Goodbye (for now)
Welcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingWelcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingThe following excerpt from Zigzags by Kamala Puligandla is published with permission from Not a Cult Press. The Obvious Combination of Beef Stew and American Cheese Richard saw himself in me since the day we met, which was something I had never been able to shake.
Continue ReadingThe below excerpt is from Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel © 2020 Ava Homa. Published May 12, 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS.
Continue ReadingThe following is excerpted from Brad Fox’s To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020) and is reprinted here with permission. To Remain Nameless –
Continue ReadingThe following story from How to Walk On Water and Other Stories by Rachel Swearingen is reprinted with permission from New American Press.
Continue ReadingMama closes all the curtains tight, but I still see the faint red glow. She yells when I try to pull the fabric back. It has sunflowers on it. She picks up the laundry basket, the one for toys, and starts collecting. She takes little cars from the carpet and drops them in with the stuffed animals and building blocks. I hear an explosion and then police sirens, but those fade away.
“You want chocolate?” Mama says. She reaches on top of the china cabinet, the one full of picture frames. I don’t know anyone in the photos, never met a single one. I ask Mama how come, and she just says that all those people died a long time ago. Mama brings down a hidden candy bar and hands it to me.
I watch her disappear down the hall. She steps into the closet, the one with the washer and dryer, and reemerges, arms loaded with sheets, only to disappear again into her bedroom. I wait, making sure she doesn’t come right back out.
I walk to the sunflower curtains and hold the fabric for a moment. It feels rough and scratchy. People are screaming outside. Earlier, when there was more than just buzzing static on the TV, Mama started crying as the news anchor said goodbye. Then it cut to footage of the sky on fire. I asked Mama where that was, where did they have clouds that looked like they were boiling. She just turned the TV off and hushed me. But I think she was hushing herself.
I pull the curtains apart only so far to leave a crack big enough for one eye. Outside there is so much smoke in the air that it’s like a foggy morning. The red glow looks far away, but I can’t be sure because of the smoke. The light bleeds around all the edges of everything, like sunset. It pulses. Maybe it’s growing. Maybe it’s not sunset but more like sunrise. It’s going to keep coming until all the city is red, until all the houses on the block are red. Maybe it’s coming for me and Mama.
Someone runs across our lawn, just a shadow in the smoke. It turns and looks at the window so I pull the curtain closed, tight. I hope the shadow doesn’t try to come through the door. Mama installed extra locks when we moved in, and we’re all closed up now, latches and bolts and chains. But the shadow could still try to break it down. It could punch right through the glass and drag me out into the smoke.
I find Mama in her room putting new sheets on her bed. I don’t disturb her, just stay in the hallway, peeping in. She doesn’t notice I’m there. She pulls on the last corner of the fresh sheets and then lies face down on the bed. Mama likes the way warm, clean sheets smell. It is probably one her most favorite things ever.
She’s crying again. I want to rush over to her and hold her hand and smooth her hair like she does to me when I feel bad. If I feel sick, she’ll give me ginger ale and popsicles and chicken soup, but it doesn’t really work until she sits on my bed and wipes my face with a wet washcloth and rubs my stomach. I did this for her once when she was upset, crying when she broke Grandma’s old baking dish. I petted her hand and told her it was all right and that we could fix it, but she just kept crying.
I back away from her bedroom door, tip-toeing to the living room so she won’t hear me. No one has broken in through the window or door. The red glow is brighter around the curtains. I eat the candy bar while sitting on the couch. The chocolate is pale in spots and tastes chalky. I don’t finish it, instead tucking the wrapper around what remains, and then I throw it back on top of the china cabinet.
Most of the photos inside the cabinet are of Grandma. Grandma on the beach in a big hat. Grandma leaning against an old truck with her arm around a young Mama. Mama says that she died way before I was born, and the sound in her voice makes it seem like it was life times ago. That’s how Mama usually likes to divide all things. From the moment of my birth, time is all years and months and days and minutes. But before I’m born, time stretches back infinite and unending.
A siren starts to wail. It’s the disaster siren at the fire station. The wailing breaks, sputters for a second, until it comes back on, and at the same time, the lights in the house flicker. Mama appears in the hallway just as the lights die completely. She disappears into darkness. Then the siren dies, too.
“Buddy?” Mama says. She sounds frightened.
So many people start screaming. It’s like every person on the block screaming at once. All their voices together sound like some kind of monster, screeching and bloodthirsty.
Before Mama can stop me, I run over and rip the curtains open. I pull too hard, and the rod jumps up off the supports. The sunflowers tumble to the carpet. The smoke has thinned. Other houses on the block are like ghosts, hazy, almost there. The glow is red and orange and yellow now, a strange rippling, pulsing blur of lights. Streaks of fire rain down from the sky. A house catches ablaze across from us. Black smoke reaches from the roof like a column. A person on fire dashes out the front door and collapses into the street.
I start screaming, but Mama grabs me. She tries to pick me up, like when she used to cradle me, but I’m too big now. I’ve been too big for a while. Instead she kneels, holding me, petting my back. I stop screaming but still shake. Wet nose, wet face. I wipe with my shirtsleeve.
A glowing red rock flies through the window, shattering the glass. It rolls across the carpet, steaming, leaving a trail of charcoal dust. The smoke pours into the living room, and it tastes like burning rubber. We both start choking. Mama pulls me along to the hall closet. She shuts us inside and stuffs sheets under the gap. We have very little room, but she sits on the floor and pulls me into her lap.
“What do we do, Mama?” I say.
She smoothes the back of my hair. “What do you like?” she asks.
“I like you.”
“But what makes you so giddy-happy it makes you dizzy?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. I try to think about something that makes me feel that way, what Mama calls giddy-happy, but it’s like when she said it all happy thoughts went right out of my head. It’s like I can’t remember what happy is. “What’s yours, Mama?”
She makes a little sigh. Happy-sad. “Helping my mama shuck ears of corn,” she says.
“Why that?” I start to taste the burning rubber.
“Because I love corn,” Mama says. “And I like the way the silk feels between my fingers, so soft. And we always did it together, on the porch, putting the scraps into a plastic bag. And it meant it must have been summer time. That way when I remember it, no matter when, it is always a little bit summer.”
My chest is tight. It feels hard to breath now. Mama stops rubbing my back. With my ear to her chest, I hear her short little breaths. But then they are not there anymore. I’m just lying in her limp arms. The chorus of screaming almost seems like it’s ready to break through the closet door. Like the house is being torn apart by wild creatures.
I close up my eyes and try not to listen to the screaming or to Mama’s silent chest. Mama had asked me what my favorite thing was. She loved remembering ears of corn because it reminded her of summer. My favorite part of summer is thunderstorms with really heavy rain. Rain that falls so fast it’s blinding. I like rain so heavy that the ground can’t absorb the water fast enough, and the lawn turns into a lake. I like to lie on my back in the water. It’s warm like a bath. I let the rain wash over me, open my mouth and let it fill me up.
The rain is so deafening, pounding the ground around my head. It pounds and pounds until it’s like static, like white noise. My ears are full of rain hitting the ground, the roof, the street, the window. It’s so constant and loud it’s like I can’t hear it anymore. The rain is so heavy it’s like it’s not even there. It’s almost like silence.
**
Thomas Price is a writer living in New Orleans, where he obtained an MFA from the Creative Writing Workshop at UNO. His fiction has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Barcelona Review, and The Los Angeles Review, where he was a finalist for their 2017 Flash Fiction Award. Find him on Twitter.
**
Image: Flickr / Geoff Sloan
The following story is excerpted from Like A Champion by Vincent Chu, published by 7.13 Books.
Arrival:
“If the ship sinks, just grab hold of that,” said Mr. Potts inside the elevator, pointing to a poster of Nelly Vasquez, the whale of a woman scheduled to sing each night after dinner service in the Moonlight Lounge. A mother near the doors glared and told her son, “Ignore the stupid idiot.” Oh what, thought Mr. Potts. The lady wasn’t a big blubbery beast? The elevator dinged. Mr. Potts got his bags and headed out for his cabin. This was going to be a relaxing eight-day vacation.
Day 1:
What a slogan the cruise line had! Cruise Like a Norwegian. The sail-away party had different colored signs saying things like Party Like a Norwegian or Dine Like a Norwegian. The staff members even encouraged guests, “There you go, Mrs. Gibbs, Hot Tubbing Like a Norwegian!” Mr. Potts had never known a real Norwegian, but he imagined they might take offense. After all, were Norwegians a lazy and entitled people like the guests on this ship? He wanted to ask one, but there weren’t any on board.
Day 2:
Every morning, the staff members greeted Mr. Potts with a great big smile. Sure, that works on the old timers, thought Mr. Potts. They probably feel like real VIPs here! Most of the guests were senior citizens. The rest were families or couples. Mr. Potts seemed to be the only guest traveling alone. Not that he didn’t have friends back home. He made sure any inquiring guest knew this when they asked him why he was “cruising” solo. All of his friends still worked, alright? None of them could spare their vacation hours. And he just happened to be single at the moment, okay? Of course he had had girlfriends before. Is that acceptable? Is that fine with you? he would sometimes reply, not in those exact words. These people were worse than the ones back home. Be Interrogated Like a Norwegian, thought Mr. Potts.
Day 3:
The food was terrible. But the old timers loved it. The waiters would come by and ask, “How was everything, Mr. Henry?” And Mr. Henry would smile and reply, “Just perfect! Absolutely exquisite!” Meanwhile, Mr. Potts wanted to barf. They served dishes like Salisbury Steak or Chicken Parmesan or Asian Beef Noodles, that classic national dish of the continent of Asia. Mr. Potts would eat alone in the dining room, observing the poor old war veterans with faded forearm tattoos and military baseball caps, probably dragged on board by their wives or children. Who knew what they saw the last time they were on a ship. They just sat there with blank looks on their faces. Mr. Potts knew they recognized this place for the circus it was, like him. Eat Shitty Dinners Like a Norwegian.
Day 4:
The pool was a disgusting affair. Mr. Potts remembered the advertisements months ago of beautiful bodies poolside. Glistening legs. Firm asses. But here, everyone was obese, pale and hairy, including the women. And nobody seemed to care! The worse the body, the smaller the bathing suit. Go Blind Like a Norwegian. Sometimes, a stranger would start a conversation with Mr. Potts in the hot tub. Mr. Potts would simply close his eyes as if enjoying the bubbles too much to talk, and eventually the stranger would leave him alone. It worked every time. Mr. Potts was very satisfied with this and practiced getting even better at it. Avoid Small Talk Like a Norwegian.
Day 5:
There was a live show nightly in the Stardust Theater. It depressed Mr. Potts. If the performers were bad, he felt embarrassed for them. If the performers were good, he wondered what went wrong in their lives that they ended up here, on this pathetic cruise ship, rather than on the radio or on Broadway. Oh, and these real sexy shows? They depressed Mr. Potts too. He watched these pretty girls strut around stage, cleavage out, and thought the old timers must get sad knowing they couldn’t get it up anymore. Or maybe they got it up just dandy, but got sad anyway seeing their wives in the same room as these bouncy young things. Marriage sure is for suckers, thought Mr. Potts as he sipped his coconut daiquiri in the dark. Enjoy the Show Like a Norwegian.
Day 6:
Games with the staff came after lunch. Mr. Potts refused to spend time with people paid to spend time with him. He wasn’t a charity case! Mr. Potts’ mother, she got a kick out of this stuff. She always loved cruises. But as she got older and sicker she couldn’t go on them anymore. She was actually the one that recommended a cruise to Mr. Potts. She worried about her son. Mr. Potts had told her about his recent nervous breakdown at work, how he stopped talking to everyone for a whole week. Why should his company get any more freebies out of him? If they didn’t give more than the bare minimum, why should he? He was this close to quitting! But Mr. Potts’ mother convinced him a cruise might help clear his head. She never understood why he took his career so serious. After all, what was so important about being an account manager for the nation’s third largest window blinds company? Mr. Potts could never explain it to her right. He spent the afternoon watching the games from afar, occasionally laughing at the fools. Keep Your Distance Like a Norwegian.
