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Books And Authors Mentioned In This Episode (By Using Our Affiliate Links To Buy These And Other Books, You’ll Grow Your Library And Help Us Pay Our Interns!)

Jaimee Wriston Colbert: Wild Things (amazon / indiebound) / Shark Girls (amazon / indiebound) / Dream Lives of Butterflies (amazon / indiebound) / Climbing the God Tree (amazon)

Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy (amazon / indiebound / ebook)

Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / Wise Blood (ebooks / indiebound / ebook)

A Kind of Extinction (excerpt)

Sometimes Fortune Hopewell still sees herself as THAT GIRL WITH THE LEG BRACES, running down the hill to her house at the bottom of it and they’re clunking and clanking, clankity clank, banging like cymbals as the knobs of her knees careen into each other, and in all the other little broken-down houses she passes, faces pressed against the windows, laughing at her. They put them on when she was five years old for what the doctor called severe in-toeing but what Fortune knows was just another way to say pigeon-toes. And that’s what the kids at school called her, pigeon-toes. Sometimes one still hisses it, pigeon, but not to her face or she’d smack him, and since she’s a foot taller and 30 pounds heavier than most they’re mindful of that. It’s what she’s got over them, she’s a big girl. That’s what Mum calls her. You’re A Big Girl! Mum says when Fortune comes wailing into their room at night after one of her bad dreams, Go back to bed. Like size has anything to do with being afraid.

Clanky, clunky metal torture racks attached to long black witches boots, snapped on and snugged tight with Velcro. Sometimes when she sneaks under the Beatnik’s window to check on what he’s doing she thinks she still hears them, clankity clank, and worries he’ll hear them too and come after her. Mostly he’s playing that shivery music on his saxophone, so smooth she imagines whip cream and butter and globs of rich vanilla ice cream, thick and cold. And she thinks of aquamarine, her color, swimming pools and oceans and icy glaciers, the sky on summer evenings and the best sea glass in the world. A friend of Mum’s once said: Fortune won’t ever be a pretty girl, not even close, but she has those beautiful aquamarine eyes. The way the Beatnik blows into that horn, what comes out of it is pure aquamarine.

Fortune’s Dad calls him the Beatnik On The Hill and Mum says, For crying out loud, there’s no more beatniks, you think it’s the fifties? Then Dad points out that he looks like a beatnik, with those billowy white pants and his pointed beard, and he wears jewelry, Dad says. Plus he’s a jazz player, which as far as Dad is concerned is no kind of music and certainly no kind of work. Their property abuts the Beatnik’s only his goes up the hill and theirs is flat downhill, which means the Beatnik gets the view of the Susquehanna River and the hills beyond while the Hopewell house is hunkered in the trees where not even enough sunlight beams in to melt the ice from their driveway in the winter.

Near the chain link fence that separates their properties, the Beatnik has a giant maple tree that drops its leaves in the fall into the Hopewell yard and Dad rants, Whose leaves are these? Then he mutters that they are the Beatnik’s because they came off his tree, so he should be the one to rake them. The Beatnik just nods and smiles and goes about his business, which isn’t raking the leaves, and Dad won’t rake them either, tossing refuse from his job installing windows and doors at their property line—old cracked window frames and busted doors from the houses he put new ones in, hissing, View that! And anyway, he said when Mum questioned it, schlepping that damn crap to the Salvage Yard costs a mint, that the old man who runs it is a bloody kike, if you get what I’m saying, his eyebrows flying up. You think we’re made of money? he whined. In this economy how many folks you suppose want new windows and doors? They want a job, that’s what. Fortune’s Mum just shrugged. She’s got her own concerns, she’ll tell you. First Officer of the local branch of the Tea Party, which is a spinoff from the bigger county branch, as in they’re none too happy about that one’s growth—Soon it’ll be just another kind of Big Government, you watch, Mum said.

Fortune wishes Dad would go to the Salvage Yard so she could poke through it for aquamarine things, china, toys, old machine parts—who knew what she might uncover? It’s like digging for buried treasure. The last time she was there she found a set of four bright blue wine goblets which she brought home to her Mum, but Mum said they weren’t worth the plastic they were made from. And furthermore, Mum said, drinking wine is what yuppies do, people who can afford to waste money on luxuries. This household shall be wineless! she proclaimed.

The Beatnik has an aquamarine shirt Fortune would like to own someday, she’s sure it’s a luxury, silk or satin, something whispery smooth that he puts on when he’s going out for the evening, Fortune peeking from behind the Christmas Berry bush snugged up against his bedroom window. She can almost feel the slide of it against her own skin; it would make her skin like his—sleek as a tiger’s with the knobs of his shoulders poking through. Its color would be like wearing the sea.

The local branch of the Tea Party meets bi-weekly in the Hopewell living room, starting their meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag Mum props up in a Folgers coffee can on top of the TV, then belting out the Star Spangled Banner, Mum leading with her deep, hard voice. Then they launch into how the bigger Tea Party movement is an embarrassment, whose founding principles the local one embraced but then decided its endorsement of giant corporal entities like Fox TV and even Glenn Beck (he’s become so mainstream, Mum said) was a threat to their commitments.

Their commitments, as far as Fortune can tell, involve being able to recite by heart at least part of the Constitution, the 5th Amendment and the freedom to bear arms, and use phrases like Big Brother and Newspeak, the Thought Police and Doublethink. The Bible and Ayn Rand are also important, and though most of the local Tea Partiers are not readers by choice, they’re literate and therefore instructed by Fortune’s Mum to read everything Mrs. Rand wrote. Mum threatened to make Fortune read these books too, if she didn’t behave, and given the heft of Atlas Shrugged Fortune does not want to be caught sneaking about the Beatnik’s property.

The local Tea Partiers are stockpiling gold, survival gear, forming armed militias, building shelters filled with canned food, ammunition, cleaning their guns, getting ready for the Big Show. You’re either with us or you’re the enemy, Mum declared. The latest to be added to the Hopewell stockpile are really ugly flannel clothes to keep them warm after the Big Show, when the textile industries are all gone since they’ve hired out their workers in foreign places like India and China, so they’re targets, Mum said. Fortune asked Mum to at least get her something aquamarine, even if it had to be flannel, but Mum said Fortune must not be picky. It’s pickiness that got us into this mess, Mum said. Fortune isn’t sure what this means or even which mess her Mum is referring to, but asking would only prolong the conversation and it still wouldn’t get Fortune a less-ugly stockpiled shirt.

One of Mum’s enemies is Mr. Diaz, Fortune’s Sixth Grade Earth Science teacher, whom Fortune would spy on if only she could figure out where he lives. Not in their neighborhood, that’s for sure. Every day when school is done he gets into his Toyota Prius and drives someplace, away from here. When Dad finally fixes Fortune’s busted bike she’ll follow Mr. Diaz home.

They’re doing a unit on global warming, which Mum claims is a hoax started by Radical Leftist Environmentalists and perpetuated by Democrats for their political gain. Yesterday Mr. Diaz showed a film about Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, how just this year it lost another half mile of ice, ten miles since 1940. It’s moving 50 feet a day, Mr. Diaz said, and it’s only a matter of time before Columbia withers away. Dead ice, he called it. The film zeroed in on a couple extreme surfers, surfing the waves spawned by the crashing ice-melt, and Fortune thought how she’d like to do that one day, ride those roaring waves. She imagined herself in the lip of one, where everything inside is aquamarine and all you could hear would be the rush of the water tumbling down. When they get to the sea the breakaway icebergs are taken by the tide never to be seen again. It’s a kind of extinction, Mr. Diaz said.

He told them glaciers everywhere are dying, and with them go one-sixth of the earth’s water, that glaciers are second only to the ocean for bearing our planet’s water. There’s an ice sheet in Greenland that moves 150 feet a day, he said, losing 150 billion more ice each year than it gains in snowfall. Coastal folks will be goners; the polar ice melts will flood the planet.

Mum dismissed this theory with a violent shrug, when Fortune told her about it. Anyway it would be good riddance, Mum said, since the coasts are where the yuppies and liberals live, radical bike riders, people who condemn cars and plastic water bottles, want the world to drink from metal. Far as Mum is concerned the best thing that’s come up the pike is the plastic water bottle. You can haul your lightweight water without wrecking your shoulder and when you’re done you throw the bottle away, and it’s guaranteed to stay in the world well over a hundred years from now. You cannot outlive the plastic water bottle, she said. Humans should be so lucky.

Glaciers are dynamic systems, always moving, Mr. Diaz said. As the ice melts it forms an aquamarine lake, which can suddenly disappear overnight with massive cracks, booms and pops like it’s declared war on itself. The water rushes out and in less than 40 minutes the entire lake is gone.

It’s Fortune’s color. Her eyes, and her pale skin too is blue in some lights, like the one in their shelter with Mum’s stockpiled stuff. It runs on a generator, hooked up to the concrete ceiling, a wide, thin light meant to illuminate the pure black of underground, or maybe the end of the world.

*

At first when she began taking things it was anything goes, notebooks from the school supply closet, bottles of paste with their shiny black tops, handfuls of pencils, some already sharpened and others the size of cigarette butts, juicy-fruit candy and Cherry Cola lip gloss from the Rite-Aid (which she picked for its flavor, not that she’d ever wear lipstick), even a tiny box turtle from Pet Mart. That one was tragic, as it managed to get itself lost before Fortune was able to steal a bowl for it to live in and turned up like a petrified turd behind the couch when Fortune’s sister Miriam Meth-Girl shoved that out in the middle of the room one day, searching for drug money. After this Fortune decided to limit herself to aquamarine things: marbles from Toys R Us, a blue grass welcome rug from Home Depot, wind chimes from the Dollar Store and sea glass from the Crafts and Hobbies shop. The sea glass is the best. Even though it’s just regular glass pocked and beveled to look like sea glass, she can stare at its riveted surface in the aquamarine color and imagine the ocean and those glaciers, far away from here.

Once she got caught trying to sneak a globe from her World History classroom—she liked its turquoise color from all the oceans and lakes and glaciers that covered its plastic surface. It was too big for her backpack though, which was a mistake, as it certainly didn’t fit under her jacket without making her look like she was going to have a baby. The principal called Mum in to talk about Fortune’s disturbing behavior, but instead of getting angry at Fortune Mum discovered they were teaching global warming and evolution and she got the Tea Partiers to leaflet the school with websites for more accurate information on these things.

Fortune Hopewell. A name like they thought she’d be someone. Her oldest sister’s name is Barbara, a practical name but she was the golden one. Then the next is Miriam, who knew why. Mum chose Barbara and Miriam, so Dad got to name Fortune. Once upon a time, before their first-born daughter became something else, her Dad was the sort who would pick a name like Fortune Hopewell.

When they first heard about THE GREAT BETRAYAL, the BMW Sport Maxi-Scooter bearing the school’s head cheerleaders on their way to a game, roaring around Kamikaze Curve, the Chenango River snaking below—only instead of taking the turn at the bottom of the hill to the stadium they shot straight down 81 (it will be rumored in high school lore that they flipped the bird as they blew by) and three hours later were starting new lives together in New York—Mum went to bed for a week and Dad hid in his basement shop, turning all the machines on, power saws, drills, things that whir and shriek and clatter. We’re so outathere! Barbara squealed, finally answering one of Mum’s frantic calls, and when Mum asked her what she’d use for money because she wouldn’t get a red cent from them until she came to her senses and came home, alone, Alyssa cut in, said not to worry, they’d try their luck at modeling. We’re tall, skinny and willing, she said.

Then the Hopewells hardened, refusing the outreach from neighbors, their church, even entreaties from the parents of the other. (It’s the 21st century, Alyssa’s mother said. They’re eighteen. We can’t choose who they want to be with.) We’ll handle this our own way, Mum announced. Eschewed all of it in favor of good old rage, at the school for allowing kids to travel on their own to sports events, too cheap to provide a bus, Alyssa Adams who was driving her dad’s motorcycle, without a lick of sense in that waste of a blond head, Mum said, and the county for championing football games in schools unwilling to fund them properly despite the criminal amount of tax money they get. Mum started the local Tea Party group, though she swore it had nothing to do with Barbara’s (probably coerced!) choices; she was just so mad at what their country had become, hijacked by Democrats and environmentalists and Obama lovers and Socialist college professors, yuppies and people like the Adams’ who would own a German luxury motorcycle in the first place in an area that can’t even support its American Big Dog franchise for crying out loud, and invited others who felt this way—Tea Party people sick of how big and bureaucratic their county movement had grown, birthers and the like, to unite.

Dad’s rage was more personal, erupting on whomever and whatever he came in contact with, from a driver who neglects to use his turn signal, to an unlucky squirrel choosing that moment to scamper across the street Dad is driving on, to a neighborhood kid’s forgotten toy that he trips on at the side of the road while getting the mail, stomping on it until it cracks in two. Whose leaves are these! he roars in the fall; come winter he will shovel them along with the snow, flinging all of it over the chain link fence onto the Beatnik’s driveway. Miriam and Fortune are left to their own resources, the older turning to chemical pursuits, and Fortune becoming a spy, which suits her fine.

*

It’s finally summer and Fortune has a job of sorts, which is to walk the mile and a half to Grandma Edna’s house, spying as she goes, the McGullys’, the Farnsworths’, Mister Blister, she calls the old man with the warty face and the blisters like bubble wrap on his nose, who refuses to recycle all his empties and they sit in a beat-up tin garbage can on the curb, a favorite stop for the county’s homeless and meth addicts since wine and beer bottles are refundable. Every fourth house has a For Sale sign stuck in its yard, yards with overgrown weeds and unmown grass, dying flowers, and houses with ivy smothered porches, the windows boarded up.

