Goodbye (for now)
Welcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingWelcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingThe following excerpt from Zigzags by Kamala Puligandla is published with permission from Not a Cult Press. The Obvious Combination of Beef Stew and American Cheese Richard saw himself in me since the day we met, which was something I had never been able to shake.
Continue ReadingThe below excerpt is from Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel © 2020 Ava Homa. Published May 12, 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS.
Continue ReadingThe following is excerpted from Brad Fox’s To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020) and is reprinted here with permission. To Remain Nameless –
Continue ReadingThe following story from How to Walk On Water and Other Stories by Rachel Swearingen is reprinted with permission from New American Press.
Continue Reading(1932)
In his whole nine years, Lenny can’t remember feeling this mixed-up, even though he hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s sitting next to his father in the synagogue, listening as the congregation recites the special Rosh Hashanah prayer: Avinu Malkenu, our Father, our King, we have sinned before You. The adults around him chant the haunting, powerful melody, first in a murmur, then in a louder, unified plea for God to be gracious. If God is so great, Lenny wants to know, why—this year of all years, when his favorite team is playing—does the Jewish New Year fall on the same days as the World Series? The last time the Yanks were in the Series Lenny had been too young to appreciate it. Later, after the festive lunch and the relatives have gone home, Lenny plans to slip out of the house and walk over to the Barnum Avenue drugstore, where the neighborhood men will be listening to today’s game. He’s not usually a sneaky boy, and he hopes God will forgive him this once.
Inside the synagogue, the service drags on, and Lenny is jealous of his younger brother Jeremiah who, at six, is allowed to play outside. Lenny isn’t thinking about the prayers. His mind is on hits, runs, and strikeouts. The sweet crack of the bat connecting with the ball. The thunder of the crowd pulsing through the static of the radio. He tugs on his father’s suit jacket and asks if he can go outside for a bit, but, no, he’s benched: the elder Gerstler shushes him and tells him he must stay in for longer.
He shifts in his seat, daydreaming about the moment later today when the Yankees will sweep the Series. He’s sure of it. Despite the prohibition of turning the radio on during Rosh Hashanah, he’s learned from a non-Jewish neighbor that the Yanks beat the Cubs in yesterday’s game, bringing the series to 3-0. He felt the agony of missing the game but was triumphant at the news. Today, even though he knows he should be praying for forgiveness and redemption, he’s beseeching God for a Yankees win.
“Give heed to the clarion call of the shofar,” the Rabbi bellows for the third time today. Some of the adults are bored; he can hear murmuring in the rows behind. Finally, towards the end of the service, his father relents and allows Lenny to go out and play.
—
Lenny makes his way to the empty lot next door, where other boys with fathers who are not as strict are playing: stickball for the older boys and marbles for the younger. His brother is kneeling in the dust, counting his pile of coveted bluish-green corkscrew marbles, his white holiday shirt and navy knickers smeared with dirt. Lenny smiles, thinking of his plan. After lunch, he’s going to volunteer to look after Jeremiah so his parents can rest, but then they’ll sneak to the drugstore to catch the game. He’s even saved a Bit-O-Honey and a peanut chew, one to get Jeremiah out of the house and the other in exchange for a promise not to tell. The kid might not know much about baseball, at least not yet, but he’ll do anything for candy. It’s surefire.
Lenny leans against the wall and turns his attention to the stickball players, wishing they’d let him play and dreaming of being a better hitter. The boys are focused on their own game—arguing over who’s batting next, yelling at the boy who just struck out—but Lenny wants to talk about the Series. “A better lineup, the Yanks couldn’t have,” he says, rattling off the batting order. “Lou Gehrig, batting fourth for the grand slam.” He mimics an announcer’s voice and assumes Gehrig’s slugging stance. When no one picks up the conversation, he starts reciting batting averages for the Yankees lineup.
“Aren’t you a real abercrombie?” says an older kid as he gets up to bat.
Lenny shrugs; it’s not the first time he’s been called a know-it-all. One of his father’s friends calls him “Bridgeport’s number-one baseball whiz,” a title he wears proudly. He and Jonny Allen, the rookie pitcher, share a birthday. But the other boys don’t seem interested in statistics, so after a bit Lenny wanders back over to the marble game, just in time to see Jeremiah flick a reddish-blue marble into the circle for a win. Secretly, he’s looking forward to their afternoon together. He would like to tell Jeremiah about the plan, but he’s afraid he’ll tell Mother and Papa by accident. He knows it will work: with Johnny Allen as the starting pitcher, the Yanks can’t lose.
—
The green clock on the kitchen wall reads 3:08 p.m. by the time lunch is over and the last relative says goodbye. Lenny watches his mother wash the dishes and his father dry and stack them in the cabinet. He is trying not to appear too anxious, but the game was scheduled to begin at 2:30 New York time. He’d known he would miss the first inning or two, but now he is getting nervous. His parents are slow in washing and drying. Instead, they gossip about their relatives: Cousin Mendy, out of a job for three months, is having a hard time feeding his family. Sussie has been forced to take in needle and button work for nine cents an hour, instead of having a better-paying factory job that might pay double.
Papa says, “We’re lucky that selling eggs and butter will never go out of business.” He hopes to have his own store one day.
When the dishes are done, Lenny jumps out of the chair, eager to volunteer to watch Jeremiah. But his mother beats him to it. “Play quietly in the den,” she instructs, “so we can rest. If Jeremiah gets too jumpy, take him over to the park on Noble Avenue. But no further than that.” She is always cautioning him not to wander down East Main Street, where the tramps like to gather.
Lenny nods, trying to hide his smile. The park on Noble Avenue is three long blocks away from the pharmacy on Barnum Avenue, though he knows that to go further and get caught would mean a heavy punishment, like no baseball ever.
“What a responsible boy you’re becoming,” his father says. “A better son, I couldn’t ask.”
His mother leans over and kisses his forehead and calls to Jeremiah to mind his big brother. Lenny waits until his parents have climbed the stairs to their bedroom and shut the door. If they walk fast enough, they might make it by the fourth inning.
Lenny finds Jeremiah on the front porch playing with his marbles. With the Bit-O-Honey, he lures his brother down the steps, and onto the sidewalk, heading for Barnum Avenue. “Come!” he tells him. “We’re going on an adventure.” He doesn’t say where they are going, or how they’re about to be part of Yankee history. To tell him the truth would only raise questions, like why they can’t just turn on their own Philco, Model #20.
As they cross over East Main, still two blocks from the pharmacy, Lenny takes Jeremiah’s hand. They pass hobos sitting under the awnings of closed shops. One tramp is curled in an entryway and looks dead, but then Lenny notices that the man’s brown hat covering his face is rising and falling as he snores.
“Look over there.” Lenny points across the street to divert Jeremiah’s attention, but his vision is drawn to a row of beggars slumped against the ledge of the church yard. The line extends all the way around to the back of the building. The men wear hats of all shapes and sizes, and some hold walking sticks. Their jackets are too tight, the sleeves torn, with filthy white shirts sticking out.
Despite Lenny’s efforts to shield him, Jeremiah notices, and asks, “Why are their clothes so dirty? What are they doing?”
“They’re waiting to get food, I think. Don’t worry about them. We don’t go there anyway, so mind your own business.” Lenny tightens his grip on Jeremiah’s hand.
“Ow! Let go of me,” Jeremiah whines.
“Hurry up then.”
They pick up the pace, passing Pearl’s Bakery and Meyerson the fishmonger. Lenny worries he’s missed the whole game. Surely he would’ve heard cheers if it was over?
“Where are we going?”
“You remember what I told you about the Yankees, right?”
Jeremiah looks up at him with wide eyes, a dribble of candy juice sliding down his chin. “Uh-huh.”
“Today we’re going to sweep the Series. Won’t that be grand?”
“Sure.” Jeremiah pulls his gray marble bag out of his pocket. “Can we play marbles when we get there?”
“Later!” The drugstore in view, he sees a thick cluster of men and boys congregating at the entrance. He starts to run, begging Jeremiah to keep up. “Come on, will you!”
Motioning for Jeremiah to sit on the bench just outside the store, Lenny pushes his head into the crowd, listening for some tidbit, some stat, some crack of the bat, to let him know his team is winning. Instead he hears a snigger, tongues clucking. Babe Ruth has just struck out. Before he can ask the score, he hears the official, tinny voice of the announcer coming over the radio: Ground ball by Gehrig. . .and the Cubs retire the Yanks with an easy out at first. Another disappointing inning for the Bronx Bombers. And after a pause: If you’re just tuning in, the Chicago Cubs are up, 4-3 at the bottom of the fourth.
Lenny can hardly believe his ears. “What!” His voice rattles. “How’s that possible?”
“Where you been, kid?” The fellow standing next to him frowns. “That damn rookie Allen gave up four runs in the first inning!”
A wave of disappointment washes over Lenny, but he tries to stay hopeful. They can still turn it around, he tells himself, and in the top of the sixth inning the Yankees pull ahead, only to have the Cubs catch up almost immediately. Every time a Chicago player is up at bat Lenny feels like he’s holding his breath; judging by the strained looks on the faces of the other boys and men, they are too. Once in a while, Lenny pulls his head from the crowd to look for his brother, and each time he sees him waiting on the designated bench. Good. Jeremiah catches his eye and points at the soda fountain through the window, to which Lenny shakes his head, a firm no. Lenny didn’t bring any money—their parents would never allow them to spend money on Rosh Hashanah, certainly not to buy such a luxury. He ignores his brother and goes back to listening to the game.
At long last, the Yankees take a strong lead in the seventh inning, scoring four runs off of back-to-back singles by Combs, Sewell, and Ruth. The crowd erupts with cheers, but Lenny doesn’t have much time to celebrate, because Jeremiah is tugging on his sleeve and asking, “Is it over yet?” For reasons Lenny cannot understand, Jeremiah has not caught on to the enthusiasm or the team spirit surging through the store.
“No, ding-bat! It’s only the seventh inning! How many innings are there in a baseball game?”
“Nine.” Jeremiah looks down at his feet. “I want to go home.”
Lenny fishes out the other piece of peanut chew, but it doesn’t placate him this time. “Don’t you want to listen? It’s the World Series, game four, only the most important game of the year!”
Jeremiah frowns. “You said we were gonna play marbles.” He holds up his bag.
“Later, I said. Not in the middle of the game, for Pete’s sake!” Lenny’s attention wavers as the glorious sound of the ball hitting the bat, followed by the crowd cheering, pulls him back to the game. “Just go back and sit on the bench. We’ll go when it’s over!”
Lenny half watches his brother sulk off, but he doesn’t care. The Cubs have the bases loaded now, bottom of the eighth. Lenny bows his head and scrunches his eyes shut, hoping for easy outs, and again his prayers are rewarded. By the time the ninth inning draws to a close, Lenny’s heroes have scored four more runs. The radio announcer’s glorious voice makes the triumph complete. Once again, ladies and gents, the New York Yankees are the world champions! Final score: 13-6. Joe McCarthy can be proud of his team today—what a comeback for the Yankees!
A shout of joy erupts from the drugstore crowd. Lenny savors this moment of pure happiness and watches the men and boys around him hugging each other, whether they’re strangers or not. “Babe! Lou! Champions!” he screams for all he’s worth.
Someone starts singing the words, “Take me out to the ballgame.” Lenny and the others join in.
“For its one, two, three strikes you’re out, at the old—ball—game. . .”
For a moment, Lenny thinks back to the unified voices in the synagogue this morning, but he finds this song more beautiful, more uplifting. Even some of the poor hobos from East Main, with holes in their shoes and sooty faces, have joined the crowd and gather to sing along.
As the crowd starts to break up and head in different directions, Lenny pushes his way to the bench where Jeremiah is waiting—only his brother isn’t there. He scans the immediate area, but doesn’t see him; the flow of bodies moving and expanding around him makes it difficult to find a small boy.
“It was Lazzeri’s two home runs that sealed the game,” someone shouts in Lenny’s face. He feels a surge of excitement, but the fear of losing his brother weighs him down, keeps him from enjoying the victory.
“Jeremiah!” he starts shouting. There are too many men walking on the sidewalk. He shouts louder now. “Jeremiah Gerstler!”
When his brother doesn’t appear, panic takes over, his heart frantic in his chest. Lenny searches the faces going past him, and he tries to stop each one, asking if they’ve seen a six-year-old boy.
A few kind men stop to hear Lenny out. “Haven’t seen him. Good luck.”
“What’s he look like?” asks another.
“Brown curly hair, white shirt, navy knickers. Holding a bag of marbles.”
“Sorry kiddo,” he says. “Gotta be careful with kids these days. Some sick people out there. My wife cried for a week over the poor Lindbergh baby.”
At this, Lenny’s eyes bulge with fright and his body goes cold with dread. He runs back and forth in front of the pharmacy, standing on the bench to see over the crowd. He begins to contemplate the unthinkable: how can he go home and face his parents?
The panic creeps down from his throat to his belly and settles like a heavy stone. If God doesn’t strike him down for this, Mother and Papa will. Atta boy, Lenny. Such a good son, we couldn’t ask. He’ll never hear his parents utter those sweet words again, and only now does it dawn on him how much he likes to hear them.
Lenny circles the drugstore, canvassing the area in all directions, his eyes scanning the stoops of the shops and the dark corners under the awnings. He prays, this time not to the god of baseball but to the Almighty Himself, promising that if Jeremiah is found, he will never again break the rules of the holiday. Never go behind his parents’ backs. He even promises to sit in shul for the whole service, every Shabbos.
—
At five-thirty, the drugstore owner shoos out the last men and starts to close up for the night, pulling down the shades and locking the cash register. Lenny sits on the bench where he last saw Jeremiah, shivering in the early October chill. The crowd has dispersed, and Lenny is hoping to see Jeremiah come around a corner. He prays his parents haven’t left the bedroom and discovered them missing. Maybe they wouldn’t worry at first, thinking the boys are at the park. But as evening comes, his mother would expect them home. She’d pace the kitchen, worried. Lenny’s imagination turns to the Hardy Boys books he’s so fond of, with their tales of little boys being tricked and kidnapped. He never thought such a thing could be possible in Bridgeport.
