Prose

Elizabeth Genovise

Death of a Custodian

The late afternoon sun kindles green-gold fire in the rainwater ditches that line Preston’s route to work. He has driven this road thousands of times, but on days like this, the landscape becomes mercurial, shifting into something else entirely. Today he is not in his battered Ford F-150 but on the blue bicycle he rode every day as a teenager until the August he left for college. He’s riding a narrow gravel road across the Louisiana plains with Ilsabeth at his side. They pass giant live oaks and marshes singing out their green verses of insects and loons. Preston slows the truck for a red light; at the edge of a great field, he and Ilsabeth tap their kickstands into place and stand there in the glow. He has never seen this place so beautiful, sparks of rose playing in the swaying grass, blue smoke clouds whistling past. Twilight’s violet shadow moves tidelike across the grass to lap at the gravel path beneath their feet. “It will be all right,” Ilsabeth says into the silence. “We’ll have to work at it, but we’ll take care of each other.” He believes her. When at last it’s time to turn around, they mount their bicycles and kick up dust. Preston notices a green inchworm making timid progress across his left arm. He pinches it, killing it. Ilsabeth’s look of surprise, the quick shadow of grief that flutters across her face, arrests him. He pedals hard in an effort to leave the moment behind. 

He arrives at the community college and parks. Today is significant: it marks his twenty-fifth-year anniversary working as a custodian for the school, and his supervisor, Don, will have left him a goofy cake or some such thing. Preston knows this will happen as surely as he knows the duties he’ll perform before the night is over. What he doesn’t know is that he’ll die of a stroke tonight, an hour after he finally turns off his bedside lamp and lies back with his hands crossed on his chest. And yet, exiting his truck and crossing the humid lot to the maintenance building, he can feel a difference. There is a thrumming tension inside him, and he imagines a network of power lines strung across the grid of his bones. Even the small motion of opening the service door feels charged.

In the office, he finds the cake with a card propped up beside it. When Preston opens the card, a cardboard cat pops out at him and does an obscene little dance while tinny music blares out from a device buried in the pasteboard. One of his coworkers has written, “They don’t know shit . . . only WE know shit,” an old joke among the janitorial staff. To please Don, Preston cuts himself a thin slice, then puts the rest of the cake in the fridge so that the others can enjoy it in the morning. He retrieves his cart and crosses into the Humanities building, the first floor of which is his domain on weekday evenings. 

The first fifteen years of his tenure here, he cleaned bathrooms and classrooms first, faculty offices last. It made sense to move from the dirtiest job to the easiest one; he’d pull jammed feces out of toilets and wipe lipstick off mirrors, then clean whiteboards and mop the floors, then do the simple vacuum-and-trash routine in the nine little offices that wrapped around the bottom floor in an L-shape. Since the offices came last, he never saw the faculty members who inhabited them; they had all gone home for the night hours before. This was his method until ten years ago when he reversed the scheme completely. 

He’d nearly had a heart attack the first time he saw Professor Catherine Daniels, who at the time had only a grey cubicle in the adjuncts’ suite at the end of the hall. Plain-faced but with wide, expressive eyes, she was a dead ringer for Ilsabeth. He dropped the trash bag he’d been holding, then recovered himself and hurried past her. “Working so late,” he murmured as he plugged in his vacuum. When he realized what he was doing, he unplugged it. “I can do this later, kiddo,” he said. “It’s a loud vacuum.” On the way home that night he reflected that if he’d stayed true to the course, and if he and Ilsabeth had had a daughter, she would have looked exactly like this girl who’d smiled so kindly at him as he fumbled with the vacuum cord. And then he ordered himself never to think of it again. 

But that was the week he turned his cleaning routine on its head, tending to the faculty offices first, when he was fresh and alert. Almost from the start he found himself weirdly entwined with the dramas of these ghosts. This was different from finding a pregnancy test in a bathroom or a cheat sheet taped to a desk or a nosebleed in a sink. The storylines here were subtler; there were torn-up tenure review forms in trash cans and certain four-digit extension numbers appearing over and over again on the same phones and, more than once, the sudden purge of framed pictures and decorations, turning a formerly bright and cluttered space into a utilitarian nightmare, as though the instructor wanted to be ready to make her escape in five minutes flat.

He’d been too tired in the past to look at what was in their trash cans or to consider what sat on their shelves. But now it only took a few months to pin down these people’s cardinal traits. It was oddly gratifying when he had a run-in with somebody and found his instincts justified (this one was cold and uptight; that one, quirky and awkward). He liked one of the speech professors best, a lanky forty-something guy whose office was crammed with posters and knick-knacks. Once, Preston walked in at six o’clock and found the man staring at his email, chin on his fist, a look of pure despair on his face.

“I’m sorry,” Preston said, backing out. “Thought everyone was gone.” 

“Oh, you shouldn’t bother with mine anyway. Look at this place. I’m a mess.”

“Bad emails today?” Preston asked, making conversation as he reached for the trash can.

“These chain emails—they’re sick. One person makes a totally innocuous comment, and eight people get offended, and then these little rage asteroids come flying out of the ether. Constructive criticism is dead. Everyone’s too delicate for it, so we all just lie, twenty-four-seven.” He picked up a rubber basketball and threw it at the mini-hoop installed on the wall. He missed and the ball bounced off the wall and nearly hit him in the face on rebound. 

“Yeah,” Preston said, finishing with the trash and trying not to laugh. “Truth’s never popular, is it.”

Nolan looked more closely at him. “No, it isn’t.”

“Well. You have a good night. Hope things get better.” 

“You too. Preston.” 

Preston continued down the hall, making a mental a note to do this professor’s office early in his rounds so that they might talk again, which they did. Over time, he learned that Nolan created children’s books in his spare time, and imagined different ways to die during department meetings. Nolan learned that Preston had once been married, and now lived alone. They had a few inside jokes by the time Christmas break came around. The following year when Catherine Daniels was promoted to full-time, Preston noticed how often her extension number appeared next to REDIAL on Nolan’s phone, and how often Nolan’s extension appeared on hers. He wondered about a romance, but then one evening he saw them together outside the building and there was something in their easy, cousinish chemistry that changed his mind. 

Catherine Daniels got married later that same year and the placard on her door proclaimed, Catherine Daniels-Roe. For a long time her office glowed with candles and lamps, and smelled of the vanilla and orange oils she diffused through a bamboo contraption set up beside her computer. The few times he saw her working late, she was only partly attentive to the task at hand, her phone tucked under her chin and presumably her young husband’s voice issuing warmly through it. She would nod and smile at Preston and keep clicking away at her keyboard. Some nights, she left him a note: Thanks for taking care of our spaces!  An arrow would point to a package of gummy bears or a chocolate bar. He kept the notes. One night, he came out of the men’s bathroom with his bucket in hand and thought he was hallucinating: Catherine Daniels was sliding down the hallway shoeless, in her dress and pantyhose, full-speed like a figure skater on ice. She stopped herself at the far wall, then turned and ran a few steps before transitioning into another glide. When she saw Preston, she braked hard and turned red as a beet. In self-defense she said, “I always wanted to do that, when nobody was here. The floors are so waxy—you can go forever.”

Delighted, Preston said, “You slide all you want. I won’t say a word.” 

“It’s called skeeching. It’s even better when somebody pulls you. My dad always did that for my mom across the kitchen floor. My husband and I try it our place but the kitchen is too small to get much momentum.” She was still red in the face. He hoped she’d launch herself down the corridor again but instead she went docilely back into her office. 

Four years after that, Catherine’s young husband was killed in an accident at the plant where he worked, and the candles and lamps disappeared. The only relic of her married life was a beautiful 1940’s radio perched on her bookshelf; everything else vanished save her computer and phone and pencil cup. There was no more skeeching, either. But the notes kept coming. The wrinkled Hershey’s kisses broke Preston’s heart and some of them he put in his freezer, unable to eat them but unwilling to let them molder. The rare nights he saw Catherine over the course of the next five years, he found her in there with the radio at low volume, her head tilted as if listening for a voice behind the music no one else could hear. 

Tonight, he goes to Nolan’s office and finds the guy working late as usual, red-eyed from his dried-up disposable contacts. Nolan grins at him and holds out an unopened bag of Zapp’s potato chips. “I saved these for you,” he says. “I know you’re an addict.”

Preston winces at the word addict but says, “Thanks.” He stashes the bag in his cargoes. Here again is that thrumming sensation, a hummingbird in his pocket. “How’re things?” He reaches for the trash. 

“I should’ve been a farmer or something.” 

Preston lingers in the doorway, his eyes combing the office for other work. It’s macabre and irrational, but he’s afraid they’ll never speak again. He has a wild impulse to park his cart by the door, sit down on the spare chair across from Nolan, and make a full confession. He imagines how he’d start: I was married, like I told you, but I didn’t love her. We were trashed at a party at college when all I did was drink and fuck and sleep, and she was pregnant a month later. And it gets worse. Want to know how?  

Nolan cocks his head. “You feeling all right?”

“Oh, sure. I’m fine. Got to get going here.” 

“Hey, thanks for doing my keyboard the other night. You didn’t have to do that.”

Preston shrugs. “I see dirt, I try to get it. You have to come at things when you first notice them.” 

“Well, thanks.” There’s kindness in Nolan’s face, something Preston doesn’t think he can bear another second without breaking down. He hurries away. The next office belongs to an English professor who always leaves bent staples scattered all over the carpet. Preston has to pick up the staples with needle-nose pliers or else they’ll destroy his vacuum, and he takes his time doing this, snapping up each little silver comma until the floor is clear. The man is the kind who uses a paper towel to open the restroom door after washing his hands, then lets the towel fall to the floor. The rare times he’s crossed paths with Preston, he’s spoken to him the way the students do—as though he’s mentally handicapped—but Preston cleans this man’s office all the more thoroughly, in keeping with a vow he made years ago that the more he disliked a person, the harder he’d work on his space. 

The next office belongs to another English teacher, a hoarder. The place is floor-to-ceiling with stacks of paper, and her microwave is always splattered with neon orange stains. She’s a divorcee in her fifties. Once he had a work order to fix a broken drawer in her desk. She hadn’t bothered to clean it out and when he went to adjust it he found it was crammed with cosmetics and perfume bottles and lotions. He shuddered to think how much makeup she applied every day, and why. He feared she was still trying to doll herself up for some man when she ought to love herself instead . . . 

A groan escapes him as he crawls partly under the desk to scoop up a pile of spilled paperclips. His back and knees nearly always hurt nowadays, thanks to a combination of arthritis and a recurring hernia. Paperclips in hand, he uses a bookshelf to hoist himself to his feet. Vacuuming is impossible in here so he cleans off her blinds and straightens some of the towering piles of paper so that they won’t collapse and start a domino effect. 

The office beside hers belongs to an art professor who makes the same ceramic mug over and over again (a face twisted into the clay, mouth open in an agonized scream). The one after that houses a language professor who had a brain tumor removed a few years back and can no longer write, can only type or record himself speaking, so his teaching load is mostly online now. The journals Preston used to find open and full of slanted black ink are now stacked on a shelf, gathering dust which he brushes away each night. 

Don, who knew all the gossip on everyone, once said to him that cleanliness was the shim keeping the whole shit-castle from collapsing in on itself. Preston is careful of his own pride, but he’s always believed Don to be right. It was faith in the value of his work that kept him honest. Now, cleaning the language professor’s carpet, he recalls a drawing Ilsabeth made when they were children. It was a house with four stories and eight rooms, a kind of hotel for rejects. There were broken toys in one room, three-legged cats in another, abandoned children in a third. The idea she’d had back then was that someday she’d open a house just like this, where the lowest of creatures could feel wanted again. Preston had watched Ilsabeth drawing her idea of redemption, filling in the details of each cripple’s personal heaven, and this was when he began to love her. They were only nine years old. 

A night class lets out upstairs. There is a thundering of feet, a small stampede as the students rush for the second-floor exit or the elevators. A few of them take the stairs and push past Preston and his cart toward the first-floor exit. Most behave as though he doesn’t exist. The others look askance at him, and their expression is one he knows well and can translate to the letter: loser didn’t have the brains to get through college, and look where he’s landed. He doesn’t resent them. He can’t. At their age, he was one of them—a good-looking self-assured young man who blamed everyone but himself when he began to circle the drain. Away from home, away from Ilsabeth, a change unfurled in him, and oh, how slowly, how stealthily . . . How many times has he tried to pinpoint the precise moment when it began?

He finds the microwave in the next office reeking of burned popcorn, the bag still on the tray. He attacks the mess with ferocity. Where exactly did things go wrong? But life was a mosaic of tiny pieces, and if you tried to study it from above, you couldn’t possibly separate one moment from another, or understand how the placement of one narrow shard altered the whole design.

 He finishes with the microwave and goes for the woman’s trash can. There is a styrofoam cup of old coffee hiding here beneath some crumpled papers, and the stale-smelling liquid splashes all over him. He doesn’t bother to wring out his sleeve. At the beginning, he skipped a few classes, went to a few parties. In his second semester he often failed to call Ilsabeth when he said he would. He was drinking a little, like everyone else; then suddenly, he was drinking a lot. The first time he slept with a girl who wasn’t Ilsabeth, he almost called her at two in the morning to confess everything, but then he thought, why did he have to answer to her? If she really loved him, she would have followed him to his college, wouldn’t keep him waiting like this . . . He moved into an off-campus house with four other guys who drank even more than he did, and the weekends began to blur together. The more people conveyed their disappointment in him, the more determined he became to go on doing what he wanted. When he saw Ilsabeth over the holidays, he felt split down the middle; the old Preston she’d loved was battling the new self that was arrogant and resentful and utterly self-absorbed. This new self liked the bottomless sleep that followed a binge. This new self made messes everywhere: failed classes, disenchanted parents, brokenhearted girls. It found the memory of that twilit bike ride in the field a bit silly, the gauzy dream of a child. 

She knew. Just before he began his junior year, she told him she understood that he’d moved on, and that he wasn’t beholden to her in any way. Her composure as she said this infuriated him. His self-absorption was so complete that only a decade later did he look back on the conversation and realize that her right hand was white-knuckled where it clutched the café tabletop.

Preston is now standing in front of Catherine Daniels’ office door. He’s not imagining the tap of keys; she’s really in there, working away at something. He can’t believe it, and yet he can, because it seems exactly right that she should be here tonight. The thrumming is back. He knocks. 

“Come in,” she calls out faintly.

He nudges open the door. “Just here for the trash. I won’t vacuum.”

She looks up from her computer. “There’s hardly anything in there. It’s okay.” 

“Well, then I’ll just disinfect your phone since I’m here.”

“Thanks, Preston.” 

He studies her as he wipes down the phone. The fluorescent lights catch up the new silver in her hair and accentuate the dark circles under her eyes. Her eye makeup has run a bit, and her necklace has twisted so that the clasp is hanging out front instead of behind her neck. She isn’t even forty yet, but there’s a disheveled sadness about her that makes him think of old women wandering grocery stores alone and then going home to sit in front of some television rerun. Remarry, he pleads as he cleans the phone. Find a good man and try again. She’s working on some sort of letter, and her posture is terrible, the kind that looks like it will induce a migraine later. 

Here again is the morbid fear that he might not speak to her again. He has to say something before he leaves, something significant. He looks around her office for inspiration. “Radio still working okay?”

Catherine leans left to switch the radio on, and a tiny orange light fires to life behind the needle as she hunts for a station. When soft music issues forth, she smiles a ghost of the smile he saw ten years ago in the adjunct suite. “Sounds like it’s still hanging on.” 

“The old things were made to last,” he says, then cringes at the corniness of it. On his way out he adds, “Don’t work too late.”

“I’ll try.”

He steps into the hallway and lets the door close gently behind him. There’s a work order for a whiteboard across the hall that has lost its protective coating. His expression is vacant as he works away at the palimpsests of old lectures, words behind words. How could the students read anything on a board like this? And suppose you found yourself staring at those faint lines hovering behind the bold ones, and realizing it was the past that mattered most? 

It was on a night about this time last year that Preston finished mopping a classroom when he heard Catherine Daniels’ voice, then Nolan’s down at the other end of the corridor. He turned. Catherine was shoeless again (the first time he’d seen this since her husband had died) and she was explaining to Nolan about skeeching. “It’s stupid,” she said. “But just one time? It’s been so long since I—” Nolan said what the hell, at least somebody on this campus wasn’t the walking dead. He held out his hands. Catherine took them, then got down in a crouch, her feet flat on the waxed floor. Nolan began to pull, hurrying backwards, and she slid along after him, bursting into giggles (oh, that sound; the girl had come back to life) as Nolan picked up speed. Nolan was laughing, too. But just before they reached the far wall, Catherine’s laughter came to a choking stop and she said something unintelligible. Then Catherine was weeping and Nolan was holding her shoulders looking lost and aggrieved. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  “It’s all right,” Nolan assured her. He caught Preston’s eye and shook his head. Preston backed up into his classroom and sat down at a desk. “I’m sorry, too,” he whispered. “I am so sorry.”

“Hey, man.”

The voice startles him. He looks up from the whiteboard. It’s Phil, his twenty-two-year-old coworker who’s in charge of the second floor. Phil’s holding up a bottle of Mountain Dew. “Want this? Two came out of the vending machine. Freebie.”

“No, thanks.”

Phil shrugs and unscrews the cap. “I guess two won’t hurt me.” 

“Are you done upstairs already?”

“Close enough. I’m checking out. Not gonna rat me out for leaving early, are you?”

Preston’s impulse is to lecture him—he’s the sloppiest cleaner on staff—but he holds his tongue. The younger ones are all the same, putting off the tough jobs until they become crises, doing everything else halfway if at all. The Phils of the world just don’t get it—the importance of daily maintenance, of in-the-moment care. The custodian’s real job, Preston always wants to tell them, is preemptive. Because the shift from soiled to ruined always happened when you weren’t paying attention. 

Phil is still talking: “. . . and I told her to suck it up, but you know there’s going to be bullshit when I come home anyway. Be glad you ain’t never been married, man. It’s not fuckin’ worth it.”

Preston blinks. “I was married.”

“You were?” Phil chugs his Mountain Dew, which is probably his fifth bottle today. 

“Third year of college. She got pregnant. Next thing you know, we’re as screwed up as you two are . . .  me working random-ass jobs and her tending bar in the middle of the night. I was a big minimum-wage alcoholic cliché living in a duplex next to all the other cliches.”

“Whaddaya mean, as screwed up as we are?” But Phil’s interest in the conversation is already waning; this is just another toilet bowl he’s not willing to finish scrubbing. His wife strips when she’s not at home with the baby neither of them wanted, and Phil is a stoner going nowhere, but none of it matters. In Phil’s head, it will all magically come right in the end. 

“You go on home. You’re all shaky—you need to eat something,” Preston says. He reaches into his cargo pocket and pulls out Nolan’s potato chips. “Take these. Look, did you at least finish the bathrooms? If you didn’t, I can take care of them.”

“You got to get a life, old man.” Phil leans in to take the chips, and the burnt-armpit smell of marijuana washes over Preston. “Later.”

