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Hollywood, MN

West of Frogtown where Saint Anthony Main meets I-94 on the Midway, there’s a boulevard where the famous people stand around all day and greet their fans. They smile and wave at all the cars pulling onto the highway. Sometimes the cars stop and give them money. My dad was the most famous of all of them, Captain Tony. Lots of the guys on the boulevard were preachers, but my dad was a sports fan. He was too thin for Minnesota, so he wore a Vikings sweatshirt under his Twins jacket and his face looked long and wind worn, except on gameday. That’s when he was happy. That’s when he’d turn red.

The Dinkytown college kids, the Seward hippies and Riverside hipsters, West Saint Paul yuppies and the Powderhorn Park lefties, they all knew him. You’d run into him around town and he’d hand you a sharpie and ask you to sign his bike, a three speed rust machine with no handlebars. He’d tell you what he knew like, “Indian is the rich man’s Chinese food,” and, “Pizza is in three different food groups.” Everybody was impressed.

I wasn’t famous yet, so my dad did what he could to keep me out of the public eye. He didn’t want my life to get wrecked by the paparazzi, the countless cars lining up on the ramp to 94 just to give a buck to their favorite celebrities. I’ll always love him for that. Not wanting to get me caught up in the fast life too young like all those other kids of Hollywood types.

I didn’t go to school because the other kids would’ve been jealous that I had a famous dad, so I spent most days at the park ten blocks up north of the boulevard, a big place, all full up with picnic benches, giant oak trees, tennis courts, and basketball hoops. The trees were old and hung over the park like a roof, so even in the middle of the afternoon it always looked like it was just before sunset. The echoes from the trucks engine braking on 94 made you feel far away, and it didn’t even smell like bus stops or bars like the Midway usually did—just summertime, wet and earthy. I’d hang out there with the other kids when they got home from the fifth grade. Their parents had normal jobs, working down at a school or making loans.  I’d never heard of any of their dads, except Aaron Gilbert’s.

Sometimes we’d play normal tag, but we’d usually play Trash Tag. Trash Tag is that game where all the kids bring the plastic bags their gas station doughnuts and Mountain Dew summer flavors came in then go around the park digging through the waste baskets looking for whatever you can fling the best. Once everybody’s got a bag full up of really good stuff, like half full pop cans or bags of dog poop, you have to figure out who’s It. When you’re It in Trash Tag,  everybody is trying to tag you and not the other way around. The dirtiest kid is It when the game starts. It was usually me, but sometimes it would be somebody else.

We’d play other games too, basketball, touch football, or Smear the Queer, depending on who was playing. Aaron Gilbert always picked the game. He was long and scrawny and looked like the noodles we’d get sometimes when the church on Charles and Fry threw spaghetti dinners, but he swore a lot and was mean and in junior high so we’d listen to him. Once he brought a computer printout to the park and made us all look at it. It was folded in the middle because he was hiding it in a book, but it was in color.

It was a picture of a girl, naked except for pink socks. She was kneeling on a bed with white sheets that had blue stars on them. It looked like she was stretching before bed, leaning back with her hands on her ankles and toothpaste on her lips. There was a flesh colored shadow on the inside of her hips.  When I looked at it my ears started burning up and my lungs felt like they were going to fall out. Like I must have been doing something wrong, but wasn’t sure what yet.

I always felt that way with Aaron. His dad knew my dad, even though his dad wasn’t the same kind of famous. My dad said Mr. Gilbert was the kind of guy who would look down on you just for knowing twice as much as him. The kind of guy who thought being King Liquor actually made you somebody. Aaron was always telling lies about my dad. Saying he was a nobody and a drunk, like you could be that and famous at the same time. Saying he tried to steal from Gilbert’s Liquor, the store his dad ran up on Sherburne. I knew none of it was true. We had McDonald’s or Culver’s or Little Ceaser’s for dinner every night, not just on special occasions or after soccer games like the other kids talked about. It didn’t make sense to me that anybody could say we were too broke for anything.

A couple days after Aaron brought the picture, he told us he found a place with some more like it farther up the Midway. I wasn’t so sure about the first one, but there’s something about a thing like that that makes you want to feel that way again, burning inside and out and electric all through your neck, like you’re about to jump out of a tree or just snuck into the State Fair, but deeper than that. Something you don’t quite remember. Something that made you know you were alive without even having to think about it.

Aaron said the spot was up University, at an old closed down tire place. The other kids said some stuff about wanting to play basketball or having to get home in time for supper. I didn’t have anywhere to be, and my dad would probably be down at the boulevard for a couple more hours, so I told him I’d come with. He spit on the grass near me like he was pissed I was tagging along, but I think he was secretly glad to have somebody to go with.

By the time we got there, the sun was low and everything was golden. The sides of the building were all painted up with a mess of kids, all different colors and holding hands with a sign that said ‘Our Neighborhood’. It didn’t look much like our neighborhood to me, but we’d walked a ways since we left the park so I figured we must’ve hit Frogtown. I’d never been there before, but my dad talked about it sometimes. He said there were lots of Vietcong in Frogtown, which he didn’t like much. Sometimes he called it Ho Chi Minh City.  

I asked Aaron if I was right and we should be on the lookout for Vietcong, and he asked me if I was born stupid or if I’d learned it from my dad. I would have said something back but I didn’t want to push my luck, not when we were just becoming friends anyway.

Around the back of the building there was a big wooden board instead of a door. The bottom half had rotted out and you could fit through the hole and get inside that way. Once we got in there it smelled like fresh sidewalk and dog pee. The air was thick and the floor was all full up with broken glass and flat old cigarette boxes turned gummy from mildew and concrete sweat.

There was a counter along the back wall, and Aaron whispered that the pictures were just behind it, magazines full of them. Glossy too, not like that paper shit he’d brought to the park. All kinds he said. Black girls and Asian girls, even fat girls. He said there was some fag stuff I’d probably like too, but I decided not to ask him what he meant.  

There were a couple candles burned to hardly anything at all up in the corner next to a mess of blankets. A few odds and ends were laying around — a small plastic trumpet, some model airplane glue, a bike chain—and, right by the blankets, a pile of phonebooks and magazines. We crawled over and started leafing through them. Aaron was right. The magazines were smeared and warped from water so you could only make out about half of the pictures, but what you could make out was the kind of thing you knew nobody had ever seen before. Bodies pressing against each other and fitting together so many ways I forgot to breathe. I almost didn’t notice the foot. I must have seen it out of the corner of my eye, because I couldn’t hear anything except the blood in my ears. A foot in a beaten up work boot. A foot attached to a leg. A moving foot, attached to a leg, coming out from the pile of blankets. .

Aaron was looking through a magazine called Chocolate Mounds and didn’t have eyes for anything except what was right in front of him. I tapped him on the shoulder. He told me to fuck off. I told him about the foot. That’s when the Green Line Monster rose up. He had a greasy kind of mane on him and a big flannel shirt. Paul Bunyan from hell. Cigarette bone teeth, yellow and jagged and hollow in the middle so you could see inside of them when he opened his mouth to ask us what in the hell we thought we were doing. A voice like a blender full of rocks. Aaron dropped the magazine and we made tracks. A train was coming down University just then, and the signal from the light rail made me dizzy and drowned out everything as soon as we crawled out the rotten entrance we came in through. We couldn’t didn’t hear ourselves screaming until the train had passed us and we were halfway down the block.

The day my dad got kicked out of Gilbert’s Liquor once and for all, he took me to the McDonald’s out by the Spruce Tree Center, a monster of a building with walls that looked like they were made out of green bathroom tiles and a big old clock tower sticking out the top that was two times taller than anything else on the Midway. It wasn’t much to look at, but the clock tower was how I always found my way home, so it felt nice to be near it. He bought us a mess of cheeseburgers and fries and a couple of Filet O’ Fishes because, even though he figured that the food pyramid was probably a scam, there might be something to it. Besides, McDonald’s makes a pretty good fish. There was a bit of a to do about him getting charged extra for sauce packets, but eventually we got ourselves sat down and he started telling me what he knew.

He said to me son, it’s taxation without representation. It’s all about nickel and diming the little guy, you hear me? You think they charge Bill Clinton an extra thirty five cents for a packet of barbecue sauce? No son, there are two kinds of people in this world. The haves and the have nots, and not one bit of good comes from mixing between the two. You know why we celebrate the Fourth of July? No more taxation without representation. I heard you been hanging around with that Gilbert boy. All that sumbitch is trying to do is tax you son. I won’t have it, I won’t have the son of King Liquor poisoning my boy’s mind.

I didn’t have much to say to this because my dad never really had much of an inclination to listen to anybody else anyway, not unless they were giving him something new to know, so I just kept quiet and took a bite out of my cheeseburger. Now that I wasn’t supposed to be doing it, running around with Aaron felt even better. Like holding your breath until you can’t anymore, until you start to fade away then get dragged back sharp and sudden and clear and it’s right now, and you’re breathing. It’s right now and you’re breathing in and out.

The day we found the Haunted House the air was sweet with decaying leaves and you couldn’t see your breath yet, but you could feel it harsh down your throat. It was getting on towards Halloween and the dusk got longer as the days got shorter. Those evenings in the half light had a way of making you feel like an hour was plenty of time to do something that would change your life, you just had to find out what it was and get on with it quick, before the snow started sticking and the Cities got frozen solid.

Me and Aaron were walking along a set of railroad tracks out by Hamline trying to see what we could see, maybe a dead cat or a busted up printer or some girl’s underwear. Railroad track stuff. Everything was going along the way you might expect it to when we heard some glass breaking up through the treeline on the uphill side of the tracks. The embankment was covered in the ratty sort of forest you find stuck in the middle of the city sometimes between neighborhoods, like somebody forgot about it. I turned to look at Aaron, but he was already done looking at me and headed up towards the trees. I thought about not going up there with him, but staying on the tracks alone seemed scarier than going up into the woods together, so I ran after him.

The brush was already mostly dead from the pre-winter chill and you could feel it burn your skin when it scratched into your hands, waking up the numbness. The woods is always the loudest when it’s cold. Branches make high pitched zip sounds when they drag across your jacket and every step seems to shatter half the sticks in the forest, like you’re walking through a field of chicken bones. About 100 feet up the embankment we heard swearing and laughing and froze in our tracks, trying to stare our way through the brush. It was woven together on itself and full up with plastic bags and styrofoam cups and all kinds of other city things that would never rot away so there wasn’t much to see from where we were at.

We inched forward a few more yards. Up ahead the brush was crackling and shaking. Aaron knelt down and grabbed up an old chunk of cement from the dirt and flung it up ahead of us. A second later we heard a big thump like somebody stomped on a full milk carton, and then a shriek. Pretty soon the shriek turned into howling and more swearing and then we heard two more voices up ahead saying that they had to get Ben the hell out of there, that he was gonna need stitches if he didn’t stop bleeding right quick. We stayed frozen in the brush, neither one of us saying anything. Just breathing, in and out. Soon enough the shrieking and howling turned to whimpering, and then nothing. Aaron grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up and before I knew it he was dragging me through the brush towards where he’d thrown the cement.

We broke out into a clearing carpeted with empty bottles and old lawn chairs. There was a dead fire pit in the middle and another thirty or so feet back was the Haunted House. More a shack than a house really, left back in the woods from who knows how long ago and forgotten about. The windows had all been knocked out and the roof was a little crooked. It seemed like just what we’d been looking for. We’d both just about made up our minds to go over there and check the place out when we heard chicken bone cracks from across the clearing.

A hockey stick poked out of the bushes and there was a hand attached to it. Pretty soon the big fella behind it stumbled out into the clearing looking meaner than hell, and he wasn’t alone. A couple more guys, must have been three or four years older than us, trailed behind him, all geared up in hockey pads and carrying baseball bats and golf clubs and what have you. For a tick they just stood there looking at us, and we just stood there looking right back at them. About the same time we got to turning to run, the one with the hockey stick shouted that we must be the fuckers who threw that rock and they were after us.

We crashed on down the embankment getting whipped in the face and neck with stray branches, feeling the trees and bushes press against our coats, trying to pierce through but not quite making it, then cracking under our weight as we bowled forward. The shouting trailed behind us, but we could hardly hear it over the sound of the forest giving way. Once we got to the tracks we could still hear the other boys crashing down the hill behind us, so we kept on running.

By the time we hit a main road, about a mile up from the Midway, the back of my throat was thick with phlegm that tasted like blood. We were both coated in bits of wood and garbage and that cold fall sweat that sends a chill across your outsides to let you know where your insides are. We knelt down on the sidewalk to catch our breath and watched the rush hour traffic tear by. I looked at Aaron and he looked at me and there were streaks of all kinds of colors dancing around, like I’d been pressing my fists into my eyeballs. Just then, he started laughing. Not at me, but with me, at us. Like we were really in it together this time.

We only had one flashlight, so Aaron lit the way and I followed behind as close as I could. The air was cold and wet and the skeleton trees danced across the low flying Halloween clouds, undersides lit up by the Minneapolis skyline. At the top of the hill Aaron hissed and put out the light. I started to ask him what the big idea was, but he slapped me on the jaw so hard I could feel my teeth rattle and shushed me. He pointed at the Haunted House. There was a flickering light behind the broken windows. That’s when I heard it, an old swing set, rhythmic and shearing. There was groaning too. Somebody trying to wake up but not quite able to. We didn’t even have to look at each other to know that we had to see it, whatever it was.

Aaron led the way and we crept up to the Haunted House, crouched down low and moving slow. I couldn’t tell if we were getting closer or the sounds were getting louder, and then it didn’t matter because we were under the window, our backs pressed against the wall of the house. Vibrations came through the walls and our jackets and into our spines. My toes were cold. Aaron held up the flashlight and clicked it on.

We popped up to look into the window at the same time, Aaron dragging the flashlight across the window sill, clearing it of broken glass so we could lean in and have a look. And there it was. Money on a table and a candle in the corner. Six pack on the floor. My dad on his hands and knees on a rotten mattress with his pants around his ankles and another fella pressed up behind him. Bodies fitting together like a magazine. The look on my dad’s face when he saw mine, a look like I’d never seen even through all the Hollywood years. A look like an itch. Like it didn’t hurt yet, but he wanted it to.

**

Angus McLinn is a Brooklyn-based writer from the Upper Midwest who holds a MFA in fiction from LIU Brooklyn. He was a 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and his award winning fiction has been anthologized in Writer’s Digest’s 17th Annual Short Short Fiction Competition Collection, Songs of my Selfie: An Anthology of Millennial Stories, and the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac. Other stories and poems of his have appeared in Blue Monday Review, Those That This, Tempered Magazine, Tiger Train Magazine, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of the fiction chapbook Your Heart Really Does Explode (Cloud City Press, 2012).

