From the Editor

Five canoes, eleven people. We’re of varying abilities. Most of us can paddle straight, the others get where they’re going eventually. Nobody capsizes, though my one-year-old niece leaps from the boat in the first hundred feet. She bobs to the surface, sputtering, shocked by the cold and the gall of gravity. She howls even before my brother plucks her from the water by the loop of her life jacket.

It’s becoming an early fall tradition. Some combination of us have journeyed into New England’s wilds each of the last four years. I suspect we’ll keep it up. There’s a nervousness that grows in me at the end of summer, a wheedling recurring thought that I’ve wasted the year’s beauty, that it will be winter soon, and I’ll only experience the air in quick frozen bursts. The others are likely less anxious, hiking and canoeing are fun, so why not do? And so, we do.

This year’s excursion is leisurely. One-year-olds can’t hike. We paddle an hour upwind. The water is dark beneath the dusky sky. My boat is heavy with jugs of water and jars of tomato sauce. We spread out across the water until every boat is indigo, and the sky is nectarine. We camp on an island and shovel Annies’s mac and cheese down our throats in silence. The sunset watches us. Already, I feel peaceful.

We sleep, and then we lounge. Some of us canoe to the mainland, where we chop wood for the fire-that-cannot-go-out. We eat hotdogs and s’mores eight of our fourteen waking hours. All day, we watch the hills around us, fall leaves, embers in the green.

“Look at that,” someone says, pointing at the hill. An hour later, someone else says it again. It becomes our motto. There’s nothing else to look at, but it feels worth remarking on.

I’m proud that Rock Salt Journal has gotten this far. I’m proud that I’ve kept it up, season by season. When I started, I was sure it would be an effortless endeavor, slap a couple short stories together, and bam, there’s an issue. I enjoy it more than I thought I would because of (not in spite of) the time and effort spent. It’s like a biannual marathon, and every time I reach the finish line, I’m amazed. This thing that didn’t exist before now, this is a good thing. These are good stories worth reading. This is good art.

Bam, there’s an issue.

J.B. Marlow

Contributors 

Fiction

Robby Sheils (“Besides Us and the Pines”) is an emerging writer from Portland, Maine, who primarily writes slice-of-life fiction. Inspired by the woods and waters of where he grew up, Robby’s writing places familiar Maine locales at the center of his stories. He spent two years as an editor for The Telling Room, and in 2022 released a self-published novel, Shelley Avenue. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Nathan Greene (“My favorite small mountain epitaphs”) also wrote recently in Bitter Oleander Review, In Parentheses and Watershed Review. Find more of their work at www.readvoices.com/.

R.W. Owen (“Beth’s Ghost”): Among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England, R.W. Owen resurrects antique typewriters and writes all first drafts from their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan’s fiction has been recognized with an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest and has been published or is forthcoming in The Rock Salt Journal, Literally Stories, Five on the Fifth, Writers Resist, Idle Ink, Litbreak Magazine, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag. Find Ryan on Twitter/X, @4gttnNewEngland or on Bluesky, @iviesofinkribbons 

Rick Henry (“Harry’s Glide”): In addition to his mixed genre and media work in prose and audio, Rick Henry has been editor of Blueline, a literary journal devoted to ‘the spirit of the Adirondacks’ and co-edited The Blueline Anthology (Syracuse University Press). On-going projects include interviewing writers from the region and recording sounds from the Little River. Find him at www.rickhenry.net.

Joe Baumann (“Group Project”) is the author of four collections of short fiction, most recently Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go, from BOA Editions, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.

Kelly Clendenin (“Finding Eden”) is a 22-year-old from Saint Petersburg, Florida. She has loved writing ever since she was little and dreams of traveling the world someday to further her creative endeavors. If she isn’t writing, she’s either working at a hotel on the beach or playing video games with her friends. Along with Rock Salt Journal, she has a poem titled "A Childhood Gone" published in the anthology Whispers of the World by Wingless Dreamer Publisher.

Alexandra Persad (“redacted”) studied creative writing at West Virginia University and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her cat, Jasper, and her partner. Her work primarily explores the complexities of female identity, and has been featured in various online journals, such as Flossy Lit Mag, Glint Literary Journal, Blaze Vox Journal, Barren Magazine, Better than Starbucks, and Olit, where her short story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 

Poetry

Tom Driscoll (“The House”) is a poet, columnist, and essayist who lives and works in Lowell, Massachusetts. "The Champion of Doubt" published summer 2023 from Finishing Line Press. Driscoll’s poetry has appeared in Oddball Magazine, Carcosa Review, Scapegoat, Paterson Literary Review, and The Worcester Review.

John Wertam (“George” and “Sweet Destruction”) loves his family, poetry and seeing any opportunity to be present.  Lives in Cumberland, Maine in an old house with a lovely wife and also has a sweet small place on Peaks Island that provides inspiration around every corner.

