Goodbye (for now)
Welcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingWelcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingThe following excerpt from Zigzags by Kamala Puligandla is published with permission from Not a Cult Press. The Obvious Combination of Beef Stew and American Cheese Richard saw himself in me since the day we met, which was something I had never been able to shake.
Continue ReadingThe below excerpt is from Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel © 2020 Ava Homa. Published May 12, 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS.
Continue ReadingThe following is excerpted from Brad Fox’s To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020) and is reprinted here with permission. To Remain Nameless –
Continue ReadingThe following story from How to Walk On Water and Other Stories by Rachel Swearingen is reprinted with permission from New American Press.
Continue Reading“The String” by Victor Ladis Schultz was first published in failbetter.
Herman Bloch was the first to fall ill, though back then we thought him merely overcome with grief. His niece had been killed. That awful business in Delaware. Sweet girl passing notes in class. Small mercy: she was the first victim. Never even saw the shooter, classmates say. Never felt a thing, we hope.
We were shocked for maybe ten minutes, not so much because a resident’s niece had died–however suddenly or tragically or violently–as because she had brought on us, a small-town nonplace out west, the hungry condoling eye of the entire republic. When the eye flitted to the next victim’s backstory, we reacted as infants passed from strange hands back to our mothers. The tension left our bodies. Best to forget all that. There there.
Herman tried to forget too. When he left town for the funeral he was still struggling to put on a brave face, but by the time he returned he looked rejuvenated. Reborn, almost. Bloch taught music at our middle school, and before long the children started to leak accounts of some truly bizarre songs in class: glacial dirges, no melody or dissonance, words that were foreign or nonsensical, possibly extraterrestrial, and sung only by Bloch. His interactions with the faculty raised as many eyebrows. His first week back, when the social studies teacher accused him of stealing her lunch, Bloch marched her straight to the faculty lounge, opened the fridge, and pointed out that he had eaten everyone’s lunch, not just hers, and what made hers so special anyway since she hadn’t even buttered the bread on her ham-Swiss? The principal let this pass with a verbal admonishment; grief can make us not ourselves. But when, one morning the following week, the custodian unlocked the school only to find Bloch asleep on a drop cloth in the gymnasium, the signature cerulean-and-gold walls now cozied by an almost comically gentle shade of pink, the superintendent had no choice but to place Bloch on administrative leave.
Administrative leave turned into psychiatric care. Bloch was a confirmed bachelor, lived alone. A neighbor found him catatonic in his own living room. He had fouled his clothes. Hadn’t eaten in days, certainly. His medical record showed no history of manic depression, no history of anything.
The professionals in the psychiatric ward performed admirably. Bloch’s body was on the mend within a couple of days, but the most dramatic transformation took place in his personality. Gone was the hyperactive vandal, gone the bandleader from Mars. In their place stood Herman Bloch as he had been before the tragedy–but better. Colleagues who visited him noted a more patient temper and a subtler sense of humor. Most unmistakable was what seemed a newfound erudition, a certain but unpretentious knowledge of things that had once happened in the world. Current events too. At first we assumed he just had a lot of extra time to read the internet while he was in hospital care. Only when he began making equally certain pronouncements about the future did we take pause.
Take heed, he said. The Harvest Festival will be canceled this autumn.
Take heed, he said. The snows this winter will be our worst yet.
For old Margot Belcher he had bigger news: Take heed, he said. Mrs. Belcher will have a son seventeen months hence, on the 21st of December.
Margot had never spoken to Bloch in her whole life. The doctors held him for further testing.
Not long after that the spree shooting at Ida happened. The casualty figures weren’t as high, of course, but imagine our surprise when one of the dead turned out to be the Cruz boy from over on Juniper Street. He had grown up here and then gone on to make something of himself. His family still lived in town: parents, a couple sisters. Good tight circle of friends. College kid, they’d called him, but never fancy college kid. Afterward he moved to Michigan to teach high school. History.
His mother, Maria, was the first Cruz to lose it. Tried to bury herself in her own backyard, middle of the night. His father, Eugenio, checked her into the hospital just in time for his own spell the next morning. Drove his jeep at speed right into the war memorial in the town square. When witnesses dragged him uninjured from the wreckage, they found he was soaked and naked, as if he’d jumped straight from the shower into the car. The Cruzes shut down quicker than Bloch had. Just a week after we heard about Ida, all four of them were glassy eyed in the hospital. Worse yet, the daughters’ families started to act up. One of their sons built a ham radio, then initiated a series of broadcasts comprising only epic screeds against individuals whose names no one had ever heard–not the boy’s father, not his siblings, not his few nonplussed listeners, not the deputy who visited the home just before the boy fell catatonic and joined his mamá and abuelos in the psychiatric ward. A few days later, the father sneaked off his job as a hunting guide. Stranded a few tourists in the hills. They were lucky to get out alive. He turned up the next week, bearded over and draped in the furs of recently slain mammals. We housed him with his family.
We had to cancel the Harvest Festival that fall. A slew of venders had dropped out unexpectedly.
We suffered through record snowfalls that winter. The trucks ran out of salt by January.
Margot Belcher learned she was pregnant that spring. She had a December due date.
We asked Bloch how he could have possibly known these things. He credited his muse.
The next school shooting was that little academy in St. Louis. The dead gunman had good grades. When police identified him as the grandson of Frankie Metcalf, a lawyer who lives here, we started to panic. When the Cruzes and their kin began making predictions–Take heed, they said–we called an emergency council. Had to use the school’s gymnasium to hold everyone. The room gave off a febrile buzz and the walls seemed to be moving but they weren’t. Mayor Ford had a frog in his throat. His first words into the microphone sounded like a burr looks:
Ladies, gentlemen, this is what we know at this time.
What we knew was that eventually somewhere else would notice. Phones would ring, questions, questions, questions. Word of the sick would get out. We would become a case series. We came to an agreement: we would quarantine ourselves. No one in, no one out–it was the responsible thing to do and only what the republic would’ve done anyway. Meanwhile, perhaps the string, as we’d come to call the phenomenon, would break. Perhaps the next time a psychopath chambered a hollow point in study hall, none of us would lose anyone. Perhaps the sick would heal and life could be something familiar again.
Around the time Metcalf began talking of things to come, we heard about the next rampage. Oregon high school. Casualties were light: a few wounded, just one dead, just a footnote in the broadcasts. The one fatality was cousin to Mora Lee, our treasurer.
The Cruzes’ predictions were starting to bear fruit. Eugenio largely contented himself with the temperatures and tidal activity near the Puget Sound and the Sea of Cortez forty-two days hence, but Maria, it is known, accurately foretold the assassination of the governor down to the minute and caliber of bullet.
The ramifications multiplied quickly; one death often laid low several households. Soon no room remained in the psychiatric ward, then no room remained in any ward. No matter, as too many of the hospital staff had become patients for the facility to operate. For everyday maladies, healing happened at home, or not at all. Teaching too: the school was now a storehouse for oracles. Few lucid students and still fewer teachers had remained once the hospital reached maximum capacity, so we designated the middle school to house the excess ill.
Maria eventually became a pillar among them. The school had been her idea. Your farsight is a gift, she said, and instructed the gifted on its use. She urged her husband to cast about for visions of greater substance. She gave tell of natural disasters and morbidity rates and secret nascent rebellions in lands whose names appear on maps but sounded fanciful on her tongue. All came to pass, and as more time passed the string grew unchecked:
Uintah High, Vernal, Utah–our bank manager’s niece.
Live Oak Elementary, Lafayette, La–our sheriff’s great nephew.
Appleton North, Appleton, Wis–our barber’s cousin’s son.
Memorial High, McAllen, Tex–our principal’s sister.
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC–our baker’s daughter.
Thus did we begin preparing our own bread.
#
I was the last. Blood all over the country: they all ignored me. Kept their young in school. In the end the fated was my own son. Junior-high basketball game outside Cleveland. South Central Trojans vs Monroeville Eagles. My son played forward for the Eagles. My ex-husband had custody but never went to the games. By the time everyone’s ears stopped ringing the only two people left alive on the court were the mascots.
I leave the maternity ward. No one here but far off I can hear a woman screaming. I have an appointment elsewhere. Feel my way down the stairs to the lobby. Its stillness and gloaming. Its broken doors and aquarial windows. Anyone could see in from out there, if there were anyone.
Out into the street where Mr. Orozco used to stand crossing-guard before his niece fell victim to a maniac in algebra class downstate. No cars, no people, the streetlights haven’t come on yet. Still the screaming endless and thin.
So it’s not from the hospital then. Outdoors the direction is impossible to pinpoint. The scream bears the by-now unremarkable intensity of the tortured. You can’t unhear it but so what. The volume here sounds the same as it did in the maternity ward. I am clothed, I notice for the first time.
I do not stop at my house. No need. Nor do I check in on my neighbors: I was the last. As I push eastward, downtown, the pitch does not waver, the shriek does not fade. Here our own manias have left their mark. On one lot stands a spacious lodge built of naked mannequins. Up the street the church’s siding has been stripped and its awing stained glass boarded up: God’s work, the pastor said, over and over, after he lost his youngest brother.
Farther on, the bank’s roof has crumpled under the weight of a fallen cell tower. I stop. I can remember the mannequins and the church and the others, the messages left in the street or the acres of weathervanes planted like steel soy. The fires. I cannot remember the bank. The wind wheezes through the rubble. The scream eats the wheeze. One is of the throat, one of the earth, but which of which? This must have been my work then. I was the last.
At the edge of town, the exodus has begun. Maria directs. We need you, she says. I take my place at the rear. Massed thus we look like many, but the roads are many more that will peel us off the parade, one by one, carry the seers to the extremities of the republic. Surely at the end of such byways waits a host with a long memory for names.
Take heed. Years on, the fall of cities. Man, hunter. Woman, hunter. Child, hunter. Each by his own hand fed or slain. Then, the rising forth: rivers, reservoirs, seafloors. Man becomes fish once again, and woman summons him, and child summons him. They swim as one school, surge as one, as though bound by a single voice unvoiced. Sing, goddess, the anger of our sons.
**
Victor Ladis Schultz is a writer whose short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Third Coast, Confrontation, and other fine publications. By day he works as a copyeditor for a trade journal near Chicago. By night he works on a novel. Follow him on Twitter, where he tweets out minor quotations by major writers.
**
Image: Flickr / ashokboghani
“Trouble” by Kate Wisel, from Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, is reprinted here with permission from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Trouble
We were all the same age, our new neighbors and us. Our puppies were the same age, our new puppy and their new puppy. We learned this as the neighbors hauled boxes out of their car and our little prize thrashed his neck against the thick leash we’d bought at Petco. Unleashed, he mistook my ankles for chew toys. He found my cigarettes, even when I hid them, and ripped them to bits. We should call him Ashtray, I thought.
“That’s why we buy him toys, dumbass,” Niko had said. Cigarettes were already overpriced, and like a homeless person, I was picking through the promising ones.
Outside the new neighbors’ car, for a split second, we expected that we would become great friends. The neighbors and us, just like normal couples. Just like the puppies, normal puppies, who were pawing at each other like lovers.
“What’s your puppy’s name? Sorry I’m eating strawberries,” the girl said. She dropped the carton and the strawberries rolled next to her laundry basket. The puppies teamed up to demolish the berries, then chewed her sweatshirt collar, the gray sleeve darkening with slobber.
“His name’s Trouble,” I said. News to Niko, who looked at our puppy reluctantly, but I had him there. It wasn’t something he could argue with. Our puppy had hole-punching teeth and coal-lined eyes like an emo teenager.
“Get back,” I said. Trouble was spread eagle on the concrete as the neighbors’ puppy tongued his privates. I jerked his leash back. Not on my watch. I scooped up Trouble as he writhed in my arms, then started yelping like a Mormon girl during a kidnapping. I edged up the stairs while Niko charmed the neighbors. The girl bought it, and started talking his head off about how we should all go to dinner. Or make it.