**

Image: Flickr / Thomas Hawk

 

Family and Other Catastrophes – excerpt

David’s childhood home looked like a modern, more expensive version of a log cabin. In front there was a wraparound wooden deck, an expanse of freshly cut grass and a tire swing hanging from an old maple tree. A well-worn wooden playhouse, painted red like a miniature barn, still stood out on the lawn. David’s father had built it when he and his brother were little and later converted it into a shed for his tools. Nick was the type of manly-man father that Emily only saw on television. He had worked for years in risk arbitrage and was now retired. He was in his late fifties, and despite being able to afford to hire people to fix things around his home, he took pleasure in home improvement: building decks, fixing pipes, woodworking.

“Hello!” he called from the front door. Emily always marveled at how excited David seemed to see his father: no deep breathing to prepare, no nervous fidgeting, no anticipation of attacks, no deployment of prearranged conversational shutdowns. Nick gave David a long, effusive hug, as if it had been years since they last saw each other. Nick and his wife, Susan, had visited San Francisco just a few months earlier, and a similar hug had occurred then.

“Emily,” Nick said, reaching out to hug her. He had a strong jaw like David’s, the same blue eyes. He had a receding hairline, short brown hair sprinkled with gray, and freckles on his nose. Sometimes when Emily looked at Nick, she wondered if he was what David would grow up to be. She could do a lot worse.

“Emily, sweetheart!” David’s stepmother, Susan, bounced over and hugged her. She was barely five feet, so Emily had to bend down. Susan had met Nick on eHarmony two years earlier. She had been living in Idaho, so they had a long-distance relationship for a year before she moved to Connecticut to marry him. She was plump with dyed blonde hair and hazel eyes. She liked to wear festive earrings that matched the season. Today she was wearing tiny dangling watermelons.

“Susan!” Emily said, giving her a hug. “You smell awesome, what is that?”

“You’ll laugh,” said Susan. “I went shopping with Mad- dyson and bought the latest Britney Spears perfume. I was worried she’d laugh at me for trying too hard, but apparently ‘only older people like Britney Spears’ anyway.”

“That’s crazy. I still love Britney Spears!”

“Well, Maddyson is eighteen so she thinks everyone is old.

So how are things in San Francisco? See any great shows?”

Susan had very limited experience with big cities, other than the few times she and Nick had ventured into Manhattan to see the Rockettes or The Lion King. When they’d visited David in San Francisco, she had insisted on riding the cable cars everywhere.

“I don’t really go to live shows very much,” Emily said. “You mean music, right?”

“Any show!” Susan laughed. “You are so lucky. Young and in a big city!”

Steven and Marla approached. Emily tensed. Her parents had met Nick and Susan before, right after she and David got engaged. Emily had delayed that encounter as long as possible because she had a palpable fear that her parents would alien- ate Nick and Susan so much that they would advise David to break up with her. Once they got engaged, she felt a little more secure, and finally told her parents that David’s parents lived close enough for them to meet up. Luckily for her, Marla and Steven only saw Susan and Nick for lunch once at a Mexican place called Cha Cha Cha Sombrero. Marla and Steven didn’t make much of an effort to see them after that, despite Susan occasionally sending them invites to events they would obviously hate, like the Fairfield Pumpkin and Gourd Festival. Emily imagined the scene at the Mexican restaurant: Marla declining to order anything from the menu, instead producing a plum and a yogurt from her bag while regaling Nick and Susan with an exhaustive list of the anti-anxiety medications Emily was prescribed in high school. After the lunch, Marla called Emily to tell her that Nick and Susan were “nice people,” which Emily knew was the real kiss of death for Marla. Later, Marla complained over the phone to Emily about a mass e-card Susan had sent her for Easter, featuring pastel cartoon rabbits somehow hatching out of eggs, which she found offensive because “she should know we don’t celebrate that.”

“Well, if it isn’t the most brilliant woman in the tri-state area!” Susan said, giving Marla a hug. “You look lovely!”

“Thank you, Susan. Such unique earrings.” Marla hugged her, then gestured toward Susan’s earrings as if she had just received an underwhelming piece of noodle art from a seven- year-old.

“Aw, thanks. There’s this adorable little jewelry place I went to when Nick and I were visiting Beantown. I thought of you the whole time. What a kick it must have been to grow up there. All the shows!”

“It was nice.”

“Do you get back there often?”

“Not that much. The last time I was there— God, I don’t think I’ve been there since my last Harvard reunion.”

Never misses a chance, Emily thought. “Ooooh, Harvard! I forgot you went there!”

“Oh, let’s not get into Harvard,” Marla said, waving it off, a few bangles clinking against her narrow wrist.

“You know who you’re like? JFK! Funny factoid, but he went there, too.”

Marla smiled weakly, and Emily could already see beads of sweat forming on her mother’s freshly waxed upper lip. “Well, I don’t think I’m that much like JFK, but I’ll take the compliment.” Marla had a distaste for Catholics that made little sense. It was an attitude more typical of lapsed Catholics with nightmarish memories of parochial school. Marla said her anger came from perfectly justifiable outrage over anti-Semitism, but Emily thought it seemed odd to single out Catholics for that. She was fairly certain that Marla’s prejudice had more to do with a girl from her high school in Boston named Colleen Sweeney—a transfer from a Catholic girls’ school— who in 1973 had won both the Latin award and the science award, two awards Marla believed she deserved. The Colleen story had been told to Emily various times over the course of her childhood, with a different moral each time. Once, the takeaway was that even if you fail at something when you are younger, you can always grow up to prove your critics wrong. (At the end of the story, Marla gleefully revealed that Colleen later turned out to be a stay-at-home mom.) Another time, she ended the story with the assertion that even if you are brilliant, if you don’t work hard enough, some “idiot” with a better work ethic could beat you.

“So how is the psychiatry racket going?” Susan asked. “Psychology, actually.” It was a distinction that Marla wasn’t proud of, and Emily was surprised she even owned up to it.

Susan turned to Emily. “What a kick, growing up with a mom who’s a therapist! Did she ever diagnose you with anything?”

“Um, yes.” Emily dug her heel into the lawn. “I mean, she diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder. And some other stuff that she later revised.”

She regretted saying it as soon as the words left her mouth. Susan placed one hand over her freckled chest, another over her mouth, her eyes widening as if she’d just found out that Emily had a terminal illness.

“It’s not a big deal,” Emily said. “Honestly.”

“Marla,” Susan gasped. “I had no idea! I am so sorry.”

“It’s nothing to feel bad about,” Marla said. “Emily has had her fair share of challenges, but it’s very important to us that we strive to help her function as well as she possibly can.”

“Mom, I’m literally right here.”

“Well, this is nothing you don’t know. I never wanted you to be treated differently because you struggle with anxiety. It was hard enough that you were profoundly gifted. Trying to help you assimilate socially proved challenging for me.”

“Okay, I’m getting some food now.” Emily took David’s arm and waved goodbye to the four parents. She panicked for a moment, worrying that in her absence Marla would unleash embarrassing stories about her worst anxiety attacks—like the time when she was fourteen and she cried in a restaurant because she suspected a waiter had not washed his hands after using the bathroom and her parents made her eat her baked ziti anyway. But knowing Marla, she would try to keep her conversation with Susan as mercifully brief as possible.

“They’ll be fine,” David said, squeezing her hand.

Nick went to man the grill, donning an apron with a corny Mr. Good Lookin’ is Cookin’ slogan next to a cartoon of a goofy, big-eared and big-nosed barbecuing man with a head two times bigger than his body. Nick sometimes made Emily wistful; she couldn’t help comparing him to her own father, who spent family dinners deriding other faculty members he was convinced were trying to sabotage his chances at tenure. “My dad has already texted me since I’ve gotten here,” David said, looking at his phone. “Why does he do this? This one just says, Dave, so proud of you! You have really become a man!”

“It’s cute. He cares about you, and he still thinks texting is new and fun.”

“Yeah, but I’m like ten feet away from him.”

“I can’t really blame him. When you come home it…well, I think it reminds him of your mom.” Emily still felt uncomfortable approaching the topic of David’s mother. No matter how angry she got with Marla, she didn’t think she’d be able to go on if Marla died. She didn’t understand how David didn’t break down crying now and again. She liked to think he showed that people could bounce back from tragedy, but instead his calm attitude signified that she was just far too emotional compared to normal people, and that if and when her mother did die, she’d suddenly collapse and die too.

“I just don’t need to hear how proud he is of me every time I eat a Hot Pocket,” David said.

“At least he’s proud of you.”

“Yeah, well.” He took a swig of beer. “I guess when my brother is the only other child he has to compare me to, I seem like Richard Branson meets Nelson Mandela.”

She wondered if David ever felt that her praise and affection was too smothering. He never said so, but if he found it so irritating coming from Nick, he must occasionally feel the same way about her staring at him while he watched basketball, putting cute little notes on the bathroom mirror for him, and sending him heart emojis for no reason during the workday. She had tried to play hard-to-get when they were first dating, but it was so difficult not to fall off the wagon and start inundating him with kisses and compliments.

Emily looked over at the barbecue guests through the haze of smoke and f lies. There was Jason, T-shirt slightly too small and revealing his belly, raising his arms in the air in what appeared to be a low-effort version of the Macarena. He was drunk.

“We are going to have an epic wedding week!” he cheered, raising his Heineken. He had finally stopped sulking about Christina’s presence. It helped that she avoided him as much as possible. She had taken a liking to Joss, one of Susan’s fifty-something granola-ish friends from the cat shelter where she volunteered, and the two of them were huddled in the corner having girl talk.

“You do you,” Emily heard Christina say.

“Your brother is getting drunk,” David said.

“No shit,” Emily laughed. “Hey, where’s your brother?” “Hmm, I don’t know. I assumed he’d be out of his cave by

now.” He looked for Nathan, and finally spotted him at the back door, half-hidden by a wooden column. He called out to him. “Nathan! Aren’t you going to say hi?”

Nathan trudged over. He was only a few years younger than David, but Emily often thought of him as if he were a teenager because it was hard to remember he wasn’t. He lived at home with Nick and Susan, and although he was usually eager to boast about his superior intelligence, he didn’t have any work history or accomplishments to show for his self-evaluated IQ of 170. He was rotund, with flappy triangular man boobs out- lined in sweat on his black T-shirt. His shoulder-length brown hair was gathered into a greasy ponytail. Growing along the underside of his double chin was an untrimmed beard with the texture of pubic hair. He was wearing his uniform: a faux leather trench coat, cargo shorts, white Nike sneakers, and a gray tweed dollar-store fedora.

“Salutations, David,” he said. “Susan suggested I wear le hat for such a fancious occasion.”

“Fancious?”

“It means fancy. I believe that it’s a Middle English term but I could be wrong.”

“Well, I’m really excited to have you as a part of our wedding,” Emily said. She gave him an awkward hug, patting him on the back and trying to avoid the smell of his ponytail. She had met him once, last Thanksgiving—they had spent the holiday with David’s family because Emily’s parents were in the Vineyard—but hadn’t spoken to him very much. He had spent the vast majority of the weekend playing World of Warcraft in his room, and at one point he proudly announced at the dinner table that he had made a thirteen-year-old cry after debating him online about atheism.

“So, Emily, do you have any fair ladies-in-waiting who would be pleased to make my acquaintance?” he asked. “Anyone looking for a gentleman?”

“Ladies-in-waiting?” “Bridesmaids, as the plebeians ay.”

“Well, my friend Gabrielle is the maid of honor, but she’s pregnant and married…”

“You didn’t make your sister the maid of honor?” He looked horrified. Even someone as socially inept as Nathan knew how weird that was. Emily blushed.

“I just…it’s a long story. She’s kind of anti-wedding. I didn’t think she’d do a good job at it.”

“Cold, m’lady. But I remain intrigued. Prithee continue.” David frowned. Emily could tell it was taking all his restraint not to punch Nathan in the face.

“Oh, my other bridesmaids? Well, there’s my friend Jennifer but she’s…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence without saying “out of your league,” so she just said, “a lot older than you.”

“How old?” “Twenty-nine.”

“Hmm. Five years older than myself. That’s pushing it, but I’ll consider her if she enchants me. Women that age sometimes have a certain…je ne sais quoi.”

David shook his head. “Nathan, don’t. Just trust me when I say no.”

“And well,” Emily said, “the only other bridesmaid is… Maddyson. But, ha-ha, since she’s your stepsister that pretty much…” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

“Don’t be so quick,” David said. “Nathan has been hung up on her ever since Susan married our dad.”

“What, really?”

“He’s being oversimplificated,” Nathan said. “I am not hung up on my stepsister. I merely admire a beauty such as she.”

Emily involuntarily cringed.

“Dude,” David said, “she’s way too young for you. I am not doing this with you again.”

“Eighteen is legal, for your information.” “Yeah, but it started when she was sixteen.”

Nathan put his hand over his chest in a bad imitation of a pearl-clutching old lady. “Dear Lord! Sixteen! Reproductive age, legal in almost all of Europe and fully able to make her own choices! Whatever must we do with this pedophile?”

“I don’t get why you can’t just date girls your own age,” David said.

“The older women get, the more demanding they become. If I were to approach a twenty-five-year-old, for example, she would be attractive but wouldn’t have Maddyson’s fertile, nubile looks. And to make matters more unsavory, she would look down on me for not having a so-called traditional job. Maddyson doesn’t have a job, ipso facto, we are actually a good match. Moreover, if we lived just a few hundred years ago I would be the natural first choice to take her maidenhood—intelligent, wise, generous, successful—and in the same family line.”

“How are you successful in any way?” David asked. “You just said you don’t have a job.”

“In days of yore, my good sir, I would have been successful. The trades in which I am highly skilled are not valued by our declining society. Sword fighting, for example.”

Emily looked over at Maddyson, leaning against a column. She had wavy brown hair cut to her shoulders with a streak of pink. (Emily had objected to the dye job because Maddyson would be in the wedding party, but she wound up allowing it for fear of looking like a bridezilla.) She wore a pair of frayed acid-washed shorts, Converse sneakers and a large white T- shirt that looked intentionally splattered with green paint. She was looking at her iPhone with her eyes glazed over, giving a surly, slightly openmouthed expression to the screen. Emily noticed that Nathan had seen her staring at Maddyson, so she quickly averted her gaze.

