From the Editor

I recently got back from hiking a forty-mile section of Vermont’s Long Trail. It was the furthest I’ve ever hiked. At the end of the second day, I discovered blisters the size of grapes on each of my heels. I poked them with our spam-cutting knife, and out came jets of fluid. Very udder-like. Very gross. Don’t pop your blisters. They will heal slower, and you may be ostracized for having weepy feet.

We (my brother, three friends, and me) woke up at four AM on the first day, stumbled out of our motel, and into the trees illuminating the wet-leaf-trail with headlamps. It began to drizzle. We’d known the forecast but refused to cancel through sheer pride. Everyone pulled up their rainhoods and arched their backs willing the wetness to subside. I opened an umbrella. The others tried to tease me but quickly became jealous. Hikers don’t bring umbrellas because that would be absurd. I remained dry and aloof the entire weekend.

Hiking dissolves my anxiety. Maybe it’s the exhaustion from constant exercise, the lack of apps and texts, the simple goals (walk, eat, sleep, walk again), or the shared sense of wanting to be at the campsite already, so why don’t we chat about something idiotic to pass the time, hey isn’t wet moss better than toilet paper? Shouldn’t Massachusetts invade Rhode Island and turn it into a county? I sure hope we don’t get stuck sleeping next to a bunch of 30-something Brooklynite hikers, all cheerful and millennial. Something about the trudge filled me with bliss. I felt peaceful.

While I was walking in the woods, I was neglecting my editor duties. This was supposed to be the first issue that came out on time, right at the beginning of October like all good semi-annual literary journals do. Whoops. My best excuse is the record-breaking number of submissions I received, more importantly, the record-breaking number of submissions I loved. This is the biggest issue by far, and there were still some stories I wish I hadn’t cut.

As always, thank you to the authors who built this issue, and thank you to the readers who read it!

J.B. Marlow

 Contributors 

Fiction

Artisan baker by trade, Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi (“Rag Doll Symposium”) has been published in numerous literary journals. Winner of the Scribes Valley Short Story Writing Contest, he was a Pushcart Prize nominee, and twice nominated for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net. In addition to several short pieces, he is currently working on his debut novel.

Vance Voyles (“Cut Through Everything”) spent the last twenty years as a police officer, seven of which were spent investigating Sex Crimes and Homicide in Central Florida, sitting in long conversations with rapists and murderers making up stories to help them confess their crimes.

His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been featured in Burrow Press Review, Flash Fiction Online, The Short Story Podcast, Ghost Parachute, Bull, Creative Nonfiction, Pithead Chapel, J Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Hippocampus, So Say We All, and Rattle Magazine respectively.

He recently published his first novel, Soldier's Heart: An Evin Walker Thriller, which is available now on Amazon. To read more of his work, feel free to check out his website at www.vancevoyles.com

Shauna Shiff (“Near Flood”) is an English teacher in Virginia, a mother, wife and textiles artist. Her poems and short stories can be found in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Atticus Review, Cold Mountain Review, Green Ink Poetry, Cola and upcoming in others. In 2022, she was nominated for Best of the Net.

Jack Croughwell (“The Rascals”) is an emerging writer from Lowell, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Teleport Magazine, Stone Quarterly, and The Offering. He carries a yellow pen.

Kate Bergquist’s (“The Distant Light of Interstellar Objects”) short fiction appears in Idle Ink, The Chamber Magazine, Rural Fiction Magazine and elsewhere, and includes a nomination for Best New American Voices. She holds an MA in Writing and Literature from Rivier College. Her inspiration is drawn from the landscape and the people of New England, especially New Hampshire and along the Maine coast, where she lives with her husband, several old rescue dogs and a petulant ghost. Kate can be reached at: firstlightkate@gmail.com.

Christine Vartoughian (“The Only Way Out Is Through the Window”) is an award-winning Armenian-American writer and director whose work has shown at Lincoln Center, Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), and whose feature film about love and suicide, Living with the Dead: A Love Story, has been awarded the Audience Choice Award at Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, Best Feature Film at Aberdeen Film Festival, and is available on Apple TV and Amazon, in the U.S. and internationally. She is the co-founder of (Screen)Play Press, a publishing company for yet-to-be-produced film scripts. @christinewritesaboutyou www.christinevartoughian.com

Joshua Sabatini (“Jack and the Trumpet”) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. In October 2002, he moved to San Francisco, California. He's currently on retreat in Katama, Massachusetts. His 2023 published writings include "Pagodians" in Still Point Arts Quarterly, “In the Pine” and “In and Out” in The Closed Eye Open, “The Crocus” in Daffodil Cosmic Journal, “Ivy Anne” and "Susitna" in Die Leere Mitte and "The Winged" in In Parentheses. The author can be contacted at JoshuaSabatini@gmail.com.

Terence Patrick Hughes (“So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star”) writes fiction, poetry, and drama. Recent short stories were published with the Stonecoast Review, Ignatian Literary, and Portrait of New England. His theatre work has been developed and produced around the USA and internationally, and published in university literary magazines, as well as Best Contemporary One-Act Plays. The New York Times noted that his work “…explores heavy subject matter with humorous dialogue and strong characters”. Born in Lawrence, MA, Hughes lives with his wife and two children in Woodstock, NY.

Nonfiction

Billie Pritchett (“Past Life”) is an assistant English professor at Kyungnam University in Changwon, Korea. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in TESOL from Murray State University.

Lael Cassidy (“Portrait”) writes poems, stories, and essays, and her work has appeared in Headline Poetry and Press, Silver Birch, Underwood Press, and Beyond Words. She has also written sixteen nonfiction children's books. She lives in Seattle, teaches writing, and is currently at work on a memoir. You can find her at www.laelcassidy.com.

Harvey Silverman (“Burnt Offerings”) is a retired old coot who writes nonfiction primarily for his own enjoyment. He lives in New Hampshire.

Visual

Erik Suchy (Cover: “Portrait of March”, “A Quiet Place”, and “Strangers”) is an amateur photographer and aspiring writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, having completed a B.A. in Creative Writing from Metropolitan State University. His visual work often incorporates themes of isolation and disharmony from both natural and digitally altered perspectives, although he frequently pursues a variety of different, cross-genre ideas alike.

GJ Gillespie (“Raft of Medusa #3”) is a collage artist living in a 1928 Tudor Revival farmhouse overlooking Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island (north of Seattle). In addition to natural beauty, he is inspired by art history -- especially mid century abstract expressionism.  Winner of 20 awards, his art has appeared in 60 shows and numerous publications.

Willy Conley (“Boat House I, Westerly, Rhode Island” and “Little Red Schoolhouse, Chester, Connecticut”), a former biomedical photographer, has photos featured in the books Photographic Memories, Plays of Our Own, The World of White Water, Listening Through the Bone, The Deaf Heart, No Walls of Stone, and Deaf World. Other publications: American Photographer, Arkansas Review, Baltimore Sun, Carolina Quarterly, Big Muddy, Folio, and 34th Parallel. Conley, born profoundly deaf, is a retired professor and former chair of theatre arts at Gallaudet University (the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students) in Washington, D.C. For more info about his work, visit: www.willyconley.com.

Donald Patten (“Rebecca” and “Nancy Lee”) is an artist from Belfast, Maine and is currently a senior in the Bachelor of Art program at the University of Maine at Augusta. As an artist, he produces oil paintings and graphic novels. Artworks of his have been exhibited in galleries across the Mid-Coast region of Maine. His online portfolio is donaldpatten.newgrounds.com/art.

Marjorie Williams (“On the Cocheco”) is a photographer from Reno, Nevada. Their work deals with the transformative powers of nighttime, the beauty of human relationships and the magic of the mundane. They work with both analog and digital photographic processes to capture not only the look, but the feel of the world they see. They have their Bachelor’s in Photography with a minor in Museum Studies from the University of Nevada, Reno. They spent a year and a half living and working in Portland, Oregon, spent Summer 2022 traveling across the country photographing, and they are currently living in New Hampshire.

Jennifer Shneiderman (“Watchful Conductor”) is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, writer and visual artist. Her work has appeared in many publications, including: Yale University’s The Perch, UCLA’s Windward, The Rubbertop Review and Harpy Hybrid Review. Her work has been featured on the Read650 podcast and she received an Honorable Mention in the Laura Riding Jackson 2020 Poetry Competition.

Rag Doll Symposium Fiction

Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi

A sensation.

Somewhere in the darkness. Soft.

Warm.

Spreading.

Familiar.

Sweetly familiar.

I don't wanna wake up, Andie thought to herself. To her.

Ultrasound-resolution snapshots of her—the owner of the sweetly familiar: An awning of wispy bangs poorly concealing the remnants of acne.

Endearing moles forever at risk of falling into severe dimples. Crooked smile full of crooked teeth.

Eyes a squirrel's winter-long regret about the prized acorns that got away.

And the sweetly familiar itself: lightly freckled, naturally fragrant flesh stretching over perfectly moulded cartilage to produce the finely pointed nose unique to Heather.

The sensation—a feathery tickle against Andie's own bumpy nose—beckoned her to wake up.

Let me sleep.

But the tickling intensified. Heather’s persistent nose rubbed against Andie's, achieving searing friction.

This better be good.

Bracing for light—even if only the dim shaded bulb on the nightstand—Andie opened her eyes and was rewarded with the darkness of Heather's close countenance.

I'm awake, I'm awake.

But Heather seemed neither to notice nor care.

Andie swivelled her head in a spasmodic arc, trying to untether herself from Heather's abrasive nose, but a keen Heather mirrored every evasive direction. She tried pushing the nuisance away, but the nuisance had prepared for this counterattack, pinning her arms.

What're you doing?

Heather continued the assault at her leisure.

Prophesying the personal pain of such a tactic, Andie shot her head forward, but the headbutt failed to make contact with the anticipating Heather. Once more, she projected her forehead; once more, Heather mirrored the motion in reverse.

The agonizing tickling and impenetrable darkness persisted.

What the fuck’re you doing?

Andie blinked vigorously, unable to grip the opaque nothingness of Heather's face. A spike of anxiety pierced but did not defeat the overwhelming tickling.

It's happened!

Sharper spikes of anxiety, whetted by an ambient lifelong fear.

I'm mute and blind!

Exaggerated blinking tested her new disability.

Tears failed to wash away the darkness. Failed to soothe the tickling ravaging her nose.

Can't you see I'm fucking blind, Heather?

A gust of wind banished the darkness, but not the awful tickling, allowing terrible light to stab Andie's unprepared eyes. Behind sealed lids, she waited for the jolting pain to subside, relishing the jagged throbbing, for it promised a chance of sight. A chance of seeing Heather.

Like a newborn's natural foray into optics, Andie studied the world between adjusting

blinks:

Hands stretched out on either side of her, free of Heather's shackles.

Blink.

The left a tight fist.

Blink.

The right upturned, open, reaching for something. Blink.

Or someone.

Heather?

Andie stared at the motionless hands shrouded in night's gloom, willing them to form the motions that would “speak” Heather's name.

They remained still.

She attempted “speech” again and again, each time forging a spike of anxiety with a message not of blindness this time, but of something else.

Sleep paralysis. Recalling the frequent occurrence blunted the spikes.

Sleeping on my stomach again.

But I'm not allowed to sleep on my stomach anymore. Why?

I don't know.

Another breath of cold air inspired movement. Vexed that Heather would leave the oscillator on at what felt like maximum power during a bitter winter night, Andie tracked the stirring to her right. Things poked out from the wrist of the unfulfilled right hand. Tiny.

Gossamer. White. Dancing in the breeze, seemingly matching the tickling on her nose without contact.

I know what you are.

Andie crossed her eyes, directed blurred sight upon the tip of her nose, and barely made out the tail-end of one of the tiny white things clinging there.

You're not Heather’s nose!

Fire raged beneath her face, stoked by the fraud that was the tiny white thing she struggled to identify. She tried to wipe the obstruction away, but sleep paralysis forced her to try another way. Attempts to move her head reported the same incapacity. Her tongue fared too short to reach the anomaly, while funnelling breath upward only contributed to the tiny white thing's dance. And its fraudulent tickling.

You'll never be Heather’s nose!

Andie glared at the other tiny white things spilling from her wrist.

None of you will ever be Heather’s nose!

One of the flimsy objects quivered in the swift breeze.

You rhyme with her...

Faster quivering.

But you're just...

Loosening itself from her wrist.

You're just a... a stupid feather!

The tiny white thing—indeed a feather—flung itself toward her. The oncoming feather grazed her nose, instigating a fresh tingling sensation, then flitted away, leaving the original feather stuck to her nose to continue the annoying assault.

Andie eyed the feathers' cousins, pouring from her wrist, threatening additional attacks.

I gotta get Heather to sew that up.

The fire beneath Andie's face simmered to a temperature of reminiscence. A heat calibrated to emulate Heather's delicate embrace. For a moment, she quieted the tickling on her nose, and she and Heather became Celsius and Fahrenheit, their trivial differences set aside to form a mutual climate. A love affair between disagreeing degrees, matched only by the winter jacket Heather had gifted her.

Why am I wearing a jacket in bed?

Andie's desperate eyes searched the farthest reaches of their sockets. She stared at her open right hand, then adjusted her vision to include her closed left fist in the narrow frame of vision. The immovable things were her means of communication with a world that barely listened to the speaking. These bony, fragile tools possessed the history of Andie and Heather in their joints, their lines, their movements; possessed their arguments, their flirtations, their declarations of love, their wordless explorations of flawed bodies. They articulated every syllable, every inflection, every nuance their shared body language spoke.

But Heather was nowhere to read Andie now.

Dread filled Andie, then a painful swig of frigid air. Countless icy teeth and claws gnashed and slashed at her hot innards, melting to a refined tickle in her dry throat—as if Heather rubbed her there with her sweetly familiar nose. Increasing pressure and vibration created an alien discomfort, and when she achieved that sense of unpleasant fullness, she braced herself, wishing for dreaded deafness as she expelled a pitiful timbre of inarticulate wind.

Andie winced at the pathetic sound of her wretched voice, immediately cutting off the gauzy second syllable of Heather's name before it could further pollute the silence.

The unpleasant fullness dissipated. The pressure released.

The vibration returned to stillness.

The tickling buried itself in her unpracticed vocal cords. Tears, not Heather, heeded her call.

Where the fuck are you, Heather?

A scream tore through the silence, a noise Andie could never aspire to create.

Heather?

The scream rose in volume, in agony.

She's having another nightmare.

Andie struggled to push her head to the right, but sleep paralysis had other plans. Still, memory showed her what she had seen many a night: a “sleeping” Heather, bathed in perspiration, a corner of the pillow cover or end of the blanket crammed into her gagging mouth, the poor thing trapped in the recurring nightmare, where she was reduced to a vulnerable child, forever choking on the sock her ashamed mother forced her to keep in her mouth for countless hours, her mother's incessant credo—“A girl who can't speak has no use for a mouth”—singing against Heather's screaming.

It's okay, doll, Andie helplessly cooed. I'm here.

Andie glared at her stricken arms to awaken from the damned sleep paralysis.

I'm awake! she yelled at her left arm. To the right: I'm fucking awake!

As the excruciating concert wore on, Andie fixed her eyes on the open seam of her jacket sleeve, its gaping mouth seemingly producing the agonizing screams. One of the feathers flitted toward the screaming as if sucked by the noise. Another followed, seemingly beckoning her to follow its trajectory. Even the fraudulent feather tacked to her nose had had enough of imitating Heather's rubbing nose and flew in the direction of the screaming—flew not adjacent to her, where Heather suffered through her nightmare, but ahead of her, where the bed's headboard and the wall beyond were just out of sight.

Screaming can't come from there.

An epiphany both relieving and perplexing: Heather can't scream.

Indeed, the perpetual soundtrack of distress was much too distinct, soaked in the clarity of the regularly-speaking.

Andie forced her head up and forward for a better view of the source of discordance, barely managing to rest her chin upon a hard, cold surface.

Where's our bed? My pillow?

She tried to extend her range of motion, but the cursed sleep paralysis established its

barrier.

The screaming dropped into an octave of frustration for a quick bar, guttural notes Andie begrudgingly adopted as the anthem to her own frustration.

The strained vocals abandoned this reprieve, resuming its song of pain. So, too, did Andie's eyes rise with the notes, straining to see something—anything!—just under their top lids. Twin images of blurry eyelashes filled her field of vision, through which she could see a dark, sleek surface that ended in a massive spiderweb.

No wonder Heather's screaming.

She's not, she reminded herself. She can't! But the spiders!

Andie's limited sight followed the strands of web, their simultaneous diverging and converging paths crooked, muddled with helter-skelter clots, knots, and lazy asymmetrical patterns. The work was devoid of famed arachnid artistry.

I gotta find and kill the spider for her.

Her eyes hunted, seeing eight legs where none existed.

Where the fuck are my legs?

Her brain sent messages to them but received reminders of sleep paralysis.

Exasperated, Andie concentrated on locating the spider. Sight settled upon a glob of web material sitting to one side, pressing against the web from behind without snapping the strands. Glistening red stained the off-white mass.

Do spiders bleed like we do?

She couldn't recall any colours from her previous Heather rescue missions. Blood and guts had always been carefully collected and concealed by exaggerated clumps of tissue or smooth-soled dollar store slippers, thrown away with neither smear nor stray piece.

If only they were made of tiny white feathers, then Heather might kill them herself. But then I couldn't rescue her.

A scream from somewhere beyond the ugly web and uglier clump of red-splotched ball of material.

Do spiders scream?

She didn't know. Didn't want to know, what with the numerous murders by her hand.

Another scream. Human, garnished with animality. An abrupt choke reduced the screaming to an intermittent rhythm of panting and crying.

The hunk of web throbbed in sync with the breathy melody. A painful bark announced the arrival of twin spiders crawling over the bulbous horizon. Large, spindly things. In Andie's mind, doubtless plump with tiny white feathers.

The binary arachnids halted in unison, staring at Andie with a multitude of hidden eyes that asked the same question: “How are you going to protect Heather?”

The panting/crying intensified, neglecting its metronome.

The spiders clenched the glob of web, impressing their spindly legs into the mass, giving Andie the impression of something hollow and soft. Intoxicated with heavy deja vu, she felt the spiders and their imprint as a single hand upon her stomach. Felt the tiny protest against the disembodied palm. Felt the barely perceptible rise and fall underneath the palm.

Andie diverted her eyes from the spiders, but she still felt the ethereal palm against her stomach, the rise and fall of burgeoning life within, communicating its own rendition of her and Heather's soundless language.

Rise and fall.

Rise and fall.

Rise Andie had, mere hours ago, sliding out from under Heather's anchoring hand.

Andie felt the life within still communicating, unaware contact had been broken during the quick escape from a cozy bed, oblivious to Andie's hasty change from toasted pajamas to untoasted winter wear. She turned to an inquisitive Heather, answering those acorn eyes with a flourish of hands, communicating her need for fresh air. And before Heather's hands could espouse cliched warnings of the perils of the late hour, the harsh weather, and remind Andie she had two people to think about—made all the more ominous by her official use of “Andrea”—Andie left.

Traffic was sparse, the last of the illuminated businesses camouflaged with the night. No matter the pace or direction travelled, Andie still felt Heather's strangling umbilical cord reeling her back to their womb-like apartment. Still felt Heather's hand upon her bulbous stomach, transmitting love, admiration, and awe to the life within. Underneath the positive trifecta, however, there lived the lingering inverted trinity of anger, resentment, and jealousy, for genetics, in all of its indiscriminate wisdom, had long ago deemed Heather unfit for childbearing.

Aimless though she believed her steps to be, Andie instinctively slowed as she approached the building. The filmy streetlamp was far too bright, too akin to Heather's omniscient eyes, coaxing Andie to review her surroundings. Despite its discreet and welcoming design, the bland building exuded an aura of stigma and harsh judgment. Andie ignored the condemnation by counting the slightly uneven steps to the front door, knowing there were three—always three. Three easy steps. And a ramp. Easy access to a life in need of correction. A new life.

Andie knew she could indeed achieve a new life beyond those sliding doors, but knew that, upon exit, it would be a certified life without dear Heather.

As if sensing the building's controversial business, the baby kicked, and like a trained horse responding to a spurred heel, Andie moved on, wondering if she would ever muster the moxie to pass through those sliding doors during hours of operation.

Hands buried in the warmth of the jacket's pockets—and far too close to the sentient creature beneath the fabric—Andie found herself not only toying with thoughts but something else. She withdrew her right hand, and between her fingers saw a bent tiny white feather, flailing in the cold wind. Pivoting her arm, she saw the seam—wider than the last time she had laid eyes upon it during a similar walk for “fresh air”—in the cuff of the jacket, the deflated sleeve having lost most of its voluptuous originality.

Andie imagined a similar opening along her abdomen. Imagined reaching in and removing her tiny white feather.

If only it was that simple.

A flash of the building in her wake, and the inspiration, along with the feather, flitted away in the bitter wind.

As cold breaths of air slowly defeated Andie's jacket, her worn boots detected uneven gravel well past the transition from smooth sidewalk. Down a quiet road she had never traversed, she found herself within the throes of longer, deeper chasms of darkness, sporadic, weepy-eyed streetlamps teasing tangled brush and sinuous, nude trees.

She, too, felt nude, but somehow freer.

The mysterious darkness beyond the last visible streetlamp illuminated a thought: I can keep going.

Her stomach ached with the kicks of countless babies, forcing her to stop. Alarmed by the swiftness of the onslaught, she felt something she hadn't since first daring to hold Heather's hand for all the world to see. Not the kicks of countless babies, but the fluttering wings of excited butterflies.

I can keep going!

In the invigorating darkness between tired streetlamps, Andie's mouth ached, both from the numbing cold and the lengthy lack of practice those deprived muscles had in performing a smile. For the first time in months, she no longer felt like an incubator to Heather's hopes and dreams, a lifeless machine providing life to a living, breathing miniature but weighty anchor, but a weightless butterfly sanctuary whose very inhabitants would whisk her off of her exhausted feet, and transport her to a place where mind and body were her own.

Keep going!

Her legs believed the hype, propelling her toward a terrifying yet exhilarating unknown. A pale pair of silvery eyes pierced the dark vanishing point of the quiet road ahead.

She was faintly aware of the glaring negatives of this compulsion, instead savouring the gluttony of well-deserved selfishness.

The pale eyes grew brighter. Closer.

Butterfly wings pushed her forward. Baby kicks—or the fresh memory of them—threatened to pull her back to Heather, and the seemingly already-lived life she had fervently planned for the young trio.

The eyes moved fast and erratically along the road, illuminating Andie's route to freedom.

Her right hand detected another loose feather.

I gotta get Heather to sew that.

Her enthusiastic legs tripped on the old, automatic thinking. She regained footing, helped by Heather's firm grip on her stomach. Heather's property.

The eyes blurred into a single spotlight, blinding, roaring, racing toward her. The baby issued a tremendous kick.

Darkness replaced the spotlight, somehow equally blinding.

Andie danced with minutes and millennia in timelessness until oblivious numbness spawned a sensation.