Lenny starts to sob, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his good Rosh Hashanah shirt. His arms prickle with a cold sweat, his chest feels heavy. Despite the sense of doom coursing through his veins, he starts down the street towards home.
“You there,” comes a voice from the manicured lawn of the church they’d passed on their way. The line of hobos has disappeared. “Come with me.” The man is slight, his beard the color of the grimy yellow chicken fat Lenny’s mother skims from the top of the soup. The tramp takes Lenny by the arm, startling him.
“Let go of me, mister!” He tries to pull away, but the man’s grip is too strong.
“I seen you up the road, and when I came back here, I got to thinking. . .” His abductor leads him through the side entrance of the church.
This is his punishment, Lenny thinks. In a flash he sees the bones of tricked, kidnapped boys. He’s just about to call for help when he sees a sign over the door:
Judge not, and you shall not be judged.
Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven.
“Oh, I’m not. . .I’m not a Christian,” Lenny stammers. “My mother is expecting me.”
The man grunts and yanks him inside, where he comes face to face with a big cross hanging on a wall. Next to it is a painting of a woman with her arms spread, her head encircled by a glowing light. He’s never been inside a church before and he begins sniveling again, his mind repeating one phrase over and over: Mother! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! He’s dimly aware of men’s voices coming from another room. His body feels rigid but the man jerks him forward, through another doorway.
The bright lights stun Lenny into silence. As his eyes adjust, he sees that he is in an assembly hall, with five long tables stretching the length of the room. Tramps sit at the tables, the remnants of leftover potatoes and stew on their plates and gravy stains on the tablecloths. A half-dozen church volunteers serve the men small pieces of chocolate cake and bruised yellow apples.
The man eases his grasp and points to a curly-haired boy sitting at the fourth table, his white shirt covered in greasy drippings.
“Len!” Jeremiah calls and waves. “Over here!”
It takes a few seconds for Lenny to understand. He is breathless by the time he reaches Jeremiah. “Oh, God. Oh, thank God. You’re okay.” His eyes water with relief, and he stops to wipe his nose. “How did you get here?”
Jeremiah shrugs, unaffected by Lenny’s urgency. “I was hungry and I couldn’t find you, so I walked back here. You said they were giving out food, remember?”
“And boy, can he eat,” one of the men at the table says, chuckling.
Lenny sees a few bites of stew on Jeremiah’s plate, and his eyes widen in shock; despite everything he’s done today, he is appalled that his brother has eaten treif. Doesn’t he know anything?
“He’s an ace at marbles,” another one of the tramps chimes in.
A volunteer approaches with several pieces of cake. Jeremiah is first to take one, but Lenny stops him. “We have to go now.”
The man who grabbed him off the street says, “Sit down; what’s the rush?” He reaches out with a grubby hand and Lenny takes two steps backward.
Lenny eyes Jeremiah, imploring him to get out of his seat and say goodbye. “We really have to go.” When he makes no move to leave, Lenny takes Jeremiah by the hand and pulls him out of his chair. “We have to go,” he hisses again.
“Come back and visit us any time, pal,” a man missing two front teeth says to Jeremiah.
“So long, fellas.” Jeremiah waves goodbye. They muss his hair as he passes, holding out their hands for him to give high-fives.
Jeremiah flashes a smile, and Lenny leads him toward the side door. They emerge into the dusky evening. The intermittent twittering of crickets follows them as they walk towards home. He’s amazed at his brother for being so at ease with these men.
Lenny throws his arm around Jeremiah’s shoulder. He has no words to express his deep relief. “I guess you weren’t scared?” he asks, realizing he had come very close to striking out today, but was granted a last-minute save by the most unlikely group of relief pitchers.
Jeremiah doesn’t answer, his nonchalance suggesting that he’s not upset with Lenny. “They were nice. You said we were going to have an adventure.”
An adventure was not quite how Lenny would’ve put it, but if that’s what the kid wanted to think, it was swell by him. His mind spins. So many things have changed in the space of a few hours: dark possibilities he didn’t even know existed, and even a newfound goodwill towards the beggars of East Main. “Stay away from those good-for-nothings,” he remembers his father once saying. But maybe Abe was wrong about some things. Lenny walks a bit taller, feeling more mature, like a rookie who’s gotten a taste of experience from the big leagues.
They are nearly home, the houses lit up with kerosene lamps, their soft glow illuminating the lilac bushes decorating the neighborhood yards. Lenny would have some explaining to do. He wasn’t a good liar, and besides, Jeremiah could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut. As it is, on the short walk home, his brother has already mentioned—twice—that the fellas invited him back to play marbles, and that he’d sure like to.
Inside, Mother and Papa sit at the kitchen table playing cards, waiting for them. They seem relieved, but not overly worried. “Were you playing in the park? Did you lose track of the time?”
Lenny can’t help himself; he starts to cry. He wishes he could be braver.
“What is it, Len?” His mother wraps him in an embrace. Faint aromas of chicken soup, carrot tsimmes, and apple cake—foods for a sweet new year—linger in her dress.
He buries his head in his mother’s bosom.
“Speak up.”
When Lenny stops his tears, he’ll tell them everything. He’ll tell them how he prayed for the wrong things, and that the tramps aren’t such bad people. He’ll explain and explain until they can find a way to forgive him. He also has his promises to keep, and many games of marbles with Jeremiah to make up. He’ll even try to save his money and buy his brother a present, maybe the set of Akro sparkler marbles he’s been asking for. Maybe then God would forgive him, too. And maybe if they aren’t too mad, he’ll see if Papa can spare some butter and eggs, and if Mother can bake a cake to take to the hobos. It’s a new year, after all.
** Julie Zuckerman’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The SFWP Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Sixfold, Crab Orchard Review, Ellipsis, The Coil, and others. The Book of Jeremiah, her debut novel-in-stories, was the runner-up in the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and is coming out May 3. A native of Connecticut, she resides in Modiin, Israel, with her husband and four children. Learn more at her website.An earlier version of this story by Joe Sacksteder was the 2013 Winner of the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Fiction Contest (judged by Caitlin Horrocks) and appeared in Passages North. The story in its current form appears in the short story collection Make/Shift and has been reprinted here with permission from Sarabande Books.
Josh Danfoss lost control of the Audi and was knocked unconscious before the car stopped rolling and started burning.
When Beth told her husband she wanted to start taking piano lessons, he led her to the upright piano in their living room, placed her left hand on the keys, and said that now the hard part was over.
For her first recital, she decided on a piece that Larry had always called the goblin song, a short intermezzo by Brahms.
Dolce, she thought as she reached a repeat sign near the end of the piece that sent her back to the first page. Dolce as skid marks—spiked—somersault.
* * *
Josh Danfoss lost control of the Audi and was probably knocked unconscious before the car stopped rolling and started burning. Beth placed his copy of Brahms’s Klavierstücke at his roadside memorial, where you could still see the skid marks, and where broken fence posts still spiked the sky, and where pieces of the somersaulted Audi still littered the furrowed corduroy plot of lifeless spring farmland. She drove by every so often to watch the sun bleach the distinctive azure cover, rain and time turn the book and photographs back into earth.
* * *
Beth told her husband she wanted to start taking piano lessons. He led her to the piano, placed her hand on the keys, and told her that now the hard part was over. When she was ready for Brahms, in more ways than one, she didn’t regret that Josh’s Henle Edition of the Klavierstücke was turning back into earth. She didn’t need to encounter his frustrated marginalia: don’t rush, legato, bring out l.h., GET IT RIGHT. Nor did she share her son’s Henle Edition fetish; she could learn the pieces just as well out of a weak-glued Dover. But she ordered the Henle Edition anyway.
At her first recital, she played a piece Larry had always called the goblin song, a Brahms intermezzo, op. 116, no. 5. The program for the recital was printed on violet paper, and the students were arranged in approximate order of skill level—which surprisingly put Beth near the end even though she’d only been taking lessons for a little over a year. The first boy to take the stage in the modest auditorium tortured his five-pitch ditty into a tedious arrhythmia. But his parents stood and clapped, and he beamed at his triumph, started to run off the stage, remembered he was supposed to bow, performed a move that approximated grabbing his stomach in pain, and was off to resume the rest of his summer.
Dolce, she thought on stage as she reached the end of the B section for a second time. Dolce as don’t rush. As violet paper. It was Brahms’s intention that the pianist now take the second ending, a dominant–tonic progression that brings the agitated piece to a tranquil resolution in the parallel E major. As corduroy fields. As broken fence posts. As the hardest part. Beth’s teacher, Holly, was the only person in the Mendelssohn Club who noticed that her student instead took the first ending, which would again direct her back to earlier in the piece. Holly’s arthritic hands tensed for a moment where they’d been clamped onto her thighs the entire recital. Then they eased. It was a common mistake; sometimes the hands just took over. As moonlight—lurched—petrified.
* * *
Josh Danfoss lost control of the Audi and hopefully was unconscious before the crash silenced its soundtrack. An abrupt new finale. Josh had discovered classical music on a trip to Europe with his German class. He spent the following months burning CDs from the library, meticulously labeling them with markers, arranging them by composer and era in giant books. At first he rushed into a number of the most famous piano pieces he wasn’t yet skilled enough to play: the Moonlight Sonata, Grieg’s Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, Chopin’s “Funeral March,” Mozart’s “Turkish March,” etc. And so it was a little surprising—not that Brahms was wallowing in obscurity—when Josh latched onto the intermezzos, in particular this piece that sounded full of wrong notes even when he managed to navigate it successfully. The egg timer had long since been replaced by a metronome on the piano, and Josh began to practice for an hour or more every night, usually after dinner.
Beth told Larry she wanted to start taking piano lessons, and he led her into the living room and placed her hands on the piano. When she was ready for Brahms, in more ways than one—in exactly two ways—she found that there were plenty of hard parts yet to come. Op. 116, no. 5 features a plodding, hiccupping rhythmic pattern that repeats throughout, and grotesque harmonies that are at odds with the piece’s baffling expressive marking, Andante con grazia ed intimissimo sentimento. Are you kidding me? Beth had to Google the Italian just to make sure, as the piece seemed the opposite of what she thought she was translating: graceful, intimate, sentimental. Most of the piece alternates between two ungainly figurations. In the first, the thumbs cross over each other, wounded shadow-puppet birds beating their wings at what pinions them. It’s even tougher when you realize you can’t use your pinkies, that you need them in reserve for subsequent legato leaps to outlying notes. Then their inverse figuration, distal chords you grope to find without the use of your thumbs. It was like Brahms had only a cursory knowledge of human hands. The thick chords are on the pickups, resolved by just two lonely notes on the downbeats; this lopsidedness plus the eighth rests between each grouping, and you have something that feels clipped and off-kilter, some dumb lumbering brute that can’t find the words for what it wants to say.
As they drove to Beth’s first recital at the Mendelssohn Club, Larry made up stupid lyrics to the goblin song. They took their new Ford Focus, a purchase they’d struggled with. She knew Larry had wanted another powerful sports car, but it would have seemed too brassy and irreverent a choice, too much like courting disaster a second time. “Like One World Trade Center” was Larry’s strange analogy. Beth would have preferred a minivan to replace their aged Town & Country, but an expensive new “family car,” too, filled the parents with a sense of crippling, unsayable irony given the recent reduction of their family and Danny’s miracle acceptance into Northwestern. So, a sedan it was. The remaining Danfoss boys were in the back seat, Danny and twelve-year-old Caleb. The parents might as well have mapped out ahead of time: this will be our sports son, this will be our art son, and this will be our smart son.
Dolce, Holly thought as Beth approached the repeat sign for the third time. Dolce as my nails digging into my thighs. And, once again, Beth took the first ending. As a family car. As clipped. As crippling. Thus, it was less likely that she’d just made a mistake—but Holly still didn’t know quite what she was witnessing. Larry was the only other person beginning to get a sense that the event was starting to wobble. He didn’t have the musical vocabulary to say what exactly—and he’d heard his wife practice the piece so often that it always seemed interminable—but an image entered his mind of shadow-puppet birds. As some dumb lumbering. No, a train approaching a switch and somehow skipping the rails. As a Turkish march. A funeral march. A Turkish funeral march. As montage—Hark!—cultivate.
* * *
Josh Danfoss lost control of burning and was probably knocked Audi before they stopped rolling and started unconscious. At his funeral they played a montage of recital clips, starting with Josh at eight years old, struggling through a beginner’s piece called “The Troubadour.” Back then, she’d had to bribe him with packs of hockey cards to get him to practice, a pack-per-hour habit she’d tried to cultivate in her middle son. She knew the egg timer on top of the piano dinged after only twenty minutes usually, but she gave him the packs anyway. Later, he expressed concern that his new hobby was annoying, that he was like Jimmy Stewart’s daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life hammering “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” Beth told him how lucky they were to get serenaded for free every night, to which Josh would grumble the difference between his bumbling and a serenade. She didn’t tell him that the mistakes were her favorite part, how they tensed the whole house and strummed it through with proof of human life. His brothers were less supportive.
Beth told Larry she wanted to resume taking piano lessons, and he promised that the hard part was over. She’d taken lessons for half a year when Josh was first starting out but had quit after sensing her son was growing jealous over how much more quickly she was progressing than he. She hadn’t driven to Holly’s house for a few years, but she remembered the route from when she used to sit in the car and read or listen to talk radio while her son took piano lessons. Then Josh turned sixteen, and he hadn’t needed her to drive him anymore. He would rush out the door five minutes or three minutes before his lesson and be back home five minutes after it was over, immediately launching into whatever piece he’d been assigned that week. Beth knew chances were slim that a forty-eight-year-old woman would amount to much at a new instrument, but she only worked a few days a week at the greenhouse, and every other day she would hurry through her housework and practice for hours and hours.
