Prose

Alexander Anthony Lopez

Paradise Underground

Cape Town, South Africa 

2011 

On the neon-lit dance floor of Beefcakes, a Sudanese man named Mahmoud, who is six foot four and smells of Shisa nyama and coconut oil, tells me that his father was murdered by the Janjaweed militia and that I have a really nice ass. 

I can’t tell which thing he is lying about, but I let him pull me in close, just in case. I don’t know how to respond when people confess to a death like this, so I kiss him. He smiles and presses his body close to mine, mouthing something new into my ear that I can’t quite understand. I feel conscious of how thin I have become. I wonder if Mahmoud can feel my ribs as he rubs his hands across my torso. 

What was left of my stipend from The Mission has run dry and for weeks I have been walking around Cape Town like an omen. The ligaments of my spine crane with effort each night in my hostel, pointing my nose north toward the smell of fresh Chakalaka, which rises up from the kitchen of the good mother downstairs, who keeps her windows open, so at the very least I will have some hope to fill my empty belly. 

I sleep on the iron cot of a hostel that goes for ten rand a night. Klaus, the Afrikaans man at the front desk, who watches porn publicly and without concern, told me on the day that I arrived that his rate was the best deal I would find in town and I knew somehow that he was not lying. 

I wonder now though, in the darkness, if I have made a mistake in coming here. If I should have just let Pastor Adam take the things he wanted from me. Running away was so reckless. I had no idea where to go. I still have no idea where to go, but I had my back to the wall and I did the only thing that made sense in the moment. You would probably do the same. 

Getting to Gaborone had taken days. The journey was arduous and felt endless. People had given me strange looks along the way. I hope desperately that nobody recognized me on the bus from Gaborone to Johannesburg. I was so afraid to look at the papers and tried my best to just keep moving south. To keep my head down. In Bloemfontein, I threw away my missionary uniform and purchased fresh trousers and a button up. Would people be looking for me? And for how long? I am a nobody. I say that to myself. Again and again. Hoping to make it true. 

When I finally arrived in Cape Town, I had just a hundred dollars. How much had that been in rand? In any case, it is all gone now. Maybe Pastor Adam will tell everyone I stole his money. Or maybe he will just say I disappeared. Died somewhere in the bush. Maybe he will say I knew the risks. Who would even care in the end? Who would even look for a kid like me? 

Mahmoud does not listen to me. Over the cosmic thumping, Kwaito house beats vibrate our blood. I have taken just enough ecstasy to feel like I am floating above myself. Mahmoud presses his hard cock against my abdomen, which bulges through his flamboyantly hot pink jeans. He takes me into a sloppy excavation of my mouth and I wonder if this might be the only thing I am good at. His tongue probes me wildly and I wonder how many men he has kissed in this same spot, and more importantly, am I better? 

I can almost taste Mahmoud’s last meal on his tongue. The thought of food gives me energy. All I have eaten today is a pint of air. I think about food so often. I wonder what would happen if I let Mahmoud fuck me and if there is a chance he will feed me afterwards. 

I think about the fresh gust of hot wind that came barreling through Greenmarket Square around noon, knocking over a cart that was already chipping away at the hinges, blowing teasingly at our pickled necks. 

If my calculations are correct, I can last in Cape Town for three more days and then I will have to move somewhere new, unless I can find a job. Maybe one of the Afrikanners in town will hire me to mop the floors? Maybe I could even work here, at Beefcakes? What would I do, though? I could learn the bar. Maybe I could be one of the go-go boys on stage? I wonder how much they get paid. 

I watch from across the room as a fat, hairy, and American looking man slips a five hundred Rand note into the panty string of the animatronic looking sex doll of a dancer on stage. My belly aches. Mahmoud does another line. The bass of the place thumps. I love that we are underground. It feels safer somehow. Like if anyone came for us, that we could lock ourselves in. Dance until the end of the world. 

Maybe I could really build a life here? Cape Town. Why not? It’s really no different, right? Just another city, full of lonely people just trying their best to get by. 

I look around and study the faces of the men as I move my body like I am supposed to. There are people here from all over the world. Beards and bellies and bears and all the things in between. I see every color, every type of person. I feel at home for the first time in my life, high on this dance floor. 

The hunger of those first days after I ran away from The Mission was a dull, slow burn. But now, here, it is clawing inside of my aching belly and begging me to do something. I can feel my body slowly eating itself. This movement is exhausting, but the drugs are helping. I try to distract myself. I think about Mahmoud’s body instead. His abdomen. His thick penis. 

I should just have sex. That will make me feel better. At least something will be inside of me. I offer this decision to him in a kiss. Deeper this time. He moans. The music is too loud to hear the sound of it, but I can feel the pulsations in the vibration of his lips. 

I wonder if he can taste me. If he can taste all the memories I am holding in my teeth. Does he notice the joy etched into the lines of my eyes? Can he feel the raised bits of skin on my arms, all the times I have ever felt that I was not good enough carved into me, the symbols of a lost language speaking my history across my thighs. 

It is so strange, this feeling of wanting to be found. Right now, I just want to belong to someone. To stop running. To go home at night and have someone expect me to be there. You know what I mean? 

I don’t think I can go back. I can’t end up like those tired ghosts from back home. The sad souls, who move through life like the River Styx, who have given up and been beaten so far down that they just do whatever they are told. Maybe this place will be an opening for me. A way for me to escape the history that has been prophesied for people that come from where I come from. 

Maybe it’s here. In this club. In this country. Maybe I could become someone different. Someone new. Someone with a dad that is still alive. Someone with a mom who doesn’t choose drugs over her kids. Someone with a sister who doesn’t overdose in the end. Maybe I could just stay. Change my name and start over completely. I could be one of those people who invents a brand new life. I could pretend to be from somewhere else. Craft an identity. Maybe learn Afrikaans. Study the accent. Study the politics. Make a persona. A mask. Why not? 

People do stuff like that, right? 

Fuck, but what if I become some big news story? What if people recognize my face. The American Gone Missing On Mission. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I hope Pastor Adam just says that I am dead. I should have killed him when I had the chance. 

~*~ 

I stare into Mahmoud's eyes, and feel like he might be able to take me somewhere, even if just for the night. Usher me back into that grand illusion of safety and belonging that I felt once in childhood. 

Maya used to say wanting to go back, wanting to remake the past, is like wanting to be famous, a long road headed absolutely nowhere good. Maybe Maya knows things -- knew things -- that I don’t. Maybe she was my sister for a reason. Maybe she’s like the ghosts we read about in those stories in school. The ominous prophet who warns the main character of the things that are yet to come. But I always thought Maya was the main character of our lives. That I would just be in the background of her story, happily cheering her on. I wasn’t prepared for a life without her. I still don’t know exactly how to do it. 

Mahmoud turns me around and I grind against him. He is rubbing his hands all over my body. His fingers are moving through my hair, sending chills down my spine. 

The first time I heard about The Mission was the fall before Maya overdosed. They had brought the kids on stage at Sunday Service and showed them off like celebrities. They had just come back from Uganda. The mission was deemed a “success”, Pastor Adam said. 

Maya said that shit like that is an example of a Faustian Bargain. A deal with the devil. I didn’t know what she meant. Maya was always reading books with words I didn’t know. I asked her to explain and she said that it is like when you sell your soul to get something you want. Or no, she corrected, it’s like when you think you’re doing something to help other people but you’re actually just messing things up and making everything way worse. 

What’s another word for that, I’d asked her, still confused. Colonizer, she said. Or asshole. Or both. I’m not sure, but I know they’re the bad guys in the end. I nodded in agreement, but I didn’t understand why. Pastor Adam said that what they were doing there was really good. That they were going to make things so much better. But Maya always knew things that I didn’t. I should’ve learned to listen to her. With each year that passes, I’m starting to realize that back then I didn’t really know anything at all. 

Mahmoud can hear my mind racing. He twirls me around to face him and continues shaking his hips across his central axis. His body sways about itself like a pendulum, elongating and protracting, the sea licking the shore and then sliding back and away again. I want to tell him about me. I don’t know why. I wonder if he would even care. I want to know about him, too. I want to know what his childhood was like and if he loved his mother and what he dreams about at night and is he happy? 

The indents of Mahmoud's obliques are cascading under the blinking lights and the sight of them makes me hard. Around me are so many other men: half naked, gorgeous, black and white, the shades of the in-between, a true spectrum of color. We are a kaleidoscope of neon and depravity. We are wearing almost nothing. I wonder how many of us are on drugs right now. The way some of us are dancing, I think it is safe to say that most, if not all of us, are rolling. I say a prayer of thanks to the man who gave me the pills, offering gratitude to the gods that made him, the gods that made this night, the gods that made these people, the gods that made those colorful north stars that we swallow whole and dissolve with our blood. I give thanks that they weren’t something else, something worse, something that might kill us all before I had the chance to dance with Mahmoud. 

I try to think of something useful to say. Something interesting and worthy of attention, like Mahmoud’s confession earlier. Something that might endear me to him. I lean in close and yell over the music awkwardly, “Last year I had mono and I thought about killing myself.” He nods, as if to say, been there, but then his face registers confusion. “What is mono?” he mouths. I gesticulate asphyxiation and a feigned dramatic coughing. He laughs and leans in close. “I’m glad you lived.” I smile. “Do you want to go somewhere?” I nod. I do. I want to go wherever he wants me to be. 

The ache in me begins to grow, making my legs feel light, like we are floating above the crowd as we leave. The faces blur together as we pass and I see flashes of makeup and glitter, smudged and wet and running down the faces of so many types of men. I think how much these images could have saved me when I was younger. If I could have just known there was a place for people like this. People like me. 

As we are walking up the stairs from Beefcakes to Paradise (the restaurant on the main floor), I meditate on him, his mind. A head full of so many things I will never know, so many places I will never see. Maya would’ve loved him, I think. She loved people who knew about things we didn’t. As we are walking outside on the street, he links his arm in mine. I could never do this back home. I wonder why he is not more afraid. Cape Town isn’t so different. 

The drinks and the drugs have made the world feel halfway up, halfway down and Mahmoud has to drag me a bit back to my hostel. He knows where it is, it’s just down the street and around the corner. I want to know this city like he does. I want someone to say a name that I can feel. Say a name and then off we go. 

As we walk, I think about Maya and how she would’ve loved it here. The smells of ocean water, fish and chips and cigarette smoke. All the different types of people. She would’ve thought about our friend Gurkaran. We’d had a Sikh friend named Gurkaran at school. He taught us about this thing called Sonder. It’s what I’m feeling right now, what I felt down in the Paradise Underground, what Maya would be feeling too. The ecstasy of knowing that everyone around us is living these big, strange, messy lives and that I am among them. That I am one of them. That we are all interconnected, in a way. That we are all just trying to survive, stumbling through our days, trying to get somewhere good. Trying to find someone like Mahmoud. Someone who wants to take us home. 

By the time we get to the hostel I am tired, dragging my feet. We both walk right past the Afrikaans guard, Klaus, who is drunk and watching porn on his laptop at his desk by the gate. It’s a bukake scene. There is a bottle of something clear to his right and a dozen or so empty bottles of Savannah Dry scattered around his feet. A few shattered. We hear the thwack-thwack-thwack of his hand jerking himself off. 

On the screen, as we pass, I see a bunch of Japanese guys cumming all over some poor woman. Klaus is masturbating wildly. His legs are on his desk. I think he has no qualms with us seeing or that he wants us to see for some reason. Both possibilities excite me. He’s hung and proud to show off. 

“Have a good night!” he hollers, beating furiously on himself as we keep on moving. Mahmoud laughs. He has a nice laugh, which makes him seem younger than he is. I have a problem with seeking out the company of older men. And they have a problem with seeking out me. I don’t let myself think about how old Mahmoud might really be. Forty? Fifty? Who can even say. I’ve decided on thirty. That sounds okay, right? 

“Does he do that a lot?” Mahmoud says. 

“Yeah,” I say. “He seems like a nice guy though. He lets me borrow DVDs from his collection sometimes.” 

“Of porn?” 

“No, of movies. Like movie-movies,” I say with a laugh. 

“What kind of movies?” 

“We watched Bend It Like Beckham the other night.” 

“Did he watch it with you?” 

I nod and Mahmoud doesn’t ask anymore questions about Klaus. I walk us to the bathroom to collect myself and Mahmoud follows me in. The lights are blue. “It’s so nobody will shoot heroin,” I say. 

Mahmoud nods and says “I know,” before taking out more cocaine. We do lines off of his key. 

“How will we sleep?” I ask. He contorts his face into a sinister smile, half joking, before saying, “I’ll just have to make sure we are exhausted.” 

Maybe he’s in his late thirties, I think. He looks young-ish, but when he smiles big like that I see the little crows feet at the corners of his eyes. I like them, though. I like to imagine he’s spent so much of his life laughing. While I pee, we both watch the steady stream of urine in silence. At least water is free in Cape Town, I think. 

As we walk up the stairs he puts his arm around me and we move to open the door to my hostel room together, as if we are coming home to a place we have long since shared. I feel embarrassed. 

“It isn’t much,” I say. 

“It doesn’t have to be,” he says back. 

There is the bed. It’s uncomfortable. It’s next to a little desk which is carved within an inch of its life. Awful things. Lots of terrible words and images. Lewd drawings of vaginas and various female orifices. I try not to look at them. Try not to add anything of my own. 

We are touching each other again. His hands are thick and dry, calloused from something. I start imagining in my mind that he is an architect or a welder. Hopefully he is someone who creates things instead of destroying them. I want to be with a creator. Someone who is always adding something, instead of taking things away, like the men back home, like Pastor Adam, like me. 

Mahmoud takes my shirt off and stares at me with the same hunger I feel in my belly. “Did your dad really get murdered by that militia?” I ask. 

He looks at me sternly, confronted by memory. “Yeah. He did.” 

I move to open my mouth and he stops me. “Don’t say your sorry.” He pauses. “Americans are always saying they are sorry for everything. You weren’t there. What do you have to feel sorry about?” 

“I’m actually Puerto Rican,” I say, which makes him smile. 

“It doesn’t change anything.” 

“Okay,” I say, a bit nervous. 

“You are still American,” he says, pushing me onto the bed. “And all Americans are the fucking same,” he adds, climbing on top of me, strattling me and pinning me down. “Oh yeah? How so?” 

He leans in close now. And I can tell there is anger to what he is about to say. “They all think they are so fucking special. But the truth is they are just ordinary and boring.” 

He is probably right and I want him to keep going. To say meaner things to me. To tell me that I am worthless. But he is kissing me now and saying what you are supposed to say. The nice stuff. And I let him. 

The first time is quick. Like a hostage extraction. I know there will be multiple acts this evening and I wonder how long his refractory period is. As I am lying there next to him, his belly is rising and falling quickly with the weight of intensified breaths. 

“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else before.” 

He thinks awhile, his brow crinkling up like an accordion. “You first,” he says. I think about all the things I could say. It’s Maya I see first in my mind. Her funeral procession. The wake. Everyone from Christ’s Place coming over to me and saying all the wrong things. Getting drunk that night and the days afterwards. I can feel myself falling back a little into my subconsciousness. I look at him. 

“Sorry, I don’t know.” 

He puts his hand on my shoulder and pulls me into his chest. He’s sweaty. Wet. “It’s okay,” he says. 

I fake a smile. I don’t want him to think I’m boring. “I, um, well I used to steal a lot?” 

“Oh yeah?” he says, releasing me from his grip, wanting to look at me while I say it. “What kind of stuff?” 

“Well in middle school my friends would go into the wealthy neighborhoods and we would break into this one lady’s house in particular and steal all her liquor.” 

“So you are a burglar?” 

“Not anymore,” I say. “I’m reformed.” 

“We’ll see about that,” he says, cheekily. 

“She was a mean drunk. I mean, she deserved it,” I say. 

Mahmoud looks at me. I can see that he is waiting for more.  

“Her son was one of our friends. She used to like... hit him. Like a lot. It was pretty bad. Stealing from her was our own little private revenge, I think. She never knew who did it. We liked hearing her worry.” 

He nods and I can tell that he really understands. 

“Your turn,” I say, watching as he waits a moment before confessing. 

“I once killed a garden toad as a little boy. On a dare.” 

“That’s not so bad,” I say. 

“Is it worse than burglary?” he asks.  

“Well yeah, way worse,” I tease, playfully pushing him. He smiles. 

“Why did you do it?” I ask, sounding more serious. 

“I don’t know,” he says, looking at me with pain in his eyes. “I guess I was just afraid of what they would think about me if I didn't do it. If I was too weak to follow through.” 

“That’s a stupid reason to do something,” I say, knowing exactly how he feels. “Yeah, I guess so,” he says.

“How old were you when it happened?” I ask.

“Nine maybe. You know, I think about it a lot, sometimes. When I am drunk, usually. Like now. I just didn’t really know what I was doing, you know?” He pauses and looks at me. “I still feel bad about past versions of myself.” 

“I think everyone does,” I say. 

He seems eager to change the subject and starts kissing me again, little pecks down my neck, down my chest, down further to my happy trail. My cock comes to attention and I watch him take me into his mouth and I think of the very first beings I watched ripped apart like that toad of his. 

My mind wanders, hovering above the room, like a lens zooming out on a camera. Soon I am above even Cape Town, hanging above the town like a poltergeist. I zoom out again, even further. I am above the earth, floating through the blackness of space. I am watching the world turn. Again and again. God, I miss being young, I think. I miss feeling free. I miss waking up and have so much energy without all the coffee or drugs. I miss who I was before everything happened, before life became such a boring chore, back when I used to feel exuberant and alive and hopeful for no reason at all. I can barely remember it now. How things felt back then. I dissociate further as he does new things to me. At some point I feel myself climax alongside the sound of Mahmoud's muffled voice. 

I run through the film reel of my life. A handful of Halloweens. Christmases when dad was still alive. Maya and I playing down by the creek of Lake Enredo. The old apartment complex. Mom smoking cigarettes on the porch and laughing as we played pretend-WWE in the yard. Fishing in the pond with grandpa Luis. Holding grandma’s hand on the way to daycare. Skipping rocks. Swimming naked in the river. Chasing after one another, running faster and faster until we couldn’t breathe. 

As Mahmoud enters me again, suddenly the images shift, and there is Pastor Adam looking at me with the devil in his eyes, telling me to get undressed. There is Maya laying there in that box they have picked out for her. Ready to lower her into the ground forever. It takes me a moment to realize that I have started to cry. I am back in the room now and Mahmoud is pumping away. I hear the sound before I feel the pain. I press my face as hard as I can into the bed. I do not want him to see my tears. I do not want him to think I am too weak to follow through. 

~*~ 

Later, when we are finally asleep, his arms are tightened around me, as if he is afraid that I might leave him in the night. I dream and my thoughts are filled with all the animals he could have killed. There is a moment where I am in a field and looking at the dead body of his toad. Watching it assemble its parts, limb by limb, only to break down again. A body composed of shattered glass. 

When I wake, I stare into the dull half lit blackness of night. I fantasize about all of the delicious things I might eat come morning. I notice there is no smell of Chakalaka tonight. I wonder if the mother downstairs has gone away. I wonder where. Maybe she no longer has anyone to cook for. I hear a clattering in the street. People are still up. There is a shout, a bang, people fighting, the whir of cars, the dull melody of city life. I fall back to sleep. 

~*~ 

There is a spot just off of Greenmarket Square. I think I will go there in the morning. The man there is named Commenti. He is kind. His shop is new, unfamiliar and not frequented. He is still nervous about his menu. It is so sweet to see someone care so much about anything these days. He has found me reading outside at his tables, struggling through the books Maya used to love. He invites me in on occasion, gives me a free cup of coffee or lets me go with a free croissant and a wink. He reminds me of my dead abuelo, sweet and old and innocent. Like the town protector. Just someone trying to do a little bit of good. I want to bring Mahmoud there. I want to show him the places I am discovering. My tongue waters and I try my best to keep still until dawn. 

I wake again, for the final time, to palms cupping darkness onto my eyes. 

“Guess who?” Mahmoud coos. My back is to him and I feel his wet teeth press against my neck as he opens himself to smile. I feel briefly that this is all I might ever want in this life. To be held by him. 

I take a deep breath, before I turn over to face him. I don’t want to do this, but I know that I have to. I have no more money. I have to at least ask. I pause a moment, collecting myself, hardening my features, holding onto this feeling for only a few seconds longer. Then I close my eyes to speak. 

“I need money.” When I open my eyes, it is to a different face. Mahmoud looks at me so strangely, caught off guard by the request. “For food,” I add. The look on his face slackens even further and he eyes me with a cross of pity and confusion. “It’s just, sorry, I just don’t have any money and I am really hungry. I haven’t eaten in a while.” 

“How much do you need?” he asks. 

“Maybe fifty?” I say. 

He considers this. “Yeah, okay. Hold on.” There is a half-minute that passes silently and uncomfortably as he fishes through the pockets of his hot pink jeans. I wish I could be the type of person Mahmoud would want to be with for real. I wish there was a world where we could go to Commenti’s shop together, eat breakfast, write the pages of a new chapter alongside one another, our relationship as the main character, but I know that won’t happen. That it can’t. Not now. 

“Here’s a hundred,” he says. “Will you be okay?” 

I take the bill, stand up and dress quickly. 

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I mean, thank you. You can… stay here if you want. I mean... there’s no rush to leave.” 

He doesn’t say anything else. There’s just a nod. I leave him there in my bed, this man who could be as old as my father, and imagine his eyes watching me go. I wonder what he thinks of me. Where he will keep the memory of this night tucked away in his mind. He probably hates me now, but it is for the best. I know that he will be gone by the time I return. I can’t make more out of this than it was. He deserves someone better than me. Someone kind. Someone older. 

I am too hungry to be good. 

~*~ 

When the gate of my hostel opens onto the hot light of morning, the guard is missing from his post. Probably exhausted from a night spent cumming and going. 

As I walk, I see today’s date on the cover of Rapport, sitting atop a pile of papers on a cart counter, guarded by a man smoking his morning cigar. I study the date and realize that today is my eighteenth birthday. It’s funny how time works. I had no idea. I pull the loosening waistband of my jeans up a little tighter and walk on towards the market by the shore. 

The vendors are preparing for their daily labor. I sit down on a bench, sipping a hot coffee, biting into a croissant as I watch the men and women below the rafters, hauling up the morning catch of fish. I imagine the thousands of little sea souls sacrificed to keep us all alive for just one more day. 

I’m staring off into the endless blue of the ocean, studying the edge of our earth, thinking of all the sharks out there, all the whales and jellyfish and the thousands of species I can’t name, when I hear a shout and turn to look for its source. 

The sound has come from a man. It is an hulking Afrikaaner hollering something horrible at a young waitress at the cafe across the street. While he is cursing, he pushes her, and she stumbles backwards. I watch as another worker comes immediately to her aid, pulling her away. I hope for a moment something sinister happens to the man. That when she comes back, she will poison him or hit him. I hope for a moment, weakly, that we all start poisoning the evil men of the world. I say a little prayer that he will have to suffer consequences. 

I watch the woman. She takes a private moment to herself out of view. She is wiping something from her eyes. Mouthing something to herself. Again and again her lips repeat it. It looks like an incantation. Her body seems to relax and I watch as she is taking what look to be deep belly breaths. A practiced ritual to compose herself with a smile before heading back to the wolves. 

I wonder how many men have abused her like that and for how long? How does she go on just taking it? Is that what it will be like for me? Spending the rest of my days just taking it? Letting men do whatever they want to me. What will be the breaking point? 

I look down at the paper I swiped and Jacob Zuma looks back at me. I hate him, staring smugly up at me, his eyes full of greed. All that money he has embezzled. All those millions that could have saved so many lives. The protests are starting again. The university students are furious and rightly so. I will join them this afternoon, I think. 

I take a sip of coffee and breathe in this strangeness of the world. There is a young woman setting up her kiosk just across the way and I study her. I watch as she lays out her latest treasurers: fresh snoke, tuna, albacore. Then candied confectionaries stacked neatly inside a glass box. And finally, a thick bushel of elderberries, hung upside down to sway in the morning breeze. 

Alexander Lopez is a writer of literary and speculative fiction. His work primarily explores childhood trauma, mental health, class discrimination, family systems, and queer intersectionality. He is currently a first-year MFA candidate in Fiction at North Carolina State University, where he was a 2020 Finalist for the James Hurst Prize in Fiction. Prior to NC State, Lopez received his BA in English from Dartmouth, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the college’s literary journal, The Stonefence Review. Outside of his formal education, Lopez has spent time as a field organizer for the Democratic Party, a researcher for the United Nations, and a fellow for the U.S. State Department. Most recently, Lopez was awarded his second Reciprocal Exchange grant from the U.S. State Department to continue his work with Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative in Windhoek, Namibia in 2021. Lopez is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Joshua G. Adair

Camping in the Cornfields 

Francie was fancy: convert-your-chicken coop-into-a-party-house fancy. A resident of rural Monmouth, Illinois – or thereabouts – her entire life, whenever anyone met her they felt certain she came from somewhere else. Well, they always said she was something else. There was an otherness about her, a sophistication that suggested the separateness only a transplant can truly transmit – except for the fact that she was entirely homegrown. She was the drag queen of my early years—even if she didn’t meet the definition, strictly speaking—and I could not get enough of her carefully calculated, crazy, style.