Somewhere in the darkness.

Soft.

Warm.

Spreading.

Familiar.

Sweetly familiar.

I don't wanna wake up.

But the crying insisted.

Not the blaring adult female screaming that had paradoxically lulled Andie to the peaceful darkness where recent memory dwelled, but a quieter, tinier, reassuring song whose hypnotic quality gently lifted Andie out of her black limbo.

Between blinks, she rediscovered her predicament: outstretched arms bracketing her peripheral, the left hand curled in a tight fist, the right hand open, awaiting acceptance, her permanently paralyzed means of communication rendering her forever mute; the tiny white feathers continuing their way through the jacket cuff's enlarged seam, some clinging to the opening, seemingly hesitant to experience their newfound freedom, while others took flight without second thought; the shattered windshield where she began to see and understand the car manufacturer's safety design rather than the intricate abstract web-work of an elusive yet brilliant spider; alas, there were the twin spiders and their glob of reddened web—dead feminine hands clenching a deployed, blood-stained airbag.

For all the human and vehicular carnage, Andie felt no pain. Felt nothing but the tickling sensation inspired by severed and confused nerve endings unable to see and comprehend the car before her and the tree behind her.

From somewhere behind the busted windshield, the crying of a newborn baby lamented its terrible start in life.

I'm sorry your mommy is dead, Andie hopelessly transmitted. The baby cried louder: “I'm sorry your baby is dead.”

Andie focused her numb senses on her stomach, the crushed filling of a gruesome sandwich. She mentally kicked the baby, receiving the stillness for which she yearned.

I can sleep on my stomach again.

The bent hood of the car was cool under her cheek.

Like its deceased mother's labour cacophony, the baby's crying wooed Andie into a masquerade of slumber. The nothingness was seductively delicious; the more obese she became indulging in a diet of pure nirvana, the lighter she felt. From infinite seams on her deflating being, tiny white feathers went wherever such things go.

There was a final sensation. Somewhere in the darkness.

Sweetly familiar.

Back to Contributors

Raft of Medusa #3 by GJ Gillespie

Cut Through Everything Fiction

Vance Voyles

She is standing on the side of the highway slicing into an apple when the horn blast from a passing eighteen-wheeler makes her jump. Jerking the knife, the blade cuts into the skin just below her thumb opening a deep gash.

He is leaning against his backpack tightening the laces on his boots and doesn’t notice the knife or apple fall to the ground at her feet, but her sudden sharp intake of breath makes him look up. At the sight of blood dripping from her hand, he stands, pulling the sweat-stained balaclava from his head, and instinctively presses it into her wound.

“Don’t,” she says. “That’s disgusting.” But he waves her away. Her eyes sting, and she grimaces against the pressure.

His hair sticks to the side of his head just above his ears, and he loosens his grip to peek under the cloth before clamping down again, looking into her eyes.

“Tell me a story,” he says.

“No,” she says, annoyed. She tries to pull away from him, but his grip is strong. “Let go. I can handle it.”

“Please,” he says. “Just one story. It’ll take your mind off.”

She squints at the pain. “Which story?” she asks, and he smiles at her, and the memory of the man flashes in her mind; his graying stubble, his dimpled grin. She’d crumpled to the floor when they told her. It happened in an instant, they said. He hadn’t suffered. But all she heard was the roar of crashing waves in the silence that followed. He hadn’t suffered. How could they really be sure? Isn’t that just a thing that people say?

“This one,” he says, raising his free hand. “Tell me this story.”

She blinks hard, returning his smile. “That’s your story,” she says.

“I know, but I like the way you tell it.”

They are standing on the side of the road waiting for a bus to take them back to town, back to civilization, hot showers, and cold beer. Cars and trucks rip past them, and the gusting wind rattles through their salt-stained clothes. She brushes a strand of hair back from her face and looks at him. He smiles at her the way the man always did.

“Fine,” she says, shaking her head. “You were what, eight years old?”

“Seven,” he says, pushing down the thick wool hiking sock to show her the pale thin line of a scar cutting across his shin. “I got this one when I was eight.”

“Are you sure,” she asks. She stares at his sun-burned face, and the dirt from two weeks wandering through the wilderness, following a trail they all took together so many years ago. She didn’t want to come. It was a stupid idea, reckless even. She was too old for this. She told him as much when he landed on her doorstep with two backpacks and his weatherworn map.

“We need this,” he’d said. “Consider it his deathbed tour.”

She’d laughed at that, albeit through the tears, because isn’t that exactly what the man would have called it? She was just glad he hadn’t made t-shirts.

But now, bleeding on the side of the road, with the two weeks at an end, the world is still here, waiting to swallow her back up. She shakes her head. Two weeks isn’t enough.

A rusted old jeep rumbles by, and she flinches.

“Yes,” he says, shaking her from her memory. “I’m sure. I was seven when I got this one,” he says, raising his hand again.

She grabs it with her free hand between his thumb and forefinger, and touches the thick scar, marveling at how hard it is. “Seven? You’re sure?”

“Sure,” he says, pulling his hand back.

“That would have made me —”

“Twenty-seven,” he says.

“Twenty-seven,” she repeats, almost nostalgic now. “I was a baby.”

“I’m twenty-seven,” he says, raising his shoulders a bit.

“I know,” she says. “Still a baby.”

He raises an eyebrow, and she ignores it.

“I didn’t want you to go,” she says. “Back then, you know? He made me.”

“He was like that.”

“He was like that,” she says, nodding, “but you wanted to go alone. An adventure, you’d said. Be the lonesome traveler.”

“Just the start, I guess," he says, gesturing to their surroundings. Clouds run across the sky, settling around the mountains in the distance.

"Well, I was against it.”

“Adamantly, as I recall.”

“And I was right, wasn’t I?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he shakes his head and smiles.

“I was,” she says. “And you know it.”

“I clearly survived,” he says.

“Just barely.” She stares out across the horizon. Dusk is creeping up on them, and a line of amber streetlights blinks to life, mixing with the setting sun and running the length of the highway, twinkling out into the distance.

“So, you forbade it,” he continues.

She shakes away her thoughts. “Of course, I did, but he was having none of it. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Let the boy wander,’ he said. ‘You remember that feeling, Sweet? Being miles away?’”

“It was only a mile,” he says.

“But you were six,” she says.

“Seven.”

“I think you’re wrong about that.”

“I’m not,” he says. “And a mile is nothing. Just down the street.”

“It didn’t feel like nothing.”

“No,” he says, finally agreeing with her. “It didn’t. Might as well have been going to Mars.”

“Exactly.”.

“But still,” he says. “It was just a mile. You know how kids think. Nothing could ever happen because nothing’s going to happen.”

“But something did happen.”

He shakes his head. “Of course, it did.”

“Just like I knew it could,” she says, with a satisfied smile.

“Yes. Yes. I know.”

“I said no, but you were dead set, and so was he." She tries to lift the rag from his hand, but he shoos it away. “I was going to follow you,” she says. “Did I ever tell you that? I was in the middle of putting on my shoes, but he came in and gave me that look.”

“Ah yes. The eyebrows.” He arches his own eyebrows up and down comically, and she laughs.

“The infamous eyebrows,” she says. “He was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame in that way he always did, shaking his head at me, holding my other shoe in his hand, saying, ‘Going somewhere, Sweet?’ And I said, ‘Give me my shoe,’ but he wouldn’t.”

“And he put it on the fridge,” he says, laughing.

“It wasn’t funny.” She huffs slightly. “He knew I couldn’t reach.”

“And you yelled at him.”

“I didn’t yell, but I was stern, the way I had to be with him sometimes. Balled my fists, saying, ‘Give me my shoe,’ but he just laughed.”

“Not mean though, right?”

“No. No. Not mean. His laugh was never mean. He was like a child, he was, so full of...I don’t know what.”

They both stare out at the horizon as lightning streaks across the sky.

“He cut through everything,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “He did.” After a few seconds, the rumble of thunder crashes. The clouds above them seem to tumble, rolling pink into purple, purple into black. Looking for a fight.

“He loved it out here,” he says, but she shakes her head, not wanting to think about it.

Instead, she continues. “So, I’m standing there, fists clenched, getting redder by the minute, and he reaches down, and he did what he always did whenever I was getting my temper up.”

“What’s that?”

“He kissed me.” She laughs softly. Her cheeks turn pink, and she touches a hand to them, closing her eyes, trying not to smile, or cry. She doesn’t know which. “Like that was an okay thing to do. Like that was just the right time to do it.”

“Was it the right time?”

She nods. “It was.” She opens her eyes and smiles. “He was always right on time, your dad.”

“He was, wasn’t he?”

She nods and lightning crashes again, followed more closely by a rumble of thunder. He looks down at the bloody rag covering her hand, lifts it, and puts it back. “A little bit longer,” he says. “And then we should probably get moving.”

“You get that from him, you know?”

“What?”

“You know,” she says, motioning her good hand at him. “All of it.”

“Not all of it,” he says. “Some of it, maybe, but there’s other parts.”

“Other parts?”

He motions his free hand to her. “Other parts.”

“Maybe,” she says.

He squeezes her hand, and she can feel his heart pumping there, twenty-seven years of blood blazing past arteries, and valves, and slamming into her. It hurts. This cut. This story. Cars continue to rip past them.

“Then what happened?” he asks.

“He took me to bed,” she says. “He was always taking me to bed. Every chance he got.”

“Well, no wonder,” he says. “You are very beautiful.”

She shakes her head. “Not anymore.”

“No,” he says. “Still.”

“Anyway. I don’t know how long it was. Fifteen minutes, an hour. He was like that with time, stretching it out and then cutting it short. Sometimes it felt like I didn’t know where or when I was.” Tears well and settle in the corners of her eyes, but she blinks them away. “But then it ended. With a phone call.”

He looks up at her wearing a sad smile. “But not that time. That time it was me.”

“Yes. You. Crying. Bleeding, apparently.”

“Profusely.”

“Nine stitches worth.”

“It felt like more.”

“It would. Six years old, as you were.”

“Seven.”

“Right. Seven. Anyway, we ran over to get you. I was barefoot, running.”

“Shoe still on the fridge?”

“Exactly. And you were there, with this face.” She reaches out to touch his cheek. “This sad, little face, and he was smiling at you. And you looked at him, and you smiled too, like you had to. Like you had no other choice. You were his brave boy, stopping the bleeding with one of your socks.”

“And he said, ‘What do you have there, big man?'”

“Bloody sock, looks like,” she says, imitating a gravelly drawl. “And you were saying sorry, and that I was right, that you shouldn’t have gone alone, and that you would never do it again, not ever.”

“But he wouldn’t hear it,” he says.

“Nope. He just kept asking how you did it. And you told him about the dog, and the fence, and how your shoe slipped, catching and cutting yourself at the same time. And he was so proud of you, bucking up like you did. Pulling off your sock, wrapping it tight before walking to the lady’s house and asking to use the phone.”

“Said it took a man to do that,” he says.

“Indeed. You were his big man.”

He lifts the bloody rag. “Looks like it’s stopped.”

“Looks like,” she says. “Too bad I didn’t bring a first aid kit.”

“Too bad,” he says, reaching into his pack and producing a plastic bag of triple antibiotic and some bandages. Squeezing some goo onto her cut, he peels the adhesive strips from one, and a behemoth beast of an RV blasts by them, pulling at their clothes, and snatching the thin strips of packaging in its wake.

“Think we’ll beat the rain?” he asks.

“Not if this bus doesn’t come,” she says.

“Soon,” he says. “I’ve got a feeling.” Then he kisses her hand over the Band-Aid and lets go.

She smiles at this, inspecting his work, and another batch of lightning races across the sky. He reaches into his pack and pulls out another apple, handing it to her, and a crack of thunder echoes in the distance. She bends to pick up the knife lying at her feet, wiping it on her pants, before cutting into the apple’s thick, waxy skin. Cars rip by them, and she smiles when the first drops of rain begin to fall.

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Past Life Nonfiction

Billie Pritchett

1.

Before my mother, there had been another woman, Britannia, whom my father had loved and married when they were both in their twenties. After a brief courthouse ceremony with three friends as witnesses (“I don’t keep in contact with them,” my father told me. “Shows what friends they were”), my father and his new bride moved into a mobile home, in a trailer park called Fox Meadows. Right away, my father and Britannia began planning their future. Seated on the floor at their coffee table (their dining table), they laid out their goals in a gnarled Mead notebook: one, my father would get a job within the year; two, they would have a baby; three, while he worked (once he found work), Britannia would take on the responsibility of household chores and child-rearing. The plan amounted to only a few sentences on wide rule, but in short order, all was underway. Within the year, my father started work at Ryan Milk, my half-brother Jared was born, and Britannia, well into her roles as wife and homemaker, assumed the role of mother. She fed everyone, cleaned house, changed diapers, and dealt with both her son’s and her husband’s unruly timetables, since in addition to baby Jared’s tantrums—worst were his colicky nighttime spells, when he couldn’t sleep, which was often—Britannia also had my father’s erratic hours to contend with. My father worked the second shift on the assembly line, three to eleven PM, but that was the least of the problem, because he had mandatory overtime, which meant he had to work an extra four hours, sometimes tacked on before his normal shift, sometimes after. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until three in the morning, and sometimes he had to work an extra day on weekends. To make matters worse, he didn’t receive notice of the next week’s hours until the current week’s end. The ever-changing schedule contributed to the chaos of family life. Britannia wanted help, needed it in fact. She needed my father to bear some of the child-rearing burdens. “All I’m asking,” she said, “is for you to sit with Jared some mornings, give him his bottle, rub his back, change him if he needs changing.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to change me,” my father said.

“Bruce, I mean it.”

“That’s the problem.” He interpreted Britannia’s plea for help as a breach of contract. “We agreed,” he said. “I work, you do this. Division of labor.”

One night, he got home from work and called out hello from the front door. Britannia stood at the kitchen sink, her back to him. “Where’s Jared?”

“In his pen,” she said.

He went to the bedroom and checked, and spotted Jared, asleep in the playpen at the side of their bed, one hand curled into a partial fist. He bent and stopped. If he kissed his son, he would wake him. From the kitchen, he heard the harsh clank of porcelain. Returning to the living room, he saw Britannia knocking around the dishes. He grunted. She didn’t turn to face him. “Are we playing games?” he said. She shook her head. “I know it’s not nothing, otherwise you wouldn’t make the racket.”

“You’d be mad if I spoke.”

“Aren’t I standing here, wanting to talk?”

Britannia removed the pink rubber dish gloves, popping them off at the middle finger. They fell into the sink with a faint slap. She turned around. “This isn’t fun.”

“What isn’t?”

“This,” she said. “Life.”

“Has life ever been fun?” he scoffed.

“Don’t pretend you don’t remember. In high school people thought you were a wild man, into hotrods. They thought you were so crazy you’d do anything.”

“I’d like to know what we’re talking about.”

“Why are you raising your voice? I don’t want to argue.”

“Are you saying I’m not fun anymore?”

“Just I want some of the old life.”

“Here’s what I know. I’m standing in the living room of a house not big enough for a bachelor, let alone a family, my shirt sticking to my back because I work at a milk plant with no windows, no ventilation, my body pouring sweat, all day, all night—” While speaking, he was unbuttoning his shirt in histrionic show, but the uncooperative buttons impeded his effort to punctuate his words with action. By the time he’d pulled the shirt off, its fall felt anticlimactic. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I have to come home to this?” She moved to hug him, but he stepped back against the coffee table. “Not now,” he said. Had he gone for a walk, he might have realized his stubbornness.

“I love you,” she said, as he pressed the coffee table’s edge further into his calves. She lunged at him with the next hug. His body bent like an air dancer, one of those tube-shaped men on the side of the road, flapping in the wind to attract customers with their breezy antics. She gave up. She sat down on the sofa, head in hands, a mask of bent fingers.

If he remained where he was, legs pressed against the coffee table, feigning stoicism behind a muted face, what kind of person would he be? He clicked his tongue. She didn’t notice his sitting down beside her, but in his trying to wrap an arm around her, she flinched and sidled away.

“You don’t get it,” she said to the wall. “I just want time to relax. A few free hours some mornings would be a major weight off my shoulders.” She continued talking. He only half-listened.

Then he told her what free time he had had to be used productively. He wouldn’t even call it free time. His so-called free mornings away from the plant weren’t all sitting around shooting the bull at the donut shop. No sir. He was trying to get a car-dealing business off the ground with Uncle James. Didn’t she understand? A second job would be extra income. “We don’t want to live in a trailer forever, do we?” He appealed to Britannia’s empathy. He said when he occupied his table at Sammon’s bakery in the morning, talking with his friends and his uncle, their talk was, admittedly, not all about planning for the car-dealing business, not one hundred percent. That said, he was blowing off some much-needed steam. Every shift, his supervisor rode him, egging him to pick up the line, threatening him with pink slips, and so on and so forth. Every night, he went to bed feeling stressed about his job, stressed he would lose it. And to think, they had a child to feed. This worry did a number on his sleep. Or hadn’t she noticed? So he needed his mornings to sleep in a little or else to see his friends, but most importantly to relax, because he was stressed, and the stress was likely to wear him down if he weren’t careful.

After he made this appeal, the two of them momentarily warmed to each other. Britannia sat closer and turned toward him. She eventually laid her head against his chest, wept, apologized. The world got quiet. All seemed resolved. My father smiled at the wall’s wood paneling. Then just as suddenly, Britannia raised her head and said what about her parents. They could take care of Jared in the mornings. They were retired. They would want to. This got my father angry again in a way he didn’t know he could be angry. He started raising his voice and in so many words put the kibosh on her idea, saying letting her parents look after Jared would send the wrong message. It would seem like he and Britannia couldn’t raise their own, and anyway her parents already looked down their noses at him. “Need I remind you of your mom’s attitude toward me? When we were first dating? What did she say? ‘Why don’t you find a man with a little money to his name? Why take up with some hellion from Dexter?’” Rather than address any of Britannia’s concerns, my father’s strategy was, as it would be with my mother, to browbeat with his own sorrows. However reluctant Britannia may have been to bend to my father’s desire, she nonetheless did, said all right, she agreed with him, he worked hard, she wanted him to keep doing what he was doing and to get the car-dealing business going.

2.

Days passed. Sunday morning. Jared had slept through the night. My father and Britannia had both been able to sleep in late. Britannia rolled over in bed, put her arm around my father, exhaled, smeared his chest hair, and said things had been going well lately, hadn’t they? He said yes, things had been going very well, they weren’t arguing or anything. She said there was a reason. She would tell him if he promised not to get angry. Then she confessed her secret arrangement. She had begun having her parents watch Jared some mornings so she could get some rest. Her parents’ house was just off Whiskville, on Catalina—incidentally, the same road my father’s future bride, my mother, grew up on. Catalina was a ten-minute walk at most from my father and Britannia’s mobile home at Fox Meadows. Despite the short walk, Britannia said she always strapped Jared into the car seat and drove over anyway, for safety. This news made my father irate. He started shouting and swearing, his head and chest grew hot, his body temperature rising to the point where he couldn’t think or talk sensibly. Instead of tackling the issue directly, he found himself complaining of wasted gas, Jimmy Carter, Aramco, the extra mileage she was putting on their second car. His shouting woke Jared. Outraged by Jared’s crying, he got dressed, packed personal items, got in the Camaro, and drove to his mother’s in Dexter, where he stayed for the next few days. During this period, he cooled down. He and Britannia exchanged calls. She apologized and said, “Bruce, come back.” He did.

Only Britannia’s drinking became bad. Before, she had drunk some spirits on special occasions, but this was different. My father got home from his shift, stripped, and carried his weary body into bed, bending toward Britannia, giving her a peck on the cheek. She reeked of beer. Though bothered, he feared confrontation. He wanted calm. But one morning, he broached the subject. She was shuffling off to the bathroom. He called out to her, which woke Jared. He asked her why she was getting drunk every night and waking up like this. She waved her arm and closed the door.

Instead of becoming angry at her, he grew fearful. She had a private world, and he didn’t belong to it. The thought was terrifying. Still, he needed to put his foot down. The closeted drinking had gone on long enough, he decided. He didn’t wait for a day off. While Britannia showered, he called into work and said he needed to use a sick day because of his boy. The foreman got on the phone after the secretary. He said my father had every right to use a day, but some advance notice would have been nice. My father asked how he ought to know in advance his son would be sick. Even though he was lying, he was indignant.

The foreman got him heated, so he went to Sammon’s bakery that morning and complained to his uncle. He complained about his wife’s drinking, too. His friends all nodded like they were listening to a sermon. Then my father went home.

Britannia said she was surprised to see him home, and so soon. Didn’t he have to work? A day off, he said. He watched TV, Columbo. He waited to talk to her, waited long—until after Britannia had run errands to pick up groceries, after she had made lunch and they had eaten together, after she had vacuumed and bathed Jared and put him to bed. Then he staged his intervention. It was still early evening, Jared asleep in his playpen in the middle of the living room. He and Britannia were seated on the sofa watching the TV. He gathered his gumption and turned to her and said that regarding the drinking he wanted to know what was going on and what was going on now. She admitted she had been doing a lot of solo drinking when he wasn’t around. He wasn’t around very much, she said. She felt lonely. He ignored the remark and said if she weren’t careful, she’d pass out drunk with their son in the bathtub. She might drown their son. Did she think about it at all? She said sorry. He asked about the contraband, the booze. While she went to the grocery store, he had gone through the cabinets and found a bottle of Ballantine’s someone at work had given him, but no beer, and it was beer he had smelled on her, he was sure of it. He had lifted the lid to the trash, found nothing. Where were all the spent bottles? Not bottles, she sighed, she didn’t drink from bottles. Cans. There was a system, she said, she had planned out long ago. In almost two years, didn’t he realize? There were lots of things he didn’t understand. As soon as he left the house, she had a girlfriend bring her over a six-pack, she said. My father asked what kind of beer she drank. She said Keystone. He asked what girlfriends she had who would bring her beer. She said an old girlfriend from high school, Theresa. He thought about it. He seemed to remember a Theresa. She said before he got home, she’d throw the cans in the communal dumpsters at the trailer park.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “if I were to go and look in there, I’d find your beer cans?”

“Good luck knowing mine from anyone else’s,” she said.

Jared stirred in his playpen, but neither of them worried, he would get back to sleep eventually. He had become a good sleeper, my father thought.

“There are lots of things about me you don’t understand,” Britannia said.

“Like what?” my father said.

“Like that I used to be a fun girl.”

He thought he had to smirk at that one.

Jared said da-da from his playpen.

Britannia stood up and towered over my father. “I was a wild one, too. I used to go out.”

“Is that so?”

She plucked at her T-shirt. “I used to get dressed up. Men liked me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you think I didn’t have boyfriends before you?”

