Prose

Tara Isabel Zambrano

The Country of Water

This piece removed due to book publication offer. Look out for Zambrano’s book soon!

Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 Anthology. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

Devon Capizzi

The Death of Young Boys

I felt trans before I felt lesbian, but lesbian was the word we got to use.

- Eileen Myles

My grandfather’s afraid of thunderstorms. There are distant clouds today. Dark on the bottom, bright white on top like beached whales. From far off, they cast a morbid spell. The fields of corn and tobacco, hardly ever wheat. I run my fingers through Hank’s closet. All those T-shirts, hung and dryer-fresh. I touch them only with my fingertips. It must be so fucking easy to be a boy, their lives like one big striped T-shirt worn over blue jeans that fit just right. Hank’s jeans are in the dresser that used to be our grandmother’s, that used to be her grandmother’s. Our family is allergic to change. 

Mae won’t believe me when I tell her Hank’s gone, run off with that freak girl from math class. Yes, the one with braces. Hank told me it was only temporary. I said the braces or the freak affair? I caught them once behind the high school theatre curtain during lunch hour, the last week of school. Just like Hank to run off as soon as I get some dirt on him. 

I open up each drawer of his old dresser. Socks. Boxer shorts. Corduroy pants the color of faded chocolate gone old and chalky in the cupboard. Long johns for winter. Underneath, I know, a little knot of weed he left behind. I take it. 

When I’m through, each drawer is a mess, but I shut them all carefully, tucking little tongues of fabric back inside. You can’t even tell I was there. I sit on Hank’s mattress, firmer than my own, and slip the weed into my pocket. Outside the window, dark clouds are not so far off now, and I can hear Grandpa downstairs, his boots thudding from room to room. He’s unplugging every lamp and appliance in the house. He grew up Amish and now he’s afraid of electricity.

I go back to Hank’s closet and slip a T-shirt from its plastic K-Mart hanger. The faded fabric is a little rough, but worn thin. Age makes its shape more relaxed than something new. I take my own shirt off quickly—cotton, and white, soft as the faux matte skin of a baby doll. Over my body Hank’s T-shirt fits more or less the way it fit over that plastic hanger. Pitched from my bony shoulders, flowy around my middle. My chest grew this year, unfortunate but necessary, Mom says. I’m becoming a woman. 

The T-shirt hides them well. I resist looking at myself too hard in the mirror above my great-great-grandmother’s dresser. His room, his clothing. Even the view outside the window seems to belong to him. I imagine how well he must have known it. I head back upstairs. 

My bedroom is in the attic, which I like. It has slanted ceilings, and the walls are thick wood panels. Hank and I covered almost an entire wall in old record covers we found in the basement. Mom said we could have them, but Dad got mad when he found out we glued the covers to the wall. Hank and I let them hash it out, shirking responsibility like true boys. What’s done is done. 

Hank gave me a record player for my birthday this year, and before he ran off with that freak girl we used to smoke weed up here and listen to music, all float and twang. I can hear her heartbeat from a thousand miles. The space like an animal den, all brown wood, dropped ceilings. A small circle of window overlooks the property. The fields, and just the occasional cut of black back country roads like snakes. Grandpa’s old pumpkin patch. The light up here changes like crazy from winter to summer. The leaves, they come and go; the sunlight, too. The hundred-year-old maple is heavy now with leaves, looking lush and a little wet. It makes the room darker, even more concave. 

I flick my bedside lamp on, because I want to see myself. If Grandpa knew I was touching metal with a storm coming through, but his knees don’t work well enough to get up here anymore. I inspect myself in the mirror propped up against the wall, and the glass is old enough to put my body in a fog. 

My arms are very thin, and suntanned this summer. My shoulders are sharp under the age-fuzzed cloth of Hank’s T-shirt. Underneath the fabric, my collarbones look sharp and fluid, and the flat of my sternum. The inkling of breast. I press my hands so tightly to my chest I can hardly breathe. I stand sideways, then front ways, then sideways again. 

My blue jean cutoffs are old and faded. They hug my thighs loosely and land just an inch or two above the knee. At school, the other girls are always getting in trouble for skimpy clothing. I’ve never been scolded for my own clothing, and it feels like an insult and a luxury. 

I sit down on the mattress, but keep watch on the mirror image of myself. My arms are getting tired from squashing my breasts. My hair needs a trim. I let go of myself and swoop it all up in the best bun I can manage, which is not a very good one. My eyes have little brown rings underneath. My copy of Frankenstein near smithereens underneath my pillow. Mom doesn’t like me reading monster stories, so I keep it hidden and read it late at night. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. Mom says I have a knack for poetry, but that’s only because I’m good at crosswords. 

“Hey, you.” 

I jump at the voice in my doorway. Mae never rings the doorbell at our house. Even if she did, I bet Grandpa’s disconnected it by now. I think he’ll die of electrocution someday. People always die of things that scare them. 

“Maybelle Grace,” I call out, slapping my knee. 

I wonder how long she’s been standing there.

“Lee Georgina Rose,” Mae says, and lays on that thick southern accent. 

We pretend we are ghosts. Straight out of Gettysburg, which is only an hour or so from here. Last fall our freshman class ventured out and we had to stand in a field and march as if we were soldiers. Everyone got real quiet and serious, like we could feel it when we walked through all that death. All that talk about the death of young boys.

Mae and I get outside before the rain comes. 

In the woods, Mae is all milky thighs and rounded shoulders. Thin fingers and clipped fingernails. Plump lips that glisten, moisturized, grapefruit-scented. I can smell it. I can see her lace bra through her T-shirt, and she has those slim shoes that slide on and off with the laces still tied. In the air, the smell of firewood and leafy must. It won’t leave our skin for days. The crisper smell of boy deodorant, so bold and knowing, as if it had always belonged there. 

“Nice shirt,” Mae says. 

“It’s Hank’s.”

“I know,” Mae says. 

The crunch of our feet. The scurry of a critter in the dead fallen leaves. I pick up a stick and slap at overgrown brush, as we walk. Mae is smiling. Mae moves like a hippie in a movie. 

We walk, following the creek to a small clearing by the oak tree with a scar in the bark. A car accident, Dad says, years ago. Teenagers, drunk and ugly with each other. Looking to escape inside the woods. Both of them were killed on impact.

 “So, he’s just gone now?” Mae asks. 

We both stop at the clearing, and Mae starts to undress.

“Left a note. Said something about us not understanding. Mom’s stored it away with my grandma’s recipes; won’t let anyone else touch it.” 

“Damn,” Mae says, which is what she always says. 

“Left me his pocket knife. For fishing, I guess.”

Mae laughs at me, lets her shirt fall to the ground.  

“You can’t even watch Animal Planet without getting queasy,” she says.

“Shut up,” I say, and toss my stick to the brush.

Mae slips her shoes off now and moves on to unbutton her khaki shorts. 

“‘Why do the animals always have to kill each other?’” Mae mocks me, laughing at her own joke.  

“I know how to gut a fish. I’ve just never done it before,” I say.

“Well, maybe we could catch you one,” Mae says.

She winks. She’s made it down to a bra and underwear. Purple up top, hot pink on the bottom. If I looked hard enough, I know I could see straight through that lace to skin. But all I do is look away and blush. She runs ahead of me. Her hair billows out behind her, dirty blonde, heavy looking. From the side, I imagine it must look like a great streak of paint across a canvas. I chase her, our bare feet slapping mud.

In Frankenstein, there’s a girl the monster watches from the woods. He watches her sleep inside her cottage. He watches her through all the seasons, a whole year gone by. 

Mae stops running. I nearly topple into her. Her arms outstretched, like my mother does in the car when we are driving together and she comes to a stop. Protective only in gesture. A woman’s arm could never save you. We’re at the edge of the creek and all we can hear is the trickling of water and the rustling of leaves, and our breathing, and, yes, we can hear our hearts beating. I can almost hear her heartbeat. 

*

“You think he’ll come back?”

Mae is neck deep in the water now, and her body looks radiant and warped underneath it. I’m sitting on a rock jutting out of the stream, dangling my feet to keep cool. 

“Hard to say. I guess they got pretty far. No sign of them for miles.”

“I heard the cops never really look for older kids,” Mae says. “Probably just wanted to please your folks.”

I shrug. The air is heavy on my shoulders. I consider swimming. Mae dips under and a burp of bubbles rises to the surface. Hank never swam, said he was afraid of water, but I was never so sure about that. It never seemed like Hank was afraid of anything. He used to catch garden snakes. Snatch them up real close to their heads so they couldn’t get at him and bite. He’d chase me around the house with them. Same with spiders. 

Once, he told me he’d caught a black widow, a fear of mine, and was keeping it just in case I got out of line. I had heard rumors at school. That they lay their sacks of baby spiders in bunches of grapes. That a woman in Idaho had dropped dead from one.

Hank was always trying to scare me. He’d love me up after, when I was scared. It’s all right there. Only joking. He’d hug me to his side. He was never scared of spiders. I don’t think he was ever really scared of swimming, either. Watching him by the side of the pool, dry and withdrawn in a clean white T-shirt. There was something cooler about him, something different. I understood it.

“You ever gonna get in here with me?” Mae asks, resurfacing.

I’m still dressed, stripped only of my socks and sneakers, which makes me feel free enough. 

“It’s too cold,” I say. 

Mae disappears again. Back under, down, down, down. Although, it isn’t very deep. A boy we knew when we were little snapped his neck in shallow water. Boys are dangerous like that. They hold themselves in so long they go wild. Like they’re owed something. 

*

We remember the storm too late and are soaked through to the bone by the time we make it back to the house. Not so much from the swimming, more from the downpour. We hope it lashes out the high humidity, which has sunken into our skin all summer long. 

Inside, we get a little chill from being rained on. Mae’s T-shirt is so wet and cloying I can see the slight curve of her nipples, so I give her a towel from the powder room to cover up. We go upstairs. 

Mae makes herself at home in my room. She plops down on my bed and I’m annoyed because we’re still so wet and I’ll have to change the sheets later. Mae tells me to shush. Says she’s tired. 

“At least sit on something,” I say.

I toss a fresh towel from my closet, and Mae reluctantly sits on it. 

“There,” she says. 

We are past the thrill of the afternoon. Now, we are only cold and moody with each other. I sit down on the floor and watch small droplets of water darken the wood, slipped from the tip of my nose, the great mess of my hair, or the edge of my T-shirt sleeve. I hardly smell like his deodorant anymore. In fact, the rain has knocked our senses clean. There is no smell. 

“You think he’s in love with her?” Mae asks. 

“Better be. Running off like that.”

“It’s a little romantic for Hank, don’t you think?” Mae asks.

“Maybe he knocked her up,” I say. 

“Don’t say knocked up,” Mae says, sounding kind.

I take my shoes off. My socks make little curved water marks on the wood floors. I take my socks off too and ring them out, and pull a finger through the water on the floor, drawing lines. 

“You think they’ll come back married?” Mae asks.

“I think Hank’s an idiot,” I say.

“Oh, come on. You’d never run off with some boy? Just get the hell out of here?”

“You would?”

“Sure, I would. For the right boy. Or, just the right day, really.”

I think that sounds silly, but I don’t say it. Mae leans back on the bed and picks up the twisted knot of weed all wrapped up in an old paper bag. 

“Damn,” she says, and tosses it to me. “What the fuck did we go to the river for?”

I laugh and unravel the package. Little bits of old paper flake away on my hands. Inside, the weed is small and old, but still fragrant. Mae tosses me a lighter from her pocket.

*

Time is endless. I ask Mae if she wants to read and she says sure, so we both settle on the bed like an old married couple before lights out. I pull out Frankenstein, but Mae says she doesn’t want to listen to a boy book. So, I pull out The Bell Jar, which makes me sad and not in a good way, but it is kind of beautiful, and Mae says it makes her feel seen. 

“From the beginning?” I ask. 

Mae nods and only leaves the bed for a moment to put a record on low. The speakers catch static from all the dust up here, and Mae blows the record off a little, then replaces it on the track and lowers the needle without really caring which song it lands on. “Doctor My Eyes.” 