Preston listens to Phil’s receding footsteps down the corridor, and he sees himself trailing down the hall behind him, then down the altar in the Baptist church where he and Taryn had their hurried wedding. Then on to their pathetic life in east Texas where Taryn worked as a barmaid and Preston worked as a gas station attendant, liquor store cashier, cafeteria cook, one dumb job after another. The two of them kept drinking even after the baby, Nicky, was born. It was Taryn who introduced drugs into the situation and they began to experiment with those too as the baby cried in the next room. When they weren’t high, Preston’s temper was uncontrollable. He lost one job after another because he stole or because he simply refused to do what they paid him to do. 

One Friday night when Taryn was working and Preston lay across their living room couch trying to nap, his son started crying in his crib and would not let up. Preston closed the bedroom door to muffle the sound and tried to sleep but it was useless. After about twenty minutes of seething he shot up from the couch, threw the bedroom door back open and approached the crib. Nicky’s sob got stuck in his throat upon sighting Preston. He was sitting up, holding one of his stuffed owls—those precious fucking owls, the stupid pop-eyed pair of them, the ones that had to go everywhere with him or else —and suddenly, Preston reached down over the crib’s bars and snatched the owl right out of Nicky’s grubby hands. He waited, smug, for the explosion. But Nicky only stared at him, his expression taking on sudden intelligence, as if he wished to say, You like owls? I had no idea. A beat, and then the baby turned to retrieve his second owl. He stretched out his arm to offer the toy to Preston.  

Dumbstruck, Preston accepted the other owl. Then he sank to his knees and pressed his forehead to the crib’s plastic bars.  “Oh, God,” he whispered, and then, “Ilsabeth.” And he felt himself a broken creature in the Sad House who had stumbled all accidentally into a second chance. He stood up and lifted his son out of the crib and held him close, the two owls nestled between them. “I’ll be better,” he said; “better. . .”

Preston drags his cart into the men’s room. He’s half-hoping for some horrid surprise, urine all over the floor or a name written across a stall wall in feces. He wants the filth, because despite his promise to his little son, life continued just as it had, until Nicky was five years old and Taryn announced she wanted a divorce. Preston agreed to it and said he would not fight for custody; this was the blessed reprieve he’d been waiting for. Taryn packed her things and took Nicky to Oklahoma where she had cousins. One night about eight months after she left, Nicky had a fever and Taryn decided to drive him to the hospital. She’d been drinking. The head-on collision happened just a few miles from the hospital, but it didn’t matter. They were both killed instantly. 

Somehow, Ilsabeth heard. She tracked down Preston’s number at his new apartment in Hammond and called him, her voice tight with pain as she apologized for what he’d been through. She was a counselor now, she told him. Her mother had gotten sick with cancer and Ilsabeth had needed to return home to be with her, so she’d abandoned her plan for a psychology doctorate and had chosen counseling as a compromise. When he said nothing, she went on, “I’m here for you, Preston, for whatever that’s worth. I can just listen.” 

“Go fuck yourself,” Preston responded before he hung up. Then he vomited into his kitchen sink. 

Preston restocks the pink soap by the sink and cleans the toilets. He scrubs some fresh graffiti off the stall doors. Even after twenty-five years, he is amazed at the cruel things people write about one another. On his way out, he stops in front of the enormous triple-paneled mirror. Gray-white hair, wrinkled cheeks, sallow skin. He looks seventy-five years old. How else could he look? He’d spent his twenties and thirties in a constant state of dissipation, finding a new low each time he’d thought he’d hit bottom. 

The men’s room door swinging open almost hits him on his way out. It’s Nolan, satchel on his shoulder, and they both apologize. But Preston stops; there’s something in Nolan’s face he hasn’t seen before. “You all right?” he asks. 

Nolan goes to the sink and runs cold water. He looks at Preston in the mirror. “I just found out Catherine’s quitting. She wanted me to look over something she wrote to our dean, explaining.”

“Quitting?” Preston is blank, unbelieving.

“I mean, it happens. I nearly did it myself about five times. You start thinking your work doesn’t mean anything. But with her it’s something different . . . it’s something else she’s giving up on.” He splashes water over his face. “But then what do I know.”

Preston says nothing. 

“God only knows who’s going to end up hired in her place,” Nolan continues. “Slim pickings for friends around here. She was always real with me—I liked that. Even when it was . . . sad.” 

“Yeah.”

“Well—goodnight. I’ll see you.” Nolan exits the bathroom. 

“I’m sorry,” Preston says to the wall of the door after Nolan is gone. 

A phone starts ringing on the other side of the bathroom wall and keeps trilling. It belongs to a psychology instructor who’s never set up his office voicemail. Preston can almost feel the plastic receiver in his hand and hear his mother’s voice on the other end. On his thirty-ninth birthday, she called him and for some reason began talking about Ilsabeth. Things had gone badly for her, she said. She’d married awhile back, but the marriage was an unhappy one, the husband always off somewhere. Now Ilsabeth had been diagnosed with the same cancer that had killed her mother. 

Preston said, “I think it’s better for her if I don’t contact her.”

“Yes,” his mother said softly. “I suppose so.”

Preston waits for the psychology professor’s phone to go silent before he pulls his cart into the women’s room next door. He calls out, but there’s no one here, just a faint scent of industrial soap clinging to the air. Someone has done a big flowery finger-drawing on the mirror with that soap. He takes his time erasing the flowers. As the glass comes clean, his own reflection intervenes like an eclipse. This was what he did after his mother told him about Ilsabeth: stare at his own face in the mirror. In the glass he saw an eroded soul, undeserving of life. Later that night he climbed into his bed with a bottle of eighty-proof vodka and a Ziploc bag stuffed with painkillers. But he was so exhausted that he fell asleep before he could take anything. He dreamed he was on his old bicycle again, pedaling like hell away from a city in flames. He was intent on getting into the distant woods where he could hide, but he knew he’d need supplies. When he saw an abandoned hospital, he veered right. Inside he fumbled through debris in search of what he needed. There was broken glass everywhere and he cut his hands so badly that he couldn’t flex them without spilling blood. He became faint and fell to the floor. Then Ilsabeth was leaning over him, stitching up his hands. “Come with me,” he said to her when he could speak. “I’m riding away . . .” She shook her head in disappointment. “I’ve packed a bag for you,” she said, holding it up. “Medicine. Food. You have to go back the way you came. You have to go back into the city. People will need you.” She wrapped his hands with tape so that he could grip the handlebars again. She hoisted the pack onto his back. “I can’t,” he said, but she righted the bike for him, and he climbed on. He pedaled back onto the road and turned left toward the apocalypse. Then he sat upright in his bed, gasping for breath, and his sudden movement sent the vodka and the pills crashing to the floor.

“I did go back,” Preston says to the mirror. “I went back, Ilsabeth. I tried. I took this job and I’ve stuck with it. I’m a fucking janitor but I’ve stuck with it and I’ve never held back.”

He scrubs the toilets until they shine. He moves his cart back into the hallway and wipes down the drinking fountains. It’s that time when the building goes dead silent, when there are no voices save those of the classroom clocks. Every weeknight for twenty-five years, he’s cleaned through this hour, and he’s never learned how not to fear it. 

So when he hears Catherine Daniels’ radio still going at the end of the hall, he can’t help but gravitate toward her door. Forgive me, he wants to say to her. Because it took me eight years to get myself to where I felt worthy enough to call her, and by then, she was gone. Died alone while that husband of hers was on the road somewhere. Too little, too late. The thrumming is louder than ever now. It’s loud enough that his custodian’s instincts tell him to check the building’s air conditioning, but he knows it’s all coming from within. 

When Catherine opens the door of her own accord, she’s standing there shoeless and ragged-looking and her expression is shot through with embarrassment. 

“Preston,” she says, “I was wondering—if you’re all done with everything—if you’d do something for me.”

Preston is not done with everything, but he stands at attention like a soldier. He’s ready for any command on earth. Make it something impossible, he pleads silently. Make it something huge. 

Her hesitation is exquisite. Her mouth works and he can’t tell if she’s about to laugh or cry. Finally she says, “I’m quitting. And leaving Louisiana. I tried, but I can’t—” She stops. “I’m not leaving tomorrow, I have to finish the semester, but . . . before I go, I just want . . .”

He looks down at her stockinged feet. “You want to skeech.”

“Is that weird? Would you mind? It’s just not the same doing it by yourself.”

He wants to cry. “Mind? I only hope I can do it right. I’m a slow old fogey, you know.”

“It’s easy.” She’s out in the hallway now, beckoning him after her as she heads toward the exit. “The longer the hall, the better. Did you wax this floor tonight?”

“Last night.”

“Perfect.”

He knows what to do. He pulls her as fast as he can, and she crouches low, keeping her feet flat and her arms taut as he tugs. His bones may be screaming, but he’s better at this than Nolan was and he figures out how to turn her in a fast U before flying back the way they came. Catherine doesn’t break down this time. The old sadness is there in her eyes, ineradicable, but she laughs and shrieks as they race down the tiles. At last they come to a stop, and she lets go of his hands and says, “Thanks. Really.” She reaches up to pull back her hair. “Thanks.”

He’s struggling to get his breath. “Oh,” he manages. “Don’t worry about it. It was fun.” 

She tells him to drive safe going home and then she goes back into her office and closes the door. He doesn’t get the chance to tell her that he’s afraid he won’t see her again even if she isn’t quitting tomorrow. He can only push his cart down the hall to the next classroom and pull out his mop. He cleans. He soaps and rinses, polishes and dries. When at last everything is finished, he limps back to the maintenance building, fills in his reports and his supply orders, and returns to his truck out in the back lot.

The cabin light illuminates a green inchworm crawling across his dashboard. He registers this only briefly, his mind still skeeching down the halls with Catherine. Chewing the peppermint gum he’s been using for years to ward off the urge to smoke, he backs out of the lot and drives home. He climbs the metal stairs to his second-floor apartment and tosses his keys onto the kitchen table. 

He is awake most of the night, pacing the floors as he moves painstakingly back through the scenes of his life. “How,” he hears himself say, unable to voice the rest of the question. He walks around in circles, his body wraithlike where it is reflected in the toaster, the bathroom mirror, the TV. After he heard of Ilsabeth’s passing, he had so many nights like this in which he wondered what was the point. Why get up in the morning? Why push his cart down the halls ever again? Then he would feel the handlebars inside his fists and he would rise the next day determined to do better. But now he is tired, his spirit deflated. He paces the floors with his hands in his hair.

Then, at two in the morning— exactly one hour before he is destined to have his stroke and die in his bed—he goes stock-still before his bedroom window. He’s remembered the inchworm in his truck. He doesn’t bother with shoes; he blunders down the metal stairs and into the lot and keys open the driver’s side door. The overhead light clicks on, flooding the cabin yellow, but the creature is no longer wandering the dashboard. Frantically Preston searches the steering wheel, the center console, the doors, but there is no speck of pale green anywhere. No color at all. He must have crushed it when he climbed out of the truck. Or else it clamored into some crevice where it will surely suffocate and die . . . 

And then he looks down, into the cup of spare change he keeps between the seats. There he is, trapped in the cup’s deep ravine, traversing with palpable fear a field of nickels and dimes. When the inchworm pauses atop a penny, Preston lifts the coin between two fingertips and carries it to the live oak at the edge of the parking lot where a streetlamp illuminates the grass. Once released, the inchworm starts happily through a shaft of light toward a fallen leaf. 

Preston sinks to his knees. From an upper window, someone who didn’t know might believe he was grieving a terrible loss. But he is thanking God for the smallest of mercies, and promising the earth beneath him, enough. It has been enough.  

Elizabeth Genovise is an O. Henry Prize recipient as well as a recent inductee into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame. Her third collection of short stories, Posing Nude for the Saints, was published in 2019 by the Texas Review Press. Currently she is active as a teacher/workshop leader for creative writers in east Tennessee. Her next book, Palindrome, will be published by Texas Review Press in 2022.

Sara Ray

A Rumination on the Devil

We spent summer evenings on the shore of the lake. Late in the afternoon my father would say, “anyone up for a swim?” We’d pack a cooler, change into our swim clothes. Then we’d walk down to the lake, following the path cut through the forest. This was Maine, a place where crossing the forest’s boundary makes the world two hours darker and two months cooler; the afternoon sunlight was reduced to patches splashed across the greens and browns of the understory. We would arrive to the rocky ledge we called our own, swim as the sun sank behind the western mountains in some permutation of cloudy purples, grapefruit pinks, and desperate yellows. Sometime after dark, under a salt spill of stars, my father would say, “well I think it’s just about bedtime,” and we would begin our walk back up the hill through the now-dark forest which existed to us only in earthy scents and rustling sounds. I hurried to stay close to my brother but often could only see him when the moonlight caught the white of his shirt. But I was young and my legs were short, so I always brought up the rear. 

I felt the devil on these walks. I expected him. During the daytime, I reminded myself that it was absurd to be so afraid of the devil and, after all, what could he want with a child walking home from a swim? But I felt him in the woods. Felt a pressing-in of energy as if the engulfing darkness were soaking into my skin, washing into my bloodstream. I felt certain that if I relaxed my shoulders from my arms even a centimeter that I would brush against the devil’s uncertain form: he was an insect-like man with numerously-articulated limbs whose tall swaying form might be mistaken, by a less astute eye, for the trees. Once I forgot my glasses by the lake. “Run back and get them,” my brother said, “we’ll wait for you.” What could I say to my brother? That if I went back for my glasses, the devil might grab me?  So instead I turned around and walked back into the velvet night, listened for the familiar sound of water lapping against stone ledge, crept down to the edge of the lake which I knew would protect me. Then I grabbed my glasses, and I sprinted down the path certain, somehow, that I could outrun hell. 

But the devil knew where I lived. Safely home, tucked into bed, I lay awake rapt at attention for signs that he’d arrived. The scratching scurry of mice in the attic, the creak of the house’s old bones, the wail of an unseen loon. Headlights would flash through the trees lining our rural road and I knew the devil would turn into our driveway, fold himself out of his shiny classic car. I waited for his knock at our door. 

One night the full moon hung outside my bedroom window like a flashlight from another world, so bright that I saw its imprint when I closed my eyes. The thought bloomed in the center of my mind: a portal. The devil could open a portal right here in my bedroom. What would stop him? Fear reached its fingers from my gut up my throat and hung at the back of my mouth like a mountain climber on a ledge. I stared at the moon. What could I do if a portal opened up in my bedroom and the devil himself came through it? If he stepped through it with the sharp clack of his shoes on my hardwood floors and stood at the foot of the bed watching me watch him with the whites of my wide eyes shining in the moonlight? He would, of course, be intending to drag me to some hellish world dead or, perish the thought, alive and unable to escape back through the portal to my warm home in the cool, green woods. A small voice much like my own called up from the depths of my mind, a small thing trapped at the bottom of a well: if some hellmouth yawns open, what could you do to close it? 

Nothing. The answer was simple and whole like the moon herself. If that were to happen, I could do nothing. I would only be able to react, to give myself to the situation as it unfolded. There is no preparing for such a situation and, recognizing this, I slept. Night after night and that portal never opened. The moon waned, she waxed again, and nights always turned into mornings. Over time, I stopped anticipating the devil in the darkness or in passing headlights. As I grew older I considered how ripe I’d been to him in my younger years: a child protected by the cardboard armor of Sunday school assurances whose mind was obsessed with him, whose Faith Like a Rock was limestone. If he had not sunk his teeth into so ripe a fruit, I thought on the night of my high school graduation as headlights swung their way through the woods, then what could he want with a being grown dull with ambivalence?

The devil came to me fifteen years later, long after my body had forgotten its fear of him. I’d moved from my childhood home to an eastern city where the darkness never fully fell, one which was always ten degrees warmer than the world outside its limits. I woke up in the night and there was his silhouette in the doorway: that tall figure with his strange limbs made even taller by his wide brimmed hat. I soon went to clearer things— was I being robbed or raped or stalked— but my cells buzzed with the truth of the situation, which was that the devil had finally come for me and he was standing at my door. When I tried to call out, speech was molasses caught in my diaphragm, remnants bubbling out as incoherent sounds. When I tried to move, my limbs were cement and unresponsive. The devil came and sat on the edge of my bed, leaning forward and clasping his hands as if he had bad news. When he turned, his face washed over me like a river’s current, its features refusing to burrow into my mind beyond the immediate. 

His voice a pleasant tenor, the devil stated, “You are afraid of me.” My body couldn’t respond. He held my hand between his, cold slick things like fish at the market. “Why are you so afraid of me? Are you afraid that I’ll kill you? That this is death?” His voice vibrated in my breastbone and down my ribs.

He climbed upon my chest and sat there with his knees tucked up so that his heels dug beneath my collarbone. I smelled the leather of his shoes in the short breaths I could take. The devil’s weight was crushing: a slender being with bones of lead. His head craned downward so his ungraspable face was pressed against mine; he sucked my desperate breaths into his belly like soup. The devil came to me like this for months with no discernable pattern. Sometimes he’d come two nights in a row; sometimes I’d sleep soundly for weeks before waking up with him kneeling on my chest as my heart tried to beat its way through my ribcage. Other times I felt his still body curled behind me like a lover, the weight of his arm draped over my waist. 

I told my brother about these visits and asked if he’d ever felt the devil in the woods near our home. My brother told me it was a dream. He told me he’d read about such things on the internet, that it was called sleep paralysis and was definitely caused by stress. Had I tried meditation, he asked, or yoga? What could I say to him? That I was certain it wasn’t a dream because I’d spent my whole life waiting for the devil and now he’d finally found me with my guard down? My brother’s advice, as always, was practical: when the devil comes for you, try your hardest to move a single finger— wrest back control by doing something small and which your body knows. After all, he said through the phone while loudly chewing and with football roaring in the background, who the fuck knows how to beat the devil so why not just reclaim what’s yours?

The devil appeared again, an anchor in the darkness. I left the hallway light on but it was blocked by his hat; my terror at his face burned slowly through my guts. He gripped my skull below the cheekbones and squeezed, turning my head this way and that as if he were looking at an apple. My body thrummed with an electricity so potent I could hear it. In the panic, my mind found my right index finger and I commanded it to move, which it did not. My hand felt like a foreign object and not a part of me. I focused on my finger and asked it: what do my sheets feel like? (It answered: soft, flannel). I told my finger I didn’t believe it, to prove it. Like a crack in a dam, I felt my finger move and, through it, the real softness of my sheets; the crack widened and I bent my finger back and forth. The devil watched this, and he crawled off my chest to sit at my bedside. 

“You are so afraid of me, but I am curious about you,” he said. His shoulders hunched and his claws clicked as he rubbed his hands over one another. “Are you ever curious about me? Or only afraid?”

I was curious about him, this long awaited stranger. And so when he visited next, I chose to let him linger a while. I tried to grasp his details: that his face was made of damp, papery scales and that holes were worn through his jacket and shoes. In all the times he came to visit, he only ever examined me. Looked. Felt the outsides of me as if I were a rough and interesting stone. I saw myself in his echo, my own body as a thing buzzing with blood, electricity, rawness. In the woods of my childhood, he lingered in the tall tree’s shadow and watched the water from a summer swim drip onto the path behind me, my small chest heaving in its tired breathing, my face bright with some private and unknowable fantasy.

