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Cage Body

If you often find yourself awake in the middle of the night wishing you weren’t alone, I know of a place you can go where you won’t be. There’s air conditioning, always turned up too high, and a television set, on mute. The vinyl chairs are arranged in a square so everyone can look at each other, and a vending machine stands off to the side. You’ll probably leave with a complicated illness of some kind and have to come straight back, but at least it doesn’t cost anything to sit in the square and look at the other people. I go often, to the sliding door under the lit-up Emergency sign. I’m always amazed at how many people are there in the middle of the night. I’m never alone. It’s where I wait for Megan.

Megan and I are regulars at the hospital the way some people are regulars at bars or coffee shops. We arrive together and split up at the triage desk—her to the doctors and nurses and me to my chair in the waiting room under the silent TV. They never make her wait very long, just wrap a paper bracelet around her wrist, tip her back and rush her down the hall. I’m never asked if I want to come; my primary job is to fill out her paperwork. I do that until I can get someone’s attention and ask where they took her this time and when I can go in. Sometimes I don’t get to go in.

It’s busy tonight; the nurse at the desk keeps shushing me and directing me to the chairs with her pen. It bothers me, and it doesn’t—Meg’s probably unconscious by now anyway. Tonight will pass like a blink for her from here on in, and I’ll take on her time along with my own, like I always do. I’ll survive an agonizing minute only to have to live it again. I feel guilty for wishing away any of my minutes, considering.

A girl with coffee-coloured hair interrupts my thoughts, poking me in the shoulder. “Is someone sitting here?” She motions to the chair beside me, the only vacant one in the room. I shake my head and let it come to rest once again in the palms of my hands, which are cold and wet with hospital sweat. This is how you sit in an emergency room if you don’t want to make conversation.

“Thanks,” she says, silently folding into the chair, legs under, arms in, hood up. Compact. Her voice is sad, and something in it causes me to glance up again. She catches me staring. “What?”

“Nothing. Sorry.” She’s rude, but she looks like she’s about 17, so I forgive her. I was 17 once; I’d hated it too.

She starts examining her fingernails, which are covered in chipped black nail polish. She frowns at them, as though they’re her problem. As though she’s come to the emergency room at 3 AM for nail polish remover. “What?”

I realize I’m staring again. “Nothing. Sorry.”

She turns her critical gaze to my face, to the hard lines in my forehead and around my mouth chiseled out by ever-present worry and too many 3 AM emergency room visits. I look haggard, and it makes me self-conscious. I used to be pretty. Like her. “Why are you here?”

“In this chair?” Does she expect me to move? I was here first.

“No. Here. In the ER. Why are you in the ER?”

For all of the nights I’ve spent here, I’ve never been asked this before. “I’m waiting for someone. You?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re waiting for someone too?”

“Yeah.” She slides her fingernail under a piece of polish and scratches it off. It makes a horrible sound. Her eyes flick over at me. “My friend broke her leg.”

“Oh.” I nod. “How’d she do that?”

Her mouth cracks open. She’s looking everywhere. I’ve stumped her. “None of your business,” she says at last.

“Emily.” A woman appears at the girl’s side. She looks tired; she’s not wearing any makeup and her hair is piled up on top of her head, held there by a large black butterfly clip. She’s holding out a hospital bracelet like it’s a stick of gum. “Put this on. I’m going to grab a coffee from the cafeteria.”

Emily’s eyes are closed.

“Emily.” The woman’s voice is ragged. She’s been yelling. She’s been awake for hours. Her face sags but her eyes flash; she’s a confusing mix of intense sadness and fierce anger, already defeated but still fighting. “Emily,” she repeats, reaching out in one swift motion, grabbing the girl’s hand and stuffing the bracelet into it. “Put,” she steadies herself, glancing at me, “this,” she catches her breath again, “on.”

Emily’s eyes don’t open. “Whatever.”

“Not whatever.” The woman presses her lips together in between every sentence, biting them hard and turning them white. “Put it on. Now.”

Emily pushes her sleeve up, scowling in my direction without looking at me, like she knows I’m watching. She’s clearly done this before; she completes the task with one hand. She thrusts her bony wrist out, displaying the paper jewelry for the woman to inspect.

Her arm is covered in lines, some of them angry and fresh and some faded to chalk-white. The woman nods, turns, and takes off down the hallway toward the cafeteria. She walks like someone who’s used to wearing high heels; she’s unsteady in her ballet flats.

I’ve never been to the cafeteria in this hospital. I’ve never been to the bathroom here either. I sometimes get hungry, and I sometimes get uncomfortable, but I don’t want to be unavailable for even a second. Some doctors urge me to walk around or even leave the building. They say Megan would wait for me. “Go out for a bit! Go grab a coffee!” they say. Their smiles are sad. She’ll be fine. She’ll know you’re not here; she won’t go without you. We’ve seen it a thousand times. They wait.

All nice thoughts, but I always want to say something snarky about how if she can’t dress herself or control the spastic flailing of her hands, if she can’t keep herself from calling out gibberish in the middle of a church service, I highly doubt she’s going to know how to keep her body from dying at an inopportune time. I want to scream these words at the doctors. I’m not angry at them; I’m angry at the situation and the doctors are the ones standing between me and it right now. The situation is a physical being, an invader from another country; it speaks a foreign language and the doctors are its interpreters, impartial middlemen relaying its messages to me from the body of my sister.

She and I were born on the same day of the same year. Our faces and hair and skin are the same. We ate all the same things growing up and played the same games and had the same friends. We had the same parents and graduated from the same high school and waitressed at the same restaurant while we worked through similar programs at the same community college.

Then one day, her body turned on her, quit working the way it always had, shut up like a steel trap with her inside it. Snap. It was like hugging someone as they were struck by lightning, having them crumble into ash in your arms. I can’t understand how I was untouched by something that big and that close. How it could claim all of her and none of me.

So now I take care of her; I carry her cage body around and poke food into it and talk to it, hoping she’s still alive in there, that my voice is soothing and comforting. Sometimes I say to her, “I’ll get you out of there, Megs,” or, “This doctor looks like he knows what he’s doing. He’ll get you out.” Sometimes her body smiles at me, but her eyes loll off into the corners of the room. Sometimes her eyes look at me but her mouth droops open and the rest of her hangs limp in her wheelchair. Maybe, I think sometimes, she escaped long ago and I’m just lugging an empty cage around.

Emily pokes me again. “Hey, sorry. Do me a favor, okay? When my mom comes back, tell her I’m in with the doctor. Tell her they’re keeping me overnight and she can go home.”

I frown. “And you’re just going to leave?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And your mother’s not going to want to say goodnight or talk to the doctor?”

Emily scoffs at this. “No.”

I gape at her. “I don’t…I don’t think you should…leave.” I expect my reaction to elicit some level of rage from her, thinking back to when I was that age and how I acted when my dad told me I couldn’t do something, but I’ve clearly overestimated her interest in my opinion. She shrugs and turns to the man reading a magazine on the other side of her, repeating her request to him. He nods and she stands up. She doesn’t even glance at the triage nurse on her way past.

I stand too. I’m not a brave person, and I’m not sure what I’ll do, but it doesn’t feel right to do nothing.

I catch up to her just outside the hospital doors, reach out my hand and jab her in the shoulder the way she’d done to me. She spins around; I can tell she’s expecting her mother. When she sees me, she relaxes. I tense. She doesn’t say anything at first, and I don’t either. Then, “What?”

“I,” I begin. I what? “I’m not going to make you go back inside or anything.”

“Okay.”

“But I think you should come anyway.”

The girl smirks. “No. I don’t think so.” She starts walking away again.

That was all I had. I can’t tackle her. Can I? I call after her. “What about your friend? With the broken leg?”

She snorts at me over her shoulder, but stops walking. “Pretty sure you’re not that stupid.” She looks me up and down with disdain and raises her chin. “Who are you, even? I don’t need another person who doesn’t care pretending like they do. If it would make you feel better, you can tell my mom you tried to stop me.”

I sputter as she walks away, knowing I should say something more but not knowing what, and then I start to cry. It surprises me because I’m not sad; I’m something else. Something that burns a little. Something like seething rage.

I’m blisteringly mad.

I’m mad at all the cages.

“What’re you trying to save her from?” The voice comes from behind me; it belongs to a grey-haired woman with a wrinkled face, hunched over a walker, dragging on a cigarette. “Dying? Is that it? You trying to save her from dying?” She looks obstinate; her tone is haughty and mocking but her mouth is lazy. Her words stick together. The sign above her left shoulder politely asks those in its vicinity not to smoke. “Everyone here is obsessed with keeping everyone else from dying. Why? Why is everyone so worried about saving each other? We’re all going to die, even them doctors. Let the ones who want to go, let them go. That’s what I say. People been trying to keep me alive since I was born. Not ‘cause they want me around, just ‘cause people are obsessed with keeping other people alive. Obsessed.” She spits this word at me. I still say nothing. She doesn’t want me to, I can see that.

Does Meg want to go?

I’ve often wondered. The doctors say it will happen soon, any day now. They’ve been saying this for years. When we’re rushing into the ER with her lips blue and her body convulsing, the only thing I can think is that I’m losing her, that I need to get her and bring her back. I always get her in on time, barely on time. The doctors save her life, what’s left of her life. I sit on her bed after it’s all over and say, “That was close, Megs. You were almost taken again.” But what’s trying to take her? Maybe she’s running away. Maybe she wants to go and I’m nothing but a glorified prison guard, on high alert, day and night, watching the door of her cage for the slightest movement, for the earliest sniff of an escape attempt.

How could I know, one way or the other? As soon as these thoughts come, I think, but maybe she’s like a baby again, just the slightest glimmer of consciousness stuffed into this big old body, and maybe the only thing she’s aware of is my existence, my love, and my earnest care for her. Maybe she’s happy in this life, like a baby’s happy when it has all the basic things. I can’t know, and it drives me crazy.

There’s a hand on my shoulder; it’s a nurse I’m familiar with, and she wants me to come with her to Meg’s room, where Meg is stable and breathing and recovering. She spends most of her time doing these things, the rest of it listening to me read her a book or push her wheelchair by the lake.

I follow the nurse to Meg’s room and sit on Meg’s bed and hold Meg’s face with both of my hands and try to see into her eyes and ask her, “You in there, Megs?” Holding the rungs of her darkened cage, calling into the corners, trying to detect movement. Are you in there? Do you want me to pick this rusty lock and let you out? Come up to the bars, here.

She doesn’t answer, but her cheeks are warm, and I imagine the twitching I feel in the facial muscles is her trying to smile. I smile back. “Megs,” I say. “You look beautiful.” She doesn’t have stress lines on her face like I do. I crawl into the hospital bed beside my sister and wrap my arms around her like a softer cage. I close my eyes and lay perfectly still. She can’t come out, but I often imagine I can go in.

I squeeze between the bars and find my sister huddled in the corner. She’s not a baby, and she’s not a prisoner. She’s just my sister. She wants to go abroad for summer vacation, she wants to become an architect and have three babies. Her favourite song is a classical piano piece called Spring and she hates asparagus. I sit down beside her and lean against her. I tell her the things I know about her. I feel her push back into me. I say, “I’m here.”

And she says, “I know.”

**

Suzy Krause is a writer from Regina, Saskatchewan, where she lives with her husband and two children. Her debut novel, Valencia & Valentine, is forthcoming from Lake Union Publishing in the summer of 2019, and she was also a contributing writer for The Magic of Motherhood, published in 2017 by HarperCollins.

**

Image: Flickr / Radek Bet

Sons

When I was eight, my father woke me in the middle of the night to watch a calf being born. I woke to the rolling, rich sound of his laughter, then boards creaking as he climbed the stairs. Before I could drift back to sleep on my warm, soft feather tick, my door opened. I smelled the cold air on him, a whiff of manure, and sat up in bed.

“Harry,” he said, “get up.”

In the kitchen, he handed me my first cup of coffee. The coffee tasted bitter, and I set the mug down, believing nothing could be worth all this trouble. But my father was alive that night, as if on fire, as if someone had set a light inside him. He glowed.

My father grabbed me by the hand, and we jogged across the yard. The night air was cold. Subzero temperatures slapped me awake. Our boots crunched  the snow as we ran. I will remember this always, this jog to the barn in the middle of the night with only the light of the stars. I couldn’t quite keep up with my father, whose legs bore him forward in great strides.

Our three, one-story barns stretched long and low in front of us. My father pushed open the door to the second, ushering me inside. The barn was flooded with light, which made me blink. I wanted to stop to catch my breath, but my father’s palms rested on my shoulders, propelled me forward to the far end of the barn, where Dr. Vargas with his pointy beard stood, a black bag opened at his feet and his arm stuck up to the elbow in one of our cows’ back end.

I started to leave.

“No, no, no,” my father said, grabbing me by the shoulder and pulling me back. “This is okay. This is life.”

Dr. Vargas laughed, then lowered his head. His forehead wrinkled. He spoke to my father. “This will be a difficult one, James.”

The cow moaned.

I looked up at my father, whose hands still rested on my shoulders. “What’s he doing?” I asked.

Then my father did something that focused my undivided attention on that moaning cow. My father spoke to me in Swedish.

He said, “Titta här, Smulan.” Look.

My father called me Smulan affectionately. In Swedish, Smulan means crumb.

I think of this now as I sit in a dimly lit hallway, listening to the nurses on the night shift tell each other about their Christmas plans. I can’t see them well from where I sit. I see only the circular, mauve desk surrounding them, the pool of white light that bathes it. The pool of light reminds me of the barn, reminds me that the calf’s birth is the only birth I’ve ever seen, reminds me that watching a calf being born is no preparation.

My father was wrong. That was not life.

One of the nurses laughs, and the sound of her laughter carries down the hall past me. I stand and rub my eyes. I wonder what time it is. I’m not wearing my watch. I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, a down jacket and slippers. Megan’s slippers, which are pink. I think of how she looked tonight as we raced to the car, biting her lip, holding her tummy, one wayward brown curl falling in her eyes; of the thin, tense smile she gave me as the nurses rolled her down the hall and away from me.