I open up The Bell Jar, carefully avoiding the author photo of Sylvia Plath printed on the back cover in black and white. I used to think they did that because she was dead, and had died by suicide. Now, I think she was just that old. Maybe, if she had lived, she would have been my grandpa’s age. I picture her alive and clunking around an old house somewhere, somewhere near or far away, unplugging lamps before a thunderstorm.  

“I’m ready,” Mae says, and lays her head on my shoulder and her hair makes my T-shirt wet all over again, but I don’t really mind. I don’t mind anything. 

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberg’s, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York…

*

“My uncle killed himself,” Mae says. 

We’re tired of reading, so now we’re just lounging, and Mae is lying upside down on my bed. Her feet by my pillows look even more naked somehow. The record ends, so I get up and put another one on. This time, The Kinks from back when they could have been anyone. Mae tells me to put on the one she knows, so I jump around until I find “You Really Got Me.”

“Why’d your uncle kill himself?” I ask. 

“You can’t really ask why about stuff like that.”

“Sorry,” I say.

Mae twirls the ends of her hair, looks up at the ceiling like she knows a thing or two about life. 

“Was he young?” I ask.

“Mom says he was only thirty, which sounds old, doesn’t it? But, we’ve almost lived half that.”

I sink back into the bed, sitting up against the wall with a pillow wedged behind my back. 

“Heard my dad talking about it one night,” Mae says. “They think he was a queer, you know? Had sex with other men.”

Mae’s legs are pitched and crossed so her one foot dangles and bobs in the air. There’s chipped nail polish on her toenails. I still feel damp, even though it’s been hours and I’m technically dry now. It’s still raining outside. 

“Is that a reason to kill yourself?” I ask.

Mae shrugs. “It depends.”

I want to ask her what it depends on, but Mae isn’t really paying attention to me anymore. I can tell she is off on her own inside her head. She does this sometimes, especially when we’re stoned and she doesn’t want to go home yet, but she’s no longer here for me. 

*

Hank told me he hated himself once. He was in trouble with Dad one night. Took the car out without asking. He and his friends went out knocking mailboxes with a boy named Carl’s wooden baseball bat. Someone’s mother saw and called someone else’s mother, who called our mother the way women do in small towns. When Hank got home he wreaked of cigarette smoke. 

After, late that night, I snuck into Hank’s room. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and I could see pink welts all over his back. I had never seen him cry before. Some people think it’s pathetic when boys cry. Some people love boys no matter what they do. 

“What are you thinking about?” Mae asks. 

I forgot she was even here with me. 

“Do you miss him?” she asks. 

I nod and fiddle with the edge of my top sheet. Mae sits up and rests back on her elbows so she can look at me. 

“You know, you look like him,” Mae says. “Got the same eyes.”

“Hank’s are hazel.”

Mae sits up further and scoots herself real close to me, drapes her arm across my lap and wraps a hand around my hip. 

“The shape of them, though. Something about this look you give me sometimes.”

“What look?” I ask.

I can feel something digging into my lower back and it hurts, and my mouth feels dry as cracked wheat. Mae’s hand squeezes a little at my hip, which surprises me. I’ve seen her flirt before with others. The boy down the street from her house. She holds his hand sometimes when we walk down to the dairy for chocolate milk. And the lifeguards at the swimming pool. Mae swoons. But not with me. Or, maybe I am just being naïve. 

When our lips touch, I understand, and I don’t. I kissed a boy last summer, spin the bottle around a fire pit at Mae’s house. His lips were fat and softer than I expected. People on TV are always kissing each other so hard. He smelled of Axe and body odor, which Mae said was sexy. After, I regretted it, but still gossiped about it with Mae and the other girls. 

Mae’s lips are soft, but not soft. They feel intentional. Which means they have intention. I am thoughtless. It is too easy, and strange in how easy it is. She pulls away and we don’t say anything at all. But privately, I change my mind. You’d never run off with some boy? 

*

We lay together in my bed and listen to the rain against the window. The afternoon is gone now, and outside is the true dark of farm country. The true quiet, too. Except for the cicadas. 

The lamp in my room casts a yellow glow, and every shadow is long and looks old like it can stretch back through time. Mae is like a mirror. Waiting to show me who I am. Waiting to show me who I am not. I am not a boy. And I don’t know if I want to be one. But I do not want to be a girl anymore. And I don’t know if I ever have. 

The album ended a while ago, but we don’t mind. Neither of us mention it. It must be close to dinner time. I wonder where my mother is, but I don’t want to think about my mother. 

“What are you thinking about?” Mae asks. 

I hate this question. 

“I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing.”

Mae sits up now. She turns and faces me with her legs crossed. Her face is down. Her fingers play around on my leg. 

“What are you thinking about?” she asks again. 

She smiles, doesn’t wait for me to answer this time. She says she’s thinking about kissing me, and I don’t know what to say to that. She says she likes the way I look with my hair up how it is. I focus on her fingertips. They walk over my calf, feeling warm and little, but not inconsequential. Powerful, maybe, in a quiet way. Mae says she likes the way I smell. I tell her it’s just Old Spice, and she says she knows. She tells me she remembers the T-shirt I’m wearing. Says that Hank wore it once to her house, and she thought he looked cute in it.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. 

Mae nodes and says, “I like it when you look like a boy.”

The rain taps across the window. Something inside of me bursts open. To look like one feels like enough. Like I didn’t know what was missing before now, but there was something missing. And maybe this was it. I allow my fingers to graze the skin of Mae’s naked ankle. 

“It’s like you’re playing dress up,” she says. 

Mae giggles and rolls back to lay down near the bottom of the bed. There’s still something digging into my back, so I reach back and pull out the book and toss it to the floor. Its cover is bent and creased. Its pages are worn around the corners and the edges. The paper is yellow and dull, and it smells of sweetness and must.

“It’s funny,” Mae says.

She rolls further and stands up, stretches. She says she should be going soon. Get home before her mom freaks out. Over nothing, of course. She tells me she might not be around tomorrow. She isn’t so sure. She doesn’t know what she’s doing really. Says the boy down the street, his name is Jimmy, wants to take her for an ice cream cone.

She makes it sound like it’s no big deal, and maybe it isn’t. She swoops down and kisses my cheek before she leaves, tells me I feel warm and feels my forehead like a mother. 

“Goodnight, Lee,” she says. 

And then she is gone, and I am alone. Still wearing my costume. 

*

The monster in Frankenstein is left without a name. The name of the book actually refers to the monster’s creator, but people ignore that. Every time I see someone all dolled up in green and bolts wedged into their neck, I call them Frankenstein. I know I’m wrong, but at this point it feels like I’m right. We’ve all decided on it. I don’t know who exactly. 

It’s been three weeks since Hank skipped town. No sign of him yet. Mom’s still waiting. Dad stays in the barn most days, building things out of wood. He made me a new wall clock for my bedroom and it clicks away the minutes like a metronome when I read. I pace out each sentence to it. Beware; for I am fearless and therefor powerful.

I wonder if I am fearless like my brother. I don’t know where my brother his. I think sometimes that he is dead, or has gone through a different kind of death. There is something fast about dying, but maybe not so permanent. Maybe you could do it more than once. 

At night, I stay up late and think Hank is dead, because he isn’t here anymore. But maybe, he is still alive somewhere else in some new body, older and wiser, in some town that isn’t our small town. And maybe Mae is dead, too. Or, at least, she is willing to die in a way. To run off somewhere. For the right boy, for the right day even. Her white neck and cool, milky arms. I think she has died many times over, just to make herself new again. Sometimes, I still feel her lips on my lips. 

Each night, I sit next to Mom at the dinner table, and Dad sits at the head of the table. Grandpa takes his dinner in front of the television, and we all listen to the trill of the Jeopardy! theme song. This is Jeopardy! Dad asks me what he always asks me. Pass the rolls, Lee. And I do, thinking maybe we are the ones who are truly permanent. Static and unmoving. Allergic to change. 

Tonight, I know I will not sleep. I will read until the house is quiet. I will creep down the attic stairway. Steeper in the dark and in the desperate shadows of the night. The wood beneath my feet will bow a little in the middle of each step, and I will be careful not to make too much noise. 

At the bottom, I will tiptoe down the hallway. In Hank’s room, which is really just an empty bedroom now, stale and cloaked in quiet, I will open up his dresser drawers. I will finger through their guts and scrape my fingers over corduroy pants, and I will listen to the fabric whistle and feel the zing under my fingertips. In the end, I will take just one small piece of clothing for myself, and I will wait. I am waiting, even now, for my own small death.

Devon Capizzi (they/them) is a writer based in Boston, MA. Their work has been supported by the Tin House Writers Workshop, a fellowship from the Emerson College MFA program, and their fiction is forthcoming in Foglifter Journal (Spring 2021). They write about grieving, queerness, and sports. Devon is originally from rural Pennsylvania.

Federico Escobar

This Is Me

I’m 12 years old I’m about to ask my mom for money. Not bubblegum money or sneakers money. This is me asking for money as adults ask for money, only that it’s me doing it, a victim of that world, not a member. I told her what I’ve been asked to tell her: This month’s tuition payment for school is due today. Do you have the money? She says what I said she would say: Honey, you know I don’t, I’m still behind on the utilities bills. She bends to eye level, which I didn’t expect, and says something I should’ve expected: Did your dad ask you to tell me this? My eyes drop. Of course he did, but I wasn't about to admit it because it would mean admitting that the world has changed, and how on earth did she figure it out anyway, it’s not like they were married for fifteen years until things unraveled like three days ago and now their only son is caught in the mudslinging. Not like that at all. I just walk out of the room and I call him, this was before cell phones so it’s a landline call, and I tell him it’s done and I tell him what she said and I asked if he can now pay the school so the school bus driver won’t ask me to step down as he did last month, not embarrassing at all. And he says yes, he’ll pay, only it’s a landline call, so my mom had picked up another receiver and listened. At that point, they take a deep breath and say they can stop now, they can stop pretending they hate each other, they can stop acting as if they were bent on ruining my life, and they laugh, for three or four minutes straight, and they cry for three or four minutes straight, and they tell me it’s all an act, they were just acting out an acrimonious divorce, but they love me still and they love each other and they would never do anything to hurt me, ever. Only they don’t say that at that point. Instead, at that point, they explain: they tell me it’s a grown-up thing, falling out of love, and they’re really stressed out trying to make ends meet, and they take long laborious minutes explaining why all of this is happening, they talk debts, they talk pension funds, they talk alimony, and I listen and mmm-hmm a lot and they tell me everything, their hopes, their fears. Only they don’t do anything close to that. What happens next is ugly and it will happen again, many times in fact, and it will become fabric that I will weave into a sweater and wear it everywhere, even when it’s warm, even when I mean to tell others that this isn’t me, it’s just this sweater I picked up at a second-hand store, sure there’s still someone inside, wearing all this.

Federico Escobar grew up in Cali, Colombia, and after living in New Orleans, Oxford, and Jerusalem, spent most of the past decade in Puerto Rico—Hurricane María included. He currently works in education. He has published short stories and poems, as well as academic articles and translations, in both Spanish and English. An anthology of his short stories in Spanish is currently under consideration by a publisher in Colombia. His website is federicoescobar.com.

Jessica Staricka

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

When footage of the angel is finally outlawed, I cross my arms over my skinny chest and tell people, “Bullshit. We should keep broadcasting those videos, no matter how toxic, just to rid ourselves of the zealots stupid enough to watch them.”

I tell this to the few people I tell anything to. My coworkers. My mother on the phone Sunday nights. My neighbor, begrudgingly.

“Hey, Ahmed,” he calls over the knee-high hedge between our lawns while I exit my dingy Lincoln and he waters his grass. “You have to have that radio on all the time?”

Yes, I do. CNN and Fox and affiliates are trying to ignore the ten-foot-tall heavenly carcass that has been discovered nine-hundred feet underground. At least BBC radio reporters describe that desert of dark hills, where in a complex of half-built skyscrapers blooming in the Middle East, titanic yellow earth-moving machinery sits abandoned, and mountains of dirt make the hole they surround seem vaster. They report the hum at the pit’s gaping maw. They journey in double-hazmat suits through construction and over the hills and to that edge.