*

When our father dies, my brother and I return to our childhood home. We stand across the kitchen island from one another, leaning onto it with our elbows over half-drunk beers and a pineapple pizza. My brother is the oldest. He has always carried the weight of these things. When he called to tell me our father had suddenly died, he told me in the next breath that he had looked up flights and I could be home by tonight— he could pick me up at the airport, should he book it? When I found him in the car outside Arrivals, he was crying into the steering wheel. He stopped when I opened the passenger’s side door, asked how my flight was, if I was hungry. I told him I would drive us home. The cool darkness of the forest lay just beyond the guardrails as I sped us northward. My brother leaned his head against the window. What am I supposed to do, he— the oldest, the fixed star— asked. 

Later, as we eat our pizza, I suggest we take the rest of our six-pack to the lake. So as the sun dips toward the mountains we walk the path our bodies know. The trees have grown, just as we have; the stream still gurgles past. Our father taught us many things during our walks between the lake and home: that our ancestors came to these foothills as trappers, how to navigate a boat across choppy waters, why we couldn’t get another dog. A sudden stroke at the hardware store, and now my brother and I are alone on the path like fawns walking on their matchstick legs. I close my eyes and give myself to the unconscious motions of my feet which know where a slow turn began, where to pick themselves up a bit higher. Like closed eyes, death is a boundary from the immediacy of the world, its details, its forward movement. Our father has said to us everything he ever will. But we can regard one another across mortality’s limit, let new wisdoms trickle from old words. Remembrance isn’t a portal, I understand, it is feeling through sheer fabric.

The devil is here with us. I imagine his tail swishing like a happy dog’s as we walk the familiar path. I look for the devil in the trees, and I find him in their craning limbs; I look for him in the forest and he is there in the shadow spots giving shade to frogs. As the woods descend into darkness, I feel that engulfing energy which tells me there are things that lurk in the dark, there are things I cannot comprehend. The edges of my body push back against the unknown and find the contours of the limit between us. I press my own energy outward and feel resistance and connection, an articulation of what is mine. We arrive to our rocky ledge at the last exhale of sunset with the waxing moon only a faint stencil in the sky. Slipping my feet into the lake’s dark waters, I wonder why I never feared the lake sucking me into her depths, but my feet find the bottom and push my body so it slides across the black surface until it rests cradled atop the water’s weight. I float on this boundary and watch the stars emerge. They twinkle like the hallway light sprawled across the devil’s scaled skin. We exist like this for a while, two universes peering into one another, until my brother and I pull ourselves back onto the shore. The devil watches us from the treeline, I know, watching the moonlight slither across our wet skin. Bare feet against rocky dirt, the woods close around us like a womb as my brother and I begin our journey home. 

Sara Ray is an award-winning oral storyteller hailing from Philadelphia. By day, Sara is pursuing her Ph.D. in the History of Science, but she enjoys escapes academic life to write stories with the Backyard Writers fiction workshop and tell them on stage with First Person Arts. Her short fiction has been published by Charge Magazine and The Head and the Hand Press. Sara is on Twitter @kappapej.

Chris Feeney

Hopeless Romantic

When Hopeful Romantic was put down by track officials behind the back end of the starting gate, a loud gasp responded and travelled ghost-like from the clubhouse to the grandstand, and viewers in the boxes, some of whom hadn’t been paying attention to the last few heats, peered down through the glass to see what was going on. The gunshot also drew in the picnickers and day-drinkers who had been lying on the lawn beyond the bleachers and balconies, listening to results as they came in through the loudspeakers or observing them on the suspended flat-screens, erected equidistant like telephone poles. More remarkably, it humbled the losing bettors, who slipped their wallets into their back pockets and put on their sunglasses, and didn’t go to the clerk to dispute any straight or exotic wagers they had made. Like unknown accomplices in a well-known crime, they simply vanished into the crowd. 

It was the fifth race of the day, the midpoint of a sweltering session in August. The end of the season was unseasonably hot, so much so that a moratorium was placed on the dress code, which was almost always strictly applied. Race-goers in the clubhouse were allowed to wear “abbreviated” clothing, like shorts just above the knee or a polo shirt, as opposed to the usual blazer and dress pants. Those in the grandstand still had to keep their shirts and shoes on, though anything open-toed was now acceptable. Women could forgo dresses, if they chose to. The whole affair spoke to the death of tradition. On the Race Course’s website, men are referred to as gentlemen and women as ladies. There is neither room nor recognition for anything in between. Gentlemen and ladies are the people who watched the races, and they shouldn’t have to see something else, including the killing of an animal. 

It could have been dehydration or over-exertion, but the fact remained that Hopeful Romantic snapped its featherweight femur at the starting gun, and was subsequently and without ceremony snuffed out by an actual one. It’s almost common knowledge that these things happen. In fact, it has been calculated that two thoroughbreds face summary execution in any given day during a summer season. Naturally, this sport, or custom, or whatever you might like to call it, has drawn the justifiable ire of animal rights activists. Officials and enthusiasts are quick to retort, explaining that a broken leg is a death sentence for a horse. The way I see it, so is a bullet.

As it could be misinterpreted, I’ll emphasize that I have no great love for horses. In my opinion, they’re just okay. I admire them for what they are. However, I don’t feel any urge to race horses or see them raced, and I certainly don’t want to see or be near something dying. 

At the time, I had been feeling listless. My life partner, Julia, and I were on hiatus again. She said that she couldn’t stand to watch the way I was changing, so I was cast out from our home. The life partnership was her idea. Which sounds, I admit, a little terse, but the sentiment is true. Whether by nature or nurture, she understood a marriage to be a large, unwieldy, fragile if not broken thing, like a car that might stall on the highway. A partnership doesn’t require a divorce, a fact that now seemed to be a problem. Painfully, like a finger, the path of our relationship had been bent backward from its once linear shape.

I was at the Saratoga track that day on account of an old friend, Connors, whom I’d fallen out of touch with and who was a racing enthusiast. He was also, at the time, very afraid of dying. He was indebted to what he kept calling a “bookie,” and had cried to me during an abrupt, surprising phone call that he couldn’t pay back what was owed. I asked how much he owed, intending to help him out financially, but when he finally disclosed the amount, I realized that I would have to drive up north and sort things out in person. I know how they treat horses at the racecourse, but I had sincere doubts they dealt with human beings, even those with bad judgment, in the same plainspoken way.

Connors did have bad judgment. We met in high school. I remember it was a Friday because I needed a ride to a concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC, for short), which is not far from the track. He was heading up there after his varsity hockey practice, ending at the same time as my basketball tryouts. Even if we hadn’t eventually become friends, I would have remembered him. He was a striking guy — popular, handsome, loud. We got to SPAC in twenty minutes. It’s a forty-minute drive if you speed like a regular person, but Connors liked to outrun the state troopers, his speedometer reading in the triple digits. When they pulled out of the dividing lane, he was usually pulling off at the next exit. Though it all seemed bold and renegade, it was only privilege masquerading as such. He could afford speeding tickets and, on occasion, bail many times over. None of which made me like him any less. I had looked up to him, once. He seemed generous with things; be they speed limits or acts of kindness. Even the man’s name was a plurality. So, after our phone call, I wanted to see what kind of trouble he was in and help him out as an old, if not close, friend should. I reserved a seat in the clubhouse for twenty-five dollars one night in advance and drove up the interstate early the next morning.

After the initial shock evaporated in the heat and ladies and gentlemen alike resumed fanning their faces with pamphlets of that day’s schedule, some racegoers were still morbidly curious and wanted to see the dead horse. I admit that I was in that camp. Like carrion, we clustered around the circle fence where the thoroughbreds are shown off before led onto the track. This is how some people bet. They like to see what they’re betting on, maybe to catch a glimpse of an energetic tic suppressed within the animal. There were two children at the front of our group. They grasped the top rail of fence and watched with their heads beneath the bar, like prisoners in stocks. With adolescent wonder, they remarked that there must be a lot of blood. I imagined there would be. I also felt a violent wonder towards to the state of the animal, but, as it might be expected, the horse never arrived. There is probably a back path that is used to ferry carcasses out before they are sent to who knows where.

I was still curious, so I walked to the teller booths and waited in line. When it was my turn, I lied and told them that I had placed a bet on Hopeful Romantic, and that I was wondering whether I could get my money back. I don’t know what I would have done if they asked for any proof. I thought the teller might have been surprised, or even disturbed, since it seemed cruel to ask for a refund, given the circumstances.

“You gambled on the horse not dying. That’s just part of the bet,” she said, without looking up from her screen, as if this was a question that had been asked and answered a thousand times before, and likely that very day.

“Is that true?”

She looked up at me. I must have been too earnest.

“Of course it’s true. You heard what happened.” She looked behind me. “Would you like to place another bet? There’s a line behind you and we’re almost out of time.”

I placed a box trifecta (which is a type of exotic wager I’d read about the day before) on horses whose names I liked, and thanked her. I then bought lunch and returned to my seat. The day only grew hotter in the afternoon. Even as the sun tracked lower in sky, it shone brightly like the blade of an axe on the west-facing audience. I watched the dry dirt of the track constrict the yellowing grass at its center as the clock wound towards the trigger-pull. Beneath the thin mist from cooling fans strapped below the second level, I lowered my hat over my eyes. When the starting gun went off, I lifted it. Three Aces, Amateur Barbarian, and Maretime all showed, and the same teller I’d spoken to handed me four hundred dollars in cash.

“I guess you won’t be needing any money back today,” she said.

“No, I guess not,” I said, and then waited for a moment too long.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you... If I wanted to dispute something else, a larger sum of money, who would I speak to?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Say I owed money. Where would I go to settle that?” 

The teller was shocked, and I realized how young she was. 

I always see people for who they are, even if it can sometimes take a while. She was certainly no “bookie”. This was a boring summer gig, one that required handing out more money than the season’s pay would ever amount to, and one that would be over soon, come September. She probably did hate the fact that they shoot horses, and that some people ask for their money back when this happens. And she probably hated when a fool won four hundred dollars for no good reason.

“I don’t think I can help you with that. Are you saying you owe money to the Race Course?”

“Can you owe money to the Race Course?”

“I really don’t think so.” She pulled a billfold from the register and waved it in front of me. “We already have your money. You usually don’t get it back.”

*

Connors was staying at a rented cabin in the Catskill Mountains, some hundred miles south of Saratoga. A dense grey haze was resting a mile over the highway. Wildfires on the west coast had been burning now for a week, and there wasn’t any indication they could be contained. Masks were recommended for those in cities. I spent an open stretch of road looking up through the sunroof. One week must be the time it takes to get to the east coast, so long as the winds cooperate. As I turned a bend, and other cars slunk into the periphery, I turned on the radio and focused back on the road.

A man had been mauled by a juvenile bear. He had left open the door of his screened-in porch and overnight, this little bear, who must have been lost or separated from its family, wandered in and nested. In the morning, the man walked out his front door, like he would any other morning. It must have been a surprise to both of them. The bear swiped, hooking and pulling the victim’s jaw down to his collar-bone, before bounding madly out through a different, closed door, tearing a hole in the mesh. All of this was told over the radio. I haven’t done any extra reading since. They were almost giddy in reporting it. I switched stations as I soon as I grew bored.

*

Directions to Connors’s place had to be sent by text since any map, paper or GPS, would not account for the opening and closing of service roads on the mountain. The text I received from him seemed hurried, likely dictated, and my phone couldn’t figure out where to place the right punctuation. Lefts were combined with rights, landmarks like cairns and birch groves drifted together into an inextricable mass. It made for difficult driving. The smoke-laden day was shifting into an especially dim, dismal evening, and I was frequently stopping to try to decipher any evident route from Connors’ message. Aside from a single pickup truck I crossed paths with on one occasion, I was alone on the mountain, stranded in the sort of forest that beget notions of Bigfoot, The Jersey Devil, and other killers near to and far from humankind. I thought about giving up, retracing my tire tracks to the highway and then back home, if I were welcome, where I’d call Connors and tell him to calm down, take a pill, and rejoin the land of the living. But when I’d decided on this, my phone, connecting with some wayward pocket of cellular service, rang.

“Isaac? Isaac? This fucking reception... this goddamn shit, fucking — Isaac?”

“I can hear you, Connors. Take a breath, alright? Could you take a breath? I need directions.”

“Thank God. Thank you, God. Where are you?”

“I told you. I’m lost.”

“Well work with me. What’s around you? What do you see?”

“Well, I see lot of trees.”

“I said work with me.”

Working with Connors, as well as a dozen homemade signs etched into storm-worn 2x4s, the kind you might see pinned outside lodges and lake houses, laminated and listing the owner’s last name or a platitude about vacation, we were able to find my way. Connors’ cabin was not like one of these vacation homes. It was more in line with homes that are built sturdy but quickly by people under threat of death by exposure. There were, in fact, two cords of firewood lining the right side of the house, but the chimney top was dormant. The only scent of woodsmoke was that which emanated from California. It was hot, I supposed. The curtains were drawn, and although it was dusk, I detected no light from inside. I knocked, and knocked again. Something shuffled on the other side of the door.

“Blackbox Theater,” said that familiar voice, which was hushed but, in his peculiar way, still loud.

“Connors?”

“Blackbox Theater!” it said again.

“Blackbox Thea— Oh...,” I thought for a moment. Brian King hooked up with Shelley Landon.” It was a juvenile reference, a joke from a bygone era, but I have a good memory.

“Yeah, and what’d they do?”

“Let’s not say.”

“Okay, fine. When then?”

“Connors, open the damn door.”

After a moment of silence, a show of protest, I heard him peel back latches, flip back the deadbolt, and turn the knob. I gently pressed the door open, slowly revealing his person: wool socks and strap-on sandals, black fleece pants, an undershirt, a dirty blond beard, and wide, wild eyes.

“I guess it really is you,” he said, humorously, but I watched those eyes cross my face to fix on the empty spaces behind me, the crushed stone driveway where I’d parked my car, the busted road, and the green matrix of trees which masked everything else. “Come on in.”

After I entered, Connors went back to work on the latches, slapping metal this way and that.

“You must have heard about the bear,” I said, hopeful.

“Bear?”

The inside of the cabin smelled like stale cigarette smoke, body odor, mildew, and soured mulch, all mingled together. Connors had one lamp turned on next to a large leather reading chair. Next to it was an ashtray, a pack of Camels, and two empty Heineken bottles. I didn’t see any books. There was a TV standing precariously on a disconnected cable box and some DVDs.

“So,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

“Pretty much what you see,” he said from kitchenette, before coming back with two mixed drinks. “I made these special. Saved a bottle of gin.” I sat on a broken-in sofa, and he sat in the reading chair.

“Thanks.”

“It is still summer right?”

I took a sip and raised my glass. “A good drink for it,” I declared.

“It’s still summer,” he replied, staring at the sweeped-out fireplace.

I hoped there hadn’t been some psychotic break. I figured I would have to stay for a couple days, maybe a week, in order to calm him down and bring him back (as I said before) to the land of the living.

“Do you have any music?” I asked. “Or why don’t we make a fire and liven the place up a little.”

“I might have some music, somewhere around. No way on the fire, though. Negatory. Not a chance.”

I got up and walked towards the door. He didn’t notice until I’d undone the latches.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re leaving. You can’t leave, already. But if you are going to go, just shut that door shut behind you, alright?”

“I’m just getting some wood. You’ve got two big stacks outside.”

“I said no, Isaac. I meant it.”

Connors took a cigarette and put it in his mouth and went back to looking at the fireplace, rocking a bit in the chair, which creaked.

“Take a breath, alright? And maybe don’t smoke inside. The look you’ve got going here,” I made a little show of observing the room. “It isn’t a good one.”

It was now completely dark, and a motion-sensing spotlight flashed on above my head, spreading white light over the front of the property, further obscuring everything beyond it. Even I got a chill from that black and blank background as I loaded up the log carrier. The feeling was hard to shake. When I heard the rolling of dirt and saw an erratic waver of high beams, my body stiffened. The vehicle stopped at the end of the driveway and I saw the driver-side window roll down. I set aside my irrational side, my own sudden paranoia, and went to meet the driver. Out of consideration, he turned on his inside lights. It was the same pickup I’d passed earlier.

“I’m sorry to disturb you!” he yelled.

“Are you lost?”

“Well, yes,” the driver said. He was a small, innocent-seeming man — short, a little heavy-set, but still small. He still had his baseball cap on. It was hard to see, but I could make out a small set of eyes underneath the brim of his hat. And he looked like he’d been sweating, almost like he was feverish, or angry. It was a hot night, I thought. Maybe building a fire was a stupid idea. “I guess I am lost,” he continued.

“I’m not sure I can help you,” I looked around. “Where could you be trying to go?”

“I’m supposed to be seeing my daughter. We’re supposed to be hiking tomorrow, up on Slide Mountain, and apparently there’s a campsite by the trail and,” he gave a high-pitched laugh, like a rodent’s squeak. “Well, I just can’t seem to find it.” He grinned sheepishly at me and lifted his palms up. “But if you can’t help me, you can’t help me.”

“I’m sorry. I really can’t. I’m not from here.” I made a show of inspecting his truck. “You remember passing me earlier? I was just as lost as you.”

“Oh, that was you! I saw the car in the driveway. I thought ‘maybe…,’ but I just wasn’t sure.”

“I am sorry that I can’t help you.”

“No worries, no worries. I appreciate it, anyway. I’m sure I’ll get there.” He looked forward down the road. “We’re really out in the middle of nowhere, aren’t we? Who could ever find anyone out here?”

“It would be a challenge. Believe me…” I said, starting to walk back to the house. It was getting to be a boring conversation, and I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to go back inside and make sure Connors hadn’t done anything drastic.

“Thank you, anyway,” he said, and drove off, the harsh red of his taillights fading away.

I dropped the log carrier on the welcome mat, closed the door behind me, and secured each lock half-heartedly and out of courtesy for Connors, who was still in his chair but had managed to light his cigarette. He rocked as he was rocking before and continued to stare off into the fireplace.

“Were you talking to someone?” he asked.

“No?” 

I didn’t want to trigger his haywire imagination. I started building a fire, hoping it would improve the mood of the place. He didn’t say much aside from one steady remark that the term “smoke signal” is not a misnomer. When the flames took and popped, sending sparks up the chimney, I made two more drinks from the good gin and some tonic water. I searched for a lime or lemon, but there was nothing of the kind.

“You’re going to be the first person to get scurvy on land,” I said.

“Fruit doesn’t keep. And I’m not in the habit of going to the store.”

“What do you eat?”

Connors thought for a moment and lit another cigarette, habitually it seemed, because he rested it over the ashtray without taking a drag.

“Non-perishables.”

“And when they run out?” I asked. He motioned to the door. There was a small shotgun leaning against the wall. It would have been comfortably within reach when I had knocked. “Oh Jesus. What are you going to shoot?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a deer. Or a bird.”

“I don’t think you’re going to do that. You’re going to have get out of here at some point. Non-perishables are only so until you eat them. Eventually, you are going to run out of food.”

“Do you want a smoke?”

“No. Thanks.” The fire was beginning to diminish the various smells of the house. The drinks I had made were strong, and as I loosened up and settled into the couch, I started to feel better. “You have to tell me what’s going on. I went up to Saratoga yesterday, like you asked.” Connors made direct eye contact for the first time in what felt like a while. 

“What? I didn’t tell you to go up there. Who did you see?”

“I didn’t see anyone. I went to the track to do, I don’t know... do some sleuthing, I guess. Anyway, they told me that it’s impossible to owe them money. That isn’t how it works.”

“Because what I was doing was illegal, Isaac. I told you that. I have a bookie — a bookmaker. He makes bets for me. But it’s all on credit, of which I currently have none.”