“We should have a dinner party,” the girl said. “We’re twenty-six. We’re over partying.”
Briefly I saw myself from the view of the light fixture on the stairs, head-first, swollen eye, the door locked, bolted, my credit cards strewn below me like clues.
**
Later, while Trouble raised his leg to pee freely in the corner of the kitchen, I asked Niko if he noticed that both the girl and the guy neighbors had lazy eyes. I just thought, what were the chances? Both of their eyes milked at the center, identically, their pupils going googly like Magic 8 Balls.
“What does it matter?” Niko said, pouring bacon grease into a beer can. It matters to me, I thought. Did they look at each other, or half look at each other, and think, You complete me?
I hid under the dining room table with Trouble, squeezing him like a tube until he slinkyed out of my grip. I loved Trouble so much that I kind of wanted to hurt him. The muscles of his underside were so tender that to even look at him I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to shreds. Trouble stared back like he was so miserably disappointed in me, though he’d only known me a month. I thought of my brother when he was little and couldn’t speak. How he twisted his hands in front of his mouth. Blowing kisses, pointing to cookies in the aisle, then back to his mouth. Mouth to object, object to mouth. His sincere words dribbling out like applesauce. Since I couldn’t understand him, I would push him as hard as I could when no one was looking. I’d push him again, his helplessness the maker of my fury.
Trouble gagged, hunched, and heaved onto the hardwood. My cigarettes.
“No! Trouble! No!” I said. I pointed my finger to emphasize my anger, but it reworded itself as excitement. “Go! Trouble! Go!”
I kept my head in my hands as Trouble ran track around the table. He howled, barks like gunshots, his paws slipping and clicking on the hardwood.
“Why are you such a fucking baby?” Niko said, walking past, assaulting me with the sharp smell of new sneakers. At the coffee table he looked otherworldly, with his plate of stacked bacon, paleo fanatic that he was. Niko was gorgeous—everyone knew. He had slick black hair and tan skin like a man on the beach whose shoulder beads with water. Our children would be blended and according to any elderly lady in line at Stop n Shop, beautiful. I sometimes imagined their sparkling cheeks and kinky, highlighted hair. They would be him with my affectations. In photos, their eyes tiny riots, wild with inarticulate demands.
**
I want to tell you why I disliked our neighbors, the girl in particular, so you won’t hate me as much as my puppy hated me. The following week on the back stairs, the girl remarked on the convenience of our shared lawn out back. When she spoke, I couldn’t tell which eye to look into, so I looked at the lazy one. It swung up, receiving radio signals.
“There’s going to be a lot of shit in that yard,” the girl said, like a fact. Maybe I didn’t know things, like why Trouble needed monthly shots when I didn’t have health care, but I knew damn well that we should clean up after him. We were adults. Every day, we were adults.
Back upstairs, I’d try to explain this to Niko, but then Trouble would start barking, and we’d freeze. Trouble’s barks were an alarm going off that we did not know how to disassemble.
“What do you want?” Niko would say.
Trouble would hop madly at my waist. “You think I’m playing, esé? Say something.”
Niko would step towards me. He’d say, “Why didn’t you set her straight?”
I’d jerk my head back without meaning to. Niko had hit me many times. More than many. More than hit. Smashed my face into the wall where a mirror from a garage sale hung by the door where I never failed to check my gaze.
**
A month later, I stood on the lawn, shaking my knee. The sky was bleeding down the center like a knife wound. I was waiting for Trouble to go already so I could clomp back upstairs to watch Bravo and eat Doritos standing up. He would circle me, the Doritos a red bag of crack. Am I your fucking Matador? I’d think. His tongue hanging loosely, that deranged shark. It was among these thoughts that I noticed a piece of shit on the lawn.
“Do I have to do everything?” Niko said, all smug, like he was the smarter one. We were on our deck with the higher view of downtown. I’d forgotten to take out the trash.
“You don’t even have a job.” Niko liked to remind me. School is a job, I thought. The twelve-pack of craft beers he’d drunk stunk from the sweat that ridged his bald chest, which was now up against mine.
After I reset my nose with a pencil, I went to be alone in our guest room, where Niko’s electric guitars hung on the wall like a rich kid’s toys. I hid in the closet. I was the guest, to talk to the guy I’d been talking to. When he teased me, I teased back, a drip of blood tickling my lip, my old clogs smelling like burnt rubber.
**
The day after the Fourth, both in sweats, the girl and I stood on the lawn as our puppies rocketed towards each other, tumbling together like free-fallers. It was noon and I’d already had two Coronas. My right eye was a puff pastry enclosing a pink slit. I wanted to be alone. Really alone. Before Niko, before Trouble, the neighbors, before I could even remember. I wanted to be alone with the guy I wasn’t supposed to be talking to. I’d go anywhere with him.
“Trouble got bigger,” the girl said.
My heart sprang like a red punch from an arcade game because I couldn’t measure change with what was mine. But he wasn’t mine; I’d never asked for Trouble. Niko and I had woken up from a bad fight. A purple shiner covered my eyelid in a deep swell but matched my makeup, so we decided to go for a walk. We were walking past the thick window of a shelter. Niko thought Trouble could be a gift, a romantic gesture. Wow, I thought, I’ve never received a gift I’d have to walk for fifteen years.
When he picked Trouble out of the litter, I thought he’d stay that same size forever, the size of an organ, sticky-soft and warm. We took Trouble home. He trembled by our feet, then ripped up the sectional Niko had bought without insurance.
“Cut it out, you fucking monster!” I screamed.
In my spot, in the closet of the guest room, he fell asleep and had puppy dreams in the cage of my arms. His paws batted the air in a field where we were free and unleashed.
**
“Hey,” the girl said after the neighbor dog nipped at Trouble’s neck. The girl and I watched as they tugged at each other’s skin, then retreated, their eyes fixed intently on the other’s, waiting to pummel. I didn’t care about my eye, dabbing it with concealer and setting it with powder. I wanted her to see.
“They like each other,” the girl said. I knew what she meant. She meant us. She wanted us to like each other. She wanted it since that first day they pulled up with their goddamn sorcerer’s auras and dirty laundry.
“Stop it,” I said to Trouble.
“Do you want to go to that new Mexican place down the street? Just you and me?” she said.
I wanted to go, I did, but if I opened my mouth, the heat would crawl in. I wanted to sit next to her in the booth with my superior eyes, tracing my fingers down the row of similar but different margaritas. She was waiting, with her permanent grin on, I could tell, though I stayed busy watching Trouble.
He was lunging this way and that way, trapped in the yard, thinking he was free. Was he bigger and why couldn’t I tell? When would I know? And then the dogs started barking, cruel little yips, and I grabbed at the leash, but Trouble had this new kind of force as he lunged at the neighbor dog. I looked at the girl, thinking she would do something. But for the first time she said nothing. Dumb chick just stood there, waiting. I was wordless, wanting. Wanting to look where she looked, but she was looking at me.
**
Kate Wisel is a Boston native. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House Online, and Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street Prize, among others. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and was most recently a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she taught fiction. She currently lives in Chicago. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is her first book.
(c) 2019 Holding On To Nothing by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, reprinted with permission from Blair
Jeptha Taylor had been in love with Lucy Kilgore since he was sixteen and her smile was the reason why. She had a smile that made people feel safe. Jeptha, particularly. He wasn’t sure why exactly—he just knew a warm, contented feeling stole over him that struck him as exactly the kind of silent bliss a newborn baby feels when his mama feeds him. But when Jeptha pulled his Camaro, dark and shiny as a pond at midnight, into the parking lot behind Judy’s Bar on a hot Friday night in June, he had no idea that Lucy’s smile would be for him tonight, that it would spark through him and spread to her like a hay blaze—fiery, fast, and destructive.
No, as far as Jeptha was concerned, tonight was only about bluegrass and ass, if he could get it. It was his first time at Judy’s Bar, and he felt a bit disloyal for being there. The bar had been open for four months and—being run by a Yankee—had been in disfavor for all those months with the local drinkers. Except for the real drunks, neighbors all, whose loyalty extended only to Jack, Jim, and whatever bar gave them the best shot at driving home shit-faced without getting caught. For those who could afford to be principled in their place of vice, the bar of choice was Avery’s Place, owned by a hometown boy named Avery who had spent ten years fighting the Pentecostals and the Baptists, both Freewill and Southern, for the right to open a bar in what previously had been a dry county. That a Yankee swooped in five years after Avery’s long fight finally ended and made use of the same provisions he had fought so hard to establish was enough for Jeptha, his friends, and the rest of the town to stay well clear of Judy’s Bar. Until, that is, four boys, so far unnamed in the paper even though everyone in town knew who they were, got high behind Avery’s Place one night in early July, lit a small fire in a patch of grass already dried out in the summer’s drought, and ran like hell when it whooshed into a patch of wiring that snaked up the outer wall of the bar. The fire caught hold in the electrical system and sparked its way from wire to wire, finally nesting in a box of receipts that Avery kept under a couple of bottles of 151 proof Everclear, reserved for the worst of the worst drunks. Within minutes, there was only a wall of flame where once there had been a bar, and Avery’s customers ran, taking their principles with them.
Jeptha, not being a subscriber to The Review, the town paper, or really much of a reader generally, heard about the fire two days later from his friend Cody. Jeptha and Cody were bandmates in a Boy Named Sue, a bluegrass group that played Friday nights at Avery’s—Cody sang and played banjo, with Jeptha on mandolin. After a respectful period of silence, in which they thought of the drunken nights—both good and bad—they had enjoyed at Avery’s, Cody explained that Judy had called him two days after the fire (“Typical Yankee. Didn’t even wait for the damn ashes to stop smoking.”) and offered the band a job playing Friday nights at her place. Cody was principled, yes, but a fool? No. He’d accepted and gone on to call his band mates. Jeptha was happy to keep the gig, and all too happy to forget any moral stand he’d once had. He’d agreed to be there on Friday.
And so, Jeptha pulled his mandolin off the passenger seat of his car and made for the front door. He was showered for the first time in two drunken days, and most of the stink had worn off. He wondered if the girl who’d been in his bed last night—Brandy? Brandy Anne? She’d been bendy for sure, that one—would be in the bar and up for another go. Bluegrass and sex wouldn’t be such a bad Friday. He wondered if he’d need to remember her actual name to get her back to his place.
Occupied as his mind was, he hadn’t absorbed the fact of the full parking lot, so when he opened the door—happy to smell the right scent of beer, sweat, and leather that came flooding out—he was shocked to see the place packed to the rafters. He wasn’t sure he’d ever played in front of so many people. A trickle of fear gnawed at his belly. He elbowed his way through the crowd. He gave a quick nod and half smile to the girl from last night. She laughed and looked down at the table, but not before Jeptha saw a blush creep up her cheeks. He smiled to himself, pretty damn sure she’d be up for it again, assuming he could finesse the fact that she was sitting with a girl he’d slept with a few months back and never called again. He gripped his mandolin case and worked his way into line, feeling content. It had the makings of a good night.
Jeptha finally caught the eye of the bartender and owner, Judy. She was in her sixties and, rumor was, had moved down to Tennessee to run this bar with a local man she’d met up in Boston. Jeptha was hard pressed to imagine why someone would move to Boston in the first place, and then, having flown the coop, decide to come back and with a Yankee in tow, no less. Still, here they were. Jeptha couldn’t say that Judy appeared happy about it. Her gray hair, which looked to have never seen the inside of a beauty salon, was pulled into a loose bun from which haphazard chunks escaped, and her t-shirt, wet in spots from the ice she dumped into glasses without so much as an attempt at aim, strained over a set of sagging, ponderous boobs.
She widened her eyes at Jeptha. “Yeah?” she said.
“Hi. How’re you?”
“What do you want?”