And I would much rather be listening to them than Mr. Ludewig, who stands with his fist on his hip and his other fist gripping a hose that runs and runs and runs as if there isn’t a drought in California and says, “Radiobiologists proved the image is toxic.”

“Oh, does my radio force images on you?”

“I mean that if the image is toxic, why not thoughts about it?”

“Oh no. You’re bad as Fox News. You think talking about the angel contaminates you!”

“Please, don’t say… those kinds of words.”

“Which words? Angel? Angelic carcass? Heavenly rot? Those kinds of words?”

Mr. Ludewig’s eyes go wide and watery.

Maybe this is why I have so few people to tell things to.

“Sorry,” I grumble. “I’m trying to assure you that talking and thinking and wondering about the angel doesn’t contaminate you.”

And because I listen to the radio and try to learn about life instead of cowering behind a garden hose, I’m practically an expert on contamination. Footage of the angel spews divine radiation. It fries electronics. It melts the mind of the viewer. Obsession. Blackouts. All symptoms of contamination the government is trying, I suppose rightfully, to protect us from by telling TV news networks to can it.

Still dumping what must by now be California’s last gallons of water onto his lush lawn, still with owl eyes, Mr. Ludewig stares at me.

I want him to go to hell. I can’t say that. Instead:

“I’m not afraid of the radio. But I swear on God’s grave I’ll stay away from the videos.”

Then I’m free. I enter my arid little house of browns and greens, where all the shades are drawn so slats of sunlight stripe the floor. I microwave a bowl of soup and plug in my oscillating fans. The kitchen radio is already on.

“—in Albuqa, two miles south of the Saudi Arabian border and six miles from the quarantined site,” says a female reporter over background chatters and clanks, a sparse street, maybe. “Citizens here rely not on scientific data, but on personal experience to inform their limits on discussion—and even thinking—of the angel. With me is Ilhan Dar Muhammad, a dental school student who has come home this semester to support her community in the wake of the angel’s discovery. Ilhan. Tell us: is there evidence of contamination in your hometown?”

“Desiree, I believe talking about the unspeakable is toxic,” comes Ilhan’s bold, faintly accented voice. “I have seen friends and neighbors suffer blackouts, sleepwalking, and obsession. The few in my neighborhood with access to television and the internet are limited because our government restricts media. I know these people are not seeing images of the unspeakable. So where does their contamination come from, if not the word, and the thought?”

“Can you share,” Desiree asks, “any personal experiences with contamination?”

“Yes. Only last night, I dragged my aunt back into the house because I caught her trying to make a pilgrimage. She was adamant. The neighborhood doctor had to come and sedate her.”

“This ‘pilgrimage,’ as you call it, can’t be explained by a personal obsession?”

Of course it can. I spoon Campbell’s into my mouth with one hand and drum my fingers with the other. My kitchen window is open behind the shades and I can hear Mr. Ludewig still feeding the whole Pacific Ocean to his grass.

“No,” Ilhan says. “I have seen people talk and end up as contaminated as those who watched the footage. When scientists return with their Geiger counters, they will see my aunt has that divine radioactivity in her. Divinity abides by no physical law. You and I are in danger right now by talking—”

I hit the button for the next preset. Classical music jitters forth and I clank my spoon against my empty bowl. Stupid Ilhan. Contamination can’t come from just thinking about the angel. I’m proof. I think about it every day. Angel clips are leaked online. If I was obsessed with seeing them, I could.

I head to my room, open my laptop, and find some forums that discuss the angel. Most members are feverishly theological and exhibit the intelligence of a gecko. Or Mr. Ludewig. Or that idiot Ilhan girl who thinks her aunt is contaminated with only words.

I read the comments. I don’t post. I was an atheist before the angel was found. Now, I don’t know what I am. Maybe the angel is a biblical figure. Maybe it’s Michael or Gabriel. Maybe it was down in literal Hell. Maybe it proves the existence of God. 

But what does it mean for the Kingdom of Heaven when one of its immortal, immaculate messengers is found decomposing in the earth’s crust?

If humans killed God, maybe I can go on being an atheist after all.

I close the message boards and work from bed, emailing department heads things like, “No I can’t give you another terabyte of storage. What did you do with the terabyte I gave you last week?” Managing data storage for an immense insurance company: not the most fulfilling use of my time. They even manage to make the business trips boring.

I give up after the sun goes down and fall asleep to Netflix. I wake tasting dreams of the angel on my brain. My workday is dull. At the watercooler, I tell coworkers, “Everyone is too sensitive. My old horse of a neighbor is probably going to buy a Geiger counter and scan my radio.” On the drive home, I listen to a talk show, where special guest, radio journalist Desiree, wonders if the angel is an alien. Maybe what we know as angels have always been aliens, their image radiating to early mankind from across the galaxy.

I should believe that. I’m an atheist. Aren’t I?

In my driveway, I rush past Mr. Ludewig before he can tell me to shut my radio off. On my bed I open my laptop. If I watch footage I’ve seen before, is it still toxic? Or has it spent its effect on me? I remember videos from before they went contraband. The images were grainy and digitally zoomed. Most ended in the camera melting. In the first angel footage I’d ever seen, the sun was setting leftward of dirt mountains. The camera swung down to reveal its handler had climbed to the top of a massive crane. The dim desert trembled below. Then the image steadied. Into horrifying focus came the angel.

On a webpage of video thumbnails, I see it: a sunset left of the dirt mountains. My heart thunders. I follow a ladder of links and instructions until I send money via Paypal for a login and password to a site with a black background and hyperlink-blue text. 

There’s the video. I’ve already seen it. Harmless. I click play.

The sun sets to the left. The distant ground trembles. The image focusses into the pit and its outpouring of white light. 

The contrast adjusts. Nestled in deep dirt is a body clothed in white. The skin is mottled with bruising and decay and glowing anyway. Eye sockets empty. Nostrils slits. Feathered wings shedding. Jaw detached and hanging crooked, cheekbones wearing through leathery skin, blond hair matted, body humming, humming, humming, HUMMING—

I slam the laptop shut.

Humming.

Humming?

I shake my head. Rub my temples. The clip had been silent. I must have imagined it. Radio journalists told me the angel hummed.

I open the laptop. The webpage refreshes. I’m locked out. My login doesn’t work again.

I can ask the seller for a new one.

Or I can find a different video.

Or I can go eat some goddamn supper. I get up. My foot catches something. I clamp my jaw and spin so I hug my laptop and land on my shoulder blade on the carpet.

I sit halfway up. Under my ankles is my suitcase.

I kick it. Feels full.

I could swear I unpacked that since my last lame business trip.

I eat a frozen pizza and listen to Desiree and Ilhan talk about the obsessions in Albuqa they call “contamination.” I fall asleep to Netflix. The next day, I frighten my coworkers again, this time by wondering aloud, “Are the videos really that toxic? How many do people have to watch before they register on a Geiger counter?” When I get home, I head to my room and fork over more money to watch another video I’ve seen before. The image is sharp. From straight above. A drone. It must have uploaded footage to online storage as it recorded. No equipment made it out of the angel’s gravesite unscathed.

The bloated skin is receding from the angel’s teeth. Its tongue is shriveled and snapped in two. The glowing radiates from the cloak and the wings and the flesh and every exposed bone.

The clip is eleven seconds long. The lens warps. The image goes black.

I watch it on repeat. Is it Michael? Gabriel? How long has it been there? Did God bury it? Did God die, too? Is Satan the victor? Is mankind the victor?

The laptop goes black.

I find my fingers plugging my ears.

Why? Humming?

I check the clock. It’s past two in the morning.

My heart seems to buzz. How many times did I repeat those eleven seconds?

I go to sleep.

I dream of the angel.

I go to work.

I talk about the angel.

Friday comes. I throw my paycheck on Paypal. Then I leave work early because I’m not needed on the latest lame business trip. Mr. Ludewig stops me between my car and my door and confronts me about how I’ve started watching the videos. He can tell thanks to the blue laptop light leaking from my bedroom window half the night.

“Mr. Ludewig,” I say as a plastic bag of groceries pressurizes my fingertips into red orbs that look ready to pop, “they’re not toxic enough to contaminate me.”

“Ahmed,” he gasps, eyes looking as ready to pop as my fingers. “That’s the contamination talking!”

He rattles stories about a friend across town, and his wife’s cousin in Kansas City, and his granddaughter’s elementary school principal, and a work associate in Biloxi, who all started watching those videos and to this day won’t stop.

“You think I don’t hear these stories on the radio every day?” I say. “Those people are just letting themselves get obsessed with it. It’s poor self-control. It’s sucking at being a person. It doesn’t mean the videos have given them divine brain-rot. They’re nowhere near as toxic as people think. If they are toxic—”

“If?!”

“—then so what? That’s the end of the road. I’m not flying out to see the angel myself.”

Going there would be like attempting a field trip to a nuclear meltdown, anyway. According to Desiree, the few fanatics who survive the trek from the nearest airport to the mouth of the massive grave get their faces melted off before even seeing the angel.

“Don’t talk like that, please, Ahmed!”

I want to tell him I don’t want to talk to him at all. Instead:

“I watch the videos, but I swear on God’s grave I won’t make some stupid pilgrimage.”

I dive inside, set my groceries on the counter, and ignore a banana that drops to the floor to rush to my laptop and check the forums. Wednesday, I’d found a program for capturing videos from the screen. Now, any videos I see, I save.

I open the folder and watch each one once. My laptop screen is discolored. The battery only lasts ten minutes before I have to plug it in.

Sure, maybe the footage is a little toxic. But these images can’t be enough to contaminate me. And so what? Staying home all day watching footage on repeat? Sounds like a better life than managing data storage and burning my life away on boring business trips.

I open my favorite clip. It’s from a drone on a suicide mission. It dives into the pit, toward the glowing, gleaming, humming, humming, humming, HUMMING—

I blink.

I find my fingers are in my ears. I pull them out. Over my drumming heart, I hear Desiree’s voice on the radio downstairs.

Huh. It’s only noon. She shouldn’t be reporting yet. 

Maybe there’s been an angelic development. 

But in the kitchen, I find it’s Desiree’s regular show. The afternoon is long gone. I must have dozed off at my computer. I shelve my groceries and arrange apples in a bowl while Desiree talks with a radiobiologist who has swept Albuqa with Geiger counters and found that the citizens who black out and wander into the desert toward the angel are radioactive.

“Have they been watching the videos?” Desiree asks.

“No,” the scientist says.

“Could it be pure proximity?”

“No. The effects are unequal. Some are contaminated. Some are not.”

Contamination. Maybe contamination is a myth. A hoax by the government to keep us from the angel. I’ve watched countless videos, and I’m not contaminated.

I step to the door to take the trash out and kick something soft. The banana that fell off the counter earlier is mushy and brown. I grab it and the peel pulls right off.

My heart hammers. Heh. No good cheap produce. I dozed for an afternoon and it went right to mush.

I bring the trash and the rotten banana to the bin in the hot orange evening light and find Mr. Ludewig killing the planet by still watering his damn lawn. He jumps when he sees me and says, “Ahmed, my boy, I was wondering where you’ve been.”

“In my house,” avoiding you, I’d like to say.

“What were you doing in there all weekend?”

All weekend? It’s Friday. 

Isn’t it?

My heart starts drumming again. Did I nap through the whole weekend?

I want to ask what day it is. I don’t. Instead:

“I haven’t slept much this week.”

“That’s because you’re up there watching those videos, aren’t you!”

“It’s none of your business!”

“It certainly is! You’re next to my home! Everyone knows now that even talking and thinking about the unspeakable can—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You need to,” he pleads.

All I need is to get inside and online. If the weekend passed, there may be new footage.

I can’t say that. Instead:

“I swear on God’s there is no such thing as angelic contamination.”

I flee from his watery gaze. Upstairs, I return to the videos. The clips are silent and my audio is turned off but they hum and hum and hum until I realize my laptop is dead and cold and my fingers are in my ears and my arms are sore from holding them there. Back in the kitchen, Desiree is signing off, saying, “This is my final goodbye. My doctor has ordered me to forget about the unspeakable. I thank you all—”

The radio falls silent.