It was Beth’s first recital, and she’d decided to play the piece that Larry liked to call the goblin song. During the recital, of course, the book itself would be tucked into her handbag—in case nerves goaded her into sneaking one last glance-through. On the stage it would just be her and the starkly blank music stand, her and her memory and her muscle memory trying to trick itself that it didn’t know what it did. Beth caught Holly’s eye across the auditorium when it was time for her to head backstage. Holly’s reassuring smile was hobbled by the current staged disintegration, a middle schooler in braids whose memory had taken leave of her. Beth opened the door and entered a backstage area where other students stood marooned amongst unused props and stage fixtures. She found the mismatched linoleum, the water-stained drop ceiling, and the wood paneling on the walls particularly disheartening, as if the whole world was one big church basement. On the stage, Swiss Miss had jumped ahead in the piece; from there, it was hoped, the debacle could conceivably lurch toward a cessation. Beth had been in the audience for enough recitals to know that, while the embarrassment of a botched performance no doubt felt isolating, the anxiety was collective, was shared by everyone in earshot. Swiss Miss finished, and her petrified lookalike (twin sister?) willed herself through the door to the stage. It was like being handed the flag, her husband might venture, after the previous flag bearer was shot through the forehead. Beth sat on the steps the lookalike had warmed.
Dolce. Dolce as mismatched linoleum. A pack-per-day habit. A staged disintegration. When Beth took the first ending for the third time, Holly knew she needed to intervene, but a mental and bodily exhaustion paralyzed her. Some of her other students, she could see, were beginning to grow even more restless than the natural state of a recital audience. Transfixed, leaden, inert, she willfully blurred her vision. As cessation. As lurched. As her and her memory and her muscle memory. Caleb knew something was wrong simply because he’d crested a new plateau of boredom. Anxiousness for his mom had drained into the feeling of captivity that any whiff of ceremony—masses, graduations, weddings, funerals—roused in him. Our smart son. As the troubadour. As a greenhouse. It’s a Wonderful Audi—Brahms—living room.
* * *
If Josh felt any pain after losing control of the Audi and rolling it through the fence, it wouldn’t have lasted very long. Beth heard his repertoire even when he wasn’t playing. In the kitchen or watching television or trying to fall asleep at night. Every clock became a metronome. Every metronome an egg timer. As Josh learned each piece, she memorized them. Her mind reproduced his mistakes, slowing down and speeding up in the places he always pushed the tempo. She found herself humming the pieces while he was at school, missing the notes he missed. The goblin piece, Larry called it, on bad days. Having trouble with that goblin piece again.
When Beth told Holly she wanted to play the Brahms intermezzo, her teacher smiled sadly, opened the new Henle Edition and said, That’s a really hard piece of music. Holly’s studio was in her living room, and pinned on a bulletin board were photos of all her students at recitals. Like the no-cavity club in a dentist’s office. It took no imagination to imagine Holly’s crisis before Beth’s first lesson, whether to leave up the pictures of Josh or take them down.
It was her first recital, and Beth couldn’t get the new words to the goblin song out of her head: The gob-lin ate the cob-bler’s shoe / The gob-lin ate the cob-bler too / The gob-lin ate the ta-ble’s legs / The gob-lin drank the ci-der kegs. Are you nervous? asked a boy who’d just joined her backstage. He was maybe freshman-aged, but he reeked of homeschooling. I think I was more nervous when I used to just watch. He sighed. I’m nervous. That’s good. If you weren’t, I’d call the paramedics. Hearing applause, Beth stood, almost tripping on her dress. She clomped across the stage, wishing she’d worn quieter, less opinionated shoes. It wasn’t until she’d already sat down that she realized she should have given a little bow or somehow acknowledged the crowd. Even as her brain told her she needed to adjust the bench, that she was sitting too close to the piano and too high up, her hands pressed the opening chord.
Dolce, she thought as she tried to play big, six-note chords pianissimo—which is like asking a Clydesdale to tiptoe. As the no-cavity club. As a clock as an egg timer as a metronome. As The goblin ate. As The goblin drank. Thumb and index finger, right hand: F-natural to E to D-sharp. As too close. Too high up. Are you nervous? As nowhere—fence—disaster.
* * *
Josh Danfoss lost control. He’d said he was going out to visit friends, and Larry let him take the Audi, but the crash happened miles from home in a direction none of his friends lived. Nobody knew why he was out that far. He’d been talking about trying to minor in music in college—perhaps major—but his enthusiasm waned during his senior year of high school, and that summer he’d told his mom she could stop paying for lessons. Stop rolling; start burning. He’d never really finished learning the Brahms intermezzo.
Now the hard part is over. Beth didn’t know how poorly Josh had been playing the E minor intermezzo until she started working on it herself. Unlike her son, who’d never developed good practice habits and just ran the pieces over and over, Beth dissected each section in a variety of ways. She played hands alone and she played the piece at half speed and (nearly) double speed. She excised the eighth rests between each figuration. She played it staccato and legato and grouped notes together to form phrases with spastic, unintended tempos. Ragtime Brahms. “Like how you put a donut on a baseball bat to make it heavier when you’re on deck,” Larry understood when she explained why on earth she’d make things harder on herself. She put new batteries in the metronome and got the piano tuned for the first time since Josh came back from Austria. She designated six “checkpoints” she could fast forward or rewind to during the recital if disaster struck. She strummed the house through with proof.
It is Beth’s first and final recital, and everyone is here. Caleb is still bored, and our sports son is still scarcely worth mentioning. Holly becomes more and more weary with every pass through the Brahms, more and more ossified into the shape her chair molds her, long past the point at which intervention is anything but a vanished novelty in the distant past. Larry is still floating dazed metaphors into the stratosphere. It’s a bat. It’s a train. It’s One World Trade. The goblin, the cobbler, the table, the cider. Like arctic balloons trying to snare one neutrino out of a billion. Josh is still seeing Salzburg for the first time, still hearing new old music in his head, still losing control of a powerful car and crashing through a fence in the middle of nowhere.
Dolce. As Beth. Beth is still on the stage refusing to take the second ending. Still too close to the piano. Still too high up. Not wanting the hard part to be over. She’s still in the audience. Nervous—sweet—listening—
**
Joe Sacksteder is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah. Fugitive Traces, his album of Werner Herzog audio collages, is available from Punctum Books. His writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Florida Review, The Literary Review, Passages North, Hobart, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the incoming Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. His collection, Make/Shift, is out now with Saraband Books.
The following is excerpted from The Wild Impossibility by Cheryl A. Ossola. Copyright © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Regal House Publishing.
February 27, 2011
Kira gripped the wheel, focusing on the road ahead. Berkeley awoke in the cool grasp of water—fog unraveling in treetops and blossoming from the asphalt, rain plummeting earthward in ecstatic downpours and gray-blurring the creeping cars and huddled storefronts. California, a place of rain-fueled excess in winter, of choked aridity in summer. You could flee the San Francisco Bay Area, fog-chilled on a summer morning, and end the day watching the sunset in the high desert with sweat beaded on your brow. Wherever you were, the other existence—fogbound or sunburned—would seem like a dream state, a fantasy you’d only imagined.
At the hospital, Kira parked in the employees’ lot and killed the car engine. Six forty-five in the morning and the day already seemed long. She yanked her keys out of the ignition. Time to go to work. In some odd twist of logic, the neonatal intensive care unit was the one place where she could block out the unrelenting memories of her own baby, Aimi—the ceaseless thinking, the nagging what-ifs. It was the pace, she supposed, the mental intensity of tending to the critically ill. If the staffing office had allowed it, she’d have worked seven days a week.
After changing into scrubs, Kira went to the nurses’ station to check the assignment board. She had Baby Bowen, a thirty-four-weeker, stable and on minimal meds. Not a busy assignment, and because of that she was scheduled to get the first transport, if there was one. Good. The more distractions, the better.
“Hey, Teresa,” Kira greeted the charge nurse. “Any transports on the horizon?”
“Twins coming from Travis. You’ve got Twin A. You’ll be busy.”
Kira checked the board again. “We lost Baby Taylor?”
“Last night, poor little guy.”
No surprise. He’d been hanging on by a thread, one of those babies who seemed likely to make it, then had one complication after another. The mother hadn’t been involved and maybe that was just as well. At least she didn’t have to hear a doctor tell her that her child was dead.
Kira scrubbed in, trying to quell the kicked-in-the-throat feeling the word “mother” gave her. Six weeks since her own mother had died, and Kira still caught herself picking up the phone to send her cat videos or pictures of baby otters, or to set a lunch date at their favorite Sicilian place. Two deaths in less than a year, deaths of the most intimate kind, of people whose tissue she had shared—one whose body she had come from, another she had created. Kira marveled at it sometimes, the malignancy of fate, God, whatever force or power could deliver that kind of cruelty. These days, she turned away when she saw women her age out with their mothers. But young mothers and their babies, she cornered them and asked, “How old is she? What’s her name?” or “Does she sleep through the night yet?” If the mother allowed it, Kira would touch the warm, sweet-scented head, close her eyes and pretend the child was Aimi.
Shift report on Baby Bowen revealed a typical preemie scenario: born at twenty-nine weeks, now stable on fifty percent oxygen and moderate ventilator settings, the usual fare of steroids and diuretics around the clock, sedatives and morphine as needed. Lab work was due at eleven; if his next blood gas was good they’d wean the ventilator settings.
“Has he needed much sedation?” Kira asked.
“I gave lorazepam around three; he was a wild man,” the night nurse said. “Oh, and the IV in his foot is out; I couldn’t get a new one. Sorry. I left you a scalp vein that looks decent. Good thing you’re a better stick than I am.”
The night nurse left and Kira tested the bedside alarms, adding to the orchestra-gone-haywire beeps and chirps from seventeen bedsides. As usual, the Unit was noisy and crowded, an amorphous, pulsating hive of nurses and attendings, haggard interns and residents, X-ray techs and respiratory therapists, social workers and anxious parents. West Coast Children’s, with the biggest NICU this side of the Rockies, was not a place for people who liked things calm and quiet. It got the sickest of the sick, the high-risk babies, and it always had, even before the crack-baby boom in the ’80s. The transport teams never stopped.
Baby Bowen looked good. Too tiny and too young, but he might make it.
Kira was taping a new IV in place when Teresa zipped past. “Transport’s twenty minutes out,” she called to Kira. “The parents are on their way.”
The team rolled in five minutes early. Twin A was a micro-preemie, barely bigger than Kira’s hand, on a hundred percent oxygen and maxed-out ventilator settings, paralyzed with Pavulon so she wouldn’t fight the machine. Eyelids still fused, skin like tissue, body limp as a waterlogged leaf.
“Twenty-two-weeker?” Kira said.
“Yeah, with a head bleed,” the transport nurse said. “Two transfusions so far, and nada.” She gestured to the other transport incubator, six feet away. “Twin B’s not much better.”
“What about the mom? Drugs?”
“Nope, she’s clean. Primipara, bed rest most of the pregnancy.”
The transport nurse grabbed her gear and headed out, and Kira began her intake assessment of the baby. She was brittle as hell, her oxygen saturation nosediving, lungs wheezing like an underwater accordion. The blood Kira drew for an arterial gas was so dark she’d have sworn it was venous.
The on-call resident came by, a sleepless second-year. “Uh-oh,” she said, looking at the ventilator. “Have you sent a gas yet?”
“Just now,” Kira said. “It’s going to suck.”
The attending swooped in and scanned the chart. “Let’s transfuse and do an EEG asap,” he said. “She’s probably not viable. Let me know when the parents get here.”
Packed red blood cells, an exercise in futility. The baby wasn’t going to make it and she probably shouldn’t. The NICU could work some impressive miracles, but this was one tiny girl with shit for lungs and a vascular system with the substance of a cobweb. As high-risk as they got. Cardiac problems, neuro, metabolic, cognitive, GI—all were more likely than not. If this baby lived, she’d be blind from months of oxygen therapy, probably end up with cerebral palsy. Her only chance would have been ECMO, medical science’s best effort to replicate the process of oxygenation, but her gestational age ruled that out. So would a head bleed.
Kira called the blood bank, then the charge desk. “Somebody’s going to have to cover Bowen.”
Thirty minutes later, Twin A was going downhill. The gas was abysmal. The docs would probably suggest discontinuing support for both babies, if they lived long enough for the parents to get there. And they might. Some of the babies you’d swear were going to die any second managed to wait for their mothers to arrive, and Kira had seen it happen too often to think it could be chance. But most of the babies who did cling to life for those minutes or hours had been out of the womb for a few weeks. Some had known their mother’s warmth, held skin to skin against her breast despite ventilators and tubing, the mother’s heartbeat going half time in a counterpoint to their own. These moments were all the comfort the babies would get in their brief lives, and they seemed to know it. And waited, hoping to feel that warmth one more time.
Twin A’s heart rate spiraled down. “Hang on, baby girl, your mama’s coming.” Kira stroked the baby’s head and the heart rate struggled upward. Placing the bell of the pediatric stethoscope on the tiny chest—it covered the baby from neck to navel—Kira listened. Pitiful breath sounds. Too young, too goddamn tiny. Not viable.
Aimi would have been.
Stop. Kira swung her ponytail behind her shoulder as if the movement would silence the memory.
Ten minutes later the parents arrived, swollen eyes raw in oatmeal faces. Standing next to Twin A’s bed, they gripped the side rails with colorless fingers. This child, and her twin six feet away—nothing else in the room existed.
The attending pulled Kira aside. “They agreed to a no-code,” he said. The best option, he was probably thinking, but that didn’t make it a good one. “God, sometimes I hate this job.”
A no-code. Kira looked at the Clarksons, ordinary people now being asked to do the extraordinary. Choosing was worse than having the inevitable forced on you. Even now hope illuminated the Clarksons’ faces, diluting their despair. Couldn’t a miracle happen now, for them, for their babies?