Francie treated life like a theatrical production; her home was an ever-evolving stage set. When she arrived anywhere as a guest, she could be counted upon to produce exquisite—and exotic—produce unlike any of the other guests’ offerings. In the 1950s, long before strawberries were available year-round, she always appeared at Christmas dressed in red taffeta with an overinflated A-line carrying plum-sized fresh strawberries like hand grenades. When her seething sisters-in-law demanded to know what demon had abetted in acquiring such absurdities, she would spin that skirt and snicker slowly out of the room. She showed up determined to win.

I didn’t know her then—I hadn’t been born—but I might as well have for all the times I took in those tales. Few people set my family a-frenzy like Francie, with all her folderol. My mother would always tell tales about how she showed up at every family gathering with obscenely large, out-of-season produce, or how she made all her own clothes – including her undergarments – from imported French fabric. She was the aunt who had money in a clan hailing from the lower middle class, though no one knew exactly from where it had come.

She and my great-uncle Lyle lived in an American Foursquare farmhouse planted among cornfields and hog lots. He was a farmer of Irish descent with a fiery temper as imposing as his wife, who towered at least a foot over him. As all her female relatives gave in and let go, Francie stayed savagely slender. She cooked and confected with the best – the competition was as stiff as a perfect meringue – but she ate child-size portions and only indulged in sweets at breakfast. Her self-control and self-styling were anomalous and made her the subject of suspicion, envy, and sometimes, emulation.

Whereas my grandmother cooked in a kitchen with a cold-water pump and a propane-fueled range, Francie outfitted hers with space-age pink-enamel appliances. Her “everyday” dishes were Limoges that seemed more suited to Marie Antoinette than a 1950s hog farm. By contrast, Gram’s daily wares were pale pink melmac, defiantly designed to survive everything from nuclear war to neuropathy. Francie further frustrated the family by installing wall-to-wall wool carpet – in a daring dusty rose – throughout the entire first floor: “even in the bathroom and kitchen!” her kids proclaimed. Her decadence destroyed the entire family’s sense of decorum – this wasn’t how “decent” people did things.

It didn’t stop there. When she renovated the bathrooms she opted for wallcoverings in foil and flock. They assaulted the senses of anyone forced to answer nature’s call. It was like defecating in a disco. My grandfather found these frou-frou features especially offensive as his commentary revealed that he believed velvety wallpaper somehow diminished his – and every man’s – masculinity merely by existing. Francie, by extension, performed a similar function. She paid for her own pleasures – Lyle never kicked in – and therefore she exercised a totalitarian creative control over the fantasy land in which they lived.

In addition to her reflective and “fuzzy” (ironically also Francie’s mother’s nickname) wallpapers, as my mother called them, Francie also collected fine antiques. She understood that femininity was far too frequently dismissed as frivolity, so she sought to counterweight the whimsy of some aspects of her style with the gravitas of authentic antiques no one else in the family could afford – or even find. No matter the material – even French silk for panties – Francie knew how to find it. She gathered impressive collections of hand-painted game plates, amberina glassware, and walnut shadowbox frames. These pieces, blended in among her inherited heirlooms, transformed Francie’s house into something entirely otherworldly when compared to the drab dwellings of her sisters-in-law.

She was their very own local celebrity. They loved to whisper about, worship, and generally work her over. They abhorred and adored her audacity. There was no point in trying to compete – she made that perfectly clear – so they were left only to decide whether they desired or despised her in any given moment. She came from a matriarchal family, with equally imposing and flamboyant mother and aunts. They were a breed all their own in outlandish fur coats, diamonds that looked oversized to a Midwestern eye, and impractical garments. They seemed to have absolutely no sense that they were expected to be the second sex.

If Francie’s house verged on the fantastic, her wardrobe sashayed into the surreal. With the exception of her stockings – which had to be special ordered from Marshall Fields in Chicago – her apparel was always bespoke, by her own hand. To many imaginations, this might conjure high-grade gabardine suits and dresses in tailored cuts to highlight her exceptionally slender, stylish frame – a highly misguided assessment. Francie went full-force into fantasy instead. She revived styles that were more likely modish a half century or so earlier.

She fawned over petticoats, pantalets, and even pinafores. She often resembled one of those porcelain Brus one might find in a Parisian doll shop. She bought only the best millinery trim: laces, tassels, and fringes, and adorned every edge of all her creations. She could have been a master couturier with her boundless knowledge of the power of hidden hooks and weighting chains to make garments look just so. She never met a ruffle or a ruche she didn’t desire; the more complex the confection the more she wished to be the lady issuing forth from it. She was the only woman in her circle with a walk-in closet and a dedicated sewing room. My grandmother didn’t even have a bathroom.

My first memory of a Francie outfit is lodged in the context of an early ‘80s grocery store. Though I heard about her frequently in the course of conversation, we did not often see her. Mom, in typical fashion, muttered, “Oh shit. There’s Aunt Francie” to we three kids. That was her signal to hang heads and avert eye contact so that we would not be forced to interact. We did it all the time. I had heard way too much, however, to comply that time. I had to see this woman that seemed to electrify anyone who ever met her.

She did not disappoint. As I scanned the produce aisle, I expected to behold a Grace Kelly or a Barbara Stanwyck – two of my early heroes from the old movies my family always watched. Instead, my eyes fixed upon a figure who looked like a hybrid of an aging Joan Crawford and the dolls my sister dressed up. For years I had heard about how Francie “had diamonds in her glasses,” so I sought first to figure out what that meant. They weren’t kidding: on the upper corner of her left plate-glass frameless lens were three improbably large round diamonds. I wondered how she didn’t spend all her time distracted by their spotlight-like sparkle.

Once I’d affirmed what I had always assumed was a fiction, I took in her hair – which required considered panoramic movement. It was a beaut: a bouffant of epic proportions, not all of which was native to her scalp. Some local coiffeur had masterfully interwoven countless hairpieces into her helmet in order to create something with all the size and seriousness of a Rose Bowl Parade float. Other women in my family wore the predictable football-helmet wash-and-set style, but never in a way that looked to require the flying-buttress barrettes that hers did. It was a feat of structural engineering and chemical compounds that would have looked far less out of place twenty – or even a hundred – years earlier.

And then there was her get-up. There is no other word for it. She looked like a doll en route to a rodeo. She wore bib-overalls constructed of winter-weight wool in a midnight blue selected to emulate the denim that a customer of her discernment would not have worn had her life depended upon it. The legs of this extraordinary garment were cropped to cigarette-length and accessorized with Flamenco-style cascading ruffles of red satin and lace. If one’s eye went with this waterfall, you then saw she was wearing scarlet-hued high-heeled cowboy boots of the finest hand-tooled Italian leather. Underneath her overalls, she donned a lacy peasant blouse and a jaunty neckerchief of gingham-printed silk. Her jewelry, as usual, was not junk; she wore doorknocker diamond earrings and a necklace expensive enough to get a queen the guillotine.

Though it was but eleven in the morning, she was in full make-up of the sort one expected from Baby Jane. The natural look, in her estimation, was for folks who could not grasp the power of artifice. When her looks had declined, she had amped – and vamped – up her style to accentuate the ways in which bodies can be beautified, and more importantly emboldened, by refusing to conform. In declining to give in or tone down, she wielded a power as outsized as her style. Sure, people stared, even snickered, but when she spoke, suggested, or even requested, no one dared defy her. She had no intention of becoming invisible, as had so many women her age, nor would she be cowed by the chorus who cluck and cackle.

Her mother had seen to it that she was not chorus material; she was raised to be the diva. She taught her daughter to expect nothing from men; to avoid dependence at all costs. One had to have a husband, she understood, but having and depending were two entirely different affairs. It made all the difference, of course, that she had money to maintain this modus operandi. Francie enjoyed an independence that Lyle, thanks to an attentive attorney, could not touch. This was never discussed – to divulge it would open doors unnecessarily – but the evidence of her affluence abounded. He might carouse and consume, demand and demean, but he never could fully gain control of his wife who had been taught strategies to defy.

She was shrewd when she left her mother’s house and entered into the realm of self-invention. She remained vigilant about boundaries and borders, learning to endure his rages and silences after she had refused to comply to one of Lyle’s demands. She did not ask for money or permission, facts he found infuriating. Their sons wore only the best and enjoyed the finest toys. To have one’s name drawn by her for the Christmas gift exchange meant receiving a present more precious than the one from one’s own parents. Whereas she was routinely charged with greed and extravagance, she worked to be generous and generative. She hoped that her kindness and her example might help others find ways to be creative as they fashioned themselves and their worlds – even if it must necessarily transpire on a smaller scale.

I think what she wanted most was for others to stop thinking “she can do this because she has money.” That’s not to say she considered the money immaterial – at least I don’t think she did. It had helped her develop a philosophy, however, that could be applied without as much ready cash. I understood her as a figure of resistance for as long as I could remember. I must have been eleven or twelve at that meeting and I was already a very queer kid. I, too, was fancy: pretend-to-have-English-teatime-in-the-back-yard – ahem, garden – fancy. A year or two before I had demanded that my mother cease and desist the use of paper tablecloths, plates, and plastic cutlery for Thanksgiving dinner. I insisted we use the cupboard full of crystal and china she had been avoiding and ignoring all her married life.

I sensed a kindred spirit in Francie as I memorized all the mythology built up around her. She was a peacock among partridges and I could completely relate. I imagined – as I still do – that she understood life as a creative project best experienced by exploring and enacting one’s own intuitions and whims, to the best of one’s abilities. Even though my family had none of her money and very little of our own, even as a child I sought out ways to beautify my life, to refine our existence. I, too, saw style as enriching, enlivening – not in the least frivolous. I wanted to live among beautiful things and to make myself equally interesting and inviting. I also wanted to co-opt some of the confidence this woman dressed as a doll clearly had in spades.

Apart from the material aspects of her existence, which many dismiss as wasteful or at least unattainable, Francie labored diligently at absolutely everything she did. She wasn’t captivating just because she could buy the very best. She intrigued me because she married into the same circumstances as many other farmers’ wives in those days and she insisted upon transforming her plain farmhouse into something she considered special. She worked out the designs – decorating schemes and architectural adjustments alike – on her own, after careful study of endless books, magazines, and films. When her mother stopped paying a seamstress to make her wardrobe, Francie took on the task herself. She wasn’t interested in paying someone else to dress her. She wanted to be the kind of woman who could make anything just as well as any professional.

She kept house and cooked expertly without any help. She didn’t mind getting dirty, though she always worked in the full drag. Whatever she did, she researched and practiced until she could perform it perfectly. She was invested in making herself into a flawlessly competent and self-reliant figure. What many folks perceived as arrogance or showiness was actually the result of endless efforts at self-betterment. To me, her life was an example of what the Germans call gesamtkunstwerk – or “complete artwork” – in that she endeavored to make each part of herself and the world she created artful, fashioned in her conception of beauty. An important part of that aesthetic was power; the ability to wield influence by styling one’s life self-consciously and calculatingly to achieve the desired effect. For a queer kid frequently informed that he should “be less…” or “act like…” these were important lessons in resistance and self-composition.

Perhaps the most famous – at least among my folk – example of Francie’s fanciness what the chicken coop party house. Sometime in the early 70s, after her two sons were suitably married and she suddenly had more time on her hands, Francie started casting about for a new project. Though it probably isn’t so, I like to imagine she had been reading French history and stumbled upon the stories of the Petit Trianon. No matter the source, she decided to transform the disused poultry parlor into her party palace. Due to the fact that it would have been cheaper and less onerous to build such a space from scratch, I can’t help but imagine her as Marie Antoinette-the-milkmaid in this scenario. It mattered the people understood the space, now the height of glamour, had once housed hens.

So she set to work, doing much of the conversion herself. She hired carpenters as necessary for roof-raising and window installation (argon-filled, to fend off fogging). She refinished the wood floors and hung the peacock wallpaper herself, in a cheeky nod to the building’s humble past. She selected crystal chandeliers and fine stemware dedicated to the space itself. Plumbing was installed, as was a disco ball just in case dancing broke out – though she knew it never would. The family found this folly infuriating and cursed her behind her back. “Why can’t she be like the rest of us?” they all continued to ask.

Conformity to them was a commodity. If everyone got fat and largely gave up, who could criticize? Why must she always stand out as a counterexample of other possible lives and ways of living? They found it endlessly frustrating even as I relished the sense of relief I felt in being related to such a rebel. For her, “good enough” simply wasn’t and I couldn’t have agreed more. She worked at – and perfected – life, even when others found her furnishings and frame of mind foolish and off-putting. Ignoring their objections, she barreled ahead and forged an identity that was equal parts iron-clad confidence and absurdist invention. Despite their distaste for her inventiveness, they came to her poultry-house parties nevertheless.

In every sense of the word, Francie was fabulous – a story she created herself. In her later years, when the house and the outbuildings all seemed “done,” she moved on to doll-making. As with everything she had done, she took considerable time to educate herself about the best practices and most sophisticated techniques. She found a local woman who could pour the porcelain components and oversaw the process herself, since she was no longer strong enough to lift the cumbersome molds. Then she painstakingly painted each piece and obsessively designed and executed entire wardrobes for her porcelain progeny, as she became the Frankenstein of fashion. Not satisfied just to enjoy her creatures, she competed in many contests and took home blue ribbons for those figures with features and fashions remarkably like Francie’s.

I admired her wish to send miniature versions of herself out into the world to remind their owners of other ways of living as she sensed her own floor show was approaching its finale. She tried harder than anyone I know to fashion a world she found fanciful, fascinating, and fair. The harder she worked, the more she seemed to enjoy herself in defying expectations and even poking fun with and at her own outlandishness. She didn’t know, nor did she wish to learn, how to fit in. She wanted splash and style in a sea of sameness and for a queer kid seeking someone to emulate, she served as a spectacular example.

She dressed herself for her own funeral. The dress was so elaborate that it took two dressers to accomplish her turning out. As someone who had always photographed her own children next to the caskets of our dearly departed, she was determined to make certain she was camera-ready as she headed for the cemetery. Though people had often been stymied by her peculiar joie de vivre, most of the guests had to give it to Francie: she had always been the most fancy. She enjoyed and engaged long after everyone else left the party. She suffered no fools and stood up for style long after everyone else had lost patience. That contribution, to me, was priceless because she taught me how to hone a steel will, to ignore the naysayers, and to conquer by camping it up – even among the cornfields.

Joshua G. Adair is Professor of English at Murray State University, where he also serves as coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. Adair’s work, whether in literary, historical, or museum studies, examines the ways we narrate – and silence – gender and sexuality; it has appeared in over sixty scholarly and creative nonfiction journals. His most recent collection, edited with Amy K. Levin, is Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism (Routledge 2020). He can be reached at jadair1@murraystate.edu.

Lillian Wang Selonick

Stroganoff Sunday at Camp Manifest

It was a dusty day at Camp Manifest and the sky was a dull butterscotch. Palmer donned his pressure suit, climbed out of his semi-subterranean habitat, and scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. The structures at Camp Cabot kept growing. He noticed a new set of neoclassical pillars sitting on top of one of the habitats. A massive maple leaf flag fluttered from a pole of an ostentatious height. Palmer clicked his tongue. Canadian bastards, he thought.

He tucked his binoculars into his suit’s utility pocket and went about the rest of his morning chores. He swept the dust off of the habitat’s solar panels, checked the environmental controls on the greenhouse, and recorded the levels in their water filtration system. Most of their daily chores could be performed remotely from the safety of the habitat, but Palmer needed the exercise. A gut was starting to form, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hide it.

This anxiety wasn’t simple vanity. Palmer’s utility to the success of the mission was, above all, his image. Palmer, his wife Patty, and the other eleven colonists were not scientists, explorers, or revolutionaries. They were influencers.

Every day, his and Patty’s primary responsibility was to create content. Red Plan-It, Inc., collected, edited, and posted their pictures, videos, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, confessionals, emails, DMs, sexts, and selfies for a total audience of four billion viewers. This continual stream of content, multiplied by thirteen colonists, itself generated a secondary ecosystem of merchandise, reaction videos, explainer videos, summary videos, conspiracy theory podcasts, fan fiction, music videos, and pornography. The editors at Red Plan-It could do convincing magic with all this material, managing to piece together something that resembled a narrative from the unstructured social data of their daily lives. 

At ages thirty-four and thirty-six, Patty and Palmer were elders of the group. Several years ago, they started a video channel to document their attempt to get pregnant. Patty had planned on becoming a mommy blogger, and Palmer was supportive of her aspirations, plus the extra sponsorship money it brought in. She posted fertility tips, beauty and self-care product reviews, a whole series on her menstrual and hormonal cycle, hauls of gender-neutral baby clothes from independent clothing lines, and vulnerable confessions of her feelings of inadequacy when she failed to conceive.

When Patty finally got pregnant, Palmer started a second channel documenting his struggle with impending fatherhood. He shared stories of his own abusive father and talked about his fears of turning into what he so hated and feared as a child. He called himself out for his toxic masculinity. He built a community of tens of thousands.

But it was the miscarriage that propelled Palmer and Patty into the big leagues. The heartbreaking openness with which they talked about their loss drew in hordes of new fans. Patty lost the baby near the end of her second trimester, after sharing her ultrasound photos, numerous photo shoots of her belly, and a gender reveal livestream. It was going to be a girl, and they had already painted the nursery a soft pink.

Palmer was the one who figured out how to break the news to their fans. A week after the bloody sheets and panicked emergency room visit, they recorded a six-minute video—one minute for each month of pregnancy—in the nursery of the two of them holding each other and crying, saying nothing. It was dynamic and compelling, like a piece of experimental film. Their grief ebbed and flowed throughout the video—for a while, it seemed to be Palmer comforting Patty, and then the roles would shift. Around minute four, both of their tears slowed and they breathed together for a while, foreheads touching. Patty’s swollen lips twitched into a smile. Palmer caught it and smiled back, and suddenly they were laughing with something like joy. Another twenty seconds and their laughter transformed into tears again.

It was a naked representation of vulnerability, love, support, and loss, a moment clearly staged and yet unscripted and genuine. It went viral at the right time, and when Palmer and Patty applied to the Red Plan-It contest, they were among the first to be accepted.

They were hoping for the first non-terrestrial pregnancy.

Palmer thought, as the older, more mature members of the expedition, that he and Patty would have an easier time adjusting. But he had never felt less in control in his life.

The colonists were expected to generate content at all hours of the day, but they had little discretion over what was published and limited fan feedback. Under normal circumstances, Palmer and Patty were constantly tracking engagement, reading viewer comments, recording Q&As, and hosting ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions. Their social media content was a vast ecosystem of interdependent relationships, two-way communication, and personalization.

On Mars, they had none of that creative freedom. Their contract with Red Plan-It relinquished all control over their platforms. Nothing was released live. Everything was vetted by a team of communications experts before it was posted. The company chose which comments to engage with and dictated all aspects of the colonists’ content creation. Red Plan-It even limited their access to news and information, citing data-volume limitations, but Palmer suspected that this was to keep the colonists from getting political and alienating their followers on Earth.

Shortly after the Canadians showed up and set up camp just a few clicks from Camp Manifest, Palmer started eating double rations. It started with Stroganoff Sundays. His favorite meal was the freeze-dried beef Stroganoff, packaged in individual serving foil pouches. He took great pleasure in preparing the meal: boiling the water, adding the water with a sprinkling of chili flakes, salt, and pepper, stirring the dry pellets of pasta and beef, and waiting for rehydration. The week after that, he made two extra bags for himself. On Taco Salad Tuesday he doubled up again. The more he ate, the hungrier he felt.

Palmer sat at his desk and glumly sorted through the fan mail mission control saw fit to forward to him. He wrote personalized notes to 75% of them, the percentage specified in his contract. 

As he typed, his mind was elsewhere. He thought about the rest of the expedition ahead—they were only nine months into a three-year term. He thought about the Canadians who had shown up, uninvited, three months into their expedition. Without access to the news, they had no way of knowing if this was a joint mission sanctioned by both governments or if it was an act of piracy. Did they really have to settle right next door to Camp Manifest? What if Manifest needed to expand? Had they found some natural resource that the American rovers surveying the planet had missed? What were their intentions?

America and Canada were historical allies, but hadn’t Palmer read something about skirmishes along the northern border just before they left? What was it about? Oil, or trade, or the climate? Damn it. He wished he’d paid more attention to international affairs.

He thought about their food supply—Red Plan-It promised that they had enough freeze-dried food for ten years, and they anticipated being able to grow large-scale crops before the end of the year. Currently they were experimenting with a small batch of peppers and beans in the greenhouses. But they hadn’t factored in Palmer’s indulgence.

That was how he thought of it: his indulgence. He was regularly consuming two to three times his normal allotment of calories per day, but he still thought of it as a treat. It was a treat that was occupying an increasing amount of real estate in his brain. Even now, as he wrote to fans and ruminated on the ominous appearance of the Canadians and the productive output of his fellow colonists, a larger, more urgent concern swelled in his mind. It was a cresting imperative, a Hollywood sign–sized command in his mind: EAT.

It was almost two hours before their normal dinner window. Palmer fidgeted for eight more minutes before deciding he would just get things ready now.

“Hey, Patty?” Palmer called to his wife, across the habitat at her own desk. She was composing her own responses to fan mail. Her pile was much larger than his. Patty also included a selfie with each reply. Palmer felt a tug of pride as he watched her work. She was so devoted and hard-working. Then her gaze met his, and he was chilled by the dull, guarded look she gave him.

“What?”

“I think I’m going to go to the greenhouse and pick a jalapeño for Taco Salad Tuesday tonight. I figured I’d record it. It’ll be good content for the Feed.”

“Umm, okay,” said Patty.

“What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“I mean, why’d you say ‘okay’ like that?”

“Like what?”

“You know what,” said Palmer.

Patty sighed. “It’s like two hours until it’s time to eat. What are you going to do that whole time? Just obsess over your food thing? It’s weird.”

“There’s a lot of prep work involved to harvest and prepare a pepper. So, yeah, I thought I’d get a head start so I could have dinner ready for you on time.”

Patty scoffed. “Don’t you put this on me. I’m not hungry, we just ate lunch.”

“That was hours ago!” said Palmer.

“You’re just using it as an excuse to start dinner early so you can have seconds or thirds later tonight. It’s not healthy. It’s not right.”

“Well goddammit, sue me for being hungry! I’m a full-grown man trying to make the red planet habitable for humankind, excuse me for working up an appetite.”

“Babe, we’re in here all day, posting to the Feed. Speaking of which, can you record this fight? As long as you apologize later, we can use it to humanize us for our followers.”

Palmer shook his head in disgust and went to get suited up.

He switched on his helmet camera and internal suit microphone as he climbed up the ladder to the surface. He narrated his actions half-heartedly, supposing that someone in post-production could edit his audio to make it more compelling. Usually, he preferred to send out his content fully edited, but tonight he was depressed.

Why couldn’t Patty just let him have his little treat? It was hard enough being stuck underground on this barren rock without his barren wife policing his every meal. So what if his waistline was beginning to expand? That’s what happens in your thirties. Besides, it’s not like gaining weight matters all that much when the gravity is 38% of Earth’s gravity.

Palmer realized with a start that he was mumbling these thoughts aloud as he opened the above-ground airlock. He did a mental reset and put on a relentlessly upbeat voice.

“Greetings from Camp Manifest, Earthlings! As y’all can see, I am entering the airlock for our greenhouse right now. It is Taco Salad Tuesday, so I am going to attempt to harvest one of the jalapeños we planted upon arrival. They weren’t looking great the last time I checked in on them, but maybe we can salvage something.”

Palmer kept his helmet on inside the greenhouse—the atmosphere was breathable and the structure was pressurized, but it was very cold, just above freezing. The roof and walls of the greenhouse were made from a specially tempered reinforced glass that was supposed to filter out enough of the solar radiation to allow plants to survive on the surface. The technology wasn’t good enough for people, yet. And it wasn’t looking great for the plants, either.

“Well, folks, we tried,” said Palmer, tracing a clumsy, gloved finger along the shriveled, misshapen pepper. Palmer plucked a couple peppers anyway. He felt sudden tears rising.

“These little guys just wanted to survive. So far from home, but they wanted to grow, and they grew the best they could. Maybe they’ll taste alright. Maybe they’ll taste like Earth.”

Palmer sniffled, wishing he could wipe his nose inside his suit. I should just delete this whole scene, he thought.

He inspected the other plants. Most had simply refused to take root. A tomato plant had sprouted, grown leaves, and then turned black and died. The peppers were the only plant that had lived to bear fruit. The rest of the colonists had had varying success with their greenhouses. One of them, a nonbinary ASMR sensation named Sammie Slim, claimed that they had coaxed a strawberry into existence, but had eaten it before remembering to take a picture. No one believed them. 

Palmer exited the greenhouse and panned over the horizon with his helmet cam. “It’s difficult to see, but you should be able to make out Camp Cabot just beyond that ridge over there.” He zoomed in on what appeared to be a large domed structure. “What the hell? That wasn’t there this morning.”

Palmer watched as dark specks low to the ground, the Canadians’ maintenance robots, circled the new building, which bore a striking resemblance to the temple at Delphi. In spite of all the new above-ground dwellings, he rarely saw the colonists themselves. More than once, he wondered if they were even there, or if the humanoid figures he sometimes saw lumbering from one building to another were androids, the advance wave establishing camp before the humans arrived.

“It makes no sense that they’d build up the surface so much. I mean, what are they trying to prove? There’s no way anyone could survive on the surface in one of those buildings. Nobody’s got that kind of shielding technology,” Palmer told his followers. “I mean, right? If America doesn’t have it, there’s no way in hell Canada does. Right?”