Great. Just great. The last good reporter has fallen to mass hysteria.

I knock my knuckles on the radio. I click through the presets. Nothing.

I unplug it. Plug it back in. It lights up and plays static for a moment. It blips out.

Like every camcorder, phone, and drone that visits the angel’s grave.

My car has a radio. I rise and cross my lawn and pass through the long shadow of Mr. Ludewig’s house, now silent. In my driver’s seat, I elbow something. I turn and find my luggage.

I could have sworn I took these out of here after the last lame business trip.

I turn on the car radio.

“—been interviewing a young woman in Albuqa named Ilhan Dar Muhammad, who has struggled to protect her family from contamination. Well, Ilhan herself has fallen. Her body was found at the base of the dirt hills around the pit. Some listeners may find the description of her condition disturbing, but with permission from her family and for the sake of journalism, we will share it. The radiation liquefied any flesh bathed in light. She was identified by her clothing, as her head was stripped to the skull. She died before tumbling—”

I shut it off. Stupid Ilhan. Stupid Desiree. I could do better.

I blink.

I’m in my room. I’m plugging my ears.

I blink.

Flies are swarming my rotten apples.

I blink.

The image of the angel is burned into my laptop screen. Halo. Wings. Hollow eyes. Slack jaw. Humming, humming, humming, HUMMING—

I blink.

I step from my house and cross my lawn. Mr. Ludewig drops his hose and bolts inside. Good riddance. Idiot. Believing in contamination. I’m sure he can tell that the blue light that keeps my room aglow at night is now full of tutorials on surviving a trek across a desert, and the search for airline tickets. Good. I’m glad I’ve scared him off.

I blink.

Jets roar overhead. My luggage is in my grasp.

I blink.

Sand grates in my shoes. The sun scorches my back.

I blink.

Bruises from barriers and barbed wire mark me. There is hot sand. There are towering cranes. The incline climbs under my feet. I ache to be awake for this. I ache to see the angel over that edge. But all is hot and humming darkness.

Jessica Staricka is a Minnesotan earning her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. She can usually be found writing, drawing, or anxiously guzzling beer. Her work has appeared in River River, the Ninth Letter web edition, and Hypertext Magazine. You can find her on twitter @jstaricka.

Eleanor Goodbody

An Attempt at Intimacy

I don’t tell Ty where I’m going. He sits on the ground staring at the wall and when I walk out the door he doesn’t ask.

*

The evening starts out normal enough. 

“Delete the numbers.” His head is in his hands and he’s talking in a calm, slow voice. This isn’t the first time he’s asked me to do this, to delete his dealer’s numbers from his phone. 

I do what he asks. I even turned on his iPad and make sure it won’t come up on the iCloud.

“Fuck,” he says. “It’s really done.”

I sit next to him on the couch. I touch his face with my hands and kiss his forehead. I tell him I’m proud of him. I want for it to be over, for us to get a six pack and sit on the roof like we used to, his head on my lap because he likes to look at the planes in the sky. I’m just about to suggest this when he puts his hand on my leg.

“There’s one more thing. I wrote the number down on pieces of paper. They're in my room.”

I tell him to stay in the living room and then I go through his drawers until I find them — three small scraps of paper with numbers written on them in rushed, scribbled handwriting. I crumple them up and put them in my pockets. I don’t trust him not to look through the trash. As I am closing his desk drawer I saw them — a tiny vial halfway full of cocaine and a dime bag that holds five Percocet. I pocket these as well and walk back into the living room.

“You’re all good.” I tell him and he rises slowly, squeezes the side of my arm. 

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” 

We decide to go and get a drink. It’s late August and the city is humid. There is a lightness about him as he walks down the street, my hand in his, and for a moment I really think things will change. 

We drink two beers each and go back to his apartment. By the time we get there, we’re both sweaty and I’m full and tired. I turn on the air conditioner and lie face down on his bed while he takes off his pants. This is familiarity — the hum of traffic coming from his second floor window, the way he mutters to himself as he does things. I hear him rummaging around in his closet, opening and closing drawers. I hear him whisper, “Fuck” under his breathe. I turn and look at him.

“Where are they?” 

It takes me a while to realize what he’s talking about.

“I took them.” I tell him. “You said not to let you do any more drugs.”

“I told you not to let me buy any more drugs, Sarah.” His voice is growing louder now. He walks from one side of the room to the other.

“You made me promise. You made me promise not to let you do them.”

“You’re not understanding this. I still had some left. That was going to be the last time. You can’t take that away from me. You can’t decide when my last time is going to be.” 

I stand up. My shirt still sticks to my back but the air conditioner blows air that now feels too cold. I try to put my hand on his shoulder but he jerks away from me.

“Where are they? Do you have them? Give them to me.” 

I have never seen him like this, so unraveled. When we first started dating he told me he had a problem with coke. But then we’d get drunk and we’d do it together and he’d tell me it wasn’t a big deal. And I believed him for a while, because we were high and drunk and walking through the park and the world seemed exciting and new. Then one morning he called me crying after staying up all night, telling me he couldn’t breathe, that he felt his heart was going to burst, that he was going to die. I took the train to his house and lay in his bed until his breathing normalized. 

I didn’t find out about the pain killers until later.

I ask him to relax and this makes him even angrier. 

“They’re not yours. Give them to me.”

“No.” I say. I start to tear up.

And that’s when it happens. He reaches for me. I push him away. He swings his hand back and hits me on the side of the head. I fall to the ground.

I don’t quite remember what happens after that. Somehow, he’s kneeling on the ground next to me.

“Are you okay, baby? I’m so sorry. Holy shit. I’m so sorry.”

His voice doesn’t register. I push his hands off me. I get up and sit on the edge of the bed for a while, try to focus on how my body moves with each breath. The room feels like it is getting smaller and larger, like the walls are changing size. He sits down on the floor, as far away from me as he can get. 

He tries to apologize again but I say, “Don’t.” 

Eventually, I get up. I don’t look at him as I turn and walked out the door.

*

The first thing that hits me is the heat. At this point, it’s dark and I realize I didn’t notice the sun going down. I need to find a bathroom so I walk down the street until I see a bar. I walk straight to the back, shut the door behind me, and flush the Percocet down the toilet. Then, I do a line of cocaine off my phone screen and sit down at the bar. 

It’s a Tuesday night so there aren’t a lot of people. There is a pretty young women at the end of the bar flirting with the bartender and two middle aged men speaking Hebrew next to me. One of them turns to me and asks to buy me a drink. I tell him I want a beer and a shot. But not one of those shitty beer and shot combos. I want a draft beer and I want a chilled Casamigos shot. He seems to think this is funny and he orders exactly that.

The men are older than I originally thought. They speak in heavy accents and I learn they’re from Israel. They’re not interesting in any real way, but they’re not boring either. I feel confident because of the cocaine and the tequila and I find myself monopolizing the conversation. I do not talk about Ty. I don’t tell them I have a boyfriend or that I live with him or that I can’t stop thinking of the day we met and fucked in a bathroom, how even though it was kind of gross, he was very sweet. 

One of the men is older than the other. He tells me he owns a restaurant and that he lives around the corner. I ask the younger one what he does but he shrugs it off. 

“I help him,” He tells me, and gestures to the older man.

“Would you like to go back to my place?” The man asks. “I have a ton of drugs and alcohol.”

It’s hard for me to turn down drugs. It always has been. And for some reason, the fact that there are two men instead of one makes me feel better. 

When we reach the building, I’m surprised. The lobby is huge and decorated with expensive furniture. The doorman runs to open the door. He greets the older man by name. Noah. “Good evening, sir. How are you?”

The man shakes his hand. 

“Important guy, this one is,” the doorman says to me. I briefly realize what this looks like but I don’t care. I do not know if this is a regular occurrence, if this doorman has seen this man lead multiple younger women through these doors. I’m coked out and drunk and I want to be in a beautiful apartment with people I don’t know.

Noah’s apartment is beautiful. There are floor to ceiling windows and a balcony that looks out across the water. I sit in a chair and he makes me a drink. The other man, who’s name I still do not know, does not drink. 

Suddenly the younger man gets up. 

“I have to go take care of something,” he says. And he walks out the door, leaving me and Noah alone in his apartment. 

As soon as the other man is gone, something shifts. I don’t feel as high or as drunk. I feel uncomfortable being alone with this man who is so much older than I am. He opens a cabinet and I see that there are dime bags of cocaine lined up.

“You have no idea who I am,” he says to me. “You’re a very lucky girl.”

“Can I do a line?” I say. If I’m not sober, the situation won’t be as weird. He lays it out for me on the marble countertop. 

After the line, I feel a little better. We sit out on his balcony and the wind feels cool against my skin. He talks about his parents back in Israel. I talk about an idea for a screenplay I have where a woman stalks a man. Things are starting to feel normal again when there is a knock on the door. A stout man walks in and Noah gets up to speak to him. They speak in Hebrew and I watch from the balcony as Noah walks over to the drawer, hands him dime bags of coke. The man nods to him and walks out again.

“Sorry about that.” He says, coming back to the balcony with another drink for me. I don’t know what I’ve been drinking — some sort of tequila and soda and juice. “I had to take care of some business.”

I know if I drink this drink, I will have committed to staying — at least for a bit. I think of Ty. I think of a summer when I was 13 and I got drunk for the first time on Mike’s Hard Lemonade and I threw up over the side of a dock into a lake. I think of how long the walk from here to Ty’s is. I take a sip of the drink.

We do more coke. We drink more. Noah asks me to get in the shower. 

“I just want to see your body,” he says. “I don’t even want to touch you.”

Sometimes my body acts on its own accord. I am drunk enough that I forget what time it is. I do what he says.

The shower is large and clear and even though he said he didn’t want to touch me, he does. He gets in with me and I realize I’ve never seen a man this old’s naked body before. He has a gut. His chest is small and enclaved. I’m disgusted but I let it happen, let the water run over me. 

When it is over, he gives me a towel. Suddenly, I feel completely sober. I get dressed and tell him I have to leave.

“No.” He says. “Don’t go. We can do more coke.” He says it like these are instructions for me to follow. He says it in the same way he said, “Get in the shower.”

I tell him I have to go to the bathroom. Instead, I exit through the front door. I run down the stairs — all 13 floors — and out onto the street. I realize I have left my sunglasses and earrings. I do not care.

*

When I get to Ty’s, my hair is almost completely dry. I ring his apartment buzzer 4 times. He buzzes me in and I walk upstairs and he pulls me into a hug. 

“I’m sorry, baby.” He says. “You were right to take the drugs. I’m so sorry.”

I let him hold me like that for a while. I think about how I recognize his body so completely, how we fit into each other. 

“Can we go to the roof.” I say. 

He seems surprised, but he doesn’t question it. We bring a blanket. This time, I lay on him, let him run his hands through my hair, let him touch my face, my neck. Softly. Like he’s scared I’ll break.

“You smell different.” He tells me. “I like it.”

I look up at the dark sky. There are no planes tonight. 

Eleanor Goodbody lives and works in New York City. Her twitter is @norabadbody.

DeAnna Stephens

Revolutions

The round blade is a sign of eternity, everything turning over, again and again, regardless of flesh or injury. Nothing fazes it. Here is my blood on its toothed wheel, and here I am,  wrapping my hand with some rags and a packing strap I left on the floor weeks ago, anything to stop the blood. 

Working from instinct and dodging those fleeting lapses of resolve, I stem the blood by wrapping with my good hand and tightening a knot with my teeth. I pick up my tools that lay scattered around the garage.  This makes sense to me. I want to find them easily when I resume building the cabinet. I hold my left hand high above my heart while I lock the back door and think of nothing but reaching a brightly lit place with bandages and surgical thread, with people whose faces have been trained into a proficient, imperturbable concern.  They will have seen worse. My hand doesn’t hurt, and I know I will live, of course, but I keep reaching for the pain, something else on which to focus.

