Contributors 

Fiction

Walter Weinschenk (“Everything”) is an attorney, writer and musician. Until a few years ago, he wrote short stories exclusively but now divides his time equally between poetry and prose. Walter's writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including the Carolina Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Gateway Review, The Closed Eye Open, The Writing Disorder, Beyond Words, The Courtship of Winds, Griffel, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Write Launch and others. His work is due to appear in forthcoming issues of The Raw Art Review, Iris Literary Journal and Phantom Kangaroo. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D. C.

Natalie Schriefer (“All That Naked Hope”) often writes about coming of age, sports, and the outdoors. She plays tennis, climbs mountains, runs, and even dabbles in ballroom dance. She received her MFA from Southern Connecticut State University and works as a freelance writer and editor. Home base: www.natalieschriefer.com.

Carl Boon (“In the Woods With Joey”) is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.

Kenneth M. Kapp (“In a Valley”) was a Professor of Mathematics, a ceramicist, a welder, and an IBMer until downsized in 2000. He taught yoga until COVID-19 decided otherwise. He lives with his wife and beagle in Shorewood, Wisconsin and writes late at night in his man-cave. He enjoys chamber music and mysteries. He's a homebrewer and runs whitewater rivers. Please visit www.kmkbooks.com.

C.A.Demi (“A Last Day”) is a writer currently living in Providence, where he works on an urban farm in the heart of the city's Southside. He has recently been published in American Fiction 17 in 2019. He has also received the honor of being named for a 2016 Fellowship Award in fiction by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. In addition to short fiction, he is at work on a novel set in the forests and steel and coal towns of his native Pennsylvania.

Nonfiction

Keren Gudeman (“Running to the Articulable”) is a a freelance writer and artist, non-profit founder, improvisor, former coach and teacher, and athlete. Keren lives in Minneapolis with her husband and 3 children. She writes about being a more playful and less stressed parent on the Improv Parenting blog.

Visual

Leah Day (Cover) is a self described adventurer, always ready to look over the next hill to see what she may find. She owns Lighthouse Bikes in Portland, Maine and spends her days leading groups along the coast to discover its beauty by bike. In her spare time, she watercolors among other things.

GJ Gillespie (Smoke on the Water and If Not for You) is a collage artist living on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. Winner of 18 awards, his art has appeared in 53 shows and numerous publications. A favorite quote: The world is but a canvas to our imagination. -- Henry David Thoreau.

Aaron Lelito (Ceremonial Time (Crest)) is a visual artist from Buffalo, NY. In his photographic work, he is primarily drawn to the patterns and imagery of nature. His images have been published in Sante Fe Review, Red Rock Review, LandLocked Magazine, EcoTheo Review, and About Place Journal. He is editor in chief of the art & literature website Wild Roof Journal. See more of his work at aaronlelito.com.

From the Editor

Welcome to the Fall 2021 issue of Rock Salt Journal,

Six months ago, I was sitting on the couch, legs covered with a green knit blanket because the heater wouldn’t go over 55 degrees. I turned to my partner and asked her if there was any reason I couldn’t start a magazine. Hannah shrugged and said no. I wasn’t expecting that answer. Did I even want to start a magazine? I imagined five or six days sipping coffee and reading exemplary pieces of fiction, tutting at misspellings, and smiling at the excellent craft. Count me in. Thinking back on the last six months of preparation, I don’t think I drank a single cup of coffee.

I chose New England as a subject immediately. Of course, it’s the only place I know well enough to organize a magazine around, but the decision also came down to the great potential of characters and environments that the region offers. Green mountains, white mountains, lakes, islands, rivers and forests, brick and granite college students, lobstermen, loggers, and potato farmers, there’s a chaotic abundance to the area that seems designed for story-telling.

I was expecting 50 stories about tugboats and every line of dialogue containing the word, “ayuh”, but what I got was so much better. These stories are scuffed, wind-bitten and angry, sorrowful, unkempt, and human, and as I read them, I saw more of New England (with a smattering of Minnesota) than I do on my ferry commute to get groceries on the mainland every Sunday. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Thank you for reading.

Jonah Marlow Bradenday

Everything

Walter Weinschenk

The storm floated for a brief eternity, came to rest and sat like a gull upon the rolling sea. The wind within it clamored to escape and the sky turned blue and black and desolate. The rain began and there was a rumbling as if a ceiling of stone were about to fall. It was the rumination of a cruel tempest that had entered the world.

I wasn’t there but I know that it happened. The storm came into existence for no apparent reason as if summoned by someone or something that stood apart from the world and could see the world and reach it, touch it and impose its will upon it. It was obscure upon the water like a distant desert and was nowhere in particular or somewhere in between, a thousand miles from beach or shore, somewhere beyond the ocean’s precipice and time’s frayed edge. The storm descended upon the sea and, mad with rage, drew its sword and plunged it deep within its soul. Though the wound could not be seen, the sea and the air, conjoined in peace for the long course of time, were ripped apart irreparably. The ocean lay impaled and dying, shocked and senseless; it recoiled and began to purge its essence in streams that rose high overhead. It thrashed about as would any living thing, beset by anger, overcome by panic and unwilling to accept the immediacy of a sudden, dire fate.

The storm consolidated itself, varied its course and gained strength and speed as it fed upon the force and energy of all that it annihilated along its path. It lurched forward and back and shifted abruptly as if attempting to fulfill the dictate of some unfortunate prophecy until, ultimately, it exploded in horrific torrents of wind that surged across the world in various directions, leveling those edifices and mangling those things that man had built through the course of millennia. Those winds crushed the jetties and spits of land that jutted into the sea, wrenched trees and plants from coastal forests, strangled the long stems of plaintive grasses that danced insanely in a thousand meadows, displaced the beds of amalgamated rock and ice that rolled in glacial sheets at the frozen ends of the earth and disbursed the layers of sand and salt amassed within the beds of ancient lakes that had languished in reclusive silence since the time those lakes had emptied. The ponds and rivers and creeks of the world, the hidden rivulets, the ancient estuaries and the delicate marshes and bogs, threatened by strong and sudden shifts in the air, anticipated their respective fates and waited for salvation. The mountains of the earth, exposed and vulnerable, strained against the onslaught to retain their footing. Everything was leveled, everything was savaged and the few living things that did not die were torn from their homes and habitats and tossed into oblivion to find themselves, in time, situated in unfamiliar places. The life of everything, at once, was draining through the gaping wound.

Life had been decimated and the few extant living things that remained were hungry and disoriented. They crawled or swam or flew in senseless circles as the force of life continued to ebb. Life was dying and it seemed inevitable that the world would exist as if life had never lived: no one would know that life had once inhabited the world. And existence itself might have succumbed to the tumult and torment that rode the winds of death but for some insipid, little thing, a simple shred of life seemingly insignificant which was, through its insignificance, too small to tear apart, too simple to smother, too slight to hunt and destroy. This small thing avoided death through the shield and power borne of its own apparent unimportance.