My father pulled her close. “Tell me about that.” He noticed she had gotten a permanent. He liked it. He had known her since their high-school homeroom. Back then, she wore her reading glasses on a string around her neck, but there in the living room, he saw her in a new light, alluring and strong-willed, a wife and mother who had already lived a richer life than most, not twenty-four and married with a child, a rarity more and more in the seventies, he thought (he was wrong about this; I looked it up: 1970s Americans’ median age for marriage was twenty-three). Apprised she had had this past life, he found her more attractive. The revelation of her drinking and the brief exchange that followed helped their relationship, at least as far as he was concerned. A fire that had been simmering had suddenly flamed up. He took to bragging to his friends and my great uncle, referring to Britannia as his “rowdy wife.” He said to Uncle James and company he had told her that while he didn’t like the drinking, she could drink two or three beers if she wanted to, but only a couple times a week. Only he had better not catch signs of her neglecting Jared or else the deal was off. His friends asked how she responded to the news. My father said she liked his assertiveness. How did she let him know that? Uncle James asked. “Let’s just put it this way,” my father said. “After I laid down the law, she took to me like flies at a picnic. About every night, we nearly shake the bed off its posts.”

3.

How long could the truth remain hidden?

One morning at the donut shop, he heard from his friends that Britannia had been spotted at Spider’s. My father knew the bar Spider’s, a glorified warehouse, really, out past the state line, where people went to drink and dance and rub against one another. My father’s friends said when he was working, his wife was going there and drinking and meeting men.

As much as possible, my father liked to think Britannia’s social life ended out of his range of vision. He didn’t want to think about her at a hole like Spider’s. Yes, he knew Spider’s, all right. He and Uncle James had gone there once after a car auction. No blacktop outside, only loose gravel, people parked wherever they wanted. Big red door bearing the name in white cursive, a logo of boxy dice beneath the cursive. The gilded doorknob rattled. Inside, no standing walls partitioned one section from the next. Bar flowed into dance hall flowed into billiard hall. Low spooky bulbs over the tables. Sawdust on the floor. The smell of old beer. That was where Britannia chose to spend her time.

That image alone had been enough to make the inside of my father’s mouth dry out, but his friend Shirrel had to open his big mouth. He said he had some news, then took a bite of a donut and let raspberry jelly plop down on wax paper. My father waited, tight-lipped, breathing through his nose, his hands shuffling, a pretense at looking loose, while beneath the table, he twisted one Reebok over the other. Shirrel said he had gotten a call from Dan Miller asking if he had heard what Bruce’s wife was up to and Shirrel had told him he hadn’t and Dan said he’d seen Bruce’s wife leave Spider’s with some man who wasn’t Bruce. My father turned dead-eyed.

He had to go to work that afternoon and do his overtime hours. As he grouped milk gallons and boxed them and pushed the boxes on to Loading, his mind wandered. The fantasy had gone bust. He had imagined his wife at home, suckling Jared at her breast, as dutiful as Mary to the messiah, afterward putting him in his mechanical swing so he could rock himself into a nap. Then she would make meals, eat, and wrap the remaining pots and dishes in tinfoil, including a plate for him. He knew some of this must have really been the case. The food, for instance. For nights he worked into the next morning, she had talked to him about preparing sack dinners he could carry with him. No, he’d said. For lunch, he might eat his meals with friends or take his meals alone, but for dinner, no matter how late he was, he wanted to be able to eat her homecooked meals. It was important to him. He thought it made her very happy. Now he guessed it made no difference.

Without thinking, he turned to his line partner and said, “Things are slow enough, cover my shift, family emergency,” and left.

Driving back, he thought he might catch Britannia in the act, that she might be at home with another man. He cut off the headlights and rolled into the gravel drive. He stepped in the front door. A chill hit him, like there hadn’t been heat on. The lights were off. From the bedroom, he heard a wail, Jared’s. He hurried to the back, half-expecting to find the house empty except for the baby, but there was Britannia, in bed, face up, mouth open, jeans, a sweater, and her sneakers still on, the playpen beside her, in which Jared bawled in the dark. My father picked him up. The baby needed changing. He carried Jared to the bathroom, removed his diaper, and cleaned him with the wet wipes, then he ran the bathwater until it was warm and roughly the height of a baby’s knee, and sat Jared down into the water and washed and shampooed him. This was the first time he had cleaned the baby, who, partially consoled, took breaks between bouts of crying. After a good towel-drying, my father carried Jared back to the bedroom where he fitted the baby into a diaper and some thick, warm pajamas that covered his body. Jared put his head against his father’s shoulder. Britannia was still asleep.

Even though my father had never called Britannia’s parents, despite their reservations toward him before the marriage, he knew they were good people at heart, though it pained him to think it so. He had no one else to contact. His own mother in Dexter would never answer the telephone past seven. Besides, they lived only a stone’s throw away on Catalina, in the better neighborhood, the suburban sprawl behind the trailer park. My father called. At nearly two in the morning, his father-in-law answered the phone. He didn’t ask questions when my father said he and Jared needed to come over.

His in-laws met him at the door. His mother-in-law took Jared. She got some baby food from the refrigerator—of course she had it on hand, Britannia had been dropping Jared off there some days, probably some nights, too—and fed him at the breakfast nook. My father sat down at the dining table. At the same time, on the corner of Catalina and Ridgewood, in a red brick house, my mother, a teenager unfamiliar with Bruce Pritchett, slept soundly in her bedroom. My father ate reheated leftovers.

The next morning, Britannia called and found out where they were. She came over. She sat down beside him at the dining table. He could have been there at the table all night. Britannia’s father had been eating scrambled eggs at the table. He took his plate into the living room. Britannia’s mother carried Jared to the den. My father bounced one caged hand against another, as though shuffling cards, and spoke low. “Jared had diarrhea down his leg. I can smell it on my shirt.”

“I don’t smell much better,” Britannia said.

“The smoking’s news to me.”

“Bruce—”

“Don’t Bruce me.”

“Can’t I go out?”

“And neglect our son?”

“You’re one to talk. Always at the donut shop.”

“Don’t turn this around on me. Where were you last night?”

“In bed.”

“Before.”

“What do you want to hear? If you know, why ask?”

Then and there, he knew they were finished. He wouldn’t ask if there were other men. He wouldn’t ask if any had come home with her or if she had gone home with them. Good God, he only hoped she never left Jared alone. He would have his future life to think about these matters. For now, he needed a new plan. He needed to move in with his mother. He figured that although Britannia would keep the trailer, she wouldn’t keep it for long and would eventually move back in with her parents, but fine, that was her decision. More immediately, he needed to contact his foreman. Britannia surprised my father by telling him his foreman had called and said my father was fired. He couldn’t just walk off on a shift like that, was what the foreman said. My father nodded. Britannia removed her Noah’s ark earrings and put them down on the dining table. They scraped against the lacquer. My father took her hand and held it, the softest he had ever felt.

4.

But this, my father said, was all in the past, back before he realized he even wanted to be a father. In divorce court, the judge ruled favorably for Britannia. She got primary custody of Jared. My father kept Jared on weekends—which didn’t amount to much time with his son, especially since my father had begun traveling cross-country from auction to auction selling cars. He had finally really got the car-dealing business going with Uncle James. And by then, my father had met a new woman: my mother. She mostly took care of Jared on weekends while my father worked. I wasn’t born yet. Five years after I came into the world, I learned of Jared. My mother had me on her lap in our living room, turning through a photo album. I came across a Polaroid of my mother seated on the same floor holding another small child in her lap. The two of them faced the camera, all smiles. “Who’s that?” I asked. “That’s Jared,” my mother replied, “your daddy’s other boy.” By then, Britannia had prohibited Jared from seeing my mother and father. My father said it was jealousy. I hadn’t been informed of this, but if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I looked at the carpet and pouted my lip. My mother’s hands came to my face. “Don’t cry,” she begged. I gathered up courage and said through drool, staccato, “I’ma gonna get my zizzors and cut his head off.” And then my mother giggled.

Three years ago, I got a call from my friend Stephanie saying my brother had died. I told her she must be mistaken; I had just spoken to my younger brother Jesse a couple days prior. But since I live halfway around the world from him in Korea, I thought it best to Skype him to check on him. Waiting for him to answer, I was genuinely scared. Jesse took the video call. I saw his face, wide like our father’s, and the interior of the family home behind him, the wood-paneled walls, the mounted deer head. He looked fine, everything fine. I explained to him I had gotten a call from a friend telling me my brother had died.

Jesse nodded and said it was our half-brother. Jared had been out back at the restaurant where he’d worked for twenty years when a food truck backed into him. The driver hadn’t seen him taking garbage to the dumpsters. I’ve lived through death before—my father and my mother’s, their different cancers. However, upon Jared’s passing, some special connection had been severed, a direct line I had to him I didn’t know existed.

My father introduced me to Jared once. In the worst possible way. After several years of never knowing what my grown half-brother looked like, I, a high schooler, came home one Saturday afternoon from my shift at a restaurant washing dishes, and as I entered the front door of the family home, I saw someone seated by the door, a rale-thin bald man in a baseball cap with a gaunt pale jaw, smoothly shaven except for the narrow mustache above his lip, and he wore eyeglasses like me. “Do you know who that is?” my father said from the sofa. I shook my head. “That’s your brother Jared.” I feigned a smile and shook his hand, then excused myself, saying I had to change out of my damp work clothes. During my shower, I had a panic attack. I went to my bedroom and couldn’t go into the living room for upward of two hours for fear of seeing my father’s face in a stranger’s.

Hearing as a younger person of my father’s marriage to and divorce from Britannia, and their rearing of their son Jared, I thought it a fine story and my father a fine storyteller. Unlike me, my father didn’t get tongue-tied as soon as he opened his mouth. But like every storyteller, he was a liar. There was nothing exact about any of this. My father had had years to craft the tale he wanted to tell, years to practice the words on me in our drives on the outskirts of our little Kentucky town. By age eleven, I had grown familiar with his standard version, only he added a detail. He briefly introduced, and then just as promptly abandoned the topic of, another woman whom he had met and lived with during a period between his first wife and my mother. He had met this woman at the milk plant, he told me, as we crested the bend of Whiskville, off which stood the hill upon which sat the trailer park Fox Meadows, my father’s former mobile home nestled away somewhere up there on cinderblocks, amid the rows of sorrows. Kitana, he said, wore Dior. It had turned him on, he said. He finally understood the allure of perfume. Like some Arabian spice, he said. I didn’t doubt Kitana’s existence, but she didn’t fit into the pre-established timeline. My father supposedly had gotten fired and divorced virtually all in one go. When did he have time to live with, let alone date, another woman? There at age eleven, I asked my father if he’d gone out with Kitana while married to his first wife. His face lost the smirk of the upper hand, his perfume fetish evaporating from memory. He returned to facing the windshield with his natural, purse-lipped frown, his brown lips twisted, a dark knot on an old tree. A past life, he said.

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Boat House I, Westerly Rhode Island by Willy Conley

Near Flood. Fiction

Shauna Shiff

The driveway had washed away again, leaving one treacherous path of mud alongside a sluice of running water. She knew, driving home and seeing the thin skim of brown coloring the bleached road, that it was her dirt spread onto Route 3, but still had not expected the damage the storm had caused. The last of the right side of her driveway had dissolved, and Allie cursed as her car plunged into a rut. She pressed down on the gas; her wheels teetering on the remaining crest of the driveway and gunned it. Rob had always reminded her, with growing derision, to drive slow in snow, in hazardous conditions. Well, he wasn’t here to criticize, so she pressed the pedal further, her tires spinning in protest.

Closer to the house, Allie was relieved to see that the driveway was waterlogged but intact. All was not lost. Something had to be done, sooner rather than later, but she refused to tally the cost now. Since she had bought this house, her house, hers and Jemma’s alone, it had been one expense after another that she couldn’t afford, all shuffling to the forefront of the queue based on what failed that week. She knew of course, even without Rob there to tell her, that this house would be a money pit. Never buy a Victorian, he had always said. But Victorians had always been her favorite, and this one sat back from the road, close to the bay. With the windows open, you could hear the lap of the waves and smell the saltwater brine.

Allie had gotten home before Jemma. Her bus was due soon, and tonight Simone would be with her. Allie was glad that Jemma had a friend. The past few years had been full of worry about her daughter, who seemed too alone, so alone that she didn’t even know to be unhappy about it. But this year Simone had moved to Maine from Louisiana, and she and Jemma became inseparable. The bookish girl that Allie had raised was almost unrecognizable now that she had a friend. Jemma had adopted Simone’s preference for short skirts and fishnet tights, heavy mascara, and winged eyeliner. When Rob had mentioned this change to Allie, she had snapped, aren’t teenagers supposed to experiment? She said she thought Jemma’s new look was edgy. Of course, Allie didn’t think that, but she wasn’t going to share her fears with Rob. As far as he needed to know, she was doing just fine on her own.

She heard the girls shrieking and went to the living room window. It was still raining, not as hard as earlier today, but enough to still drench. Both girls were leaping to avoid puddles, spindly black-clad gazelles. Simone was charging ahead, and before she reached the front steps, she twirled, arms open, head thrown back and tongue pushed out. She was splattered in mud, her eyes screwed shut, spinning faster and faster. Jemma finally caught up and bent over in hysterical laughter, nearly throwing her backpack over her head with the suddenness of how quick she dropped. The girls stayed out in the rain, seeming to relish the bad weather. Watching them, Allie was tempted to fling open the door and scold them inside, but instead, she stayed behind the curtain, watching her daughter dance in circles around her new friend. Simone stayed in one spot, arms upraised, her mouth moving fast as if chanting. Her words ignited Jemma and as if bound to a tether, Jemma lifted her bony knees high in euphoria, twirling with abandon, circling Simone as if she were a maypole.

This was a new Jemma she was seeing, and Allie felt worry root. Maybe Rob was right; Jemma was a follower like Rob had always told Allie that she was, susceptible to aligning herself with bad leadership. Jemma did seem to worship Simone. But didn’t all teenage girls feel a devotion to their friends that bordered on obsession? Simone did fit what Rob would label a bad seed. Half her head was dyed an unnatural magenta, the other half black, and worst, she looked you directly in the eye when speaking to you as if she wasn’t afraid of anything. Such confidence was incomprehensible to Allie, and to her, Simone seemed narcissistic, capable of luring Jemma away. Outside, Simone had dropped her arms and Jemma rushed into Simone, nearly bowling her over with her embrace. Allie stepped back quickly as the girls turned towards the house.

“Mo-om,” Jemma said, when she finally came in, shaking water off like a too-big puppy, “The driveway is like, totally gone.”

“Not totally!” Allie always felt a rush to defend the house.

“Three-quarters to totally,” Simone deadpanned. “Anyways, you should see the shithole I live in.”

Jemma giggled and darted her eyes to Allie, gauging her reaction. Allie had to work to keep her face neutral. She was shocked at Simone cursing in front of her, but more than that, offended. This was not a shithole. This was a Victorian.

Allie thought that when it came to teenagers, it was good policy to not fan flames. So, she changed the subject, “I’m making pizza. I’ll call you when it’s time to put toppings on.” She wanted to lick her fingers and rub off the rivulets of mascara running down Jemma’s cheeks, but instead, she said, “Take off your shoes too! You guys are covered in mud and it’s dripping.”

“Like I told you, the driveway!” Jemma said, using the heel of one toe to slide her shoe off without unlacing, smearing mud into the grooves of the wood floor.

“Let’s go,” Simone said with authority, and the two bounded up the stairs, their steps in unison, heads bent towards one another. Allie rested one hand on the banister, watching her daughter disappear.

Allie sank into the couch, then sprang up just as quickly, remembering the bottle of wine prechilled in the refrigerator. One glass to settle the unease she felt – likely from the impending bill her driveway would be. But Jemma too. It used to be that Jemma would talk to her – maybe not about school or friends, but movies at least. In truth, Allie felt a little lonely without Jemma’s company. Twirling her wine stem, she wondered what the appeal of dancing in the rain had for Jemma. It wasn’t the splashing puddles that had excited her as a toddler, this was almost as if she and Simone were celebrating the rain. Almost like communing.

Draining the last of her glass, Allie shook her head free of such thoughts and set to work on dinner. The wine hadn’t eased her anxiety; if anything, she felt fuzzy detachment from the alcohol. She began to knead the dough, too aggressively, stretching with her fingers till she tore holes and had to start over. The kitchen looked out into the backyard, a reclusive spot shaded by trees, though the view was blurred by the rain. Off the kitchen door, a small patio, then, where the grass petered out was a well-worn path that led to the bay. When Allie and Jemma first moved here, they would walk down to the rocky beach every day, sometimes more than once. The ocean was always changing. Allie especially loved the unapologetic surge and swell of incoming high tide, but the low tide that unearthed silt full of snails, starfish, sea glass was Jemma’s favorite. In her bedroom, she had a glass jar filled with treasures found beachcombing.

A crash, followed by the sound of objects spilling and rolling across the floor above, startled Allie. Her first thought – which she resented herself for! – was to call out for Rob. Rob always solved all problems, investigated all sounds, soothed Allie’s worries. Eventually, though Rob, practical Rob, had run out of steam examining the minute strands of Allie’s fear. Allie had worked to overcome her anxiety without his guiding logical judgment. Rinsing her hands to remove the sticky traces of dough, Allie intended to go speak to Jemma. She was glad Jemma had a friend, she was, but they needn’t be so wild. Rob had always been the one concerned with decorum, and she could hear his voice in her head, chastising Jemma to be more careful. Allie wouldn’t admonish as Rob would have; she’d just ask them to calm down.

Allie resolutely climbed the stairs, feeling her anger toward Jemma rise. She hadn’t bothered to switch on any lights, leaving the upstairs shadowed. How could she even see? What were they doing together in the dark? Halfway up the stairwell, a loud crack of lightning illuminated the living room below. The lights snapped off, along with the electric hum of the refrigerator. It never got less eerie, the loss of power, how used you were to the safe buzz of electricity, and how alone you felt in the sudden quiet. Allie gripped the banister, counting the seconds till she heard the roar of thunder as she had as a child. She got to four when the boom shook the windowpanes. That was close. The storm was nearby.

In times like this, Rob would charge into action, lighting candles and flicking on flashlights from the emergency cupboard. Allie didn’t have an emergency cupboard, so she stood, uncertain, thinking about when she last used candles and if there were any matches. She remembered using a Citronella candle on the patio to deter mosquitoes. Maybe it was still there? She turned, walking cautiously down the stairs, unsure of her footing in the dark. She felt her way to the kitchen, hands out, dragging her fingers against the walls to align her. Reaching the kitchen door, she opened it to the pelt of the rain and stepped out onto the slick concrete in bare feet. The candle was there, a large jar with a double wick, filled with rainwater. It would be impossible to light wet. If only she had brought it inside. Rob would describe this as a preventable accident. If you just thought a little Allie, he always used to say, you could avoid reacting.

Dumping out the dregs of water, she made a plan to dry the wicks with paper towels. And she was sure the matches were still on the shelf beside the fireplace. Maybe she should start a fire – it was still storming and the temperature had dropped, cold and damp enough to warrant warmth. It could be cozy, she and the girls around the fire with peanut butter sandwiches. This could be just what she needed to resolve her concern over Jemma, over Simone.

More lightning flashed, followed quickly by a boom of thunder. Allie didn’t have time to count by she knew the storm was zeroing in on her house. God, her driveway would surely be washed away now. Allie, holding the candle upside down to drain out the dregs, turned to go inside when she heard a squeal. She turned and saw two figures run towards the bay. Was that the girls?

“JEMMA!” Allie screamed. She waited for answer, then screamed her daughter’s name again. The wind whipped her hair in her eyes and whistled as it sped through the yard. She scanned the yard, squinting, but saw nothing: just rain and swaying trees. It must have been the storm she heard. The girls would still be upstairs, waiting for her.

Allie used the kitchen towel that had covered the dough and rubbed the inside of the candle vigorously. She listened for the girls as she retraced her steps to the living room, her wet feet wanting to slide beneath her, hands reaching out ahead. The house was silent.

“Jemma! I’ll be up soon with a CANDLE!” Allie shouted up the stairs, emphasizing the last word like a promise. No response. She knocked her knees into the coffee table on the way to the fireplace and gripped the candle tighter. Her fingers were frigid when she found the matches. Sitting the candle at her feet, she cupped her hands and blew hot breath to warm them. Reinvigorated, she struck a match and dropped to her knees to light the candle. It was still wet, but Allie held the match there till the flame licked her fingertips. Singed, she blew the match out. Trying again, Allie held the match to the wick and it nearly caught. Come on, she thought, angling the jar to give the tiny flame more airflow. Finally, the wick ignited and Allie nearly cheered, the panic that was mounting quieted.

“Jemma? I’m coming!” Allie called, climbing the stairs, holding the candle aloft. Jemma’s bedroom was at the end of the hall. Her door was ajar. Allie repeated her daughter’s name down the dark hall, but softly now.

Allie pushed the door open further. Inside, Jemma’s jar of beachcombing treasures was strewn across the floor. Many of the shells and sea glass were arranged in an intricate circular pattern on the floor, spokes radiating out from a center plate. Allie leaned her candle closer – there was something in the dish. The light shone on a frog, flattened as if run over by a car, its limbs frozen and outstretched. Allie gasped and stepped back. As if underwater, Allie went to Jemma’s bed, her feet crunching over the debris. Stones pierced her heel, but she didn’t feel it. She sat, slouched over her candle, unsure.

Lightning struck again, brightening Jemma’s room and shining a spotlight onto the backyard. Allie stood at the window, the glass candle burning her hand, when she saw movement below. Splashing on the soggy lawn, Allie saw her daughter and her friend, dancing triumphantly, calling the storm to them. Allie couldn’t be certain, but she thought Simone saw her. It was the way Simone paused, head tilted up, and smiled under the drumming rain, before pulling Jemma towards her, out of Allie’s sight.

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Little Red Schoolhouse, Chester, Connecticut by Willy Conley

The Rascals Fiction

Jack Croughwell

I lived in a loft overlooking Boston through a wall of glass. I won’t tell you where. Don’t find me. I lived in a loft overlooking Boston, and the only way to get there was by either freight elevator or a ten-story stair. And I thought at the time of signing that lease, surely, I wasn’t the only soul who’d live in such a loft—not too expensive for what you got. My apartment was this room, and the bathroom, and on my floor there was only one unit across from me, and not long ago the neighbors vanished. I used to hear through the walls. A couple, half-young. She was rich, and he was a kept-thing, and I always thought that was nice. They left, and I don’t hear anything anymore.

There was a statue I made some ten-odd years back when I was experimental. Now, I was just me. That statue I made still stood in the Museum of Fine Arts—it was simple, Homoerotic. All statues are a little sexy because something’s either hard or getting there. My studio apartment was built around large-scale ceramic. I put music on, some pretentious string quartet, and stretched out the canvas. It used to be I’d turn down the volume when the neighbors’ noises came on. I passed the neighbors in the hall once. They smiled at me. I smiled back. Good neighbors, good fences, and all that.

I brought the boys around. I brought the girls. I stripped naked and stood to the city skyline, proffering all my juicy bits to heaven. People were made to live on in stone, yes, and I liked marble well enough. That statue I made, still standing at the museum, that was marble. I was a real artist after that. Nowadays, I hauled pallets of clay up the freight elevator and hoped to pass by something smiling.