Palmer stared through the binoculars at Camp Cabot for a while longer. Each robot was dragging what looked like a giant stone brick from behind the camp to the space between Cabot and Manifest. His stomach began to rumble.

“What the hell are they building?” Palmer said. “It’s like a—a pyramid.” He sighed and dropped the binoculars. His hunger drew him back to the habitat.

“No one on Earth will tell us what they’re up to over there,” he said as he trudged back to the habitat airlock. “So if you know what’s going on that’s making these Canadians so bold, drop us a DM, eh?”

Of course, the messages would never come. The colonists were at the mercy of Red Plan-It for all information from Earth, and there was apparently an embargo on all information about the other settlement. Or maybe Red Plan-It was keeping the Canadian encampment a secret back on Earth, and they’d been censoring all of his content about it for months.

The first structure had gone up just a couple weeks after the Canadian lander touched down. What use a Martian colonist had for a replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House was anyone’s guess. Every week, another distinct architectural style was erected, and Palmer was left to puzzle and speculate. A few weeks in, they put up a huge sign: Welcome to Camp Cabot! The uncertainty gnawed at him. He ranted and raved to Patty, who had learned to tune him out. He kept a careful record of every change to Camp Cabot that he could see in his personal log. The only time he wasn’t obsessing over the latest construction at Camp Cabot was when he was eating.

When Palmer entered the lower level of the habitat, where the majority of the living space was set up, it was still an hour away from their scheduled dinner. Patty didn’t look up when he came in, cradling the withered little peppers.

He took them into the kitchenette and set up his camera. He put on a cooking show for his followers, hamming it up for the camera like he was cooking a five-star meal in a professional kitchen. He boiled water, extolling the virtues of Taco Salad Tuesdays, and chopped the peppers. They crumbled into dust under his blade.

“Well, I guess I can try sprinkling this into the food,” he said, zooming in on the grey-ish green dust on the cutting board. “They were a little deformed from all that solar radiation, but it probably won’t kill us. And it’ll be the first thing we’ve eaten that was grown entirely on Mars,” said Palmer. “Now if we could just grow some avocados, I could die happy.”

It was still an hour until their scheduled dinner time. Palmer could not stall any longer.

“Honey, you ready for dinner?” he called to Patty. She didn’t respond. Palmer looked across the lower level to her desk and saw that she was video chatting with Zach Stoner, the bodybuilding fitfluencer in the habitat nearest to them who maintained a massive fan base by recording ingenious body weight workouts wearing almost no clothing. Palmer had caught Patty watching his “How to Stay Swole in 1/3 Gravity” video alone on two occasions. She insisted that she was just watching for tips on how to maintain her physique and looked pointedly at Palmer’s own expanding waistline.

Stoner was not wearing a shirt as he chatted with Palmer’s wife. Palmer scowled. Patty can fix her own dinner, he thought. Triples for me tonight.

Palmer poured boiling water into all three aluminum bags and sealed them up according to the instructions on the back of the package. He could recite the instructions like spoken word poetry.

            Open package

            at tear notch. Carefully

            add 3/4 cups

Boiling water. Stir        

            Carefully

            and close zipper.

                        Wait 5 minutes. Stir

            and reseal.

            Let stand

An additional

                        4 minutes.

            Stir and enjoy

                        right

                                    out

            of the pouch.

He set a timer on his watch and settled in. He focused on his breathing. He imagined he was inside the pouch, a tiny speck of freeze-dried ground beef or cornmeal, empty and brittle. He felt the boiling water flood him and his brethren. He felt the water surround him, drowning him, until gradually his freeze-dried pores opened up and began to accept the inundation. He felt himself swelling with the welcome warmth, doubling, tripling in size as he was filled to bursting with life-giving moisture.

Palmer exhaled through his nose. He noticed that he had an erection. He stirred the pouches and resealed them. The aroma of cumin and oregano and the strange acrid Martian jalapeño was almost too much for him to bear. But he sat and waited for four more minutes.

When it was finally time to eat, Palmer poured all three pouches into a serving bowl. It nearly overflowed. It looked like mostly grey-brown porridge, with flecks of green and red and the occasional yellow corn kernel. He drooled a little when he opened his mouth for the first forkful.

Palmer’s eyes glazed over. He stared at the wall, shoveling the taco-flavored gruel into his mouth. He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to. Palmer watched his hand dipping his fork down into the bowl over and over again, even before he had time to swallow the previous bite. He sputtered and choked on an overly full mouthful but was helpless to slow the pace of his eating.

Palmer’s mind was empty. Camp Cabot, shirtless Zach Stoner, the bleak prospect of two more years locked underground in the barren Martian dirt—nothing existed for Palmer but the vaguely Mexican taste of his freeze-dried meals and the visceral pleasure of chewing and swallowing. The hot slop sliding down his throat warmed him like a beam of late afternoon sunlight on a lazy summer Sunday. He felt a glow like when you smile at a pretty girl and she smiles back.

As Palmer’s fork scraped the bottom of the bowl, the malaise began to settle back in. He sucked the tines dry and wiped three fingers around the bowl, licking every last particle of gravy off of his fingers. He sat back. His stomach felt rigid, but he was still empty. He was still hungry.

Palmer sighed. It was a beautiful, precious feeling, and it was over so fast. Taco Salad Tuesdays never satisfied him as much as he hoped. Only Stroganoff Sundays left him feeling full for more than a few minutes.

He blinked, realizing that he had been staring, slack-jawed, at the empty bowl for several seconds. Palmer reached over and shut off his camera. He wiped out his bowl and sat for a few more moments at the table, savoring the fast-fading afterglow of his meal. Then he heard Patty laugh at something Stoner said, a bright, joyous sound he hadn’t heard in weeks. His mood ruined, Palmer got up from the kitchenette table and cleaned up.

In bed that night, Palmer made a perfunctory attempt to initiate intimacy. Patty was on her side, facing away from him. Palmer scooted up against her, running a hand over her arm. His belly pressed into the small of her back. Patty inched away from him and pretended to be asleep.

Palmer rolled over and pulled an empty Beef Stroganoff wrapper from his nightstand. He read the ingredients list over and over again until his mind was quiet enough to drift into sleep.

Beef (beef, rosemary extract, salt). Corn starch. Sunflower oil. Sour cream (cultured cream, skim milk, enzymes). Nonfat Dry Milk. Onion. Sea salt. Beef flavor (yeast extract, salt). Less than 2% of: Mushroom. Brown sugar (cane sugar, cane syrup). Yeast extract. White pepper. Lemon juice (lemon juice concentrate, lemon oil, metabisulfite potassium). Garlic Powder. Precooked noodles: Durum semolina, whole egg, salt. Contains: milk, wheat, egg.

Palmer wondered what was on the menu at Camp Cabot. He whispered the ingredients again like a lullaby.

Palmer awoke two hours later with a jolt. He ran the few steps to the bathroom, dropped hard to his knees, and stuck his head into the toilet bowl. Taco Salad burned his esophagus and throat. He choked and sputtered and struggled to breathe as the interminable stream of chunky bile tore out of him. His chest heaved. His ears rang.

I’m going to die. He felt a rush of euphoria at the idea, a lightness of spirit even as his body was wracked with spasms to purge itself of the alien spice.

When the flow of vomit finally ceased, Palmer rinsed his mouth, splashed his face, and staggered back to bed. Patty was still lying on her side, her back to him.

“Did you wipe the seat?” she said.

“Yes,” said Palmer.

“Good,” said Patty.      

Palmer settled back into his cold bed and thought about the pyramid rising from the Martian plain between Camp Manifest and Camp Cabot. He felt the sweat cooling on his brow. He felt empty and new.

Only five more days until Stroganoff Sunday.

Bio: Lillian Wang Selonick is a dog person in the Washington, DC area who works in scholarly publishing. Her fiction has appeared in Obelus Journal, America's Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction, and Sliced Bread, the University of Chicago literary magazine. Find her on Twitter @LillianSelonick.

Julia Hanson

Copycat

Just before everyone else logs on, it’s the two of us. I do something with the corners of my mouth that (maybe) makes my face look happy. I blink.

She blinks too. Copycat.

Her pale cheeks catch the early morning sun. She’s shining, but it’s a bit more oily urban puddle after a rainstorm than morning dew. She appears poreless, which I admire.

Her mascara takes the furry shape of a smudge on the screen, and her lips are somewhere between blue and flesh-colored, a slight shade of pink gloss is a failed attempt at resuscitation. The color has, regrettably, snagged and clumped on her dry, peeling lips. Does her boyfriend forget to turn on the humidifier, too?

Her hair is a dull shade of brown, but it does have a bit of a wave to it that does not look totally half-assed. Her eyes are often one-third closed, until every tenth second or so, when I see her expend the effort to pop them open a bit. I try it myself.

Her eyebrows are darker and more orderly than mine. They’re perfectly shaped and, as long as she keeps them somewhat raised, convey an inquisitive alertness. Will also try this.

When she freezes, her face gets stuck in a spectacularly unflattering Picasso distortion, her eyes halfway closed, her mouth agape. Her top half is an unsightly lump strewn across the screen. I feel bad, but it is funny.

At the close of the last meeting of the day, I tip my head, giving her a half smile, which she returns.

Where does she go? I shove the computer into the bottom rung of the bookshelf. For the rest of the evening, I sidestep it like a poorly assembled pipe bomb that might become radioactive at any second.

Is she just the top half of a 2D woman, forever suspended in a grainy square? What does she really think? What’s she looking at, when her eyes dart outside the square? Does she wonder about what I do outside of the frame, too?

Lying in bed, I’m still thinking about her, no matter how hard I try to wipe thoughts of work from my tired mind. She’s four feet away from me, after all, through the bedroom wall. I hope she’s getting some rest, and that her boyfriend turned on the humidifier.

I hope she felt the sun on her face today, just for a minute or two.

I hope she ate something for dinner that she hadn’t eaten since last summer. Grilled chicken maybe, with lemon juice dripping on the charred bits, that was so delicious it transported her to a picnic table. To reaching her body across one friend to grab the arm of the other, their three heads huddled close together, laughing until one friend’s white wine came through her nose, splashing on to the other two.  

I close my eyes, willing my thoughts to wander beyond these four, flat walls.

Julia Hanson is a writer and marketing professional who lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Dickinson College. She has published prose in Curlew Quarterly. She can be reached at juliashanson@gmail.com.

John Gredler

Amagansett

She lived in a hotel in Amagansett, a big boxy structure with rows of rooms looking out over the dunes to the ocean. Her room was a small studio with a big window. She hung long strips of brown butcher paper from floor to ceiling as curtains. There were drawings tacked directly onto the sheetrock and paintings stacked against the walls. The paintings were on plywood. She told him she started using plywood because she could’t afford canvas, now she'd gotten used to the rough uneven surface and liked the effect it produced.

They kissed and ended up on her mattress on the floor but the speed and booze kept him from climaxing and after a while he just stopped, telling her he was too high. She laughed. She had a deep, almost raspy voice but her laugh was higher pitched. He found the difference in tone between them jarring but not unpleasant.

She lit a cigarette and told him that she had been raped six months earlier and hadn't slept with anyone since. 'It figures the first time I end up with a guy who can't come' she said as she laughed again.

Unsure what to say, he sat looking at her.

‘I’m all right now’, she sighed, exhaling smoke.

When she fell asleep he lay for a long time staring at the ceiling, tracing every crack, imagining landscapes with rivers as if he was flying above. He thought he could feel the speed pulsing through his veins. The diffuse light of dawn was slowly filtering in when eventually nodded off into a half sleep.

When he woke the sun was pouring into the small room, the wide strips of paper offering little resistance. She was sitting at her desk working on a charcoal drawing of him. 'You're awake, good, let’s go get some coffee.’

He went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, rinsing his dry mouth and drinking the water from the faucet. It tasted of sulphur. They went outside, stopping on the walkway that connected the rooms and looking out across the rolling dunes to the ocean beyond. 'Not too many people live out here in the off-season so it's cheap, but I have to give it up in June when they jack the rent.’

She drove them into town to get breakfast. There was no front passenger seat in her VW bug so he sat in the back and stretched out his legs. The ride made him nauseous. When she pulled up in front of the deli he went behind a dumpster in the alley to throw up. He was able to get down an egg sandwich and drink some coffee while she drove him to the bus in Southampton.

Back at his place on East Third Street he received the first of her cryptic letters. They were penciled in a large unruly script on thick paper torn from her sketch pads. She preferred letters to talking on the phone but wrote in such convolutions that he never could completely understand what she was trying to say.

He wondered if he was missing something, if maybe the letters were profound and he unable to comprehend them. When he went back out to the beach he did not try to see her.

A month or so later she wrote him saying she had a new boyfriend. He was a musician and they were going to go to France together. She would be gone for months. ‘It’s not serious’ she wrote, ‘just a diversion.’

She wanted to see him before she left so he agreed to meet her at the beach on Griffin Lane in Sagaponack. As he drove down along the pastures filled with horses and the potato fields on either side of the road he saw that her faded blue VW was the only car there. He pulled his pick-up truck next to it. She was leaning on the fender smoking a cigarette. She looked at him, her straight black hair emphasizing the paleness of her face, her green eyes hidden by large sunglasses. 

The late summer light, the constant chorus of crickets and the gatherings of the swallows into long rows on the telephone wires gave the place both a feeling of stillness and of the impending change of season.

A man rode up on his bicycle and parked it next to her car. He walked by them on his way to the beach and nodded hello.

‘That was Andre.’

'Who'? she said looking in his direction.

'You know ‘My Dinner with Andre.’ That's Andre.

'Oh I loved that film' she said as they watched him walk to the beach, her words trailing off.

She was supposed to bring lunch but all she had was a half finished bottle of red wine and a baguette. 'You're late so I started without you' she said passing him the bottle.

'Too early for me. '

She laughed. 'In France they drink wine with every meal.'

'Yes, and they eat at every meal too.'

'Touche' she said as they walked up the big dunes into a valley of shaded sand. As they sat facing each other he took the baguette, breaking off a piece. He leaned back on the cool sand, looking upward. They were in a deep cleft of the dune, dark swallows darting erratic into view against the deep blue sky, the sound of the waves breaking a constant.

When he sat back up she appeared as if she was about to speak but instead vomited, the red liquid that came out looking like old blood as it spread a stain on the sand.

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.’

'You need to eat something, have some bread.’

'No. I'm sorry no, I have to go. '

'Let me drive you. '

'No, I'm all right' she spat out with anger, startling him. Then, more softly ‘I'm sorry’ as she turned away and walked fast back to her car. He followed her and listened to the gears whine as she drove off, a cloud of dust following her until she made the turn at Daniels Lane and was gone.

She continued to write. Her letters from France were all about the cafes and the wine and sitting all afternoon in cafes drinking the wine, writing letters and drawing.

Then she was back on Long Island by herself. She wrote that she left the boyfriend in the south of France. She said she had straightened herself out and was living in Quogue. She was offering her place as a refuge, including a little hand-drawn map with pictures of the landmarks and a sketch of her house. 'Come out any time, you don't need to call'.

It was late September and his favorite time to be out there so he took her up on the invitation. He called to tell her he was coming and she sounded pleased, though perhaps disappointed that he didn't just arrive without notice.

When he left the city it was a sunny day but by the time he pulled off the highway there were gray crenellated clouds low in the sky covering everything like a heavy quilt.

Turning down a straight road of small cottages he found the house and pulled into the driveway, just two dirt tracks worn into the grass. Her cat, a half feral animal with the one ear missing sat on the steps looking at him with yellow eyes. It ran off as he approached and he saw it only had a stump for a tail.

He peered through the streaked glass, watching her come to open the door. By the way she moved he guessed she had already been drinking. His impulse was to turn and go but it was too late for that. She kissed him hello and he tasted the sourness of the wine on her lips.

'What happened to Van Gogh, I don't recall him being a Manx.’

'A what?'

'A cat with no tail.’

'Oh that. He was gone for a few days, I thought he must be dead and one morning I heard scratching at the door. He was a mess, limping and bloody, then I saw his tail was just hanging there by a thin strip of skin. I got my garden shears and cut it off. He didn't like that, scratched me up pretty bad.'

She showed her inner arm, the white, almost transparent skin lined with bright pink scars over pale blue veins.

'Shouldn't you have taken him to a vet'?

‘He's too wild. He's all healed up now. He'll be fine, until he gets into something else.’

She made a pasta dinner and showed him the two cases of her favorite French red, a Cote du Rhone that she got a good deal on. She drank steadily through dinner and was kind of gone by the time they were finished. She was slurring a bit, trying hard not to. He wanted to leave but could not think of a way to do it.

In bed he went through the motions, doing what she asked of him. She seemed to be enjoying herself but again he couldn’t climax. Not because of drugs this time. He felt outside of it, even afraid. He pretended to come, grunting a fake finish. She soon fell asleep.

He waited until her breathing was steady and deep before he got up and dressed. Outside the door he saw Van Gogh sitting on the porch gnawing on a small dark gray animal, maybe a mole. The cat looked up, his yellow eyes catching a reflected light that seemed to come from within. He picked up the small limp body, the tail already chewed away. Walking off quickly, hunched low to the ground, he paused once to look back with those eyes before disappearing into the dark.

Not familiar with Quogue, he drove back to Route 27 and headed out east to a spot he knew in Wainscot. It was a far but he didn’t care, it felt good to be driving. He took Sayre’s Path down to the end of Beach Lane and parked facing the ocean. He kicked off his shoes and walked out onto the sand.

The cloud cover had broken up and the almost full moon cast a light so strong it made a long shadow behind him. Large tufts of gray clouds blew across the sky blotting out the moon. One moment he was covered in bright light and the next he was in darkness with the beach in front of and behind him still lit up. The clouds moved fast, the light and dark changing constantly as he walked up to Georgica Pond. He arrived at the narrow strip of sand that separated the pond from the ocean and watched the waves steadily coming in.

He stripped naked and waded into the surf fearful and excited to be in the black water. The dark shadow of a passing cloud enveloped him he as looked out over the ocean to the horizon feeling small at the edge of the vast undulate sea. When the moon shone again its white light was caught and scattered on the surface of the rolling waves. As he floated he was entranced by the riotous dance of silver flames.

After a while he got out and dried himself with his shirt, pulling on his jeans over his damp legs. He sat watching the moonlight come and go until the sky began to change. In the soft predawn light, he walked up to the nearby pond and stood shivering at its edge. The moon was lower in the sky now and the blazing curve of the rising sun was just breaking above the ocean’s edge.

A pair of mergansers flew into view, skidding onto the glassy surface of the pond, shattering the mirror-like veneer into shards of wobbly light. The ducks washed themselves by dipping their heads forward under water in spasmodic full body contortions, the liquid was like beads of mercury as it rolled from their backs. They expanded and contracted their pompadour hoods, the male's a stark white headdress and the female’s an aurora of subtle shades of brown.

She dove underwater first and the male soon followed. It seemed minutes before they surfaced again. The early sun was on them now, in the female's mouth the silver tail of a small fish glittered. When she tilted her head back, opening her slender beak to swallow it down, he could see the serrated edge of her sawbill, like a row of small perfect black teeth, glistening in the golden light.

John Gredler has been published in Narratively, Atticus Review, The Sun Magazine, Westchester Review, and other publications. John was awarded a Gurfein Fellowship from The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. He is a frequent contributor to read650.org. John lives with his family in Tuckahoe, NY.

Jones DeRitter

Some People Have All the Luck

In February of 1962, my six-year-old older sister and my three-year-old younger brother and I were locked for a short time inside a Ford Falcon minivan with a smoldering charcoal grill.  My parents had taken the three of us on a day trip to a ski hill near Rochester, New York, and after a tailgate lunch of hot dogs and burgers cooked on a hibachi, they decided we needed a nap, so they laid us down on the bench seats in the back of their new car, rolled up our ski jackets so they could be used as pillows, and covered us with wool blankets.  Then, to make sure we didn’t get cold, they put the hibachi on the metal floor behind the back seat, closed us in, and went off to ski.

I don’t know exactly how long they left us there, but a quick Google search suggests that two hours of exposure to charcoal fumes in that small space would have killed all three of us, and also that it would have taken less time than that to cause permanent neurological damage.  I remember the cold air rushing in when the door opened and some kind of hubbub going on around us, and I remember falling against the side of the van and throwing up.  My sister and brother were also sick and disoriented, and none of us can recall anything my parents said to us at the time, or anything that others might have said to them.  We didn’t get around to raising questions about this event until three or four years later, and when we did finally ask, my mother confirmed that they had put the grill in the car to keep us warm, had thought the fire was pretty much out, didn’t really know much about carbon monoxide, hadn’t heard anything about charcoal fires being dangerous, or maybe they’d seen a public service announcement on TV, but it hadn’t stayed with them as something they needed to worry about.

There are no chemists in my family.  There are also no electricians, plumbers, or structural engineers, but that didn’t stop my father, many years before practical information about this stuff was easily available on the web, from re-wiring, re-plumbing, and partially re-building two old farmhouses.  One of them later burned to the ground.   Putting the hibachi in the van with us was probably just something that occurred to my parents on the spur of the moment, and no, it didn’t really matter that they had never heard of anyone else doing anything like that.   There were lots of good ideas out there just waiting for someone to think them up, and somebody had to go first.  The upside of this parenting style was that my brothers and sisters and I grew up believing we could solve almost any problem by improvising in real time, and also that almost anything was worth trying at least once.  The downside was a childhood that was punctuated at odd intervals by avoidable injuries and inadvertent property damage.  I never doubted that my parents loved me, but for most of my childhood and adolescence, I also carried with me the knowledge that they had already proved they were capable of making a mistake that could cost me my life. 

Over the past decade, several elaborate scientific studies have sought to identify and explore the neurological foundations of the moral judgments we level at ourselves and others.  Partly in response to this research, neuroscientists and philosophers have tried to design experiments or arguments that can explain the competition between two familiar but contradictory mental habits.  The studies show that we apparently like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who praise or condemn specific actions based primarily on what we think we know about the motives or intentions of the actors.  We all make mistakes, and in most cases most of us try to forgive others as we hope to be forgiven ourselves.  There’s a catch, though.  This pattern remains in place only as long as the results of the behavior in question appear to us to be not very serious.  When a particular choice or action produces an extremely good or an extremely bad result, we tend to discount individual motives and to assign credit or blame based more or less exclusively on what we feel about the outcome.  Taken together, these competing perspectives explain both why some of us have managed to get away with making bad choices for dubious reasons because nothing very bad happened as a result, and why others have been condemned or shunned for actions where there was no bad faith or bad intention involved.  The degree to which each of these modes of judgment is hard-wired into human consciousness is not yet clear, but there is a robust debate taking place in academic journals these days about the origins and the implications of what both the philosophers and the neuroscientists refer to as “moral luck.”

The case of the hibachi in the minivan can be treated as one example of how this puzzle plays out in real time.  On the one hand, insofar as my parents were trying to make sure that the three of us were warm and well rested, their motives were praiseworthy.  On the other hand, if they had failed to return in time to keep us from being killed or harmed, neither their motives nor their efforts to save us would have mattered much to outside observers—or even, probably, to themselves.  The studies also suggest that we are all more likely to express our disapproval in moral terms in situations that produce irreparably bad results, so my parents were lucky in both the conventional sense and in the new neuro-philosophical sense of the word.  Because their mistake had no long-term consequences, we can assume that any impartial observer who watched us spill out of the car that day probably concluded (a) that my parents lacked common sense, but also (b) that they were not monsters or criminals.     

On December 5th, 2012, in Minneapolis, a two-year-old boy named Neegnco Xiong was shot in the chest by his four-year-old brother with a handgun the older boy found under a pillow in his parents’ bed.  By American standards, Minnesota has relatively strict laws about gun safety, and when Neegnco died, the Hennepin County District Attorney charged his father with second-degree manslaughter and child endangerment.  Prosecutors usually do not bring felony charges against parents in these circumstances, but in this case the D.A. took a harder line, because (he said) Kao Xiong had kept several other guns in the apartment within easy reach of his four young children.  Because the funerals for the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting had taken place two weeks after Neegnco’s death and one week before the charges were filed against Kao Xiong, it seems reasonable to conclude that the briefly ubiquitous images of those undersized coffins in Connecticut also influenced the D.A.’s decision.  To make matters worse, the Hennepin County case went to trial in May 2013, only a week after the country had been treated to the unappetizing spectacle of Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev hurling defiance at the reporters who came to them with questions about the role played by their sons in the Boston Marathon bombing.  In the end, Xiong was convicted on both counts, required to state in court that he accepted the responsibility for his son’s death, and sentenced to time already served followed by community service and ten years’ probation.  A day or two after the verdict was announced, the crime blogger for Slate gave the story national attention by arguing that well-publicized prosecutions like this would have a useful deterrent effect on other negligent parents.