“Why does he make such shit bets?” I asked. I was becoming frustrated.

“No, I make the bets. I’m the one who... I’m the one who makes shit bets.”

“Okay. Well, who is this guy?”

“Isaac, please. Just don’t get involved, alright? You don’t know about this stuff, so leave it alone. I didn’t have you here to talk about it or to have you save me. I only wanted to see you... we’re good friends, right?” 

Before I die was probably where he was going with that, but I was glad he didn’t. Connors pulled another two cigarettes from the pack and offered again. I declined, again. 

I’d sworn off the things after my uncle died. I spent a night with him two weeks before he did. We watched Star Wars and he smoked in her chair. He couldn’t even walk right at that point, so I brought him tiny portions of food and his Red 100s, and we smoked and watched Star Wars. And while we did, it struck me that death rays and laser beams must have been a revolution in exposing violence to adolescent world. Bam, flash, and the galactic fascist is down, with a smoldering splotch covering his heart, but even that is going too far into the grisly details. But violence isn’t like the war movies, either. I, or really Julia and I, once saw a “hit” take place across a street in Albany after walking out of a restaurant. It was our post-engagement dinner that, in retrospect, wasn’t so much that. It was disturbing how awkward it had been, “the hit,” the jerk of the killer’s arm, the flat pop of the pistol, and the way the victim turned around, as if he had forgotten something inside, before collapsing on the steps of his home. I remember it so clearly. You could argue that I’ve visualized it so much that it threatens to inform everything else I continue to see. Which is natural, I suppose. It’s not really something you’d forget. I’ve tried to come to terms with it, with the fact that the world is filled with violence. I try not to let it upset me to an irrational degree.

I promised Connors I’d stay the night, and took the empty downstairs bedroom. He had been sleeping in the attic, which couldn’t have been good for his health. He seemed calmer before he climbed his ladder. I hoped he’d begun turn a corner. 

In bed, sitting up against the headboard with my laptop on my lap, I got started on an email that I intended to send to the Veterinary Centers’ of America to find out more about the morbid future of put-down horses. I figured that the VCA had little to do with either PETA or with any thoroughbred racing organization, and that I might receive an unbiased response. I mentioned that I’m good at seeing things for what they are. It’s more of a trade than a talent, and one that always involves considering both sides of the equation. When I finished, I went to sleep. I woke up only once when the motion-sensing light, hanging outside my window, switched on, likely activated by the running of red squirrels.

In the early morning, the windows were covered by a warm woodland mist, and I thought about that poor father who couldn’t find his daughter. Connors had the foresight to buy a lot of coffee, but it had all been stored in the freezer, so I started a small fire and thawed a package beside the embers. This took some time, so I went back into the bedroom. There was a little desk in the room. I’d hardly noticed it in the dark, nor what was on it, but there it was. It was covered in papers — spreadsheets that tracked wagers, intact race cards, torn-up race cards, and a business card that named no business but listed a name, number, and address. The address was located in Burnt Hills, a neighborhood that is just a couple exits south of Saratoga. I stood there for a while, in front of that little desk, thinking. I heard Connors stirring upstairs and, slipping the card into my shirt pocket, went to brew our coffee. I convinced him to take it outside. We sipped it between small conversations and watched the mist burn off in the rising light.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked.

“I admit it,” he said. “This is nice.”

“Do this every day, okay? Make your coffee, then drink it out here.” 

“Okay,” he said, staring into his mug.

“You promise?”

“Yes. I promise.”

I stood up to grab my bag from inside and bring it to the car. He almost moved to stop me.

“You know, Isaac...”

“Yeah.”

“Do you feel like we’re trained to do one thing? In our lives, I mean. We’re only trained to do one thing.”

I thought for a moment.

“I think that might be true.”

“It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it?”

*

I made plans to be back in week with fresh fruits and vegetables, and then I left. I drove straight up the Northway to Burnt Hills with the mysterious address in mind. 

Burnt Hills is a bit of an anomaly, a conservative bastion of the largely liberal Capital Region of New York. It isn’t exactly the countryside, but it isn’t suburban, either. You see confederate flags waving over doorways, large pickup trucks with mostly empty truck beds, and farmlands cut through with strip malls and fast food restaurants. It’s an antebellum country that never was, but now, oddly, is. My directions led me to a big white farmhouse that rose from fields that looked like they hadn’t been worked in a very long time. I stopped on the roadside, and, resolved to get to the source of Connors’ anxiety, trespassed. A man was working in the front yard. He appeared to be digging holes. I waved and walked over to him.

“Do you know a James Nettles?” I asked. He laid down his shovel, took off his gloves, and placed them on top of the pile of dirt resting in a bright red Radio Flyer wheelbarrow. “Are you him?”

“Yes. What’s this about?”

“I’m hoping you’ll clear something up for me.” He raised his eyebrows. “Or that I can clear something up for you.” The words surprised me. My heart was beating fast. Suddenly, I was overcome by a violent urge to attack. I looked at the supple, sweating belly that protruded over his belt and under his work shirt.

“What is it we need to talk about?”

“Do you know a man named Connors Mercer?”

The man chewed for a moment and then spat a bolus of tobacco into the hole beside us. “Yes. I do know him.”

“He thinks someone is out to get him.” Again, the man raised his eyebrows. He picked up his shovel, and in my pocket my fist clenched over my car key, but the man simply balanced the shovel on the handles of the Radio Flyer. “I think you might know something about it,” I continued. “And I’m here to settle that.” James Nettles looked in his hole.

“Okay...” he gestured at me.

“Isaac.”

“What is it you think I do, Isaac?”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Well... why don’t you come inside?” He wiped his forehead with a loose glove. “It’s another hot day, isn’t it?” When I stalled, he smiled. “It’s alright, really. Let’s not talk in this heat. Why do that to ourselves?”

“Right,” I said, and I followed him inside with the confused posture of a pet.

It was a beautiful house. You could even say it was tasteful. The floors were hardwood, and the windows were wide and tall, permitting an excess of natural light. The walls were painted a very gentle shade of mauve. He had me sit at his table in the dining room before disappearing into the house. Even the china in the cabinets seemed thoughtful, curated, and not the result of some stock purchase. He returned with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses.

“If you want something harder, I could bring that. It’s a little early for me, though. It’s a rule I have: when the sun is up, so am I.”

“This is fine for me, thank you.”

He poured our glasses. “My wife should be home soon with our daughter. It’s the first day of school.” He handed me the glass. “She could come up with something a little more substantive. I’m the first to admit that I’m a terrible cook.”

“Will this take long?”

“I don’t think so. You wanted to talk about Connors. It’s Connors, right? Not just Connor.”

“Yes. Connors.”

“And he’s just one man? Not two? Or twenty?”

“Yes, just the one. Listen, this is all kind of you, but don’t jerk me around.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to liven things up a little bit. Because, truthfully, that’s all taken care of. You don’t have to worry about him anymore, if that’s what you are doing right now. Worrying.”

“Can I ask how it’s settled? From what I understand, he owes you money.”

“What is it that you think I do?”

“I think you’re a bookmaker, or something like it. You might call yourself anything. Dishonest, for example.”

James smiled and drank his lemonade. “It’s something like that, I guess. But not dishonest. I’m a very honest person. And it’s all in good fun. Have you been to the races?” I nodded. “Well then you know that it’s just good fun. Money gets thrown around and lost and maybe won, and that’s it. It isn’t like the movies, Isaac. If you really mess up, and let’s face it: we both know that Connors really did mess up, no one just goes and simply breaks his legs. There is always a type of legal process in place, even if you’re on the wrong side it.”

“But what you do is illegal.”

“What did I just say? Against the law is not outside the law. A law is always there for someone who seeks it out. But this doesn’t matter, does it? I already told you there isn’t anything to worry about. We settled up.”

“It didn’t seem ‘settled up’ when I was with him this morning.”

“And would you say that he was in his right mind this morning? From what I understand, he’s been in the mountains for God knows how long. Sure, he’s afraid of bad news, but how is he supposed to get any news? Bad or good.”

I supposed that he was right, and took a sip of lemonade. It was delicious lemonade. My throat had become incredibly dry. 

“And I’m sorry that you came all this way for nothing. You said you were with him recently? I imagine it was pretty much done while you were there, or at least soon after you left, depending on how you view it. So, here’s your ending. Even so, it doesn’t seem like it’s the one you wanted.” He smiled. “If you wanted bloodshed, Isaac, you might have to wait a while longer. Or find a different career. What is it you do, if I may?”

“I write reviews.”

“Of?”

“Books, mostly. Fiction.”

“So that’s condition.”

“My condition?”

 “Yes. A person who analyzes stories, tears them down to the bone in some cases, must, on purpose or by accident, seeks them out in the real world. That makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?”

“You’ve been kind, but don’t insult me,” I said, standing up and pushing the chair in. “Thanks for all of this, but I have to go. I didn’t mean to stay, and I’m sorry for intruding.”

“It wasn’t an intrusion. Well... since we have been able to be so honest with one another, it was. It was a small intrusion. But I didn’t mean to insult you. I didn’t mean to at all, and like I said, you’re welcome to stay. My wife and daughter will be home soon, and they’re kinder than I am. If it means anything, I think was trying to congratulate you. I’m not the easiest person to find, not in this context, and I can be even harder to confront. I recognize that. My wife tells me that I put people on their back foot, but I never mean to. I just see things through. Take this visit: I’m just a person who sees everything through to its end.”

Driving away, I felt angry with Connors for dragging me into a situation that turned out to be no situation at all. By the second exit I passed on the interstate, I started to resentment myself -- my foolishness, of my apparent sensationalism, and of my seeking to help a friend from a decade ago, and not, as I may have been seeking at the time, a decades-old friend.

*

I spent the next day at the Saratoga Race Course. The Travers Stakes had begun, and I thought it might be good to spend some time forgetting the week’s ordeal by nurturing this newfound interest. I didn’t spend money on a seat. Instead, I bought a beach chair and case of beer, and sat on the lawn with my race card in my lap while I noted the results, which were posted by the half-hour. I must have seemed a little out of place, encompassed by high schoolers in their candied attire, struggling to properly light a cigar or cursing when they lost twenty dollars. Some of them, thoroughly stoned, took to lying on top of each other or over spread-out blankets, while others looked to be in love, wrestling as the late summer sky wrestled above them. Every third race or so, I would walk to the trackside fence and watch the thoroughbreds speed by, their figures perfect examples of life teetering on the lip of death, their muscled flanks glimmering like valuable stone and their faces mad with teeth, spittle, and breath. I didn’t feel any urge to see them hurt or killed. 

Later in the day, when I was tired, and a little bit drunk, I thought about Connors and his present period of exile. I also wondered about James Nettles and his lovely home, his phantom wife and child. I have another old friend, a poet, who once wrote the best endings are nothing at all, that realism gets the final say. It brought to mind my conversation with Connors before I left, when I had encouraged him to take his morning coffee outside as a means of recovery, and he had asked me whether we, as human beings, were trained for singular purposes. The stupidity of an afternoon spent at the races probably disproves the theory. However, if what he said were true, I hoped that whatever unique purpose I had been trained for could subsist over a long and happy lifetime. And for a lucid moment, I felt I was able to sit on that wide dried lawn and see things both as they are and as they will never be again. I was still a young man, and I was still part of a good world that exists before life’s luster is rubbed away.

In the evening, I heard back from a representative at the Veterinary Centers’ of America. They thanked me for my inquiry, noting that it was not a common question, but one that deserved an answer. They said that it is unusual, and sometimes illegal depending on the state or community, for horses to be buried. Horses are almost always cremated, and the ashes are returned to the owner, should they wish to receive them. Sometimes a special request will be granted for alternative burials, but she didn’t get into the specifics. Although I didn’t ask (my original question being about the future of dead horses, and not the past), the representative told me why an injured horse is typically euthanized on the spot:

It is understandable that the decision to willfully and intentionally end any animal’s life can seem like an extreme decision, and one that is made with unusual haste, but there are always trained professionals on hand who are able to efficiently determine whether recovery is possible. The facts dictate that a horse can rarely recover from a broken bone. In the unfortunate case of racehorses, this truth is amplified. Their light bones and frames are bred, genetically manufactured, for racing. Given this osteo make-up, fractures are usually compound in nature, and thus difficult to reset and properly mend. Additionally, a horse-in-recovery is very difficult to keep still. Out of boredom or pain, they will try to move. This will often result in the bone re-separating. If a horse can be made to keep still over the exceedingly long duration required for proper healing, sores would likely develop, putting the animal at a greatly increased risk for infection. In saying such, we do not seek to defend the conditions and the stressors that horses bred for racing are subjected to. We are merely giving you an accurate picture of the extreme challenges the injured animal poses. 

If you have recently experienced the loss of a beloved animal, please accept our sincere condolences. If you have further questions, we have listed pertinent contact information below, or, if you are in need of disposal, call the following number...”

I replied with a brief thank you and let them know that their answer went above and beyond my expectations. It’s true that I was appreciative, even if it reminded me too much of Hopeful Romantic and the terrible sound of guns, and how, for a moment, the fresh summer air seemed sick with heat. Spending a sleepless night wrapped in the bone-white color of a hotel bed, I decided that I had to drop it, and go home to my life partner. Hug her. Apologize. She would criticize me, and question who this “Connors” was, and I would waive the question away, chalk it up to my foolishness, as it is so easy to do. I wouldn’t go back to the races. I wouldn’t follow through on any expeditions into the Catskills. I would instead remedy my own small exile, and in doing so come to terms with it, and then see it for what it was.

Chris Feeney is an emerging writer from Upstate New York who currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to writing his own fiction, which has been shortlisted in CRAFT Literary magazine, Chris reads submissions for the New England Review and works as a writing advisor. He can be reached at chrisfeeney24@gmail.com.

Eleanor Lerman

The Game Cafe

Laura is tired. She’s been working all day, doing a twelve-hour shift emptying trash in the rooms of patients in a hospital in Flushing, Queens, then replacing the bag and moving on to the next one, and the next until she has to do it all over again. These are not the rooms of COVID patients. Laura is employed by a contracting company that sends cleaning crews to hospitals all over New York City, but she is one of the minimum-wage hourly workers who are only allowed on non-COVID floors. Others with special training—and who make more money—are deployed to clean and disinfect the COVID units. Laura has seen those workers using the kind of heavy-duty equipment that she imagines are the tools of the trade for professionals who sanitize crime scenes, like electrostatic sprayers with containers for disinfectant that are strapped to the workers’ backs so that they resemble astronauts carrying around their own life support system. All of these individuals, along with the hospitals’ regular custodians and housekeepers, do their jobs dressed in full personal protective gear provided by their hospital.

The only equipment Laura is issued for her cleaning shifts, however, consists of one flimsy yellow vest emblazoned with the name of the company she works for, one light-blue disposable mask, and one pair of latex gloves. During her work hours, she is allowed to replace the gloves by taking a pair from one of the boxes of different-sized gloves clamped to the wall in the patients’ rooms, but there are no extra masks to be had. If she wants to change her mask during her shift, she has to use one that she has brought herself, so she always keeps a few in the pocket of the vest, tucked inside a plastic sandwich bag—the kind that is meant to hold a child’s lunch.

The hospital where Laura worked today is in the Bronx, so she has a long ride home on the subway to Queens, where she lives. But as weary as she is, she isn’t ready to head straight home. Not yet. So she gets off the subway at the West Fourth Street station, in the Village, and walks over to MacDougal Street, hoping to be able to spend some time at the Game Café. 

Laura is forty-nine years old. She has been coming to the Game Café since she was sixteen and discovered that she could take a bus from Newark, New Jersey, where she lived with her parents and, in an hour, be in Greenwich Village. She doesn’t remember what first compelled her to take that bus ride—maybe she heard a siren song in the music she listened to on the radio or it was embedded in some show she watched on television while her father ranted in the background about people who took drugs and got themselves tattooed—but somehow, she had figured out that the Village was where she had to go to escape, because what she did know from an early age was that she was the kind of person who was going to have to run away from one place to make her life in another. At sixteen, she couldn’t go into any of the bars or music venues that served liquor, but she could wander in and out of the headshops and the stores that sold the kind of silver jewelry and retro-hippie clothes she would have liked to buy if she had the money. The only place she could afford to hang out was the Game Café, where she could spend hours drinking coffee and playing board games. She liked the games, but even more than that, she liked—loved—the feeling of just being in the Village, being on MacDougal Street, where the air always seemed hazy, thick with the scent of incense and rain. Where music played by live bands banged through basement walls and probably half the people drifting along the sidewalks were high. 

She still likes spending time at the Game Café, which has a special magnetism for her. She is not—has never been—a person who is socially adept, but the interactions at the café are organized around the specific rules that govern the various board games, so Laura feels comfortable there. Years ago, she actually had an apartment nearby, on Thompson Street, but when a wealthier generation of people began moving into the Village and the rents went through the roof, she had move out.

Of course, these days, everything is different at the Game Café, just as it is everywhere else. The walls are still lined with shelves piled to the ceiling with boxes of games, but only a few of the tables and chairs that used to crowd the indoor space remain, since there are restrictions on how many people can be inside at one time. In an effort to keep the place in business, though, the owner has set up a tent strung with colored lights above the alleyway in the back and placed some of the old, scarred tables out there so the regulars can keep on drinking coffee and playing games.

Now, as Laura stands in front of the café, she scans the blackboard propped against the front window, where people looking for partners have written their name and the game they want to play. The blackboard used to be inside but it, too, has been exiled to the outdoors. People usually come here with a friend or a group, but when someone comes alone, the blackboard is a convenient way of hooking up with a partner.

There is only one name on the blackboard this evening: someone named Leonid, who wants to play Scrabble. That’s lucky for Laura because Scrabble is her one of her favorite games, though this evening she would have been happy enough to play just about anything: Risk, Monopoly, Chess, Parcheesi, Backgammon—any of the board games that she’s been playing from the time she was a child. There are also dozens of newer games on the shelves, and over the years, Laura has learned to play those as well, but they aren’t all that popular here and these days, people seem to want to stick to what’s familiar. What’s been familiar for as long as they can remember.

Taking a piece of white chalk from a tray placed near the board, Laura writes her name next to Leonid’s and then goes inside to ask the young woman working at the coffee counter where she can find him. The girl tells her that he’s outside. After she pays ten dollars for an hour of game time and is offered yet another pair of latex gloves from a box on the counter, Laura steps through the back door and looks for the Scrabble player, expecting an older man because who else would be named Leonid? But there is only one person sitting under the tent in the back alley, and that’s a teenage boy—maybe fourteen or fifteen. The autumn evening has grown chilly, so the boy has kept his jacket on. The table he’s chosen is the one near a tall heat lamp that’s glowing like a fiery electric eye chained to a post. 

Laura sits down opposite the boy, who is wearing the same kind of disposable mask that she is, as well as the same latex gloves. Normally, they would shake hands, but in these new times, all they can do is nod to each other.

“I’m Leonid,” the boy says, after Laura introduces herself.

“Nice name,” Laura tells him.

The boy shrugs. Right now, he doesn’t want compliments or conversation: he just wants to play. After Laura selects her tiles from the pouch that the boy holds out to her, they begin the game.