Nonfiction

Josie Hughes (“Eureka”) wrote plays during her first career in theatre arts. She placed in three national playwrighting competitions and performed her original plays for 15 years.  She completed thirty graduate credit hours in writing. Josie finished a memoir in essays and had three essays published thus far. Josie is her pen name. She lives on the Texas Coast.

Stacie Charbonneau Hess (“May 1986: Mattapoisett”) is a writer and teacher living in her hometown of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts—which means—according to her Wampanoag-speaking friends, “The No-Work Place.” She has three grown children and an adorable husband, with whom she runs a chicken and bee farm. If you would like to run into her, try the woods near her house where she walks her two chocolate labs, Sailor and Francisco, nearly every day.

Rebecca Rush (“The Golden Feather”) is a writer from the east coast living in Los Angeles. Her articles have appeared in numerous outlets, including Psychology Today, Fodor’s Travel, and Huffington Post. Her essays and poems have been published in various literary journals and several anthologies: “I’ve Been Swindled” was recently released in “Red Flags: Tales of Love & Instinct” by Running Wild Press and “Confusion Hill” pends publication in “Missing Pieces” by Quilkeeper’s Press. She holds a B.A. in English Literature with a Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Connecticut.  @RebeccaRush639 on socials, #ActuallyAutistic

Thomas Page (“Scary Monsters”) is a writer and teacher based in the Washington, D.C. metro area. He just graduated with his MFA in hybrid forms from the University of South Florida. Most of his work focuses on the effects of tourism on the environment and on the person. Some of his recent work has appeared in Meniscus, Progenitors, Unfortunately, and Aquifer. 

Visual

GJ Gillespie (cover: Into the Mystic) is a collage artist living in a 1928 farmhouse overlooking Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, WA. A prolific artist with 22 awards to his name, his work has been exhibited in 65 shows and appeared in 167 publications. Beyond his studio practice, Gillespie channels his passion for art by running Leda Art Supply, a company specializing in premium sketchbooks. Whether conjuring vivid collage compositions or enabling other artists through exceptional tools, Gillespie remains dedicated to the transformative power of art.

Dana McGahey (Peaks Island Retreat) is an artist and teacher living in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Besides Us and the Pines Fiction

Robby Sheils

I waded around Newt Lake all morning, knee-deep, pointing my camera down through its ripples, framing rocks that caught my eye. After each wind and click, I’d sift through the sand for them, stuffing all kinds of rocks in my shorts’ pockets to save. Rocks smooth like eggs, some flat like sand dollars, some chipped and bumped and slimy. So many rocks, by the end I had to hold my waistband up from sliding down and into the water.

I’m sitting next to them now, all clumped in a pile, still too wet and dull to show any hidden scratches or freckles. I picked them up for no particular reason—maybe just as a funny way to clear my head. You see, just hours ago, I was asked to leave the only home I’ve ever really known to move across the country for good. I’ve never journaled, but a decent amount happened recently, and I just can’t stand the thought of forgetting all the shit that led up to that moment. Right now it feels like I’ll never forget, but fuzz always bleeds back, and when the fuzz starts you’re done for. Besides, it’s a way to pass the time until these rocks dry up.

I’m in a good spot to write, too. I’m sitting on a flat, mossy boulder the size of a queen-size bed, with white pine branches above me, blocking the sun with its layers of needles, shielding the moss like a canopy. My Minolta is resting in my lap, full of undeveloped photos. Further up the beach, a circle of old-timers are glued to their camp chairs, drinking beer and eating junk. It’s not too loud around here either; besides the occasional birdsong, all I can hear are the whirring engines of motor boats out on the water, puttering in arbitrary circles. It’s good. Anyway, I guess the best way to start this is to go back to yesterday morning when my friend Max and I left our hometown and started our drive up to his camp.

As I steered my old truck over train tracks, Max Archer looked out of the passenger window into a green rush of Maine. It’s a blurred landscape, one we both knew well, one I was planning to leave behind. Besides riding shotgun, Max is my best friend in the whole world. He’s a tall kid, built like a goofy German shepherd, and he’s got a laugh that could echo from Lewiston to Merrymeeting Bay. You see, Max is the kind of person who has handfuls of people saying he's their best friend. And that’s all right—I’m not one to be jealous like that. What I will say, though, is that if you put a gun to Max’s head and told him to name his best man, I’d bet the house that I’d get the nod. Anyway, when we’d crossed those train tracks, we were only five minutes into our journey. We were driving up to his house on the eastern shore of Newt Lake, one of the biggest lakes in Maine, where we planned to spend the night and fish for trout and smallies in the morning.