When she gets to Grandma Edna’s she does things like help Grandma Edna pull her diaper pants up, which is the worst, because she doesn’t like to look at her grandmother’s you-know-what, Fortune down on her knees and it’s staring at her like a vertical smile if a smile could stare—her grandma lost what hair she had there. Then she dusts Grandma Edna’s billions of knickknacks, her Pretties Grandma calls them, which is the best. Grandma Edna is a hoarder, Fortune’s Mum said, and Grandma Edna says she knows damn well that some think it’s irrational, Mum can spare her the diagnosis, but she just can’t bear to throw anything away, since she never could trust that somewhere down the line she might have use for the very thing she tossed out. Who knows what you will need in the future, Grandma Edna says.

So Fortune takes a feather duster she found atop the stacks of this and that and dusts, because Grandma Edna has allergies and the dust gets to her after a while, and if she has a sneezing fit she’ll also pee the diaper pants, which Fortune must then help her take off and place new ones on yet again, Grandma Edna using Fortune’s shoulders to steady herself as she steps into the pants, Fortune tugging them up. Grandma Edna broke her hip and when she recovered it was like she had turned into a Lego toy that couldn’t bend, could only be arranged into different configurations.

Fortune tries not to take much from Grandma Edna, but sometimes she can’t help herself, slipping a particularly brilliant aquamarine glass egg, for instance—that was yesterday’s haul, into the zippered pocket of her backpack. Faberge, her grandma said when Fortune asked her about it, costs a mint! Fortune knew that even though at one time the egg might have been worth something, it’s not now because it has a chip in it from being at the bottom of a pile of folding metal chairs, mismatched china and cakes of old soaps, half-used bottles of laundry detergent and an ancient iron with rust and lime deposits all over it. And she knows Grandma Edna won’t miss it, because on top of all her other ailments she can no longer see, with cataracts occluding both her eyes and no insurance other than Medicaid to do much about it. She ain’t going to the damn County Hospital! (which would take her Medicaid) Dad declared. Grandma Edna is his mother so he gets to say what will happen to her, unless, says Grandma Edna, she is of a different opinion, in which case she’ll do as she damn well pleases. They are in agreement on this: no state run hospitals, and no state-supported nursing homes; Grandma Edna will stay in her own damn house for as long as there’s breath in her body.

It’s a hot summer, the kind where you can see the air, filled with the humming and buzzing of insects, and Fortune helped Dad drag Grandma Edna’s bed right under the window so that if there’s a breath of breeze to be gotten Grandma would get it. Now Fortune props the hippo pillow behind Grandma’s back to help her sit up straight in the bed and Grandma rolls her cloudy, filmy blue eyes toward the window light. Gawd damn! she whines. Son of a bitch! Fortune replies, grinning. They like to swear at each other, it’s their secret code. Grandma Edna says she wants to feel the snow on her face one last time before she dies, though Dad said Grandma Edna isn’t dying. She refuses to, he said. Won’t be long now, Grandma Edna says, what do I got to live for? Now take me out so I can feel the snow on my face. Fortune says it’s summer and bloody hot, and Grandma Edna snaps: I know that but I’m pretending cause I can’t see for shit, anyway.

Gawd almighty damn, Fortune agrees, and she closes her eyes and imagines it, but what she sees is a grey, wet November, one of those indeterminate seasons, Mr. Diaz calls them, on its way to becoming something else. OK, she says, what the hell, I’m opening your window so the snow will blow in on you. Then Fortune climbs up on Grandma Edna’s bookcase where piles of books, old telephone directories, ancient newspapers and magazines and file folders filled with crumpled clippings are stacked a mile high. She’s made a sort of nest for herself, with an old ratty bedspread and some towels, and perches like a gawky bird, watching as her grandma tilts her chin into the hot blade of yellow sunlight blazing through the window. One more winter, Grandma Edna sighs, and I’m done for.

**

The excerpted story above appears originally in Wild Things published by BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and is reprinted here with permission.

**

Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of five books: the just-released Wild Things, a collection of linked stories; the novel Shark Girls, finalist for the USA Book News Best Books of 2010 and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year; Dream Lives of Butterflies, winner of the Independent Publishers Award for story collections; Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize, and Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner, and broadcast on “Selected Shorts.” She was the 2012 recipient of the Ian MacMillan Fiction Prize for “Things Blow Up,” a story in her new collection. Other stories won the Jane’s Stories Award and the Isotope Editor’s Prize. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.

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Mother’s Milk (excerpt)

In one arm you clasp onto your infant daughter, pressing her against your chest. With the other hand your toddler son clutches you. You bust through the doors of the supermarket sideways and you’re hit with the reprieve of air conditioning alleviating you from the heat of the sun and the blanket of humidity you waded through in the parking lot.

Calvin squirms alerting you of the full bladder and minimal time you have to get him to the bathroom. And even though this isn’t a shopping trip he doesn’t hesitate to say, “Oh, can we get crispies?” while you weave through the aisles.

Past the dry goods and the refrigerated section, through the produce and the area where meat is butchered, the rawness of hide extremely pungent the closer you get to it. You and your children swerve by aisles trying to get to the other side. Sidestepping consumers free of children or with ones hanging on to them as well you say “excuse me” and whisper “move.”

The bathrooms are tucked into a corner of the market, hidden for those who aren’t searching for them. You drag Calvin into the women’s room when he hedges.

“What’s wrong?” Alarmed you crouch down and search his overalls for wet spots in the front. “Did you already go?”

“I wanna use the big boys.”

“Big boy.” The words he’s used regularly since the countdown began for his fifth birthday. Twenty-five days and counting.

“Calvin,” you sigh. You shift Kayla, squeeze her so your arms press her more into your body, already sweat-soaked because of the lack of air from the fan in the car and the increasing temperature outside. You unbuckle one of Calvin’s loops. He in turn sways tapping his feet to a beat only he knows but translates universally to the “pee pee dance.”

“I have to go with you,” you tell him. “Please.”

“Why now of all times do you have to go to the bathroom by yourself?”

“I do it at home.” Already he sounds like his father, building an argument for himself, already able to reason. Amazing. His eyes enlarge in that way that pleads and projects cuteness. Damn, you think, he’ll get anything he wants when he’s older.

Undoing the other buckle you hold his gaze and tell him slowly, carefully, not so much talking down but being assertive, “You go in and you come out, understand? And what about strangers?”

“Strangers are dangers.” “Go, quick!”

He smiles then hustles inside pushing the door back and giving you one last grin before heading in.

It’s when one worry is gone that another arises, you feel your own bladder full and not willing to wait. You clench your whole body in the hope this will pass, but apparently it cannot.

You push in the doorway and yell for your son. “Stay inside okay? I’ll be right back.”

What sounds like a “‘kay” sends you to the ladies room.

Kayla’s head swivels all over in new places. She likes lights, she likes sparkly things. She smiles, all gums, when you jiggle her not so much for her amusement but because you have to maneuver in the stall and quick. You hang your purse up and switch baby-holding arms. Lift your skirt with one hand then lower your panties with the other. And hover over the already sprinkled upon toilet seat. The smell is not that of a restroom but not one of cleanliness either and you make a point not to let anything that isn’t clad in shoes touch the floor.

The move to shuffle your underwear up your legs is reminiscent of The Twist. Kayla enjoys it. She bites onto your shoulder and sucks dampening the short sleeve of your dress.

Teething, you remember and try to think if you have one of her pacifiers in your purse as you wash your hands with Kayla between your arms, her butt on the water-soaked sink. Now she looks like she made a mess. Any coolness that alleviated your perspiration is gone due to bathroom choreography. Your underarms are wet and Kayla’s heat raises yours. Your brow is beaded and you get out in record time but don’t see Calvin.

Pushing in the door you spy a man doing his own jiggle at the urinal and gasp an apology as you duck outside.

“Calvin, you in here?” you ask but there’s no response from a child, instead it’s a man, startled and baritone that responds, “Lady, this is a men’s room!”

“Well aware of that! Is there a little boy in there?” “Lady, I don’t—”

“Can you just check please?”

The sound of a buckle latching and a grunt from this man. Knocking on stalls and doors rattling in response.

“No one else in here,” he calls. “Thanks,” you mumble.

“Calvin?” You’re frantic. “He has to be here. Has to.” In this moment you’re unsure who you’re madder at, him or yourself.

Your daughter fidgets more feeling your tension, hearing the fear in your voice, and she starts to whimper. An undercurrent at first before she opens her mouth and her whine rings through the supermarket along with your own cries.

“Calvin!” your voice is rough and scratchy. You rush through more rows. There are too damn many. Past Ghostbusters cereal, past Mott’s applesauce, past kalamata olives, and Velveeta mac. So much food, who the hell would eat all of this? The blockades hinder your search, seeming more like a maze than a place to attain goods to feed your family. You continue up and down until you see the overalls, the checkered blue and red shirt, and the woman who has his sleeve scrunched under her grip.

“Calvin!” You rush at them. The woman surveys you.

“Mommy!” Calvin cries edging away from the person holding onto him. “That’s my mommy!” he repeats pointing at you.

Your daughter joins in. “Mommy!” she says to you or the woman or anyone in her direct vicinity.

You try to cancel out the rage in your voice, put on the ‘in public’ tone because you don’t want to be one of those mothers. “Didn’t I tell you to stay put? Huh?”

Calvin dips his head. “Yeah.”

“You left this child unattended?” The woman says, and the way she asks it is not a polite question or even accusatory it’s as though you’re one of the stupidest women on the face of the Earth.

“He had to go. So did I. Thank you for finding him.” You reach for him but Calvin is seized by this lady.

“You’re aware this child was left alone?” Her amazement at your actions is all over her tone. Her face has the demeanor of someone sucking on a lemon. Half her body covers Calvin as if she’s doing her duty as a good citizen to protect him from you. This woman attempts to admonish you with a look. Like you haven’t pulled that before.

A standoff begins. Your son is in-between, trembling, shifting, reaching out but also holding back not knowing what is expected of him. He’s a tiny thing barely coming up to your hip but on this squat woman he reaches higher. He’s been trained to listen to adults and stands by idly waiting. While your daughter continues to fidget in your arms and your son fidgets in the woman’s you remember Kayla’s tone, lighter, but matching yours and Calvin being the one that does not sync with your announcement that you see what she sees.

The row you’re in is canned goods up and down. Sturdy items fermented and sealed that would last forever and could make a mean dent if you simply tilted your body over, used the hand that isn’t adhering one child to your person, and decided to toss it.

You like to consider yourself the calm sort, reasonable, not overly emotional. It’s why you fit in with your in-laws. You’re not that uppity Negro, that all out diva that sets worlds on fire with a glance so wicked it’s on par with Medusa herself. The point at hand is that you were cut from vagina to anus to give birth to Calvin and Kayla. You couldn’t piss straight let alone sit down for a week after childbirth. You were in a postpartum funk that engulfed you in darkness for days. A depression so heavy it was like wool across your body initiating fluctuating moods that included panic attacks inciting thrashing in bed leading to your husband sleeping on the floor. Gradually you woke up, to your humanity and to motherhood and the appreciation that you carried a child to term, finally.

You’ve had losses. Bled out children that were not yet fully formed before achieving success. So who the fuck does this woman think she is trying to discount what you’ve earned? To dismiss with a flick of the eye what your body, which was once an hourglass gone pear- shaped, has brought unto the world as not yours. When you look at your son he is pale, he is pointy-nosed, he is freckled and smiley and Joel to the bone. In taking all of this in more than anything, he is yours.

“Fuck this.” You bring Kayla closer to you; the shoulder of the top of your dress clinging to your skin as she sucks. You rush at the woman. Her eyes turn to saucers when you duck down, swoop up your son—heavy—and make your exit. Calvin clasps his arms around your neck but his lower half slides down your torso.

You’re rushing, eyes focused on the door, waiting for the woman to chase you down. For some reason you expect dogs, flashing lights, police intervention. At the doorway one of the men you’ve seen before holds a platter of cold cuts with toothpicks sticking out. Kayla breaks from your shoulder to lunge for it. You turn knocking her head against your breasts. You’re already using your backside to open the door letting it shut behind you but your daughter is too quick,

too curious, and too willing to thrust out fingers so that when she separates from your body again, albeit briefly, her face, her cheeks so chubby and consistently commented on by those who peer at her, is smacked by the metallic rim of the door.

CONTINUED…

**
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional with 13 years experience, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, panels organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and social media director and writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story collection Everyday People: The Color of Life with Atria Books. And she has contributed articles and reviews to Forbes.com, The Billfold, and Bustle as well as other online publications.

**

Image: Flickr / Francesco Tolu

Books And Authors Mentioned In This Episode (By Using Our Affiliate Links To Buy These And Other Books, You’ll Grow Your Library And Help Us Pay Our Interns!)

Ayana Mathis: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (amazon / indiebound / ebook)

Five Minutes

Her job was on Eighth Avenue, in Homestead. I hated it there, but working in Braddock, I couldn’t judge. The place was sandwiched between an auto-body joint and the municipal court. The bus dropped me off a block ahead and I walked back down. I took a half-day at the mill just to visit. The boss was pissed because we already didn’t have enough men on night shift; I left anyway. Once the bus was out of sight, I sped up, looked if anyone was around, and shuffled toward the splotchy blue doors.