“Um, I’ll have a Bud Light, ma’am.” Jeptha shut his mouth. She was clearly a Yankee with no time for formalities.
“A Bud Light and what?”
“Just the beer, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
“Okay, ma—” Jeptha cut himself off when her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “Just a beer, please.”
“You guys are too damn polite for your own good.” She slid the bottle across the bar and nodded at the stage. “You with the band?”
“Yes, ma—” Jeptha stopped. “Yes.”
“If you guys need anything tonight, grab Lucy. She’s helping out with the tables.”
Jeptha turned to see the Lucy she was pointing at with her chin, and the trickle of fear in his belly grew to a flood. There she was—the wavy blond hair tickling her waist where her shirt rode up from bending over to take people’s orders; the pert little nose, turned up at the end in a way that was more cute than beautiful; and her cut-off skirt hugging curves he never got to see in church, back when he used to go. Most of all, there was her smile. Every time he saw it, he fell a little bit more in love.
Jeptha knew Lucy’s smile didn’t mean anything when it was turned to him—birth had given her a nice one and she was polite enough to use it often, but Jeptha had never been able to help the feeling he got the few times she flashed it his way. Even though her smile made others feel safe, she rarely looked as if she felt that way. She instead sported a hunted look, as wary as a deer stopping to nose through a leaf pile for acorns in the fall, the kind of deer that looked so nervous, so ready to bolt, that Jeptha could never bring himself to even sight his rifle on it. Every time, a few seconds after warmth flowed through him at the sight of her smile, he’d see that wariness on her face and realize that he may as well have been standing in the woods without a gun, for all the chance he had of getting her. Especially now. He’d heard from his sister that Lucy was leaving town, moving to Knoxville to work and go to school. At least he wouldn’t have to see her anymore, though his stomach bottomed out at the thought.
Jeptha grabbed his beer off the counter for a much-needed sip of courage. Despite the pulsing needs of the crowd, he could feel Judy’s eyes still on him. Her lips flickered. It looked like her last real smile had occurred sometime in the 1970s, and yet here were her lips, the edges moving up subtly toward her eyes. Jeptha mumbled thanks and walked toward the stage, uncomfortably aware of being watched. He kept his head down, trying to avoid making eye contact with Lucy. If he looked at her, the fear he was feeling would travel out to his hands and make them as useful as an arthritic bird dog.
“Y’all ready?” Cody asked, as Jeptha stepped up on the stage and wedged his beer between two amps.
Cody nodded once and then tapped his foot—one and a two and a here we go—and launched into a riff on his banjo, which Jeptha and the fiddler and the drummer raced to catch up with. His fingers were stiff and stumbling. His stage fright, which usually decreased as he played, grew into an untamable creature, fed by the fear of playing poorly in front of Lucy. He played like he was six years old, holding the mandolin for the first time—his fingers glancing off the strings, missing his intros and staring into the crowd at Lucy during what was supposed to a solo. It was the kind of pitiful performance that makes a pick-up band think they ought to start practicing.
During the fourth song, he watched, mesmerized, as Lucy’s hips snaked this way and that through the crowd toward the band. She had a small tray in her hands, on which rested five shot glasses, full of what looked tantalizingly like whiskey. She waited at the left side of the stage a few feet from Jeptha until the song ended.
“Hey,” she said after they wound the song to a half-hearted close. “It’s Jeptha, right? Deanna’s brother?”
“Unfortunately.”
“You said it, not me,” she said, her eyebrow raised. “Judy told me to bring these over. Said y’all couldn’t sound any worse drunk than you did sober.”
Jeptha winced. “I was hoping y’all couldn’t hear that,” he said, passing out shots to Cody and the other guys. He nodded at the tray. “Who’s that one for?”
“Me, I think.”
“You get to drink on the job?”
“You are.” She wrinkled her nose at him and straightened her shoulders, clearly annoyed. Jeptha felt like a fool. “Besides, Judy said I needed to loosen up, get some better tips.”
“You look to be doing all right to me.”
“If you count slaps on the ass as tips, then yeah, I’m rich as hell. Cheers,” she said and tipped the shot down her throat. In his hurry to keep up with her, a few drops of whiskey went down the wrong pipe, and he coughed so hard tears welled in the corners of his eyes.
Lucy cocked her head at him, a teasing smile on her lips. Jeptha’s insides fizzed with a longing so fierce he felt it in his fingertips. “I’ll tell Judy to make the next one a lemon drop,” she said.
“Hey, that ain’t nice,” he said to her, but in his head he was thinking, Do it again. Please, God, do it again.
All trace of teasing dropped off Lucy’s face, and she nodded seriously. “You’ll be great. I heard you play at church back when.”
“You did?”
“Yep. Besides, if you get nervous, imagine all these people naked. Not me, though. I want no part of that, thank you.”
It was the longest conversation Jeptha had ever had with Lucy. She walked away as Jeptha tried and failed to keep his mind off the much-nourished fantasy of her naked. Finally, he shook his head and tore his gaze away. He nodded thanks to Judy, who mouthed, “For what?” followed by the tiniest, coolest of smiles. He relaxed under the influence of the whiskey and the image of a naked Delnor Gilliam tapping his foot against the floor, his gray, straggly beard bouncing off his belly in time to the music. He nodded at Cody, ready to play again.
**
Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, and Globalpost, among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street’s year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists (edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan.) Holding On To Nothing is her debut novel. Find her on Twitter @ecshelburne.
Excerpted from One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow with permission of
Lake Union Publishing. Copyright © 2019 by Olivia Hawker. All rights reserved.
I was leading the cows to the milking shed when my pa shot Mr. Webber. It was the end of the season for blackberries, and the fence beside the shed was thick with vines my ma had planted years before. The evening air smelled of berries, rich and sweet in the way that makes you close your eyes when you breathe in the scent. You can’t help but do it; the smell takes ahold of you and calls to your heart, and it makes you think of all the good things that have passed and all the good things yet to come, so you close your eyes and shut out everything else that’s real, everything that’s drab or sorrowful, all the things that hurt you like the thorns. That’s what I was doing when I heard the shot—standing with one hand on the gate and my eyes closed, thinking about those berries and how, after milking was done, I’d pick a whole basketful and share them with my brothers and baby sister, sweet and good with cream on top, the cream still warm from the cows.
But the moment the shot cracked the air, I opened my eyes and my hand. The pail of grain fell, and the cows pushed me aside to lip up what was spilled. I knew right then that something terrible had happened, something that would change us all forever. And I knew it was my fault—at least some—for I’d be the one who told me pa that the calf was missing, and he’d gone off to search for it. If I’d never told him, if I’d gone to find that calf myself, it would have been me who seen what no one else should have seen, and I would have left it all alone. Never said a word, just drifted off like a ghost through the dusk, with no one any wiser.
But instead, it was Pa who found them, under the poplars by the river, and now Substance Webber is dead.
I can’t say just how I knew it was trouble when I heard that shot. Pa fired his Henry rifle all the time, at coyotes and eagles who came for our stock, and at bears to shoo them away from the places where my brothers and sisters played. Maybe I heard a sound in the rifle’s voice. Maybe it was like a shout of pain torn from my father’s throat, worse than the time his horse slipped and fell on him, and his leg was broken in two places. Maybe it was just because my ma had been missing all evening, and I finally wised up enough to think it strange. She slipped off toward the river once she saw that all her children were fed and the shores were underway. It was a think she’d done for days now, but until the rifle sounded, I’d never thought twice about it. I was big enough to care for the little ones without being told.
As soon as I knew deep down in my heart that something had gone awry, I slapped the cows on their backsides to hurry them into the pen, and then I ran to the house, where the little ones were putting on their nightdresses. I said, everybody into the bedroom, and don’t coe out till I say so. They complained, because they always do, but they did as I told them. They always do that, too. I wanted them shut safely away when the trouble came up from the riverside to our little gray house. I didn’t want them to see the look on our pa’s face when he returned.
When Pa came back through the twilight, he was paler than a bad-omen moon. He walked with a stagger, like he was struck by some illness, and his eyes seemed to see nothing that lay before him—only what lay behind, what had caused him to raise his rifle and pull the trigger before he could think any better. He held the gun as if it was a foreign thing, and too distasteful to bear, one-handed by its stick with the muzzle dragging through the tall grass. Behind him came my mother, hair unbound and weeping into her hands.
I went outside to meet them both. I was scared all at once for them—afraid one of them should fall, like they were fragile, breakable things. The sight of me brought Pa from his daze. He stared at my face for a long time, and it was hard not to look away, for I’d never seen such agony in him before, and I knew right then that he was only a man, and mortal. No girl likes to realize that her father will die someday. Much less does she like to know that grief could be enough to kill him.
Beulah, he said, I done something wrong. I said, I know it, Pa.
He nodded. Pa never questioned this way I have—the knowing that comes to me from the movement of the wind or the scent of blackberries, or the sound of a gunshot by the river.
He said, I got to go now, over to the Webber’s place, and tell that what all happened. And then I got to ride to town and turn myself over to the sheriff. It’s the only righteous thing to be done.
My mother wailed at that and staggered toward him, but Pa stepped back. He held up his free hand, a wall between them. It only made Ma weep more piteously.
I said, I’ll saddle Tiger for you, and he answered, No not Tiger. He’s a fast horse. I can’t say how long I’ll be gone, Little Mite, and you may have need of a fast horse, by and by. You’ll need the saddle, too. I don’t know if the sheriff will return my horse to my farm and my family. I’ve never done this before. Could be a man forfeits his right to his horse when he…when he does what I just done. Put a bridle on Meg; I’ll take her to town bareback.
I still liked to hear him call me Little Mite, even though I was thirteen and not little anymore. And I had never felt older or steadier that I did in that moment, when I stepped away from my parents to pull the old, slow mare from her paddock and ready her so she could carry off Pa to his fate. My mother was still weeping, her cries loud and long like the peal of a bell.
The pain in her voice was heavy to bear. I would have cried, too, if I’d had the lee, for I already felt the badness of it all, the distance between my mother and father opening wider like a crack in the earth. You’ll fall into that cold, damp darkness if you aren’t careful where to set your feet.
But there was work to be done, and no time for crying. Not if we hoped to get by without Pa.
In time, my mother stopped weeping and huddled on the doorstep. In the first silver creeping of moonlight, she looked smaller and frailer than she ever had before. She hugged her body and rocked as if it was a baby she held in her arms, not herself—and she stared at my father, hungry, desperate for one look from him, one word. He gave neither.
I handed Meg’s reins to my pa, and he passed the gun to me. You how to use the rifle, he said.
I nodded. I wasn’t handy with a gun—I never had needed to be—but it was simple enough.
That much I knew.
He said, I’ll send word, soon as I’m able. It’s up to you to think of something to tell the little ones, something they’ll understand.
I said, Is there anything you want me to tell Ma?
He stood listening to the crickets in the long grass. He wrapped Meg’s reins around his fist and tightened it till his knuckles blanched white. Then he took a deep breath, savoring the smell of his homestead and the coolness of a soft Wyoming night. He closed his eyes and stood like that for a long while. When he opened his eyes again, Pa said, In time, I’ll want you to tell your ma how sorry I am, and that I love her still. But that time ain’t come yet. Not yet.
I watched him ride away down the rutted path through our pasture, east toward the Webber farm. When night’s gray shadows hid him from view, I turned my back on Pa and face the house, and my mother wilting on the steps.
I went to her and unwrapped her hands from around her thin body, and pulled her to her feet, where she swayed. We didn’t speak, for I knew she had no words yet, and wouldn’t for days to come. That’s the way with Ma. Whenever a sorrow or a fear comes along to put a crack in her heart, she goes quiet—the only time she ever does. I knew she would say nothing while she was shrouded in grief and remorse, just as I knew that after he took himself to jail, my pa would send word and forgive her.