The boy is an excellent player, but Laura expected he would be. She knows from experience that the kind of teenagers who play Scrabble here are serious kids who read a lot and have a head full of words—long words, odd words, words that are barely a step away from their Latin root and are almost never used in modern conversation but still retain their place in the dictionary. Look them up and there they are, smirking at you. On the Scrabble board, these words are chock full of potential points, and Laura has memorized quite a few of them herself, ready to defend again triple word points and dangerous blank tiles.

Laura wins the first game, but barely—for most of the game, the outcome could have gone either way. As she helps the boy gather up the tiles for the next game, he finally seems ready for a little small talk. 

“You’re good at this,” he says.

“So are you,” Laura responds.

“Sometimes, when I’m home, I play with an app on my phone. Have you ever tried that?” the boy asks.

“No, but thanks for the tip,” Laura says, meaning to be friendly. “I could probably use that on the subway, when I’m on my way to work.”

“What do you do?” the boy asks her.

Clearly, he’s not only smart, Laura thinks, but also perceptive: he’s picked up on the fact that it’s safe to ask her about work, since she’s mentioned it, which means she’s still employed. Which means she hasn’t spent the last of her food money on a chance to play Scrabble out here, in an alleyway, where it feels like it’s getting colder by the minute despite the radiation-colored glow of the electric eye.

She’s about to tell him about working at the hospital but then decides not to: it might scare him, make him think he’s sitting opposite someone who’s got coronavirus germs stuck to her clothes. So, instead, she tells him what she used to do, about the job she had for fifteen years until last May, when the place where she worked closed down. It is quite possible that it will never reopen.

“I manage a workshop where we make stained glass. Window panels, ornaments—things like that.”

“Really?” he says, sounding genuinely surprised. Or maybe just doubtful.

“Yes, really,” Laura tells him. “Not everyone runs a hedge fund, you know. Or else drives a cab. There are other jobs.” Her attempt at friendliness has oozed away and now she’s bristling at the fact that he seems so surprised by what she’s told him—and probably, also, she’s opened up a well of misery for herself because she’s told a lie that she dearly wishes was true. Still, she thinks she knows why the boy sounded doubtful about what she told him: it is her belief that most people think everyone who lives and works in the city is either rich or poor. A wealthy financier or struggling taxi driver. A famous artist or failed one, a drudge. Tell then you do something else, some in-between thing like working as an artisan whose medium is glass or metal or clay or wood or some other material, and they don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about. 

But this boy does not need an explanation. “I know that,” he snaps back. But then, perhaps because he’s been brought up to be a mannerly young man, he changes his tone. He tries to re-establish the earlier harmony between them. “Do you like it?” He asks. “I mean, working in the stained-glass place.”

“Yes, I do,” Laura tells him. “I like it very much.” She hopes that adding emphasis to her answer is a signal that she is willing to let bygones be bygones, not matter how briefly they have come and gone, and that she is now more than ready to just get back to the game, which is what they do. And, as is the understood protocol at the Game Café, the boy pays for one hour and Laura pays for another. When she goes to the counter to get a cup of coffee for herself and a Coke for him, along with two chocolate chip cookies, they split the cost right down the middle.

Around nine o’clock, they agree it’s time to quit. After they’ve returned the game to the girl at the counter and are heading for the front door, the boys asks Laura if she ever goes to the other Game Café, which is on the Upper West Side.

“Do you mean where they play all those wizards and dragons games?” Laura has heard about this place although really, all she knows is that the games that are played there often use multiple packs of playing cards, involve complex fantasy worlds, and include tournaments where players from all over the world connect online.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “It can be fun.”

Laura shakes her head. “Nope,” she says emphatically. “Definitely not my thing.” But then, thinking that maybe she’s being a little dismissive, she says, “I did watch ‘Game of Thrones,’ though, on tv.”

“Everybody watched that,” the boy says, and now he’s the one who sounds scornful.

He turns to leave and Laura watches as he walks away. “Hey,” Laura calls after him. “Do your parents know where you are?”

He stops, but doesn’t bother to face her. He’s looking down at his phone, already absorbed in another universe of messages and information. “Of course. I texted them while you were at the counter,” he says, as if speaking to the phone, but still loud enough for Laura to hear. And then he strides off, never looking back.

As Laura rides the subway home, she thinks about the boy, Leonid, who seems to her, like a free person in the world. He’s got his phone, his parents, somewhere, who must have some trust in him to let him be out in the night in the middle of a virus-haunted time, armed with only his phone and probably a promise to be careful, to observe the rules that will keep him safe while he does whatever he wants to do. While he plays Scrabble in Greenwich Village and goes home when he said he would. 

All this is very different than what her life was when she was his age. Most of her memories of that time are of some kind of struggle. Examples come immediately to mind, like when she was assigned to a vocational track in high school: she was so terrible at all the girl things like cooking and sewing and so relentlessly rebellious about being told that she at least had to try that she was finally allowed to join the boys in woodworking shop. And she remembers going through a period of being obsessed with paint-by number kits, which her father told her was a waste of time—he would have preferred that she help her mother with chores around the house, or caring for her younger sisters—but she defied him, persisting in buying the kits with money she earned from an after-school job as a supermarket cashier. She painted landscapes and cityscapes and finally, began a large canvas of a geisha walking across a wooden footbridge with her face hidden behind a fan, but the picture remained unfinished because that was the year she left home and she did not take the paint sets with her. 

A while later, as the subway train rattles its way through the tunnel under the East River, heading towards Queens, another odd, disconnected memory comes to her: it’s of being at a party for the daughter of the one wealthy person related to her family, a cousin of her mother’s. The daughter was twelve at the time, about Laura’s age, though they hardly knew each other. The party was held in a huge house in a New Jersey suburb, but where, exactly, that was forever remains a mystery to Laura because no one told her where she was going when a long black car came to pick her up. A famous tv cowboy appeared at the party to sing songs to the girls, and though Laura was appropriately dressed (her mother had seen to that), and had brought an appropriate present (also her mother’s doing), and no one was even vaguely unpleasant to her, she felt completely out of place and deeply unhappy. Inside herself, in her mind, she was not there, not at the party in the huge house but rather at the woodworking shop or painting a picture of the seashore or of a shy geisha who would have been showered by cherry blossoms if her canvas had been completed.

Now, once Laura gets home, she stays up late watching television and when she finally goes to bed, her sleep is restless and broken. When she wakes up, she eats breakfast and then lays on the couch, watching tv again until early afternoon when it’s time to get ready for work. She’s on the overnight shift now, the worst time to be working at the hospital but she has no choice about her hours. If she wants to work, she has to take the assignments that she is given.

Finally, as she’s washing up, getting herself ready to go, she finds herself staring at her reflection in the mirror. What she sees is a woman with dark eyes and unruly hair that has grown too long, which serves to emphasizes the fact that it is dyed jet black. This is how she wore her hair when she was younger and has lately begun to do again. And she is applying black eyeliner as well, and jet-black mascara, also a return to a look she favored when she was in her twenties. So the person she sees in the mirror is someone who seems to be trying to go backwards, to another time, a better time. Or else, she decides, maybe she just wants to look as fierce as she can when all you can see of her all day is her eyes and her hair.   

She doesn’t like the job she has now, but she needs to support herself and this was all that was available when the stained-glass workshop closed down. It was a renowned artisan enterprise that sold expensive, hand-made items, and Laura had been completely truthful when she told Leonid that she was happy to work there. She started as a glass cutter, sitting at a worktable and cutting sheets of colored glass into the patterns that were given to her: sometimes just shapes that would fit into a larger panel, sometimes birds and angels, sometimes suns and moons, sometimes more complicated figures like tarot symbols and woodland fairies. Later, when it was clear how skilled she was, she was allowed to solder the pieces together by herself, to clean and polish them and apply the final patina. Eventually, she became the manager of the workshop, which employed a dozen people. She still finds it hard to believe that she will never again sit at her worktable. Never inspect the glass sheets as they are delivered or check the final products as they are packed up for delivery. 

But the truth is that it’s likely she won’t. So, once she’s dressed and ready, she leaves her small apartment in an old rent-controlled building in an old neighborhood where brick tenements crowd together near the subway line and heads back to the train. 

In the hospital, as she moves from floor to floor, room to room, she sometimes has to exchange information with another of the contract workers, but there is no camaraderie among them, no small talk. Most of the mostly silent men and women who are doing this menial, labor-intensive work have taken the job because they have no other choice, so it’s not an atmosphere that encourages genial relationships. Besides, the supervisor who is constantly checking on them would reprimand them if she thought that any of the workers were taking an unauthorized break to have a chat.

So, all through the long middle-of-the-night hours, Laura slips in and out of patients’ rooms, trying not to disturb anyone. But often, the patients are awake. Many of them look frightened, as if they believe that the minute they close their eyes, they’ll die. Sometimes they say hello to Laura, sometimes they say thank you as she empties their garbage pail or takes a box of tissues from the cart she pushes and places it on the nightstand beside their bed. She assumes that she’s permitted to reply to them so she does, in a few words and a quiet voice, and then moves on. In and out of the rooms she goes, hour after hour. The machines beep, the televisions bolted to the wall above patients’ beds murmur dialogue from the kind of old cop shows and over-excited comedies that are broadcast on basic cable channels between midnight and dawn. When Laura finally finishes her shift and leaves the hospital, it is just beginning to get light outside. The early morning clouds look small and ragged to her, like a collection of scraps being blown across a low, gray sky.

For the next two weeks she’s on night shifts at the same hospital and is then randomly assigned to day shifts at a different hospital on the upper east side of Manhattan. Here, she has to mop the floors and clean the patients’ bathrooms. One afternoon, on a floor where patients are recovering from orthopedic surgeries, Laura is sent to clean what was once the sunroom, a place at the end of the floor where patients who were mobile enough to walk down the hall were encouraged to relax and read one of the books on the shelves or just sit and enjoy the view of the East River. Now, of course, no one is allowed to spend even an idle minute in a space meant to be shared by multiple patients, so it is kept locked because it’s being used as a storage room. A supervisor unlocks the door for Laura and she spends a long time here, wiping down every clear surface with disinfectants. As she’s almost done, she moves aside laundry cart to get to a bookshelf under one of the windows and finds that it holds not books, but instead, a dusty stack of board games. They’re a random assortment that includes Checkers, an old Monopoly-type game called Easy Money, and even Candyland, which is actually a game for small children. There is also a chess set meant for travelers: a little hinged box that opens to reveal a tiny game board where every square is punctured with a hole so that the tiny playing pieces, each mounted on a thin peg, will stay in place when they’re moved. It gives Laura an odd feeling to find board games here, but she’s not sure what that feeling really is until later, when she’s riding the subway down to the Village. On the train, where there are few other passengers and everyone sits in silence, hidden behind their masks, eyes on the floor or on their phones, she is finally able to make sense of the reaction she had when she spotted the disused games: what she wanted was to steal the dusty boxes and carry them off to MacDougal Street. To free the prisoners. To raise them from the dead. 

When she’s released from work and steps outside, she finds that the temperature has dropped since she left home in the morning. It’s a cold night, a shivery night, and Laura hopes there’s an indoor table available at the café when she finally gets downtown.

Luckily, there is. In fact, the café is practically empty tonight; no one is seated under the tent out back and there is only one pair of players inside, hunched over a chess board at a table near the front window. Laura buys a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic from the girl at the counter and puts them down on a table in the far corner. Then she walks back outside and writes her name on the blackboard using green chalk, which means she’s looking for a partner and is willing to play pretty much any game on the shelves. But when she goes back inside and heads back to her table, she suddenly spots a cardboard box standing alone on the floor, nearby. It looks like it’s full of board games, but she can’t believe what she sees lying on top.

“Hey, Maddy,” she says to the girl at the counter, “where did these come from?”

The girl looks over at the box that Laura is pointing to. “Don’t know. Maybe somebody came in earlier and sold them to Harold,” she says, naming the owner of the café. 

“Can I use one of them?” Laura asks.

“Sure,” the girl tells her. “Help yourself.”

Laura takes the game that was lying on top of the pile in the box and brings it over to the table. She takes a sip of her coffee because she doesn’t want it to get cold, but leaves the sandwich unwrapped. She’ll get to it, she thinks, but first, she needs to open the box in front of her and see if it really is what she thinks it is. It can’t be, she tells herself. But yes, it is.

The box itself is white and there is an image of a piano keyboard printed on the top under a sweep of elegant script that spells out The Piano Game. The top and bottom of the box are dinged and battered, so it’s a small miracle that they’ve managed to stay together but somehow, they have. And so, there’s The Piano Game sitting on a table in front of Laura, who has seen it before, but not for at least forty years.

She removes the top of the box and inside, just as she remembers, is what looks like a roll of dark blue velvet. She unrolls the velvet and turns it over, revealing a keyboard made of shiny white fabric on the other side. Strips of black velvet have been glued onto the fabric to represent the black keys. Most of the keys are marked with numbers that stand for points a player can accrue in the game, but some bear music notations—flats, sharps, naturals, tremolos—that, according to the instruction sheet that was rolled up with the keyboard, either help you advance in the game or damage your chances. The ups and downs decreed by these symbols include Your Concert was Cancelled: Lose A Turn, or, You Played at Carnegie Hall: Win Twenty-Five Extra Points.

There are a few other items in the box, as well: a pair of dice, a narrow gold cup to roll the dice around before spilling them out, and the playing pieces, four small wafers of plastic stamped with different colored bass and treble clefs.

“What’s that?”

Laura looks up to see someone she knows, a man she has often played chess with in the past. “Hi, Ron,” she says, gesturing to him to sit down. “It’s called The Piano Game,” she tells him.

Ron is a tall man with cropped white hair who lives somewhere in Brooklyn. He’s a various serious bike rider who goes on hours-long rides that can start in the morning and end at night, taking him over bridges that lead to lonely winter beaches or wander through the hot summer streets of every borough in the city. Those are about all the facts Ron has ever shared about himself other than that he’s the stage manager for an off-Broadway theater that has been closed since last March. He’s been out of work since then, eking out a living on unemployment, which has run out on him and then been extended by a confusing set of state and federal rulings. He told her a few weeks ago that he had no idea when theaters would ever be able to open up or what he would do if unemployment benefits were suddenly cut off again.

“I’ve never seen that here before,” Ron says, as he looks over at the keyboard along with the other pieces of the game that Laura has spread out on the table.

“Apparently, Harold just bought it today,” she replies.

“Do you know how to play?” Ron asks.

“I do,” Laura says. Then she shakes her head and looks down at the board. “This is so weird,” she says. “I thought there was only one but this can’t be the original because it’s not signed. He must have made at least a few more.”

“What are you talking about?” Ron asks.

So Laura explains. “When I was growing up, there was a man named Mr. Albescu who lived in our building. He was an immigrant from Romania, I think it was. Anyway, there was a rumor that back home he was some kind of famous pianist but here, he worked in the same factory as my father. One day—just, like out of nowhere—he invited all the kids in the building to his apartment and he showed us this game he’d invented called The Piano Game and taught us how to play it. But before we started playing, he used a marker to sign his name on one of the keys. He said that The Piano Game was going to make him a fortune.”

Ron looks down at the keyboard and reaches out one finger to tap it, as if that might produce the ghost of musical note. “So this is an immigrant’s dream?” he says. “To be a board game king?”

“I guess so,” Laura replies. “Though this isn’t exactly a board game. And he never got rich.”

“Then what did happen to him?” Ron asks.

“I don’t know,” Laura tells him. “I guess he just went on working in the factory.”

“Well, that’s a pretty sad story,” Ron says. “But it was a long time ago, right?” He pauses for a moment and again taps the silent key. “So,” he says to Laura, “why don’t you tell me the rules, and let’s play. Let’s give Mr. Albescu his due.”

Without having to refer to the instruction sheet, Laura reaches back into her memory and recites the rules of The Piano Game. After that, she and Ron play all the way through one game, which Ron wins, and then they start again. They’re nearly finished with a second game when Laura happens to glance out the window and sees that it’s begun to snow.

“Wow,” she says. “Look at that.”

She’s the one facing the window so Ron has to turn around to see what she’s talking about. “Shit,” he says. “It’s really coming down.”

“I don’t understand,” Laura says. She’s holding the golden cup and was about to drop in the dice but now, she puts the cup down. “I heard the weather report on the radio this afternoon and they said it might rain tonight or maybe there’d be some light snow flurries. That doesn’t look light,” she concludes.

“I wish I’d brought my other bike,” Ron tells her. “It has better tires for snow.”

“Then why don’t you get going?” Laura replies. “We can just call this a tie.

“No,” Ron says. I want to finish. “I think I can beat you.”

“Ha,” Laura says. “We’ll see about that.”

They each take a few more turns, but the next time Laura glances out the window, she sees that the snow seems to be coming down even harder. “Ron,” she says, “look outside. If you haven’t got the right tires on your bike, it might be hard to get home if you don’t start back soon.”

He shrugs. “We’ll be finished in a few minutes,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

So they go on playing. But then, suddenly—just, like out of nowhere—Ron looks up from the keyboard. He looks straight at Laura. He has blue eyes—very blue—and now, he fixes her with his clear blue stare. 

Suddenly, feeling that something is wrong, Laura also looks up from the game. “What’s the matter?” she asks.

“I want to ask you something,” Ron says.

“Okay,” Laura replies, cautiously. “What is it?”

He takes a breath. “Aren’t you ever scared?”

Laura takes a breath, too. She knows what he means. She knows what a big question he’s asked her, especially since they’re not really friends, just two people who happen to be sitting in a café on a snowy night, playing a game. And thus, she wonders if she can answer him. If she should even try. 

But that clear blue stare in like an arrow coming her way, and she can’t avoid it. So, in her real voice, not the quiet one she uses in the hospital or has taken to using here, in the Game Café, since it is also such a night-quiet place now, she says, “No.” And then, “Yes.”

Ron nods at her. Laura picks up the dice and puts them in the golden cup. After that, in silent agreement, the two players turn their attention back to finishing the game.

Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories and novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her novel, Radiomen (The Permanent Press), was awarded the 2016 John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her most recent novel, Satellite Street (The Permanent Press, 2019) was a finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Eric Hoffer Award. Her next novel, Watkins Glen, will be published by Mayapple Press in the Spring of 2021. http://www.eleanorlerman.com

Georgie Hunt

Walgreens Pharmacy

Long line, heavy coats, arms crossed. A lady says, “I’ve been waiting since 11:00.” All the women working behind the counter have dark circles. One has red rings around her eyes as though she’s been crying or is really that tired. There’s a new girl, younger, who keeps asking questions. She has a tattoo of a snake coiled at the back of her neck below the hairline. She wears a low ponytail pulled to the side. A part of herself she is proud of, deliberately displayed. I think of a girl I wronged once who had a shoulder tattoo and so many asymmetrical, one-shoulder shirts so she could show it off. I wonder if she still wears those shirts. I wonder how long before the new girl stops pulling her ponytail to the side. How long until she grows so tired or bored or broken, all the good parts covered over? 

The pharmacy just converted from Rite-Aid to Walgreens. Computers backed up, hence the wait. Three times I hear one of the women behind the counter answer the phone, say, “Rite A—Walgreens!” quickly correcting herself. The third time, several of us in line laugh aloud. It feels good, forgetting for a second. Or, is it remembering? The woman with the red-ringed eyes looks up and smiles.    