“Would you like to hold her?” Kira asked Mrs. Clarkson. “Here, let me help you.” Baby to breast, if only for a moment. She turned off the monitors; even with the ventilator pumping that tiny chest, Mrs. Clarkson wouldn’t need a machine to tell her that her child was dead. And no parent should see the flat line announcing their child’s death.
“I’ll sit with Jessica,” the father said, and kissed his wife.
“I’m here, Jasmine,” Mrs. Clarkson whispered. “Mommy loves you.” She began to cry, a strangled sound; moments later the father’s sobbing echoed hers.
Everything else went quiet, or as quiet as a busy room could get. The parents wouldn’t notice. At times like this the world became small, uninhabited. Kira had sat like Mrs. Clarkson did now, holding her dead baby. This mother wouldn’t know anyone else was there. This mother was somewhere else, lost. Going on would seem incomprehensible, the future an impossible thought. Nothing mattered but the agonizing emptiness in her belly and the still body in her arms. A universe of two.
* * *
Four hours later, Kira sat in her car and cried. That poor woman would never get over the loss. You never did. Lose a baby and you lose yourself. Blood and tissue, yours and your child’s, commingled then ripped apart. Images flashed through her mind—Twin A, now a tiny bundle in the morgue; Aimi’s body, a rounded weight against her chest. The grief intensified, bloomed like a hot flash. Aimi in her arms, eyes like her father’s, hair that promised to curl like Kira’s and her mother’s—this six-pound proof of family, of bloodlines, gone.
Say the words: Your child did not live.
Kira pressed her hands to her eyes. Her fingers felt oddly warm; within seconds, her palms burned with a dry, fiery heat that reached for bone. Confused, she looked up, thought something had happened outside because everything was monochrome, the pinked orange of raw salmon. It must be late, already sunset—but no, the color was changing, now warm yellow, now cooler, an acid green. Cortisol rushed through her bloodstream, a junkie feeling, hands shaking, a staccato thrumming at her temples. She closed her eyes, opened them again. The green was still there, a watercolor wash. Then it faded, leaving only shadows.
A girl’s voice. Kira jerked around, expecting to see someone behind her. The backseat was empty. The voice was in her head.
I hear them coming and pull his arms tighter around me. I can hardly breathe.
Fear like Kira has never known. She sees—or senses, because everything is gray, veiled, lines and shapes mere suggestions of three-dimensional objects—a small interior, rough metal walls, a wooden floor. She tries to open her eyes, but they’re already open. She’s awake, in the hospital parking lot, in her car. She’s not dreaming. Her body shakes. The voice again, compelling yet flat, a monotone so out of tune with the words spoken that Kira’s fear skyrockets.
They’re closer now; I can hear their voices, my brother’s harsh, my father’s softer, dangerous. The door opens and I plead with them, but they ignore me. They drag us outside.
A pink breath of air, sage-scented and cool. Kira has no bones, no muscles. No sound but her breath, the wash of blood in her ears. Fear inflames her.
My brother struts like a fighting cock. He’s come to right a wrong, of course he believes that. But there is no wrong but him, him and my father. I beg them to let him go. I might as well not open my mouth.
The gun rises and I scream.
In an instant, the scene disappeared. Daylight pierced the windshield, searchlight sharp. Kira sat shaking, fingers digging into her arms, hair glued to her neck. Breathe, she thought. Don’t panic. But no one had dreams at four o’clock in the afternoon, wide awake in a car. A hallucination then? No, impossible, she’d fallen asleep, it was a dream, a bizarre grief response. Nothing more.
Kira sat immobile in the driver’s seat, afraid that if she moved the world would again lose its color, the voice would invade her head. At last, bloodless with cold, still numbed with fear, she started the car. Key in ignition, spark of life, surge of power—all normal, thank God. As she shifted into first, the engine choked, then shuddered back to life.
Kira stepped on the gas, desperate for home, for wine or whiskey, for her comforting bed. She would burrow into the blankets, pretend that what had just happened was nothing to worry about, cry for Aimi and her mother, feel the weight of their absence flatten her spine. She would dream, wake her husband Dan with her tossing, ignore the chasm widening between them. These were the new rules. They weren’t normal, but they were predictable.
**
Cheryl A. Ossola is a former magazine editor, freelance writer and editor, and RN (neonatal ICU), with work published in Fourteen Hills, Speak and Speak Again, Switchback, Dance Magazine,Dance Studio Life, and San Francisco Ballet’s Backstage and program books. A member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, she now lives and writes in Italy. The Wild Impossibility is her first novel.
The following is excerpted from Grevious by H. S. Cross. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux April 9th 2019. Copyright © 2019 by H. S. Cross. All rights reserved.
At breakfast in Ely, John could hear himself being cold to Owain though Meg seemed not to notice. It was her birthday; she ate with pleasure, and her cheeks glowed. As if to make a point, Owain kept reaching across the table to kiss her. Of course, it was his right, but to break off conversation repeatedly and murmur My darling little girl was overdoing it, surely.
—Now, John, Owain was saying, you mustn’t hurry this afternoon, not in the slightest.
John and Meg had planned an afternoon in Saffron Walden, to visit the graveyard and to collect Cordelia after school for tea with Mrs. Kneesworth.
—You three have a grand old natter with Mrs. K, the old battle-axe.
Another kiss.
—My darling girl.
It would be sickening if it weren’t so transparent: husbands only overdid it when they had something to hide. Likely Owain had not so much started over with her as he had moved the wife to a different town so he could carry on with his pieces in the first. More obvious was Owain’s hostile maneuver in buying a house without a spare room. By many measures the new house was better than the old, but there was no place for John in it. Cordelia had decamped to a cupboard-cum-sewing room and given him her bed, but his neck had begun to ache as soon as he arrived, necessitating another drop.
As they left for the station, Meg put her arm through his. She had been chattering about the new house and town, and now she began to describe the Meeting in Ely, though it sounded as though she’d gone only once. Tradesmen where shouting across the road, and the unsaid pressed like the weight of the scrum.
—Darling, she said, closing her hand around his. Let’s not speak of it. Let’s agree, shall we, not to?
He tried to stop, but she pulled him along.
—You know, don’t you, darling, how grateful I am?
She used the voice that repelled every protest.
—We’re all grateful, for everything you did and are doing.
—I can’t think what you mean.
—Darling.
Sweet, shaming. He sounded like a child and knew it.
—We’ve such a beautiful day. Don’t let’s spoil it.
He followed her, chastened, into the carriage and smiled as she, through a stray association, began to reminisce about the production of Patience they’d both been part of at Cambridge. He’d almost forgotten it, but she conjured every detail.
—Knee breeches vermillion!
A man such as Jamie would simply insist. I’m afraid this won’t do. I’m afraid we must speak of it. It being the madcap string of—what to call them even? Travels? Consultations? Dramatics?—adventures you followed from the moment I left you until the end of August, one hundred and twenty- five interminable days later, when you wrote from Liverpool that We were coming home All of Us, that Everything Was Splendid, that you were, no explanation, Cured. And as for the Splendid New House, it’s plain our holiday arrangements will have to change. But if he said those things, her eyes would overflow, she’d begin coughing, and it would all come around to his spoiling things again.
In Saffron Walden, Meg bought chrysanthemums to put on Delia’s grave. It was something they did every holiday, but this time they found weeds grown up around the headstone. Meg pulled them out with horror and apology, and John realized she was treating him as if he required consolation, presumably for the distress of seeing his wife’s grave untended, this woman dead ten times longer than he’d even known her. Meg was acting as if she were the one whose life was satisfactory, whereas he—wife in the ground, life held hostage by some wretched school— were the one deserving solace. For a moment he froze in fear that she might suggest, obscenely, he marry again.
—It doesn’t seem so long ago, she was saying, does it?
—On the contrary.
—Oh, darling!
He had always believed Delia was pregnant when she died. He’d found markings in her diary that suggested it, and to his shame, rather than grieve at the notion, John had felt only relief that the child had died with her. What sort of creature would it have been, he’d told himself, a child conceived while in his heart he made love to another? He’d always believed it had been a boy, who would now be Cordelia’s age, just old enough to come to the Academy. Now as he carried the grave weeds over to the rough, it occurred to him that the child, if it had indeed existed, would exist still in this very grave, inside her, without name or headstone or even a prayer. Was it wrong to pray for a child you’d no proof existed? Perhaps it was even sacrilegious. This was the kind of question Jamie’s father could answer. You could ask, and he’d listen, and all the embarrassment would vanish as he told you decisively: Yes, pray this; or No, and here is why. Was writing the man so far out of the question? Yet if the Bishop’s portcullis were to raise again for him, Meg would accuse him of backsliding to the superstitions of his childhood.
Did it go against the point of love to keep chambers of one’s self sealed from one’s beloved? Of course it was all hypothetical, wildly so, but if it ever ceased to be hypothetical, he vowed he would renounce the church and conform himself to the Testimonies they affirmed. As they left the cemetery by the far side, he drew a cross in his hand with his middle finger, This is my solemn vow.
✦
John had always been a favorite with Mrs. Kneesworth, and he realized as she welcomed them that he’d neglected her. After everything she’d done to help in March, he’d sent her updates from Paris, but since then not a word. She appeared not to hold it against him and kissed them all repeatedly. Since the Líohts returned, she had seen them only once, when the removers came. Since then she had been trying to get them to pay her a visit, but ah, she understood how very busy they’d been. And Mr. Grieves, dear Mr. Grieves, he knew he was always welcome in her spare room should he ever need accommodation in Saffron Walden. Of course, her room would be nothing to the rooms in the grand new house in Ely. John glanced at Cordelia, who returned an expression roughly equivalent to boys kicking one another under the table.
Mrs. K had made a tower of sandwiches, and although she obviously had a tower of questions, she allowed the conversation to unfold in the customary way: what John was getting up to (a book; an intriguing new boy in his House), how Meg was keeping in Ely (splendidly; plans for next spring’s garden; service with the housebound), how Cordelia was finding the long journey to school (quite short, actually), whether she didn’t after all fancy Mrs. Kneesworth’s spare bedroom (so kind, but no), just how churchy was Ely (rather), how in any case it wasn’t Saffron Walden (never), what the bachelor who’d bought their house was getting up to (travesties).
—And you still haven’t told me about your Grand Tour.
Meg glanced at the clock:
—Your da will be wondering where we’ve got to.
—It’s only five, Cordelia replied. He said not to hurry.
—You mustn’t dash off yet.
And so a monologue was undertaken about their Grand Tour, first by Meg, who put quite a gloss on it, and then by Cordelia. To hear the two of them tell it, the whole thing had been one lark after another, ridiculous foreigners alternating with marvelous foreigners, the account peppered with quaint foreign phrases and their confident assessments of The Germans, The Hungarians, The Swiss, The French, The Italians, The Americans, The Irish.
—And how is Mr. Líoht?
John thought Mrs. K’s voice had turned sour. Shouldn’t she try harder to conceal it? But Mr. Líoht, Meg assured her, had never been better. Business was thriving, and he was compelled to travel less than previously, scarcely at all. In short, there was nothing under the sun that could be judged unsatisfactory.
Mrs. K turned to Cordelia:
—And whatever became of your correspondent, dear?
Cordelia blanched, and John saw her gaze flit to the clock.
—Pardon?
—The person who wrote to me in the summer, Mrs. K said. I always assumed it was a young man, but I was never certain.
The girl’s face was flushing, her cup was being set on the table, and a polite smile was forming, one plainly false, yet one John realized he had seen before and taken as true.
—The one you asked to write to me, dear.
—I feel queer.
John had never seen his goddaughter be rude, yet here she was not only interrupting Mrs. K but refusing her mother’s help and now actually pulling Mrs. K into the kitchen.
—Whatever was that? Meg asked.
They’d closed the door, and John could glean nothing through it. The mantel clock ticked louder than a galloping horse and then commenced an elaborate chiming.
—I ought to stay with Mrs. K next time, he said.
—Darling. Don’t be that way.
She flexed her fingers as if they were stiff. He set his cup on the table and took her hand in his. The edge left her face. She sat back on the settee and closed her eyes. His lips beat. He could see the pulse in her throat. It wasn’t too late, couldn’t be. If Christ were to be believed, it never was, not until the end, and that wasn’t yet.
✦
—It was only a young man I met in Budapest, a medical student.
Mrs. K raised her brow.
—It was entirely gallant, but you can understand, can’t you, why I didn’t want to bother my mother with it?
Mrs. K could certainly understand. She’d had a German suitor herself once. This Cordelia had heard many times, but she smiled as if she hadn’t. (Had Tommy Gray not received the update telling him not to write Mrs. K? She’d written it right after the first, at least she’d thought of writing it . . . had she really lost the thread once her father had . . . train, Lourdes—)
—But, Cordelia dear, why would you ask this man to write to me rather than writing yourself?
She pretended to cough again, and Mrs. K fetched some water.
—It’s such a tedious story.
Mrs. K settled into a chair.
Oh, dear, the truth was that they’d been in a rush. Their train was earlier than they thought, and this boy—the medical student?—yes, this poor boy was simply in love with her, and she felt ever so sorry for him and so she’d tried to make him feel useful and asked him to write to Mrs. K for her. But she hadn’t said America! She’d said Austria.
But what about the rest? Mrs. K persisted. He mentioned a doctor, Mr. Felix Rush in Asheville, North Carolina? She took down a tin and produced a letter.
Oh, dear!—she snatched it—What a misunderstanding! There had been an article in a journal about such a man. The boy must have somehow confused it with Austria. He was foreign and tearful and she needed to be rid of him. It had been unwise, she knew, but no harm had come of it.
But what if the young man turned up at her door? He sounded unstable.
But Mrs. K needn’t worry! He was Hungarian and penniless and couldn’t afford to leave Budapest.