“She’s beautiful,” he said with a knowing smile. “No shame in looking.”

“I wasn’t…”

“It’s fine. All women are slightly bisexual.” “Nathan,” David said. “That’s enough.”

Nathan shrugged. He was relatively immune to criticism. Emily couldn’t tell if it came from abnormally low or abnormally high self-esteem. Either he was so used to negative feedback that it no longer affected him, or he was so delusional that he refused to believe that anything could be wrong with him. Perhaps she’d ask Marla to analyze him. She was sure there would be an interesting cavalcade of diagnoses on the ride home. All of Emily’s ex-boyfriends had earned their places in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from histrionic personality disorder to borderline personality disorder to chronic depression. Marla followed up each assessment with, “not that I’ve personally examined him or anything” as if trying to avoid liability. She had diagnosed Christina with narcissism back when she and Jason were dating, and Matt with compliant codependency. David was the only one who had evaded a diagnosis so far, probably because Emily had rigorously prevented him from spending too much time with her mother.

**

(c) Alexandra Borowitz. excerpted from Family and Other Catastrophes, Published in 2018  with permission from Mira Books

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Alexandra Borowitz has been writing since she was six, and her family and friends provide endless inspiration. She was raised in New York, and spent her first years out of college in San Francisco working at advertising startups. Family and Other Catastrophes is her first novel.

Yo No Soy Marinero

In front of the jukebox, a boy danced by himself, beer in one hand and cigarette in the other. He might have been eighteen. His bare feet scraped patterns in the sand on the cement floor as “La Bamba” streamed out of the jukebox in the small Mexican bar. Burke took a swig of his Tecate. A dozen people sat scattered against the bar to Burke’s left—locals, expats, and college kids on spring break. A breeze off the bay came in from the patio and carried the cigarette smoke out the open front door.  The boy stumbled and fell to the floor, landed on his back. Conversations around the bar stopped. Heads turned. He lay still for a moment, his poncho flipped over his face. The beer bottle rolled out of his open hand and across the floor. Burke stopped it with his foot.

“Whoa! Yeah!” the boy shouted as he sat up.

Conversations resumed. Burke shook his head and took another sip of beer. The boy crawled across the floor to his runaway bottle.

“Thanks for stopping this, man.” He clutched his beer in one hand and used the other to pull himself up to the bar. He swayed in a slow arc as he chugged the rest of his Pacifico. His hand gripped the edge of the stained plywood counter top. He came to rest, shoulder to shoulder with Burke. Sand fell from his poncho.

“Sorry, man. You didn’t happen to see my cigarette, did you?”

Burke shook his head.

“That’s all right. I’m trying to stop anyway.”

The boy put the empty bottle on the bar and pulled himself up straight. He managed to snag a nearby stool and shove it under him on the third try.

“Bartender. One more round,” he said, his left forefinger pointed toward the ceiling at the far end of the room. He put a ball of crumpled bills on the counter when the beer arrived. The bartender picked through the money until he got what he needed.

Burke took another sip. At the opposite end of the bar, the two men he’d driven down with—one in his late forties, the other older—and a couple local women, hit the empty space they called a dance floor. The jukebox continued to pump out songs. More people entered the bar.

“I love that song,” the boy said, as “La Bamba” started for the third time. “Do you love that song?”

Burke shook his head.

“It’s a great song. I could listen to it forever.”

“I think we’re all listening to it forever.”

“Bartender.” The boy waved for Jorge to come over.

“Hey, man. Can I get like three dollars worth of quarters?”

“No.”

“Why not, man?”

“Cause all you gonna do is play ‘La Bamba’.”

“But it’s a great song, man.”

“Not any more it ain’t.” Jorge walked away.

“It’s a great song,” the boy said and looked at Burke. “It’s a great song.”

Burke downed the rest of his beer. More people filled the room. The dancing spilled onto the patio. “La Bamba” still played. Or played again. He looked down at the boy, whose forehead rested on the counter top. Burke signaled Jorge for another beer.  

“Hey. Got a twenty we can borrow? We need some Camels and six packs and Jorge won’t break a hundred,” said the middle aged man as he approached Burke.

“A hundred? What’d you bring a hundred for? Nobody’s gonna break a hundred.”

“I know.” He snatched the twenty from Burke’s hand and waved the bill at Jorge. “Some Camels and two sixes to go.” He turned to Burke. “You know, there’s this little wisp of a thing at the other end of the bar been eyeing you all night. You might wanna wander down that way when you break up with your boyfriend here. We’ll leave you some blankets in the back of the station wagon in case you get lucky.” He winked.

Jorge deposited the six packs and cigarettes onto the counter along with Burke’s beer. The boy pivoted his face on the plywood bar, wiped sand from his forehead. The man grabbed the Camels and stuffed the pack in his shirt pocket, along with a pack of matches from the empty ashtray in front of Burke. He handed one of the six packs to the older man who’d joined him with their dance partners.

“We’re heading back to the place, so . . .”

“So don’t come a knockin’ if the trailer’s a rockin’.”

“Don’t worry, old man,” Burke said as the four dancers laughed their way to the door.

“You know those old guys?” The boy tried to sit up, but had his arms tangled in his poncho. He held down the counter top with his head.

“That was my father and grandfather.”

“No way. You’re totally messing with me, man.”

“For real.”

The boy freed his hands and shot straight up on the stool, almost falling over backward. His hands clutched the edge of the bar top. He stared at Burke.

“You’re telling me those two old guys are your father and your grandfather and they just headed out to get drunk and get laid?”

“Well. They’ll get drunk.”

“Your father and your grandfather?”

“Yeah.”

“For real? Your father and your grandfather?”

“For real.”

The boy stared at Burke. His eyes watered. “My father and I never do anything together, man.” He loosened one hand from the bar to point a finger at Burke. “You are so lucky. So lucky. My father never wants to do anything with me. Ever.”

Tears rolled down the boy’s cheeks. He threw his poncho-wrapped arms on the bar and buried his head into them. After a minute he lifted his head and turned to Burke.

“My father. He’s got a big old boat. A sailboat. A forty footer there at Marina Del Rey. I’ve never been on it. Ever. All I want is to go sailing and he won’t take me. Just uses it for clients. I asked, but he’s too busy. Just one ride in the boat. That’s all. And he don’t have time. No time for one little ride in the boat. That’s all I want.” His head sunk back on his arms.

Burke fished some change out of his pocket, picked through it, and slapped some coins on the counter.

“Hey. This is the one and probably only time the three of us’ll do this generational bonding thing. You’re not missing much. Here’s four quarters. Go play ‘La Bamba’. But if you see Jorge come out from behind the bar, run for it.”

The boy lifted his head from the poncho. Sand clung to his wet face.

“This is the only time?”

Burke stood. “The only time.” He patted the boy once on the back and walked toward the other end of the bar, beer bottle in hand.

The boy got off his stool and weaved toward the jukebox. He dropped the quarters into the coin slot.

“Don’t you dare,” yelled Jorge as he backpedaled toward the opening at the other end of the bar.

The boy punched in the code for “La Bamba” four times and ran for the patio with Jorge close behind, bar towel snapping at the boy’s head.

Jorge stopped at the edge of the patio, but the boy continued across the beach and into the reflection of stars on the shallow water of the bay. “La Bamba” started again on the jukebox. People got up to dance and Jorge went behind the bar to serve more beer.

The boy waded into deeper water until he stumbled and fell forward. He thrashed and kicked until he turned himself onto his back. He gasped and gulped at air, then caught his breath. The boy struggled out of his poncho and let it sink. He floated at the edge of the bar light, pale face illuminated against the dark water like a moon in an ocean of stars. His voice carried landward from the sea: “Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán!”

**

Ray Carns resides in Phoenix, AZ, USA where he spends his time involved in writing, photography, and film making. His fiction, poetry, plays, and an essay have appeared in Passages, Bourbon Penn, The Journal of Microliterature, Rose and Thorn Journal, this– a literary webzine, Penny Shorts, and Epiphany: An Unpretentious Publication. Ray earned a Certificate of Completion in the Creative Writing Program at Phoenix College in 2012. Ray’s entries in the Maricopa Community Colleges Creative Writing Competition earned him Honorable Mention for both a one-act play and short story in 2010 and Third Place for a one-act play in 2011. Both one-act plays received a Certificate of National Merit from the League for Innovation in the Community College.

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Image: Flickr / Marco Verch

Bumps

“Sometimes I can just use some good news,” Sadie tells me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes watery, a slight quiver to her voice and a tremble in her hands, heavy sigh, “about anything.”

Late August always gets Sadie down. It’s one of those times of year, I can almost mark them on the calendar, when Sadie has a tough go of it, right along with after Christmas and New Year’s once the anticipation of the holidays has faded into torn wrapping paper and empty plastic champagne flutes, the middle of February when Louisville is dead and gray and frozen and it feels like spring will never get here, even the Fourth of July weekend because Sadie can’t stand fireworks ever since the father of one of her friends from growing up blew off his hand putting on a fireworks show in their backyard and she particularly can’t stand people who shoot fireworks well into the next week when she’s trying to sleep. It’s a cycle with Sadie, and when she hits one of these bumps, as we’ve come to call them, it’s hard to pull her through.

I hate to see Sadie like this. I hate to see Sadie sad, and when I can’t do anything about it, nothing more than to hold her, like some bulky, scratchy, stadium blanket, and tell her that everything is going to be alright. I want to do more. I want to take the brunt of these bumps. I want to experience the full impact, to absorb them so that Sadie is no longer burdened. I want to understand them, to really understand them because maybe then I can really do something, anything to return Sadie to her cheery, happy way. But maybe Sadie isn’t cheery and happy, maybe that’s what she uses to cover what’s underneath, and when she hits a bump it all comes spilling out.

Sadie has talked to someone about this before, some dour social worker with doe eyes and a nondescript hairstyle that girl from work recommended, in an office in a converted townhouse in the East End littered with overstuffed throw pillows stitched with positive affirmations and smelling like cinnamon potpourri, a poster of the Serenity Prayer tacked to the back of the door and the faint strands of NPR wafting in from the waiting room. I went with her once or twice but neither of us got much out of it, and eventually Sadie stopped going altogether, said it was weird having that woman glare at her, with those doe eyes, pursed lips, expressionless, waiting for her to come up with the answers. Sadie thought that if she could come up with the answers she wouldn’t need the dour social worker to begin with, and I had to agree, but when I suggested someone else, someone who could prescribe a pill, just to take the edge off, “we all need to take the edge off,” Sadie said she was done with that, talking like that, and she worried if she blunted the bumps with medication something else would take their place, and what if that something else was way worse than the bumps. “I don’t want to risk it, buddy,” Sadie confided to me. “I can’t.”

So I am left to try to figure out these bumps myself, to find what triggers them other than the calendar because it has to be more than that, yet I still haven’t had much success, and I still haven’t pinpointed what it is about late August that gets Sadie down, although I have my theories. Sadie hates back-to-school, hated it as a kid and hates it now, hates it because it means the carefree days of summer vacation are over, not that our days these days are carefree, but it’s the idea of that, the idea that days could be carefree, what Sadie and I see in the clusters of children we pass in the neighborhood on our drive in to work each morning, gathered at the street corners, new clothes, new squeaky sneakers, new full backpacks, new experiences awaiting them, a whole wide world ahead, jumping up and down and shouting and fidgeting and laughing for no discernible reason other than they are children and that’s what they do, anxious parents hovering about to make sure they climb aboard the right lumbering yellow bus. Sadie and I see them every morning knowing we can never be anxious parents, knowing we can’t have children, no matter what we’ve tried or the so-called experts we’ve met with or when all else has failed how much we’ve prayed. We have come to accept that it will just be the two of us, alone and together, and that’s okay, or we lie to each other that that’s okay, with Sadie casually mentioning to me one evening, apropos of nothing, and completely unexpected and equally unconvincing, her words lingering like an echo in a cellar, “I don’t really mind not having babies if that’s how it’s gonna be.” It isn’t okay, and maybe that’s where this bump comes from.

Late August always takes me back to when Sadie and I first met, at college, thirty-some years ago, standing outside of Wannamaker waiting for our freshman dorm assignments, when my cheap nylon knapsack decided at the most inopportune moment to split at the seams, belching out a semester’s supply of toothpaste and razor blades and contact lens solution, and a box of extra-large condoms and a tube of KY jelly my buddies had given me as a going away gag that I packed anyway for some reason, all of it everywhere, and everyone ignoring me and my plight, except for Sadie, this girl I had seen, the first person I met, when my dad dropped me off to find a parking spot for the unwieldy box truck he rented to move me the eight hours from home, on her knees beside me, her typically tousled and then-blonde hair – which she claimed was bleached from the sun and I, later, much later, once we were comfortable enough that I was certain I could get away with it, teased was bleached from a bottle – in long curls in her face, laughing hysterically and goading me to laugh with her, a joke only we shared, helping me to wrangle my shit. We had everything then, and nothing to lose. We could have done whatever we wanted. And if Sadie thinks about it like I do, reflecting on those days, now gone forever, when possibilities were endless and life was limitless, before reality had its way, maybe that’s the reason for her bump.

Or maybe it’s her birthday, creeping up in a couple of weeks, and while Sadie insists she loves her birthday, sees it as her own personal holiday and wishes every day could be her birthday, she let slip last week over a bottle of Sonoma-Cutrer during half-price wine night at Lou Lou’s that there’s something sobering about becoming a year older and being that much further removed from who you used to be. “We’ll never be who we were!” she proclaimed, rushed and wide-eyed, a sort of epiphany, amplified by the half-price wine. Sadie has started to lose people close to her, people she cared for, people who had been constants, who she always assumed would always be there, who have up and broken down and crumbled apart and withered away before her eyes, who she never imagined leaving, not like that, with a final gasp and gone, forever. It’s the alignment of those occurrences that’s to blame for the latest bump, my theory at least, one of many. All I can do is conjecture and speculate and guess because whenever I ask Sadie she snaps at me, uncharacteristically, and questions why she needs a reason to be sad, why she needs to explain, why it isn’t enough that she’s sad and can’t I leave it at that. And I can, and I do, I leave it at that, as I try, to myself, to understand, because I hate to see Sadie sad.

