Prose

Joshua Craze

The Shirt Exception

It was a Sunday morning shortly after I returned to Chicago, there was snow on the windowsill, and Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 filled the apartment. I was lying on the couch, willing myself into the book I was working on, trying to disappear into its pages.

I determinedly didn’t hear the book that Emilie wasn’t writing. Nor did I hear her on the other side of our open-plan flat, about ten metres away, scrubbing the hobs with an assiduity I could only envy. Not that I heard her.

She didn’t like the Bach. It was oppressive. Not that she mentioned it. She told herself that she must be agreeable: I need to give him what he needs, she thought. This is the music that his father would play on a Sunday, as he roasted a chicken for the family, and Anthony and his brother would gather around the kitchen table, drink wine and talk. We need to listen to the relentlessness of that cello, not the scratch of my scrubbing.

She shouldn’t be scrubbing the hobs, I thought. I certainly didn’t ask her to. There is a schedule. In the schedule, it states that I am to clean the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon. Now it is morning. That is the time we agreed upon for writing.

The cleaning schedule was next to the cooking schedule and both of them were stuck to the fridge just to the right of the hobs that Emilie was cleaning. If we would just stick to the schedule then everything would be fine, I thought.

To say any of this out aloud would have transformed the flat into a battleground, with opposing armies of insults and snubs arranging themselves amid the pots and pans, accusations forged from broken promises ready to be flung at a moment’s notice, and behind them, the oil stained rug prepared for the final offensive. She loved that rug; I dropped a roast duck on it; no one will win that battle. We should, I once suggested, get rid of it, and Emilie reacted as might a detective to the suggestion that a crime scene should be cleaned before it had been fully investigated.

Why say any of it again? We have had this fight a thousand times, and despite the theatrics, it’s all just a skirmish between auxiliary forces. It doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Why repeat dead words, clichés of our discontent? It’s better, I thought, to try and get in a few hours of writing before a dying Archduke Franz Ferdinand is found in the cutlery drawer and it all kicks off. I just want to write this book, I thought; I want to vanish until I finish it.

My vanishing took up an enormous amount of space. This used to be her flat. For four seasons, when I was away caring for my father, there was an order to the apartment. In the morning, she would make a salad to take to work: the CSA box reinforced with beans and cheese. Dinner was often a stew from a vat that sat in the freezer. Making the stew was her solitary Sunday ritual – creating the fuel that she hoped would see her through the indignities of the week ahead. Some days, though, she would finish work so late that dinner became a takeaway pizza and a bottle of wine. On those days, yes, she told herself, my clothes would lie on the floor of the bedroom. OK? Who has time to clean, who has time – let alone the appetite – for a schedule, when life is an unceasing set of schedules, of deadlines imposed by indifferent American corporate clients and stupid superiors, incapable of doing their job, unless their real job, their true job, is wielding the inanity of corporate language to make me feel utterly invisible. My work, she would think, is impacting me, and so yes, some days I would head straight home to Netflix and oblivion, the white noise of watching stupid American dramas the only cure to stupid American dramas. I wasn’t proud of my routine. I didn’t think I had made a good life; I had turned this apartment into a suit of armour. I would be humiliated to show it to anyone, but I could live in it.

Since he came back, she thought, this house has gone from being a refuge to a warzone. He commands an occupying army, and when he isn’t teaching, he is at home all day, with plentiful time to hire mercenaries. It began in the kitchen. The endless mason jars full of beans. A blender, an ice cream maker, and a brand-new espresso machine. There is no counter space. I would put all of the invaders in the cupboards, tucked out of sight, except these are now full of spices and herbs and oils, promissory notes of future culinary projects.

There was no space for anything, she thought. Where am I, she wanted to say, in all of these schedules. Where are you? We are not automatons, you least of all. His nights of exception never appeared in the daily planner. There were evenings when a bottle of wine would spin into three, and I would leave him alone on the couch, nursing a whisky, silent and far from me. By the next morning, there would be a new schedule in place, deadlines recalculated, as if the night of oblivion had never existed. If he talked about those evenings, it was only to discount them as exceptions. Inexplicable deviations from planetary orbits. It was during those deviations that we would argue all night, but also when we would fuck. What are those exceptions, Anthony? Are they curses or miracles? There was no space for them on the gridded paper on which he printed out our schedules.

Listening to Bach, Emilie thought that everything felt very loud. I had sculpted a quiet life, she thought, in keeping with my humiliation. One that I could just about hold together. It did a job, as Mark might say. Then Anthony arrived, and the volume knob went up. That Sunday, we didn’t have eggs for breakfast. We had French scrambled eggs made with chives and an entire stick of butter. Every mouthful seemed to have an essay attached: a disquisition on the three ways to make scrambled eggs; stories of stir-fried tomatoes and eggs eaten at a cafeteria in Beijing; plans for pickles. He kept talking and talking and I wanted to know: can’t he see me? I’m hungover. Doesn’t he know I already ate the leftover pizza this morning? Who wants another breakfast after that? Next Sunday, I knew, would be my ‘turn’ to cook breakfast, or so said the schedule. “This sets a high bar,” I said, already exhausted by the idea of even thinking about next weekend. “Why,” he asked, all faux innocence, “does this have to be a competition?” Because, I didn’t say, you are in technicolour and you make me feel black and white.

From the couch, the world looked different. I wanted to create a world from my will. Not one where Emilie did all the cooking and cleaning. I would do almost all of that – I didn’t care about that. I wanted us to live intensely. I know, I know. I got too excited – I was too enthusiastic about too many things. That’s how I get. I wanted to live again. A big life. Not tubes and cleaning and the smell of hospital detergent, but writing and wine, bright lights and friends around a big table. A life like we used to live in Paris, not this sadly reduced world that I found in Chicago, in which Emilie was just hanging on and trying to make it through the day. I tried to enchant everything. That, I told myself, is how you bring the quotidian to life. We can turn this place into a holiday, I told Emilie.

He’ll tell you, she thought, that he wants to live a big life. Go and live in a permanent vacation. Why can’t we share in joy, he would say, offering me roast duck, as if I wasn’t living a stunted existence in a job I hated, as if we weren’t both in mourning. It was then that he sounded like the American self-help books he so disparaged, as he asserted we could simply choose to live our best lives, despite the debts and the indignities and the sheer exhaustion of it all. The truth was that he wanted to live life on his own terms. Joy was only the name for what happened in the evening. He wanted to write his book, and rearranged his entire existence around that one task. I was a satellite in orbit, who fitted in as long as I was part of the plan. He will tell you his dreams are of Emilie and Anthony as Didion and Dunne, reading their work out aloud to each other at the end of the day over very dry Martinis. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Much nicer than co-existing with a man who had spent the day slumped on couches, slouched on chairs, picking mutely at exactly the right words to describe his grief.

It took her about an hour to finally seize hold of a witness. I had just finished a paragraph when she grabbed hold of the shirts that were lying innocently on the back of a chair in the kitchen and threw them on the couch. Could you not leave your shirts in the kitchen? You make all these lists, try and control everything, and then decide you can treat our dining room as your clothes hanger? Carve out a nice little exception for yourself without realizing how self-serving it is. How is this different to my clothes on the bedroom floor?

I apologized – which infuriated her even more – and put away the shirts. It won’t happen again. I was being scolded. I tried to be placatory. Did I know I was only inflaming the situation? Probably. Don’t clean, I said to her, I’ll do it later, as I said I would. Why don’t you, I suggested, get on with your book.

Bathroom door slams. Sound of cleaning-spray a hiss over the Bach. Indistinct muttering. Theatre directions for a play whose end is already played out.

I started to clean the hobs she had already cleaned, removing the last recalcitrant stains of grease in a gesture I knew she would understand as a reproach. Then, finally, I offered a peace signal and put the Bach on my noise-cancelling headphones. My own private Sunday. I couldn’t hear anything then, not even my own frenetic scrubbing on the hobs. We were in different rooms and in exactly the same space.

Joshua Craze is a novelist and essayist. He is an artist-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists, where he is doing research in the archives of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and finishing a novel, Passagework, about displacement and grief. In 2020, he has published fiction and essays in N+1, Cabinet, and Foreign Policy, amongst other venues, and one of his short stories, ‘My Hands Never Shake, won a Five Dials ‘Very Specific Commission’ competition for short fiction. He has previously had residencies in at Art-Omi in upstate New York and at Dar Al-Ma’mûn, in Marrakech, Morocco. He was a 2014 UNESCO Laureate Artist in Creative Writing.

Sarah Leamy

Blue for Pints

When I stopped smoking, I cried. Will I cry if I stop drinking alcohol? No one could answer me on that one. The guys sitting at the bar all looked at me like I was crazy. I carried on though. This is important to know. It means we’re here by choice; know thy enemy and all that crap, I added. Jordan asked if this means I was going to get god in order to skip out on him, it was my round next, he reminded me. No, I’m not getting god in the next ten minutes, I told him, and sipped the pale ale in front of me. It was time to shut up apparently. I just can’t talk about drinking to those that drink. The bartender wouldn’t engage with me after the fourth beer, but fine, I know what I’m trying to say. It all started with the company doctor last week asking me how much do I drink. Per day, I’d clarified, or per week. Either one, she’d said, fingers hovering over the keyboard. I told her. She tapped it in. I have good eyesight for my age. I noticed that she put in brackets a higher number. I asked her about that. She explained without blushing that ‘we all know how drunks down-count the numbers. We add 25% on average. The paramedics, nurses, doctors, we all do it. You didn’t know? It’s different for men and women, how you process alcohol so we take that into consideration, she said, looking at her notes and not the old fool in front of her. And then that company doctor got me fired, saying it was ten in the morning and I shouldn’t be drinking on the job, but it’s not like I’d sipped anything before work, it was from the night before, I told them, but it didn’t help me keep my job, did it? Since then I’ve carried a marker with me and noted on my left forearm the pints as I drink them. I was going to say as I buy them but it’s not that easy as so many are gifts and who am I to refuse a gift. I keep track. I’m into learning about this numbers game. My arm now is black and blue with small crosses marking each beverage. I started playing with colors. Black for shots. Blue for pints. There’s nothing else that I drink. A pint in every sandwich, oh, no, I mean the other way around. But more importantly, would I still come here if I didn’t drink a few pints of beer each day? And if I didn’t, who would I talk to in the afternoons since I can’t keep a job? It’s not like I’m old or anything, but I’m a bit worried about all of that and it’s a bit of a problem, is what I said, and Jordan nodded at me but held his empty pint glass up for the bartender to refill, telling her it was on my tab. He got me another pint too, and I reached for my blue marker. There wasn’t much bare skin left to write on. I’m scared to run out of room because what happens then? What will I do with myself? Where will I go?