Unsure and unsteady at first, it took on various forms until it found the perfect fit. It began, perhaps, as a dragonfly, violet or blue, hovering low and hesitant above the shore or may have churned the soil and edged through darkness as an earthworm or might have hid beneath the surface of a lake or bay, submerged and indifferent to the passage of time in the form of a garden eel or a barnacle or it may have slowly, scrupulously navigated the dim edges and unstable banks of the earth as a millipede but none of these formulations of life were quite right, none were sufficient as a vehicle through which life could exist and endure over the long course of time in the environment and condition of this new, precarious world.

There came a day, however, when life found itself transmuted and alive in a form that was perfect. It awoke upon the sand of a battered beach in the guise of a tiny, black-clawed crab. It was primitive but its simplicity was its strength: its size and design enabled it to move and maneuver, impervious to the violence around it. It was but a tiny crab, a tiny speck of life that was now the entirety of life in the world, a vestige of the whole but magnificent all the same, more than an aberration and no mere curiosity. It was too small to be destroyed and too strong in its conception to do anything but persevere.

On that day, the crab found cover between two great boulders that had been tossed along the shore by the marauding storm. It felt the sand slowly warm as the sun’s beams descended upon the precise spot upon which that fragile bit of life labored to live as if those beams had burst forth from the sun in pursuit of it. The crab sat immobile and it absorbed that heat. In time, it began to generate its own strength and felt strength and power gradually rise within its body. The hours passed, the rays of the sun began to recede and, as the shadows of the boulders grew long, the crab recognized the need to find a safer habitat. It abandoned its position and slowly inched its way among the rocks and sand, evasive and willful, miles beyond the circle of death that radiated out from the patch of sea within which it might have drowned only hours before. It clung to the rocks that had no stake or interest in death and had no awareness of what was now there or there no longer. As the power and rage of the storm reached its zenith and the waves and the rain in arrogant union suffocated the things that crossed within reach, it was this small being that held strong against the iniquity to which all else had succumbed.

Steady was the heartbeat of that snippet of life that beat within its shell. It shielded itself with its quick pincer claws and sheltered the life within it as if transporting a treasure. It ate and drank from the salts and water and remnants of the things that had died. It implicitly understood that it was the arrowhead of life, knew it essential to save itself and it drew upon the reservoir of resolve embedded in some unidentifiable place within the husk of its body to overcome fear and maintain focus. It would scurry for a moment and stop in a sudden, sit as motionless as a tree and lay in wait for the opportunity to move again. It danced upon furrows etched along the sand and it scuttled between shadows and it hid beneath the ground. The tunnels it bore served as routes of salvation from the terror and blight and chaos that attacked the air and, if it felt the coalescence of those forces descend, it simply waited until it was safe to move on. It would find cover among the crags of those rocks and in gullies carpeted with sand that separated one rock from another and beneath shells and weeds and sticks strewn upon the shore, inauspicious, dull and lifeless in themselves but comprising the only universe within which life could be preserved. That field of stone became a second Garden, a refuge of rock that would shield life from the malevolent gales that patrolled the earth in search of life to destroy: it was a sanctuary in which life could rest and refuse to die until, inevitably, it would be safe to venture out of that wasteland.

When it happened, I was miles away. In the moments before the storm, I was alone in a meadow prone upon a bed of soft grass. The sky above me was quiet, soft and lavender. There was a tree that rose straight out of that ground, alone and imposing upon the landscape. It stood close to me and was positioned in such a way as to suggest that it was allied to me and would protect me, if called upon, as would an older brother or a parent. Perhaps it was an oak or an elm but, regardless, it was so broad and substantial that I felt assured of its strength, secure in its presence and shielded by the long reach of its branches against the sky. Its leaves shook gently like small fish that flinch and shimmer beneath the surface of a glassy pond. The air was warm and delicate, the sun was still and the leaves gently rocked and the sweet smell of grass and the sway of the branches caused me to lower my head to the ground. My thoughts began to drift, and in that moment, I had no care in the world.

One moment passed and then another until I became numb to the passage of time but then, suddenly, I was numb no longer. The breeze gained momentum as it circled the tree and, captivated by its own power, gave license to a cruelty that lay dormant until that moment. It took the form of a malignant wind and it battered the branches of that tree for the sole purpose of breaking them. The wind twisted those branches and bent them in awkward, painful angles and drew them back and released them and those branches snapped in the air like whips. Every few moments, I would hear the wood tear and crackle like bone breaking between the jaws of a dog. Those branches were powerless to resist the force of the assault and the sound of the onslaught was overwhelming.

Though I couldn’t foretell the day or hour, I could see the panorama of everything that lay ahead as time passed. My vision was drawn steadily, in time, toward that horizon. I quickly roused myself as would a sailor of a long-forgotten era, at once peacefully asleep in his hammock within the depths of the rocking hull, suspended just above the thin floor that separated that sailor’s beating heart and the malevolent, rapacious sea. I was stirred from sleep: I was dragged out of a dream. I jumped up and balanced myself upon the grassy ground, unsteady in the wind but soon upright and alert like that sailor and I waited for something I couldn’t describe but somehow knew was coming and I remained undeterred despite my fear and sense of foreboding, standing as a sailor would, poised, awake and steady upon the shifting gundeck, watching, hearing, waiting.

As I waited, I saw everything. I felt an overriding urgency and I ran in some direction, though I can’t remember which, toward a place I can’t recall. I saw an endless procession of enormous waves and I spotted some wooden sticks that once comprised a boat and I watched them rise and fall atop the rolling swells and I saw a metal buoy bounce helplessly, tethered forever to the floor of the sea, constrained to stand vigil at the surface, condemned to withstand the onslaught of waves that came and battered it in rapid order. I could feel its panic as it rang in frantic sequence. It was then that I saw a tiny crab jump from its base into the chaos of those waters and I could see it swim, slow and resolute, toward the ground upon which I stand today.

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Running to the Articulable

Keren Gudeman

At -22 degrees, it's stuck-inside weather. I go running anyway. 

My hands begin to sweat a half-mile into my run and the left side of my goggles fogs over as I reach my destination. The abandoned mill offers a visual escape from the snowy sameness; it’s a 3-storey skeleton, all sharp edges and gashes and too-bright colors of graffiti.

Just behind the mill, Bassett Creek flows into downtown Minneapolis. In a bend of the creek, I find a female and male mallard floating in a small opening of water.

Hey guys, you forgot to fly south, I think.

But I’m grateful to see life, so I slow on the ice-packed bank. Their necks and heads are high, invigorated. It’s enough company for today.

I read later that some waterfowl stay north in the winter, particularly mallards, and especially in urban settings. A duck’s legs warm and cool quickly, and can be 50 degrees cooler than their feathery-meaty bodies.