Day 7:
Formal night was a big deal. Men wore jackets and women wore dresses. It was the same terrible food, now divided into four courses. Mr. Potts got his table for one. This time, they put him near the kitchen doors. Mr. Potts drank four gin martinis, one for each course. Afterwards, he felt like paying Nelly Vasquez and the Norwegian House Band a visit. Mr. Potts made his way to the Moonlight Lounge and plopped down in the front row. Whoa, Nelly! thought Mr. Potts. The woman could sing! Mr. Potts drank and drank and watched that big ass of Nelly Vasquez bounce back and forth on stage, flexing the floorboards. During her last song, Nelly Vasquez even winked at Mr. Potts. He blew a big wet floating kiss back at her. Then he passed out in his lounge chair. Get Piss Drunk Like a Norwegian. He was finally getting the hang of this.
Day 8:
Mr. Potts was hung over. But that’s not why he spent most of the last sea day in his cabin. He had this awful habit of spending the ends of his vacations planning his re-entry into society. He thought about what he had to do at work on Monday, about the several apology emails he wanted to write, about visiting his mother in the hospital and telling her how great the cruise was. She would like that. Mr. Potts then walked around the deck. He ate dinner in the less crowded 24-hour cafeteria. He gambled at the casino and lost forty dollars. He drank a pint of beer at the Irish pub. Then he went back to the Moonlight Lounge. Nelly Vasquez was already singing. Mr. Potts sat down in the front row again. After a few songs, Nelly started with a real slow version of The Love Boat theme song. Hah! thought Mr. Potts. The Love Boat theme song, for Christ’s sake! God, he always hated that show.
…Love, exciting and new
Come aboard. We’re expecting you.
And Love, life’s sweetest reward.
Let it flow, it floats back to you.
Mr. Potts glanced around to see if anyone else was as embarrassed as him. This was really a stupid song!
…And Love won’t hurt anymore
It’s an open smile on a friendly shore.
Yes, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE!
Then Mr. Potts started to cry. Tears and all. He couldn’t stop. He cried and continued to cry, sitting there alone in the front row of the Moonlight Lounge on Deck 7 of the Norwegian Pearl, listening to The Love Boat theme song. The tears flowed and Mr. Potts, trembly and wet, didn’t know why or how to stop them. Nobody came with a tissue or asked if he was okay. Mr. Potts just sat there, a quiet mess. Finally the song ended and eventually Mr. Potts pulled himself together. After the band left and he had ordered another drink, he wondered more about the crying, specifically if anyone saw it. He didn’t think so. Perhaps just Nelly Vasquez. Oh, what did he care. She probably cried every time the buffet ran out of riblets! Mr. Potts paid his tab and got up to go to his cabin. A pointless end to a pointless vacation. Well, thought Mr. Potts, at least it was almost over.
Mr. Potts dried his eyes once more in the elevator. He pressed the button. After one deck, the car stopped and the doors opened. “Well, if it isn’t the lone sailor himself. I must say, sweetheart, I think you and me are the only two lookers on this whole God awful boat.” Mr. Potts looked up. It was Nelly Vasquez, wink and all. He sniffled. Then, without a word, he reached forward and put his arms around that big fantastic body of hers and pulled it right up against his. He kissed her. Nelly Vasquez had had groupies before, so she was startled but not shocked as she kissed the poor chap back. Mr. Potts held on tight and didn’t let go. She smelled sweet. She was warm and soft and round and the only thing in this world he ever wanted. The elevator dinged and two people got out. Mr. Potts could pack in the morning. Make Love Like a Norwegian.
**
Vincent Chu was born in Oakland, California. His fiction has appeared in PANK Magazine, East Bay Review, Pithead Chapel, Fjords Review, Cooper Street, Stockholm Review, Chicago Literati, Forth Magazine, The Collapsar and WhiskeyPaper. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Like a Champion is his debut collection. He can be found at his website and on Twitter.
The neon sign says ‘Billiards.’ The sign hangs above twin steel doors that are dented from kicks, more from the inside then out. Inside the doors there is a wide staircase with tintype walls. At the top of the stairs, when you turn the corner, you enter a huge parking lot of old pool tables with ripped stained felt. Wire-strung woodchips keep score over each table. The cues, lined up in racks on the walls, are all warped. The balls are chipped and take weird rolls down the rutted surfaces. But when they fall into the leather pockets, the balls make a gentle ‘poof’ sound, like they are dropped into a soft leather mitt.
Sitting at a podium is a guy named Charlie. Charlie has a head like a cue ball and mismatched burnsides starting behind a huge pair of ears, which make him look funny, but he isn’t. “28,” he says when you walk in, handing you a tray of chipped balls, or “29.” “8 dollars,” he says when you handed him the tray two hours later, or “7 dollars.” That is it from Charlie. Next to the podium there is a coke machine. For fifty cents, if you push the ‘Fanta Orange’ button, out pops a frosty can of Schlitz. “Here,” Charlie says, handing you a small paper bag which you have to keep the Schlitz in, because drinking on the premises is forbidden. Smoking is not, and the place is filled with smoke, even when nobody is there.
*
Today Charlie puts you at table 28, next to a hissing radiator, right under a huge picture window. You pick a cue, rack and break. The balls scatter across 28’s dusty surface, finding ruts and creases and a slow hill down the right bank, and a ball falls. It’s a stripe. You don’t like stripes. This isn’t going to go well, you think.
You look up at the table 31 and in the shadows you see Stickman, leaning on his cue, staring down at the passersbye on the street. You light up a smoke.
“Hey man,” you say—you never call him Stickman, not in front of him—“What are you doing?”
“I’m having a face attack,” he says without looking up.
“Oh,” you say. “Cool.” You drink a slug of Schlitz and hit a bank shot. Then you walk the dog on the eleven. It’s all looking up, you think, but then you get stuck on a rail behind the three. Before you consider the consequences you’ve got the eight ball dribbling into the side pocket for a scratch.
You drain you beer can and crumple it, bag and all, and put it under the table. You look over at the coke machine, then at your neighbor.
“Hey man. You want a Schlitz?”
“No,” Stickman says, still staring down there at the street, fixated. “No,” he repeats in that skinny New Orleans voice of his, “not now man. I’m almost finished here.”
“Suit yourself.” You buy two more Schlitz from the machine. Without looking up, Charlie hands you two more bags. You rack again, and break for solids, and this goes much better. In three rounds you’ve run the next-to-last ball into the side pocket. When it falls in the mitt- poof- Stickman walks over.
“Hey, man.” He says. “Wow. You ever have yourself a face attack?”
“Now, what exactly are you talking about,” you ask. You bank the eight ball off the far rail-careful, because Stickman is watching, to tap the desired pocket beforehand with the tip of your cue-and the ball rolls submissively in. Poof.
“Well, it’s like this,” he continues. “A face attack is when you are walking around this here city all day, and you see all these faces, and your brain just can’t process it, man- and suddenly it’s like all them people have plastic mask on, with long rubbery noses and eyes like coals and skin like dripping wax and stuff.”
Stickman pulls a bottle of something out of his pocket, and sucks on it mindlessly. When he stops the whole pool hall smells like licorice. “That’s what a face attack is,” he says, looking over his shoulder at the picture window, the masses of bodies, the orange glow of river light bouncing off the face of the municipal building across the street. “Face attacks,” he says, and he shutters. “Man. They give me the Jimmies.”
*
You walk out together, you and Stickman, and go a few blocks east on the avenue. You would often do this. At a cross street, you part ways- him for a home in the old neighborhood, in the days that it was a much different place then it is now; and you for a bar to sit alone in. This was a time when you would pick a bar, pretend you were waiting for a friend, drink five or six drinks, pretend your friend never showed up, and head for the subway home.
“So I was wondering,” Stickman says on this particular night, “what you might be doing this evening.”
“I’m doing nothing,” you say.
“Well, it’s like this,” Stickman says. “I’m going over to visit my sister. You remember my sister?”
You met Stickman’s sister once. You were walking one late summer night past some street vendors. Stickman, standing by a vendor, waved you over. He was talking to a girl who was selling jewelry. What you remember about her was that she looked like a cat without whiskers. Her jewelry was made mostly of bones. She was Stickman’s sister. She didn’t speak to you or look at you when he introduced you. She started railing into Stickman pretty hard, something about losing her keys or bringing her stuff back to his apartment or something. You stood there awkwardly for a few minutes, and then you left.
“Yeah,” you say. “I remember your sister.”
“Well, yeah.”
You stop on the corner. Stickman tries to hitch up his pants, which is kind of ridiculous-he is little more than a skeleton, and has nothing to hitch his pants to. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands, then offers one to you. “Well, the thing is, I got this little old bookshelf I got to bring over to her house. You think you could give me a hand bringing it over there?”
“Huh,” you say, taking a slow drag of the cigarette, its embers glowing warmly just under the tip of your cold nose. “A bookshelf, huh?”
“Oh, she’ll feed us a big dinner if we go over there now, she cooks jambalaya every Sunday night, all shrimp and andui sausage and stuff. Yes, sir. Ho, boy.”
“Sure.” You haven’t eaten all day. “Sure I’ll help you. Where does she live?”
“She’s just over the river there, right over that there bridge.”
“Bridge? What bridge?” But he has already started walking, and you follow him.
*
Stickman stops in front of the steel fence of a city graveyard. He looks up at the unlit windows of an apartment building behind the graveyard, its back windows and fire escapes and laundry lines and pipes and wires, all sticking out over the graves.
“Well, that there’s my place,” he says. “Give me a hand, will you?”
You help him push a steel gate inward, revealing a little path between the gravestones that leads to a cellar door. He pulls on the cellar door, and it swings open. You enter a pitch-black basement. You stumble through darkness, your arms out in front of you. Stickman says “shush,” and then “shush, now.” He pulls on a light cord; a rickety staircase appears. You follow Stickman up three flights. He jiggles a key into a door lock. The door pops open. You are standing in a bare room. Two windows. No curtains. No furniture, except for a big empty bookcase-maybe ten feet tall.
“There she be,” Stickman says. “Now all we got to do is get her back down there, the way we came.”
“Can’t we just take it out through the front door?”
“Now, don’t be ridiculous,” Stickman says. “If the landlord sees us walking out the front door, he’s going to start asking some questions.”
“What questions?” You ask. But Stickman is already taking the bookcase down and resting one end on his shoulder. You pick up the other end. It is heavy, and you are not in the best of shape. “There now,” he says, leading the bookcase and you back down the narrow staircase. In three blocks you are carrying it down into the subway station.
“You can’t take that thing on the train,” the token booth clerk says without looking up from his paper.
You walk back up to the avenue and Stickman tries to wave a cab.
“You can’t take that thing in a taxi,” one driver slows down to yell at you.
You stand the bookcase up on the corner. Stickman offers you another cigarette.
“Well,” you say, “we gave it our best shot.”
“Well,” Stickman says after a minute, flicking his cigarette out into the avenue. “I guess we’re just going to have to walk it there.”
*
The blocks pass by and the City and night parts and streaks around you. Faces float by but they stare straight ahead, icy and emotionless. On long streets, kids in snorkel jackets run around you and under the bookshelf- “come on mister,” they yell, “let me ride in it!”Along the way, Stickman tells you a very long story about growing up in a southern city—his father was a Romanian Prince, or something, who escaped the Nazis, or something, and taught tennis to fat rich children at a private club while his own children went hungry—and Stickman and his sister were taken in by the poor family next door who fed them plates of jambalaya every Sunday and taught them how to catch crayfish. Or something. You fade in and out of the story. You are thirsty, and thinking of your next beer, more than you are thinking about Jambalaya.