Sarah Leamy is the author of the award-winning books, When No One’s Looking, Lucky Shot, and Lucky Find, as well as Van Life, a travel memoir. Blue for Pints comes from STAY, a recently completed memoir comprised of micro-essays. Finishing Line Press is publishing Hidden, a chapbook in the form of a queer narrative prose poem in March 2021. Get in touch via www.sarahleamy.com and @dirtroadsndogs on Twitter.

Dustin Heron

Dooley Goes to Court

I.

Dooley was swaying in his hammock, a dull blue but cloudless sky cupped over him. Back and forth and the sky was changeless, static. Blue and empty, empty and blue, and then something, something shimmering, bright and silver. A balloon? Dooley sat up, a stubborn fog lifting in his mind. Something about balloons. When he was a boy—no, that’s not it. “My God!” he said. “The Russians!” Was it the Russians? Well, Gary would know. Gary! Gary should know, must know. “Gary!” Dooley said. He lay back down and patted his pockets for the roach he was sure he had.

And then Jansen’s skinny little face with its pointed beard hovered over him, blocking balloon and sky. Then he was gone, then back again, then gone; Jansen gently laid a hand on Dooley’s arm and the hammock wobbled to a halt.

“Mr. Dooley,” said Jansen.

“Jansen.”

“Have you seen a pig?”

“I seen a pig,” said Dooley, sitting up.

“Where?”

“Today?” said Dooley.

Jansen grunted. “Of course today.”

“Your question was not very specific,” said Dooley.

“I have lost a pig.”

“I gathered.”

“Have you seen her?”

“What’s it look like?”

Jansen sighed. “Have you seen any pigs?”

“Not today.”

“Then what does it matter what she looks like?”

“Well, in case I see one later. I’ll know whose it is.”

“If you see any pig, alert me immediately.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Dooley saluted. Jansen walked away and Dooley shouted after him, “But if I call you for a pig that ain’t yours, I’m going to say ‘I told you so!’” Jansen waved over his head without turning around.

Dooley lay back down. Jansen. Rude, young Jansen, with his pointy beard and his little round glasses. He was Dooley’s neighbor on the side opposite Gary, had bought the property with some kind of inheritance and was some kind of artist, hammering away at all hours in his contractor-built shop, making big wooden installations that he drove to art shows in the Bay Area, the nature and meaning of which he never bothered to explain to Dooley, though Dooley had, on several occasions, insinuated heavily that he would like to know. And!—he was followed around by this dreamy naif in yoga pants that never spoke and whom Jansen never introduced, but just kind of floated there, silently coiled up with both innocence and sex. Jansen was different, lived differently, than anyone else who lived on Hard Met Hill. Gary said it was because Jansen was some rich kid living here on a lark, not because he cared about personal liberty, or because his family had always lived here, or because the property was cheap and he couldn’t afford to live elsewhere, like most of the other old men in the community—and it was mostly men: bearded, their flannel coats torn at the elbows and covered in a kind of permanent dust, stooped a little, or leaning on a cane, like Dooley did. Some of the houses were tucked far off into the forest, hanging halfway out over the canyon, and these men, and their occasional women were only very rarely seen. But when you did chance upon each other, they had the courtesy to stand and chat. Sure, they might not talk about a wide range of topics–usually limited to what projects you were doing or neglecting on your property, or where you got a new tool, or that sturdy pair of pants, or (most frequently) commiserating on the continual degradation of society at large, represented by Town, the shopping hub visited as infrequently as possible and never called by its actual name–but they didtalk. They might be mostly hermits but they were neighborly. 

For Dooley, this was important. He didn’t live on the outskirts of the Hill, or tucked away into the woods; he lived right off Red Hat Road, the rutted, dirt track that flooded every season but summer. He always waved hello and generally got on with his neighbors. Gary, and Toothless Pete, and Bev. But Jansen. Rude, young Jansen was the only person on the Hill that had never given Dooley a neighborly conversation. Gary was right: Jansen was a tourist. It took resolve to live an hour from town, to live on your disability checks and pensions and to find a way to make do, month by month. You did it to protect something in yourself, to follow through on a philosophy, to take control of your poverty. Resolve, yes, resolve and strength—there was something special about the people who lived here. But not Jansen–it didn’t seem like Jansen had resolved to do anything in his life! He was just living the way he wanted as if he had all the choice in the world. Hmph. And now his pig was missing. Dooley didn’t even know Jansen had pigs. Dooley swung the hammock but he couldn’t relax; he felt all wound up, like he’d left something important unfinished. He levered himself out of the hammock with his cane and went walking between the trees towards Gary’s ramshackle cabin.

“Well, look at this dumb fucker!” Gary shouted his usual greeting. He was sitting in a ratty recliner on his cement porch, a plastic tumbler squeezed between his knees. He wore camo cargo shorts, a black t shirt and a green beret slightly crooked atop his stringy white hair. His fu-man-chu glistened with liquor.

“Hey Gary, got some news.”

“I seen the balloon too,” Gary nodded gravely and patted his ledger, which was laid across his lap and which contained all of his personal observations of government interference in and around the Hill.

“Oh, good. Well, something else.” Dooley panted slightly and patted his pockets for the half-joint he could swear he stashed.

“The contrails? Yeah, I seen those too. Pretty sure they’re marking the Hill for future Special Ops activities.”

Dooley gave up his search. “No, uh, not that. Jansen. He lost a pig.”

“What’s it look like?”

Dooley threw up his hands. “Damned if I know! He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Well how in the hell does he expect us to help him find it?”

“I tried to explain this to him.”

“Fucking yuppy.”

“Yeah, so, I think we’d better find that pig.”

Gary grinned. “Make us some bacon?”

“No! God no! Just, you know, among other reasons, Jansen isn’t really one of us, you know? Maybe if we help, he’ll be, like, one of the gang. Warm up a little.”

Gary considered this, snorted. “Nah, I don’t give a shit about that.”

Dooley stomped his foot. “Well, I mean, another reason is that Jansen seems a bit, uh officious, you know? Like maybe he’d call the cops about his missing pig? Do you want some kind of manhunt going on up here?”

“You mean pig-hunt?” said Gary.

They laughed for what seemed a really long time.

“Anyway,” said Dooley. “What else are you doing today?”

Gary downed his drink, wrote something in his ledger, flipped it closed, stood, and said, “Nothing now! Let’s find that god-damned pig.”

They beat around in the woods, Gary with a machete, Dooley with his cane, for most of the morning. It got hot. They went back to Gary’s so he could make another whiskey soda, which he put in a travel mug. They decided to change their tactics and rather than look in the woods, they would investigate all the gardens the pig might have found in its wanderings. Because, as Gary said, “Pigs love to fuck with gardens.”

Gary’s garden was safe, as was Dooley’s. They were eating some cherry tomatoes when Dooley looked over to the back of his lot, behind his shed, where a chickenwire fence was backed by black screening.

“Hey Gary,” said Dooley.

“What is this tomato?” said Gary. “It’s like god-damned candy.”

“Gary, do you think pigs like weed?”

Gary shrugged, pulled a few more cherry tomatoes from the vine. “I find it highly doubtful that the pig will be attracted to your bong, if you are thinking of setting a trap. But I do like the idea of setting a trap.” He burst a tomato between his teeth and a glob of seeds stuck to his mustache.

“No, I mean—”

And they went at a mild trot to Dooley’s substantial and not strictly legal pot garden. The pig had dug under the fence and now was lying on top of a crushed marijuana plant, its belly bloated and its purple tongue hanging out into the dirt. Its skin was vaguely blue with black spots.

“Unusual looking pig,” said Gary, after a moment.

“I think it’s dead,” said Dooley.

“I mean, a blue and black pig? Seems like ol’Jansen could have just said so.”

“It’s fucking dead,” said Dooley.

“Well, yeah. That’s obvious, I’m just saying—”

“Fuck, Gary!”

“Calm down, Dooley,” Gary took a deep breath. “Remember my original plan?”

“Bacon?”

“Bacon.” Gary wiped his machete on his shorts.

Dooley stared at Gary, then down at the pig, at the chewed up, crushed pot plants, back to Gary, back to the pig. “Fine,” he said, with a sigh. “Just, not here. We have to drag the pig somewhere else.”

“Pigs are heavy,” said Gary, “when they’re whole.”

“Not in my garden, Gary.”

Gary shrugged. “Alright, well, you—”

But just then Jansen was screaming; he had climbed up and was looking over the edge of the fence. “Blueberry!” he shrieked.

“Okay, Jansen,” said Dooley, raising his hands. “Okay, now—”

Gary lifted his machete high into the air and brought it down into Blueberry’s shoulder, where it landed with a wet, hollow sound. “Self defense!” he yelled.

Dooley dropped his hands and let out a long, tired sigh. Jansen fell from the fence, crying. Gary’s machete was stuck in the pig, and he put a booted foot on its snout to wrench it free.

“Well,” said Gary, flicking blood onto Dooley’s crushed marijuana plants. “I do believe I just saved your life.”

II.

So Dooley went to court. He’d been charged with destruction of property for poor, dead Blueberry the Pig, a misdemeanor, and the manufacture of illicit substances, a felony. His court-appointed lawyer had secured a plea deal on the felony, due to the fact that pot was largely de-criminalized and that Dooley actually did have a medical marijuana license and was allowed to grow up to three plants (even after Blueberry’s weed feast, Dooley still had nine healthy plants, which even he had to admit was a bit excessive).