Going down the hallway, it was the same as ever. A warm staleness mixed with cheap halloween fog; the air tasted sour. Red studio lights shined dust against the posters on the walls while dim fluorescent bulbs flickered within the ceiling.

In the lobby, Vanessa (not her real name, nobody had real names) was inside the cash cage. Her face was a harsh, brassy green like unwatered grass, from the lights above. Her cutoff David Bowie shirt  glowed. Her lips, puffing a cigarette, were almost black. Eyes almost lost. She studied me while picking at a scab on her forehead. “Seein’ Starla?”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Uh-huh,” Vanessa moaned. “You know the deal: five bucks, five minutes, just like everybody else.”

Like everybody else. Sure. I slipped a bill through the slot in the cage, she took it, threw it in the register. A red ticket popped up from the counter. She tore it and gave me half.

I shoved the stub into the pocket of my work shirt  and waited near the booths, looking through the window of the door, but didn’t see her. “Where am I going?” I called across the room.

Vanessa threw her finger in front of her pursed lips and looked over at Jerri, the bouncer. It was only Tuesday night, but he was still there with her, fat muscle sleeping most of the night and throwing people out when he could be woke to. She stood, walked past the man-sized thumb nodded off on a folding chair, and winked at me. “Remember the rules?”

“Just tell me where the hell I’m going.”

“Y’know we give nicknames to all the regular customers,” Vanessa said. “Yours oughta be ‘Mr. Sensitive’.”

“Ain’t a customer.”

“Whatever.” She shrugged. “Booth eight.”

I pushed against the door with my shoulder and went down the hallway.

The whole time I wondered why I was there. I knew the reason, but why bother? She didn’t want to see me. I didn’t exist to her anymore. Nothing and nobody from those times did. She knew I took two buses to see her. She could just talk to me. Instead, she played games. Hadn’t always been that way, and I figured it was important to try seeing her anyhow. She had been there for me once. I believed in righteous dues.

Walking past the booths, I saw all the men’s backs through the beaded doorways, until I reached number eight. I stepped through the beads and sat down on a fading yellow chair that might have been nice once. Everything there, once.

The room was tiny, black from floor to ceiling. A vent running through the booths weakly blew fresh air in from outside. I could smell my mill a few miles away. I stared at the glass in front of me. There was a slot of the bottom for the tickets. The entire place was just slots to reach through. I waited.

The smell was bad, ripped pieces of tissue flecked into the dark walls like snowflakes. It was too quiet. How could anyone stand it? Nothing but the air, the clicking of the beads, the embarrassed rustling of hands against denim, the dirty whispers of people who didn’t like to talk much.

I started playing with the keys in my right pocket. What if she wouldn’t see me? Vanessa might’ve told her. Twice I got up, started to leave, then went back in. Each time I passed through the beads, the rustling hands stopped before slowly starting again. Sick, but I had no choice.

I remembered when we were younger—everything—and wondered if she could recall anything before packing up and leaving? Maybe where a part of my life became still, hers was just starting. That sort of thing wasn’t my call, but it I couldn’t just walk away when things had gotten so bad. My temples ached.

A few moments and I finally heard a door. Footsteps approached, and what sounded like a chair was adjusted.

“Got your ticket, baby?” ‘Starla’ said in a sultry, but strained, voice.

“Hey it’s—”

“Na-uh,” she cooed. “Lemme see just your ticket, baby.”

I sat up and got my hand from my pocket, pulling the stub out. I flicked the goddamn thing through the slot. Her hand, under the curtain, grabbed around, eventually finding the paper. A moment passed and the stub was pushed back out to my side. Maybe some people kept them as souvenirs. I let it fall to the floor.

“Okay baby…”

I watched as her fingers peeked through the curtains and she tied each side back with red cord. She flipped a switch. A light faded up.

“Hii bab—oh, it’s you.” She closed her legs and bent forward, elbows on her knees, hands up on her neck to block her chest. At first, she wasn’t even looking at me, just staring at the glass itself. A 60 watt hung over her like in an interrogation room. I touched the back of my hand to the glass. It was warm. She said, “Still pluggin’ away in Braddock, huh?”

I examined my shirt. “It’s honest work.”

“Well, hey, I pay my bills. And anyways, I don’t come see you at that dirtball mill, so why you bothering me at my job?”

“You won’t tell me any other way to reach you.”

Her fingers quickly rolled on her neck. The words came out like an exhausted cigarette puff. “That’s because I don’t want you to reach me, dumbass.”

She looked sweaty, tired. Frayed twine hair. Hard to believe, but she was thinner. Gloves ran up her bony arms and I knew why she wore them. I’d tried to get her to kick more than a few times—I had a rough patch with the same junk for a few years before, and she’d helped me—but she didn’t want my help. She wanted to live the way she was and really looked like hell for it.

She didn’t like my staring. She quickly spread her arms, laying her hands against the walls. I darted my eyes down.

“Let’s talk in the parking lot?” I said to the floor.

“Nope. I don’t feel like changing.”

“I can’t stand seeing you here, like one of your customers.”

“Right now, you are one of my customers.”

“You can move back in with me any time,” I said.

“I don’t want to. I’m sure your wife wouldn’t like it, either.”

“That don’t matter.”

“What would you tell her?”

“Quitting this skanky shit might make it easier,” I said.

“That’s it!”

She shot up and called for Jerri. I knew what was coming before I heard the beads jangling behind me. A hand gripped on my collar and I was on my feet in one swift jerk. I looked back at Jerri. His free hand was balled into a tree bark fist. “Alright, let’s go.”

He began dragging me me out. I lunged at the glass and slapped on it. “Hey don’t do this! It’s important!”

She turned around and looked at me. She rolled her eyes and sat down again, nodding at Jerri.

“You sure, Starla?”

She nodded again and the huge bastard let me go as fast as he’d picked me up. I collapsed to the floor and he walked away, snickering.

“Better be real fuckin’ important,” she said. “I got more skanky shit to do.”

“Okay, so…” I started, getting back up onto the chair. “I’m not sure how to say it, and I really don’t want to do this at—”

“Just say it, dumbass.”

“Look—”

“Spit it out!”

“She’s gone.”

Her face dropped. I’d never seen that expression before.

“She went last night,” I said. “It was looking pretty good for a while, but she finally gave in. It was in her sleep, though. Really peaceful.”

“I… I don’t…”

“Dad wants you to come back home, Rach. We all do.”

She looked at me. “Josh.”

The light above her head went down by itself; almost by instinct she reached for the red cords and undid them. The curtains closed. Five bucks for five minutes. How many times had she gone through this routine? I sat there, waiting for her to say something, but I didn’t hear a word. Just muffled, short-breathed sobbing. The kind I heard when Rach used to scrape her knees or fall down the cellar steps, the kind I’d heard when she got stung by bees or when that kid with the funny hair never showed up to take her to prom. It was a crying I hadn’t heard from her since leaving home and it made my chest tight hearing it. How the fuck did this all happen? People lose their way. They try to forget things and, when it comes to back to them, it comes back all at once.

She stopped. I leaned forward and whispered, “You there?”

No response. My eyes hit the floor, totally black, like I could fall and never stop. The only thing that stood out was the red ticket stub, folded and wrinkled and torn in half. It was barely recognizable; but in faded, bent letters I could read the word “ADMIT.”

I took it, looked up, and pressed my hand on the glass. “Rach, are you still there?”

Behind the battered curtains, she coughed and said, “I really don’t know.”

**

This story was originally published in Joyland Magazine.

**

Eric Boyd lives in Pittsburgh and recently completed his first short story collection, Brownfields. His writing has been published by Joyland, Guernica, The Offing, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. He appeared in the anthologies Prison Noir (Akashic Books; ed. Joyce Carol Oates) and Words Without Walls (Trinity University Press; eds. Sheryl St. Germain & Sarah Shotland). He is the editor of The Pittsburgh Anthology (Belt Publishing). Boyd is a winner of Slice Magazine’s Bridging the Gap award, the PEN Prison Writing award, and was a semifinalist for the H.E. Francis award. He judged the 2015 Waldman International Arts and Writing competition. He is currently working on a novel.

**

Image: Flickr / Lee Royal

Books And Authors Mentioned In This Episode (By Using Our Affiliate Links To Buy These And Other Books, You’ll Grow Your Library And Help Us Pay Our Interns!)

Beth Deitchman: Mary Bennet and the Bloomsbury Coven (amazon / indiebound) / Mary Bennet and the Enchanted Atlas (amazon / indiebound) / The Painted Dog and Other Stories (amazon)

John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / The Cider House Rules (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / A Widow For One Year (amazon / indiebound / ebook)

N. K. Jemisin: The Fifth Season (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (amazon / indiebound / ebook)  / The Killing Moon (amazon / indiebound / ebook)

Carol Berg: Transformation (amazon / indiebound) / Son of Avonar (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / Song of the Beast (amazon / indiebound / ebook)

Ursula K. Le Guin: Steering the Craft (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / A Wizard of Earthsea (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / The Left Hand of Darkness (amazon / indiebound / ebook)

Pink Boxes

I was stocking GI Joes at the Super Kmart. I’d been working there all summer to save up for Ivy Tech’s dental technician program. It wasn’t so bad—it got me out of my mom’s house, away from the smoking and the bitching. I liked stocking the toys. I always made sure they were lined up real neat. I put the last GI Joe on the bottom row and started loading the next shelf. A little girl barely tall enough to reach the handles pushed a dingy blue stroller into the aisle. She was a scrawny thing with stringy blonde hair and a big snot glob sitting on her upper lip. Underneath her faded orange sundress, she wore a green bathing suit. A baby napped in the stroller, wearing only a diaper. He had to be freezing—the air conditioner was blasting because it was August. Which, in Evansville, means hot and sticky outside, freezing cold inside.

The little girl stopped in front of the Barbies. Rows and rows of pretty pink boxes that I’d put there a little while earlier, filled with smiling, blonde dolls in fancy dresses. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and shot me a nervous look. Then she grabbed a box. As she stared at the Ballerina Barbie, the little girl ran her fingers over the clear plastic wrapping. The light pink nail polish on her fingernails had started to peel.

“Dammit, Crystal!” someone shouted.

Both me and the girl jumped. I dropped a GI Joe, but the little girl hung on to the Barbie. A woman marched toward her, pushing a cart and trailing the scent of cigarettes and beer. She couldn’t have been too much older than me. Maybe twenty-five?

“I told you to stay with me!” she said. Her dirty red flip-flops slapped against the hard floor. She wore black shorts that oozed white, dimply flesh, but her lower legs were bright pink—like her belly hanging out of her purple mesh top. A brown, fringy purse thunked against her thighs with every step. Her bleached hair frizzed around her face. My mom would’ve said she looked rode hard and put away wet.

The woman tried to grab the Barbie box, but the little girl moved it away just in time.

“Please, Mama,” the girl said. It was sad how she hugged that box.

“No! How many goddamn times do I got to tell you?” The woman yanked the doll away.

“Why can’t I have one?” the girl asked. More snot bubbled at her nose.

“We can’t afford a Barbie.” The woman sounded more sad than angry, and for a second I felt sorry for her. Then she shoved the Barbie onto the shelf, knocking a bunch of boxes over. Some of them got dented when they hit the floor. The woman didn’t even pretend to care.

The girl started crying. The baby woke up and looked confused.

“Jesus Christ, Crystal. Stop crying. Stop it.” She slapped the girl. The poor little thing touched her cheek and whimpered.

I glared at the woman, but she didn’t notice. The baby just watched. He looked about a year or a year and a half old—I can’t always tell. Also with a snotty nose. He coughed and the pacifier shot out of his mouth onto the floor.

“Shit,” the woman said. She picked up the pacifier, wiped it on her shorts, and stuffed it back into the baby’s mouth. No wonder her kids were sick. She got the cart. “Come on.”

Crystal looked back at the Barbies and started crying again. The woman grabbed Crystal’s arm and shook her. “You should’ve been looking after your brother, not staring at toys we can’t afford!”

I had to do something—I couldn’t just watch her hurt her kids—so I took a step forward saying, “Hey—”

Her glare shut me right up. Her face was all sunburned and puffy. I recognized her expression—anger and bitterness all tangled together. My mother looked at me like that sometimes.

“Mind your own goddamned business!” she barked.

Mr. Schultz, the manager, came puffing around the corner into the aisle. He’d been a big deal at Harrison in the eighties. High school football. I think he’d been a quarterback. But now he was just fat, bald, and middle-aged.

“Is everything okay here?” He wore his good ol’ boy grin. Mr. Schultz took customer service seriously.

The woman rounded on him. “What do you want?”

Mr. Schultz kept grinning and put out his hands. “I’m just making sure there’s nothing wrong.”

“We’re fine,” she said. “Come on, Crystal. Get your brother.”

Mr. Schultz turned to me. “Shelley, is everything okay?”

I had to give him credit for asking me. He could’ve just backed off and let the woman go.

So I said, “I think you should call Social Services, Mr. Schultz. She—”

The woman came at me fast, saying, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

I nearly tripped over my feet getting away from her. Luckily, she stopped just before she reached me and pointed at her kids. Crystal huddled against the shelf, and the baby wailed. “You don’t know nothing about me or my kids!”

“Everyone just calm down, now.” Mr. Schultz held the woman’s arm. “Ma’am, I’m sure Shelley’s exaggerating.”

The woman tried to pull her arm away, shrieking, “Get off me!”  