But then you start thinking of the sister, the one who looks like a cat. Maybe she was just cranky that day. She has good reason to be hostile at first, you think, with a childhood like that. But she’ll be so happy to get this bookshelf. She’ll be so surprised that Stickman and his big friend carried it all the way to her house, all the way across the river. She’ll invite you to stay for dinner, and as the three of you sit around her table, eating a big Jambalaya dinner, she’ll tell you all about their childhood and their father and the Nazis and the tennis and the poor crayfish family, and you’ll listen really closely to her. It will be the start of a new and different time in your life, when you start to hang out with real people. You will have real friends, like Stickman and his sister, and you won’t hang out in bars alone pretending to wait for imaginary friends anymore.
*
“Hold up here now a minute,” Stickman says. You have reached the foot of a metal staircase climbing to a walkway over a bridge. He re-hitches up his pants. Again with the pants. He’s starting to look crazy. He’s breathing heavy. You know that you are too—even in the March cold, you’ve sweated out all of the beer—but you’re not giving up until he does.
“So listen, man,” you ask him, while accepting another cigarette. “Tell me the truth, now. Is this really your bookcase? Or did we just steal it?”
“Steal it? Now that’s just plain crazy.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the bottle, and fills the air with licorice. “This here is my book case. My bookcase. And I’m giving it to my sister. Come on now,” he says.
You struggle up the stairs. At the top, there’s a broken chain-link fence. You pass through it, and the headlights of cars crossing the bridge stream below you. The walkway arcs gently above and between the roadways, surrounded by the skeletal steel ribs of the bridge, all streaked with graffiti. You walk across steel plates spot-welded onto the girders. They are warped, and rock upwards when you step on them, exposing a crack between where you are walking and the dark black river well below you. You start thinking of the sister, the Cat, again. You start to daydream that she’s asking you questions about your life. You try anticipating what her questions will be, and what your answers will be.
At the far end of the bridge, the walkway grows darker. The bookcase is cutting a divet into your neck and Stickman is muttering and cursing ten feet behind you. At the landing before another set of steps you can make out the silhouettes of four or five men lying on the steel sheets, their hooded heads nodded down into their chests . One has his right pants leg rolled up and a needle attached to his ankle, standing up like it fell out of the sky.
“Hey, man, is that a bookcase?” He asks.
“Yes,” you say.
“Is that oak?”
“No sir,” Stickman says. “That’s maple.”
“Maple,” he says. “Man. You can’t beat maple.”
*
An hour and thirty blocks later you turn a corner to a row of little frame houses, neatly lit by street lamps. You turn so that Stickman buzzes the door. His sister, the Cat, pulls it open. She is on the telephone, a long cord leading back into an unlit kitchen. It is a very nice little house, somebody else’s. It does not smell like Jambalaya.
“So this crazy thing happened where we couldn’t get it on the subway, and we couldn’t get us a cab,” Stickman starts telling her. Her back is turned and she is still talking. “So we just started walking with it, and before you know it-“
“Just put it over THERE,” she turns and hisses at him. “No, not you,” she says into the phone.
You help him put the bookshelf into place. Stickman shrugs at you, then turns to her. You both stand there for a minute, your hands in your pockets. She turns around and glares at both of you.
“Can’t you see I’m busy here?” She says.
You walk out together in silence. Stickman leads you to the subway and buys you a token. You ride together in silence. He starts drinking that stuff again, really draining the bottle; the subway car fills with the licorice smell but nobody looks up. At his stop Stickman gets up, unfolding himself, and pulling his pants up one last time.
“We must have walked that bookcase like six miles or something,” he says.
At your stop you find a bar you haven’t frequented yet. You sit down on a stool, and some time later, you come out. You are standing in the street alone at three in the morning, looking out at the streaks of people still coming and going. And then it happens-everybody who passes wears a plastic mask with a rubber nose and eyes like black coals, shaking, shaking. “Face attack!” you think. “It’s a face attack!” You can’t wait to tell Stickman. But when you go back to the Billiards Hall a few days later, the steel doors are locked forever.
**
Frank Haberle’s short stories have won the 2011 Pen Parentis Award, the 2013 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and the 2017 Beautiful Loser Magazine Award. They have appeared in magazines including the Stockholm Literary Review, Inwood Indiana, Necessary Fiction, the Adirondack Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Melic Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Cantaraville and Hot Metal Press. Frank works professionally as a nonprofit grantwriter and volunteers as a workshop leader for the NY Writers Coalition. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and three children.
**
Image: Flickr / Smeikx
“Pieces of String Too Short to Be of Any Use” by Mary J. Breen was originally published in Fiction365
Euchre always ends early in the summer because all of us have to be up by five. That night, Gord was tired so he just dropped me off. I knew Donny would drive me home as our place wasn’t far out of his way. I guess it’s high time Gord and I admitted that we’re getting too old for farming, but neither of us can bear the thought of giving it up. Not just yet.
I remember the sweetness of the night air after that fusty old church hall. The moon was almost full, and as I walked down the driveway, I could see Donny leaning on his old truck, ankles crossed, smoking a cigarette just like a gorgeous old James Dean. As I got closer, he signalled for me to follow him over to a ditch where a scattering of lightning bugs drifted over the long grass. A tiny galaxy of their own. Ever so slowly, he caught some between his hands and held them close for me to peek at before he let them go. Then he put his arm through mine, and walked me back to the truck.
“So where’s your new truck?” I asked. “I hear you bought one of those big ones with air conditioning and everything.”
“I’d have brought it if I’d’ve known I was driving you, Beth. I guess the truth is I’m kinda saving it. Foolish really, but I never had a brand-new one before. Kinda afraid I’ll break it.”
“You could get some of that plastic bubble stuff and wrap it all up safe. That wouldn’t look too silly.”
He chuckled as he held the door for me. “Ah, Beth,” he said, “you could always make me laugh.” He was still smiling when he got in on the driver’s side.
“You realize that kind of crazy-mad saving is a sign of old age,” I said. “You with a lovely new truck you don’t dare drive, and me with I-don’t-know-how-many sweaters and blouses and scarves still wrapped in tissue paper in my bottom drawer. Never wearing them, saving them, just in case.”
“Blame it on the Depression,” he said. “Our parents really learned how to save, and they taught us too.”
“And one day we’re going to wake up dead, and our kids will find out how foolish we were. That reminds me: remember my Aunt Ida out in Calgary? Well she died last month, and when I was cleaning out her place I found a box labelled “Pieces Of String Too Short To Be Of Any Use”! I’m not kidding. All of them really, really short but still she’d kept them! Why do we do this?”
He laughed again, shaking his head as he turned the key. The truck started up with a shudder and a lurch. “Here we are again, Donny. You and me in an old pickup with a bad clutch.”
“Right. Here we are,” he said.
“You know,” I went on, “just the other day I was thinking about those shoes I dyed blue to match my bridesmaid dress for Norma’s wedding. Remember how that damned truck broke down, and we had to walk in the pouring rain, and my feet ended up turquoise for weeks!”
We turned onto the County Line and drove along in what they always call “companionable silence” in books, letting the warm wind push back our hair like kids again, kids without a care in the world.
“So,” I said, “tell me how Eileen’s feeling. I hear she’s back home, and Tracy’s home to visit too. Must be lovely having her around again.”
The truck slowed to a crawl and Donny pulled over onto the shoulder, and turned off the ignition. “What’s wrong, Donny?” I asked. “Don’t tell me your truck—that we’re having another breakdown!”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s—well—you see, Beth—” He stopped and took a deep breath. “It’s not good. Not good at all. We just heard Monday that the tests—Eileen had a bunch more done last week—and, well, the cancer’s spread. Bone. Brain too. They’ve let her come home, and they’re gonna try some more drugs, but the truth of the matter is—” he kept shaking his head, “—she’s not, she’s not gonna—”
“Oh, Donny!” I reached over to his arm. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea! Poor Eileen. And poor you too.”
Right away I thought of Gord and how scared I was last year when we weren’t sure what was wrong with him. He and the doctor thought it was his heart, but it turned out to be just a combination of terrible heartburn and terrible fatigue.
Donny half-turned towards me, and then quickly turned back. There were tears in his eyes. “Beth,” he said, staring at the dark road ahead, “do you remember how we always said we were meant for each other?”
I didn’t want to tell him that I don’t remember ever saying those exact words, but I do know that everyone—especially me—thought I was the luckiest girl in the county to be Donny Walsh’s girlfriend. He didn’t drink like most of them, and he was cute and funny and smart, and a big local hockey star. I went to all his games. “Gee, Donny,” I said, “that was, let’s see . . . almost forty years ago! We were just kids.” He didn’t answer. “What I remember is that I was going to be a missionary in darkest, deepest Africa while you learned to be a famous horse trainer, and when I got home, we were going to get married. God, we were so young!”
“Never mind that we were young, Beth. We knew. I did, anyway. And, well, you see, it’s never changed for me. I’ve never felt any different, that is, any different about you.” He took a deep breath. “I—I decided I would just come out and tell you.”
The engine kept ticking, and an owl cried suddenly out in the woods. I could feel my heart pounding as I tried to think of something good to say.
Donny went on. “Well, Beth, I’ve always known that if anything happened to Eileen, I’d come to you. I made a terrible mistake back then. You’re the one I should have married. But, you know, Eileen was pregnant, and you were already going out with Gord, and—”
Did he think all those years that my sweet, quiet, homely Gord was just a runner-up? That I missed first prize? Donny was a lovely boy, but Gord was already a man, even back then. And a very good man.
Donny sat there, perfectly still, his hands on the wheel, still staring at the road ahead.
I tried to pick my words. “I think you’re just feeling a bit scared, Donny, with the stress of looking after Eileen, seeing her in so much pain, not knowing what’s coming next.” Suddenly it was like forty years ago, me and Donny in his pickup, him staring straight out the windshield. I was astonished that I could still read from the set of his shoulders and the clenching of his jaw just how upset he was.
He reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. Then he stopped and looked at me. “Still hate these things?”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to lie, “but maybe with the windows open it won’t be so—”
“I can wait,” he said and he threw the pack onto the dash. “I’m supposed to cut down anyways.”
After several minutes, I finally said, “Donny, it’s late. We should be getting home. Eileen and Tracy, they’ll be worrying.”
He started to apologize, but I wouldn’t let him. “No, no,” I said, “I’m glad you told me. I’m flattered.” And then my babbling nature took over, and I started saying corny, useless things about how we can’t turn back the clock, can’t second-guess our lives. He just shook himself, started up the truck, and drove off as if we were being chased by demons.
We didn’t speak the rest of the way down the Fourth Concession, and up the lane to our house, all dark except for the side porch light and the one on the stove. I leaned over and kissed Donny on the cheek and told him that we were still old friends, good friends, and nothing would ever change that. He just nodded. As soon as I got out, he slammed the truck into gear, and drove off without another word.
I only saw Donny twice more—once at the Co-Op where I was picking up some special feed for a sick foal, and another at the IGA. Both times, I know he saw me, but when I went looking for him he’d gone.
Eileen died that fall, and then Donny just four weeks later. Heart. Apparently he’d been due for bypass surgery for the end of November, but none of us knew that. The Friday before he died, Tracy called and said her dad was hoping I’d drop in sometime. We were off to see the grandkids that weekend, so I promised I’d stop by the first of the week. He died that Sunday morning.
Tracy wrote in the obituary, “Without Mom, Dad’s heart couldn’t go on.” And whenever anyone repeats that to me, I make sure I agree.
**
Mary J. Breen lives in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in national newspapers, essay collections, travel magazines, health journals, and literary magazines including Brick, The Christian Science Monitor, Ars Medica, The Windsor Review, and Dropped Threads II; she was a regular contributor to The Toast. She has been an ESL and literacy teacher in Canada and overseas, a health worker, and a writer of easy-to-read health information including two books about women’s health. Now, among other things, she teaches memoir classes while trying to complete her own memoir.
**
Image: Flickr / dominocat
If you often find yourself awake in the middle of the night wishing you weren’t alone, I know of a place you can go where you won’t be. There’s air conditioning, always turned up too high, and a television set, on mute. The vinyl chairs are arranged in a square so everyone can look at each other, and a vending machine stands off to the side. You’ll probably leave with a complicated illness of some kind and have to come straight back, but at least it doesn’t cost anything to sit in the square and look at the other people. I go often, to the sliding door under the lit-up Emergency sign. I’m always amazed at how many people are there in the middle of the night. I’m never alone. It’s where I wait for Megan.