They were waiting for the judge at the sentencing hearing, where punishment for the misdemeanor would be meted out and the judge would hear the conditions of the plea. Dooley’s lawyer, Mark, was some kid fresh out of law school who played online poker on his cell phone every chance he got and whose ankle socks with the Nike “swoosh” could be seen bobbing in and out of his too-large loafers. Dooley wore his long, gray hair pulled back into a tight, clean ponytail, and he’d been able to fish his corduroy suit out of the depths of his closet. The cuffs of his jacket and the hem of his pants had been subtly chewed by mice, but it still fit.

“Motherfucker,” said Mark.

“Everything okay?”

“I should have known he had a flush.”

“Yeah,” said Dooley, looking around the courtroom. The ceiling was tall, vaulted, and painted to look like a sunny afternoon. Perfectly fluffed clouds drifted towards the apex of the ceiling, where a great chandelier glowed with the brassy orange of an autumn sun. Dooley wondered how many people’s lives had changed, been ruined or saved, beneath that fake sun. He looked away from the ceiling, along the dark, varnished wooden walls of the courtroom, across the empty gallery, and found Jansen and his girl—her wide eyes, her shining hair flowing freely about her shoulders, looking at once alert and disinterested—sitting in the back of the courtroom. Dooley turned towards them and opened his mouth to say something, but Jansen just glared at him, and the girl glared too, before turning to Jansen and whispering behind a thin, angelic hand. Jansen’s mouth twisted into a little smile, but he continued to stare at Dooley with what Dooley could only think of as perverse hunger.

“Man,” said Dooley turning around. “I’ve never hurt anybody before.”

“What’s that?” said Mark.

“I said I’ve always been a nice guy. A good neighbor. I just hate this.”

“Eh,” said Mark, going all in with a pair of Jacks. “It was just a stupid pig.”

“Not to Jansen.”

“You think he fucked it?” Mark giggled. Then, “Fucking god damnit!”

“You only had a pair,” said Dooley.

“I was bluffing,” Mark said quietly.

“Well, you didn’t fool anybody,” said Dooley.

The judge entered the courtroom, and everyone rose, the prosecutor last of all and behind a barely contained yawn. He was a doughy bald man who seemed to leave a faint smell of onions everywhere he went. The judge was a tall, imposing woman whose eyes never seemed to blink; her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun; her robe hung crisply from her broad shoulders and never seemed to lose its stiff shape, even when she pounded her gavel and raised her hand for silence.

“I don’t like the looks of her,” said Mark, putting his phone away.  

The judge, the Honorable Christina Ramirez, read the docket and charges, accepted Dooley’s guilty plea to misdemeanor drug possession in exchange for five years probation, drug counseling, and a fine of five hundred dollars. But when it came time to hear the destruction of property charges, the prosecutor harrumphed to his feet and submitted a folder for the court’s consideration. He gave a copy to Mark and Dooley, and began his speech.

“Blueberry the Pig was not just a beautiful animal. She was not just a prize-winning sow, whose lustrous hide and ability to perform tricks has won her ribbons at county fairs in Alameda, Kern, Sacramento, and many more. She was not just the progeny of The Porkonaut and Piggie Smalls, legendary swine known to all aficionados of competitive pig breeding. She was not just the fun-loving creature who—pardon the pun—hammed it up on David Letterman, winning the hearts of viewers all over America. She was not just a lucrative breeder (though the court will note we have included an estimate of all future earnings lost due to this unfortunate incident). No, Blueberry was all these things, true, but what she was—first and foremost—a member of the family.”

Dooley and Mark flipped through the folder. It was filled with pictures. Jansen and the girl hugging Blueberry on a stage, a blue ribbon hanging from her pointed ear; Blueberry lying on her side by the couch while Jansen and the girl watched TV; Jansen using a sleeping Blueberry as a headrest while reading in a meadow; Jansen running with a kite while Blueberry chased him; the girl straddling Blueberry while the pig nuzzled in the dirt for truffles. Dooley couldn’t believe it. Jansen had been living this secret life right there on the Hill. His own neighbors didn’t know. How was it possible to have such life in such isolation? He turned to look at Jansen, who was doubled over, sobbing quietly.

“She was on Letterman?” whispered Mark.

Judge Ramirez leafed through the folder dispassionately and looked askance at the prosecutor. “Your point, Mr. Flaherty?”

“We would like the court to consider the personal nature of this incident, Your Honor, not just the, uh, property aspect. As you can see, Blueberry was much more than property.”

The Judge tossed the folder aside. “Mr. Dooley, do you have anything to say?”

Mark’s eyes grew wide and he shook his head. Dooley stood. “Don’t!” Mark hissed.

“I just—I don’t know, Ma’am. Your Honor. I’m sorry. I just—I didn’t even know he had a pig.” He sat back down.

Mark covered his face with his hands and groaned. “What was the point of that?”

“Okay,” said Judge Ramirez. “Let’s not waste any more of the court’s time. I accept the estimated loss of earnings for Mr. and Mrs. Jansen, not only for competitions but for breeding as well. But while I don’t doubt that Blueberry the Pig was much loved I can’t in good conscience put a numerical value on that love. This court finds that Mr. Dooley, for his crime of negligent destruction of property, will be fined two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to be paid in the next thirty days.” She pounded her gavel. Jansen let out a wailing cry. The prosecutor idly gathered his things and slowly waddled out of the court.

Mark turned to Dooley. “That sucks, dude,” he said.

Dooley looked down at his hands, expecting them to tremble, or something. But they just sat there all limp and pale in his lap. “Do I really have to pay that much money?”

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “I guess so?”

“What if I don’t?”

“Well, you can’t just…not.”

“I don’t have that much money.”

“Well then they’ll probably take your house, or anything else you have of value.”

“I…I don’t have anything of value.”

“Look,” said Mark. “It might not have been so bad if your buddy hadn’t hacked at the damn pig with his machete. You should get him to go halfsies with you.”

Dooley sighed, looked up at the ceiling. The air conditioning had turned on and the chandelier swayed slightly; bits of dust and broken spider web fluttered down onto the empty room.

Gary was waiting outside. “Well look at this dumb fucker,” he said solemnly as Dooley descended the courthouse stairs, his cane knocking at the concrete. “How’d it go?”

“Very badly,” said Dooley. He told Gary, who whistled. “Fucking government,” said Gary.

“Well,” Jansen said, coming up behind them. His face was raw and red and his voice sounded wet. “Some justice was served at least.”

“There’s no such thing as justice,” said Gary. “Your pig is still dead.”

“Let it go, Ernest,” said the girl, putting a hand on Jansen’s trembling shoulder. “Blueberry is in a better place.”

Later, back at Dooley’s, Gary was mixing drinks and singing “Radar Love.” Mark was in the corner whispering into his cellphone, and, though he was quiet enough, it was obvious he was begging his mom to loan him money. Dooley wasn’t sure if he’d ever had two other people in his house before. It made him feel claustrophobic. The whole place was done up in dark wood paneling, and the ceiling— all exposed I-beams—hung low on account of it holding up the bedroom, a windowless loft triangulated by the peaked roof. It was a small and dark and close space, like a cave. The kitchen was a single L-shaped counter, lukewarm fridge, and a stove that had a burner (rear left) that melted a bit more each time it was lit. The light in the kitchen was a naked bulb ringed by moths; the light it cast was oppressive and hot but did nothing to expel the shadows and the dust in every other corner of the house. Dooley felt low and strange but he drank Gary’s mojitos, one after the other, and he laughed at Gary’s jokes, because he knew he should, and slowly the night was spinning away.

“Booty call!” said Mark.

“What’s that?” said Dooley.

“Booty call!” said Gary, drumming his belly.

“It’s when a girl calls you up to fuck,” said Mark.

“Oh,” said Dooley. He’d lost the conversation somewhere. “Did you get one?”

“Nah,” said Mark. “But, y’know.” He spun his phone in his hand like it was a revolver. It fell to the floor. “God damnit!” he yelled.

“We need booty calls!” said Gary. He did a little dance that consisted of the same moves he used when he said he was doing karate.

“I think I cracked it,” said Mark.

“Cracked your balls!” said Gary.

They laughed and Dooley felt far away. He felt like he did when he was a teenager, smoking out with his buddies, cruising downtown, how the lights got all smeary through the windows, how his buddies whistled at girls on the sidewalk but not Dooley, never Dooley, Dooley who had a secret. Yes, that’s right, he held her way down inside himself and told no one. Stella. They met in clandestine places: abandoned lots and the old granary and one time next to that old dump-truck rusted out at the bottom of the canyon. And when he was with his buddies he liked to visit that part of himself, to see himself and his idiot friends through Stella’s eyes, and he liked to feel separate from that, above it, knowing that his time was coming to an end, soon he would be the kind of guy who shook his head when his friends invited him to get stoned and drive around downtown. He liked to bring himself right to the verge of telling them all about her, he liked to drop hints, but he’d always pull back. He’d always nod his head yes when they invited him. He’d always take his turn at the pipe. He never whistled at the girls, no. He was there and not there. And when he was with Stella, part of him was always rushed with the excitement of telling them, of being something like a pioneer: how having a girlfriend made him feel special in a way that was frightening and large. Whenever he was with her, he was framing stories in his mind, describing things to himself to remember them, always there and not there, with her, and the others, those who came after, just a few others, who’d come and go—or, more accurately: he’d come and go—until Daphne, and then, suddenly and inevitably, there weren’t any more, and it was just him.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Yes, my son?” said Gary. Mark laughed and laughed but his eyes were wet like he wanted to cry.

“Warner Valley,” said Dooley, standing up. He turned towards the kitchen, decided against it, stepped out onto the sagging wooden porch. Gary and Mark joined him outside. The air was cool and there was a slight breeze. Dooley looked up but between light from the kitchen and the cobwebbed porch cover he couldn’t see any stars.