“All I want is some good news,” Sadie repeats, her face half-lit by the flickering pale bulb above the garage, taking the glass of water I bring her as I join her outside on the back stoop, at three-something in the morning, where Sadie has retreated after tossing and turning for most of the night because as much as I tried to hold onto her in bed, with how her bumps were, and the air conditioner even in our modest Cape Cod unable to cool the second floor during such a muggy spell, it became too stifling, and Sadie had to get up, and get out. So we sit on the back stoop of our house just as we did in college when we would meet late at night on the concrete back patio of Wannamaker to sneak a cigarette from Hank’s stash and stare up at the starry sky imagining what it would be like to be somebody else before that dick RA yelled at us to get inside because it was past curfew.

“I know,” I say to Sadie, watching her delicately sip the water, those dimples, and I move a thick brown lock of hair out of her face. “Good news is coming all the time,” I try to convince her, to convince me, “could be you have to wait a little longer for it is all.”

“Yeah,” Sadie concedes, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and setting the glass down at her feet with a clink. She leans her head on my shoulder, and exhales, then, softer, towards the far end of the yard, darkened and mysterious, “But the waiting wears me down after a while.”

Sadie says she’s tired, but she can’t sleep, and she’s tired of a lot of things, but she doesn’t know what exactly, and she can’t wait for October because she likes pumpkin beer and trick-or-treaters and the smell of falling leaves in the crisp autumn air, but that now it’s just so hard, that everything is so hard, and she doesn’t know why because it never used to be like this, so hard, and there’s a dull dingy sheen over everything, and she’s feeling gravity’s pull more than ever, and she can’t snap out it of like she used to. My throat is dry, and I want a glass of water, and my heart sinks, dense and heavy like a two-ton weight. I’m pissed at myself for not being able to figure this out, and I’m pissed at Sadie for having these bumps, and I’m pissed even more at myself for thinking that way because Sadie can’t help it, and I can’t help her. All I know to do is pull her closer, and kiss her wherever my lips meet her face, and let her fall asleep against me, and I manage to fall asleep too, until the stray rays of sun peeking through the evergreen on the other side of the warped wooden fence and the neighbor’s ridiculous Pomeranian who was let out to take a dump and found a squirrel to chase and bark at wake us. Sadie gently stirs to life, and she’s beautiful, and she’s perfect. I wish she understood that. I wish that would make a difference with the bumps.

I offer to cook banana pancakes for breakfast, on the cast iron griddle we got as a wedding present, with thick-cut pieces of pink country ham from the farmers market down the street and French Roast coffee in the Fiestaware mugs we bought at that outlet mall in Pigeon Forge when we were there for our anniversary. Sadie smiles, still sad behind her eyes but smiles still, and says, “Yes,” and “that sounds good, buddy.” So I get up and go into the kitchen, and we start to begin our day, as I wish for this bump to go away.   

**

Peter J. Stavros is a writer in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, The East Bay Review, Hypertext Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Juked, and Literary Orphans, among others. Peter has also had plays produced, including as part of the Festival of Ten at The College at Brockport – SUNY, for which he was named Audience Choice Winner. More can be found at his website.

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Image: Flickr / Gerald Gabernig

The German Photographer

The first time they met it was, oddly enough, at an Austrian restaurant. Ben had to wonder: with all the culinary delights of New York, why would a visiting German, a man of reputed taste, choose an Austrian restaurant? Austrian wines, sure. Who didn’t like a nice Grüner Veltliner? But Austrian food? All those sausages and gummy little dumplings…it gave Ben gas just thinking about. He wanted to go to Florent (it was still around then), where it would be noisy and fun and—this was crucial—affordable. But apparently the suggestion had been vetoed by Viktor, who, just off the plane from Berlin, wanted schnitzel.

Viktor and Ben were on opposite ends of the table. Between them were Ben’s girlfriend (Emily) and Viktor’s fiancée (Jane). Over pre-dinner drinks, the women caught up—they hadn’t seen each other since Jane had moved to Germany. Older, impassive, jet-lagged, Viktor listened and watched. Your eyes kept going to him, to his froggy gaze, his flying-upwards-hair. A paunch was visible beneath his black silk turtleneck. An imposing physical presence made more imposing by his manner. But he was not unfriendly: before ordering the wine, he solicited opinions. Ben suggested the house cabernet. Viktor ordered a one-hundred-and forty dollar Burgenland.

Later, Emily would ask Ben why he hadn’t said much at dinner. Was he intimidated? Not so much, Ben would say, after a moment’s thought. Instead he had been quiet for two reasons: (a) because his portion of the check eradicated his food budget for the week; and (b) because, when he wasn’t obsessing about the check, he was studying Viktor. Ben had never met anyone like him. He knew successful people, but this was success. Viktor was an artist, he was rich, and lots of people—serious and otherwise—were greatly interested in his work. In him.

A word about Viktor’s fiancée: Jane was a close friend of Emily’s, and in one of those coincidences that become less surprising the older one gets, Ben knew her from college. He found her sweet and attractive in a motherly way, with her soft voice and big tits. Perhaps this motherly quality was what Viktor had responded to, aside from her comparative youth. Apparently Viktor had met her six months or so before the Austrian dinner, when Jane had just sold a young adult novel. (It seemed to Ben that everyone in New York had a young adult novel, including his dry cleaner.) One night, this guy invited Jane to an opening at the International Center for Photography. When she got there she was nervous—this was outside of her usual range of experience. Stylish people were speaking various languages. Wandering away from her date (the poor schmuck) she checked out the art. The photographs were of families, shot in the middle distance. There was an aesthetic impeccability about the pictures, despite, or due to, the stiffness of the subjects. They were so stiff, in fact, so un-posed, that there was no way to understand these people beyond their external signifiers, their age or hairstyles or jewelry. Jane wondered if that was the point, if we were supposed to consider these people as sociological types, and then maybe to individualize them via externals? Someone touched her elbow—the German Artist, an older man with dark eyes. “I know this may seem, ah, crazy,” he said, the “z” sibilant. “But you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”  

Six months later, Ben was assessing Viktor, while pretending to enjoy the schinkenfleckerl.

That night Viktor and Ben did have two exchanges. The first was prompted when Jane asked Ben if he’d been to some exhibit, and Ben said that he’d been too busy with his design studio. Jane turned to Viktor. “In college Ben used to paint these lovely big canvases with Jewish themes, like Chagall.”

Viktor said, declaratively, “You are Jewish.”

Ben nodded. It seemed important to be casual about it. Despite this punishing restaurant, Ben sort of hoped that they might be friends. He could use an important friend right now. He might have failed to convey casualness, though, because Viktor seemed embarrassed: he looked away and changed the subject. It couldn’t be easy to be a German of a certain age, with all that historical weight behind you.

The second exchange came when Emily asked Jane what kind of music they wanted at their wedding.

“It should be all Kraftwerk,” Ben said.

“But that is electronic music,” Viktor said. “My fiancée prefers Motown.”

“Honey,” Jane said. “He’s kidding.”

“Ah,” said Viktor.

Ben got some laughs when he repeated that to Emily’s friends. He wanted them to like him too, so he ignored the guilt he usually felt when he mocked people.

Emily was part of a close-knit group of men and women in their thirties. Most of them were easy to be around. Still, Ben felt some ambivalence towards them, because they were all achievers, more or less. They worked for respected magazines or made documentaries or wrote books; Emily herself designed furniture. What’s worse, most of them projected a kind of world-ease that made it all seem so uncomplicated. Sure, they had their pretensions and insecurities. (When Jane was drinking, she liked to lecture you on the Young Adult Novel As Literature.) Nevertheless, they were making their way. And Ben wasn’t. In fact, he had just endured a string of bitter disappointments. Two of his clients had gone out of business, leaving him with thousands in bad debt. Then his only employee had quit, taking two more clients with her. And when you feel frightened and on the verge of disappointment, it’s hard to be around bright people with interesting jobs. He was trying to muddle through—to work hard, to live modestly and beat the bushes for work. And yet he kept spending more than he could afford, for example at Austrian restaurants.

At least things were good with Emily. Mostly good. Almost always good, really, save for one problem: she couldn’t sleep at his apartment. She literally could not sleep, and to see her in the morning, puffy-eyed, stumbling towards the coffee-maker, broke his heart. Was it the mattress, the spare apartment, the industrial neighborhood? She couldn’t tell him—or wouldn’t. Thus three or four evenings a week, after a long day of fighting for clients, he’d fight traffic from Queens, fight for a parking space in Brooklyn. (His car, a fifteen-year old Honda, was his one extravagance). In the morning, he’d do the same in reverse. The obvious solution would have been to move in with her, but he wasn’t ready for that.

Ben had modest goals. He wanted to make money and do interesting work. He wanted to end the inter-borough scramble without surrendering his autonomy. So maybe that was why Viktor had made such a big impression: because he made money and did interesting work, and because other people bent to his will. Ben acknowledged that he himself had bent to Viktor’s will before ever setting eyes on the man: Viktor had wanted to go to the Wien Haus, or whatever the fuck it was called, and that was that.

In all fairness, Viktor could be gracious. A week after their exploration of the culinary delights of the Österreich, the two couples saw a Korean horror movie and then shared a brick-oven pizza. The women discussed the upcoming wedding (Viktor and Jane had decided to have it in New York), while the men talked cigars—both, as it turned out, were occasional smokers. Then Viktor picked up the check. Out on the street, just before hailing a cab, Viktor mentioned that he had a show coming up at his gallery. He put his hand on Ben’s shoulder and said, “I hope I will see you at the party.”

Before they met, Ben associated Viktor’s name with architectural photography, bleak cityscapes in lustrous gelatin silver. That stuff was over twenty years old now, the portraiture from a decade ago. His new pictures were these giant, pellucid photographs of museum-goers, looking or not looking at art. As soon as Ben entered the gallery, he drifted away from Emily and stood before a picture of plaid-skirted girls at the Prado. The girls stood between two paintings, one the Velazquez portrait of the little blonde in the big skirt, the other also a Velazquez, with the girls and the dog and the dwarf.  Ben was struck by the force of the composition, by the intensity of color, by what the artist might be saying about the intimacy and spectacle of art.

After a minute or so Ben had the prickly feeling that someone was watching him—Viktor was looking at Ben looking at his picture of people looking and not looking at art. Embarrassed, Ben turned back to the work, but he could no longer enjoy it without self-consciousness. He bummed a cigarette from one of Emily’s friends and took the elevator to the street. It was a chilly night; the pavement was wet and glistening. Even after the meditative pause of a cigarette, Ben was still not quite sure what he was feeling.

Viktor and Jane were married in a chapel near Madison Park. Before the ceremony, there was an affectionate speech by a handsome woman wearing an alarming array of primary colors. Then some guy spoke in German. Finally the minister spoke before marrying the bridge and groom. There was no denying that it was a lovely ceremony (nor denying its effect on Emily, who pressed against Ben and stroked his hand). And yet Ben missed the brevity of a Jewish wedding, where you said a few prayers, stepped on a glass, and then stuffed your face.   

The reception was held at some extremely fancy venue that Ben had never heard of. Many of the guests could be described in similar terms. Meanwhile, Ben was experiencing a kind of distracting, and mildly disturbing, ambivalence. On the one hand, he had a few drinks in him, and the food was very good (simple and fresh, without the least hint of Teutonic sauces), and Emily looked slim and attractive in her black dress and heels, and he was enjoying her friends. On the other hand, he wasn’t enjoying her friends all that much—tonight there was something a little strained and smug about their conviviality. There was also an irrational but persistent idea that he shouldn’t be here—that he would be better off at home, working on the website for the jewelry designer, or the estimate for the sportswear manufacturer, or reading a book.

After the cake had been served, he was approached by an older man, clearly a German, with his fussy little glasses and high, small lapels.  

“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you Benjamin? Viktor wants you.”

As Ben made his way across the room, he realized that the guy who had taken him from his cake was Gerhard Fucking Richter, and he wondered what was more astonishing: that Gerhard Richter had addressed him by name, or that the groom was the sort of man who could send Gerhard Richter on an errand.

Viktor was over by the bar, kingly and joyful, surrounded by friends.

“Ah,” he said. “A present for you.”  

He pressed something into Ben’s palm. A cigar.  

“Thanks,” Ben said, touched. Because it seemed warranted that he say more, he added, “You look happy.”

“I have done the most wonderful thing in my life.”

He slapped Ben on the shoulder and turned back to his friends.  

After the reception, Emily’s friends took the out-of-town guests to Williamsburg—the Germans were grimly determined to party in Brooklyn. In a booth crammed with wedding guests, Ben fell into a debate with a German printmaker about the merits of George Grosz (Ben was pro, the printmaker con). When Emily fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, he figured it was time to go. He was tired as well—he felt as if he’d been drunk and sobered up twice. But in the cab he realized that now he was agitated, excited. The cigar was in his breast pocket. He kept puzzling over what Viktor had said, about doing the best thing in his life. Ben wished he could go to his own apartment and smoke and think, but of course Emily would be pissed if he went home.

He helped her to bed and then went to the kitchen for a hydrating cup of herbal tea. Instead he poured a scotch and trimmed the cigar with kitchen scissors. To mitigate the smell he sat by the living room window. (Emily would complain anyway, but he’d deal with that when it happened.) As he relaxed into the mixed fumes of scotch and cigar, he considered how good it felt to be thought of, to be remembered by Viktor. Partially because he was famous and gifted, but mostly (and this was important) because he had self-respect. Viktor did what he wanted and he wasn’t a dick about it, which magnified the effect of his kindness, like when he handed you a Cohiba, which, come to think of it, was likely Cuban.

So where did that self-respect come from? It couldn’t have arisen with success. You don’t become an artist in the first place without knowing that you’re capable of interesting work. Years ago, Ben had stopped painting when he had grasped that he was not capable of interesting work. He did not regret the decision, because he knew he was a good designer; he had a feel for color and type. Still, it pained him that he achieved so little in his thirty-odd years. He assumed that no one, not even Emily, had noticed the depth of his unhappiness. He functioned in the world, drove between boroughs, paid his quarterly taxes. From a certain perspective you could say that he was doing all right. Meanwhile he felt that failure was his destiny, and neither his own modest talent nor his ability to work like an animal would allow him to escape it.

But maybe (thought Benjamin, straightening in his chair), just maybe, it was not a question of achievement. It was about how to rid yourself of this terrible feeling.

The sun was coming up, awakening the sky over the brownstones and tenements of Brooklyn. Ben was heartily fucking sick of Brooklyn. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another finger of scotch and envisioned Emily some weeks hence, when Viktor and Jane returned from their honeymoon. They meet, let’s say, at Wien Haus again, where the dim lighting afforded some privacy. Her face puffy from crying, Emily is explaining the breakup.

“He just did it,” she says. “I woke up the day after your wedding and he did it. He hadn’t even changed out of his suit.”