The pair was comfortable and I could hope – without wishing for their peril – to see them again. Unlike us, they are made for this weather.

—

In 2nd grade, I was near the cloakroom, beyond the reach of teachers. Heidi’s eyes and nose squinted, her lip curled as she spat, “You can’t use the Lord's name in vain!”

I didn’t know what it meant, the vain part. And her conviction was foreign. I wanted to laugh because that’s how I handle discomfort. But her disgust landed in my stomach. I was other.

As philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, “Nobody wants to spend their life going around being the 'village atheist’.”

Not long after I used the lord’s name in vain, Katie and I are enveloped in sleeping bags, staring at the moonlight on the ceiling of Rebecca’s room (not Bible Rebecca, but big sister Rebecca). Our small bodies find comfort on the hard floor and each other. We ask about the stars, and up there, and forever. No answer is big enough to capture these kinds of distances. It takes me a long time to fall asleep.

I am still that village atheist, a god-damner. But, I think my most damning feature is captured by Mary Oliver: “Only if there are angels in your head will you ever possibly, see one.” This, to me, means I have no hope.

—

It’s -11 degrees. My footsteps squeak, scree-scroo, scree-scroo, the soundtrack to these runs. Sometimes I glance back, adrenaline coursing as I anticipate a person – or shadow – on my heels.

My arms form right angles, on autopilot, moving me warily across the snow. The most vigorous part of me is my uterus, roiling as it sheds its inner lining. Usually, this monthly death makes it difficult to run for very long, my cramped hips resist intensity. But I long to see my new friends.

Hey, birds, I have eggs too!

At my turnaround point, I pluck the goggles off my face and pull the face mask from my nose. Peering into nooks of the creek bank, I look for the mallards huddled for warmth by the soil. Their water hole is covered with a thin layer of ice.

As I turn back home, I linger at the mill to study the broken windows and notice the chicken wire. Shards of glass dangle, as if waiting for the windows to be put back together again.

This seems an important faith to have these days – in our ability to put things back together. To imagine futures for the forsaken parts of us.

My body drips with sweat on the way home, and my face is clammy, unable to escape the face mask. For a moment I view the windswept path as if from an airplane, high above, looking down on miles of snowy tundra.

—

In the first half of John Updikes’ Bird Feathers, 14-year-old David is a non-believer. But then he shoots pigeons in his family’s barn, and upon studying the dead bird feathers he sees the “effortless mechanics” and “designs.” To the relief of his parents, he becomes a Believer.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal urges us all to skip over the proof step and just wager on God’s existence, because why not, just in case. It’s the rational thing to do.

Some might say my anxiety and depression are a rational response to the untethered expanses of the universe, pandemics, loneliness, and the like.

But I feel full of holes; I need to be educated or convinced. Or more proactive, like David.

—

A week after my coldest runs, I’m on the clinic table, gown pulled open to reveal my bare chest. My mind spins, imagining possibilities:

there is something wrong with my heart...

the echocardiogram technician has to stop, to talk me down. my heaving chest, unable to speak.

The technician traces the cold probe on my chest, occasionally twisting dials to turn up my heartbeat: tha-thum….tha-thum. An unwelcome self-awareness.

The sound transports me to the clinical table of my pregnancies, the bird-like flutterings. To the joy and fear tied so closely together, how can any one person bear the hope and responsibility at the same time? To the heartbreak of the flutter that wasn’t there after 9 weeks. Kagi was his name. Tears spring into my eyes, and I am transported again, to my live children. Miles away, at home, eating breakfast and complaining about the wrong dessert in their lunch boxes.

I prompt the technician for more information, “I know you can’t fully analyze it, but did you find anything?”

“We would keep you here longer if there was anything to worry about.”

It’s a half-answer, the most she can give me. How do I find faith in this small truth?

When I get home I go running and push on even when my arthritic ankle objects and hobbles me for 2 miles. I feel – or hope – I’m going to find something: the ducks in the creek; or, dead on the railroad tracks.

I feel small. Inside myself. No soundtrack to my run, only the effort of one human. I’m only a mile from home and with every step, I am a speck on the tundra.

—

In a photo from the opening ceremony of the 1988 Olympic Games, two doves are visible above the cauldron. We can’t see the 9 other birds of the 11 released.

Nor can the 3 torch-bearers, the cauldron being so tall, made for Gods. The athletes’ arms are above their heads, dipping to the middle of the cauldron.

Perhaps one of them noticed a flicker of movement above. A shadow fluttering across the spotlight. A feather. But this practiced moment needed to set in motion thousands of practiced moments in the days ahead.

In a photo taken shortly after the lighting of the torch, we can’t see the doves anymore. Likely their little bodies are engulfed in flame. Perhaps one escaped, but our view is obscured by the smoke and camera angle.

Every four years the Olympics leave ashes and abandoned buildings that grow weeds and graffiti. A 16-day performance of our shoulders-hunched big human Dreams. Hope blurs into desperation, and sometimes we kill the birds.

—

My primary doctor had said over the phone, “maybe a sign of a heart attack,” so two weeks later when the cardiologist tells me my heart is normal I don’t feel relief. I want to hear I’m abnormal. That the ECG and Echocardiogram results are irrefutable signs of an athlete’s heart. A super heart.

The cardiologist grabs a plastic model, pulls it apart, pointing with his middle finger at the atria, ventricles, and valves. I nod, not paying attention to the perplexing anatomy of my heart because his grace fills me as it fills the room.

He tells me that if I were his older sister, he wouldn’t advise further tests. Just keep an eye on it. He says, “Pay attention if pain or fatigue crops up.” Another half-answer, a thread tethering me.

In her poem The World I Live In, Mary Oliver asks,

And anyway,

what’s wrong with Maybe?

—

I had my first panic attack in graduate school, driving home for Thanksgiving. Alone, my head filled with big questions and too many truths, none of which fill or bridge or justify the chasm of my mom’s recent cancer diagnosis. My mind focused on death.

In an anonymous Wisconsin hotel room, the memory is best remembered on a slide projector, trotting out a vacation gone wrong:

stuffy air                      click!

hotel walls close in      click!

heart racing                 click!

heart attack                 click!

pick up phone            click!

white space               click!

white space               click!

white space               click!

My sister’s calm voice over the phone; breathing...in….out…..in.

I finally emerged. It was only in believing small half-truths my sister whispered to me, that my anxiety finally loosened and I breathed my way back into my body. But I unearthed a new specter of otherness: This was possible.

I have a brain that can veer off safely worn paths, convince itself of its own demise, a peril so close that it chokes me.

—

Years ago I ran my fastest mile on a straight, downhill course through downtown Minneapolis. A quarter of a mile into the frenzy my hands grew numb and bladder muscles relaxed. Whatever it takes.