III.

Dooley booked the flight. A round trip ticket, both flights in one day. He had an address in Laguna Niguel that he was fairly certain was still good; the phone number he knew wasn’t any good. Against the suggestions of both Mark and Gary, and his own better judgment, Dooley flew down to John Wayne International Airport, and took a cab to Happy Sparrow Lane.

The house was in a little subdivision of identical stucco buildings with broad garages facing the street and front doors hidden down overgrown walkways, behind trellises and potted plants. All roads led to a grassy little park with a brand-new playground devoid of children. It was an overcast, muggy day. Standing in the driveway, Dooley felt incredibly stupid, but he also felt that this had to be done in person. He found his way to the door and opened the metal screen and rang the bell.

For some reason, he didn’t expect her to answer. But there she was.

“Hey Daph.”

“Dooley.”

She was older, yeah, but not so much as him. She was wearing a loose Springsteen concert t-shirt and form-fitting jeans; her blonde-brown hair (little streaks of white?) was shoulder length, free. Her eyes were that same milky green, but now there were slight—just slight—wrinkles at their edges. And laugh lines around her mouth. Deep, lovely laugh lines, and the smell of her house wafting out from behind her was of dried flowers and warm coffee and cookie dough. Dooley wondered if his own house had a smell, something that visitors would immediately identify as his own.

“My god,” she said, laughing. “What in the fuck are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “I—I don’t even know.” He laughed.

She cocked her head at him, smiling, yes, but she had a befuddled, pitying look on her face. “Well, are you okay?”

He hands worried at his cane. “Not really.”

“What’s with that?” she said.

“This?” He held up the cane. “Ah. I had my leg kind of crushed at work. Was working for the rice mill? Anyway, it’s a long story. I don’t really need it so much anymore but I’m worried if I don’t have it, they’ll reconsider my disability.”

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Huh. So, that’s not why you’re here though, I’m assuming?”

“No. Can I come in?”

She took a deep breath.

“Daphne, please. I won’t be long. I just…feel like a beggar out here.”

“Aren’t you?”

He hung his head, kicked at the ground. He was wearing sandals and saw, with a distant disgust, that he’d forgotten to trim his toenails. “Yes,” he said. “But it won’t take long, and it won’t cost you anything.”

“Ten minutes,” she said, and stepped aside, and he stepped through.

She led him to the kitchen, which was open to the living room, which boasted a leather sectional couch and a wall-mounted flat screen television over a stone fireplace that had likely never been used. The kitchen itself was all granite countertops, with a breakfast bar piled with mail, and empty glasses, and pink toys—little ponies, little big-eyed dolls. Both kitchen and living room were awash in pale grey light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. High above them three ceiling fans spun around in shadow. Outside, on a broad lawn, three little girls, not quite teenagers, were at play. Two ran back and forth, some form of tag, but the third sat by herself, toying with a cellphone. Then she jumped up and joined them, and they washed back and forth across the lawn like foaming waves, all flowing blond hair and fluttering skirts and flailing, awkward limbs. Then they stopped and seemed to settle into their own little corners of the yard, to their phones, their thoughts, some interesting change in the sky. They were more unknowable to Dooley than anything he’d ever seen so close. It seemed impossible that at any moment they could just open the door and come walking up to him.

Daphne was standing on the opposite side of the breakfast bar from him, staring at him while he stared at the girls. He looked over at her, a few feet away, and the way the room, the whole house, expanded out from her, it seemed that she was at a fixed distance and that if he stepped towards her he would never get any closer, she would always have another room, another corner, another floor to disappear into.

She nodded towards the girls. “Mine, and Braden’s two. Do you want to know which is which?”

Dooley swallowed hard and shook his head.

Daphne snorted. “Of course not, why would you?”

“Daph…Daphne, I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“What are you here for, Dooley?”

He nodded, and pulled the folded papers from his pocket. He cleared some space on the bar and smoothed the papers out. His hands were shaking. “So, I got into some trouble.”

“Okay, well—”

“No, it’s okay. There was this pig? I don’t know. It was famous or something. Anyway, it’s dead and it was my fault, I guess.”

Daphne laughed. “You killed a famous pig? Now I kinda want to hear this, actually.”

“I don’t think you do. Anyway, I have a pretty big fine I have to pay.”

“Oh, hell no—” she said, slamming her palm on the counter.

“No no no,” said Dooley. “I don’t need any money. I just need…I just need a signature.”

Daphne took a deep breath, closed her eyes. “Dooley…”

“So, when we were together, you know, I worked for that guy up in Chester?”

“The real estate guy.”

“That’s the guy. Anyway,” he said, but one of the girls opened the sliding glass door and poked her head in.

“Mom?” she said. Then, noticing Dooley. “Who’s that?”

“Someone from school.”

“No he’s not.”

“From church.”

“Which church?”

“A church for the needy.”

“Ew,” said the girl.

“God damnit Stevie what do you want?”

“What’s for dinner?”

Daphne threw her hands up. “I don’t know, something from the freezer. Are you done playing?”

“I’m bored.”

“There’s dishes.”

“I want Dino-Nuggets,” said Stevie, who slid the door closed and promptly held a conference with the other two girls. They all looked back towards the house with a staccato repetition.

“Five minutes,” Daphne said, turning back to Dooley.

“I—” he said. “She—?”

“Nope, you had a chance for the normal shit. What do you want?”

Dooley nodded. Took a deep breath. He had rehearsed what he would say, so he just said it. More or less. “Anyway. This guy. Real estate guy. He was in on this development, and he got me a deal on a piece of property. Remember how we always talked about having a cabin someday? Like, a vacation home we could take…a place we could just go to? So I bought this property. It was cheap, at the time. I thought, it was so cheap, it would cost us nothing to build a little cabin on it. I thought I’d surprise you with it. We’d go for a drive, and I’d take you there, and we’d hike around, and then I’d…Anyway, I’d surprise you with this property, our property, that was…part of our future. And I meant to do that, and I wanted it to be this big gesture, you know? So, I had your name put on the deed. I wanted to surprise you with the deed, and with…So you’re part owner of this property, up in the Warner Valley. You always have been. I just…I guess I just never told you. I guess the chance just passed me by.” He looked down, pressed his hand against that papers to keep from shaking harder than he was.

Daphne had crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, consider me surprised,” she said flatly.

“The thing is…” he said. “This dead pig…this fucking dead pig. I owe all this money, and if I don’t pay it, they’ll take the property, or my house, or both, I don’t know. And your name is on the deed.” His voice was quivering. “I just need your signature. I need you to sign it over to me, so I can sell it, and pay my fine.” He looked up at her. There were tears in her eyes.

“Why did you come here?” she said quietly.

“I just told you.”

“No,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “Why didn’t you just, I don’t know, send a fucking courier or something?”

“I had to see you, I guess,” he said.

“You’re such an asshole.”

“I know,” he said. “I know that now.”

“Now?”

“Please.”

“I’ll sign your fucking paper,” she said, coming around the bar. She pushed him aside, rummaged through all the papers and all the junk on the bar and found a pen, and signed with a big flourish in pink ink where the paper had been highlighted.

“There,” she said, shoving it at him.

“I think it has to be blue or black ink,” he said quietly.

“God damnit!” she said. She found a black pen and signed carefully over her original signature. “Happy?”

“No,” he said.

“Good. Now get the fuck out of my house.”

She walked him to the door and opened it.

He took a step towards the door but she stopped him.

She said, “Lose my address, and forget my name.”

He nodded and left.

On the plane back to Sacramento, he ordered three screwdrivers. The flight attendant raised her eyebrow and smirked, but said nothing. She brought the drinks and he downed them, one after the other. He looked out the window. They had left the clouds behind. Below them, awash in sunlight, was the long, brown Central Valley. Cars and people and cattle not even like ants, like less than ants, like specks of dirt. Cities here and there turned the light across their faces. Away from the cities the farmland was flat and empty. The hills and mountains rose in fractured creases. Dooley thought that maybe up here he’d find some perspective, a big picture kind of thing, but all he could see was an alien geography, as loose and contradictory as his own selfish heart. He signaled for the flight attendant but they had begun their descent and the bar was closed.    

Dustin Heron’s work has appeared recently in Drunk Monkeys, Gravel, Bending Genres, Conclave, The Normal School, Fictive Dream, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His first book, Paradise Stories, was published by Small Desk Press.

Sofia T. Romero

One Day You Will Know What to Do

You once asked me to tell you a story, your head on my lap as we sat under the trees at the cemetery, the fingertips of a breeze tickled at us and our minds were light with the wine we had with lunch.

This was the first story that came to mind, about a woodworker who lived in the mountains (and we discussed whether this place had mountain tarns or not, I thought possibly) and his name was Sebastian (or possibly Santiago, but you weren’t sure).

And, I added, Sebastian the woodworker loved bluebirds. He lived in a place where there were no longer bluebirds, they had left years ago, as many of our birds had done during that time, left and never come back. He loved the memory of them, but mostly he loved remembering that when he was a child there was picture that his mother had hung in his room of a house in the mountains and two bluebirds, and when he was a child, he used to dream of seeing bluebirds, just like in this picture.

The picture of the house in the mountains and the two bluebirds had been embroidered by his mother one winter, because before that time, women did things like this, like use their gifts to create beautiful pictures of birds and flowers and houses, it was still allowed and so they just did these things, our mothers.

Now they don’t do those kinds of things, make those kinds of beautiful things, no one makes time for that anymore, that kind of beauty, it is easier to forget there was ever that kind of beauty in the world, so we hide those things away, we try not to remember. But many of us remember anyway.

So our Sebastian, who during the day used his skillsas a woodworkerto make things that were more useful, like a bench to sit on or a shed to store things in, at night sat by the fire and used his giftand carved these delicate bluebirds that would fit in the palm of his hand. He would carve the bluebirds because he couldn’t not, because they reminded him of something but he wasn’t sure what.