Then why had the letter been postmarked Kent? It was an English letter from an English correspondent. It didn’t look foreign and neither did the penmanship.
Was that so? Could she see the envelope? How curious. How entirely curious! But . . . ah, now see, she knew exactly what had happened. What a circus! This penniless Hungarian doctor-in-training had a friend, a kind older doctor from England who was in Budapest at the time lecturing at the medical school. They had spent time together. No, he hadn’t examined her mother, he was a dental doctor. But . . . what must have happened was that her Hungarian—his name was Stefan—Stefan must have been overwhelmed by the prospect of writing in English, even though he so desperately wanted to help, and so he must have got the English dentist to write it for him. And to save the postage, the dentist must have taken it back with him to England and sent it from there. What an adventure! Wasn’t life funny?
**
H. S. Cross was born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She was educated at Harvard College and has taught at Friends Seminary, among other schools. She lives in New York.
The following story is published with permission of BlazeVOX [books] and Andrew Farkas. The story originally appeared in Denver Quarterly 49.1.
The City of the Sunsphere
At Heliopolis, we saw ruined buildings where the priests had lived. For it is said, anciently, this was the principle residence of the priests who studied philosophy and astronomy. But there are no longer such a body of persons or such pursuits. No one was pointed out to us on the spot as presiding over these studies, but only persons who repeated sacred rites, and those who explained to strangers the peculiarities of the obelisk*.
– Strabo, Geographica (XVII.1:29) [*slightly altered]
And now the new Sunsphere is the cynosure of Knoxville. Standing 6,520 feet tall, its base is a black, cylindrical tower capped by a circular crown that extends well past the parameters of the column accentuated by equally black spires which carry the eye to the orb. The orb is a perfect globe of gold hovering twenty feet above the crown. It rotates thirty times per second, 108,000 times per hour precisely as does the Crab Pulsar, located 6,520 light years away near the constellation Taurus in the center of the Crab Nebula. The Crab Nebula and the Crab Pulsar were created by the Supernova of 1054 (SN1054), although the exact date of the event is unknown. The Crab Pulsar is a neutron star six miles in diameter, far smaller yet much denser than the Earth’s sun. Again, mimicking the Crab Pulsar, the Sunsphere’s orb emits a concentrated beam of light that makes the sphere appear to pulse because of its rotations. If the orb could be decelerated, the light beam would match that of a lighthouse or emergency vehicle. The Sunsphere and the Crab Pulsar also emit radio pulses and X-rays, but only the X-rays are susceptible to Quasi-Periodic Oscillations (QPOs); hence the X-ray emissions vary, the light waves and the radio pulses remain constant. Once the Sunsphere was 266 feet tall, consisting of a green, girder-supported tower and a golden sphere made of connected hexagons. It did not pulse with light. It did not emit radio waves. It did not emit X-rays. It had a red light on a pole at the zenith to warn airplane pilots. On July 4, 2054, an explosion erupted around the Sunsphere, engulfing the structure in red, yellow, green, and blue flames. After the blast, a crimson and cobalt cloud was left behind. When the smoke dispersed, the new Sunsphere stood in place of the former. The orb began spinning. The city filled with light.
§§
To the southeast of the Sunsphere, windows reflecting golden beams, is Knoxville City Hospital. In OR 1058, Yang Wie-Te, a second-generation Chinese-American, a physicist and astronomer, is in critical condition. He proved that the Crab Pulsar and the new Sunsphere are in synchronicity with each other. He is supposed to deduce the meaning of the cosmic alignment. He is supposed to translate the messages being transmitted through the radio waves, light emissions, and X-rays. He lies prone on an operating table. Whether he has solved the mystery of the Sunsphere and the Crab Pulsar is unknown. The operating room, contrary to the rest of the hospital, is painted white and the tables are stainless steel. The doctors, nurses, and assistants surrounding the astronomer wear suits of aquamarine, including facemasks, caps, and gloves. Their hands move rapidly. They speak in curt, terse commands or laconic repetitions. From the celeritous and ever-increasing activity, it can be deduced that the physicist is in a worsening state of dissolution. Should Mr. Yang die, he would be subject to the following penalizations: a $250,000 fine, the incarceration of his entire family in health resorts for the despondent and valetudinary located in Farragut (or Far West Knoxville), the marking of his entire family with the sign of the Theta (theta for thanatos, the death imprint). Yang Wie-Te’s descendants will also be liable for any destruction caused by the physicist’s death which could reach upwards of one hundred billion dollars to assorted insurance companies, banks, law firms, and other public and private interests. Ultimately, Mr. Yang’s family may face the severest sentence: expulsion from the City of Knoxville. These sanctions, and perhaps more, would be effected if the astronomer should pass away because of City Code 529: Thou shalt not die, lest ye release a shock wave. And it is true, whenever a human passes away the corpse immediately releases a shock wave that ranges in power from a quarter ton nuclear weapon to a one megaton hydrogen bomb. On account of these puissant bursts, death is prohibited. With modern medicine, however, aging and dying are purely voluntary. Hence, no one has died in Knoxville in over twenty years. Yet a question arises: how could Yang Wie-Te allow himself to degenerate to his current status? No matter the reason, the penalties and fines to be exacted on Mr. Yang’s family are theoretical, superfluous. At Knoxville’s current population, and given the physicist’s enthalpy and exergy readings, the shock wave from his body would be the genesis of a chain reaction of shock waves that would obliterate each building, that would eradicate the entire population of 100,000,000 Knoxvillians, if not the entire world.
§§
Second only to the Sunsphere, Knoxville City Hospital is the tallest manmade structure in the city (since the aforementioned tower can no longer be considered manmade). From the roof of the sanatorium, the entire megalopolis is viewable, with the exception of parts of the Northern Wasteland blocked by the former World’s Fair tower. Here one can see that the majority of the population has clogged the streets, parks, bridges, sidewalks, riverbanks, and other open spaces of the city. Although the Knoxville Health Commission (KHC) inundates the airwaves, satellite signals, Internet, newspapers, magazines, etc. with calming broadcasts and Public Placation Announcements (PPAs), the news of Yang Wie-Te’s condition has been disseminated by some means. Utterly docile, the citizens understand that if Mr. Yang expires, Knoxville, but more importantly the Sunsphere, will cease to exist. Yet the soothing tones, the conciliating reports, and the optimistic premonitions do nothing to alleviate the tension. In spite of the danger, such masses of people moved to Knoxville because of the new Sunsphere. Being a neutron star (although comparatively infinitesimal) like the Crab Pulsar, it supplies the megalopolis with an almighty source of energy. Hence electricity is inexpensive. The citizens, however, are also filled with this vigor. No one in Knoxville needs to sleep any longer than three or four hours per night; only those who fight against their own inherent vivacity (which is also illegal) go without exercise; only those who eschew their intrinsic verve fail to accomplish their goals. Lassitude, as are aging and death, is a voluntary condition. Moreover, the Sunsphere provides the city with a constant heat source. The mean temperature in Knoxville is 85º F. Finally, much as neutron stars generate the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe, the Sunsphere’s magnetism is due to its mystery and the mystery inherent in its connection to the Crab Pulsar. The answer to this enigma is what each citizen of Knoxville hopes to learn. Yang Wie-Te had been attempting to deduce the answer for over eight years when he was checked into Knoxville City Hospital by his assistant. He was found on the outskirts of the Northern Wasteland.
East of the Sunsphere, along Summit Hill, are Market Square and the Old City, until Summit Hill becomes Martin Luther King (MLK). Market Square and the Old City are an entertainment district composed of subterranean clubs: literally subterranean. Aboveground, this recreational zone is constructed almost uniformly of red brick. The streets are older, still molded from asphalt in most places down to limestone in others. Meticulous care has been taken in this borough to preserve an aged appearance of no particular year. Gas lights line Gay Street. South Central is made of brick. Advertisements for products no longer in use, whose use is no longer remembered are still prevalent. A structure rumored to be a saloon and a bordello in the middle to late 1800s continues to be both to this day. Past the Old City, the houses are concatenated, and yet most Eastern Knoxvillians still live underground. Whereas the citizens of Knoxville hope to solve the mystery of the Sunsphere, or to have the mystery solved for them, there are three cults whose beliefs find their origins in the exact date of the occurrence of SN1054, which explain their interest in the World’s Fair Tower. The East is home to the Believers, also known as the Doomsdayers or the Apocryphites. They believe SN1054 was first observed by Sadiae Fujiwara, a Japanese poet, on May 29, 1054. Astronomers have proven that such a viewing would have been impossible because Zeta Tauri, the closest observable star before the supernova, was in direct proximity to the sun, therefore invisible. Furthermore, Sadiae Fujiwara was not yet born in 1054, since he made his astronomical hypothesis in 1235. Although the evidence is against their claim, the Apocryphites continue to believe that Fujiwara was teleported back in time to a position where he could witness SN1054. Along with this belief, the Apocryphites assert that whatever the pulsar message may be, it will encourage humans to die and be transported to Paradise, located in the Crab Nebula, to live with Sadiae Fujiwara and James Agee. The reason humans began erupting into shock waves and the reason the old Sunsphere became the new: so more earthlings would die simultaneously and be delivered to Arcadia. At this hour, while the city of Knoxville awaits the outcome of Yang Wie-Te’s surgery, the Apocryphites have concluded that Mr. Yang induced from the X-rays what the Believers themselves already knew. Yang, who perambulated in the direction of the Old City about once or twice per month, was aiming to bring about the apocalypse when his turncoat assistant committed him. Asked how they are keen to such information, Believers will say that the X-ray QPOs “told me so.” They will also say that the number 529 in City Code 529 is no coincidence. It signifies that the Apocryphite belief in May 29 is correct, that their convictions are also correct. Because of their obsession with death, Apocryphite temples are the aforementioned underground speakeasies. Here they lure Tellers, Ramponans, and their own kind to dine on deleterious cuisine, imbibe alcohol and other drugs, fornicate randomly, smoke cigarettes, brawl with their fellow citizens, etc. With their goals they are successful, although modern medicine, if consulted soon enough, can cure all of the effects of these activities. On occasion, since the diversions in these clubs are prohibited, the police launch cleansing campaigns, sending those who are found to health resorts; the subterranean caves, however, are labyrinthine and the Apocryphites have never been completely reeducated. Instead, they continue their rebellion, speaking of their apocalyptic revolution in hushed, deferential tones, pointing to the new Sunsphere which they feel was created when the ghost of James Agee rose from his grave to make possible the transfer of all humankind to Paradise. The QPOs told them so.
The Northern Wasteland was demolished by the only shock waves that have occurred. It is composed, solely, of rubble. There are no brick buildings. There are no skyscrapers. There are no cinderblock structures. There are no actual streets. There are no people. There is nothing but the reminder of what happens when a human being expires. There are sections where the detritus has been itself destroyed, leaving a view of the Appalachian Mountains far in the distance. The shock waves did not obliterate all of Knoxville because there were fewer people living in the city at the time. Before the explosions, the North was home to a fourth Sunsphere Cult: the Free Thinkers, also known as the Sunsphere Haters. Even with the radiating charm of the propaganda and the menace of death, the other Knoxvillian groups despised the Free Thinkers to an almost self-destructive degree. The reason the Free Thinkers were hated, the reason they were called the Sunsphere Haters: they claimed the message the Sunsphere was emitting meant nothing at all, that the alignment of the Crab Pulsar and the World’s Fair Tower was a cosmic event of astounding, yet nonsensical proportions. The light waves, radio pulses, and X-rays were not a code to be decrypted, but even if they were they could be studied from the antipodes where there was no peril. The date of SN1054 is inconsequential, or was so to them. The Free Thinkers, therefore, worked to get Knoxvillians to apostatize, proclaiming there would be no revelation from the Sunsphere, that it was merely beautiful and dangerous. A scandal would have arisen if any of the Free Thinkers had lived: who caused the shock waves? Since the Sunsphere Haters were eradicated, they were blamed. The Tower, according to the other groups, had its vengeance. The one surviving invention the Free Thinkers imparted on Knoxvillian society is the Enthalpy/Exergy Meter (EEM). Exergy is the amount of energy that can be extracted from a system. Since this energy is ejected as a shock wave when a human perishes, exergy is the measure of a person’s explosive potential. Enthalpy calculates internal energy, pressure, and volume (in the case of humans, weight). Keeping enthalpy low is the goal of all human beings who are not Apocryphites. A high enthalpy score means your body contains too much energy, too much pressure, or too much weight. Energy and pressure can add to exergy, increasing explosive potential. Weight cannot add to exergy, but an obese individual could still erupt into a shock wave equivalent to a quarter ton nuclear device. Furthermore, a corpulent human probably has a high energy reserve (since the Sunsphere energizes all), probably is under excessive physical stress, and both of these properties lead to a higher exergy rating. When enthalpy reaches a predetermined level (calculated by doctors for each individual) a person will either go into cardiac arrest or will immediately die; Yang Wie-Te was in cardiac arrest when he was discovered. The Free Thinkers, to simplify the EEM, wrote a song to explain its value:
Enthalpy and exergy work together to instill harmony,
Without them your deaths would destroy this here fine city.
The Sunsphere Haters hoped to preserve as many humans as possible until they could remove them from Knoxville. Members of the other cults now walk to the edge of Henley Street, which used to become Broadway in the North, whenever they question their own beliefs, whenever they lose hope in the Sunsphere. These questioners stand at the extremity of the city and ponder the expanse of the wastes beyond. In the distance, there are the mountains.