Megan and I are regulars at the hospital the way some people are regulars at bars or coffee shops. We arrive together and split up at the triage desk—her to the doctors and nurses and me to my chair in the waiting room under the silent TV. They never make her wait very long, just wrap a paper bracelet around her wrist, tip her back and rush her down the hall. I’m never asked if I want to come; my primary job is to fill out her paperwork. I do that until I can get someone’s attention and ask where they took her this time and when I can go in. Sometimes I don’t get to go in.
It’s busy tonight; the nurse at the desk keeps shushing me and directing me to the chairs with her pen. It bothers me, and it doesn’t—Meg’s probably unconscious by now anyway. Tonight will pass like a blink for her from here on in, and I’ll take on her time along with my own, like I always do. I’ll survive an agonizing minute only to have to live it again. I feel guilty for wishing away any of my minutes, considering.
A girl with coffee-coloured hair interrupts my thoughts, poking me in the shoulder. “Is someone sitting here?” She motions to the chair beside me, the only vacant one in the room. I shake my head and let it come to rest once again in the palms of my hands, which are cold and wet with hospital sweat. This is how you sit in an emergency room if you don’t want to make conversation.
“Thanks,” she says, silently folding into the chair, legs under, arms in, hood up. Compact. Her voice is sad, and something in it causes me to glance up again. She catches me staring. “What?”
“Nothing. Sorry.” She’s rude, but she looks like she’s about 17, so I forgive her. I was 17 once; I’d hated it too.
She starts examining her fingernails, which are covered in chipped black nail polish. She frowns at them, as though they’re her problem. As though she’s come to the emergency room at 3 AM for nail polish remover. “What?”
I realize I’m staring again. “Nothing. Sorry.”
She turns her critical gaze to my face, to the hard lines in my forehead and around my mouth chiseled out by ever-present worry and too many 3 AM emergency room visits. I look haggard, and it makes me self-conscious. I used to be pretty. Like her. “Why are you here?”
“In this chair?” Does she expect me to move? I was here first.
“No. Here. In the ER. Why are you in the ER?”
For all of the nights I’ve spent here, I’ve never been asked this before. “I’m waiting for someone. You?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re waiting for someone too?”
“Yeah.” She slides her fingernail under a piece of polish and scratches it off. It makes a horrible sound. Her eyes flick over at me. “My friend broke her leg.”
“Oh.” I nod. “How’d she do that?”
Her mouth cracks open. She’s looking everywhere. I’ve stumped her. “None of your business,” she says at last.
“Emily.” A woman appears at the girl’s side. She looks tired; she’s not wearing any makeup and her hair is piled up on top of her head, held there by a large black butterfly clip. She’s holding out a hospital bracelet like it’s a stick of gum. “Put this on. I’m going to grab a coffee from the cafeteria.”
Emily’s eyes are closed.
“Emily.” The woman’s voice is ragged. She’s been yelling. She’s been awake for hours. Her face sags but her eyes flash; she’s a confusing mix of intense sadness and fierce anger, already defeated but still fighting. “Emily,” she repeats, reaching out in one swift motion, grabbing the girl’s hand and stuffing the bracelet into it. “Put,” she steadies herself, glancing at me, “this,” she catches her breath again, “on.”
Emily’s eyes don’t open. “Whatever.”
“Not whatever.” The woman presses her lips together in between every sentence, biting them hard and turning them white. “Put it on. Now.”
Emily pushes her sleeve up, scowling in my direction without looking at me, like she knows I’m watching. She’s clearly done this before; she completes the task with one hand. She thrusts her bony wrist out, displaying the paper jewelry for the woman to inspect.
Her arm is covered in lines, some of them angry and fresh and some faded to chalk-white. The woman nods, turns, and takes off down the hallway toward the cafeteria. She walks like someone who’s used to wearing high heels; she’s unsteady in her ballet flats.
I’ve never been to the cafeteria in this hospital. I’ve never been to the bathroom here either. I sometimes get hungry, and I sometimes get uncomfortable, but I don’t want to be unavailable for even a second. Some doctors urge me to walk around or even leave the building. They say Megan would wait for me. “Go out for a bit! Go grab a coffee!” they say. Their smiles are sad. She’ll be fine. She’ll know you’re not here; she won’t go without you. We’ve seen it a thousand times. They wait.
All nice thoughts, but I always want to say something snarky about how if she can’t dress herself or control the spastic flailing of her hands, if she can’t keep herself from calling out gibberish in the middle of a church service, I highly doubt she’s going to know how to keep her body from dying at an inopportune time. I want to scream these words at the doctors. I’m not angry at them; I’m angry at the situation and the doctors are the ones standing between me and it right now. The situation is a physical being, an invader from another country; it speaks a foreign language and the doctors are its interpreters, impartial middlemen relaying its messages to me from the body of my sister.
She and I were born on the same day of the same year. Our faces and hair and skin are the same. We ate all the same things growing up and played the same games and had the same friends. We had the same parents and graduated from the same high school and waitressed at the same restaurant while we worked through similar programs at the same community college.
Then one day, her body turned on her, quit working the way it always had, shut up like a steel trap with her inside it. Snap. It was like hugging someone as they were struck by lightning, having them crumble into ash in your arms. I can’t understand how I was untouched by something that big and that close. How it could claim all of her and none of me.
So now I take care of her; I carry her cage body around and poke food into it and talk to it, hoping she’s still alive in there, that my voice is soothing and comforting. Sometimes I say to her, “I’ll get you out of there, Megs,” or, “This doctor looks like he knows what he’s doing. He’ll get you out.” Sometimes her body smiles at me, but her eyes loll off into the corners of the room. Sometimes her eyes look at me but her mouth droops open and the rest of her hangs limp in her wheelchair. Maybe, I think sometimes, she escaped long ago and I’m just lugging an empty cage around.
Emily pokes me again. “Hey, sorry. Do me a favor, okay? When my mom comes back, tell her I’m in with the doctor. Tell her they’re keeping me overnight and she can go home.”
I frown. “And you’re just going to leave?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And your mother’s not going to want to say goodnight or talk to the doctor?”
Emily scoffs at this. “No.”
I gape at her. “I don’t…I don’t think you should…leave.” I expect my reaction to elicit some level of rage from her, thinking back to when I was that age and how I acted when my dad told me I couldn’t do something, but I’ve clearly overestimated her interest in my opinion. She shrugs and turns to the man reading a magazine on the other side of her, repeating her request to him. He nods and she stands up. She doesn’t even glance at the triage nurse on her way past.
I stand too. I’m not a brave person, and I’m not sure what I’ll do, but it doesn’t feel right to do nothing.
I catch up to her just outside the hospital doors, reach out my hand and jab her in the shoulder the way she’d done to me. She spins around; I can tell she’s expecting her mother. When she sees me, she relaxes. I tense. She doesn’t say anything at first, and I don’t either. Then, “What?”
“I,” I begin. I what? “I’m not going to make you go back inside or anything.”
“Okay.”
“But I think you should come anyway.”
The girl smirks. “No. I don’t think so.” She starts walking away again.
That was all I had. I can’t tackle her. Can I? I call after her. “What about your friend? With the broken leg?”
She snorts at me over her shoulder, but stops walking. “Pretty sure you’re not that stupid.” She looks me up and down with disdain and raises her chin. “Who are you, even? I don’t need another person who doesn’t care pretending like they do. If it would make you feel better, you can tell my mom you tried to stop me.”
I sputter as she walks away, knowing I should say something more but not knowing what, and then I start to cry. It surprises me because I’m not sad; I’m something else. Something that burns a little. Something like seething rage.
I’m blisteringly mad.
I’m mad at all the cages.
“What’re you trying to save her from?” The voice comes from behind me; it belongs to a grey-haired woman with a wrinkled face, hunched over a walker, dragging on a cigarette. “Dying? Is that it? You trying to save her from dying?” She looks obstinate; her tone is haughty and mocking but her mouth is lazy. Her words stick together. The sign above her left shoulder politely asks those in its vicinity not to smoke. “Everyone here is obsessed with keeping everyone else from dying. Why? Why is everyone so worried about saving each other? We’re all going to die, even them doctors. Let the ones who want to go, let them go. That’s what I say. People been trying to keep me alive since I was born. Not ‘cause they want me around, just ‘cause people are obsessed with keeping other people alive. Obsessed.” She spits this word at me. I still say nothing. She doesn’t want me to, I can see that.
Does Meg want to go?
I’ve often wondered. The doctors say it will happen soon, any day now. They’ve been saying this for years. When we’re rushing into the ER with her lips blue and her body convulsing, the only thing I can think is that I’m losing her, that I need to get her and bring her back. I always get her in on time, barely on time. The doctors save her life, what’s left of her life. I sit on her bed after it’s all over and say, “That was close, Megs. You were almost taken again.” But what’s trying to take her? Maybe she’s running away. Maybe she wants to go and I’m nothing but a glorified prison guard, on high alert, day and night, watching the door of her cage for the slightest movement, for the earliest sniff of an escape attempt.
How could I know, one way or the other? As soon as these thoughts come, I think, but maybe she’s like a baby again, just the slightest glimmer of consciousness stuffed into this big old body, and maybe the only thing she’s aware of is my existence, my love, and my earnest care for her. Maybe she’s happy in this life, like a baby’s happy when it has all the basic things. I can’t know, and it drives me crazy.
There’s a hand on my shoulder; it’s a nurse I’m familiar with, and she wants me to come with her to Meg’s room, where Meg is stable and breathing and recovering. She spends most of her time doing these things, the rest of it listening to me read her a book or push her wheelchair by the lake.
I follow the nurse to Meg’s room and sit on Meg’s bed and hold Meg’s face with both of my hands and try to see into her eyes and ask her, “You in there, Megs?” Holding the rungs of her darkened cage, calling into the corners, trying to detect movement. Are you in there? Do you want me to pick this rusty lock and let you out? Come up to the bars, here.
She doesn’t answer, but her cheeks are warm, and I imagine the twitching I feel in the facial muscles is her trying to smile. I smile back. “Megs,” I say. “You look beautiful.” She doesn’t have stress lines on her face like I do. I crawl into the hospital bed beside my sister and wrap my arms around her like a softer cage. I close my eyes and lay perfectly still. She can’t come out, but I often imagine I can go in.
I squeeze between the bars and find my sister huddled in the corner. She’s not a baby, and she’s not a prisoner. She’s just my sister. She wants to go abroad for summer vacation, she wants to become an architect and have three babies. Her favourite song is a classical piano piece called Spring and she hates asparagus. I sit down beside her and lean against her. I tell her the things I know about her. I feel her push back into me. I say, “I’m here.”
And she says, “I know.”
**
Suzy Krause is a writer from Regina, Saskatchewan, where she lives with her husband and two children. Her debut novel, Valencia & Valentine, is forthcoming from Lake Union Publishing in the summer of 2019, and she was also a contributing writer for The Magic of Motherhood, published in 2017 by HarperCollins.
**
Image: Flickr / Radek Bet
When I was eight, my father woke me in the middle of the night to watch a calf being born. I woke to the rolling, rich sound of his laughter, then boards creaking as he climbed the stairs. Before I could drift back to sleep on my warm, soft feather tick, my door opened. I smelled the cold air on him, a whiff of manure, and sat up in bed.
“Harry,” he said, “get up.”
In the kitchen, he handed me my first cup of coffee. The coffee tasted bitter, and I set the mug down, believing nothing could be worth all this trouble. But my father was alive that night, as if on fire, as if someone had set a light inside him. He glowed.
My father grabbed me by the hand, and we jogged across the yard. The night air was cold. Subzero temperatures slapped me awake. Our boots crunched the snow as we ran. I will remember this always, this jog to the barn in the middle of the night with only the light of the stars. I couldn’t quite keep up with my father, whose legs bore him forward in great strides.
