since we lowered Mom into the ground. I wonder what she looks like now, if the bugs are eating her yet. I think about the soft, smooth skin on the top of her hand, how I rubbed my thumb against it as I counted her strained breaths in the hospital bed, until the number reached as high as it would ever go. I wonder if that skin is peeling back now, revealing the rotted muscle and bone beneath. I want to lower my window again, but I squeeze my fingernails into my fists and swallow the rising bile instead.

Kayla turns to me. We keep getting forced together: by classes, church, her parents. We both had small roles in our school’s production of Grease. Kayla thinks she’s a great actress, but she’s never been able to hide how much she hates me.

“I know,” She says in a voice that really should be quieter, “You don’t like to talk about what happened, but if you ever want to, I’m here.”

I look at her, the calculation in her eyes, and realize that even now, even about this, about my mom being dead and underground, withering away until she’s all bones and bugs, it is about looking for an opportunity to best me.

I nod and look away. We’re almost there anyway. Soon I will open my door, and smell the real air. Mom always said if I ever felt uncomfortable at a party, I could call her. When I step out of the car and onto the ground in which she is buried, somewhere, miles from here, I whisper under my breath:  Mom, I don’t feel comfortable. Can you come get me?

Nothing replies but the wind.

Christina MacKinnon is a writer and mother based out of Los Angeles, California. She graduated from Arizona State University and has been published at Secret Attic, Big Whoopie Deal, and others.

Jess Richards

First Song

You are a new girl and I am a strange girl, and our desks in the classroom are almost touching. You pass me a note. I pass you one back. We’re both fourteen and lonely. This is how it begins. On tiny scraps of paper you tell me you believe that a heavenly love is the only love there is, that to love a god, his son, and a ghost, is to surrender, to wipe clean, wash away. You and your god are a temptation to me, when no one talks deeply about anything in this school, and there is so much in me that needs to be washed.

Within a month, I love you and can’t say it, especially not to you. You like boys, fathers, sons and gods. I like no one but you. Boys don’t really see me and I’m glad of it. They are always circling you, and you are so light, with your wide lips and clear bright eyes. Even your voice is clean. You wear crisp clothes ironed by your clean mother whose taste in pastel colours matches yours. I keep myself hidden beneath tangled dirty-brown hair and crumpled black clothes. Do you know I often feel like a scar, wide open to grit? You might think it in passing, as you keep telling me that church washes everyone clean. But I have the terrible feeling that any disinfectant delivered from a lectern must only sting for a while. After the delicious sensation it will turn stale too fast, dry up, curl off, fall away.

I sometimes dream of some church man I haven’t yet met who is wide and high, angelic and feathered or fire-tongued. He’ll have the strength to put a hand on my neck and hold me still. Lift my jaw. Cup my face. Teach me how to gaze ever upwards or I will be lost.

But even in dreams, that church man’s face keeps turning into yours. I can’t understand how one book translated from so many books is held so sacred. It’s like the fairy tales I read as a child. They were translated by being written down instead of being told around firesides. I didn’t understand why princes didn’t kidnap other princes in order to privately tell them how much they loved them, or why a clever princess couldn’t marry a beautiful queen. In its original language, the word virgin means unmarried. Not an unbroken membrane. Can girls break each other’s membranes? I know you’ll never even kiss me. You believe in a sacred and mistranslated book, so you’re saving your membrane for god, or for marriage.

Are the words faith, worship and passion also mistranslations?

I’m afraid of what churches are. What they can do, when led by a powerful pair of hands. I can see their potential for passion, because I ache for its dangers.

I pause, sometimes, listening at a church door to the voices of a choir. The voices are like rising waters. The high notes soothe, the bass tones race my heart as if I’m surfacing for air. Alto voices rush over my skin and make me ache. My mind translates dry hymns into liquid sounds. But as the water music ends, I hear the dirge of a psalm and know I’m dreaming of choirs in a small town which has none. It has factories and churches and pubs, a library full of tourist books about other places none of us can afford to go to, a school with too many pupils and not enough teachers, and a fish farm up the road that’s soon to close down.