My wife drives me to the emergency room. I don’t let her see the revelation of tendon, possibly bone. Right now, she is unflustered, surprisingly so, speeding as one would in the event of such an emergency, but she is soothing me with words I can’t decode. I’m too alive in adrenaline and in the awareness of having glimpsed a part of myself that is meant to be hidden, the occult juncture of flesh and spirit maybe.  I wonder what will happen now that I have seen this forbidden interior—the pearlescent ribbon riding my knuckle—and I think of our newlywed home where my fist christened the bedroom wall. The sharp fire in my knuckles could not rival my wife’s incisive reproach, which subdued me like the nail she resumed hammering in order to hang one of our wedding photos. 

A stupid squeamishness rides up my spine and niggles beneath my scalp. This is the burden of every man: to pretend that he is not astounded at the radiance of it seeping from him, to commit to action that applauds and venerates that risk. The injury looks almost beautiful beneath the surgical light, each layer distinct, lying open and vulnerable. I can manage only glances. Instead, I watch with envy the woman who drove me to safety as she studies the hand, the doctor’s motions. She glows with the self-possessed awe I have admired in men, in someone other than my wife, and I recall the collection of injuries our two children sustained over the years—scrapes, sprains, a broken finger, a broken collar bone, nothing that unlocked the body. How she had panicked, grieved. I wonder as she watches the doctor sew the tendon sheath together with the finest thread she says she has ever seen, and later I must turn away from her smile when the final dark loop closes my skin. 

DeAnna Stephens holds an MFA from George Mason University. Her poetry has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and has appeared recently in Cherry Tree and Rumble Fish Quarterly. In 2019, Main Street Rag published her chapbook, Heliotaxis. Although her prose has received regional awards, “Revolutions” is her first publication of short fiction. When she isn’t writing or assisting students, she and her daughter are reading, building castles, dancing, or pretending that footbridges are rollercoasters. She resides with her husband and daughter on the Cumberland Plateau where she teaches writing and literature at Roane State Community College in Crossville, Tennessee.

Emily Anne Standlee

Reluctant Deductive Reasoning

In the morning, I smoke weed and set out with an old friend to see floodwaters, a greenhouse, speckled koi fish that swim in circles. We laugh over store-bought sushi. Thirty miles south, my father’s old friend convinces him to go to the emergency room. My father does not call me from St. Mary’s Hospital; he sends a text. Chest pain, come down when you can. He’s fit, active, doesn’t drink, hasn’t in years. Genetics fail us. I’d bought a huge philodendron for $30—the kind with leaves that look like the slender heads of horses—and it stares at me, lazy and still in filtered sunlight, watching as I read the text again. First with tears, then with numbness. I trick myself into indifference. I’d known this day was coming, that something had to go wrong, sometime. I had dreamt about it for weeks. Do we dream to manifest? Had I pushed the universe a little bit further than necessary, tipping the scales in disfavor? At my apartment, I leave the plant outside, drive homeward toward my father and his weird veins all plugged up and caught with shiny needles and thread. My father on the operating table. An image of him hovering inside of a white room under a single spotlight, the glow unnatural and inexplicably watery. Blood thinners. Stints. The words cold in my mouth. My stepmother and I pick at hospital salads with wilted lettuce; my sister’s kids yell on the elevator. See you later, my father says as he’s wheeled back. You’ll be fine, I say. After it’s finished, after I call my grandparents in Arkansas to tell them their son is recovering, I run out to buy wine for my stepmother. Because her own mother had been admitted that same day—also for a heart attack—it is necessary for me to sneak the wine into the hospital. The wine is necessary because my stepmother becomes a floating thing that drifts from my father’s room on the top floor to her mother’s room a floor below, where she rests in a medically induced coma. I know I have begun to care too much. That I will always care too much for my father, for the men in my family, for my stepmother, who must find a way to care less or risk losing herself. The present moment is ruined by the future as soon as it arrives.

Emily Anne Standlee claims Columbia, MO as her hometown and is a Durwood Fellow in the MFA program at UMKC, where she contributes to New Letters. She lives in a 100-year-old apartment building in Midtown KC and in the past, has worked for The Missouri Review. She edits nonfiction for Number One and Nashville Review and has work forthcoming in Tampa Review.

Charles Grosel

Bobby

Bobby was such a boy when he came to the Village, eager and shy, with the curls in his uncombed hair and the baby face not yet leaned out by all-night jams, amphetamines, and the dictates of style. 

 “You put guys up?” he said without introduction the first time we met. He was working on what would become the Voice of a Generation. It came out a reedy twang, somewhere between rodeo cowboy and church choir. We were at that night’s rolling party, where the players streamed in and out as they finished their sets at one club and moved on to the next, refueling with beer, wine, grass, and pills. Partygoers spilled into the hallway and up and down the stairwell. Everyone with a guitar or banjo jammed wherever they found room. We were young and in love with everything, and this was what we had come for. 

I dragged on my cigarette, brushed hair from my face. I had just begun to wear it long and straight and wasn’t used to it. His smile was genuine enough, but with the flicker of a smirk, as if he were taller than he was, broader shouldered, and a place to sleep might not be all he was looking for. He held a beer by the neck in one hand, and swayed from side to side, then raised his eyes to mine—Titian blue, and back then that was enough for me. 

“Did I hear wrong?” 

I blew the smoke out of the side of my mouth, a habit I had picked up from the old movies I snuck out of the library to watch on afternoons I should have been writing my dissertation. “We’ve been known to do that. My husband and me.” With that, I expected to see the back of him. 

“Your husband,” he said instead, leaning forward. His nose had a curve to it, softened by the plump in his cheeks that would last only a couple months more. “He play?”

“No,” I said, miffed that his interest had lurched to my husband so quickly. Another wannabe. But who else would need a place to stay? “Runs the record store.” 

“Papa Bear’s. I heard about it.” He looked at me like he thought he was Brando or Dean. “Bear’s wife. Heard about her, too. The Queen of the Village.”

My face grew warm, as if I were the kid who had just stepped off the bus. Good thing the smoke was thick and the lighting bad. “No queen am I.” I had no idea where that came from. The afternoon movies, I supposed.

“’Tis a shame, for I seek favor of the one named Queen, whose wit and beauty is sung far and wide.” 

I watched myself stub out the cigarette in an upended bottle cap on the closest fruit crate cum end table. When I looked up to retort, he was gone. Just as well, I thought. I had been going to say, “I have no favor to bestow,” but that would have been a lie.

Later, I found him rifling through the books on the plank shelves in the apartment’s only bedroom. He sat on the bed, which had an actual bedframe, not all that common with this crowd. The ivory bedspread pooled where he sat, and he held a cigarette between the first two fingers of his left hand. He pulled books off the shelf one by one, opened them, read a line or two, then dropped them to the floor in a sprinkle of ash, more than a dozen strewn about. 

“I hope you treat my books better than that.”

“Depends on what they are.” He neither looked up nor broke his rhythm. 

I moved in closer, to see which book he was holding, I told myself. The Carpetbaggers. He tossed it on the floor with the others, ignored me. I called his bluff and left. 

*

“Bobby something,” said my friend Michael, the resident of the apartment whose books had been found wanting. We hadn’t been to sleep yet, and we were down on our knees clearing a way to the bed so we could catch a couple hours. I didn’t know where Bear was—he loved the after-hours shows more than I did, and after nights like these, Michael and I often shared a bed, though not like that. He had other preferences. 

“What kind of shit would do such a thing?” Michael said more than once as we smoothed out the crimped pages and restacked the shelves. 

I kept that knowledge to myself.

This Bobby seemed to disappear after that, and when he didn’t show up, I had to remind myself that he was just another picker who needed a place, and I was a married woman with a dissertation to write. For all I knew, he’d already headed back to Ohio or Indiana or wherever—it was always the Midwest, which made me wonder what went on out there that sent their young scampering to us the first chance they got. I spent much of the time cleaning our place, which was always a little grimy and cluttered, what with Bear running the store, me not writing my dissertation, and the roll call of parties every night of the week.

“What’s with the housecleaning?” Bear said when he came home unexpectedly at lunch one day to pick up some records he had left behind. “Your mom again already?”  

I went damp beneath the old blouse and stretch pants I wore for cleaning. I had been thinking—if thinking was the right word—about the way Bobby’s full, pale lips ran up and down the harmonica he had played for the stragglers later that night at Michael’s party.

“Babe, you all right?” 

 “No, god no. I mean, yes, I’m all right. No, not my mom. Busy with Sister’s wedding. Thank god.” 

Bear and I had met at the harpsichord recital of one of my grad school friends. I was so taken by the notion of a man named Bear who looked like he’d just come out of the mountains with his wild beard and long hair—a look not yet as common as it would become—listening to Bach and Handel, I had an immediate and massive crush on him. When we spoke later I learned that he needed an investor for the shop, and this was at the time I was playing Lady Bountiful with my share of the family fortune. Since the dissertation was stalled at a particularly difficult phase—the writing—I moved into Bear’s place since it was closer to the shop. I took over the finances; he sold the records and instruments. Then one morning on our way to the shop, we went to the courthouse and made it permanent, partners in life as well as business, and we remain so to this day. When I told my mother a couple of weeks later, all I got was a stony silence and the lowest keyed, “I hope you find every happiness” I’d ever heard. 

While we practiced only a loose monogamy, the marriage offered certain comforts and protections when I needed them, not the least of which was a good reason to put off the dissertation. Bear was the best friend a girl could have. He kept busy with the store and his musician friends, asked few questions, and had lived on his own long enough to barely notice I wasn’t Donna Reed—until now. 

I folded myself into his arms. “It was worse than usual. You don’t have to rush back, do you?”

“Hmmm.” He smoothed my back with his large, gentle hands, tickled my cheek with his beard. “If this is what housework does for you. . . .”

“You should see the bedroom.” I slipped out of his embrace, clasped his hands in mine, and waltzed him toward the door. 

Making love with Bear was like cozying under a quilt in the dead of winter with a cup of hot cocoa. It left you glowing and sleepy, but a little hollow. Maybe because he was such a large man, he was especially careful, almost polite, even when he didn’t have to be. Even when I didn’t want him to be. 

After we emerged from our daze, Bear spooned behind me. “This kid came into the store today. Said he knew you. Bobby something. He needs a place to stay.”

“Met him at Michael’s.” I pushed up on my elbows, twisted to face him. “We’ve never said no. Is he any good?” 

“Talked some rot about playing with a blues outfit down South, but when I asked which one, he couldn’t say. I’ve heard him a little. He throttles the guitar, sings like a cat in a sack. Won’t be around long.”

“That harmonica, though. Cuts right through you.”

“That’s right.” He watched me from his pillow. “He stole one, you know. From the store.” 

“An harmonica?” I dropped back onto the pillow. “You sure?” I remembered Bobby had borrowed the one he played at the party.

“I was showing some guy a couple of Hohners when he came in. The customer didn’t want either, so I left them on the counter. When this guy Bobby left, one was gone.” 

I rolled away from Bear, then curled back into him. He brought the covers over my shoulder. 

“Doesn’t matter.” He dropped a heavy arm on top of me. “A donation to the cause.” 

Bear was willing to put up with a lot from musicians. 

*

I played a game with myself. People crashed at our place all the time, after all, and it was no big deal. So the game was, I didn’t care whether Bobby showed up or not, and that if he did, it would be the same as anyone else. 

Meanwhile, I got up every morning, made love with Bear, shooed him off to the shop, then cleaned the bathroom, made the bed, vacuumed, dusted. My mother would have dropped dead. When I was done for the morning, I sat at the kitchen table, read every word of the newspaper, did the crossword, chain-smoked Pall Malls.

 “All right, what’s going on?” Bear finally asked on one of the rare nights we stayed in. I had rearranged the magazines on the seaman’s trunk we used as a coffee table for about the tenth time. Then his eyes went big as forty-fives. “Are you having a baby?” He stood up, his arms apart, as if to catch me.

“No, no.” I shook my head. “No, no, no, no, no.” My face went tight with a hyena grin. “Don’t worry.” 

“I’m not worried.” He dropped onto the couch and lowered his head. Then he looked up. “I just thought with all the—” He stopped when he saw the expression on my face. 

“No, you know. We talked about it.”