There’s no air conditioning in my truck, so we’d rolled down our windows to let the wind rush in. I figured it was turning into the hottest day of the year; when we left home, it was already eighty-five degrees. Beyond the open window, there were trees and signs and telephone poles, all of which Max and I have passed an incalculable amount of times, but he wasn’t looking at any of them anymore. He was looking at the road ahead with a lost stare, eyes zoned out. For someone as wild as he is, these moments are rare.

“What're you thinking about?” I asked him over the hum of the engine. I remember he let out a shudder as if I’d shaken him from a deep afternoon nap.

“Nothing, Deaner,” he replied, releasing a breath, then turning to me with a wide smile.  He opened my glove box and started to root through the heap of random papers and broken things I’d packed in there over the years. Not surprisingly, he dug out a photo I once took of a sunset over the Old Saw Lakes. It’s a blurred photo, overexposed, unfocused, washed, and generally bad. I hate it, but Max loves it. I was with him when I’d taken it, during my last week in Maine before I left for college in Pennsylvania. And even though the photo is poor, I took it on a great night. Way earlier that day we’d woken up in a Hannaford’s parking lot in Millinocket and hiked Katahdin with our buddy Wes Nadeau. The hike was hard and long, and our feet swelled up like warm yeast, but for some funny reason we all caught a second wind on our drive back home and none of us wanted the day to end. Wes had us touch down in Bangor for some beer and a dozen hot dogs. We grilled them later up on top of Norton’s Hill over a smoky fire that we’d made from a bundle of waterlogged branches and newspaper. It was a shit fire—we only got the dogs lukewarm before we gave up on cooking them—but we couldn’t care less. Anyway, I was having a good time and wasn’t paying attention to taking the perfect photo, so I ended up taking that one. Now Max was dusting it off, ironing out the bent corners, folding down the truck's visor, and sticking the picture in the beauty mirror.

On one side of the train tracks is Manning, a small inland town on the western edge of the Old Saw Lakes, where Max and I grew up. Before college, we both lived near a roundabout that connects four skinny streets—Plum, Peach, Apricot, and Cherry—like the hub of a tire. The streets are identical in shape, size, and probably number of homes, though I’ve never given them a proper count. Both of us grew up on Apricot, our houses just five doors apart.

Max’s house is the smallest on our street, despite having the neighborhood’s largest backyard and front porch. Over the years, I spent thousands of summer hours out on the Archers’ screened-in porch, sitting in an Adirondack, drinking Max’s mother’s sun tea, spiking it with rum once he and I had reached high school. That porch was the hangout for everyone we knew. Deep into middle school summers, an hour after the dinner bells had reverberated through the stone-fruit streets, my neighbors’ lanterns would flicker on, and the summer moths would begin to swarm. Screen doors squeaked up and down the sidewalks, and it felt like the whole neighborhood had come alive to bike over to the Archer porch for movie night. Most of those nights are fuzzy to me now, but I do remember some things, like how kids would bring sleeping pads so they could lie down, while others would sit on their hoodies so their butts wouldn’t fall asleep. And once the crowd would settle in, Max’s mother—a woman as sweet as her tea—would hold the front door open, waving a wooden spoon to say hello to the children whose parents she knew. Then Max would wheel out a cart carrying jugs of tea and his old twenty-inch box television.

There’d always be a big commotion when the cart appeared; Max wasn’t just the most popular kid in our neighborhood, but maybe the whole state. In middle school he’d hang out with high schoolers; in high school he was invited to college parties out of town. It’s rare to meet someone with that level of charisma—Max is, as my buddy Grant Panneci would say, “one in a generation, like a great boxer.”

After everyone else had left, Max and I would linger on the porch for as long as we could, talking about girls and baseball, rambling about circle changeups and cup sizes until we’d drop. Eventually, his mother would come out and tell us that it was time. There’s only so much arguing you can do when a parent says: “It’s time,” but Max would try. He’d stand there with his mouth open, his eyebrows up, his hands hanging by his side, looking like a dumbass. Then I’d leave.

By the time we’d reached high school age, the dinner bells died down and the neighborhood crew had drifted apart like most all do. There were no more movie nights, but Max and I would still stay out on the porch for hours after dark, basking in the confluence of our innocence and independence, taking turns to reach behind a big pot of lilies to grab our bottle of rum. Between sips, we’d switch on the flash on my shitty little point-and-shoot Olympus and take photos of the street cats that crept near his steps, of daddy long-legs crawling into corners. Now that I’m thinking about it, I can't guess where that camera is now. We’d talk about what the world would be like when we got older, how we would own both of our houses on Apricot Street, how our kids would watch the same VHS movies that we had. At the time, the plan felt real. As we grew older, I couldn’t wait to leave, and he still wanted to stay. Max noticed that change in me, but he never got mad at me for it. It wasn’t anything personal, and he knew that. Most friends wouldn’t know that, but he did.