My father and mother are waiting for my second phone call. I imagine them now, sitting at the kitchen table. My mother has her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, and my father is leaning back on the two back legs of his chair, feet propped on the table, smoking his pipe. I imagine that my mother is watching the clock and shaking her head. And I imagine that my father is deferring to my mother’s experience, letting her shake her head, letting her mutter, “This is not good.”

When I called her from the lobby phone not too long ago, that was what she said: “This is not good.”

We know we have a boy. We just didn’t expect him this soon.

Farther away, in St. Paul, Megan’s parents wait, trapped inside their house by a sudden December blizzard. I can’t imagine them clearly. Maybe Mrs. Hall is making coffee. When in crisis, she usually does. Mr. Hall is probably clenching the keys to his Chevy Impala, waiting for the snow to stop. Most likely though, he has decided not to wait, just like my son. Instead, he is sliding down 94 East with Mrs. Hall, following the headlights to western Wisconsin and to the small hospital where I stand now, listening to nurses laugh.

My parents will not come.

I stand and stretch my legs, then lean against the wall. I don’t understand the waiting. My mother’s voice, soft and low, echoes in my head. “This is not good.”

But waiting doesn’t matter, as long as everything turns out all right. There is no price I would not pay.

The calf was breech, so Dr. Vargas had to turn it around. He stuck his arm inside the cow almost up to his shoulder, placed his free hand on her backside, and worked on turning that baby calf. The cow moaned, and when she did Dr. Vargas whispered to her. He whispered that she would be all right. He nodded to himself. Yes, she would be fine.

Then Dr. Vargas lifted his chin and grinned at my father. “Here it comes.”

Dr. Vargas slowly pulled his arm out of the cow. His arm was smeared with blood, and the shirt sleeve he had pulled up to his elbow was stained. As his hand came out of the cow, his fingers were gripping two hooves.

I remember I stepped closer and watched as the skinny legs emerged, and then a nose, and finally, in a great rush, the whole heavy body wet with birth. Dr. Vargas caught the calf against his chest and laid it gently on the straw next to the cow. I stared at the shivering calf at my feet. Its eyes were open. It looked at me, and I stared back.

Dr. Vargas smiled at me, stretching his mouth so wide that his beard stretched as well and became even more pointed.

“Not bad for a night’s work, eh, Harry?” he said.

I heard my father behind me. “He’s never seen a calf being born before.”

We had three barns then. Later, we tore down the third because we had fewer cows, because the barn was too old. We expected to rebuild, but we didn’t have the latest equipment, the size, or the clout to convince the bank to give us a loan. We were a family business. We relied on our reputation, but our reputation wouldn’t pay the bills. The older I grew, the worse we did. We lost business. We scaled back. We got by.

I have lost track of time, and I search the pale yellow wall for a clock. A sketch of a barn and silo is on the hospital wall. I feel suddenly like I’m lost in a shopping mall, looking at a floor plan for the red triangle which will tell me where I am, orient me. But this picture doesn’t orient me. This picture tells me where I am not.

My father and I don’t speak any more. Whenever I call, my mother answers the phone. She apologizes for him. She asks if Megan and I are okay, listens to my yes, then quickly tells me that Mr. Hendrickson wants our cows. She still calls them our cows, as if I have a claim to them. I say nothing.

On rare occasions, she asks about my job. I lie. I don’t tell her that I miss hearing the cows lowing. I don’t explain how much I miss watching the sun rise behind the barns or eating family meals around our aged, wood table or drinking Dad’s bad coffee, thick as sludge. Some things cannot last; some things last too long.

I am tempted to ask one of the nurses what time it is, but then I think, I don’t really want to know.

My great-grandpa Patrik left Sweden when he was 18. He came here, to Wisconsin, and married an American girl. He was not interested in talking about Sweden; he was not interested in lutefisk and lefsa and Aquavit. He insisted on speaking English. Patrik said this country was paradise.

Now our family can no longer speak Swedish. Our linguistic skills have deteriorated with each generation. We are reduced to tapping glasses together and saying Skal. We are left with only pieces of my great-grandfather’s past, with only part of the truth, with only his surname, Kvist. What we have in common with Patrik is exactly what he intended.

Out here in this flat expanse of land, the wind gathers strength as it rolls across the prairie. Hits a man square in the face with cold and snow and sometimes ice. This is the same wind my ancestors endured; this is the wind that beat against their faces until their skin was red and raw and rugged. For years, we have worked the same land, and we are marked more by the wind than by our name. Today, our surname means nothing. We are no more Swedish than my friend Marty Feinstein. But we are farmers. We have the leathery faces, the chapped lips and hands, which are our scars.

Or, at least, I did have them. My skin is healing, now that I’m not blasted by wind or standing in a cold barn stamping my feet. Now I sit at a wooden desk. I swivel back and forth in my chair when I talk on the phone. I tell farmers about fertilizer. Sometimes I call home, just to hear them answer. They no longer answer as Kvist’s Dairy.

I used to ask my father about Sweden, ask him to tell me stories. When I was young, he’d indulge me. He’d tell me about his father, August, and his Uncle Peter, whom great-grandpa Patrik in his old age sometimes called Peir. They each had a farm, not too far from one another, but as far apart as possible. My father told me what he could, but he couldn’t name people in old family photographs. He couldn’t remember who played the accordion, though he suspected it was Uncle Peir. He couldn’t remember the names of Patrik’s parents, or whether or not Patrik’s father farmed.

Once when he was drunk, my father told me about Christmases at Uncle Peir’s farm, all three households gathering to cut the tree, then decorate the boughs. They sang Christmas carols, Uncle Peir always leading, always off-key, with my grandmother accompanying on the piano.

But this is as detailed as my father got.

I have stared at the pictures of these men, of August with his round glasses and curled mustache; of Uncle Peir with his sizable belly; of great-grandpa Patrik, who is squinting. I want to ask Patrik why he left us with nothing but photographs. Photographs and land in paradise.

I think, “You had too much confidence in this country, Great-Grandpa Patrik.” The night my father told me about the family Christmases at Uncle Peir’s, he slipped. Too much Aquavit. He leaned over the armrest of his chair, motioned me close with his hand. His breath was hot and wet against my cheek when he spoke:

“My father told me that he thought Grandpa Patrik left Vimmerby because he killed a man.”
Then he pushed me away, shook his head, said nothing for the rest of the evening. He fell asleep in his armchair, woke himself snoring, and lumbered off to bed. Sleep well, he muttered.

I don’t know if my father remembers his slip.

I’ll never know what he knows or doesn’t know.

At the opposite end of the hall, past the nurses’ station, there are vending machines. I walk the length of the hall, Megan’s slippers slapping on the tile. When I pass the nurses they lower their voices. I keep my head down. I don’t want to speak to them. I don’t want their sympathetic smiles.

The calf that was born became my training bull. My father lectured me on its development. As the calf grew, he explained to me what weight he needed it to be. This was not a bull my father planned to keep; he made this clear immediately. He said, “Don’t name the calf, Harry.” The bull was good stock, but we didn’t need another, and we could get a good price for him. And I didn’t cry when the bull was carted off with others we didn’t plan to keep. My father said, this is the life of a farmer, and I understood. I have always understood.

In early October, I walked downstairs from Megan’s and my upstairs bedroom, from the converted attic that was our apartment within the house, and told my father I was going to stop farming. We had had the first snow then, and the morning air was rejuvenating or maybe without the wind, the cold just didn’t bother me.

I said, “Dad, let’s go for a walk.”

But we didn’t. I got as far as the back steps and sat down. I couldn’t move. The sun was rising, and suddenly I didn’t want to walk. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to stay.

Dad met me on the steps with a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

He said, “This house is too old and too small.”

He was smoking a cigarette, rubbing his trim white beard. He wore his black rubber boots.

“Maybe we can fix up the house ourselves this spring.
I said, “Dad…”

He shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll manage.”

“Dad…”

Maybe the tone of my voice betrayed me, because his eyes immediately met mine. He stared at me, and I looked away. Away from the barns, away from the Swedish flag snapping against the flagpole beside the house, away from my father. Away from the land I had planned never to leave.

And then, as the sky settled into the washed-out gray of a winter sky, Dad asked: “What will you do?”

“I’ve lined up a job with Hansen’s Fertilizer in Eau Claire.”

“I see. You’ve been thinking about this for a while, then.”

I nodded.

“You should have told me earlier.” Then my father was silent.  Suddenly he said: “I can’t do this alone.”

We have not spoken since.

These are the things my son will not know: the first dark morning of winter when stars freckle the sky as we head out to do chores; the chorus of cows lowing as they come back into the barn from pasture; the taste of milk fresh from the cow.

This is what kills me, deep down. Not that my childhood is slipping away, or my way of life. Not that the last tangible evidence of my past is up for sale. What kills me is that my son will never know what the seasons smell like on a farm. My son will not know in his bones how a farm works. My son will not understand me.

We are two families now, the family that farmed, and the family that will not.

The evening Megan and I left the farm, just as we were about to climb into my truck, my father pulled me aside. He said nothing, he simply tugged at my jacket sleeve. I walked with him down the driveway, waiting for him to speak. We walked in silence past the house, past the flagpole, down the driveway, to the first barn. He pulled open the door, and we walked by each cow. As we passed they turned their heads, glanced at us, then looked away. We walked out the door at the other end, then into the second barn, past the empty stalls, over the scrubbed floor. He stopped finally at the far end of the barn, and I understood what he could not say.

My father will wait up until the phone rings. He won’t go to bed. And perhaps tonight when I call, he’ll get on the phone. Perhaps tonight we’ll speak, if only of the baby.

I see the doctor. He’s standing at the nurses’ station, dressed in his blue paper gown, discussing something with the nurses. He turns in my direction, and I stand. And suddenly I’m walking as I imagine Mr. Hall is driving, as perhaps my father is driving, coming from the other direction, west to his grandchild, west to his son.

“Mr. Johnson, you have a son. He weighs three pounds. Amazingly, no defects.” The doctor is smiling at me. I can’t remember his name.

“Will he live?” My voice sounds hoarse.

The doctor pushes his glasses up on his nose. “I can’t say he’ll survive, but I have high hopes.”

I can live with high hopes. I notice there is blood on his blue paper gown, and I stare at him, waiting.

Finally I say, “How’s my wife?”

“She’s fine,” he says.

“I want to see them.”

I walk with him down the hall, past the nurses’ station, down another hall, and into a room. Megan is asleep, her head to one side. She is pale and drawn. I kiss her forehead, but she doesn’t open her eyes.

The doctor stands on the other side of her bed.

“She’s fine,” he repeats.

I hold her hand. I wipe her forehead though it is dry and cool. I listen to her breathe.

“Would you like to meet your son?”

I glance up at the doctor, at his round, flushed face, at his broad smile, at the wire glasses he wears.

The doctor calls for a nurse to guide me. She leads me to an elevator, and we ride up two floors. We walk through double doors, past another nurses’ station, past an old man whom someone has left sitting in the hallway in a wheelchair.

We stop in front of a large glass window that looks into a room full of babies, terrifyingly small babies. They have tubes sticking in their nostrils, tubes taped with white tape to their arms. I search the bassinets. I search among the faces of the babies for one who looks windblown.

I see my son. I know him instantly.

He is the one who is screaming.

“A kid like that has to live,” I tell the nurse, and I mean this as an order.

I have a son now, a three-pound son. A three-pound son with no name. But unlike the product of the only birth I’ve seen, this one will be named. This one I will keep.

The nurse stands beside me for a moment, then mutters something I can’t hear and leaves. I place my forehead against the glass and watch my son. I watch another nurse go over to him, put her hands in little gloves which are made to fit inside his incubator, adjust a tube which is in his arm, check the tube in his nose. He is too little for tubes. The tubes must be bigger than his veins.

I speak to him through the glass. I whisper: “Titta här, Smulan.”

My son stops screaming. I flatter myself that somehow he knows I am here.

I don’t know what to say to my son, so I begin to recite my memories. I begin by telling him about his grandfather and about the night his mother and I left the farm, left the house that had been my home for thirty years, and drove to Eau Claire. I tell him about the walk my father and I took, about the smell of the cows and the chill in the air that whispered of snow. I tell him that my father and I did not hug good-bye, that we stood facing each other, staring at each other, until he turned and walked back into the house.

I tell Smulan that as I watched my father walk away, I knew how I would remember my father: half eaten by dusk, halfway back to the house, half with me and half not. And I promise Smulan that I’ll ask for my father when I call home tonight; that when we are done speaking of him, I will ask my father what he really knows about great-grandpa Patrik.

**

Caitlin Hamilton Summie earned an MFA with Distinction from Colorado State University, and her short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Wisconsin Review, Puerto del Sol, Mud Season Review, Hypertext Magazine, South85 Journal, and Long Story, Short. Her first book, a short story collection called To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, was published in August by Fomite. Most recently her poetry was published in The Literary Nest. She spent many years in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado before settling with her family in Knoxville, Tennessee. She co-owns the book marketing firm, Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, founded in 2003.

**

Image: Flickr / Tim Green

The following excerpt from Nightwolf by Willie Davis is being reprinted with permission from 7.13 Books:

Last Words

For a long time, I kept myself awake by writing personalized suicide notes for each of my friends. I’d found a website that compiled every recorded suicide note of the last ten years, and, not to sound conceited, I could do better. To be fair, a lot of the note-writers were teenagers, and some of the older ones had already taken enough sleeping pills to write like teenagers, but these were pretty pedestrian. They tried to fit the whole world into one paragraph, so all the sorrows clanged together. Also, seriously, every third letter used the phrase “ocean of sadness.”

            Go small, I whispered into my computer, after reading an open-veiner yammer about “piles of endless infinity.”  Talk about the disappointment gathering at the pit of your stomach every Sunday evening, so slight and predictable you can mistake it for hunger. Talk about waking up five minutes before the alarm clock rings. Talk about your cousin who loves telling people he loves jazz. I know pain, and I know escape, but I don’t know one infinity, let alone piles.