Because Sebastian had never seen a bluebird in his life, at least not a live one, and they were something that only a few people remembered but no one spoke of it.

It wasn’t until later when his mother died, and he cleared out her attic and found the picture of the house and two bluebirds that he remembered. When the picture hung in Sebastian’s room when he was a child, and when the moon was full, he could see the birds and the house in the woods, and he would look at them until he fell asleep.

If this resembles in any way the fact that when I was a child I also had a picture of a house in the woods and two bluebirds on my wall, and that I imagined that the bluebirds that lived on the wall in my bedroom would one day take me away from things I didn’t yet understand, then that’s a coincidence.

And if the fact that when Sebastian was seven, one day he came home, and his mother had removed the embroidered image of the bluebird and replaced it with a drab poster of an anemic watercolor image of mountains, and his heart broke a little, even though he would never have called it that, if that fact in anyway relates to how I felt when one day I ran up to my room and my bluebirds were no longer there, then that’s a coincidence, too.

And if I went downstairs and told my parents that the bluebirds had left, and told them the story I had written in my mind about the birds migrating south, and my parents reacted by laughing in a way that betrayed their discomfort, and I felt such shame about having told them, having given them this window into my mind, that I started to tell them just a little less about the things I imagined and felt, then that’s a different story, I suppose.

In the bedroom next to mine, my younger brother used to rhythmically rock on his hands and knees at night, hitting his head against the bars of his crib or the wall and when we woke up in the morning, the bed or the crib was several inches away from the wall. But that could have gone on for a day or a week or a year. In my mind, it was always like that, a day or a week or a year.

Even though I know that at some point, he had to share a room with me because the new baby was born. And the bluebirds on my wall made my brother cry, I never knew why, so they took them away before his new bed was placed along the wall where my bluebirds lived.

Those are things I know are true, and they were stories I had told you before, in hushed darkness, in quiet tones, in fear, the things that had come before and why I was the person I was, and you also feared to reveal your heart, and why you were the person you were, and we learned not to fear. 

In Sebastian’s story, it was a little different, and one day he came home from school and his mother had redecorated his room because she thought it needed it, in that careless way some mothers have of just doing things, and so his bluebirds were gone, just as all the bluebirds had gone. And it wasn’t until much later, when his mother had died, and he had to clean out her house that he found the bluebirds in her attic, despite the fact that she had told him that she had thrown it away.

So Sebastian brought the picture back to his house, and his wife, who was named Maria, said it scared her that someone would see it, scared her the way it scared her that someone would find the finely carved bluebirds. But she never told, because secretly she was proud of her husband and his gift, which she would also never tell. And so he brought the picture to his studio and put it up on the wall and he also kept on carving the small wooden birds, and he knew that Maria feared that someone would find him, find the birds, and he would be punished for using his gift, the way they were all supposed to do in that time after the birds.

But as much as Sebastian loved the small birds, and would sometimes take them out of the box and think of another time, a time he had never known, and as much as he wished he lived in a time when he could freely share his gift, he also loved his wife, and he had no desire to cause her to be anxious, so he knew what he needed to do.

But later, when he held the box in his hands and built a small fire in the fireplace and stood over the fire, intending to throw in the tiny creations, one by one, so there would never be bluebirds here ever, not ever, never again, because in his own way, he feared the discovery as much as Maria did, he found that he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

So standing by the fire, he cupped two hands around the tiny bird, the delicate bird that was no more a real bluebird than the ones he saw in the picture that his mother made for him, just his imagination of what one would really be like. And he took the small wooden bird, and breathed over it and whispered only one word over it: Awaysoar.

And the small wooden bird began to twitch and move in his hand, animated by the force of Sebastian’s word, which wasn’t just a word, wasn’t just a jumble of letters or a thoughtless feeling, it was all the longing of his heart.

And as the small bluebird flew about the studio, he picked up the birds one by one and breathed over them one word each, and they grew, warm, energized, alive. Lovehome. Wonderjoy. Dolove. Bepeace.

And the small birds, now brought to life, full of feeldreams as they were, soared around Sebastian’s studio, chirruping and beckoning as they did, until Sebastian opened the window and told them all to skyfree. And they flew out, in a cloud, fast and furious, skyward in a place where no bluebird had lived in many years, and he watched as they flew until he couldn’t see them anymore.

And Maria, who had come into the room quietly while all this was happening, held him as he wept, for himself, for her, for the birds, for all of us.

So that was the end of the story I told you, the story of the woodworker and his wife whom he loved, that day that we lay in each other’s arms in the grass, enjoying for that moment, the sun, the sky, the warm air.

And if later I kept searching for that feeling of lovehome and never found it, not even in your arms, and there was a point at which I could no longer bear the loneliness that was planted when you went away, is it any surprise what happened next when I looked out the window and there was a bluebird in the tree, like there hadn’t been in so many years?

And there wasn’t just one, there was a small flock of six or seven, and they darted from tree to tree, and their song was an invitation whispered to me, and I knew what to do. I whispered back take me with you, and gave them my dream of lovehome, and the next time I looked at myself, I was looking from outside in through the window at the woman who stood there, her eyes blank, as though the self of her had been extinguished, and then she blinked and smiled and walked away.

We all sang different songs, and after a time, my song was less of an ache. And one day we flew to Sebastian’s window and startled him with the sight of us, and there were tears in his eyes to see us, though he created us, and we sang join us, join us, join us, as they had sang to me before them. And I thought for a moment he would, his heart was open to us, and we could feel the pull between us and for a moment, our minds careened about his heart and felt the longing there and read the words of his story, as he looked at all of us like he was trying to memorize every one of our feathers. In that moment, his wife called to him, and he, well, he turned away and closed his yes.

Some things stay with you. They grow inside you, taking root, asking — no, not asking — demanding to stay. They hunker down there, put down roots, stretch out by the river on a beautiful day and drift off to sleep in your arms.

Sebastian’s decision to stay knit itself in our hearts like a darkness and burned through us like an ember. Do you love me now, it whispers, doing flips in the air to impress me. Look at me! Look at me now! The things I am doing are daring! And now even more daring!

And now do you love me? It whispers again. And now?

Some things stay with you. Sebastian’s story was one of them because, in a way, it was also mine.

Sofia T. Romero is a writer and editor who lives in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in Blue Mountain Review, Rigorous, Waterwheel Review, and Leon Literary Review. Her story, “We Have Always Been Who We Are,” received a 2020 Pushcart Prize nomination. Reach her on Twitter @mightyredpen or @sofiatromero.

Matt Leibel

Dunce Partner

He fell in love too easily. He fell in love in the morning, he fell in love in the afternoon. He fell in love with the twilight: its vampires, its last gleaming, its Zone. He fell in love with stray animals, stray thoughts. He took a dance class, and fell in love with his partner, though she wasn’t in step with his affections. He fell in love with the dance itself, though he could never quite remember its name. He fell in love with words that sound like dance and feel partnered to it, like trance, and prance. And dunce. He knew he was a dunce about dance. He knew he was a dunce about love, too. He bought a dunce hat and peacocked about in it, but it didn’t help him to find love. It didn’t even help him to find other dunces, because most dunces don’t advertise. But he decided he should. He posted ads on dunce sites, and got responses. Meanwhile he’d fallen in love with tangential things: a wooden cat sculpture perched on his writing desk, an unmarked cassette tape filled with forgotten hit singles, the tricolor flag of the nation of Gabon. He listed out all of the things he loved to the first dunce who agreed to partner up. The list was long, it had 245 items on it—the final of which was the list itself. His new partner had the same list, including comically oversized paper clips, Haibun poetry, and scallop tacos. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly the same but she was agreeing with him, because she liked him, or she was agreeing to be agreeable, or because of some obscure private joke. Any of those choices sounded suspiciously non-duncelike to him. But then, so did liking Japanese prosimetrics or African vexillology. Maybe they were both fake dunces—which was either item #147 or item #13 on the list of things they both claimed to love. They kissed, which was a thing that wasn’t on either of their lists, though that song about kisses being on a list was. They took an outing to an outlet store and bought each other new and better dunce hats. They fell in dunce love, stupidly, as if out of narrative necessity. They imagined their love was a scarce resource, like oil or empathy, and that they must hoard it before shortages cause an unresolvable international crisis. They imagined their love was a geometric proof of itself, and that the nation’s math teachers would applaud them for their inarguable, recursive logic. They imagined their love was a forcefield, one that could protect them from the slings and arrows of the merciless world. And if the arrows wanted to split them apart like apples, then they could turn their love into oranges—so they could rhyme with, and only with, each other.

Matt Leibel has published short fiction in Electric Literature, Portland Review, Cheap Pop, DIAGRAM, Wigleaf, and Best Small Fictions 2020. He lives in California where he works as a product copywriter and can be found on Twitter @matt_leibel.

Natalia Alexandrova

The Shiner (After Apocalypse)

My friend Kurt was the first one to notice it. We were queuing for coffee by the office kitchenette one morning when he told me, “Are you going to get that shiner checked then?”

“What?” said I. Fuck. Earlier that morning, when I was brushing my teeth, I noticed some odd blinking in the bathroom mirror, but I wasn’t wearing my glasses then, so I decided it was probably just the bathroom light that was about to go off.

“Fuck,” I muttered before taking myself promptly to my desk. I looked at myself in the small mirror I kept in the drawer for emergencies like spontaneous nosebleeds, ink on the shirt, you name it. At first, I saw just my own countenance: curly hair spilling on the forehead like an explosion in a fettuccine factory, new glasses, plaid shirt, green sweater – the usual. And then my face got obscured with a sort of a gleaming white shimmer, it ebbed and flowed, like an ever-arriving tide, soft and flickering, then it turned a slightly dimmer shade of white, and through it, as clearly as I had just perceived myself, I saw a reflection of a woman with dark hair and dark eyes. The silver ring of a piercing adorning her left brow gleamed at me, and I lay the mirror face down on the desk.