Our different paths made sense. Max’s parents are high school sweethearts who grew up together in Auburn, not even an hour’s drive from Manning. By contrast, my parents grew up on separate coasts and met in graduate school. Max’s father owns a carpentry company, and his mother works as a receptionist in Augusta. My father is a nose doctor down in Portland, and my mother has been in between jobs since before I can remember. I have no siblings. Max has three older sisters who all still live in Maine; in fact, I don’t think any of them has ever left Maine, even for a vacation.

 In our freshman year of high school, Max started working for his dad on weekends, building decks and sheds, soon to inherit his father’s business. It was around that same time that I decided I was to become a photographer. On my fifteenth birthday, my father gave me an old forgotten film camera of his, which also happened to be my first ever—the shitty little point-and-shoot Olympus. I remember he felt sorry he couldn’t find me a new bike; God, how absurd that sounds eight years later. That gift absorbed me.

By the time I was sixteen, film photography was almost all I cared about, and as expected I started to struggle in school. Around that time I began to secretly build a dark room out of my bedroom closet. I needed equipment, but I was broke and far too afraid to ask my parents for money out of fear they’d shut the project down. Anyway, a week into construction I got caught stealing beakers and bins from the AP chemistry lab. It was such a big deal that I had to sit down with my parents in the vice principal’s office. After some scolding, the meeting ended with a compromise. If I applied myself in classes, I’d be given access to an old janitor's closet. No more C’s. After that day, I started getting to school an hour early to renovate that closet into a dark room. I had my very own key and everything.

With a bit of badgering, the science department gave me bins, beakers, gloves, tongs, a safelight, and a bag of developer powder they’d found hidden away. I started helping Max’s dad with building decks on weekends until I collected enough money to buy the rest. It took me almost a year, but I did it. Soon enough, I started making some under-the-table money developing rolls for other kids. I didn’t do it for the cash, but more for the thrill of developing. By the time I turned eighteen, I got into a top media department in the nation. The next fall I moved to Philadelphia to enroll.

Anyway, Max and I had split on different paths; it’s amazing how the person you’re closest to in the entire world can see it so differently than you do. One day around last Thanksgiving, when Max and I were out on a walk in Norton’s Orchard, we’d paused at sunset on the top of Norton’s Hill, the highest point in the orchard and in our little town. Up there, the rows of apple trees seem to slide down the slope. The rest of the hill is dense woods, covered with white pines that never stop swaying, almost like they’re breathing. We’d sat on a bench, installed in memory of some name I’ve forgotten, and watched the boats docked on the lakes below. In the distance, a scatter of silver lights sparkled up from the big-box stores in Augusta. We’ve sat there hundreds of times, but that night the twinkle from those lights looked so sad and empty to me—possibly a symptom of being surrounded by brighter ones these past few years.

That night, I asked about the baseball team at UMaine, and in return, he asked me about my photos, though I know he did just to be nice. My high school hobby had become something more in college. As a journalism major, I almost exclusively took photos of politicians, using digital cameras that cost thirty times what my shitty little Olympus had. I wasn’t that interested in politics, but the travel program was killer. If you concentrated in photojournalism and pitched a strong enough plan to the department, you’d receive a plane ticket, a stipend, and a platinum-sealed letter of affiliation that would get you almost any press pass you wanted. For my senior thesis, I traveled to Montreal, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. Most of the time I’d been down in the press pit, my polished 150mm lens sticking up like a telescope, focusing on blue and red ties, snapping thousands of photos, rapid-fire. Burst. Check. Adjust aperture. Burst. Check. Too high. Burst. Check. Good. Burst. Lighting change. Adjust ISO. Burst. Check. Good. Burst. Refine. Refine. Refine. And so on.

We talked for a good bit about those things until the pink sky bruised with blacks and blues, but I still couldn’t shake the dull glow of those lights. I’d opened my mouth to say that to Max, but he spoke his mind before I could.

“This view up here is so full,” he said with a smile. “I love it.”

 —

On the other side of the tracks is Monte Leone, which looks identical to Manning. As I drove, I could see the humidity of late morning hanging on the horizon, distorting strawberry fields, reducing distant herds of cattle to the size of bugs buzzing over a pond. Above, great lazy clouds followed us northward, and the roadsides were dotted with old farmhouses, their screen doors shut tight. Next to me, Max broke into one of our four bags of marshmallows. I was concentrating on the road. There’s a good number of squiggles and hairpin turns in Monte Leone, but I knew where I was going—I’d been up to Max’s house on Newt Lake since I was eleven.

The house isn’t big—maybe half of the size of Max’s house on Apricot Street—but the view is unreal. His deck looks down on the widest stretch of Newt’s basin, where a scattering of house-sized islands poke out of the water. Late at night, after the stars would pop, we’d always leave the house, make our way down a snake trail, and out onto the dock, our pockets stuffed with skipping stones. Over the years, we must’ve left 5,000 rocks on the bottom of that lake.