You read romance novels and don’t like the English teacher. I give you a book of poetry for your birthday. In art, you draw flowers and I paint pictures of bones. I stay over at your house one Saturday night. You tell me you’re afraid of darkness. You sleep with the light on. I lie on a blow-up mattress beside the bed you’re sharing with a crowd of stuffed bears. You fall asleep and I watch your lips part. My breath quickens, and I can’t sleep, so I turn the light off.

You wake with a shriek, kick your blankets off, flounder and fall against the floorboards. Scrambling up again, you flick the light back on. Your eyes spill tears that you’re trying to hide.

I get out of bed and warmth rushes through my body as I put my arms awkwardly around your shoulders. My lips kiss your forehead, your eyebrow, your eyelids. You push me away, sit on your bed and glare at me as you rub your grazed knee.

Your father is in the doorway, watching me through thick glasses. I’m not sure how long he’s been there. You run to him, colliding with his chest. Accepting his hug as if it is the easiest thing to do.

He picks lint off his blue pyjamas as he examines my red cheeks and says, ‘let’s get you a bed made up on the sofa downstairs, shall we?’

Your eyes are raw and unforgiving.

In summer, your dad sends you away to some camp for five weeks. I don’t know exactly where you’ve gone to. ‘Somewhere a ferry ride away.’ I think that’s what you said when you phoned.

I miss you. You haven’t written. I guess you will if something is wrong.

I am pale from a summer spent alone in my bedroom. I’ve been doing a painting of a black-haired witch with no eyes. Getting the right shades of green for her skin has taken weeks. I’ve been trying to paint women as monsters, but even as I draw in wrinkles and warts and teeth, they still look unbearably beautiful.

You phone me when you arrive home and say, ‘I’ve found god. He’s with me now.’

I smile and say, ‘well he’s travelled a long way. Were either of you sick on the ferry?’

You don’t laugh. You ask me to come to your house tomorrow. ‘On Sunday,’ you say, more urgently, as if Sunday has a heavy weight.

Your father beams as he opens the door. ‘Go upstairs,’ he says. ‘She’s in her room.’

He’s never looked pleased to see me before.

I climb the staircase and your bedroom door is wide open. You’re dancing to a recording of some man’s voice singing ‘holy holy’ along to badly strummed guitar music. You sway around your pink bedroom, as if dancing in the invisibly clutching arms of the holy son.

Your bookshelves are empty. I ask where all your books have gone.

You stop dancing and say, ‘come with me to my new church.’

‘You’ve not even kept the poetry book?’

‘Please.’

I say, ‘if you want, but I’ll wait outside.’

‘No, you have to come in. Otherwise you’ll not be converted too. They play guitars, you like guitars.’

‘I’ll wait for you outside.’

‘Well I’ll pray for you, and you might find you have to come in.’

On the way to your church, you talk and I listen. You tell me that you embraced a shining lord on some battered shore, and were repeatedly baptised under freezing waves. I imagine that the minister half-loved you, to want to drown you so thoroughly over and over again. Your gold hair is brighter. The light from the sea shines in your eyes, but the salt has got in there as well. You’re glazed.

While you are inside the brick and glass church praying for my conversion, I’m at the edge of the old graveyard across the road, lying underneath a cathedral of ferns. As the rain pelts down and shakes the ferns above me I dream of lying in a boat on a river, in the arms of a woman who loves me. We drift away together though everyone thinks she’s alone. She is visible, and I am her shadow, seen by no one but her.

I walk you home in silence. Your cheeks are pink. Eventually you start the conversation half-way through, as if it’s been happening for a while in your head. You say, ‘but the new minister’s insisting. You’ve got to convert. Else…’

I guess her thoughts. ‘You’d best find a new best friend who’s already converted then.’