“Do Craigslist,” Kurt said from behind my back. He looked worried. There was a fresh coffee stain on his vest. It looked like he jumped the line to get the coffee first, and then ran to my desk hoping to catch at least part of it.

“No,” said I.

“Everyone else does.” He shrugged. “What? There’s nothing wrong with it. You get the shiner, you post an ad on Craigslist with your likeness included. Your reflector sees you, you connect, you hit it off. Possibly. Everyone’s happy…” He searched for something on the bottom of his coffee mug. “And alive.”

“No,” said I and started my computer. He hovered above me for another moment, then left.

#

“I saw two people explode in Madison Square Park,” I said, “when I was in high school.”

“No shit,” said Kurt and put his sandwich down. We were having lunch in the public area near our office. It was early September, the pigeons and sparrows jumping around still looked lively, and the trees were all green.

What did I remember of the time when it happened? It was a lot less common back then. I don’t think any research of the phenomenon had been done at that point. The world was still busy rebuilding itself after the war. Those were survivalist years. Everyone was still hungry. We were all walking skeletons looking for ways to get additional food, outside of the allotted monthly rations. I myself was working three days a week clearing out the post-bombing devastation after school, you know, debris, human remains – all that was expected. The government paid me and other cleaners in actual cow milk. It was good pay, helped me and my parents survive. No one cared about the reports of people noticing odd reflections on themselves. Not yet.

“I think they connected, but didn’t make it to each other on time,” I continued. “Back then, I don’t think people realized how dangerous it was.” I felt myself go hoarse. “I remember, the woman – she was waiting for him in the middle of the lawn, and she was shining pretty badly. She was nothing in particular – a small middle-aged woman, but that column of light she carried around her seemed enormous.”

Kurt was staring at me, his eyes wide with expectation. Clearly, he had already imagined it all in his head, a lot more vividly than my words would have ever described.

“And then it went loud – the vibration and the light surrounding her. It was like a living thing, and it roared, and you could feel the pressure building in the atmosphere. My friends and I hid behind the Farragut Monument, whatever was left of it after the bombings. And we watched from there. Suddenly her guy came running. By the time he got there, she was already – engulfed. It was one giant ball of white flame. But you could still see her inside, she was still there. And he sort of reached out, through the shimmer, and touched her. I have no idea what he was thinking, probably hoped to pull her out. There was an enormous clap, like a giant piece of glass shattered. And the light went even brighter and obscured them for a second, and then you could see them disintegrate in it. And then there was nothing, poof – a tall wall of ash dust hanging in the air.”

My food was sitting in front of me on the wooden table. I didn’t feel like eating.

“Yoni, please, I’m begging you,” said Kurt, “get it fixed.”

“I will,” said I. “Oh, I will.”

#

“I don’t see anything out of ordinary,” Doctor Lutz said, reading through my lab results. “Are you sure you’re not imagining it?” He looked up from the report and stared at me, assessing.

“I’m positive,” said I, and he got up and stuck the thermometer in my mouth.

“Well,” he said when the reading appeared on the wall monitor, “you do tend to run a bit hot. Alright now, let me listen to your lungs real quick.” He moved towards me, stethoscope ready, and then he suddenly yelled, “Wow, wow!” – and sprang away from me, knocking over his chair.

I looked down at myself and saw the familiar faint shimmer, as a soft film of light hanging in the air about my person. It seemed to me that it had grown a bit brighter since the first time I saw it two weeks back. Now I could also feel it: a light vibration of air, traveling up and down along my frame, starting at the soles of my feet and dissipating somewhere above the crown of my head. Nevertheless, I was planning to go on ignoring it.

“Ay-yai-yai!” said Doctor Lutz and brought me back to the real world. He took out his phone and snapped a picture of me. “For your medical record,” he explained. “I am obligated by law to report on all instances of Reflecting.”

“You really don’t have to,” said I.

“Not for you to decide,” said he.

#

“So, does it ever go away, or do you just walk around like this?” Martina asked and pointed at me with her beer bottle.  A month had passed since my physical.

“It goes away,” said I, “sometimes.” Sometimes it did disappear for an entire afternoon, or I would wake up in the morning and be surprised by my own face in the bathroom mirror. Tonight, however, I was flashing like a fucking lighthouse, glowing, projecting my supposed need for that one individual all over Brooklyn.

We were standing by the wall in our local, the one establishment licensed to serve the population of the three neighboring sub-boroughs of Brooklyn where we lived. It was Kurt’s turn to fight for the bartenders’ attention at the bar. The place was packed with kids celebrating the end of the week. Even a larger crowd was queuing in the cold outside. The band was playing some old-time Rockabilly stuff, probably something that was around long before we all were born. Barely contained by the dance floor, the crowd sloshed around and moaned to the rhythm. Drinks were being spilled, feet were being stepped on, sides elbowed. Nobody cared, everyone was drunk out of their mind and content. Friday night was the beginning of a new life, the weekly revival of the dead.

“I’m so happy for you,” Martina said and leaned her head against the brick wall near my shoulder.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said I.

“Yes, I know,” she replied. “I don’t need to have experienced a shiner to know what you’re feeling right now. Being a woman should suffice.”

I just shook my head. There were people stumbling by us, to and from the exit, everyone squeezing by, pushing around, and only the small circle lit up by my shiner remained gracefully free of human bodies. Self-preservation instinct kept even the most inebriated ones at an arm’s distance from my person.

 “They’re busy tonight, huh?” said Kurt as he handed us a new round. Somebody knocked him on the back while trying to squeeze by him on their way to the dance floor. He ignored them stoically. “I can’t believe there are so many people this young in the world today. How old do you think they are? Nineteen? Twenty? I thought nobody was being born in those years. I guess I was wrong.”

“Don’t talk about it,” said Martina. “This kind of talk depresses me.” She huddled closer to me. I embraced her with my one arm that wasn’t holding a drink. To the three of us who were between twelve and fourteen at the time of the apocalypse and survived the worst of the devastation and the aftermath, the fact that somewhere people were able to fall in love and conceive a relatively healthy child while we were watching the world annihilate itself seemed to be an idea worth of a science fiction novel.

“I think it’s mostly artificially fertilized eggs,” I said, trying to speak as quietly as possible. “Which is totally cool. They look like they turned out okay. For the most part.”

“Yes,” said Kurt, “I just read that’s the exact reason why they want to impose mandatory genetic screening on everyone wanting to conceive. So that, you know, you don’t unknowingly knock up your half-sister or what have you.”

To the kids surrounding us we probably seemed like a small herd of dinosaurs who wandered into a human habitat by mistake. Sadly, people who would have now been between thirty and forty-five – our age – seemed to have been hit the hardest by the war. It seemed the three of us were among the last of the very few remaining, living in the world of sexagenarians and the young.

We said goodbye inside the transit hub, and each of us went our separate way. Despite the late hour, there were people on the platform. The station timer announced four minutes before the arrival of the next eastbound train. I leaned against a platform pillar and whistled. Then I noticed a woman in her fifties staring at me. She peered at me, put her glasses on, and looked at me again.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Is that you?” she inquired and pointed somewhere to the right of my right shoulder.

I looked in the direction she was pointing and gave a start.

My likeness, naked from the waist up, was printed on a large missing person ad. I had been photographed sitting on a doctor’s couch and staring curiously down at my own hands. My face and body were half-obscured by the shiner, but you could still get a very good idea of what I looked like. Fucking Doctor Lutz. He did report me to the RRC.

“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?”

questioned the top line of the ad.

The space below the photograph threatened: “Missing Reflector. As mandated by the Reflector Registration Commission, our Client is looking for the following individual:

Male

Early Thirties

Approximately 6’2 – 6’4

Brown Hair, Brown Eyes

Athletic Build.”

And then in smaller font:

“This Reflector was reported by his medical provider as living in the unified sub-borough of Prospect Heights and Flatbush. Name and Address of the individual in question is unavailable for public search as per Reflector Privacy Protection Act. If you know this man, please call us at: (They gave a number in the city. Probably some law firm.) This is a matter of extreme urgency.”

And finally:

“Do you recognize yourself? It is your legal duty to report for Connection immediately upon seeing this ad.”

The very bottom read in bright red:

“It is illegal to remove this ad.”

“So, it is you, then,” said the old woman.

“No,” said I, “that’s not me”. And I looked away.

The train arrived. She lingered on the platform waiting to see what I was going to do. I leaned back against the pillar making sure to cover as much of the ad as possible and pretended to be waiting for someone. There was nothing she could do. She entered the train. I watched it leave the station and the arriving passengers move up the stairs. Once I was alone, save for a couple of cripples asleep on the subway bench, I ripped the ad off and stuck it into the trash can.

#

“You can’t go to Dallas like this,” said Olga. She was half-sitting on the desk next to mine, her arms crossed on her chest. Olga, my boss, who five years ago plucked me from the pool of project coordinators and made me Assistant PM, and then a proper PM, and since then had acted as the watchful guardian of my professional advancement.

Great A’Tuin upholding my Earth gave a slight tremble.

“Why not?” said I, trying to remain calm.

“Because–“ She gestured at me with her hand holding her phone, bottom to top, and encompassed in that succinct gesture my entire person. The phone rang in her hand. She turned it off and put it in her pocket.

“I know you think you’re still young.” She smirked. “And you still want to have your fun. But you still can! No one says you must stay with her. Give her a hug. That’s really all that is needed with reflectors – the one-time physical contact. You don’t need to stay joined at the hip for the remainder of your lives.”

I thought of the girl with the pierced eyebrow, the one whose reflection I saw in the mirror every morning, and somehow it didn’t seem that this solution, while being the most sensible – and the most convenient – would satisfy her.

“I think,” I began cautiously, “if you could talk to Jim (our EMD) and convey to him that this condition doesn’t impair my ability to present–“

She didn’t let me finish.

“Who’s going to talk to Jim? Me? Why would I do that?” It was more of a declaration than a question, enunciated with her usual aplomb and broadcast all over the office space. Everyone around us was listening not even bothering to pretend they weren’t. “If you don’t take care of this thing, I myself will go to Dallas in your place and speak for Project Management during the business review. Clients don’t pay us to be exposed to a human blowtorch. You can participate over the phone, not a problem.”