My vision narrowed toward the blur of legs in front of me and my brain was grateful for the basics: push, relax.

The number – 5:25 – irrefutable, Super (for me). This personal record was a culmination of countless miles and track workouts training with my running team.

Olympians need some self-deception in their view of themselves, or their competition, or their chance for glory. Belief in half-truths. Their dreams are both hubris and hope.

Perhaps this is how we stave off death, ultimately. We discover potential to get us through. We find ways to be stubborn, to simplify to a logic that equips us to pierce where the creek has frozen or to let pee run down our legs or to burn doves.

—

I force myself out into -16 degrees. The arctic blast is setting records, and I’ve given up on seeing the mallards.

After 30 minutes of a run, my body and its burdened thoughts sometimes find a rhythm. Each step holds potential for settling, calibrating. Scree-scroo...scree-scroo...the soundtrack that sews up something inside of me. Anxious thinking transforms into tolerable koans: What if my heart is actually bad? What if I die? Where are the angels?

It occurs to me on this lonely run that my trust in its mending potential is borne of consistency. I know, through repeated experience, that running brings me closer to myself, and my nothingness, in a half-answer sort of way that makes space for all of the truths I am living.

Birdsong along the path to the mill pulls me out of my thoughts. Moments later, a red-tailed hawk opens its wings in a large oak above me, and flies from tree to tree for a quarter-mile, just a step ahead of me. At the mill, the mallards aren’t in the creek, but I take a small turn off the main path, across a small tributary. A pudgy robin scrambles out of my path. A mile later and once again embedded in my thoughts, I suck in my breath when I turn a corner and find seven turkeys crossing the street.

—

As a young girl, I watched the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy with my anthropologist father. It’s about a Bushman ‘discovering’ modern society, and in the opening scene, a Coke bottle is thrown out of a helicopter window and found by a Bushman walking in the desert. The story flips the normal anthropological narrative on its head, by having the Bushman ‘discover’ modern civilization, helping us to (re-)see the strangeness of Coke bottles, tranquilizer guns, and our Western assumptions about what is good, moral, and important.

The lasting impression on me remains: Our outer and inner worlds are malleable and inextricably bound to our social world. To who and what we surround ourselves by. And how we move through those spaces.

Running keeps my shadows and hope dancing in the same body; shame and acceptance intact but not choking me. These days I am alone but I will lace up again, holding up my part of the wager, finding my “little islands of the articulable,” as Marilynn Robinson says.

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In the Woods With Joey

Carl Boon

Joey’s got a place in the woods—way out there off State Route 23—that smells like cigar ash and rotten wood. He took me out there last spring for a long weekend of bass fishing in an old farm pond, buck euchre, beer, and what he called general relaxation. He told me not to expect much in the way of luxury, but that was fine with me. I needed to get away from the twin demands of work and divorce. Being that I install and repair furnaces, April’s a downtime, anyway. Aside from that, my soon-to-be-ex, who I figured lawyered up even before she started the affair with the middle-school principal, kept stalling on the paperwork. In America, marriage is easy, and divorce is hard, and I think it ought to be the other way around.

So we packed up his truck with the basics: a couple loaves of bread and some canned goods, the fishing gear, light bedding, and four cases of beer. On the way out, we stopped at a Sunoco for three large bags of ice and a few odds and ends: granola bars, Twizzlers, and the like. The guy on the radio promised fine weather through the weekend—bright, sunny days and cool nights. No chance of rain. Yeah, it was going to be good to get away, and I didn’t care one way or the other that Joey was a bit of an eccentric; everyone’s got their quirks, and I made sure he only packed his long gun. For protection, he said, and I understood. Even in Ohio, bears are known to wander around in search of food or mischief. I’m not a gun person like Joey, who keeps a decent collection of handguns locked up in his house and will sometimes drive down to Kentucky or West Virginia for a gun show. I’m not what these Second Amendment-types call anti-gun, but I just assume not be around them. Guns do more harm than good, but I didn’t tell Joey that. He spent three years in ’Nam while I was at vocational school learning about gas furnaces. You gotta give a guy leeway once in a while. He wouldn’t shoot me.

But because you’re reading this in the form of a short story and pondering the usual aspects of irony and foreshadowing, you’ve probably already concluded that Joey did shoot me and that I’m just slowly leading up to that, and that I’ll spend the next few paragraphs immersing you in the details of bass fishing (we use spinners, of course, not live bait) and rural Ohio scenes to soothe you (the barns painted with tobacco advertisements, the dragonflies tittering on the pond, red-winged blackbirds and the squawking of jays in late morning). Or, à la E.B. White in that famous essay of his, the teenaged girls at the nearby campground who smelled of shampoo and fried chicken. And you’d be right, of course: Joey did shoot me, but it was in self-defense. Don’t scoff; he’s a good guy and I actually deserved it, no matter that the asshole cheated at buck euchre. That may seem like a stupid detail to you, but we Ohioans take four things seriously: God, family, Buckeye football, and euchre. He didn’t have to do that. We were only playing for nickels and garbage duty (beer cans, mostly, Blatz and Budweiser), but I don’t like cheaters. My wife was a cheater. Joey had no excuse.

So when I caught him the second time, I threatened him with a log that had probably been sitting in the fireplace long damn forever. I could’ve done him in, but I’m a merciful man, so I merely broke his shoulder with it, most of the teeth from the left side of his mouth, and his right knee-cap. You could hear it shatter the way a window does when struck by a baseball. The noise pleased me. Then we went back to euchre. He kept cheating, but I kept winning and my stack of nickels grew (and I imagined—no, I saw—the middle-school principal’s cock growing as he plugged my wife), so I didn’t care much and got up to use the outhouse. I didn’t think Joey could move, let alone find and load his shotgun, but of course, he did and shot me in my right buttock when my back was turned. The old ass shot. So we called it a night and decided to deal with the blood and the bits of Joey’s bones the next day. It was rainy that Monday, after all, and I steered while he maneuvered the pedals with hands. It was raining very hard with intermittent thunder when we finally arrived at the hospital in Wilmington.

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In a Valley

Kenneth M. Kapp

 I was lucky to represent Paul. Ever since his show in 1997, his paintings had a steady market and commanded a good price; he had been “discovered.” By 2001, he had saved enough to purchase an old homestead 250 miles north of the city. How he found it remains a mystery. The first time I had trouble even finding the macadam county road, double letter designation, never mind the dirt path hidden behind a birch grove. It wandered a half-mile to his property: two old buildings at the bottom of an overgrown valley.

Paul had been painting abstract landscapes using everything from acrylics to watercolors so I understood why he fell in love with the location; he was now truly immersed in his subject. He told me that it was like living in a happy valley. However, both the old wooden outbuilding and the two-room “house” left a lot to be desired. The unheated outbuilding he had converted into a studio but could use it only when it was warm enough to hold a brush, perhaps 6 months out of the year. I had to dissuade him from putting in a wood-burning stove; the place was a fire trap.