According to the original criminal complaint, Kao Xiong’s children lived with their mother, Ma Vang, but Xiong split time between their apartment and another place a short distance away.  Both Kao Xiong and Ma Vang were descended from the Hmong who lived in Southeast Asia for centuries before being recruited by the CIA in the 1960s to fight the “Secret War” in Laos. When the Vietnam War ended, the Secret War was closed down as well, and in the chaotic years that followed, more than 100,000 Hmong were tortured, imprisoned, or simply slaughtered by the Pathet Lao.  To escape these horrors, thousands of Hmong fled to refugee camps in Thailand, and some of them ultimately established expatriate communities in France and in the United States.  (More than 40,000 Hmong now live in the Twin Cities metro area.)   Because they lived in the jungle, Hmong men in Laos were valued for their skill as hunters, and because of their political situation, most Hmong refugees were connected in some way to the military campaigns against the communists.  For both reasons, many present-day Hmong-Americans own guns.  Kao Xiong considered himself an avid deer hunter, and he sometimes carried a handgun when he was alone on the street at night.  He owned eight weapons in all, including a semi-automatic rifle.   Like many gun enthusiasts, he may simply have been entranced by the different technologies, but in light of the political history of his family and his community, we can assume that taking part in the local gun culture would have been much easier than choosing not to do so.   

After Kao Xiong was charged, Second Amendment absolutists on the web tried to make sure that nobody confused him with a responsible gun owner, and some gun control advocates argued that anyone who kept even a trigger-locked, unloaded firearm anywhere near small children was for that reason alone an unfit parent.  The word “stupid” was thrown around a lot.  Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis, the Hmong-American community held a prayer vigil for the family on the one-week anniversary of Neegnco’s death, and after Kao Xiong was charged, friends and relatives told reporters that jailing a loving father would only do further damage to the family.  On the witness stand, Xiong burst into tears when he was asked to explain how his son had died.  He had taken an NRA safety course, and trial testimony confirmed that some of the guns in the children’s apartment were properly secured, but the weapon that killed Neegnco was a semi-automatic pistol, which meant that it had no conventional safety and could be secured only by removing the ammunition clip—a simple maneuver, but one which Xiong obviously had neglected to perform.  He hadn’t left the gun in plain sight, but he hadn’t placed it out of reach, either.  And if there was a second residence available, why were all the guns in the kids’ apartment to begin with?  Stupid, really, but also unlucky, in both senses of the word. 

In 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot an acquaintance named Andrew Whittington in the face, chest, and neck with a .28 gauge shotgun from what he claimed was ninety feet away.  (Forensic experts who tried to re-stage the incident a few weeks after the fact argued that the actual distance between the shooter and his victim was probably closer to fifty feet.)  If Cheney had been using a .12 gauge or even a .20 gauge shotgun, his victim would probably have been killed, but a .28 is the second-smallest commercially available long gun, and Cheney was far enough away from the victim so that Whittington was hit with only one third to one half of the lead pellets contained in the shell.  Whittington passed out from the pain and had to be helicoptered to a hospital 40 miles away, but within days of the shooting he offered a dramatic public apology to the Vice President for being in his line of fire, and he eventually made something close to a full recovery.  Dick Cheney is an obscenely lucky human being.

On March 9, 2004, my nephew J.D., who was eighteen at the time, accidentally shot and killed his fourteen-yr.-old brother Brandon while their sixteen-yr.-old brother Ben looked on.  J.D. and Ben and Brandon were the sons of my younger brother Jon, who had been too small to be included in the ski trip back in 1962.  According to a brief item published two days after the accident in the local section of the Buffalo News, the three boys were in an attic room of the oversized, dilapidated Federal-style farmhouse they shared with their father and their grandparents, and they “were preparing to shoot crows out a window when the gun accidentally discharged.” My brother was six hours into his eight-hour shift at the lumberyard when the accident occurred, and it took him forty minutes to get home.  By the time he got there, New York State Police investigators had confiscated the .410 gauge shotgun that had been used to kill Brandon and had interviewed everyone who was home at the time of the shooting, a few who had arrived shortly thereafter, and the ambulance crew as well.  Less than an hour after Jon arrived, the troopers put the shotgun in the trunk and J.D. in the back seat of a navy blue and gold NYSP cruiser and drove him to the barracks in Wayland, some twenty-five miles to the east.  My brother followed in his beat-up minivan and waited for an hour while his oldest son was questioned about the death of his youngest son.  He and J.D. returned home shortly after dark.   Six weeks later, an Assistant District Attorney for Livingston County wrote a letter to the investigators which confirmed that his office had decided against filing charges and described the event itself as a “horrible tragic accident.” A few weeks after that, one of the troopers who had been at the house that day dropped by to return the shotgun.   

After a decade of living a weirdly bifurcated existence that involved a crowded house in a working-class suburb of Rochester and an even smaller fixer upper out in the woods, my parents had moved out to the country for good in 1974.  They wanted out of the suburbs and they probably thought of the new project as an outside-the-box version of a retirement plan, but the second farmhouse turned out to be far too big and much too run down, and in the end they lacked the time, the planning skills, and the financial resources that would have been required to complete the task.  Jon and his wife Lynn had moved in with them in the early 90s with the idea of avoiding rent elsewhere so that they could save up for a down payment on a place of their own, but by the end of the decade, the marriage had foundered and Lynn had moved out.   My parents retired a few years after Jon’s divorce, but for roughly the last quarter of the twentieth century, they had shared a commute of more than one hundred miles per day, five days per week.   This meant that Jon and my younger sister spent several years in a household where their parents left at six-thirty every weekday morning and didn’t return until dinnertime.  Jon’s kids got more attention growing up than Jon himself had gotten, but Jon and Lynn also had full-time jobs of their own, so their kids were often left to their devices on weekdays after school and sometimes for long stretches on the weekend as well.  In other words, if one wished to connect my nephew’s death to a moral failing, one could point to an upbringing that might not have provided the boys with all the attention and guidance they might have needed in order to thrive.  On the other hand, how much mentoring should an eighteen-year-old have needed in order to understand that pointing a loaded shotgun in even the general direction of his brother was a stupid thing to do? 

Like the Hmong Americans who have put down roots in the Twin Cities metro area, the inhabitants of tiny country villages in Western New York love their guns.  There were probably six or seven long guns in my parents’ house at the time of the accident, and the one that J.D. carried upstairs into the attic room that afternoon was the only one that was not in his father’s gun safe at the start of the day.  That sounds as though it should have mattered, but it really didn’t, because by that time all three boys knew how to open the gun safe, and all three were allowed to do so.  What did matter was that as far as the boys were concerned, the .410 gauge shotgun was basically a toy.  Their dad had given it to their little sister as a birthday present only a few weeks earlier, because she had asked him to teach her how to shoot.  The .410 is a small-bore shotgun with virtually no recoil, and it is used mostly for varmint control and for beginners like my niece.  If a full-sized adult is hit from a distance of fifty or sixty feet with birdshot fired from a gun of this size, he has a good chance of surviving his injuries.  By weight, a .410 shell contains less than half of the load that can be delivered by a .12 gauge shotgun, but my nephew was so close to his sister’s gun when it went off that basically the entire load hit him in the neck, and his carotid artery was shredded.  He bled out in less than three minutes. 

Even when I was very little and my family still lived in the suburbs, I remember my father keeping a .12 gauge shotgun in his bedroom closet.  I probably fired it for the first time when I was fourteen, but even before that my brothers and I had spent many hours out in the woods shooting at tin cans and clay pigeons with a .20 gauge my parents or someone else had given us a few years earlier.  I don’t have a specific memory of this, but my father must have taught us some basic gun safety at some point, because even when I was only eight or ten inches taller than the gun itself, I could have told anyone who asked how to handle it safely: if I wasn’t aiming at something, the safety had to be on, and the barrel had to be pointed at the ground in front of me.  By the time I was allowed to try out my father’s .12 gauge, I was also allowed—allowed, hell, I was required—to drive a tractor and to use a chainsaw, both at times without adult supervision.  If the need had arisen, any competent actuary would have testified that on the list of dangerous activities I engaged in as an adolescent, skeet shooting with my younger brothers wouldn’t have finished any higher than third.  Although we did some stupid things—not just with the guns, but with the chainsaws and the tractor as well—none of was ever hurt in any way that would have called those particular parental decisions into question.  This means, I suppose, that as boys we were lucky in the usual way, and, if you like, that the moral luck of my sometimes foolhardy parents protected all of us as well.   

My wife and I started taking vacations on North Carolina’s Outer Banks in the early 1980s, and we continued the tradition after our daughter was born in 1989.  In 1992, just before we headed south for our beach week, my daughter tripped and fell into the wooden handle of a wheelbarrow, giving herself an impressive shiner.  It’s a long way from northeastern Pennsylvania to Cape Hatteras, and when we stopped in fast food places and grocery stores along the way, we noticed that people were staring at us.  After the second or third incident, we talked about it in the car and concluded that the people who were sizing us up so carefully were trying to figure out whether we were the kind of people who would hit their little girl in the face.   We wanted to explain, but nobody ever actually asked.  A few days later, I was standing in knee-deep water maybe ten feet offshore with my daughter in my arms when an unexpected wave caught us from behind and knocked me down.  I tried to curl around her so that we could ride in together, but when the wave slammed me onto the sand, I lost my grip, and the water quickly swept her out of reach. 

Imagine the comments that would have appeared in social media and elsewhere in the summer of 2020 if a three-year-old had been washed out of her father’s arms and drowned:  “My heart goes out to that little girl, but only morons take kids that small into ocean surf.”  “There were five-foot swells that day.  What was he thinking?”  “My sister-in-law saw these people at the Food Lion last Friday, and she said the baby already had a black eye.  Somebody should check this out.”  In fact, similar accusations were flashing through my head at the time, along with a weirdly clinical curiosity about whether the tingling sensation radiating down my left arm meant I had separated my shoulder, but those thoughts were really just background noise accompanying the interior harangue that began with she’s gone! and continued with get up where is she get up where is she get up you bastard get up until I finally did manage to get to my feet—and there she was, just ten or a dozen yards up the beach from me, already standing on her own two feet and smiling, actually, because she had just tried body surfing for the first time and had kind of liked it, although apparently she didn’t like it well enough to keep from reminding me a few minutes later, in a rather offhand way, that I had promised before we stepped into the water together that I would not let go of her.

In those frantic moments when I was trying to stand up, I felt both deeply afraid and deeply ashamed, because I had no way of affecting the outcome of an event I should probably have anticipated, an event that was still unfolding but was already catastrophic because it had taken my child.  I believe that Kao Xiong, who was making lunch for his children in his kitchen when the accident occurred, felt like this when he heard the gunshot from upstairs, and that my brother and my nephews experienced some version of this feeling as well.  I do not know why my parents and I were lucky enough to evade the likely consequences of our worst choices while other people in need of the same lucky break were launched into the void instead, but I have reached a point in my life where I am impatient with anyone who responds to events like these by enumerating the mostly superficial ways in which the good people of the world are alleged to be unlike the people who make life-altering mistakes. 

Listening to the good part of a podcast or laughing at something your friend said on your hands-free phone call, you enter the intersection while the light is still yellow, but it turns to red before you’re halfway across, and some guy on your right who’s in a hurry and also thinking about something else looks up just in time, hits the brakes and the horn, and then gives you the finger as you go by.  No big deal—both of you have things to do, and both of you have basically forgotten the whole encounter by dinnertime.  Or you enter the same intersection the same way eleven minutes later and you can’t stop in time to avoid the attractive teen-ager who’s playing some music you never heard of on a pair of expensive ear buds, and who has stepped out into the crosswalk a little too soon because she knows the “Walk” sign is going to light up any second now.  She can’t hear you coming, and she’s not looking at you. 

Back in 1962, someone might have said something to my parents that sent them charging back to their car in the nick of time, but it’s also possible that my parents and my siblings and I were saved, as my daughter and I were saved three decades later, by sheer, dumb, amoral luck.  Very few of us are careful all of the time, and no one is smart all of the time, and I suspect that if we are honest with ourselves, most of us—not just most parents, but most of all of us—can recall at least a few occasions when our own errors in judgment might have had lethal consequences.   It’s at least worth considering, especially if that consideration leads us to respond more sympathetically to our flawed fellow creatures, including those who have been extraordinarily unlucky, and those who have been occasionally or even chronically unwise. 

Jones DeRitter teaches film and literature courses at the University of Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania. He can be reached at jones.deritter@gmail.com.

Carolyn Mainardi

Joe and Melinda

On days and at events that were supposed to be happy—New Year’s Eve, weddings, beach vacations—Joe and Melinda were not so happy. They’d give each other tired smiles and say: “Can we go home yet?”

Once Joe and Melinda walked three miles through Boston after the bars closed because they couldn’t get a cab. This was early on; each wondered if the other would complain. It started to rain, and Joe thought: if she doesn’t complain now, I’ll marry her. And then she beamed, tilting her face to the sky.

Last year, on Joe’s birthday, they attended Melinda’s father’s funeral. He didn’t remind his wife’s family that it was his birthday, and so there was no cake, no singing, no presents, and it was the best birthday Joe has ever had.

Once, in the midst of an argument, Melinda reached into the oven without a mitt and burned her hand on the cast-iron skillet. They came together over her pain, whatever they were fighting about forgotten, forgiven.

Once Melinda twisted her ankle while exercising, and was laid up for days on the couch. Joe cooked and cleaned and brought her cups of water. These were, looking back, some of the sweetest days of their marriage. There was no pressure to be happy, and so they were.

 This year Melinda wants to make up for Joe’s birthday last year. She books a weekend at a cabin in northern Vermont. He doesn’t need a trip, he tells her. He doesn’t particularly like going on vacation. Melinda knows this. But look how excited she looks—this is rare these days, this smile.

But a day in, with only the Green Mountains and his beautiful wife to look at, he grows so bored that he offers to cook dinner. If only there was a storm coming, if only there was some tragedy on the news. He has long known that his marriage is at its best when things around them are going wrong.

He’s chopping carrots for beef stew. He imagines the long and quiet night ahead: they’ll build a fire, they’ll eat, they’ll chat. It comes to him suddenly, how to avoid all this.

He sees the blood before he feels the pain. Then the pain is acute. He’s sliced off the very tip of his finger. He didn’t mean to go quite that far. Still, there’s more relief in him than despair. Melinda appears in the kitchen. She stares at his bloody hand. “What did you do!” Her face pales, but there’s a glint in her eyes, something like excitement in her voice.

This is not sustainable, he thinks, but for tonight, we’ll be happy.

A native of New Jersey and a graduate of Boston University, Carolyn Mainardi is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at University of New Hampshire. Her short fiction has appeared in Crack the Spine, Burn Magazine, and 50-Word Stories. Follow her on Instagram at @blueberriesforcarl.

Neal Snidow

Night Running

 I’m running at night through my city, down alleys and along boulevards and avenues, the ocean in its meditative blackness at the western edge, and this is bliss. There is always enough street light and ambient glow to light the way, but not too much, so shadowy yards and retaining walls and the shabby, peeling eucalyptus, unimproved, untended, darken overhead and then clear away in a dappling of porchlight. Also, in this era of non-portable music, the last couple of years when the inner voice is one’s only entertainer, I’ve achieved the ultimate this evening, a perfectly remembered song playing over and over in an ideal running rhythm, with full performance emotion, and what else could it be but “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, for at this period in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, the 1970s, the airways are owned by the purring Stevie and her gang of velvet-clad, coke-loving dandies, and also by Maria Muldaur, and Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Brown, these mellow songsters, and they have all made songs you can run to but none as good as “Dreams”:

            Now here I go again

            I see the crystal visions

            I keep my visions to myself

I’m envied in these days, and well I might be, because while all of us in-our-twenties beach people are trying to gain a foothold in employment and careers, I have a full time teaching job at my old high school. And if that weren’t enough, the assignment is a plum, 12th grade Honors English, with the able downfield interference of my former high school English teacher who is now vice principal for curriculum, indulging my whims for non-standard class sets—he was an aspiring writer himself once, even a successful seller of teleplays; does he not see his young self in me?— always moving them forward with immediate approval. Do I need 35 copies of Zen and the Art of Archery, Ariel, Shall We Gather at the River, a rental of Citizen Kane, Top Hat, Los Olvidados? No problem. And the students are very bright indeed, keeping up and bringing joy. The long-term sub who also applied for the job, a fine instructor and a highly respected folk singer and guitarist who entrances students at assemblies and who will later release several albums, sits opposite me in the teacher’s lounge one day, to my alarm quietly furious, and tells me I shouldn’t have gotten the job, these things “just don’t happen,” and then moves to Maine. A close friend from the old blocks is also beginning his teaching career working for LA Unified in a junior high life science assignment somewhere between Gardena and Compton and a highlight of his semester is testifying in court about the graffiti that has appeared on his classroom walls above the Periodic Table, were these phrases in his opinion characteristic of Crips or Bloods?, so he confesses in our polite, sheepish, Redondo Beach way that as he climbs into his van every morning to head east, he is envious of me and my job, of me walking to our old high school—for I’m close enough, see, to walk to work from the little house we’ve just purchased—through the beach overcast to my classroom, where some years before, sitting in one of the rows, I can’t recall which, I’d learned that John Kennedy was dead.

But for some reason I can’t feel the glow of satisfaction that the situation warrants, and not all of this hesitation comes from the work involved in a full five period English assignment, a thundering scree slope of prep and papers. In planning for the Honors group alone I am reading endlessly and pondering presentations, plus all thirty-odd of this class are writing a significant paper every week, so probably one reason I am running as much as I do is in an unconscious effort to keep uplifting chemicals circulating within because without this, I fear the job will pull me under as, the staff room reveals every day, it clearly has several colleagues.

The other is that despite the good students, full time pay, insurance plan, and firm place in the world, the job is a grave. Old teachers are still wandering around, a Driver's Ed instructor is in the faculty bathroom sitting on the toilet eating an apple—you haven't gone anywhere. You're also a focus of envy and the teacher's particular agony, dismay at the fluid passage of time, the porpoise-like semesters gliding by while students stay endlessly young. How recently it seems to them you were a student here! And now you're no longer a promising product, ready to launch, but back as a rival for reputation, student acclaim and teaching assignments—with all the choices available to the young, they reflect sourly, this is where you ended up, the best you could do. As a student, you moved through the school in a theater of your own achievement and grandiosity, but as a member of the permanent cast, you enter through another door with the poorly paid extras, the English colleague whose cheeks are mottled with drink, the shop teachers painting houses as a summer sideline. In the same dismal faculty bathroom, just offstage but eternally hidden from students by a firm Yale lock, one of the sadder English teachers, a difficult, clench jawed, slightly unstable and unfireable older staffer who will never come near an Honors class catches me at the urinal and triumphantly stammers through what sounds like a carefully rehearsed rundown on the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, demonstrating how some of Shakespeare's lines employ metaphor but others reveal the use of metaphor's close cousin the simile in which the careful auditor can detect the use of "like" or "as."

Finally at year's end, while the graduation ceremony goes on in the stadium, I will stand by a collection box on Gown Duty in the girl's gym—this name so taken for granted that it's painted in huge letters on the outside walls—while around me fall the half-hearted cracks of my shopworn fellow faculty stationed at the other boxes and tables, and this is what happens, I now see, that you get to escape once, but then come back where this theater of freedom is enacted and reenacted year after year, attended by the weary stagehands. "Here they come," someone cries, and the ground literally begins to shake, footsteps pounding nearer as the seniors race to the gym, the first few bursting through the door screaming, eyes huge with relief and fear to hurl their gowns with a fury into the big boxes marked with the letters of their last names. Then, stunned, barely able to stand still, they exchange the ceremonial folder of leatherette lined in grosgrain ribbon they've been given on their walk across the stage for their actual diploma, held hostage during the ceremony to guarantee respectful behavior. After Gown Duty, what you remember most is the shaking, the rumble as they approach the door, those pounding feet, like in the OED definition of "pell mell":  "with vehement onset." It’s this same pounding I’m trying to shed in the early summer through acts of sympathetic magic while running, making a slapping sound climbing Calle Miramar, a long uphill pull in the upscale western edge of the Hollywood Riviera, a major energy burner, a full career, and then the exorcism of the identical pounding on the downhill side, that jarring impact on legs and knees, and finally at the bottom, having exorcised the seismic rage of the grad stampede, there's the tiniest, high-cardio endorphined calm of the flat old beach streets themselves. There might even be a reward, perhaps passing the duplex where it's soothing to recall a birthday party years before, one of the blindfolded kids gently clustered elbow to elbow at a “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” game, pushing pins through the paper and on into the soft grape stake fencing in the parking area of the rear unit, sightless and safe.

It’s hard to find such equilibrium, because on one hand there’s what's happening every day, the mistakes and pleasures, grinding work, panics, not enough money, disruptive students who hijack your thoughts over a whole weekend leaving you obsessed and enraged; all of this seems indelible, a photo by Weegee, flash lit and metallic. But also like Weegee, there's an odd evanescence, as in his infrared images of people captured in the dark of theaters, their faces shining in a secret exultation, maximally entertained but also terrified should they have to abandon their pleasure for some other inner state, to responsibility and boundedness. The long renunciation of desire, the "reality principle," is visible everywhere in these days, even among my parents, of whom now that I’m well into my twenties, mother confesses to me privately father would have been so much happier as…and she mentions some fine, unlikely career, a fantasy lifeline. Then one day in my second year at this school I have a conversation with my department chair, a very organized, very capable teacher maybe ten years older than me, and I tell her I'm feeling a little rocky because Deb and I had too much wine the night before, and her face lights up: "Oh I'm so glad we're not the only ones who do that!" But then in a month or two she is gone one day, and in secret we English teachers are told that while they are letting on that she suffered an aneurysm, she has actually taken her own life, and there will be a sub for the rest of the semester. What would the infrared have shown?

Dreaminess can also appear in the daytime, certainly, for after the amazing blast of output, the sheer energy required to hold a room of teenagers for 50 minutes, in which your whole inner self shuts down, makes itself scarce, and instead there is this yammering, performing person, "a public man," sometimes doing well, sometimes not, for you've just started to learn how to do this, and all at the split second, watching students so carefully, so intent on their condition and progress and having created this field of energy to then hold it like a long wavering note, a sort of soothing hum of collective identity, when this spell breaks at the end of class and it’s your prep period, no one now coming in the door so you can finally sit at your desk, on quiet days this is when the dreaming starts, and you can look out at Vincent Park, whose grace of landscape, especially to the instructor in his room, is its soothing beauty, the verged shade of the magnolias and their great blossoms of ivory and rust floating against the smallest paling of the sky to the west that marks the ocean itself.

Much of the day is spent with tenth-graders, who despite being challenging in their behavior—you just have to learn how, there's no other way—can also have a curious sweetness.  Being fifteen, although the girls are often beautiful and the boys starting to be big and strong, they have a puppyish quality unseen to themselves. They have been in school such a long time but haven't yet—at least in this long distant era—felt in their bones an alternative, and this collective attraction acts centripetally. They come to you and lean in to talk, they lean on your desk, girl pals lean on each other and boys lean their heads together to exchange something funny and look up guiltily when called on it;  and in quiet times they lean inward toward the center of the room, a movement almost imperceptible, but standing in front of them as they silently read—this used to be possible—or complete an assignment, you can feel the room draw together like flower petals barely tightening in some warmth-seeking correction. In October, for instance, classes are settling down, and in the first half of the month—again, this is long ago—the onshore winds often pause and are replaced by a warmer, offshore flow, drying the marine layer, brightening the light to an autumnal poise and attention. When these winds strengthen they're called Santa Ana's, famed in their mistral-like power to alter mood and landscape, and to herald fire. On my evening runs along the Strand in Hermosa, the sound of playoff games and then the World Series comes from patios and decks while far ahead of me, miles across the Santa Monica Bay, fires gleam in Malibu and the San Gabriel’s.

On these days the school is hot, but there is no air conditioning, so windows are open and students tend to wilt after lunch. It's quiet, we've done the presentation and discussion and whatever else has been scheduled, and now there's a little time in the last ten minutes for reading or working on an assignment, which is what the group is doing, and here the dream begins to condense. The air on both sides of the class is autumnally smoky, partly from distant fires, and partly from the incursion of Los Angeles air making its way to the coast. There's a quiet, then a somnolence. Two rows back or so, Vince, a dark, handsome Latino surfer, not the most interested student, is actually deeply involved in what he's reading, and his blonde girlfriend, cute and personable, who day by day sits beside him marshalling his behavior in an impressively maternal way, for she's taken his progress on as a project and is steady, sweet and unremitting, is gazing ahead for the moment, taking a small break, her blonde head as dreamy as my own in this afternoon lull. Then there's a small drop in pressure and the girl raises her hand just to stretch, staring straight out to her right, and by mistake hitches her sleeveless top to her rising hand and as she closes her eyes to yawn, by accident reveals her left breast, small and round, and no one sees, only me. Of its classical order, the moment is unadorned, elegant, ionic instead of erotic—if anything I'm worried someone else will see and then we will have a situation in which I will need to keep things cool and be the unflappable adult. But just as quickly she drops her hand, the breast disappears, and she widens her eyes to wake up a little. Vince is still caught up in his book, and everyone else is in this same spell, more like the desert whose still air the offshore has ushered into the room, so this has been a blink of revelation that we really are here, in our single lives.

At the end of the period, collecting papers and walking up and down the rows, in an oddly peaceful calm, I see Vince has penciled something on his desk, though he and his girl are gone. It's a slogan for a nearby surfer hangout, a breakfast place down the highway:  "eat at Joe's geekmo," he admonishes all surfers, kooks, gremmies, goofy-foots, ho-dads, greasers, nose riders, those who think they're all hot, and this note closes the season of the Santa Ana's for that school year though there are still fires. Our department teacher's aide, the mother of one of my Honor's students, tells me that when he was born seventeen years earlier it was weather like this, hot and still, and she and her husband walked down to the beach and stood awhile in the quiet water, and then drove to the hospital, and this is how she remembers his birthday always, this moment of slightly dangerous warmth and poise.