Fort Sanders, the University of Tennessee campus, and parts West are home to the Tellers of the Truth. Here there are mostly skyscrapers made of steel, aluminum, and prismatic windows which cast kaleidoscopic patterns. The streets are made of an advanced polymer that transmogrifies according to the climate to instill optimal traction. Along Kingston Pike, the largest thoroughfare in the megalopolis, are uplifting aphoristic billboards, appeasing colors, and tranquil professionally landscaped gardens. On each street corner is a speaker that broadcasts confidence-building adages and PPAs. Far West Knoxville is home to the mammoth KHC building, the third largest structure in the city. Contrary to the East, most Westerners live aboveground, as far aboveground as humanly possible, in order to be closer to the Crab Pulsar. The Tellers of the Truth, simply called the Tellers (or the Tattletales, depending on who one asks), believe the original Yang Wie-Te was correct (the Yang Wie-Te being attended to by rapidly moving, aquamarine-clad doctors is a far distant relative). He claimed that SN1054 took place on July 4, 1054. Since this date is widely accepted by the scientific community, the Tellers are completely confident in their assessment. They are also confident that, whatever the message may turn out to be, it will undoubtedly be found in the radio waves and it will undoubtedly encourage humans to live longer and longer. The radio waves hold the secret because they are the most easily deciphered. The secret is obviously to live longer because of the destruction corpses cause. Furthermore, the Tellers hold that their conclusions are correct because the old Sunsphere became the new on July 4: the date, they claim, of SN1054. They also claim that the Sunsphere metamorphosis was caused by a blast from the Crab Pulsar itself. The fact that such a blast would have taken 6,520 years to reach earth from the Crab Nebula does not deter their doctrines. While the prognostication becomes grimmer for Yang Wie-Te, a one-time native of the West (who departed after the Northern Wasteland was formed), the Tellers believe he had yet to deduce the answer to the World’s Fair Tower Enigma. He had been working too hard. He had worn himself down. What Mr. Yang needs to do, once he has convalesced, is to check into one of the health resorts, which are also the Teller temples. Citizens either choose to enter these sanitariums for their own fitness related reasons, or they are incarcerated into them when caught engaging in harmful activities often in insalubrious parts of town (the East). The propaganda from the city address system and the consumption of attitude adjustment pills, both Teller inventions, are not militarily enforced. A human who remains morose for an extended period of time, however, is considered to be engaging in antisocial (and therefore dangerous) behavior and may be subject to surveillance by the Knoxville Police Department (KPD). On this day, the propaganda and the pills appear to be inoperative, insufficient, since the general mood is one of consternation. Yet perhaps the propaganda is working, since the message transmitted for the past two days has been that the mystery of the Sunsphere was about to be solved.
Along Chapman Highway, south of the Sunsphere, live the Ramponans. The vast majority of their structures are made of cinderblock, but there is no architectural consistency. The roads are made of polymers, asphalt, cement, brick, and other substances. Some Southerners live underground, while an equal number live above to far aboveground. In sections their buildings are concatenated, in others they are sparse. The Ramponan ideology is that human beings can never really know anything at all. Facetiously, they uphold the SN1054 date “discovered” by Giovanni Lupoato, who backs the only Western recording of the occurrence which appears in the admittedly questionable Rampona Chronicle. The Rampona Chronicle itself includes an error, accidentally listing the supernova year as MLVIII (1058), instead of MLIV (1054). If this document can otherwise be trusted, and according to the Ramponans no one knows if it can, then the date of the supernova was June 24, 1054. Since irrefutable knowledge is solely mythical, however, the Ramponans proclaim they are ignorant of the actual date, but that the rest of humanity is also ignorant. Yang Wie-Te, vying to display his exergetic reserve, was equally benighted but had yet to construct a nihilistic detachment from his situation when his assistant committed him. Since nescience is the controlling factor for Ramponans, they have no theories as to what the mystery behind the Sunsphere could be, any more than it is possible to infer the exact date of SN1054 (which might not have occurred in 1054). Moreover, while discussing humanity’s witlessness, Ramponans will often declare that a doctrine of utter ignorance is itself a dogma, so humans cannot aver peremptorily their de facto state of naïveté. When dealing with Apocryphites or Tellers, Ramponans will frequently dismiss the X-rays (especially the QPOs) and the radio waves and point to the light, asserting that it is Morse Code. When asked what the Morse Code means they answer that no one will ever know. Often lacking congruity, the Ramponans feel their system is correct at this hour because Mr. Yang, who last resided in South Knoxville, is in OR 1058: a strictly ironic coincidence. The Ramponans remain in Knoxville to harass the other cults, to sow discord. Mockingly, they broadcast the radio waves emanating from the Crab Pulsar and the new Sunsphere. The sound, which is repeated ad infinitum, is a chopping sound, the sound of a helicopter, the sound of an overturned lawnmower. They intersperse these transmissions with belittling pleas of what it could all mean. In spite of their nihilistic detachment, the Ramponans also await the outcome of Yang Wie-Te’s operation.
§§
6,520 light years away, shrouded in a cloud of gases extant from SN1054, the Crab Pulsar sends forth its message encrypted in X-rays, radio waves, and light. For now, the Sunsphere relays its esoteric message, not yet deciphered, perhaps indecipherable. Yang Wie-Te was often known to gaze in the direction of the Crab Nebula. When asked what he was pondering, Yang would say that he was imagining himself near the Pulsar, he was imagining himself as an antenna, he was preparing to disseminate the directive that would one day surge forth from his brain. He claimed the Pulsar and the World’s Fair Tower were made to speak through him. And they would. But now Mr. Yang is in the hospital, silent, perhaps awaiting his explosive transubstantiation. Yet in the Crab Nebula, the neutron star’s nature does not change. It continues to pulse. It continues to transmit.
And now the new Sunsphere. Even below the structure, in what was once World’s Fair Park, and what is now Sunsphere Place, people are compacted and waiting. They wait to learn of Mr. Yang’s condition. They wait to learn about the mystery behind the new Sunsphere and the Crab Pulsar. They search for answers. They are told over a loudspeaker by a soothing, relaxing voice that the physicist, the astronomer is fine, that the mystery will soon be solved. Above them all the orb of the Sunsphere pulses signifying doom, nothing, joy, nescience. Like the eye of a god it sees them all, the tower beneath standing as if a monolith to someone or something’s past or possibly future demise.
**
Andrew Farkas is the author of two short fiction collections: Sunsphere (BlazeVOX Books) and Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press), and a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He had a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXV and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University.
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Image: Flickr / Jacob Ian Wall
The Other Stories has 7.13 Books’ permission to publish “Dorian Vandercleef” which appears in Not Everyone Is Special by Josh Denslow
When you’re a failure at everything else, write a novel. That was the first line of my novel, spoken by Dorian Vandercleef – musician, artist, and social provocateur. My main character would never achieve fame, but I was confident this novel was my ticket to literary stardom.
I wrote the last few pages while staying in the garage of my periodic friend from high school and his obnoxiously nice family. Not a converted garage or anything. It was a sleeping-on-an-air-mattress-next-to-boxes-of-Christmas-decorations-and-two-empty-gas-cans-that-still-emanated-the-ghosts-of-fillings-past type of situation. My friend felt he owed me because my family had taken him in for a few months during our freshman year when his parents were going through a nasty divorce that involved private investigators, secret bank accounts, and a sex toy called The Mint Julep.
After some mild cajoling one night at dinner, I let my friend’s wife read my novel. She hadn’t struck me as all that insightful in our previous conversations, but she fancied herself an expert on the English language because she’d written the manuals that accompanied a popular brand of digital cameras.
That night as I slumbered in the garage (which at the time was the temperature of a meat locker), she shook me awake, her face dangerously close to mine. There was a moment when I thought she’d been so overcome by my prose that she was going to engage me in a bit of sexual escapades. I’m ashamed to admit that I wouldn’t have stopped her. But luckily for everyone, especially my high school friend, that’s not what she had in mind.
“How do you know Dorian?” she asked me urgently.
“I made him up,” I said with pride. “He’s a figment of my imagination.”
“I know this guy. Personally. He’s even writing this same book. Except his is in first person.”
“First person?”
“Like when you say ‘I’ and ‘we’ instead of ‘he’ and ‘they’.”
“I know what first person is,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out what you’re telling me here.”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve known Dorian Vandercleef since I was a girl. We even tried to date once in college. I’m the Tina in your book.”
I realized I hadn’t bothered to remember my friend’s wife’s name (or the names of any of his children) even though I’d been staying with them for a few days. And now she was looming over me, and somehow, even with my stunning powers of observation, I’d missed that she was exactly as I’d described Tina in the novel. Slightly plump with an alluring overbite and honey-colored hair that she tucked behind her tiny ears.
I sat up on the air mattress and my ass sunk all the way to the cement floor. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“You’ve written my friend Dorian’s story. Perfectly.” She looked scared.
“I must meet this man.”
Which is exactly what we did. Right then. Using their family minivan.
When Dorian opened the door to his apartment (which I’d also described in my novel down to the lopsided number), I knew that everything my friend’s wife said was true. There he was in the robe from the downtown Radisson which I’d had him steal as a reminder of his conquest of the maid-of-honor at his sister’s wedding.
“What’s going on, Tina?” Dorian’s voice was just as mellifluous as I’d written on page three. His leather jacket was thrown over the back of the couch (page ten). The lamp with bird feet he’d found while riding a motorcycle across Bali was on dim (chapter six).
“Do you know this guy?” she said.
They were both staring at me like I was the weird one here. Had I become a character in my book? Or more frightening, was I now going to be a character in his? Standing there between them I was suddenly aware of my burgeoning double chin and the striking whiteness of my bare arms. I couldn’t help but think how we’d each write this scene and how unattractive I would become when reduced to words.
“I don’t know,” Dorian said. “Is he important?”
He wasn’t asking my friend’s wife; he was asking me. He wanted to know if I was going to make it into his book. Would I thrust his narrative forward?
I didn’t need to say anything. We all knew the answer. It was fine for me to write about Dorian because he was interesting whether he was in first or third person. But no one needed to write about me. I’d never been to Bali or slept with the maid-of-honor. I didn’t want Dorian to know my name. I didn’t want this moment to become memorable. I did not want to be part of his plot.
They were waiting for my answer. It was a test of my fortitude. I had to do something unexpected. Something that no reader would see coming.
So I ran like hell.
My feet slammed on the asphalt outside Dorian’s apartment complex, but I didn’t slow until I was out of sight. Hunched over and gasping for breath, one thing was certain.
I had never, ever, meant to tell the truth.
**
Josh Denslow’s debut collection Not Everyone Is Special will be published in March by 7.13 Books. It contains stories that originally appeared in Third Coast, Cutbank, Black Clock and other fine places. When he’s not building elaborate Lego sets with his three boys (all under five-years-old!), he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane and edits at SmokeLong Quarterly.
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Image: Flickr / Micah Baldwin
“Relatable Objects” by Anita Goveas originally appeared in Porridge.
The man is small and thin, like a washed-out finger chili. Anjali sits next to him gingerly, rubs her back, then spots the bookbag. Another happy parent, the world is saturated with them, six at least on this bus. Meanwhile, her back is aching, her hips are sore, with nothing to show for it. He notices Anjali’s awkward position and grins. She smiles back warily.
“How many weeks are you?”
Anjali blinks, follows his questioning gaze. There is a gentle curve to her wool-covered belly. She places her hands on the ghost of five months ago.
“Um, eight?” She purses her lips too late to swallow the lie. It slips out more easily than responding to muttered sympathies, mutually blushed with embarrassment.
“Enjoy it while it lasts! I’m on the way to pick up the oldest, haven’t slept a wink for four years!”
Her second smile is wider. Darren-proud-father-of-two, as he introduces himself, elaborates about baby-led weaning ( ridiculous), toddler-baby jealousy (not a myth) and the importance of choosing a good nursery as soon as they’ve popped out (sets them up for life). Darren says she should definitely find out the baby’s sex, who wants hundreds of yellow baby-grows. The conversation flows until she misses her stop at Old Kent Road.
Home finally, she explores the site of misunderstanding. One of the fluffy grey socks she’s made for Haroon was caught in her jumper, an illusion of fertility. She balls it up and places it over her belly-button, a small orb of potency. The muscles in her back relax slightly.
Dinner is simple, cumin-scented daal, rice, crisp fish-fry. Comfort food. She can’t swallow mango chutney after eating it with everything for weeks, but it’s Haroon’s favourite. She watches it plop on his plate in syrupy yellow mounds.
“Did you make it to see Mr Foster? He’s being kind, keeping your job open.” he says, pulling out the bones from his piece of mackerel and mashing flakes of flesh into his rice.
She tears away from his ravaging of her perfectly-cooked offering to his hopeful eyebrows, and twitches her shoulders.
“I didn’t feel up to it today.” She should have put his dinner in a blender, saved him the trouble of all that destruction. His eyebrows retreat to their usual place, hovering above his watery cow eyes and lashes meant for their daughter. “But I do need to get out more. I might try the library next week.”
Night-time is when she goes through the should-haves, while Haroon dribbles and snorts into his pillow. Worked less, drunk more water, been more aware. Now there are other considerations.
This time she hovers eagerly next to the toned-looking woman in navy-blue trainers with the green and grey jogging stroller. She’s oval-faced, with a sleek black bob with purplish high-lights, like squeezed-out tamarind. Her wide-faced infant is drinking juice from a sippy cup, wearing a t-shirt covered in fuschia ducks.
Anjali has tried several outfits before venturing out, settling on leggings and a grey thigh-length kurtha. The socks are wrapped in a clean linen pillow-case and secured with a chiffon scarf, the swell approximating four months. She’s jiggled the reproduction to ensure its stability against unexpected traffic-stops. The only thing she’s not practised is how to start the conversation.
The other woman nods, moves her lime-green Puma backpack, and gestures to the empty seat. Luisa is her first, that’s her with her favourite bear, this is when she first walked, this one’s when she started nursery. Her sister says if she waits too long to have another, they’ll fight. Her husband says she should eat more. Her father says she won’t be promoted now, her mother says Luisa cries for an hour when she leaves. Exercise is her saviour, but more sleep would be lovely, eyes closing as she smirks. Elena works part-time now, there aren’t enough hours in the day, but of course Luisa is worth it.