When the neighbors vanished, I had someone naked on a barstool say, Hey, I like this pretentious string quartet. They said, Hey, Did you know M is coming back to town? They said, I have to run, and I’ll be back, and would you please hand me my pants? I asked them to stay. Please, talk with me, moan with me, fill my rafters with sound, but they left all the same. They always leave. I took their earthy body and ran it through the pug mill. I woke up with ceramic dried to my sheets.

M was back in town, not yet, but soonish. They had an exhibition opening at the museum. M did statues too, but you wouldn’t sleep with them.

The old exhibition I loved—Arnaldo Pomodoro, an Italian futurist sculptor who said, What if there was a big, shiny sphere, but it was fucked up and at the Vatican? My favorite thing of his was simply his name: Arnold Tomato. I wished my name was something like that, like produce. Figs. Ole Figs, they’d call me. Mister Tomato, I loved.

M texted me without punctuation, and I was always like, What am I supposed to do with that? M wanted to get together because I was a Local Artist, how cute. I had a statue, and they had an exhibition. They wanted me at the launch. As far as I knew there was nothing more tragic than an artist who could feed themselves. I said I would be out of town.

There was an artist’s retreat—something this collective in Somerville did to inspire casual artists to get away for a week or two—and I was on the emailing list. How my email got there, couldn’t tell you. I shaved my head to look cuter and more pixie-ish and less 80s Rock. Bought new glasses too because my squarish black rims made a tabloid headline, and I saw these gold wire frames wrapped around octagonal lenses and I thought, Yeah, I’d change my personality for that.

The retreat: it lasted a little more than a week and we lived on a tiny campus with a café and a tiny yard and a horizon line of pine needles you couldn’t see over, but that looked down on you. Our rooms were dorms that looked unchanged since the 1950s. Quaint and squat and white, and the mattress was thin, but the poof still welcomed my buns. I got new clothes. Baggy jeans and light fabric button-downs, whites and pale purples and pale greens, and one pastel bitch half-pink half-blue jumpsuit that had me walking around like a gender reveal. Not my usual flair. At home, I was in black or in nothing.

That first night, there was a welcome ceremony. I didn’t give my name when we went around. I didn’t give my name when I signed up. I wanted to go by Arnold Tomato, but that too, I thought a glaring tell. I told them Tom Arnold and if anyone asked if it was short for Thomas, I’d tell them Tomato and we would laugh together. I had pieces, well-known pieces, tasteful fig leaves and busts, and juicy bits all over this rock and I didn’t want to put off any beginners. I’m so good at friends; it’s uncanny.

There was a little dining hall to match the little garden and little café and little studios and little everything else. We could eat all our meals together, or not. If we wanted, we could write a little note to the not-little staff, and they would leave a basket outside our doors. We had a couple rows of tables at the mess just for us. Our cohort numbered twenty. Plucky undergrads here on the recommendation of their professors, determined septuagenarians finally working with their hands, and cowards. I was straddling my early thirties and the people to my left made me feel a grave and the people to my right had me feeling that cradle.

Beside me though, sat a girl named Louisa, no more than twenty-two. Brunette, hair cropped to her shoulders and a tattoo of a sunflower under the strap of her tank top. In those brief moments at the table, she had introduced herself, or rather re-introduced because we’d gone through it all at the ceremony, and she used a spoon to shape the rice on her plate into a smiley face. I turned to her and said, Hi, I’m Tom. Ole Figs, I’d’ve said if I wasn’t scared.

—Sculptor, are you? I asked.

—Tryna be! she said. Her words themselves had a grinning oeuvre to them. She was cute in a dictionary definition kind of way, and I thought what I always thought: Hey, maybe this could be something. I had to stretch in the mornings now, but maybe we could overcome that.

—So, you’re into sculpting, what else you like to do? She swallowed a laugh down with some rice and asserted:

—I’m actually really into axe-throwing.

Hell yeah, hell yes. It was not long after my follow-up questions that she mentioned the boyfriend. My boyfriend and I started going to this axe-throwing gym a couple months ago. I didn’t want to be one of those people who, in that instant, lost interest in the conversation. Hey, if I didn’t like couples, I didn’t like anyone these days.

Family members, friends, could come and go as they pleased, but if they ate, they needed to pay, and if they stayed the night, they weren’t allowed to, but, mostly, it was just us. The teachers came from fringe Boston circles, from the local Universities, and, for the exceptionally worldly folk, some of the teachers were from both. None of them I knew, personally. Some I had known of, sure, which made me believe they had heard of me. I didn’t have anyone to visit, which I was fine with, I was. It just meant that when we got to the studios—reclaimed brick buildings, one even with an ancient bottle kiln reaching against the sky—I stuck with Louisa.

—Do you mind the company? I asked.

—I welcome it.

Early on the first full day of the retreat, we set about the ceramics studio. Rows of canvas-topped worktables at the room’s heart. Everything dusted with beige. Resplendent. I took a tired wire tool from a hook. The instructors were there if anyone had questions, and Louise the ever-confident, took a lump of brown clay from its plastic-wrapped block and sat down, started molding. I grabbed an extra needle tool, an extra cup of slip, and set it down beside her. She regarded the artifacts like one did a jigsaw puzzle seconds after spilling the pieces onto the coffee table.

—You have to wedge it, I told her. It’s like kneading dough, and you have to do it unless you want an explosion in the kiln.

—A literal lifesaver.

—I do my part.

We had stoneworkers, metalworkers, woodworkers, all kinds of work among our numbers. Out in the hall, you’d hear the machinations from the other studios. An adorable clanging and sizzle from the metal shops, the whirring of sawblades and woodturners; only took an hour before someone went out to the infirmary. The cohort broke for lunch, but I worked through it. I wanted a hug in clay. Two vague lifeforms with four ambiguous arms wrapped around each other. The clay instructor came around and told me that it reminded her of U—‘s work and asked me if I had heard of them. I said no, even though it was me. When she turned, I brushed the WIP off the side of the table, gray-brown slip ran over the imperfections of the floor like murky blood.

Louisa came back from lunch and What happened all over the clay when she saw me re-wedging the piece. I smiled. Accidents, you knew how it goes.

—What are you going to do with that? I asked Louisa. It was the second day, and I hadn’t even seen she’d neglected the slip part of score and slip. She was making a cat, simple enough.

—Oh, it’s for me, she said. We’re moving into a new apartment soon.

That seemed to be the week’s flavor. I met Deb who was sixty-six and learning how to work a lathe because she wanted to make a chair that matched her father’s old dining set. I met Xiao and his boyfriend Grant who were throwing respective parts of a birdbath for their garden. When I asked them if they would ever show it, ever enter it in a contest, I was met with cocked heads. No one had heard of contests for birdbaths and chairs. How could you not have heard of contests for birdbaths and chairs?

Louisa called out to me night of the third day. I couldn’t get away from time. It was always noon of the second day, middle of the fourth night, end of the first week, I couldn’t simply be on time, I had to be regimented. I wanted to melt into a clock, have it dissolve in my gut so I could shit it out, or it shit me. I didn’t want to know time was moving; you never want it running out. But, Louisa called to me.

—Tom! She shouted. There was a little bar that matched the little café and little garden and little baskets, and we sat around every night a bowl of beer nuts and pretzels with a glass of wine, and I just knew that one more stiff pour of Malbec and  Deb’d tell me if her husband was her first lover or if it was some other memory that made her face a pure crimson. Tom, Louisa said, this is my boyfriend, Tommy. You have the same name which I hope won’t be confusing.

—We can find a workaround for that, I said. I shook Tommy’s hand. He was cute in a dictionary definition kind of way. A shock of brown hair, a flannel button-down that was, perhaps, a half-size too big, and he had those lines around his mouth. Those lines, the giveaway that we had a smiler in our ranks. A laugher. He hunched forward slightly, and his hands were calloused, and I wondered if that was for axe-throwing or if he had other brilliant lives waiting to be unpacked.

—It’s good to meet you, he said. Lou tells me you’ve been watching out for her in the studio. I’ll probably need your help too, come tomorrow. I couldn’t get away from work for the first couple days.

—Dental hygienist? I guessed.

—House painter, but who wouldn’t be opposed to teeth now and then?

I didn’t know why Tommy added the last bit. And, from the gleeful perplexity on Louisa’s—Lou’s—face as she looked up at him, I knew there that none of us knew quite what Tommy meant. How brilliant it was. I loved that his words came first and sense, not second or third, but fifth. I wanted you to speak, then feel, and then, years from now, then I wanted it all to make sense. I handed Deb over to Xiao and Grant, which Deb loved as if she had a punch card, and for every twelve gays she got to know, there’d be a free sandwich in it for her. I bought a bottle of white from the bartender and told Lou and Tommy that I didn’t care what they normally drank; We were all Pinot Grigio that night.

Here's how they met. It was food poisoning. A Panera Bread, of all places—it was a cheap place for some friends to share a meal before a hockey game, no, a baseball game, no, a hockey, well, it didn’t matter because no one went. Lou and Tommy both got that cheddar broccoli soup and that was enough to pique each other’s curiosity because it was the night they met. Everyone else had chicken in some way or another and they were all piled into a shuttle crossing town when six, seven of their friends checked their glut and clutched their guts. Involuntary shepherds, Lou and Tommy ushered their friends to the nearest of their apartments, a train of farts and vomit along some city sidewalk in Maine. They assumed the roles of wardens and gardeners, keeping watch and keeping watered. I poured them both another glass. We sat in the warm late sun. Humid, without bugs, perfection. It was a fun enough story, but I realized it wasn’t the conversation that drew me to Lou and Tommy. Frankly, their analogies were not tight and their lessons-learned, fairly prosaic.

No, it was the way they looked at each other when the other wasn’t watching. They stole glances like kisses. When the bottle was empty, Lou offered the next round and, as she walked away, Tommy said to her:

—My fraaand.

It was a call and response.

—My fraaand, Lou returned. He reached out his hand. She accepted while still walking away, their fingertips were lazy hooks, knowing that even this short goodbye was still a goodbye. Frand, they called out. Like friend, but with a Fran Drescher thrown in the middle there. She came back with three glasses, and I paid her with promises for tomorrow. She kissed—a short, lovely peck—the top of her partner’s head. They had not quite an electric intimacy. I looked at them and saw kids deeply caring, that even a more engaged kiss, a squeeze, a pet name even, would exclude me from the moment. Me. I came to take it that you didn’t do that to your frands.

The hour drew late. I didn’t want to hobble back to the dorms just yet. Some of the instructors were still pounding them back, but Deb, Xiao, Grant, they had long retired. I offered that, as the night became a chill, Lou and Tommy and I sit down with the teachers, but, looking back, I saw them—eyes locked—as Lou cupped Tommy’s hands in hers, pulling, inching back to the dorms. I then thought, hell, it must’ve been at least a few days since they saw each other. And they were twenty-two—it must’ve been an eternity and their juicy bits were yearning. I caught them in a question of between being polite and staying or going back and sleeping together. So, I withdrew the offer. I got another drink with the instructors, but I told Lou and Tommy to get some rest. I watched their excited little asses hustle across the little yard back to the little dorms. Now that. That was a statue.

I went to bed that night harder than I’d been in a long time. I was embarrassed, newly embarrassed, like I was a teenager again, and it was the middle of the date and oh, God, we had to walk from the Applebee’s to the movie theater, and what if they saw me reaching out against a zipper? It was something I’d hoped to have conquered by twenty-five. By twenty-five, if they saw me hard on the date, my eyes posing the question, Oh, God: How about you and me skip the movie? My place isn’t far from here. I lay there on my thin strip of cloud in my 1950s dorm room. Staring at the dark, I wondered if I missed my long hair or if choirboy was who I was now. I listened through the wall, wondering if I would hear sex—moans, giggles, and box springs; I wanted to hear a head bang against a wall they were too passionate to realize was there. I wanted to hear love as an act. I wanted to hear names called out through sweat. I wanted to hear my name, but no one knew it.

My lovers, that night, were hands and the moonlight.

Next day, it was the three of us taking up a canvas table. I tried making my hug again, my vague embrace, but trying to make it not like me. I wanted a present-tense me, or a future-tense me. I didn’t want the instructor coming around and saying if I didn’t know my own work, I should look me up. Tommy started out fresh. Lou had her cat statue and tried to mold whiskers, but it turned out producing a cat from memory was difficult when she’d never spent much time thinking about what cats looked like before. Tommy said he wanted to make a rabbit, or a boat, and when I offered a rabbit on a boat, it was a revelation. By lunch, they got silly.

—I’m gonna knock it over, Tommy said, pointing to Lou’s kitty in the mock-serious way of kids who want to be annoying for the bit.

—Noooo, she said, If you do, I’ll crush your rabbit.

—Not my cottontail!

Lou left for the bathroom. Tommy—he was never going to crush anything—Tommy reached over with a clayed pointer finger and drew a teeny smiley face at Lou’s workstation.

—You two have mischief in your hearts, don’t you, I asked him. I’d rarely met people like Tommy and Lou. They liked to needle at each other, harmless little jokes and notes, but the second another person joined the conversation, they had an almost anxiety about being kind, considerate. Made me feel honored that, when it was the three of us, they would drop the pretense and laugh like they had never left the playground.

—Oh, yeah, Tommy said. He finished modeling the ears of his bunny when I asked him if he’d wedged. He hadn’t. He was so proud of his rabbit, too. He crushed it under the ball of his hand and, in the time Lou was gone and he’d restarted, there came a problem with Lou’s whiskers. She was just returning when she hurriedly called out to us. Tommy and I looked up as the cat’s heavy whiskers pulled its head from its shoulder, tore the neck, and its face flattened on the tabletop.

—Okay, she said, okay. Tommy forgot his rabbits for the day. He and Lou set about a head transplant for the cat. But, the body’s clay was a day old and the new clay was unagreeable to it. After an hour, they were fatigued and ready to call it. Tommy had a fingerprint of slip on his nose, and when she tried to point it out, she managed to get some on her own. We all laughed, tired, and cold with earth. God, I wished they could see me. This was the closest I’d known such affection.

There was a bucket for recycled clay that Tommy dropped his rabbits into, but, at least, Lou had a fresh-faced cat with whiskers relieved instead of molded on, which left them with some security. Lou’s cat and my piece sat on the drying room shelves with the hope of getting fired in a day or two so we could glaze before the week was out. The teacher told me, it’s incredible how much your sculpture reminds me of U—‘s work. Are they not an influence?

What a weird question: to ask me if I’m an influence. We all scraped muck into opaque water and were left with our forearms.

—Drinks? I asked. But it was an early night for my friends. I got drunk with people I wasn’t as obsessed with. The clay instructor mentioned my artwork to the others, and they mentioned how much my artwork looked like my artwork. You should see them, she said, they have these glasses with these thick black rims—iconic.

—I’m sure, I said. I turned in early. Many people were, the fatigue of working, of flowing the creative juice, was plum-tuckering the artists out, but we all were happy to share our works-in-progress with each other. Grant and Xiao’s birdbath was on track for firing and glazing. Deb’s chair was wobbly but still good. Not bad for a first draft. In fact, most of them all happy to say, hey, not bad for a first draft. I missed Lou and Tommy.

Walked alone back to my room. Didn’t need to close out the bar every night. I did, occasionally, enjoy to dream. On my way back, I did pass some noises. The deep mahogany doors kept secrets, but the flimsy sheetrock was designed by gossips sick of getting news by holding a glass to their ear. The walls let everything through. Did you know how I learned which room was Lou and Tommy’s? As it happened, Lou was a grunter and Tommy a moaner and Lou a baby and Tommy a daddy, and they had more stamina than I had patience for waiting. I imagined a simple missionary, so they could look into the other’s eyes rather than stealing looks. There was the hypnotic percussion of the bedframe knocking against the stone windowsill. I timed my steps to it, my heart sinking with the fading of its definition.

In my room, I stripped my pale purples and greens and stood naked before my window. I saw brick buildings and the needled horizon. It wasn’t that I wanted to sleep with Lou and Tommy, no matter what my spent sheets said. I didn’t like them apart. I liked them as a circuit. And, no, that didn’t mean I wanted to be in the room. I didn’t want to be a voyeur because I always liked to get my hands in the paint, but watching them, hearing them, oh, why could I not be across the hall? They’re alive. They were just so alive. I ground against the bed for what seemed would last the rest of my life.

I woke up the next day with a message from M on my phone saying they missed me at the launch and that they were leaving Boston, hoped to catch up next time they were in town. Sure, yeah, okay. Tommy finally made his rabbits, and Lou got her bisque-fired cat and me, my hug. This was how it was as the week rounded out. We glazed our pieces. I walked away with something silvery and cobalt that I was happy enough to call mine. Tommy and Lou walked away with their non-exploded pieces, though Lou’s cat did have a crack that broke that cat’s head from its body. She fixed it with glaze.

—Figs, I said. It was the penultimate day. Noon of the penultimate day. I told them, you can call me Figs, it’s confusing with two Toms.

—Fig? Lou echoed. I figured it was close enough. I scribbled my apartment in the city down and told them not to be surprised if there wasn’t a Tom or a Fig on the buzzer. They hugged me in the end, one big bear. I told them to get out of here. It was a world too pure for them. I didn’t know how, but they had figured it out. They knew a secret I didn’t, and they kept it in each other.

—Be good, Fig, Tommy said. On the final day, the teachers offered us all bubble wrap for our pieces. Grant and Xiao’s birdbath had a crack that ruined the basin’s watertightness, and Deb had tried so hard to fix the wobble in her chair it was a half-foot shorter than the chairs she had at home. No contests for them, but they left happy.

The clay teacher said to me:

—You know, I like these glasses more than your old ones. You did great here.

As much as I didn’t want to admit she’d figured me out, I guessed she knew the whole time I wasn’t who I said I was. I never knew who I was, let alone who I said I was. I loaded my embrace into my rental and left for town, wishing I could see Lou and Tommy watch each other once more.

I took the freight elevator up ten stories. I looked down on a steel horizon. I put my piece in a box and hid the box behind a curtain. No one had moved in across the hall, still, nothing had changed in my absence. To the high ceilings of my loft, I called out: My fraaand.

It was ever quiet. I was alone and still unknown. I had a dream of then and there starting something new. But, no, I ordered a small block of marble online. I thought of calling M. Or calling Lou, Tommy. The sun went down, and the lights of Boston came on in a patchwork.

I stripped down, lay across the bed feeling the hollowness where a second body would fit, and I screamed.

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Rebecca by Donald Patten

Portrait Nonfiction

Lael Cassidy

We are in Provincetown for the summer so Dad can write his novel. Mom isn’t around, because she has to stay back and work. The house we are renting is small, and Dad’s typewriter takes up most of the kitchen table. So Mark and I are on our own. We spend the days either at the beach or in town. It's our job to disappear.

The house is damp, and the walls are thin. Every surface has knick-knacks: shells, sand dollars, paintings of the sea, a boat’s steering wheel, a captain’s hat. Our belongings stand out against this backdrop: Dad’s coffee maker, his stacks of newspapers, his pens, pads, and books, gin bottles. Then there’s our Wonder Bread, and peanut butter, the small boxes of cereal plastic wrapped together so that they make a long brick. Mark and I quietly cut open the boxes with scissors and pour the milk into the white wax paper so that there are no dishes from breakfast, just two abandoned dirty spoons.

The tide is always changing. Sometimes it comes so far in that it laps the deck, and the gray shingles common to most of the homes here end up, like us, speckled with sand and salt. It’s another world when the tide is low, because instead of there being water, there’s an endless beach, a landscape of ruin. Boats and buoys and rafts are left strewn like dead fish.

I never get the tide’s rhythm down––just Dad’s. In the morning he is either typing or is supposed to be, then in the afternoon he finds us, brings us inside and  feeds us lunch. Even when we are out on the beach, our ears are attuned to the thumps and hum and clacks of the Smith-Corona, the dings and the rattle of the carriage return, the sounds or the absence of them will tell us whether Dad will be up or down, a happy person or a monster. The monster yells at us.

We’ve only been here a few days when we meet some kids on the beach. They are also here for the summer. One of them is a red-haired girl, five like me, and the other two are boys, and  one of them is seven like Mark. They have big blotchy freckles on their arms and legs and faces while we only have a constellation of spots on our noses and cheeks.

“Hey, it’s low tide,” the oldest one says. “You want to collect mussels?”

We say yes, and they take us to their house a few doors down to grab buckets then we go to a rock wall that seems to rise from the sand. The rocks are covered with barnacles, sharp and white, that seem to open and close  as the water passes near them. At first it seems as if there are no mussels, but then we climb on the rocks and see them, the smooth blue-gray of them attached in between. We pull hard to get them free, and our hands get red and cold and pricked from all the sharp edges.

“We have enough to eat,” the girl says, and I am surprised by this because I thought that we were collecting them like seashells. “Will you come for dinner? My dad will cook them on the beach.”

I have my usual response to invitations, excitement then immediately anxiety that my Dad won’t like it; sometimes he even gets mad when I ask. But he has written ten pages today, and that’s a lot. He is the happy person. We eat with their family at their place a few doors down, like we’re old friends. After the mussels are cooked, they open, revealing orange and rubbery balls that taste of slime, sand, and sea.

The grownups talk and drink, and we kids go out into the dark to the water’s edge. It’s far because the tide is still low. We can barely see but move toward the soft waves. When we turn back, civilization looks like a pretend place. Nondescript people stand like toys in doll houses, this or that mother, father, or child, no one we know, in their kitchens, living rooms, or bedrooms.

The next day Mark and I are on the beach when we see someone come out of the house next door to ours. A very thin man is on his deck in a tiny swimsuit, wearing sunglasses, and drinking orange juice. Mark and I make up theories about him. I say he’s an actor or a model, but Mark says that since his house is so much nicer than ours, with its painted wood and cathedral ceilings, that he is rich and doesn’t work. We each dare the other to talk to him, and neither of us do, but when we move closer we hear music playing, a woman with an operatic voice. The man is singing along.

We have been here three weeks when Dad tells us that Mom will be out to visit in four days. I count each one carefully but they are long and the same, and I can never figure out whether to count the day that we’re on. Then it’s the morning of day zero. I run into the kitchen like Paul Revere on his horse.

“Mom’s coming! Mom’s coming.”

Dad stops writing, looks out the window, and takes a long sip of coffee.

“That’s right,” he says in a low voice that I know is a warning. “But not until tonight.”

“I already told you that…” Mark says and yanks my arm pulling me toward the door. I’m still in my jammies and haven’t eaten, but he gives me a severe look, making the kind of face that looks like he has ever smiled and never would, so I go, and he sits with me on the deck until I calm down, then takes me back in so quietly that Dad doesn’t notice.

That night Mom’s bus is late, so we won’t see her until morning. I wake up, and the house already feels sunnier. I hear her voice in the next room, her deep belly laugh, and rush into her arms.

