Prose

Claudia Putnam

Thoughts on Crossing to Safety

Except where is the safety when there’s love. You’ve loved her since you were children. You loved her when she was beautiful and it’s the beauty we remember, oh, occasionally reality breaks through, we see a wrinkle, she didn’t get her rest or have time for a shower, you think wow, she’s old, or she thinks the same of you, but then her hair folds against her temple in a certain way, her laugh rings out, also she says that one right thing when you are tired, just sick and tired and not sure why you are here and doing any of it anymore or why you ever were, and that one thing she says is so funny, so right, and what is really means is I love you, and you think oh right, of course, and so you go on, but of course that doesn’t make it safe.

What was safe was your despair actually, and that bitch knows that, she knows that, there’s no woman in the world who wants to keep a man safe and that’s the truth, they want you at the edge, at your best, every day no matter what. It’s why you can’t trust a woman, even she who is so Good and Kind and Gentle, unlike men, who lie, but who want to do that one good and right thing, keep their women safe, which is why they lie, and which they can’t do, because they lie. 

She’s had polio, which she got while young, while you were both still young and beautiful, love like that knifing a man’s heart the way it knifes a woman’s loins. These poles shift with time, with the earth’s. A young man can think of nothing but lust, so when his heart aches he must listen. It’s the opposite for women.

Polio: a strange thing: you were off on a long ramble, picnicking, sleeping out, swimming in streams, with friends, their children, she nearly drowned and that was it: polio. Many got it in pools or streams, but this was out in the country, she the only one in your group. 

She was twenty, you married her anyway, what else would you do? Still beautiful. Wise and kind. Frail now in a lovely way, wiser and kinder. You had a momentum of love that surely would push a wheelchair, what could not be overcome at your age? The foreverness of a wheelchair could not then be grasped. But later. You would hate yourself but there would be so much cause for lying.

You would never stop loving her. Not just because how could you but because how could you. She really was your companion, your equal, she read your work, offered finer insights than any, her advice on your colleagues drove your career, she soothed any missteps, she was lovely and lay with you beautifully, lace laid delicately over the wasted legs. Be honest, you would have lied anyway. There would always have been graduate students, talented, besotted secretaries, women at faraway conferences, perhaps in another life only a sampling, after too much drink, one or two nights when the need for self-hatred was greater than usual. But now, how can you help it? She has been unable to walk since you were twenty-three. There are facts of life. There are positions. There are experiences one cannot bear never to have had. 

She would understand, she does understand, she knows there’s no competition, you’ll come back, in fact you’ve never left, you’re not even martyring yourself by coming back, you love her, love her company, make love to her out of love, enjoy her physical love. She could have other lovers, perhaps not as many as you, but there are opportunities, men drawn to her exoticism, her dark eyes, their spiritual glow, her wit, wisdom, humor, yes, that beauty, and let’s face it, her perceived helplessness. Some of them a little sick, some a little dangerous, some in love with her. A sampling, if small, of all men. She, unlike you, has no reason to stray. They, unlike her, have little to offer outside the bedroom. You can satisfy her, and do. She cannot satisfy you, though she does what she can.

Define safety. Define crossing. You’ve tried; you haven’t.

Claudia Putnam is in the process of moving from Colorado to the Puget Sound (ah, oxygen). Her prose can be found in Ghost Parachute, Clackamas Literary Review, Confrontation, Cimarron Review, Variant Lit, and elsewhere. A brief memoir, Double Negative, came out in 2022 from Split/Lip Press. A novella, Seconds, was published in 2023 by Neutral Zones Press. Her debut collection, The Land of Stone and River, won the Moon City Press poetry prize.

Martin Horn

Metro

When it happened, when life ended and then began again, it was decided that the metro should stay running. As long as there was power, as long as there was someone left to drive the trains, staff the ticket booths and fix the already ancient rolling stock when it broke, it would help maintain a sense of normalcy, something those left behind could hang their hopes on.

I used to work in payroll for the Transit Authority, but there is very nearly no one left, so instead of processing paychecks I sit in a booth collecting fares. I bring a book with me most days as there’s no phone service underground, though after a few hours my eyes become tired and I have to stop reading. Then I stare out at the cavernous emptiness of the station concourse. I feel a shiver in the pit of my stomach, a sensation of cold within warmth, of safety in distance.

There's no rhythm to the trickle of passengers who come through the turnstiles. They cluster together, three or four in an hour and then none for hours on end. They’re often surprised to see me. Is the green line still running, they’ll sometimes ask. A memo, taped a few weeks ago to the window by a coworker who has since emigrated, says that all stations are open and this is what I tell them. They look skeptical, often hesitating a moment before proceeding through the turnstile. All pay the fare. The money, as far as I know, goes nowhere.

I also have nowhere to go. I have no family overseas to send for me, no one to welcome me into new life. It’s the same for the stragglers who come through my station, and the skeleton crew of train drivers, ticket punchers and maintenance staff who are now my colleagues. Sometimes on my walk to and from work I see people like me in the streets, outside without purpose, often lying down on benches, or on the sidewalk, or on patches of grass in front of emptied apartment buildings.

* 

I had been sitting in the booth for a few hours when a girl came through the station carrying a violin case on her back. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old but she walked with such purpose and self-possession along the concourse’s endless row of Corinthian columns that I wondered if she was, in fact, an adult, that her violin was actually a cello and that something was wrong with my depth perception. But no, she came to the turnstile, a small child, held her pass up to the reader and smiled at me, a serious, professional but not insincere smile and then walked the rest of the way along the concourse, her shoes tapping loudly against the gold-flecked granite floor, the sound reverberating as she disappeared around the corner to the platform. I heard a train arrive and her shoes tapped again for a moment before I heard the doors close.

A few minutes later I again heard steps, these ones louder and more irregular. A man appeared, wearing a deep blue overcoat and a grey suit, both of which looked quite old, out of style, but crisp and well-cared for.

Have you seen a girl, about this tall? Violin? he asked. A smell like rotting fruit wafted through the holes in the glass between us. His eyes were bloodshot. I hesitated.

It’s alright, I’m her father. Have you seen her?

She came through a few minutes ago, I said. I assume she took the train that just left.

In which direction?

East, I think.

You think?

I looked at the timetable. It should have been the 12:40, eastbound, though I was unsure if the timetable was still being followed.

Yes, east, it must have been east.

He struggled with some change, managing to pay his fare and he walked to the platform.

No one else came through the station that day, though on my walk home I saw two men sitting in the park near my apartment, one about my age, the other older, maybe seventy, cooking hot dogs on a fire. They looked disheveled and cold, possibly homeless, but the thought that anyone could be homeless when there were so many tens of thousands of empty apartments in the city was absurd. Maybe they just wanted to be outside, hoping to see people. The older man waved at me in a hesitant, half-hearted way. The younger man didn’t look up from his food.

*

Every day when I get home, I look at my phone, which I keep on a shelf next to my bed. There are sometimes messages waiting for me from friends, checking in. They want to know that I’m okay. I am, I tell them, but I have little else to say. 

I should call them. I should video chat with them while these things are still possible but instead I eat my dinner, microwave ravioli or lentils in vinegar and oil, and sit on my balcony twenty storeys up, wrapped in blankets against the cold night air, staring out over the empty, still-illuminated city. 

*

The next day I sat in the booth and read a thriller I found in the street, its cover torn off. I couldn’t make sense of the story and was about to put it down when I heard footsteps coming along the concourse. There were two people, I could tell, one walking purposefully, the other’s steps muffled, almost inaudible. They came into view, a short, sharply dressed woman in a belt-less trench coat, middle-aged, and with her a tall young woman who walked with stooped shoulders, her feet gliding along the ground in padded slippers. I thought for a moment that they might be mother and daughter, but the middle-aged woman walked as if she were alone, the younger woman keeping several steps behind, like a servant.

Is Central Station open? The middle-aged woman asked.

Yes, it is. All stations on the network are open.

Have you been there? Are you sure?

I haven't been ma'am. 

So how do you know?

It was in the memo, I said, pointing to the ancient memo still taped to the glass.

I was certain she didn’t believe me. The younger woman looked down the concourse as if wishing she were elsewhere. The older woman paid for both of them and they went through.

*

The pair I’d seen the night before were in the park again cooking hot dogs when I walked home that night. The older man smiled more easily this time. The young man looked at me briefly before his gaze returned to the ground at his feet. I decided there might be no harm in joining them.

The older of the two got up when he saw me come towards them and started looking around for something for me to sit on.

No, it's fine I said. I can sit on the ground.

He walked off, ignoring me, and finding a plank of wood in a nearby pile of refuse, inspected it to make sure there were no nails sticking out. He came back, walking with stiff hips, and gently placed it on the ground and patted it with his hand and said, sit, at least you won't get your pants dirty.

I sat down and looked at the younger man, whom I now realized was not especially young, but tired-looking with hints of grey in his stubble. He bore a resemblance to the older man, and I realized that he must have been his son, or his nephew.

So no family abroad, eh? No one to take you in? No extraordinary skills or talents to open the door? the older man asked. 

I nodded. Was it the same for you?

My sister, she would take us in, if I asked, but I have no intention of begging her. He spat on the ground.

Oh, I said.

He pulled two hot dogs off the makeshift grill, a dirty oven rack propped up on sticks over the small fire, and put each of them into a bun, his last two, as far as I could see. There didn't seem to be any ketchup or mustard or any other condiments. He handed each of us one on a paper plate.

I can't take your last bun, I said.

You take it. I'm old. You need the energy, he said, as he put another hot dog on the fire.

His son chewed silently. He looked at me and for the first time didn’t look away when our eyes met.

Do you work? The old man asked.

I work for the Transit Authority. I collect fares in the metro.

He laughed. 

Sometimes it's better to accept that something has ended, don't you think? How many people passed through your station today?

There were five today, I replied.

All this for five people. And there will be even fewer tomorrow. The world has no use for us, clearly. We should forget the world and move on.

We should forget and move on, but you stay here because you don't like your sister?

The son looked at me, his head shaking, almost imperceptibly, perhaps warning me not to press further.

It’s my choice, the older man said. Why should you care?

It’s my choice to work for the Transit Authority, I answered, but he had turned his knees to the side to face his son, as if I were no longer there. I got up to leave, placing my plate on the wooden plank I’d been sitting on.

Thank you for the food, I said. It was nice to speak to another person.

He said nothing, but pretended to examine his hot dog, which he had pulled from the waning fire and now held in a napkin.

*

There were no commuters at all the next morning. I started to wonder if the old man had cursed me. Had he been right? Was I only prolonging the inevitable? I'd run out of books to read and had to fall back on my mother's old collection of westerns, ancient dog-eared books about drifters, earnest farm hands, and fallen women which she’d left to me, a final attempt to temper what she characterized as my unreasonable pragmatism, my total lack of romantic imagination. I kept them, resentfully, as keepsakes on the small shelf next to my bed. I brought one with me to work in a plastic bag to protect it, feeling as though I was risking my mother’s very memory by taking it out of the house.

At some point in the afternoon, I heard familiar steps. The middle-aged woman in the trench coat and the younger woman in soft shoes appeared. They looked tired, and the older woman’s hair was out of place.

Excuse me, the older woman said to me. The other day, you told me that Central Station was open. Well it wasn't.

I'm sorry, I had been told that it was. 