Anjali is hiding the bundle in her beside-table drawer, when Haroon ambles in, scratching his curly head.
“Where are my grey socks, sweetheart? Did you wash them?”
She pushes the corner of the pillow-case down, closes her eyes, shakes her head.
“Haroon Chabra, is that all I am to you now? A maid-servant?”
His gaze follows her as she brushes past him. The fluttering in her gut could be satisfaction.
She waits nine days before the next outing. Her hands and feet went hot and cold every morning and the tingling made her nauseous, then wistful. She swapped the socks for folded teal-blue cotton hand-towels, an old wedding present hidden in the loft because they don’t match the bathroom. They’re layered into a six months belly, skimming her area of previous knowledge, and silky against her stomach like an extra skin.
The woman’s cropped beige hair is edged with grey, like a mouldering samosa. There are folds between her mouth and chin and above her thin, straight nose. Something about the way she stares as Anjali eases into the seat causes her to clasp her creation. The red-faced baby in the lollipop-printed blue pram coos intermittently, and gets an instant response. White lacy blanket straightened, buggy book adjusted, Burberry-checked babygrow smoothed. They sit together in nose-scratching, head-twitching silence from Champion Hill to Camberwell Green before the baby tries to eat his right foot and they mutually beam.
Claire says, I bet you thought I was his grandmother, didn’t you? Claire says, what’s wrong with wanting a career first? Bradley’s important to me, but he’s not my only legacy. Why don’t people wake up to the 21st century? We have choices, our bodies belong to us.
She’s ironing their cream damask table-cloth when Haroon folds up the Times and plays the messages on the answerphone. They listen together to Mr Foster’s message in head-twitching silence. The office is fake sympathy, averted eyes, abrupt changes of subject. She won’t go back.
Haroon rolls towards her in his sleep that night, and she shoves at his heavy arm.
“I won’t try again yet, I’m not ready, ” she says with her hands clenched. He grunts as she rubs her taut abdomen, fingers tracing the ugly scar.
She’s on an almost empty bus, post school-run, sat automatically by the space for the pram. In recognition of the last time she’ll do this, she’s wrapped the socks in the hand-towels and the table- cloth. Rain is streaking the window, and the distension is obscured behind a navy-blue raincoat. But the pressure is comforting, and she’s rubbing it in circles, branding the feel over her skin.
Her meditation is disturbed by a plastic car bouncing off her black ankle boots, and a murmured apology in a soft accented voice.
The space is filled by a red double-stroller, holding a sleeping chubby-cheeked baby and a wide-awake black-haired toddler. The woman sitting next to her has curly auburn hair, dark shadows under her eyes, and lightly pock-marked wheatish skin, like a perfectly-cooked chapati. They all smell like cardamom and chocolate.
Nour is on her way to the park while her oldest Delisha is in school. Bahir is a handful, doesn’t start nursery for five months, but Leila sleeps through anything. Listen to him singing ‘Wheels on the bus’ and she’s quiet as an angel. They’ll visit her real angel, Shaheen, who came before Bahir, in the cemetary tomorrow. The singing, and the reading, the park, and the school-run fill the ache in the daytime but it’s at night you remember, don’t you?
Anjali moves to help the stroller off the bus, and Nour waves her away.
“You need to think more of yourself, but thank you. Good luck with the baby! This is my card, we’ll do coffee some time?”
She stands by the doors, watching them recede, clutching the cardboard until it leaves a thin red line on her palm. What brought them together is an invention, a barrier to further shared sympathies.
When Haroon rolls to her rigid body, she doesn’t move away. She grabs his wrist, counts the strong regular pulsebeats.
“Do you think about Rupa? She’d be three months old now.”
He shuffles his head toward her shoulder, splays a long-fingered hand over her belly,
“Every day, sweetheart. Every day.”
It’s a risk to look for Nour again, wearing the bulkiest accessory, but speeches sound rehearsed and she deserves full disclosure. If she can find the words to tell Nour, perhaps this can all make sense again. She hears her name and smiles, then her knees stop working and her throat dries up.
Jasminder shouldn’t be on this bus, her neighbour has a car. They’re frozen in consternation, Jasminder’s eyes on the hideous, alien protuberance. Until they jerk to a stop, and Anjali bolts through the doors.
She cuts up every shred of fabric with scissors, flushes it down the toilet. The damask is expensively dense, blocks up the pipe. Water gushes onto the black and white tiled floor. She lies down in the shambles, back aching, hips sore. She was too weak to keep her baby, too consumed to move on. There are no words for Nour, for Haroon, for herself. This is her legacy.
**
Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently in JMWW, OkayDonkey and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s Twitter zine, a reader for Bare Fiction and tweets erratically.
**
Image: Flickr / GollyGforce
The following excerpt is from Sugar Land by tammy lynne stoner, published on October 23, 2018 by Red Hen Press Copyright (c) 2018 by tammy lynne stoner.
My step-daughter, Edna—who wanted to be called Eddie, pushed open the door. I watched a moment of realization pass through her as she saw how big I’d gotten—my size no doubt highlighted by my yellow T-shirt and matching sweat pants. It must’ve looked like I was merging with my mustard-colored couch, as if it was just a puddle of me.
Eddie’s hair was a little longer now and could maybe be a bob if she didn’t keep it so far back behind her ears. It made me wonder if she did that in case there were times when she had to wear a bob to feminize herself. It’s tough living so consciously all the time.
“Come on in.”
She took a few steps in and looked around as if she expected to be attacked by a giant pan of fudge.
“Don’t worry. I’m working on my weight—I’m turning it around.” I took in a breath. “And I want to tell you something I should have told you all those years ago on the night you didn’t go to your prom.”
“Which prom that I didn’t go to?”
“The first one.”
“Alright.”
“Ah… well…”
While I stammered, Eddie sat down on the rickety chair with her legs spread and her hands locked in the middle, like she was watching football. When she looked up at me, she broke out in a big smile. “Why don’t you let me guess what you are going to tell me?”
I lit a cigarette. “Sure.”
“You’re a lover of Sappho.”
“What now?” I asked.
She clarified: “You’re a lesbian.”
I nearly dropped my cigarette. “How did you know?”
“Other than the shoes you wear? Miss Debbie.”
“That girl leaks more than a wooden bucket of termites.”
“She called and read me the act—said it was my doing, that I had ‘poisoned the waters of our family well.’”
“Lord.” I leaned back.
Eddie smiled. “She goes crazy sometimes, Nana Dara, usually after Bible study or her third gin and tonic—or both.”
“Eddie,” I said, staying on track, “all of your pain is my fault. I should have been there for you. I should have been a role model for you. It’s my fault you suffered.”
“What?”
“I had chances—like prom night—to tell you about me so you wouldn’t feel so alone.”
She sighed. “That is even crazier than your rampages about aliens.”
“Well, they are breedin’ with us-”
“Oh, here we go! Between you and Miss Debbie, I’m looking like the sanest one out there—me, a woman with a bow tie collection.”
Eddie had a new ease to her, I noticed. She even smiled without hiding her teeth and just made a joke about her ties, something we never even addressed before much less joked about.
I hoped there was someone out there thinking about her right now.
“Seriously now, I should have told you earlier. I should have said something. Instead I made you hide and be someone you weren’t and then you did dangerous things and got pregnant and had to give up your baby-”
She looked down at her trimmed, plain fingernails. “You really taking all that on, Nana Dara?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Eddie took the cigarette from my smiley face ashtray and sat back down. “I did what I did. I didn’t love the man who got me pregnant, but he was fun and when my friends and their boyfriends went out, I had someone to take along. Then he enlisted. I slept with him because I wanted to, not because of anything you did or anyone I wasn’t yet able to be.”
I nodded, unconvinced but trying to look the opposite.
Eddie stared down through her knees at my stained and worn carpet. Her face grew dark. “But I will tell you this—the pregnancy sealed it for me. Made it all clear what I could and could not do. I love my daughter, you know I do, but I hated it, Nana Dara. I hated being pregnant. I didn’t really want the body I’d been given and there I was with it in its highest female form. And the doctor visits. Do you know what they do to check on the baby? Oh, I could barely handle it. And I was alone.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“I finally told Miss Debbie in the second trimester. I told her because I didn’t know if I could keep on going. I didn’t know if I could do labor. I needed some reason to keep on…”
I tried to catch her eye, but she kept her head down.
“Once I told her I wanted to give her the baby, she drove me to every doctor’s appointment and bought me all my clothes and didn’t say a word when I cut all my hair off. She said I was in ‘the crazy point’ of pregnant. She’d read it in a book.”
I smiled. “If you got Miss Debbie to read, you know it’s serious.”
“She told me all about the stages and made me write down what I was eating every day. It was Miss Debbie in the room with me when I found out it was a girl. We had some wine later that night to celebrate and I asked her if I could name the baby. At that point I could have told her I wanted everything she owned—and her husband—and she would have given it to me.”
“You could probably still have him, I imagine.”
Eddie met my eyes. “Nana Dara, we both know I’d never want him.”
“Me neither.”
She smiled—beamed really—and took another drag off my cigarette.
I said, “Can I ask you something?”
She nodded.
“I don’t quite get how you don’t want to have a woman’s body—I mean, what does that mean?”
“It took me so many nights, many of them more than a little dark, for me to come to understand that. And by understand I am not saying I understand but, rather, that I just accept. It’s like what you learn in Eastern Religions, like Buddhism.”
“What now?”
“Buddhism.” She smiled. “I learned about it when I was in California. It’s just like a different religion, only they don’t like to call it a religion—they call it a philosophy.”
“Alright,” I said, wary.
“Buddhism teaches a lot about self-acceptance, or at least that was the focus when I was studying it, seeing that I needed a lot of self-acceptance. I learned to stop asking ‘why’ and start accepting the fact that I have these strange yearnings, which put me somewhere between the two genders, and having something is enough—you don’t always need to know why.”
I didn’t say anything, my mind playing a tug of war between how I’d been raised and how I truly felt.
She went on: “There’s a saying I repeated to myself fifty times a day, every day for three months: ‘What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you’ll do now.’ Buddha said it.”
“Buddha?”
“He’s like Jesus—actually a lot like Jesus, only not Jesus.”
I smiled. No one in Sugar Land, Texas sits around talking about an alternative to Jesus.
“Nana Dara, the way I’ve come to love myself as I am in every moment, is the way I want you to love yourself. Start by giving away all those notions that who I am is your fault. Maybe even thank yourself for who I am.”
It hit me then: I had just apologized to Eddie for being the way she was, which means that I thought her being this way was wrong—but I didn’t, did I?
“I’m just sorry you felt so bad for so long,” I said.
“I know.” She smiled like someone who didn’t mind waiting five hours on a lake for one measly bite. “Thank you, Nana Dara.”
I took in a breath and recollected, hitting the maximum of new information I could process in one day. I pulled us back to our original topic, letting Eddie know she had to ease off or my head would pop. “OK, so then you had the baby…”
She nodded, telling me she got it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Was that hard for you, given what we just talked about?”
“I came to think of it like this, Nana Dara: It’s what needed to happen, for a million reasons. A million.”
“That’s a big number.”
“Yes.” Her dark eyes dulled to a far away place. “Yes it is.”
“Oh honey.”
“And now there’s my little girl.”
I said “Yes, yes there is” all the while wondering if she gave up California and their crazy philosophies that seem to suit her so she could be near her daughter.
“Well,” she said, clearly also at her limit for the day, “it’s time for me to head out.”
I pushed myself up with arms, which were getting stronger every day. “You think you might want to have a visit again some time this week?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good,” I said.
“Are you fine with Miss Debbie—with the way her mind goes?”
“I just hope it passes.”
“Most storms do,” she said.
“Even on Jupiter.”
Eddie tucked her shirt in and headed for the door. She turned back to me. “So, you have a girlfriend?”
“What? No, no.”
She laughed. “Why not?”
“I’m an old woman!”
“So?”
“So, that’s nasty.”
She stepped outside. “That so?”
“No,” I said, taking a minute in our safe space to consider the words I’d just used. “No, it isn’t nasty. It’s just not available.”
“Well,” Eddie said, looking feisty and proud, “I’ve found that it’s more available than folks think.”
**
tammy lynne stoner was born in Midland, Texas. Her work has been selected for more than a dozen anthologies and literary journals. She was nominated for a Million Writers Award and earned her MFA from Antioch University. tammy has lived in 15 cities, working as a biscuit maker, a medical experimentee, a forklift operator, a gas station attendant, and a college instructor, among other odd jobs. She is the creator of Dottie’s Magic Pockets and the publisher of Gertrude. She lives in Portland, OR and Basel, Switzerland with her lady-friend, Karena, and their three kids. Learn more at her website.
The following text is excerpted from Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy. Copyright © 2018 by Sarah McCoy. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
VI.
Introducing John Blythe
The snows had melted and the rains had come, making everything and everyone in Avonlea sticky. Water seemed to come from every direction, even up from the ground where the drops splashed in puddles. You couldn’t walk a yard without being soaked through.
Marilla had run over to Rachel’s while one storm was moving off to Newfoundland and another was approaching from New Brunswick. She had barely made it to the Whites’ when the clouds broke open again. From the shelter of their porch, she turned to look out over Avonlea: the gulf in the distance roared; the wind was scented with melted icecaps and blew the trees like stalks of kelp; the rain fell faster and faster until it looked as if a veil had been drawn over the island, tinting everything wet gray. She hardly recognized Avonlea as home. From someone else’s front door, it looked so different.
“Come on, before you’re drenched!” Rachel pulled her inside. “I’ve done it! See here—I’ve perfected the rosette. Every bridal pattern from Paris to London is using it. They say the future Queen Victoria will have at least ten thousand rosettes on her coronation gown. I can’t even imagine!”
Rachel proudly held up her circular for admiration. The rosette chain didn’t look terribly different from the standard cable stitch, but Marilla kept silent.