“Darling!” she says and then she’s all around me, soft and warm, and smelling of her familiar perfume. I sit in her lap and lean against her chest and belly. Her hair grazes my shoulders, and I pretend it’s mine.

She and Mark and I spend the whole day together. Mom takes us to the boardwalk for footlong hot dogs and ice cream cones. I feel as if everyone, even the ocean, is meeting her. That afternoon she brings a blanket and a book to the beach to watch us swim. We’re in the water when we see her standing talking to the neighbor. Her laugh carries across the beach.

That night it’s raining so we eat  inside, cramped at the table. Dad is quiet. He may be fine or this may be the calm before an explosion.

“Have you met the man next door?” Mom asks us. “He’s a successful artist.”

Mark and I look at one other, silently acknowledging that our theories are wrong.

“I’ve asked him to paint your portrait,” she says to me, leaning over the table, and pressing my nose with her thumb.

“Why?” Mark asks. “Why wouldn’t you just take a picture?”

He is looking at Dad, measuring his response. Dad takes lots of pictures of us, on black and white film that he develops at home.

“I wouldn’t want a painting of me!” Mark blurts out, then looks guiltily at Dad, who is not paying attention.

“Well,” Mom says in her rich alto voice. “That’s just fine. I thought you might feel that way which is why I didn’t ask you. But you should know that there are things a painting can capture that a photograph can’t.”

She smiles so that her teeth and eyes sparkle. I don’t know what she means. I picture piles of thick paint, the colors swirled together.  I’ve only painted with my fingers. It’s messy, the kind of thing that gets me in trouble.

Mom goes back to the city, and I forget about the portrait until Dad says out of the blue it’s time for you to go next door. At first I think it’s some kind of punishment, but then he says it’s for the painting. He walks me there and looms over me at the door. He’s massive and unpaintable, and I’m a little girl, a doll in a dress. The neighbor is in non-beach clothes, a blue short sleeved shirt and tan pants. The moment we meet he smiles, but then his face goes blank, back to the way it was before. Then Dad leaves, and it feels strange to be alone with a stranger. His place has thick walls, shiny wood floors, shaggy rugs, and glass sculptures. Giant colorful paintings are everywhere. He doesn’t say anything to me the whole time. I am in a stiff dress that my mother picked out for me: light blue with a frill of lace around the neck. As I  hold myself very still, the only sounds are the paint brush against canvas and the lapping of the water.

The next morning I watch my father, thinking of how he is so very different from the artist next door. He’s sitting on the couch writing notes on legal pads while we are eating breakfast. First he frowns, then smiles; a moment later his face  droops, and his mouth turns downward. The dark circles under his eyes seem to darken, as if a shadow is passing over him. 

I sit for the portrait once a week for several weeks, but each time I am never allowed to see it. Not even a glimpse.

Mark and I meet only one other person that summer. One night we come in from the beach and a woman is in our house who I’ve never seen before. She sits with her back straight and her purse in her lap, as if she is applying for a job, but she is not dressed like that; it’s more like she’s dressed for a night out. She has on big hoop earrings, a short skirt, and a low-cut puffy sleeved top. She’s pretty, younger than my mom,  with short curly hair like Carol Burnett. Her feet are lined up neatly in high wedged shoes, one next to the other.

“I’m waiting for your father,” she says to me, “he’s getting changed.”

She smiles, and I can tell she means to be polite to us, like she recognizes that we are important, but isn’t trying to make friends. Immediately Mark goes to our bedroom and closes the door behind him, but I want to look at her. I’m trying to understand what’s happening. The only time we see women like this is when they come to babysit us; no one has come to see Dad before. In her lap is a copy of my father’s book. Her hands are wrapped around it tight.

“Your father’s famous,” she says and smiles her Carol Burnett smile, parting her lips to show oversized teeth. Her mouth makes me think of horses and apples.

Dad appears, reeking of aftershave. He asks sweetly if I’m hungry, using an especially kind voice reserved for when there are guests.  I say, “No, I’m not hungry” back, in my in-front-of-guests voice, and scamper off. Mark and I listen from our room, hear them talking and laughing. The combination of their voices makes a noise that doesn’t belong. Dad doesn’t seem to belong to anybody, not to our mom and not to us.

In the morning, for the first time all summer, we are up before him. We don’t see him until late that afternoon.

“Hop in the car,” he says, when he is finishing the last of his coffee. “We’re going to the ocean.”

“I thought we were at the ocean,” I say, looking sheepishly at Mark, who seems to already understand, and frowns at me while he puts on his sneakers.

Dad pulls me up onto his shoulders so that my head nearly scrapes the ceiling. Then he points out the window.

“See this? All this is bay, not ocean.”

From up on his shoulders the window over the kitchen sink looks low.

“But I thought the bay was the ocean.”

I look for Mark again but he is standing by the car, eyes squinting in the sun.

“Well, it’s all the same water. That’s true,” he says and puts me down gently. “But here it’s protected. You see how the land curls around. It makes it very calm here. But the ocean’s not calm. There are big waves over there. And it’s not far, just on the other side of the Cape.”

We drive past low green bushes that pass outside the car window in a green and yellow blur,  then come to a road through low dunes. The wind is so strong it pulls the car door open and makes it hard to close. Mark and I race ahead to the water’s edge and can barely hear each other over the noise of the waves.

“Take your shoes off and go in!” Dad yells from back on the beach. “And roll up your pants!”

We jump over each wave. Our pants get soaked. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the world but the three of us.

In August, Mom’s visiting again. We are having dinner on the deck, and the sun is setting. A delicious golden light is on her face. She has a scarf around her neck, her sunglasses on, and  looks like a movie star. Dad is looking out at the Bay, his hand on his glass of gin, covering it. Mom feels like a stranger now; for a month it’s been the three of us. The tides have taken us over, while she still has the air of the city. You can see it in the way she sits in her chair. She doesn’t lean back but forward, is ready to pop up and do something else; from the moment she arrives, she is preparing to leave.

The next door neighbor calls down to her from his balcony.

“Hello! You’re back!” he yells.

“Yes! Hello!” she yells back. He gestures for her to come over. She gets up from the table and goes over to his deck. Mark and I don’t budge from our seats. This is during dinner. Dad has an exasperated look. She comes back and announces, “It’s done!”

For a moment I have no idea what she means, and I worry that it means something’s wrong.

“The painting of you!” she says and puts her hand on my shoulder. “ I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see it.”

When we go to get the painting, Mark stays back, happy to be alone. It’s odd to walk with my parents down the street. They are almost never together. They are like magnets with opposite poles. We stand at the door in complete silence as Dad rings the bell. Mom rearranges her scarf, smooths her hair, and does that thing she always does when she sees her reflection. She sucks in her cheeks so that she looks thinner.

At first she does the talking, but then we fall into silence again as we stand in front of the covered picture. With a flourish, the man lifts the fabric from the canvas, the way my mother unfurls a sheet to make a bed.

A girl stares back at me with round pink cheeks, giant freckles, and an almost smile. My parents make no oohs or ahhs. 

“Well this is no good,” Dad says.

Mom says, “I’m sorry, but I have to agree.”

I’m looking at the artist and his unchanging face as they take a few steps away to speak to one another about what to do. I hear Mom say, “No obligation to buy” and Dad say “You better believe I’m not going to.”

But the girl doesn’t seem that bad to me. I like her. I want to look at her longer, but Mom pulls me toward the door.  Dad talks to the man, whose eyebrows for the first time are slightly furrowed, cheekbones becoming more pronounced. I hear Dad’s voice raise as Mom and I go out the door.

“But it doesn’t look anything like her!”

The painting is left behind. I don’t dare ask my parents about it.I imagine the canvas tucked between other paintings, the girl on her side, two dimensional, trying to smile despite being alone in the picture, a lost and thrown away thing.

On our last night on the Cape, Dad has one of the artists on Commercial Street draw my portrait, a caricature. These are quick distorted sketches of people, with giant heads and little bodies. This is the art I take home at the end of the summer: a thin piece of 11x14 drawing paper with a cartoon of a big-headed girl with a toothy smile.

It could be anybody.

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Nancy Lee by Donald Patten

The Distant Light of Interstellar Objects Fiction

Kate Bergquist

Here she comes, still catching her breath, shaking the rain from her wheat-colored hair.

A slender girl in jeans and a tan sweatshirt. No scarf, no jewelry, very little makeup. Her wish is to be transparent, to move about in the world without ever being seen.

But Frankie’s late, so everyone looks up as she enters Science class. She glances nervously at the wall clock—five past one – she made it back just before the bell – and hooks her backpack on her chair before sliding into her seat. She tries to ignore the whispers. There are other things she needs to do, to think about. Important things. She wonders if Mr. Tibbetts fixed the leaky pipes under the bathroom sink. And she forgot to make a grocery list. But—she’s pretty sure there’s still a half-loaf of oatmeal bread and some oyster stew, so she can make that for dinner. Gran loves oyster stew. Maybe she will have a little more appetite tonight.

And wait -- it’s Friday, right? – that means the hospice nurse won’t stop by, so Frankie has a valid reason to skip her guidance counselor appointment and head home again right after school.

Besides, she doesn’t want to talk to Mrs. Heath anyway. She keeps bringing up unpleasant subjects.

And Gran will be so happy to see her. Some days she doesn’t quite seem to know who Frankie is, but she’s always so pleased to have company. A tiny little thing, Gran, a collection of rattling bones in a cornflower robe; a grinning ancient ruin, thank you for calling on me, had I known I would have gotten dressed. Gran never gets angry, or combative – not that she ever did, really, not that Frankie can recall -- and from everything Frankie has heard, this is a blessing, and she is thankful for it. I would have served us tea, dear, with a slice of blueberry pie.

Their teacher fumbles with his laptop, trying to start a video. He is a big man, hands like oven mitts, awkward with technology. He accidentally presses a wrong key, and they watch a black dog racing around a kitchen island with a diaper in its mouth. A bare-bottomed, arm-flailing toddler follows, screeching with delight.

“Whoops.”

“Who’s that, Mr. Wooly?”

“My little granddaughter,” he says, embarrassed. His sausage fingers push more keys and they watch his family gathered at a table on a pool patio. Colorful balloons tied to every chair. The little girl is maybe a year older, blowing out candles. Exasperated, Mr. Wooly reluctantly signals to Dean Conley, who is good at everything, who volunteers for everything, who swaggers to the front of the room, offering a little bow to exaggerated whistles and catcalls.

Frankie hates that her heart hammers every time she looks at him.  

“It’s the one marked O.”     

“As in…orgasm!”

“No, Dean. Oumuamua.”

Dean does a pelvic grind as he repeats, “OH…Mooahh Mooahh! Is that what you Boomers call it these days,” as the class screams with laughter, Dean bends forward, pointing at the screen, feigning a shocked expression.

“Holy crap, look at all the porn you got on here!”

 Wooly is aghast. His jowls shaking, he actually squints at the screen. Frankie feels his deep embarrassment pulsating in her throat, in her heart, like physical pain.

“There’s no porn!”

“I’m just messing with yah.” Dean gives him a soft little punch on the shoulder. He artfully presses a key and Mr. Wooly turns his indignant, scarlet face to the projection screen.

The class goes quiet as they watch a huge, rather flat, somewhat cigar-shaped object speeding through the solar system.

“Meet Oumuamua.”

“It looks like an old spaceship.”

“Or an alien probe.”

“It’s a comet!”

Mr. Wooly nods at all their comments. “You’re watching a simulation. We don’t know what it was, definitively. There’s no consensus. Some scientists postulated it could be a comet, but it had no tail.”

“An asteroid, then?”
“Perhaps. But it was traveling much faster than an asteroid. And it was ten times brighter. It seemed to be tumbling through space.”

“How do they know what it looked like?

“Because of its unusual rotation and the way it reflected sunlight, we were able to calculate its elongated shape.”

 “It was shiny, then! Like a spaceship!”

 “Possibly. It did display some unusual non-gravitational acceleration. But honestly, we don’t know what it was, where it originated from, or where it is headed. We just don’t have enough data. But the name – Oumuamua – translated from Hawaiian means, “messenger from afar arriving first.”

“Can we track it?”

“It’s already left our solar system, far beyond the reach of our telescopes. But--whatever it was, it was the first interstellar object ever to be discovered. And it could have been hurtling through space for millions of years.”

How tired it must be, traveling like that for so long. Frankie is still thinking about Oumuamua almost an hour later, during English class. She wants to write down her thoughts about it. She wonders if it is lonely in its travels. A messenger from afar arriving first. Does that mean more will follow? And…what was the message?

Vaguely, she hears someone speak her name from far away and it pulls her into the present. Frankie is fond of her name; it has four balanced syllables, it has some heft to it, those sturdy “k” sounds; she thinks Frankie Becker might look cool as a byline if she ever finds the time to write. There are lots of stories in her head, incredibly detailed little dramas that play themselves out in her imagination. Some of them she writes down, scribbled onto the backs of menus and envelopes and kept in her nightstand drawer. This is where she also keeps her mother’s yearbook, Samoset Harbor High School, Class of 1991, that she stole from the library last year. She often studies Faith’s portrait, and holds it up to the mirror to measure their resemblance: the same thin smile, pale eyes, beige hair. And the caption beneath the photo: We’re all just passing through.

This week’s assignment was to write a review of a recently released movie. Frankie hasn’t seen any movies in quite a while. No time to watch television, and she doesn’t have an iPad. She does her homework on Mr. Tibbetts’ computer, and the only phone she has is Gran’s flip. So instead, she wrote a review of The Second Life of Persephone Bergstrom. A movie she knows intimately, an “unsettling, coming-of-age drama set in Down East Maine.” The lead character, a highly sensitive, shy teen named Paulina, has such bell-clear memories of her past life as Persephone that she stows away on a transatlantic cruise ship to search for her previous birth mother.

Frankie’s teacher, Mr. Mello, is so taken by the review that he reads it to the class.

“This is good. I haven’t heard of this movie, but I definitely want to see it. How about it, class, any takers?”

“I’ll go see it if you pay me,” grunts Dean Conley, and of course, everyone laughs. Frankie feels her own lips stretching hideously across her teeth, her armpits growing damp. She took a shower this morning, but it didn’t make her clean. She is ugly, disgusting, a stupid fake. Being equally praised and ridiculed for her stupidity.

“But--didn’t you hear? How Frankie skillfully framed the story? Without giving too much of it away? How she described the film’s protagonist, Paulina/Persephone, as someone who, quote, ‘embodies the aching vulnerability of youth as she seeks a sense of belonging in an existential world.’ Frankie -- you deftly captured the thematic element of the film. Well done.”

A drumbeat thunders in her chest. She hopes her classmates won’t see her overheated face, but she feels their stares. If only he had said that to her privately, after class. She hates being singled out. Even by Mr. Mello, whom she really likes, whose name sounds deliciously creamy, like mint ice cream, even though he is, in fact, quite the opposite: a face pitted with acne scars, a scratchy voice. Breath like rusted coins. And certainly not anywhere near fat, his clothes hang loose and wrinkled from his lanky frame. He has long, bony fingers with chewed nails. Slender wrists. He is caught in that in-between place of not-old and not-young. Frankie likes to study the craggy coastline of his face.  

And his eyes – a turmoiled sea. She loves his eyes.

Amanda Gomes slips her iPhone from her pink leather handbag and thumbs a few strokes. The bag matches the pink highlights in her hair. Her teal eyeshadow matches her crystal phone case, which matches her dipped manicure. She shakes her head dramatically. “Not streaming on Netflix or Hulu,” she says accusingly, “and I can’t even find it on IMDB.”

A few snickers. Frankie can feel the rage behind Amanda’s smirk, like an angry dog snapping its jaws near her neck, and turns her head away.

Mr. Mello studies Frankie for a moment: in his eyes, a rolling wave rises and then breaks against a cliff. “Ah. An independent arthouse film,” he says, popping his right palm to his forehead, “I should have known. A rare gem like this will only showcase in the elite festivals.”

“Yeah,” Dean snorts, “to an audience of one.”

When the class ends, Frankie notices Mr. Mello pretending to be busy, shuffling his paperwork. He glances up a couple of times, above the rushing heads, to see if she is still in the room. Frankie pulls on her backpack and shyly approaches his desk.

“It’s very clever, your…movie. Have you finished it?”

“Almost,” Frankie admits, eyes downcast.

There it is again, that subtext. Do you know what comes next? It seems that everyone is asking it lately. Frankie isn’t sure how to answer. There are so many viable endings, an endless array of them, all existing in her mind like tiny twinkling stars.

“I’d like to read it, whenever you’re ready to share.” He pauses, then, “Do you…desire to write, Frankie?” 

“Um, sure,” she says, trying for casual, feeling the flush returning to her cheeks.

“I mean, I’d like to be a writer…someday.” As she glances up, Mr. Mello holds her gaze. Frankie floats there, suspended, in those glistening pools of dark blue.

“Well, take it from me, try not to let life get in the way.” He huffs out a laugh. “Because it does. And whatever you do, don’t listen to…the fray.” He gestures at the empty room. “What do they know about truth and beauty? And what really matters in life? What could they possibly know? Not much. Not much at all.” He leans closer and continues, his tone conspiratorial, “It’s not their fault, really, you can’t blame them, they just aren’t capable. But you. You know. You feel. It’s a rare thing.”

As he bends to her, a black forelock drapes across his creased forehead. “I just…I mean, I want you to know,” he lowers his voice to a whisper, his lips almost touching her left ear, “…that you are better than the whole lot of them.”

Frankie shrinks back. His words of praise have unzipped her body and peeled back layers of her skin. His thoughts push their way inside.

I am your friend, you know this to be true, let me in, let me in.

But it’s not fair, it’s not right, this unexpected intimacy, she didn’t ask for it, it frightens her, this tickle of shame. She can feel his thoughts reaching for her spine. We are one. I know you. Do you…desire?

“No!” Frankie cinches her arms around her waist, tight as a belt, and races from the classroom, and out of the school. I’m not special, not special. Mr. Mello, whom she trusted, who was important to her…she tries to steady her breath…it is like pulling herself out of a hole, wresting away from him. But what did he do that was wrong? Frankie isn’t sure. She can hear the lapping waves of Gran’s voice, there you go again, Frankie, making way too much of little things.

She slows her pace and starts to count. Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…fifty-six, fifty-seven…two hundred twenty-seven, two hundred twenty-eight. The frost is almost completely out of the ground now; her feet make a steady squishing sound.

Two blocks from school, and she already feels the rhythm erasing her anxiety.

By the time she reaches five hundred steps, she feels safe again.

She breathes in the briny scent, the view of the harbor, the chugging of the lobster boats. Some of the boats that left before sunrise are already back; gulls swoop in for discarded bait. Frankie picks out at least two Great Black-backed gulls, the largest gulls found in Maine and the most majestic, in her opinion. She watches as they bully the other gulls for food. She wishes she had scraps to toss into the swirling water. Instead, she flings them a few random words that come to her just now: Protuberant. Excrement. Sapient.   

It’s so peaceful here; Frankie can’t imagine ever living anywhere else. Samoset Harbor, a working fishing village, a scenic two-hour drive north from Portland. She grew up here, since she was a toddler, not quite a native, but almost. She doesn’t remember anything about her life from before, only what Gran has told her.

In a trinket shop in Ann Arbor, I found a dusty postcard of the sea crashing against cliffs, this magical place on the Maine coast. I’d never been there. I wanted to get far away from him to start a new life. Him: her married lover, a tenured professor, who she never told about the pregnancy. In fact, Frankie knows scant few details about her mother: She was a solemn child, Faith, unknowable, her face always silhouetted against the sky, always dreaming of stars. Faith struggled with depression and drug addiction, and then, at eighteen, ran away to Latin America to find herself. I wasn’t a good enough mother, Frankie, I know it. I resented having an imperfect, restless child. I expected motherhood to be easy. I could do everything else so well, I could control all the other parts of my life, everything but Faith. I didn’t focus on her enough. I was selfish, I know that now. And she was lost to me.

 Gran took several leaves of absence from teaching to travel to Argentina to search for Faith–but to no avail. During the last trip, Gran’s house caught fire; it burned everything she owned. Nothing remained of Faith, not a single shred of clothing, not one photo.

After the fire, Gran hired a private investigator to try to find her daughter, draining her life savings in the process.

But no one ever heard from Faith again.

Until, a dozen years later, a call from out of the blue--from the American Embassy in Buenos Aires. Faith had been found, dead -- a tragic overdose -- her three-year-old daughter left outside the embassy, with a note pinned to her jumper: My name is Francia. Please contact my grandmother, Ida Becker, in Samoset Harbor, Maine.

And so, nearing seventy, and newly diagnosed with heart disease, Gran retired from teaching to bury her only child and begin raising a toddler.

They live above Tibbetts Oyster Barn, in a snug apartment, a single bedroom and bath, a kitchen/living room combo, and a sliding glass door that leads to a small deck with an expansive harbor view. It’s the only home Frankie has ever known. It’s comfortable, and safe, and convenient, too, since they don’t own a car and Frankie’s still too young to drive. She works at Tibbetts three nights a week, and most weekends, as a busser and dishwasher, and Mr. Tibbetts always lets Frankie leave her shift a couple of times to go check on Gran.

Gran has always seemed old, but Frankie sees the accelerating weight loss, the breathlessness, the cognitive decline. Gran says she only forgets what she doesn’t need to remember. But it doesn’t matter. They still make it work. Despite the regular attempts by Mrs. Heath to deem it otherwise. You have to start thinking about what comes next, Frankie. What happens…after. Frankie can always plan the next chapter of one of her stories. But in her own life, there is just the steady metronome of routine, the intent focus on what needs to be done, now, in the moment. Anything beyond that is too scary to contemplate.

The word “hospice” in itself isn’t threatening. Frankie knows the etymology of the word is hospitum, a Latin word meaning “a place of lodging.” A place of comfort. A respite for weary travelers just passing through, like Oumuamua. The image is appealing, really, it is like the feeling of snuggling into warm bed covers after a long, exhausting day.

“We’re a good team, aren’t we, dear?”   

“Always.” Frankie makes check marks on the medication chart and counts the pills in the bottles again. There’s Bisoprolol to lower blood pressure, Benazepril to open blood vessels, and Lasix to reduce water retention. Frankie spoons brightly-colored pills into applesauce and Gran dutifully opens her mouth.

Thick fog rolls into the harbor. Gran loves fog. She’s lucid tonight; Frankie wonders if there is some kind of chemical reaction in the atmosphere that triggers Gran’s clearer state of mind. Or maybe it’s the music. Devon’s Ride is playing tonight. Their New England style of upbeat, Celtic folk-rock is very popular with the locals. Even so, Frankie counted four shiny black cars in the crowded parking lot, all with New York license plates.

The noise is so loud, the floor is shaking. Gran moves her toes in sync with the beat. Her chair faces the sliding glass door.

“Fog comes…on little cat feet,” Gran says, tapping her toes as she quotes her favorite poet, Carl Sandburg.

“Yeah, but it’s not sitting on its haunches,” Frankie points out the window. “It’s feeling frisky tonight.”