Our three, one-story barns stretched long and low in front of us. My father pushed open the door to the second, ushering me inside. The barn was flooded with light, which made me blink. I wanted to stop to catch my breath, but my father’s palms rested on my shoulders, propelled me forward to the far end of the barn, where Dr. Vargas with his pointy beard stood, a black bag opened at his feet and his arm stuck up to the elbow in one of our cows’ back end.
I started to leave.
“No, no, no,” my father said, grabbing me by the shoulder and pulling me back. “This is okay. This is life.”
Dr. Vargas laughed, then lowered his head. His forehead wrinkled. He spoke to my father. “This will be a difficult one, James.”
The cow moaned.
I looked up at my father, whose hands still rested on my shoulders. “What’s he doing?” I asked.
Then my father did something that focused my undivided attention on that moaning cow. My father spoke to me in Swedish.
He said, “Titta här, Smulan.” Look.
My father called me Smulan affectionately. In Swedish, Smulan means crumb.
I think of this now as I sit in a dimly lit hallway, listening to the nurses on the night shift tell each other about their Christmas plans. I can’t see them well from where I sit. I see only the circular, mauve desk surrounding them, the pool of white light that bathes it. The pool of light reminds me of the barn, reminds me that the calf’s birth is the only birth I’ve ever seen, reminds me that watching a calf being born is no preparation.
My father was wrong. That was not life.
One of the nurses laughs, and the sound of her laughter carries down the hall past me. I stand and rub my eyes. I wonder what time it is. I’m not wearing my watch. I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, a down jacket and slippers. Megan’s slippers, which are pink. I think of how she looked tonight as we raced to the car, biting her lip, holding her tummy, one wayward brown curl falling in her eyes; of the thin, tense smile she gave me as the nurses rolled her down the hall and away from me.
My father and mother are waiting for my second phone call. I imagine them now, sitting at the kitchen table. My mother has her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, and my father is leaning back on the two back legs of his chair, feet propped on the table, smoking his pipe. I imagine that my mother is watching the clock and shaking her head. And I imagine that my father is deferring to my mother’s experience, letting her shake her head, letting her mutter, “This is not good.”
When I called her from the lobby phone not too long ago, that was what she said: “This is not good.”
We know we have a boy. We just didn’t expect him this soon.
Farther away, in St. Paul, Megan’s parents wait, trapped inside their house by a sudden December blizzard. I can’t imagine them clearly. Maybe Mrs. Hall is making coffee. When in crisis, she usually does. Mr. Hall is probably clenching the keys to his Chevy Impala, waiting for the snow to stop. Most likely though, he has decided not to wait, just like my son. Instead, he is sliding down 94 East with Mrs. Hall, following the headlights to western Wisconsin and to the small hospital where I stand now, listening to nurses laugh.
My parents will not come.
I stand and stretch my legs, then lean against the wall. I don’t understand the waiting. My mother’s voice, soft and low, echoes in my head. “This is not good.”
But waiting doesn’t matter, as long as everything turns out all right. There is no price I would not pay.
The calf was breech, so Dr. Vargas had to turn it around. He stuck his arm inside the cow almost up to his shoulder, placed his free hand on her backside, and worked on turning that baby calf. The cow moaned, and when she did Dr. Vargas whispered to her. He whispered that she would be all right. He nodded to himself. Yes, she would be fine.
Then Dr. Vargas lifted his chin and grinned at my father. “Here it comes.”
Dr. Vargas slowly pulled his arm out of the cow. His arm was smeared with blood, and the shirt sleeve he had pulled up to his elbow was stained. As his hand came out of the cow, his fingers were gripping two hooves.
I remember I stepped closer and watched as the skinny legs emerged, and then a nose, and finally, in a great rush, the whole heavy body wet with birth. Dr. Vargas caught the calf against his chest and laid it gently on the straw next to the cow. I stared at the shivering calf at my feet. Its eyes were open. It looked at me, and I stared back.
Dr. Vargas smiled at me, stretching his mouth so wide that his beard stretched as well and became even more pointed.
“Not bad for a night’s work, eh, Harry?” he said.
I heard my father behind me. “He’s never seen a calf being born before.”
We had three barns then. Later, we tore down the third because we had fewer cows, because the barn was too old. We expected to rebuild, but we didn’t have the latest equipment, the size, or the clout to convince the bank to give us a loan. We were a family business. We relied on our reputation, but our reputation wouldn’t pay the bills. The older I grew, the worse we did. We lost business. We scaled back. We got by.
I have lost track of time, and I search the pale yellow wall for a clock. A sketch of a barn and silo is on the hospital wall. I feel suddenly like I’m lost in a shopping mall, looking at a floor plan for the red triangle which will tell me where I am, orient me. But this picture doesn’t orient me. This picture tells me where I am not.
My father and I don’t speak any more. Whenever I call, my mother answers the phone. She apologizes for him. She asks if Megan and I are okay, listens to my yes, then quickly tells me that Mr. Hendrickson wants our cows. She still calls them our cows, as if I have a claim to them. I say nothing.
On rare occasions, she asks about my job. I lie. I don’t tell her that I miss hearing the cows lowing. I don’t explain how much I miss watching the sun rise behind the barns or eating family meals around our aged, wood table or drinking Dad’s bad coffee, thick as sludge. Some things cannot last; some things last too long.
I am tempted to ask one of the nurses what time it is, but then I think, I don’t really want to know.
My great-grandpa Patrik left Sweden when he was 18. He came here, to Wisconsin, and married an American girl. He was not interested in talking about Sweden; he was not interested in lutefisk and lefsa and Aquavit. He insisted on speaking English. Patrik said this country was paradise.
Now our family can no longer speak Swedish. Our linguistic skills have deteriorated with each generation. We are reduced to tapping glasses together and saying Skal. We are left with only pieces of my great-grandfather’s past, with only part of the truth, with only his surname, Kvist. What we have in common with Patrik is exactly what he intended.
Out here in this flat expanse of land, the wind gathers strength as it rolls across the prairie. Hits a man square in the face with cold and snow and sometimes ice. This is the same wind my ancestors endured; this is the wind that beat against their faces until their skin was red and raw and rugged. For years, we have worked the same land, and we are marked more by the wind than by our name. Today, our surname means nothing. We are no more Swedish than my friend Marty Feinstein. But we are farmers. We have the leathery faces, the chapped lips and hands, which are our scars.
Or, at least, I did have them. My skin is healing, now that I’m not blasted by wind or standing in a cold barn stamping my feet. Now I sit at a wooden desk. I swivel back and forth in my chair when I talk on the phone. I tell farmers about fertilizer. Sometimes I call home, just to hear them answer. They no longer answer as Kvist’s Dairy.
I used to ask my father about Sweden, ask him to tell me stories. When I was young, he’d indulge me. He’d tell me about his father, August, and his Uncle Peter, whom great-grandpa Patrik in his old age sometimes called Peir. They each had a farm, not too far from one another, but as far apart as possible. My father told me what he could, but he couldn’t name people in old family photographs. He couldn’t remember who played the accordion, though he suspected it was Uncle Peir. He couldn’t remember the names of Patrik’s parents, or whether or not Patrik’s father farmed.
Once when he was drunk, my father told me about Christmases at Uncle Peir’s farm, all three households gathering to cut the tree, then decorate the boughs. They sang Christmas carols, Uncle Peir always leading, always off-key, with my grandmother accompanying on the piano.
But this is as detailed as my father got.
I have stared at the pictures of these men, of August with his round glasses and curled mustache; of Uncle Peir with his sizable belly; of great-grandpa Patrik, who is squinting. I want to ask Patrik why he left us with nothing but photographs. Photographs and land in paradise.
I think, “You had too much confidence in this country, Great-Grandpa Patrik.” The night my father told me about the family Christmases at Uncle Peir’s, he slipped. Too much Aquavit. He leaned over the armrest of his chair, motioned me close with his hand. His breath was hot and wet against my cheek when he spoke:
“My father told me that he thought Grandpa Patrik left Vimmerby because he killed a man.”
Then he pushed me away, shook his head, said nothing for the rest of the evening. He fell asleep in his armchair, woke himself snoring, and lumbered off to bed. Sleep well, he muttered.
I don’t know if my father remembers his slip.
I’ll never know what he knows or doesn’t know.
At the opposite end of the hall, past the nurses’ station, there are vending machines. I walk the length of the hall, Megan’s slippers slapping on the tile. When I pass the nurses they lower their voices. I keep my head down. I don’t want to speak to them. I don’t want their sympathetic smiles.
The calf that was born became my training bull. My father lectured me on its development. As the calf grew, he explained to me what weight he needed it to be. This was not a bull my father planned to keep; he made this clear immediately. He said, “Don’t name the calf, Harry.” The bull was good stock, but we didn’t need another, and we could get a good price for him. And I didn’t cry when the bull was carted off with others we didn’t plan to keep. My father said, this is the life of a farmer, and I understood. I have always understood.
In early October, I walked downstairs from Megan’s and my upstairs bedroom, from the converted attic that was our apartment within the house, and told my father I was going to stop farming. We had had the first snow then, and the morning air was rejuvenating or maybe without the wind, the cold just didn’t bother me.
I said, “Dad, let’s go for a walk.”
But we didn’t. I got as far as the back steps and sat down. I couldn’t move. The sun was rising, and suddenly I didn’t want to walk. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to stay.
Dad met me on the steps with a freshly brewed cup of coffee.
He said, “This house is too old and too small.”
He was smoking a cigarette, rubbing his trim white beard. He wore his black rubber boots.
“Maybe we can fix up the house ourselves this spring.
I said, “Dad…”
He shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll manage.”
“Dad…”
Maybe the tone of my voice betrayed me, because his eyes immediately met mine. He stared at me, and I looked away. Away from the barns, away from the Swedish flag snapping against the flagpole beside the house, away from my father. Away from the land I had planned never to leave.
And then, as the sky settled into the washed-out gray of a winter sky, Dad asked: “What will you do?”
“I’ve lined up a job with Hansen’s Fertilizer in Eau Claire.”
“I see. You’ve been thinking about this for a while, then.”
I nodded.
“You should have told me earlier.” Then my father was silent. Suddenly he said: “I can’t do this alone.”
We have not spoken since.
These are the things my son will not know: the first dark morning of winter when stars freckle the sky as we head out to do chores; the chorus of cows lowing as they come back into the barn from pasture; the taste of milk fresh from the cow.
This is what kills me, deep down. Not that my childhood is slipping away, or my way of life. Not that the last tangible evidence of my past is up for sale. What kills me is that my son will never know what the seasons smell like on a farm. My son will not know in his bones how a farm works. My son will not understand me.
We are two families now, the family that farmed, and the family that will not.
The evening Megan and I left the farm, just as we were about to climb into my truck, my father pulled me aside. He said nothing, he simply tugged at my jacket sleeve. I walked with him down the driveway, waiting for him to speak. We walked in silence past the house, past the flagpole, down the driveway, to the first barn. He pulled open the door, and we walked by each cow. As we passed they turned their heads, glanced at us, then looked away. We walked out the door at the other end, then into the second barn, past the empty stalls, over the scrubbed floor. He stopped finally at the far end of the barn, and I understood what he could not say.
My father will wait up until the phone rings. He won’t go to bed. And perhaps tonight when I call, he’ll get on the phone. Perhaps tonight we’ll speak, if only of the baby.
I see the doctor. He’s standing at the nurses’ station, dressed in his blue paper gown, discussing something with the nurses. He turns in my direction, and I stand. And suddenly I’m walking as I imagine Mr. Hall is driving, as perhaps my father is driving, coming from the other direction, west to his grandchild, west to his son.
“Mr. Johnson, you have a son. He weighs three pounds. Amazingly, no defects.” The doctor is smiling at me. I can’t remember his name.
“Will he live?” My voice sounds hoarse.
The doctor pushes his glasses up on his nose. “I can’t say he’ll survive, but I have high hopes.”
I can live with high hopes. I notice there is blood on his blue paper gown, and I stare at him, waiting.
Finally I say, “How’s my wife?”
“She’s fine,” he says.
“I want to see them.”