“It’s exceedingly difficult. I can teach you,” Rachel offered. “But don’t be disheartened if you don’t pick it up as quickly as I did. It takes some years if they haven’t the God-given knack.”
Rachel had determined on their second meeting that Marilla didn’t share her “God-given knack,” but her work showed potential, Rachel thought, if Marilla diligently applied herself.
“I’d be very glad to learn,” said Marilla.
“Let’s get our prayer shawl stitching done first. Mother counted my rows before she and father left for White Sands.” Rachel pulled the skein of thick, fleecy yarn from her hamper. “They took my cousins some of Ella’s cooking. Poor dears. It’s the chicken pox. All five children broke out at the same time.” She started to loop her crochet needle around and through, around and through. Marilla joined her, working on the opposite end of the shawl.
“The pox is the most wicked illness,” Rachel continued with a maternal air. “Mother wrapped my fingers in cotton so I couldn’t scratch. Her mother did the same to her. You could scar your face for life if you aren’t cautious. Afterward, I healed without a single blemish. I once read a magazine story about a beautiful girl with a pock perfectly placed on her forehead so that it looked like she’d been anointed with a holy wound. That’s how it was described in the chapter: anointed with a holy wound. I thought it the loveliest thing I’d ever heard. I started drawing a little scar on my forehead with a dab of crushed carmine petals. When Mother forced me to confess what on earth I was doing with her rouge, she said it was wicked foolishness. She took me down to see one of the little French boys living on the wharf row—sorrowful child was pockmarked from ear to ear! A face like a corncob. I was so ashamed. I never wished for such a thing again.” She shook her head. “Have you had the pox?”
Marilla nodded. “When Matthew was nine and I was one year old. Mother said I was the sickest she’s ever seen. I was too young to remember the fever or itching, but Matthew and I have matching scars, so I know it must’ve been.”
“Do you really have a scar?” Rachel set down her crocheting.
Marilla thought it strange that Rachel would have such a morbid fascination. It was a chicken pox scar, as common as a freckle and unsightly as a mole. She couldn’t understand why Rachel would romanticize it. But then, Rachel was an only child and Marilla understood how an imagination left to its own could make the unknown a grand and beastly thing. So in this way, she knew something Rachel didn’t.
“It’s right here.” She rolled up her left sleeve cuff to reveal the inner crook of her elbow, white and soft from hiding. There, in the bony divot between flesh and bone was a teardrop hollow, no bigger than one of the rosettes on Rachel’s circular.
“Yours is the prettiest pock I’ve ever seen! If it’s any consolation,” said Rachel.
“Matthew has one on his right elbow,” Marilla explained. “Mother says it’s often that way with siblings. The pain that one feels, the other does too. When you’ve shared the same womb, it naturally follows that you share your lives.”
Rachel’s eyes softened to a glassy stare. “What if you haven’t siblings?”
Marilla rolled down her sleeve. She’d hurt Rachel, though she hadn’t meant to. “Well, I suppose that’s why God gave us friends.”
Rachel blinked hard and smiled. “Yes. Reverend Patterson gave a right nice sermon on that very subject last week. It’s a proverb: ‘A man with many friends comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’—or sister in our case, right?”
Marilla nodded.
“Maybe I don’t have a scar on my elbow like you, but I have one right in the middle of my you-know-where after sitting on that stinger last month!” She giggled. “You saved me from eternal humiliation, Marilla Cuthbert. I’m forever grateful.”
Marilla didn’t see the accident or what she’d said as anything worthy of humiliation or gratitude. But again, she was fast learning that how she saw the world and how another did could be entirely dissimilar.
Ella interrupted their sewing. “Mademoiselle Rachel, Monsieur Blythe has come about a barter?”
Rachel tilted her head and frowned. “Mother and Father didn’t mention anything to me.”
“Nor to me. It’s Monsieur John Blythe,” Ella clarified. “Says he’s come on his father’s request regarding a gun.”
“A gun?” Rachel wrapped the yarn she was using back around the skein. “Father must’ve spoken to Mr. Blythe at the town hall meeting last Monday.” She put the sewing things back in the hamper. “Tell him that they aren’t home and to come back later.”
Ella nodded half-heartedly. “I suppose so . . . but he came all the way over in the downpour. Do you think we might offer him a warm drink? A chance to dry some? Seems the charitable thing to do, oui?”
Rachel looked to Marilla, who shrugged. She’d never met John Blythe, but she’d felt the force of the rain. It was enough to cut your nose off. Letting the worst of it pass before sending him back seemed sensible.
“All right then.” Rachel rose, smoothed her skirts, and pinched her cheeks.
Marilla thought that odd. She’d long ago given up on her appearance. She had Hugh’s angular cheekbones that caught the sun too much and so were never the alabaster of fashion but tanned like deerskin. Rouges and pinching only made her look a-splotched. She was just as she was. It didn’t bother her to be plain. Besides, it was only the dairy farmer’s son.
John Blythe sat two grades up from her at the Avonlea School. There weren’t any girls in his grade eight class. Most had left to help raise their younger siblings and do house chores. If anything, they home-studied like she did. So John Blythe had been little more than one of the rumpled dark heads in the crowd of older boys. However, there was a notable difference in Rachel as Ella brought him through the kitchen door. He seemed to have an effect on Ella too. Her tone changed. A jingle under its usual flat inflection.
“S’il vous plaît, come in, Monsieur Blythe. You must be chilled to the bone. Here, let me hang your coat to dry by the stove. I’ll make a tasse de thé. Mademoiselle Rachel and her company are waiting for you in the parlor.”
“Very kind of you,” he said.
Marilla thought it a pleasant voice.
Rachel moved a bang ringlet forward onto her forehead at his footsteps down the hall. Marilla scratched her neck.
The toe of his boot came out of the shadows first, followed by the rest of him. He was tall and muscular. The rain had plastered his shirt to his body like a second skin, revealing the outlines of his chest and arms and back. His wet, dark curls hung low on his forehead, making his hazel eyes look nearly golden in the parlor light. When he changed his gaze, from Rachel to Marilla and back, it was like being in the shine and then in shade.
“Hello, Rachel.”
“Why hello, John Blythe,” said Rachel. “This is my friend, Marilla Cuthbert.”
He nodded. “I know your brother Matthew. We schooled together before he went to work for your father. Nice to meet you.” He smiled, and his eyes gleamed brighter.
Marilla had to look away. It nearly pained her. Like staring into sun. “Nice to meet you.”
“As Ella informed you,” said Rachel with one hand on the curve of her hip, “my parents are not at home. They’ve gone over to visit my cousins at Four Winds. Was there some pressing business you needed?”
A drip of water fell from his temple to the parlor carpet. John pushed his hair back, and Marilla nearly gasped at the little pockmark nestled in his left temple. So small a thing. It would’ve gone unnoticed by everyone except . . . they were just speaking of their scars. Anointed, Rachel had said. Chills ran the length of Marilla’s body.
“My apologies for intruding. We didn’t know they were gone today,” explained John. “We arranged a barter. One of our jersey cows for a Ferguson that Mr. White purchased from a London exporter last year. My father sent me over to appraise the condition of the rifle before we bring over the heifer.”
Rachel cocked her head. “I remember that gun. Father said it was a waste of money. He’s never so much as loaded the thing. Not much to shoot at but bunnies and birds in Avonlea. Father hasn’t the time or bloodthirst for such diversions.”
John nodded. “He said as much to my father.”
“Well, feel free to have a look. He keeps it right over here.” She led them to the hall closet and pointed to the top shelf. “Practically new. Still in the box.”
“May I?” asked John.
“Have at it. I’d hate to think you came across town in a storm for nothing.”
John pulled the box down. His arms flexed beneath the damp cotton. The three found themselves standing too close together in the confinement of the narrow hallway. Marilla could smell the ripeness of wet leather and sea salt on his skin. He opened the box, and they gazed inside at the long, polished wooden barrel.
“I forgot how pretty it looks.” Rachel ran her fingers over the shiny metal trigger. “Almost like a royal scepter.”
“A dangerous one, perhaps,” said John.
Rachel lifted her chin. “Depends on how it’s used. If the aimer hits nothing but blue sky, it might as well be a scepter.” She laughed, a tinny sound that echoed down the tiled foyer.
Marilla had never seen a gun up close. She wasn’t even sure her father owned one. The gunpowder alone was too expensive, never mind the rifle. And as Mr. White had pointed out, there was no use for such a weapon in Avonlea. It was a civilized town on a civilized island. There were no dangers larger than an occasional vermin provoking their livestock, and for that a pitchfork did the job just as well as anything else. Mr. White had obviously bought it on a lark. But now, John had been told to trade a pricey cow for this fancy firearm, and Marilla was curious why.
“What would the Blythes need of a rifle like this?” asked Marilla.
John turned his face to her and her cheeks burned. “For protection.”
“Protection?” scoffed Rachel.
“We haven’t any enemies here,” insisted Marilla. “No wolves or bears. It’s an island.”
“‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’”
Mr. Murdock had read that to them once. The author’s name danced on the tip of her tongue . . .
“John Donne,” she said, having come to it.
John smiled at her. “You’re a smart one.”
Marilla felt something pull inside her like sands to the tide.
“Of course it’s an island,” Rachel huffed. “You think you’re so clever because your father lets you study all day. But my mother said there’s more to life than books.” She closed the lid on the rifle box. “You’ve seen it. Now you can go home and say so.”
John’s mouth twitched with a smile. “I’m obliged to you for letting me do the business I was tasked. I am but a lowly farmhand, Mademoiselle White.” He bowed like a liegeman.
“Don’t try to sweet-talk me. I’m immune to highbrow hooey.” Rachel flipped her skirt and went back to the parlor.
Marilla turned to follow, but John stood directly in her path.
“There’s rumor of an insurrection,” he said.
Marilla’s heart quickened to a gallop.
“By whom?”
“Canadian farmers, townsfolk, and tradesmen against the corrupt aristocracy—the Châteaux Clique and the Family Compact.”
Marilla knew of the Americans’ domestic warring, but such conflict had not been Canadian. Canadians were peaceable with their countrymen—or at least, so she’d believed. Seeing her unsettled, John put a hand on her elbow; his fingers wrapped round to the very spot she’d uncovered to Rachel the hour before. She could nearly feel his skin through the muslin sleeve.
“Don’t worry, Marilla. You’ll be safe.”
Marilla dared to meet his stare.
“I will?”
“Of course. I’m sure Matthew and your father are taking precautionary measures. Everyone is. Well . . .” —he looked away to the parlor where Rachel had returned to her sewing—“. . . most everyone. Mr. White told my father that the only reason he’d trade this rifle is because he’s already purchased another. A musket, more suited for targets at a close distance.”
Marilla’s palms went clammy, the danger suddenly all too close.
“Tea?” Ella carried the tray.
John released Marilla’s arm. “Thank you, but I better get going.”
Ella didn’t hide her chagrin. She slumped her way back to the kitchen.
“I’ll be sure to tell my father the rifle is in excellent condition,” John called to Rachel. “I’m sorry for interrupting your afternoon, Mademoiselle White. I hope you can resume your rousing stitchery upon my departure.”
“You are insufferable, Mr. Blythe!” said Rachel, but Marilla heard the giggle in it. So did John.
“Good day, Rachel.”
Rachel gave a mouse huff in reply.
“Good day, Marilla.”
He winked, and she thought it an awfully bold thing to do on their first meeting. Even bolder than taking her by the elbow. “Tell your brother Matthew that I said hello. It’s been too long since I came down to the Cuthbert place. Maybe I should.”
All three of the girls watched John trot away, his horse’s hooves splashing through fresh puddles. The rains had cleared, and the sky had opened up to a shimmering pink sunset.
Ella sighed. “He’s as handsome as the devil.”
Rachel twisted a curl around her finger. “I’ve seen handsomer. Besides, it seems the only one he’s interested in being civil toward is Marilla.”
Marilla shook her head. “Only because he’s friendly with Matthew.”
Rachel raised her eyebrows high. “Surely you would’ve met already if he and your brother were so close.”
Truthfully, Matthew had little time for friends. He and Father were too busy on the farm. And after the drunk fire, he hardly went out socially again. She wondered if John had been at the party that night. Probably not, she decided. Matthew was twenty-one to John’s sixteen. Too far apart in age to share schoolmates. So why then was John so terribly interested in visiting her brother now?
Rachel finished the crocheted row on her prayer shawl. “He’s not my type, but he’s mighty nice to look at. Don’t you agree, Marilla?”
“Handsome is as handsome does. What a person says and thinks are what count.”
It was getting late. Mother and Izzy would have supper waiting, so she packed up her sewing notions. Ella lit the oil lamps while Rachel walked her out to the porch. The air was fresh-scented of earth and mineral with the approach of night.
“So tell me this in truth, Marilla. What would you do if John Blythe showed up at your gable door?”
“I’d welcome him. Just as I would to you or any Avonlea friend.”
Rachel nodded. “Be careful walking. The light’s going quick, and I’d hate for you to fall into a mud hole.”
The whole way home, Marilla thought about the pock scar at John’s temple. It was hard to imagine his face born without it. Such a small feature. A flaw, by most opinions, and yet, to her, it was one of the interesting parts of him. It carried a story, and she understood why Rachel found the idea of a holy wound desirable.
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Sarah McCoy is a New York Times,USA Today, and international bestselling author. McCoy’s work has been featured in Real Simple, The Millions, Your Health Monthly, Huffington Post and other publications. She has taught English writing at Old Dominion University and at the University of Texas at El Paso. She lives with her husband, an orthopedic sports surgeon, and their dog, Gilbert, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
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Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko is trans, queer, non-binary, Tanzania-American looking for a literary agent and publisher for a book of short stories. Nick has published two queer, trans books called Waafrika (Un/CUT Voices Press, 2013) and Waafrika 123 (Un/CUT Voices Press, 2016). If you’d like to get in touch, Nick can be contacted by email.
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Image: Flickr / Gnome J