The train just went straight through, and skipped the next five stops. It spat us out in Avalon, completely the other side of town. There was nothing there but a gas station and a big empty field.

I’m sorry about that. Is there something else I can help you with?

Two tickets please, she said, angrily. Do you know which station is closest to the planetarium?

No, I don’t, unfortunately.

Useless, she said, under her breath. She walked through the turnstile. The young woman followed her, glancing at me briefly.

As they started walking towards the platform, I heard yet another familiar footfall, but this time strangely doubled, one clear, clarion-like snap, followed each time at irregular intervals by a kind of echo, a hesitant restatement of the initial sound. It was the girl with the violin and her father. 

The two pairs of people stared at each other across the turnstiles.

We've been looking for you, the man said.

I was shopping, the older woman said.

For two days you were shopping?

There was a lot to buy. We needed many things for the house.

Where can you even buy anything?

We just walked in where we could. 

How did you pay?

We took what we needed. We'll pay for it later, when all of this has passed. Phillipa took careful notes, she said, gesturing to the younger woman.

Did you get my rosin, mummy? The little girl asked.

Yes dear, the woman smiled, a genuine loving smile. I'm sorry we were gone for so long. There was so much to do, and it's been so hard to get around, she added, turning to me in my booth. They all looked at me for a moment.

Can we go home now, the girl said. I need to practice.

Sure, dear, her father said. Let’s go home.

Her mother moved to speak, but then hesitated.

What is it? the man asked.

No, it's nothing, she said. She looked at him, a look not unlike relief coming to her face for the briefest of moments.

The girl with the violin went through the turnstile and started walking to the platform. A train was coming. The man and the woman followed their daughter quickly, and Phillipa, dragging her feet after them, turned to me, an almost pleading look on her face, as if there was something I could do to deliver her from her circumstances, whatever those were. ‘Look around you,’ I wanted to say. ‘No one can keep you here. No one can make you wander, despairing, through the landscape of your old life,’ I would have told her, if the words had come to me then, and not much, much later. 

*

They aren’t going to maintain the phone lines anymore, Christina, the only one who still writes me every day, says. They said that the connection to the outside world would fail, eventually.

Christina, in another country, calls me after she hears this on the news. There aren’t enough people left for it to be worthwhile, she says. Who would pay to maintain the lines?

I start crying, surprised at how affected I am. Christina cries too. This is the first time I begin to think it might be best not to speak to my friends. It would be easier to disappear.

*

Google Maps says it's sixteen hours to walk to the border. I’ve been mapping it over and over again the last few days, trying different routes, as if a magically shorter one will appear. I estimate that I can walk those sixteen hours in two or three days. I would need to find a way across, a wooded area perhaps, and keep away from patrols, though who knows if there even are any. Everyone who was going to leave already has. 

I study the satellite images. I do this, not intending to follow through, but then, just to see what it would feel like, I pack what I think looks like seven days’ worth of food and all the water I can carry in reusable bottles. I pack an extra battery for my phone, and, still uncommitted, I find myself hoping there will be places to charge it. The countryside should be as empty as the city, but I can't know for sure. I lay tomorrow’s work clothes on a chair in my room and go to bed. 

I am visited, that night, by an image of Phillipa walking out of Avalon station at the end of the line, abandoned fields stretching to the horizon. I feel the catch in Phillipa’s throat as she faces this impassable ocean of land. 

*

It takes longer than I'd hoped to get to the border, four days in all. My legs are leaden. I break into empty houses to sleep and charge my phone, use the bathroom, shower. I even manage a bath in an old house just off the road on the evening of the first day. I see almost no one, though one evening a few days later, towards dusk, as I try to find somewhere to sleep, a truck passes me, the driver leaning forward, looking for road signs, as if he is lost. He sees me but he doesn’t stop.

*

The next morning I reach the border. I can see the crossing from a distance, the door of the customs house off its hinges, the lawn overgrown. I backtrack a few hundred meters and then start walking parallel to the frontier, a short way north to the tree line. After walking in the forest for a while, I turn west again and walk for what feels like a long time, crouching low to the ground as I get closer to where I think the border is. I look to my left, and a few meters away is a small orange flag staked to the ground. There is another to my right. I see open fields ahead. 

I empty my bag, keeping only a day's food and one water bottle, placing these in a shoulder bag and leaving my backpack where I stand. I look at myself on my phone. I arrange my hair and clean the dirt from my face, and then look at a few selfies, from before. I look like I always have, there is no difference between then and now. I walk west for another hour. There is a road, there are cars on it. I walk on the embankment. I reach a town, and walk into the center of it, there are people everywhere. My ATM card works, somehow, and I have money, enough for a few days. I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger and eat it, surrounded by strangers, a feeling of cold within warmth rising from my stomach and filling my chest. 

I leave the restaurant and walk down a busy shopping street, full of people, families, children. I disappear into the world.

Martin Horn is a writer from Montreal, Canada. His story, "Le Château" was the winner of the 2022 Short Fiction/University of Essex Wild Writing Prize. He has recently finished a novel about artistic envy, friendship, and surveillance.

Sadie Wade-Stein

Unclaimed Bodies

The party’s over. The ground outside has gathered almost a foot of snow, and Jude has the window cracked, letting in a bitter wind. Jude is reflective when he drinks too much, and overheats quickly. I’m close to sober and now cold, too, but I don’t tell him to close the window. I feel far away from him. 

Hours ago, Jude made each of our friends a whiskey sour as they filed into our undecorated living room. This is the first place we’ve lived together, and we have very little. Jude and I don’t try to fill space. My mother doesn’t approve of this, or of Jude, but he has been easy to build a life with, cold and unadorned though it may be.

“Are you going to be able to drive?” Jude asks. He is not looking at me.

“I haven’t had a drink in hours.”

“It’s snowing like hell out there.”

For more than a month, we’ve been caring for a house a few miles outside of town. It used to be a farm, but now is only peeling wood and wild grass. There is nothing for us to do there. We’ve been splitting bottles of wine and seeing each other differently, and tonight had been an attempt at reinhabiting our old lives. 

“We could just stay,” I say.

“We don’t live here anymore.” He tries to laugh, but it gets caught wet in his throat. He finally closes the window and turns to me. “We should make sure the pipes haven’t burst.”

*

Jude wears my favorite of his jackets. It’s dusty blue canvas, lined with thick wool and what he was wearing when we met. He pulls the hood up with his left hand and locks the door with his right. It feels obscene to be able to watch him like this, with both of my hands empty.

The remnant whiskey makes me warm and lucid and when we step outside, the world has sharpened at its edges, our street narrowing into a perfect perspective point and looming above us, the shadows of black mountains. The snow comes to our shins. We take exaggerated steps toward the car. I think distantly about the dream that I’ve been having almost every night in the farmhouse, where we are moving slowly, as though through molasses, impossibly graceless and forced to take our time.

I clear only the windshield of snow and we idle for a long time in darkness, the wipers making a sound like pages turning as they wash back and forth. Jude rolls his window down an inch and watches the snow collapse inside followed by scraps of moonlight. He pulls his cigarettes from his pocket and his face glows golden brown as he lights. My hands are too cold to use the lighter.

“Here, baby,” Jude says, taking the cigarette from my mouth. He lights it off the end of his and hands it back to me. “We should go.”

The headlights flood unrelenting snow. With each gray instant that passes, I feel newly like I have awoken to find myself in the driver’s seat staring at unfamiliar hands on the wheel. I cannot be sure that we are moving or that it was me who hours ago, held Jude’s hand at a table replete with the people who know us best. I cannot conjure anyone’s face but Jude’s and what must have been my own, briefly, in the bathroom mirror, flushed with alcohol, all my features unfamiliar.

The wind screams through Jude’s cracked window. He lights another cigarette and gestures toward the inches that are illuminated in front of us.

“There’s nowhere to go,” he says.

“What?”

“There’s nowhere to go to get out of the snow.”

We must be halfway down the main road by now, passing what I know to be the post office, though I cannot see it through the frost. It’s almost three in the morning.

“We’ll get there,” I say.

“Not us.”

“What?”

“I didn’t mean us. The snow’s going to kill people who don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh.” 

The way I’m driving, it could be June, an evening unmuffled, the car steady in the dirt.

“Yeah,” Jude says. “Oh.” 

I can hardly see him in the shadows, but I know his face is scarily still. I take my right hand off the wheel and rest it on his thigh. 

I recognize it. My hand. My hand on my Jude. I’m awake again.

“The city buries them, did you know that?”

“Who?” 

“The unclaimed bodies.”

“Unclaimed bodies,” I repeat. These are not Jude’s words. I take my hand from his leg and run my fingers over my lips. The skin there is dead and peeling.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

I know he means that there is nothing we can do. I’m aware, suddenly, of how fast I’m going. I let up on the accelerator.

“I missed you tonight,” Jude says. He pulls my fingers away from my lips and brings them to his own, kissing each of my knuckles. The snow on the rear window sloughs off, all at once, to reveal deepening darkness.

“I was right next to you.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

I have never known myself to be like I am at the farmhouse. I spend hours staring at the shifting fields and let my hands rest in frothing dish water. I am aware of myself and Jude, in neighboring rooms, drawn here only by each other. I do not pray for the days to be over.

“I missed you, too,” I say.

“Let’s take a bath when we get home.”

“Not tonight. In the morning.” At the farmhouse, we never wake tired.

“I want to hold you.” Jude stretches across the stick shift to brush his nose against my neck. 

The moonlight comes brighter through the snow. We’ve made it out of town.

“I’m right here.”

“You’re not close enough.” He moves his hand beneath my jacket. “I want to be here.”

“Jude, I’m driving.”

He doesn’t pull back, but whispers, “I sometimes want to swallow you whole.”

I turn my head to meet his eyes, opalescent against his shadowed face. He opens his mouth wide, as though considering it, and then snaps his teeth shut. 

I look back at the road. I have thought of myself like this before–a stone in Jude’s stomach. 

“What would you want with me like that?” I ask.

“We shouldn’t have to be separate things.” He leans in again and presses his nose to my pulse point.

“I wouldn’t be able to talk to you,” I say.

I will have to make a turn soon, toward the farmhouse. I don’t know how I’ll see the street sign.

“But you’d be there.”

I feel hollow hearing him say it. I bring my hand to my chest and tap one finger hard on my breastbone. The sound echoes through the car. 

“No. It would be just like it was tonight.”

Jude sits back and rubs the bridge of his nose, clenches his jaw. He is silent for a moment, and then says, “How come I’ve spent so much time missing you?”

He has been trying to ask me this for weeks. I can’t stand him acting this way, as though I would do anything to hurt him. 

“That’s not fair.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” He knocks his forearm against the window, then stares at his sleeve, exhaling a laugh that sounds like a sigh. “I don’t know why I thought that would clear the snow.”

I squint at the road in front of me, looking for the intersection.

Jude isn't finished. “It’s like for years I’ve been in love with your silhouette and I can finally see your face.”

“I wasn’t keeping it from you.” I think he is being unreasonable, lamenting our time like this–the days and days that must have amounted to an entire life without my notice. “Think of me,” I say. “I’ve been a shadow.”

“Don’t you wish you could have it all back? With me?”

“Fuck, Jude. I’m just happy to be here at all.”