I walk with him down the hall, past the nurses’ station, down another hall, and into a room. Megan is asleep, her head to one side. She is pale and drawn. I kiss her forehead, but she doesn’t open her eyes.
The doctor stands on the other side of her bed.
“She’s fine,” he repeats.
I hold her hand. I wipe her forehead though it is dry and cool. I listen to her breathe.
“Would you like to meet your son?”
I glance up at the doctor, at his round, flushed face, at his broad smile, at the wire glasses he wears.
The doctor calls for a nurse to guide me. She leads me to an elevator, and we ride up two floors. We walk through double doors, past another nurses’ station, past an old man whom someone has left sitting in the hallway in a wheelchair.
We stop in front of a large glass window that looks into a room full of babies, terrifyingly small babies. They have tubes sticking in their nostrils, tubes taped with white tape to their arms. I search the bassinets. I search among the faces of the babies for one who looks windblown.
I see my son. I know him instantly.
He is the one who is screaming.
“A kid like that has to live,” I tell the nurse, and I mean this as an order.
I have a son now, a three-pound son. A three-pound son with no name. But unlike the product of the only birth I’ve seen, this one will be named. This one I will keep.
The nurse stands beside me for a moment, then mutters something I can’t hear and leaves. I place my forehead against the glass and watch my son. I watch another nurse go over to him, put her hands in little gloves which are made to fit inside his incubator, adjust a tube which is in his arm, check the tube in his nose. He is too little for tubes. The tubes must be bigger than his veins.
I speak to him through the glass. I whisper: “Titta här, Smulan.”
My son stops screaming. I flatter myself that somehow he knows I am here.
I don’t know what to say to my son, so I begin to recite my memories. I begin by telling him about his grandfather and about the night his mother and I left the farm, left the house that had been my home for thirty years, and drove to Eau Claire. I tell him about the walk my father and I took, about the smell of the cows and the chill in the air that whispered of snow. I tell him that my father and I did not hug good-bye, that we stood facing each other, staring at each other, until he turned and walked back into the house.
I tell Smulan that as I watched my father walk away, I knew how I would remember my father: half eaten by dusk, halfway back to the house, half with me and half not. And I promise Smulan that I’ll ask for my father when I call home tonight; that when we are done speaking of him, I will ask my father what he really knows about great-grandpa Patrik.
**
Caitlin Hamilton Summie earned an MFA with Distinction from Colorado State University, and her short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Wisconsin Review, Puerto del Sol, Mud Season Review, Hypertext Magazine, South85 Journal, and Long Story, Short. Her first book, a short story collection called To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, was published in August by Fomite. Most recently her poetry was published in The Literary Nest. She spent many years in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado before settling with her family in Knoxville, Tennessee. She co-owns the book marketing firm, Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, founded in 2003.
**
Image: Flickr / Tim Green
The following excerpt from Nightwolf by Willie Davis is being reprinted with permission from 7.13 Books:
For a long time, I kept myself awake by writing personalized suicide notes for each of my friends. I’d found a website that compiled every recorded suicide note of the last ten years, and, not to sound conceited, I could do better. To be fair, a lot of the note-writers were teenagers, and some of the older ones had already taken enough sleeping pills to write like teenagers, but these were pretty pedestrian. They tried to fit the whole world into one paragraph, so all the sorrows clanged together. Also, seriously, every third letter used the phrase “ocean of sadness.”
Go small, I whispered into my computer, after reading an open-veiner yammer about “piles of endless infinity.” Talk about the disappointment gathering at the pit of your stomach every Sunday evening, so slight and predictable you can mistake it for hunger. Talk about waking up five minutes before the alarm clock rings. Talk about your cousin who loves telling people he loves jazz. I know pain, and I know escape, but I don’t know one infinity, let alone piles.
The hardest part of writing a bang-up suicide note for the living is guessing each person’s method of self-destruction. They each had their separate styles. Pill-poppers talked of betrayal, of friends who walked out, the beating of their own broken hearts. Shooters were brief—they didn’t care if anyone read it. The people who hanged themselves were the best because they had a sense of humor. They understood they were leaving a body behind, swinging like the world’s fattest wind-chime.
The only time I ever told any of my friends I was setting them up for posterity, I was on half-a-suicide mission myself. Meander Casey and I had been tasked with wandering through Irishtown and finding Ollie Hallahan’s runaway black mastiff. Somebody had purposefully taken the dog off the leash while Nunez was inside a party in Prospect Hill, the shanty-town peak overlooking the rest of the neighborhood. Nunez assumed Meander had done it, and he sent the two of us into the cold to try to retrieve the animal.
Ollie Nunez had been the monster at the end of our book for five years now. When Meander and I were kids, we worked for him, selling dime-bags and fake ID’s. Nunez’s sense of justice was as nuanced as a cymbal crash. If we didn’t hit our numbers, he’d take us to the shaded part of Orman Park and mete out Old Testament Style justice on our spines. These weren’t great working conditions, but I couldn’t file a complaint with the union. Meander, on the other hand, loved pain, and he’d sometimes give away nickel-bags, just to provoke a beating. Except now we were older, and even a professional crash-test dummy had to grow tired of bouncing his chin against the pavement.
“Did you write a suicide note for me?” Meander asked. “Who do I thank?”
“You don’t thank anyone,” I said. “That’s an Oscars speech.”
“But how do I kill myself?” Meander asked.
“Suicide by cop,” I said. “You find a cop with AIDS and blow him.”
We were leaving Irishtown and moving toward Garron Heights, a neighborhood we nicknamed Little Indianapolis because we assumed it had to be the most boring suburb in America.
“My suicide note would just be a long downward pointing arrow,” Meander said. “I’d buy a paint roller, hop out of a third story window, and hold the roller against the building.”
“That’s not an arrow, that’s a line,” I said.
“No, because before I jumped, I would have painted the arrow ends, so it would be pointing right to my body.” He grinned at me, waiting for congratulations. “Oh come on, that’s pretty good. Like as a statement on life.”
“If you do that, I’ll go the fourth floor and write, ‘This Man Has A Micro-Penis’ directly above the arrow.”
We stopped into a fire station to ask if anyone had seen a black mastiff, but no luck. We tried to talk to some kids playing touch football in the middle of the street, but they wouldn’t even stop their game to answer. At that point, we were pretty much out of ideas and had to go back to searching streets we’d already been down once.
“This dog is doomed,” I said. “If we haven’t found it yet, then it doesn’t want to be found.”
“I like how every mammal is born with the instinct to run away from Nunez,” Meander said. “Anything he doesn’t literally tie up leaves him.”
“Are you scared of him?” I said. “I know what we’re supposed to say, but seriously, are you scared?”
“Kind of,” he said. “As in, I’d prefer it if he wouldn’t work out his daddy issues on my nose, but I know he’s going to do it. I’m terrified, but terror gets boring after awhile. I expect him.”
“We aren’t meant to be scared anymore,” I said. “We act like kids. At some point, we’re supposed to join the rest of the world, right?”
“Do you want to know something funny?” Meander said. “Like, really crazy.”
I braced myself. “Is it that you untied the dog? Because I already kind of figured that you did.”
“I didn’t,” Meander said. “Why would I do something to a dog?”
“The working theory is that you’re an asshole,” I said. “And you did it for asshole reasons.”
“But I didn’t.” A soft breeze blew the smell of fish oil and curdled milk from a nearby dumpster. “What I was saying was that when I’m out like this, on the street searching, sometimes I wonder what it would be like if you found a baby. Like a dumpster baby you hear about on the news. I don’t wish for it exactly, but kind of.”
“Wow,” I said. “That is seriously so much worse. I really wish you’d untied the dog.”
“Not a dead one,” he said. “But you asked about growing up, and all I can think of is that’s the grown-up world. I keep expecting that world to uncover itself. Nunez scares me, but not near as much as I scare me. I have imagination.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah,” he said. “In fact, this one time, I imagined my hand was a vagina.”
I shook my head. “I never know when to believe you, and I don’t even know when I want to believe you.”
“You don’t know—” His eyes went wide and he stopped himself. “Jesus Christ.”
“I know Jesus,” I said. “Early thirties, nice guy, beard, God raped his mom.”
But Meander wasn’t listening. He stared glassy-eyed over my shoulder, and then he broke into a full on sprint. By the time I turned around, he was halfway up the street, hurtling toward a young boy on the corner playing with a big, black mastiff.
When I caught up to the two of them, Meander was out of breath, but he already had his hand on the dog’s collar. “Where’d you get this thing?” he said, over his own wheezing. “You just find it?”
“My dog,” the kid said. He couldn’t have been more than seven.
“Yeah, what’s his name?”
“I don’t know,” the kid said. “My brother found him.”
“Your brother’s a fucking thief,” Meander said. “Trying to get my balls busted for your brother. Tell him, if I ever meet him.” He took a breath. “Wait, what’s your brother? Ten? Tell him nothing will happen to him, but, you know, he’s a fucker.”
We walked back to Prospect Hill, taking turns hunching over and holding the dog’s collar. Meander found a torn t-shirt in a garbage can that we fashioned it into a leash. When we were four blocks away, Meander said he was going to leave and let me take credit for returning the dog. He didn’t want to see Nunez’s gratitude because it would confuse him.
“Maybe this is how it happens,” I said. “We grow and become something we weren’t this morning. We weren’t meant to find this dog, but we did. The world had its plan, but we disobeyed it. We make the world we want.”
“That or we robbed a kid of his dog, and a dog of his happiness just to help someone we don’t like.” He smiled at me and walked away, while the dog tugged me further in the opposite direction. Whenever Meander left my sight, I worried I’d never see him again.
Friends and victims, I thought, following the dog dragging me exactly where I did not want to go. I’d like to thank you all as there is no way I’d be able to complete this suicide without you. It is with great regret and joy that I, Meander Casey, have decided to light myself on fire in the city square. The world was taken from me in shades, like a too-wet watercolor smearing and lightening until the shape it held has melted. I offer my body as a tribute to this city and know that as the smoke worms its way into my lungs, I will have one last sliver of fresh air, and it will fit as tight and sharp into my mouth as a fishhook, making me remember the joys I now forfeit: the useless afternoon, the warm breeze, and the unending search for the mediocre miracle.
**
Willie Davis’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and storySouth. He is the winner of The Willesden Herald Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He received a Waiter Scholarship from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He teaches English at Kentucky State University.
**
Image: Flickr / cuio
I know I’m dreaming because everything that’s happening has already happened. Hell, even this dream has happened before and I can’t get away from it. My brain just reruns the last year of life like bad television.
I’m in the bathroom at home. White tile, white toilet, white sink, blue walls, and a copy of a lithograph by MC Escher above the towel bar. The blood stains on the grout have been bleached away.
The kitchen knife in my hand is from a set in one of those wood blocks.
Not the largest of the set, not the smallest. Not the bread knife.
Just one of the middle ones. A white handle the right size to fit in my palm.
Jagged sharp edge. Sharp sharp edge.
And I’m sitting on the white bathmat, thinking about how this is a generous thing to do, that Mom can be happier and Andrew won’t have to worry and Zoe won’t think that her little sister turned out to be a total slut. How Mom and Ken can stay married because I won’t be around to interfere with them. How Andrew and his wife can raise Emily without her ever having to know that her real mother was thirteen when she was born. And, maybe if there is a selfish part to it, then it will also make it so I don’t have to deal with Ken anymore. And also maybe Mom will quit with the questions – “who’s the father, Skyler?” and “tell me the truth, Skyler!” and “I want to talk to this boy’s parents, Skyler!”
So in my dream-memory, I’m sitting here on the white bathmat, the blood pools around me, thick and dark. It spreads into a cloud shape. And two flies are buzzing around on the ceiling looking down at me and one fly says to his fly friend, ‘That blood puddle looks like a bunny – see the ears and the cotton tail?’
But he’s wrong, because it looks like a face, see the eyes and nose and grimace and…wait.
There weren’t flies on the ceiling. Not the day when this happened outside of my dreams. It was just me in the bathroom and I had Mom’s knife and no one else was home and I put the bathmat on the floor and sat down.