He let go. I was afraid he was going to let her leave with those poor kids. They were so little.

“Look at the kids, Mr. Schultz!” But I kept my distance from the woman because after Mr. Schultz touched her, she went kind of crazy: her eyes got really wide, and I think she stopped blinking. She reminded me of a cornered dog. If she’d had hackles, they would’ve been raised.

Mr. Schultz glanced toward the kids. Crystal rubbed her arm where her mother had gripped it. I could still see the red mark on her cheek from the slap.

“Are you okay?” he said, taking a step toward Crystal.

“Don’t touch her.” Crystal’s mom was shouting before, but now she went all cold and quiet.

I looked away from Crystal and froze. The woman had something grey in her hands pointed at Mr. Schultz. It took me a second to realize that it was a gun. At first I thought it had to be fake—who takes a gun into the Super Kmart? But then I saw the sweat on Mr. Schultz’s upper lip and forehead. He held up his hands.

“There’s no need for that.” His voice cracked. “I’m not gonna touch her. I’m just looking out for the little girl.”

“She don’t need your help.” The woman gestured with the gun. “Back up.” I’m pretty sure she was scared of Mr. Schultz. She had this look in her eyes—like my mom did most of the time until my dad finally stopped coming home.

Mr. Schultz obeyed. I didn’t blame him.

She hesitated, like she didn’t know what to do next. We stood there for a while—me and Mr. Schulz staring at the gun, the woman holding it away from her body with both hands. Then she looked at the pink boxes on the floor.

“Crystal, get a Barbie.” She looked up at us—daring us to say no, I think. Mr. Schulz nodded.

Crystal stopped rubbing her arm and stared at her mother.

The woman kept her gun pointed at Mr. Schultz, but looked over her shoulder. “I said you could have a Barbie. What? Don’t you want one?”

The little girl reached out slowly—like she wasn’t sure her mom was serious—and then snatched another Ballerina Barbie off the shelf. The woman looked at Mr. Schultz again.

“She’s gonna get as many as she wants.”

Mr. Schultz nodded, hands still held up, palms facing the woman. “I don’t want any trouble, Ma’am.”

I stared at Mr. Schultz. His hands shook. So much for heroics.

Crystal dumped Barbies onto the packages of toilet paper and paper towels that were in the cart. Me and Mr. Schultz just watched, helpless, which pissed me off. I wanted Mr. Schultz to do something. I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the gun. The woman’s hands trembled, so I didn’t think she’d actually shoot us. But I didn’t want to take any chances. She was clearly coming apart after a day of sun, beer, and cigarettes. And, if she was anything like my mother, a lifetime of disappointment.

The woman glanced at the cart. “Get something for your brother, too.”

Crystal stepped toward me, looking scared and confused. I held out a GI Joe. She took it and dropped it in the cart.

“See? I take care of my babies!” The woman’s voice shook.

“Yes, you do, Ma’am.” Mr. Schultz had gone a scary shade of grey. He kept clenching and unclenching his left hand. Plus he was breathing hard. I put my hand on his back to, I don’t know, remind him that I was there. His shirt was damp.

When Crystal finished putting toys in the cart, the woman motioned to me with her gun. “You push it. If you try anything, I’ll shoot your boss.” She made Mr. Schultz turn around. He winced when she shoved the gun into his lower back.

The cart’s wheel squeaked as we walked down the aisle, Mr. Schultz in front with the woman behind him, and Crystal pushing the stroller beside me. I prayed that Mr. Schultz didn’t have a heart attack before that crazy woman got the hell out of the store with her kids. I just wanted to get to the front door. I figured I’d help her load all the stolen stuff into her car. Then I’d write down the license plate number and call the police and Social Services. I had a plan. I felt calm and cool-headed. Watching all those crime shows had finally paid off.

But then Russell came dancing down the aisle from where he’d been stocking feminine supplies. He listened to his iPod, not paying much attention to anything else. I held my breath, willed him to turn around, to get out of the way. But the woman saw him.

“Stop!” she shouted, although she kept the gun pointed at Mr. Schultz’s back. Russell stopped dancing, but he pushed his bangs out of his eyes and kept coming toward us, smiling at me because we had a little thing going on. We liked the same music and books. Plus we both hated Evansville.

“Russell!” I shouted. “Go away!”

He pulled his earbuds out. I could hear the music enough to recognize the song: “Asleep” by the Smiths.  I motioned for Russell to stop, but he didn’t. He looked from me to Mr. Schultz, like he was trying to figure out what was going on.

“Just go!” I shouted and almost started crying.

But then Russell noticed the gun and, like an idiot, lunged toward the woman.

The gun went off. Crystal screamed. You know how they say that bad things happen in slow motion? That’s total bullshit. One second Mr. Schultz stood in front of the woman, grey and sweaty. The next he twisted on the floor, a dark patch of red spreading beneath his ribs. I couldn’t stop staring at the blood. Mr. Schultz stopped moving and looked at me. The fear in his eyes made me cold. He gasped a few times, but then he went horribly still. I stared at his chest, but it didn’t move.

“Fuck!” the woman shouted. I could barely hear her over the high-pitched squealing in my ears. She looked at Russell. “This is your fault! Back up. Back the fuck up or I will shoot you, too.”

Russell backed up a few steps, but then he tripped over his shoelace and ended up on his skinny butt. He didn’t get up. I couldn’t move or take my eyes off Mr. Schultz. I dug my finger into my left ear, trying to make the sound go away.

“Shit! Motherfucking shit!” Crystal’s mom shouted. She started pacing, waving the gun around. “Just let me think!”

But then other customers showed up. When they saw her and Mr. Schultz, they stopped. An older woman with big glasses and short hair screamed. Behind her a chubby teenager clutching a box of diet pills said, “Oh my God!” and covered her mouth. A man carrying a cell phone came from the other side of the aisle. Crystal’s mom grabbed my arm and shoved the gun into my ribs. It burned. When I tried to get away, she dug the gun in harder.

“Stay away. Or I’ll kill her.”

I almost threw up. The man dropped his phone and raised his hands. “No one’s going to do anything.” He looked at me. “Okay?”

I nodded.

The woman still held the gun to me, but she seemed not to know what to do next. I watched the cellphone man. He was about Mr. Schultz’s age, but in much better shape. He caught my eye and glanced down at his cellphone. I don’t know how I understood, but I did. He’d already called the police. I prayed again—that the police wouldn’t use their sirens. I didn’t want to get shot.

“Come on.” The woman jerked me forward by the arm. “We’re getting out of here.” She pulled me around to look at the kids. Crystal trembled next to the cart, eyes wide. The baby had, miraculously, fallen asleep in his stroller, mouth open, pacifier resting on his bare chest. Maybe he was deaf.

“Get your brother.”

The girl didn’t move.

“Crystal, get your goddamn brother!”

Crystal looked at the cart of toys and then wheeled her brother forward.

The others didn’t move as the three of us walked to the front doors. The woman didn’t say anything. She walked fast, pulling me along. We had nearly made it when the middle door opened. A cop in a bulletproof vest stepped inside. He saw us right away and aimed his gun at the woman.

“Put down your weapon.” He reminded me of a character from Law and Order. Even though the gun at my ribs was all too solid, I felt like I was in the middle of a TV show and that everything happening came from some script.

The woman stopped. She breathed fast—almost panting—and dug her fingers into my shoulder.

“Put it down, Ma’am.” A second cop had come inside. Outside another police car pulled up, lights flashing.

“Everything will be okay, Ma’am, if you just drop your weapon.”

I don’t know why she didn’t do what he said. She let go of my arm, but she kept the gun.

“Please,” I said. “Just—”

She looked at me with the saddest expression I’d ever seen. Then she looked at her kids.

“Mama?” Crystal said.

“I’m sorry,” the woman whispered right before she took a step forward and fired. The cop nearest to us fell, holding his upper arm. The cop in the doorway shot the woman a second later, and she crumpled to the floor.

The baby and Crystal both shrieked. I grabbed her and pulled her to me so that she couldn’t look at her mother. She weighed almost nothing.

“Mama!” she screamed over and over again, struggling to get away from me.

“Get the baby!” I shouted to the cellphone man. He knelt and unclicked the stroller’s straps and then pulled the baby to his chest, one hand held gently against the back of the baby’s head. We stood side by side, holding the hysterical kids as more people ran past. A young cop stopped nearby and spoke into the radio on his shoulder.

“We need an ambulance. Officer shot.” He gave the address. “And there’s another person down.”

“Two,” I said.

The cop looked at me.

“She shot the manager.” I pointed to the aisle where Mr. Schultz had fallen.

“Two civilians down,” he said.

Sirens wailed in the distance. I could just see the flashing lights coming down Burkhardt Road. Two or three cop cars were already parked outside. People kept going in and out. I moved farther away from the door. The little girl had gone quiet.

“Crystal?” I said. “Are you okay?” She had flecks of blood on her face and arms. “Are you hurt?” But then I realized that it was her mother’s blood. Crystal didn’t answer me. She just held me tighter. I stroked her hair and made cooing sounds. I couldn’t lie to her and tell her everything was going to be okay, but I wanted her to stop shaking.

Russell came over to us.

“What the fuck?”

I shook my head, looking at Crystal.

The cellphone man handed the baby to Russell and went to kneel by the wounded cop. I couldn’t hear what he said.

“You okay?” Russell asked.

I held Crystal tighter and shrugged. I didn’t want to talk.

More policemen swarmed through the store, talking to the customers.

“Can you tell me what happened, Ma’am?” someone said behind me. It was the young cop who had called the ambulances. “Someone can take the little girl while we talk.” He held out his arms like he wanted to hand Crystal to someone else.

I pressed her closer to me. “No.”

“Come on, Ma’am.”

“Stop calling me Ma’am. My name’s Shelley.”

“Okay, Shelley.” He let me hold Crystal. “I’m Officer Williams. I just want to know what happened.”

I kept my hand against the back of Crystal’s head and rocked back and forth while I talked. The cop took notes. When I stopped, he looked up from his notebook.

“Thank you, Shelley. Could I get a number where we can reach you?”

“Why?”

“In case we have any other questions.”

I gave him my number. He walked back to the entrance where a black lady stopped him. I guessed that she was from Social Services because of her blue pantsuit and sensible shoes. The cop gestured toward me and Crystal, and the Social Services lady came over.

“Hi, I’m Mrs. Daniels,” she said to Crystal. She had a gentle voice.

Crystal buried her face in my shoulder.

“It’s okay, honey. This nice lady is gonna take care of you,” I said.

Crystal looked at me with wide brown eyes. She shook her head and then wrapped her arms around my neck, pulling herself closer to me. I had to work hard not to cry. “I’ve got to let you go with the nice lady. But she’ll take good care of you.”

Mrs. Daniels took the baby from Russell, strapped him back into his stroller, and then tried to get hold of Crystal. She screamed and clung to me. But the lady managed to get her away and spoke softly to her, stroking her back. I managed to keep myself together until they were gone.

“That poor girl,” I sobbed into Russell’s bony shoulder. He patted me lightly on my back. “That poor baby girl.”

Then I remembered the Barbies. I didn’t want to go near the cart filled with pink boxes—it was too close to Crystal’s mom—so I ran to the toy aisle, ignoring the cops who shouted at me, grabbed a Barbie for Crystal and a stuffed monkey for the baby, and sprinted to the parking lot. Mrs. Daniels was loading Crystal into the car. When she finished clicking Crystal’s car seat shut, I knelt inside the car.

“Hey, Crystal, I got you something.” Crystal stared at the package, not seeming to know what it was. “It’s a Barbie. For you.” She took it and looked up at me. Then she hugged the whole package to her chest. I set the stuffed animal next to her brother.

I stood and took Mrs. Daniels’s arm. “Please tell me they’ll be okay.”

She got a serious look on her face and started to speak.

“Lie to me if you have to.”

“We’ll do our best for them.”

She got in the car and drove off, merging with the traffic on the Lloyd Expressway. I kept watching long after they’d disappeared.

“Shelley?” Russell stood behind me. “They say we can leave now.”

I didn’t answer.

“Are you okay?”

I shook my head.

“Can I do anything?”

I shook my head again. Russell stood there a little while longer, but then he left.

I turned back toward the store. The cop cars hadn’t moved, but the ambulances had arrived. Two paramedics wheeled the shot cop toward an ambulance. He was sitting up, so he must’ve been okay.

I found Officer Williams.

“I’ve got to get my stuff. Can I go back inside?” I didn’t want to, but my purse was in the back room. I needed my keys.

“Hold on. I’ll check.”

As I waited I started to shiver. It was so hot outside but I stood there, freezing. I just wanted to go home and wrap myself in a blanket.

“Miss, are you okay?”

The cell phone man stood in front of me. He had blood on his shirt and jeans.

My teeth chattered. I shook my head.

“Hold on.” He went over to an ambulance. I figured it was waiting for Mr. Schultz’s body. Or for the woman’s. Thinking about that made me feel sick. When the man came back, he wrapped a scratchy blanket around me and led me to the bench at the front of the store. I felt like an idiot, but I couldn’t stop shivering. He put his arm around me. It felt good. Like a dad’s arm.

He looked at my nametag. “Hi Shelley. I’m Dave.”

I nodded.

“Do you have anyone to talk to about this?”

I just shrugged. I couldn’t talk to Russell about it. Or my mom. And my friends wouldn’t know what to say. Then I shook my head.

He pulled out a card and wrote down a number. “You’re going to need help processing all this. Give me a call, okay? I’ll help you find someone to talk to. A professional,” he added. I must’ve looked confused.