The last of the snow slides off my window. The storm has stopped. We are nearing the intersection. The sky is once again distinct from the fields on either side of us and ripples like purple satin behind the stars.

“Is it the farm?” Jude asks. He’s not looking at me, flipping his lighter over and over in his hands.

“We’re close,” I tell him, though I know it isn’t what he meant. “We’re not there yet.” 

I turn onto the county road, surprised that my wheels take direction on the ice. I have only one more turn to make, down the farmhouse’s drive.

“I’m not mad at you,” Jude starts. “I just… drank too much.”

“I know you’re not.”

He opens the glove compartment and starts shuffling through the papers inside.

“Anything good in there?” I ask.

“I thought I put the instructions in here, for taking care of the house.”

I smile. “Don’t we know what to do by now?”

The snow is deeper as I turn up the driveway. I lean heavy on the accelerator, impatient as the car drags through the drifts. Our bedroom light burns distantly. I imagine us silhouetted in its golden frame, bending toward each other.

When he finally looks at me, there are tears collecting in the corners of Jude’s eyes. 

I move, instinctively, to touch his face. “Are you alright?”

He doesn’t answer, still staring at the paper in his hands. 

“Jude?” 

The farmhouse grows closer, its pallid clapboard siding rising from the snow.

His voice sounds strangely soft and unlike himself. “I thought there might be instructions on how to leave.”

“Oh, Jude,” I say.

We reach the porch and I turn off the engine. The cold comes quick into the stillness.

Jude pulls away from my hand. “Let’s go inside,” he says.

Sadie Wade-Stein grew up in Colorado, and now lives and writes in New York City.

Steve Mitchell

R E G I M E N T

I realized others questioned my sexuality before I even considered it on my own. It surfaced first in adults—men—who wanted to ask me about sports while I wanted to talk about space and science fiction, who asked about girlfriends before I’d ever thought of one, who wanted to know if I was going out for the team. I was small, asthmatic. I’d liked playing football and baseball with the kids in the neighborhood until it became aggressive and tinged with rage. Now, I read.

I didn’t comprehend sexuality at all when I was asked for affirmations and assurances; I was 10. I was 12. It took time to understand the nature of their interrogation, but my understanding didn’t alleviate their confusion. I knew I was soft. I knew I was weak. My body was always lying in wait to kill me. There were days I could ride my bike and run with the other kids, and days when my lungs constricted and I watched from the window struggling for the next breath. I was under no illusion I was a perfect physical specimen of boyhood.

Still, the questions about sexuality, when they came, struck me as a demand for loyalty to a force I couldn’t identify. There was a decision to be made it seemed, or at the least, a declaration. A flag must be planted somewhere. Sexuality was a part of it, but there was a deeper question about masculinity. Was I going out for the team?

*

No actor uses their body as fully and completely as Denis Lavant. Watching others, we focus on expression or gesture but with Lavant, it’s his body that holds the revelation. His face is an extension of that body. As revealing and distinctive as it is, his face is only ever a small part of the larger whole.

He doesn’t move like a dancer. Dancers who worked in film—Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines—float as if on a cushion of air, as if their feet dangle just above the floor. Lavant is more grounded; there’s weight to him. Where dancers seem to defy gravity, Lavant leverages it.  He appears taut but never tense; his limbs slide as if operating independently yet always in concert.

You wouldn’t mistake him for an athlete, either. He moves like a new creature, discovering his body and its limits in fits of quiet abandon. His body is expressive in the way a flower is expressive, in its clear elaboration of form; a being only and completely itself.

In Mauvais Sang (1986) he’s fallen in love with Anna (Juliette Binoche), the girlfriend of his mobster boss. Glancing at her in rapture, he resembles nothing so much as an elf. Narrow face, large ears, dark deep-set eyes. He’s 25, but he could be 16. 

On the street, outside her apartment, he smokes while she lies in existential torpor on a bed upstairs. A French song plays on the radio. I love the slight turn and the lean toward the stairs when he thinks of her, the soft steps to the window. His body is loose; there’s nothing to prepare us for the transformation that occurs when the radio shifts to David Bowie’s Modern Love. 

Bursting into a run once the beat is established, he propels himself flat-out nearly stumbling like a five-year-old racing downhill. He’s an engine building speed and we, watching, expect him to take flight, to burn past his restrictive orbit. He runs to feel his muscles, his bones, to feel the air rush by on the darkened street. He becomes a blur, running for the sake of running then skidding to a stop suddenly as if he’s remembered something important.

Returning to the apartment, he’s a different man. On the bed he picks up a note. Folding his arm behind him as he lies down around the space where Anna has lain, his hand remains open around the paper, completely relaxed. The world, it seems, has taken on a new delicacy.

*

I grew up with an alcoholic dad and a family in which the disease was never addressed—as if it didn’t exist, as if it were a misperception. I developed a fundamental belief that adults were lying to me, if not directly then by omission but more than that, I believed they were actively trying to obscure or block the truth. Books, film, TV, seemed a way of discovering something more true about the world than I could discern from those around me. Words and books swept me into my own imagination. Images resonated differently; in films and TV I could see a different world. And, seeing is believing.

The men I saw there weren’t always beautiful or ready with their fists. They were nondescript and smart, like Columbo, they were aloof and smart like Spock, they were funny and smart like Johnny Carson, while the men in my family were quiet, never revealing themselves. It was the sixties; that’s what was expected of them.  Nearly all their conversations I remember revolved around markers of masculinity. I couldn’t imagine Columbo or Spock would have much to say. Sometimes, I pretended to be engaged, smiling along the hard edge of the conversation. Sometimes, I simply remained quiet, my face set to a neutral expression.

At family gatherings, I gravitated toward the women; I liked their voices and their stories. Something in these stories seemed to touch on a truth I believed I was missing. They alluded to invisible entanglements and secret histories. I didn’t want to be a woman, but I couldn’t say I wanted to be a man—not the kind I saw around me, not the kind I thought I was expected to be.

When I was 13 or so, after the divorce and my dad’s time living with his parents upon his release from the state hospital, he finally acquired his own apartment in an old house near downtown in an area of the city yet to be gentrified. 

This is the period I remember being closest to him—not that we spoke much, or that he had much money to spend in entertaining me and my sisters. He’d been sober for a while, he’d been hired as a Substance Abuse counselor; he was no longer building fences or loading trucks. There was something open about him that was new to me.

Years before, in what I imagine now to be a suicide attempt, my dad drove his VW beetle into and under the back of a moving freight truck. Among other things, the accident crushed his face. The doctors asked my mother to bring a photograph to the hospital so they could attempt to reconstruct it. When he finally returned home, he looked as close to something from a horror film as anything I’d ever seen. 

The sutures crawled over his face. There was a metal brace around his neck and head, his jaw was wired shut. He spoke through gritted teeth and ate through a straw. Of course, he never looked the same as before. He’d created his own mask. I only knew he was my father with certainty when he began to drink again.

Now that he was sober and on his own, my sisters and I stayed over one weekend a month, amusing ourselves in whatever way we could. Sometimes we’d all go to a movie; often we were bored. Sometimes we’d listen to records on dad’s small box turntable. He only had two I remember: Janis Joplin’s Pearl and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. 

We’d sit in his living room while the music churned from the record player: raucous, loud, full of pain and longing. He’d drink coffee and smoke. That’s what people in AA did. I knew this because I’d gone to the occasional meeting with him in the damp basement of a dark church.

Still, sitting with him in the aura of the music was a happy surprise. In those moments I felt I could almost bring to clarity—like every truth which eluded me—something real. Something unstated but clear, if only I could find the correct lens through which to view it.

*

In Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), a film loosely based on Melville’s Billy Budd, Denis Lavant plays Galoup, an officer of a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti. Galoup finds himself openly ambivalent toward a new recruit, Sentain (Grégoire Colin), and eventually seeks to cause his death. Throughout, Lavant performs a ballet of repression; however, to call it a ballet makes it sound stylized and artificial. There’s nothing of that in the performance; he never looks less than completely natural. His struggle with this ambivalence gives the film its insinuating tension.

Galoup pictures himself the perfect Legionnaire, in love with his commanding officer—maybe romantically, perhaps more in the way a child loves a father. What he loves most, however, is the Legion itself. Its arms close around him on all sides. He knows who he is and what he should do. The uniform makes the man and Galoup is made until Sentain arrives and he’s thrown off-center. Is it because he’s sexually attracted to him, or fears he’ll be replaced in the eyes of the commandant? Or is it simply that everyone seems to like him? We never know for certain.

The Legion is an elite arm of the French military. Until the 1990’s, a Foreign Legion recruit was required to sign up under a ‘declared name’—a new name—as a symbol of a life starting over. This has its parallel in the doctrine of the Christian name, the name originally given at baptism as a signifier of rebirth in the Catholic Church. Re-naming provides a clear dividing line, a before and an after, and a definitive break with the past. Recruits are given a second chance.

In Beau Travail (Good Work), Claire Denis focuses on the rituals of training—the push-ups, marches, obstacle courses, the grunting, sweating physical prowess of the soldiers. They are never seen in a combat situation and their artifice—setting up camp surrounded by barbed wire with armed sentry points—is counterposed to shots of a few Djibouti women and children watching them laconically from the other side of the wire.

The emphasis here is on bodies—how they move, thump against each other, how they are trained: as instruments of force and fear and protection, as instruments of isolation and community.

The soldiers swim together, shout and dance around a campfire, shower together. Galoup is always slightly outside their group, lodged in a position between the men and the commandant. The soldiers go drinking as a group in town; Galoup drinks alone. Maybe something is different in the camaraderie of the group since Sentain arrived; maybe they are not so desperate. Galoup would see this as softness, as a loss of focus.

The mythology of masculinity in movies really can’t be entered—it holds us outside as a golden projection, one part wish fulfillment, one part nostalgia for a time that never existed. In this world, women are always the vulnerability, there to be held hostage or murdered in retribution. So, you can see how my loyalties were divided.

In movies, women—and a family—leave you weak. They are the wound every villain exploits. That exploitation itself is a violation of the code of men, but they are, after all, villains. What can we expect? Harry Callahan, Rambo, James Bond: they don’t have wives—they are men—not husbands, not fathers—men. In film, men are fathers only in as much as they ‘protect their family.’ Their lack of attachment is an integral part of their uniform.

This uniform brings each male body into harmony with the other. The legionnaire loses himself within the sharp creases of his trousers. Like the declared name, the uniform draws a line in the sand and lets everyone know who is folded within the group, who is the other. The ultimate other is always women.

Lavant as Galoup watches his men with a cat-like drill of attention. He’s never still around them, sliding up to the group then falling away, circling, attentive. In scenes where he is alone, he’s often motionless. He’s a man who is completely and only his job, in that way men are supposed to be. (Shown with his lover—a beautiful local woman—he most often stands apart, watching.) 

Accepting recruits not only from all levels of French society but from around the world, the Legion’s rigorous training is structured to build a heightened sense of camaraderie among recruits. It is the only branch of the French military that doesn’t swear allegiance to France; legionnaires swear allegiance only to each other. To the Legion. 

“You can disappear in the Legion,” Claire Denis says, in an interview about the film. Galoup is a man who has vanished within his uniform.

*

My dad was a casualty in the resistance to the uniform. Something in manhood, or fatherhood, or both, broke him. Wounded early, it took him a long time to die from his injuries; he lived his life incapacitated.