The hardest part of writing a bang-up suicide note for the living is guessing each person’s method of self-destruction. They each had their separate styles. Pill-poppers talked of betrayal, of friends who walked out, the beating of their own broken hearts. Shooters were brief—they didn’t care if anyone read it. The people who hanged themselves were the best because they had a sense of humor. They understood they were leaving a body behind, swinging like the world’s fattest wind-chime.

           The only time I ever told any of my friends I was setting them up for posterity, I was on half-a-suicide mission myself. Meander Casey and I had been tasked with wandering through Irishtown and finding Ollie Hallahan’s runaway black mastiff. Somebody had purposefully taken the dog off the leash while Nunez was inside a party in Prospect Hill, the shanty-town peak overlooking the rest of the neighborhood. Nunez assumed Meander had done it, and he sent the two of us into the cold to try to retrieve the animal.

Ollie Nunez had been the monster at the end of our book for five years now. When Meander and I were kids, we worked for him, selling dime-bags and fake ID’s. Nunez’s sense of justice was as nuanced as a cymbal crash. If we didn’t hit our numbers, he’d take us to the shaded part of Orman Park and mete out Old Testament Style justice on our spines. These weren’t great working conditions, but I couldn’t file a complaint with the union. Meander, on the other hand, loved pain, and he’d sometimes give away nickel-bags, just to provoke a beating. Except now we were older, and even a professional crash-test dummy had to grow tired of bouncing his chin against the pavement.

“Did you write a suicide note for me?” Meander asked. “Who do I thank?”

“You don’t thank anyone,” I said. “That’s an Oscars speech.”

“But how do I kill myself?” Meander asked.

“Suicide by cop,” I said. “You find a cop with AIDS and blow him.”

We were leaving Irishtown and moving toward Garron Heights, a neighborhood we nicknamed Little Indianapolis because we assumed it had to be the most boring suburb in America.

“My suicide note would just be a long downward pointing arrow,” Meander said. “I’d buy a paint roller, hop out of a third story window, and hold the roller against the building.”

“That’s not an arrow, that’s a line,” I said.

“No, because before I jumped, I would have painted the arrow ends, so it would be pointing right to my body.”  He grinned at me, waiting for congratulations. “Oh come on, that’s pretty good. Like as a statement on life.”

“If you do that, I’ll go the fourth floor and write, ‘This Man Has A Micro-Penis’ directly above the arrow.”  

We stopped into a fire station to ask if anyone had seen a black mastiff, but no luck. We tried to talk to some kids playing touch football in the middle of the street, but they wouldn’t even stop their game to answer. At that point, we were pretty much out of ideas and had to go back to searching streets we’d already been down once.

“This dog is doomed,” I said. “If we haven’t found it yet, then it doesn’t want to be found.”

“I like how every mammal is born with the instinct to run away from Nunez,” Meander said. “Anything he doesn’t literally tie up leaves him.”

“Are you scared of him?” I said. “I know what we’re supposed to say, but seriously, are you scared?”

“Kind of,” he said. “As in, I’d prefer it if he wouldn’t work out his daddy issues on my nose, but I know he’s going to do it. I’m terrified, but terror gets boring after awhile. I expect him.”

“We aren’t meant to be scared anymore,” I said. “We act like kids. At some point, we’re supposed to join the rest of the world, right?”

“Do you want to know something funny?” Meander said. “Like, really crazy.”

I braced myself. “Is it that you untied the dog?  Because I already kind of figured that you did.”

“I didn’t,” Meander said. “Why would I do something to a dog?”

“The working theory is that you’re an asshole,” I said. “And you did it for asshole reasons.”

“But I didn’t.”  A soft breeze blew the smell of fish oil and curdled milk from a nearby dumpster. “What I was saying was that when I’m out like this, on the street searching, sometimes I wonder what it would be like if you found a baby. Like a dumpster baby you hear about on the news. I don’t wish for it exactly, but kind of.”

“Wow,” I said. “That is seriously so much worse. I really wish you’d untied the dog.”

“Not a dead one,” he said. “But you asked about growing up, and all I can think of is that’s the grown-up world. I keep expecting that world to uncover itself. Nunez scares me, but not near as much as I scare me. I have imagination.”

“Is that so?”  

“Yeah,” he said. “In fact, this one time, I imagined my hand was a vagina.”

I shook my head. “I never know when to believe you, and I don’t even know when I want to believe you.”

“You don’t know—”  His eyes went wide and he stopped himself. “Jesus Christ.”

“I know Jesus,” I said. “Early thirties, nice guy, beard, God raped his mom.”

But Meander wasn’t listening. He stared glassy-eyed over my shoulder, and then he broke into a full on sprint. By the time I turned around, he was halfway up the street, hurtling toward a young boy on the corner playing with a big, black mastiff.

When I caught up to the two of them, Meander was out of breath, but he already had his hand on the dog’s collar. “Where’d you get this thing?” he said, over his own wheezing. “You just find it?”

“My dog,” the kid said. He couldn’t have been more than seven.

“Yeah, what’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “My brother found him.”

“Your brother’s a fucking thief,” Meander said. “Trying to get my balls busted for your brother. Tell him, if I ever meet him.”  He took a breath. “Wait, what’s your brother? Ten? Tell him nothing will happen to him, but, you know, he’s a fucker.”

We walked back to Prospect Hill, taking turns hunching over and holding the dog’s collar. Meander found a torn t-shirt in a garbage can that we fashioned it into a leash. When we were four blocks away, Meander said he was going to leave and let me take credit for returning the dog. He didn’t want to see Nunez’s gratitude because it would confuse him.

“Maybe this is how it happens,” I said. “We grow and become something we weren’t this morning. We weren’t meant to find this dog, but we did. The world had its plan, but we disobeyed it. We make the world we want.”

“That or we robbed a kid of his dog, and a dog of his happiness just to help someone we don’t like.”  He smiled at me and walked away, while the dog tugged me further in the opposite direction. Whenever Meander left my sight, I worried I’d never see him again.

Friends and victims, I thought, following the dog dragging me exactly where I did not want to go. I’d like to thank you all as there is no way I’d be able to complete this suicide without you. It is with great regret and joy that I, Meander Casey, have decided to light myself on fire in the city square. The world was taken from me in shades, like a too-wet watercolor smearing and lightening until the shape it held has melted. I offer my body as a tribute to this city and know that as the smoke worms its way into my lungs, I will have one last sliver of fresh air, and it will fit as tight and sharp into my mouth as a fishhook, making me remember the joys I now forfeit: the useless afternoon, the warm breeze, and the unending search for the mediocre miracle.

**

Willie Davis’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and storySouth. He is the winner of The Willesden Herald Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He received a Waiter Scholarship from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He teaches English at Kentucky State University.

**

Image: Flickr / cuio

Excerpts from In the Fat

The Real Problem was My Thigh

I know I’m dreaming because everything that’s happening has already happened. Hell, even this dream has happened before and I can’t get away from it. My brain just reruns the last year of life like bad television.

I’m in the bathroom at home. White tile, white toilet, white sink, blue walls, and a copy of a lithograph by MC Escher above the towel bar. The blood stains on the grout have been bleached away.

The kitchen knife in my hand is from a set in one of those wood blocks.

Not the largest of the set, not the smallest. Not the bread knife.

Just one of the middle ones. A white handle the right size to fit in my palm.

Jagged sharp edge. Sharp sharp edge.

And I’m sitting on the white bathmat, thinking about how this is a generous thing to do, that Mom can be happier and Andrew won’t have to worry and Zoe won’t think that her little sister turned out to be a total slut. How Mom and Ken can stay married because I won’t be around to interfere with them. How Andrew and his wife can raise Emily without her ever having to know that her real mother was thirteen when she was born. And, maybe if there is a selfish part to it, then it will also make it so I don’t have to deal with Ken anymore. And also maybe Mom will quit with the questions – “who’s the father, Skyler?” and “tell me the truth, Skyler!” and “I want to talk to this boy’s parents, Skyler!”

So in my dream-memory, I’m sitting here on the white bathmat, the blood pools around me, thick and dark. It spreads into a cloud shape. And two flies are buzzing around on the ceiling looking down at me and one fly says to his fly friend, ‘That blood puddle looks like a bunny – see the ears and the cotton tail?’

But he’s wrong, because it looks like a face, see the eyes and nose and grimace and…wait.

There weren’t flies on the ceiling. Not the day when this happened outside of my dreams. It was just me in the bathroom and I had Mom’s knife and no one else was home and I put the bathmat on the floor and sat down.

Since it’s a dream, I rewind, redo, go back to the beginning, and I put down the bathmat and sit again and there isn’t any blood yet. And the dark blue walls look like the nighttime sky and the sink is just a marshmallow cloud and I’m still a lot younger than I will be.

Medium sized knife in hand, bare leg. I sit looking at the knife, at my right thigh, back and forth, knife, leg, knife leg, knifeleg. Then the tip of the knife is on the thigh-side of my knee bone, right where the long muscle begins, and it runs along the skin, up from the knee toward the edge of my shorts, through layers of skin and into the top of the muscle and the knife is sharp enough that the cut stings more than hurts.

A thin line of red comes up. Like the knife’s a magnet and the blood’s metal.

And the pain that was there when this happened outside of my dreams, the pain that made my teeth and jaw clench, the pain like when I spilled boiling hot noodles and water onto my foot when Ken and I made spaghetti one night, the pain that almost made me stop but I didn’t, that pain isn’t there. The benefit of dreams. Instead of pain it’s all soft fuzziness while blood pulses out and all over the white tiles and white bathmat and maybe the flies are back and the puddle does look like a rabbit, who am I to judge what a fly thinks.

Then I’m falling.

The fall happens slow.

The fall starts with my shoulders sliding along the white edge of the tub aimed to the left. Then the memory of the pain that’s not really there in a dream makes me pull up and slide to the right instead.

As I fall, I see two long blue paint drips hidden behind the toilet and a small peek of the old yellow paint below the vanity cupboard and Mom’s going to be pissed about that.

And I see the blood drops, one by one, as they slow motion drip out of my body, out of my thigh, onto the bathmat, onto the floor, through the floor, through the apartments below me, into the streets, into the water of the Willamette River even though we live twenty-three blocks uphill from the river.

My blood makes its way there and spoils the water so even the fish and the boats and the rocks and the sand are all ruined for everyone because of me.

And the flies talk about that too.

“It’s a pity about the water,” the fly who saw the rabbit says.

“It used to be so clean,” the other fly says.

“She’s ruined it for sure,” the first fly says.

“Oh look, the rabbit has a tail now,” the other fly says.

My right shoulder hits the floor. Cold ceramic tile.

My right arm catches under my body like it did when this all happened in the world outside of dreams, but this isn’t real and my arm goes through the floor just like the blood did, through the floor and dangling somewhere above the river like a strange moving piñata filled with unfriendly things like blood and knife and death and naughty finger gestures, nasty surprises for eager children because I’ve learned that childhood sometimes has nasty surprises.

My face lands last.

The tile floor cold and hard and white and smooth against my cheek.

The edges of the blood puddle spread toward me, dark and thick, and maybe it looks like a rabbit, maybe a face, maybe a big-ass blood clot that’s been pulled out of me.

The blood rabbitfaceclot comes for my face and my eyes and the thought of blood getting into my eyes is too disgusting to think about so I close my eyes and I wait to die.

Monday, October 23, 2012

Mom’s all stony silence while we drive. Not even the damned radio is on, and we get satellite radio so we have a ton of stations and it’s almost always on. I think I can actually hear Mom’s heartbeat it’s so quiet in this car.

And it’s not a long drive, I mean Troutdale is only about a half hour away from home, not cool enough to be PortlandLite, it’s more like PortlandRedneck.

I stare at the red Honda in front of us, the one Mom’s tailgating, and I wonder what the people in the Honda are doing and where they’re going. I’d look out the side window, but all I can see is the soundproof walls that edge the freeway and the swoop swoop of wall breaks is making me carsick like when I was a kid. Well, when I was a younger kid. I’m thirteen now. Thirteen on the outside, something like a million years old inside my head.

That’s the real problem. My head. My mother is driving me away from my home in downtown Portland and over to some loony bin for girls in the east-side suburbs because she thinks I’m crazy. Mom says it’s the most expensive private mental institute in Oregon as if that makes it better.

We turn off the freeway, and there’s new stuff to look at – a McDonald’s and hotels, gas stations and a half-dozen furniture stores. I guess Troutdale people like their furniture.

A few more turns and we’re sitting in front of this big building made of red bricks with a red brick driveway and a black wrought iron fence with spikes on the top. We’ve left Portland circa 2012 and driven into Suburbia USA circa 1950. The place to leave your crazy daughters, folks; away from the public at large; scary scary girls who slice up their skin and try to kill themselves and have to be locked away. Modern day Frankensteins.

And shit, “Mom is really going to leave me here,” that’s all I can think. What do I have to say? “I promise it’ll never happen again? Cross my heart, tried to die, stick a needle in my eye?”

But I won’t say any of those “I’m sorry” things. I mean, I said them before, or something like them at least, but I promised myself that I won’t say any of that ever ever ever again, because she’s not listening. Because I can talk and talk at her but it’s like she forgot English or like I’m talking at that stupid frequency only dogs can hear.

A long wet drip comes off my jaw and lands on my shirt. That’s when I realize I’m crying.

I wipe my eyes and suck in the snot and make myself stop it, except I’m scared and my leg jitters up and down. Mom’s got to see the leg, but she doesn’t say anything about it. And I can’t stay quiet any more. My voice can’t just be lost inside me, so I clear my throat, and this wussy-little-kid voice comes out.

“Mom, this is so fucking stupid,” I say, but I’m talking more to my hands on my lap than to her.

“Skyler, when you use that kind of language, it makes me feel disappointed,” Mom says. But she’s talking more to the windshield than to me.