‘There’s a nice boy…’

‘I’ve always wondered where nice boys hid.’ I stop walking and turn to you. ‘I’m sorry. No one splashed water on my head when I was a baby, or told me these bible stories. You might as well ask me to believe in a fairy godmother or an ogre.’

‘It’s not the same.’ You look angry.

‘To me, it is.’

‘Well I suppose that’s our friendship over.’ You kick at something invisible on the pavement.

I smile but don’t mean it. ‘Good luck with your boy.’

There’s a glint in your eyes as you say, ‘he’s not mine yet.’

I touch your lips with my fingertip, just once. ‘He will be.’

You hang around at school with the new minister’s son for the next few months. You wear matching clothes, as if he is boy-you, and you are girl-him. Sky blue t-shirts, sometimes pink. The minister’s son gets teased more than you, and I can’t help feeling glad, though I hate myself for it. You look at him with longing. He looks at you with respect. You avoid me completely and don’t seem to have any other friends but him and the god you whisper to, hands clasped together. What a tiny thing god must be, to fit in the air between your palms.

When the trees are budding green shoots, I hear whispers that you’ve both left town. Your families are both going off to preach with his dad as he needs a bigger flock, or a bigger sky to catapult angels into, something like that. You don’t say goodbye to anyone.

There is nothing left here, of who you were before last summer.

A month after you’ve gone, I skip school for the afternoon. I go into a small derelict church on the edge of town. Tiny leaves grow in through broken wooden walls, spreading like line drawings of vines. An arched window lets light in through dust. Strands of a web drift down from the beams and fall on stone. This place once held song.

The congregation have either died or abandoned this place. It was once filled with worship, passion, faith: black funerals and white weddings, songs for love and songs for longing. What would it be like, to love some god who loves me back? I won’t know what any kind of love is till I’ve left this town. Till I find a place where I care enough to make eye contact with the people all around me. I imagine a city, a waterfront, cargo ships, a wide ocean. Yellow flowers in the trees, and the sounds of strange birds that click and clack like percussion. In this empty building, it becomes possible to feel longing for a place I haven’t yet met.

I’m only in this church because I want to know what it’s like to dream in your heaven. There’s a statue of a dead man asleep on a tomb. He is almost naked and almost a god. There are wounds carved in his feet. I touch his shin and ask him, ‘If I had faith, would it feel like we were lovers?’

His stone lips don’t speak, so I turn away from him.

At the pulpit, there’s a pale ghost of a long-dead minister. He kisses a cross and descends, kneels and rises at the altar, and there is no one but me to look at him. No one who understands the weight of this moment, the weight of who he is, the weight of Sundays. As if he knows this, he sighs as he picks up a chalice of ghost blood which transforms into ghost wine, and picks up a piece of ghost flesh which transforms into a ghost wafer. He puts them both down again and closes a book which has pages as thin as the skin on his hands. He wraps the book in a cloth and fades away, spent from the effort of being visible.

If I pause for long enough inside this empty church, I will hear the water music again. I stand beside the arched doorway, holding myself still, ears straining, waiting for the ache.

Jess Richards is the author of three literary fiction novels. Snake Ropes, Cooking with Bones, and City of Circles are published in the UK by Sceptre. She also writes short fiction and personal essays, and has an artistic practice where she blends art and fiction writing to make hybrid objects. Originally from Scotland, she now lives with her wife in New Zealand. She can be reached at jessrichards.com and on Instagram @jessrichardswriter.

Kyle Seibel

Chris

So this guy, my first roommate in the barracks. He seems okay. Busted back a few times, a career E3, they call him. But he doesn’t seem so bad to me. Asked to borrow socks once. Washed em. Gave em back. Spits tobacco juice in a Gatorade bottle and plays video games with his shirt off after work. His name’s Chris so I say Chris you seem like one of those guys that joins up to be on Seal Team a Hundred or whatever. How did end up working the night shift in the fuckin line shack? And he goes, yep. I was one of those guys all right. Tried right out of boot camp but didn’t have my mind right. Tried to go back and got fucked. You wouldn’t believe it. Try me, I go and he starts in.