He’d been a high school basketball star in the mid-1950’s with a scholarship to college. He’d married his high-school sweetheart, the chief cheerleader. He went to school in Business because that’s what you did. He had his first child at 21 because that’s what you did. He started drinking early. Though I don’t remember him ever talking much, my mom assured me he’d been witty and smart. And everyone liked him.

It was while dad lived in this apartment—I was 12 or 13—that I began playing golf. My uncle, his younger brother, played and showed me how to set my grip, gave me rudimentary lessons then a small set of used clubs. My friends and I chipped and putted in our backyard. It was something we could do when there weren’t enough kids around to form teams. Golf was also less likely to trigger an asthma attack. 

My uncle had coerced my grandfather into playing, then my dad. At one point, all the men were playing, and family conversations began to center on the sport. I thought this might be a language I could learn, unlocking the passwords needed to enter the private club or secret society.

That summer, my mom dropped me off at the public courses in town and I’d play 18 holes by myself. Badly. I don’t remember ever thinking I was very good, but part of this exercise was performance: I was practicing how I looked on the course, how I looked in my swing. I was acting as if I were a person who enjoyed sports. I could do it alone there. I could feel I was learning the role.

That was the first year I remember my dad buying Christmas presents for us himself. When he was recovering from the state hospital, living with his parents who could not hide their disgust for him, dosed nearly unconscious on Haldol, they bought presents for us and put his name on them. Placed under the tree, the tags were written in my grandmother’s rounded cursive—To: Steve, From: Charles.

Dad put up his own small tree in a corner of his living room, strung with large colored bulbs, and we—my sisters and I—each had presents there. One of mine, wrapped in red Santa paper was long, thin, and heavy. I was certain it was a new putter, the kind with the curving goose-neck that looked vaguely sci-fi, a putter Captain Kirk might use when golfing in the Covidan System. 

I imagined swinging it lightly above the hardwood floor on Christmas morning, putting the dimpled ball along the floor into dad’s automatic machine which rolled the ball back to you once you made the shot. 

Playing golf had brought me to the edges of the male conversations but, instead of alleviating a pressure it intensified instead, because I was circling, because I was so close to what I believed was acceptance I came to believe it wasn’t exactly my sexuality that was being questioned, more my relationship to manhood, a manhood completely distinct from sexual preference. The language around this was garbled—well, there wasn’t a language. The language was set only in as much as there was a question. I was supposed to already know something I didn’t yet know. Was I going out for the team? Would I make the team?

In the previous year, dad had begun to dress like a professional, a casual professional. He wore Izod shirts and khaki chinos. He shaved every day and smelled of aftershave. He had his own car and his own apartment, and I was old enough to know this was an accomplishment but not old enough to know how much of one. Finally, he looked more like a dad—those in my neighborhood and those on TV. Something in me relaxed just a little.

My sisters and I anxiously awaited Christmas and its frenzy of excitement. We always had Christmas Eve at home, so Santa could come in the morning, then dad’s place later that day. I don’t remember the other presents of that Christmas, only the anticipation of the afternoon at my dad’s.

Once there, I lay the present along my lap, waiting as my sisters opened their dolls and makeup kits, feeling the weight of it on my thighs. When it was my turn, I tore at the paper on the thin end first, confused by the bare metal, ripping the paper across my lap until it fell open on my knees. It was a rifle.

*

Beau Travail is the story of Galoup, vanished into the brotherhood, happy in the vanishing, until Sentain like the snake in Eden brings a discord he can’t accept or define. In truth, he’s not interested in definition; he wants a return to the grace of the uniform.

The film intercuts Galoup, exiled in Belgium, with his service in the Legion. It is nearly wordless, except for the occasional voiceover—Galoup writing in his journal, trying to make sense of what has happened. There’s no inkling of who Galoup was before he joined the Legion. Within its impressionistic rhythm it’s not always immediately clear shot to shot where we are in time. This is Claire Denis’ style: elliptical, associative, less interested in narrative drive than mood and memory. 

We don’t always know where we are in time unless we pay attention to Lavant’s body. In Djibouti, he knows who he is, he’s fully present; in Belgium there’s something straying about him, diffuse. He makes coffee, he smokes. He tries to write his story in a journal. He sits alone on the train, in a bar.

Galoup sends Sentain on a pointless suicide mission. The Commandant discovers this, and he is court-martialed then expelled from the Legion. Stripped of his uniform, he seems smaller, older. Outside the brotherhood, how does he know he is a man?

He remembers. He’s swamped by images of the rituals of manhood: bare-chested young men crawling under wire, scaling walls, drinking beer, breaking rocks, digging holes. Sweating, muscular men, shaven and sleek, together, and he is there with them. Always a step or two distant but with them, nonetheless. Denis lingers on these images, set against the monochromatic East African landscape, her camera tracking low at shoulder height as the group do pushups, or tilted upward so each recruit leaps into frame as they scale the wall.

In the Legion, you pledge allegiance only to each other. As men.

I never wanted a gun. Not in a million years. Dad came over to me, where it lay revealed in the white paper, and began to explain how to use it. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I have no doubt this was a gift he’d been refused as a child and that the giving had a meaning for him so distant from me as to be incomprehensible. 

He lifted it from my thighs, hefted it in his hand, pleased with its weight. My arms extended to receive it from him. I choked down the communion, partly because I was stunned, partly because it was a transubstantiation he wanted. I returned it to the corner, where it had been resting for weeks.

*

Over the years, the evolution in the way Tom Cruise runs in his films has become so noticeable that there are Youtube videos dedicated to it.  Tom Cruise runs a lot in his movies; there’s a lot of material there. Devoting himself almost exclusively to tentpole Mission Impossible films for the last decade, he has no character to play other than Ethan Hunt and Ethan Hunt is a machine; the flesh has vanished from inside the shell of the character and the shell—the uniform—has become seamless armor. You can almost see it, scene to scene and film to film; Cruise’s body closes in around him like a shield.

There’s probably a clear demarcation line that marks when Tom Cruise’s eyes become dead as an actor, but I’ll leave that research to someone else. The way he runs in, say MI:5, is the same run the Terminator (Robert Patrick) affects in Terminator 2: eyes unwaveringly forward, jaw clenched, hands stiff and blade-like, slicing the air rhythmically before him. This is not the image of the body as an instrument; it’s the body as a prison. 

Denis Lavant’s sprint in Mauvais Sang is an expression of emotion bursting forth into velocity and release.  If I had seen the film when I was 12 or 13, I would have imagined that was how I would like to move in the world. Lavant’s run is the image of someone pushing, defying, their own boundaries. When Cruise runs, he looks like a Maserati: shiny, sleek, and soulless. What Cruise believes reads as confidence and singleness of purpose reads instead as the clockwork churning of a brute mechanism. 

My dad married again soon after that Christmas and had a child with his new wife. They moved to another town, set up a nice house, acquired a dog. They bought furniture, and cooked trendy meals, and their marriage was over in a couple of years. He left, and eventually gave up parental rights to his son so he wouldn’t have to pay child support. He never paid my mother child support for the three of us.

Now, I like to imagine that maybe my dad felt a sense of freedom when he played basketball in high school. He was short and wiry then. He played guard. I like to imagine he dribbled low along the court, pivoting to elude his cover and for the instant he drove toward the shot he felt light, timeless. It’s something I never actually saw, but it’s an image I hold of him, of a time before the armor closed and nothing remained but glinting metal and hard edges.

I see this in the gray, shifting focus of history, a history passed on as fuzzy photographs and incomplete sentences; pieced together from hearsay, myth, and the occasional tale told with conviction. Something destroyed, then built again from the vestiges of memory. 

As he aged, my dad grew into his new face to such an extent that you might never know about his accident. He continued to wear Izod polos and khaki chinos; he continued to shave and smell nice. When I had my first child, he wanted to talk to me about insurance and retirement plans. Money had joined sports as the markers of manhood. Was I part of the team? 

He never wanted to talk to me about much else and I didn’t want to talk to him. I had lost interest in understanding him. This is not a story with an epiphany.

When I come to understand my sexuality, it isn’t that complicated, and it has nothing to do with guns or golf. I wasn’t part of the team and I never would be. Like so many of us who didn’t or couldn’t join, I made my friends elsewhere, one at a time, struggling toward some definition of what it meant to be in this body, to carry this uniform. This is not a story with an epiphany.

I have no idea what my dad might have wanted to do with his life. Once he became a counselor, he was eventually hired for the in-house program at a large utility company and worked there until he could no longer. A mask wasn’t enough for him. He needed a uniform, and eventually that wasn’t enough; he needed more protection. 

*

Court-martialed due to his transgression, removed from the Legion and exiled to Marseilles, Galoup has lost everything. In the penultimate scene, he spends time making his narrow bed, removing every crease, straightening each line. Stripped of his uniform, he finds it hadn’t given him an identity, only a shell.

Claire Denis knows she doesn’t need to show Lavant’s face in this scene, his body is enough. He lies down on his bed, bare-chested, holding a pistol at his waist. The camera lingers on his taut body and the gun, finally resting on a pulsing artery in his bicep, the rhythm matched by the rising beat of an ecstatic disco anthem, Corona’s Rhythm of the Night.

The dance at the end of Beau Travail comes out of nowhere; it comes after we have watched Galoup hold everything in for the entirety of the film. It’s a coda, set in the disco in Djibouti—only no one is there. No one we can see, at least. It’s a solitary dance and it wasn’t choreographed for the film. Denis gave Lavant a simple direction: to treat it as ‘a dance between life and death.’ He performed it in two takes.

Wearing perfectly ironed black shirt and trousers, he stands for a moment, smoking, then begins to turn so slightly it takes an instant to register. Mirrored tiles provide the backdrop, reflect the colored, blinking lights of the club. The music pulses and soars.

He glances off screen now and then; it’s a lupine gaze which might be a threat, or a come-on, or both. He might be looking at someone else or studying himself in an unseen mirror. He swings around a bit, preening and smoking, as if circling something. His arms burst forth and he spins, comes back to the sway. Then, he explodes into motion.

The dance is a cataclysm. It is not a smooth demonstration of poise and agility though it contains them. It comes in spurts and spasms, Lavant returning to a casual posture now and then, only to have his body spring forward again.

It’s tempting to say that his body expresses emotion, but it’s more direct than that. Lavant’s isn’t so much an instrument as expression itself. There seems to be no filter, no distance. His body constantly elaborates who it is with an elemental elegance usually reserved for animals, even when he’s doesn’t appear elegant.

His freedom is not graceful; it barrels forth in all directions at once. It’s not joy, not release. It’s sheer expression. It doesn’t have to have a meaning, or a point. It simply exists. I imagine this dance changes his molecular structure. It could be a form of rebirth. He’s still dancing when the film fades.

Maybe all men recognize this dance. It’s not a war dance, it’s not a mating dance. It’s the way you dance when no one is watching, when you’re not trying to be Mick Jagger or Pierce Brosnan or John Travolta, when you want to feel your body move in a way it never has before. You don’t tell your body what to do, you let it happen. You lose all sense of watching and all sense of performance. There’s something naked and feral, even frightening, in the abandon. 

I want to believe that once—just once—in the many years that came after high school, my dad danced like Denis Lavant.