I took the card and slipped it into my pocket. “Thank you.”

Officer Williams showed up. “I can take you to the storeroom.”

I stood with the blanket around me like a cape. “Thank you, Dave.”

He nodded. I wondered who he would talk to.

Then I followed the officer inside. We passed the aisle where Mr. Schultz got shot. A bunch of cops stood around while someone took pictures. There was so much blood. I made it all the way to the storeroom before I threw up in the employee bathroom. Officer Williams waited while I rinsed out my mouth. Thank God he didn’t say anything. I didn’t think I could take another person asking if I was okay.

I hung up my Kmart vest and grabbed my purse. Then I followed Officer Williams back through the store. There were still some pink boxes on the floor in the toy aisle. I snuck away from the cop and stared at them. Most of them were okay. A few had crushed edges, but nothing was wrong with the Barbies inside, so I put them back on the shelf, lining them up as neatly as I could. When I was done, I looked at all those smiling plastic faces behind their plastic walls—so pretty and so peaceful. Like nothing bad would ever touch them.

**

Beth Deitchman has been a dancer, a university lecturer, and an actor. In 2013 she co-founded Luminous Creatures Press with Emily June Street. Her books include Mary Bennet and the Bloomsbury Coven, and Margaret Dashwood and the Enchanted Atlas, both part of her Regency Magic series. Additionally, she has co-authored two collections of short stories. Her story “La Voshnikaya” appears in the September 2016 Issue of SQ Mag. Beth lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband Dave and dog Ralphie. You can find Beth and Luminous Creatues Press online, and follow her on Twitter.

**

Image: Flickr / Rob Shenk

Books and authors mentioned in this episode (by using our affiliate links to buy these and other books, you’ll grow your library and help us pay our interns!)

Laurie Stone: My Life as an Animal (amazon / indiebound)

Edouard Leve: Autoportrait (amazon / indiebound) / Suicide (amazon / indiebound) / Newspaper (amazon / indiebound)

Grace Paley: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (amazon / ebook / indiebound) / The Collected Stories (amazon / ebook / indiebound) / The Little Disturbances of Man (amazon / indiebound)

Lydia Davis: The Collected Stories (amazon / ebook / indiebound) / Can’t and Won’t: Stories (amazon / ebook / indiebound) / Varieties of Disturbance (amazon / ebook / indiebound)

Paul LaFarge: The Artist of the Missing: A Novel (amazon / indiebound) / Luminous Airplanes: A Novel (amazon / indiebound) / Haussmann, or the Distinction: A Novel (amazon / indiebound)

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre (amazon / ebook / indiebound) / Villette (amazon / ebooks / indiebound) / Shirley (amazon / ebook / indiebound)

When People Fall, I Laugh (after Édouard Levé)

At a certain stage of life I divided my belongings into “things I could not part with” and “things that were part of me.” The first group included a granite table designed by a man I loved. The second group included my father’s ashes. In the period before cell phones, I liked checking messages from pay phones. Their sweet-and-sour tang became associated with hope. Plot devices in narratives that rely on people being out of touch are no longer credible. In subways, I push back against the thighs of men who encroach on my space. On the street, if someone compliments me, I say, “Thank-you.” Growing up, I did not know what was expected of me by my parents. As I get older Marilyn Monroe appears more and more beautiful. When I meet someone, I feel I know them. As I get to know them, the stranger they become, but by then I am used to them. I wear new clothes over and over until they are no longer new. A friend suggested I wear a different shade of lipstick. I did not want to think she was looking at my mouth. I asked Richard why some people are more interested in monkeys than other people, and he said, “Some people, when they look in the eyes of a monkey, see their relatives.” When I was four, I picked out an expensive dress embroidered with strawberries at a clothing store. The saleswoman disapproved of a child so young making the choice. My mother remembered the incident because she told the woman to mind her own business. I remember the story because my mother stuck up for me. I like being a guest in other people’s houses. When I offer my apartment to friends, it is because I have to. When a young woman quickly established she was teaching at a prestigious university and working on her third book, I disliked her. When she said her son was mentally disabled and her husband had recently lost a third of his body weight, I felt guilty. When she said, “I never wanted children,” I thought we should be friends. In skiing, falling is flying. My mother used to say, “A Leopard never changes its spots.” I wondered why a leopard would want to be spotless. I hunted for the chocolate she hid behind books. Leopards don’t have spots when they are born; spots develop for camouflage. On the coldest day of the year I said, “Hello,” to a homeless man swaddled in a dirt-caked blanket in front of the Victoria’s Secret on Broadway. He looked up under a mop of dark curls and said, “Another place, another time.” I discovered I had been unfriended by a writer on Facebook when his name appeared among people I might like to know. There was his picture in a little box, with his dark eyes and a jaunty wool cap pulled low on his brow, as if where he lived it was permanent winter. When I met him I was in love and loved everyone. He didn’t have a boyfriend, and I hadn’t had one in a long time. When I realized he had unfriended me, it reminded me of times I had found myself alone on a set of swings, a stretch of beach, a park bench. When I was a child, puppets scared me. Puppets are closer in size to children than adults. By the time I was old enough to articulate this, I had grown interested in puppets as abstractions. Siblings can fall into a kind of love that does not change. It also cannot be used, like furniture in a museum you are not allowed to sit on. When I consider that most of humanity will drown in floods within the next 40 years, I file this away with wild, apocalyptic predictions, even though the ice caps are melting and the likelihood of a deluge is great. I answered an ad on Craig’s List for free tea and spices and arrived at a stately brownstone on 10th Street. The man who had placed the ad said he was in the tea business and was giving away what he didn’t need. He was small and recovering from a cold, and he sat at the end of a large table arrayed with teapots and books related to tea. I took a box of black tea mixed with lavender and a box of chai tea threaded with orange peel and spices. He offered me a new, enamel kettle I accepted for a friend. I was happy on the floor, rummaging in his boxes. He said, “I hope you are dangerous,” and I did not think I was dangerous enough, and I wondered if I would cross paths with a man who had broken my heart. He lived nearby, and I imagined he would encounter me with the loot and say, “This is the reason I had to let you go.” I say things I don’t mean. I may mean them in the moment or tell myself I mean them in order not to appear a liar to myself. When, at fourteen, the psychoanalyst I was in treatment with took me into his bed, I wonder how he knew I would not tell my parents. I used to imagine I would die of cancer, but as I get closer to death I think less about how it will happen. I laugh when people fall, even if they hurt themselves, even if I am the one falling. I dreamed my father flew in through a window while my mother was out shopping. He said, “I can’t wait,” and we flew out together. Below us, Broadway swirled like a river. A friend said, “Can you imagine sleeping with the husband of a woman who was like a mother to you?” I said, “Yes, I can imagine doing that.” I prefer eating on the street to eating at home. I consider the time it takes to shop, prepare a meal, serve it, eat it, and clean up a kind of death. I once ate three hash brownies by accident and went for a walk. When the air cracked open and I could not feel the pavement, I wondered if I was having a stroke. I used to visit the apartment of a friend and look at the leftovers in her refrigerator. They were moldy, but I was jealous of the restaurants she was able to eat at. After the man who made the granite table died, I had sex with a doctor two times and two times I cried. I have drawn blood in fights. When I used to look at my dog, I would see all the other animals that exist. I think shame is something animals feel, but animals do not feel guilt. I do not laugh at satire. I laugh at slapstick and farce. One day a man approached me in the Guggenheim Museum. He smiled and asked how I was. He looked like someone I might like to know with his warm, brown eyes and unbuttoned tweed coat, but since I did not know him I thought I had forgotten my life. As I walked down the ramp, I remembered the man’s name and that we had worked together at the Village Voice and finally that we had had sex one night with an awkward finish. When I passed onto Fifth Avenue, I did not know whether I was relieved to have left or sorry I had missed the opportunity to pretend nothing had happened. Storm clouds over the desert are extra black, making up for the fact that it seldom rains. One day Richard and I were running from lightning, and a white streak split my life in two. In my apartment, when I used to wait for the buzzer to ring, I would dance around to Jimmy Cliff singing, “The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall.” A friend had a cancerous lump removed from a breast. She was dark-haired and pretty. As she unhooked her bra, she stood before me with her chin up. A divot of flesh was missing from her left breast, and I knew I would not forget the moment. She said she felt disfigured. I said she was beautiful. She did not have a boyfriend and neither did I. When my mother was in her 90s and close to death, she leaned against the door of her bedroom and said, “I wouldn’t have had children if anyone had asked me, which they didn’t.” The remark makes me miss her much the way I missed her when she was alive. I find places of worship obscene. I think women who live in secular countries and conform to religious dress codes make the lives of all women less free and less safe. I love money as a possession as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life. John Maynard Keynes called this “a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” I like the rag-tag look of homemade signs at political demonstrations. I like the way alcohol makes you want to fuck away your life. I eat whipped cream even though I have high cholesterol. I don’t think artificial intelligence will be any more intelligent than the other kind of intelligence. I have trouble sleeping. I once rode the horse of a mounted policeman in Central Park. I think the act of looking is erotic. A friend said, “There are stories that are mine to tell and stories that are not mine to tell.” I do not make this distinction. Richard said, “The problem with origin myths is they contain a story about the ending of things, too. People read into evolution a narrative that justifies human domination.” I said, “My life will go dark if you die.” He said, “No, it won’t,” and I could see what he meant.

**

The story above was reprinted with permission from the author.
Laurie Stone is author most recently of My Life as an Animal, Stories (Triquarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, October 2016). She was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and has published numerous stories in such publications as Fence, Open City, Anderbo, Nanofiction, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, Ms., TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, Memorious, Creative Nonfiction, and St Petersberg Review. In 2005, she participated in “Novel: An Installation,” writing a book and living in a house designed by architects Salazar/Davis in the Flux Factory’s gallery space. She has frequently collaborated with composer Gordon Beeferman in text/music works. The world premier of their piece “You, the Weather, a Wolf” was presented in the 2016 season of the St. Urbans concerts. She is at work on the fiction collection The Love of Strangers. Her website is: lauriestonewriter.com.

Books and authors mentioned in this episode (by using our affiliate links to buy these and other books, you’ll grow your library and help us pay our interns! )

Rebecca Brown: He Came to Set the Captives Free (Amazon / indiebound) / Prepare for War (Amazon / indiebound) / The Terrible Girls (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound)

Brian Evenson: Dead Space: Martyr (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound) / Immobility (Amazon / indiebound) / Last Days (Amazon / indiebound)

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound) / Nights at the Circus (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound) / The Magic Toyshop (Amazon / eBooks / indiebound)

The Tale of the Missing Girls

The term began as any other at the mid-range state school in Virginia. The early reaches of autumn hadn’t burned off the humidity in the valley, but the imminent change of leaves that hovered over the patches of mini-reunions on the quad marked the unofficial commencement of another academic year.

Everyone was here—the returning students, the rumpled professors, the eager freshmen, the apprehensive groundskeepers, the haggard librarians, the dipsomaniacal grad students, and the haughty administrators—marching across the grounds and through the hallways of the “historic” campus. Even the girls who would soon go missing were here.

On the first day, the lecture hall was so full it was difficult to find a seat. Students, it seemed, sat on one another’s laps, twined their arms around each other to stretch their pens to the college-ruled lines of their notebooks. They leaned forward, breathing hot on the backs of others necks, anxious to hear every word, record every point, take a copy of every class syllabus from the giant stack that slowly made their way around the room, winnowed one copy at a time, each pause a painful interval for those waiting in back. In the meantime, they distracted themselves by scribing in furious silence as the professor delivered, with oratory flourish, the foundational lecture of the course.

The professor, who was not a tall man, managed to dominate the space at the front of the hall, of which he was the sole occupant. He paced back and forth as he revealed the distinctions between the two dominant theories, inserting, through facial expressions and a variety of arm waves, his own opinion as to the validity of each. He was, the students realized all at once and in awe, an expert on the subject.

This scene was repeated in every classroom in every subject in every building throughout the day, except sometimes the professor was female. At night, this enthusiasm, diverted from the academic buildings, overflowed from the dormitories to inundate the roads, sidewalks and well-traveled shortcuts that snaked to and from campus as busty coeds and stalwart young men made their way to parties and bars. Though a university, unlike a middling city, has a limit on the number of entrants, when every one of that number is simultaneously wandering the streets and footways of the town at night, the possibilities seem endless.

Best intentions, however, even when enacted en masse, only last for so long. Within weeks students began to sleep in and miss early morning classes. The sense of camaraderie among the student body fizzled as it broke into cliques. The professors’ lectures, once so robust, took on a new lethargy that reciprocated the thinning class size. Some professors, especially the males, observed this trend each year and could not help, especially the literary ones, to see this as a metaphor for their thinning hair, muscles, and will.

In reverse proportion to the attendance in classes, the bulletin boards located in the common areas of the dormitories and academic halls filled with flyers, mostly promoting events. No one ever took it upon themselves to remove outdated signs, so papers were stapled over each other, creating an unofficial records hall of things you may or may not have known had happened. It was on such a corkboard in one dorm’s foyer that the first flyer of the first missing girl appeared. She had gone out one night. She did not return. She was last seen 10/19/1987. She was wearing a blue shirt and jeans. If you had information you should call this number.

You had to act quick though, because suddenly a notice for a concert at the Larimer Lounge had been tacked over her face. You had to be 18 and older. If you brought a girl friend, you would get $5 off.