Anyway, sometime after leaving Monte Leone I steered off a winding farm road and onto a highway on ramp. The thermometer had hit the mid-nineties. As the highway leveled out, the ground around the truck seemed to stretch into infinity, and the sky was wallpapered with cotton-ball clouds.

For the next thirty miles, the wind took the place of our conversation. Within that whistle and roar, the world kept expanding, the piles of great lazy clouds rising higher and higher, getting smaller and smaller. The further north we drove, the thinner the traffic became. Eventually, Max and I started to try to get cars in the other lane to roll down their windows so we could talk to them. In the left lane, I would speed up and slow down as Max waved to the drivers. We must’ve tried this on fifty cars and didn’t get a single one to pay attention to us. Finally, he resorted to hurling marshmallows at their windows.

Max has a hard time sitting still, and he really only slows down when he’s fascinated by something. I remember a spring day when we were in high school—one of those rare balmy April afternoons. Last period had just ended, and we had an hour before Max needed to get to a game, so we hopped on our bikes and rode around the perimeter of the lakes as fast as we could. When we got near Rome, we turned onto Dow Road and stopped at a gas station to pick up Cokes and hot fries. We stayed on Dow until we hitched a right onto a dirt path and coasted down it until we hit a narrow trail overhung with pine branches that brushed us as we rode. The trail spat us out onto a small crescent beach with a couple of fallen white pines splayed on the sand. We pedaled straight onto the beach, tipped over our bikes, and ran into the lake without saying a word to one another.

After that first splash, Max paused, stood still, calf-deep in lake water. After a moment, he reached down into the shallows, felt around, and slowly pulled up the limp white carcass of a crayfish. I remember high-stepping back to the beach so he wouldn’t toss it at me, but when I looked back he still had it in his hand. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was locked in on that crayfish. From what I could see, the poor thing was missing half of its legs and its whole back shell. It was grim, but for some reason, Max couldn’t look away. He held the translucent body gently as if it were a bird with a broken wing. Later, as we were sweeping the bottom of our hot fries bag for crumbs, he told me he’d never seen the inside of a crayfish before. He thought, if he looked long enough, he’d never forget what was underneath that shell.

 —

As soon as we left the highway and negotiated our way past the truck stop and Walmart, we were on backroads again, most of them scarred by logging trucks and snowplows. We were headed northwest, pointed towards Canada, still decently away from Jennings. To give Max something to do, I reached into my door well and pulled out my beater film camera—a Minolta—and a booklet of CDs. As soon as I handed them over, he stuck in an old and scratched-up mixtape and started snapping photos of me.

Some time later I drove through a town called Moss and past the brick buildings on Main Street. There was a sandwich shop, a paper shop, a hardware store, and an antique store. Each telephone pole carried an American flag for the upcoming Independence Day parade. Leaving downtown behind, we crossed a tiny bridge over a skinny lake, where rope swings dangled from the tree-lined banks. On the other side of the bridge Max needed to pee, so I stopped at a store stationed at the split of two roads. Hungry enough to eat again, I grabbed my camera back and followed him in for a snack.

The store was an old yellow house with maybe twenty windows, a white wicker porch, and a door that shrieked like a cat fight when Max swung it open. Pausing, I turned around to pick up a sense of setting that I could carry with me inside. Back toward the bridge, a half dozen teenage boys were leaning over the railing to size up a jump. Some began rolling off their socks, while others retreated. I felt a lot, right then as if their shadows were stretching out and onto the white of my t-shirt as if I were a mirror of them, and their movements were etching tiny cuts into my chest. I raised my Minolta to my eye, adjusted my shutter speed, wound the lever, and clicked.

Inside, the store was a maze of shoulder-high shelves mostly stocked with jerky and junk food. Barrels of yarn and beads collected dust under the sunbeams glinting up from the river. At the back, a line of lit-up fridges stocked energy drinks, beer, and chocolate milk. An ancient wooden table functioned as a checkout counter, displaying ten kinds of gum, a basket of wrapped baked goods, and one of those high registers that looks like a rolltop desk. Behind the counter was a boy who looked no older than nine. He was perched on a stack of Yellow Pages and counting cash from the register. I swear. Halfway through a wad of fives, he felt me staring and stopped.

“Yes, sir?” he asked awkwardly, his hands still counting bills. Now that we’d made eye contact, I could see he was older than I’d thought, just small for his age. He had scarlet hair and buck teeth.

“Do you run this place?” I asked. He stopped his count again as if I was actually wondering if he ran this place.

“Well, my mom does mostly. But when she’s gone, I do.” The way he emphasized that ‘I’ made me smile.