Steve Mitchell has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. His fiction and nonfiction have been published widely in journals and magazines. His novel is Cloud Diary (C&R Press). His short story collection is The Naming of Ghosts (Press 53). He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books and Editor at Scuppernong Editions. Find him at clouddiary.org

Connie Draving Malko

Standing Down

On Fifth Avenue, clogged with taxis and delivery trucks, a guy tattooed with a pirate patch and a jagged scar came by on a skateboard.

“He’s gonna fall,” said Chant-Elle, Laura’s 10-year-old niece.

But he floated past them over the street’s bumps and potholes, balancing an insulated food carrier in his arms.

Laura was on her way to meet her brother Eddie with Chant-Elle, her sister’s daughter visiting from Alabama. When Laura touched Chant-Elle’s shoulder to cross the street, she felt the brush of the stiff fur trim on the girl’s purse.

“Isn’t that hot?” This was June.

“Mama gave it to me for Christmas,” Chant-Elle said, patting the faux beige suede like a pet.

Apparently Chant-Elle’s mother Meredith gave her no rules about when to wear fur. Meredith, Laura’s sister, would be away for six weeks to sing the solo part in the Kenyan Mass Gloria during a five-week European tour by her Gospel group.  She had come to New York to catch a direct flight abroad and had agreed to bring Chant-Elle along to spend a long weekend in the city with Laura.

 A bearded man strolled nonchalantly by with a black-and-white cat perched on the top of his head. Two burly men in pink tights and tutus passed in a hurry. As Chant-Elle did a double-take and looked at Laura with a dropped jaw, Laura nodded as if to say - yes, that’s how it is here. It was Chant-Elle’s first visit to New York. Laura was pleased to expose her niece to the idea that people were free to dress and behave and be whatever they liked. Laura had moved here—where her brother Eddie lived—after she returned from the Peace Corps four months earlier. Strolling down the noisy, bustling street of Midtown made Laura feel she was in the right place—far away from the cracked dirt roads of the Mauritanian village and the man she was trying to forget—Ahmeed. 

 Wide open here. More open too than the South where Laura had grown up, always aware of the lingering, suspicious glances given to her and her family. Her siblings Eddie and Meredith were of mixed race, bi-racial was the word then, whereas Laura—born two years after they were adopted—was white like their parents. 

They had all felt the scrutiny from strangers, and friends too, about their family mix. They did what all siblings do—fought shamelessly over the remaining piece of pizza, retrieved lost socks from the same washer, cried together taking their pet lab to the vet a last time. All normal things in a family. But many people around them could not understand it—they either were casually curious or downright disapproving. Sometimes it was silent discrimination, sometimes it was painfully overt.

Chant-Elle’s situation was different. Her father Tommy B. was black, so that physically Chant-Elle had ethnic features that made her racial identity clear. She did not have to suffer the gawking side glances that plagued Laura’s bi-racial siblings. Meredith always complained that their reaction always left her hanging—somewhere between not being purely white and never really black enough either.

Eddie, who could always be seen above the crowd, glided toward them. He smiled broadly.

“Well, just look at you,” he said to Chant-Elle, measuring her increase in height by passing a level hand from the high button of his wrinkled shirt to the top of her head. 

 “Are we on Broadway?” Chant-Elle asked as they saw a gathering around performers dressed in red—some bare-chested, others in sleeveless tops.

Their well-defined contours glistened with sweat as they did their tricks—one spinning around on roller blades, another break dancing on a worn piece of cardboard. 

Five performers gathered into a line and a jumper backed up and leaped over them. The crowd cheered. A Latino girl, bare midriff, shorts and tights, took a tam off her head and turned it upside down to collect tips. 

Selecting children from the audience, the group’s leader pointed to Chant-Elle.  “Come on, you pinch of brown sugar.”

Chant-Elle stepped forward before Laura could stop her and joined the line of kids. As the jumper took position for his run-up start, Laura realized they were planning to use the kids for their stunt.

Laura motioned to Chant-Elle that she should leave the line. 

The barker noticed. “Hey—you taking my girl away?”

“She’s not your girl,” Laura said, stepping in front of the crowd to pull Chant-Elle out of the line.

“Don’t leave without putting something in the hat here,” the barker told Laura.  “A five. Whoa wait - you white - you need to give ten.” He grinned as his remark drew chuckles from the crowd. He slapped the palm of a woman with mint green hair.

 “I got a five,” said a familiar voice, Eddie. He stepped toward the girl holding the tam. He tapped the bill against his forehead, as though giving the barker a salute. 

“Hold on,” the barker said following Laura to the edge of the crowd, “seems like my girl here wanted to be in the act.” 

“I said she’s not ‘your girl’,” Laura said, jutting her chin out at him. Wanting to make a point of his small-mindedness, Laura said loudly, “She’s my niece.” She hissed the word “niece” so hard that spittle spurted between her teeth. The man pretended to wipe spit from his face.

“Oh yea, her ‘niece’,” he snickered. “And the mayor’s my uncle.”

Giggles broke out from the onlookers.

Laura reached toward the donation hat defiantly, intending to take back Eddie’s $5.

Eddie stepped in. “Hey bro,” he said looking down at the barker, “we don’t want no trouble here.”

The barker shrugged, backed away and gave his signal to the runner to go on with the show.  

Laura ushered Chant-Elle through the crowd.

“You shouldn’t have goaded the guy,” Eddie told Laura.

“And you shouldn’t have tried so hard to appease him,” Laura said.

“Why didn’t you let me stay in line?” asked Chant-Elle.

Laura thought she detected a little thrill in the way Chant-Elle said it. Chant-Elle allowed Laura to take her hand even though she was at the age when girls start wagging the neck roll and give lingering stares at how high one wears their pants on their waist. 

“They’re hustlers,” Laura told her. “Like in the picture at the museum that you liked.”

The painting, The Fortune Teller, had shown a young dandy engrossed in watching a gypsy read his palm while hoaxer onlookers robbed him—one lifting his coin purse, the other cutting the cord that held it to his tunic pocket. Chant-Elle’s face had lit up—replacing her heavy-eyed tolerance of other Met attractions.

“They’re jackin’ the guy,” Chant-Elle had chirped. 

Laura had been intrigued by the Caravaggio painting too, her attention seized by the minuscule broken thread. The artist had captured the exact instant before the purse came loose. On the brink. She thought of the slow, silent descent of a pill she had dropped into a yellowed teacup. A weighty consequence to her trying to help a schoolboy in Mauritania.

Laura closed her eyes, wanting to block out the reminder of what had caused her own life to fray like the golden thread. She had trusted Ahmeed, the man she had fallen in love with. The village’s pharmacist. He was educated and had traveled to Cairo. After her service term was over, she could go anywhere in the world with him. 

But when she had told him the truth about dissolving pills in the boy’s tea, everything changed. He had turned away from her and never looked back.

Laura watched  now as Chant-Elle walked ahead, hopping on one foot and then the other.

“We’ll have fun tomorrow taking her to Coney Island,” she told Eddie. 

“It’ll be a great final fling before you fly her home to spend the rest of the summer with her dad,” he said.

“I’m not sure that Tommy B. is what’s best for Chant-Elle,” Laura said.

Eddie stopped and crossed his arms. “What do you mean by that?”

 Laura did not answer him.

“Wait up,” Laura called out to Chant-Elle who was cutting in and out of throngs of people, like a flat stone skipping through water. When Laura caught up with her, she said, “I feel frightened when you get too far away from me.” 

*

Rinsing the mismatched silverware, Laura felt a shift in the water pressure as Chant-Elle turned on the shower. Eddie’s tiny kitchen smelled of the mishmash of take-out food—from the deli, a diner and a fast-food hamburger for Chant-Elle.

Laura pulled back a sheet hanging in the doorway to keep AC-cooled air in the front room. Eddie was on the floor spreading out the air mattress, limp as a deflated Macy’s Parade balloon.

“What did you mean this afternoon when you said that Chant-Elle may stay with you longer?”

“I’m the best one to take care of Chant-Elle while Meredith is away.” Laura touched the withering petals of the plant she’d given Eddie a few months before. “You should take better care of this.” She took the plant to the kitchen sink to water it.  

Eddie stood up to face Laura when she came back. “Hey, answer me—what’s going on? I thought you and Meredith agreed that you would fly Chant-Elle back to Birmingham on Sunday to spend the rest of the summer with Tommy B.”

Tommy B. was Chant-Elle’s father; Meredith had granted him parental rights although they never had married. 

Laura set the plant back on the windowsill, her motions self-conscious like someone who drank too much trying to act normal. “Umm, well—I didn’t have time to bring it up with Meredith at the airport. I think that Chant-Elle should stay with me.”  

Eddie sighed and shook his head as he stepped across the room for the air mattress pump beside his trumpet on the table by the wall.

“When were you planning to tell Meredith?” As Eddie lifted the pump, stacks of sheet music fell and he stooped to straighten them up. Then he came back to Laura again. “What’s Tommy B. gonna say?”

 “He’ll be relieved. Meredith probably guilted him into keeping Chant-Elle. I know he’ll take her to stay with his mother.”

“And that’s bad because…?”

“You’ve never been there. I felt very uneasy when I dropped Chant-Elle off there once —kids everywhere, a musty smell, a bed made up on the couch with an Afghan and a pillowslip from the metro hospital.” 

Eddie puckered his lips. “How much of that is actually dangerous and how much is really a lifestyle difference?”

Laura pulled her sleeves down over her wrists. Eddie always minimized things. He handled unpleasantness the same way their mother had handled it: never confronting a situation, always backing down to keep the peace. The more her mother and Eddie placated, the more Laura and Meredith became agitated.

 “Tommy can’t do anything about me keeping Chant-Elle—he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to come here and take her.”

Eddie scratched at the soul patch under his lip, looking down at her. “That’s their business. Not yours. What happens when Meredith finds out?” Eddie knelt beside the air pump. “Don’t you know your sister? There’ll be hell to pay.”

He turned on the pump. They could not talk over the loud droning sound it made. 

Water had seeped through the bottom of the plant. Laura went into the kitchen for paper towels. Out the window, the setting sun—a bright orange sliver—obscured the clock face on the Williamsburg Bank tower. 

In Mauritania, a country that connects the Arabic north and the African south, the sun sets like water seeping into the earth. Acacia trees, etched against the sky, have roots that descend more than a hundred feet in search of groundwater. The people are deeply entrenched in the land, connected to centuries of history and customs. 

Laura had believed that she could enter that world; she thought that Ahmeed believed it too. One day he had found her, overcome by the heat in the garden of her host family.

“You do too much, Achicia.” Ahmeed had called her by her Mauritanian name.

He often had dinner with them—all eating out of the same bowl, a fish and rice dish seasoned with the mouth-drying tartness of hibiscus. They all had crowded one another without a Westerner’s sensitivity to personal space. However, Ahmeed had always seemed careful, even on the first night, not to let his arm brush hers, as though that closeness—with her—would set something off. 

When they were alone in the garden—where Laura was tending the sorghum and peas—Ahmeed was not so guarded. He had dipped a cloth into her watering can and squeezed droplets over her wrists. He looked down at her feet. She raised her trouser cuffs so he could sprinkle water over her ankles too. His eyes had been level with hers with an expectant look like watching a bowl fill with fresh water. 

After Eddie turned off the pump, he said to Laura, “You know you have to call Meredith and straighten this out.”

Laura went to the overwatered plant, sopped up the dribbles with the paper towel.