Things like this happened again and again in the following weeks. Two girls, tired of walking in their heels up the steep hill to the party would stick out their thumbs, jut their slender legs forward as they’d seen actresses do in movies to sometimes seductive and sometimes comic effect. The next day, black and white photocopies of their pictures would hang from bulletin boards across campus, reading, “Missing. Last seen. Call.”, and were quickly covered by notices about events, “Meeting. Concert. Tomorrow. Next Week. Free. $5 cover. Come.”

When she returned to her dorm one evening after a late class, a man and a woman were standing in her room.

“Have you seen our daughter?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“She’s your roommate,” the woman said impatiently.

“I don’t remember when I last saw her,” she replied.

The girl’s mother was incredulous. “She’s been missing for over two weeks!”

“I thought she was at her boyfriend’s place,” she responded. She had no precise recollection of when she last saw her roommate. If pressed, she doubted she would have any precise recollection of her roommate at all.

Soon other parents arrived, also looking for their daughters. Some girls had been missing for weeks as well, some for months, a few for years. They wanted to know who had seen them, when and where. They wanted to know what was being done about the situation. They wanted to hang more flyers and resurrect forgotten faces. They wanted anonymous tips and surveys of the surrounding town.

Even more parents made the pilgrimage to the place of their daughters’ last known whereabouts. They erected a marquee in the middle of the quad and filled it with telephones and fax machines and photocopiers. They stretched dozens of electrical cords like a sinuous root system across the manicured ryegrass of the campus grounds and into the nearest outlets of the surrounding historic buildings.

The parents organized search parties. Local volunteers, university students and town residents, were formed into groups standing shoulder-to-shoulder, beginning at the tent, and slowly marched across a marked swath of ground in different directions, radiating like spokes on a wheel, on the lookout for clues. Some prod the ground with sticks, others with metal detectors, but the only things recovered were a few bottle caps, hundreds of cigarette butts, a missing wallet that was returned to its owner, a stripped and abandoned bicycle, a set of unlabeled keys that looked as if they belonged to the stout locks of a dormitory, and a notebook whose last entry on Henry David Thoreau yielded nothing of significance.

Despite the lack of success, the parents pushed on. Class attendance continued to dwindle, along with the trees, whose colors blazed brightly for a moment before a leaf broke free to inter itself with the others lining the grounds. “Much like,” the parents who could not stop themselves from thinking such things though, “our daughters.”

“This seems to happen every year,” the Resident Assistant, who was hanging new flyers on the boards in the dormitory’s common area, told her when she walked in. “Last year, two from my floor alone went missing.”

Not knowing what to say, she said, “They should really mention that on the campus tour,” which sounded more reasonable than she wanted it too.

The RA paused and looked at her. “It’s a serious problem, you know.” Then she picked up the cardboard box full of flyers and headed for the exit. She considered running ahead and holding the door open to demonstrate mutual concern about the situation, but instead she stood there and watched the RA balance the heavy box across her thigh and reach her free hand for the handle. When she glanced again at the bulletin board, the photo of the most recent missing girl that had just been posted was already covered by a flyer promoting the Spelunking Club’s next expedition.

Eventually, the parents who had been there for weeks, months and years, who had posted hundreds of notices and manned silent phone lines, who had organized fruitless searches and interviewed absent-minded witnesses, who had fought off the hollow cries of their daughters in their dreams to maintain their last semblances of hope, these parents, all of them, began to lose their curiosity. It’s not that they didn’t want their daughters back, (in fact, that’s all they wanted,) but they no longer cared what had happened or was happening to them. They no longer cared to find and punish those responsible. In short, they no longer cared about justice; they just wanted their girls back.

They increased the reward. Maybe, they thought, it’ll be enough for someone to rat someone out. Though in their unspoken minds they knew crimes like these, crimes where people go missing, are not driven by money but by some darker desire. All the information that could be gathered was synthesized into a profile of a single suspect. They were looking for a

White male, 20 to 40, above to below-average intelligence, who may or may not stand out among the campus’ 20,000 residents. He lacks a moral conscience and/or fear of consequences for his actions as well as a respect for cultural impediments—such as religious beliefs, the legal system, or social inhibitions—that normally prohibit the average person from doing anything he wants. The suspect most likely suffers from narcissistic personality traits and exhibits anti-social behavior, though at times can seem both charming and outgoing. He’s likely attempting to rectify issues with an overbearing mother figure and/or to compensate for feelings of or actual impotence. He has access to a vehicle large enough to transport a college-aged female, and owns or rents a private dwelling.

This description was distributed around campus, and many professors began their lectures by reading it and asking anyone who met the criteria to proceed to the large white tent in the center of campus for questioning. Several young men (and some young women) would stand and leave, but only a few went to the tent. Most simply wanted to an excuse to cut.

In History class the professor read the profile of the suspect and also held up a copy of the Missing Persons flyer that the parents-turned-detectives had distributed. He needed only one flyer because, much like the parents had created a single profile of the suspect, the parents also, through a police sketch artist, created an amalgamation of all their missing girls. They circled the artist and each described their daughters until a single photo emerged.

This new missing girl, this Everyvictim, had straight brown hair interrupted by that wave caused by swooping it behind an ear; a nose with a linear bridge and rounded nostrils; lips that were not too full, not pouty or inquisitive; cheeks that had just lost their baby fat; and eyes that, either due to their own constitution or to the poor resolution of black and white photocopies, revealed nothing at all. She was any and every girl, and she was missing.

“Let’s tell her story,” the professor said to the class, shaking the picture to make a slight crinkling noise.

“She is young,” he began. “She has just graduated high school and is looking forward to college. She will miss her friends from back home, of which she has plenty, mostly from the field hockey and student government, in which she played a minor role, such as treasurer, because it was easy and looked good on a college application. She has chosen a college, this college, because it has the right balance of academic rigor and social outlets. She plans to pledge a sorority partly because she admires the pseudo-Victorian style of the houses on Greek Row that run alongside the piddling stream cutting through our campus.

“After her parents drop her off and buy her some dorm room necessities, she says her tearful good-byes and then is on her own for the first time in her life. It doesn’t take her long to adjust to campus life, and she quickly befriends the girls in her pledge class.

“One night she finds herself at the brother-fraternity of the sorority she is pledging. There is a tradition. She is sent to one of the senior brother’s room. She is told to do whatever he asks. She is drunk, and on her way up the narrow wooden stairwell she plays out in her head the things she is and is not willing to do. She is willing to do more than the average girl since she is both drunk and pledging, but she does, she tells herself, have limits. As she gains the top of the steps, however, the clear line she has drawn in her mind wavers. She enters the room.

“Three minutes later she returns downstairs. We are left to wonder what happened there.

“Later that night, after still more drinking, she wants to go back to her dorm room and sleep. She tells this to a fellow pledge who lives in the same building. This girl does not want to leave the party however, and so our girl sets out on her own. Her dorm is not even a half-mile across the well-lit campus.

“On her walk she crosses the small bridge that swoops up and over the tiny stream separating Greek Row from the body of campus. A young man approaches. How young we do not know. He is average height and build and his face is shadowed from the lampposts along the walkway by his ball cap. He begins to walk with her, making polite conversation.

“When they come to an area of the path that is shadowed, he pauses and she pauses too. They do not hear any voices from late-night revelers floating across the manicured lawns. This suggests they are alone. Not necessarily in this order, he bludgeons, rapes, kills, transports, and then buries her body in a shallow grave.”

The professor set down the flyer on the table in front of him and paused as a few students finished jotting notes from this lecture. He reminded them of the reading due for next class and dismissed them. The students filed out of the room, through the building’s heavy double doors, down the stone steps and stood on the lawn to shield their faces against the burning sun. Or was it the glare off the taut white top of the tent in the center of campus that they were protecting their eyes from?

**

Born in New England, Dani Rado bounced around the country until she settled in Colorado, where she currently divides her time unevenly between work, the outdoors, and writing. Her stories have appeared in Mochila Review, 5th Wednesday, Floodwall, Bloom, Clackamas Review, Unstuck, and Liar’s League NYC, among others. She’s been awarded an artist’s residency at the Prairie Center for the Arts and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She was a professional student for as long as she could manage, but is now a Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Denver, where she teaches writing and literature. She currently lives in that city with her fiancée and their four accidental cats.

**

Image: Flickr / Hernán Piñera

 

A Note: Help The Other Stories by using our affiliate links to buy these and other books – you’ll grow your library and help us pay our interns! We now have both print and e-book options for your reading pleasure

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (print / e-book) / The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel (print / e-book) / Telegraph Avenue (print / e-book)

Jay McInerney: Bright Lights, Big City (print / e-book) / The Good Life (print / e-book) / Bright, Precious Days: A Novel (print / e-book)

Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting (print) / Filth (print) / Last Exit to Brooklyn (print)

Paul Aster: The New York Trilogy (print / e-book) / Timbuktu: A Novel (print / e-book) / The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel (print / e-book)

He’s Doing Just Fine

Nate’s doing great.
He has strategies. He knows his triggers. He keeps a little red notebook in his back pocket. He picked that one up during his ninety-day stint.
His councilor said, “It’s a good tool to maintain a level of self awareness you may not have had in the past.”
His support group leader said, “All adults struggle with the difference between knowing who they are, and what they think they can handle.”
But it was also said that addiction doesn’t take sick-days, and the notebook’s a reminder.
So Nate scribbles notes, makes lists. There’s a list of things he shouldn’t do anymore. There’s a list of place he can’t go. There’s quite a bit of overlap between the two.
He writes, Jason’s house.
Then, Medusa Lounge.
Then, Jersey.
Nate’s encouraged to show his notes to his family members. Just so they know that A.) He’s doing what he’s supposed to during this crucial post-rehab period, and B.) They can provide any assistance they need to if ever he makes the decision to return to his old habits.
His father says, “You used to love the beach.”
His mother says, “You loved the boardwalk.”
And Nate says he never wants to smell the stink of that state again.  He says, “Plus Jason always got his stuff over there.”
His father says, “Don’t talk to Jason anymore.”
His mother says, “Already on the list, see? Good for you, Nathan.”
Nate’s brother Tony calls, says he’s not making dinner tonight, says he can’t talk.  So Nate, his mother and father, eat a pasta dish his mother always makes when there’s something to celebrate. They talk about how nice it is to have Nate home again.
“How’s Tony?” Nate says.
His father says, “You know Tony. He’s standoffish.”
His mother says, “Stop it.  He’s just busy. He works hard.”
“That’s new,” his father says. He winks at Nate. “He’s trying it out.”
Nate’s mother reaches across the table, slaps his father’s hand, says, “Stop it. Try calling him up, Nathan.”
Nate doesn’t tell her he has called. A couple times. Left messages from rehab. He would text now, but the papers he signed explained he no longer has the privilege to own or use a cell phone. By the time he’s able to use one again it may very well need to be implanted in his ear—or his eye. Unless, of course, the judge views the progress he’s making as permanent change. Not the Band-Aiding of a wound that’ll get ripped open ever other every-so-often.
Nate eats, tells his mother the food’s delicious, says he’s going to go write a bit.
Before, any excuse to leave a room would mean something else. So his parents stare a moment before seeming to remember the progress he’s making. They smile. They nod. And Nate steps out of the kitchen, passes photos on the foyer walls. In one he’s featured in a football uniform. Another, he’s holding an oar with the rest of his rowing team. A third, in a cap and gown, his arm is wrapped around his pimple-faced little brother’s shoulder.
In the room he slept in as a kid, he writes another list.
Ways to Make Everything Up to Tony.
He writes, Save up, replace stuff I stole.
Then, Apologize.  For everything.
Then, as an addendum, he writes, Don’t fuck up.
***
Nate’s making excellent progress.
His former boss says he’s heard as much while they shake hands. “I want to do this,” he boss says. “I don’t have to.”
Nate nods. His father, beside him, does the same.
“Your dad’s a good man. I trust him.”
Nate’s father shakes his head, mouths, no, no, no.
“We’re going to reinstate you.”
“Thank you,” Nate says.
“Under three conditions. One. You’ll be under probation until your court date. Since we don’t know what will happen, you’ll be taken off probation only if you return.”
Nate says, “Okay.”
His father says, “That’s fair.”
“Two. Weekly and random drug tests.”
Nate says he has to do that anyway.
“And three. If at any moment there is evidence of a relapse, no matter what the circumstance, you’re out. Whether you’re standing funny enough for people to think something’s up, or you look just a bit too sleepy, that’s it.”
“I understand.”
His boss says, “I’m taking a risk. But I think it’s a good one to take.”
“Thanks, I—”
“Remember how many people are sticking their necks out for you.”
“I will.”
“Good. Now, out. See you in the morning.”
Nate watches his father shake hands with the boss. They use each other’s first names, they smile, they pat each other’s shoulders. Nate stays still, stares at his father’s face smiling and saying thank you.
In his notebook, Nate writes, Learn to make/maintain positive relationships.
And, Stick out neck.
And, Take good risks.
His father asks him if he’s ready to go.
The walk across the shop floor is filled with factory sounds that used to lull Nate to sleep. While he was standing. They pass people who filed complaints against Nate. They pass people who looked the other way on the real bad days. They pass a guy who said he’d quit if Nate ever walked into the building again.
Nate writes while he walks. When he’s not writing, he’s staring at the floor ahead of him. He’ll make eye contact another time. Tomorrow. Or maybe only when he has to.
His father says, “You should be happy.”
“I am.”
“Then what’s this about?”
Nate says nothing, sidesteps someone who says hello to his father, but not him.
His father says, “All you need to do is show them how much you’ve changed.”
In the car, Nate sits on the passenger side. He writes that he can’t remember what it’s like being behind the wheel. He writes that he can’t remember the last time he drove sober. How driving high felt. Every word is positive.
His father puts his hand on Nate’s shoulder, says his name.
Nate’s scratching notes into his notebook makes his father’s voice sound as if he is speaking to him from inside a glass box. Filled with water.
His name is said a second time.
A third.
“Yeah?” Nate says. “Sorry.”
His father doesn’t say anything for a moment. Like he used to when Nate was high, after Nate would have to blink himself into understanding where he was and how he got there. Then his father says, “We need to talk about money.”
Nate doesn’t argue when he’s told that his paychecks will be deposited into an account that he won’t be able to access. That money will be taken from the account using a debit card his father will control. That Nate will be handed cash to buy lunch while at work. That he’ll need to give up the change. That his earnings will be socked away for the future. It’s unclear if that means until there is little doubt that Nate will relapse. Or that he’ll have to be given an allowance by his parents for the rest of his life.
Nate nods his head, says, “Okay.”
His father says, “I hope you’re not looking at this as punishment.”
“No. I did this to myself. I was just hoping—”
“What? Hoping to what?”