The pain her words caused was agonizing. I stared at her, speechless, paralyzed by the sudden discovery that I grew to perceive this woman as an adoptive mother whose unyielding support and validation I grew to depend on – completely unbeknownst to myself. This was the leader who, when questioned why she would ever put on her team someone who had never pulled a project of his own (myself), said that she did so because I was smart and produced excellent work, and I didn’t blabber. She also might have told me once at a holiday party, upon having drunk a few vodka martinis, that, while being only a few years my senior, she loved me like a son she always wanted to have. The full meaning of those words didn’t quite register with me back then.

As if seeing the entire situation anew, I realized that through my recent behavior she might have felt quite a bit of pain herself.

I rose from my seat. She startled and angled away from me but didn’t budge from her spot. She was clearly gearing up for a fight.

“I’ll fix it,” said I. “Consider it done.” And I went to get my jacket.

“Yonatan, moi malchik (that meant ‘my boy’)”, she said at my back, “you don’t need to leave the office now. The meeting is not until next Thursday, remember?”

I left anyway. I had to report myself to the RRC.

#

At around five that evening I was ringing the bell of an apartment located in a four-story walk-up in Utica Avenue. A wheelchair-bound man occupying the first-floor dwellings opened his window and told me that Deanna Ramos had not returned from work yet. In fact, she was rarely home before eleven lately, out looking for that friggin’ – oh, wait! – looking for me! No, there was no jealous husband to fear. Admittedly, there had been a boyfriend, but he’d been blown away by the arrival of the omni-potent shiner. Yes, she was employed, teaching middle school in fact. Better come tomorrow. She is always home on Saturdays.

The wheelchair dude – Diego – turned out to be nice company. He gave me root bear, and we had a small chat. I sat on the porch. He sat in his wheelchair by the window. He told me about his work. He was writing code, working remotely for a bank in the city. I told him about my work. I told him about Olga, and then I somehow told him about how my mother died from radiation sickness when I was younger, and about how much I missed her. We talked about how our families suffered during the war, and about everyone we lost to it. It was a sad conversation. We talked some about Deanna too, about how brave one had to be to teach middle school, about how damn disrespectful and entitled kids were these days, and how much better we were in our own time.

I got on the 6:15 train that was supposed to take me to my home in Bergen Street. There was no point waiting for her, truly. The train was relatively bearable up to Grand Army Plaza where a crowd of high-schoolers and their teachers suddenly invaded all of it. They were probably coming back from the day at the Brooklyn Museum and the Library. Completely accustomed to the repellent effect my shiner had on people around me, I suddenly found myself, where I stood, surrounded by a crowd of fifteen-year-olds, yelling, pushing, laughing, listening to the music on their phones and arguing with their teachers. All seats were immediately taken. Confident they were impervious to death, they paid no heed to my condition. The bustling crowd uprooted me and pushed me almost all the way to the doors on the opposite side of the car. I was stuck between their sweaty, energetic young bodies more securely than a fly on a stick pad. The teachers were giving me worried looks, but there was nothing they could do about my person. The train timer showed two minutes remaining before the departure of the train. I looked around me trying to find a way to somehow alleviate my suffering and that was when I saw her.

She was amusingly short for someone with such potent energy – the girl in a long black coat and a black beret, carrying under her arm a sheaf of leaflets that had my face printed on all of them. She was standing on the platform, talking to another teacher, a big girl with funny glasses and red hair.

The train conductor announced that the cars had now been filled to their full capacity. The train ushers started clamoring and pushing the late-comers away and squeezing the over-stuffers deeper into the cars. Drawn by the noise, my reflector stared at the loudspeaker, then at the ushers, and finally she glanced distractedly at where I was standing frozen in expectation. She started to turn away from me, halted, and looked at me again. I jerked inadvertently where I stood, conflicted, wanting to duck down and hide behind the kids standing in front of me. Unfortunately, they were all too short.

She stared directly at me, quite murderously, and then said, very loudly and with a lot of dignity: “You dick!”

And then she stepped towards the car, straight between the ushers, grabbed her leaflets with both hands, raised them high in the air, and threw them at me, with an almost mathematical precision hitting me square on the nose. Squealing with laughter, the kids in front of me cowered under the rain of paper.

“Whoa, whoa!” said a train usher. “Step away from the train car, madam! Step away!” And he ushered her away from the doors.

“Meet me in 7th Avenue,” I yelled above the kids’ heads, and I laughed. For some reason, I felt light-hearted.

She rolled her eyes and turned away from me. I was not sure whether she was truly outraged or just pretending. The train timer showed I still had about fifteen seconds before the train doors were due to close.

“Excuse me,” I said to the kids in front of me and pushed to bulldoze my way out of the car.

“You, hey, you!” the train usher said to me and grabbed the door handle. “Don’t even think about it!” And he rolled the car doors shut right in front of me.

The train tooted and shuddered into motion. She turned around; our eyes met as I was moving away. I felt a deep sadness as I stared back at her.

#

She made me wait for an hour. The rush hour came and went. I felt like I was born and grew up on the bench I was sitting on in 7th Avenue station. I was also so tense that I was unable to read or simply rest while I was waiting. All I could do was worry. My mind was caught in the eternal loop of indecision: should I go back, or should I stay? What if I go, and she will come here, and we will lose each other forever? What if I stay, and she will never come – to the same outcome?

Then I felt it. The ever-present breeze of the shiner moving around me that I’d gotten used to in the past two months suddenly grew stronger. I realized it wasn’t some sort of a weird electric draft that I’d imagined it to be. It was an incessant hum of high-voltage energy that now accelerated rapidly in its frequency and surrounded me like an impenetrable wall. I felt my palms go very, very warm. I was vaguely aware of people around me start moving away, towards the corners of the platform. Someone wearing an MTA vest was frantically trying to connect with the Fire Department through the help booth on the platform. The station timer was ticking off seconds until the arrival of the next train. Then I felt the shiner push me upright. It was now pushing me towards the platform edge. No, it didn’t feel like a gentle nudge on the shoulder. It felt like I was trapped between a number of large rolling pins that were being rolled about my person on all sides. The pressure I was subjected to was growing with every second. I had to move forward, otherwise this immense energy would have flattened me dead. I already found it very hard to be able to drag air through my lungs.

The train arrived and docked in the station. There was a moment of quiet, and then the doors of the car in front of me groaned, and, without any human assistance, rolled jerkily apart. Submerged in a ray of blinding white light, a human-shaped silhouette walked out of the empty car and stepped forth towards me. The air came alive and roared all around us. It was deafening. Not being entirely in command of my body anymore, I took a step towards my reflector. At that moment I believe I lost my sight, because I could not see anything around me, just the all-encompassing white. My seeing and hearing stripped from me, all I was allowed to do was to continue moving.I did. I took another step towards her, and then another, and then I collided with something that felt like a solid wall. I kept pressing against it, and it kept pushing back at me, just as strongly. The platform under my feet shook so violently that it felt like the earth was falling apart. This was what an earthquake felt like, this was what a bomb exploding on the ground felt like. I felt that this was probably the moment we were both going to die. Therefore, I tried, as much as I was able to, to open my arms and embrace her, or whatever was left of her.

There was a crack. I’m pretty sure it was preceded by a contained lightning too. And then for a few seconds everything went dark. I stumbled because with the light gone, the rolling pins were gone as well. It took me all the strength I had left to remain upright and not spill onto the floor like a cup of jelly. Then the lights above our heads flickered back on. She was still there. We were facing each other through a faint veil of concrete dust that was hanging in the air. Pieces of plaster and pieces of ceiling littered the station floor. The car she arrived in looked like it took a beating. Its windows crumpled into shards. We were both completely unharmed.

“Woohoo!” yelled somebody very young from the side of the platform. As if through cotton balls in my ears, I heard phone cameras click. People still trapped inside the unopened train cars were glued to the windows, surveying us with great interest.

#

They kept me in the hospital overnight. I was receiving my discharging orders from the patients’ coordinator in the hallway when I noticed Deanna. She was sitting in one of the chairs in the waiting area. Waiting for me, no doubt about that. I thought: Good. Time to put this entire thing to rest.

She noticed me; our eyes met. She got up and walked towards me, somewhat resignedly. She was wearing the same clothes, but she looked different, better than the night before, like someone who was on their way to recovery from an illness. There was still a residual reflection of myself about her, but it was fading.

She approached, and I was just standing next to her, and I could already see that this was not going to work. There was absolutely no way I would ever understand this person or feel in any way aligned with anything she was. It wasn’t like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. No, it was more of an I Came from a Galaxy that Does Not Exist in Your Dimension. One obvious good thing that came out of it was that my fear of losing myself in another turned out to be completely unfounded.

She, too, looked apprehensive, like she was in the presence of an alien species. I knew I had to say something, but I could not force my lips to unglue. A few seconds elapsed, and none of us spoke. We stood facing each other like two human-sized mirrors, still reflecting one another in perfect harmony, and feeling not even close to that.

“What even!” she said after some time and proceeded to grab my hand.

The earth trembled. It wasn’t the mad, angry wobble of our yesterday’s collision. It was a soft, gentle shudder that rose from the ground beneath my feet and rolled through my body like a soothing, comforting wave, dissipating somewhere in my skull, lodging itself forever in my mind like a quiet, flickering light of a candle in the night.

I think I said, “A-a-ah…” Or something of that sort. The world had gone very warm and very – welcoming and safe. I felt simultaneously like lying down and taking a nap and like running a mile and screaming at the top of my lungs. Suddenly, it all made perfect sense.

Deanna startled as if coming back from whatever void she’d just fallen into and moved to pull her hand away. She was obviously not herself to want to do something like that.

I yelled, “No-no-no!” And I laughed, and I squeezed her fingers maybe a bit too hard.