Later, as it always does, the onshore returns and the magnolias oscillate as fog rises uphill. Now my prep period is isolated, socked in, suitable to introspection and the fixed gaze. One day out the window I see a student of mine leaning on a railing, and he's very bright, an Honor's student, but on a tangent of some sort, floating more than is good for him probably. He's leaning, idly watching students parade the walkway below him, coming back from lunch. It occurs to me that you never see young women in these bereft attitudes, certainly not the bright ones, who are always so directed. The dress code of my day is long gone, and he's in beach casual, long hair wafting a little in the overcast, worn out jeans and a plaid shirt with flap pockets, low-cut black Converse, treads flat with wear—surfer old school. From the discouraged and loitering array of this boy's body and gazing head, an unconscious immobility as vivid in its own way as anger or sexual interest showing across his body, only now slackness and woe, it's clear to me he doesn't have a clue. The room I'm sitting in a few feet from him has no open windows, is only a space set with desks and, I imagine, from a far vantage point in the overcast, a bright fluorescent in the grey with myself miniaturized in a corner, and then a moment of understanding comes to me: no matter how smart he is, this boy knows nothing. I'm a little alarmed at the thought—it's one, I suspect, my wife shares when she considers me from some angles. Taken aback, I hear my own voice suddenly speak out over the empty rows of desks, "So lost!"

Sometimes in the evening, against my better judgement, I even carry this lostness with me and, drawn to some perceived center, jog past my own classroom on Vincent Park along El Redondo, mostly to tempt and then ward off the feeling of despair it tends to bring. The street named for the city's round beach surrounds a small egg-shaped park that on a map forms an omphalos around which the rest of the genteel avenues of the city undulate like petals or fronds. It's a soothing old neighborhood, modest and poky, hilly and grown over with ivy, firethorn, ice plant and pittosporum. The English wing is here, where students wait between periods at redwood benches outside each room, and against the rusting sea air these are held together by large galvanized bolts. The chain link separating the campus from the house next door is also rusted, and in the middle of this grass, a well-tended palm with cut fronds covering its trunk in decades' worth of chevrons and cleats fills a bricked planter on whose edge students can sit, precarious though it is with pigeon droppings. The one-way street rises half its orbit past bungalow style houses, where in the antique Saturday Evening Post look of our own era ten years earlier I can see myself clambering from a station wagon with books and sack lunch. Then the street curves back down the hill to the corner where Vincent Street bisects the round, and once a month or so along this empty circumambulation I'm impelled to lope. 

There's a pleasure in tempting other well-known spaces, looping around old haunts without being seen: elementary schools, libraries, favorite childhood walks, the old apartments where we first lived when we arrived in Los Angeles, moving onto this map that is half land, half ocean. A short block from our current little starter home, one street over, lies the modest house of my father's older brother Ray, a brown stucco one story bulked up over the years with add-ons, and from the corner of Diamond and Maria as I run by, I can look to the right and perhaps even see without being seen Uncle Ray a few houses up, a stoop shouldered, veteran lead man at Northrop, thanks to his Appalachian fatalism endlessly pessimistic on any subject, gray hair in an undiluted forties roach, pulling on a Chesterfield King held between second and third finger so his hand is like a mask as he contemplates the state of his lawn beneath the marine layer while beside him a sprinkler undulates its curtain of water. I tempt fate and invisibility running by at a distance unnoticed and without a greeting, a rude, unthoughtful, arrogantly unbeholden figure.  I can even pull this off on my own old street on some evenings, running by my parents' home as if on a compass exercise during a scout meeting from years before, passing the old house unseen on a windy night, the windows lit, sensing on the one hand a sly freedom like a small bright minor chord, as in: not stopping, trick, or sleight of hand, but on the other, a pang, a place no longer yours.

Daytimes in summer and on weekends, I watch the low tide hours in the paper, and when the beach is hard sand, run ten miles barefoot, from the Hermosa Breakwater to the El Segundo line at 45th Street, the red and white banded stacks of the Hyperion Power Plant visible to the south, and then back, and in my head all this time songs or schemes or rages or reflections or teaching ideas or writing thoughts or what I will say to one group or the other that will inoculate them at last from their bad behavior, this all rolls through my breathing head like time lapsed images of clouds, and the last burst from the Hermosa Pier south to the breakwater is a triumph of having made it as well as a feeling of being pursued—literally pursued sometimes, as you can hear feet pounding behind you on the wet sand or splashing through the wavelets as people gain and pass, and one day toward the end of the run I refuse to be passed, and kick up the gear and go as fast as I can, pounding and breathing, and after a hundred yards or so my pursuer peels away and I finally slow, and it's just another guy running on the wet sand, and he calls out "good race!" and I wave, but he doesn't know how desperately I don't want to be caught.

 Other days I run through the streets, loops out and back, sometimes north, sometimes east, sometimes south to the Palos Verdes line, and I do this whenever I can with an addict’s disregard for anything or anyone. I arrive late to a department meeting in sockless shoes with a hastily thrown on shirt I’ve had in the car because getting in a quick beach run between the time school is out and the meeting starts has seemed a good idea, and here I am, salty and present. I exasperate my wife by zipping out for a run just a bit before we should be getting ready for a social event; I run north on Lucia past where as a child I used to take art lessons with a gang of kids from the retired sheriff’s wife and then down to Herondo heading for the beach or the Strand, pounding along this famous sidewalk up to the Manhattan line and back for a quick six. I know these places so well, locals-only short cuts, back alleys, cul de sacs, or along the wide extended park that divides Valley and Ardmore in Hermosa with a sandy running trail and banks of ice plant, then down the walk streets along this inner map to the Strand again and home, the cardio push to regain elevation to the dune and the hills and up our front steps.

In the daytime, at least at the beach, these runs are accompanied by a great determined herd, for running is now the thing, and baggy shorts have not yet come into style, so there are a lot of tight hams and upper legs pumping along in front of one, and on Saturdays there are busy professional people finally with some time for exercise, and these are tall, often quite hairy men in good shoes, and this is the era of the male perm, and these men have large, afro-like perms haloing their lean, alert, white faces, and they resent having to stop, will tell people off because in pausing for the bike or baby carriage they’ve lost the optimal cardio peak, and when they sprint to the Manhattan Pier pumping their long legs in a last burst of effort, and then stop at their designated terminus, they bounce walk a few steps in a circle shaking it out, with a finger on a carotid artery counting pulse rates to a digital watch. The idea is to capitalize immediately on the fruits of one's self-improvement for a quick and substantial return, and this gleaming curation of gain is a new note of the time, an investment of suspect joy, and accounts for the intense quantification of all activity, split times, paces and beats per minute, all loudly traded with running rivals, as well as mileage totals and their quarterly accumulations.

But the night runs are the actual magic, and this I badly need. Mother for some reason, as a Midwestern cultivator, has always found the phrase "night blooming Jasmine" a bit of  Southern California exotica, like Grauman's Chinese or The Garden of Allah, and never fails to pronounce its name with humor, but I rely on this fragrant maker of screens and privacy hedges to guide me down our evening street to the elementary school on Beryl. There pepper tree shapes are broadcast onto the stucco walls in the benign schoolyard lights of yellow and light gold, and I head east to cross Prospect and past the apartments facing the Vons and then turn uphill on Harkness and move up this steep pitch past the dog park and across the Edison Company easement below the great tangent towers striding east and the humming, catenary flow of the lines in the suddenly big night, and on across 190th and down Harkness to Van Horne where now it's tiny and intimate again, streets with little houses, low thronging silhouettes of dwarf lemon, one story starters and rentals with many Mexican families, some homes stucco and some frame. These are neighborhoods where in high school mother has recruited me to help deliver donated prom dresses paid for by her clerical staff association, and you go up little banks of steps and knock on doors and hand in the box to the girl's mother, a measured, polite black haired lady at the door, and the girl herself in the living room beaming on the sofa, and this memory trails along the sidewalk as well, a small full joy; there are duplexes with succulents and palms, cars snugged into short driveways and hilltop views past trailing branches of eucalyptus east into the basin now shining up in its many lights. Then past the rusted fence and stuccoed retaining wall of St Guadalupe, the Catholic school, its playground fitted to its hilly, angular lot. The west side of Prospect here has narrow sidewalks, no yards, just entrances onto the street, so you run inches past these doors and windows and tiny courts quiet or glowing inside with TV as you're breathing, and this stretch is best in a light rain or mist, and the light is poor but you can still see the sidewalk and it’s actually thrilling flying by like this, like running for a moment through these people’s lives or just outside them in the rain but so near the skin, the interior, in but not of, secretly and in the dark, an intimacy and a strange knowing. Like skimming past the houses of parents and relations, it's a flirtation with belonging, to observe these beloved spaces magically unknown and unattached.

When the approaching lights of Artesia with the big boulevard's liquor stores and gas stations start to loom too brightly it’s time to turn back, up the other side of Prospect, toward the dark again, more lawns on this side but still miniature, grass behind concrete block retaining walls and chain link, and potted succulents, and by this time you really need to have the song going in a solid, seamless repeat, it's a fine line achieving this state but it must truly fill the head, the ineffable Stevie Nicks and the loping bass, thunder only happens when it's raining, and always with full emotion, for without this you will only struggle and plod.

But with the song you can run fluently, in an otherness, a rhythm, a groove, and home at last can rest on your stoop with steam rising off your back in peace, looking out at the squat garage and behind it the alley where skunks and possums roam. In this backyard mind, you're invested in the presence of the rhythm, because without it there's a frightening bleakness, a Santa Ana with its freight of inland glare and low humidity, so it's vital that there be some alternative called up in the running because night running is the dream and the days are going past in such a waking blur.    

Finally, there's the curdled sheen even of the reverend onshore, a surfeit of grey. The whole family, for instance, they're all around too. No matter how fleetly you feel you're running past these people, entwining them in your routes without them suspecting, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins not far off, on the contrary, it's just as when you were growing up, they know where you are, are swapping tales about you, winking and making allowances as they always have, and one morning my cousin from the next block over has dropped by knocking on the door at 7 while I'm getting ready for school. He's 5, maybe 6 years older, he's never been all that trustworthy, his family is pretty odd—ok, he was an Eagle Scout, a pow wow dancer and a surfer and a Navy orderly in Vietnam, but then he manages to lose the family dog, he drops a pet kinkajou on Aunt Nancy's back at a family get together and makes her scream, he gets a pet fox and keeps it in his room and it eats into his mattress and won't come out, then while enrolled at community college he's dating a girl still in high school and gets her pregnant and has to get married, then has a couple of kids with her, then separates, then is picked up for shoplifting Tylenol outside the Thrifty down by the pier and later in East LA somewhere is found by the police passed out in a van parked on an industrial street with his kids, two toddlers, it's his weekend with them, they're on the seat behind him, and he's out cold—and here he is at the door somehow radiant with this sheen, it's a grey sort of glow on his teeth and his eyes aren't quite right. He gives me the hipster's head nod and eyebrow raise, the significant distant smile; he's heard I'm teaching and jogging, he says, and of course he's heard this, I'm right there on the street a block away from him, easily seen and talked about, so he's jogged by at seven to let me know he also jogs and teaches, in fact he's jogging right now past our house despite the heavy shoes he's got on and the blue jeans and what seem to be long johns. Years ago at the urging of parents, I played war with him and gangs of neighbor kids behind his house in a vacant lot of black-eyed Susan's and foxtails before the last of the subdivision went in, and this was a lonely and alien experience part of which has always remained for me as a singular emanation of his being. All my life he has been the shadowy origin of brotherly hand-me-downs negotiated between my father and Ray's father, also named Ray, for like me, Ray is a "Jr." to his dad, this is the family thing, naming kids for themselves in self-satisfied homage. So we are both namesakes, and there's been the flow of the needful from Ray to me over the years, the pack frame and the clarinet and the bicycle, a straggling debt. "You're teaching at Redondo huh," he asks, "nice!" and he's gone there too, of course, but now he teaches martial arts he says, and the teeth show wetly again, this pearlescent sheen that so matches the sky, and the feeling is he hasn't quite gotten to bed in a while, and also won't quite leave the porch. I'm feeling anxious he wants to come in when he adds, I'm a sensei! with the big eyebrow raise again and another wide moist smile built around a pregnant pause. But then to my relief he finally jogs off, smiling back and waving chugging up our little hill, a grimace for my benefit, really working out, my cousin, my kin, looking ill and grey in the heavy clothes.

Neal Snidow writes and photographs in Magalia, CA. His work has appeared in Catamaran Literary Review, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. His book Vista Del Mar: a memoir of the ordinary, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2016. For more information and a photo gallery, please visit nealsnidow.com.

Anna Stacy

House

 I knew I was in winter before I opened my eyes. The light through my eyelids was purple, not red, and the air was thick. But it wasn’t snowing, not that day. When it’s snowing, the light glows white from the sun reflecting off of the ground. It’s just different.

And I knew I was alone because it was dead quiet. Not the humming and buzzing of end of the world-quiet, not the soft music of nebula-quiet. A still, still quiet, like the cold of stars and the white of paper. The cry of a crow ripped through it and a dozen more joined in chorus: haw haw haw!

I wondered where I was and took the wonder as a good sign. I was going to get up today, maybe even go outside. Look around. See people.

So I counted backwards from 60 then pushed the covers off and swung my feet to the floor before I could stop myself. My toes curled against the old warped hardwood and my feet stung. The house’s heat had only just turned on.

I pulled back a corner of the curtain to inspect our surroundings. We were in a frozen field beneath a grey and clouded sky. The unkempt, tawny grass stretched out for a mile in all directions. The sun peeked weakly from between the tops of conifers at the field’s edge to my right. Evening. And far ahead, a road, and beyond that, a squat residential skyline with a water tower. WESTFIELD, it said.

“No way,” I said. “No fucking way.”

The radiator tapped and groaned. I grabbed a sweatshirt off the floor and ran down to the kitchen, my bare feet slapping the carpeted stairs, then linoleum. Exactly 37 steps from the bedroom.

We’d never been to the same place twice, the house and I. Not exactly the same place, anyway. Westfield couldn’t be too unusual a name for a town but I recognized the buildings in the distance, the air, even though it had been summer last time. My heart ticked and whirred like something mechanical. The clouds of my breath hung in the frigid kitchen air as I turned on the kettle. The clock said 2008.

So Jackson had met me.

I knew I’d kept his address, in case, and as the water boiled, I tried to remember exactly where. The coffee was almost gone, but I could pick some up. We hadn’t been anywhere with coffee in a few days. Mug in hand, I made my way into the library, 25 steps from the kitchen. Liquid dribbled out of the mug as I walked.

It wasn’t in Pollock: la Dissimulation d’image, nor was it in The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent. At long last, I found it tucked into Birds of Florida next to the first page of a chapter entitled “Birds of Jacksonville.”

Jackson Daniels, it said. 144 Calden Lane. Westfield, NH 06042, USA. April 24? 2003.

I changed, then put on my coat and boots in the entryway, 32 steps from my bedroom instead of the usual 46 because I ran.

“I’ll be back soon,” I told the house. My skin buzzed. “Soon, soon,” I said. My breaths were fast and tight and hovered in my throat. The keys were in my hand and my hand was in my pocket. I opened the door and pulled myself outside. It closed behind me and I checked the brass knob to make sure it was locked.

My beautiful white house with the red door, the brown tiled roof, the peeling paint and crooked windows. A chunk of the chimney was still somewhere around Beta Andromedae, and one of the windows had circular, nippled glass from a 19th century repair, but it was perfect and I loved it and it was mine.

I walked down to the road, anemic grass crunching underfoot.

Jackson’s house was a sort of slate color, with a grey roof and a grey door with a screen over it. When I knocked, no one answered for 28 seconds. But then he opened the grey door and he was just there on the other side of the screen.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Casey?”

“Hey, Jackson.”

“Holy shit,” he said, making the vowels long. Then he said it again: “Holy shit. What are you doing here? I thought you don’t come to the same place twice.”

“First time for everything,” I replied. “Wanna go walk around?”

Jackson grinned. “Lemme put on some layers. It’s chilly, right?” And he let me in.

I don’t like other people’s houses much, not that I’ve been in many. Most just aren’t right, they’re either too clean or too cluttered or simply lifeless. But Jackson’s was systematically untidy. A stack of takeout containers towered, interlocking, by the door. Dishes piled high in the sink. Books and magazines in little turrets on tables and chairs. Jackson was neat in his messiness and had life pouring out of every corner.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

I laughed. “How long has it been since we last saw each other?”

“Five years.”

“I think it’s been about eight for me,” I said. “So I’ve been everywhere.”

Jackson stuck his head out of the closet and grinned wickedly. “Do you know how I die?”

“Nope. And I wouldn’t tell you even if I did.”

He emerged, jacket in hand. “Nah, I bet you know. I’ve always thought I’d die in some heroic, badass way. Like rescuing people from a fire or something.”

I snorted.

“I’m taking your silence as a yes!” he crowed. “I die a hero!”

“Come on,” I opened his door. “Let’s go! You’re so slow.”

The grey sky hung heavily above us, so low and close that our heads grazed the bellies of the clouds. “It’s a weekday, isn’t it?” I asked. “No one’s really around.”

“Yeah, but I am. One of the perks of freelance!”

“Freelance? I thought you worked at that bar.”

Jackson’s mouth tightened. “Nah, not anymore,” he said. “Sam Harvey’s shut down last year. Crap economy.” Then he smirked. “So no free rum-and-cokes this time.”

“They were not free! It was a fair trade. Info for drinks.”

“Info for info, Casey. It’s called a conversation.”

“You didn’t have to give me those drinks,” I said.

“Yes, I did! I’ve never been out of the country and you were telling me about Easter Island. Easter. Island. I didn’t even know that people lived there. Thought it was just those big heads.”

“Where did you think the big heads came from?”

Jackson shrugged sheepishly. I rolled my eyes and he laughed through his nose. His smile was so simple, so present. “You know, I’d never told anyone before I told you,” I admitted.

“About your…” He gestured with his hands as if hoping the right word would appear between them. “Situation?” he finished.

“Yeah.”

“Why, it just never came up?”

We laughed and our breath fogged the air in front of our faces. “So why?” Jackson prompted.

“I dunno, I just didn’t have anyone worth telling it to.”

Jackson didn’t respond. When I gathered the nerve I looked over at him. He was beaming.

“Oh god,” I said. “There goes your ego.”

“No, no!” Jackson insisted. “No, I’m good, I’m good. No ego here.”

“Right.”

“I just have to ask,” he said. “Why did you tell me?”

“I’m not sure. You just looked so content, and you love it here so much. You love being here.”

I heard him breathe in sharply. “Well. Sometimes.”

 “No, I mean. You were perfectly okay with being so stationary and I thought that was incredible. You don’t need to move, you don’t need to go anywhere, you can be right here and be happy. I’ve never felt that sort of stillness. That centeredness. Ever.”

“And?”

“And that’s it. I dunno, I liked how happy you seemed.”

We walked along in silence for a bit.

 “So come on, tell me about where you’ve been,” Jackson said. “Tell me everything.”

“It was eight years, I can’t possibly tell you everything.”

“Eight years,” he echoed, and shook his head. “Okay, fine. Just the highlights, then. Like a top five list or something.”

We turned down a street called Skunks Misery Lane. It was lined with identical houses with small identical lawns and identical driveways.

“I was at the final NASA launch a few weeks ago,” I told him. “Right there, in Cape Canaveral. The house was on a beach not too far away, and I could see it from my window. I could feel it, too. The beach shook, the waves shook, the whole house shook. And I could feel it hot on my face, even from that far away. It was so bright that I couldn’t see a single star. And then the house moved, not too long after. Maybe a minute or two later.”

“When was that?”

“Um. 2011, I think? But NASA gets a reboot in the 40s.”

“Tell me more.”

We passed two young children playing with a pile of sticks in a front yard. Jackson stuck a cigarette between his lips and shielded the end as his lit it. He took a long drag.

“I’m not sure where I was, but once I saw a sunset in this sort of rocky desert. Not really sure when it was, either, I didn’t check, but there were no people around, and when it got dark I couldn’t see any cities so it must’ve been long ago. Or maybe a long time from now. But that sunset, it was. Wide. These orange, pink clouds sort of hung up against purple. I’m not making it sound right. But it was so big, I felt like it wrapped around my ears, you know? And then it got cold and I went back in the house.”

“I’ve never been to a desert,” Jackson admitted. “Or a beach. Well, the lake sort of has a beach, but it doesn’t have sand or anything. Just kelp and mud and clay.”

“The beaches on Io are ice,” I told him, and then watched him get lost in the image of it for a little as we walked side by side down the road.

And then: “Go on.”

“I saw Arcturus die.”

“Who’s that?”

“No, it’s a star. I saw it from Lambda Boötis – it’s a. Well, it’s another star. Arcturus sort of puckered and it bruised and then burst. It looked like it was in pain. Is that a thing? But then the star’s outer layer was pushed away into this cloud, you know, a nebula. And then the UV radiation made the surrounding gas light up and the whole thing glowed in these oranges and blues and whites and colors I just can’t explain. It was beautiful, and so sad to think that I was the only one there when it died.”

“Is our sun is going to die?” Jackson looked at me.

I didn’t look back at him as we came to the end of Skunks Misery. “Which way?” I asked.

“Um…left.” And then we were on Horeshoe Road. “That’s only three.”

“Right.” I paused. “Top five best or top five most interesting?”

Jackson squinted and pursed his lips. “Most interesting,” he decided.

“Okay. So one day last year – two years ago? No, last year. We were somewhere in China, 24th or 25th century–.”

“We? You were with someone?”

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. Despite his casual tone, the look of polite curiosity on his face had a sort of forced quality. Jackson caught my glance and he raised his eyebrows.

“I mean me and the house. The house and I. Just us.”

“Ah,” Jackson said. I turned away and smiled.

“Anyway,” I continued. “China, mid-2nd millennium. So still Earth, so the house didn’t provide oxygen or anything, but the pollution there is so bad, apparently it’s almost totally uninhabitable. Definitely no one lives on the ground, because I went out looking. I really needed air, I just couldn’t breathe. But there was no one there, and I almost passed out. I managed to make it back to the house before I did, and then I just lay in bed and tried not to move. There were airships, though, I could hear them, but I couldn’t get them on my com. My Mandarin is rusty, in any case.”

“Shit,” Jackson said. Another long drag on the cigarette. “So that’s four.”

“Alright,” I said. “Number five.”

And I stopped walking and stood directly in front of Jackson so I could see his face as I told him. “I saw the start of time.”

His eyes widened but he said nothing.

“Three years ago.”

Haw haw! called a family of crows above against the darkening night.

“What was it like?”

“I can’t tell you. No, not because I don’t want to,” I said when he opened his mouth to protest. “Because I don’t know how. But there’s music at the start of time, just like at the end of the world. And the sky opened up like a wound. I was so afraid.”

Jackson dropped his cigarette to the ground and rubbed it into the wet pavement with the toe of his boot. “Don’t you get lonely?”

“No,” I said immediately.

“You do,” he said. “You do.”

“No,” I said. “I have the house. And the whole universe.”

I stepped away from him and kept walking. He fell in step beside me.

“My turn,” he said. “Let me show you one of my top five.”

And we didn’t speak as he led me through Westfield, and then we were back at his place. I made my way up the steps to his door. The sky was dark and clear and the first stars had begun to bloom.

“No,” he said. “Back here.” And we went through a gate next to the house. He reached over the top to undo the latch and then held it open for me.

He had a small backyard, really just a patch of grass lined with flagstones. “Come here,” he said, holding out a hand for me. We lay together, backs to the cold ground.

“Do you have parents?”

“I must have, at one point. I don’t know.”

“So who named you Casey?”

“Someone when I was a kid. 1970s, I think. Scotland. I have other names, too.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Amaliax. And Beta Four.”

“I’ll stick to Casey.” He turned to me and beamed.

I shivered.

“Look,” he said, and pointed up. His arm stuck straight into the air.

“What?”

“The stars.”

I turned my head to him and grass was in my ear. “I’ve seen stars,” I said.

“Not like this.”

And I looked, and with him there in that tiny corner of the world under the sky that belonged to no one, I felt so small.

“You don’t have to be alone,” he said. “You could stay.”

I can’t stay. I don’t belong to anywhere, or to anyone. I wouldn’t know how. But I didn’t know how to say that, so I just said “No.”

The eye of the moon looked down on us. I wondered what we looked like from that great height. We lay there and the stars moved, slowly, slowly. We said nothing.

“What time is it?” I asked.

Jackson tapped a button on his phone and narrowed his eyes at the bright light of the screen. “11:47.”

I sprang up. “I have to go,” I said. “Now.”

“What?” Jackson scrambled to his knees. “Now? Why?”

“The house leaves at midnight. Always at midnight.”

His eyes widened. “Where is it?”

“A field off of 78.”

He scrambled in his pockets. “We’ll take my car.”

I kept my head out of the window the whole way there. The stars sang overhead and the cold air stung. My heart rang in my ears.

When we got to the field, I tumbled out of the car without closing the door and Jackson ran after me. The house was just ahead, and I ran. The grass crunched underfoot.

And then the house, my house, began to shiver and shake like an image on a broken screen. It flickered in and out of here and now.

I barely breathed and my feet flew.

And then it was gone.

I kept running at it.

“Casey,” called Jackson. “Casey, did it go?”

“No,” I said. “It can’t have. It’ll come back for me. It’s all I’ve got.”