“Of course, yeah, I didn’t mean anything, I was just . . . .”

*

One day, after a week or so of this, I cleaned everything I could clean and straightened everything I could straighten and started going through the closet for shirts to iron. Then it hit me. This is what I had come to the Village to get away from. What was I waiting for? I slammed the closet door, hunched into a sweater, grabbed my bag of books, and took off for the library. But I never made it. I took the usual detour to the movie theater, where I sat in the dark, smoked, and gave myself over to someone else’s dreams. 

When I left the theater, I had a headache and the guilty hollowness of a misspent afternoon. I vowed the next day I would get up early and make it to the library and really get down to work. I heard the jangle of a guitar, not unusual in our building, as I watched my shoes hit the cracked mat of each step to our third floor apartment. I was thinking I’d call Bear at the shop to see what was on for that night, and there Bobby was, sitting with his back against the wall, one knee cocked to support his guitar and the other leg stretched out, showing the boot’s worn treads. He plucked the strings lightly, but squeezed hard with his chord fingers. He jerked his head with each change, and moved his lips as he worked out the words. It wasn’t a song I knew. 

I shifted my bag and moved past him to unlock the door with the key I had been holding since the street. 

“Lips move when you read, too?” 

“I like to taste the words.” 

“Save it for the teenyboppers.” I got the door open, dropped my bag on the entrance table, twirled to face him. “Where’ve you been?” I couldn’t help myself.

“A ramblin’ and a gamblin’.” He strummed the guitar with a busker’s bravado. 

“Cut the cowboy crap.” I turned into the apartment, smoothed my sweater to my waist, which was still as thin as most of the girls around, except maybe the dancers with their tiny green pills.

He pushed himself up to his feet, holding the guitar by its neck. He grabbed a frayed drawstring bag I hadn’t seen with the other hand and dumped it just inside the door. His face had grown thinner, his hair longer and wilder and a little greasy. His clothes hung loose. But his eyes were still blue. 

 “When’s the last time you ate?” 

 “I had some ketchup this morning,” he said, straight-faced but with a curl in his lip and a flash in his eyes so you didn’t know if he was dead serious, letting you in on a joke, or making fun of you. 

“Ketchup.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Ketchup soup. We shared it. Woulda made a sandwich, but we run out of bread a couple days ago. Ma’am.”

 “Don’t call me that.” I snapped at the “we.” “My name is Ren.”

“Like the bird.”

“R-E-N. Like Kar-ren. My sister had trouble with K’s.”

“Ren. R-r-r-ren,” he trilled. “R—“

“Stop, just stop.” I pressed a finger to his lips. They were chapped, but I went all fluttery in my throat and elsewhere. “I’m not a bird. I’m not like a bird. I don’t even like birds.” 

“I can see that.” His lips moved against my finger.

I pulled my hand away, wiped at my sweater, headed to the closet. 

“What do you want?” I called back. “The fridge is full.” I pulled out the basket of bedding and towels I kept packed for guests.

“I do have a hankering for mustard.” I heard him plunk down the guitar. “Maybe a little Mayo. And relish, just a touch of relish.”

I laughed out loud, and the headache drained away. 

When I returned with the basket, Bobby was slouched on the couch, mouthing a harmonica. A Hohner, I noticed by the capital H pressed into the chrome.

I sidled into the space between the couch and the chest right up to his legs and dropped the basket next to him. He raised his head, but kept the harmonica in place. I dropped onto his lap, sidesaddle.

“Oof.” He tried to sit up, but I had him good.

I slid the harmonica from between his lips. My hair hung swung loose across his face. “You’ve got something of mine.” 

“Oh, yeah?” He batted the hair away.

“Yeah. I own half the store. More than half, really. I’m the silent partner.”

He made a noise in his throat.

“I can be silent when I want to be.” I tossed the harmonica into the basket. “Maybe you’d like to earn that back.”

He dropped his hands to his sides. I crossed my wrists behind his neck, tilted my head, and when I was sure from the way he held his lips open and the cold fire in those damn blue eyes, I kissed him. 

You’ve probably read about the rest in the magazines.

An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and now lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter. He has published stories in journals such as Western Humanities Review, Fiction Southeast, Water-Stone, and The MacGuffin, as well as poems in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, and Harpur Palate. The Sound of Rain Without Water, a chapbook of poems, came out in December 2020.

Michelle Brooks

A Story That Happened to Someone Else

“I want you to say flowery things,” says Xu Li, “like my poets of the 1800s.”

Nick looks over the side of the Market Street Bridge at the river, a dark flowing carpet. He wishes he could recite a few lines of poetry to make her happy. He pulls the collar up around his neck, his coat just thick enough to keep the cold at bay.

They cross Market to look off the other side of the bridge. “The viaduct shimmers in the crisp night air,” he says.

“And?” 

“And Xu Li sees the JFK Bridge, the Schuylkill, and the 30th Street Station and the Great Post Office, while back to her right, the lights of Center City sparkle at the mystic borderlands of her sidelong vision . . .”

“But my old man husband is still arriving next week,” Xu Li says. 

Nick nods. “And if he were here instead of me right now, what would he be saying?”

“He would be saying that before the JFK Bridge, eck-eck, there was the Filbert Street Viaduct eck-eck, and the railroads bifurcated the north-south passageway of the city, and it was eck-eck called the Chinese Wall, and it hindered the flow of people of different classes.”

“Ah, the romance in his heart,” Nick says. “Eck-eck and away. Now replaced by the JFK Way.”

“Still remnants of Filbert exist in Center City,” Xu Li says.

“Near Chinatown?”

“Spills out from Chinatown. Area inside Chinatown proper only has less than 1,500 Chinese people living on site. Room for more but many Chinese live all over Philadelphia area, like to visit Chinatown from time to time only.” Xu Li moves closer to Nick, pushes her right hand through his hair. “Where is your hat?”

Nick remembers their first night like this, a couple of months before. At first blush, as they sat near each other in a graduate class at Temple’s Center City Campus, Xu Li’s beaming grin suggested mischief. She approached him in the hallway immediately after class let out. “You always seem to be smiling,” she said. 

“Kindred spirits,” Nick said, formally introducing himself, shaking her hand. “Do you like movies? Letter to Brezhnev us playing at the Cinematheque if you’d like to go.”

A week later, after they slept together in his apartment on Spruce Street, she told him she was married and had a young daughter, and they were coming to join her in Philadelphia at the end of the spring semester.  Nick made a show of surprise, but didn’t bother to tell her that he was still technically married, too, so no big deal. Now what?

“You should apply to teach English in Beijing,” Xu Li had said. “Tax-free haven for you, and lots of pretty college students.” 

“And what will you do?” 

“Continue to teach English with Chinese people.”

“Were you one of your husband’s students, or was he your student?”

“No. My father thought he would make up-and-coming husband, loyal party member. Father was sixty when I was born, was a hero of the Long March to Shaanxi in 1930s, lucky to survive wars. Served with Chairman Mao, became Red Army officer, married second time late. Was strict man, no fun and games.”

The second week, Xu Li brought bok choy, rice and various seasonings from Reading Terminal Market. While cooking, she joked about Y2K compliance where she worked. Steam floated toward the back window, which was cracked open. 

“Should we be worried?” Nick asks.

“Always. But not about Y2K.”

After dinner, Nick unlocked the window bars in back and they climbed out onto a patch of roof just above the fire escape, which was pulled up from the back alleyway a couple of floors below.

“Where I work, a fax came about a chemical spill in Texas. The PR department said one thing, but it looked bad. Why would they let a temp retrieve something like this?”

Xu Li had laughed. “Never happen in China.”

*

Xu Li stays with Nick, the tacit understanding that it will be the last time before her husband returns. He feels as if he should feel more of something (sorrow, relief?), but can barely bring himself to pretend he’s sad. His soon-to-be ex-wife said she knew the minute he turned off her, but she didn’t realize it was permanent. He had Only You engraved on her wedding ring. His brother summed it up when he went with him to buy the ring. “Don’t go for the engraving. If you have to engrave it, it’s definitely not true.”

*

A few weeks later, Nick is poking around the Reading Terminal Market among the vegetable aisles when he runs smack into a little kid, a Chinese girl, who looks up at him, bundled in a puffy goose down style coat. Nick is startled to see Xu Li a few paces behind the child. She nods, wide-eyed, smiles, takes the girl’s hand and walks away. Nick is a little taken aback.  He feels like she’s already a ghost, a story that happened to someone else. 

She had wanted him to recite Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and so he at last recalled these lines now that he didn’t have anyone who wanted to hear them.  “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” He looks around to catch one last glimpse of Xu Li and her child but only sees strangers before bundling up and heading out onto the streets with no particular destination in mind.

Michelle Brooks has published three collections of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press), The Pretend Life (Atmosphere Press), Pretty in A Hard Way (Finishing Line Press) and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia Press). She has just finished a book of photographs titled Illusion Warehouse.  A native Texan, she has lived much of her adult life in Detroit. 

Bethany Reid

Abednego Thornes

Willapa Hills, Western Washington State, 1920

Standing in the ravine, he couldn’t see the other men from the logging crew. The only sign of them, over the lip of the ridge, was the yarder’s smokestack, belching a black plume. “The donkey,” as they called it. Beg pulled off his gloves and blew into his hands. 

A shrub of mountain snowberry stood not far from the harvested logs, a miracle it had survived, its white berries a hundred tiny moons. A towhee flitted into its branches, tilted its head and looked at Beg, then flew away, skipping across the ravaged landscape. 

He’d been thinking about his bitch hound, whelped just last week. But now he looked over the clearcut. Logging scoured away more than the big firs and cedars. The brush, too, had to go. Elderberry, vine maple, alder, all of it hacked away so the hemlock and cedar and fir logs could be cabled to the yarder and dragged one by one up the ravine and over the ridge to the landing. Across the hillside from where Beg stood, where the trees were felled but the crew had not yet begun to work, Oregon grape, salal, and fern pocked the ground with green. Here next the pile, there was little but tatters left. The path to the rigging was scarred, dragged mud-slick. 

Beg plucked one white berry, crushing it between his finger and thumb and letting the juice run over his fingers. He put his glove back on and picked up the cable and choker, then began climbing with them onto the logs, criss-crossed into a pile. Finding secure footing, he climbed from one log to the next, dragging the cable with him until he stood beside the topmost. Several grunting minutes of labor later he had the choker set. Sweat ran down under his felt hat and he took it off, mopped his forehead with his sleeve and stuck the hat back on. He faced the ridge, faced the landing and the landing crew, and he pulled one glove off, whistled with his fingers between his teeth, one long high blast and one short. When the answering whistle drifted back to him, he tugged the glove back on, jumped down, and ran along the log below the one to be pulled, scrambling away until he was almost clear. 

Then he tripped, falling against a stub and into a hole. He hadn’t time even to curse. He clambered up, limping away until he was all the way clear and a bit more because it was hard to know how a log on a cable was going to shift and how it was going to shift the logs under it. As he moved, the knee loosened a little. He took in a lungful of freezing air. Not broken, he thought. He’d be all right.  

The cable jerked taut and the log groaned and rolled massively like some great beast adjusting its haunches. It was a good four feet at the base and some of the fir in this stand had been bigger than that. His dad had counted out the rings on one, a Western Hemlock, the surveyor had called it, and come all the way to one hundred twenty. Hemlocks were by no means the biggest of the trees, and Beg guessed some of these had been growing since God created the whole damn thing. They were trees that didn’t waste a man’s time. You could build a house out of the boards milled from just one. That big. Beg sat down to watch the log go, and to wait for when they’d toss the cable back to him. He rubbed his knee through his canvas pantleg and he picked at the torn threads around the wound, trying not to think about how much it hurt. Like a son of a bitch. 