But until forgiveness came, I had to run the farm on my own. There was no one else who could do it. I wasn’t afraid. I haven’t found anything yet in this life that’s worth being afraid of.
**
Through unexpected characters and vivid prose, Olivia Hawker explores the varied
landscape of the human spirit. Olivia’s interest in genealogy often informs her writing:
her two novels, The Ragged Edge of Night and One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow,
are based on true stories found within her own family tree. She lives in the San Juan
Islands of Washington State, where she homesteads at Longlight, a one-acre microfarm
dedicated to sustainable permaculture practices. For more information, visit
www.hawkerbooks.com/olivia.
The following excerpt from PIGS was reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Red Hen Press:
The pigs ate everything. Kitchen scraps. Bitter lettuce from the garden. The stale and sticky contents of lunch boxes kids brought home from school. Toe nail clippings. Hair balls pulled up from the drain. After the pigs were done, there weren’t even any teeth left over, not even any metal from cavities filled long ago.
They lived in a pen out back. The land was rocky but spacious, and the pen had been tucked in a corner out of sight for more years than any of the children could remember. It was made out of wood, gray, splintered boards nailed together in a haphazard way. Every five feet, the wood was anchored by posts. When you stood by the fence the pigs lumbered over grunting and stuck their snouts out between the rickety slats. It wasn’t always that they expected food. Sometimes they just wanted their snouts scratched. Sometimes they just grunted happily and settled back down in the shade. There were six of them. They never fought. They seemed to smile when you approached. But you had to be quick. If you brought a bucket of slop and poured it out too slowly without moving your hand away, you never knew what could happen.
Luisa was missing a finger. Not an important one. Just her left hand pinky, where she hadn’t moved away quickly enough one hot summer afternoon when she was feeding them shoes. It was summer every afternoon there. Soft and lazy and slow. The pinky came off in one clean bite before she even realized what was happening. She left with a feeling of shame, like it had been her fault the pig grabbed her finger. She wrapped her hand in her skirt and kept her mouth shut, and the stub didn’t start hurting until she lay down for the night.
The land was actually an island. The island was surrounded by water that glinted green in the sun and clouded to gray in the shade. Some might have let the pigs run free, feral among the scrubby bushes. The pigs could have rooted happily for mushrooms or truffles, found entire brambles of berries to eat and maybe left the children alone. They could have gobbled up the entire world’s detritus without anyone’s help. But the grownups preferred the pigs confined. They preferred the relative safety of the fence.
Luisa had lived on the island forever, or for as long as she could remember, which was the same as forever. There were other children too, three of them. Andrew, who sang in his sleep and had straw colored hair. Mimi, who was older, or at least taller, than the rest, and who liked to pretend she knew much more about the world than anyone else, and who couldn’t grow her hair long no matter how hard she tried. There was even a toddler. They called her Natasha. Her head was covered with loose blonde curls. She couldn’t have been more than three, and she giggled every time she heard the grunting of the pigs.
They were all afraid of the gray water, of the sea in a mood of despair. It wrapped the island like a scarf made of grief. It made you choke with tears to touch it.
The children slept together in the same room. It was a whitewashed room in a one-room hut, and they each had a space on the floor. It was comfortable and clean, and they were so used to each other that they never felt crowded. Mimi sometimes said she was getting older and needed more space, but the rest of them were happy to shove over and let her have it. They didn’t have beds, but they’d never heard of beds, and who needed beds anyway? They had blankets. They had pillows. They had mice that skittered along the edges of the room and ate breadcrumbs from the tips of their fingers.
The children ate fish for dinner every night. They picked berries and searched for bird eggs and kept watch from high rocks for sails and garbage on the horizon. Except for Luisa. The distance always blurred for her. Sometimes she wished she could get out on the water, get up close to those ships and find out where they came from. There was no way to tell from far away. But it was just a dream, and she never mentioned it to any of the others. Even in her head, she couldn’t figure out how to make a seaworthy craft.
It didn’t take long for Luisa’s finger to heal into a nice, neat stump. She rubbed it sometimes, and whispered to herself that it was time to grow up and stop being clumsy. She tripped over things easily. She didn’t notice roots or loose rocks or places where the earth buckled. She’d kick the ground in frustration and end up hurting her own foot. It was her fault she’d lost a finger. The pigs were fast, but if she’d been a little more agile they’d have snapped at air. She wondered what she’d tasted like. She hoped she’d tasted good, but not so good that the pig would want more. She tried to remember which one it was that had snapped at her, but even though she was pretty sure it was the one with black spots, she wasn’t sure enough to say.
Sometimes the children tested what the pigs would eat. The leather flaps of shoe tongues. The bent frames of glasses. Mardi Gras beads. Tin cans. Pistols. Cap guns. There seemed to be no limit to their appetite. The children would stand a few feet away from the fence and toss whatever they were testing high into the air. The pigs moved with an unexpected grace, opening their long mouths and catching whatever came sailing down directly between their teeth. The pigs were remarkable. The children watched them with amazement, their own mouths open, their hands, now empty, coming together of their own will to clap. Hub caps. The tassels off bicycle handlebars. Empty jars of mayonnaise. Gone, all gone in seconds.
The grownups on the island frowned at the children and never even pretended to help them with their chores. They drank espresso and smoked cigarettes and plugged their noses dramatically whenever the children got too close. As far as the children could tell, the grownups never cooked.
“It’s not that they don’t know how,” Mimi said. She grabbed every opportunity to be the expert. “It’s that they don’t need to. Food appears. Why should they slave over a hot stove?”
“But what do they do?” Luisa said. “What do they talk about all day long?”
“Do they ever watch the pigs?” Andrew asked.
Natasha gulped and puffed out her toddler’s cheeks.
Nobody had the courage to ask. When Natasha fell into the gray water and came out covered in spots and filled with an unquenchable thirst for a parent that even Mimi couldn’t solve, the grownups flinched at the sight of her.
“What are they here for?” Luisa said. Sometimes she thought, “Maybe we should just feed them to the pigs.”
**
Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novel City of Ghosts and, most recently, PIGS (Red Hen Press). Her honors include the James W. Hall Prize for Fiction, an Artist Trust GAP award, and a Jack Straw Fellowship. In 2016 she was named Runner Up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Best of the Net Anthology, and Catamaran, among others. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington, where she teaches at Whitman College.
Excerpted from The Future of Another Timeline copyright © 2019 by Annalee Newitz.
Drums beat in the distance like an amplified pulse. People streamed over the dirt road, leather boots laced to their knees, eyes ringed in kohl, ears and lips studded with precious metals. Some gathered in an open square below the steep path to the amphitheater, making a bonfire out of objects stolen from their enemies. The smoke reeked of something ancient and horrific; materials far older than humanity were burning. A rusty sunset painted everyone in blood, and shrieks around the flames mixed with faraway chanting.
It could have been Rome under Nero. It could have been Samarkand when the Sogdians fled. It could have been Ataturk’s new Istanbul, or a feast day in Chaco Canyon. The technologies were industrial, Neolithic, and medieval. The screams were geochronologically neutral.
I paused, smelling the toxins, watching a woman with jet-black lips and blue hair pretend to eat a spider. One of her companions laughed. “Michelle, you are so gross! This isn’t an Ozzy concert!” They paused at the ticket booths to flip off the Vice Fighters, a gang of conservative protesters waving signs covered in Bible quotes. Some of them were burning CDs in a garbage can, and the stench of melting plastic formed a noxious bubble around their demonstration.
The Machine had not delivered me to an ancient war, nor to an anti-imperialist celebration. I was at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in 1992, deep in the heart of Orange County, Alta California. Soon I’d be seeing one of the greatest punk bands of the decade. But I wasn’t here for history tourism. Somewhere in this rowdy concert crowd, a dangerous conspiracy was unfolding. I needed to find out who was behind it. If these bastards succeeded, they would destroy time travel, locking us into one version of history forever.
I bought a lawn seat and raced up the winding pedestrian walkway to the seating area, lurid with stadium lights. The theater was relatively small and open to the sky, with a steep grade of loge seats above the prized orchestra section next to the stage. The lawn formed a green semicircle above it all, pocked with mud puddles and beer cans. Still, even up here, the air vibrated with anticipation for the headliner. Spotlights sent a cluster of beams racing around the stage.
Grape Ape’s lead singer Glorious Garcia strutted out alone, sequins on her tattered skirt shimmering in the glare. She let out a furious howl. “HOLA, BITCHES! IF ANYONE CALLED YOU A SLUT TODAY, SAY IT WITH ME! SLUT SLUT SLUT!” All around me, women joined the chant. They wore battered combat boots, shredded jeans, and wrecked dresses. They had tattoos and black nail polish and looked like warrior queens from another planet. Tangled hair flashed in every possible artificial color. “YOU SLUTS ARE BEAUTIFUL!” Glorious fisted the air and aimed her mic at the crowd, still chanting, “SLUT SLUT SLUT!” Back when I went to this concert for the first time, I was an angry sixteen-year-old with too many piercings for suburbia, wearing a military jacket over a 1950s dress.
Now I was forty-seven on the books, fifty-five with travel time.
My eyes flicked to the things I never would have seen back then. Everyone looked so scrubbed and affluent. Our rebel fashions were cobbled together from the expensive stuff we’d seen in some New York Times story about grunge. But what really jolted me was the way people occupied themselves as they waited for the music to start. Nobody was texting or taking selfies. And without phones, people didn’t know what to do with their eyes. I didn’t either. I watched a guy in a Dead Kennedys shirt urging a hip flask on a woman who was already so drunk she could barely stand in her platform creepers. She stumbled against him, swigging, and he gave a thumbs-up sign to his pal. The punk scene, once my inspiration, now looked like a bunch of future bankers and tech executives learning how to harass women.
The rest of the band charged on stage, Maricela Hernandez’s guitar squealing over the clatter of drums and bass fuzz. Cigarette smoke and sound merged into a throbbing haze around us. From my distant perch, Glorious was a tiny figure with the biggest voice in the world.
“THIS IS A SONG ABOUT THE GIRLS FROM MEXICO WHO ARE PICKING FRUIT IN YOUR IRVINE COMPANY FARMS! LET’S RIP DOWN THE FUCKING BORDER NET AND STOP THE KILLING!”
That took me back. In 1991, a huge group of refugees fleeing Mexico had drowned in the Gulf of California, just as they’d almost reached the safety of U.S. soil in Baja. They’d gotten tangled in offshore nets the border patrol set up to stop illegal immigrants.
The music tore through me until it merged with muscle and bone. I had a job to do, but I couldn’t move. Grape Ape was the only thing here that hadn’t been warped by my disillusionment. They still had the power to replace my cynicism with a feeling that careened between hope and outrage. Strobe lights churned the darkness, and the audience frenzy reached beyond fandom, struggling toward something else. Something revolutionary.
Then I felt a broad hand on my upper arm, squeezing a little too hard, and a large male body pressed against my back. I tried to elbow him and wriggle away, but the still-invisible stranger held me in place. He leaned down to whisper-yell in my ear, blotting out the music. “I know you must have many daughters at your age, and you are worried about their future.” His voice was smooth, and his warm breath smelled like lavender and mint. With his free hand, he started massaging my neck as he continued to grip my arm. “That’s why you come to places like this. To find a better way for women. We want that too. Maybe you’ll look past your prejudice against men and read our zine.”
At last he released me and I whirled to face him. He pulled his zine from a rumpled Kinko’s bag. Grainy Xeroxed images of women in chains adorned the cover, and letters torn from magazines spelled out the title: COLLEGE IS A LIE. Flipping through the pages of ten-point Courier font and smeary cartoons, I scanned a few typical punk rants against suburban brainwashing: college teaches conformity, turns you into a corporate drone, destroys true art, blah blah blah. But there was a weird strand of gender politics in it. Over and over, the anonymous authors preached that college “destroys feminine freedoms inherited from our ancestors on the plains of Africa” and “is anti-uterus.” I scanned a paragraph:
Women are naturally empathic, and college tortures them with artificial rationality. Millions of years of evolution have led men to thrive in the toolmaking worlds of science and politics, and women to become queens of emotional expression and the nurturing arts. College denies this biological reality, which is why so many women feel bad about themselves. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Fuck college! It’s time for liberation!