I picked up a blueberry muffin and handed him a five. As I pocketed the change, Max swung open the restroom door in the back, wiping his hands on the front of his shorts, and walked over to the barrels of yarn and beads.  Over by the barrels, Max picked up a lavender skein. The wool was thick and soft and flecked with tiny blue dots. I left the register and walked over to him.

“This is the best color I’ve ever seen,” he said, staring down at the yarn and twisting it between his hands. “I’m gonna make something out of this. I’m gonna make a hat.”

I laughed, and he laughed a little, too, but his eyes stayed glued to that clump of yarn.

“Made in Miss-Oh-La,” he said, reading the label “Where is that?”

“Mizz-Oo-La,” I corrected. “It’s a cute city in Montana.”

“Mizz-Oooo-La,” he repeated, nodding and smiling. “That's nice.”

I nodded back, and he put the yarn in a brown paper bag to bring to the checkout.

 —

There are rivers everywhere in Maine. Around Jennings, though, you start to lose count of them. It’s as if Newt Lake is the state’s heart, and the rivers and streams that extend from its vast banks are veins, pumping like blood through a huge wooded body. Honestly, there were probably springs and ripples trickling beneath our wheels as we shot up Route 15, far beneath the rumpled pavement, beneath the old gravel, beneath the soil and the worms and the bones and beneath the Earth that had been rotting there forever. Little trickles, moving, without anyone knowing they exist.

Near Jennings, we crossed one of these innumerable rivers, and in the middle of the bridge I had to slam my brakes so hard that my tires squealed and I smelled the bitter burn of rubber. A gangly boy with a shaved head had run straight across the road in front of my truck. He waved a hand to say ‘sorry!’, and then hurled himself up and over the bridge railing. We couldn’t see him break the surface but could hear howls of applause shoot up from the river bank.

“All right!” shouted Max, bouncing up and down, slapping his hands on my dash as if it were a conga drum. “We gotta try that. Pull over, Deaner!”

I burnt some more rubber peeling my truck out and over to the five or six cars parked on the shoulder. According to a small rusted sign, this was the Bunker River, and even though I’d passed it many times, I’d never really noticed it before. Max and I started laughing like madmen, overcome by the wildness of it all. We threw our shirts and shoes into the bed, next to our rods and backpacks, and walked back to the railing. The drop was considerable, maybe thirty feet. Down below, a pack of tattooed twenty-somethings swam and hollered like it was the last sunny day of summer.

We stood there for a bit, silently assessing our options. I was sure as shit going to back out, but someone below shouted, “Jump!” Max lifted one foot onto the railing, then pulled himself up so that he could balance with his arms open wide to blue sky and sunshine. Then he leapt. He hit the water smoothly, surfaced, then floated for what felt like a long time, his arms making tiny circles. Before I could talk myself out of it, I climbed up on the railing. My body swished through hot air, and I saw Max quickly swim out of the way so I wouldn’t kill him. And then I hit the water with such force that I lost my breath and the insides of my ears tightened. When I finally broke free, I gasped in big breaths of soupy air before swinging toward Max, who was treading water alongside the others.

Everyone in the group looked to be about our age. I was introduced to all of them, though I really only remembered the names of a couple of the pretty girls and Bode, the boy we’d watched jump, who’d already hit it off with Max. Bode was twenty-three, a recent graduate from UMaine Farmington, and, no kidding, had grown up in Missoula, Montana. I swear. When Max found out, he lost his mind. “Mizzz-Oooo-Laaaa, Deaner! What are the chances of this shit? Jesus!” He went on to tell Bode about the skein he’d bought, and Bode asked him if it was from some little mom-and-pop company he knew of, and Max told him he thought so but needed to check the label to be sure. That’s all I heard before I started chatting it up with one of the pretty girls, whose name is Drew. She’d also just graduated from Farmington and was staying there to work at the hospital. She had a giant smile that showed thirty teeth and a sun hat that was the same deep brown as her eyes. In just fifteen minutes I got to know her better than I’d known any girl in my life.

 Before long everyone started to get cold, so we splashed over to a big slanted rock on the sunny side of the river. It was just high enough out of the water so we could dangle our ankles in the river. The bridge had a constant rush of cars zooming on it, and way behind us there was a trestle that had the occasional train squeaking down south. It was nice, sitting there. At one point Max yelled out that this was his heaven, and I almost could’ve nodded.

As we dried, I told our new friends about Manning, about Philadelphia, about driving up to Newt, about how Max and I had thrown marshmallows at cars on the highway. And then, as the setting sun began to turn the water gold, a glint up on the bridge caught my eye, something shiny coiling up into the sky like a pop-fly. It was a can of beer, and at its peak it turned over and spun towards the river, picking up speed like an asteroid. It hit the water hard and fast, staying beneath the surface so long I thought it might have lodged in the mud. Eventually, though, it popped up like a buoy, and everyone on the rock erupted in laughter and cheers. Another can shot up from the bridge, and then another, and Max and Bode and Drew and ten others dove back into the Bunker to bring them in.