The old farmhouse was only a little better – the original homesteaders and their heirs never bothered to put in central heating or get on the grid. The third generation used it as a rustic retreat. I had cautioned Paul, but he was determined. “Larry, I’ve had enough of the city and it’s impossible to work there in the summer. Haven’t you heard about global warning?” I asked if he meant to say “warming” and he replied, “No, warning is the right word. Mother earth is telling us to shape up or she’ll burn us out!”

I couldn’t argue with that. And, besides, he promised to give me at least as many paintings as before. “Come visit me every couple of months. I’ll up your commission 5% for the bother. And you can take a picture of me on location – Paul en plein air. Those old dowagers or whoever is buying my paintings will lap it up.” He was right.

Finding his place the first time was tough. I almost gave up and I guess that if I never came, he wouldn’t have cried, just kept on painting and stacking one work behind the other. But it was a day in the country for me and he didn’t require any advance notice. “Worst case, if I have to run up to town, I’m never long. Like the sign says ‘Bentonhurst, pop. 613.’ Trust me, there’s not much to do. I leave lists in the grocery and hardware stores and return in two weeks. Once a month I make my run to the big box store. Help yourself to a beer and enjoy the ambiance.”

Paul continued to paint abstract landscapes but now favored watercolors. You could definitely see the impact of wabi-sabi over the last ten years; the scenes had become amorphous and the colors appeared to have fallen on the cold press 750 gsm paper as if condensing from a fog. But once or twice a year when I called, there would be a large acrylic with a nightmarish quality. When I asked, he would shrug and spit out a remark like, “That’s the way the shit falls sometimes.” He took offence when I asked if I could help, so I stopped asking. Since they were selling well, neither of us had reason to complain.

Five years went by and then he asked me to come just twice a year. “June 1, I’ll give you the spring stuff; November 1, you can get whatever. I’ll leave them inside the house in case I’m not home. Leave me a statement and a couple of thousand in cash, nothing larger than a twenty, people are funny up here. The balance you can put in my account.”

He was becoming more reclusive and was often out on one or both of the days I came up. A torn paper bag, with his titles – mostly some weird numbering scheme: 2A 31 b, 2B 32 a – along with a minimum price, was on the floor in front of the paintings inside the door. Surprisingly, his prices were on the money. And then for two years, the list, the paintings, but no Paul. The last time there was another torn bag with a note saying he was taking some time off. Not to worry. He’d get a note to me in the city when he had new stuff: “I’m moving in a new direction and it may take some time.”

I knew he wasn’t hurting for money; in fact, he was sitting pretty even if none of the paintings we had in inventory ever sold. So I left him alone, thinking temperamental artists. Two, three years passed without any note. I wasn’t really worried. Paul seemed to have shrunk in size those first years on his homestead but then I hadn’t noticed any further changes. Maybe he had lost another few pounds and was hunched a little more, but he kept his intensity and color. I just assumed he had a winter studio somewhere warm and maybe another agent for those six months. Didn’t feel as if I had to get bent out of shape. He did well by me and I did well by him.

Still, I was a little concerned. I remembered that the studio and house had at best only received a minimum of maintenance over the years. Probably the only thing he did was to have a neighboring farmer come in and cut the weeds and lawn surrounding the buildings. I recalled that there were a couple of plowed rows with vegetables behind the house on the south side. There was ivy growing up the sides of the house and shrubs seemed to be crowding in on the studio.

The Wednesday after Memorial Day I decided to drive up north and see Paul. I felt we were old friends and since a couple of his paintings had recently sold, I had the excuse of wanting to drop off some cash as in the old days rather than putting all the proceeds in his account.

The road leading in was as before – a road less traveled – but I was shocked as I came around the last bend and saw the house. The fields were overgrown, indeed they looked as if it had been a year or two since they were last cut. Vines now covered several of the windows and one tree had fallen across the front of the studio.

I parked, walked around the house and studio shouting out, “Paul, are you there? Paul, are you home?” I felt foolish but went back to the car and blasted the horn several times, making enough noise to wake the dead. Then I went up the two steps to the front door and banged loudly. I tried the door, and when it creaked open, entered as in the old days.

That probably was a mistake. The air was rank. I looked around. There was neither a rock holding down a note nor a stack of paintings standing behind it. The front room where I was standing was a combination living room/dining room with a primitive kitchen off to one side. The bedroom was in the back. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and walked across to the bedroom door, which was half ajar. I stood inside the doorway and shined my light on the bed. Paul was lying there covered in spider webs. I retreated out the front door and retched, holding onto my car door.

I had to drive back out to the macadam to get a phone signal and call 911. Thirty minutes later a sheriff pulled up, listened to my report, and then asked me to drive with him back to the house. The rest played out as if it were on TV. Eventually, I had to follow the officer to the county office and fill out a full report. It was late when I finished, and I was in no shape to drive back into the city. I got a recommendation for a dinner club and a clean motel and spent a restless night, wondering if Paul had painted himself into one of his abstract landscapes.

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A Last Day

C.A.Demi

Thom Doebler pulled his pickup in front of the steamroller and parked parallel to the length of its cylinder. He let the truck’s engine run for a few seconds, listening to its sound before he cut the ignition. Considerate of the clicks and pings of the cooling engine, he remained still, one hand on the steering wheel and the other not yet withdrawing the key. Down the road, about ten yards, one of the flaggers, Leanne Dobson, leaned into her pole, positioning it with the 'stop' sign turned toward Thom’s truck. She held a walkie before her face as if ready to make a report, but only looked, mouth agape, down the length of road stretching past where Thom had parked. When he, at last, stood up out of the pickup, Thom reached to his back pocket, pulled out a white kerchief, and brushed the breast of his green flannel shirt and the front of his brown work trousers. He then leaned all the way over to flick it at the toes of each of his boots. He executed this ritual with practiced, steadfast movements, not exactly fastidious but always measured. Once finished, he refolded the kerchief and returned it to his pocket.

Thom nodded as he walked up to the flagger.

“Hi, Thom.” Leanne dropped the walkie to her side.

“Been much traffic this morning?”

“Nah. Now that schools been out it’s quiet, mostly.” Still leaning on the pole, she pivoted her weight to face Thom squarely. “I’m glad. Them buses scare me. Sometimes the wheels go off the edge of the road there, and they look like they're just about going all the way over. You can see all them kids in there…” She stepped back and swayed dramatically, emitting a quick laugh. Then her normally broad, slack smile faded into a look of embarrassment and she averted her eyes. “Hey Thom, I heard something, I don’t know if it’s ok to say.”

“What’s that?”

“I heard…” Leanne cast a look up and down the empty road, only allowing their eyes to meet directly for an instant as she turned her head from one side to the other. “Well, I heard about what your wife said at church.”