The entire zine was about why women should drop out of college. I looked sharply at the man, a nasty retort on my tongue, but his face stole my words. It couldn’t be. I would never forget those features, so perfectly formed it was as if he’d been grown in a vat full of men’s magazines. I’d last seen him in 1880, at a lecture on suppressing vice in New York City. He was one of the young men clustered around Anthony Comstock, lapping up the famous moral crusader’s invective about the evils of birth control and abortion. Later, at the protest, he’d given me a beautiful smile before punching me in the chest. Gasping for air, I’d dismissed him as one of the many YMCA boys under Comstock’s spell. Now it appeared he was something more—a traveler. I feigned interest in the zine and shot another glance at him. The man might be a few years younger than he’d been in 1880, so maybe this was his first time meeting me. His blond hair was currently spiked in an embarrassing imitation of Billy Idol.
He took my silence as an opening, and leaned closer again, touching my shoulder. “I can tell you don’t quite understand, but you’re intrigued. My friends and I are here to help if you need us.” He gestured to a few other men, all wearing black armbands around their biceps, handing out zines to other women in the crowd. Despite the distraction of Grape Ape onstage, they’d managed to get quite a few people to take one. Fear filled my guts with ice. This guy and his buddies were planting ideas, playing a long game. Trying to eliminate choices for these women in the future. It was a textbook example of a forbidden traveler’s art: editing the timeline.
I was looking for anti-travel activists, people who wanted to shut down the Machines. It was hardly the kind of political stance a traveler would take. But everything about this guy was off. So I followed at a safe distance, watching him whisper in women’s ears, pointing them away from one of their few pathways to power. Eventually, at the very edge of the loge section, the black armband men came together. I stood nearby and bummed a cigarette from an old crusty punk, catching snatches of the traveler’s conversation.
“I think we converted a few today. Good work.” That was the Billy Idol guy, the one I’d seen over a century ago in Comstock’s orbit.
“Do you think we’ll be able to make the edit before time stops?” another man asked.
“We may need to go back a century.”
“How long until we have our rights back? This is taking too long. I think we should hit the Machines now.”
The crowd began to roar, burying their voices.
A terrifying hypothesis coalesced in my mind. There’s only one reason why a traveler might want to lock the timeline, and that’s if he planned to make a final, lasting edit that could not be undone. I looked at the zine again. It was exactly the kind of propaganda that Comstockers would use to revert the secret edits made by people like me and my colleagues in the Daughters of Harriet.
The Daughters often debated whether we were working directly against another group. Even when it seemed like we made significant progress in the past, the present remained stubbornly unchanged. But we had no evidence of oppositional reverts, other than our constant frustration. It was like we were fighting with ghosts.
Now the ghosts had become men.
The Comstocker was delivering a final rallying speech. He gestured at the loge section. “This is what happens when men become victims. But once we take control of the Machine, nobody will remember this world.”
At that moment he looked over and saw me listening. His face went ugly and asymmetrical: he’d recognized me, and realized I wasn’t a temporal local.
“Get her! She’s one of them!” He pointed. Suddenly, four men with black armbands and pale skin had eyes on me.
I took off running, edging my way past the security guards, aiming for the mosh pit. Grape Ape roared through a song I couldn’t hear over the thump of blood in my ears. My momentum was swallowed by a swell of bodies, diverting our chase into a chaotic circle of flailing limbs. Women who smelled like cloves and disintegrating nylon rammed into us. The Billy Idol guy was so close that I could see the acid-wash streaks in his jeans when he grabbed me by the collar. “Get your hands off me!” I shouted. “I have friends at the Chronology Academy, and I guarantee they won’t like the way you’re trying to change the timeline with your shitty Comstocker zine. They’ll send you back to your home time and you’ll never travel again.” Onstage, Maricela shredded a solo. I glared and hoped he believed me, because there was no guarantee the Chronology Academy would agree that he’d violated regulations. Or that they wouldn’t catch me doing the same thing. But the threat worked. He released me with a sneer.
“You misandrist bitch!” He was close enough that I could smell his strangely sweet breath again. “You and your sisters are a genetic dead end. Next time I see you downstream, I’ll make sure you’re punished for spreading lewdness and vice.” Then he shoved me into a young woman who bounced away and smashed back into him with a maniacal cackle. Screeching and spinning with her arms out, she battered the Comstocker over and over until he fought his way out of the mosh pit and disappeared into the crowd. Good riddance—at least for now. I moved with the circle, bumped and bruised and safe inside its performative violence. Bursts of light from the stage illuminated the Comstocker rounding up his black armband pals and heading for the exit. Hopefully I’d scared them a little, though it had been stupid to reveal myself like that.
At least I’d confirmed Berenice’s report at the last Daughters of Harriet meeting. She’d traveled to early 1992 in Los Angeles, gathering data at ground zero for the anti-travel movement. One of her sources said he’d met some extremists hanging around in the alternative music scene. I suggested this concert would be a good place to look for them. This particular Grape Ape show had been famously controversial, called out by the Vice Fighters as a gateway to hell and by Rolling Stone as the most anticipated show of spring. Everyone would be here, especially if they considered themselves radicals.
Of course, I neglected to tell the Daughters that my younger self had been at the concert too. They never would have agreed to send me if I’d mentioned that little detail. Nobody knew what happened to travelers who met their younger selves; it was both illegal and so morally offensive that most scholars avoided the topic. The only detailed description came from a medieval manuscript about the life of an old, impoverished traveler who took the Machine back thirty years to advise himself to save money. When he returned to his present, the traveler found that his house had become a beautiful mansion. But then his bones began to break themselves, and he was plagued by attacks from a cloud of tiny demons that flew around his head unceasingly.
I wasn’t worried about demonic fantasies. They were a staple of medieval manuscripts, along with women giving birth to monsters. I was thinking about evidence-based threats to the timeline, our only timeline, whose natural stability emerged from perpetual revision.
The woman who’d harried the Comstocker earlier was spinning back toward me, and my stomach dropped. I’d been too rattled to recognize her before. Now I could clearly recognize Heather, one of my friends from high school. She barked her crazy laugh again, and I could see the Wonder Woman Returns T-shirt clearly under the lacy bodice of her dress. We’d all been obsessed with the Tim Burton Wonder Woman movies in high school, with their badass heroine in fishnets and leather.
I looked around in a panic. Was I here too? I thought I’d been in the loge section during the concert, which was why I’d avoided that area. But my recollections of tonight were murky. Maybe that was the problem. My younger self seemed so distant that I’d figured— stupidly—it would be easy to avoid her. I kept searching for my lost self until the spotlights poured illumination across the steeply angled seats and I caught a brief glimpse of her—me—with my two best friends at the time. Soojin was on my right, frowning with concentration as she studied Maricela’s fingering technique. And there, on my left, was the person who had been my best friend since we were little kids. The two of us were scream-singing along with Glorious Garcia, fists in the air. Seeing us from a distance, I realized how our closeness had even manifested in dressing like each other. We wore the same trashed vintage dresses and combat boots. People were always mistaking us for sisters back then, which wasn’t far from the truth. We were angry riot grrl clones, except for the hair.
A pasty white boy grabbed Heather roughly and she stumbled toward him, a red lipstick smile bright in her brown face. The boy’s right ear was crusted with safety pins and dried blood. Piercing injury. Very punk rock.
What was his name? A jagged shard of imagery was lodged in my mind, painful and opaque. Oh fuck. The slurry of psychological muck that usually buried my high school memories was gone, leaving behind a crisp picture of what that kid’s face would look like in three hours, when it was covered in blood. I stared at him as he twitched to the music, angry and alive. I had to intervene. If I didn’t, something horrific was going to happen. Many horrific things. And they would all lead, in the end, to a broken and beloved body, robbed of the consciousness that hurled it off a bridge.
Now that I was here, maybe I could undo that whole narrative and make everything right. I muscled my way out of the orchestra section, away from Heather’s laugh and my own age-reversed face, back down the path to the parking lot. Passing the merch table, I felt a painful twist of nostalgia as I read Grape Ape’s once-familiar slogans: MAKE BAJA MEXICAN AGAIN! SUCK MY PLASTIC DICK! SLUTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! At last I reached my rental car. I’d made it out before the encore, which should give me enough time to make an edit. As I turned the key in the ignition, recklessness oozed into me. Had I really come back because of Berenice’s report, or had I been hoping subconsciously for something like this to happen? Some excuse to intervene in my own past?
I wished I could remember my favorite shortcut from thirty-eight years ago, through Irvine’s palimpsest of malls, churches, and walled subdivisions. I’d have to brave traffic. Merging on the 405 freeway, I slowed down and considered what the hell I was doing. The Daughters of Harriet were waiting for me back in 2022, and I needed to tell them about the Comstockers. I should be headed back to the Machine. But this was an emergency. I had to save that boy’s life.
**
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their bookScatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.
Excerpted from Rebel Girls by Elizabeth Keenan. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Keenan. Published by Inkyard Press.
There was a goth girl in front of my locker. Or, more accurately, she was by her locker and trying to get it open, but completely blocking access to mine. She wrestled with the combination a few more times before banging on her locker, as though that would help open it up, her teased-out dyed-black hair moving stiffly in time with each loud thump of fist-to-locker. Under her white pancake makeup, her cheeks were red from the struggle.
“Excuse me,” I said politely, trying to maneuver around her so I could open my own locker and grab my stuff for physics. Mrs. Breaux didn’t accept late work. Last week, she’d even assigned us extra work to keep us occupied while school was canceled for three days during Hurricane Andrew. Thankfully, the storm didn’t damage Baton Rouge too much—not like Florida, and some of the parishes closer to the coast—but I still had to finish my homework by the light of a battery-operated hurricane lamp. Mrs. Breaux told us that it was light enough during the day, and daylight hours provided more than enough time to get homework done. She didn’t care that most of us had to help our parents clear up yard debris during the day.
So if Mrs. Breaux didn’t give us extra time due to a hurricane, she wasn’t going to care that I couldn’t find my homework folder on a random Friday when the weather was sunny and clear.
“Oh, hey, Red!” The girl turned to me with a bright smile that clashed with her almost-black lipstick and crinkled the corners of her eyes, where eyeliner swooped out like the Death character from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Her full-on goth look was a little outside what anyone could normally get away with in terms of hair or makeup, but the girl’s perkiness overrode any sense of the supposed darkness within.
“Hey…?” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Karen? Kandace? Kelly? What was her name? I vaguely remembered her from last year, pre-goth, but the transformation had overridden most of her identifying characteristics.
“Wisteria,” she answered, rocking back on her heels with a nod of finality.
That one was definitely made-up. Like all the goths’ names.
“I’m Athena.” You would have thought my name was made-up, too. But, no, my mom had definitely embraced her love of the classics when she named Helen and me.
“Oh, I know,” she said brightly. “I just like your hair.” At least someone besides Melissa did. Helen said it looked like I’d been assaulted by the Kool-Aid Man, and my dad had just shaken his head when he saw me get off the plane from Eugene with it freshly dyed red.
Wisteria looked back at her locker. “D’you have any idea what’s wrong with this thing? I never had any trouble last year?”
She said everything like a question, a trait I didn’t normally associate with goths. Then again, I hadn’t spoken to most of them. They tended to hang out behind the school smoking clove cigarettes and practicing sullen ennui.
I suspected Wisteria’s lack of trouble last year came from not actually locking her locker, as most people didn’t. I also suspected her current troubles came from Melissa, who liked to mess with people by casually twisting locks as she walked by. Wisteria’s proximity to my locker was a dead giveaway.