“Oh honey,” Jane says. “Did he give you a reason?”

“He kept saying that he needed to spend some time alone. That was the stupidest thing about it. There was no real like explanation, he just kept saying, ‘I need to be alone.’”

“And then what happened?”

“He left. And my whole apartment smelled like his stupid cigar.”

Viktor has his face in the menu, hiding his pained expression. He is unaccustomed to such displays of female emotion. He finds it very American, the way these women cry anywhere.  

Jane reaches for her friend’s hand. “I didn’t think he could be such an asshole,” she says. She turns to her husband, willing him to say something encouraging. And Viktor, already attuned to his wife, lowers the menu and says—what?

“I am very sorry for you, Emily.”

Or: “Yes, he is an asshole.”

Or: “He did not deserve that cigar.”

Or perhaps he just thinks, Isn’t it a pity about this nice girl, but she will be better off without him. Certainly I am glad that I won’t have to see him again; there was something about him that made me uncomfortable.

**

Gordon Haber writes fiction, criticism and journalism. His nonfiction on the nexus of religion and culture appears in The Forward, The Tablet, Religion & Politics and Religion Dispatches. His fiction has appeared in The Rumpus and The Normal School and as three best-selling Kindle Singles. His debut collection, Uggs for Gazza (and other stories), was published in 2017. His awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland and two Queens Arts Fund grants. In addition to writing, Gordon founded the micropublishing company, Dutch Kills Press. He does not live in Brooklyn.

**

Image: Flickr / Isangmugngkape

Flesh & Bones

My father and I were sitting opposite each other in that Polish place in Whitechapel, because it was cheap and they made the kinds of soup he liked – chilled in summer, hot and sour in winter. I had just wolfed down my salt beef sandwich, and was thinking of you, Zeb, while I picked at the last shreds of lettuce on my plate. I watched my father slurp, his face close to the bowl, giving the soup his full attention as he tore off little pieces of soft white bread from the basket and stuffed them sideways into his mouth.

‘Not plumping out much, are you?’ he said, finally looking up at me.

The last time I’d seen my father, it was my hair that needed sorting. The time before that, he’d said my teeth might be worth investing in.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not plumping out.’

Usually, I’d keep my mouth shut and look away or smile at someone on the next table. So it took him by surprise, me answering him like that, and he gave me one of his short, square smiles, that look of irritation and confusion tinged with little-boy hurt.

At least being thin, I could squeeze into crowded tube trains and hide in broom cupboards. But by the way my father’s eyes were moving over me, he seemed to have clocked the small breasts again too. He always just about managed not to mention those, but you could tell what a challenge it was for him, so much wanting a daughter, his very own flesh and bones, to be beautiful and clever.

When he’d finished his soup, my father sat up, arched his back and clicked it straight. He wiped the corner of his lips with his paper napkin and began to work a toothpick around his mouth, letting his eyes drift over the panelled wall behind me, eventually, pointing to something directly above my head. It was a weeny gold-plated clock in a dark wooden box with some kind of temperature gauge dangling from it and a copper-coloured cockerel that moved up and down. My father likes multi-function devices so he began explaining to me how it worked. But I probably didn’t seem too interested, because he stopped, bemused, to look at me again.

‘Nada, Nicht,’ he said. ‘Just like your mother. Don’t know a thing.’

I could have told him I knew plenty. That I’d read the whole of War and Peace, that I could talk backwards and make perfect omelettes. I could have told him I knew how to spell words like rhythm and Presbyterian and that when I was stoned I could read people’s minds. But my father was giving me his short square smile again, baring his little grey teeth, as if to say he was only kidding.

‘So how is she, the old bitch?’ he asked. I didn’t intend answering the question but he was fixing his eyes on mine like he needed the answer right away.

As it happened, my mother was in the Asturias mountains with a crystal healer named Miguel la Galaxia, and I was home alone with the new lodger from Bratislava who had parked her cello in the hall and was filling the fridge with noodles and black sausage.

‘All right, is she?’ my father persisted.

‘She’s fine,’ I said.

My father nodded slowly and turned down the corners of his mouth.

‘Well, as long as she’s all right.  I think I’ll have a slice of that blueberry cheesecake. Want to share some?’

‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, although a growing girl like me, I could have handled a whole slice to myself.

‘Sabrina makes a great cheesecake. You ever tried Sabrina’s cheesecake?’  

I had not. Sabrina was my father’s second wife who preferred not to have the kids about. She was everything my father could have wished for: curvaceous and bossy, an expert on the domestic front. Sabrina had a bunch of children from her first marriage too but that hadn’t stopped my father from taking over the cracker tin and the best spot on their sofa.

I thought of telling him how I’d recently bumped into her younger son, Gordy, because for a time he and Gordy had enjoyed dismantling small appliances together. I could have told him that Gordy had nailed a job in Do-it-All, that he’d grown a little moustache, and was living above Nandos with a lady-friend on the Holloway Road. But I wasn’t too sure what my father would make of that. In any case, he was busy catching the attention of our waitress and pointing at the cheesecake in the glass cabinet.

‘Yeah. We’ll have a slice of that,’ he said, turning back to face me. ‘So, what is it you’re doing again?’

‘Temping.’ I said.

‘As in…?’

‘Oh, all kinds of stuff,’ I said.

I didn’t bother telling my father about the publishing house opposite the British Museum that specialised in coffee table books on religion and Far Eastern philosophies, how I had spent three days there typing six rejection letters and used up a whole bottle of Tippex. I didn’t tell him about the ad agency on Charlotte Street either, where I had licked envelopes for men behind smoked glass doors who stared straight through me when they passed my desk. Although I could have mentioned the trick I’d learnt of dissolving red wine stains on carpet with white wine. My father would have enjoyed explaining the chemical principles behind it.

‘So any offers of a real job yet?

‘Not that I’ve said yes to.’

My father took out a clean folded hanky from his pocket, freshly washed and pressed by Sabrina by the looks of it. ‘Ah, well. Keep trying. You never know,’ he said and wrapping the hanky around his nose, he gave a dry trumpet blow.

When our cheesecake came, I watched my father take a deep scoop out of it and roll it about on his tongue with an intense expression on his face, like he was giving it a score out of ten. And then out of nowhere, the face of Sabrina’s daughter, Lacey came to me, clear as day, with her huge blue eyes and mean looking mouth. She had not been mentioned in years and I had only met her the once, in the back of my father’s Skoda for a Sunday drive. We had ended up at some stately home that day so that Sabrina and my father could spend an afternoon snooping about inspecting perennial borders and four poster beds. While her brothers kicked a ball around the car park, Lacey and I had gone into a nearby wood to snap branches and later we had rolled up our shirts to sunbathe across the bonnet of the car. It was then that she’d told me what an arse my father was, how more than once he’d given her a fat lip and, oh, man, was I lucky I didn’t have to live with him.

My father wiped the corners of his mouth and breathed a sigh. ‘Well, I gotta get going,’ he said. ‘Important meeting to prepare for Monday.’

I never pushed him on it, but I always suspected he just took minutes at these ‘meetings’, as a favour to his boss. So he could hang about with the big knobs.

Our waitress brought the bill and my father cracked a joke – that she seemed to tolerate –  about how she shouldn’t lean forward quite so much, it could do a man some damage. He read the bill carefully and pulled out a ten pound note.

‘Got any shrapnel?’ he said.

It looked like he was a few pennies short of an eight percent tip so I pulled out a pound coin from my pocket, and missing the tin ashtray on the table, it flipped into the sugar bowl. I didn’t dwell on it though. I even managed to stand up first because I was feeling good. Because I was meeting you, Zeb, at three o’clock outside the Lumière. You had tickets for a movie about an Iranian boy who couldn’t stop running, and later we were going for the best crispy duck in Chinatown.

Zeb. I said your name in my head a lot back then. It sounded so cool, though I couldn’t swear it was your real name. We had spent our first weekend together swimming at Highgate Ponds and you’d introduced me to Campari from your parents’ drinks cabinet. We’d had some deep and funny conversations on your carpet too – your magic, rented carpet that absorbed ash, gin and orange, sweet and sour sauce, just about anything. You were sweet and kind and frighteningly handsome and I was still half-expecting you to come to your senses any day. But I smiled as I waited for my father by the door. You’d already left two messages on my answer phone since Thursday. Skinny and lithe, you said I was. Skinny and lithe.

**

Stella Klein graduated from the MA in Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2016. She has had short prose and poetry published by Pyramid Press, The Mechanics Institute Review in print and online, as well as Southbank Poetry Review and The Blue Nib magazine. Stella lives in London and is working on her first collection of short stories. When she is not writing, she is a study support tutor at Goldsmiths University and Central St Martins School of Art in London.

**

Image: Flickr /J Lippold

Pongo and the Hands of Sound

When she pulled out her iPhone to film me on our second date, I should’ve known that it would never work with Katie Wilson. Yet as I peered across the table at her leather, her dark lipstick, I wanted to believe that it would work.

“It’s for a documentary,” said Katie, with her camera on my face.

I shielded, not one for attention.

Katie persisted. “What’s your deepest hidden dream?”

I placed my hand upon the camera’s eye. “A documentary?”

“It’s about how people connect.”

I lifted my hand from the camera.

“I have a surprise,” Katie giggled. She slapped two tickets to the table.

Feigning excitement, my voice flew uncomfortably high. “Pongo? At the Civic Opera Center?” Though I often tried to fool myself to think that I was cultured, I didn’t know if Pongo was an opera or a man.

“It’s the only time he’s playing in America this summer.” Katie steadied her shot on the iPhone. “I need a better reaction than that.”

I pushed her phone aside and kissed her cheek. Katie grabbed my face and kissed me on the lips in the café.

#

The plan was to pick Katie up at her place. From there, we would train to the opera. I had never had a date beyond dinner and drinks— for advice on how to dress, I searched the internet for opera videos. Ill-equipped and nervous, I rented a tux.

I knocked on Katie’s door, bowtie aslant even after watching online videos on how to tie it. She answered the door in a crop-top and torn fishnet stockings. Glow-sticks coiled her forearms. Her face wore the expression of an ice-cold splash.

“You’re in a fucking tux.” She fanned herself. “Oh my god.” Laughing now, she grabbed her phone.

I scrambled. “Let’s pretend that I was trying to be ironic.”

Katie gave a deep laugh, then sighed. “I guess every fan needs a first show.” She put the camera down and hooked her arm in mine. Again, she laughed, alone. “Tonight you’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

#

The mob rumbled into the box office. A skinny blonde, a painted butterfly below her navel, shouldered past me, nearly tearing the sleeve from my tux. The mob pushed, getting nowhere, feeling vindicated— young, likeminded and like-dressed in neon.

Katie smiled— she said she liked that I was different. She held her phone above the crowd, aiming the eye of the camera down toward us to capture the mob.

“Nice tux, bro.” A high-school kid, half his head shaved, rubbed my shoulder.

The mob pummeled the box office reps. Past the gate, in the theatre, mayhem reigned. The usher nearest us, middle aged and nearly heaving, was relegated to the corner, sweating in his three-piece suit.

I checked our tickets. “Section C. Row NN.”

“We’re not that kind of mob,” Katie said.

The opera house surrendered to abandonment. Several people pushed through aisles, smoking cigarettes, offering drugs and commenting upon my tux. Katie filmed me. I pretended not to notice. No one in the roaring mob had ever been inside an opera house. They mostly spent their weekend nights in underground clubs, popping chemicals that caused their eyes to dance for thirty hours.

“I don’t think the opera house is quite the place for Pongo crowds,” I yelled in Katie’s ear to drown the mob.

“It’s so Pongo to play here,” she said.

The lights died. A deep bass rumbled. The crowd nearly brought down the gallery, stamping their feet like mad bulls. Neon lights flashed on the neon-clad crowd. My generation danced through a neon world— only now had I become a part of it.

Katie kissed me and straightened my bowtie.

Sirens sang. Horns blared, shaking the floor. The crowd connected, jumping in rhythm, screaming out the word that bound them all— Pongo, Pongo, Pongo. I took it in— Katie filmed my reaction.

Spotlights shined the stage. An orangutan appeared in a loose-fitted tux. The mob’s eruption caused my ears to ring. Situated at a turntable onstage, the orangutan loosened his bowtie. Katie put her camera down. She untied my bow, allowing the two ends to fall. Heads drifted my direction. Stoned faces nodded. A topless girl with stickers on her nipples tapped her friend— “That dude has a tux, just like Pongo.”

The orangutan in formal wear wrapped a pair of headphones round his tree-trunk neck. He unsheathed a vinyl record from the sleeve, placed the record on the turntable and commandeered the needle. Katie held her phone extended, filming with the flash on. The air was thick with powder and the lights began to dance across the stage. The amplified needle in the vinyl groove blasted the paint off the walls.

Deep bass pulsed over tribal percussion. Pongo made a low rolling call into the microphone. The mob danced across the opera house like ocean waves in a historical storm. Katie leaned her back against my front and started grinding.

“Isn’t this great?” Katie yelled over the primate’s beat.

I tried to hide my lack of confidence. “Does he write the music himself?”

“What?”

“Does— he— write— the music— himself?” I screamed each syllable as loud as I could muster, feeling more ridiculous with each passing breath.

“Who? Pongo?” She laughed, as if to say, He’s an orangutan.

The beat dropped, elevated, then dropped. The mob elevated with the primate’s hairy hands, screaming louder with each beat as DJ Pongo waved his fur-matted arms. His hands, long ways from swinging trees, became all-powerful— voodoo medicine for thirteen thousand screaming youths, Pongo’s hands of sound maintained the rhythm that their hearts conformed to.

DJ Pongo flung the vinyl like a frisbee to the crowd. A flash of neon silence— then a mad stampede.

Katie kissed me once again. The mob began to form around us.

Onstage, the orangutan removed his loosened bowtie. He dropped the tie into the crowd. A girl with a glowing hula hoop over her shoulder grabbed my loosened tie and tossed it to the neon elements.

Pongo removed his tuxedo jacket.

The crowd turned, as though it were my turn. They rooted.

I put my hands up. “It’s a rental.”

As Pongo placed his hairy hands between the buttons on his shirt to tear the fabric from his chest, the mob ambushed me. They tore my tux, stitch-by-stitch, button-by-button, beat-by-beat, from my body. DJ Pongo made a kissing sound into the microphone. Katie filmed it for her documentary.

Pongo let the record drop.