She turns off the engine and we sit while the leftover energy in the car ticks away around us. The fine hairs on Mom’s arm right next to my fine hairs on the armrest, and I smell Mom’s perfume. She always wears Obsession and it smells like warm oranges and home. Her smooth dark-red hair hides part of her face from me, frames her green eyes and that small bump along the bridge of her nose. I don’t know how long we can sit here, but I know that I will never have my mother all to myself again, and the only thing I can think to say is please take me back home, but that’s stuck in my throat like I chewed up a whole bag of caramels at once and they turned into a solid mass of unswallowable shit.

Mom opens her car door just as the front door of the building opens and this tall black guy dressed in blue doctor-scrubs comes out, and while Mom opens the trunk and grabs the backpack with the little bit of stuff I’m allowed to have, the black guy opens my car door. I figure he opened the door for me so I won’t run off or something, like I could with my new bum leg. I consider trying to run for about a second, like it’s some mandatory crazy girl thing that I should do. Finally, I just unbuckle my seatbelt and get out.

The black guy has a nametag that says “Andre” then right under it “Orderly”. So I say, “Hi, Andre Orderly. I’m Sky Crazy-girl.”

Mom slams the trunk closed and gives me one of those looks that all Moms have, that they must have gone to Mom School to learn.

Andre Orderly just laughs and says, “Hi, Sky.”

I half expect Mom to say “don’t talk to strangers Skyler” because she still thinks I’m five, and I figure I’ll say something like “yeah well you’re leaving me with them so how strange can they be” but Mom says nothing so I say nothing and we follow Andre Orderly up to the front door.

My backpack with pairs of underwear and a brush goes into Andre Orderly’s hands and Mom steps up to the admittance window. I walk along the black and white checker board floor tiles, the childish rhyme of “step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back” sings in my head while I look around. While I avoid cracks.

The walls aren’t white. I mean, isn’t there a rule that hospital walls are supposed to be white? The walls are this tea-stained-beige color that’s probably supposed to be all calming, but I don’t think I calm that easily. And there are no pictures. Not even one that could show me who the Employee of the Month is supposed to be.

Across from the window Mom’s at is this metal plaque hung on the wall.

Dedicated this Twelfth day of July, 1962, in the Memory of St Ansbald

Abbot and Benedictine builder, Ansbald served as Abbot of St Hubert.

He then became Abbot of Prum, which he rebuilt in 882 through

petitions to Holy Roman Emperor Edward the Fat

“You reading about The Saint?”

I look up and Andre Orderly is back. I see the side of his head and notice that he has stripes shaved into the sideburn areas, and I want to ask why but I don’t.

“So, why this dude?” I ask. “What did he do?”

“He was a priest. The German family who founded this place honored him by naming the hospital after him.”

“So, this place’s called Ansbald’s?”

“Saint Ansbald’s,” he says. “At least by those of us who work here.”

“Other people don’t call it that?”

“Naw, the girls that live here, well, don’t tell anyone I told you,” and he darts his eyes back and forth like he’s worried someone will hear, even though no one else is around. He tilts his shave-striped ear to me and says, “They call it The Fat.”

**

Sally K Lehman is the author of the novels In The Fat which was on the Multnomah County Library list of Best Novels of 2016, The Unit – Room 154, and Living in the Second Tense. She is also the editor/co-editor of the anthologies War Stories 2016, War Stories 2017, and Bear the Pall, and is the Creative NonFiction Editor for the literary journal River & South. Her work can be found in several literary magazines including Lunch Ticket and The Coachella Review. Sally is a graduate of the Maslow Family Graduate in Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University, where she will be beginning an MFA program in June. She lives in the Portland, Oregon area.

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Image: Flickr / Thomas Hawk

A Ghost’s Story

For the first three years he lived on Peachtree Trail, Eric had tried to have the ghost exorcised. Holy water, priests, rosaries, sacraments, crucifixes – that kind of thing. He was rather unimpressed by the results. Not only would the ghost return on the same day the next year, judging from some of the priests’ reactions he was fairly certain it was the first demonic entity most of them had actually seen.

So eventually Eric had decided to stop wasting the money. He wasn’t overly rich – he was a roofer, a profession and family business he had inherited from his late father. He wore flannel and pilling sweaters because they lasted and he enjoyed cutting coupons. Besides, he thought, it wasn’t as if the ghost was hurting anybody. You had to weigh the costs against the results when it came to things like this.

The ghost was only ever around once a year, December 3rd, and it was only ever in one room – the one room that was the kitchen, or the dining room, depending on whether you wanted to define it by the stove and refrigerator or by the scratched wooden floors and the dinner table. The ghost appeared as the sun went down – the darker it got, the clearer its outline was. It always appeared sitting at the head of the old pine dining table. It stared down at its hands, which rested on the table before it, holding something that looked like a square sort of locket. Its fingers traced the edges.

It had remarkably good posture, Eric had noted, considering it spent the entire night looking down. Its shoulders only stooped a little. He assumed it was because of the ghost’s military background. It wore its dress uniform – polished black boots, white gloves, buttoned dress coat complete with small metal scales on its shoulders. Its black felt hat, which had a small brass pin of an eagle coat of arms on the front, always appeared sitting in front of it on the table. Its high-collared coat and pressed pants were a translucent sky blue. It smelled vaguely of ozone.

Because the ghost appeared in the dead of winter, when the sun was setting around seven, it ended up horrifying anyone trying to have dinner. This was particularly the case if it happened to materialize in the same chair they were sitting in. But for the first six years it was just Eric in the house and so it really wasn’t an issue. He just marked the day on the calendar and was sure not to invite over any of his numerous elderly, heart-attack prone relatives. He also avoided anyone he didn’t want to have a deep theological discussions with. This was the majority of people, and so December 3rd remained, for the most part, uneventful. Sometimes he would wander downstairs to watch the ghost appear and have a beer, much like he assumed one would watch the northern lights.

The first year Alice moved in, however, she had declared that it was time for a change. The ghost was suffering, wasn’t he? Something must be done. She trooped down to the kitchen the night it was to appear and dragged Eric with her. He was perfectly content to spend the night in and share the apparition with her – he hadn’t shown the ghost to anyone since his brother Ace, who had since run off to be a missionary in Honduras — though he assured her that talking to it was no good.

The kitchen had brightened with Alice’s arrival. A red cotton tablecloth with embroidered magnolias on it that she and Eric had received as a wedding gift now covered the nicks and dents in the table, and, per usual, dishes that she hadn’t quite gotten around to washing sat in the sink. The ghost appeared on time, in its usual spot. Its hat appeared despite a glass of water in its way.

Alice’s intervention was solemn. She and Eric sat at the place across the table from the ghost, holding hands. There were long pauses between the questions she posed.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “What are you still doing here? Who is in the locket? What can we do for you? What do you need? What are you waiting for?”

She never got an answer but that didn’t seem to faze her. Instead, she simply decided to answer some of the general questions herself and go from there. She had work off on Tuesdays — more people can make it in to the optometrist on the weekends, and so it made sense for her to work Saturday instead – and so for the year after that, she spent the occasional afternoon at the library doing research. Every few Tuesdays she had some new development to share over dinner. They had both inferred that the ghost was a Union soldier, but did Eric know the sky blue, rather than Prussian blue, indicated that he was enlisted? Or that the pieces on his shoulders were called epaulets?

“The thing it has – it’s not a locket,” she said one week, brandishing a poorly maintained public library book at Eric while he stirred spaghetti sauce. “It’s a daguerreotype. It’s like an early photograph, but they had to make them on tin or silver surfaces, so people would keep them in ornamented cases.”

Eric did not really see the practicality of this distinction, told her so, and so they had argued good-naturedly about it while looking over the book of dashing young soldiers in the black-and-white photos that she had brought home.

That year the ghost’s appearance became more like an interrogation. Alice had notes prepared. Why was a Union Soldier here in Georgia? Was he killed there? Was he from there? Who had he fought under? Was it General Sherman? Had he been part of the March to the Sea? The house hadn’t been built until 1920 – if the war ended in 1865, why here? Soldiers usually gave daguerreotypes to their girlfriends – why did he have one? Was it of his girlfriend? His wife? Another soldier? Him?

Eric felt a little bad for the ghost, but it never responded, so he guessed it didn’t really matter one way or the other. Eventually Alice ran out of questions. When she finished, she had pursed her lip and stared at her papers. She sat there looking for something she had missed until Eric convinced her it was time to go to bed. They could try again later.

Alice had continued to research the Civil War – she would get a book about it every year from her dad for Christmas, who was confused but utterly pleased by her newfound interest in history – but she never found anything directly related to their ghost.

She wandered downstairs to see the ghost, alone this time, two years after the interrogation. She wanted to ask it if it knew its side had won the war, she had told Eric, and it wouldn’t take long. She had sat down next to it at the table and told it that it was part of the reason her great-grandmother was freed. She told it that it had done a good thing, a horrible, necessary, inevitable thing, and thanked it for its sacrifice. Nothing happened, so after a bit she wandered back upstairs again, and she and Eric watched a soap opera they secretly liked but said they only watched to appease his mother, complained about the plot, and went to bed.

Eric was the one who had confronted the ghost alone the next year. The kitchen cabinets, courtesy of Eric’s enthusiastic mother and aunts, now had what looked like zip ties on their handles to keep them closed in case of ground-level interference. Formula was ready, tucked away inside of them. A box of bottles loomed, unopened but ready, on top of the refrigerator. Alice was upstairs, already asleep. The pregnancy had hit her hard.

Eric cleared his throat and sat down across the table from the ghost.

“Look here,” he said diplomatically, “I know we had some trouble at the beginning, but since then all I’ve tried to do was help you out. I really haven’t minded you staying. But I’m about to have a family start, and I’m going to need you to move on. You’ve had your time. You’ve had more than your time, and now you’re trespassing on private property.”

The ghost remained silent.

“You need to pull yourself together,” Eric said. He was having a difficult time taking the stand he had wanted to. He had no idea how to threaten a ghost. “You should try to get to the afterlife – it will be so much better for us and for you if you were there.”

He stared the ghost down for a while, but it never looked up. It’s finger slowly traced the edges of the picture. Its image always wavered a bit – like it was at the bottom of a pool of water – and Eric found this unpleasantly distracting.

“You could at least do us the decency of trying.” Eric said. He stood up — the chair jolted back with a screech as he did — and he left.

Since the ghost refused to leave, Eric and Alice vowed to. They had talked it over and decided that a haunted house was no place for a child. But they didn’t really want to go – Eric’s whole extended family lived nearby, and they wanted their little girl to grow up around cousins and tire swings. And Alice loved her coworkers and the neighborhood park. So they compromised. If the ghost was only there once a year, they would leave once a year.

They bought a timeshare in the Appalachians, though everyone they knew told them it was a horrible investment, and then pretended they could never get it for the holiday season – not really a stretch, they couldn’t have if they tried — and they always reserved it for the day the ghost was going to appear a year in advance. It became Eric’s favorite time of year. They would go hiking through evergreens and come home to a fireplace, hot chocolate, cards, and Alice’s annual jigsaw puzzle. When she was little, Josephine thought it was funny to hide the last piece. When she was older, she’d buy them harder and harder puzzles. She and her mother liked the challenge. Alice always insisted they go ice skating — she could float on skates — and Eric always fell down.

And so for a long time the ghost was alone. Over the years Josephine’s multicolored magnetic alphabet kit had first spelled out words like CAT on the fridge, and then transitioned into being used to hold up scribbles, and then a multitude of drawings of unicorns, and finally particularly good test grades and her parent’s favorites of her sketches. Eventually Eric and Alice got around to taking down the wallpaper. They painted the kitchen a toasted marshmallow color instead. On the counter sat a new coffee maker, to which Alice had become extremely attached, and the pantry was usually filled up with jams Eric and Josephine had made together. His mother had taught them how before she passed.

The ghost didn’t ever move, so perhaps it didn’t care.

The one year Alice and Eric couldn’t get the timeshare they had spent a good two weeks debating whether or not to tell Josephine about the ghost. She was old enough then, almost off to college. But they had decided against it. It was just a conversation they didn’t want to have. It would bring up questions that they felt unqualified to answer, and yet they didn’t quite feel like she was old enough that they could admit that. It was the frustration of that year, what with scheduling a visit to Alice’s parent’s house and sleeping on the floor and coming up with excuses as to why they had to be out of town on that particular day – termites – that caused Eric and Alice to make a pact that neither one would come back as a ghost.

It had been Eric’s idea, and it was an offhanded one he had said mostly as a joke while he held his wife’s hand and they whispered in the dark on an uncomfortable air mattress in her parent’s basement.

It was an agreement he would regret when a car slammed into Alice’s Ford early April. It was her fault – she had cut someone off while turning left across traffic. She had been running late, like she always was. She had always been an impatient driver.

Eric didn’t quite believe it had really happened, even through the wake and funeral, until about mid-May, when he started sobbing while he was on the phone with the insurance company. The employee on the other end of the line, who had been assuring him that the wreck was covered under their accident-forgiveness policy, made his awkward excuses and hung up.  

That year was a long year, though nothing of consequence happened.

The ghost appeared that year as well, but there was still no one there to see him. Eric knew she wouldn’t be there with him. So he and Josephine had gone to the mountains instead. They went skating together, and Eric had watched Josephine. She’d grown into grace. She had on a pink yarn hat her mother had (poorly) knitted her, and her hair poofed out around the edges in a little halo. It framed her face. The longer she did laps around the rink the more Eric felt like he had released a sigh he had been holding onto.

The next year had been Josephine’s first semester at college – she was studying art, and was utterly confident in the job opportunities that would provide – and Eric visited her early December in Chicago every year of her undergrad. In the years after he came to visit the little apartment she shared with the young man she eventually married, and then their first house. He didn’t have to leave the ghost – there was no child at home to protect anymore – but he wanted to. He didn’t like to look at him anymore. He visited his daughter even more when his first grandbaby, who was called Phillip, was born. He finally understood why his mother had been so enthusiastic about baby-proofing his kitchen.