First time, he says, I quit. Just couldn’t handle it. Went to the fleet as an undesignated seaman. Did a westpac cruise on a DG. Cranked the entire time. Never saw the outside of the ship. So I think, no way man. I can’t do this blue water navy shit. I need to get serious. So I do it. Razor sharp creases in my uniform. I’m squared away, you know. Best shape of my life, man. Twenty pull ups, no problem.

And we come home and I’m ship’s company so I don’t have shit to do. I become Mr. Volunteer. Picking up trash along the highway, you know? Base little league umpire. And eval time rolls around and Chief says holy shit Chris. You maxed out the PRT, you volunteer, you’re taking online college. You’re one shit hot sailor.

Now the base commander wants to give me a letter of commendation, I fuckin shit you not. And Chief says, this guy can make a phone call and you’ll be back in San Diego, on your way to a Trident. So I’m on my way to meet the captain. It’s summer. I’m in my whites. Being the fuckhead I am, I smudge my dixie cup. I try to wipe it off and it makes it worse. I mean, it’s just fucked. I run to the NEX and I’m staring at the stacks of covers and I look around. Who would know? Who would even give a shit? I put my smudged one on the shelf and took a clean one.

I’m almost to my car when base police taps me on the shoulder. They fuckin arrest me, man.

Holy shit, I say.

Yeah, Chris says. So I missed my appointment with the captain that day. But I ended up in front of him anyway. But I did not get a letter of commendation. And I never went back to San Diego.

Fuck man, I say. And now what?

I’ll tell you now what, man, he says, spitting into the Gatorade bottle and unpausing his video game. Now I’m gonna save this fuckin princess.

Kyle Seibel is 36 years old and works as a copywriter in Santa Barbara, CA. He is a veteran of the US Navy. He can be reached at kyle.seibel@gmail.com and found on Twitter @kylerseibel and Instagram @keith_urban_dictionary.

Robert Sachs

Wednesday’s Child

She smiles. He smiles. Holding hands. Foreplay. Bed: Grunting, sighing, release. Cigarettes.

“Nice.”

“Thanks,” he says, cocksure. They sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

Morning: He makes breakfast. She showers. “Must go,” she says. “Tonight?”

“Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow.”

“When then?”

“Next Wednesday. You know the rules.”

“I’m tired of sharing you,” she says.

“You’ve got the option to buy out the shares of the others. You know that.”

“This is crazy.”

“You agreed when you bought in.”

“But a one-seventh interest isn’t enough. I love you.”

He smiles, kissing her. “Poor girl. You’re not supposed to fall in love with me.”

All seven attend the next monthly co-op meeting. “I’ve fallen in love with Richie,” she says.

The others laugh. “Who hasn’t,” Thursday says.

“I’m serious: I love Richie.”

Awkward silence.

Monday says, “I suppose you could buy us out.”

“Buy us out?” Saturday says, agitated. “Can she do that?”

“The by-laws provide for the buy-out at three times the buy-in cost plus a yearly inflation factor of four percent for the first two years and then it starts dropping. It’s complicated. But she’s got to buy-out all of us. It’s an all or nothing deal.”

“I think she’s serious about being in love, and I doubt she has that kind of money. Do you?”

“Of course not,” she says. “I’m an assistant professor.”

“Does he love you?” Tuesday asks. “Has he actually told you he loves you?”

“Not in so many words,” she admits.

“Well then…”

“But I know he does.”

“See, that’s the problem,” says Sunday. “You’ve kind of ruined it for me. I mean how can I enjoy being with Richie on Sunday when I know you love him and, more than likely, he loves you?”

“Wouldn’t bother me a bit,” says Tuesday.