“Did you now.” Thom's voice was smooth and unsurprised. His eyes shone with either a deep sadness or a bottomless serenity, an indication that the distance between the two is not really so far. “I think she’s more worried than I am.”

“But you seem so healthy. It just don’t seem like that’s how it should be.”

“Oh. Well, these things can be complicated, their causes. But like I said, I’m not sure it’s worth getting too worked up over. Not yet.”

“It’s not like lung cancer, is it?”

“No.” The creases in his face became increasingly pronounced until he forced a cough. “It’s my prostate.”

“You know, sometimes I wonder out here with the fumes and all. Like the cars and that smell the tar gets when your eyes get watery and stuff. Plus, I smoke.” Leanne shook her head. “But, you don’t though.”

“It’s not lung cancer. Maybe my wife didn’t say that.”

“Well, I didn’t hear from her. My cousin heard, or that’s who I heard from. She's the one always going to church. I don't hardly ever.”

“I only go sometimes myself. Not this last weekend.” Thom’s smile settled on bemusement. His skin had been fair in his youth, but years of working mostly outdoors had prevailed to toughen and brown it. Around his eyes were heavily wrinkled lines that seemed to deepen even at times when his face otherwise betrayed no reaction. “There’re still a few tests they want to do at the hospital. Nothing’s for certain. They want to be sure about it all, but the doctors say maybe they won’t need to operate. If it’s not growing, or just real slow.”

“Slow.” She drew the word out then smacked her tongue wetly. “That’s good. Right? We’ll just have to pray it works out that way.”

“I reckon so. Thank you. Right now it’s just wait and see. That’s about all a person ever can do. Certain things have to happen of their own accord. And then I’ll hear whatever they say, after the tests.”

Leanne removed her hardhat to smooth the hair that had worked free from her ponytail. She grinned quizzically at the hat's crown before replacing it on her head.

“You know, there might be something you could help me out with,” Thom said, already reaching into the left pocket of his trousers. He produced a cellphone. “I got this...”

“Oh my god,” Leanne broke in. When her mouth fell open her high cheekbones were set at odds with the round fleshiness of the rest of her face. The ensuing laugher smelled of cigarettes and cinnamon chewing gum.

Thom simply nodded, the ferment of others never so easily souring his disposition. He turned the cellphone over and back in his hand. “My son’s been after me to get it. And now that he’s deployed, it seemed about time I should.”

“Oh, yeah.” Leanne was still slightly breathless. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“He wanted to be able to call us whenever; so if we’re not home, he can still get hold of us. You know the time difference over there’s pretty big.” He was holding the cellphone in his flattened palm as if it were a compass that might point across the breach of time and space that made his son otherwise unreachable. “Just in case anything happens. And he can send me little emails, too.” Without moving his head, he narrowed his eyes at the object. “Just to let us know how it’s going.”

“You can do emails on that?” She squinted. “You mean texts? That’s just a regular phone like I got. You need one of them BlackBerrys for emails.”

“I don’t know what they’re called, but he writes me these little mails, or…” He took the phone in both hands and flipped it open. “Little notes. There’s one he said how there's no grass over there. That’s all it said. I took it that meant he was okay if he had time to comment about something like that.”

“Those are texts. I don’t even know why they’re still sending guys over there anyway. They got Saddam. I mean, I know there’s still all that violence going on, but still. Let them all just fight it out with each other if that’s what they want? And if there’s not even any grass… What’s the point? I mean, I know it’s not about grass why the war started. It was about, well… I’m just saying, it don’t make no sense.”

“Maybe it's too dry for grass, or maybe people there just don't like it.” Thom hesitated as if considering his own suggestions. “I didn’t like it when Sammy said that’s where they were sending him. But he didn't get to choose. He got orders. He’s a good boy.”

“Boy? Jeez, he's older than me. Anyway, what’s wrong with your phone then?”

“Oh, I don’t know anything wrong with it. I can make calls, though it's hard to hear. But, it’s got a camera on it and my wife said I can email the pictures I took. Like this morning I saw a doe with her little fawn. It maybe still had some spots, though it was kind of hard to tell. It was still a bit dark out. But it made for a real pretty scene. Peaceful. The two of them there by the road... If I took a picture of something like that, I reckon he’d like to see it, to remind him of home.”

Leanne looked over his shoulder, maybe trying to conjure an image of the mother deer and its young. “Yeah,” she said, “you can’t email on that, just BlackBerrys.”

“That's different from what I have?” The smile that had remained through the conversation faded now.

“Don't they got deer in Iraq, either?” She blinked and shook her head, then refocused her gaze on Thom. “You need to download your pictures on a computer and send emails that way. You should have a wire for that that came with it.”

“Yeah, I believe there were a couple of different wires.”

“Do you even have a computer?” She started laughing but it turned into a cough. After she cleared her throat she continued, “I know you’re not that old, or maybe you are. I just can’t really picture you sitting down at a computer.” She started to choke on her words as she had another coughing fit which ended with her wiping spittle from the corner of her mouth.

Thom’s smile returned, reposeful and compassionate. He waited until she collected herself, then said, “My wife uses it. It was Sammy’s.”

Leanne shook her head and her neck spasmed twice as if to laugh, though no sound accompanied. She produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the pockets of her jeans, and the ritual of lighting her smoke seemed, at last, to put her at ease. “It depends on the computer, like the program or whatever.” She exhaled smoke, turning her head to look down the road as she did.

Thom looked too. Mike Logan, Wayne Kurtzler, and a bunch of the other guys, including Little Mikey, stood between the front-end loader and a flatbed with a large drainage pipe lashed to it. Too far away to hear what they were saying, it was nonetheless clear the group had taken a speculative interest in Thom and Leanne’s conversation.

“Well, thanks,” Thom said. “I’ll give that a try with the wires.”

Leanne, still looking towards the other workers, blew out another puff of smoke. As Thom turned to walk away she said, “I hope them doctors got good news.”

He paused, turned his head, winked, and gestured as though tipping his hardhat.

It was early enough that the evaporating dew still gave verdant sweetness to the air. Out of sight behind a stand of trees, a freshly manured field added the sickly but enticing smell of oiled leather and molasses cake. There was also dust from the work site where the earth had been stripped naked by the blades of various machines and scarred by the tread of their tires. On the right side of the road, opposite the trees and hidden field, the bare land was shrouded in the long morning shadow cast by the embankment where a new stretch of highway was being built, and to which this secluded two-lane road would connect via an access ramp.

Thom walked down the middle of the closed lane of the country road. Looping over the pavement at various points, wide, muddy tire tracks stitched a series of linking half circles that were completed by deep ruts gouged into the ground along the side of the road. Halfway between Leanne and the other workers, Thom headed toward the line of orange barrels that sequestered the closed lane from traffic. He went to a barrel that had been nudged out of line, put his hand on its top, and gave the base a firm kick. It barely moved, but he did it again and again until it was finally forced more into the rank of the rest. With a satisfied expression, Thom looked up and down the formation then continued along the road. The chatter of the workmen became more discernible with each step.