“I could have guessed you would take her side,” Laura said. 

“I’m not taking sides.” He sorted through his music and pulled out a play book. “Why do you have to do things the hard way?” 

“I’ve talked to a neighbor I trust about watching Chant-Elle when I have to go in. But mostly I work from home. I’m the best one for Chant-Elle to stay with. I don’t think Meredith always makes good decisions about her,” Laura said.

“You’re not one to talk about making good decisions,” Eddie said.

She wondered if he was talking about what happened in Mauritania.

But instead he said,“like in middle school when you reported the band director for telling me my lips were too big to play trumpet.”

“He never heard of Satchmo?” 

“You just made it harder on me.” Eddie leaned close to her face, grinning, making a raspy “thbpbpthpt” sound between his lips. “Look who’s blowing the roof off the Blue Note now.” He zipped his music into his trumpet bag. 

Laura paused, trying to stop herself.

But then she said, “Sometimes, when children are in bad situations, someone must step in.”

“Not Chant-Elle. She can stick up for herself.” 

“Not all kids can.”

 “Who are you talking about now?” He shoved the air pump back to the side of the room.

“In the Peace Corps we were fighting trachoma. Scar tissue so thick it could cause blindness. One couple would not sign the medication permission slip for their child—said it was against the will of Allah.”

 Laura pictured the children in her classroom, gentle and curious in their white cotton shirts and blue shorts, hands folded obediently on their desks.

“The boy who didn’t get the medicine came to school with beet-red eyes, white streaks on his cheeks from mucus draining.” Laura threw up her hands. “I dissolved a pill for him each afternoon in his tea.”

She rubbed the tips of her fingers together, remembering how light those tiny yellow pills were balanced on her fingertip. 

“So that’s what happened over there? That’s why you came back early.”

“The pharmacist who administered the medicine—he noticed one day that some pills were missing.”

 Laura looked out the window, now as opaque as a blackboard, not wanting Eddie to see her face, knowing she could not hide the dismay she felt.

“PC found out and asked me to resign.”

“Eeemmm-heemmm.” It sounded like Eddie was clearing his throat but that was the sound he always made when confirming that he had been right about something. “I knew something happened over there. I speculated that it had to do with someone you met there.”

The room was darker but she could imagine the knowing look on Eddie’s face. 

“It was simply a cultural clash—a moral disagreement,” Laura said.

She bent over the pathos ivy and picked off four variegated leaves, dry and yellowing.

Eddie raised a finger in the direction of the bathroom as the pipes gave a shrill squeak. They looked at each other realizing that Chant-Elle had turned off the shower.

 “I’d take matters into my own hands again if it meant protecting a child.”

“Not without talking to Meredith you won’t,” Eddie said. 

Laura cupped her hand around the dead leaves, squeezing them inside her palm. In the kitchen, she dropped them into the trash can. She thought of the loose tea leaves at the bottom of the boy’s cup, shifting slightly when she had dropped in the pill and stirred it into the liquid. 

Laura had not told Eddie the whole story. What happened was more personal than an unavoidable cultural clash. Laura’s eyelids fluttered as though blinking at grit, trying to blur the picture still in her mind of the moment Ahmeed had turned on her and walked away. Ahmeed had hurt her in a way that no one else could because she had never loved anyone as selflessly as she had loved him. She had thought he felt the same. But when she had trusted him with her well-intentioned secret, he had betrayed her.

“For me?” Chant-Elle ran in excited, smelling soapy and minty as she scrambled onto the air mattress.

Laura unclipped the plastic grocery bag wrapped around her head as a shower cap and her hair fell to her shoulders.

“Can we call Mama now?” she asked. 

*

Laura waited for Eddie to go off to the gig he was playing in that night and then called Meredith. No one answered. Laura turned on Chant-Elle’s favorite animal network and they settled back, Laura on the couch and Chant-Elle on the air mattress. Chant-Elle tucked the furry purse under her arm and Laura noticed a dime-sized splotch on Chant-Elle’s shoulder when her pajama top slipped to the side. Laura sat up and looked more closely. The heaped-up, rubbery splotch was like the scar tissue that grew over scrapes that Eddie got as a boy. His doctor had identified it as a keloid scar, a case of the body “overhealing”.

How’d you get that?” Laura asked Chant-Elle. 

Chant-Elle straightened her pajama strap so it covered the scar. “It’s nothing.”

“If someone burned you with a cigarette, you have to speak up. Was it one of those boys at your grandmother’s house?”

 “No, it was just me and my cousin—playin’ around. She say—spose we heat a penny on a light bulb and put it on somebody’s arm?”

“Why your arm?” asked Laura. “Where was your father?”Chant-Elle shrugged.

Laura stopped herself from clucking disapproval. “Did your cousin get punished?” 

“No,” said Chant-Elle. “Mama was mad at me. She say if I let someone hurt me like that again, she gonna whooop me good. So I don’t.” She smiled and leaned toward Laura.  “Could we try to call her now?”

“She’ll call us back when she sees we tried to reach her,” Laura said. 

*

By the time the cell phone buzzed, Chant-Elle was sound asleep. Laura got up from the sofa to take the call.

 “Is my baby okay? Does she miss me too much?” asked Meredith.

“She’s fine.” Laura told about their sight-seeing and then paused. “Meredith–I want to ask you something. Please think it over before you answer.” She took a long breath. “Let Chant-Elle stay with me while you’re gone. We’d have a great time and I’d take good care of her.”

 There was no answer, no static either.

“Hello?” Maybe Meredith was repositioning the receiver to her other ear or moving across the room to look at Prague in the early dawn, the sun rising behind ancient church spires. “Are you there?” 

“I heard you.” The deep resonance of Meredith’s voice made it sound like she was in the next room. There was more silence and then Meredith said, “I have a good plan in place already. You know that she always wants her father to spend more time with her.” 

“Really? Or is that what you wish were true?” Laura asked. The question sprang from her before she could stop it.

“You know, Laura, I feel kind of ambushed here,” Meredith said. “If you were thinking this all along, why didn’t you say something earlier?” 

Laura did not know what to say. “If you would have agreed then, why don’t you agree now?”

“Look, I’ve gotta go,” said Meredith. “Kiss my baby’s sweet cheeks for me.”The phone clicked and the connection went dead. Laura laid the phone on the floor beside the sofa, knowing Meredith would not pick up if she called back now.

 Laura had trouble getting back to sleep. The program on TV, about animal camouflage, featured the sand-colored desert lark. It was a bird that she had seen in Mauritania. Its light feathers made it blend into its surroundings. The lark was safe as long as it stayed put. Ahmeed had pointed out the nest one night when he was walking her back to her host family. He had spent more and more time with her, not defiantly but slow and gradual. The birds had built the nest against rock, had stacked sandstone pebbles around the open side to keep the winds from blowing it away. And yet the last night they passed that way, the nest had disappeared.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Chant-Elle making a frightened, high-pitched squeal. 

Chant-Elle shot up, her gaze ricocheting around the room until it settled on Laura.

“That same dream,” Chant-Elle said. “It’s water coming down, and then it’s dirt and when I call out nobody hears me. I know I have to keep calling out to wake myself up.”

Laura eased Chant-Elle up onto the couch, reaching for the sheet and wrapping it around the two of them. The air from the AC unit caught a strand of loose hair and Laura reached over to lift it. 

Chant-Elle turned to Laura. Closing her eyes, she ran her fingers over the curve of Laura’s arm until she fell asleep.

Down on the floor—beside Chant-Elle’s forgotten fur purse—the phone rang. It blinked like a flitting insect, and Laura leaned over to see a text message. Meredith had written, “Chant-Elle needs 2 B with her father”. 

Laura laid her arm over Chant-Elle’s, now curved up around her neck. As Laura laid there waiting for sleep to come, she wasn’t sure if the breath she felt was her own or Chant-Elle’s.

Daylight came into the room like dye dispensing into liquid. In the honey haze, the skin color of Laura and Chant-Elle appeared to be the same. The contrast between Laura and Ahmeed had always been very pronounced, even in the dusk light of the desert. But—at that new place in Laura’s life—Laura believed that differences in skin color did not matter. It was a relief. Or so it seemed. And yet—at the end—Laura had the rude awakening that it was differences under the skin that mattered. Differences in culture and religion and social mores. The power of all that went deeper than anything she had ever experienced before. 

*   

On the boardwalk of Coney Island, the smell of salty air mixed with the heavy aromas of deep-fry oil, mustard, and a syrupy sweet glaze. Cotton candy in pointed paper holders was lined up like a row of pink wigs with no openings for faces. Frequenters of the beach paraded their dogs, leashed and harnessed. Some people were as scantily clad as the pets. What a shock the scene would be to everyone Laura had known in Mauritania. 

Rubber thong sandals slapped against the wooden walkway with a thwap-thwap-thwap. Rap chants and rhythm pulsed from a speaker. Chant-Elle danced—raising one knee and then the other. She bent her arms like chicken wings and then dropped them straight at her sides as she ambled forward with a slouch. Behind her, Eddie imitated her moves until she turned around and caught him. 

Eddie led the way down the steps to Astroland. “Here’s the Cyclone. It won’t be around forever.”

Blistered white paint was peeling on the scaffolding underneath the roller coaster frame. When Laura grabbed onto the railing, her finger was pierced with a sliver of splintered wood. Laura ignored the splinter as they crawled into a kart, Eddie in the middle. He pulled the safety bar back as close to them as he could.

“Scoot forward,” he said, noticing a gap between Chant-Elle and the bar. 

“At Great Park, everyone has their own seat belts over their shoulders,” Chant-Elle said.

“This ride’s had lap bars since 1907,” Eddie said. 

“Don’t worry–it’s safe,” said Laura to reassure her. 

“Sometimes I like to feel scared,” said Chant-Elle. She wrinkled her nose as though safety on a thrill ride was as unexciting as training wheels on a bike. 

The kart climbed slowly, its wheels pulled by the clanking chain lift. The sight of the white-capped ocean. Sunbathers and beach umbrellas congealed like melted crayons. Laura felt her phone slip from her pocket and clunk to the floor of the kart. She had not told Eddie about Meredith’s text. He had not asked and she had not offered the information.

  As the kart climbed, Laura saw Eddie put his arm in front of Chant-Elle to provide a brace. That is how Eddie is, thought Laura, knowing he would help take care of Chant-Elle if Laura kept her for the summer.

As the kart looped around a curve, Laura heard the shrill grind of metal on metal.  Blunt planks of wood passed within inches of her face.

The second plunge, worse than the first, lifted Laura from her seat. Her vision blurred as her half-closed eyes filled with water. She wondered if Chant-Elle had gone weightless too, feared that the girl might fall out. The danger was not like in Chant-Elle’s dream where things caved in from above. The danger now was below—Laura fought off the image of Chant-Elle flying out of the kart and crashing to the ground. 

The last ascent took longer than the others. Laura knew that the higher they climbed, the deeper they would dive. She held herself tight, waiting, but time slowed down. It was like the moment she had waited for Ahmeed’s reaction to her confession. She could not stop what was going to happen now anymore than she could have stopped the yellow pill from falling into the boy’s teacup once she released it. Irreversible. 