She looked at me and said, “What…”

It wasn’t a question. She stared at our hands, interlocked, and her hard face went very soft and perfectly pink. Clearly, I was not the only one affected.

Our energies didn’t merge. We each transmitted on our own frequency, forever running parallel to one another, never overlapping, and between us existed this perfectly empty space of nothingness, completely void of any danger. Once I stepped into it, I knew I was never going to leave.

“I don’t get it,” she said and looked at me like she expected me to explain what just happened.

I thought of my parents and whatever force that had brought them together. I thought of my brother still lying somewhere in the scorched desert on the other side of the world. I thought of the millions of people on the other side who were just like him, unacknowledged. I looked at Deanna, and I saw her as a child, and at the same time as a grown woman. I saw that she as well was thinking of the ones she loved. And I felt very calm. I forced myself to let go of her hand only for her to immediately grab it back.

“Trust me,” I said, “it’s going to be okay.”

Natalia Alexandrova is an aspiring writer of fiction and drama. She was born in Russia and holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Chuvash State Pedagogical University. Her writing is largely influenced by the works of Ray Bradbury and Boris Akunin. She currently lives in Chicago, but her heart belongs to the borough of Brooklyn, which was her first home in the United States. Natalia can always be reached at natalia.alexandrova.info@gmail.com.

Roger d'Agostin

Prime

Mr. Warren realized sixty-one was a prime number while waiting in line at the cash register, when he spotted a pair of striped number one birthday candles perched on top of the Big League Chew Gum.  He instantly thought of Mae, the youngest student in his class, who told the entire class that she has two birthday parties every year now that her parents are divorced and her dad lives in Long Island.   Mr. Warren thought the party would be a fun way to continue their prime number lesson.  Yesterday, they only made it to thirteen because of the disruption at eleven when Mae announced her birthday and the whole class realized they were now all the same age.

While searching for a six candle Mr. Warren decided he would wear the white dress shirt he intended to purchase.  This was the gift from his mom.  For the past seven years, after committing her to a nursing home, he placed a wrapped present in her room then feigned surprise, on or near his birthday: “What’s this, Mom?  You remembered?”

But Mr. Warren should have bought two ones and not the six.  And he should have waited for the class to arrive and settle at their desks before he lit them.  But he was excited and didn’t think the candles would burn so quick.  The wax melted into the frosting and his attempt to rouse the class into Happy Birthday petered out after the first to you. 

Mae asked, “Who’s birthday is it?” 

Mr. Warren replied, “Mine, in two days, and I’m sixty-one, another prime number.  Just like eleven.  Then thirteen.  Thennnnn.”  He searched for a participant.  “Seventeen?  Thennnn.”  The children were silent.  They stared at the cake.  “Come on, we went over this the other day.  The next one is?” 

Mae asked, “After sixty-one?”

“Well, no.  After nineteen.” 

“Nineteennnnn.”

“Do you still get presents?” Mae asked.  

Mr. Warren said, no, then yes, then quickly asked who wanted cake.  He huffed at the candles but only the six went out and he had to blow two more times to extinguish the one.  He felt dizzy and held onto the desk. 

He thought someone asked if he still got presents. 

“It’s double chocolate,” he exclaimed.  “And we have enough so everyone can have a second piece.” 

Someone asked what he got.  But Mr. Warren didn’t answer.  He stared at the disgusting blue gel smear in the middle of his shirt.  The entire word Happy was gone from the cake.  Now he couldn’t rewrap the shirt and pretend it was new. 

Mr. Warren didn’t look up.

“No,” he answered.  “I don’t get presents anymore.”

Roger D’Agostin is a writer living in Connecticut.  His work has been published most recently in FRiGG, jmww, and Pif Magazine.  He is currently working on a book of short stories.  For further inquiries he can be contacted at rdagostin@yahoo.com.

Molly Giles

Family Wedding

We were pretty sure that Josh, who delivers pizzas and plays bass in a trap metal band called Medical Waste, and Josie, who works in a marijuana dispensary, couldn’t afford anything fancy, so my six sisters and I were pleasantly surprised if a little puzzled when their wedding announcement—heavily embossed on expensive paper–listed Tanglevine Chapel for the ceremony and Tanglevine Terrace for the reception. We would have thought a park or the beach or someone’s backyard, but then we remembered that Josie’s mother had just won a five million dollar lawsuit for a botched booty lift so that at least explained the $13,000 to rent the Chapel (not that we Googled it) and the $15,000 (this took a few phone calls) to rent the Terrace. Josh lucked out, we chuckled, for hadn’t his last girlfriend been deported? Still, that left the question of why a chapel. Tanglevine is all stained glass and life-size crucifixes. Was Josh still a churchgoer? We thought not. He and his brother Duncan and their little sister Susie had been pious kids, but after their mother ran off with the babysitter, they stopped going to Sunday School and Reg was too distraught to make them. Reg we see is distraught again today. We find our little brother leaning against his Mercedes in the Tanglevine parking lot, weeping. It takes some time for us to find out why. Is it because he’s losing Josh? No, no, it’s Sondra, he sobs, Sondra, his latest wife, who refused to come to Josh’s wedding; she doesn’t like Josh and she thinks Josie is spoiled. Poor Reg. He’s lost a lot of weight since Sondra stopped sleeping with him and although he’s The Beauty—we all agree Reg is The Beauty of The Family—he looks terrible. We try to cheer him up. It’s great Josh is getting married, we say, after all his drug busts and DUI’s and that long stint of begging on the streets, look how he’s come out of it, he’s marrying an heiress, it’s a happy day. Happy day! Little Susie repeats and we suddenly notice her below us and bend over her wheelchair to greet her, hoping she won’t slobber on us. We have never known what exactly’s wrong with Little Susie, whether she was dropped as an infant or, as Reg claims, “accidentally run over,” and although we hate to see her attendant give her another dose of phenobarbital, we know it’s only to keep her from screaming. Her blurred eyes dart from one to the other of us and her little hands twist on her lap as she repeats Happy Day. We straighten, brush off our fronts, and begin to maneuver through the crowds of Josh and Josie’s young friends, the girls half naked and the boys in makeup and earrings. We look for the mother of the bride, to congratulate her, and find Josie’s mother standing under a bower with a young man supporting her on either side; she has not been able to sit down, someone whispers, since her “procedure.” The two young men holding her up are gorgeous and we admire their identical baby blue tuxedos and silently wonder how much they get paid. Josh, we are relieved to see, wears a normal black tuxedo. He greets us at the chapel door with a wide smile, though his pupils are alarmingly dark and we are confused by the way he chants, “You’re only an inch tall, where are your brains!” as we step forward to hug him. He instructs us to also hug the seven-foot green Gumby blow-up doll rocking back and forth beside him and, amused, why not, we do. Inside, the chapel is soft with candlelight and fragrant with flowers but the music the organist is playing is strange, like something you’d hear in a horror film. One of Josh’s original compositions? We find our seats and Reg pushes in next to us, sits down heavily, pulls out his cell phone and starts studying photos of his own wedding to Sondra. She hates me, he says. She hates Little Susie and Duncan and Josh. We pat his back and look straight ahead as the minister comes to stand before the altar. Are we wrong or is this a real minister? He looks like a twelve-year-old and he is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants. Is he chewing gum? Embarrassed for him, we look away and wonder if the reason Sondra hates Josh is because Josh claims she pulled a gun on him once; she has denied this, just as she has denied being married four times before she met Reg. We once asked Reg which one of them lies the most, Sondra or Josh, and Reg had to think before he said, They both lie, so it’s more or less a moot point and not our problem. We turn to greet our other nephew Duncan as he and pretty little Yeej and their baby Mee settle into the row behind us. We do know why Sondra never went to Duncan’s wedding, for Yeej is Hmong and Sondra said that as a Christian she could not condone a pagan ceremony, so Reg was the only parent at that wedding too, which was fine with us; we were willing to come and eat the cow Duncan had shot in the head with a .38 the night before, gray and tough as the beef was, boiled and served from a tin vat onto paper plates, but Yeej’s family was friendly and we were glad to see Duncan happy, though he does not look happy today and there is a bruise on Yeej’s face we wish we had not seen. It is a relief when Josie comes down the aisle, radiant in a white dress with flowers in her hair and a black dragon tattoo on her shoulder, and Josh joins her and we only wish we could hear the vows, we love wedding vows, but the little minister is talking too fast and Josh and Josie are laughing too hard to hear. At last there’s the familiar I Now Proclaim You and the kiss, which is a great backwards ballroom move, good for Josh, terrific, and then the newly-weds chase each other down the aisle yelling Outta Here and we all rise to follow but on the way out of the chapel little Yeej misses a step and falls flat onto the courtyard stones below and Duncan turns to a guy behind him and shouts You pushed her and the guy says The hell I did and they start to fight while Yeej lies there with her leg bent funny and Mee screams Mommeee and one of Josh’s friends breaks the fight up by whacking Duncan with Gumby and making him laugh and one of Josie’s mother’s friends, a nurse who testified at the malpractice trial, kneels by Yeej until the medics come and carry her off on a stretcher, little Mee wailing behind her. It could have happened to any of us, we agree, except we probably wouldn’t have been able to get up at all; with our luck, we would have broken a hip or a back, we would have died. By then we are all seriously rattled and even though we don’t smoke, we bum cigarettes from the boys in mascara and even though we don’t drink we hit the bar hard and even though we don’t do red meat, gluten, or sugar we pig out on ribs, pasta, and big hunks of gooey black wedding cake, and even though we don’t do drugs we get some coke from the nurse and even though we don’t dance we find ourselves slow dancing with the minister and after we pull our pants up again in the bushes and pay the attendants we go back to the tables and sit and listen to Reg sob and say he doesn’t know why Sondra hates him and we hug him and say don’t worry you have us you will always have us and Little Susie lurches forward in her wheelchair and starts to scream.

Molly Giles has published four award winning collections of short stories; her fifth collection, WIFE WITH KNIFE, just won the Leap Frog Press prize and will be published both in the US and in the UK next year.