“Good work there, Doeby,” said Mike. As usual, the words from the heavy-set man were threaded with sarcasm.

Thom smiled and nodded. “Fellas.”

“Hey, Doeby, you got something on your hat there.” Wayne’s joke fell into well-worn tracks and the small dust-up of laughter that followed was as familiar as the stutters and coughs of each of the diesel motors on the worksite. “Don’t know how you can miss it, it being all shiny like that.”

“Oh, well, guess I’ll have to take a closer look later.”

The men were too easily amused by themselves to ever give much attention to how Thom responded. They stood beside the flatbed, three of them leaning against it, while Mike, Wayne, and Little Mikey stood nearly shoulder to shoulder in front of them. They all wore jeans, ill-fitting and unwashed, and heavy, lugged, muddy boots.

“What’d you have up there, a cellphone?” Mike jibed. “I didn’t know you were all techno-logical.” Whether his pronunciation was for emphasis or a genuine struggle on his own part, could not be certain. Guffaws followed all the same.

“What happened, you have some of them carrier pigeons and they all fly away?” shot Wayne.

“Well, I figured I'd save on the cost of feed with a cellphone.”

“Hey look, there goes one now. He’s looking for you.” Little Mikey pointed into the air at a bird, not a pigeon, flying high behind Thom toward the lilting tops of the trees. Mike and Wayne broke loose yelling in mock excitement, encouraging Thom to give chase. Two of the men leaning against the flatbed trailer laughed and exchanged a few words between themselves, but never bothered to look in the direction in which Little Mikey had pointed. The other, the flatbed’s driver, shifted his glance among the other men assembled with a self-conscience that appeared to be more a part of his temperament than weariness of, or caution aroused by, the proceedings.

“Can you take pictures with it?” Wayne tried to assume a more congenial tone, drawing the group into an anticipatory lull.

“It does.” Thom’s reply was flat and without malice.

“Well, if you want you can take my picture. That way you can see my pretty face whenever you want to.” With that Wayne folded his hands under his chin and made an extravagant attempt at come-hither-eyes. A buoyant, more genuine, chorus broke out. Mike pulled his glasses from his face and rubbed his free hand over his eyes.

“Doeby. Hey, Doeby,” Little Mikey could barely contain himself. “You can take my picture too.” He turned around and bent over making a motion as if to hike down his pants. One of the men leaning against the flatbed folded his arms and shook his head, not exactly disapproving but maybe disappointed that Little Mikey had only mimed his daring.

“Ok fellas,” Thom said, “let’s behave.”

Little Mikey’s eyes beamed with pride. Laughter is the singing of the shuttle across the loom of time. Its frequency dictates the density of life's pile. The men were happy to allow themselves a moment or two to relish the texture and pattern of their banter.

Then Thom, his voice, as ever, revealing no hard feelings, said, “Ok now, let’s see. I don’t suppose it'd be too much trouble to try and get a few things done today.”

The workers mumbled but made no real protest.

“Wayne, how’s she running now?” Thom indicated toward the loader parked in the shadow of the embankment.

Wayne shrugged a little defensively and walked to the ladder of the loader. However, instead of climbing to the cab, he lit a cigarette, looking at once sullen and impatient. Little Mikey went off at a trot to the skidder. Two of the men who had been leaning against the flatbed climbed onto it and milled about, giving cursory inspection to the straps and fasteners that secured the drainage pipe, the diameter of which came to the shoulders of the taller of the two. The chatter of the morning still reverberating along the pipe’s corrugated length, where it was translated into an elemental hum. Mike hitched his jeans and took a step closer to Thom.

“Rich been around this morning?” Thom asked.

“No. Probably still up top. I heard…” A sudden, uncertain gravity weighted Mike’s voice. He paused, letting the unspoken words sink back into the murk of propriety. “Guess they’re all behind up there now.”

“Up top, yeah. The engineers weren’t happy with the levels. They want to regrade that second bend.”

“That’s probably where he is then. I’m glad I ain’t got to deal with them like that.”

“It’s a big operation. You got to do it how the experts say.” Thom looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the second bend but could not even see the first. “They have it all figured and just want to make sure it’s done right.”

The shadows had receded enough toward the base of the embankment to permit sunlight to glint in Mike’s glasses. Where the rays focused directly on the men’s skin, they conducted a warmth that bore the message of the coming season. In a few weeks, it would be hot, even in the mornings, and the routine laziness of the day’s beginning would be poisoned by surly lethargy. Sweat in June is the result of ardor, and if men complain about the work they have done it is in part to disguise their self-regard.

“Anyhow, Rich showed us what to do yesterday. We already dug out all along there.” Mike waved vaguely in the direction of the embankment. “Just got to lay that culvert in.”

In the distance, out of sight, a large diesel grumbled and ratcheted its way through its gears. Almost imperceptibly, the idleness of the workmen had transformed into some form of industry. A heavy chain dragged and clanked dully into the dirt. One of the men on the back of the flatbed gave the drainage pipe a kick. Despite its mass and tautly drawn lashing, the thing emitted a subsonic ring that harmonized menacingly with the rattle and purr of the loader’s engine. The pipe sang not to the ears but directly into the spine, the metallic ribs of one fiddling in a dissonant frequency with the bone of the other. Once all of the cigarettes had been finished, a length of chain was put through the pipe so that the loose ends could be brought together over top.

Thom walked to the front of the flatbed. Farther down the road he could see the other flagger standing with his pole leaned back against his shoulder. Thom watched the man for a minute, but the flagger never turned to look back. Sitting in the skidder, Little Mikey did make eye contact, mischief plain in his smile. He jerked the controls of the machine causing it to bounce, toy-like, his head rag-doll-loose on his shoulders, dumb grin never subsiding.

Wayne pulled the loader around and lined the bucket over the pipe. When the chain was secure, he raised the bucket to take up slack. With a final nudge of the controls, it thrummed tight. The men on the back of the flatbed stood clear, one of them already fishing into his pockets for a lighter to apply to the cigarette waiting on his lips. The loader backed away. Wayne looked down from the cab to Mike, who was sidling along the loader’s course. With the slightest of possible nods, they acknowledged each other through that distance. Wayne took care as he maneuvered the large piece of machinery, stopping anytime during its progress that the pipe, suspended from either end by the chain, began swaying too much. Drawing clear of the flatbed trailer, he cut the controls to the left in a slow sweeping arc. After a quick check back down to Mike, and a repetition of their acknowledgement, he inched forward toward the ditch at the base of the embankment.