Laura felt a yank. The kart’s direction changed from going up to going down and shot forward like an automobile careening over a cliff. Chant-Elle’s high-pitched scream—a mix of terror and titillation—lasted as long as the descent. Eddie faked a loud groan. They were laughing and it occurred to Laura that they were laughing at her. Eddie called out to Laura that they were almost at the end.

Finally, the track leveled off; speed bumps slowed the kart. Laura felt the air come back into her lungs. She wiped her wet eyes. 

Chant-Elle asked her, “are you okay?”

“No.” Laura held up the splintered finger. Her tongue felt like sandpaper. “I was so frightened that you would fall out.”

“Noooooo. Not me.” Chant-Elle clasped one hand inside the other and waved them over her head like a champion’s trophy. “This is the best ride ev-er.” 

An attendant came by to offer a second ride at half price. “Not me,” said Laura. She got out quickly, glancing back to look for her phone on the floor but not seeing it.

 “Can we go again?” Chant-Elle asked Eddie.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s move to the front.”

 Steadying herself on rubber legs, Laura looked back to see Eddie and Chant-Elle settling themselves in the front seats. Chant-Elle looked back to wave and then turned around to the front. She raised her hands high, rippling her fingertips through the air. The twitter of sparrows in the rafters was drowned out by the roar of the Cyclone karts thundering away. Laura felt the kart speed faster and faster away from her. She knew she would have the same feelings of fear and disconnection if she followed Meredith’s plan and took Chant-Elle back to spend the summer with Tommy B. 

Laura thought about reporting that her phone had fallen out during the ride. But the heat, along with the strenuous jolts of the roller coaster, had made Laura tired and a little nauseous. She sat on a bench, fanning her face with her left hand. The right hand had begun to throb from the splinter. Laura picked at the place where the splinter was embedded, flaking off tiny pieces of skin around it.

 Laura’s thoughts wandered to the pivotal moment in Mauritania—after she told Ahmeed, before he turned away. Laura had wanted to put a finger to his mouth—as she dared to do sometimes when they were alone—to press the cushion of his lips so she could explain before he passed judgement. Shaking his head gravely from side to side, he had swept up the canister of pills and tucked it inside the sleeve of his robe. He turned slowly and then bolted so fast that she had no way to stop him. She heard later that he had resigned his position, had moved back to Nouakchott, the capital city where he had earned his degree. 

Laura concentrated on her finger, pulling at the skin although the flesh was stinging as she tore it loose. What had she expected? What choice did he have? That he would have defended her against everyone else? Defy his world and bring it crashing down on both of them? He had no choice but to walk away. 

After tearing off enough skin from over the splinter to expose the wood fragment, Laura slipped a nail beneath the rest and pried it loose. It came out easily at the end.

 As the roller coaster whooshed to the end of the ride, Laura heard a chorus of howls. Surely it was Chant-Elle’s voice above the others, the pitch going up and down like Meredith’s as a child practicing her musical scales.

Chant-Elle came running down the ramp to Laura.

“Thanks so much for bringing me,” she said, leaning in to give Laura a hug. The fake-fur on her purse tickled Laura’s nose.

Chant-Elle put her arm around Laura’s neck as she had in the night when she woke from a bad dream. In the bright sun, the differences in their skin color was as stark as on the stripes of a zebra. Laura wondered if anyone around them judged that–as outsiders always judged her white mother and mixed-race siblings–a white woman holding a black girl in such a close embrace. Laura ignored that thought as she felt Chant-Elle’s warm cheek against her neck.

Eddie held up Laura’s phone. “The attendant found it fallen between the scaffolding. I saw the text from Meredith.”

“You’re nosy,” said Laura.

 “So what did you decide to do?” he asked. 

It was in this moment that Laura knew she had to do. She would not put Chant-Elle at the center of a family dispute, would not cause her world to cave in as Chant-Elle had imagined in her nightmare.

“Let’s get a souvenir to give your dad at the airport tomorrow,” Laura said. 

Chant-Elle looked surprised. “The time went so quick.”

“Your dad would be disappointed if we don’t get you home when your mom said we would.”

Laura did not totally believe that Tommy B. was eager to have responsibility for Chant-Elle but she knew she could not interfere. Not again. 

Laura thought again about Ahmeed walking off without a word when she had told him about giving the boy the medicine. She would make the final moment with Chant-Elle as unencumbered as Ahmeed had made it for her. Laura would leave Chant-Elle without a regretful backward glance.

*

 When Laura and Chant-Elle returned to Eddie’s apartment, he said to them,“Come on…I want to take you to the roof tonight for one last look at the city.”

At the top of an aluminum ladder in the hallway ceiling, the three of them climbed out into the night, their arrival heralded by the crackle of activity—a police siren, the babble of voices, the steady bup-bup-bup patter of helicopter rotor blades somewhere in the sky.

 Eddie led them past a grimy skyway window, air exhausts and a brick chimney. And then, as if a curtain were drawn open, they came to a brilliant view of Manhattan. Eddie took out his trumpet mouthpiece and blew into it, quacking first and then creating a muted version of salsa music.

  Chant-Elle clapped her hands and swirled in a circle on the roof, a glittering ballroom.

 “Watch out,” Laura warned, “don’t go too close to the edge.”

Chant-Elle’s shoes were tacky against the black tarpaper which sparkled with city-light reflections. Chant-Elle danced, her hands and legs sweeping up and down in rapid motion, her hair bouncing as she shifted her head from one side to the other. 

Skyscrapers seemed to rise out of gold dust, glowing like lanterns. “Like a birthday cake. Can I make a wish?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “I wish Mama was here. Can we try to call her again?”

 Laura hit Meredith’s number on her speed dial but again no one answered.

“Maybe Mama’s outside looking up at this same sky—right now,” Chant-Elle said. She crossed each hand to the opposite shoulder, forearms over her chest. “Mama says she can hear my heartbeat when I do this. Think she can?”        

Laura crossed her own arms, felt them press against her beating heart. “I think what your mom says could be true.”

Laura imagined the night sky of Mauritania—so far away now but nearer than the stars. When Laura closed her eyes, she could still imagine Ahmeed’s light touch on her shoulder on the nights he walked her home, their outline a double-peaked velvet shadow, their voices as soft as their footsteps over the sand. 

Even when they were away from each other in the day, she had felt his presence, a pull on her like the moon’s attraction of the tides, the moon so powerful even when invisible in the day sky. Maybe he was influencing her even now. 

In the instant before he had turned away from her, his eyes had locked with hers, perhaps longer than he intended. Now Laura understood the wisdom of that look—why his eyes were sad, knowing the breadth of their relationship, knowing everything that connected them and at the same time all the things that set them apart.           

As Laura thought back on it now, she realized that him rushing away from her had not been as effortless as she might have thought. By forgoing hesitant goodbyes and melodrama, he was releasing her, as she would need to release Chant-Elle. Laura put her thumb against her finger, felt that it was no longer tender at the spot where she had forced the splinter out.

“What is that faraway look in your eye?” Eddie asked, coming over to her. 

“Thanks for helping me make this a great day for Chant-Elle,” she said.

“Even though we frightened the crap out of you on the roller coaster?”

“Yes, even so,” Laura said, patting his arm.

She looked at the dark sky thinking of Coney Island and the track of the mighty Cyclone lit up for the night. She imagined the clatter and dip, the circle and soar, as it whirled around to where it was supposed to go, as it followed a predetermined pathway in a boundless sky.

Connie Draving Malko earned a master's degree in electronic media from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and had a career in media writing before turning to short fiction. Other stories that she has written appeared in West Trade Review, Mount Hope Literary Journal, North American Review, and Hamilton Stone Review and are upcoming in the Heartland Review and the Headlight Review. She is currently working on a short story collection.

Big Hark

Brilliancy in the Fundación Ortega y Gasset Sala de Inglés

The American girls, sweet and friendly, like a litter of puppies, called me Sucia because I am named Diane and translating Dirty Diane sounds funny to giggling future teachers of high school Spanish.

You they called Che because you came from Argentina. Because you were handsome. Because you dressed in waistcoats like a Buenos Aires banker and carried a briefcase bursting with Borges and Cortázar and Mario Paoletti. 

One day those girls found a game and its pieces in the school’s sala de estar. Play, they commanded, and we did. I sorted the pieces as three tolls from the cathedral’s 17-ton campana gorda vibrated through the bones of the former convent that housed our international institute for language and culture and art. 

As we waited for the ringing to settle, the girls hopped about excitedly in sweatshirts that helpfully detailed their provenances, like cheerful, stitched-on pedigrees. From Indiana this one comes. This one, Wisconsin. This one, Nebraska. This one, Mizzou. 

Play! said the puppies, and we began.

You knew the pieces’ names but not their movements. Good enough, they determined. They resolved you should learn. They resolved I should teach you. And you resolved to smoke your foul black Ducados while I walked you through what I remembered from my days in lycée, before my studies in art history took me from Paris to London to Rome.

I had come there to Toledo to study Mudéjar architecture. The mixing of three great cultures in one time and space. I had hoped to unlock the mysteries of my parents’ union—my father, the Muslim; my mother, the Jew. I just didn’t plan on finding you there, my Christian.  

“Tell me again the names as you know them.” 

“Torre,” you said, offering the one on the end. 

“Torre,” I repeated, surprised. “Claro. Por supuesto. That makes sense. Same in French,” I told you. “Tour.”

You handed me another one, a neighbor. 

“Alfín,” you said. “It means in English bishop. Like the priest.” 

“That one we call le fou,” I said. “The jester.”

At the next one you said confidently, “Caballo.”

“Oh stop it,” I laughed. “¿De veras?” 

“Yes. It’s true. Caballo—te lo juro.”

“Chevalier,” I corrected. “The rider. Como caballero andante, sabes. Don Quijote.” 

“But no caballero rides on top of him,” you protested. 

And the puppies squealed, delighted, attracting rolled eyes and huffy sighs from passing students dismissed from the 14h00 section of your colleague’s class on the verbal Borges. 

“Mira,” you teased. “Tell me. Just what? Go on, say it.” 

“I don’t want to.”

“It is a horse!” 

And the puppies toppled over! 

“It’s a chevalier,” I insisted.

“No,” you said in your language. 

“Si,” I said in mine.

“That word you say is Spanish.”

“Mais non. Français.” 

“¿Si?” 

“Oui. Following a negative question.”

“You say yes when what you mean is no?”

“Sort of. That’s French.”

You smiled that smile of yours, the glint of the Desaguadero dancing in your teeth, the smoke of La Rioja curling through your hair, a wry knowing cackle from those brujas hiding amongst the shadows of the Andes in your eyes, saying “No, no, no, morena, we will never let you keep him.” 

“That’s a woman.” 

And the puppies barked, and so did I, and we all knew you deserved it.

I stood and lifted the most powerful piece with a fire you’d come soon to know, eh, hombre? “This?”

“Reina,” you purred, and the puppies loved you all anew for it. 

You stopped. Caressed her mate. You said, “Rey.”  

Like a sunbeam.

“Rois,” I responded.

Like a cheer. 

“Peón.” 

“Mmm hmm. Pion. Like yours, but faster. And when I do this?” I asked, demonstrating en passant. 

“Ah, si,” you brightened. “This term I know. La captura al paso. And jacque is next, yes?” 

“Échec.”

“I like that,” you giggled. “Échec.”

“Jacque mate,” you continued, suddenly stern and final. “This ends the game, no?”