            High, Nate would laugh whenever his father’s voice went urgent. It’s still a bit funny. But he doesn’t laugh. He keeps his face straight by crossing off the list item regarding Tony’s repayment. He writes, Figure something else out.
Nate says, “Nothing. I understand.”
***
Nate is taking on responsibilities.
He tells his parents he’s planning on going through all of the junk in the basement to find some things worth keeping. And others worthy of a trash bag.
His mother says, “Good for you, Nathan.”
His father says, “You’re crossing things off my honey-do list. Clean out all the junk-drawers around here for me when you’re done.”
In the basement, Nate digs through boxes of Transformers with pieces missing, preventing them from transforming to vehicle mode. He goes through a bin of Ghostbusters figures that stay or go depending on discoloration and nostalgia. He tosses Mighty Max playsets, motorized board games with battery acid caked on the pieces, Power Rangers with missing arms, or legs, or heads.
And he works every day after he and his father come home from the shop unless they work doubles.
He’s told at his meetings that the formation of good habits will overrule the bad ones.
He’s told that strides toward recovery—while they may seem small—are in fact creating a path that he can follow if ever he feels himself slipping.
But walking on ice is fucking hard.
When Tony stops by, Nate hears his parents upstairs telling his brother about all of that—everything they’ve read in his notebook, anyway. They use all the words he’s heard over and over. All repetitive, but all positive. And he hears Tony say, “Good,” and, “Glad to hear it,” and, “I guess he’s busy, I’ll take off.”
Nate listens to the muffled voices, works through a box full of Ninja Turtles.  Figures, and vehicles, and pointy weapons that shouldn’t have been included with kids’ toys. Then, the costumes. Old foam turtle shells. Cloth masks with green plastic noses attached. Nate always wore red.
He ties the mask around his head, tries to ignore the mildew latching onto his nose hairs. Then he waits for the conversation upstairs—which at this point sounds like an argument—to end. But that could just be how the words seep through the floorboards.
The door opens. And Nate waits for the footsteps to end.
He jumps out from a closet, yells cowabunga dude, and scares the shit out of his brother.
“Holy shit,” Tony says. “Fuck.”

            Tony’s cursing is familiar. Nate heard it when he sold off most of Tony’s CD collection. When he pulled out and pawned Tony’s car stereo. When he emptied out Tony’s checking account by assuming that he—like the rest of the family—used his birth year as the ATM pin.
“Sorry,” Nate says. “Look what I found.” He holds an orange mask out for Tony to take. “You can keep it if you want.”
“That’s a little small for you.”
Nate takes off his mask, pulls it up over his head by the nose, says, “The shell’s in here, too. You want it?”
“Thanks. But, no. I don’t think I have anywhere to put it.”
Nate swallows, shakes his head, looks at the floor. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll probably just throw it out anyway.”
Tony holds out his hand. Nate puts the orange mask in it.
“No, here,” Tony says. They shake hands with their lefts.
Nate says, “How are you?”
“Good. You good?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
“Glad you’re home.”
“Me too.”
“Sorry I haven’t returned your calls. Things get crazy sometimes. You know.”
“No. No problem. It’s fine.”
They talk a bit longer. About nothing. Pleasantries. Work. They don’t get any closer than a handshake apart. And after a pause, Tony goes into how much he needs to do tonight.
Nate says, “Before you go. I wonder if there’s anything I can—”
“Don’t worry about it, okay?”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Yeah, I do. I know how those programs work. And it’s fine. I’m fine. We’re good. You don’t need to make up for anything.”
“It’s not really the program that makes to me want to—”
“I’m not someone you need to worry about.” Tony extends his hand again, says, “Let’s get dinner sometime, okay? Just give me a call.”
Nate shakes his hand, doesn’t look into his eyes, says, “Yeah, I’ll call you.”
Once Tony is upstairs saying goodbye to their parents, Nate gets back to work. With a Sharpie he scratches Tony’s name into the side of a box. He puts the orange Ninja Turtles mask, a foam shell, a pair of plastic nunchuks inside.  Then he roots through the stuff he’s already thrown into trash bags trying to remember which toys were his brother’s.
***
Nate’s doing just fine.
The calls that go unreturned don’t stop him from going to group, seeing his councilor, going to work sober. Wishing he was high, but staying straight. They don’t stop him from discussing realistic options with his lawyer.
And he does have options.
Plead guilty. Or don’t.
His lawyer says, “It won’t be as bad if you plead guilty.”
Nate doesn’t feel his face change. It’s not as if he’s surprised. But to his sides he can almost hear his parents’ faces sliding off tensed muscle while the lawyer’s words soak into their brains.
Nate’s mother says, “What is he looking at, at best, if he does that?”
“Couple years. Parole.”
Nate’s father says, “There’s nothing that can be done? Even with all the progress he’s making?”
“Progress is great. Really,” the lawyer says. But then he begins discussing the massive destruction of property. That not only was Nate high and driving, but he left the paraphernalia with which to get high in the car. “Yes, you went through a program. Yes, you’ve been conditionally released. But there is a reality here that we will fight and lose.”
Nate stops his parents from speaking, says, “I still have time at home. I’m fine with this. I understand it, and I’m fine.”
His father excuses himself to the bathroom, blames being an aging male.
His mother dabs her eyes with tissues from a pack she pulls from her purse.
And Nate shakes hands with his lawyer, says he’ll see him in a few weeks.
The ride home is quiet. Nate writes in the backseat while his parents listen to news radio. He writes about Tony lying about wanting to get lunch. He writes about calling Jay, getting sent to prison early. Then he writes about what he said in the lawyer’s office.
There’s time. Plenty of it.
He writes that he can still fix things.
***
Nate’s adjusting very well.
Having to ride in the passenger seat as his father drives the long way to work—to avoid the empty lot that used to be a house—is routine now. It’s better that he can’t see the lot anyhow. It would bring back how it felt having to be pulled from the wrecked car embedded in the front of the house. It would bring back the EMTs having to examine him with his one arm handcuffed to a stretcher. It would bring back the family standing in the street staring and crying as the shattered support beams gave out and buried Nate’s car with the master bedroom.
When he’s at work, he’s quiet. He says hello to people who say so first, but otherwise he keeps his eyes on the shop floor. And the machines he works on. And the change handed to him when he pays for his lunch. And the look on his fathers face when he hands over a smaller amount, making sure it goes unnoticed.
What he keeps, he adds to his total. Then updates a list he keeps in a second notebook that he doesn’t share with his parents.
Only $146.82 more until he can buy a used Nintendo 64 for Tony.
Only $113.04 before he can buy the Nintendo 3DS that’ll have to make up for the Game Boy Advance.
Only $27.69 before he can replace the VCR with a DVD player.
The list is long, but he’s doing well with his priorities.
Then again his court date is coming up. And even though they go the long way home, there’s the amount he’ll have to pay in restitution. There’s the amount of time he will spend in jail. There’s the possibility that after a couple years in a cell, Tony will change his number to save himself from having to ignore Nate’s calls.
At home, Nate watches his parents. How they act. How their vigilance slips with his progress. He’s just doing so well with everything.
He has remind his parents to check his notebook—the official one—a time or two.
His father leaves the car keys on the kitchen table for almost a half an hour, but curses about it later.
His mother lets him alone in the basement without calling down, asking how he’s doing for longer stretches.
And Nate keeps track in that second book. Sitting alone in the unfinished basement, all cement and two-by-fours, Nate sits and scribbles. His red mask tied around his head.
He writes, Time’s running out. I’ve wasted all my time.
Then it’s the footsteps on the stairs.
Nate hides the notebook next to an envelope filled with the money he’s saved behind boxes labeled with Tony’s name in Sharpie.
His father says, “Everything okay down here?”
“Hmm? Yeah, why?”
“What’s with the mask?”
Nate pulls the mask off of his face, says, “Nothing. Just memories.”
“Dinner’s ready.”
His father looks funny. Not the funny Nate remembers while coming down during holiday dinners. But funny.
He says, “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think I could use some of my money to replace some of Tony’s stuff? Like, the stuff I took.”
His father smiles, walks across the room, puts his hands on Nate’s shoulders. He did that when Nate was in high school. Less in college—not at all after he was kicked out. But, now, enough. And it’s something Nate would miss if it disappeared again. His father says, “I think just being home and doing as well as you are is enough for your brother. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know if that’s—”
“That’s one area you don’t have to worry about. Okay?
Nate lets out the breath he was holding, says, “Okay.”
“Good.”
The hand’s taken away, his father’s back is turned. Then his father says, “We’re going to need that money for court fees, anyway. Know what I mean?”
Nate waits at the bottom of the steps, tells his parents he’ll be right up. Then he drops his red mask into one of Tony’s boxes.
***
Nate is cultivating positive routines.
The day after of a week of doubles, Nate wakes up, tells his parents he’ll be in the basement if they need him for anything. His mother asks him to stay upstairs, tells him he spends too much time down there anyway. “Why don’t you watch TV with us this morning?”
“I told you I’d clean out the basement. I’ve been working too much, but I’m almost done.” He closes the door behind him, ignores his mother’s next sentence.
He stops at the bottom of the stairs.  He checks the closets, the alcove with the water heater. The bare cement floors echo his footsteps more than he remembers. There’s nothing for the sounds to bounce off but the floors and the walls. No trash bags filled with toys. No boxes marked with Tony’s name. It’s just Nate’s voice calling for his parents that ping-pongs from wall to wall.
From the top of the stairs his mother tells him she thought she’d lend a hand, took everything to the dump during his double yesterday.
“What about Tony’s stuff?” Nate says.
“I texted him about it,” she says. “He didn’t want any of it.”
“Was there anything else? Did you find anything else?”
“That’s why I wanted you to spend time with us today.”
Nate skips steps, pushes past his parents, yells at them, tells them that money was for Tony. No one else. “That was for him,” he says.
He pulls the phone from the wall, dials Tony’s number. It rings, and he screams things at his parents he hasn’t since before his ninety days. He calls them, “You fucking people.”
Tony’s phone goes to voicemail.
Nate dials Tony again after dialing halfway through Jason’s number.
“Nathan,” his mother says, “Try to calm yourself.”
“Calm your fucking self. I had a fucking plan. I was doing what I needed to do, and you fucked it up.”
His father says, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.” Hand on Nate’s shoulder, he says, “We saw that second notebook, the money. We’re just doing everything we can to make sure—”
Nate pushes his father away, points, says, “Shut. Up.”
Over the phone, Nate begs Tony’s voicemail to call him back. He says, “I need to talk to you,” and, “Please stop ignoring me,” and, “I’m your brother, man, come on.”

            Then he hangs up, leans against the wall, and slides to the floor.
Both his mother and father sit down next to him. Then it’s all arms, and back rubs, and Nate screaming on the floor.
***
Nate’s okay.
He goes to work, comes home, goes to bed, wakes up and does it over every day.
He hasn’t added anything new to his notebook. He can’t see a point to it anymore.  Soon enough he’ll be in a cell doing a multi-year sober stint. His track marks will fade all together. He’ll put on weight. Maybe he’ll get a degree.
He’s reconnecting with old friends after his parents go to bed. Jason, who Nate wrote he would never be in touch with again, is nice, asks him how he’s doing. And Nate says he’s doing fine, but he needs a favor.
Since Nate stopped calling Tony, he’s watched his father. Before work. During work. After work. Watching, taking mental notes. After double shifts, the guy’s shot. He forgets things. He leaves stuff where he shouldn’t. Car keys on end tables. Bills on the kitchen counters. Then his wallet in the master bathroom.
It’s a matter of Nate telling his parents he’s taking a shower after dinner. Then popping into the bathroom and replacing the orange PNC Bank card linked to his account with an old one from a junk drawer linked to nothing. Then standing under the water until enough time passes to suggest he did in fact shower.
He takes the trash to the end of the driveway. He leaves the card, wrapped in a sheet of paper telling Jason to try Nate’s birth year as the pin.
Nate goes to bed nervous, but falls asleep over the possibility of feeling better.      He wakes up early.  Early enough to beat the sun out. The mailbox holds the things he asked for, but the card wasn’t left behind. He’ll figure that one out later.
He waits until his father’s alarm goes off to run into the bathroom. He jams his fingers down his throat, pukes up what little was left from dinner last night.
“You okay in there?” his father calls through the door.
“Yeah,” Nate says, “But I think I caught something.”
It’s back to bed for Nate. His first sick-day since being home. His father tells him not to worry about it, he’ll explain everything. His mother tells him to reach her on the cell if he needs her.
Then he’s alone.
Everything comes back to him. He’s cooked up doses enough to ballpark his standard, functional high.
After, Nate will call Jason, ask what the fuck about the card.
After he can empty out his brain for a bit, he’ll accept that he’s heading to jail a little early.
After this, he’ll call Tony, tell him not to worry about ignoring him, even though he’s sure Tony’s not worried about anything.
But for now he gets comfortable. He folds his legs, sits like he did in kindergarten. Then he’s tying off an arm, slapping a vein swollen. Then he’s poking through skin that’s thickened up enough to send a signal to his brain telling him that shit hurts.
But the pain fades first. Then it’s the room that blackens at the edges.
And he feels wonderful.