Barricades

Those plastic toy trolls. The ones that come in different sizes, some an inch tall including their hair that sticks up straight in bright colors. Pink, purple, orange, yellow, green, or blue. Some wear tiny outfits with peekaboo cutouts exposing jeweled bellybuttons. Diamonds, circles, or stars. Others don’t wear any clothes at all. “They are bare,” Mom says. Instead of those toy trolls, Mom buys me a fuzzy grey toy mouse sold in the cat section of the supermarket. I name my mouse Henry. Henry doesn’t have a visible bellybutton or jewels on his body or crazy-colored hair. He is bare, too. Bare like a bear. Mom says that kind is okay.

My Barbie lunchbox. I got it as a birthday present from a friend. The color purple, a picture of blonde Barbie practically bare in a gold sparkly bikini. Mom fills the lunchbox with cookie cutters we use only at Christmastime and places it deep within the most infrequently opened cabinet next to the stove. I want to bring my lunchbox to school. Carry my peanut butter sandwich Mom cut into the shape of a bunny rabbit with chocolate chips for eyes. I take the lunchbox from the cabinet and place it on the kitchen counter. Mom stares at it then stares at me. After a moment, she opens a kitchen drawer, takes out a pack of multicolored construction paper, and selects a pale pink sheet. I watch as she drafts a Barbie-sized dress, crewneck, A-line. She cuts out the dress with kitchen shears and fastens it to my lunchbox with three pieces of Scotch Tape. She packs the inside of the box—sandwich, snack, juice box, floral cocktail napkin—then closes the lid, holds it out to me by and handle, and says I can carry it to school now. 

Every night after dinner, dishes done, Mom soaks in the tub. When I hear the pipes rumble from running water shut off, I go stand outside the bathroom. My hand heavy on the doorknob, I ask, “Are you barricaded?” Our kind of password. When white and pink bath towels hang in appropriate positions on glass shower doors, I go inside. The room smells of Calgon bubble bath and feels wet warm, like when I put my face too close to a pot of soup simmering on the stove. I sit cross-legged on the lid of the toilet seat and read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or my hot pink hardcover edition of Little Women. To listen, Mom leaves the shower door open a crack. I can see her dark brown ponytail on white porcelain.

Georgie Hunt's writing has appeared in Brevity, Brevity Podcast, River Teeth, NANO Fiction, and Balancing Act 2: An Anthology of Poems by Fifty Maine Women. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and currently lives in Maine.

Brendan Wolfe

Address Book

“Brendan, find my address book, would you?” 

Mom said this through a cough that started down in her chest and came rushing through her throat like a fire in a mineshaft. Then a magnificent, pterodactyl-like screech, followed by a hock of clumpy phlegm into a Kleenex. 

“That’s a good Boopie,” she said, invoking an embarrassing childhood nickname.

It arrived to my ears with the slightest hint of mockery, which is how I knew that her spirits remained relatively high even as she slumped more deeply into her living-room easy chair, an oxygen tube snaking down from her nose.

It was the third week of March. The beginning of the pandemic. I had been here, at my childhood home on East Street in Davenport, Iowa, for about two weeks now, maybe longer, and the sole caretaker for about a week. My older sister Bridget was temporarily back in Virginia working. For the moment, my younger sister Sara was stuck in Des Moines. So Mom and I, alone together, struggled to come to terms with the unexpected truth that her end was near.

“Everybody has their time,” she told me on a couple different occasions. “Mine’s now, I guess.”

Had Mom read Marcus Aurelius? I can’t remember which college course assigned him, but all these years later I’ve held onto my volume of his Meditations (it’s slim). Pulling it from the shelf at home in Charlottesville where it sits next to Barthes, the Elder Edda, and a host of others that, ante morbum, I hadn’t cracked open for decades, I read how at the beginning of Book VI the emperor (last seen in the film Gladiator) shrugs his Richard Harris shoulders: Hot, cold. What does it matter? Refreshed or dog tired. Either way, you do your job. (Marcus Aurelius surely must have been from the Midwest.) And death, far from the bugbear we have made it out to be, represents just another job—an early morning paper to be delivered, an acre of corn to be detasseled, a house to be cleaned—although with the unfortunate caveat that “we die as we perform it.”

Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: “to do what needs doing.”

“Brendan. My address book.”

Right.

I looked for it again the other day, which required moving five or six heavy, stacked boxes in the spare room, rummaging through the papers and photo albums therein, and discovering Mom’s college yearbooks, her complete college transcripts, her complete marks from grade school and high school, her birth and baptismal certificates, all the paperwork from buying the house. I found a photocopy of her divorce decree filed away near a framed National Honor Society certificate dated March 12, 1959, and a letter offering her a position teaching African American literature at Davenport Central High School (my alma mater), dated August 17, 1972. Her marriage certificate, I found that too. And a couple favorite books from her childhood, both with her name signed inside (by my grandmother, I think): The Ugly Duckling by Mary Patric, from 1946, and Tuffy the Tugboat by Alice Sankey, from 1947. I remember these from my own childhood. They were in Grandma’s clean, well-lit basement, where a kid might find himself after getting bored with the adults upstairs, their cigarettes and never-ending chatter about the Middle East. I was old enough that Tuffy struck me as quaint—“The other tugboats passed him by without a single toot”—although don’t let my daughter Bebe see this.

“Who tooted? Did you toot? Tuffy?”

Followed by ten minutes of aren’t-I-hilarious belly laughs.

When Grandma died, Mom inherited other things from the basement, including The Girl Graduate, Grandma’s high school graduation scrapbook. Young Marie Jardon appeared to have been dating a boy named Bob, with whom she picnicked on July 31, 1923 (she glued a Wrigley’s Spearmint gum wrapper to the page in order to commemorate the occasion), while also noting “a great disagreement,” words she underscored twice. On another occasion, she spent the day with Bob in a “circumnavigation” of tiny Riverside, Iowa (future birthplace of Captain James Kirk), and, apparently, smoked Camel cigarettes while doing it. On August 17 of that summer, she caught Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand at the Englert Theater in Iowa City (again chewing Wrigley’s). I once saw Second City at the Englert, and took an Irish-Catholic Tri-Delt English major named Claire on a first date there to see Alive, a movie that involves cannibalism in the Andes. I made her laugh somewhere in the gory middle, a feat that, while impressive, didn’t stop her from dumping me after I talked too much about ex-girlfriend. Grandma doesn’t indicate with whom she went to the Englert, but affixed just below her notation is Grandpa’s calling card: “Willis E. Cupp.” Blood and Sand, meanwhile, is a “torrid” love story (according to Wikipedia) “with sadomasochistic overtones,” in which Valentino portrays a Spanish matador who, having betrayed his beautiful wife, martyrs himself on the horns of a bull. Apparently the early NFL halfback Johnny “Blood” McNally, a Wisconsin native, took his nickname from the film. It’s possible that Grandpa, who played semipro football in those days, made McNally’s acquaintance. One of the only stories I can remember him ever telling me, on those annual Christmas trips to his house, was about his having competed against the great Jim Thorpe, so maybe he faced off against Johnny Blood, too. McNally and Thorpe entered the NFL Hall of Fame together as part of the inaugural class of 1963. Thorpe was born into the Sauk and Fox nation of Indians—but in Oklahoma. That’s where they were forced to settle after Black Hawk’s defeats along the Mississippi, near where I was born.

“My address book?”

Right.

I never did find it upstairs, but a few boxes are still stored in the shower of the downstairs bathroom, and there it was, in the first one I opened: a yellow, spiral-bound notebook, seven by five inches, with Mom’s return-address sticker on the front (“Fran Wolfe, 2544 East St., Davenport, IA 52803”) and another, red-white-and-blue indication that she was a “Proud Supporter of Paralyzed Veterans of America.” Unlike Grandma’s scrapbook, there is nothing gossipy here, no tittering entries about stepping out with Bob when her parents trusted her to have spent the night at home (young Marie smoked Camels on that adventure, too). Instead, it’s just page after page of addresses and phone numbers in Mom’s careful, exquisitely neat, southpaw hand. Blue ballpoint pen, almost exclusively. She’d had the book for many years. You can tell by opening it up to the page that holds a pastel purple bookmark (“Friends fill your life with happiness, your day with sunshine, and your heart with love”), which is where you’ll find my Iowa City address under “Brendan & Jules Wolfe,” along with our cell numbers, our anniversary, and Jules’s birthday. But in the margins she wrote my second wife Annie’s name and birthday, and above that are my one-time blog URL (incorrect) and my longtime email address (also incorrect). On the facing page are my various Charlottesville addresses and phone numbers, along with Bridget’s equally fluid vitals. Where it’s easier, she has Scotch-taped business cards onto the pages, and on the page with Bridget’s current address Mom has inserted a photograph of then–Lieutenant Wolfe in her Army nurse whites, circa 1991. There’s the number of the cleaning lady, who sometimes guzzled wine coolers on the job, and that terrible, greasy takeout pizza place that Mom preferred. And the service garage where she took her Lexus, which she bought on a whim, insisted on calling Lexie, and never fully understood how to operate. I got the oil changed there before driving the car to Virginia.

“She was just in here a couple weeks ago,” the guy at the front counter told me, his voice quavering. “The tire light was on and we topped her right off.”

I kept flipping the pages and found her best friend Bev, her sisters Mary, Sr. Germaine, and Kotty, her brothers, Jim and Gene. All the ladies from church and all of her congressmen, several of whom are since deceased. Numbers for NPR, Habitat for Humanity, and a sewer-cleaning service. Directions to Sara’s house in Des Moines and, apropos of nothing, the password “Lucybelle,” which is what she called our dog when we were kids. Lucy didn’t much like me, causing her to viciously attack my beloved Curious George doll, and she peed on the carpet anytime she saw my dad. But she adored Mom, and when Lucy was hit by a car and Dad left home, Mom, unable to properly care for her anymore, reluctantly put the old, limping mutt down. One evening I was working behind the bar at the student union in Iowa City when the phone rang. It was Mom, crying.

“Lucybelle,” she said.

Flipping some more and there was Barb, Mom’s hair stylist.

“Hand me my phone.”

Mom pulled the oxygen out of her nose and carefully punched in the numbers. Her address book rested on the quilt that covered her lap.

“Hee-yellow, Barb? This is Fran.”

Mom was calling to cancel her appointment.

“No, I won’t need to reschedule,” she explained, while I dinged my Duolingo Irish on the couch. “I’ve called to say goodbye.”

*

When I first arrived in Davenport, in early March, Mom hadn’t yet been diagnosed. Back in January she had endured a long, sleepless night with some kind of sharp and frightening pain in her lungs. But she nevertheless waited until it was “a decent hour” on the East Coast (“I didn’t want to bother anyone”) before phoning Bridget, who, in turn, called Mom’s neighbors, Ray and Mike. They rushed her to the emergency room. The doctor on call ordered a battery of tests. Later he strode into the room and presented the results with a hushed, stagey seriousness that remained vague when it came to what was actually wrong. His mantra: Further tests. We need further tests.

This is how I imagine it, anyway. While nurses poked and prodded Mom, I was waking up as usual in Charlottesville, feeding the cats their kibble, and making sure that Bebe brushed her teeth. Only later did Sara call and inform me of what I came to half-jokingly call the lung trifecta: blood clots, probable pneumonia, and a spot on the X-ray.

“A spot?”

“A spot.”

“What kind of spot?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “A spot spot. The kind of spot where they have no idea what kind of spot it is.”

“They have no idea. What are we supposed to do with that?”

“Wait, I guess.”

“For what?”

“To see whether it does anything. Grows, shrinks, whatever.”

Waiting on a spot. It took three weeks, during which time Mom sounded gasping and nearly gone, only to improve and reemerge as herself again. But after finally undergoing another round of tests, she received the results over the phone. They proved grim, so naturally she didn’t tell anybody. At least not at first. Then, gently, she let people know she was dying. At her next appointment with the pulmonologist, she engaged him on the question of “next steps.” He asked her what she meant by “my prognosis.”

“Based on my tests. How long do I have?”

“Your tests?”

“My tests. They showed the spot. That it was growing.”

“Oh, those tests,” the doctor said. “Those tests were inconclusive. We need further tests.”

When I met him later, the pulmonologist appeared to struggle with certain kinds of social interaction; he never once looked me in the eye. From Mom’s account of things, he certainly didn’t register her anxiety. Still, for a week or so, Mom allowed herself to laugh. It was all a colossal misunderstanding. Nobody knew anything. Further tests. We need further tests. But for now, there was hope.

I was taking my regular evening walk through my neighborhood when Sara called. Mom had been rushed to the ER again, only this time the attending preferred not to pussyfoot around.

“Of course you have cancer,” he snapped. “And it’s spreading.”

By the time I pulled up in front of 2544 East Street, Mom had already gone in for a biopsy, but she’d been too ill for it to be successful. A slightly different procedure was penciled in for a few days hence. For now, it was Saturday afternoon, and I had arrived in time for the second half of Virginia-Louisville basketball. After fourteen hours on the road, I collapsed on the couch and we turned on the game. Between handfuls of Chex-Mix, I downed a couple glasses of Iowa rye whiskey.

“You didn’t have to come,” Mom said. “It’s so far. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

“They don’t even know what I have.”

When it came time for dinner, I followed Mom and Sara into the kitchen and the last thing I remember was standing at the counter. The same counter where we used to scrub dishes as kids, except that Bridget always politely excused herself (“I have to use the bathroom”) and somehow got away with never returning. Where I’d come face to face with an equally sloshed Dad upon arriving home the first time I got drunk. And where, just below the sink, my parents had always stored their booze. Soon after he left, Mom told me how he had come home late from a night at the bar and broken one of her antique lamps. “I took all of his liquor from the cabinet,” she said, “and put it on the counter next to a note that said, ‘Here, really go to it this time.’”

I don’t recall my limbs stiffening up or my eyeballs flipping back. Apparently Sara grabbed me under my armpits and helped me down to the floor—the same floor where as a baby I had once sucked my thumb while Dad, from across the room, tossed his beat-up old fishing hat at my head. A kind of horseshoes.

“You and your rye whiskey,” Mom said when I finally woke up.

*

Sometimes I feel like I’m tumbling out of my frame. It’s Covid Day 119, and this has been a particularly harrowing week of self-quarantine. Depression. Anxiety. Hours-long, slow-motion panic attacks. Whiskey. Thinking about those weeks at 2544, the helpless feeling that comes with waiting for something awful but necessary. We’ve endured maybe thirty straight afternoons of ninety-degree weather, with four or five days in a row of triple digits.

“I’ve got your back, Dad,” my daughter Bebe said to me earlier today, as she packed up a bag to go to her mom’s. “And if you ever need to talk …”

“This is not how it’s supposed to be,” I told her for the thousandth time.

Now it’s storming outside, shocking thunderclaps and Zeus-like spears of lightning. Tay-Tay dropped a new album last night, so that’s streaming on the smart speakers (even in Bebe’s absence) while I lean forward in an uncomfortable leather chair in the living room, the front door open and a St. Brigid’s cross stationed just above. The cats Nora and Gladys have disappeared deep inside some mysterious hideout, while their sister Iris eyes this queer, water-soaked world with astonishment. After a few minutes I realize that I’ve been staring at the Grant Wood print hanging on the wall. Everyone knows American Gothic; I even have an original folk-art pastiche of those two austere, pitchforked Iowans upstairs on my bedroom wall. But this piece is lesser known, a portrait from the year before, in 1929: Woman with Plants. Mom purchased it after visiting Wood’s studio in Cedar Rapids, leaning it above the fireplace in a living room so lush with houseplants my sisters and I had difficulty transporting them all to our respective homes. (Mom could have titled her memoir Woman with Plants.) In addition to the framed print, I claimed a single plant: the sansevieria, which happens to be identical to the species the elderly woman holds in Wood’s portrait. (Mine now sits atop the refrigerator, out of the cats’ reach.)

Even as a kid I wrote. When I was about Bebe’s age, nine or ten, I sat for whole weekends at the dining-room table earnestly drafting a novel set during that fateful winter at Valley Forge. In fact, I probably called it That Fateful Winter. I also created a comic strip about D-Day. Mom thought engineering might have been a more practical, long-term aspiration (“Learn to fix something, would you?”), but with a sigh she offered me the following advice: “If you’re going to be a writer, make sure you know the names of plants and flowers.”

“Why?”

“Because details are important.”

I had to look up sansevieria. Mom called it the mother-in-law plant, although it’s more commonly (and evocatively) known as mother-in-law’s tongue. Which sounds about right. Seeing what I couldn’t, Mom never was gentle when it came to my wives. When I phoned to tell her I had left Jules, instead of asking whether I was okay, she exploded with years of pent-up anger—anger at me. After spending a year overseas, I lived at home in the summer months leading up to our wedding, and I must have been difficult company. Jules was violent and abusive. And as I fielded screaming calls from her several times a week, I certainly understood, on some level, that I was about to screw up on a life-altering scale. Of course, I also desperately missed my fiancée. Mixed feelings can be the worst kind, and mine combined longing, fear, and shame. I don’t believe I confided any of this to Mom. I didn’t believe I could.

“I tried to tell you,” Mom said to me recently. “I tried to get you to listen to me, but you wouldn’t.”

I have no memory of her trying to tell me anything.

It turns out that the woman in the painting—grim, block-jawed, possibly still in mourning—was Grant Wood’s own mother, Hattie. (His father, Francis, had been dead more than twenty years by then, but Hattie continued to wear black.) Wood, too, had been abroad, in Munich, and he composed this portrait not long after his return to eastern Iowa. A few years later he explained to a convention of art teachers that “I came back to Cedar Rapids, my old home town, and the first thing I noticed was the cross-stich embroidery on my mother’s kitchen apron. That to me was just as decorative as the costumes of Europe.”

He was living with Hattie then, and the painting suggests a connection to more than just her cross-stitch. According to one of Wood’s biographers, the composition bears striking parallels with a work the artist had viewed in Munich: Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Carnation (1478–1480). Here, baby Jesus squirms awkwardly on Mary’s lap, reaching for the red carnation she holds; a vase of flowers rests at her left elbow. For the biographer, Jesus’s outstretched arms are mimicked by Wood’s tall, white-veined sansevieria plant, which, “in Hattie’s lap reads as an emblem of her son’s birth, growth, artistic renewal, or even his return to the womb—an indication of the artist’s wish for a biological ‘homecoming.’”

What kind of nonsense is that? I imagine Mom scoffing.

Let go of your mother’s skirt.

And then there’s the brooch. Mother Mary binds her blue cloak with a studded but otherwise plain brooch, while Mother Hattie’s appears to bear a depiction of wild-haired Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture. Which makes sense, the painting having been set in Iowa. An autumnal scape of hills and cottony trees rolls behind Mrs. Wood, taking me back to drives through the ribbony hills of rural Iowa as a kid with my dad, who grew up on a farm. The storms he described, like the one that led to his electrocution and subsequent epilepsy, couldn’t have been too much worse than what’s raging outside right now. Zeus’s thunderbolt: it was a gift for standing up to his father, apparently. I just read that in my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, shelved in the dining room. (Opening it just now I saw that it’s actually signed to Annie: “May you have a mythical 13th.” A birthday gift, I suppose.)