It wasn’t until Phillip was eight (and his two siblings were five and three) that Eric couldn’t visit on December 3rd. Phillip had a soccer tournament, and Josephine was helping organize that on top of her work at the gallery, where they were having a large auction the same week. She had been apologetic, but firm. Eric could visit over Christmas this year. She’d never understood why he chose such an odd time of year to vacation anyway, though she said she’d enjoyed the tradition while it lasted.

Eric visited a few more times on the third, but after that year it was never a staple. Christmas was just easier. And so Eric spent those evenings with the ghost. Not at first – at first Eric avoided him. But it was just too much trouble – to avoid seeing him completely Eric either had to go to bed far too early or stay away all night. So he gave up — he refused to change his plans for something so silly. He made dinner as he always did, and he ate dinner as he always did, and if the ghost was there, well, then a ghost was there.

Besides, Eric didn’t have many dinner guests, and this visitor would never cancel.  

So, as was the norm, a few years later, Eric stayed home. He treated the day like he would any other day. He went to a men’s breakfast and fellowship event at the church that morning. That afternoon he went by the office to give advice and do what he could, though he’d long since passed his business onto his nephew. And then, when evening came, after he’d fixed and eaten a bowl of soup, the ghost appeared sitting at the table.

Eric fumbled around the kitchen as the he materialized. He washed his dish and spoon as the ghost stared down at the case that held the picture in his hands. Occasionally he slid his nail between the two metal sides, as if he would flip open the case and look inside, but he always thought better of it and kept it closed. The ghost’s epaulets and buttons were just as polished as the first day Eric had seen him. It struck Eric suddenly that he hadn’t aged. He was so young — maybe eighteen.

Eric glanced up the stairs, where the television was waiting. Then he looked again at the ghost. He had nowhere to go. He made some tea and sat down. His knees popped as he did.

They communed there in silence, and Eric sipped his tea.

He thought back over his day at first – what he should have done with this or that customer’s call, what more he could volunteer for at the church, what more he could volunteer for at the family business. Maybe they could hire him officially as part-time help. Hell, he’d helped build that business. He’d just order them to hire him as part-time help….

His mind then wandered north. He wondered if Phillip, now on junior varsity, would still play soccer when he got older, the same way Josephine had always been an artist. He wondered how hard it was to make it big in that sport. Eric had no idea — he’d always followed football. He thought about what puzzle he wanted to bring for Christmas, and then ice skating, and deliberated whether or not his littlest granddaughter was old enough to take. For some reason remembering the sound of skates scratching on ice reminded him of the voice of the boy on the other end of the telephone that had been trying to inform him about accident-forgiveness policies. His herbal tea now seemed to reminiscent of the smell of the lavender-oatmeal soap Alice had loved and he put it down.

He glanced at the ghost and wondered what had happened to Alice’s collection of history books about the Civil War. One called Brother against Brother, which was filled with stories about families separated and caught on opposite sides of the conflict, had been her favorite. She was convinced their ghost was in there, somewhere. It was because of the feel the book had given her, she had said, she just couldn’t articulate how the two were connected.

Eric knew now, though, what she had been trying to say.

“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.

The ghost stiffened.

“I’m sorry for everything that’s happened to you,” Eric concluded, after a bit. “I can see they were important to you,” he indicated the daguerreotype, “and it must have been hard to die so young.”

The ghost looked up slowly and met Eric’s eyes. He nodded in what Eric assumed was a sort of thank you.

Eric nodded back, went upstairs, and went to bed.

**

Katie Sanders grew up in a military family – she’s lived in Cairo, D.C., and she graduated high school in Lima, Peru. She moved to North Carolina for university, and to appease the travel bug has driven all over the state in her Volkswagen beetle.

A recent graduate of UNCG with a master’s of genetic counseling, Katie has mostly non-fiction writing experience. She’s been a reporter and editor for the NC State school newspaper, the Technician – her favorite interviews were probably either with the world-champion lumberjack or with the artists that created the public art exhibit “Cow Parade.” She’s also helped author a scientific paper discussing an experimental perfluorocarbon and she’ working on submitting her graduate school research. This is her first available work of fiction.

The following story was originally published in Tragedy Queens, an anthology edited by Leza Cantoral

Going About 99

Shadows from the lace curtains cut your face into one hundred black lilies. You were in our bed, propped up too close to the fogged up window. Your mother had embroidered the satin pillow that made it possible for you to sit up because your body no longer could. Your muscles had all the strength of a toadstool trying to bolster a boulder. I didn’t mind that the bed smelled musty because you had spent the last week dying in it. But I did mind that your bones pushed through your yellow skin more and more each day. You had always been a substantial woman.

When we first fucked, I took comfort in the depths of your flesh. From there, we made love. Sometimes we made love hard and rough, but we still made love. I adored every pound of you. Friends accused me of having a fetish.

“What’s her fetish then? Skinny blonde bitches?” I quipped.

“No, that’s what everyone wants,” they said while sipping their margaritas at the only lesbian bar in town. “That can’t be a fetish.”

I told them that the reason their pussies were dry was because they had hearts of stone.

“Why are you so desperate? You could have anyone.”

“I’m desperate for her because she’s the one I want.”

Somehow, I had convinced myself that you didn’t want me. I felt certain that I wasn’t smart enough. You managed a prestigious archive at a university library while I hosted at a steakhouse downtown. Academics across the country interviewed you for journals and books from elite presses. Meanwhile, I could barely remember to give menus to the flocks of tobacco corporation executives who came to my workplace every day. You had discipline; I had dreams.

But if I hadn’t been bumbling my way through another dead-end job in the city that gave my pathetic little suburb the right to exist, I never would’ve met you.

“Table for one,” you crooned as you marched up to my stand. The harmony of your voice intrigued me, especially since it came from such plush, red lips. You were sharply dressed in a black cocktail dress and Kit Kat Club glasses to match. But it was the shock of pink hair that hooked me.

“One?”

“Yes, just me tonight.”

It was 2000 and I had been out all year. Just two years before you walked into that smoky steakhouse, the press outed George Michael after an undercover police officer found him having sex in a public restroom. Humiliated, he admitted that he was gay in a national CNN interview.

As a 23-year-old Baptist from the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, I was not supposed to fall in love with you. I was supposed to fall in love with a weak-chinned boy from school or church and be married by now. Where was my ring? Where was my child?

“Would you like a table or a booth?”

“Oh,” you said, slightly startled but quick to chuckle. “Well, a booth then!”

“What brings you here tonight?”

“Nothing special. I’m a regular. I like the skirt steak.”

“I’ve never seen you here before.”

You raised your powdered eyebrows.

“I just mean we get so many businessmen. I think I would notice…a woman like you.”

We were standing at your table when you looked straight at me and said, “You mean a lesbian?” You laughed it off, but when you later told me you were testing your gaydar, I was flattered.

“Yeah, I guess,” I laughed, embarrassed. I pulled out your chair and set down the menu. “Enjoy your meal.”

Maybe our history might have ended with our encounter at table no. 7, but I found your note later that night. You had scrawled Do you like comics? with your name and number on a napkin. Best yet, you had written it in metallic purple gel pen. Even before I came out, I knew I wanted a woman with style.

“Panache,” you later corrected me. You were fingering me in the back of the archives that had become your life’s work when you whispered that in my ear. Somehow, you had singlehandedly persuaded thousands of comic geeks from across the country to donate their rare editions to the university library. In less than a decade, you had taken the collection from literally one title to the largest university comic book collection in the United States. All this before age 35.

You were bragging, but I didn’t mind. I wanted you to talk to me, to hold me, to run your fingers through my hair. I felt more electricity making out with you among those comic books than I did losing my virginity to Robby Stone the night of my junior prom. The latter had been my hetero test and I failed it. I wept for a month. To this day, I hate Camaros.

As you lay in our bed dying, I recalled the former roundness of your belly and how I took solace in it. You let me cry there until my mascara ran down my cheeks and I resembled the raccoons that terrorized my grandpa’s old apple farm in the holler. You said your weight came from all the cornbread that your mama made you when you were growing up in Charlotte.

Once you ended your cancer treatment, the doctor told me that you were almost too delicate to touch.

“I’ve touched a lot of ancient paper in the past sixteen years, doc. That’s what happens when you marry a librarian.”

He smiled, but didn’t say anything.

I touched you, anyway. I didn’t rest my head on your belly because you had no belly to speak of, but I did hold your hand. I stroked your sunken cheeks. I even rubbed lotion on your skeletal feet. I touched you as gently as I knew possible. I looked after you in ways the nurses could not.

Of course, there was no one to look after me. Even with in-home hospice care, the nurses must call it a day and return to their personal lives. We had no children and, apparently, no true friends. While plenty of people were happy to take part in our wedding, none of them could be bothered to comfort me or even relieve me from simple household chores. One goddamn casserole was too much to ask. The burden of carrying out the most mundane tasks while the love of my life was dying fell completely and totally on me. I accepted that I couldn’t rely on my homophobic, racist family, but what about my friends? Where was the so-called LGBTQ community? Where were my flag-waving, oh-so-open-minded allies? When I actually needed them, they could not be bothered.

Once the shift nurse went home, it was just the two of us. The first couple of nights, I attempted to fall asleep once the nurse left, but I could never squeeze in more than a nap before I woke up shrieking. I was terrified that you would die while I slept. So instead, I read to you until you fell asleep. At this stage, you could no longer sleep peacefully. Even though it pained me to watch you twitch and even kick in your feebleness, I kept my eyes on you. These moments were part of the countdown.

I could usually stand these periods of obsessive observation for about an hour. Then I had to pour myself a drink. It always started with one, but it could never end there. One drink became two and two became three and three became four and then I typically lost count. You knew when you married me that I had an addictive personality. You were just always there to temper it. Normally you would cajole me to bed and I no longer cared for another drink. My desire for you ignited every vein, every pore, every hair on my body. I would follow you to bed, knowing in my bones that you going down on me would give me a much bigger buzz than that next gin and tonic ever could.

Yet once you entered hospice care, you could not supervise or seduce me. Alcohol entertained me until it drowned my brains. I needed to drown them so I could forget that we would not grow old together. We would never venture to Paris or Australia together. We would never eat chicken quesadillas at our favorite drive-thru or catch another dollar movie at our go-to dollar movie theater. We would never make love ever again. I wanted to taste your cunt until you squealed and moaned. I wanted to kiss you until you teared up and giggled and cried.

But I couldn’t do much more than watch you.

The doctor had practically wrapped you up in caution tape.

On that seventh night of hospice care, I told myself that this was not how you wanted to live and this was not how you wanted to die. I cannot say how many drinks I’d had by then, only that I’d had more than any good Baptist girl was supposed to have. Needless to say, I was not a “good” Baptist girl. I wasn’t even a bad Baptist girl. I was a godless girl and I was not sorry for it. I was sorry for not loving you harder. I was sorry that I could not inhale you and possess you or even become you. I wanted to preserve you. I wanted to protect you. I wanted to take all of the faith I did not have in religion and put it in you.

When I left church life for good, we had been dating shy of three months. I swore that I no longer believed in God, but I didn’t invest that belief elsewhere. I believed in you in the sense that I supported you. But you were in your early 30s and had already accomplished so much. How much of my support did you really need? I doubted our relationship needed my faith, either. I took it for granted that we sustained each other. For that reason, I didn’t think our relationship needed faith. I should’ve believed in the power of us as much as I had once believed in the power of God. Even atheists need faith in something.

You were still doing your end-of-life equivalent of tossing and turning when I appeared at your side in my wedding dress. It shone scarlet in the lamplight. I discovered the iridescent gown at a disco vintage shop and wore it to the courthouse with twinning silk shoes. You had on the same cocktail dress you were wearing when we met. I had talked you into donning a daisy crown all through the ceremony and reception. It’s poignant to think that your black father and white mother were lucky to meet after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage. We met 14 years before gay marriage was legalized, but it wasn’t too late for us. We could still walk down that aisle.

I poked you because I wanted you to wake up and see me in my wedding dress. I wanted you to remember how beautiful I had been when we got married. Somehow in my drunkenness, I had even approximated the big beauty queen hair I wore on our wedding day. It wasn’t exactly a flawless recreation, but I knew you would get the idea.

I poked you again when you would not wake up. Aware that your sleep was not a deep one, I figured one poke would be enough to wake you. It was not. It took half a dozen prods to rouse you. Though your body remained stiff, you gradually fluttered open your hazel eyes. I couldn’t tell what color your eyes were when we first met because you had on glasses and the steakhouse was so dim. But on our first date, we were outside of a coffee shop in the light of day, discussing Superman and Little Audrey. Sometime during your telling of Lois Lane’s feminist revolution, I noticed that your eyes were pools of light brown with green and gray flecks. It was during that same conversation that you got me to admit that I wanted to be an illustrator.

You didn’t have much control of your facial expressions in this final phase, so I read your eyes. It took a few beats, but your eyes lit up when you registered that I had on my wedding dress. I almost tricked myself into thinking that you had turned. You weren’t going to die. You’d recover. You’d survive. We could go to Paris and Australia and the chicken quesadilla place and the dollar movie theater.

Then you coughed.

“No!” I shouted. It was the biggest noise the house had heard all week. I clamped my hands over my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I won’t be that loud again. I’ll put on some Nat King Cole—real soft, promise.”

“Unforgettable,” which we played for our first dance, eked from my iPod. The song had never sounded so slow before. But as you lay there, it played slowly and softly for you. Too drunk to mimic our first dance, I simply twirled.

This is the when the alcohol began making waves in my skull. It wouldn’t be the first time you saw me stumbling drunk, but it would be the last time. I always used to say that you were my weakness. While that was true, my fixation on you never hurt me the way my slavish dependence on gin hurt me. You encouraged me to draw, to pour out the contents of my imagination on the page. You encouraged me to abandon the church that made me miserable. You encouraged me to embrace my sexuality. All you ever did was encourage me, except when it came to drinking. That was one desire of mine you were eager to stifle.