“Do you know your combination?” I felt obligated to help, since Wisteria’s struggle was most likely my best friend’s fault. We didn’t have much time between classes, but I couldn’t just bounce off to next period and leave her to suffer.
She nodded. “Yeah, but it just doesn’t work.”
I was going to have to get back at Melissa for this one. Messing with people’s lockers seemed a lot less funny when it was causing stress to someone who seemed like she didn’t deserve it. Not that anyone did, really.
“You need to twist right twice before your first number,” I told her, “then twist left past zero to your next number, and then right again to the last number.”
Wisteria tried again after watching me open mine. “It worked!” She jumped up and down enthusiastically. “Thanks!”
“No problem.” I grabbed my stuff for physics and shoved my religion notebook and calc binder into my locker.
Wisteria paused for a second and squinted at me curiously. “Uh, Red?”
“Mmm-hmm?” I half listened to Wisteria as I continued to search through my locker for my physics homework, which seemed to have gone missing among the chaos of my possessions.
“Uh, this is super awkward, but, I wanted to thank you and Melissa for all your pro-choice activism this summer?” Wisteria said, leaning in so that her voice dropped to an enthusiastic whisper. “It’s a really big deal? Because no one in this school gets it?”
I stopped my search for my physics folder and turned to give Wisteria my full attention. Two things confused me about this conversation: first, I’d had no idea that Wisteria was pro-choice. In theory, I knew there might be other prochoice people at our school, but that theory was, until now, unproven. The second puzzling thing was that she had no real reason to thank me.
Everybody knew about Melissa’s work on the front lines, but I couldn’t take credit for being a badass when my contributions to the pro-choice cause had maxed out at writing an essay for the zine Melissa handed out at the protests and buying a Rock for Choice T-shirt via mail order. Oh, and I also considered keeping Helen away from the protests as part of my civic duty.
I shook my head. “You’ve got it wrong. I totally support Melissa, but I was in Eugene at my mom’s all summer.”
“But your sister?” Wisteria looked at me with a face that mirrored my own confusion, tilting her head to one side and scrunching up her face so much that the curlicue eyeliner crinkled in on itself at the corners of her eyes.
“Helen was in Eugene with me all summer?” Now I was doing the question-voice thing, too, and tilted my head to mirror hers.
“Oh. Oh.” Wisteria’s eyes widened with an epiphany that I clearly wasn’t in on. “Never mind? I think I was given some bad intel?”
Okay, now that my sister was in the mix of a sentence involving “bad intel,” I needed to know what it was. I suspected it had something to do with that weird interaction between Leah and Helen almost two weeks ago, but since then, Helen had clammed up whenever I asked her about it, saying it was no big deal. She eventually resorted to putting on headphones and playing CDs on her Discman during Hurricane Andrew’s landfall so she wouldn’t have to talk to me. Then she’d ignored me all weekend, saying my cello practice was annoying her, and wound up going to her friend Sara’s house. Whatever was going on, she didn’t want my help.
“Wisteria, can you please tell me what you heard?” I pleaded. I wanted to be patient, but it felt like Wisteria had an aversion to being direct. And while it wasn’t Wisteria’s fault that I felt so in the dark, I’d had enough of being the only one who didn’t know what was going on.
“Really, Red, I think I just got confused,” she said with a hesitant smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you!” She paused again, and her smile faded. “It’s just—I heard that you and your sister were more, like, involved with the protests than that. Like, you may want to talk with your sister.” She widened her eyes with emphasis, like I was supposed to understand.
“Oooh-kaay.” I shrugged my backpack up on my shoulder. I usually let Helen fight her own battles, but this seemed serious. After school, I’d check in with her to see if she was all right.
But right now, physics—and the Cute Boy—called.
**
Elizabeth Keenan lives in New York City with her husband and small colony of well-behaved cats. She has a PhD in punk rock, which is as good/bad/cool as it sounds and resulted in lots of academic publications on punk and indie rock, third wave feminism, and gender and sexuality, including the most-downloaded article of all time at the journal Women and Music (which is both impressive and brought her zero dollars). She has been interviewed as an expert about grunge for CBS, about Riot Grrrl for NPR and Vice, and about third wave feminism for The Establishment. Her first novel, Rebel Girls, will be published in 2019 on Inkyard Press. When she’s not writing, she generally spends her time running along the Hudson and helping people navigate the terrifying waters of NYC real estate, because real artists have day jobs. You can follow her @badcoverversion.
Contrary to what you might think, Old Blue was not my dog. Blue was the lawn mower that led to the salvation of my dog, who was also named Blue. Together, these two formed the strongest, inextricably entwined cords of my youth. The one: a black lab puppy. Four and a half pounds of love, joy and energy that filled my waking hours and slept by my side. The other: a two stroke, four horsepower gas lawn mower. Rusty red, stained grass green and spotted with black soot. When first fired up, Blue blew blasts of blue smoke so thick you would close your eyes and cover your face. Canine Blue would bark at it before high-tailing it to the safety of the porch.
We weren’t a wealthy family by any stretch. A younger sister and baby brother, a surly father and mother who tried her best to feed us on his itinerant pay. We never went without a meal but we’d have to fend for ourselves when Mom took on work as a baby sitter or part time secretary. As Blue got bigger, his food bill grew and loud arguments would revolve around “the damn dog”, escalating to threats of leaving him at my Uncle’s farm. I’d cover Blue’s ears in my bedroom above the garage.
My father left for good when I was eight. Even then I knew it was for the best and I didn’t grieve. Instead I tried to comfort my mother as best I could. Someone had to. The first few months seemed alright. Better even, without the shouting and random quick clips across the ear. Blue and I would sit on the front porch, in my father’s old spot and watch the tumble and grind of our dusty street. Sitting there I would recall his gruff “Papers here!” when my bundle of fifty plus newspapers were dropped off at the foot of the drive. With him gone, I felt it was up to me to wave at the truck driver before setting off on the two mile paper route with close to thirty pounds of newspapers over my shoulders; Blue bouncing along beside me, stopping to sniff at every leaf. In winter, there was often a foot or more of snow but in the summer time, it was bliss. September brought the treat of an apple from the McKlintoch’s tree about half up the windy hill. We’d sit up in the fork of the tree, Blue and me, and watch the freight trains rumbling across the bridge out over the bay.
One Saturday morning I got home to find Mom in the kitchen looking over some loose change. She had been crying. I knew it was about money. “You want me to pour you some coffee Mom?” I asked.
“There’s none left. We haven’t got enough,” she replied. Blue could sense distress in people and tried unsuccessfully to tuck his nose up under her arm.
I knew the value of a dollar. I knew that those who worked hard for it did not give it up lightly. Mr. Barrington once tore a strip off me for accidentally charging him twice in a month for the newspaper subscription. It was $1.65 but he screamed bloody murder and threatened to call the police. I was so humbled by the experience, I wanted to quit the paper route that day, but I knew I couldn’t. Every bit helped. My sister and I knew that and we would never complain. “We just all got to pitch in a bit”, I would tell her.
But I knew it was coming. I knew Blue was a burden. I was prepared but still, I did not want to give up my dog. I would not give up Blue. I’d have to find another job.
Mr. Barrington lived by himself in a large house that looked out over the bay. It had a huge front lawn and an even bigger back yard that swept down a hill. He limped from an injury of some kind and the grass on the lawn was always a little too long. I was afraid of him. I thought of him as some kind of ogre. Blue felt the same way, cowering behind me until I mustered up the courage to knock on the door. “You want me to mow yer lawn?” I asked. He assessed me, my dog and the manual push mower I had pulled from our house a quarter mile away.
“How much?” he replied.
I didn’t know. I thought about it for a moment then asked, “You know how much a bag of dog food costs?”
Barrington watched me for an hour, struggling in the deep grass with the woefully inadequate mower until he couldn’t bear it any more. “Lookit. There’s a gas mower over there in the shed. If you can start it, you can use it. Make yer job easier and I don’t have to watch this crap.”
Perhaps my father’s saving grace was that he was a good mechanic. “If you got gas, compression and spark, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t run.” I looked at the dust covered mower in Barrington’s shed and cleared away the pile of junk around it. There was another mower buried deeper in the rubble. Both red, rusted and covered in bat shit. But there was gas in the first one and the motor spun freely when I yanked on the cord. After the fourth or fifth pull, it sputtered briefly sending out a cloud of blue smoke before stopping. “That means there’s spark.” I could hear my father’s voice again. But something’s not right, my young mind rationalized. I examined the spark plug and spun the engine again. Within the shadowy darkness of the shed, I could see the little jolt of electricity meant to fire the piston and that didn’t make any sense. The spark is inside the engine, not out and I shouldn’t be able to see it at all! Looking around the clutter of the shed, I found the necessary tools and, with the plug in hand, I discovered a thin crack in the ceramic insulation surrounded by black burn marks. A cracked plug. “Look at that, Blue! Cracked plug!”
I had to negotiate with Barrington in order to get a new plug which was $1.35 and posed a serious dilemma for a 10-year-old. On one hand, there was my anticipated pay of $3.00 which would cover the cost of Blue’s dog food. On the other, there was the price of the new plug which would bite into my profits but allow me to finish the job and get paid. He could tell I was torn. “Tell you what. Finish the lawn with the gas mower and if you can get that other mower working, you can have it. How about that?” I nodded. The dog food would have to wait.
I purchased the new plug with “an advance on payment” as Mr. B. called it. I installed it and moved Blue up to the porch where they could both watch from a safe distance. I primed the carb, set my foot on the mower and yanked at the pull cord with all my might. The mower roared into life, barking and belching a thick, stinking cloud of blue smoke. But it was running, and settled into a satisfying idle once I backed off on the throttle. I could see Blue peeking out from behind Mr. Barrington, happy to see that I was still alive amidst the cacophony and chaos.
Barrington ended up paying me the full three dollars for mowing both lawns and gave me a two dollar tip for getting the mower started. But even more thrilling was the prospect of owning the second mower. Blue and I ran the quarter mile home to tell Mom the news.
“I got us a mower!” I shouted when I could finally breathe. My sister and brother shared in the good news even though they didn’t know what I was talking about.
I wheeled the second mower home on the weekend and found the problem immediately; the throttle cable had come loose from the carburetor. I fixed it with a kitchen knife. I also cleaned it, oiled it and asked our neighbour Mr. Phillips if he could sharpen the blades for me. He went one better and showed me how to do it myself. I cut his lawn free of charge that day while at the same time, tested out my new mower. It worked perfectly. The rightness I felt for this tattered mower that I now pushed ahead seemed to parallel the pride and joy I had for the young pup following along behind. As such, I named it Old Blue.
There were plenty of lawns that needed to get cut in my neighbourhood and the Blues and I were known by all. With the paper round in the morning and lawns to cut on the weekends, we made enough cash to buy my sister some new school clothes and Mom a new pair of shoes. My friend Finny was always on at me to play baseball on Saturdays but I would say, with significant pride and confidence “I gotta work.” They’d tease, and it grated on me to see my pals having such fun. But when I showed up on my new Raleigh ten speed racing bike, they soon changed their tune. Finny asked if he could help.
We’d throw a ball around, Finny and me, when Blue was getting too tired to fetch. I liked him. I think he was my only true friend. But his parents didn’t like me and I never could understand that. After the fifth summer of mowing lawns and paper rounds, I had a crew of four helping me and in the winter months we expanded into clearing driveways. It was a contract of sorts with the neighbours bidding ever higher to get their lawns or driveways done first. I could do three lawns in a day on account of my strength and experience whereas the others could only manage one before they lost interest or got too tired. Generally, we’d end the day in good spirits sipping Mom’s lemonade on my front porch or tossing a baseball around. Mr. Phillips, who was the high school gym teacher, was watching us one day and asked me to throw him my best pitch. “Damn boy! That’s a fine arm you got there!” He told me I had to try out for the high school baseball team but I didn’t think I had time.