The men on the back of the trailer chatted, though the specifics of their locution on any occasion were hardly worth any attention. Every time the one who had been so eager to smoke tapped ash from his cigarette, it fell onto the grimy, greased planks lining the trailer bottom where he would, in a reflex retarded by entropy, scuff at them with the sole of his boot. Meanwhile, Thom moseyed into the trail of the loader. He stopped after a few steps to inspect himself, deciding a single tweak of his trousers about his hips would suffice.

When the link broke, the chain threw itself open with searing force. Later, the wrenched, faulty piece of metal would be found near where the flatbed had been parked. Though at the time it would have kicked a tuft of dust as it skipped to that spot, not a man present had witnessed it. In the moment, the general sensation was that the entire atmosphere had been ionized, that some intrinsic and awesome magnetic force locked in the heavy metal cylinder had been unleashed, fraying into bits the fabric of what happened next. It invaded each man and object to the last atom. Gravity and sound were null. All outward perception was replaced by the feeling of each bodily hair standing to its very end, the smell of blood flooding the nose’s capillaries, the pulse of electricity that makes animate the living things of the world surging to the tips of the fingers. The feeling lasted no longer than the time elapsed between two heartbeats. It would not be until afterwards when the men were able to speak with one another, that they would satisfy an account of what they had seen.

The chain did break. The pipe lurched, willing, impossibly, to keep contact with it. Then, having failed, or realizing the hopelessness of the impulse, it twisted angrily to the ground, where, in a final act of malevolence, it struck out. The men would agree that Mike, for his part, had seemed as frozen in the moment as any other present, his eventual attempt to lunge out of the way as futile as it was late.

A thick haze of dust hung about the fallen man. It plastered his face and filled his nostrils. An arm of his glasses had slipped from behind one ear, causing them to dangle against his face. He tore at and threw them to the side once he had shimmied along the ground enough to gain some clearance from the pipe which, after striking him, had rolled to rest no more than two feet away. Mike pounded the ground with a fist and projected a groan beyond his harried cloud.

Little Mikey was the first to the spot, his oversized boots thumping with perilous quickness as he raced across the worksite. “Oh shit.” The words, subsumed by the dust that had yet to settle, did not likely reach Mike’s ears. Little Mikey looked to the others as they arrived and repeated, “Oh shit.”

As Wayne approached, he reached down to pick up Mike’s glasses and proffered them uncertainly back to their owner. “Shit man, shit. You ok?” Seeing that Mike wasn’t, he drew the glasses close to his own body and nervously worked them opened and closed. “Damn, I seen it go. I didn’t…”

Mike breathed through his teeth. He looked down his leg to the ankle. He let out another groan, this heavily barbed with curses. His foot was turned askew so that it looked like an empty boot twisted onto the limb of a scarecrow, but instead of straw, there was blood. It oozed over a large portion of the skin, the top layer of which had been burned off by the sudden energy of the impact. It soaked through the denim and stained the top of his sock yet did not flow so quickly as to have begun pooling on the dusty ground. Excepting Thom, each man winced, some ghostly twinge still running through his nervous system, as he came to Mike’s side.

“Alright. Hold on. Well alright, just hold still.” Thom knelt.

=“Ah, Christ.” Already Mike’s eyes were red and swollen. He clamped his teeth together making the tense cables of his jaw pop against his flesh and his lips harden and turn the color of solder. Removed from context, looks of agony and bliss appear to be poured of the same ore. There is a polished sheen in the eyes and the surfaces of an expression are burnished by the hot blood coursing beneath. In either case, the fissures of exhaustion that follow are inevitable. “God damn.”

“Okay. Okay.” Thom now had his hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Looks broken. But don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

“Fuck.”

Blood began to spatter on the bare earth. Looking at it the men’s thoughts might have been briefly transported anywhere, to a sandlot where a runner had come in too hard to home plate or to a desert battlefield half the world away. Then, the dust that had been thrown up in the accident either settled or was carried off in the morning breeze. The sky reemerged, brilliant. The grass and trees on the opposite side of the road pressed themselves eagerly toward it. The normal sounds of the morning filtered with quiet defiance back into consciousness. The men stole glances at each other and up and down the road. Finally, slouching to one side or the other, they looked nowhere in particular.

“They’ll be able to patch that up. Don’t worry, doctors these days, this’ll be no problem.”            

Mike gave a long series of heavy, focused breaths.

“Hold still now,” continued Thom. “We’ll get this taken care of. You won’t even know anything ever happened.”

“At least, you know, you’ll get some time off. Worker’s comp,” said Wayne, his tone seeking both irony and compassion.

“Shit yeah, soaking up the AC…” Mike leaned his head back and shook it, then looked from Wayne back to Thom. “Fuck, it’s busted pretty good. I’m going to be off my feet for a while.” He turned his head to spit, but just smacked his gums. “Shit. That fucker came right at me.”

The hem of Mike’s jeans grew heavy and matted. Blood, now muddying the dirt that had been kicked up, continued to seep. It caked in his leg hairs and began to fill his boot. The flesh inflated, its color deepening steadily toward black.

“Mikey, get your truck and bring it over. You can take him in,” said Thom. Still kneeling, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his kerchief. “Here, take it. Try and stop the bleeding.”

Mike took the kerchief and leaned forward to apply it to his ankle. His head came close to Thom’s. Their eyes met, Mike’s steely despite the redness fracturing their edges. A stain appeared on the kerchief and spread. “Shit, it’s really fucked... I mean, it’s bad.”

“They can fix that,” Thom said. “They can fix just about anything these days.”

“Yeah right. They like to say that. But some shit just...” He peeled the kerchief away, but it was too much of a bloody mess to allow for predictions.

“Just keep it on there. It could be a lot more blood, but just keep it on there.”

Mike shifted his weight, leaned closer, and fixed Thom’s eyes. “Hey, I know about... Leanne was saying.”

“Oh, that. Well, there’re more important things right now. We got to get you taken care of.”

“No. But, my brother, too.”

Thom put his hand back on Mike’s shoulder. “Oh. Well, the doctors…”

Wayne stepped away as Little Mikey pulled his pickup just behind Thom. The other two workers and the flatbed driver came solemnly around its side.

“He can’t hardly get out of bed. They say maybe six months.” Mike’s eyes reddened further; the steel began to boil. “If he's lucky. Seems like any day could be the last.”

There was a moment during which neither man took a breath, like the moment before two ends of a rent cloth fall away from each other for good, when silence becomes palpable and weaves into the space of what is unsaid and thereby gives shape to it. As it passed, tears began lacing patterns over Mike’s dust-covered cheeks.

Little Mikey came around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. He and Wayne came up behind Mike and reached down to take hold of him. “Got it, chief?” Wayne asked, gripping Mike under the arm. Together they helped him, wincing and cursing, to his feet. He hopped toward the pickup with one arm around Wayne's shoulder while his free hand held tight to Thom’s blood-spoiled kerchief.

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