I jumped in too, swimming as hard as I could. Beers kept dropping like bombs, and, man, it was terrifying. Against the sky, the cans looked like broken blue satellites spiraling out of control, heading straight for our faces. Nobody ever got hit, though; the cans always struck empty water, smacking the surface with a massive plop and sinking like stones. Waiting for them to reemerge, we stayed quiet as if we were on the eighteenth hole of the Masters, waiting to see if a shot would be sunk. But when they sprang up to the surface, we’d lose our shit. This went on and on. Cans would tumble up, catching darts of sunlight against aluminum, before they’d hang, motionless, basking in the blaring whistles of southbound trains. Each time, they’d plunge into the water and we’d wait there believing that they may never come up again. Honestly, I think it was the wait that made them taste so good.

Eventually, the case from heaven was empty, and as we drank, two men leaned over the railing, both shaggy and deep into their thirties, smiling and pumping their fists. I never learned who they were, but we cheered and waved back. As they drove away, we heard the bang of a few early evening fireworks going somewhere nearby, close enough for us to see puffs of smoke drift away among the pine trees.

 —

Max and I ditched our plan to go to his lake house and instead followed our new friends to their campsite on the western shore of Newt. We hadn’t packed tents, so we drove up to where everyone else was pitching theirs and planned to sleep in the bed of my truck. The site was a wide piece of grass, rimmed with second-growth pine trees that jutted like an elbow into the water. Between two of the trees there hung a taught black clothing line, displaying a rainbow of bottoms and tops still wet from the Bunker. We didn’t have a beach or anything like that, but there were a few boulders flat enough to sit on. Next to a rock-ringed fire pit, a few people set up a Coleman stove and started boiling water for macaroni. As the lake began to darken, our fire brightened, and we pulled sweatshirts from our backpacks. We sat in a circle around the Coleman—some in camp chairs, others criss-crossed on sleeping pads. I hadn’t brought camping supplies, so I had to spoon my helping of macaroni into a travel cup I’d brought for coffee in the canoe. Then I sat down next to Drew.

After dinner, Max passed out the remainder of our marshmallows, constantly pausing to spark up conversation and toke borrowed cigarettes. As the smells of burnt sugar and tobacco rose into the night, I could hear Grant Panneci’s voice in my head: “Like a great boxer.” When Bode’s girlfriend Winnie got up from her chair to go pee, Max ditched the piece of cardboard he’d been sitting on and sat his ass down in her empty seat like a sultan. When she came back, he stayed put. Max shouldn’t have won that battle, but Winnie didn’t fuss; she climbed onto Bode’s lap and let Max stay.

The stars came out, and Bode started talking about Montana rivers, and Winnie chimed in, remembering a day when they’d caught too many fish to carry home. Max kept interrupting with handfuls of questions: “What’s Missoula look like? What’s it smell like? Why’s it smell like that?” Patiently, Bode answered them all. He told Max that Montana skies stay lighter for longer than they do in Maine, that the clouds turn the same shade of purple as Max’s skein of yarn; how you can taste the smell of smoke. He talked about honest-to-god-cowboys, and the way sound bounces off Missoula’s low brick buildings in the early morning. He spoke about that place with the kind of pride I’ve been searching for my whole life. And then, he said that he and Winnie would be leaving early in the morning to drive back there.

At that, Max started bouncing and his questions got more urgent: “How much gas will it take? How many buffalo you think you’ll see? Are buffalo bison? Are bison buffalo?” Drew leaned over and whispered to me that it would be easier if he just went so he wouldn’t have to keep pestering them. She was joking, but the more we talked, the less wild the idea seemed. I’d been wanting to drop by Missoula on my way to a bigger city, and what was stopping me? I don’t have a job; my truck is in good shape. Max had his fishing rods in the back of my truck, and we had some basic clothes and our toothbrushes. If we drove out now, we’d be with people who could show us what’s what.

Eventually, those thoughts spilled out to the group, and Max was on the hot seat. He can be wild and all, but Max’s never been make-a-drunk-decision-to-move-across-the-country wild, you know? He’s a Mainer, and he talks about Maine the way people like Bode talk about Montana. Anyway, Bode and Winnie hammered him until he squeaked out a ‘maybe’. I knew it was no use.