Since it’s a dream, I rewind, redo, go back to the beginning, and I put down the bathmat and sit again and there isn’t any blood yet. And the dark blue walls look like the nighttime sky and the sink is just a marshmallow cloud and I’m still a lot younger than I will be.
Medium sized knife in hand, bare leg. I sit looking at the knife, at my right thigh, back and forth, knife, leg, knife leg, knifeleg. Then the tip of the knife is on the thigh-side of my knee bone, right where the long muscle begins, and it runs along the skin, up from the knee toward the edge of my shorts, through layers of skin and into the top of the muscle and the knife is sharp enough that the cut stings more than hurts.
A thin line of red comes up. Like the knife’s a magnet and the blood’s metal.
And the pain that was there when this happened outside of my dreams, the pain that made my teeth and jaw clench, the pain like when I spilled boiling hot noodles and water onto my foot when Ken and I made spaghetti one night, the pain that almost made me stop but I didn’t, that pain isn’t there. The benefit of dreams. Instead of pain it’s all soft fuzziness while blood pulses out and all over the white tiles and white bathmat and maybe the flies are back and the puddle does look like a rabbit, who am I to judge what a fly thinks.
Then I’m falling.
The fall happens slow.
The fall starts with my shoulders sliding along the white edge of the tub aimed to the left. Then the memory of the pain that’s not really there in a dream makes me pull up and slide to the right instead.
As I fall, I see two long blue paint drips hidden behind the toilet and a small peek of the old yellow paint below the vanity cupboard and Mom’s going to be pissed about that.
And I see the blood drops, one by one, as they slow motion drip out of my body, out of my thigh, onto the bathmat, onto the floor, through the floor, through the apartments below me, into the streets, into the water of the Willamette River even though we live twenty-three blocks uphill from the river.
My blood makes its way there and spoils the water so even the fish and the boats and the rocks and the sand are all ruined for everyone because of me.
And the flies talk about that too.
“It’s a pity about the water,” the fly who saw the rabbit says.
“It used to be so clean,” the other fly says.
“She’s ruined it for sure,” the first fly says.
“Oh look, the rabbit has a tail now,” the other fly says.
My right shoulder hits the floor. Cold ceramic tile.
My right arm catches under my body like it did when this all happened in the world outside of dreams, but this isn’t real and my arm goes through the floor just like the blood did, through the floor and dangling somewhere above the river like a strange moving piñata filled with unfriendly things like blood and knife and death and naughty finger gestures, nasty surprises for eager children because I’ve learned that childhood sometimes has nasty surprises.
My face lands last.
The tile floor cold and hard and white and smooth against my cheek.
The edges of the blood puddle spread toward me, dark and thick, and maybe it looks like a rabbit, maybe a face, maybe a big-ass blood clot that’s been pulled out of me.
The blood rabbitfaceclot comes for my face and my eyes and the thought of blood getting into my eyes is too disgusting to think about so I close my eyes and I wait to die.
Mom’s all stony silence while we drive. Not even the damned radio is on, and we get satellite radio so we have a ton of stations and it’s almost always on. I think I can actually hear Mom’s heartbeat it’s so quiet in this car.
And it’s not a long drive, I mean Troutdale is only about a half hour away from home, not cool enough to be PortlandLite, it’s more like PortlandRedneck.
I stare at the red Honda in front of us, the one Mom’s tailgating, and I wonder what the people in the Honda are doing and where they’re going. I’d look out the side window, but all I can see is the soundproof walls that edge the freeway and the swoop swoop of wall breaks is making me carsick like when I was a kid. Well, when I was a younger kid. I’m thirteen now. Thirteen on the outside, something like a million years old inside my head.
That’s the real problem. My head. My mother is driving me away from my home in downtown Portland and over to some loony bin for girls in the east-side suburbs because she thinks I’m crazy. Mom says it’s the most expensive private mental institute in Oregon as if that makes it better.
We turn off the freeway, and there’s new stuff to look at – a McDonald’s and hotels, gas stations and a half-dozen furniture stores. I guess Troutdale people like their furniture.
A few more turns and we’re sitting in front of this big building made of red bricks with a red brick driveway and a black wrought iron fence with spikes on the top. We’ve left Portland circa 2012 and driven into Suburbia USA circa 1950. The place to leave your crazy daughters, folks; away from the public at large; scary scary girls who slice up their skin and try to kill themselves and have to be locked away. Modern day Frankensteins.
And shit, “Mom is really going to leave me here,” that’s all I can think. What do I have to say? “I promise it’ll never happen again? Cross my heart, tried to die, stick a needle in my eye?”
But I won’t say any of those “I’m sorry” things. I mean, I said them before, or something like them at least, but I promised myself that I won’t say any of that ever ever ever again, because she’s not listening. Because I can talk and talk at her but it’s like she forgot English or like I’m talking at that stupid frequency only dogs can hear.
A long wet drip comes off my jaw and lands on my shirt. That’s when I realize I’m crying.
I wipe my eyes and suck in the snot and make myself stop it, except I’m scared and my leg jitters up and down. Mom’s got to see the leg, but she doesn’t say anything about it. And I can’t stay quiet any more. My voice can’t just be lost inside me, so I clear my throat, and this wussy-little-kid voice comes out.
“Mom, this is so fucking stupid,” I say, but I’m talking more to my hands on my lap than to her.
“Skyler, when you use that kind of language, it makes me feel disappointed,” Mom says. But she’s talking more to the windshield than to me.
She turns off the engine and we sit while the leftover energy in the car ticks away around us. The fine hairs on Mom’s arm right next to my fine hairs on the armrest, and I smell Mom’s perfume. She always wears Obsession and it smells like warm oranges and home. Her smooth dark-red hair hides part of her face from me, frames her green eyes and that small bump along the bridge of her nose. I don’t know how long we can sit here, but I know that I will never have my mother all to myself again, and the only thing I can think to say is please take me back home, but that’s stuck in my throat like I chewed up a whole bag of caramels at once and they turned into a solid mass of unswallowable shit.
Mom opens her car door just as the front door of the building opens and this tall black guy dressed in blue doctor-scrubs comes out, and while Mom opens the trunk and grabs the backpack with the little bit of stuff I’m allowed to have, the black guy opens my car door. I figure he opened the door for me so I won’t run off or something, like I could with my new bum leg. I consider trying to run for about a second, like it’s some mandatory crazy girl thing that I should do. Finally, I just unbuckle my seatbelt and get out.
The black guy has a nametag that says “Andre” then right under it “Orderly”. So I say, “Hi, Andre Orderly. I’m Sky Crazy-girl.”
Mom slams the trunk closed and gives me one of those looks that all Moms have, that they must have gone to Mom School to learn.
Andre Orderly just laughs and says, “Hi, Sky.”
I half expect Mom to say “don’t talk to strangers Skyler” because she still thinks I’m five, and I figure I’ll say something like “yeah well you’re leaving me with them so how strange can they be” but Mom says nothing so I say nothing and we follow Andre Orderly up to the front door.
My backpack with pairs of underwear and a brush goes into Andre Orderly’s hands and Mom steps up to the admittance window. I walk along the black and white checker board floor tiles, the childish rhyme of “step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back” sings in my head while I look around. While I avoid cracks.
The walls aren’t white. I mean, isn’t there a rule that hospital walls are supposed to be white? The walls are this tea-stained-beige color that’s probably supposed to be all calming, but I don’t think I calm that easily. And there are no pictures. Not even one that could show me who the Employee of the Month is supposed to be.
Across from the window Mom’s at is this metal plaque hung on the wall.
Dedicated this Twelfth day of July, 1962, in the Memory of St Ansbald
Abbot and Benedictine builder, Ansbald served as Abbot of St Hubert.
He then became Abbot of Prum, which he rebuilt in 882 through
petitions to Holy Roman Emperor Edward the Fat
“You reading about The Saint?”
I look up and Andre Orderly is back. I see the side of his head and notice that he has stripes shaved into the sideburn areas, and I want to ask why but I don’t.
“So, why this dude?” I ask. “What did he do?”
“He was a priest. The German family who founded this place honored him by naming the hospital after him.”
“So, this place’s called Ansbald’s?”
“Saint Ansbald’s,” he says. “At least by those of us who work here.”
“Other people don’t call it that?”
“Naw, the girls that live here, well, don’t tell anyone I told you,” and he darts his eyes back and forth like he’s worried someone will hear, even though no one else is around. He tilts his shave-striped ear to me and says, “They call it The Fat.”
**
Sally K Lehman is the author of the novels In The Fat which was on the Multnomah County Library list of Best Novels of 2016, The Unit – Room 154, and Living in the Second Tense. She is also the editor/co-editor of the anthologies War Stories 2016, War Stories 2017, and Bear the Pall, and is the Creative NonFiction Editor for the literary journal River & South. Her work can be found in several literary magazines including Lunch Ticket and The Coachella Review. Sally is a graduate of the Maslow Family Graduate in Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University, where she will be beginning an MFA program in June. She lives in the Portland, Oregon area.
**
Image: Flickr / Thomas Hawk
It’s July 2018 and our last update was almost a year ago, and we’re not proud of that fact. But during this time, both our host and our audio producer/composer have picked up and moved halfway (almost exactly) across the country, started new activities, and have been trying to wrestle with the political situation we all find ourselves in.
Art is, as always, a saving grace in troubled times as well as a resistance more powerful than it seems on the face of it. So we’d like to bring your attention to the marvelous work of our brilliant guests, and hope you keep engaging with literature as a space of empathy, protest, and more.
Below, you’ll find recent notices of our guests’ latest writing activities:
For the first three years he lived on Peachtree Trail, Eric had tried to have the ghost exorcised. Holy water, priests, rosaries, sacraments, crucifixes – that kind of thing. He was rather unimpressed by the results. Not only would the ghost return on the same day the next year, judging from some of the priests’ reactions he was fairly certain it was the first demonic entity most of them had actually seen.
So eventually Eric had decided to stop wasting the money. He wasn’t overly rich – he was a roofer, a profession and family business he had inherited from his late father. He wore flannel and pilling sweaters because they lasted and he enjoyed cutting coupons. Besides, he thought, it wasn’t as if the ghost was hurting anybody. You had to weigh the costs against the results when it came to things like this.
The ghost was only ever around once a year, December 3rd, and it was only ever in one room – the one room that was the kitchen, or the dining room, depending on whether you wanted to define it by the stove and refrigerator or by the scratched wooden floors and the dinner table. The ghost appeared as the sun went down – the darker it got, the clearer its outline was. It always appeared sitting at the head of the old pine dining table. It stared down at its hands, which rested on the table before it, holding something that looked like a square sort of locket. Its fingers traced the edges.
It had remarkably good posture, Eric had noted, considering it spent the entire night looking down. Its shoulders only stooped a little. He assumed it was because of the ghost’s military background. It wore its dress uniform – polished black boots, white gloves, buttoned dress coat complete with small metal scales on its shoulders. Its black felt hat, which had a small brass pin of an eagle coat of arms on the front, always appeared sitting in front of it on the table. Its high-collared coat and pressed pants were a translucent sky blue. It smelled vaguely of ozone.
Because the ghost appeared in the dead of winter, when the sun was setting around seven, it ended up horrifying anyone trying to have dinner. This was particularly the case if it happened to materialize in the same chair they were sitting in. But for the first six years it was just Eric in the house and so it really wasn’t an issue. He just marked the day on the calendar and was sure not to invite over any of his numerous elderly, heart-attack prone relatives. He also avoided anyone he didn’t want to have a deep theological discussions with. This was the majority of people, and so December 3rd remained, for the most part, uneventful. Sometimes he would wander downstairs to watch the ghost appear and have a beer, much like he assumed one would watch the northern lights.
The first year Alice moved in, however, she had declared that it was time for a change. The ghost was suffering, wasn’t he? Something must be done. She trooped down to the kitchen the night it was to appear and dragged Eric with her. He was perfectly content to spend the night in and share the apparition with her – he hadn’t shown the ghost to anyone since his brother Ace, who had since run off to be a missionary in Honduras — though he assured her that talking to it was no good.