“Échec et mat,” I said, toppling the chessman with a clack. “Yes, that ends the game.” I reached across the table and restored its upright position, leaving it there purposely askew. 

“J’adoube,” I said adjusting. “This you say in French no matter what language you play. Those are the rules.”

“You cannot make me use that language.” 

“You must. And if you touch a piece without saying ‘j’adoube,’ you have to move it.” 

“Ah, but what if the piece I touch is not one of mine?” 

“You have to capture it—if there exists a legal move.” 

“If there exists a legal move, I must capture this thing I touch?”

“Those are the rules.” 

Your hand covered mine.

Everybody saw it—The puppies. Pilar. Don Mario. Everyone.

*

Para Pilar Bravo

Big Hark is a writer from Chicago.

Elizabeth Christopher

The Gift

Grażyna’s father saw ghosts—a woman clutching a bundle, her face like ash, appeared in the cellar, aside the monstrous coal furnace. A soldier, with the face of a boy, came to him out back, near the garbage heap. Ludwik, who came upstairs to their apartment to play cards on Saturday nights, said the ghosts were only in his head. But Grażyna’s grandmother saw them, too. “A family gift,” she called it, though she hadn’t seen one since they left Poland. “I don’t know any dead people here,” she said, as she placed down her cards, making Gin. 

Grażyna was glad she’d never seen a ghost. She wanted to keep it that way; that’s why she closed her eyes whenever she heard a noise in the middle of the night and whenever her grandmother sent her to the cellar for a bottle of wine. Grażyna would prop open the door, flick the switch at the cellar stairs, and squint so she could see just enough to keep from knocking over the boxes of her mother’s pottery they’d brought with them from Boleslawiec. 

Though she’d never seen a ghost, Grażyna was like her father, “in every other way,” her grandmother said after he died. She meant his blond hair and dimpled chin, but she also said this whenever Grażyna came home from high school and left her jacket on the floor or her books at the table. “Just like your father, taking me for granted,” she said, picking up the jacket and hanging it in the front hall closet. When Grażyna finished high school and enrolled in secretarial school, her grandmother said it again: “Just like your father, always wanting to do better.”

When her grandmother died, Grażyna half expected to see her appear at the foot of her bed just to scold her for not soaking the dishpan in which Grażyna had cooked the last of the pierogis she’d left wrapped in wax paper in the freezer. But she didn’t appear, and for the first time, Grażyna was relieved to be truly alone. 

The day Grażyna graduated from secretarial school, she ate soup by herself in the luncheonette on Washington Street. Then she crossed the street to Filene’s, where she stood at the window, sketching in her mind the lines of the pink pencil skirt suit she saw there so she could make her own. 

She got a job at an insurance company in one of the two skyscrapers downtown, and on her first day she wore the suit, the new pair of gloves, and the purse with the short strap she’d bought to go with it. She had set her hair the night before so in the morning it swooped like soft-serve ice cream.

“Just like Mrs. Kennedy,” Ludwik said to her from the stoop as she left for work. His comment pleased her. That was just the kind of American she wanted to be—someone who’d crawl out of the line of fire to save herself.

She took the long way to work, down Beacon Street, so she didn’t have to cross through the Boston Common, which was occupied by war protesters who sat in smoky clusters on the sloping green where her father had taught her to fly a kite, drawling out protest songs. Her father would have called them fools for not knowing how good they had it.  

Her father had wanted them to leave Poland when the Nazis came, but his wife—Grażyna’s mother—refused to go. The Nazis had burned their factory to the ground where generations of her family had made pottery, even for royalty, when there was royalty. “They’d rebuild after the war,” she reasoned. So they took what they could and set off for a village in the hills where they knew a farmer that would take them in. Her mother gave the farmer her very best platter, hand painted to look like peacock feathers. She gave him a pitcher in indigo blue, and the bowl she’d pressed into shape on the wheel from a piece of clay that pressed back at her with the will of a child. Two years they stayed in that barn. Grażyna had been a good baby, her father said. Never cried, never gave them away.

*

One night, Ludwik knocked on Grażyna’s door. He was holding a bouquet of daisies. “Marry me,” he said. Her father had been his best friend, the only one who shared his painful past. “We’re already connected,” he said. She laughed before she could stop herself, and his face, which was the face of an old man, grew hurt then angry. “You don’t understand what you’re giving up,” he said and slunk away. The next week she moved into an apartment with two other girls from secretarial school. She stopped cooking the old foods—the kielbasa and pierogis her grandmother had made every Thursday. Instead, they ate TV dinners or no dinner at all; sometimes they’d eat just a handful of popcorn and smoke a pack of Virginia Slims to keep their figures. They played records in the front room and did the twist, the pony, the hully gully with boyfriends who greased their hair. Afterwards, the other girls let their fellas into their bedrooms, but Grażyna made hers sit at the kitchen table, giving him nothing more than a cup of tea. In their hands the surface of the tea trembled, the bodily sounds from the girls’ bedrooms electrifying their fingertips. Her grandmother’s words haunted her: why give away the milk for free.

*

Grażyna married a man from the office, a risk analyst from Cincinnati who wore wire framed glasses and polished brown shoes. He bought them a house in the suburbs and put up a security fence that crows used as a perch. 

When their daughter, Jennifer, turned fourteen, she told Grażyna she’d seen a ghost. “An old woman at the stove,” she said lifting one side of the headphones from her ear as if it were nothing.

Grażyna told her about the family gift. “Then why haven’t you seen one?” Jennifer asked, her brown eyes digging like always. Grażyna said she didn’t know. She didn’t know why her grandmother appeared to Jennifer, but not her. But it was freeing not to be haunted. Not to have anyone to remind you of your past. That was a gift, too.

*

Jennifer had a gift for numbers, like her father. Math came easy, though she learned to pretend it didn’t so the girls at school would like her. Jennifer hated her mother, for her contradictions and for the way she moved like a ghost through the house when the cleaners were there, making sure they dusted the grandfather clock and didn’t knock the Polish pottery out of the cabinet, even though her mother claimed to hate these things—saying the clock was nothing more but a hand-me-down from her husband’s relations and the pottery was garish, not right for this house. She didn’t get along with people. At her field hockey games, her mother was always at the far end of the sideline, away from other parents, a long cloud of smoke billowing from her cigarette, as if she were a receding freight train. 

On the day of her high school graduation, Jennifer told her mother she wasn’t going to college like her mother had planned for her, and instead was going to backpack across the country with her boyfriend. She didn’t look at her mother’s eyes as she said this; rather, she fixed them on Grażyna’s latticework of hair sprayed into place atop her head like Nancy Reagan’s. Her father put his newspaper in front of his face. “You speak to her,” he said in a pitch set to avoid confrontation.

*

But Grażyna didn’t speak. Jennifer’s folded arms were armor. Her face was a challenge. Give me your best, her body seemed to say. Grażyna felt what she’d always known: that a mother’s usefulness was finite. You could give your children life, but that was all. That was all her own mother could do.

Her daughter sent postcards. A Mississippi Steamboat. The Grand Canyon. The Golden Gate Bridge. When Jennifer wrote that she was going to have a baby, Grażyna tore up the card, set it on fire in the sink with her lighted cigarette, then put it out under the faucet. 

The first time Grażyna met her grandchild was when the baby was a year old. Jennifer and her boyfriend, who Jennifer called her “partner,” would come home for a long weekend. “That was all,” Jennifer had said from the payphone. “So don’t try to persuade us to stay longer.” She hung up.

*

The weight her daughter had gained looked good on her, Grażyna thought as she ladled soup from her mother’s tureen. She looked more settled, less wild. More like a mother. 

“You’re using the tureen,” Jennifer said. Then came the familiar cynical edge to her voice. “Why?”

“It’s a special occasion,” Grażyna said, looking at the four of them around the dinner table: her husband, her daughter, the partner, and of course the baby, who they’d named “Aleksandra,” her grandmother’s name. The baby was in the highchair Grażyna had the presence of mind to order just in time for their arrival, making a mess of the pear she’d given her.

“I used to beg her to use the pottery,” Jennifer was saying to her partner. “But she wouldn’t. Not even on holidays.” Grażyna kept her eyes on her granddaughter, willing herself not to react to her daughter’s provocation. Grażyna’s eyes drank in her granddaughter in a way she never did her own daughter, marveled at her hungry hands, breathed in the organic scent of her like the forest.

“It’s beautiful,” the partner said. He’d been studying the tureen, the peacock feathers soaring upwards, the brushstrokes of her mother’s handiwork. 

Jennifer’s partner was as gangly as he had been in high school. He still hadn’t cut his hair and now he had a goatee. Like her daughter, he had been at the top of his class, and now he managed a coffee shop.

“Why don’t you take it with you,” Grażyna said. 

“The tureen? We couldn’t do that,” the partner said, looking alarmingly at Jennifer.

“You like it, don’t you?” Grażyna said to her. Holding onto her mother’s pottery had felt like holding onto a grudge, something she’d take out and turn over in her hand from time to time just to feel the weight of it. Now she wanted to be done with it.

“That never mattered before,” Jennifer said into her soup bowl. 

He laid a gentle hand on Jennifer’s knee. “Maybe she wanted to keep it safe for you,” he said, raising his eyebrows. He looked like a puppy, trying to elicit some small kindness from her daughter. Aleksandra had his brown eyes, Grażyna noticed, the same contented expression. 

“Uppy!” Aleksandra said, holding up her hands to Grażyna, who reached over and brought her to her lap.

“My mother came from a long line of potters,” Grażyna said to him as she stroked Aleksandra’s hair. She told them about the factory. About how when her mother had a chance to leave Poland, she didn’t take it. Not even the pull of motherhood had been enough. “When word came they were coming for them, my father ran into the woods with me. My mother went to protect her pottery.” Her husband looked at her, pushing his wire framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. 

No one said anything for a few moments. 

“Damn Nazis,” the partner said, shaking his head and taking another mouthful of soup.

Grażyna looked at her husband. He tilted his head at her in a way that said, “go easy on him, he’s just a boy, after all, what does he know about what’s an appropriate thing to say about such horrors?” 

 “It wasn’t the Nazis who shot her,” Grażyna said. “It was our own people. They betrayed us to save themselves.”

The four of them looked at the tureen and said nothing. 

*

After the dishes were washed and the house was dark, and Jennifer and her partner and the baby were upstairs settling down for the night, Grażyna was at the kitchen counter, insulating the pottery in newspaper. She’d ship it from the post office in the morning, so it would arrive at Jennifer’s door before New Years.

She heard her daughter’s footsteps on the stairs. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Jennifer said, coming into the kitchen. 

“Because it’s all in the past,” Grażyna said. 

Jennifer put a hand on Grażyna’s shoulder. “But it’s my past, too,” she said.

*

For years, Grażyna had told herself that having a ghost of a mother was enough. That it had allowed Grażyna to become whoever she wanted to become. She supposed it was how she mothered her own daughter. Later, from her bed, Grażyna could hear the baby’s contented babble and the soft voices of her parents through the bedroom walls. She closed her eyes and held onto that moment, knowing it was a gift. 

Elizabeth Christopher lives and writes in Massachusetts. Her stories and essays have appeared in Huffpost, The Writer, Bacopa Literary Review, The Penmen Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, Obelus, and elsewhere. See more of her writings at www.elizabethchristopherwriter.com