I’m not sure how long I was twirling, but I could not spin around and around forever. I got dizzy and collapsed into the rocking chair that held my iPod. I thought the crunching noise came from my bones hitting the wood at the wrong angle. That wasn’t it. I had crushed the iPod. It was gone. Done. I threw the iPod’s remains against the wall and wailed.

Your beauteous hazel eyes had closed again, so I came over to rub your forehead.

“Wake up, my love,” I said.

You did not wake up.

“Wake up,” I growled. “Wake up. Wake up.”

I shook you by the shoulders and you woke up. Maybe I should’ve seen the terror in your eyes and stopped, but I did not. Instead, I kissed you. I knew I was not supposed to kiss you, at least not with any real vigor—any real feeling—but I did. You could not reciprocate. Your tongue remained curled up in your dry, dying mouth. Your once bee-stung lips were parched.

If I could not kiss you, I figured I could hold you. Thus, I violated another one of the doctor’s orders. I swept you up in my arms and cradled you. One year ago, I could not have possibly done that. For fifteen out of our sixteen years together, you dwarfed me. Now I was the big one, the strong one.

If you responded to me cradling you, I did not notice. As much as I loathe admitting it, the night was no longer about you. It was about me. Alcohol had made it about me. By drinking, I had made the night about me. It’s tempting to wonder whose brain was more alive then—yours or mine.

I kicked off my heels and stood up with you still in my arms. I stopped marveling at how light you were. Now it was a fact, just like the fact that you were dying. I couldn’t be stunned forever. The novelty of this new reality had worn off and my perception adjusted accordingly.

Maybe that is why I began heading toward our pool. It glowed in the backyard, calling to me as it had in all of our years hosting lesbian pool parties. Our email invitations always read “No boys allowed.” Funny how friends will come to your Southside house to enjoy your pool, but none of them will come to your Southside house to mow your lawn or do your laundry when your wife is dying.

The pool hadn’t only been for parties. Really, it was for us. Sometimes we’d read in our beach chairs and just stare at it as the water lapped the steps. Other times we’d play volleyball or swim laps. The sensation of underwater sex never lost its appeal, either.

Even in my drunken state, I knew we would not play volleyball or swim laps. Sex, too, was out of the question. But I saw no harm in us floating in our inflatable pool raft shaped like a Corvette. It was as pink as your hair had been at our wedding.

Maneuvering into the raft with you in my arms was no problem. For thirty seconds, I seemed to regain my sense of balance. I held you tight and, sometime while floating, I fell asleep.

You and I almost died once during the first year of our relationship. All of the downtown bars were closed, but you insisted on going into the city anyway. You were almost certain that this one diner was still open. Those were the pre-Internet days and you saw no point in calling, so we had to drive there to find out. When we approached the James River Bridge, you let out a battle cry and hit the gas. It was clear at 3 a.m., which made the fact that you were going about 99 a little less unforgivable. Still, I was horrified.

That horror increased tenfold when a homeless man toppled into the street. You swerved to miss him, momentarily losing control of the car. You just missed a lamppost as we ricocheted from one side of the bridge to the other and then shot down the length of it into Richmond.

“We made it!” you yelled, a crazed grin taking up more than half of your face.

I sat in silence for a full minute before confessing that we needed to go home because I shat my pants.

We could not have possibly been going 99 in our Corvette raft when I woke up. Yet we had been going fast enough—or at least clumsily enough—that you had fallen off of the raft. I didn’t realize it at first because I didn’t understand why I was in the pool. I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t remember why I had on my wedding dress. What I did know was that I had been clutching you like the most precious jewel on earth because that’s exactly what you were to me. But I had let you go. I deduced this because you were facedown in the water.

This was not a nightmare. This was my life, which had somehow escalated past the terror of any nightmare I had ever had. After days of forcing myself to stay awake for your last breath, I had been asleep when you died.

I paddled the raft over to you and scooped you up. It was only then, holding you as the Blessed Mother held Christ that I howled. Otherwise, I did not move.

I am still in this raft with you in my arms, not knowing what I will tell the police, though I swear I will call them at sunrise. All I do know is that I will never drink again or draw again or love again. I could say that it was your greatness that has made such things impossible, but really it is my worthlessness. When you told me that I was worthy, you were lying. I am less than the scum sticking to the sides of our pool, your deathbed.

**

Christine Stoddard is an artist working across writing and text-based media, as well as sculptural photography and videography. She is the author of Water for the Cactus Woman (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing) and Hispanic & Latino Heritage in Virginia (The History Press), among chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Maverick Duck Press, Another New Calligraphy, and other small presses. Her work has appeared in the New York Transit Museum, the Queens Museum, the Poe Museum, the Ground Zero Hurricane Katrina Museum, Annmarie Sculpture Garden, FiveMyles Gallery, and beyond. Her words and images have been published in The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Bustle, Marie Claire, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Hispanic Culture Review, Native American Peoples, Bushwick Daily, Yes! Magazine, Whurk, The Establishment, So to Speak, and elsewhere. As the founder of Quail Bell Magazine, she has edited two anthologies and multiple zines recognizes by Washington Post Express, Time Out New York, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other outlets. In the summer of 2018, Stoddard will be a visiting artist at Laberinto Projects in El Salvador and the Woodstock Art Museum in Woodstock, New York. Currently, she is an MFA candidate in the Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice program at The City College of New York (CUNY). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, David.

Excerpt from The Reckoning

Westchester, New York

“Is he dead?”

Father Stanford Aquanine D’Oncetta shook his head patiently as he casually removed a cigar from the darkly-illuminated Savinelli humidor.

“No, Robert, he is not dead,” replied D’Oncetta calmly. “But there is no need for emotion. He will be dead soon enough.”

“Not soon enough for me.”

Stately and imperious, D’Oncetta laughed. Drawing steadily upon a vigilance candle to light his cigar, the priest leaned back against a mahogany desk, slowly releasing a stream of pale blue smoke.

Separated from D’Oncetta by the length of the library, Robert Milburn regarded the priest in the dim light. Reluctantly impressed by D’Oncetta’s authoritative appearance, Milburn noted the deeply tanned hands and face of a man who had actually spent little of his life in dark confessionals or chapels.

The face of this man commanded true power and feared nothing at all.

Above the clerical collar and the black, finely tailored robe, D’Oncetta’s straight white hair laid back smoothly from his low forehead, lending him the demeanor of an elder statesman. Everything about the priest was richly impressive, dignified, cultured and refined – an investment banker wearing the robe of a holy father.

“What are you so afraid of, Robert?” D’Oncetta laughed in his voice of quiet authority, a voice accustomed to controlling and persuading. “How many men is it that you have stationed outside?”

“Eleven.” Milburn met D’Oncetta’s steady gaze.

“And is that not enough to guard a single, isolated mansion in Westchester, especially with the noble assistance of New York’s vaunted police force that even now has a priority patrol on surrounding streets?”

D’Oncetta smiled reassuringly and exhaled again, savoring. Then he looked down at the cigar, turning it in his fingers with familiar approval.

“A Davidoff,” he remarked fondly. “Rich and complex. Always the result of superior breeding. And it’s not even Cuban, as one might presume, but a product of the Dominican Republic.”

D’Oncetta’s satisfied gaze focused on Milburn. “Would you like to try one?”

“No.”

Turning his back to the priest, Milburn moved to the uncurtained picture window. He stared past the mansion’s carefully manicured lawn and into the shadowed night beyond.

“I just want that old man upstairs to die so we can all get out of here.” Control made his voice toneless. “I don’t like this, D’Oncetta. If Gage is really out there, like your people say he is, then we should just leave the old man alone. Because if Gage claims the old man as family … If he’s put Father Simon under his protection, then Gage will come for him. And if that happens…” Milburn paused, turning coldly toward the priest. “You don’t have any idea what you’re dealing with.”

“But that is why you are here, isn’t it, Robert?” D’Oncetta responded tolerantly, and Milburn suspected a faint mocking tone. “It is your solemn responsibility to deal with such matters. And there is much that remains, for this is simply the beginning. There are even more delicate tasks which will require your skills in the near future. Tasks which, through the centuries, have always demanded men such as yourself. Men deeply inured and intimately familiar with the higher arts. Men who can insure the success of our plans while simultaneously protecting us all from this individual that you seem to respect, or fear, so profoundly.”

Milburn’s face was stone.

“Yes, Robert, that is why we need superb field operatives such as yourself. And that is why you and your men will remain here, guarding us all so efficiently, until Father Simon is dead. We do not want him disturbed in his final, tragic hours, do we?”

Milburn took his time to reply.

“I’m retired,” he said finally.

D’Oncetta nodded magnanimously.

“Of course.”

Milburn looked again out the window. Shadows completely cloaked the darkened wood line, untouched by the security lights illuminating the surrounding lawn. Training told him not to look for the faint outline of sentries concealed within the obscured trees, so Milburn allowed his gaze to wander, unfocused, receptive to discerning movement where shape could not be seen.

But there was nothing.

He turned nervously toward D’Oncetta.

“How much longer will it take?”

Black and stately, the priest shrugged.

“An hour,” he said with supreme composure. “Perhaps less. The chemical is quite painless and, I might add, undetectable. Not that we shall have to worry. Validating documents have already been executed. There shall be no confirmation of peculiarity. So it will be tragic, but natural. For, as you know, Robert, all of us are destined to die.”

D’Oncetta released another draw from the Davidoff and smiled again, this time plainly amused. And Milburn made a decision, releasing some of his tension by taking a slow and threatening step across the library.

Toward D’Oncetta.

The priest watched Milburn’s measured step with calm detachment. And when Milburn was face to face with D’Oncetta, he stopped as if he had always intended to stop, emotions tight once more. But as Milburn stood close to the priest he felt a sudden strangeness in the moment, in the tension, and he heard the question coming out of himself before regret could silence it.

“Who are you, D’Oncetta?” he asked quietly in a voice of unbelief no matter what the answer.

D’Oncetta laughed indulgently.

“I am a priest, Robert.”

Milburn’s face was a rigid mask. Slowly he turned away and lifted a small radio from his coat: “Command post. Perimeter check.”

One by one, unseen guards responded.

“Position one, Alpha clear … Position two, Epsilon clear,” until finally the code words, “Position eleven, Omega clear,” emerged from the radio with startling clarity.

“Command clear.” Milburn lowered the radio to his side, refusing to look at D’Oncetta again. But he knew the priest maintained his air of amused calm.

“There, you see, Robert. We are all quite safe.”

**

James Byron Huggins was a decorated police detective in Huntsville, Alabama, when he published his first novel, A Wolf Story, to international acclaim. He left the force to write full time, and his subsequent novels The Reckoning, Cain, and Hunter all met with national and international praise. After two of his books were optioned for more a million dollars each, he left writing to work on films. Now back to writing, he lives in North Carolina.

**

Permission: WildBlue Press gives permission to The Other Stories to use the excerpt we provided them from THE RECKONING by JAMES BYRON HUGGINS.

“Disappearing Act” by David Galef was first published in F(r)iction #9

Disappearing Act

One day, Steven woke up to find that everything he disliked on the planet had disappeared. Traffic jams, well-done steak, hour-long meetings. Tangerines, heavy metal, overpriced coffee bars. The list was long, and he discovered new items daily. Creamy coleslaw, pickup trucks. Often it was hard to tell whether it was a shortage or a genuine gap, but when he asked others about certain objects—grape Kool-Aid, Kawasaki motorcycles—he found they had no clue what he was talking about. The color chartreuse, toy dogs who yipped rather than barked. But no people disappeared because, odd to say, Steven found some good in everyone, even Brendan, his irritating boss at GraphicArts.

On the other hand, when he found any new items to dislike—hard-shell luggage—they usually disappeared. On the third hand, wishing away war or hunger didn’t work.

For a while, the disappearances pleased a certain part of him. What’s not to like? he told himself, walking down a street that contained no potholes or flattened patches of chewing gum. But gradually he began feeling guilty over his power, first over the disappearance of strawberry yogurt, just because he’d grown tired of it last year. Then discount coupons and traffic circles.

Soon enough, he realized what he was: a slayer of a lot that was good and decent, a murderer of the past. Why make old Volkswagen Beetles disappear? The world reflected his preconceptions, and that was wrong. When he walked around town, no longer did he think of himself as a decent guy with grievances but as a menace. He’d killed food stamps, though he couldn’t recall why. He’d winkled out emojis. It had been months since he acquired his power, and he couldn’t recall the last time he’d been happy with the world—or himself. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a petty, dislikeable man. So Steven disappeared.

**

David Galef is a shameless eclectic, with over a dozen books in two dozen directions, including the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (a Book Sense choice, listed by Kirkus as one of the Best 30 Books of 2006); the short-story collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (winner of Dzanc Books’ Short Story Collection Award); and the co-edited anthology of fiction 20 over 40. His latest volume is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. A co-founder of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Mississippi, he is now a professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University.

The Tattoo Artist and the Barefoot Bandit

The wind was whipping empty black plastic bags above the sands like airborne jellyfish. Cameron stopped and looked around her for landmarks, but everything looked the same white-grey—the wooden slats beneath her feet, the buildings, the water—all bleached by the end-of-season steel sky. The smell of fried foods still crept out of the few open boardwalk stands, but at this time of year the paying customers were fewer than the seagulls that ate gratis.

There were a few bubbles of color imprisoned behind fences: kids rides covered over and locked down, bright outdoor benches pulled behind gates to collect dirt for the winter. The grey of the chains and fences seemed sharper than any of the blurbs of color, like the foreground in an amateur photograph.