            Nothing matters.

            Nothing hurts.
And when Nate’s chin meets his chest, everything sort of fades away.

**

The story was originally published in Derails Review.

Nick Gregorio lives, writes, and teaches just outside of Philadelphia. His fiction has appeared in Crack the Spine, Hypertrophic Literary, Maudlin House and more. He is a contributing writer and assistant editor for the arts and culture blog, Spectrum Culture, and currently serves as fiction editor for Driftwood Press. He earned his MFA from Arcadia University in May 2015 and has fiction forthcoming in Zeit|Haus, Corvus Review, and Rum Punch Press.

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Image: Flickr / Brady Kenniston

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Shadows Over Main Street: An Anthology of Small-Town Lovecraftian Terror (print)

Tracy Letts: Bug: A Play (print) / August: Osage County (print / ebook)  / Killer Joe (print / ebook)

Peter Watts: Blindsight (print / ebook) / Echopraxia (print / ebook) / Starfish (print / ebook)

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (print / ebook)

Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom (print / ebook) / The Devil in Silver (print / ebook) / Big Machine: A Novel (print / ebook)

Stephen King: 11/22/63 (print / ebook) / Doctor Sleep: A Novel (print / ebook) / Mr. Mercedes (print / ebook)

First Souls

The waitress brings us our coffee, dishwater pale murk in cracked porcelain cups. Behind the thin surgical mask, her face is unreadable, but her gaze flicks from me to my companion and back again before she leaves without a word. Mickey watches her go and then fixes his eyes on me. For a long moment, the silence continues, as our eyes confirm what our hearts seemed to know the instant we passed on the street.

“Okay, Dale,” he says, his voice hoarse and still raw, like my own. There is an accent I can’t place – perhaps a district on the other side of the city. “I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, but I think I already know the answers.”

I pick up the coffee, finding it smells as weak and thin as it looks, and contemplate taking an exploratory swig. Around us the few lunchtime patrons of the dingy coffee shop are listlessly eating, lifting up paper masks to shovel in crumbling and greasy burgers, backsides squeaking on red vinyl seats. Those that aren’t eating are staring at us, at our uncovered faces.

“Okay,” I say, “Shoot.”

**

First souls was originally published in the Summer 2016 issue of FLAPPERHOUSE. Read the full story here, and enjoy the excerpt above.

**

Cameron Suey lives in California with his wife and two children. He works as a writer in the games industry, most recently on “Rise of the Tomb Raider.” His work has appeared on the Pseudopod Podcast, anthologies including Shadows over Main Street, and was featured in the first issues of Jamais Vu and Flapperhouse. He can be found on the web at cameronsuey.com, and on twitter as @josefkstories.

**

Image: Flickr / Marco – Clef de Peau

Purchase today’s featured book, The Infinite

The Infinite excerpt

1

The river was there, broad and brown. Calm, it seemed. Clouds swept low, fled with the current. Luz sat with Jonah on the levee between river and sky, a nowhere place. He took her hand and the river did seem calm, but she heard the water at its turbulent depth, beating against a floor carved through millions of years.

“We used to come up here a lot,” Jonah said. “My family.”

“No more?” Luz asked. Over his shoulder, a gull shrieked and banked toward picnickers along the riverwalk.

“Nah,” he said. “My brother moved away.”

“Your mother?”

“My mom died when I was little,” Jonah said. “A car wreck.” Luz tried to apologize, but he interrupted to say, “It’s all right. It feels like a long time ago.”

A tug drove a column of barges in the middle of the river. A beat emerged from the wind—a

kid playing drums on overturned buckets for the dog walkers and the joggers and the tourists arm in arm. Upriver, a cruise ship squatted heavily in the water against the bridge, near the hotels and the casino.

“My mamá,” Luz said, “she passed away, too. Almost six years now. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a long time ago. But only sometimes.”

Jonah’s grip on her hand grew firmer.

“After that I came to the United States. To be with my papá.”

“Wow,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“She was sick,” Luz said, a small smile. “We didn’t know.”

The wake of the tugboat and the barges finally reached the bank, cresting against the rocks of the levee. It was spring, and the river was high.

Jonah wanted to know if he could ask something.

“Okay,” Luz said.

“Did people tell you to talk to your mom? Like, talk to her in your head because she’d hear you and all?”

And she was there, at home in Las Monarcas, in her grandmother’s apartment. The old woman held her hands and peered at her through her glasses. An uncle lingered in the doorway, waiting to ferry the little girl to El Norte and her father, and her grandmother said good-bye and told her to pray to her mother, always, for her mother would be watching and listening. “My abuela told me to pray.”

“I got that a lot, too. The priests at school. Everybody.” He was looking at their hands—hers

was small and bronze; his was large and fair, some freckles. “Does she ever answer you?”

Luz closed her eyes and reached for her mother. The clouds broke and the sun was on her face. “No,” she answered. “Not so that I can hear her.” The gull screeched. A jogger passed, brief and mild hip-hop pumping from his headphones. “I believe she hears me, though.”

He nodded, watched her. His eyes were green, almost gray, and steady like the river seemed to be. But Luz sensed the pull beneath Jonah’s eyes, and it made her ache.

2

Jonah and Luz grew closer as the summer passed and edged into fall. He had been living alone in the camelback shotgun house in Central City, New Orleans, where his family, the McBees, had lived for three generations. Flaking lavender paint, a sagging porch, a dirt backyard shadowed by an ancient live oak. Jonah’s older brother Dex owned the home, but he lived like a recluse down the bayou. On only a few occasions had he come back to the city—the last time being for their father’s funeral, after the old man’s heart attack. Dex had stayed until Jonah turned eighteen—that is, until Dex’s legal guardianship had ceased—and then returned to the swamp and the old family fishing camp, where he made his living as a hunter.

“Me and Dex, we hardly talk,” Jonah told Luz. “He sends some money every now and then to help with bills.”

Jonah’s brother was his last living relation. The absolute nature of Jonah’s loneliness had staggered Luz, but it was of course familiar, and part of what drew her to him was this residue of his experience. It suggested he might be able to understand her in a way that nobody else—not her track teammates, not her father—was able.

During afternoons when there was neither work nor track practice, they took to reclining on the couch in his living room and talking, learning each other’s histories. Jonah had pictures all over the walls of his home, photographs of his family. He had explained to Luz that while he was growing up his father never wanted to see the images, wanted to leave them buried. They reminded him of too much. “At the camp, here at the house, bare walls,” Jonah had said. But once Jonah was alone, he put them up. He was much younger than his brothers, nine years junior to Dex and ten to Bill. Jonah had been six when a drunk driver blew through a stop sign and broadsided his mother’s car less than a mile from their home. He needed the pictures, markers to trace out his own beginning.

Luz got up from the couch and circuited the living room, looking at the framed shots while Jonah commented on each.

There was a photograph of his father in which the old man stares through the grass of the duck blind, hair rumpled and face confused—as if wondering why this moment called for a permanent likeness at all—as droplets of mist freeze in the flash against the predawn dark.

There was a photograph of Jonah’s mother, a blond bob and green eyes, and she stands on the riverwalk, slightly turned from the camera, her hands resting atop her belly.

“Maybe she’s pregnant with me in that one,” Jonah said.

Luz watched the wide river roll behind his mother, the steeple of a church on the far bank. The view was not far from where Luz had first sat with Jonah on the levee.

“I remember small things,” Jonah told her. “Just flashes. Mom walking me to church while my brothers watched football with Pop. Tracing symbols on my back after she tucked me in.”

Luz smiled and returned to the photograph. Jonah’s eyes were like his mother’s. Luz imagined his father taking this picture, pride swelling. A wish rose for her own possible future with Jonah.

Luz prayed, quick: Please, señora McBee, help us.

Jonah did not pray to his relatives, so Luz had begun to speak to his mother. It was a small thing she could do for him. Luz imagined Jonah’s loss as an anchor obscured by dark water. Jonah neither saw it nor understood how it restricted the range of his drifting. If you would only reach for her, Luz had tried to tell him.

Luz paced the living room and stopped opposite the couch, where in the center of the wall there waited a photograph of Jonah’s eldest brother, Bill, with a crew cut and in dress blues. The American flag the government sent, cotton folded in a triangular frame, hung next to it. Jonah told her that a land mine had killed his brother. Something old, something the Soviets left in Afghanistan more than twenty years before Bill showed up. “How fucked up is that,” Jonah whispered.

Alongside the jamb of the kitchen doorway Jonah had hung the only photograph he had of him with both brothers. Little Jonah stands in front of them. Bill and Dex are in high school. Bill is eighteen, just before he graduated and enlisted. “He’s my age now in that picture,” Jonah said. Bill was sandy haired and green eyed like Jonah, but he was stocky where Jonah had become tall. In the photo Dex is darker, rangier, wearing a sour look. All three stand on the dock at the camp, the cypress and the early pale sky behind them.

“Think I’ll ever get to meet Dex?” Luz asked.

Jonah shrugged from the couch.

Luz again sensed the implacable sadness roiling within Jonah and tried to find something to say. She glanced over the photographs and told him that he looked like his mother. “You and Bill both,” she said.

Jonah grinned and picked at a thread in the couch cushion. “You must look like your mom, too, huh?” He had seen her father once or twice, though he’d not yet spoken with the man. Her father was lanky and his skin was cooked like a baseball glove and his eyes were blue, which had surprised Jonah.

“I do look like my mamá,” Luz told him. She explained how her mother used to tell her that they were descended from Guachichil warriors, who had lived five hundred years ago and fought the Spaniards. The Guachichiles were the fiercest of the Chichimec people. As Luz grew older, she began to understand that her mother couldn’t know for certain whether they had Guachichil ancestry as opposed to anything else—all that history was lost—but it didn’t matter. It was more, Luz recognized, a matter of what they wanted to believe and what that belief could do for them. Her father couldn’t care less, practical as he was. But her mother liked the stories, appreciated their power: This history makes

you strong, my Luz. And Luz saw it, watching herself age in mirrors. Sometimes, now, she looked at herself before track meets, narrowed her eyes like a hawk, and imagined herself to be a warrior.

“What do you mean, you don’t know for sure?” Jonah asked.

“I don’t know,” Luz said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But this troubled Jonah, how something could be unknown and known at the same time. Something so essential. He could know, for instance, that the McBees had lived in the Scottish Highlands a long time ago. Then they left those for New World highlands. Sometime later they showed up in New Orleans, and here he was. It made sense.

“Look,” he said, getting up and directing her attention to another frame on the wall. Within it a sheet of parchment depicted the McBee family crest—a disembodied hand running a sword through a green dragon. “I don’t care that much about it all,” he said, “but it’s something I can know, at least. Doesn’t it bother you at all, that you can’t know for sure?”

Luz, though, was thinking about all the countless things that had happened on different parts of the planet in different eras in order for her and Jonah to be together now in New Orleans. It was a strangely sobering thought. An image popped into her head: she saw them as an impossible couple, five centuries before. Jonah wore a plaid skirt and swung a sword, and straw-colored dreadlocks fell over his bare shoulders. She clutched a spear and wore the head of a wolf for a hat and painted her face red and munched peyote before battle. She began to laugh.

“What?” Jonah said, breaking up before he even knew the joke. “What’s funny?”

Luz shoved him so that he fell backward over the arm of the couch. She leaped after him and, in the breath before she kissed him, she said, “You are, Jonás. You.”

All the guilt that had been there after their first time and the times after—it eventually passed when the retribution Luz had been taught to expect never arrived. It amazed her, how quickly they learned each other. She figured him out without a word, and once the guilt ebbed, giving in felt good, and with it came a new and special understanding of the world. After a while she imagined that God might consider them a special case. And if not, she might convince Him otherwise. Maybe they had been given a unique opportunity.

And likewise, Jonah learned to treat the geography of her body with diligence, with the terrifying knowledge that the moment would end. She was small, she was strong. The first time she threw her leg over him, he was surprised by the hardness of her muscle, the solidity and weight of her leg, and he could summon that moment any time he wished and it would excite him. They discovered their own rhythm, created it between themselves, called on it together in his bedroom. Sometimes

Spanish words left her lips when she forgot herself, and this was a fact no other man but Jonah possessed. Sometimes she called him Jonás. It was a thing with which he came to define himself.

**The Infinite is written by Nicholas Mainieri and was published by Harper Perennial on November 15, 2016**

Nicholas Mainieri’s short fiction has appeared in the Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Salamander, among other literary magazines. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and son. The Infinite is his first novel.