My high school years were as awkward for me as for many. I didn’t get bullied much because I was stronger than most and I had my own car which made me popular with the girls. I was still mowing lawns but I passed the paper route on to my younger brother who was also helping out with the yard care work. By the 12th grade, I’d opened a small engine repair business out of the garage while the other kids my age were still taking auto shop classes at school. Me and You and a Dog named Blue, I’d sing to my girl when the three of us took drives in the truck on the back country roads. Sometimes Blue would try to harmonize. He was a funny old boy: slightly blind by that point. But he loved those rides on sweet summer nights.
On the last weekend of my twenty-first summer I was mowing Mr. Barrington’s lawn when he came out to the porch to shout at me: “Where’s yer dog at?” I stopped the mower and thought hard for a moment, about where I was, how I got there and how I should answer his question. “Blue died this morning Mr. Barrington. He died in my arms. I held him. I told him not to worry. He took a deep breath and died right there in my arms.”
You couldn’t call either of us affectionate men but he hugged me then and there. And I cried. I cried for the first time in my adult life. I cried and I thanked him and I finished the lawn.
**
Bryn Chamberlain is a writer and filmmaker working out of Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a compilation of short stories and various screenplay projects. Bryn’s short term plans include spending more time on boats.
**
Image: Flickr / Brian Boucheron
The following story appears in Masterworks by Simon Jacobs (instar books, 2019) and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
I.
The year is 2004. I just got my ears pierced! Reese is wearing eight million bracelets and boots that come up past her knees, so in order to sit in the booth she has to lower herself onto the seat first and then swing her legs rigid under the table. I think that if I ask about each of these bracelets in turn, I will be able to carry our conversation at least through this dinner and possibly into infinity, that we could be talking forever. Instead, because I’ve been thinking about it, I ask if she thinks the guitar sound in Rise Against’s latest album makes them sound too much like a stadium rock band.
Reese juts her head forward and says “What?” And in the tone I detect that it’s less a “What?” of indignation at my bold claim and more of a “What?” like she did not take meaning from any of my words. Fortunately, the waiter arrives, and I make it about the breadsticks.
“That’s the reason to come to an Olive Garden,” I say, looking conspiratorially from the waiter to my date. “Unlimited breadsticks.”
Yet when she sits back in the booth, Diet Coke ordered, I decide that Reese is a half-breadstick girl at most, and bizarrely, it still seems to be my turn to ask a question. That said, my capacity is honestly endless; between us, I picture a giant grid, like a mega-calendar, the building blocks of our Great Love, and each blank box comprises a question, and the boxes are filled with bracelets. I imagine checking one off as I open my yap yet again: “Where did you get those bracelets?”
The grid falls to pieces. I’ve made a terrible mistake, delivered the question totally wrong, in plural—like trying to fan a candle flame by setting the room on fire—and I know the answer before it’s delivered: vague, all-encompassing, unparseable, probably two words at most, hacking off the conversation as if with a machete, and now—
Our waiter puts a wire and paper basket of seasoned breadsticks on the table. He drifts off into the restaurant. I should never have mentioned them. The sound outside of our table seems to fade. Reese looks shyly down and begins sliding the bracelets up and down on her wrist, smiling to herself, as if each one is a distinct sensory memory too private to share. “Well, this one comes from Forever 21, this one comes from Claire’s, this one comes from JC Penney…”
Her word choice is strangely passive, and as she moves obsessively down her forearm cataloguing every shitty clothing and accessory chain in southern Ohio, I am of two minds. The jangling overcomes everything; her Diet Coke hisses across the table. Motion, thought slows to a crawl. Either she is victim to the most boring and compulsive gifter known to man, or she is a taker.
“Did you steal all of those?”
She looks up at me from across the table, her fingers playing with the chain between two sprigs of a charm bracelet. Her eyes look out in a sly drawl, and the breadsticks rise between us like a yeasty monument from before time. Their seasonal glaze dissipates into the heavy air.
But before she can confirm or deny, the ground breaks open to the right of our table, and in the next second the restaurant seems to have doubled its proportions, the kitchen is now a football field away from us, and everything between it and our table has been consumed. The high- and low-calorie vessels move trancelike down our table, and Reese and I reach across and fasten arms in a power grip, like we’re bracing for the first drop on a rollercoaster. We jump from the booth at the same time, but Reese’s legs are still locked in their great boots beneath the table, so instead of clearing the area she wrenches from my sweaty hands and snaps cleanly mid-thigh, and I watch her tumble along with the entire booth—still positioned as if she’s sitting within it, freeze-framed in profile—into the widening chasm now bearing up at me: a gaping, wet cave winding down and out of sight, its walls the same texture and color as the roof of a burned mouth. Everything in the restaurant ricochets into its depths, the patrons breaking apart on the rocks and gradually slopping down the tunnel to join the mound of bodies and wreckage at the juncture where the cave wraps out of sight, like waterlogged meat in a kitchen drain awaiting disposal. I see smaller passages branching out from the tunnel, and some kind of lithe and speckled creatures flit in and out, their skin like leopard print, always just momentarily visible, snatching at the falling humans as they roll past, dragging them whole or piecemeal into their caves. A faint light flickers out as if from a campfire, deep below and out of sight. Screams waft up from beneath me like a song on the wind, and with them, swarming my nostrils, the exact smell of my hands after I’ve masturbated at the end of an active day, earthy shame and empty potential. And across the gulf now eating into the kitchen on the opposite side, crumbling at my feet on this one, as my heart leaps into my throat with the sudden plunge, I find another: a woman hangs there, her arms planted on the stainless steel counter behind her, legs dangling into the crevasse, emitting the same scream over and over, like a car alarm.
II.
Molly has been upset since her dad died six years ago, fundamentally upset, but tonight she is going to turn it all around. When she enters the LaRosa’s Pizzeria ten minutes early and sees Megan already at a booth in the far corner, her hands wrapped entirely around a frosty water glass and peeking nervously out at the restaurant, Molly knows that the date is going to be an incredible success, that it is the beginning of what is called a love connection. She has already determined their couple name: it is Molmeg.
Megan throws herself out of her seat when she sees Molly coming, like a seaman flailing for rescue, and her reaction is so sudden that she bangs her knees on the underside of the table and briefly doubles over with a mysterious squeak of the booth, clattering her elbows on the varnished pseudo-wood. The violence of the attempted greeting is both endearing and terrifying, and Molly feels a surge of guilt (she ought to have announced herself!) and also the frightening desire to laugh. She races forward to the table. “Megan! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she says, unsticking her arms from the table. “I’m so excited to see you!” She launches into a hug with the same frantic energy, and she holds onto Molly as if for dear life, rocking slightly back and forth. “Your hair! I love it!”
“Thank you!” Molly replies, unintentionally matching her enthusiasm. (She’s been slowly growing it out since the school year ended, because adolescence is a time of changes large and small.)
They huddle up on one tangent of the circular booth-table, and Molly thinks that there is hardly any point to this date at all, that they are already as intimate as they will ever be, as if they’ve been dating for months, as if they walked in on this story midway through. After dinner, at 6:20, they are going to Cross Pointe to see Cinderella Man, starring Russell Crowe, because there is literally nothing else. It is the tail end of June, and the great plains of summer opportunity still stretch endlessly into the horizon.
They both order Diet Cokes and a large pizza to share. The restaurant is still fairly unpopulated because it’s not yet truly dinnertime. There is a ridiculous amount of light outside, and Molly occasionally has to shield her eyes from the glare cast by the wall of windows perpendicular to their corner booth. Her double glasses—the soda one steadily emptying, the water one untouched—sweat feverishly. It feels inappropriate for a date. There’s another showing at 8:05, but the movie is over two hours long and they both have curfews to keep, Molly’s mom is only willing to come out so late to pick them up.
And it is going so well. By Molly’s first refill, their hands are already knotted together beneath the table. Megan gets up to pee, and upon her return when she rounds the partition into view, Molly feels herself rise spontaneously in greeting and likewise bangs her knees on the underside of the table, a matching gesture, and she goes down clattering the same way, like they are programmed the same.
When the pizza is delivered, Megan studies it for a while, looking from the pepperoni up to their retreating waiter and back again.
“Which do you think looks more like a ladybug,” she asks. “The pizza, or our waiter?”
As Molly ponders this suddenly perfect image—the round, shiny red face of the waiter and his sparkling silver stud earrings, the glistening pizza—realizing this uncanny ability that Megan possesses, that of magical association, she simultaneously witnesses an anomaly: the partition that separates one row of booths from the other blurs in the air and then vanishes like a bad hologram. An ear-splitting roar—like being strapped to the undercarriage of a monster truck while it revs, a monster truck that is also engulfed in explosive fire—erupts around them, vibrating the narrow passages inside her head with a crawling pain, blasting her face with heat. A fiery crater rips wide in the center of the restaurant, expanding like a hole in an old t-shirt when you work your thumbs in and tear it open, splitting the earth along a million tiny seams, devouring everything around their booth. Below the opening stretches an enormous, roaring lake the shade of cooking oil, churning and boiling, frothing with movement. Their corner booth is uniquely positioned at an architectural key point in the restaurant’s foundation, meaning that for a second after they leap up, they’re just standing there perched on a Tetris-corner span of tile as the upholstered seat back and table slide as one into the abyss, and squinting down at it through the veil of heat, Molly makes out a dense conglomerate of squirming, naked bodies beneath the lake’s shimmering surface, filling its every inch, while around the perimeter, soot-black figures scamper head-over-heels, shouldering human skewers that they deposit into the lake with their feet, hands, and teeth, like clearing speared cubes of chicken off a kebab. Steam bursts as each new body hits the surface, a fizzing effect, and the mass has to shift to accommodate it before the body is fully submerged. And still the roar overcomes everything, becomes the only sound she’s ever heard, what she was born hearing. Flecks of the lake’s evil substance spatter her face, splash burning up onto her jeans, her contacts melt out of her eyes, and as their stubborn patch of the floor dissolves beneath them (Megan’s final gesture is that of a mime’s scream), Molly realizes that maybe what is scariest of all is how appetizing it smells, how much like pepperoni.
III.
It was basically impossible to transition as a teenager in a place like Dayton, Ohio in 2006; Bennett knew this. Moreover, the name his friend had chosen—Margie—seemed squarely planted in 1940s Midwest farmland, which was a statement in the year of Borat and Clerks II. At times, Bennett selfishly and crudely thought that their situations should be reversed: it felt confusing that while he, cis, like studied Dead Kennedys lyrics and clung obsessively to every scrap of his barely experienced alt-communal West Coast origins, Margie, trans, pored unironically through the 1954 Centerville High School yearbook to find the black-and-white faces of relatives who’d grown up in the same house that she had. Bennett resents Ohio basically because he’s not a native, while Margie seems to have made it her own.
Even Flavors Eatery, where the two now sit, seems to exemplify this dynamic: Bennett likes it because the owners are from San Francisco, his homeland for his four initial years, and Margie likes it because the white sauce they drizzle over each dish makes everything taste like ranch dressing. They have wrested the front corner table that looks out at the parking lot and East Franklin Street, no mean feat during the second lunch period at Centerville (which is two blocks away); the fact that they’re here now means that they’ll have to wait thirty minutes for their food and will have to cram it in order to get back to school on time, but that is always part of the equation. Windchimes and sun-themed art dangle above them.
The husband-owner brings their two cans of Diet Coke to the table. They put orange slices on the glasses here. As always, Bennett and Margie chat vaguely with him; as always, Bennett asks for “news from the home front,” as if he’s a soldier away fighting an unjustified war, or as if it’s every transplant’s desire, not so secretly (just look at this place!) to return to their birthplace. “Did you hear? It’s finally sinking!” the co-owner quips. Margie smiles into her soda; Bennett’s nostalgia is kind of a joke to her.