The tattoo studio wasn’t near the boardwalk, that much Cameron knew for sure. It was down some sidestreet with crumbling asphalt, past a trailer selling deep fried foods on sticks, near a Giant Amazonian Sewer Rat or an Amazing Headless Lady. She could remember bits and pieces of descriptions woven through Sasha’s long narratives. Sasha’s voice in her mind was still clearer than the directions, though—quick, confident, laced with slang that would’ve been inappropriate coming out of Cameron’s mouth, but which Sasha managed to get away with. Like when Sasha described her boyfriend’s eyes as “chinky.” Cameron had nudged her then, but no one else in the room said anything. Sasha turned her own large black eyes on Cameron with unfeigned innocence and said, “What, Big Sis?” She was only nineteen.

She’s still a child, Cameron thought. She has time. But what am I still doing in places like this?

Now, under the flat grey sky and above the bleached boardwalk planks, Cameron turned in a slow revolution. The artist that tattooed for free had to be here somewhere.

*

They had been sitting in the dayroom when Sasha first mentioned the tattoo artist. Cameron had been there for over a week, and Sasha for three days. The bruises that had marked the younger girl’s arm and the side of her face had begun to fade into purplish pools that looked like stains from spilled wine that lingered after a desperate scrubbing. The Barefoot Bandit was on TV and Cameron kept telling Sasha to shut up, to watch the news, to stop acting like a child—this was what was happening in the world. But really, Cameron couldn’t stomach the news that was happening world-wide—children with limbs blown off, unmanned planes dropping bombs, towering walls built on borders and M-16s guarding them—she could only stomach the Barefoot Bandit, and ate up stories of him like a bloated pigeon gorging on after-wedding rice.

“Diabla,” Sasha was saying, and in the meantime little bare feet trekked across a map on the TV screen showing the summer houses the Barefoot Bandit had broken into, robbed, and left notes in declaring war on the police, and (even though he was still a teenager and had no formal lessons) the place he had stolen and flown a small plane from.

“Shut up, Little Sis,” Cameron said. “Watch this.”

Sasha looked around to make sure no one was watching and then quickly pulled her sky-blue elastic-banded pants down to reveal the top right of her bottom. “Diabla” was tattooed there in English Calligraphy font.

“Badass, right?” she said with her challenging half-smirk. “He tattoos for free if it’s on your ass.”

*

There was a man slamming a booth closed—one of two open in a row of steel gates surrounded by wooden window frames covered in once-bright red and yellow and blue paint. What had been inside the booth—a ring toss, a distorted basketball hoop, a row of clown heads with open mouths lined up across from water pistols like comic suicides—Cameron could not say. The man slamming the booth shut had a short salt-and-pepper beard, yellow from cigarette smoke.

“Where’s the World’s Smallest Woman?” she asked. She moved her hand into her purse by instinct, feeling all the things there: a wallet, her make-up bag, her tampon case, her cigarettes, her mace.

The man looked at her and he looked at her hand in her bag.

“She’s around here somewhere,” he said, and went back to closing the stand.

*

Another night, in the day room, they were showing a picture of the Barefoot Bandit in a Mercedes Benz shirt, reclining like a millionaire. He had taken the picture after joyriding in someone’s car, and left the picture behind. Cameron didn’t think he sounded like the best criminal, but she respected his verve. Everyone was there. Constance the long-haired schizophrenic, Daniel the inmate, Rudy the drunk. They were all watching the news.

“Big Sis,” Sasha said, “a few weeks before I got here, me and my boyfriend and our friends were drinking outside an abandoned building. We set that shit on fire. We sat there watching it burn.”

“You should have made sure nobody was squatting it, Little Sis,” Cameron said, watching the TV. She had taken to dispensing questionable advice to the younger girl in this offhanded manner. Though more sedate advice about taking meds and formatting her life around a structured schedule was something Sasha refused to accept, she seemed willing to listen to Cameron’s brand. It had even caused her to bestow Cameron with a nickname–“Big Sis.” Cameron had reciprocated with the diminutive version, and the two had persisted in the nicknames even as the other patients rolled their eyes and the nurses looked concerned. On the TV, the bare feet were back again, walking all over the state the Barefoot Bandit came from, then trekking off to  all the subsequent places he had been.

The next day in arts and crafts group, Sasha started talking about arson.

“But I have to make sure I don’t hurt anyone, first,” Sasha said. “My Big Sis taught me that.”

Sasha smiled. Cameron laughed. The therapists did neither.

*

Now, away from the boardwalk, down a crumbled asphalt street, Cameron paid a dollar to stare into what appeared to be a dumpster at something that resembled a coiled rope more than a Giant Bloodthirsty Python. She looked away from the dark green metal container and saw, down the road, a blinking neon yellow sign. Sasha had never said the name of the studio, but the name of this studio was unreadable anyway: a victim of broken neon.

“Do you know anything about that tattoo studio?” she asked the man she had given the dollar to. He was piled with muscles. He had more of them than bottom teeth. He lowered his brows over his already dark eyes and looked to where she pointed, then back to her. Cameron felt conscious of the dark roots of her hair, her Salvation Army clothes, and the fading atrophic scars on her left arm.

The man shrugged. “Ask for Ratchet,” he said.

“Rat Shit?” she asked.

The eyebrows lowered again. “Ratch-et,” he enunciated. Spit flew between the gaps in his teeth.

*

Cameron was sitting on the off-white ledge of the big window, crying. Sasha strutted—Sasha always strutted, swinging her longs limbs lithely, her shoulders rolling like wavelets at low tide—over and said quietly, “What’s wrong, Big Sis?”

Cameron cried and cried. She had no power in her to stop. “I’m never going to get out of here,” she said.

Sasha could not possibly understand all the reasons–the medications that never seemed to change anything, the ones that made her body bloated and her hips and stomach squeeze like dough over the low-slung pants she still wanted to be able to wear; the therapists who nodded at everything she said, or the ones who asked, at every turn, in their infuriatingly calm voices,  “How does that make you feel?” The two week mandatory stays that had happened at least once a year for so many years she had lost count, how they had taken the place of the vacations she’d worked so hard to go on in her early twenties; how she struggled, after these two week stays, to keep the jobs she had abruptly stopped coming in to, how she struggled to pay her rent after she got out; the good days when she was sure, absolutely sure, that it was all over, that things would stay good, that words like “learning to cope” and “managing your disease” were the bullshit she’d always taken them for and she had her life back as quickly as it seemed to have slipped out of her grasp—and the crashes that always brought her back, each time lower than she’d been before them.  Sasha was still a child, Cameron knew she could not understand this all, and yet she put her arm around her anyway in a gesture strictly forbidden between patients.

“Yes, you will, Big Sis,” she said. “They can’t keep you here forever.”

Eventually the tears stopped. They hit a tall beige wall beyond which there was simply no more room for them, jagged breaths or hitching shoulders. Cameron steadied herself, hating that the blotched pink of her face would fade so much less quickly.

“You’re right, Little Sis,” she said. “The Barefoot Bandit is going to break in here and bust me out.”

*

Ratchet was short and stocky. His long brown hair was tied back at the nape of his neck with a plain rubber band, but the sea air had frizzed the short hairs near the front. They stood in a humidity induced halo around his face. He stood near the posters of flash art with his muscular, tattooed arms crossed over his chest. There was a hard half-smile on his face.

“You’re Ratchet?” Cameron asked.

He nodded once, his expression unchanging.

She knew, from friends who had been tattooed, that she should ask to see his portfolio. She could see several books sitting on a ludicrously red table next to a decrepit wooden chair the grey of the boardwalk planks. But she felt she shouldn’t ask. She looked at one of the tattoos on his forearm: a pinup girl with an exposed, cherry red nipple. The girl was winking lasciviously, as she would do every day until the skin of his forearm was no more.

“I want bare feet,” she said. “A trail of them.”

“Where?”

“On my ass.”

Ratchet smirked and looked directly at her ass. His eyes then moved up to her breasts. After pausing on these two spots, he took in the rest of her body with a slow, intentional gaze. She knew he saw the old scars running up her arm, remnants from the days when she had been Sasha’s age, and her troubles had seemed to everyone around her like things that would even out with time. Her used jeans that squeezed the fat around her hips so that it came up and out, as if her torso were something balanced atop their waistband. Cameron realized then that she hadn’t yet taken off the wrist band the nurses had scanned every time they gave her a pill: a white one for anxiety, a red one for ups; a blue one of downs, a green one for thoughts that moved like a new, shining orange roller coaster on a more fashionable beach. There hadn’t been time. She’d just been let out this morning, handed her wallet, her shoelaces, her belt. She had walked out the door into a day that was too sharply in focus after the soft edges of the hospital. Things would change. She would start doing Pilates. She would stop draining her bank account before she wrote her rent check. She would get a new boyfriend, one that wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict or played in a cover band. She would start waking up before noon. She would start styling her hair. But first a symbol. A sign that she was new. She tried not to move under Ratchet’s discomfiting gaze. She needed this.

As he continued to review her in silence, Cameron thought of how Sasha must have looked when she came here. From the story she’d heard in bits and pieces, it had been about an hour before she threatened to jump in front of the train, screaming and leaning her body out over the edge of the platform until her friends called the police, who wrestled her back and handcuffed her and called an ambulance. A time when she’d drank just enough alcohol that it wasn’t yet another oppressing force, a time when she felt, for a moment, free from the two bedroom apartment she shared with her six person family, the second senior year of high school that didn’t look like it would be the last, and the boyfriend who’s fear, jealousy, hate, anxiety and pleasure all reached her thorough his fists and left little spilled wine stains of bruises on the side of her face. But perhaps even in those relatively free moments, her looming gesture had already been showing on her face.

“Why bare feet?” he asked finally. The smirk was gone.

Cameron opened her mouth to tell him the story from the news. But the bravado of the stolen plane seemed false. She thought to tell him of Sasha in the dayroom, or by the windowsill. But she had left quickly, without even saying goodbye to the younger girl. And the Barefoot Bandit had never come to bust her out. Instead, he’d flown to the Bahamas where he’d been apprehended and taken off by men with shining silver badges.

“A child,” she said, finally. “A thief.”

Ratchet said nothing. He turned his eyes away from her body and to the flash art. This lack of look, she had seen it before–in bartenders as they served her the last drink they both knew she shouldn’t have, in therapists who suddenly stopped their incessant nodding and fixed their gazes just over her shoulder. Cameron was unsure of whether she heard a sigh come from him or from the fading scene beyond his neon window sign.

“Go in the first door on your right,” he commanded, not looking at her. “Lie on your stomach and take your pants off.”

**

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press) are forthcoming in Spring of 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found on Twitter, or, more often, snuggling their cat, Sylvia

**

Flickr / State Library Victoria Collections

The Devil’s Hands

A monster lived in Cocoa’s bathroom. It emerged when the sun went down, and she couldn’t sleep for the deep, rattled heave of its breathing. In the night she heard the heavy clomp of its pacing, and if she watched closely she saw its curved claws wrap around the edge of the half-closed bathroom door. With her eyes clamped shut she saw in her mind those same claws creep toward her body. She could never help but look, even though she knew that looking meant not sleeping for another night. In the morning, once light brought with it the courage to peep behind the door, the creature was gone.

Maybe that was why she let her rancid friend Vincent sleep on her couch in the living room; his snores distracted her, made the thing in the bathroom less troubling. It wouldn’t hurt her if someone else were there. Or maybe she really did like him, even though he repulsed her. Or maybe she wanted someone there who loved her like she had always thought Anne had loved her.

After long nights of shaking in bed, Cocoa tried not to call her ex. But some mornings she couldn’t help but dial Anne’s number. Anne rarely answered, and when she did it made Cocoa feel worse. Cocoa would ask how she was, and Anne would say she was great, which made Cocoa feel like shit. Then Anne would ask how Cocoa was doing, and Cocoa would try not to let her voice shake when she said she was great too, real happy with her job still — she baked the bread at a sandwich shop — and she had a lot of new friends now that they weren’t always together. They would say more bullshit about their lives, about how easy everything was in the other’s absence, and then Anne would have to go. She always had somewhere to go.

Cocoa didn’t tell Anne that she missed her, that she wished she’d gone with her to Denver rather than staying in Riddle, the Texas town she’d never left. Cocoa didn’t tell Anne she wished she’d followed her like a fucking dog. She didn’t tell her that sometimes she let Vincent touch her tits for twenty dollars, when he asked. She didn’t tell Anne about the thing in her bathroom she suspected was waiting for her to come to it and let herself be devoured.

The morning of her twenty-fourth birthday, Cocoa woke to Vincent standing before his easel in the living room, shirtless, facing her bedroom. While she fixed them two bowls of granola and almond milk, he talked about his painting, an abstract collage of drug-induced stupor, the canvas cluttered with cut-outs of women’s faces from fashion magazines.

“Listen,” he said, “to the brushstrokes.” He painted a red line down the canvas, then another next to it. He dipped one of his unkempt dreadlocks in the paint and laughed. Cocoa hated his goofy laugh. It made him look like he was just about to drool. But his paintings were cool. “Nature’s own paintbrush,” he said.

Cocoa asked about his plans for the day. She hoped they included anyone but her. In the daylight she usually wanted to be alone. She slept most of the days away, curled into a ball on her couch.

“I figured we’d, you know, have some birthday shenanigans.” He painted another line with his hair.

“I don’t want to,” she said, mouth full.

“Why not?” He cupped his hand on her shoulder. “Because you’re depressed? Everyone’s depressed. You know what depression is, Cocoa? I’ll tell you what depression is.”

“I’m not depressed,” she said. Depression was fantasizing about jumping off buildings. Depression was crying all the time. Depression was a pile of pills in your palm.

“Depression is drinking from the devil’s hands,” he said, moving his cupped palm beneath his mouth. “It’s that rock bottom urge to so what you know you shouldn’t. You know what you do with that? You fucking drink. You drink from the motherfucking devil’s hands.”

While he talked, she stared at the phone. She’d told herself she wouldn’t call Anne, wouldn’t bring herself down on a day when she was supposed to be up. Picking up the phone, she excused herself to her room, but when she got there she called her mom instead. As soon as the phone started ringing, she regretted the call.