Regarding Demeter, Hamilton explains that Zeus’s older sister, alongside the vintner Bacchus, was one of the two earth gods. Though immortal, she finds herself nevertheless fettered to certain of the whims and constraints that define a human life. Grief, for example. Hamilton tells of how the lord of the underworld kidnapped Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, causing the girl to scream out in terror. “The high hills echoed her cry and the depths of the sea,” Hamilton writes, “and her mother heard it. She sped like a bird over sea and land seeking her daughter.” Having been told what happened to Persephone, Demeter assumed the form of an old woman and wandered the earth in senseless misery. Eventually, Zeus intervened, negotiating the release of Demeter’s daughter, now wed to the dark lord, on one condition: that the girl return to the underworld for four months of every year. These are the months of winter, when Demeter’s grief at Persephone’s absence causes the earth’s fields to go temporarily barren.

Demeter is associated with snakes, often through that Medusa hair of hers. (The sansevieria, or mother-in-law’s tongue, is also known as a snake plant.) But unlike many gods who seem to live within an infinite stretch of time, Demeter is ultimately responsible for time’s demarcation. Time given the gift of boundaries, like a poem blessed by its form or a painting its frame. A story that has neither a beginning nor an end can also have no meaning: it’s just one hot, faceless day after another. And this is what it feels like to be trapped in Covid time, in grief time—wandering this house in senseless, seemingly endless misery.

*

“Brendan. Quit staring at that picture and pay attention. Bring me my address book.”

“Who do you need to call?”

“My tax lady. To tell her you’ll be bringing in my receipts. Then we should get ready. I’ll drive.”

“No, you won’t.”

It was Thursday. I’d been home for about six days now. Earlier in the week Mom had attended bridge club at the local Pizza Ranch, while I answered some work emails at a nearby Starbuck’s. She had loved introducing me to the old ladies. “You must be the writer!” they chirped, making it sound intriguingly disreputable. Like how they might have greeted a jazz musician in the fifties. When I returned, though, I found the cardplayers in anxious disarray, with several bending over Mom, who struggled to breathe.

“Oh, good,” she wheezed. “There’s my son.”

We hooked her up to an oxygen tank almost immediately after that. Now today was her second crack at a biopsy. Bridget and I accompanied her to her room and then, when it was time, retreated to the waiting area. The St. Patrick’s Day parade had been scheduled for that morning but was called off. Across from us sat an elfish woman, perhaps not quite as old but bearing that unmistakably severe, Hattie-like visage. (Is this how Iowans look?) Rather than mourning black underneath a conservative housedress, however, she wore tight kelly-green leggings speckled with white shamrocks, black high tops, and a purple winter coat with a black fur collar. I discreetly snapped a picture with my phone, causing Bridget to elbow me in the ribs. The woman was reading the local daily, the front page of which bullhorned a single-word, all-caps headline: “PANDEMIC.”

Her eyes skipped over the broadsheet and in my direction. What do people say about Irish eyes? Hers weren’t. I looked down, suddenly red-faced.

After about an hour, maybe longer, we received a text that Mom was cleared to go home. As we helped her get dressed, the pulmonologist arrived and informed us, without ever looking up from his chart, that her results should be in by Monday at the earliest.

“Thank you, doctor,” I said, as if he were some kind of priest.

*

The weekend passed by in a blur. While we waited on the biopsy results, Bridget returned to Virginia and Mom’s condition crashed. She slept more. And moaned. Synchronous with her breathing, this noise was a pedal point to our days, the constant that organized everything around it. She moaned awake and asleep, although at times the distinction between the two seemed to be muddled. At first, her moans woke me in the middle of the night, recalling for me those first months as a vigilant new parent when I jumped out of bed to feed Bebe. (Parents hear things others don’t.) Mom regularly required assistance getting up to use the toilet, and when she returned to bed I sat next to her and rubbed her back until she could breathe again. The sound of the moan changed when I did this, almost to a purr.

“Oh, Brendan. Thank you.”

Recently I was rubbing Bebe’s back, I don’t remember why, when those nights came rushing back to me. How could I have forgotten so quickly? I remember having thought at the time, These nights will stay with me forever.

Sleep was fitful for both of us, although I began to contrive fine distinctions among her moans: those that demanded my immediate attention and those that didn’t. Those that were somehow pitched just below an emergency, giving me permission to roll over and fall back asleep. Still, there was no ignoring that pterodactyl screech of hers, as she fought to expel from her lungs whatever toxic fluid had invaded them. It could sound anywhere, anytime—a siren that wrenched me from whatever refuge I had improvised for myself and back into the truth of Mom’s death.

“How long do you think I have?” Mom asked me. “A week? A month? Will I die tomorrow?”

“I’ve got your back,” I said. “No matter what.”

As her lungs, and my nerves, continued to deteriorate, we called hospice. The intake nurse arrived Monday afternoon. Aunt Mary swung by and we all sat in the living room. Mom leaned back in her recliner, her eyes fluttering open and shut. Still absent a diagnosis, we mapped out the end. We arranged for a hospital bed to be set up in the northeast corner of the room, near her beloved back deck. We talked about morphine for the pain. We talked about comfort versus treatment. We talked about her spiritual care.

We made awkward small talk about the virus. About no March Madness. We signed some paperwork and, like good midwestern Stoics, we set about doing whatever needed to be done.

Then my phone rang. It was the pulmonologist.

“I’m calling with Fran Wolfe’s biopsy results,” he said, after which a long, strange silence stretched across the line. I had assumed he would just continue speaking. By now I was standing and my eyes had settled on a slight depression underneath the front window, a wisp of shadow in the afternoon sun. I don’t think I had ever noticed it before.

“So, do you want to hear them?” the doctor said finally.

Brendan Wolfe is the author of Finding Bix: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend (2017). He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his daughter, Beatrix. He can be reached on Twitter @brendanwolfe and by email at brendanwolfe@yahoo.com

Mickey Greaves

Taking Liberties

“Presumption”: Failing to observe the limits of what is permitted – Oxford Dictionaries

Dear sister,

Looking back, I’d say that the mile and a half between the school and our house was vast, seemingly further than the distance I later traveled from Pittsburgh to Geneva, and more daunting than the eleven-hour bus ride from Sao Paulo to Assuncion. And, somehow, the roads across the globe were less pitted and fraught.

At sixteen, your brain can’t work with the few tools you may have, the issues are new and unwieldy, and you don’t have the patience to get the child-proof cap off. Yet the anxiety you feel is all grown-up, focused and unremitting. It is as if you are super-glued to a magnifying glass and the issue is a tender leaf. The tool condenses the sun’s rays, and sizzles a small perforation through the chlorophyll. Not what you want. You become wild at your own ineptitude.

I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted. I was afraid to be denied. Our mother struck down requests so easily and artlessly. Let’s just say that when I began to negotiate contracts with my clients, it wasn’t what I learned from Mom that helped me close business. “No,” so often an expected gambit in a negotiation, was the final word with her. You can’t argue with someone who doesn’t want to talk. You and I, sister, were expected to observe the limits of what she offered.

You remember, it was before the beck and call of technology. There was one pay phone at the high school then. One phone for 3,000 students. Once we were in school, our mother didn’t expect to hear from us until at least 3:45 p.m. and more likely, given extracurricular activities, dinner time, when we would just show up at home.

It was rare that our mama stopped to take a call, anyway. She had the usual chores, in and around Pittsburgh, the business of pushing her girls forward and through college, sewing clothes, and fixing things around the house. There was a roast beef slicer, I recall, that used to give her trouble but she took it apart one day and when she put it back together, it worked better than ever. I remember going downstairs to check on her and she was crying over it. Not about how undependable it had been. More like how broken her second marriage was, and that she wasn’t sure how she could fix it. Yes, and then she went back to school to get her accounting degree and met a new man.

If I hadn’t arranged that morning for our mother to pick me up by the end of school, I’d have to walk home. Not that it was a long walk, as you know. On a cold day, or perhaps when I’d gotten my period or had studied too late, I felt the regret of not having the nerve to ask Mom to stop everything and pick me up. It was painful, to feel demoralized at not persuading her, at having no strategy to win her over.

Further, she made it clear that “an emergency” wasn’t a reason in itself. None of us dared to call her unless we were in the nurse’s office, bleeding from a head wound.

In direct contrast, our mother was presumptuous with others. She assumed an intimacy that she had no right to. She was a woman who said hello to the postman with “boyfriend” added to the end. Of course, she knew his real name. It’s just that she was up for a kind of steeple chase, jumping the privet hedges of personal boundaries. There was no holding her at arm’s length. To us she seemed very brave, potentially facing a strong rebuff each time, yet men (and some women) grinned at her insouciance. Theirs was the smile of the lonely, when they allow an interloper admittance during a momentary lapse in their stern demeanor. They didn’t see that she was a kind of predator, keeping a tally of hearts she had stolen.

It was as if she were teaching us girls that only the brazen get what they want, the way the lioness shows the young lions how to hunt.

Yes, so while she kept us from making assumptions on her time, our mother was otherwise presumptuous with others. In fact, I could argue, she saw no limits.

…….

I met a man who was surprised that I fell for him. He was a natural salesman but he didn’t recognize the moment when he’d convinced me that I should date him. I admit that it was fast and came on hard, a one call close; begun the moment he stood and spoke, and ending with some soft mechanics; the sound of his breath up through flared nostrils, and his whispered exhale in a puff of martini- and nicotine-scented carbon dioxide. Between his words and that quiet susurration, he had convinced me that he was worth my time.

Let me explain:

What attracted me was the mix of the way he put words together, the connections his brain made, and then the speed with which the words tumbled out, seeming to align as they hit the air. Like speed Scrabble. Wait. Was that it?

His words were a liquor bath of phonemes, a tonal sauce of what sex would be if you didn’t have a body, just your two ears. I lost composure at the reverberation of his sound, the relaxed and gentle way he handled American English. He was a professional language-killer. I wanted to get my body in between the noise of it.

He might have been a kindred spirit. An asthmatic, I waited for the push of breath, a slight crackle at its depth. Come on, I’m not the only one who finds breathlessness sexy. Think: “a bout de souffle.”

I was drawn, especially, to the way he tapped on the verbal brakes with the word “that.” His “T” was a placeholder, a kind of verbal comma, the caress of it, as he reached for another sound in what was a velvet bag of smooth, pale consonants, each with its own tender value. Yes, the word, the way he said it, verged slightly into the polysyllabic. I even liked that I had to pay attention to catch his little aberration.

I think you know what I mean. Take, for example, a South Asian, who may have learned English in India. Notice how he pauses to place an article, “the,” back into an English sentence? I suspect that in many of the 500 languages one can speak in India, few require articles. It is as if he has been goosed. So the speaker hesitates long enough for an English listener to wonder if they’ve forgotten their place in the sentence:

“We have excelled in building … [thuh-UH?] … software to meet expectations …” 

Hmm. Is he asking me if I agree? Native English speakers are primed to think so. They nod at the questioning tone of “the,” and his apparent pause. Yet he is not asking anything. He is making allowances. As if he were saying, “Oh, you need that silly little ‘the?’ Okay, I’ll give it to you.” 

It’s an accommodation to the listener. Yes, my date accommodated me, as he thought out a fair reply, he tongued his “T” with a slight caress.

I was hooked and he had my interest on the pause and placement of sound, on cadence. Maybe my southern grandma was right about enunciation. Maybe it's the only thing that matters as a social lubricant. 

Over drinks at the French bistro, he touched my hand and engaged on what I said. When I spoke, verging on clever, he rewarded me with the interruption, “I could just kiss you right now.” Okay, okay.  Later my friends laughed at my vulnerability, saying that he was playing me. Who cares? I enjoyed it. Although it did begin our misunderstanding. It was too heady for a first date.

I responded deeply to the quick connection. Yet over the next month he pulled back, surprised that I would presume on his time.

What are presumptions? 

Overstepping due bounds, as of propriety or courtesy: taking liberties – Merriam-Webster

Was I the one who took liberties? Perhaps. He had years of his own system, complete with a moat and hot tar at the ready, not to mention a portcullis that seemed at once impossible to breach and then stuck at open. He courted women in a way that I recognized but was impatient with. So I pole-vaulted over. 

In sum: he had moved into the chambers of my heart and taken up residence there. To his apparent surprise, I demanded the rent.

I had learned from the best. Thanks, Mama.

…..

It was after the last bell, and school was out for the day. I approached the pay phone wearily yet already wired for an argument, change in hand.

“Mom,” I said in surprise, when she picked up at the first ring.

“Daughter,” she replied, coyly.

“I was just wondering … I mean it’s 3:45 … I thought I could stay for drama club rehearsals … but … I’m too tired …”

“Just come home, then,” my mother said. She was toying with me.

“I can’t.”

“Okay, then.”

“I’m too tired.”

“Yes. So come home and lie down.”

This went on for a few minutes. Until I ran out of change.

I never did ask for a lift home. I wasn’t brave enough to ask outright for my mother to come get me. My mother remembers this as the last day I vacillated on asking her for a favor. She laughs at the recollection, at how I avoided asking to be picked up at school. I remember it as mortifying, that she saw my naked need, and wouldn’t provide cloth. It was the leveling of my burgeoning ego. After that, I learned to ask for what I wanted. What does “no” matter, any way? Mostly, though, I don’t negotiate when I want something. 

Sister, you and I have the same stories about our mother. So who am I kidding? I’ll never send this letter. It’s like singing to the choir.

Mickey sells software to Wall Street. She is a poet, writing a memoir. Her work appears in Please See Me, Cagibi, Poydras Review, Passengers Journal, Poets’ Choice, and“Cross Cultural Poetics. She has read in downtown New York venues; St. Mark’s Church, Zinc Bar and Poets & Writers. Follow her on Instagram @mickeygreaves, twitter @xyzmickey and see more writing on www.mickeygreaves.xyz

Eri Cavalieri

The King I Knew

Do you believe in past lives? I was trying to think of a way to ask without being so blunt. Some people are turned off by that kind of in-your-face questioning, especially when the question hovers over abstractions like religion that, for centuries, have driven us to do some pretty aggressive things like kill thousands of people. I’m not saying you’re a person who would kill someone based on your beliefs. At least in this life, you’re probably not. But time and place change us profoundly. If you were to look back at the many lives you’ve lived, you might be at best, surprised, and at worst, horrified, to learn the things you’ve done and the things you’re capable of doing. 

That is, if you believe. Adam, my former co-worker, believed. He told me something that I struggle with now, ten years later. And because of the pandemic, you know, being stuck in my apartment all day with too much time to look back, it’s been sitting at the top of my mind again. 

I was an aimless 21 year old when I met him. We worked at the corporate office of a well-known, now-bankrupt men’s clothing brand. I was a product photographer. It was my fresh-out-of-college job, my won’t-be-here-forever job, my Julia-you-better-get-an-actual-job job (that was my mom, the day I moved home from school, who thought photography wouldn’t make me money). It was Adam’s first-and-now-mid-life job, his looking-like-forever job, his blink-and-fifteen-years-have-passed job. He was 35, with a wife and two kids who relied on his insurance. 

It was early February, first thing in the morning. I was standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in our office kitchen. Cars sped and trucks groaned down the main road, each dragging limp puffs of exhaust. Something about the coldness of the morning, the struggling sounds of the engines made me vow to leave this job before I got stuck here forever. 

Adam walked in. Well, at that point, he was an accounting guy in khakis and a plaid button down, drifting in and out of my periphery as he fixed a cup of coffee. Most guys wore white button downs and dress pants, the clothes our company sold. We seemed to share a style philosophy. I never dressed as well as the women here, either. Instead of pant suits and skirt suits and pumps, I was comfortable in white tennis sneakers, high waist jeans, and a sweater. 

We said good morning. He told me I looked familiar. 

The office Fun Committee had just redone the office décor, and he was studying the new plants in terracotta pots on the tables. Rigid and sharp, the dark green leaves shot straight up towards the ceiling. He tapped his finger over the top point of one leaf. I noticed his ring.

Sansevieria, he said. He explained that this was a snake plant, and how they thrive in low light with little water. Because they need such little nourishment, they’re impossible to kill. They’re perfect for a place like this. He was going on and on. They’re also called “mother-in-law’s tongue” because of their sharp leaves. You know, mothers in law can say cutting things. People who are married see the connection right away. 

At the time, I was dating Tom, my college boyfriend of two years who lived more than an hour away. We had been inseparable at school. Now that we were home with our parents, we only saw each other on weekends. Because of this newfound distance, we knew that this would be the last spring, summer, and fall we’d spend together. We stopped referencing the future. Or maybe that was only me.  

I asked Adam how he knew so much about snake plants. 

He pushed up his glasses, folded his arms, and leaned against the counter. 

It’s a long story, he said. In another life, I was a gardener.

Another life. I laughed, he laughed, and, I think, sensing that we didn’t know each other well enough in this life to start talking about others, he asked what I did for the company. He mentioned his wife, Chelsea, and showed me pictures of his two daughters. I usually hated baby pictures. This guy Mark who worked upstairs made a beeline across the office floor whenever he saw me and showed me pictures of his grandkids. But Adam’s kids were cute. They looked just like him.  

Our co-workers started shuffling in around nine. He picked up his cup. 

One day I’ll figure it out, he said. 

What?

How I know you. 

*

We started talking every day over our company’s messaging system. He initiated it. Tell me about your day, how was your weekend, what’s going on tonight? I was surprised he agreed with me about not wanting to be at this office forever. I didn’t tell him this, but I didn’t think he and I were in the same boat. He was older and had already been here for so long. I liked him a lot, but I saw him as damned and doomed, one of those here-forever guys. It’s harder to leave the longer you stay. Everyone knows that. 

I spent my days in a photo studio on the first floor taking pictures of khakis, ties, button downs, dress shoes, belts, wallets, and blazers for our website and catalogs. Packed clothing racks and a perpetual mountain of boxes stuffed with samples from recent photoshoots surrounded me at all times. I wouldn’t trade my messy space for a cubicle on the floor with everyone else. Adam sat up on the third floor with the accounting department. The quiet, old, and boring part of the office. Up there, even the lights felt dimmer and the walls seemed tinged with a smoker’s living room shade of yellow. I went up there once to get an invoice for new lighting signed and I’d never go up there again. 

Adam made his own salsas and sold them at a local Farmer’s Market. It surprised me to know that someone so entrenched in an office could have a separate, simultaneous life. He gave me a mini bottle of salsa verde and a slow cooker chicken recipe to try. I never did. I lived with my mom. I didn’t have my own kitchen or appliances. To kill time, I started browsing for apartments and taking virtual tours in surrounding areas. I wanted to tell Tom about it but I never felt it was the right time to bring it up and ruin our completely comfortable stasis. Where I was looking would’ve put more distance between us. When I think back to those days, I see myself as a little girl on the playground, bouncing on the balls of her feet, waiting to hop into an already-turning jump rope on the blacktop, but is too frightened by the sound of rope relentlessly whipping the pavement to move. 

*

March, April, and May passed. Tom and I went out on dates every Friday night. We split time between his town and mine, sometimes meeting in-between for dinner or a movie. One Thursday night, I felt a ball of impatience explode in my stomach. It swelled whenever I took a deep breath. Building up were all these little instances that I wanted to tell Tom. The apartment I was considering with a decorative fireplace I could fill with candles. The surprising small-talk I made with my morning train’s conductor about Funkadelic. The country blue house with white trim and dandelion shutters that I pass on my lunch walks. Dumb stuff that couldn’t be conveyed fully over text or over the phone. I drove out to his house without calling first. 