Out at the margins of the clearcut, the standing trees had gone almost black in the slanting light. A widowmaker had blown into the arms of other firs. Widowmaker or deadfall, it must have come down not long ago, for the broken end was a raw reddish orange, and the green needles still clung to the branches. His brother Shadrack worked felling trees, chugging away at the two-man saws half a day to cut down just one. The saw wasn’t called a misery whip for nothing, and a snag like that in the branches above them made it all the worse. Not that anything would stop the work. Logging paid good wages and it wasn’t child’s play, for all that Dad had brought Beg out here when he was no more than twelve, thirteen years old. He and Shadrack. Never put them in a school once they’d come out here from West Virginia, said there was too much work to leave a boy near big as a man fussing over book-learning. Shadrack hadn’t minded, figured he was old enough to work. And Dad never could keep the two of them straight, Shadrack small for his age, Beg big for his, so that they could have been twins. 

Shadrack had darker hair than Beg, and an older way about him despite how close they were in age. He was mean with a knife, and had a mouth for cursing like old Nick hisself. Shadrack could drink without ever retching it back up. Married, and still drank like a fish.

This Saturday night, Beg thought, I’ll get the T from him, take my wages and drive over Oysterville way. He’d go see Penny Mire and she’d make a fuss over his bruised knee. They’d go to Sam Sandhill’s and drink his bootleg liquor. After, back in her room above the laundry, Penny would spread that smelly lineament on his sore muscles, his lower back where it ached most of the time, his feet cramped up by these damn boots. His hands that he feared would soon be gnarled and mapped with black grease and dirt like his dad’s. 

Beg held up his gloved hands and looked at them. He had long fingers that a teacher lady once said ought to be playing piano or painting portraits like that one of George Washington that hung in her schoolroom. Ma had laughed when Beg told her. “George Warshington,” she’d repeated, laughing, as if the teacher had suggested her boy should be president. 

Beg didn’t aspire to be president, or a painter or musician, for that matter, though he could pluck out a tune on a guitar fair enough. What he wanted hands for was something alive, like the mountain snowberry, or like Lucy’s pups he’d helped birth last week. Like Penny Mire’s long smooth thighs. Her calf muscles, the weight of them in his hands, the soles of her feet. Her heavy breasts. Her hands latched around his shoulders. 

He thought he might have made a farmer. And maybe he would yet—once he stopped spending every nickel before his pocket could warm it. The land round here shorn of trees went for next to nothing. He could buy a whole section. He guessed he’d marry some nice steady girl then, like that Franklin girl with the curly hair loose down her back. They’d have cows and pigs and a passel of babies. He could marry Penny Mire, not that she’d want to. She was older and didn’t seem the marrying sort. If they married they’d have dark babies, like her. Penny Mire was said to be Sam Sandhill’s daughter and that made her at least one quarter Quillyute, and probably three-quarters. Beg liked babies. Liked to hold them. Liked the faces they made when they screwed up to bawl. He liked to chase his bigger nephews around the yard and wrestle with them. Shadrack’s older boy would grab hold of Beg around his ankle and sit on his boot, making him clump around with him clamped there like a lead weight, like a choker on a log. And the boy could hold on like death, giggling until he cried he liked the attention so much.

The log had been hauled up the ravine now and Beg watched it buck and fall over the ridge of the landing. He stood up, waiting for the signal to call it a day.

He and Shadrack when they were little had been given pretty much a free rein. They were too much younger than their older brother and sisters to be thought useful. And they were set apart from the younger ones, Simon and the little girls that had to be minded so close. Summer mornings the two of them would go down to the Gauley, the bigger river that the little Cherry ran into. Run over half of West Virginia every day and sometimes not come home at night. Then when they did pop back, there’d be Ma, waiting on the porch with a hazel switch. “I’ll larn you to worry me,” she’d say. She wasn’t much of a hand at whipping. She was a good ma. Couldn’t be no better. If you were hurt, didn’t need no doctor but Ma. 

A picture came into his mind. Leaning in a doorway half asleep watching his mother in his sister Eva’s room, years back on the old place.

Wasn’t no one more relentless than Ma neither. She could wring a chicken’s neck or draw up a hog herself for rendering. When Lucy had birthed that last pup, still in its sack as a stone, Beg had hesitated. Stood there with it in his hand, sobered in the face of its small death. Ma took it, opened the furnace door with the toe of her boot and flung it in. “You got those seven,” she’d said. “Heed them.”

Beg shook out his leg. It was swelling and goddamn if it wasn’t stiff. But there was Kip Rhoades at the crest, tossing the cable and choker down. So the day wasn’t done, though the sun was already settling into the tops of the trees where the widowmaker hung.

Rhoades walked down the ravine toward him. He cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Just one more, your dad says.”

Beg waved back, one finger raised, showing he’d understood. It wouldn’t do any good to argue with his father. If he wanted one more log, they’d bring in one more log. He picked up the choker and headed back to the logpile. He wouldn’t be setting chokers today if Jim Edison had shown up for work. And Rhoades ought to be doing it, he was the newest on the crew while Beg was nearly up to slinging rigging. But he was the youngest but Edison, so Dad said he would. No one liked to set chokers, though Beg didn’t mind working off by himself away from the rest of the crew, playing in the world his own thoughts made. 

Goddamn but his knee hurt. 

The new puppies, his bitch Lucy looking so pleased with herself and wrung out at the same time. He’d have a farm, he told himself, on this piece of land right here. Shadrack could build him a house on it, too, as there wasn’t any sense to him staying in town, married so long, two kids, probably more on the way. The kids would do better in the fields and woods. A town wasn’t the place for kids.

They’d have a bunch of hounds and a bunch of boys to raise up, and a few little girls, too. A woman needed girls. Maybe they’d have one like his sister Eva had been, smart and twinkly-eyed, delicate and that pretty, too, so that no one ever minded watching out for her. That’s how they had all been with Eva, right up until she died that first summer after they came West. 

The logs were so skewed that he had to take another look at the topmost, noting how it was lapped at the end by another. But he got the cable wrapped under it about twenty feet up, and hauled the choker around, threading it through the nubbin. He was sweating at the work of it despite the air, even colder now that the sun was below the treeline. He paused to pull off his hat again and wipe his forehead. 

Then, fastening the choker, he heard the whistle, one low note and one high.

He wasn’t ready. He stood upright, waved his arms, jumped to the top of the log as the cable shivered its length and pulled taut. He leaned to squeeze his hands around the knee because the shock of jumping had made it twang with pain, and then he straightened and waved again at the silhouettes on the ridge. The cable jerked and began to pull. He turned to see which end of the log was likely to swing round on him and made to jump and wished he didn’t have the busted knee.

The cable stuck, just for a second, and then it jerked again, hard, and the choker pulled loose from the log and whipped up, a big snake dancing, and it caught the side of his head and Beg never saw and never had that instant in which to have a last image flash in his brain—fresh loam of a field, or Penny Mire, or the wet pups just birthed. If any image at all lodged in him, it was the mountain snowberry, a hundred white moons hung on the bare branches. 

*

When the cable pulled up slack, Rhoades gave a yell. The sun disappeared into the trees while the crew waited for Beg to get it set again. Someone thought he saw Beg come for the cable, scrambling down into the gulley and part way back up—Rhoades said it or maybe Parker, though neither would own up later. No one worried. Even Beg’s father, Henry Thornes, who was the crew boss, got out his lunch bucket and ate his second sandwich that he hadn’t had room for earlier. Rhoades rolled a cigarette. Parker went off in the brush.

“Shittinest boy Ah ever seen,” Albert Innes said.

They waited for Beg’s whistle. Albert and Henry talked. “That’s a good boy you got there,” Albert said. “Good worker. He don’t complain about a little work like the rest of these yahoos.”

“Yuhp,” said Henry. He took his hat off and his thick hair stuck up all over. “He and Shadrack, they’re hard workers, but I’ll tell ya, of all my kids those two are the ones give me the hardest run for the money. I come out here as much for them as anything. And all they do is whup it up and drink and piss away what they work for. Don’t know what to do about ‘em.”

“Shadrack’s married, ain’t he?” Albert asked. “That settles a boy. His wife’ll finish raising him.”

“Oh, yeah, one’s married. They lure one another out though and seems they both got a unfair share of wild oats to sow.”

“Well,” said Albert. “That’s all right. That’s biblical.”

When the whistle didn’t come, they sent Rhoades to see what was wrong. The sun squatted deep behind the trees so what light there was came from nowhere and everywhere, playing dull shadows among the felled logs. Rhoades yelled up the ridge that Beg was gone off somewhere, to come help find him. They searched through the shadows and hallo’ed to Beg and to each other.

Henry Thornes said to no one, “His ma’ll skin me if I let somethin’ happen to that boy.”

“She set a particular stock on this one?” Albert asked.

“She do on them all. Don’t know how she has time to tell ‘em apart.” 

“That’s a woman for you. Be the first to blister a kid with a switch, but nobody else better mess with it.”

Henry cleared his throat and took a minute before he answered. “He’s a quick one. She used to say she couldn’t swat him cause he’d flash her that grin a’ his. She never much wanted him in the woods. Said he warn’t suited to it, not like the others.” Henry looked off in the distance and then spat.

“I’d say he’s suited,” Albert said. “Damn fine worker.”

Henry sat on the tapered end of a log and put his head in his hands. The crew thought of him and Albert Innes as old men. Henry would be fifty in the spring. 

“Oh, hell, he’ll be fine,” Parker said. “Got hisself knocked out maybe.”

A full moon was rising over the eastern treeline before one of the younger men called out that he’d found him. Henry jumped down to where the body lay, his moonshadow falling against the logs. He said, “He’s all right, he’s all right.” He lifted Beg’s broken head and said, “Hold on, boy, your Pap’s here.” 

When they convinced him that Beg was dead, Henry gathered the body in his arms. He tipped back his head and wept so that the tears ran down into his mouth and into his big, fleshy ears. The other men stood in a half circle looking on, not knowing what to do. From the woods beyond them, from the tall trees standing as if judgment, an owl swooped out and began its night hunt.

Bethany Reid has four books of poems, including Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize. Her short story, “Corinne, at Floodtime,” was a 2018 finalist for the Margarita Donnelly Prize at Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature for Women, and was published in 2020 by Fresh Ink. A creative non-fiction piece, “Doll Stories,” is forthcoming from Helix. Bethany lives in Edmonds, Washington, where she takes long walks, writes poems, and is hard at work on a mystery novel. She blogs about all of it at https://www.bethanyareid.com/.

Travis Stephens

Brunch and Roll

I was about to get off my feet when I heard them coming. Don’t know what it is about the guys on motorcycles, they got to buy the loudest machine and then rev it up as they ride. Hey, I know about bikes. Used to have one. You throttle up and you shift into a higher gear. Then you ease off the throttle. That’s how it works. What I’m saying is that anyone who rides around all throttled up don’t know how to ride.

Gail was at the door letting in another party. Booth number four, so another table for me. Two couples. They came in and I knew they were newbies. They were looking around and I saw one of the women get big eyed at the buffalo head mounted on the wall. That’s right, sweetie, a buffalo. Been hanging on that wall since about 1950. Get used to it.

It was late breakfast. Not brunch. We don’t do lunch. We do breakfast from seven to eleven-thirty then switch to lunch. I carried over some menus. The women sat and slid into the booth. One, the big eyed one, got her little skirt caught in the leather and it slid off her hips to reveal  the line of a bright green thong. Like safety green, the color worn by the guys who flagged traffic by. A color I would wear, like, never in my life.

Her boy seemed to like it though and grinned across the table at the other guy. I swatted him with the menus.

“Coffee?” I asked.

He took the menus. “I’ll take a latte,” the other woman said. She wore a ball cap with her ponytail jutting out the back.

“We got coffee,” I said. “Brewed coffee. You want espresso or oat milk or any of that you got to get on the 101, maybe Westlake.”

“See,” one of the guys said. Yankees cap, hoodie. “I told you it was authentic.”

“Like a movie set,” big-eyed thong woman said. 

“I’ll take coffee,” Yankee cap said. He was good-looking and met for my eyes, give him that.

“What you got on tap?” the other guy asked. Another handsome guy, shaved head, earring. Really white teeth.

It was on the menu, of course, with the wines and drinks. “Oly on tap. Bottles of Bud Light, Corona and Heineken.”

“What’s Oly?” he asked.

Some people were leaving so I scooched up to where my thighs hit the booth table. It is always crowded on weekends. I felt them brush my back. “Olympia,” I said.