The mob dispersed the pieces of my clothes in all directions. They lifted me over their heads. Passed from hand to hand over the crowd, in only underwear, I soared on hands of sound over a roaring mob of Pongo fans, weightless, bathing in neon.

After ten yards, the people dropped me to the floor. Reduced to underwear, the tatters of my rented tux now strewn about the opera house, balanced on the mighty hands of sound among the neon mob that was my generation, only now can I admit— it had been the greatest moment of my life. In the corner of my eye, a camera flashed.

It was the last time I saw Katie Wilson.

**

Daniel Deleón is a writer and musician from Chicago. He is a member of the Chicago Writers Association, as well as an attendee of the UW-Madison Writers’ Institute. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and he is completing a manuscript about a tale of forbidden love between an Israeli and a Palestinian. For further reading, visit his website.

**

Image: Flickr / HargaiNyawa

The Woman in the Trees

In Western Africa there lives Pachira oleaginea, a tropical tree with large flowers like shaving brushes where bats deposit pollen. After fertilization, the tree drops chestnut-like seeds onto the ground. Though only one embryo has been fertilized, additional embryos appear in the same seed, and these grow faster than the fertilized one. These fatherless seeds produce the next generation of trees.

Pachira oleaginea thus gets along perfectly well without male input.

There’s a Chinese man in Alice’s yard. Or maybe he’s Korean or Japanese. She can’t tell humans apart in the same way she can distinguish trees. She dislikes this man, regardless of his race, simply because he’s in her yard. He’s holding a rake. Christ, he’s raking her leaves.

She goes out and leans over the porch railing and shouts to him: “What do you think you’re doing?”

He flattens his hand over his brow, though his red-checkered hunting hat already has a visor. “I’ll give you three guesses,” he says.

“My first guess would be trespassing.”

He walks closer, tents his fingers over the knob of the rake. “You Mrs. Tremaine? I was told you’re the only other year-rounder.”

She’s always surprised when Asians don’t have accents. “I’m Doctor Tremaine. What do you want?”

He flashes a smile. “Thought you might like a little help with these leaves. Being neighborly.”

She arches her back and bellows, “I certainly don’t need any help with my lawn. I’m a dendrologist.”

“Like a botanist?”

“Yes. Retired. And dead leaves take up space in landfills. Leave them, they make excellent mulch.”

He ponders this for a moment then shouts, “You just stopped me from ever raking another lawn. My raking days are finished!” He takes up the rake and shakes it like a tent revivalist. “As God is my witness, I will never lay hands on the Devil’s instrument again!” He holds the rake aloft, huffing in the chilly air.

“See that you don’t.”

She turns to go inside.

“Ma’am!”

Good Christ, he’s still talking. “What is it?” she asks.

“I’m Peter Lo,” he says. “Just moved in down the way, wanted to introduce myself. Since there’s no one else out here.” He tilts his head up at the surrounding tree-laden mountains.

She returns to the railing and peers at the cottage a quarter-mile down the road, the one he says he’s living in. “That’s a summer rental. . . . I never saw any moving trucks.”

“I had a truck. I don’t own a lot of stuff. Some books. I plan to make a go of it year-round—I like the quiet.”

For a man who likes quiet, he talks a great deal. She studies his silvery sideburns and pointed goatee. Men are strange animals, with their facial adornments like groomed dogs. He goes back to leaning on his rake, nods his head toward her driveway. “That’s a fine-looking automobile,” he says. “A Land Rover?”

“Yes.”

“V-8, too. How’s she drive?”

“I don’t know what business that is of yours.”

“None, I suppose.” He smiles again, flashing his crooked teeth.

She studies her knobbed knuckles, gripping the porch railing. “I haven’t driven her—I mean it—in a couple of months.”

He sucks his teeth, a sound like a squeaking mouse. “Ought to drive her at least once a week. Cars are like women, you gotta take them out once in a while to keep them happy.” A dozen curses spring to mind, but he asks a question before she can utter any of them: “All that land behind the house belong to you?”

“Most of the way up the mountain, yes. Fifty acres.”

“How come it’s not BLM land?”

“It just isn’t. It’s my land.”

He rocks back on his heels. “Lot of different kinds of trees back there,” he says. “How’d that come to be?”

“I planted them.”

When the slash pine of South Africa is planted at a high elevation, it ties itself into knots. Among California Redwoods, if a parent tree is gnarled, any growth it spawns will also be warped. Some trees, like the Sitka spruce and the Douglas fir, are known to twist on the inside with little evidence of turmoil on the outer bark.

She’s just finished washing her wooden plates, her wooden spoons, her wooden bowls, when the doorbell chimes. With her hands submerged, she gazes out the back window at a stand of aspens two-hundred yards up the mountain, hoping whoever it is will go away.

This her favorite time of day, soaking her hands in the dishwater and looking out the back window into the trees. For whatever reason, warm dishwater helps the pain more than anything. Maybe it’s the Palmolive. The bell rings again, then a third time. She wipes her hands on the dish towel and finds the Chinese man on her porch, wearing that same red-checked hunting cap. She sticks her head through the door and shows him a deathly frown.

“Going into Taos,” he says. “For groceries. They say there’ll be an early snow this weekend.”

She waits for a question. He smiles dumbly back. The staring contest continues until she asks, “And?”

“And I thought I’d see if you wanted to come along. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

“No.”

“All right. Can I get you anything in town?”

“No. Thank you.”

He tips his hunting cap. “All right.”

He’s not leaving. Just stands there with that broken-toothed smile. “Driven that Land Rover lately?”

“No.”

He rubs his hands together in the chilled air. “I could take her for a spin sometime, just down the main road. I’d like to see how she drives. Be good for the car, too.”

“Maybe.”

He peers at her for a moment then shrugs. “Well, I’m off.”

When he reaches the bottom porch step, some strange force provokes her to call out: “Oatmeal!”

He squints back. “Oatmeal?”

“I’m almost out of oatmeal.”

“Oatmeal for the lady.” His face holds an expression of solemn gravity.

In the evening she finds ten canisters of oatmeal on the porch steps. Enough to last a year.

Morning: a bath, oatmeal, then pruning and mulching. Lunch, grapes and crackers. Afternoon, more pruning and general tree care, perhaps a short hike. Dinner, skillet chicken and green beans or salad. Read and sleep. Repeat.

On the slope behind her house reside the usual New Mexico subjects: lodgepole pine, quaking aspen, piñon pine, bristlecones, white firs. Peachleaf willow. Chokecherry. And then there are the less common ones. Osage orange. Autumn blaze red maple. Tulip poplar. Smoketree and tricolor beeches. Spartan juniper. For fruit, a hardy Chicago fig and a Cleveland pear. And then there are the trees that have no business growing in this part of the world. A flask tree. A crooked hazelnut. An English yew tree. A Yoshino cherry.

These last are her favorites. Transplants. Outsiders.

One day the sheriff will find her somewhere up on the mountain, slumped lifeless at the base of an Engelmann spruce, half-eaten by raccoons. This is acceptable. No surprises until then.     

On Holland’s West Coast live poplars one hundred feet tall, entirely covered with sand but for a few twigs at the top. Though these trees are little seen, they are strong and powerful. Their magnificence comes not from their physical beauty, but in how they cope with being buried.

She finds herself peeking down from her forest at the neighboring cottage, looking for the Chinese. Peter, right?

It’s not as though she wants him to come around again. Though he is amusing. It’s strange to have conversations with another person. Sure, she has conversations with her trees, lazy afternoon chats with the knobcone pine and the monkey puzzle. They discuss all manner of things. The changing season, the stiffness in her wrists, the way Joseph used to sneeze three times when he woke.

These conversations sustain her. And the trees respond, in their quiet ways. She’s even told them about the Chinese. About Peter.

Plants are not above killing. Certain trees are known to swallow and digest insects. The pitcher-plant of Borneo drowns victims in its cup-shaped leaves. The difference between trees and men is that trees only kill to survive, and even then it’s exceedingly rare.

Never once has a tree killed out of anger.

The power went out this afternoon.

There’s a five-thousand-watt two-stroke generator out back, gives enough electricity to warm her bedroom. She pours the remnants of the red gas can into it and starts the thing up, reminding herself to go into town for more fuel. The doorbell rings before she can make a note.

Peter Lo is standing on the porch with a rifle. She flings the door open. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I don’t like guns. In fact, I abhor violence of any kind.”

“That’s a good way to approach life,” he says.

She waits for him to say more, but he just stands there grinning. “What do you want?”

“I noticed quite a few deer up on your land. Overpopulated, by the look of it. Thought I might cook us some venison for Christmas.”

“You’re asking if you can murder a deer on my land?”

“Murder seems a bit ungracious, but yes, that’s the gist of it.”

“Not on your life. Take that weapon away from here.”

“All right.” He turns and says over his shoulder, “I’ll put it next to the rake in the garage. I’m creating a do-not-touch zone in there.”

Walking back to his cottage, tiny clouds of breath puffing, he resembles a boy with a toy gun.

The plantsman Harry Blossfeld recounted the story of an acquaintance from Hong Kong who traveled up the Yang Tse to spend an evening in a remote region where bamboo was harvested. In the night, the man was awakened by the sound of distant screams. His hosts later told him that, on warm mornings, giant bamboo grows at such an astonishing speed that it shrieks as if in pain.

She can still hear the echo of her own voice, reverberating in her skull. Her heart thumps. The blurred figure of Joseph remains before her in the darkness. His worried face, in that moment before he steps out of the car to confront the man in the Super-Save lot. The lunatic, waving a pistol at his pregnant girlfriend.

The last moment of Joseph’s life. Even now, she wants to call out to him, to stop him. But her voice doesn’t work. Thirty years, the same dream.

The power kicks back on and the kitchen light suddenly shines through the house. She welcomes the coming warmth and drifts into sleep, neglecting to turn off the generator.

There’s a stiff tribal penalty for cutting down a certain conversational tree in tropical Africa. The tree is held in high regard, considered something of a wise counselor. Locals pay good money to witch doctors for permission to sit by the tree and spill out their troubles, plucking its leaves as they talk.

She glances out the window and sees his footprints in the snow before she hears the bell. His hunting cap is papered in white flakes from the walk over. He talks before she has a chance to speak: “You like eggnog?”

“I haven’t thought of eggnog in twenty years.”

“Special Cleveland recipe,” he says. “Got a hefty kick. Come over, it’s too cold to be alone.”

“That where you’re from? Cleveland?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Stop calling me Ma’am.”

“What should I call you?”

“Alice, I suppose. If you must call me something.”

“Alice,” he repeats. “I like it.”

She pushes the door closed and speaks through the glass. “I don’t want any eggnog, but thanks anyway.”

He hollers back through the door: “You can leave anytime. At least walk back with me, see my place.”

His expectant face. Holy God in Heaven, what is she supposed to do with this man? She tells him to wait while she puts on her boots and coat.

On the walk to his cottage, he chatters like a squirrel: “Sure is pretty out here. Can’t get enough of it. Gets kinda lonesome though. Maybe I should get a TV, though I have a record player and that works pretty well.”

On and on he goes. Though she prefers this to being asked questions. She counts her crunching footsteps. How many steps she’s gone from her forest.  

On his porch they kick the snow from their boots. All is quiet for these few moments but for the thumping of their heels against the steps. In the entryway he takes her coat and she unties her waterproof hiking boots and leaves them by the door, ready for a quick escape. He tells her to make herself at home then disappears into the back of the house.

The small den is sparsely furnished. For a moment, she considers running away. But the bastard would just come and find her. Her attention is drawn to artwork on the den’s log wall, a hanging scroll of ink on paper, discrete wooded scenes nestled into the white openness of the paper with Chinese writing across the top.

Peter re-appears with two steaming cups. “Hope you like it hot!”

The idea of hot eggnog turns her stomach. She asks about the painting.

“My mother’s work,” he says. “She was a great artist. This is done in the style of the Chinese master Ni Zan, who lived six centuries ago. I love this scroll but find it kind of sad.”

“Sad?”

“Because there are no people in it, I guess.”

That’s what she likes about it, she says. He ponders this, then asks if she’d like to go into his library. Reluctantly she follows him into the next room, taking an adventurous sip of the eggnog along the way. It’s the most delicious drink she’s ever tasted.

The library is really a small bedroom with bookcases and a couple of love seats facing one another across a dented coffee table. There’s a huge bay window on the far wall. Outside, the snow falls thickly. Peter sits on one of the love seats, and she occupies herself with the bookshelves, surprised to see the names Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Schrödinger, Einstein.

“What is it you do, Peter?”

“I’m a physicist.” He sets his cup down and absentmindedly pats his knees. “Employed at Los Alamos these last couple decades.”

“A nuclear physicist?”

“Yes.” He shifts in the loveseat. The silence grows thick in the room and he speaks again to fill it: “I’m told you were married to a popular attorney in Taos.”

“Who told you that?” she asks.

“The realtor.”

Her throat feels dry and she sips the eggnog. “His name was Joseph,” she says. “That’s his house that I live in. We lived there together until he died.”

“Sorry to hear it. About him dying, I mean. How long have you lived in that house?”

“Forty-five years.”

He whistles, low and hollow. “That’s a long time. How’d you meet him?”

“At Oxford. He was a Rhodes scholar.”

“Sounds like quite a guy.”

To stop the interrogation, she turns her attention back to the books. On the third shelf, nested atop a leather-bound collection, she sees a familiar spine. She removes the book, holds it up. The Inner Lives of Trees by Alice Tremaine, PhD.

“You’ve been checking up on me.”

That toothy smile. “A little, I guess.”

The fact that this man owns her book sends shivers through her, as if he has access to her innermost thoughts.

“Have you read it?”

“Some of it. It’s great.”

Panic approaches. “I must go.”

He follows her to the entryway, leans against the jamb while she pulls on her boots. “I ran across it in the bookshop in town. I won’t finish reading it if you don’t want.”

She can’t pull her boots on quickly enough. “Do whatever you wish.”

She slops out into the snow in her untied brogans. He follows her out in his stocking feet. As she slushes along the mountain road, she feels his eyes on her back.

She’s halfway home when he shouts, “I’m going to drink the rest of your eggnog!”

The Pachypodium trees of Angola are known by the locals as Ghost Men. In the desert, natives refuse to enter the areas where they grow by moonlight, so afraid are they of these haunted trees. It’s said that the Ghost Men are the frozen souls of a tribe of Hottentots, who were punished by the Creator for attempting to flee the desert.

Joseph has returned. He stands skinny and pale in the corner of her room, his mouth a black O.