But the field lay just as it had before. No house. Not even an indent in the grass where it had been. My home with the red door and the half-chimney.

“Casey. It’s gone.”

And the moon stared at me, all alone. The stars said nothing.

Anna Stacy (she/they) is a writer, actor, medical student, and multi-tasker from New York. She loves a good story and hates being bored. Anna’s writing has been published in the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, The Apothecary, and Academic Emergency Medicine, and can be found on-screen in the award-winning web series Dead-Enders. For more on what else Anna's been doing when they should be studying, visit anna-stacy.squarespace.com.

Ev Waugh

Matters of Love

I found him.

He was cruising down Fore Street, swiveling about the sidewalk on a Penny board whose smallness made his body look too large as it gravitated toward mine. It was wet, and I was walking with my head down, examining the cracks on the sidewalk and the worms that had come up from underground to the unforgiving pavement so that they could die. I heard wheels scraping cement, and as I glanced up, our eyes met momentarily. His wheel bit the crack suddenly. All at once he came crashing off his board and off the sidewalk, there was a terrible thud of body on street and our fates had been sealed.

Our love knew no unfolding. First it wasn’t there, then it was. Maybe you believe love’s happenstance—a temporal, hormonal, and geographic accident. Maybe your grandfather married your grandmother simply because she was the woman who lived down the hall when he was a man of the right age for sex and for marriage. My own best friend, Sylvie, picked the boy from calculus simply because he spoke to her the first day of classes. And when I was in highschool, only a freshman, I’d walk the halls holding the hand of the boy in the house across the street and two doors down, three years older than I was, my brother’s best friend. He was tall, I thought then, and smelled like Axe and chewed mint gum and smoked Newports, and he held his curls back with pomade, an impossibly sexy, adult decision. And we were unsupervised. I’d kiss him in the woods behind my house on his black hoodie he’d lay over the leaves, and I’d run home when the sun set, giddy, afraid of being caught.

And that was love to me: obvious, fun, convenient and flimsy. It’s easy to make mistakes and to be tricked about love. People want love, even if fake love, and the fact is that love operates on levels we don’t fully understand. And so we’re liable to kiss boys or court neighbors and call it what it isn’t, and that’s fine, if you aren’t overly concerned with truth.

But I want to understand love, and I want you to understand love, too. And despite my mistakes and bad judgement and the simple, Newtonian approaches to love of me, you, and everyone we know, I’m certain of this one salient fact: love’s no accident. It’s predetermined, an axiom posited in space by some omniscient matchmaker, and it churns, love, before even your birth, somewhere in the ether. It stews and it waits.

I slid over to the puddle of body to inspect it. I offered him my hand and he took it, my acquiescent lover. I lifted his torso by the hand and considered the grime caked around the nail beds, and then I considered all of him. He wore a flannel with more holes in it than fabric, he had hair that was matting, patches strewed the denim of his greasy pants, and I could smell quite easily that he wasn’t wearing deodorant, characteristic of all authentic crusties I have known.

Our exchange was brief. I expressed obligatory concern while he swore he was fine. And then we both walked in two separate directions—and I was possessed with the sudden knowing that I could love him, deeply, truly, exclusively, if he would let me. This was day one of the rest of my life.

He made no great effort to contact me after we first met, and, I’ll admit it, this hurt. I repeatedly posted to Maine Missed Connections, in hopes that he was searching for me, too, with a physical description of myself and my message to him:

fore street crust punk,

you smell like love and patchouli.

 i want to patch the holes in your flannel with my❤.

I checked for responses five times daily, and many more on lonely days. I got ready each morning with him in mind. I stared at the pores in the face in the mirror, poking at the nose, curling the lashes. Would he prefer minimal makeup? Curled or straightened hair? Black pants or denim skirt? I knew nothing about him. I was inert with uncertainty. How can one tailor oneself to please an enigma?  I’d stand there, taking myself in, all of me, and I’d worry. I’d worry that I was ridiculous looking, or too vain, or too untidy. I’d worry he wouldn’t like my personality. Maybe I was too loud, or overbearing, or just generally uninteresting. Or, worst of all, what Sylvie calls “tolerable in small doses”—she’s never said this about me, not to my face, but I worry about it often, still. How could I know if I were tolerable only in small doses? And how could I fix it, even if I did know?

 I wanted so badly to see him, to prove that I could be just the right amount, to prove that I could be not boring, not loud, and always tolerable. My desire was crescendo, everyday accumulating more longing.

When going or coming to or from work, I went out of my way to walk down Fore Street, calculative, slow, eyeing the spot where his body had been. At first, I only took this route around noon, the hour we first met. Eventually, by the twentieth day of the rest of my life, I found myself there at least four times daily. Each time I saw some punk kid cruising by I was sure it must be him. It never was. I was beginning to wonder if I had dreamed him—did he really exist? It occurred to me that I didn't even know his name, and this was crushing.

The nights got lonelier. I imagined him to be a Scorpio: shy, but not irredeemably so. I imagined that he brushed his teeth with clove and myrrh essential oils and made incredible banana pancakes. I didn’t imagine him to be clean, I’m not so naive. I’d picture the grime between the tiles, in the sink. The dust on the base of the bedside lamp. I didn’t mind. I imagined long postcoital discussions on the failings of our past relationships and our desire to be together, our mutual understanding that this was different—that this time would be different. I imagined that the Fore Street Crust Punk was actually quite complex under his crust; I imagined that he read The Greats (but preferred Bakunin to Proust) and volunteered at the needle exchange and never really identified as a Scorpio, though it did fit him, he’d allow sometimes. I fantasized that he went to all the same parties I did, always just around the corner, lost in a sea of bodies, flat Allagash in hand, desperately seeking me as I sought him, too. In our perpetual pursuit of each other, we were caught in a tragedy, a cosmic joke, the will of the gods to make us wait just a little bit longer for one another. Like squirrels circling a tree, eternally clutching the other side, always just out of reach.

So I began asking around at the parties. I cared little about the friends at the parties. They were like the stock photographs that came in frames, meant to be tossed and replaced by something personal, something mine. I asked if they had seen the Fore Street Crust Punk, endlessly to no avail, but at these parties, all within a couple miles of Fore Street, I was certain he must be lurking. I was with him in my dreams—that boyish smile, that clumsiness, that patch of blue in his hair. I couldn’t sit through a lecture at university—I was flunking physics, so I switched my major from engineering to English. In this new epoch of my life, every single paper I turned in was about him. The professors wrote in the margins cliché, trite, and I really don’t want to know all of this about you, but what did they know? Have they ever known true love? Doubtful.

The heart of the issue is that most people will never know true love, I said on the Eve of the forty-seventh day on the high stools in the window at Rosie’s, perched and overlooking Fore Street with the other intern who was young, obliging, and drunk. A good-looking man approached. His ironed shirt was stuffed into jeans, a symbol of his great taste and moderation. He pointed his beard at me when he asked me what I was having.

I glanced over at my coworker for backup, and her eyes were urging me on, thrilled at my luck. I couldn’t believe she found this man attractive. I was entirely trapped here between her and a man with bleached teeth who probably lives in one of those ridiculous miniature condos all the way up at the very top of Munjoy, who likely lists On The Road, Cat’s Cradle, and The God Delusion as his favorite books in his Tinder bio. I was a deer caught in the headlights, a roach trapped under a Dixie Cup, and like an epiphany sadness hit me. And then clarity, and then I knew why the worms come up from underground to drown themselves on sun-laden pavement when the sky rains. I was disgusted by the presumptuousness of the man at the bar and the predictability of the intern. By the things they were willing to settle for.

And so I got up. I left.

Alone, at night, I left the bar full of men to seek the one whom I could not stop thinking about like a believer leaves church to witness Christ in His Flesh—you, who lives at the bottom of every drink that I should not have ordered. I’ve believed, since learning about love and its mysteries, that someone would come into my life and find themself suddenly obsessed with me, uncontrollably overcome with attraction, and then everything would just fall perfectly into place. An astral alignment of hearts. When I met you, I knew I’d found him. So I left the bar to find you. But I didn’t find you. I didn’t find you on Fore Street, or on Craigslist, at any of the parties, or at the bar, and that night, I didn’t even find you in my dreams.

I woke up empty and desperate. Quickly I realized I had to purge myself of you. I googled help i’m a romanceaholic and I scrolled through AA meeting after AA meeting until I finally stumbled upon a six-day women’s retreat in Arizona.  The retreat was designed for women torturing and sabotaging themselves with their incessant pursuits of love.

An immersive series of empowering and life-changing workshops, read the site’s landing, above the link for payment, frees its patrons of their romantic bondage and allows them to finally live according to their Own True Nature, and “Own True Nature” was to be read as Single.

And so I paid the fees, bought a ticket to West Sedona, and, three days later, I was with my people. This was the cock’s crow of my recovery, and I thank you for that, Fore Street Crust Punk. Thank you for aiding in the abolition of this woman. This was day forty-seven of the rest of my life.

Everything we do in Sedona we do nude.

We meditate nude. We perform trust building exercises: fall into each other's arms, put blindfolds on one another and lead one another around by the wrists, take turns making intense eye contact, and play two truths and a lie, all nude. Together we go to therapy, nude, and talk about our obsession and our loving and our loneliness. In the evenings, after lunch and meditation hour, we leave each other to go to hypnotherapy. We attend workshops about trusting our intuition, and workshops about learning to distinguish our intuition from our horrible, neurotic search for partnership.

The hypnotherapist wears clothes. In five days of thirty minute sessions, she hypnotizes us not to fall in love anymore, at least not for a little while.

“Your desperate appeals for attention are symptomatic of your soul’s amnesia of its true nature,” she says, tugging at her sleeve, and I wonder if she doesn’t wish she were nude, too, or that I was clothed. She tells me my soul is psychic. Once I realize my innate perfection, the goddess state I share with every other being, I won’t need love anymore.

“Until then, hypnosis will help.”

The ranch is full of well-intentioned women made unlovable by some shortcoming or excess. One woman clears her throat constantly and dashes around, butting in front of other romanceaholics at breakfast or before group sessions or during relaxation hours. One has a dead ex-husband about whom she can’t stop talking, always ruining the eggs and greens in the mess hall with her chattering. I assumed she also did this on first dates, or to strangers at the bus stop. One woman has a Dextromethorphan habit. All of us exhibited some awful trait. None of us were spared and all of us were roughly equal in that we were here at all.

And yet I began to envy the women at the retreat. They were odd, sure, but older, in their forties, fifties: desperate but settled. Comfortable. A sort of neurodivergence that carried too many bags and knitted in church and wore fuchsia lipstick that bled all over, but not one that lit itself on fire or mailed love and hate letters to its exes or stabbed holes in tires. Next to them, I felt volatile, radioactive. They sought love wherever they could get it in earnest, with a calm, knowing want and a wisdom about it. But I yearned deeply for the Crust Punk and I did burn; I did light myself on fire every chance I’ve had. I began to feel bitter.

Danicka was in her late fifties and had the DXM habit. The frames of her small, round glasses sat practically flush with her eyes and magnified the irises. She looked like a possum with long, fine, shiny hair. In the mess hall she told me the retreat was her last hope at finding some semblance of independence, some stability or peace. She had gone broke, she said, not once or twice but three times—her irises grew when she said it, to show emphasis—paying a man’s way—housing him, feeding him, clothing him, buying the phone he used to swipe right on the one who came next, someone beautiful and young, she said, and I felt guilty when she said it, as if all youth was in cahoots, sabotaging the relationships of their elders with their health and allure.

“And then he disappeared,” she said. A ghost, each one of him, each time. “And even after he was gone, the last guy, I didn’t even cancel the card.”

“You thought he’d be back.”

“I did.”

“That’s valid,” I said, but it wasn’t valid. It was dumb. Danicka was dumb, but she wasn’t cursed or star-crossed, so I said “I’m sure you’re really very great, and if you could just find someone to love you back—”

“How?” Her eyes were desperate, searching mine for some answer or at least some register of the hopelessness of her situation. “It never works.”

And I believed her, and I let it go, because she looked sadder then, as if the possibility that there was still hope, that she had to keep dating, was more awful than the prospect of completing some workshops and dying happily alone.

What Danicka can’t accept, and what I didn’t say, is that Danicka herself isn’t a major problem. Her taste in men is her problem. If she could just step far enough away from herself to see that she was self-selecting for men who would use her and ghost her, then and only then she could find someone nicer, simpler. Someone who didn’t like her for her gullibility alone.

And then everything could work out fine for Danicka, and for most of the other women at the ranch. Kids, marriage, homes in Cape Cod, monetary support while they write the next great American novel—all are possibilities for women such as these. The horizons of the lovescapes of the ladies at the retreat were full of promise, because their demands, their requirements for love, were simple, actionable. Like your grandfather or Sylvie—or like me, at one point, in my youth—they all just want someone to fill the time.

Danicka and I sat in rattan patio chairs and sipped lemonade, virgin, and it was red all around us, in the dirt, off in the horizon, red, red. There were small, shallow fountains huddling in the corners of the patio, and the sun reflected off the surface of the water and hurt my eyes, and I looked at Danicka, her own shallow eyes, and from her brows to the crown of her cheeks, her drained, grey complexion looked beautiful and glowed in the light of golden hour.

“I don’t think I could ever settle,” I said, and practiced eye contact. “I’m looking for something perfect.”

“Like what?”

“Like something…written in the stars.”

“Well. That seems reasonable to me.”

“Thanks.”

“If you’re holding out, and that does it for you, why’d you come here?”

“I don’t know. I’m miserable.”

“…”   

“Sorry. That was intense.”

“No, I just… I don’t think you’re a romanceaholic,” she shook her head quickly and looked down, then back up at me, and I found I wasn’t practicing eye contact anymore, but really wanted to look at her, and to be seen by her. “I don’t think that’s the problem.”

“Oh, okay. What’s my problem, then?”

She snorted and the other women, themselves beautiful in the gold and the red of the light, looked at us. I squirmed.

“Why do you bother thinking so much about love, if you think it’s fated? According to your own theories, it’s out of your hands. So why not just live? You can’t do anything about it, anyway.”

“That’s called fatalism, Danicka. Aristotle covered that.”

“Listen, I get it. You went to college. All I’m saying is, you’re young. Breathe.”

“Okay,” I said, a little wounded.

“Good.”

“Danicka…” 

“Yes?”

“Why do you drink so much cold medicine?”

“Because I like it.”

In the workshops and the hypnotherapy and the trust exercises I find love for myself and for the other women around me, sisters of my illness. I am determined for my sake and theirs to be empowered, independent, and unattached. Single, imperturbable—impenetrable. Free of the Crust Punk, I would build a fort around myself with cinder blocks of calm, stacked and cemented, my new life. 

And so I returned to work that next Tuesday, on the fifty-third day of the rest of my life. There’s the intern from Rosie’s, and she’s glowing, so I’m certain she’s been sleeping with the perfect man from the bar. I swallow and focus on being my new more level-headed self. There’s my cubicle, and there’s the copy machine. I make the copies in the copy machine and I put them in the cubicle, and I feel all the better for it. This is living. This is calm. This is mental stability. I do it thrice more, the copy-cubicle dance, and then it’s time for a fifteen-minute break. I’ve earned it.

A new assistant is slated to start today. There will be doughnuts in the breakroom. I stroll with forced contentment towards the fluorescence and the noise. There’s the refrigerator with the passive-aggressive coworker notes. There’s the coffee maker, ever tasting of caked on muck. There’s the Styrofoam cup, there’s the absence of the mug I keep forgetting to bring in and—miraculously—there’s you.

There you are, Fore Street Crust Punk, only you don’t look so crusty anymore. Suddenly clean shaven, with no sign of matting hair, no denim in sight, shoes new and leather, a nose straighter, without crook, and your eyes so lucid, your teeth white and straight, your glasses, designer, and you’re drinking the bad coffee from the Styrofoam cup, an icon of professionalism, of all the things I’d imagined you would hate, and you glance up at me. Our eyes met momentarily. All at once I know.

I found you.

Ev Waugh is a writer raised in Riverdale, Maryland and living in Portland, Maine. She has a B.A. in philosophy and works in science publishing. Her writing has appeared in Goat's Milk Magazine, Portland Magazine, and other publications.

Scout Roux

Real Life

I am looking for a woman who rode the number 18 bus late last Tuesday night. I would like to apologize for my unkindness.

She didn’t know I was being unkind, because it all took place inside my head. Even so, I’d like a chance to explain myself. She can reach me by phone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx. Texting is preferred.

The time was between 10:00 and 10:30 PM. I had just got off a long shift at the restaurant. The woman wore a dark brown wool overcoat over a blue turtleneck. She had a pearl necklace and wrinkled cheeks in powdered blush. Her smell was lemon and sage, like a chicken, I thought bitterly, because I’d already decided the moment she stepped on that I hated her completely.

Hate is a strong word that I try not to use in my real life, but on the bus is not real life. On the bus is the interstice of the rusty chain link fence of my life. It is clusters of minutes where every day my conscience slouches its shoulders inside me and I become a little worse of a person.

The woman sat on the right hand side of the bus a few rows up from me, having got on at the hospital stop with all the worn out second shift nurses. She pressed a cell phone to her ear and stared down at her hand on which sat a fat sapphire ring.

She said, “I got there just in time, right before someone came to take him away.” The reflection of the ring glinted in the dark window as she turned it round and round on her finger.

She waited a while as the person on the other end of the line spoke. She shook her head even though they couldn’t see her, an action which frustrated me in its futility. Not that I was watching or listening, just seeing and hearing. My headphones ran out of battery earlier in the day, no doubt contributing to my sour disposition.

“No,” she said, “I didn’t get to say goodbye. By the time I got to the hospital…”

Who cares? I wanted to ask. Shut up, I wanted to say. I thought, couldn’t she sense how rude she was being, talking loudly on a bus full of strangers trying to go about their business?

“You’re my best friend,” she told the phone. “You know I couldn’t do this without you.”

I would like to apologize to this woman, because at that moment I imagined myself slapping the phone from her hand and watching as it slid across the dirty bus floor. Smiling as its large glass face shattered to little pieces. Laughing as she held her hand to her mouth, the big flashy ring close enough to knock on her front teeth.

Instead, I did perhaps an even more cruel thing: I ignored her as tears rolled down her cheeks, even though there were tissues in my bag. I looked out the dark window into nothingness, hazy orbs of light from unseen streetlamps, illuminating my own tired reflection. I pretended she wasn’t there.

Soon enough it was my stop. I walked past her and got off.

If you or anyone you know fits this description, please feel free to respond to this ad directly. I am best available between the hours of 8PM and 12AM. I am open to meeting in person at or outside my building during this time. If you can verify your identity, I will be happy to private message you my address.

“Open casket,” she was nearly shouting as the doors closed and the bus hissed again to its feet. “I’ve got the outfit all picked out.”

If you are this woman and you see this ad, I want you to know my own late husband’s ashes sit in the cabinet above the fridge with the liquor, where the children won’t be able to reach for several years. He did not leave behind a ring or anything else, only us. And that having thought about it, we could have much to talk about, you and I. I could maybe even offer some advice.

It took a long shower and a cold beer, but now I’ve finally calmed down. Now, the tissues sit heavy in my bag. Who knows, with how sore I am, if I’ll be able to lift it in the morning.

Scout Roux is a Wisconsin writer of short fiction and poetry. Their work has been published in Barstow & Grand, The Allegheny Review, and Wild Roof Journal, among others. They can be found on Twitter @scoutroux.

Phoebe Tsang

1500 Hours

She needs 1500 hours of flying time to qualify for the airlines. So she sublets her rented Lakeshore loft for the summer, and flies north with her Commercial license. Yellowknife is a town of pilots. In Toronto, she’d be grounded by the cost of fuel alone.

On her first day, she walks into the Bush Pilot’s Brew Pub. Two old men with hawk noses and silver side wings wave her over.

I’m Arnie, and this is Hector. You can’t just stand there alone.

I don’t know anyone here.

Arnie’s left eyebrow goes skyward and she realises her words are no longer true.

Just like these former Air Force pilots, she loves the nuts and bolts of flying analog aircraft. Computerised dashboards take away the fun.

A pint of Arctic Brew later, they tell her: Finn Cameron operates a vintage fleet down Mackenzie Valley. He’s even got a couple DC-4s. With the original bomb-lock lights.

She’s always had a soft spot for the plain, sturdy Dakotas who do their stunt-work solo and unsung. Not like the Snowbirds, raucous as Canada geese gearing up for winter.

At Finn’s, she starts flying freight. Take-off at seven each morning. Cruising by seven-ten. The stops on her delivery route are like beads on the mala she bought last summer in Kensington Market: Gameti, Snare River, Norman Wells, Tulita, Wekweètì, Déline. Places with no roads in or out. Places you could touch down and never leave.

In Toronto, she’d be on her rooftop watching the Air Show alone. Here, she can walk into the nearest pub and feel at home among folks most comfortable 5000 feet above ground.

Summer hurtles past at the Bush Pilot’s Brew Pub. Arnie’s visiting family in Moose Jaw this Thanksgiving. He might stay through the new year, help out with some construction. Hector says he’ll go to his brother’s in Montreal.

What about you, kid? Heading back to the Big Smoke this fall?

I haven’t thought about it.

Never too early to make plans.

Before Yellowknife, the plan was Air Canada. Part-time job with full-time benefits. Work out of Toronto or Vancouver. Fly recreational on her downtime. Maybe start her own school. As if she could afford airport rent.

That was another life. You can’t dream the same dream twice.

Keep moving, keep your head above drowsy banks of low-lying cumulus. What’s the name of that bird that sleeps while they glide?

Hey kid, you all right? says Hector. Was it something I said?

Arnie stands up. Here, let me find you a napkin.

Hector says, I’ll go get us another round.

Swift, round tears map the stained cardboard coaster. One for each mala bead: Skyhawk, Dragon, Beaver, Norseman, Sunbird, Swallow, Nightingale, Sparrow…

Wherever you leave, you can’t go back. But she won’t settle. After all, she came here to fly.

Phoebe Tsang is a writer and violinist who makes music with words and tells stories through music. The author of the poetry collection "Contents of a Mermaid's Purse" (Tightrope Books), her fiction has appeared in the Asia Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Rivet Journal, and Broken Pencil Magazine. She is also a playwright and librettist. See more at www.phoebetsang.com.

Byron Spooner

Self Improvement

In April of that year, forty-some years ago, I met with my friend Henry and, for the first time, his friend Al, in the Carnival of Venice, an adobe-looking bar that sat slowly crumbling kitty-corner from World of Books Merchandise Center where I was then working. At that time World of Books was secretly owned by the giant New York book retailer, M&B—McCracken & Beech—I worked for. They’d been expanding, making deals left and right, buying up small chains all over the Northeast, and somewhere along the way, someone had tossed World of Books into one of those deals. Though they hadn’t exactly launched a publicity blitz about their acquisition, M&B owned the place, like it or not. There was no reason for the secrecy. Everyone who counted in the business knew. It occurred to me that with their law firm-sounding name and Fifth Avenue reputation they were simply embarrassed to own a vast warehouse in Newark stuffed with crappy used books, decades-old remainders and old-edition textbooks. But for my bosses, secrecy was a value in and of itself; you didn’t need a reason to keep things secret, you just did. Plus nothing seemed to embarrass them in the least.         

“Embarrassed? These gangsters?” a veteran coworker snorted when I told him my theory, “These guys would pimp their mothers out of the men’s room at the Apollo if they thought there was a dime in it.”  

I was working at World of Books, the gangsters assured me, on a strictly temporary basis—“Six, nine months, Jay, tops, really,” they told me, “Call it a ‘Special Assignment.’ Just ‘til things get straightened out.” The commute from the East Village was brutal; the working conditions either gulag frostbitten or Calcutta malarial. ‘Special Assignment,’ my ass; any way you sliced it, the rubbly streets of Newark were a giant step down from the stainless steel and glass of Fifth Avenue. I was just starting out; I didn’t think I had much say in things.

Ostensibly, I was on my lunch break. Henry and Al and I were officially supposed to talk about a deal to purchase a major load of books for M&B and, unofficially, secretly, a job. A job for me, in California, where my girlfriend, Becca, and I were planning to move. She was sick of the city, which was, you had to admit, getting shittier every day. I kind of liked it but I’d once told her I would go anywhere with her and now felt obligated.

Ever since I’d started in Newark Becca had been saying, "Certainly you can find a better class of people to associate with than those roughnecks over there." She had a pretty low opinion of Jersey and M&B. The city was dotted with leathery rare bookshops where nothing stirred for days at a time, the only sound the rustling of tweed. I think she imagined me working in one of those places, figuring that getting me into ‘a new situation’—new job, new friends, new environment—would make me into a new, and presumably better, person. It was like a self-improvement program only with outside supervision. This, in retrospect, was pretty much the point where our shared thinking went off the rails, diverged as it were. Every decision we made subsequent to those initial faulty, if innocent-seeming, calculations was mostly doomed. Generally, people don’t become better people, new environment or no new environment; people tend to stay the same. I for one knew I had no intention of putting in the effort it would require to become a better person. But we were both young, and she, at least, was optimistic.

You could tell Henry and Al found the whole idea of a job pretty amusing; neither of them had, in living memory, held down what you could call ‘jobs,’ unless you could hammer ‘living by your wits’ or ‘working the angles’ into a shape that fit under the definition of a ‘job.’