“It’s the water,” the voice behind me said. “See you Sam.”

“See you, Pete. Take care, Ann.” Some of the locals. Own a place a few miles away. Gail said they made a fortune in commercial real estate. She knows everybody’s story.

“Sam, is it?” Handsome Shaved Head said. “Like Samantha?”

“Yep. What would you like?”

“I read in Yelp to get the bacon,” Miss Ball Cap said. “And the cinnamon rolls.”

“We’ll take two cinnamon rolls to start,” Handsome Yankee cap stated. Man of action. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary. Bacon and eggs.”

“How you want your eggs?”

“Scrambled.”

“I’ll take the same,” said Miss Ball Cap.

Handsome Shaved Head looked puzzled. “What did that guy say about the water?”

“It’s the water,” I said. “It’s the slogan for Olympia Beer.”

“Oh, I get it.” He handed me his menu. “I’ll have an Oly. Eggs and bacon, extra bacon on the side.  Eggs over easy.”

“Right.” I collected more menus. “And for you?”

Big-eyed thong girl held the menu to her face. “Bagel and lox?” she said.

“Outta lox,” I said. Wasn’t sure if we were, but whatever. 

“Oh. Just toast, then. Yogurt and fruit.”

“We don’t have yogurt,” I said. “We got Corn Flakes. Wheat toast, sourdough or rye?”

She handed me her menu. “Oh, foo,” she said. “Just give me bacon and eggs, too.”

“Atta girl,” said Handsome Shaved Head.

“How do you want your eggs?” I asked.

“I don’t care. Any way.”

“Scrambled it is.”

I took the orders and menus to the kitchen. Weekends there are a lot of us working. Gail, the hostess, plus four of us waiting tables. Gaston and Enrique in the kitchen with one of Gaston’s boys at the dishwasher. Today it was Juan. Nighttime, when this place went back to being a steak house it was all Anglo. Better tips. The place was only open four days a week.

“Sam,” Donna said, ”you going back out with coffee?” She saw me reaching for a carafe.

“Uh-huh.”

“Top mine around, okay ?”

“Sure.” I carried two cups, figuring Big Eyes would want a cup. A little cream pitcher too. I set the cups down and poured coffee before passing by Donna’s booths to tip coffee into empty cups. Soon my carafe was empty and I returned for another. It’s all a dance, waiting tables, weaving past each other with plates loaded with food or lugging a tote of dirty dishes. For some reason this place didn’t use trays for delivering food, they didn’t fit the ambience of a saloon-stage coach stop. Ugly plastic totes were somehow okay.

At least the uniforms were alright. Jeans and t-shirts with the logo and name across the front. That buffalo head as logo. Ernie, is the buffalo’s name. Nobody knows who named him or why. Or who shot the poor wooly bastard, for that matter.

“Ernie says it’s time for you to go,” Jack Stanford likes to say. He’s the regular bartender and it’s his way of saying you’ve had enough.  I heard him say it to Neil.

Ah, Neil. I shouldn’t think of him while I’m at work but I had a funny feeling when I left for work today. He was on the balcony with a joint and cup of coffee. Magazines splayed across the little table out there.

“I’m off to work,” I had said, from the doorway. “Got to earn my pay.”

He gave me one of his sleepy smiles. Neil looks like a surfer. Tanned and lean with a big head of sun bleached hair. Messy beach hair. Like central casting for Malibu.

I know that smile. He’s been up all night reading, smoking and talking to the moon, the stars.

“In the Amazon they are losing ten square miles of rainforest every day,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes. It is the most diverse ecological place on the planet and they bulldoze it for hamburgers.”

“Hamburgers?”

“You know, cattle. McDonald’s. Burger King.”

“Okay. Look, I got to go. You going in today?” He is counselor at Fairwinds Clinic, a re-hab facility just a few doors away.

“At nine.”

I stepped over to kiss the top of his head. He stank of marijuana. “Maybe you should shower,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean, Neil, you smell of dope.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he said. “It’s a eating disorder joint, remember?”

“Right. See you.”

He was a counselor there because he’d been a counselor at Sun Haven, a re-hab place for drugs. There he’d received a glowing mention by two Hollywood celebrities . They said he was the reason they were able to shake their addictions, rejoin their families, blah, blah, blah. Neil had spent time in Sun Haven as a patient and then as a janitor. He was likable and not a threat to a certain insecure actress who had starred in a surprise hit. She was a blond from Texas who played a blond from Texas but with a better script. She encouraged her boyfriend, a musician from Atlanta, who fronted an award winning punk-ska-bluegrass band to come to the clinic for a rest. He spent two weeks and left two guitars, shredded curtains and another glowing recommendation for Neil.

“He’s, like, a real metaphysical guy,” Neil told me.

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“He sees music in spatial ways. The spaces between notes and how they expand. The way he can feel music bounce from one side of his brain to the other.”

“Sounds like he was doing some serious drugs.” I was joking.

“Only smoke. No more hard stuff.”

Neil is old Malibu. His father was a builder who specialized in septic tanks. They had a house and a few horses in Topanga. Neil’s sister did barrel racing and Neil and his brother took up surfing. After a storm the family bought a beach lot where the house was demolished. Eventually they built a beach cottage where the parents lived out their lives. While they grew old the cottage grew into a four million dollar home. It was the source of Neil’s drug addiction, you could say. There isn’t much left to his share.

I came later, of course. When I talk to my mother she still asks when I’m coming back home. “I am home,” I tell her. 

The bartender waved toward the waitress station. I found and Oly and Bloody Mary there and delivered them.

When my thermos of coffee was empty I returned to the kitchen.

“Order up,” Gaston said when he saw me. It was the cinnamon rolls. I plucked the plates from the counter and went back into the fray. Gail was leading a party toward the back both so I waited. It was a group of bikers and one looked at my plate. “Those look good,” he said.

“They are. Better order before we run out.”

“Will do.” This guy had the biggest diamond stud I’ve ever seen in a man’s ear. I looked close to see if it was real. Ball Cap girl saw me looking and mouthed “Wow” to me. I had to smile. She had seen it too. I put the cinnamon rolls in front of the women, Ball Cap and Big-eyed Thong.

“Hey,” Handsome Shaved Head said.

“Chef’s orders,” I said. “The last cinnamon rolls go to the women only.”

“Yes.” Ball Cap girl stabbed at the roll with a fork. They are big spiral rolls, bigger than a teacup saucer and slathered with cream cheese icing. Big enough to share. His fork attacked from the other side of the plate. I saw her shift just a little in the booth to let him get closer. It’s little things like that I watch for. Couples come in all the time and I look for hints as to how well they are doing. Body English. That little shift meant that they were on good terms.

Not so good, Big-eyed Thong and Yankee Cap. She looked down at the cinnamon roll before her.

“It’s so big,” she said.

“Give it a try,” Yankee Cap said.

“I don’t know.” She paused and I saw Yankee Cap slide it away from her. So much for sharing. He went at it with his fork and she watched him.

Handsome Shaved Head craned his neck. “It always like this?” he asked. “So busy?”

“On weekends.” I felt a tiny twinge in my back and tipped my shoulders back. Better. Then I saw Big-Eyed Thong staring at me. Her eyes narrowed. Yankee Cap’s eyes were riveted on my chest.

Aw geez. I’m not a big girl, but I played center field in high school softball. I’ve always been strong. I turned my back on Yankee Cap and returned to the kitchen. I got a temper and I got to watch it. Creeps. You can dress them in designer jeans and they still are creeps.

“Order up,” Gaston said. It was an order of flapjacks for a seat at the bar. 

“Order up, Sam,” Enrique said. He’s a kind man with two adorable daughters, nine and six. I carried the four plates of eggs and bacon to the table. We give generous portions and I figured I would carrying a lot of the food back to the trash. Handsome Shaved Head nodded at his plate. “Oh boy,” he said.

“Eat up,” I told him.

Miss Big-eyed Thong was still glaring at me. Whatever. When I turned away she called to me. “Miss,” she said. “I’d like some more coffee.”

“Coming up.” I didn’t look back. The thermoses  were empty and I filled one from a coffeemaker. Before I left though I started another pot. You never leave an empty for the next person.

When I poured coffee into Big-eyed Thong’s cup I saw that there was still some coffee in it. “About time,” she said to Yankee Cap. “Service here is slow.”

Whatever, I thought. 

“Sam,” Handsome Shaved Head said, “could I get another Oly?”

“Sure.” I went behind the bar and got it, tipped the cap off and set in before him.

“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry,” he said in a low voice. “About them.” He tipped his head toward Yankee Cap. Ball Cap turned the corners of her mouth down and nodded.

“Ain’t nothin’,” I said, loud enough for all to hear. “Jest another day.”

“Hon, where you from?” Ball Cap asked. I heard Tennessee in her voice, plain as could be.

“Russellville,” I said. “Kentucky.”

“There you go,” Ball Cap said. She nodded vigorously. 

“What brought you out here?” Handsome Shaved Head asked.

“My Daddy’s ’81 Trans Am,” I said, lying. I arrived in a Camry, like anybody else.

“Sweet,” he answered and laughed.

“I got to get back to work,” I told him. “Need  anything else?”

He shook his head, as did Ball Cap. “Let her go,” Big-eyed thong said. “She got to earn those tips.”

Which made me shoot her a look.

“Lisa, take it easy,” Handsome Shaved Head said. “What’s the matter with you?”

I just walked away. Before I left home I worked at an Applebee’s. One of the waitresses there taught me anything I ever needed to know about customer service. Her voice rose to me and I repeated under my breath one of her sayings. Got no time for that. Water on a duck’s back. I went to the back booth to see if the biker boys wanted more coffee.

Big Diamond Stud was drinking Corona and asked for a round. Two Coronas, two Olys. No problem. When I delivered them a found that Ball Cap was hemming me in. There is a back door and I went out with her close behind.

“Sam,” she said. “Don’t get upset.”

“I ain’t upset.”

She smiled. “Man, it’s good to hear down home accents again. You sound like my Mom. When she’s upset she says ‘I don’t get upset.’” She was taller than I thought, almost even with me. “Don’t pay Lisa any mind.”

“She’s got a smart mouth,” I said, “for a toddler.”

She laughed and swept her cap off. Even released from a ball cap there is no mistaking an expensive haircut. Her teeth, too, were perfect. It’s something about California, all these beautiful smiles. “She’s a fool,” she said, and again I heard the Tennessee. “Cute, but dumb.” Steve works with Jason and he brought her along.” She paused. “They’re in the business.”

I know I’m supposed to be impressed by anybody in movies or television. Maybe a few years ago. Now I hear about an actress who goes to NOBU for a couple hundred in sushi, then returns to her room to put a finger down her throat. Neil tells me about another one who has to be told to wash her hair, to wipe properly. A leading man with the trembles and jags. Neil likes to say they put the “mal” in Malibu.

“How exciting,” I think to say. “And you. You’re so beautiful.” I put a hand on her arm. “I know, we’re not supposed to go ga-ga at celebrities. But I saw you and Steve and I just knew it.”

Careful, I thought. Putting it on a little thick.

But not as thick as Ball Cap. She lapped it up. Downplayed her involvement with a little shrug that says “what can I tell you?” She was here, today, in the role of Taking Care of the Little People. The working stiffs.

In my mind I saw Ball Cap and green thong Lisa five years from now. Not enough paying parts and too many days in the sun. Neil will come home and tell me about the new patients, Miss Used-to-Be in for a little “rest”. Maybe paid for by a studio, but not by the handsome boys. They would be long gone.

I walked behind Ball Cap as we returned to her table. Steve with the Handsome Shaved Head smiled at her and smiled at me. Of course I smiled big pretty. I mean, Lisa is the only one who gets it. The one I have a shred of respect for. I’m working for the tips, baby. Who wants some more coffee? Anything else?

Travis Stephens is a tugboat captain who resides with his family in California. A University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire alumnus, recent fiction credits include: Dime Show Review, 101 Words, Good Life Review, Waxing and Waning, True Chili, The Stillwater Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Visit him at: travisstephenswrites.com