“That means the wind will pick up.” Gran focuses on the sliding glass door. “My, it’s warm, don’t you think, Faith? Warm for late March.”

“It’s April, Gran. April tenth. And I’m Frankie.”

 Gran winces, presses a hand to her heart.

“You okay?”

Gran nods.  

“Dizzy?” Frankie is on high alert, taking Gran’s pulse, observing her breath. It seems regular. And her pulse is steady. Good. Frankie goes to the medicine cabinet and finds the antacid. Heartburn isn’t unusual for Gran, but it seems to be more frequent. She makes a mental note to tell Gran’s doctor about it. Gran takes the two pink tablets and chews them.

“Better?”

Gran nods.

“Try to burp.”

Gran takes a breath and holds it, puffs out her cheeks. After a moment, she pushes out a soft belch and a mischievous smile.

“Want me to open the window a bit so you can smell the sea?”

Gran claps her hands together, jubilant. “Yes! How wonderful!”

“I’m heading down now. But I’ll be back soon.”

“Okay, sweetheart. I’ll be right here, listening.”

Frankie feels guilty as she busses tables. The crowd is having so much fun, and poor Gran is stuck upstairs in her chair, as usual, staring at heavy fog through glass. No one has come to visit her in a long time, except for the hospice people. Mr. Tibbetts used to stop by often, but it seems like he’s been avoiding them lately.

Maneuvering a heavy tray down the crowded hallway, Frankie collides with warm skin and rippling muscle --“Whoa! Sorry, Frankie—” as her tray tilts and the contents slide to the floor. It’s Dean Conley. He stoops to pick up his phone and glances at a text. And then he helps Frankie collect the dishes. He looks at her with his full attention, smiling, his eyes a clearing sky! He’s like a totally different person, an imposter auditioning in Dean’s body. His hair is so clean, too. It shines light brown and frames his face. His features are open, handsome. And his shoulders are so broad! She has never been this close to him; he smells nice, like spiced chai.  

Dean helps Frankie lift the tray. She wants to speak to him, to make some small talk, it doesn’t matter what. Say anything! But -- just as she raises her voice above the music, audio feedback screeches from the sound system.

Frankie almost drops the tray again.  

“You okay, kid?”

A residual whine still vibrating in her ears, a cloying scent of aftershave assaulting her nose, Frankie blinks to see it’s not Dean, it’s some other man, a looming stranger, touching her arm solicitously. Tall, with close-set, probing eyes; an aquiline nose, angular face. Like a bold seagull about to peck at food. He carries himself like someone with money. Someone accustomed to getting his way.

A stylish, dark-lashed woman presses in – Trev! – and shakes his hand. Trev pushes out his chest; he makes a sweeping gesture, like he’s showing off the place. The woman is so attractive, the perspiration on her face like a film of silk. I never doubted you! Who are these people, friends of Mr. Tibbetts? She has never seen them before. They’re from away, certainly. New Yorkers. Celebrating, but what? The view?

With growing unease, Frankie takes a step back, glancing about for Dean.

And there he is -- already at the exit, head bent to his phone. Dean pushes the door open with his elbow as he texts with both thumbs. The breeze lifts his hair, little fingers of fog reach around the edge of the door as he closes it behind him. Frankie’s smile is frozen on her face; she thinks mendacious sycophant, but shakes it away. Dean was nice to her, even if only for a moment. She is invisible again, and there is a cool, familiar comfort in that well-worn space.

She ducks into the kitchen, sets the tray down, and plunges her trembling hands into the sink. She loves the rush of hot water on her skin, the suds, the scrubbing, the steam. The pleasant clacking of clean plates being stacked.

Mr. Tibbetts pops his head in the door. “Hey, kiddo.”

Frankie nods, offers a weak smile. “Hey.”

“How’s Ida?” Mr. Tibbetts has known Gran ever since she was his seventh-grade Language Arts teacher. Frankie turns off the water. Wipes her hands on a clean towel. Turns to him.

“Lonely.” 

“Yuh.” A heavy sigh. He stares at the foamy water, his right hand scratching his chin. “That sucks. Sorry. I should stop up. Lots of…stuff going on.”

Frankie nods, shrugs. The restaurant’s been short-handed for months now, everyone doing extra shifts. Hard to find reliable staff. “She loves the music, though.”

Frankie sees a tiny flash in his eyes.

“Too bad she can’t—well, wait -- why the heck not?” Tibbetts says, his broad face a million crinkles. But he looks really tired. And his face and body seem puffier than usual. Words spill into her mind; Turgescent, tumefied. She wonders vaguely if “tummy” comes from the word tumid. She wonders if he is drinking again. But his grin is so infectious – how she loves his funny face – that Frankie can’t help but giggle.

“Take a break, girl – we’ve got something more important to do right now.” He laughs and takes Frankie’s arm, pulls her out of the kitchen. Frankie can tolerate his touch, because he is a kind man, and well…because he’s family.

Mr. Tibbetts signals to George Moody, the best oyster shucker at Tibbetts, and in all of mid-coast – he even has an oyster shell tattoo. The men follow Frankie upstairs. She peeks into the living room to make sure Gran is decent. (Once, recently, Frankie had come home to find Gran sitting on a chair in only her underwear. She didn’t seem to have any awareness of her half-nakedness).

But tonight, Gran is alert, dressed, and still tapping her feet. She beams at George and Mr. Tibbetts. “Hello there, boys! It’s a fine evening!” Frankie grabs a hairbrush and runs it through Gran’s fine hair, setting a few silver strands dancing the air. She deftly pulls it into a bun, then grabs a plaid scarf from a hook and drapes it around Gran’s neck.

“Sure is, Ms. Becker,” says George, his wide grin exposing a missing front tooth. He looks like a pirate to Frankie, with his gray ponytail, red bandanna, and wide-striped blue and white t-shirt. All that’s missing is the parrot. But this is no costumed, cultivated look. This is just George, and he is still who he has always been, authentic and real.

“Ready for my date!” Gran declares.

Mr. Tibbetts places his big hands on her frail shoulders and gently squeezes.

“Who’s the lucky man?”

“Why, Jim, of course!”

“Jim?” George asks.

“Jim Beam!”

They all laugh, even though they’ve heard this quip countless times. It means Gran is happy, and her happiness is all that really matters to Frankie. Gran reaches up to hug the men, and they lift her from the chair, Ida, you’re light as cotton, there’s nothing to you! and carry her down the stairs, giggling like a schoolgirl.

The crowd has spilled onto the outside patio. Frankie looks out at the harbor and sees the fog has lifted. It’s a moonless night. There’s a strong, chilly breeze. George drapes his leather jacket around Gran’s shoulders and sets her securely in a chair on the deck.

Frankie hovers for a while, making sure Gran is comfortable, and she is, of course, she is, she’s drinking up the view, she’s smiling, animated, gesturing to the people around her, swaying to the music, watching the harbor, watching the sky.

The sight of Gran so completely in the moment brings an unexpected gush of emotion and Frankie has to turn away so that no one sees her tears.

Later, as the last set is about to finish, Frankie wanders to the edge of the patio. She holds onto the railing and counts each of the twenty-two steps before she walks out onto the wharf.

Above, a smattering of stars sweeps across a black canvas. It is so dark, and so clear, Frankie can see a faded smear of The Milky Way.

She breathes in the sounds of night, the water lapping against the boats, soft peals of laughter, tendrilled wisps of conversation.

She wonders about Faith – from her vantage point in the heavens, does the sun look like a tiny star? Are you lonely? Are you happy? Do you ever think about me?

Frankie whispers, “Can you see me?”

She stretches her right hand up to the sky.

“Will you take care of Gran?”

As if in response, the stars seem to sparkle ten times brighter. Twinkling, just for her. And the right word comes to her: Scintillation. Countless beams of light from distant luminous objects passing through moving air to reach her eyes.

They appear so close she can almost touch them.

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A Quiet Place by Erik Suchy

The Only Way Out Is Through the Window Fiction

Christine Vartoughian

I am in a room with a door that does not open. I have been here a long time.

Voices tell me I must rest.

It is impossible to sleep your life away. I have tried and can tell you this hard truth. People who consider themselves healthcare professionals say sleep is essential. They tell you to establish a series of regular sleeping habits like going to bed at the same time each night, practicing relaxing activities like reading. They recommend exercise, low lighting, and deep breathing. They tell you to sleep when you are tired, but I am always tired, and still cannot skewer sleep. What the professionals don’t tell you is how to  summon  energy to go on when the world around you is so exhausting, Or is it that I exhaust myself with an interpretation of a world that is, like all of us, only trying to do its best?

A different kind of professional once told me that I am constantly collecting uncharitable interpretations.

I turn on a meditation tape and try to follow it, breathing with the bright and crisp voice of a woman who is trying just a little too hard to be soothing. “Hold for four seconds. Now out for five.” Her deep sighs annoy me, but I try because meditation is the best thing you can do to convince yourself that you’re practicing self-care and not making excuses for lacking interest in life.

Meditation.

Breathing.

Sleep.

It’s a business like everything else, aimed at the hopeful and desperate. Or maybe that’s just my skepticism speaking again.

I lower my lids and try to relax.

Relax.

Relax.

I can feel some ache like I’ve been straining my eyes. Even when they’re closed, they try to be productive. Best if I could just let them exist in the comfort of unseeing, unknowing. If I could let them live in the dark.

—

Whenever I manage to fall asleep, I go somewhere else.

In my dreams, I enter a hotel. No one is in the lobby, not even at the front desk, except for a figure in the distance, lying face down on the floor. I look around, seeing if there is someone who will help. I cry out but no one comes. No one to help or hurt.

I don’t want to approach the body on my own, but I do it anyway.

I am good at doing things I dislike.

As I get closer, I am startled by something I cannot see. Loud echoes of the roaring, shaking ground. I feel myself losing balance, and then…

I am back in my bedroom.

Fully awake.

On those nights when I wake with a start, I look out the window. I see everything and nothing, all at once, and I think, ah, yes.

This is my life.

—

Soundproof windows keep outside life away, keep whatever is meant to be quiet, quiet. It is often forgotten that windows are not just a means of viewing, but also bearers of sound, smell, light, and air. Of words no one else can hear, of the sounds of our mistakes.

Windows keep what’s inside in and what’s outside out.

Until someone opens them.

—

The windows here are floor-to-ceiling and open like the unfolding lids of a box. I hear steps outside my room day and night, but I don’t know who they belong to, even though I can guess the owners have more of a choice than I do when it comes to their presence here. Their steps vary throughout the day. I have learned to tell them apart by their pace and how much the ground shakes when they pass my door. One is slower, larger than the other, the one that feels more hurried and doesn’t press much against the floor. Both come and go without a word.

In my room, there is a small mirror attached to the door, a single chair made of clear plastic, a bed with a three-inch-thick mattress, a small glass table, and on it, a lamp in the shape of the world. The sheets on the bed are light grey and they match the color of the wall-to-wall carpeting. My steps make no sounds.

At sunset, new sounds come from inside. I imagine them to be the sharpening of swords or other weapons too heavy for me to yield. They clash and crunch, strong and weighted. I am too afraid of leaving my room to check. I have kept to myself all day, like every day. If I’m not counting this one, I’ve got seven more days to go before they say I can leave. At this thought, the sun parts the clouds and shines on me for a brief moment. Just one.

Today is a bleeding day so I’ve spent most of it lying down. When night comes, I will try to sleep so that the next morning I can make another tally mark on my wall of waiting.

—

Six days.

I wake up on what I think is the next day. It’s hard to tell when you sleep all the time just to escape life. Many people try to avoid monotony, but now, here, I want to become the monotony in hopes that it will ease my panic. Who needs anti-anxiety medicine when you can subdue yourself with your own despair?

I open the door to a small bathroom attached to my room. Less blood today. Perhaps I’ll have more energy. Energy to do what, write a postcard? “Wish you were here xoxo.”

I sit on the edge of the thin mattress and gaze out the window. I’m too high up to climb down, and even if I did make it to the ground in one piece, I’d be in an enclosed courtyard, just as trapped as before.

I cannot remember being anywhere else.

Where am I? How did I get here?

What is my name?

—

I cling to my pen as if it’s my mother and the paper I’m writing on is my father; the only safe things I have. I try to be brave, but I am not. In the middle of the night, I wake to screams that take me minutes to realize are my own.

Except tonight.

Tonight, the screams are coming from someone else.

Someone nearby.

Someone in my room.

Before I can react, a hand is tight over my mouth. It turns out I was the one screaming after all, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am not alone.

“If you keep shrieking like a dumb bird, they’ll hear you.”

I shut my mouth, my muscles clenching hard in the dark.

“I can get you out of here but only if you close your eyes and keep them closed the whole time.” “Who are you?” I manage to whisper, my voice cracking, so long has it gone unused.

“I will tell you afterwards. Once you are home, you can open your eyes and see.”

In the dark, now no longer alone, I consider my options and realize what I already know- that I don’t have many. I am a cornered king in an unmatched game of chess. “Why would you help me?”

“Because I would also like to leave this place, but in order to do that, I must have a package to deliver. You could be my package.”

It seems simple enough, except for one thing. “But how would we get out? The only way out is through the window.”

“Leave that to me.”

Can I take the chance? What is the alternative?

I close my eyes as this creature I cannot see wraps me up.

—

The glass of a broken window is the prettiest glass of all.

Look down at the ground. Do you see the shards? Are they inside the room? Or are they on the outside? If you don’t see any bits and pieces, then you know this story is not about something that broke in.

It’s about something that broke out.

—

As we fly outside, his talons clutching the bedsheets that held me, I can feel the wind against my cheeks, drying tears of happiness that leak from my shut eyes. I don’t need to see to feel like I am in the world again, like I am on my way home.

Soon, I will be myself again.

I keep my eyes closed.  The fate of my life is in someone else’s hands and all I can hear is wind.

—

The time between my escape and my arrival is time spent in the night of myself. I stay awake so as not to accidentally open my eyes if and when I wake up, reminding myself of the promise I made. I don’t know what would happen if I fail to keep them closed.

I do not want to find out.

Remember, I am not brave.

—

“Open your eyes.”

I fell asleep despite my efforts. The dark was so soft and my body swinging in its lovely hammock against the wind lulled me into the most calming peace.

My awakening is not as peaceful. As soon as the voice speaks, I feel such pain, as if my entire body is being squeezed into a vacuum, suffocating me, pressing the air right out of me. I now truly know fear. Fear of being trapped forever in a space smaller than any room. I am being suffocated. I try to scream with all the power in my little lungs but no sound comes out.

“Open your eyes.”

For a moment, it seems I might be dead.

I try to scream again and find that I can breathe.

I scream and scream and scream.

“Open your eyes.” This time the voice sounds louder, like it’s coming from much closer than before.

“Open your eyes!” It shouts and though my eyelids shoot open from the force of the command, I can barely see, surrounded by bright lights and blurry shapes moving all around me. I am no longer in my traveling cocoon, and I can see the creature now. She is a large woman with long arms and hands bigger than my face. I’d be frightened except… she’s smiling at me. Her face looks like love. I try to say hello, but it comes out a scream. This only makes her smile grow, despite how tired she looks. It must have been a long journey and we stared at each other, both exhausted and yet not wanting to look away or close our eyes, not even for a moment.

When I grow up, I will not remember my birth, but I’ll remember the feeling I got the first time my mother saw me.

I’ll remember it every time she looks at me.

Every time she smiles.

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Strangers by Erik Suchy

Burnt Offerings Nonfiction

Harvey Silverman

The Worcester, Massachusetts of the 1950s seems so far away, but my mind returns me to that time and place. A simple house on a simple street, welcoming neighbors and comfortable friends. And priceless family always there.

New England autumn played the senses of a young boy, though I would not have thought of it like that then. There was the sight of the colored leaves, those fallen commanding attention more than the tree bound, the reds and yellows and oranges and all the colors in between, sorting through them in search of the most beautiful to present to my mom. The sound of my feet shuffling through piles of fallen and dried leaves that collected at street’s edge, crunch and swoosh, a sound that could be nothing else and so enjoyable as to cause me to seek more and alter my path just to do it, hear it, again. The pleasant feel of the autumn breeze, fresh and clean, so unlike the warm and heavy humid currents of summer or the painful cold wind of winter. The crisp taste of a just-picked McIntosh from a daytrip to a nearby orchard.

The smell is gone. The colors are still there, appreciated even more now in a single leaf, a tree in sunlight or a landscape on an October drive. Walking through a pile of dried leaves, the sound unchanged all these years, still tempts, still diverts my path. I’m still thrilled by an apple, carefully chosen and polished.

But the smell. The smell of burning leaves was different and special – distinct from a wood fire in a fireplace or stove. Special also because it was part of a process that involved a day of work and fun and family.

We set aside a day for raking. The scratching of the rake moving at a regular and unhurried pace that a grandparent could maintain. The discussion about rakes – which was better, metal or bamboo, and who had to use the one with the broken tine. The old peach baskets from the grocer, made of wooden slats so thin that I was amazed that they did not break, with wire handles, and carefully stored in the basement to be used each year. The piles of leaves that demanded running through and tossing about until a parent gently suggested the return to the task at hand.

At last, when we had raked and gathered enough leaves we lit the fire and while others continued to rake, filling more baskets, carried more leaves to the fire, somebody watched and carefully controlled the burning so that it remained safe and so that all the leaves were burned. The hose, always brought nearby “just in case” was never needed.  As the day slowly moved along the smell of the burning leaves soaked into our clothes. Dusk approached and the fire was allowed to die down and burn itself out. But that wonderful and special smell lingered in the air. When we were finally inside our clothes reminded us of the good day we had enjoyed and we shed them almost reluctantly as if unwilling to end it all. After bathing we might sneak into the laundry to get one last whiff.

We do not burn leaves anymore. Concern about having clean air, about pollution, has long ended the ritual. Progress has supplanted the pleasant and pleasing sound of the rake with the noise of the leaf blower. The piles of leaves gathered for burning are replaced with brown leaf bags adorned with logos and corporate colors standing in a row like unarmed soldiers having surrendered and awaiting their pickup by a large truck that rumbles along.

But every once in a while, from where I do not know, I will smell, or think that I do, just a hint of burning leaves and journey for a moment in my mind’s eye to a time and scene too long passed.

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Jack and the Trumpet Fiction

Joshua Sabatini

“Wake up, Jack, wake up,” Julia said.

She tipped the taster cup to his lips, wetting them with the whiskey, and his mouth began to move, drawing in the liquid. He opened his eyes and saw how things stood. He blinked his eyes, clearing his vision, and moved his head subtly side-to-side, as if to make sure the images were all intact and they were not mere projections of his imagination.

“I was folding and refolding the linens, and when I returned, I found you passed out, Jack,” Julia said. “I tried to rouse you and when I couldn’t, I turned to the whiskey. I hear spirits can wake you up. I’ve seen it work in cartoons.”

Jack looked at her suspiciously, but he let it go. He had tired himself out, and his previous efforts to pierce through her purported intentions to unearth what possibly lay behind them had proven ineffective in the past. What was the use now? He looked at the grandfather clock. He saw he had lost consciousness for some portion of 30 minutes. He knew what must have done it. The sounds of his imagined trumpet playing overwhelmed him, and he plummeted into the land of oblivion. She resurrected him. He smiled at her to thank her. She didn’t seem to care.

“Can I have more?” Jack asked. “I think it’ll do me good to have more.”

Julia looked at him; her eyes were glistening in the muted lights of the lobby at twilight.

“Only if you kiss me,” Julia said, turning her ivory cheek to his mouth.

He was surprised by the request, but he was happy to do it. He planted his lips against her warm cheek. She moved back to the liquor cabinet and poured more whiskey into the taster cup. He wondered how much she had already drunk, and if she had drunk a lot, and if he was having more, how'd they conceal from Margaret the change in volume in the bottle, but he decided he’d worry about that particular matter later. Why ruin a good thing now? Jack received the taster cup and his eyes widened at the fullness of the pour. He didn’t wish to drink too much, for fear it could thwart the much-anticipated event, but if he had his chance, he certainly didn’t wish to drink too little. He decided to err on the side of too much, and drank it all down, enjoying the burn in his throat, as if it was the prelude to the creative fire to come.

“You appear much better, Jack,” Julia said, examining him after taking the empty taster cup back.

He felt the burning sensation in his mouth, all down his throat, spread to the far reaches of his inner body, and everything was stimulated to operate with a superior vivacity. He was comfortable with the change; he felt anything new destroyed the discordant notes of his past and ushered in an improved harmony that came along with his new self, those notes forming a richer and fuller symphony, which was building upon itself, amassing big amounts of god-like energy.

“It’s that time, Jack,” Julia said, looking at the face of the grandfather clock.

He laughed but forgot to capture the outburst before it escaped.

“What’s gotten into you? What’s so funny?” Julia asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Jack said, waving it off.

“You’ve had too much. Be careful out there in the night,” Julia said, taking the taster cup through the front office to the back locker room to wash it in the hand-rinsing sink.

Jack made the closing rounds of the vacant inn, relying on a conditioned automatic performance to see through it all as if Margaret had cast a formidable spell over him to perform his job duties flawlessly in her inn; Margaret struck him as a determined soul, rising against all circumstances, refusing to quit. He had a fondness for those qualities of hers because they reminded him of qualities he employed to play his trumpet. After he’d run in and out of all the rooms on the second and third floors, Jack came back down the stairs. He saw Julia at the entryway door holding it ajar; he had caught her in her escape.

“Close up, Jacky, I’m late,” she said, and vanished out into the street, closing the door behind her.

Jack thought she was acting peculiar, but he attributed it to the whiskey. He walked to the office toward the lockers to change and collect his things, most importantly, his trumpet. On his way, he noticed the skeleton key she used to lock the liquor cabinet hanging on the nail in the office. He shook the idea out of his head. He must have had enough. He walked into the locker room, removed the tailored Daniel O’Rourke uniform, and hung it up carefully in his assigned locker. He was certain Margaret routinely checked how he cared for the uniform. But even if she didn’t, he felt a deep responsibility for it because it was her deceased husband’s uniform, which she gave him as a gift. Jack didn’t have anything else to wear that was appropriate for the job. He dressed in his usual day clothes, picked up his bag with his trumpet inside, and closed the locker door shut. He walked out, closing the door to the locker room shut, and he looked at the skeleton key hanging on the nail. He assessed his mood and his condition. He thought possibly another sip just to make sure he had enough. He grabbed the key and walked over to the cabinet. He took out the whiskey bottle, unscrewed the cap, and instead of dirtying the taster cup, which Julia had placed back exactly where it belonged, he tipped the bottle to pour it into his mouth from a few inches away. He gulped it down, and he instantly felt the warmth throughout his body intensify. He asked himself if that was enough and he thought one more for good luck, and he tipped it back, and poured more into his mouth, and swallowed it. He carefully screwed the cap onto the bottle, placed it inside the cabinet, closed the doors, and locked them with the skeleton key. He walked the key back to the nail, hung it by the hemp string, turned out the office lights, picked up his bag by the liquor cabinet, turned out the lobby lights, leaving nothing but a small night light on, and locked the front door by pressing in a button on the inner knob before closing it behind him. He was glad he got his inn duties out of the way when he had, because he was increasingly finding it difficult to focus on matters related to the inn, and he was also losing coordination to perform them. The door handle felt funny in his hand as he brought it closed. He checked more than once if he had in fact locked and closed it properly. He couldn’t see clearly if the door came right up against the jamb. He peered closer, and while it was swimming around, he was able to snap an image of it flush.