“You’re a twit,” Sunday says.

“Co-op’s got five more years to run,” Friday says. “After that you can have him free and clear. That is, if he’ll have you. Richie might not like it you just waiting it out rather than buying us out.”

“He’s got rights too,” Monday chimes in. “Can’t he give back some of the money and cancel the whole deal?”

“Right,” one of them says. “There’s a formula in the by-laws.”

“I’m pleading with you,” she says. “Help me out here.”

Sunday: “Damn it, ladies. It’s not her fault she’s fallen in love. Shit happens. Can you step outside for a few minutes while we discuss it?”

She leaves.

“Look, am I the only one getting tired of Richie? I mean, same old, same old.”

“I hear ya,” Saturday says. The others, except for Tuesday, nod.

“It’s going to be worse now,” Sunday says, “knowing how they feel about each other. Kind of takes the edge off.”

“If Richie can find a replacement…”

“Great idea,” says Saturday. “Maybe somebody a bit shorter?”

“Maybe what’s his name, the Italian hunk from English Lit.”

“Call Wednesday back in.”

“We’ve got a proposal you might like,” Sunday says.

Robert Sachs’ fiction has appeared in The Louisville Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Free State Review, The Great Ape Journal, and The Delmarva Review, among others. He holds an M.F.A. in Writing from Spalding University. His story, “Vondelpark,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017. His story Yo-Yo Man was a Fiction Finalist in the 2019 Tiferet Writing Contest. Read more at www.roberthsachs.com.

Natalie Coufal

The Resiliency of the Human Spirit

The lady at the front desk weighs me when I come in. I stand backwards on the scale; I’m not supposed to know the number. She asks me how many times I’ve purged in the past week. Three sounds like a good number, so I tell her that and she writes it down. The real number is probably twenty-something. Then she leads me to this aqua-colored room that reminds me of a spa. Its got plants and a fish tank and throw pillows, stuff to make people calm.

She’s really great, the Eating Disorder specialist. Her name’s Vanessa. She’s all serene as she sips her hot chamomile tea, completely at ease in one of those chair-and-a-half chairs. She’s younger than me, but still she exudes confidence. I notice her degree from Baylor hanging on the wall. Her folks must have money. Her teeth are Hollywood white; she looks like a sorority girl.  She has me coming in twice a week, to start out.

Today we work on personifying Ed, the voice inside me that is the Eating Disorder. Ed is full of lies, she tells me. He is a bad friend that must be let go. I practice addressing him; I’m supposed to tell him off, so I do. I add in a fuck you for good measure. She shows me this really cool, motivational book, Life Without Ed, written by Jenni Schaefer. In it Schaefer says the first step to recovery is distinguishing Ed’s voice from your own. After that, you must vow to divorce Ed. Schaefer even writes a Declaration of Independence from Ed, modeling it after the Thomas Jefferson version that was written in 1776. She reads it out loud to her group therapy circle and they all applaud and sign it. Schaefer hangs it on her bedroom wall, a memento of her victory over Ed.

I’m a good student. I’ve always been an overachiever and good with words, too. I write a real compelling letter to Ed, severing my relationship with my toxic friend. I liken Ed to a bad, abusive boyfriend who always made me feel inferior, like I would be nothing without him. I explain to Ed how he has had power over me, but now I’m taking that power back. I read it out loud to Vanessa. It’s all so very empowering.

I’ve done my homework too: I’ve brought my bathroom scale from home to turn into Vanessa because I’m not supposed to weigh myself anymore. She has a treat for me today, a hammer. We go out in the parking lot where I bash the scale with the hammer in symbolic victory. Vanessa congratulates me on all the progress I’ve made. It’s inspiring, the resiliency of the human spirit and its ability to overcome.

On the way home I stop at a Walmart and buy another scale.

Natalie Coufal is a nonfiction and fiction writer from rural Central Texas. She is pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing at Sam Houston State University where she has received a fellowship.