She wakes, shivering. In the streaming moonlight her breath puffs phantom white. The power’s out again. She remembers now that she neglected to go into town for more gasoline. She pulls her coat over her nightgown and slides into her boots and spends ten minutes outside in the freezing darkness, trying to get the generator started, yanking the cord until her back screams in pain. Futile. As she jerks the plastic handle, she can still see Joseph’s white face in her mind, his hammock jaw and black eyes. A new dream. She searches the shadows among the trees behind the house, expecting to find him there, watching.

She takes up the metal gas can and stomps through the house, muttering curses. Driving to town at this hour in the dark and the cold and the ice will be a new kind of hardship—if the Land Rover can even make it down the mountain road. On the porch she slips and bangs her hip. Limping out to the car, she takes the keys into her mittened fingers and turns the ignition.

Nothing.

She tries again, but it’s no use.

She recalls Peter’s joke about cars being like women. She hates him.

Somewhere beneath the hum of Peter’s generator, she can hear Mozart’s twenty-fifth. The little symphony in G minor.

He doesn’t answer his door until the fifth ring of the bell. Her ears are so cold she fears they’ll shatter. “What’s wrong?” Then before she can answer, “Come in, you’re freezing.”

He takes her into his library, covers her in blankets, puts on a pot of tea. He stops the Mozart record but she insists that he start it again. When he returns with the tea she explains about the power outage, about the generator and the Land Rover. He sits on the opposite sofa, never taking his eyes from her. She is tempted to tell him about the dream, about Joseph’s ghost in her room.

“I want you to sleep here,” he says. “You can have my bed and I’ll sleep here on the loveseat. Give me your keys. In the morning, I’ll get your car running and fetch gas for your generator.”

For once, she’s too tired to argue.

His bed is a simple full-size mattress and box spring pushed into a corner. No other furniture. She wonders where he keeps his clothes.

He puts her into the bed and tucks the quilt under her chin and pads back into the library. She can hear him rustling around in there. Then the click of the light switch, the swell of Mozart, the hum of the generator. She blinks up into the shadows and thinks of Joseph’s ghost. The gaping mouth, the wide eyes, the sickly face. She looks into the dark corner behind the door to see if Joseph is there. No.

Mozart ends. She hears a creak. A footstep on pine boards? How can she be frightened of Joseph? He was like a reliable old redwood, strong and stately and quiet. He was safe.

Another creak. Louder.

In the library, Peter’s socked feet poke over the loveseat’s arm like two moonlit puppets. She hovers in the doorway, listening for signs that he’s sleeping.

“Alice? What’s wrong?”

She stands with her mouth open in the doorway. He sits up, scratching his thinning hair. “Tell me,” he says.

She wonders if he can see her outline in the darkness. The wideness of her hips, her pointed shoulders, her limp hair. Gathering courage. “This is silly,” she says. “Come to bed.”

The Angsana trees of Singapore are peculiar because they don’t flower continuously; rather, all of the trees in a region will explode into color on the same day, filling the air with fragrance. The next morning, the trees will rain down petals and then return to their unremarkable former state. A few days later, another mysterious stimulus will set them off again, and the trees will bloom their golden inflorescences.

She opens her eyes to a bright morning, with the icicles clattering down against Peter’s porch. Beside her, the little man snores like a warthog. She quietly dresses, slips her boots over her feet, and steps out the front door into warm sunlight.

No bath, no breakfast. She doesn’t even bother to go home, instead climbing straightaway into her forest. Now she’s here, among her trees, tending to the rarest of them all. The maidenhair, the only remaining species of the Ginkgoaceae family. A living fossil, long thought to be extinct until live ones were discovered hiding among the forests of China. Hers is still young, struggling for survival.

She can still taste Peter. Can recall the smoothness of his cheek beneath her fingertips, his crooked teeth jutting against her bottom lip. These aren’t unpleasant recollections.

In the afternoon she hears the rumble of a distant motor. She climbs down the mountain and find the power back on in her house, with the heater blasting and Peter reading a Graham Greene novel on her porch. The Land Rover idles in the drive.

He smiles when he sees her. “Thought I might drive into town, get some gasoline for your generator. You want to ride? I’ll buy you a coffee.”

“No,” she says, and thanks him.

He slaps his knees in that way he does. “Suit yourself,” he says. “Excited to drive your truck, anyway. Eight cylinders, hoo boy.” He waggles his eyebrows at her and skips down the steps.

She watches this funny little man jitter out to her Land Rover and swing himself up into the cab. A tip of the red hunting hat, and he goes roaring down the drive, leaving only a trail of dirty snow behind. Somewhere up on her mountain, the rattle of a woodpecker that decided not to leave for the winter. Beyond that, all is silence.

She turns and heads back up the hill. Peter will be back soon. In the meantime, the trees need tending.

**

Jonathan Baker returned to his small West Texas hometown of Canyon three years ago, after living in New York City and Chicago for a number of years. He is the former assistant to the editor-in-chief at W.W. Norton & Co., where he worked on finalists for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. In the past few years he has completed four novels, and his copywriting has appeared in Esquire, Road & Track, Marie Claire, Inc., and Popular Mechanics, among other publications. Baker holds a master’s degree in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and he’s a former professional comedian who has performed at clubs nationwide.

**

Image: Flickr / moni cah

 

The Soft Confessional

The phone’s about to ring.

I know this because I can feel the electrons rubbing together. It’s strange, the level of clarity you can reach when a strange moony-eyed woman is holding a gun to your head. She’s dressed in wrinkled business clothes; her entire posture seems to be held together with spit and prayer, crumbling before my eyes in stop-motion.

And I wasn’t even supposed to be here today.

“I need to get the phone,” I tell her, as calmly as I can possibly manage. The phone goes off right on cue. She still jumps, barely stopping herself from squeezing the trigger.

“No funny business,” she hisses. I nod, reaching out for the receiver. It’s Jane from finances.

“Donny, we have a Code Orange,” she says in her usual, controlled tone. Code Orange is company slang for ‘crazy person with a gun in the premises’ “I need you to lock your door, sit down and keep real quiet, okay?”

“Yeah, that ain’t happening,” I mutter and hang up before Jane has had time to process what I just said. “Sorry about that,” I tell the woman with the gun. Her eyes have gone wide as saucers.

“It’s okay. This will only take a minute,” she says, pointing the gun at the mess of xeroxed instruction manuals, stacks of cardboard boxes stenciled with meaningless esoteric jargon that ring my screen-less workstation. “I just need to get into the nursery.”

I blink, very slowly, trying to make sense of the situation. Then, it dawns on me. “You want to get into the Crib? What the hell for?” The last couple of words stream out of me in a high-pitched, near-hysterical tone. The Crib is the place where we store the artificial wombs; the lightless, depressing little hole where we pretty much get to play God in.  

“Just do it,” she hisses, jabbing the gun at me. I slowly make my way to the desk, fish out my keyboard from the foundation of my take-away carton ziggurat. The cartoon auroch from the De-Meat packaging gives me a Disney ‘don’t do it, Donny’ look. I punch the code into the keyboard, releasing the first dozen security locks from the Crib’s reinforced vault door, then move in to get my keycard from the filing cabinet.

“Easy now…” the woman mutters when she sees me reach my hand into the depths of the cabinet.

“Okay. Okay,” I breathe out slowly, fighting against the pressure in my bladder. My fight-or-flight dial has opted for the better part of bravery and is now dinging ominously in my head. Carefully, I pull out the keycard and hold it up so she can see it. “Master keycard. We can’t make it in without it.”

The woman leads me out of my office and we trek down the squeaky white corridor, toward the reinforced steel door. Time begins to slide away from me, seconds translating into frantic heartbeats. We’ve got another three dozen thumps before the time-lock resets and I have to go back and do it all over again, but I can’t risk breaking into a sprint. I don’t know much about guns, but you don’t have to be an expert to tell when someone’s desperate. We reach the keycard slot with sixteen thumps to spare. Pressing my eye against the retinal scanner, I punch in today’s 10-digit code without a hitch for the first time since forever. With a gentle machine-whistle, the Crib’s security door slides open. The soft hiss of classical music spills out from the interior. Liszt’s pizzicato trills snake out into the building. The people at R&D swear by the New German School when it comes to easing the gestation process. ‘Brain fertilizer’, is what they call it.

“Get some lights on,” the woman says. “Why is everything pitch black in here?”

I stop myself from going into a tirade about the theories on the harmful effects of halogen lighting on gestating infants, move away from the regulation night vision goggle shelf and instead fumble in the dark for the emergency lights switch. A rosy imitation dawn creeps into the Crib, seeping in through concealed LED strips. The Crib’s rosy bounty blossoms from the darkness, rows upon rows of egg-shaped artificial wombs coming into view, their spotless metallic surfaces shining like rows of freshly-pilfered fish-eggs. The woman gasps at the sight of it: the cruel metal contours of each device; the sleek, featureless interfaces made from mirrored glass, the hell of knotted wires, intake and outtake tubes snaking out across the floor.

“What the hell is this?” she asks.

“It’s the Crib. This is where…” I stutter, looking for anything other than the usual ‘we keep our baby-makers’ then finally say: “…where the magic happens.”

“Which one is R#3710?” she says, squinting against the red glare, trying to divine the identity of each artificial womb. “Let’s get this over with.”

Leading her across the rows of machinery, I look for row R, column 37, position 10. She looks it over, squinting at the numbered plate. The machine is identical to the others, each of these cast in Vietnam from parts made in Taipei, the entire thing assembled by Waldos toiling across a vacuum-proof factory line in the outskirts of Hiroshima according to plans laid out by Swedish engineer-kings.

“Are you sure this is it?” she asks, looking me over. Her eyes are almost shooting daggers into my back. I nod and she says “Okay, abort it.”

“What?” I stutter. Something cold and hard thuds into my stomach. “You can’t be serious.”

The woman raises the gun in the air and lets off a shot. It thunders inside the enclosed space of the Crib, probably setting off all kinds of silent alarms all over the place. I hold my palms up, held toward her. “Look, I can’t do that. No matter what you think is going on here, we don’t just…”

“Just cut the power. Take out an intake valve. Jam a screwdriver in its guts,” she says. I can see her lip trembling, the gun shaking in her hand. How long until the police show up? Too long, I guess. And that’s without me getting dragged into a hostage situation. Staring down at the bottomless pit that’s the handgun’s barrel, I take a deep breath and assume the calmest, most reasonable tone I can muster.

“We don’t terminate here. We have an option to stop the gestation, in the event that a child develops some unwanted mutation, some genetic disorder if it goes against the contract but that’s it…”

“What’s the option?” she says, her eyes veering to the mirror-screen, its glowing touch interface festooned with arcane feedback sigils “And give it to me in English.”

“We…” I manage through gritted teeth, clenching my fists so hard my knuckles ache. “I can manually drain the amniotic fluid. That kills the semipermeable placenta and cuts of supply to the umbilical cord. It takes a while,” I add. The woman points the gun down for a moment. I catch a glimpse of her shoes (high-heels; crumbled, worn down) then her face (twisted, wavering).

“Do it,” she tells me. I can see she’s getting cold feet. She probably came here thinking it was going to be as simple as flushing the toilet. On my knees, I produce my portable toolkit, rifle through my Allen key ring and begin pulling the front of the chassis apart. “I hope it takes long enough for him to see it.”

I don’t dare say a word. Removing the plating, I reach inside the machine’s whirring guts and fumble a while. She keeps talking. “You know how they say that a baby can keep a marriage from falling apart?”

“Preaching to the choir,” I mumble as the womb’s plates whir, almost silently, producing a plexiglass-shielded blue button from its insides like one of those nuclear doomsday interfaces you’d find in a campy Cold-War era drama. Say what you will about the Swedes, but they got flair to spare.

“There’s a name for it, SIDS. Ever heard of that? Apparently sometimes, babies just…die. The doctors told me it was nobody’s fault. Not that that helped any,” she mutters, staring into the blue blinking light. Her nostrils flare at the sight of it. “She went limp in my arms, just like that. I felt her tiny heart stop.”

The look she gives me makes me forget she has me at gunpoint for one second. I try to do something, anything that will help. I’m not big on handling emotional crises, but I’d risk a hug under the circumstances. She mistakes my move for some clumsy attempt at sleight of hand, slaps my arm away with her gun. The blow is clumsy, but nearly snaps my wrist. “I swear to God I’ll shoot.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I mutter, biting back the pain. Sobbing uncontrollably, she struggles with the casing. When she can’t find a purchase, she brings the gun butt down on it, again and again until it cracks. Using the nozzle like some crude digging tool, she snaps bits of it away, making enough room for her to reach two fingers inside.

“Screw you. You don’t know anything. You didn’t get dumped for some whore that would give him a goddamn tube-baby with designer genes! He didn’t even come to the funeral! I had to carry that tiny pink casket! They wouldn’t even let me see her face!” she howls through the sobs, reaches for the button, smashes her fingers into it. There’s a two-second delay and then it happens: the womb stops, the blinking lights recede into the blackness. The mirrored surface of the glass begins to recede, an ink blot in reverse leaving behind a sheet of curved, transparent glass. She stops, paralyzed as the soft bounty that bobs inside the pool of amniotic fluid comes into view, connected into the pink, nurturing wall by a silky cord. The child turns with infinite grace like a tiny comet, eyes blinking away sleep to gaze at the world of the quick. Their eyes lock together for a while. Its tiny fingers grasp at the length of umbilical, tug at it like a plaything as it makes a sharp turn in comforting freefall.

It’s a dirty trick, but it does the job.

“Stop it. Don’t let it die,” she tells me, shaking all over. I get down on my knees, pretend to fumble around in the artificial womb’s machinery. I maintain the pretense of averting some catastrophe. The blue button was simply intended as a means to commence safe mode in the event of the infant requiring immediate surgery. If I had chosen to go along with it, she never would have had to see the child. When I get up, she has her head pressed against the glass, her entire body wracked with sobs. The gun clatters to the floor. This time, she doesn’t slap me away when I lean in to hug her.

When Jane and half the city’s SWAT force burst into the Crib, she lets me lead her to them. “Thank you,” she mutters, as they drag her away. Her name’s Christine. I savor it at the tip of my tongue, staring into her eyes as they drag her away.

“What did she want?” Jane asks me when I’ve finally snapped out of my reverie, just as the horde of coverall-clad technicians burst into the room to assess the damage. I decide against letting her have the full story. This is between me and Christine.

“How the hell should I know? I wasn’t even supposed to be here today.”