We ate leftover pizza and watched the Yankee game in his room. An open suitcase was on the floor, smack in front of his TV stand. Clothes spilled out of it so obviously that I thought he must’ve wanted me to ask about it, then I remembered he didn’t expect to see me here, and that I was just flattering myself. That was how I found out he was going to Mexico to drink and fish with the guys. The tickets were already booked. 

I left without telling him about my favorite blue house or the apartment. I suppose that’s how you slip away from someone. Failing to bring up those little, fleeting instances you experience while apart, that alone don’t matter or bear huge significance, but all together portray an entire day, an entire person, an entire life.

*

In June, Adam asked if I wanted to grab lunch at a ramen house around the corner. He knew it was my one year anniversary at the job and wanted to celebrate. 

This is kind of embarrassing, but I put too much thought into my outfit that morning. I almost missed my train trying on skirts that were too short and jeans that were too stiff. I’d landed on a black cotton t-shirt dress and white sneakers. I had developed a harmless crush on him. It wasn’t sexual. I thought of it the way I’d think about, say, a benign mole on the side of my nose; as something ugly, constantly in my periphery, that I’d have to remind myself wouldn’t cause real-life harm. 

We sat side by side at the noodle counter. I’d ordered chicken ramen. He got the house pho with rare beef and a Diet Coke. He told me his next project was to make his own sauce for pho broth, something spicy and sweet at once. He asked my plan. 

My plan for what? 

Life, he said. It could be something big or something small, like a new bottle of sauce. 

I told him about a recurring dream I still have today. I dream that I’m somewhere I’ve always wanted to go, like the Ligurian coastline or a shrine in Kyoto. Some place impossibly beautiful, foreign to me, and always far away. In these dreams, I know that I’ll never be able to return to wherever I am. This moment only comes about once-in-a-lifetime. So I take out my camera to try and capture it. The shutter goes off and nothing happens. Or I’ll completely miss what I was aiming for. 

Nodding, he set down his chopsticks and wiped the corners of his lips with his napkin.

Do you believe in past lives?

I’ve never thought about them, I said. 

I know it sounds silly, but when I meditate, I ask the universe: how can I learn from my past experiences? And I get these images of things that I’ve done. Like this: 

A few months ago, I had a vision, or dream—whatever you want to call it—that everyone from our office worked as merchants. The market was dusty and loud, the most popular in the city. I was the boss of the fruit sellers, believe it or not. They all had to get their apples and oranges from me. And I wasn’t generous. If someone had to miss one day of work, I didn’t allow them to sell again. I gave their spot to someone else. 

Very unlike you, I said.

Is it? One day, one of my merchants told me his son had a fever. There was a chance his son would die if he didn’t see a doctor. It was actually my buddy Paul, from work. You know Paul. I let him go to the doctor and come back to work the next day. For whatever reason, I’d felt generous. Other merchants didn’t like that. I’d turned down their similar requests and now they saw I had the capacity to treat people fairly and chose not to do. So the next night, there was an mob. They came for me. Before I woke up, I saw my head floating down the river. 

What do you make of it? I asked. 

Adam took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and middle finger. 

I used to only give Paul my salsa. Some people started asking when they’ll get their free sample. It annoyed me. The same people who never stopped to ask how I’m doing. Then I had this vision, which I think was me telling myself to share, who cares if they don’t deserve it. 

But get this. I don’t think anyone’s tried it yet. I see a few of them unopened on people’s desks. Why go through the trouble of cutting off my head if you’re not going to try the salsa?

We laughed. I was almost uncomfortable with how open he was. Tom and I never talked about stuff like this. He didn’t believe in much.

Sometimes it helps to wonder these things, and sometimes, you only end up with more questions, Adam said. But what I want to say to you is that the market eventually burned down. And if the market is a metaphor for this office…you should have a plan to find another job before anything bad happens here. 

Was I a merchant in your vision? I asked.

You? Adam frowned. I couldn’t find you. I was looking. 

*

Tom and I went to the Farmers Market in early July. Adam insisted we come, and I hadn’t told him things were starting to end. It wasn’t his business. I guess I also wanted to protect what was left of our relationship. It was one of the last things we did as a couple. 

White tents reflected the sunlight so brightly that their peaks looked slicked with rain water. I smelled freshly baked bread, the inevitable crunch, the promise of warmth. We passed tables with rows of glass bottles filled with fresh apricot, blueberry, and raspberry jams, covered by handwritten labels. Crates of corn. Baskets of apples. Shelves with bottles of honey. Small tins with white dishes in front of them, on the dishes a spoonful of a colorful spice or tea. I’d never been to a Farmer’s Market. Wanting everything, I could only float from one stand to the next, overcome with where to start, what to buy. Everyone seemed to know what they wanted and I could tell right away that this was no place to linger. 

Adam was set up under a blue tent, behind a table covered with blue and white gingham cloth. A small chalkboard leaning on the register listed his prices, and there were three groups of jars with different color lids on the table. Mango, mild red, verde. A woman bent down behind him and pulled new jars out of boxes and setting them on a back-facing table. 

We introduced ourselves. Me to Chelsea, Adam to Tom. I know I should have remembered this meeting with clear-as-day detail: who said what, who did what But they were busy. And I was nervous. My nerves cloud the memory. I think Chelsea only looked at Adam when she spoke, rather than at me. I don’t know if Tom was interested. I don’t know if he asked for a free bottle, or if Adam just gave it to him. I laughed too loudly. 

In between small talk, a steady stream of customers wedged themselves between me and Tom, asking for free samples that Chelsea spooned into small clear cups, asking to buy a jar, but not if it’s too spicy. Adam and Chelsea took turns helping, and on coming back to our conversation, couldn’t pick up where they’d left off. Too much time had passed, we’d already moved onto some other topic, and in the soft, spring air around us were a thousand little lost sentences that were almost but never said. 

On our way out, Tom and I passed a booth of snake plants, succulents, wind chimes, and local honey. The shopkeeper waved me over and I felt obligated. The woman asked if I knew about snake plants. I said they’re hard to kill.

I remember her laughing, fighting with the wind to tuck her wild grey-blond hair behind a red bandana. That isn’t entirely true, she said. Some people overwater them. They think they’re doing the right thing but they’re drowning it until the root rots out. She knocked on the terra cotta vase on the table between her hands.

*

Something told me to pop downstairs the first morning back after holiday break even though I’d already had my coffee. When I got there, Adam was facing the Keurig machine. I sensed he was deep in thought and lingered by the windows until he turned around.

I’m moving, he said. 

*

He and his family were going north, where the cost of living was lower and he could easily grow his business. Chelsea already secured a teaching job with better benefits. Their new house was down the block from a beach. A beach. He could never dream of waterfront property down here. They would leave in the spring.

I knew I wouldn’t see him again. It was fine getting lunch when pure coincidence brought us together, but now it would take planning, deliberation, and effort. I knew right away that I wouldn’t drive four hours north to see him, and he wouldn’t call me when he came back to see his in-laws. 

Co-workers seemed to appear in the kitchen out of thin air. Poof! In front of the water cooler. Poof! In front of the fridge. Poof! In front of the Keurig. Poof! In front of the microwave. I felt surrounded. It was like the kitchen had wanted us out. Adam scratched his face and picked up his cup. His grey stubble shone in the morning sun. I’d never seen him look so old. 

*

I know not everyone has an it’s-time-to-see-a-psychic moment, but mine came that winter. I saw a woman my friend Molly had recommended. I was bored and wanting of something. Maybe I wanted to hear someone tell me what I was made of, what I could do with my life, where I could go, who I could be, and too lazy to figure it out for myself. 

Artemis charged $120 an hour. A few years ago, she predicted Molly would get into a car crash. And one morning on her way to work, Molly got T-boned. It clearly wasn’t her fault, so it’s not like she self-fulfilled some prophecy to make the prediction came true (and why would she do that anyway, risk her life to justify spending $120?). So I went to see a woman who, at the very least, could accurately predict a car crash. 

Artemis’ office was on Main Street, wedged between a pho restaurant and a dog grooming parlor. A piece of computer paper taped to a construction-orange sidewalk sign advertised $20 tarot card readings. It was hard to imagine someone with a sign like this could be right about anything, but I’d never been to a psychic before. Maybe this was standard marketing. 

We sat at a small wooden table, in a room with jade walls and a single window enveloped in burgundy curtains. There were a few wire baskets of salt rocks on the floor, lit up in an orange glow. The air was so heavy with burned sage that it made my eyes buzz.

We’ll start with these as a warm up, she said, shuffling tarot cards between her thick fingers, each with a silver ring like a tourniquet. She flipped over three. 

Two of Cups, are you in a relationship? 

The opposite, I said. 

Seven of Coins, are you unfulfilled? 

I shrugged, that’s why I’m here. 

Nine of Swords, she looked up at me. Have you had bad dreams lately? 

We went back and forth. At times, I had no answers to her questions, and others, I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin. Still, I was careful not to give too much away. I needed proof she knew something I didn’t, and when I abandoned hope for some sort of ground-shaking statement, I asked if we could talk about past lives. 

She collected the cards, placed the deck in front of her, and patted its edges until it was neat. 

Of course, she said, closing her eyes. I noticed the freckles on her nose, the wrinkles on her metallic pink lips. She took so many deep breaths I thought she might’ve fallen asleep.

Somewhere, she said, there exists a stone version of you. A statue, I suppose. The ocean has thrashed you around for centuries—your nose, your lips, your eyes, have largely eroded—and right now, I’m watching you wash up on some beach. Her eyes rolled up my eyebrows, forehead, and settled on my hairline. There is a crown on your head. Its stone spikes have softened, but I could tell it was once magnificent, that of a queen.  But like I said, you have been lost at sea for a while.

A little girl is jumping around you. She’s excited, like she’s discovered something. She thinks the earth is giving her a present. Her parents are yelling at her from their towels. They’re mad she’s touching your crown. You must appear dirty to them.  

She reached across the table and folded her warm hands around mine. She asked me if I knew why my statue had ended up in the sea. 

I shrugged. A storm could have knocked me in, I said.

Would have had to be one hell of a storm. No, I’m thinking you did something. Close your eyes. Help me imagine this, she said. Ready? You are sinking into the mud. Your eyes, or the smooth surface where your eyes should be, are fixed on the horizon. My goodness, the water. It’s turquoise and dazzling in the sun. But I can’t see what you’re looking at. Can you? 

I was picturing a composite image of every single ocean I’ve ever looked at. When taking all of those horizons in at once, they all seemed the same—how else can an ocean appear besides unknowable, tactile, and blue? The longer I thought about it, the heavier I felt.

Not really, I said.

Do you smell the salt in the air, or hear the gulls crying above you? They are moving in a W shape. First it’s lowercase, then it’s uppercase. Does the letter W mean anything to you? she asked.

I shook my head.

Nothing at all?

I’m sorry, I said. 

Well, they’re flying away now, she said, flatly. 

She pulled back her hands and immediately mine felt cold. 

*

Adam’s last day was a Friday at the end of April. I insisted we take the long way over to the restaurant so we could pass my favorite house. It was the first warm day of spring, and the moist air smelled like wet flowers and moss. We stopped at the white picket fence. He liked the sunroom, the white wicker chair. I liked the Italian ceramic tiles on the mailbox bearing their address. We stood there maybe a minute, just looking. 

The waitress seated us in our usual spot. As we ate, I told myself I’d come back to the noodle house alone to people watch and wonder. We were just about done with lunch when Adam looked up at me. 

He said: I was a king once. 

*

It’s the last past life I’ll tell you about. I was a king. I never liked ruling—back in those days, you were born into it—but my people loved me. I had transformed. You see, I wasn’t that selfish merchant. I was good. I treated everyone fairly. The trouble was my mother. Every night, she’d drink my wine until her teeth turned blue and just get nasty. She was a cold woman. Want to hear something crazy? The mother in this past life was actually Chelsea. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyway, one morning, Chelsea, or, my mother, didn’t come down for breakfast. The servants rang the bells. They went upstairs to find her dead in bed. Someone poisoned her wine. 

I went upstairs to the queen’s chambers. I didn’t want a servant to break the news. I pulled opened the big wooden doors and excused the maid braiding her hair. Then you turned around. I knew it was you immediately. The queen. You know, you were a good soul, too. The country made beautiful statues of us. 

He took off his glasses, wiped them on the red cloth napkin, and fixed them back on his nose. 

Trust me, he said, at first, this vision bothered me. My mother—and your mother in law—had taken on Chelsea’s form. What did that say about our marriage? I felt so guilty. Have you ever had a dream you wish you didn’t have? Where even if it’s fucked up, you can’t help but feel that you meant to dream it? I wonder if I’ve done something along the way to someone that I love that I can’t take back.

He fell silent. I didn’t know what to say. 

Anyway, I should lighten up, he smiled. The bottom line, all I wanted to tell you, is that at some point in time, you and I were king and queen. That’s why you looked so familiar when I saw you in the kitchen that morning. It’s because I’ve known you forever. Isn’t that funny?

*

Just so you know, I never told him about the psychic, and I definitely wasn’t about to over that lunch. He wouldn’t have believed me and it would have felt wrong. Like I was flirting or something. So I just sat there and laughed, having resolved to worry about it later when I was alone and not at the noodle bar, during the last few minutes I’d ever spend with my friend. 

We hugged goodbye in the parking lot of our office. He gave me his phone number and address on a yellow Post-It note. We hugged again. I watched him carry a box of desk junk to his car. After he set it in his backseat, he turned to wave. I held his Post-It note in one hand and waved goodbye with the other. 

*

On the train ride home that night, I agonized over what he’d said. I replayed what Artemis had told me, too. Though the more I thought about my session with her, the more I questioned if I were remembering it accurately. Half of me came to think his vision meant that our past lives truly aligned. The other half of me challenged everything, and assumed it’d be a stretch to assume our stories were related. I didn’t know enough about the laws of past lives to come down on one side or another. Weren’t they simply fantasies guided by our subconscious desires? If you’ve never had a past life vision, but someone saw you in theirs, did that mean their version was true for you as well? Who had the final say over your former existences? 

In the months after he moved we exchanged emails with long-winded updates. One night I couldn’t take it. I wrote him a letter with the story about me washing up like a queen statue on a piece of yellow lined paper. I had no intention of mailing it to him. I figured if I went through the trouble of getting it off my chest then it would stop haunting me. It worked. At some point after I’d scribbled it all down, Adam’s emails stopped coming and I stopped missing them. By some miracle, the whole thing stayed behind me like a faithful but obedient old dog who knew it couldn’t keep up. 

Years passed. I’d dated a few people, had loud nights out with friends, went on vacations, saw movies, lived my life. Then the pandemic hit. That menswear company, where I still worked, filed for bankruptcy and I lost my job. I’ve been alone in my apartment since the shutdown, passing time by de-cluttering. That’s when I found the letter I’d written Adam. I made the mistake of opening it, re-reading it, and taping it back up. Years later and I still didn’t know what it meant to dream the same dream as someone else. I wondered if enough time had passed, if now it was finally safe for him to know about this strange coincidence.

The world opened up in summer. Something told me to drive to the Farmer’s Market in town center one sunny day. I’d forgotten to bring a reusable bag so I didn’t buy anything. Everyone’s face was covered. It was like moving through a different world, a different life. There was a navy blue domed USPS mailbox on the sidewalk by the entrance. I walked up and down the aisles, towards it, away from it, always relative to it. I’d never noticed it before, and my noticing it that day seemed significant.

During the week, I drove back to the town center, this time with the letter. I didn’t know if I’d mail it but I wanted it with me. The market was gone. Patches of grass where heavy things once sat were tamped down in odd shapes. It was a quiet afternoon. 

I laid on the grass in the sun and thumbed the blunted edges of the old envelope resting on my belly. The breeze was soft. The sun warmed my face. Black birds drifted across the blue sky. I squinted to watch them go. They first appeared in a tight lowercase w, and then opened up slowly into a wide, uppercase W. Did this mean anything to me? I squeezed my eyes shut to try and find the answer in the black behind my eyelids. I thought so hard and for so long that when the wind came to loosen my grip on the envelope, I let it. I felt it slip from my fingers, I felt it get dragged away. I laid completely still. I didn’t try to stop it. After some time, I opened my eyes and the shape in the sky of the birds was gone. 

Eri Cavalieri received an MFA from Fairfield University in January 2018. Tumio’s stories are featured in the Oakland Review (2018) and Sequestrum (2019). Tumio has also been a semi-finalist for The Nimrod Literary Awards: The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction.

Susan Enzer

The Cells of a Tiny New Life

There once was a woman whose womb held the cells of a tiny new life that was already dying. The woman, who was thirty-seven, was branded “geriatric” by the Doctor who trussed her up like a scrawny hen to poke and probe her tender insides. He leached scarlet blood from her blue veins into vials. He used the vials of her blood to prove there was a new life in the woman’s womb. 

The woman knew better than to believe the Doctor or even the story of her own vials of blood. She knew better because of what her body was telling her. That is that her breasts were neither tender nor sore. They were calm and unexpectant. Sadness coursed through her veins making her limbs heavy and full of foreboding. But the woman was the container and protector of those cells. She loved them and would rescue them from the brink of never-ness.

She told her husband not to speak about the new life. The woman herself was superstitious and didn’t want to call up any dark spirits. She remained silent on the subject, sidled away from shadows, and crossed the street to avoid black cats. 

The woman cradled and stroked her own belly. She named the cells Elena and whispered to them. She needed a daughter to learn what it meant to be one. 

Soon the woman, with her husband, would enter the basement labyrinth of a hospital. There a Specialist, inventor of a new scientific test, would have a technician slather the woman’s belly with clear, cold gel. Then the technician would place a flat wand on the woman’s belly to search for the cells growing in her womb. They would all watch on a black and white screen. Then the Specialist would paint the woman’s belly orange with betadine and plunge a long, thick syringe inches inside piercing her womb and extracting fluid. This would be used to prove that the cells were normal. This would even prove the cells belonged to a girl named Elena. 

Weeks before they were to go the Specialist, the woman and her husband went to the theatre.

They met two friends there and her husband betrayed the promised silence. He was proud of himself. So, he told the friends there was a new life inside the woman. The woman’s hands, now cold as ice, lay her jacket across her belly. Her belly felt empty and hollow.

In the morning black blood stained the woman’s lavender panties. She told her husband and called the Doctor who sent her to a private office for another test. The woman lay on a leather table. The husband stood beside her and watched. A technician spread cold gel on her bare belly and ran a wand north, south, east, west. On the black and white screen, a shadow image. Hard as the woman looked; the cells told nothing. And neither she nor her husband had an answer for what was there.

Afterward the woman went to her office. She sat at her gunmetal gray desk. She ran her hands across her belly. She whispered to Elena in between answering her phone and calling her clients

No word yet from the Doctor but it didn’t matter. In an instant the woman’s womb contracted. It squeezed hard. Tears of pain trickled down the sides of her face. She moved toward the ladies’ bathroom. Her steps tight, slowed by lightning rods of pain.

The woman entered a stall and locked the door. Sitting on the toilet seat she looked through the space between her lavender panties and the floor as she felt Elena slide out of her disappearing deep into porcelain never-ness. 

Susan Enzer is a writer from New York City. She is a student at The Writers Studio and participates in workshops at Shakespeare and Co where she has done readings of some of her pieces. She can be reached at susan.enzer1@gmail.com or on Instagram @susan.enzer1.