Her mom picked up, singing. Cocoa tried to smile, but really she wished she could hang up and pretend she’d dialed the number by mistake. At the end of the birthday song, her mom hounded her. What were her plans for the day? When was she going to come for lunch? Did she have any party plans with her friends tonight? It was Saturday, after all, and she shouldn’t be alone on her birthday.

“I won’t be alone,” Cocoa said. “Vincent’s here.”

“Will he be joining us for lunch?

Cocoa didn’t answer. Cocoa’s mom thought Vincent was her secret boyfriend, even though Cocoa had been truthful about her relationship with Anne. And after all, Anne had only left a couple of months ago. She couldn’t be expected to move on already.

“But, Anne wasn’t really your girlfriend, was she, dear? I mean, you never even brought her home to meet us,” her mom said.

It was true. She had asked Anne to come to her parents’ for dinner, but Anne had never wanted to. And no, they were never officially “together” together, but shit, they’d only spent every night together for a year and a half. And Cocoa cared about Anne. When they’d first met, Anne had given her so much: books on baking cookies with messages of encouragement inside, an ear — Anne always listened to her, handed her the hard truth when no one else would — and orgasms, of course, the first she’d ever had from another’s hand. Cocoa had never thought herself beautiful until she saw her reflection in Anne’s eyes, and Anne had somehow known from the start that when Cocoa cried all she wanted was to be touched. Anne had given her everything she had ever wanted. It wasn’t until right before Cocoa’s last birthday, when Anne became distant, that Anne stopped giving her anything.

Back in the living room Vincent sat on the couch with that fucking silly grin, in his hands a bag of something that resembled dirt. Mushrooms.

“Happy birthday, girl,” he said. He handed her a cap and a couple stems. She didn’t think before popping the cap in her mouth. The raw earthy grit was like sand between her teeth.

Vincent swallowed his whole. “Ready for lunch?”

It wasn’t worth it to argue; she didn’t want to start her trip with confrontation, and so Cocoa put on her fake leather jacket and prepared to face her parents’ place.

#

Cocoa’s mom had set the table for five, and at each chair set a handmade name tag. Three red balloons tied to Cocoa’s chair bobbed under the ceiling fan’s wind. Her mom brought out the dishes and set them in the middle of the table. Everyone took their assigned seat.

Cocoa and her family all shared the same lackluster brown hair cut near to their shoulders, even her father, and the same lackluster brown eyes. Their bodies all mostly thin, with the exception of Cocoa’s sister, whose adolescent pudge had still not disappeared. The only way anyone could tell them apart was by the way they dressed. Cocoa’s parents were still stuck in their hippy days, though they had always been the watered-down Texas kind, their cowboy boots concealed beneath their bellbottoms, and Cocoa’s sister hid under baggy jeans and oversized shirts. Cocoa rebelled against them as best she could. She tried to look professional in pinstripe pants, collared shirts and suspenders. Sweater vests and cardigans. She wanted to look like she knew what she wanted with her life. She didn’t.

Cocoa stared at the feast her mom had prepared: mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cinnamon apples, sesame green beans, vegetarian pizza and a loaf of walnut bread. All Cocoa’s favorites, she’d prepared them all. Damn, Cocoa thought. She tries too hard.

Everyone passed the dishes around, but no one said grace before digging in, not in this family. Cocoa and Vincent both spooned heaping piles of food onto their plates, but as Cocoa picked up her fork and the shrooms started to kick in, she realized she was far from hungry, and the fork seemed too silly an instrument to use, with its four-pronged silver hair. Vincent didn’t seem to have trouble. He daintily forked green beans into his mouth, pausing to glance from Cocoa’s mom to her dad and smile when spoken to.

“Aren’t you hungry, dear?” her mom asked. “You’ve hardly touched anything. Is something wrong?”

“I…I can’t figure out how to use my fork.”  Once Cocoa started laughing she couldn’t stop. The rest of the family stared. Cocoa looked down into the sopping pile of cinnamon apples. The cinnamon danced under the light. “The apples are beautiful, mom. Everything’s so beautiful.”

Vincent placed a hand on her mom’s shoulder. “We did some mushrooms this morning, Jill.”

“Oh, dear,” her mom said. “Does that mean you won’t be staying for dessert?”

“May we be excused? I think it’s time for a little walksie.” Vincent took Cocoa’s hand and helped her stand. They walked, still laughing, through the hallway and ran their hands along the textured wall, cool and strange beneath Cocoa’s fingers. In her childhood room, leftover totems from her teenage years littered the shelves: rubber ducks of varying shapes and sizes, a Beanie Baby Dalmatian, and a music box that sang Swan Lake. A plastic Halloween skull glared at them. Cocoa slid to the floor.

Posters obscured the walls as though she had wanted to hide the blank white: a Sandman poster, a poster of a cheesy werewolf film she’d found ironic, and a psychedelic Jim Morrison print. Now it all seemed morbid, and the faces leered down at her but weren’t laughing. The Sandman wore a permanent grimace, and Jim’s frown made him look like a weeping clown. The skull was eerie, too detached, and for a moment reminded Cocoa of the thing in the bathroom. She imagined its face as bony as the skeleton’s, unmarred by skin, and she felt an incredible desire to know what it looked like. For a moment she nearly up and ran all the way back to her apartment, but she shook the urge away; it would only bring her down, and she wasn’t sure she could find the way.

They didn’t speak for what seemed like a lot of time but was only thirty minutes. Cocoa wasn’t sure about time. All she knew was, this should only last about four hours, and she didn’t know how long ago they’d taken them. Vincent pulled a packed pipe from his pocket and held the lighter over the weed. He inhaled, held it in, exhaled, held the pipe out to her. Cocoa looked at the bright green and shook her head.

“I don’t think we should, not inside–“

“It’s your birthday. You can do whatever you want. You need this,” he said. He pried her fist open and forced the pipe into her grip.

Cocoa tried to spark the lighter but couldn’t. She glanced at Vincent’s bizarre dreads, the layers of tangles he’d let tangle on purpose. Maybe Vincent did it right. She let things tangle in secret, brushed her hair three times a day at least. Kept her house obscenely clean. Tried to make her life seem as put-together as possible, but under the surface she was even more fucked up than Vincent’s hair. She felt numb and scared and pointless.

“I can’t. I just don’t think I can,” she said.

He lit the bowl for her, holding it to her lips. She breathed the smoke in and let it out, and she realized their knees were touching. His free hand had climbed to her thigh. The air crackled with his attraction for her, and once the charge was there Cocoa knew there was nowhere to go but down, and she didn’t think she could handle the bottom right then. It was imperative that she leave the room before their bodies came closer. She threw the pipe onto the carpet; the charred weed spilt out and into the crevices.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have to go home.”

She rushed alone down the hallway, and when she reached the table she saw her family still seated, eating their lunch like nothing was happening. She wished her family could be the normal kind of normal.

“Are you getting the wiggins, girl?” her dad asked.

Cocoa shook her head. “I’m not going to do drugs anymore. I don’t want to feel like shit anymore.”

Her mom nodded, and the look of strained relief in her eyes brought a wave of guilt into Cocoa’s gut. She was sorry she ruined the feast.

“Okay. That’s fine. Would you like to eat now?” her mom said.

“No, I think I’m going to take off.”

She heard her father on the way out. “Looks like she’s got the wiggins.”

#

Cocoa walked the long way home, and every truck that passed pounded the hum of its engine into her body, and the sidewalk beneath her shifted with each step. She hoped Vincent wouldn’t follow. She wished she could shower the shrooms away, but she couldn’t go home yet. She knew the walls would close in. Instead she went to the playground three blocks away.

Parents surrounded her, mothers in their matching sweat suits, fathers staring down into the faces of their iPhones, and the children who didn’t need drugs to see birds soar circles in the clouds. Cocoa sat in the grass. The kids’ shrill laughter would be too much of a reminder that she had passed the stage of such mindless amusement, that now she felt like she could only laugh to keep her thoughts from overwhelming. Cocoa’s mind, even though she tried to keep it from serious thoughts, went right to her own family, how they hadn’t batted an eye when she was tripping balls. That it was all a joke. Not even her little sister, a sophomore in high school. Cocoa’s mother and father had done drugs, back in their youth, and even now they smoked pot every day. They let her sister smoke on weekends when she didn’t have homework, and they had let Cocoa do the same. Back then she thought herself lucky, but now she wanted her mother to slap some sense into her. Tell her she was shitting on her life.

It wasn’t even really about drugs. Cocoa didn’t have a drug problem. Vincent was the one who did drugs, and Cocoa just took what he gave her. What she had was a numb problem. The kind of problem she couldn’t even describe. She could chalk it up to Anne, and she did, but this nagging voice told her Anne wasn’t the half of it.

What bugged her, what really bugged her, was that she let herself fall for Anne. Cocoa knew that Anne was all kinds of wrong, that she partied too hard, lacked ambition. Cocoa knew every word from Anne’s mouth was a lie; the love Anne claimed for her was false, as false as friendship. Anne moved to Denver so she could live with her parents again, so she wouldn’t have to work. So she could go out every night and sleep in every day. But Cocoa still wanted Anne beside her, just so she could feel her skin again.

Her thoughts circled around, folded in on themselves, intensified the empty ache in her stomach that she knew could only be filled by someone’s arms wrapped so tight around her she had to give in.

And Vincent. Cocoa didn’t know why she kept him around. He was lame, almost as lame as Anne, but he loved her in his way. She could tell that he loved her, and it made her sick to her stomach. When she saw the hungry look in his eyes it made her want to puke. She knew she’d had the same stupid eyes for Anne, and now she couldn’t even talk to Anne for more than a goddamn couple of minutes without feeling like shit. All she really wanted was to be rid of the feeling that she was falling, always falling, and that thing in the bathroom wanted to catch her. She looked at the sky, where the sun was falling. She knew it was time to go home and see the thing that had been at the edge of her skin every night, trying to break its way through, and she wanted to go. She felt like she could wait no longer to see it.

#

Back at the apartment she went straight to the bathroom, but it was empty. She sat on the edge of the tub. The water dripped. She leaned her head against the wall and reached into her pocket for her phone. Even in the darkness she knew where her fingers should press.

When Anne answered she sounded irritated, like she’d just been woken from a good dream.

“Anne, how long has it been?” Cocoa said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Since we broke up? How long has it been?”

Anne sighed. “What’s up, Cocoa? You know exactly how long it’s been.”

“I don’t.” She was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know. How long? I keep thinking we’re still together.”

“Seriously, what’s up? I’m kind of busy. I have a friend over.”

“Where are you? I forget. I don’t know what time it is.”

Anne whispered something away from the mouthpiece.

“I took shrooms. I think I’m having a bad trip.”

“Ugh, is that it? You’re just on drugs. It’ll go away. You just have to remember, it’s not going to last. Listen, I can’t talk right now,” Anne said.

“Hey,” Cocoa whispered. Anne asked her to speak up. “I, uh, I wish I were there with you. I wish I’d gone with you.”

“Well, you should have come then. Listen–“

But no, Cocoa thought. She couldn’t have come, couldn’t have just trailed alongside Anne for the rest of her life.

“You should have fucking asked,” Cocoa said.

Cocoa hung up before Anne could say anything more. She remembered time. She remembered that it had been eight months, and that Anne had never seemed interested in bringing Cocoa with her. If she was honest, she had to admit that she hadn’t been serious about it either. She was clinging to Anne so she wouldn’t have to let go, of fear, of the numb, of blame.

But she was peaking too hard to hold her fist tight around the realization then. She fell to her knees and let herself wish that Anne were there to pick her up; she was too weak to do it herself. She needed time to do it herself. Pressing her open palms into the cold white tile, she saw the creature. Standing before her, his body cracked like dry soil. A man-shape, with slits for eyes. Bulky arms and legs, like the muscles were too big for the body. A mess of serpent hair wriggling around his head, and he lowered his hands to her face and cupped them before her mouth. She peered into his open hands and saw that inside the cracks there was nothing but water which began to bubble up and collect in his palms.

“Are you rock bottom?” she asked it. “Is it time for me to climb out?”

“Drink,” he said, and it was the wheezing voice that kept her awake.

She glanced into the empty sockets, and her lips fell to his hands without her willing them to. She gripped his wrists. Even though they burned her hands, she could not let go. She wanted to feel something, anything, and the burn was better than numb. She wanted to bottom out so she could come up again for air.

She drank like she was thirsty. She drank until there was nothing left.

#

A hot hand on her forehead woke her from her first sleep in two months. She opened her eyes to Vincent’s face. He looked stoned, his eyes thin slits, but the hungry look was there, as if he had never eaten in his life. Cocoa started to say something, but he reached down and slipped a bill into her hand. She started to pull her top up, but he shook his dreaded head, gave her a thin smile. She looked down at the bill, the crisp 100 in the corner. He slid under the blankets. She looked at the cracked skin of his hands as they groped at her clothes, into his devil red eyes.

She crumpled the bill in her hands and shoved it into his open mouth. “I won’t.”

He spit the bill out onto the bed and let his hands fall from her.

“What’s wrong?” Vincent said. “No one loves you like I love you, girl.”

“Get out,” she said.

He tried to kiss her. She pushed him. He toppled onto the floor with a thud. For a moment, he looked as though he might protest, might crawl back into the bed and try to make her love him, but then he shoved the bill into his pocket and rose from the floor. “You’ll love me eventually,” he said.

“Out,” she said.

Silence stretched between them like a long trail of spit. He nodded and backed out the door. Minutes later she heard her front door slam. It sounded like an ending. She smiled into the dark. In the bathroom, all was quiet as beautiful death.

**

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies both literary and speculative including Clarkesworld, The Toast, Lightspeed, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She recently released an audio fiction-jazz collaborative album, Strange Monsters, with her partner Peter Brewer, centered around the theme of women’s voices. She’s been reprinted in French and Polish, for numerous podcasts, and on io9. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program and created and curates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Find her on Twitter and at her website.

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Image: Flickr / James Gaither