The kitchen had brightened with Alice’s arrival. A red cotton tablecloth with embroidered magnolias on it that she and Eric had received as a wedding gift now covered the nicks and dents in the table, and, per usual, dishes that she hadn’t quite gotten around to washing sat in the sink. The ghost appeared on time, in its usual spot. Its hat appeared despite a glass of water in its way.
Alice’s intervention was solemn. She and Eric sat at the place across the table from the ghost, holding hands. There were long pauses between the questions she posed.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “What are you still doing here? Who is in the locket? What can we do for you? What do you need? What are you waiting for?”
She never got an answer but that didn’t seem to faze her. Instead, she simply decided to answer some of the general questions herself and go from there. She had work off on Tuesdays — more people can make it in to the optometrist on the weekends, and so it made sense for her to work Saturday instead – and so for the year after that, she spent the occasional afternoon at the library doing research. Every few Tuesdays she had some new development to share over dinner. They had both inferred that the ghost was a Union soldier, but did Eric know the sky blue, rather than Prussian blue, indicated that he was enlisted? Or that the pieces on his shoulders were called epaulets?
“The thing it has – it’s not a locket,” she said one week, brandishing a poorly maintained public library book at Eric while he stirred spaghetti sauce. “It’s a daguerreotype. It’s like an early photograph, but they had to make them on tin or silver surfaces, so people would keep them in ornamented cases.”
Eric did not really see the practicality of this distinction, told her so, and so they had argued good-naturedly about it while looking over the book of dashing young soldiers in the black-and-white photos that she had brought home.
That year the ghost’s appearance became more like an interrogation. Alice had notes prepared. Why was a Union Soldier here in Georgia? Was he killed there? Was he from there? Who had he fought under? Was it General Sherman? Had he been part of the March to the Sea? The house hadn’t been built until 1920 – if the war ended in 1865, why here? Soldiers usually gave daguerreotypes to their girlfriends – why did he have one? Was it of his girlfriend? His wife? Another soldier? Him?
Eric felt a little bad for the ghost, but it never responded, so he guessed it didn’t really matter one way or the other. Eventually Alice ran out of questions. When she finished, she had pursed her lip and stared at her papers. She sat there looking for something she had missed until Eric convinced her it was time to go to bed. They could try again later.
Alice had continued to research the Civil War – she would get a book about it every year from her dad for Christmas, who was confused but utterly pleased by her newfound interest in history – but she never found anything directly related to their ghost.
She wandered downstairs to see the ghost, alone this time, two years after the interrogation. She wanted to ask it if it knew its side had won the war, she had told Eric, and it wouldn’t take long. She had sat down next to it at the table and told it that it was part of the reason her great-grandmother was freed. She told it that it had done a good thing, a horrible, necessary, inevitable thing, and thanked it for its sacrifice. Nothing happened, so after a bit she wandered back upstairs again, and she and Eric watched a soap opera they secretly liked but said they only watched to appease his mother, complained about the plot, and went to bed.
Eric was the one who had confronted the ghost alone the next year. The kitchen cabinets, courtesy of Eric’s enthusiastic mother and aunts, now had what looked like zip ties on their handles to keep them closed in case of ground-level interference. Formula was ready, tucked away inside of them. A box of bottles loomed, unopened but ready, on top of the refrigerator. Alice was upstairs, already asleep. The pregnancy had hit her hard.
Eric cleared his throat and sat down across the table from the ghost.
“Look here,” he said diplomatically, “I know we had some trouble at the beginning, but since then all I’ve tried to do was help you out. I really haven’t minded you staying. But I’m about to have a family start, and I’m going to need you to move on. You’ve had your time. You’ve had more than your time, and now you’re trespassing on private property.”
The ghost remained silent.
“You need to pull yourself together,” Eric said. He was having a difficult time taking the stand he had wanted to. He had no idea how to threaten a ghost. “You should try to get to the afterlife – it will be so much better for us and for you if you were there.”
He stared the ghost down for a while, but it never looked up. It’s finger slowly traced the edges of the picture. Its image always wavered a bit – like it was at the bottom of a pool of water – and Eric found this unpleasantly distracting.
“You could at least do us the decency of trying.” Eric said. He stood up — the chair jolted back with a screech as he did — and he left.
Since the ghost refused to leave, Eric and Alice vowed to. They had talked it over and decided that a haunted house was no place for a child. But they didn’t really want to go – Eric’s whole extended family lived nearby, and they wanted their little girl to grow up around cousins and tire swings. And Alice loved her coworkers and the neighborhood park. So they compromised. If the ghost was only there once a year, they would leave once a year.
They bought a timeshare in the Appalachians, though everyone they knew told them it was a horrible investment, and then pretended they could never get it for the holiday season – not really a stretch, they couldn’t have if they tried — and they always reserved it for the day the ghost was going to appear a year in advance. It became Eric’s favorite time of year. They would go hiking through evergreens and come home to a fireplace, hot chocolate, cards, and Alice’s annual jigsaw puzzle. When she was little, Josephine thought it was funny to hide the last piece. When she was older, she’d buy them harder and harder puzzles. She and her mother liked the challenge. Alice always insisted they go ice skating — she could float on skates — and Eric always fell down.
And so for a long time the ghost was alone. Over the years Josephine’s multicolored magnetic alphabet kit had first spelled out words like CAT on the fridge, and then transitioned into being used to hold up scribbles, and then a multitude of drawings of unicorns, and finally particularly good test grades and her parent’s favorites of her sketches. Eventually Eric and Alice got around to taking down the wallpaper. They painted the kitchen a toasted marshmallow color instead. On the counter sat a new coffee maker, to which Alice had become extremely attached, and the pantry was usually filled up with jams Eric and Josephine had made together. His mother had taught them how before she passed.
The ghost didn’t ever move, so perhaps it didn’t care.
The one year Alice and Eric couldn’t get the timeshare they had spent a good two weeks debating whether or not to tell Josephine about the ghost. She was old enough then, almost off to college. But they had decided against it. It was just a conversation they didn’t want to have. It would bring up questions that they felt unqualified to answer, and yet they didn’t quite feel like she was old enough that they could admit that. It was the frustration of that year, what with scheduling a visit to Alice’s parent’s house and sleeping on the floor and coming up with excuses as to why they had to be out of town on that particular day – termites – that caused Eric and Alice to make a pact that neither one would come back as a ghost.
It had been Eric’s idea, and it was an offhanded one he had said mostly as a joke while he held his wife’s hand and they whispered in the dark on an uncomfortable air mattress in her parent’s basement.
It was an agreement he would regret when a car slammed into Alice’s Ford early April. It was her fault – she had cut someone off while turning left across traffic. She had been running late, like she always was. She had always been an impatient driver.
Eric didn’t quite believe it had really happened, even through the wake and funeral, until about mid-May, when he started sobbing while he was on the phone with the insurance company. The employee on the other end of the line, who had been assuring him that the wreck was covered under their accident-forgiveness policy, made his awkward excuses and hung up.
That year was a long year, though nothing of consequence happened.
The ghost appeared that year as well, but there was still no one there to see him. Eric knew she wouldn’t be there with him. So he and Josephine had gone to the mountains instead. They went skating together, and Eric had watched Josephine. She’d grown into grace. She had on a pink yarn hat her mother had (poorly) knitted her, and her hair poofed out around the edges in a little halo. It framed her face. The longer she did laps around the rink the more Eric felt like he had released a sigh he had been holding onto.
The next year had been Josephine’s first semester at college – she was studying art, and was utterly confident in the job opportunities that would provide – and Eric visited her early December in Chicago every year of her undergrad. In the years after he came to visit the little apartment she shared with the young man she eventually married, and then their first house. He didn’t have to leave the ghost – there was no child at home to protect anymore – but he wanted to. He didn’t like to look at him anymore. He visited his daughter even more when his first grandbaby, who was called Phillip, was born. He finally understood why his mother had been so enthusiastic about baby-proofing his kitchen.
It wasn’t until Phillip was eight (and his two siblings were five and three) that Eric couldn’t visit on December 3rd. Phillip had a soccer tournament, and Josephine was helping organize that on top of her work at the gallery, where they were having a large auction the same week. She had been apologetic, but firm. Eric could visit over Christmas this year. She’d never understood why he chose such an odd time of year to vacation anyway, though she said she’d enjoyed the tradition while it lasted.
Eric visited a few more times on the third, but after that year it was never a staple. Christmas was just easier. And so Eric spent those evenings with the ghost. Not at first – at first Eric avoided him. But it was just too much trouble – to avoid seeing him completely Eric either had to go to bed far too early or stay away all night. So he gave up — he refused to change his plans for something so silly. He made dinner as he always did, and he ate dinner as he always did, and if the ghost was there, well, then a ghost was there.
Besides, Eric didn’t have many dinner guests, and this visitor would never cancel.
So, as was the norm, a few years later, Eric stayed home. He treated the day like he would any other day. He went to a men’s breakfast and fellowship event at the church that morning. That afternoon he went by the office to give advice and do what he could, though he’d long since passed his business onto his nephew. And then, when evening came, after he’d fixed and eaten a bowl of soup, the ghost appeared sitting at the table.
Eric fumbled around the kitchen as the he materialized. He washed his dish and spoon as the ghost stared down at the case that held the picture in his hands. Occasionally he slid his nail between the two metal sides, as if he would flip open the case and look inside, but he always thought better of it and kept it closed. The ghost’s epaulets and buttons were just as polished as the first day Eric had seen him. It struck Eric suddenly that he hadn’t aged. He was so young — maybe eighteen.
Eric glanced up the stairs, where the television was waiting. Then he looked again at the ghost. He had nowhere to go. He made some tea and sat down. His knees popped as he did.
They communed there in silence, and Eric sipped his tea.
He thought back over his day at first – what he should have done with this or that customer’s call, what more he could volunteer for at the church, what more he could volunteer for at the family business. Maybe they could hire him officially as part-time help. Hell, he’d helped build that business. He’d just order them to hire him as part-time help….
His mind then wandered north. He wondered if Phillip, now on junior varsity, would still play soccer when he got older, the same way Josephine had always been an artist. He wondered how hard it was to make it big in that sport. Eric had no idea — he’d always followed football. He thought about what puzzle he wanted to bring for Christmas, and then ice skating, and deliberated whether or not his littlest granddaughter was old enough to take. For some reason remembering the sound of skates scratching on ice reminded him of the voice of the boy on the other end of the telephone that had been trying to inform him about accident-forgiveness policies. His herbal tea now seemed to reminiscent of the smell of the lavender-oatmeal soap Alice had loved and he put it down.
He glanced at the ghost and wondered what had happened to Alice’s collection of history books about the Civil War. One called Brother against Brother, which was filled with stories about families separated and caught on opposite sides of the conflict, had been her favorite. She was convinced their ghost was in there, somewhere. It was because of the feel the book had given her, she had said, she just couldn’t articulate how the two were connected.
Eric knew now, though, what she had been trying to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.
The ghost stiffened.
“I’m sorry for everything that’s happened to you,” Eric concluded, after a bit. “I can see they were important to you,” he indicated the daguerreotype, “and it must have been hard to die so young.”
The ghost looked up slowly and met Eric’s eyes. He nodded in what Eric assumed was a sort of thank you.
Eric nodded back, went upstairs, and went to bed.
**
Katie Sanders grew up in a military family – she’s lived in Cairo, D.C., and she graduated high school in Lima, Peru. She moved to North Carolina for university, and to appease the travel bug has driven all over the state in her Volkswagen beetle.
A recent graduate of UNCG with a master’s of genetic counseling, Katie has mostly non-fiction writing experience. She’s been a reporter and editor for the NC State school newspaper, the Technician – her favorite interviews were probably either with the world-champion lumberjack or with the artists that created the public art exhibit “Cow Parade.” She’s also helped author a scientific paper discussing an experimental perfluorocarbon and she’ working on submitting her graduate school research. This is her first available work of fiction.