**

Konstantine Paradias is a writer by choice and a member of the SFWA by compulsion. At the moment, he’s published over 100 stories in a bunch of languages and has written, edited and posed for videogames, screenplays and anthologies. People tell him he’s got a writing problem but he can, like, quit whenever he wants, man. His latest book, Sorry, Wrong Country is published by Rooster Republic Press.

**

Image: Flickr / Ali Catterall

Fair Game

    I used to spend an inordinate amount of time considering what other people were like in bed. The scenarios I imagined were not poetically beautiful moments between two loving souls, but more a desperate collection of limbs interspersed with bodily functions and guttural noises—pornography without choreography.

    I asked Todd if he ever thought about what other people were like in bed.

    “What, like other women?”

    “No, like anyone.”

    I don’t think he got what I meant, so I explained. The obese physical education teacher who constantly rearranged his balls while he divided the kids into teams? I had him pegged as a two-minute man, one who didn’t bother to take his socks off in bed. The kind of guy who belched right after he climaxed. The scrawny little librarian who passed her age-speckled hands over the covers of my loaned books? I had her figured for a dynamite lover. A sweet lady who whipped up wicked good scrambled eggs the morning after and patted you on the hand as a kind of thank you.  When I got to the bagger at Kroger—the one you can tell is a little different—Todd cut me off.

    “Jesus, Melinda. You’re fantasizing about a retarded guy?”

    “He’s not retarded. And, no, I’m not fantasizing. I’m just … curious, I guess.”

    “It’s weird.”

    “How is it any different than you looking at your magazines?”

    “It just is.”

    Maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t know where to draw the line. In my case, everybody—or every body—was fair game.

    I can see now that it was more than a casual curiosity that drove me to these thoughts. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel completely empty inside. When I look back at childhood photos, I squint to recall the event that prompted the picture, all the while recognizing the emptiness that hung over me like an invisible friend no one else could see and I could go nowhere without.

    Attempts to fill the void involved food. As a baby, when I was hungry, I cried. When food wasn’t brought fast enough, I shrieked. In between shrieks, my parents would shovel food into my mouth and I’d suck it in and aspirate. The pictures don’t lie. There I am on my first birthday—a cloth-diapered behemoth surrounded by a pile of unopened gifts—gutting and devouring a cake with both hands and wearing an expression of presents be damned!  That kind of thing is cute when you’re a baby, even when you’re a toddler.

But when, as an adult, you purchase and eat every last crumb of your birthday cake by yourself, no one cares what the reason is. No one cares about your struggle to quell an insatiable loneliness.

    Just before I met Todd, I’d had some luck on a new diet. One of those fad diets—eat all you want every other day, go meatless on Monday, skip carbs Tuesday, stand on one leg and squawk like a chicken Wednesday. You get the picture. I got the hang of it enough to lose thirty pounds.

    At first Todd’s presence took the place of food. I gorged on the thought of him and “us” to the point of intoxication. However, when the newness of our relationship wore off, the emptiness returned. So did my love affair with food.

    I made secret plans throughout the day as to when and where to have my next snack. Sweet? Salty? Both? Before I knew it, I was back in my “fat clothes,” telling myself it was only temporary.

    From either the guilt of not being able to control myself, or Todd constantly asking, “Are you going to eat all that?” I dropped into a pit of shame equal to being caught cheating. Which, in a way I guess I had.

    One night after Todd and I had just finished up a sexual interlude, an image came to me. A new second grade teacher had been hired at the elementary school where I taught. She had this malformed, child-size arm that dangled from her torso. Nice lady, really. Not deserving of my libidinous thoughts at all. I’m sure she had enough struggles in her life already. Anyway, for whatever reason I started thinking about her and that tiny arm.  

    What would her lover be like? The word selfless came to mind. Someone who wanted to make love to her so badly he’d see beyond her flaw, maybe even embrace it. He wouldn’t be afraid to touch her arm. In fact, he’d plant delicate kisses all over it. Then he’d take her face in his hands and tell her how beautiful and unique she was, and mean every word of it.  

    I tried to put the beauty of the scene into words but Todd didn’t want to hear it.

    “You’re crying over some deformed chick’s sex life? Goddammit Melinda, what is wrong with you?”

    The talk escalated from there. Ironic, Todd calling me a pervert.  I kept my thoughts to myself after that. No sense in letting Todd down any more than I already had. I worked on concealing my meanderings. The hardest part was trying to hide my facial expressions, which Todd claimed were a dead give away to my “sick” thoughts.

     I didn’t bother to explain to Todd how whenever I thought about the sex lives of others it filled me up inside. How could I explain something I barely understood myself?

    Often times I try to picture some man I run across acting like Todd. I can’t seem to find anyone who looks the part; who might pull my hair a little too hard, push himself into me a little too deep even after I’ve quietly said, “ow.” One guy I saw pumping gas at the Kwik Sak seemed capable of coming home with a magazine and some accessories and pleading for things that I’d never even heard of before. But, other than him, I can’t recall any others.

    So, I snacked on those bite-sized images instead of food and ended up losing a few more pounds. Weird how something that pissed Todd off so much could also bring me success. You can’t win for losing. Or maybe you can’t lose for winning?

     About a week before Todd’s annual work party, I still hadn’t made up my mind whether to go or not. Though Todd hadn’t asked, I told him I was concerned about how all the major players of the company were going to be there. My real concern: I didn’t know anybody. I’d feel lonely. I’d do something to fill myself up. Something Todd didn’t like.

    “I always end up saying something incredibly misplaced when I’m in a pressure cooker situation like that,” I told Todd.

    “Yeah and I can’t be babysitting you all night. If you’re going, you need to keep that in mind.”

    “I don’t need babysitting.” And with that statement I locked myself into going.

    That night Todd toured the crowd acting like the model employee while I hovered near the food table. I’d just shoved another jalapeno popper into my mouth when some guy backed into me. He apologized all over the place then introduced himself and his wife. Brett and Alecia McSomebody. I introduced myself, garbling around the scalding, cheesy mess in my mouth.

    “From the North Street office?”

    “No. I’m Todd’s girlfriend.”

    Alecia cocked her head at me as if to ask, who?

    “LeFevre. Todd LeFevre,” I said.

    “Oh, oh, oh.” Alecia said. “LeFevre’s had a terrific year. Absolutely banner.”

    “If he keeps it up, he’ll be in the running for our Agent of the Quarter,” Brett added.

    I wondered how many years of marriage it took for them to perfect their one-two punch way of talking. They were otherwise so mismatched.

    Alecia stood about five inches taller than Brett and towered over me. Her legs were long and sinewy, like pulled taffy. I imagined those legs wrapped around Brett, squeezing the life out of him in a candy hug. Brett would be the one on top, sweaty. His face buried just below her manly shoulders until he satisfied her.

    Stop!  I pleaded with myself to switch gears entirely; consider their statistics. Summer home: 5,000 square foot ranch overlooking Lake Tahoe. Education: Ivy league. So-so grades. Car make and model: Matching Lexus LS460’s—something big enough to accommodate Alecia if she felt like getting frisky in the back seat after a PTA meeting.

    “So, you both work at Krieg?” I asked in a desperate attempt to move on.

    Alecia and Brett laughed as if I’d just delivered the punch line to a very long joke. I could feel my face turning red and my throat constricting. If I laughed along with them it would mean I was in on the joke. If I didn’t laugh, they’d know how big of an ignoramus I truly was. Put in this position, I resorted to more comforting thoughts. By the time Todd showed up I’d just concluded Alecia would most certainly make Brett sleep in the wet spot. No post-coital cuddles for her.

    My face revealed my thoughts. Todd pinched the back of my neck in what might’ve appeared to be a loving manner, but signaled to me that I’d better, Cut this shit out. Right now. He smiled a smile I’d never seen before, like he’d just let out a bad fart and was waiting apologetically for the stench to reach them. Todd asked about their flight in and the conversation seemed to go on forever in a ridiculous amount of detail. I excused myself and headed to the dessert table. He stood there and talked and laughed. At one point all three of them were staring at me. Alecia and Brett grinning, Todd giving me the stink-eye. We left a few minutes later.

    Todd drove home NASCAR-style without uttering a word. I could tell he was mad at me. Had my eating embarrassed him? Or pissed him off? He jerked the car to a stop in the driveway and said, “Get out.” I did as he said. I barely got the passenger door closed before he backed down the driveway, ran over the mailbox and peeled out.

    Once I got inside and my hands stopped shaking, I opened a new pint of ice cream; dug out chunks of chocolate and ate them in the dark, binged on sea salt potato chips, M & M’s, and leftover chicken potpie. I went over and over the conversation I’d had with the McWhoevers. What had I missed?

    I came to around four in the morning to Todd stumbling in through the front door. One whiff and I could tell he’d been at Dooley’s Pink Palace giving his money away again. He smelled like Mad Dog 20/20 and vomit. When he came in he didn’t say anything to me, just looked at me like see what you made me do, and headed to the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush and the shower come on. I knocked on the door and waited. When Todd didn’t answer, I went in and stood beside the mirrored shower door.  

    “Todd,” I said.   

    “Not now, Melinda.”

    “Please, just tell me what I did wrong.”

    Several minutes went by. The bathroom fogged up some and I lost sight of my reflection in the mirror.

    “They’re the owners, Melinda. The owners. You can’t remember that without an org chart?”

    He was right, of course. A good girlfriend would commit certain names to memory.

    “I bet if I gave you an org chart you’d just use it to think up a bunch of sick shit.”

    He was right again. I probably would consider what kind of things each one of those self-important morons said to their wives during sex. The meaningless words that stream out of their mouths during what’s supposed to be an act of love. According to Todd, the things that get said during sex don’t mean anything.

    I sincerely hope he’s right about that.

    “I’m sorry,” I said over the squeal of the shower turning off. I unfolded a towel and held it out for Todd. He raked back the shower curtain and snatched the towel out of my hands. He dried all around his torso and down to his crotch. His penis looked like a recoiled party favor, inching away from me in disgust.

    “Yeah, well, sorry doesn’t cut it this time. I’ve had enough of your bullshit.” He threw his towel down and pushed past me.

    My first thought: is he leaving me? Then: look at yourself. Of course he is. You’re a stupid cow. I crumpled onto the bathroom tile and cried, sobbed right into his wet towel. I grabbed the extra fold on my gut, got a good handful of fat and squeezed. Moved down to my thighs and slapped the excess gathered there.

    Todd came in. He stepped over me to the sink and brushed his teeth. As soon as he left, I climbed into the bathtub, pulled the shower curtain around me and let the hot water roll over me, wishing it would melt my skin and boil my bones down small enough to get sucked into the drain.

    Next thing I knew, I was in front of the medicine cabinet counting the Vicodin pills again, entertaining how nice it would be if I wasn’t around anymore; if I found a black hole and slipped into it forever. I wallowed for a few minutes, imagined Todd’s remorse when he’d find the empty bottle of pills next to my lifeless body. As usual, as soon as I pictured the part where Todd might actually put words to his regret, all I could hear him say was, “You took all my Vicodin!” No, it wasn’t quite time for Vicodin.

    I changed out of my wet clothes, washed my face and wrapped my hair in a towel. If I couldn’t kill myself, I’d kill Todd. With kindness. I made corned beef hash, dicing up the onions real small the way Todd likes. He didn’t eat with me but I heard him moving around the kitchen after I went to bed.  

    For a few days I walked around like a ghost, quietly hovering in the shadows near Todd, trying not to be seen. Eventually he stopped avoiding me, stopped glaring at me. When he came to bed instead of sleeping on the couch, I knew we’d be okay. Sex was the next step in his forgiveness. I forced myself to relax and go with the flow. I didn’t flinch, not even when he got to the rougher stuff he liked. Intimacy comes at a price, I told myself.

    Everything was sailing along in the right direction until last night.

    There I was, in the living room alone with my Doritos, when an update came on TV about Camille Hixson, who, at age sixteen, had made headlines for being a concubine of fifty-six year old cult leader Freddy Lovar. The mini documentary focused on how Camille’s life had turned out in the years since Freddy had been arrested for statutory rape and she’d been deprogrammed. The national news played and replayed the footage of Freddy getting cuffed and Camille clawing at the police while they dragged her away from him. The story got so much airtime it became America’s pet fish in a glass bowl.

    I considered turning the TV off but something about this woman drew me in. She wasn’t a half-bad looking girl now. Back when the world first caught up with her, though, she’d been used and abused by Lovar and then fileted by the media. I remembered her as disheveled and angry, like a wild animal. Now, here she was this calm woman with zero chance of bashing an interviewer over the head to get to her “master” like she’d reportedly once done.

    The interviewer recapped past events for the audience and then asked Hixson about her current life. I opened my bag of Doritos and leaned back into the couch.

    All right, I thought. Fill me in.

    Hixson said before she’d hooked up with Lovar she’d considered herself an average girl. She’d had normal hopes for her future like passing her driver’s test, finding a boyfriend, and going to prom. She’d never even heard of cults prior to meeting Lovar, and had no idea she’d been recruited into one until she learned of it in the deprogramming process.

    “I didn’t believe it at first. But, slowly I began to see just how vulnerable I was back then. I liked anyone who liked me. And here was this man who liked me. Unfortunately, that man was Freddy. He honed in on my vulnerability and was able to lure me into being his,” she hesitated, “…sex slave. It’s still hard to believe.”

    The interviewer asked Hixson how she was doing now, emotionally. The camera zoomed in on her face. Her smile was easy. Her eyes, confident. I’d never seen her look as beautiful as she did then.  She straightened up in her seat and stared right into the camera as if she’d been waiting a lifetime to answer the question.

    “Here’s what I’ve figured out in these past years. There’s a big disparity between the life we think we’re living and the life we’re actually living. I mean, I thought Freddy loved me and I believed I was in love with him. But what we had wasn’t love. It was an illusion.”

    “That bimbo’s still around?” Todd’s voice startled me. I hadn’t noticed him come into the room. He reached one hand into the Doritos bag on my lap and held out his other hand for the remote.

    “We all live in some kind of illusion,” Camille continued. “It’s just that some illusions are better than others.”  

    Todd rolled his eyes and sighed. “Give it here,” he said, motioning again for the remote, “I can’t stand to hear this freak talk anymore.”

    I didn’t budge.

**

Amber Colleen Hart is the author of the short story collection No Landscape Lasts Forever, which earned her a silver medal in the 2017 Independent Book Publisher’s Awards. Her stories have been published in Neon, Cheat River Review, Gravel, Lumina, and Ponder Review, among others. She currently resides in Columbia, Tennessee.

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Image: Flickr / steve