He looked into the night and saw a tapestry of flowing narrow streams of illuminated silver on the edges of objects as if a heartbeat was pumping the mysterious blood-like light through the veins of everything. He never once thought about retreating. This was all part of his dream, and since it was happening, he felt like he was living his dream in real-time, at last, and he was finding everything favoring him to assist in his attainment as if he was by his actions striking a harmony with everything of the universe, like the planets and the stars, and by consequence, he was receiving their aiding and abetting, when marvels occur, wonderful works.

His steps down the stairs of the porch of the inn were absurd, and he told himself he may have had too much, but he needed to struggle against the potency and stay on track, and his hope was it was just enough, not too much; it was a delicate operation in that everything had to fit exactly perfectly. He thought if anyone saw him walking, they would have surely assumed he was intoxicated, which was why he wished nobody saw him but if they did, they wouldn’t make a fuss about it. The town, mostly during the high season, when the streets were bustling well past midnight, would see its share of drunks and think nothing of it. They might think he just got an early start. He struggled to walk like a sober person, but the more he attempted to, the more he felt like he failed a great deal more, by an equal portion of some ratio to the amount he tried, so he gave up trying and walked the way he would if nobody was watching. He walked to the wharf. He knew one misstep might take him headfirst over a stone wall, cause him to crash into a bush, or make him collapse in a doorway where’d he remain until sobered up; these were the pitfalls of having drunk too much. But he had to be bigger than this, he had to live up to the jazz gods, he had to become the master of his own footsteps; he had to work with the intoxication.

When the lower level of the wharf came into view, on the descent of the street nearing its terminus, Jack stopped walking suddenly and looked into the darkened window of the gallery, where Margaret attended local artist gatherings. He had thought he saw out of the corner of his eye activity on the inside of the building, which was unusual for this time of day at this time of the season and when there were no lights on, certainly. But he had thought he saw a soft light and activity. Looking through the lower pane of the window, he saw strange movements inside. He first had to get over an initial disbelief before understanding what was going on. There was no other explanation for the unfolding scene except that he was observing the supernatural. A man originally constructed the art gallery building on the corner lot to use for his wooden boat building workshop, where he labored daily, walking up and down the wooden floor working on one boat after the next. The site was conveniently located about 40 feet from the harbor waters; when he finished a boat, he’d drag it on rails from his workshop right into the sea. Jack knew the history of the place well; many more knew it too after the gallery installed an historical plaque on the exterior commemorating the late boat builder. Jack’s favorite detail of what he knew about it was the indented floor inside which had bowed under the shipbuilder’s constant footsteps.

Jack empathized with the craftsman’s dedication and discipline because he was emulating it, not for building ships, but for playing his trumpet. He had known the story of the man, but this was the first time he had ever seen the man in his work. There was a holy element to his face like it was the source of the light he saw illuminating the scene, which otherwise would have been concealed by the darkness inside. The care and attention he applied to the small wooden vessel was full of love and tenderness, as if he was caring for a child of his own making, from the woman of his dreams. As much as Jack was amazed by the sight, he had a respect for the secret devotion of the shipbuilder and tore himself away from it, appreciative of the opportunity to have witnessed it, but knowing how best to go about the matters through an instinctual goodness, pulsing in every particle of his being which was guiding him more powerfully than ever before.

When he stepped onto the wharf, he saw one or two fishers’ boats tied up, but his vision was disorientated, and he couldn’t deduce which boats they were, and he gave up trying only after trying once or twice because everything in him was pushing him to tackle weightier matters, and the idea of discovering the fine details of which boats they were was burnt up into ashes as easily as dry tinder in a roaring fire. He was that fire, and he demanded the kind of fuel that would sustain the burn and allow its tongue to dance around it and its limbs to swirl like a serpent around a tree.

He placed his bag down by the ledge, and he knelt on the wooden plank to remove his trumpet from his bag. The world around him vanished, and his thoughts spread out until they exhausted themselves, but he found an inner kernel of self-might to bring the world back together from its infinite fragments, and his thoughts coalesced into simple concrete ones to perform what was usually a much easier task of taking the trumpet from the bag. Once his hands felt the trumpet, the wildness was tamed. His concentration intensified and focused on the instrument for which he lived. It wasn’t his own concentration either. He felt as if the liquefied world was flowing like a river all around him to the source of the trumpet like he had brought everything within him to it. Everything was pleased; the unrest from earlier in the day subsided. Jack stood from his kneeled position, steadied himself, and took a step onto the ledge near the piling, which seemed to breathe in expectation and sway in anticipation of a dance it could intuit through a prophecy.

Jack stabilized himself with one foot on the ledge and another one on the lower level, but he had to bring the other foot up to position himself the way he liked, and he knew it would be a challenge the way his equilibrium was playing a number of tricks on him. His first attempt to bring the right foot up to join the left was a failed one. He nearly lost his balance, before quickly setting the foot back down again. He decided to place one hand on his piling companion to steady himself with her as support, and it worked, and he stood on the ledge with his feet planted, and he positioned them in the way he did when he stood there to play nightly after his work at the inn ended. He knew all he needed to do was play that first note and surely like every other time it would take control of everything and guide him; all he had to do was release his hand from the piling and bring it to the trumpet and blow. He bowed his head, summoning the courage and the strength as he looked into the mysterious water lapping gently around and up against the lower part of the piling; it was alive and jovial in the night and it danced around in the silver light he had seen up on the hill in all the edges of all the objects, pumped by the heart of the night through the veins of its tapestry. He listened to voices from out of the waters, whispering secrets from time immemorial; they had come for him, for his moment, like it seemed everything else was, converging from their inner flows at his focal point for the transformation by the alchemical god. He was like Phoebus, and everything was like the life-searching faces of the pregnant blooms. He breathed out the air, emptying his lungs, and sucked in a fresh salty mouthful of the night, filling up his lungs, and in the purposeful breathing, he discovered a welcomed stability and calmness, his heart steadied itself, and his thoughts slowed to a patient condition, preparing him for the moment when he’d release his hand from the piling and place it on the instrument of his soul, seeking its salvation out of the phase it was in, knowing within itself all it needed to know for how to develop and what to aim toward like the seed of a fruit tree knows how to release a root and sprout from the top on its quest to become a fruit producing tree. In his readied state, his confidence in what he knew best reigned supreme. The essential force chased away all doubt and chance for failure, and it filled him up with an enthusiasm to perform the anticipated act.

With his feet in their proper stance, the position he had assumed countless times in his daily practice and performance as if it was the initial start like many other particulars to turn on whatever it was that began the flow like a switch turns on a light or a faucet turns on a water flow, he lifted the palm of his hand from the piling, which he no longer needed for support, feeling its uselessness before removing it, and finding his instincts were accurate, as he knew they would be, as he had the utmost confidence, the assurances beyond himself, the assurances from deep within his soul which found the promise from beyond the world, and brought it to his trumpet while he stood with a straightened posture, as if he was connecting his vertebrae into the cosmic socket and drawing into himself the electrical energy of all creation, from the ouroboros. He breathed out the spirit from his lips, and he sounded the note from out of the instrument. Everything came under the spell of its infectious resonance. Everything came to participate in the melodious flow, the moon rising in the east, the bright stars flashing their intelligence to pierce through the ignorance of people’s thoughts, the waters full of ghosts, the wooden wharf and piling, the substance of the night air, the soul of Jack, discovering once again the genuine substance of existence from deep within the heart of it all, opened up by the artistry of the trumpet blower.

Note followed note, and the creation was being born, becoming richer and fuller with activity of divine significance. Jack was coming and going out of a self-awareness, sometimes forgetting himself altogether, only to recall he was there and in the midst of it all, and letting himself go away again when he knew it was best, when he gave up himself altogether, like a self-immolation, and let the melody lead the way. Eventually, he was led for the second time to the same illuminated materials which called to him for its construction, beginning where he had begun the other night, only this time he went about it with an expertise of someone who had been through it before, only not just once before but many times before. He sensed an urgency, as he had the other night, but he felt it in the moment as if this was his final chance and no others would come again, as if the very fate of his soul depended upon it, a sort of holy desperation.

As he blew to build the illuminated steps from off the thick ledge of the wharf, he recalled the image of the shipbuilder through the windowpane and felt his companionship as if he was whispering to him particular guidance to assist in the craftsmanship, as he was a master craftsman in creating well-known vessels from his devoted service of more than half his life. The presence of the master builder only inflamed his enthusiasm the more, and the steps swiftly came into being through the expended energy of Jack, only achieved through self-sacrifice to the higher aim. When the higher aim came to fruition, there were the illuminated iridescent steps rising from the wooden ledge of the wharf up to the threshold of the moon’s kingdom and the stars, the angels and the gods, the heavenly harmonies.

Building the structure was one thing, one giant thing at that, which drained from out of Jack his vital energy, but he continued to hold on and draw from his well-spring as if he was at an eternal spring ever replenishing itself. The other thing was its use. The steps called out for him, the steps and what was from where they led to, the voice taking the form of a medley of voices across a broad spectrum, calling him from where he was at the ledge to step upward and reach the cosmic realm where his soul would feel more at home and the cares of the world would dissolve into the proper nothingness they were. Up there at the end of the steps, there was the promise of the greatest happiness imaginable and the destruction of all worry; there was no past and no future, only the perfect present where there was the jubilation.

Jack dug around searchingly within himself; there was a need to attempt something new, unexpected. Up until this point, he had only struggled in his thinking leading up to the moment when the steps would come into creation; he hadn’t ever taken it beyond them because that feat alone was a difficult task requiring his complete and utter absorption. He now had to process it on the fly as he blew his wild melody in celebration of the creation and the promise of continued glory beyond it. He felt himself slipping from out of his flesh like a snake shedding its skin, but instead of growing a new epidermis, there was his form of light only, which glowed before him as the purest essence of his being, a superior and more complete expression of himself, a truer image of his being, like removing a costume and revealing what was truly behind the disguise, what was holding it up. The exciting aspect of his light form Jack discovered was its ability to move deftly and quickly to the beat of the drum, or in this case the blowing of the trumpet. At times, he thought the trumpet was playing in response to the Jack of light, at other times he felt like the notes were leading Jack of light onward and upward, and without it, he would retreat into the heavy flesh. Playing within the two vacillating feels, Jack kept on with it, determined to go until he used up each and every particle of whiskey he had filled himself up with, having yet to feel the faint lag and depletion he had felt the other night when it began to wear off and everything collapsed mid-creation, but fearing the warning signs, hoping they’d never come again. He wished to thrive on everything beyond the trumpet’s gateway, wondering if he could derive his energy source from it and replace one type of fuel with the other and still have the ability to go after what he was pursuing. As he played, the illuminated Jack was reaching higher and his physical body remained on the wharf's ledge, and he maintained a vision of these two among so many other elements of the moment as he concentrated on the trumpet and the flowering song as if he was looking through a higher eye, taking it all in at the same time, full of understanding. The higher eye was a witness to all the moving parts, in control of none of them. Jack on the ledge, Jack of light, the sounds of the trumpet, these were like the teeth of a key having opened the gate to another world, these were like the gears of a machine spinning fast on their axes, impossible to sustain themselves at the high velocity. But Jack of light was ascending into the lightness of the darkness, and the experiences were flowing direct into Jack on the ledge, in the company of the angels and their trumpets, the company of the jazz gods; the roadway opened up beyond the last step, yawning to the Jack of light and welcoming him along it to reach the first cause of all the effects from all the other causes that ever there were. It was beyond his imagination, it was beyond telling. It was no wonder nobody ever said a word about it. And yet, this was where it was at, this was the essential source of the chain of existence. He had discovered it at last, and it explained to him so much about how he was feeling before he had arrived. While he had listened to the jazz gods’ music countless times, studied and imitated it for hours on end daily, wishing some days there were more hours in a day to do more of both, he never knew until he was there, the Jack of light out there, that their compositions were full of it too because it was the only substance worth blowing about and they’d never have the energy or strength to make those sounds without having drawn from here while they were playing. And here Jack was, doing it too, among the jazz gods himself, in their stations, from a place of their kind, and he didn’t ever wish to let it go, he wished to go and never stop, he wished to blow himself into some utterly new existence he hadn’t ever fathomed before within the unfathomable space he had arrived within.

While others may have stopped in utter stupefaction over all the inundation of wonders, Jack was eager to explore and experience whatever there was through adventures to go on. The higher eye must have cried over what happened next, unable to lend any help whatsoever. Jack on the ledge and Jack of light were feeding off each other, the one not wishing to disappoint the other and vice versa. The dynamic created a competition and something of a fatal game of chicken. With neither refusing to give up, with both fighting to press on in the discovery of the heavens, the two failed to heed other vitally important considerations. Jack on the ledge had become engrossed in the entire enterprise and was blowing at a wild feverish pitch, but he lost track of how he was Jack of the ledge and not Jack of the light out there soaring, and he slipped up on his steps and he fell off the wharf, which wouldn’t have been so bad in itself other than he would have soaked himself and ended the enterprise, but on his way down he struck his head on the beloved piling, and it knocked him unconscious. With the slip in the sea and the blow to the head, everything went black; that Jack was no more.

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On the Cocheco by Marjorie Williams

So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star Fiction

Terence Patrick Hughes

Charlie Dibenidetto had made it big. That’s what we’d say in the days before any of us ever gave anything a real try, except for Charlie, who was always plucking and strumming away at a guitar when we were kids. His family lived the next block over, on the top floor of a roughly aged three-tenement apartment stack, one of scores that lined the streets of our town, once a textile-mill mecca, now municipal sinkhole. Charlie was just a little older than me, so we spent the better part of three pre-adolescent summers hanging out constantly, attempting to tolerate the long hours of humidity and scorching heat by creatively making something to do out of absolutely nothing. Neither of us had any money nor were we big athletes, me passably, Charlie, hell no, and when wiffle ball teams excluded us, we headed to the garbage dump because that’s where lost souls go to feel found.

Charlie always led the two-mile trek to the dumping grounds, but it was a different route each time, cutting through yards, cemeteries, any sacred or fenced-in acreage was a temptation to his mildly destructive spirit. Meanwhile, as a church-going innocent, I breathlessly prayed for both of us as Charlie danced across the flower beds and vaulted over headstones. Once at the dump, we’d pass up the tantalizing magazine stacks piled by the incinerator, there were always a few racy ones in there and at times an all-out disgusting publication, but the feverish shuffling of pages consistently came second to our main destination, which was the woodpile.

Based on some sort of flammable logic, the keepers of the dump set aside spent instruments along with rotted timber and decayed boards to be burned over the weekend. We’d inspect the pile every Friday, most times coming up empty but on occasion scoring a busted banjo or acoustic guitar. Charlie would restring them with fishing wire or mend a cracked bar with duct tape allowing a good few weeks of playing before we returned to the town dump to search for the next instrument of passion for my friend and junkyard luthier. But here’s the thing,      not only did Charlie teach himself how to play guitar on taped-up pieces of wood and wire, he got good, then he went off and got really good, and for a long stretch of time, he was great. I never offer, but on the random occasion that an acquaintance mentions being a fan of his band, Total Annihilation, crudely acronymized into T & A, I do share some warm memories from the long, uncomplicated days of my adolescence spent with the stormy lead guitarist, Cha Dibo, as Charlie began calling himself in high school which drew bullying and later fame and fortune. Back then, it was just me and Charlie learning songs from the radio. I was the audience, and he was the player, but we were both the self-proclaimed kings of the garbage dump, growing up slowly in a shared impoverished bliss.

So, when my cell phone began buzzing just before midnight, I figured it was my ex-wife calling to cancel on me. I was to pick my kids up early the next morning and kick off fishing season at the freshly stocked reservoir, followed by the cramming of a nine-year-old boy, ten-year-old girl, and fastly-pushing fifty father into my studio apartment for a night of take-out Chinese food and movies. Twice a month, as best that I can, I get to act like dad again for two days, and it gets canceled on a regular basis by the woman with whom I once shared a marriage.

“What the hell,” I murmured into the phone, too tired to conjure hostility.

Only it wasn’t Kaitlin, it was Charlie. 

“Hell is what I’m all about, son.”

“You got the wrong number,” I grumbled and rolled over, thumb searching the dimly lit pad to kill the call.

“Frank-iiiiiieeeeeeee,” the shrieking voice on the line sent a shiver through me.

“Who is this?” I asked in a more alert tone, although even through the background din of a chattering crowd, I could hear the young voice underneath the aged rasp. 

“It’s Cha Di … sorry … it’s Charlie … Dibenedetto. Dude, it’s Charlie! You got a second?”

I was groggy but my gut twinged with the mix of interest and caution.

“Charlie?”

“Dude, I’m … your number’s on the website so …” he explained before backhanding one in classic Charlie fashion, “Frankie the ambulance chaser, go, man, go!”

That goddamn website. I spent almost five grand on it, pushing my credit cards to razor-thin balances, and although it has brought in some business, it’s often the kind that Charlie is ribbing me about. Too many questionable malpractice suits and dubious wrongful injuries, most all of them acrimoniously settled out of court but each one leaving a worse taste in my mouth, the spoiled smack of money not quite earned through barratry but close enough that it’s difficult to make eye-contact with opposing attorneys. The perky jet-black-haired girl with a skull tattoo on her wrist who led the design team insisted on the image of an ambulance and although I initially objected, there it was, placed in the lower corner of every page and shrunk to the size of a quarter. Its star of life bursting in such a deep, concerning shade of red that in a fraction of a second one’s eyes are forced to it, minimalism meets shock advertising.

“Why are you calling me?” I blurted out not exactly what I wanted to say.

“Sorry, dude,” he said after a long sigh, “We played Boston and … I don’t mean to wake … forget it, just …”

“Wait, hold on,” I sat up in bed as the inherent sense of trouble was overwhelmed by curiosity or maybe something else, “Where are you?”

“Beats me. I had to split after the …” his voice trailed off and then he shouted, “Hey, what’s the name of this hole?”

After a brief mumbled exchange with someone followed by a bit of laughter, he was back on the line.

“Guy said it’s ‘Grendel’s Den’, but he may be jerkin’ me. Hey, meathead, don’t go messin’ with …” he was off shouting at someone now.

“No!” I spoke loudly as if I were able to break up whatever shit my ancient friend was in the middle of, “I know the place, you’re in Cambridge. I used to work near there.”

“I got a problem, dude” he slowly breathed out after a loud sip of something, “I don’t mean to wake your family up, it’s … we had a gig andddddd … there was a big scrap, so now I’m… where am I?”

“Cambridge. Harvard Square.”

“Yeh, right! That’s why everybody’s a square. Where are you?”

“I’m in …” I almost said Newton, where my wife and kids were fast asleep in my former castle, but I choked on it and finally spit out the reply, “Woburn…right on the Winchester line.”

“Can I come over? I had a car ... might still be around, driver was a jag-off though…”

I snapped on the little lamp by my bed, illuminating the tiny, cluttered room. Since the divorce, I downsized to a one-bedroom apartment whose lease I had to break to further belt-tighten into a cramped studio stuffed with painstakingly assembled Ikea furniture leaving little space to move about.

“Noooo,” I stretched the negation as if I were unable to entertain due to my staff having the night off, “I can get to you in a half-hour. I mean…if it’s important.”

“Life or death, dude. Wolves at the door.”

Charlie then let out a long howl and hung up the line. I looked at the recent call list but the number was local so he must have used the phone at the bar. Two choices, go back to bed like a dependable parent and be somewhat rested for fishing with the kids or meet up with my rock star friend for likely many drinks as if a trace of my youth still existed. Within minutes, I was dressed and warming up my car.

I fully expected to be overwhelmed with saccharin memories of an ill-spent childhood during the trip, but as my route to Cambridge began with the same ride down the interstate that I take to Newton, my head spun with petty yet acrimonious thoughts of Kaitlin. The latest collateral damage from our disturbingly speedy divorce was her demand that we send our daughter to private school. Apparently, the poor kid was having a lot of issues with boys, not entirely unlike her mother, but these problems were schoolyard teasing and clumsy crushes gone bad, not detonating an affair bomb in the middle of a not-happy but at least stable family. I countered the private school idea with the bald reality of finances, hers sparingly funded by a filthy rich son-of-a-bitch father and mine presently on life support, adding to it the direct question of whether her live-in boyfriend might want to donate a few bucks, which ended the battle but not the war.

After a short circling of Harvard Square for free parking and a brisk walk to the bar in the unseasonably cold spring air, I walked up and flashed a grin at the tall, heavy-set man with sleepy eyes who was checking IDs outside of the bar and he simply waved me in and went to work scratching at his gnarly bush of beard. The stairs leading down to the Den were crowded with smokers of various substances and my feet landed in a puddle of something as I pulled open the big oak door and stepped inside. As I wiped my shoes on the hardwood floor in case it had been urine pooling out there, the dazzling sights and sounds of the crowded barroom bathed me in its unique glow. Only the charmed buzz of one’s very first step into a candy store as a child can rival the rush of appetite and desire that permeate a packed tavern’s chatter of excited voices, proximity of bodies, strong, fresh odor of beer on tap, and a kitchen in the back supplying the place with the steady aroma of fried everything. I stood and took it in for a few moments as this was Friday night near closing time, the joints don’t jump higher than this.

One half of the bar had a small dance floor, and it was jammed with a large group of Havard students, my assumption based on the near-proximity of the school and their well-dressed obliviousness. On the other side, were a scattering of pub tables holding a smaller crowd of grad students blowing off quiet steam and elderly regulars communing on the stools at the bar with their faces glued to the TV sets or Keeno games. When a roaring laugh erupted from somewhere within the youthful gang on the dance floor, it gave me a start and brought a slight smile to my face.

“Charlie?”

I began to bump and apologize my way through the mass of people, slightly upsetting a glass of beer whose owner simply smiled as most of it had spilled on my arm. After pressing into a female body for the first time in a year, I came up behind the source of the raucous humor, an imposing figure amidst the crowd of young adults, towering over everyone on thick-heeled boots, a bandana covering a mane of jet-black hair, and the wide shoulders, long arms, and thin legs decked out fully in leather, draped in scarves, and tightly grasping the attention of everyone.

“Charlie!” I shouted this time.

 As he cut off his guffawing, so too did the crowd around him, and all turned to face the interloper, which is the precise moment that I wished I hadn’t dressed like I was going to court.

“There he is!” Charlie screamed and before I knew it, I was suffocating in a bear hug of old leather that reeked of sweat and liquor.