When I walked into The Carnival of Venice they were holding down a couple of stools at the dark end of the bar. Two forty-somethings; Henry all pockmarked jowls and paunchy, a South Carolina drawl. Al with his buzz cut, New York Rangers cap, his dark suit hanging like he’d recently battled to a draw with some wasting disease. He smiled a neon madman’s grin when Henry introduced me.

“Over from the big city, huh?’ Al said, “How are those ginzos treatin’ you over there?”

I nodded my head indicating they were treating me OK.

“Take the train, do you? It ain’t the same since they took out the fucking ferries, coming over here. I think you always have a better sense of where you’ve ended up when you can actually see the river you’re crossing instead of just going under it.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said, “I never really thought about it that way.”

“If I had an office that’s where I’d have it,” he said, “over there. But I got no need. Anyone wants to get hold of me can just get me here.”

He pointed at the wall phone next to the giant mirror behind the bar.

“I was never much for the phone.”

Henry had already filled me in on Al, how he’d gotten his start in the book business selling bibles on street corners.

“Imagine! A Jew! Selling bibles! It tickled my funny bone no end. Still does.”

How back around the time of the Kennedy assassination he’d quit a hot-shot job with American Express the day after the company doctor told him he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“He’d buy them bibles in case lots for around a buck apiece down around Canal Street and sell them for a flat three bucks further uptown. No sales tax, nothing like that.”

How Henry had spotted him on Union Square and, impressed with his entrepreneurial zeal, walked right up to him, saying, “Whatever you’re paying for them bibles, I know I can get ‘em for you cheaper. Same stuff, too. Gold-embossed, genuine, The words of our savior in red, all that shit.”

Lifelong friendships have been built on a lot less.

They had already finished their burgers and were ordering another round of drinks, a few buck’s worth of change in a heap among their dirty plates and empty glasses. Henry was talking his usual mile a minute and they were both lighting cigarettes one off the last and crushing out the spent butts in the sawdust on the floor; Henry's Marlboros, Al's Kools.

“Want one?” Henry pointed at his glass.

I shrugged ‘Why not?’ and Henry made a whirling gesture with his hand. Love and Happiness grooved out of the ceiling speakers, the bass striding the room like some great foreboding, Al Green moaning and cooing ecstatically.

The news was on with the sound off on the TV that hung over the bar; half the customers half-watching. Overnight the President had launched a rescue mission to free the hostages in Iran. It had failed spectacularly in the deserts of the Mideast and was all anybody was talking about, all over the radio and the papers. The whole ongoing crisis hung over the country like low cloud cover, threatening but never raining, just spitting, pissing. People talked about World War III. Nukes and shit. Apocalypse. Armageddon.

“Fuckin’ Carter,” Henry said, “Guy could fuck up a wet dream.”

“I say we should bomb the bastards back to the Stone Age and be done with it,” Al said loudly.

“They’re halfway there already,” some wit down the bar hollered back.

I wanted to say that I figured most of the people working in the embassy over there had probably been up to no good in the first place, probably spying and profiteering and who knew what else, but thought any remarks along those lines I might make would go over like the proverbial lead balloon.

The bartender brought us drinks. He wore a torn t-shirt and exhibited his collection of safety pins in his left ear.

“Aces? This here is Pinboy,” Henry said, “He’s kind of a weirdo but he’s OK.”

Apparently, my new nickname was ‘Aces.’ First I’d heard of it.

Pinboy put out his hand and I shook it.

“Roger,” he said.

“Jay,” I said back. It occurred to me that Roger might be the only person in the room who might agree with me on my profiteering theory. He was probably keeping his trap tightly shut, same as me.

Barry White’s deep, sensuous groan of a voice took over, the disco beat making the bar vibrate.

A stripper wearing nothing but white panties with yellow smiley faces on them was strutting up and down the back bar about as well as could be managed in three-inch heels. Roger worked around her as if she wasn’t there. Most of the customers ignored her as well, either too loaded to notice or caught up in the hostage news. She stopped across from where we were sitting, turned to face us and pulled the front of her panties open, her eyes laughing. Al and Henry grabbed quarters from their pile and pitched them toward the open goal she offered, leering and snickering as coins bounced everywhere but where they intended. There were rules to the game, obviously, but I didn’t know what they were.

“Carla, Carla! Hold still a minute, I mean for fuck’s sake,” Henry shouted, aiming with one eye closed.

Yeah, c’mon,” Al said.

“How’re we supposed to do anything if you keep wiggling around like that?”

Eventually a nickel found its way in on the rebound.

“A cushion shot!” Henry exclaimed.

Back slapping, whooping, pandemonium.

I sipped my drink and tried to keep my distance but found myself laughing along with them in spite of myself, all the while knowing Becca wouldn't approve one bit.

“That was mine,” said Henry, once they’d calmed down a bit.

“No it wasn’t either.”

“It was Henry’s,” I shouted, “I saw it.” At that moment all I wanted to do was fit in.

“Aw whadda you know,” Al said.

But what was the other thing I was feeling? Guilt? Complicity? I shoved my doubts down and joined the hilarity. I'd go back to becoming a better person tomorrow.

“You’re buying next anyway.”

“Ah, hell, I don’t care.”

“This’ll put me through college,” Carla said, picking the coins off the back bar and the duckboards and stuffing them into a miniature purse. She caught me watching her and shot me a wink.

“Yeah, talk about getting nickel and dimed to death,” I said.

And so passed lunch. 

Pinboy switched the jukebox to weirder fare once the lunch crowd went back to work. The Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and Wire replaced Al Green and Barry White.

“Another cigarette, another daaaaay,” cried the singer as though another day was a greater existential burden than any human could be asked to bear.

Al looked up at the speakers. “What’s this shit?”

The afternoon wore on. Carla had shrugged into a Ramones t-shirt and taken a place next to Al at the bar. She helped herself to Kools from his pack, lit them with his gold Zippo but only touched them to her lips, not inhaling, barely taking in any smoke at all.

“Was I artistic enough for you guys?” she said, laughing with her voice.

“You were perfect, darling,” Al said, “It buggered description.”

Henry turned to me, “Aces, meet Carla Capri. Carla, this is Aces.”

Carla flashed me a smile.

“She’s the best goddamned stripper in Jersey,” Henry said.

“Wow,” I said rather dimwittedly.

“The best in the Northeast,” Al said.

The news came on again. "Shut up, shut up," Carla said, “I wanna see this."

They were still covering the botched hostage rescue—Iranians rioting in the streets, smoke, chaos—it looked like a version of the end of the world as prophesied in a bible no one had read. A graphic at the bottom of the screen said AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE and, bafflingly, gave the number of days the whole thing had been going on. We all piped down and settled in to watch, even without the sound and the music going full blast. We were getting pretty loaded.

“Like I was saying, before” Carla said to Al, “I was reading in the U.S. News about how the CIA installed the Shah over there back in the fifties and they’ve all been pissed about it ever since. And now the whole goddamned election hinges on whether Carter can get his spooks home safe. It’s the U. S.’s chickens coming home to roost is what it is and they’re shittin’ all over Carter. That’s maybe why he took the risks he took last night. Kennedy will pound him for it; the Republicans will never let him up. It’s all politics, plain and simple, he had no choice. If it had worked they’d all be playing a different tune.”

Carter came on and started mumbling, something we couldn’t hear anyway. He looked like one those before and after pictures they have of Lincoln from the Civil War. The one after.

“Putz,” Al said and emptied his drink.

“This is the same shit we looked at during lunch,” Henry said and grabbed me by the arm.

We stuffed ourselves into the phone booth at the back of the place, near the men’s room, laughing and unsteadily trying to come up with enough change to get a line to San Francisco; forehead to forehead, as we picked through the coins in his palm. The operator sounded exasperated when I again told her to hang on.

“Sure this is all right? I don’t think I’m in any proper shape to talk to a prospective employer right now.”

“Don’t worry, for Christ’s sake. Caulfield’s one of us.” I wasn’t sure what he meant but I wasn’t in any condition to think anything through at that point. Uselessly I thought of Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye. It seemed to bode well; a boss with a literary name and all.

“It’s in the bag,” he said.

“That makes three of us,” I said and Henry dropped half the change he was laughing so hard. 

Later that spring Henry picks me up at Newark Penn Station, where the PATH from the City comes in, and soon we’re charging through traffic out of downtown, onto an elevated highway where we look down at brick warehouses and Quonset hut transmission places flashing by. Potholes everywhere. We trundle over patches in the road where the macadam has worn away and the original cobblestone surface sticks through. It’s one of those old Ford vans with the engine compartment right there between the driver and passenger seats. It’s 8:30 in morning. The radio plays All News All the Time set at a terrifying volume to compete with the road noise and the rattle-bang of the van. They’re still banging away at the hostage story but they’ve dialed down the tone a little since the peak back in April; people are getting bored with Armageddon.

Henry twists backward and fishes around in the cooler behind my seat—we’re veering all over the fucking road—and hands me a Budweiser, the cuff of his Glenn Plaid jacket dark with ice water.

“You wanna keep that down,” he advises, “where the Staties won’t see it.”

I light a cigarette, thinking Becca would definitely not approve of any of this—she already says I drink too much—but my hangover will celebrate as soon as the beer hits my bloodstream. She’s no Carrie Nation herself, by the way, and her pot intake bears scrutiny lately as well. Even so, she disapproves of a lot of what I do, especially my stupid friends, Henry currently principal among them. She’s my fiancé now, I guess, technically, but the word sounds so wimpy I still call her my girlfriend, which annoys her.

“’Fiancé’ is a perfectly nice word,” she says, “Just because it’s French, I mean…”

And I can’t believe this is the kind of shit we argue about, I mean, who cares, right?

 Especially when you consider the fact that Becca and I have a whole new life to look forward to, or at least that’s what we’ve been saying. I’ve quit my job with McCracken & Beech and we’re leaving for California in a week. This time I’m buying books from Henry to be shipped to my new employer in San Francisco. Al and Henry’s connections on both coasts have landed me the job. Caulfield, a guy they both know, is opening a little shop in North Beach and needs a manager. Becca is still hoping—more than ever , really—that moving to the West Coast and starting fresh in a small place and getting away from all the ‘bad influences’ will change me for the better.

Henry’s warehouse looks abandoned, nearly identical to World of Books. There’s no sign outside, no indication at all that anyone might be doing business inside.

“They’re shootin’ movies upstairs, Henry said, pointing straight up, “And not exactly The Sound of Music if you get my meaning. Last week they had a German Shepherd up there. Just for the day.”

Henry and I get in by climbing up on the bumper of the van onto the treacherously narrow lip of the loading dock and hoisting a racketing roll-up door. Apparently he does this every single time he comes or goes. His wife, Andrea, is working in the glassed-off office area, answering the phone, doing paperwork. We are introduced. She’s dowdy and shapeless, looks like my mother, forty-five maybe, and I wonder if she climbs up on a bumper too or if there’s maybe another entrance somewhere. I wonder if she knows about Carla and all the other shit Henry gets up to.

He and I walk through the place crammed with pallets, gaylords, corrugated boxes, canvas hampers, tubs, and bins full of books and parts of books, lurid under filthy fluorescence. There’re pin-ups stuck up everywhere, there’s no door on the pisser. He’s pointing left and right, “I got Harcourt over there, Holt. Here’s a little Random House I just got in. I got a couple of Ricans coming in this afternoon to help sorting through some of this shit.”

There are forty or fifty pallets of old issues of Fantastic Tales, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Alfred Hitchcock Magazine, and about twenty pallets of five-year-old Playboys. “If you want some, take ‘em,” he says, winking, elbowing me in the ribs.

“Fugazis,” he says, “All fugazis.”

Across the river in The City, my former employers at M&B called anything of a shady, fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck nature a ‘fugazi.’ Henry was often cited as the source of some of these semi-legal windfalls.

Just like the major book chains all have tarted-up stores in the better business districts of the City while warehousing in Jersey, so the major publishers all have fancy midtown offices for doing business in. At the same time, for their printing, binding, packing and shipping, they use printers and binderies over the river in Jersey. The printing is a fairly straightforward proposition, but the binders are susceptible to more mishaps than your average manufacturer, producing tons of unsaleable misbound, miscut, and poorly-trimmed books that the publishers have stipulated must be shredded. Henry has spent months figuring out how to intercept the trucks that transport these leftovers from the binders’ warehouses to the shredder, ending up with the simplest solution; bribing the drivers; getting them smashed at one of the hundreds of two-girl strip joints along Patterson Plank Road and convincing them to 'reroute' their loads to his warehouse. There he can separate the salvageable from the rest and sell them to McCracken at pennies on the dollar.

There was always some debate at M&B, tongue in cheek mostly, as to whether this constituted one giant fugazi or a series of small fugazis strung together, but all agreed it was definitely a fugazi and a profitable one all the way around.

Henry has one corner of the place stuffed with hundreds of pallets of ancient TV Guides. Worthless by any conventional measure. He sees me looking at them, thinking he’s a nut maybe.

“I buy these for nothin,” Henry tells me, “then when the boys in the semis come by, I offload the pallets of fucked-up books, give the driver a couple hundred clams. I load on some TVGs so the pallet count and the weight jibe, at least approximately, with the paperwork…not that anybody gives a shit but still…and off we go. No one’s the wiser.”

I admire his TV Guides with new respect. I open my third or fourth beer of the day.

“Don’t nobody should ask me about where I get this stuff,” he says, though no one has. “I start answering questions like that, next thing I know I got competition,” hitting me on the arm as if to say, ‘Of course you’d never do that.’

“Besides, the wife’s got invoices back in the office to match up each one of these things. Not that anybody gives a shit, but still.”

For lunch we have tuna sandwiches Andrea has made for us and a couple of Dr. Peppers.

“I hate it when she puts capers in this shit,” Henry says around his first mouthful, “Now I’ll be getting instant replays all afternoon.”

“I’m not one for capers either,” I say. Becca calls me a ‘picky eater.’ She says it with affection, usually.

“’Course I’d never say anything,” he says.  

Two Puerto Rican guys walk up.

“Hola, senors,” Henry says and introduces me to Pablo and Jorge.

I salute them in greeting.

“Well, los amigos are aqui, so let’s get to work,” he says.

And, seriously, what could be better? We spend the rest of the day rooting through books, making piles—this pile: yes; this pile: maybe; this pile: no—and changing them and changing them again. I’m haggling over prices with Henry and together we’re guessing what will and what won’t sell in a store three thousand miles away in a city I’ve never seen. We work quickly, the stacks build up fast. Pablo and Jorge pack the boxes and stack them on pallets and strap them up for shipping. And I stop to read here and there, too, a paragraph, a page, the jacket copy, and this is permissible, part of what I do. Imagine.

Around three or so we all take a break. Jorge and Pablo go outside, Henry and I stand in the middle of our project. Surrounded by stacks of books and parts of books and boxes of books and pallets of books. We both light cigarettes.        

“Listen, I gotta get back to the PATH around five, five-thirty at the latest so I get home in time to shower and change,” I say. I’m meeting Becca and both my parents and my soon-to-be in-laws for dinner at a nice quiet place in Little Italy. A place with candles and a strolling violinist and all.

“Don’t worry,” Henry says, “We’ll be done way before that.” He opens an electrical box on the wall next to us and pulls out a collapsing waxed carton of orange juice.

“Wanna screwdriver, kid?”

I wave him off but he pours me one anyway.

“Listen, I know you want to meet your people,” Henry says over the rattle of the van, “but I want to stop at the bar, there’s something I gotta tell Al. It’ll only take a second.”

Without waiting for my answer Henry hits the exit ramp at seventy and I figure I can change my clothes and skip the shower.

The contagious exhilaration of having been sprung from a week-long confinement has swept through the place like an epidemic and the speakers are blaring Friday night; Like a Rolling Stone, Bitch, London Calling.

Henry and I push in close to the stools Al and Carla have commandeered. There’s nowhere left to sit and the crowd pushes us all in tight.

“As always. I’m glad those idiots over the agency sent you,” Al is saying to Carla. She’s completely naked, a fact everyone seems to be ignoring.

“Friday night at the Carnival? I wouldn’t miss it,” she said, rolling her eyes for my benefit.

 “A lot of the agencies won’t send girls out this way,” Al said.

“They say it’s too sleazy,” Carla said.

“’Too sleazy?’” Henry said in mock shock.

Down the bar, four or five guys were tossing change into a black stripper’s outstretched panties and hollering. She’s half-bent at the waist and pulling out her waistband from behind, a slight variation on Carla’s game. No one’s even pretending to keep score.

Card games play out silently. There’s a couple of guys in reflective vests left over from lunch asleep with heads on their arms at the bar. Even the dice games slapping the bar don’t rouse them. In the men’s room some guy in a suit is passed out in the stall with his pants still down. Pinball machines bang and tilt, guys holler and laugh over Skeeball, Foosball. In every corner there’s some guy trying to feel up a stripper trying to squirm away. In the alley out back is a Portuguese dude named Benedito selling pot, ludes, whatever you want. He’s welcome to come in but prefers the outdoors.

“Yeah,” she says, turning to me, “the agencies say they don’t want to send us places where they want us to take our bottoms off.”

“That’s half the fun,” Al says, “when the bottoms come off.”

“Not that I mind it,” Carla says and does a little shimmy.

“They call us sleazy,” Henry says, “what about that place over by Rahway State? ‘Behind Bars’ it’s called?”

“I avoid that place. Prison guards are sickos,” Carla says, “I should know.”

“You mean where they got the midget strippers?” Al says, “I mean who’d wanna see that?”

“Midgets?” I say.

Carla leans back on her stool to see around the guys and shoots me a grin; at least she appreciates my little joke.

“Hell, no. Lotsa guys,” Henry says, “It’s like midget wrasslin,’ you don’t have to be a fucking midget to watch it.”

I head for the back.

From the phone booth I dial home, figuring by this time Becca will have left for the restaurant. I’m already in trouble; if I left this instant and went directly to the place—no stopping at home, no shower, no change of clothes—I’d be maybe forty-five minutes late, at best. Still, it’s not going to hurt to leave a message.

Since the last time I was in here, someone has written ‘Camel Jockeys Go Home!’ above the phone in black magic marker and though the first thing I think of is how unnecessary the exclamation point is, it momentarily depresses me. The tune to Black Magic Woman starts going through my head—Santana’s otherworldly guitar. Got a black magic marker/Got a black magic marker/I got a black magic marker/ got me so blind I can’t see/ That she’s a black magic marker and she’s tryin’ to make a devil outta me. It makes no sense but it cheers me  up.

I leave a message about how we ‘ran late’ at Henry’s and then the van wouldn’t start and we had to jump it and the traffic on Tonnalee Avenue was fucked up and I’ll meet everybody there and hope for the best.

I sit down on a stool Al has saved for me. Sometimes I think he doesn’t know I exist, the way he can look right past me, the saved stool goes a ways towards proving otherwise.

“Listen, hey, Henry,” I say, hollering over Bang A Gong, “I gotta get going, I’m gonna be late. I already am late.”

“OK, yeah, gimme a minute.”

At least I can say I tried.

Carla snakes up next to me, real close.

“Al tells me you’re quittin’ this shitpit,” she says, leaning into my ear. I’m not sure if she’s referring to the Carnival, Newark, M&B, greater Jersey, or to my general existential plight. It could be all five.

“Yeah, time for a change,” I say noncommittally, I’m already feeling like I’m being unfaithful to Becca, with Carla up against me and all, and I think anything I say to encourage her will only make things worse.

“Yeah, I used to work for M&B too. That’s what two years of English Lit at Patterson State gets you. I couldn’t make anything doing that. This shit pays a lot better.”

“I can imagine,” I say.

“California, huh?’ she says, “I hear everybody’s crazier’n hell out there.”  

I start laughing. The idea that a girl wearing nothing but heels in a roomful of horny men is telling me that anywhere could be crazier than a full-time, three-ring madhouse that is the Carnival, featuring every imaginable species of jabbering lunacy, strikes me as the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while.

“I’ll just have to make do,” I say with a resigned shrug.

Carla pulls herself closer, her whole body right up against mine, her lips touching my ear. I think of Becca again but now I’m figuring, ’How’s she gonna find out if I don’t tell her?’ I slip my arm around Carla, my hand resting in the small of her back. I haven't made a lot of progress toward becoming a better person, I guess. None at all, I would be forced to admit if I bothered to take a good hard look at it, which I’m not, at least at this very moment, about to do. I figure I have Becca for that.

Carla whispers, “Well, we’re gonna miss you in this dump here. At least I’m gonna miss you, anyway.”

She does a quick hootchie-coo—call it the Jersey Grind—that sends an erotic shudder, combined with a small wave of guilt, very small, through me.

“And you can take that with you,” she says, “on me,” and slips free of my arm as easy as that and goes back down the bar to rejoin Al.

The opening chords to I Fought The Law (and the Law Won) comes over the speakers. The version by The Clash.

We pull up in front of Newark Penn. I open the door to the van and make to bail out but Henry grabs me by the arm and keeps me seated. I’m about an hour late now.

“Listen, kid, I want you to be careful out west like that. There's no one there you know, no one who will have your back. Not like I do. Caulfield is OK, we're friends, known each other for years, but don’t let him draw you into anything you're not comfortable with. I know I set this up for you, but…”

“And you should know how grateful I am,” I say.

“So with that comes this little piece of advice: Don’t turn your back on that fucker, especially when you got your own money on the stump.

“I know you and I know what makes you—fellas like us—tick. He don’t have the values we do, he doesn’t think like us. So, call me any time if what he’s getting up to seems at all hinky to you, anything don’t feel right, ‘cause I’m telling you, he’ll fuck anybody. He tried to fuck me once, after all I’ve did for him, but I was smarter than him. He never got that you don’t shit where you eat.”

I nod. I don’t know what to say and my head is spinning a little from the booze.

“Look, I know and you know what I do. But at least all this shit I got is paid for,” he said. He laughed and went on, “Maybe I pay a guy who maybe shouldn’t have what he’s getting paid for. Maybe he didn’t pay the guy he got it off of, but I paid the guys that sold the shit to me. To me that makes me square with my conscience, my wife, and with the world.”

He fishes a couple of Marlboros out of the pack in his front pocket and hands me one. I pull out a book of matches and light mine and then his. He draws the first lungful in deep and blows it out. I’m so late now there’s no sense worrying about it anymore.

“I’m just telling you, watch out for fucking Caulfield. He will do absolutely anything for money, short of rape and murder. I’m just letting you know so you know.”

So much for Holden Caulfield and all that.

In the end, Carla Capri’s predictions had been right; Carter lost the election to Reagan and the whole hostage thing and, specifically, Carter’s inability to bring them home was a major factor in that loss. It turned out to be one of the few things during that time that Becca didn’t blame me for.  

For one thing, I never really became the better person Becca had always hoped I would be, though she tried mightily. And around that same time, when everything was turning to shit, she often, in fact repeatedly, ad infinitum, cited that night as an early turning point in our relationship.

“A harbinger of what was to come,” she said.

“Which is what a harbinger is,” I would point out. Imagine how much she appreciated that.

She’d go on and on about how I’d ‘strolled in hours late when in fact it was only an hour-and-a-half, maybe an hour-and-three-quarters, tops, not ‘hours.’ And I didn’t exactly ‘stroll’ in, I strode in briskly, voicing my apologies from the moment I burst through the door and for the twenty or so paces to the table.

And how I was half-drunk.

No argument there.

And how my old man had decided to kill the time they spent waiting for me, the time before they decided to go ahead and order and eat without me, by knocking back ‘two or three’ martinis.

Becca said it was more like five and she was the only one keeping a truly reliable count for possible future reference.

“Who ya gonna believe?” the Old Man said, and that was how he left it.

And how, about halfway through that flight of cocktails the perennially misguided compulsion he always felt to keep things lively became too great to resist and he trotted out a few of his favorite bawdy tales.

My mother called them ‘filthy stories,’ he called them ‘harmless jokes, little more than puns and riddles—limericks practically.’

And how that poisoned, right from the get-go, any realistic chance of my parents and my future in-laws having any kind of constructive relationship. Although what ‘constructive’ meant in this context I have no idea.

I never mentioned Carla to her, or anyone else for that matter, so I at least didn’t have to hear about that.

And Becca always blamed Henry and Al for the way things turned out with Caulfield, too.

Henry and I had stayed in touch, talking on the phone fairly regularly, but that petered out pretty quickly once things with Caulfield ended up in the toilet. I always wrote the whole misbegotten venture off as a case of that’s the way shit goes. Henry didn’t see it that way and sided with Caulfield.

I never found out how Al felt; he was never much for the phone.

Byron Spooner retired as the Literary Director of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library after 21 years. Byron founded and edited The Readers Review, the Friends’ literary blog, where he wrote about books, music, film, and bookselling. With his wife, writer Judith Ayn Bernhard, he co-edited Arcana: A Festschrift for Jack Hirschman (Andover Street Archives Press, 2014). His writing has been published in Manifest-Station, the San Francisco Examiner, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Autobiography, and Isis. His short story, “A Book for Christmas,” was published by Red Berry Editions in 2011. He is on the Board of Litquake and the advisory board of the Beat Museum. He has recently completed a novel. He is a co-owner of Andover Street Archives, brokering cultural archives to university libraries.

Angela Sucich

Tea Break

Their therapist had said it was a radical approach, but they had tried everything else.

They agreed that the only way they could share the same space was if one of them were stuffed into the teapot.

Thankfully, it was a large pot, for both really liked tea. It would, they thought, remain a point of connection between them.