The first time they’d come here after Margie started transitioning, sitting at this same table, the wiry wife-owner—who looked to Bennett like the physical manifestation of every ill-advised health craze rolled into one, meaning she did not partake in the house sauce—approached their table and began absently massaging Margie’s shoulders, and neither Bennett nor Margie knew her or her husband’s name and the owners didn’t know theirs, but generally it seemed like this was a safe place of sympathetically minded people. Lately, whether it was justified or not—whether Margie needed or wanted it or not—Bennett had been noting such places, had been compiling a list in his head. It will be another solid twenty minutes until their food arrives.
To fill this gap, Bennett shares a theory his mother related to him the day before: “My mom was telling me last night how much better she thought the world would be if every male between fifteen and twenty-five had to take a regular dose of estrogen.” He says this without knowing exactly how it will land, whether it’s more of a “mom’s-so-out-there” anecdote or a “mom’s-on-top-of-it” anecdote.
Margie’s response gives nothing away. “I love your mother. Do you want my orange?” She hands the slimy fruit slice across the table. “It contaminates the soda,” she says.
Bennett slurps the orange and then, over the next several minutes, painstakingly wraps the rind into a cocoon of napkin followed by straw wrapper. The table lays barren between them. After a while Margie asks, “What’s up?”
Bennett looks up from the tiny mummy. “Hmm? Nothing.”
“You’re barely speaking.”
“No, that’s—just.” He waves his hand. “Just empty head, that’s all.”
“As a matter of fact,” she says, “you’ve been barely speaking for like the last two months. Since I came out.”
The accusation buried in this hits Bennett like a bucket of cold water, and all he can respond with is abject denial, physically shaking it off: “No! That’s not it at all, I—” And shades of this. Bennett suddenly feels sick, as if the careful hut he’d been trying to build for them was actually made of glass, and now people are throwing rocks at it. Behind Margie, the husband-owner approaches, surprisingly early, wielding the characteristically cluttered-looking plates piled with innocuous greens, white sauce arrayed across them in cyclonic shapes. But the cyclone is within him!
“You only talk about trans stuff now!” Margie is shouting at him. “That’s not all there is! It’s not like this has evaporated all the rest of my personality! I’m not a ball bearing!”
As he contemplates this metaphor, struggling to find an appropriate response, one that will not wreck their glass hut but will hold up a shard of it and show that it is a mirror, as Bennett imagines saying this, out of the corner of his eye he sees the floor pop like a blister, and the husband-owner disappears into it. And as Bennett rises instinctively from the table to see what’s happened, his face becomes a shocked mask, and Margie’s falls in response to his, and he realizes that his every move is a disaster, his every word some poorly planned gamble. The restaurant turns freezing, and Bennett feels his lips crack, his hands seize and age forty years. Great chunks of the floor fall away (the counter and kitchen are already gone) and are whipped into oblivion by the winds that pour from the rending hole in the ground, revealing a furious whiteness underneath them, like a snowblind sky, and finally Margie turns around. The restaurant’s teenage diners slip on the icy tiles; they crackle to the floor and are sucked away. As their table begins to skid toward the breaching rift, Bennett reaches out and grabs Margie by the shoulder, pulling her from the chair, which glides on without her, and in the couple of seconds they’re successfully standing together at the edge of the void, his fingers on her elbow joint, the restaurant and its people bursting like fragile implements dipped in liquid nitrogen and then smashed with a hammer, Bennett glimpses, below them, through the whipping snow and scalding wind, a solitary, naked figure trudging across an endless plain, doubled over himself against the cold. The figure falls to his knees, the skin of his back breaks in a line down its center, and he blooms like a brilliant red flower on the white before his body is grayed out by the ice, buried under another strata of endless snow. And as his Converse inevitably give way on the frozen floor, Bennett formulates the answer to the question Margie is implicitly asking, that everyone is asking, that they’ve been asking for years, he shouts it to her through his bleeding lips in the blistering gale that obliterates everything around them, he shouts it so loud that his voice cracks, shatters like ice, and the words become instantly a part of the weather, are swallowed between them like a wave in the ocean, a turn in a wheel, between the girl and the pit at her feet, yawning, yes, with opportunity.
**
Simon Jacobs is the author of the novel Palaces (Two Dollar Radio), and of two collections of short fiction: Masterworks (instar books), and Saturn (Spork Press), a collection of David Bowie stories. He is from Dayton, Ohio, and currently lives in New York City.
The following excerpt from Chimerica by Anita Felicelli is reprinted here with permission of the author and the publisher, WTAW Press.
When I woke the morning after Ross moved out, the house was silent. No sounds of our kids getting ready for school and racing up the stairs, no sounds of Ross banging pots and pans around the kitchen, and no whir of the coffee grinder before he brewed me a pot. My skull was throbbing and my tweed skirt was cutting into my stomach. Two bottles of wine into the night before, I had forgotten to draw the crimson drapes or change out of my work clothes. My laptop rested next to me on the bed, still open to a website about Malagasy lemurs. From the bed, I could see the sunlit green hills of Oakland, irregularly studded with sprawling houses and eucalyptus trees and wood sorrel. It was the same panoramic view to which I always woke, the same splendor, but I was alone. Again. As a child I decided I would never let myself feel as lost as I felt after my mother killed herself, leaving me with a workaholic father and a younger sister to raise. And yet, here I was again, waking up alone in a large too-quiet house.
Eager to throw myself into trial preparation for an all-consuming copyright lawsuit Turner v. Eustachio, I showered and slipped into other clothes. I blow dried and flat ironed my unruly black curls. When I padded down the hall to the kitchen, I noticed that the painting my younger sister Julie had made for Ross was gone. No huge loss as far as I was concerned—it had been one of her weirder, more colorful canvases from a controversial graduate school exhibit entitled The Existential Crisis of Brown Folk that left me speechless and mildly irritated—but there now was a darker-colored square where the painting had hung, where sunlight hadn’t bleached the walls, a square that reminded me of a day more than ten years ago when the house painters had left and our young, excited family moved into a new home.
In the kitchen, I started the coffee maker. Roasted coffee was slowly dripping into my ceramic cup when the phone began beeping and vibrating. I glanced at the text message. It was from Nick Evers, my lover and a named partner at the firm where I worked: We need to talk.
My palms started sweating with anticipation. I texted back: What’s going on? The last thing I wanted to do was talk, excavate what we meant to each other. Evers knew Ross had left—was he wanting to discuss moving forward? Part of me thought yes, he wants to move forward, I should move forward. This is new. This is someone who doesn’t already know how hard intimacy is for me—a chance for a fresh start. But the other part, the deeper part, suspected my kids blamed me for blowing up our lives together, and knowing they could be right, I wanted to burrow under the covers of my bed in shame. It was dangerous to speak out loud about this—about how I felt or how they felt. I was numb to being left, and I wanted to keep my emotions underground, wanted to avoid shining any sort of conversational spotlight on the subterranean things I knew were messy and irrational and overwhelming. Instead I told myself: nobody meets the right person at age nineteen, and at least you still have the comfort and thrill of work, and with Spencer’s support, the possibility of the biggest win of your career so far.
It was a minute before Evers replied to my text. I stared at the phone willing it to beep again. I had already poured a cup of coffee by the time it signaled a new text. I’ll tell you when you come over. Instead of answering right away, I took a swig of searing hot coffee, scalding my tongue, and waited another beat in order to seem as mysterious and aloof as him. I texted back: After work.
The phone beeped. We should talk now.
Mechanically, I laid out bowls for Tara and Mike and Ross. I was pouring my cereal when I realized with a start it was just one for breakfast. One is the loneliest and all that. I stared into my empty bowl. Its pale porcelain surface reflected my face, and with no work to focus me, the rage I’d been trying to suppress—at myself, at Ross, at how little I’d been able to accomplish in my life so far—flashed through me. I shoved the bowl off the table. It cracked on the floor. There was nobody for whom I was performing, so I left the pieces and the cereal where they had fallen to be swept up later. I grabbed a protein bar and my briefcase, and headed to the office, but in my rush to escape the gloomy, hollow silence of the home that had once meant so much, I forgot to text Evers back.
“Spencer wants to see you right away,” our brunette receptionist said as I strolled into the lobby. Usually I started working immediately, and met Spencer for lunch or an evening drink to talk strategy. Wondering what he could possibly want to discuss first thing in the morning, I hurried down the hall. Inside one of the offices, I overheard two junior associates speaking in hushed tones. The quietness of their voices, their smug, speculative cadences, caught my attention, and I paused to listen before passing the open door.
“Shocking that Evers got fired.”
“Can they do that to a partner?”
“It depends on what their agreement says …”
I continued toward Spencer’s spacious corner office at a slower clip. I should have called Evers back. I turned right into Spencer’s office. A short, broad-shouldered man in a crisp white dress shirt and pressed slacks, he was gazing out of the enormous plate-glass window that faced west onto the brick beacon of the Tribune Tower with its triangular cap, the pale mint-green of an oxidized penny.
Sunlight glinted off the gold type on the dark red leather of the codebooks and the glass faces of framed lithographs of California farmworkers and antique local maps that adorned the walls. On the front lip of his desk were items of hockey and football memorabilia and trinkets from grateful clients. One row behind these knickknacks sat a photograph of Spencer on the ice in his skates, with an arm casually slung around the governor’s shoulder. Both wore protective hockey gear: they were an alliance of two of the most powerful men in California, still in some ways a Wild West of reinvention, the last frontier of genius hucksters and lone gunslingers. Pride swelled in me—I belonged to a premier firm run by someone powerful—this was a place where anyone could be the star she was meant to be, even if she didn’t fit the script of what power looked like.
Before I could say anything, Spencer spun around, and started speaking, “Maya, eight years ago your father convinced me to bring you on board, to give you a chance. You know how much I respect your father’s judgment—he’s a hell of a lawyer. I thought, no problem. You’d last a year, then scurry out of this business as fast as you could, the way most of our associates do. But instead, you proved yourself as an associate.” He sat down and smoothed back his silvery hair.
“Thank you.”
Spencer crossed his arms and breathed deeply, as if he were holding back a violent barrage of words. His gentleness and restraint were entirely uncharacteristic and unsettled me—this type of care from him was far worse than a slap. “Let me finish. To no one’s surprise, you’ve proven to be a hard worker, one of our hardest workers. I was ready to recommend to the other partners we promote you after this case.”
I was ready . . . He had seen me as heir to his legacy, but why the past tense?
“Thank you. You’ve been more of a father to me than my own father has. I appreciate the confidence you’ve had in me and I know I would never have come so far without your mentorship.” Perhaps I hadn’t been effusive enough about how grateful I was; perhaps I hadn’t suggested what was true—that the work I did at his firm was necessary, that it was saving me, that it gave me a place to belong. Did he need to hear that?
“Before your ethics were called into question, I thought this trial would be your last step toward making partner.” He rubbed his temples.
Ethics. A chill passed through me. They had never worried me because I saw Spencer had no qualms about them—he was sure of himself and I had trained myself to appear just as tough as he was. But I knew I’d committed any number of very minor ethical violations, so many morally ambiguous courses of conduct shading over into just plain wrong—all violations I could argue my way out of, of course—that I couldn’t really narrow down the possibilities enough to issue a plausible denial.
The room darkened; it was only the sun slipping behind a cloud, but my vocabulary contracted as the light pulled away. I could tell from Spencer’s gentle demeanor, he was talking about something corrosive. The affair? Must be. He didn’t even think I was worth the harsh criticism; he didn’t even see me as his equal. In all the time I’d spent being mentored by him, I never realized he saw me as less than him.
**
Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica (WTAW Press) and Love Songs for a Lost Continent (Stillhouse Press). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Salon, the New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. She was born in South India and grew up in the Bay Area, where she lives with her family.