After he let me go, I took a step back and caught a brief glimpse of little Charlie’s face under the haggard imprints of life yet also covered in traces of make-up, but who cares, it was there.

“Hey, Charlie,” I smiled.

“Heavy metal guy, finish the story!” was a loud yet kind demand from a plain-faced, crop-haired young man who was terribly drunk.

The other revelers concurred, applause rose and more laughter.

“OK, but real fast. I got an important guy here I gotta meet with.”

“Yah! Important guy! Important guy!” another highly-educated drunkard called out.

Soon the large group was repeating the call, and someone handed me a huge mug of cold beer so, for the moment, I was good.

“Sooooo… I was doin’ like the officer said,'' Charlie spoke in between sips from a glass full of something brown, “Got my arms spread over the hood, cop’s goosin’ and pinchin’ me all over tryin’ to find drugs or whatever but there’s two things he don’t know. Numero uno bein’ I was at the tail end of six weeks gettin’ clean for a tour of Japan. Damn!  You shoulda seen the freakin’ blowouts when we got back from there. Days, weeks. And clue number dos was the two gals in the car bouncin’ round all bug-eyed and kooky cause the reason I’m drivin’ their piece of crap Chevy in the first place is they’d been partyin’ since we left the stadium like they was in Amsterdam on a Saturday night or… L.A. on a rainy day!”

The crowd around us cackled and smiled at one another as if in the company of this once wildly and now still sort-of-famous musician then they, too, are temporary rock stars. Charlie shot me a couple of playful looks as he continued.

“Then ‘bam’ the car door flies open and the two of em tumble out and start runnin’ off to the woods like a couple of chickens tryin’ to save their necks. Cop’s screamin’, you know, ‘halt’ and they ain’t haltin’, so he takes off after em but first he looks me right in the eye and says, ‘stay here!’ So, I say ‘you have my word, officer’. As soon as he hits the woodline, I’m off that hood and ready to fly but first I’m lookin’ at the Chevy, kind of ride you buy when you ain’t got no choice. Then I look at that police car. Real beauty of a machine, dark, sleek, real cop-ish, right? So, to make a long story short, I got that thing up to 135 miles an hour with the lights blazin’ and had me out of that state in thirteen minutes!!”

A raucous round of laughter was interrupted by Charlie’s screeching final words.

“Found myself a biker-bar and traded those dudes straight up for a sweet Chieftain! Rode that baby all the way to Chicago!!”

Charlie pretended to climb on a motorcycle and loudly roared in circles through the jubilant crowd. As he got to me, he slowed down.

“Climb on, buddy!” he shouted.

I didn’t outright pretend to ride but sort of sidled behind him as he roared off toward the other side of the bar to a round of applause and one excited woman grabbing at his collar until she could plant a kiss on his cheek and lodge an elbow into my shoulder. After we escaped further fondling and physical violence, Charlie led us toward a set of stairs that were cut off by a red velvet rope hanging from two hooks on either wall. There was a waitress just coming by when we got there.

“Excuse me, miss,” Charlie asked sweetly, “Can we go upstairs?”

“Nope. Restaurant closed at 10. You can get food at the bar, though,” she pointed across the room with purple-painted fingernails that looked like weapons.

“We’re just gonna sit and talk…and how ‘bout a bottle of something dark from Kentucky,” Charlie spoke in a calm tone and stuffed a big lump of cash in her hand.

In a few minutes, we had the upstairs dining room to ourselves. A couple of candles at our table lent an unstable yet soothing light to the dark corner, and, sure enough, a bottle of Maker’s Mark soon delivered by our lovely hostess to which she added a basket of bread.

“You’re the best,” Charlie grinned.

“You just tipped me more than I make in a month,” she replied and expertly pulled off the red wax from the bottle top before exiting back downstairs.

As Charlie poured our glasses full of whiskey, we started off touching upon customary points that old pals do when uncomfortably coming together after many years. Do you ever get back there? No. Do you ever see anyone? No. What about … no. Still, it didn’t take long for the spark of old friendship to reignite, and we ditched the familiarities as bullshit.

“This is bizarre, man,” I chuckled and forced down a sizable sip, “Everything OK with you?”

“Wwwwhhhh …” Charlie blew out the heat of his own oversized gulp, “OK’s about right. My health’s so-so. Got crooks handlin’ my money. Tryin’ like livin’ hell to stay away from cigarettes and coke. This doctor, a therapist, you know? She made me quit swearin’. Says it keeps my brain busy. And it’s been a bi-… you see? Long story short, I’m pretty beat, dude.”

“How can you be ...”

I was about to wonder at the incredulity of a rock star’s claims of bad luck and depression when I thought about how fast I had fallen on hard times in the last year and that was without a cocaine problem.

“I mean,” I was maneuvering around an insult, “You guys were huge for a while there.”

“Yeh, we had a run,” Charlie knocked out the rest of his glass in a gulp, “I should be sittin’ in a mansion, right?”

“Your videos were on all the time. It wasn’t my…I was more yacht rock than heavy metal back then but … you were cool, man. A real star.”             

“Wanna see the only real thing left of me from those days?”

He looked back at the stairs leading to the bar and then turned his gaze across the room before he leaned his head down toward his lap and brought his hands up, digging fingers hard into his scalp with tips disappearing into the bandana and its captive dark mass of locks. My first thought was that he was removing his head from his body and I jolted upright in my seat, not sure exactly what to do other than be there to console my headless friend, but after pulling hard at the top he let his hands slide behind his ears and began to yank forward as he let out a low growl and pulled off his hair.  Once it was in his hands, a magnificent piece, in fact, which was somehow expertly secured to the bandana, he laid it on the table and we both stared at it. For some reason, I was waiting for it to move.

“Saved it all in a bag when it started fallin’ out, got myself a wig guy, and bam,” Charlie seemed proud of it and then he whispered loudly, “I call it ‘Precious’.” 

When I looked up at him and saw the thin tawny hair, widely streaked in gray and cut short to the very top of his pale forehead, and unobstructed Charlie eyes of chocolate brown, he looked much more like a grown, battered version of the pal I remembered from those young years, and it made me giddy. We broke into a long peel of belly laughs, causing a waitress to step up the stairs to peek in and Charlie’s wild motion to put his mop back on his head set us into another round of breathless laughter. After the waitress left, he set the wig back down.

“I know, man. I wear it all the time. Probably shouldn’t but…” he muttered, oddly bitter after such a good laugh, “Everybody’s got a camera nowadays and…”

“What…why did you call me? We haven’t…”

“I need a lawyer. And you’re one, right?”

“Yes but…how did you know?”

“Hell, I'm online 24/7. We go five, six months straight playin’ gigs, you end up either on drugs or web surfin’. I google everybody!  And you’re doin’ better’n all them other slobs from high school. My man’s a lawyer and you’re married with two….”

“Divorced.”

“You gotta update your social media, dude. So, divorced. That good or bad?” Charlie squinted at me as he poured and sipped.

“Both. More bad, I guess. We’re trying to split time with the kids and…she kind of follows the King Solomon manual of parenting…”

“See!” Charlie pounded an open hand down on the table, “I don’t know who the f-...hell King Salmon is. That’s why I called you. I need a lawyer with some brains that ain’t tryin’ to shake me down for…and look! I’m back in town. It’s a sign, man.”

“Are you in trouble?” I finally got out the most important question.

“Hell, yeh. Born into it with you. But, yeh…I’m sloggin’ in some serious crap.”

My head had begun to cloud with the late-night liquor and my stomach felt empty despite an early evening’s repast of Kraft singles, crackers, and left-over potato salad. Charlie had a desperate yet excited energy about him and although he slugged shot after shot, he was sober. I’d swear to it.

“I had it out with the f-...freakin’ jerks!” he gripped his glass, and I thought he was going to throw it against the wall but instead he tipped in more whiskey, “It’s rock bottom, man. Used to be, we’d come to Boston and play the Garden. There might a’ been six hundred in that club tonight. Then after a piss-poor show, my pinhead buddies tell me how they cooked up a farewell tour. Original lineup. Glory-days setlist. All that crap. Get the old farts back out to see us for one last big payday. Sound good? Nope! First off, we got to fire half the band, and these are good dudes. But that’s nothin’. Cause original lineup means Barry Torch comes back…”

“Was that the guy with the swords?”

“That’s him!” Charlie swatted the breadbasket spilling its contents to the floor, “Try bein’ on stage with a psycho swingin’ a machete. It’s stressful, man! Plus, he’s a dick.”

“Hey,” I calmly picked up the scattered bread but was now talking with the whiskey instead of against it, “It’s so great to meet up again after…but what the hell do you want me to do?”

After I placed the basket on the table, he looked at me with the same starkly serious look as the one he’d given me when we were kids, the day he told me that his dog had died.

“Kill me.”

Our very brief silence was interrupted by a roar of voices from below as some sort of closing-time ritual was playing out and it struck me how incredibly free from anxiety those drunken youths were at that moment. It made me hatefully jealous.

“What?” 

“Dude,” Charlie let his head drop nearly to the table and I actually felt honored to bear witness to his bald spot, “I’m done. I’m half-dead already.”

He then looked up with an angry sort of grimace.

“I need the money. It ain’t about nothin’ else no more. But Torch is a…I hate him! And this is my band! It’s my band!!”

This time he did throw the glass. It bounced off the wall but then smashed against the parquet floor and broke into pieces. Fortunately, the drunken tumult below covered the outburst and Charlie stood up and clumsily began pulling his hair onto his head.

“I gotta get out.”

By the time we hit the stairs, he had his rock and roll hairdo secured pretty well, and he was pulling on his jacket as we got into the basement, which was when the grabbing began. Some of the revelers who had enjoyed his wild tale-telling earlier saw him coming and began urging him to have a drink and give them another story, more than urging really, more like sloppy groping. Of course, Charlie let them have it.

“Get off me, ya country club rats!” he shouted and took a couple of young men who had playfully put their hands on his shoulders and knocked their heads together.

Charlie’s unexpected physicality looked, rather than a move taught in self-defense training, more like a tactic learned by watching too many episodes of The Three Stooges. A few catcalls were overwhelmed by the cheers and strewn beer that patrons let fly as I grabbed Charlie by the arm and got him speedily out into the cold night air before he could do anything more bizarre. They may be spoiled rich kids, but it doesn’t mean they can’t beat the shit out of an angry, glammed-out drunk.

“What’s the matter with you?” I complained more than inquired as he sat and laughed his ass off on a bench in the small park outside of the bar.

I stepped out to the sidewalk and looked around for a cab to dump him into. He then began executing a slow, unsteady shuffle toward me.

“Didn’t you say you took a car here? Give me your phone, I’ll…”

“Lost it,” he grumbled.

“Well, where are you staying?” I asked in annoyance as at this point my mind was calculating how much sleep could be had before the kids woke up and my phone started to explode.

“I’m nowhere, man.”

Charlie began to climb a lamp post while singing The Beatles ‘Nowhere Man’. The climbing was terrible, but the singing was really good.

“The cops will pull you in for that,” I warned, looking around for them, perhaps hopefully.

“See,” he panted, giving up on the mounting serenade, “That’s legal advice. You’re hired. Come on, counselor, I need candy.”

We left the park and he seemed to somewhat regain his faculties as we crossed the street and ducked into a convenience store, passing a lone customer who was on the way out. Charlie managed to bump into the exiting patron and knock over a standing display of sunglasses, which the thin, bug-eyed kid behind the counter made no move to clean up. Otherwise, it was a quick selection of a six-pack of Bud and numerous candy bars.

“I gotta go to Philadelphia,” Charlie offered as he checked out and I simply nodded as the young clerk looked to me to decipher the statement.

We got out of the store and Charlie instantly dug into his bag of tricks.

“Hold on, man,” I said in my best drunk-side manner, but Charlie was insistent on popping open a beer, “Cops will pull you in for that, I promise. And I don’t need the hassle.”

“Damn, you sound like an old man, Frankie.”

Although a toss-away comment, his words delivered a sting loaded with the poison of truth. 

“Come on, goddamn it.”

 I started walking briskly, not waiting as Charlie unwrapped a candy bar, and I didn’t look back for a few blocks. Turning off down a wide gravel path near some hotels, I could hear his big boots on the sidewalk across the street, so I slowed and ultimately stopped and waited outside one of the few structures in the vicinity not yet gobbled up by Harvard. Among the building’s varied residents is a software company where I worked for a couple of years reviewing contracts. I was single in those days, saddled by student loans but just beginning to make some money, young enough to abuse my body all night with intoxicants and still appear respectable in the morning, lots of work and lots of fun. Then I met Kaitlin, who was also lots of work and lots of fun, one of my better jobs, I guess. But instead of hopping to a more lucrative opportunity like I did after the software gig, the termination of our marriage has led to a drastic career switch, inconceivable downsizing in living standards, basically an all-around existence within a ring of hell, very far from the bottom but not near enough to the top that I can recognize the surface world as my own.

“Where ya goin’, dude? Stop. Have a beer.”

“I used to work here.”

“Oh, yeh?” Charlie looked up, the night was dark, and we were on a walkway in between

the office building and the hotel, completely enveloped in midnight shadows, “Hell you do here?”

“Find mistakes.”

“Oh,” Charlie started unwrapping another bar, “Shoulda called me. I make em every day.”

“What the hell do you mean by ‘kill me’, Charlie? Seriously.”

“I can’t do it myself.”

He offered nothing else, just stood there looking as despondent as someone can be while munching candy and nursing a can of beer.

“We can sit down for a minute, all right? So, you can … explain,” I offered, quickly veering from annoyed to consoling and motioning for him to follow, “Over here.”

For the short walk up the pathway and out onto the wide stretch of grass and trees that faced the sparse traffic on Memorial Drive, Charlie went on about how when slowly coming up as a musician he used to play small clubs in Boston and Cambridge that were now either coffee shops or clothing stores. The breeze off the river carried an odor of its damp, earthy banks, and the cold air sank into my neck and face as I buttoned up the poor-choice-of-an-old-blazer and pulled the collar tight. I sat down on the grass underneath a tree with my back to the river, and Charlie plopped himself near me, unfazed by the elements. He tossed over a beer, and I opened it.

“Look at us,” he chuckled.

“I’d rather not,” I responded plainly and took a long sip, welcoming the sudsy burn at the

back of my throat, there’s nothing like cheap beer, liquid comfort.

“OK. Cut to the chase, right?” Charlie threw me a candy bar, which I left lying on the grass, “I’m gonna quit the band. They can stuff the farewell tour up their … anyway, I’ll still be on the board, so none of em can …”

“Is this a band or a corporation?” I chided.

“It’s a big smokin’ mess, dude. Our drummer, Cagney, this guy let me tell ya … he comes to us, I don’t know, five, six years ago. Says we make the band a company, go public, double, triple our money. Ever since we been losin’ our shirts. Doin’ 100 shows a year just to pay the bills ...”

“I know a guy who can help you. He does mergers mostly but first thing tomorrow, I …”

“Why won’t you help me, man?”

“I’m not that kind of lawyer,” my words had no weight behind them, “Charlie, if you need a place to crash … my apartment’s too small but the hotel back there is nice, let’s ...”

“You tryin’ to get away from me?”

“I have to take my kids fishing in the …”

“Screw your kids!”

I reached out and seized him by the arm of his jacket. I’m not quite sure what I was ready to do next, but my beer spilled on my pants and shot me back to the moment. I stood up and shouted.

“Don’t talk shit about my kids!”

“I didn’t mean …”

“They’re the only good thing I have left! So shut up about them! Shit, Charlie!” I wanted that to be enough, but I went on, “Do you want to know why I’m here? In the middle of the goddamn night? My long-lost best buddy calls, I go help, right? But what really got me out of bed is money. I figured I’d talk for a bit, refer you to someone, and get my cut at the end for doing an hour’s work. That’s the friend you called, Charlie. That’s who I am now!”

I chugged down what was left of the beer, threw the can aside, and then went and picked it up. 

“Dude,” Charlie struggled to his feet for what I was unsure to be a fight or more talk, “Do I look like a f-...freakin’ judge? I didn’t mean nothin’ about your kids. But let me lay it out, OK?”

“Please hurry up. I’m cold. And tired.”

“I don’t want you to kill me,” his voice now carried a clearer edge, “I want Cha Dibo to die. Get it?”

He stopped and gave me a hopeful look.

“I don’t … offer that kind of service.”

“You know people. You said so yourself. I can’t trust no one! The band’s infested. Leeches, vampires …” Charlie picked up the candy bar from the grass and tore it open, “I gotta lawyer up. Killin’ off Cha Dibo’s gonna be a mess’a paperwork and prolly get dragged into court with everybody screamin’ their asses off but whatever! Screw em! We drop the bomb in Philly tomorrow night. Gives em no time to get that freak Torch a …”

“They’ll sue the shit out of you, Charlie. And if you quit, they …”

Charlie laughed and took a big bite of the candy, and as he chewed, he laughed some more.

“T&A’s been round a long time. More albums than I can count. And Cha Dibo never wrote a single song on any of em.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Nope. It’s fu-… freakin’ brilliant. Every last track except for one crappy Kinks cover is music and lyrics by Charles Dibenidetto,” he tossed the last piece of candy in his mouth, sucking on it, “Music’s mine, songs are mine. Get it? Company or not, those jerks work for me. And I say we’re gonna finish this tour for the fans, and then I’m takin’ my ball and goin’ home. So … you my new lawyer or what, Frankie?” 

“Charlie, I have a business. Bills to pay. I can’t just …”

“I got this account with ‘bout thirty-nine grand in it. Used to be the Cha Dibo drug fund. I’ll shoot it to you tomorrow.”

Charlie saw my body twitch at the mention of the former narcotic nest egg, and he came right up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. 

“Thirty-nine grand in your pocket. And say another … twenty once we get me outta this hole. How’s that? Not bad for a few months of travelin’ the country and partyin’ your ass off with …”

“No. I can’t.”

I took a step back, but my voice had such a tenor of timidity because even just thirty-nine grand could help a lot … a lot. And over fifty is a year's worth of slip-and-falls. My mind began conjuring images of a bigger apartment, new suits, and health insurance that doctors actually take. Charlie began detailing the vacation that he had planned for us. More shows this week in Philly, Atlanta, and Miami, and then dozens of West Coast gigs before a month of performances in one of the worst casinos in Las Vegas. As he spoke, I stared at the red and white stone footbridge across the street that led to the Boston side of the Charles River, its throwback brass lamp posts casting small half-circles of light on the choppy water that from a distance looked black as oil.

“My wife would flip out,” I interrupted, “If I don’t take Liv and Tommy every other weekend, she’d…”

“We’ll talk to her. Come on. Take the money,” Charlie deadpanned, “I mean it don’t sound like you’re doin’ so hot and … listen…I’ve been all over, man. Everywhere. Met all kinds’a people. Ain’t none of them was real. Not like us, Frankie. Remember?”

“We were kids.”

“I know but … geez … I need that feelin’ again.”

An uncomfortable silence settled between us that was only broken by a faraway voice calling out from near the river and, in a few seconds, the return of a more distant shout.

“I just hit a wall, man,” Charlie yawned, “Say we go back there and grab a room. Finish this beer and crash. Catch a plane in the mornin’ to Philly. Show ain’t until night.”

“Crazy,” is all I offered in return.

Charlie helped me gather the trash and in a few minutes, we were in the lobby of the hotel. It was smartly lit and decorated in fashionable, hard-edged furniture, deep-cushioned leather couches, and the place was entirely empty except for two night-staffers behind the front desk. Both looked Charlie up and down as we approached.

“You got a room?” he barked with a voice finally showing the bounty of liquor in his system.

“Ah,” the older of the two men answered slowly as he typed on a keyboard below our view, “There … seems to be, yes … um, they start at $500 a night.”

“Deal!” Charlie put his beer and last two candy bars up on the counter and then fished out and flipped a credit card onto the desk, which the man took and began to process, only changing his cautious attitude when the charge went through “Perfect, then! Welcome, Mr. Dibo.”

When the man handed the credit card back to Charlie, he tossed it to me, and I just barely caught it.

“That’s for expenses,” he winked, “Don’t worry. I got a whole stack.”

“How many keys will you be needing?” the younger clerk asked.

“I gotta go,” I said.

Charlie spun around instantly.

“What? Why? You ain’t gonna do it? Come on. Want me to get you the money right now? I will!”

I noticed the glances that the two men exchanged but I was too tired to tell them to go to hell.

“I’ll … come back in the morning. I have to think this out. I mean … this has been a lot to process, you know? I have to … to think.”

“At least come up for a drink,” Charlie dangled the beers by the empty plastic rings as he took the keycard and then pointed at me and spoke to the guys behind the desk, “I grew up with this dude. Two kids who had nothin’, freakin’ nothin’. Now look at us.”

After an awkward pause, the younger clerk responded.

“Wow.”

Charlie gave me his room number, and we agreed that I’d be back by nine the next morning with clothes to last me at least a week. I walked him to the elevator where he gave me a giant, uncomfortable hug.

“I love you, man,” he growled into my ear.

As he shuffled onto the elevator, he tripped over virtually nothing, and while the doors were closing, he stuck his face out.

“Life’s gonna be different tomorrow! Get ready, dude!”

The doors closed shut, leaving only the sound of the gears working the lift upward, ascending Charlie as close to the heavens as I imagined he’d ever want to get. I walked out of the hotel, ignoring the looks of the staffers, and found my car. There was hardly any traffic on the roads, and soon I was back in bed. It took me a long time to get to sleep.

—

I got up early and made coffee in the narrow galley kitchen, then got dressed. Still half-asleep and somewhat hungover, I threw clothes into a suitcase and set it by the door. Then I sat on the bed and drank two cups of coffee while considering my options. It was eerily similar to the morning that my marriage had come apart. Back then, Kaitlin and I had been fighting endlessly, the kids were suffering, and the choice seemed crystal clear but the hole that it tore in my heart made life almost impossible to endure for a long time, maybe even still. The coffee suddenly seemed bitter, so I dumped it in the sink and then turned and stared some more at the luggage by the door.

By the time I was in the car, my chest began to tighten, and breathing was difficult. On the road, my throat began to tense, and a tear tried to escape down my cheek, but I destroyed it with my thumb as I put on sunglasses. All the way down the interstate and then at each stoplight, I covered my nose and delivered honking blows into the old napkins from the glove box. Screw it, I kept repeating, screw it. After the difficult drive, I found a parking spot and gave my face one last wipe down before getting out and walking slowly with feet that weren’t at all getting along with my brain until finally, I arrived. My head pounded with dehydration and remorse, and my heart beat furiously because the choice was still there, suspended in the air between my knuckles and the door, it could be done, it couldn’t be done. In the end, survival isn’t just about staying alive, it’s also about living with yourself. 

I knocked hard a few times until I heard a rustling inside. When the door opened, a sleepy yet excited face peeked around the door, greeting me with a smile that seemed misplaced at such an early hour.

“Go get your brother, sweetie,” I whispered, “We don’t want the big fish to get away.”

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Watchful Conductor by Jennifer Shneiderman