It was decided that she would be the one to do it. Her hand slid in easily, past the wrist and up to the forearm. Her elbow had to wedge in, the teapot biting into her bicep. When her ring scraped bottom, her husband said, keep going. But that wasn’t the same thing as helping, she thought, and she told him so. He said fine, then he didn’t have to watch, either, and he left.

She picked up her iPhone in her free hand and scrolled her girlfriend’s name. The one who reminded her of things forgotten. 

“You left your job to manage his business,” the girlfriend said. “You stopped visiting your family.”

The words were little punches.

“The dishes he leaves in the sink. Socks in the living room. The toilet seat.”

She pushed a little further into the pot. Inch by inch, hurt by hurt.

“Keep going,” the girlfriend told her. “Bear down.” 

Her shoulder pinched in a hard stop. Not enough, she thought, and said so.

“Try the news,” suggested the girlfriend.

She went to stream it on her laptop. She sat down with the teapot to talking heads, analysts and commentators, and a hot spray of words that crackled and sputtered. Ash flew in her face. She opened another window to read some posts. But it was the tweets that finally did it. Slowly she reached out to touch her big toe and discovered it popped off easily. She dropped it in the teapot. You, too? she asked her other toes, which she broke off and ground to powder between thumb and index. She fed her toeless foot through the teapot’s mouth and shifted her weight. Her leg crumbled like a razed building, creating a cloud of dust that someone would have to clean up later.

Toe by toe and bit by bit, she broke herself up as one would pieces of pu’er cake. When she was nearly done, she worried how she would get the lid on afterwards. 

He could do it, she thought. Or they could do it. There was no end to the people that would do it.

Angela Sucich holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Washington. A freelance writer, she’s written on a variety of topics over the years, including a book on the history of a Seattle trade union, published in 2011. Recently she was named a finalist for the 2020 Francine Ringold Awards for poetry. Reach her at angelasucich@gmail.com.

Julian Mithra

“The Wren and the Rain” by Cheeky Sanguich

Many times ago, there lived a sniveling boy called Carlos who always jammed his thumb into the honey. It so happened that the village of his grandmother, cousin, father, aunt, and all the rest of them were awful thirsty because the well had dried up on a burning-hot-as-the-devil day. Their purple tongues stuck out of their mouths like they’d licked too many Christmas candies.

Carlos, who never tied his shoes or patted his dog, marched off to a mountain shaped like a billy goat. He pushed the lid off the well crash. He shouted, shocked that the sound should come back and smack him on the ear. A biddy pail hung on a chain. When he sat on the pail, whoosh it unraveled him to the bottom. It was not a friendly kind of darkness, the sort that hides with capperdillers under a rock. It was not a helpful kind of darkness, a shadow that hides your face before you yell Boo! It was the low and growly darkness inside of a cat’s mouth; a sharp and unyielding darkness like the disappeared moon. And there he crouched at the floor of the well, covered all in darkness.

Oh, you will say, but a silver fairy will save him, for he is but a helpless boy who does not know better. Oh, he will see a door just his size that opens at Kalamazing. His fritzing and his frailing shall be redeemed. You forget that he was the boy who stomped gillies. Who jeered at mushrooms. Who painted snails. 

For one minute or nine minutes, he kicked the stone. For nine minutes or seventeen minutes, he chimed, “Help!” but the wind whisked it from the thirsty villagers and delivered it to the deaf goat at the crown of the mountain. For seventeen or a hundred minutes, he talked to God. God was busy with Mrs. Cavendish who needed someone to rush one red radish for the middle of the table.

Snail told Capperdiller that Carlos was trapped. Capperdiller told Lizard. Lizard told Wren and her sisters. The wrens told everyone, even Ladybird and even grumpy Badger. In an organized line they were marching so they could spit on the hapless boy. Snail didn’t spit but spurted a smear of slime. Ladybird didn’t spit but peed. The other animals and birds and insects spit, though, great sloshes of spit until poor poor wicked Carlos floated to the top of the well. (He didn’t drown because he clutched the rope.) When he set foot on solid ground, the spitters had gone and not one was left to stomp, not even slow Salamander.

It began to rain, for it would not be dry forevermore. Purple tongues shrunk back into the village people’s mouths and only the wrens remembered that the boy had been daft enough to try to fix the rain which everyone knew came by the stars and had nothing to do with little boys called Carlos. The End.

Julian Mithra hovers between genders and genres, border-mongering and -mongreling. If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic Press, 2018) intervenes in the historical frontier and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. "The Wren and the Rain" is part of an imaginary atlas that undertakes a spiritual, epistemological, linguistic, and historiographic account of the underground through a tomboy's nostalgia for the Gold Rush. Zines on queer embodiment collage obsolete scientific textbooks to remix femme/nonbinary affinities, embellished with leather and wood. Their chapbook of queer anagrams, Kaleidoscope, is forthcoming from Ethel Press. They can be found on Instagram @julianmithra

Beau Gambold

A Taste

They hadn’t eaten since breakfast, about six wineries ago, so when the tasting rooms closed Martin and Marina tucked their bottles under a sweater in the back seat of Martin’s car, then found their way—him stumbling, her dancing—to one of Carmel Valley’s nearby restaurants. They took a sunny table on the patio. He ordered three appetizers to share, and she picked a bottle of wine from the list, and then they just sat there, suddenly quiet. They held hands across the little table and gazed dreamily up at the mountains, or at the trickle of traffic on the valley road, and sometimes they looked at each other and smiled.

When the food arrived they started talking again, like two little birds bursting into song. They discussed which wines they’d liked and not liked, and what a beautiful day it had been, and how the lady at the one tasting room had reminded them of someone, but still they couldn’t say who. Then Martin’s phone vibrated, and after he checked it he said, “Pebble was great today, too. Fog blew off early. Folks played well, tipped well — Johnny made a mint, apparently.” Then he smiled, a little wistful, and there was the sense that he wished he’d been there, too — that he would’ve liked to have been in both places at once.

Johnny had filled in for Martin so that Martin could take the day off to be with Marina, so Marina now felt suddenly on the defensive; she defended herself by attacking the golf course, using a tidbit that had come up during the day: “I still can’t believe you caddie there all year long, and only get to play once a year.”

Martin, looking off at the mountains and not quite catching her tone, said, “Only once for free, but I can pay the greens fee anytime.”

It was supposed to be a joke, and so she got his attention by not laughing. For one thing, the fee was something like $500, and with the money they’d spent today he’d probably have to pick up a shift, either at a golf course or at the restaurant where they both worked, just to play one of the lesser courses around. Possibly just to pay his rent.

That was bad enough, but to add to it the loss of the money Johnny had made — Marina suddenly felt guilty, like today had been one big mistake. And so she was mostly defending herself to herself when she said, nearly at a whisper, “We hardly get any days off together — this is the first time in, like, forever. In three weeks, at least.”

“We get days,” Martin said. “We had today. And we went kayaking just recently, you’re just forgetting. And, anyways, you’re the one who’s about to leave.”

 “I’m only gone for the semester, and after kayaking I still had to go to work. And — what? What is it?”

She stopped now because Martin had suddenly begun to cry. But just as quickly as he’d started he stopped, running a sleeve across his face to dry it. He straightened up and said, “It’s just the wine,” as though without alcohol he would have had no feelings at all.  

She stretched her hand out across the table toward him. “I’m going to miss you, too.”

He took the hand, and his smile reappeared as she went on: “And just think of all the golfing you’ll get to do when I’m not keeping you up all night!”

He laughed now, his chin still wet with tears. “You’ll have to come watch me at the Open when you get back!”

“Definitely,” she said. “I look forward to it.”

He took a long sip from his glass, gurgled it like she’d taught him, then told her again about his buddy Dean that he used to caddie with, who would break into the top hundred professional golfers if he did well this weekend in Georgia. He told her how he and Dean used to play in the rain when people cancelled on them, lightning be damned, and how once they stole a whole bucket of range balls and hit them into the ocean. He talked about Dean’s long, smooth swing. Marina feigned interest, but all she could think about was the image of a grey or a sperm whale somewhere out off the coast, suffocating with a golf ball stuck in its blowhole.

They finished the appetizers and then, as they browsed the menu for entrées, the sun dropped behind the mountains. Marina shivered, and Martin, glancing around the darkened patio, said, “Let’s get out of here, hey?”

They split the check and then ran for the greenhouse warmth still lingering in his thirteen-year-old beige Corolla. She kicked receipts and napkins and empty cans as she climbed into the passenger’s seat. He started the car and turned the heater up. She rubbed her hands over her thighs to warm them.

Then she looked out through the bug-smeared windshield and exclaimed, “Hey! If we get to the top of the mountains, we can probably catch the sunset.”

Martin squinted up at the range. “Think there’s even road up there?”

She unlocked her phone and opened the GPS.

“You just start driving,” she said. “I’ll figure it out.”

He backed out of the parking spot, then shoved the stick into what was left of first gear. They began to move, but then the clutch slipped and the engine revved. The car shook and went limp.

“Eek!” She burst into laughter.

“Hang on…” he said, blushing, avoiding looks from the passing traffic.

He put the car back in neutral and started it again. This time he skipped first gear and went right into second, crawling to motion as a big truck pulled in behind them. But the gear held, and soon they were headed west.

“We turn right in a mile and a half,” Marina said, looking up from her phone.

“Sounds good.”

On either side of them was a mountain range, and the foothills were dotted with little modern villas. Marina studied the scenery with fixed curiosity. Martin watched for cop cars and kept them mostly inside the lane.

Eventually she looked down at her phone and said, “Oops! That was our turn.”  

Martin turned them around in a grocery store parking lot, then they left the valley road for a series of switchbacks carved into the mountain. Marina dug through the back seat, returning with a bottle wrapped in brown paper. A wine key was recovered from the console, and she opened the bottle with the quick dexterity of someone who did it for a living. There were two water glasses in the cup holders, both already stained red, and she filled each just less than halfway.

He straightened the wheel from a cliff-side turn, dropping the gear before reaching for his glass.

“What is it?”

“Guess.”

Marina was good at wine; for Martin it was mere recreation, and being tested took the fun out. But she wanted him to, so he tried.

“Syrah?”

“We didn’t even buy Syrah!” she said, laughing.

“Shiraz?”

“Hardy har.”

He swung them around a turn and took a bigger sip.

“What fruit are you getting?” she asked, coaching him. “Is it light or dark?”

He ventured a few guesses while she drank along, either nodding or shaking her head at him — he was never quite certain which, since his eyes stayed mostly on the road. Then he got annoyed and said, “Well, it’s good. I can tell that.”

The road straightened out and he chanced a look her direction. She had a smirk and an eyebrow raised, as if to say, “But do you know how good?”

“Wait,” he said. “You didn’t… You opened it already?”

Marina laughed. “See? You’re getting better!”

The car slid onto the shoulder and he righted them sharply.

“But we were saving that for your last night in town.”

“We’ll save some,” she said. “You have a wine saver in here somewhere.” She poked around in the mess at her feet. “But I wanted to have some now; it’s a beautiful day and a beautiful wine, and everything else seemed like a letdown.”

“You’re the expert,” he said.

They drove for a few minutes without speaking. Marina turned the radio on and up, then changed her mind and turned it off again. She rolled her window down. Martin pretended not to notice or care. Then she said, “Oh shit!”

“What?”

He hit the brakes and looked around, alarmed, then looked at Marina.

“It was the chick from The Office — what’s her name…? Pam!”

“What?”

“The woman at the tasting room,” Marina said. “We couldn’t think of who she looked like?”

Martin shot her a look, then looked back at the road.

“Right, though?”

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.

They reached the ridge road and turned west. Trees covered most of this high ground but, as the car swung around the rolling peaks, sunlight occasionally broke through and lit up their faces.

Martin took another sip of his wine and said, “So it’s supposed to be like Cheval Blanc?”

“That’s what the lady said.”

Marina thought for a moment, then added, “I doubt she would really know, though.”

“Wasn’t she the owner or the winemaker or something?”

He slowed to bring them around a blind turn.

“Yeah…” she said. “Then maybe she would.”

“Which one is Cheval Blanc?”

She laughed like he was joking, then realized that he wasn’t. “Dude? We sell it at the restaurant?”

“That’s why it sounded familiar…”

“You’ve been there six months,” she said. “It goes for like fifteen hundred.”

“Holy shit.”

“Right?”

“You ever try it?”

She shook her head.

“I wonder what it actually tastes like.”

Marina swirled the glass in her hand. “Maybe like this?” Then she shrugged. “Some of those old chateaux have been around so long, though, that it doesn’t matter so much what they taste like. The cool thing is that you’re drinking history.”

Martin considered this while he drove, then said, “That’s kind of crap.” Marina decided to laugh at this. He went on: “And what I didn’t want to say at the wineries is how it’s crazy that you study wine, that you care about it, but that the only people who can afford to drink the things you study are people who made a ton of money doing something else.”

“Them and winemakers,” she said.

“Okay, but still…” He took a breath, felt around for the cupholder and put his glass down. “All the best wines in the world, you can’t have. History or not. They’re mostly only for people who, the only thing they know about the wine is that they can afford it.”

“My dad can afford them because he’s a doctor, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care and know about them.”

 Martin shook his head. “At least with golf I get to walk the greens, try my hand sometimes. The disparity with wine is too much.”

 He looked at her for emphasis and veered off the road. Then he over-corrected; the car skittered into the on-coming lane as an SUV came around the corner. He hit the brakes, swerved back into their lane. The other vehicle ran off onto the shoulder and laid on their horn. Martin hit the gas and sped off.

“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, heart pounding. He found his wine glass again and took a big gulp. Marina sat hugging herself under the seatbelt. She was trembling.

They turned another corner, and suddenly the ocean stretched out before them, out into the horizon. The sun hung mere inches above the water.

Marina had been dazed and quiet, but she perked up now and pointed. “That little side road — there!”

This gravel path wound around an ocean-facing ridge, just wide enough for two cars to pass if one was pulled over. It was guarded by a row of old mailboxes but no street sign. A plume of white dust rose as Martin made the turn.

When they were out of sight from the main road, he turned them around with about a nine-point turn, then pulled over and killed the engine. She rolled her window up against the ocean wind. They reclined their seats and clinked glasses.

The mountain descended its full length right in front of them, straight down to a stretch of green plain dotted with cows. The plain went on maybe half a mile before dropping into the ocean. The Pacific Coast Highway cut through the plain, splitting the difference between mountain and sea. Above it all, a few innocent clouds floated past. The beauty restored them. Marina topped off their glasses.

“How much wine do you think we drank today?” she asked, more or less admitting that they might’ve done something wrong, maybe even something dangerous, even as she piled on the misdeed.

“A lot!” Martin said. “I should drink some water.” But he didn’t look around for a water bottle, and anyways there wasn’t one. Then he said, “Might end up cancelling my tee time tomorrow.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” she said unconvincingly.

“We’ll see.”

The sun edged toward the faint line between ocean and sky.

“There it goes,” he said.

She pulled his hand into her lap.

“You’re amazing,” Martin said.

Marina only looked over and blinked at him.

“Seriously,” he said. “You don’t know what you do to me.”

She smiled sleepily. He went on: “This morning even, when we were making love…”­ The word love made a dent in the car’s quiet atmosphere, but he pushed through it: “I remember I wanted you so bad. So much that I didn’t quite know what to do.”

Her smile became thoughtful; her eyes lost their peaceful dullness.

“I mean, we were already having sex,” he said. “I didn’t know what else we could do. But I still wanted you more and more… You’re just so beautiful, and I just like you so much. But there wasn’t anything else to do.”

“Is that why you seemed a little… perplexed?”

He laughed through his nose. “Probably.”

Marina held her hands out in front of her. She turned them over, palm to back, back to palm, then pointed at the horizon and the ocean and the few clouds now purple with dusk.

“If that out there is beautiful—and it is—then how am I also beautiful?” She presented her two hands for his inspection. He took them and kissed them.

“You just are,” he said. “You’re more beautiful to me than any sunset.”

She squinted at him doubtfully, and then a smile broke out. And then a sports car turned onto their road. It was a dark vehicle, headlights on against the advancing night. Martin whispered for Marina to put her glass down, but it had been resting in the cupholder for some time. The vehicle eased past them, and they began to relax again, but then it pulled over a little ways down.

Both hearts raced. The lights went on inside the other car, then the driver’s door swung open. A man stepped out, medium-height, medium-build, wearing a light sweater and navy blue slacks. He walked toward the Corolla. Martin and Marina quickly put their glasses down on the floorboards, where they wouldn’t be seen. She positioned her legs to hide the bottle.

The man walked up to the driver’s side and rapped on the glass. Martin assumed an air of calmness as he rolled down the window just slightly, maybe about two inches. Still, a cool wind rushed into the car. Then a round face with thick, circular glasses peered in through the crack.

“Can I help you?” Martin asked, nearly adding the word officer at the end.

“You all okay?” The man said.

“Um… Yes?”

“We were watching the sunset,” Marina offered.

The man straightened up, looked out at the ocean, then leaned back to the crack in the window. “Well, sunset’s over,” he said. “And this is a private road, so you’d best move along.”

Martin’s calm face creased with unpleasantness.

“Pardon?”

“It’s a private road,” the man repeated. “You can’t just park anywhere you like.”

“We can’t be parked along a road?”

“This is a private road,” the man said.

“So we can’t—”

“No,” the man said. “You can move now or I’ll have the police come move you.”

He didn’t raise his voice, and there was the chilling sense that he knew he didn’t have to.

“C’mon.” Marina pulled on Martin’s arm. “Let’s go.”

The man looked at her and nodded, then turned and walked away. He was nearly back to his car when Martin threw his door open. He stumbled out, slammed it behind him, then started for the other vehicle.

Marina hugged the back of her seat, watching the two through the rear windshield. She heard their tone change, their voices rise, but the wind carried away their words. Martin began pointing and waving his arms. He looked ridiculous. Marina turned back around in her seat.

Reception was horrible, but little by little a map appeared on her phone. The route wouldn’t load, so she manually picked the turns that would lead to the highway — not the PCH, but the smaller, local road. She was doubling back to confirm when the driver’s-side door flew open. Martin moved his wine from the floorboard to the cupholder, and she did the same. He started the engine.

“Asshole’s calling the cops,” he said. The gear tried to slip but he forced it. The engine whined for a second like an undersized power tool. The tires spun and then caught hold.

Marina stared at Martin. She thought about punching him in the arm, but she realized that somehow, suddenly, she no longer had the right. She thought about asking him what he’d said to the man, but realized that it didn’t matter.

“Can you tell if he’s reading our plates?” he asked.

She looked over her shoulder.

 “It doesn’t look like it.”

“You sure?”

“We’re around the corner now,” she said, “but I don’t think he was looking at us at all.”

“You certain?”

“How should I know?” She turned back around to the front. “But I’m pretty certain.”

She looked down at her phone. “Take a left up there.”

She had them on the highway in less than a mile. There was little traffic, but Martin kept a close watch on the speedometer and the rearview.

They continued to sip the wine, defiantly, admittedly with less relish but both unwilling to waste or pour back what had been poured. He turned the radio up. She rolled the window down and embraced the cold and stared out at the mountains diminishing to hills diminishing to fields.

Then faintly, in the rearview, he saw it.

“Oh, fuck,” Martin mumbled. “Goddammit.”

He punched the radio off.

“The hell?” Marina said, annoyed. Then she saw his face. “What is it?”

He started to slow the car down. Marina turned and saw the flashing lights. “Oh no oh no oh no,” she said. She grabbed his glass of wine and poured it into hers, then held it in her lap. “What do we do what do we do?”

“I don’t know,” he said softly. The Carolla rumbled onto the shoulder.

Marina chugged the wine, coughed, then rolled the window down and flung both glasses into the ditch. The car came to a stop.

Martin sat rooted to the seat, breathing deep troubled breaths. He dug the wallet out of his pocket, pulled out his I.D., held it against the outside of the wallet.

Something occurred to Marina, and she began hunting frantically around the floorboard and the seat and the cupholders. Then the flashing lights flew past.

The car rocked from the wind of the passing cruiser. The lights sped on into the night and shrunk and shrunk and finally disappeared. Martin and Marina sat stupefied. Then Marina stuck a hand down under her crotch. “Found it,” she said, holding the cork up longways between her thumb and a finger.

Martin stayed looking straight ahead. A tear rolled down his stubbled cheek, and another car passed.

Marina began to reach for his knee to console him, but again felt somehow that she couldn’t. Instead she put the cork back in the bottle, then tucked the bottle back in the back seat with the others.

Martin took a big shaky breath and said, “It’s just…”

Marina waited, then asked, “What is it?” She had turned now and was also looking straight out ahead. They were somewhere in the Salinas Valley, and the mountains were either behind them or too far off to see; surrounding the highway were only fields and more fields, of who even knew what, stretching out further than their headlights in every direction.

“When I thought we were getting pulled over?” Martin said. “I think I felt something… almost like relief.”

“Relief?” Marina echoed. “Relief from what?”

Martin exhaled.

“I don’t know.”

Two vehicles passed in rapid succession; the car shook in response. Martin looked at Marina now, and she felt him looking though she didn’t look back. And it finally fully dawned on them both that he’d lost her. That he’d never really had her. In a way, she’d been letting him try her out, but really she was trying herself out. And she would continue to do so, with other boys, in other places. And she saw with tranquil clarity then that she would eventually find her place, as well as her person, and that her life would be quite nice. She would make it nice — a lot nicer than this. And that was all that she saw, and all that she cared about.

For Martin’s part, he felt for a moment that Marina had a part of him that he’d never get back, that she would take with her when she left. But then he wondered if he only hoped that, if it wasn’t actually true. And then he finally realized that he’d never golf on a level with his friend Dean, that he’d never even know wine on a level with Marina, or ever again date someone as pretty as Marina, and that, in fact, he’d never be excellent in any way. And this was the relief that he’d felt when he’d seen those flashing lights — they had been someone coming to take away the myth that he was in any way excellent. He was only sufficient. He would only ever get by, and sometimes not even that. And that was okay, because that was who he was. And he also saw that Marina would never be excellent, either, only she would be better at fooling herself and the world into thinking she was.

They looked at each other now across the console as though from across a gap in time and dimension. They each felt like they were in the car with a complete stranger. Marina turned around, took the sweater from the back seat, and pulled it on. Then she opened the door.

“I’m gonna look for the glasses,” she said. And then she was gone.

Martin had tripped getting out, and so he’d covered the distance between the two cars more quickly than intended. When he caught himself, he called after the man, “It’s not enough to see beautiful things. You have to own them.”

The man had stopped and turned around.

“And once they’re yours,” Martin continued, “you don’t care. You consider them twice and move on. You spend all your time working so you can have more. More and more. And you only remember your view when someone else tries to enjoy it.”

He waved back at the car, then at the space around them. “Your mailboxes have a better view than my life. And you still got past us, didn’t you?”

The man eyed him for a moment.

“Are you drunk?”

“Am I drunk?” Martin laughed. “I’m not drunk. Are you drunk?”

“No,” the man said. “I am not drunk. I’m just getting home from a long trip, and I’m not thrilled there are strangers in my driveway.”

“Your driveway.” Martin said. “We just wanted a decent place to watch a sunset. But apparently we can’t afford it. Apparently this mountain’s owned? Everything’s fucking owned!”

He raised his arms in a bigger gesture, one meant to indicate the whole possessed countryside. Maybe even the sky.

“You think you can just take every beautiful thing? Because you have money? Because you or maybe your great grand uncle earned it somehow? But you can’t earn a fucking mountain! It’ll outlast you. It doesn’t even know or care that you’re here. And even if you knocked it to the ground…”

Martin’s face went slack for a moment, then fastened into a kind of tortured grimace.

“And we do no good by it,” he said. “What can you do that’s any good?”

His arms fell to his sides and he looked back at the car. Marina was on her phone. Somehow he knew before he ever knew.

Martin turned back to the man and added, almost whining, “We were just watching the sunset.”

The man’s eyes behind the thick, round glasses gave Martin a sense of being at the bottom of a microscope. A gust of wind rippled their clothing. The man sighed and seemed to relax.

“You know,” he said, “I’m on my way back from—” Then he stopped. He started again: “Have you ever seen real…” He stopped again. “Never mind,” he said. “You don’t know, and there’s nothing for it.”

He slid his phone from his pocket, pushed his glasses up, and squinted under them at the screen. Then he leaned his head back to focus on Martin. Martin was frozen like a cornered animal. The man pressed a button, put the phone to his ear.

“I’m calling the police,” he said. “Stay here if you want.”

“Seriously?”

“This is Allen Corse at one one seven zero…”

Martin took a slow step back, hesitated, then turned heel for his beige sedan. As soon as the couple in the car were gone, Allen lowered his phone. The illuminated screen displayed the inbox of his email: several hundred unread messages. Zero reception.

He fixed his gaze on the rolling shadows of the waves below, and he stood there long after the chill wind must have penetrated his sweater. Then eventually he, too, returned to his vehicle and followed the gravel out of sight. Then there was only the mountain and the wind, carrying with it the crashing sound of waves beating at the edges of the far away shore, much as they had and would for millions of years.

Beau Lee Gambold is a fiction writer currently based in Virginia. He is a graduate of the Columbia MFA, has taught creative writing workshops and seminars, and his short fiction has been published in From the Depths, Bluing the Blade, and The Rational Creature. He’s a recipient of the Hemera Tending Space Fellowship for Artists and the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Award for Fiction. Beau is currently in the late drafts of his first novel. See more at Bgambold.com.