 When the glitter above us brightened and everyone was still awake, I grabbed my Minolta from the truck so I wouldn’t forget the scene. Besides, everyone was keen to have their photo taken. I used my headlamp as a makeshift flash, a nearby stump to hold my camera steady, and my finger to click away at random moments. It felt like seconds before I couldn’t wind my camera anymore. And once I took out the canister, I held it as tight as I could. I kept it clenched in my palm as if to protect it. In my delirium, I thought the dim light from the fire was going to burn through plastic and warp whatever I’d taken. In reality, the light of three bald suns couldn’t beam through that canister. I’ve known that for years, but last night I chose to ignore it. Last night I needed my hand to keep those photos safe.

The circle shrank and the fire died, and eventually, the only ones left were Drew, Max, and myself. Max was drunk. He kept poking the embers with a long dead birch branch and telling us how excited he was for the sun to wake him in the bed of my truck. Drew and I talked with him until neither of us could get through a sentence without yawning. When we headed for her tent, Max stayed in front of the dying fire. Drew turned to him. “You won’t wake up in the truck if you stay here ‘till the morning,” she said.

Max smiled at the ground and nodded. “Right, right.”

The last I saw, Max was still in Winnie’s chair, moving around little flecks of light, humming to himself.

 —

I woke up in Drew’s tent to the sound of a zipper. The sleeping bag beside me was empty. The sky was still mostly dark, and I wanted to fall asleep again. I had dried drool all over my cheek, and an eyelid sealed shut with sleep. I felt awful. When I staggered outside, I saw that she was on one of the boulders by the lake. It was cold out, and dew was still sparkling on the ground. The horizon beyond Drew was showing a soft pink line, and I had the urge to take a picture of it. So instead of climbing down to join her, I walked like a dead man over to my passenger door for another roll of film.

After I grabbed my new roll, I staggered up on the seat and flipped down the visor to see just how bad I looked. When I did, out fell the print Max had tucked there yesterday, spinning down like a leaf onto my lap. It landed perfectly straight, right-side-up. Maybe it was the moment, or the way it rested, all perfect like that, that’d made me open my eyes a touch more. Without thinking, I breathed a laugh. You know those inkblot tests? The ones where a blot looks like a dog, but then all of a sudden it transforms into an upside-down old man? Since that day with Max and Wes, the photo had always bored me. At that moment, though, it became the most beautiful picture I’d ever taken—leagues beyond any I’d captured in college.

The blurs, the haze, the overexposed Augusta sky—that photo transported me back to a place I’d been on a good night with my best friends, when I was too carefree to check the light meter, too busy throwing rocks with my left hand to balance the camera in my right. It was also something more than a memory. Beyond those blurred trees were rivers I’d never seen, trains hooting alongside them . . . places far beyond the bent glossy corners in my hand; places right underneath my nose. It was the most beautiful picture I’d ever taken, and it took me four years to realize it—what kind of sick joke is that? The sun was starting to cut through trees across the lake, and little golden lines were streaking my dash. Before I left the truck, I reached into my pocket, took out the film canister from last night, and dropped it in the glove box.

Down at the boulder, Drew apologized for waking me, but I told her I was glad to be up. She sighed and I loaded up my new canister in a flash. The sun was streaking through the Hundred Mile pines, and Newt Lake looked brand-new under the orange glow. I lifted my Minolta to my eye and clicked, stamping those sunbeams and shadows onto my new roll. I couldn’t stop smiling.

“Deaner!” Max was standing by Drew’s tent, his hand on the zipper. “Deaner! Get up!”

Drew laughed into her hands, and I sprang up and hurried back to the campsite. Max didn’t hear me coming, and when I tapped him on the back, he jumped, then turned to me, smiling and jittering like a madman who hadn’t slept a wink.

“I’ve given it some thought,” he said. “I’m in.”

I took a second to process his words. “You’re in?”

He smiled and nodded. “For the trip. I’m in. You ready?”

I was too confused for words—confused at his decision, even more confused about mine. You know how badly I wanted to say yes? To hug Max and run over to wake up Bode and Winnie? To throw our bags into my truck and drive off? Man, I wanted that as bad as I’ve ever wanted anything. But I couldn’t say yes. And, instead, I told him that I’d changed my mind—my words repeating themselves over and over again. I couldn’t figure out how to say anything more, anything that would explain what I was feeling.

On and on I went, until Max stopped me. He put his hand on my chest and asked, “Drew?”

 I wish I hadn’t, but I laughed at him and laughed for a long time too. When I finally calmed down, I shook my head. It was the truth; in the end, I didn’t even get a number or P.O. box to reach her.

Tears welled into Max’s eyes, and he shook his head slowly. My eyes filled too. I’d never seen Max cry before. But now he was, softly, looking like the little boy whose mother just told him it’s time to come in from the porch. Until that moment, I’d never thought twice about Max Archer’s future, and I’m not sure he had either. He was to live in Manning, with his family, and work with his father until he’d take over the business. He’d find a home, a pretty wife, and die peacefully in the town he grew up in. When he cried, I knew he was gone.

The woods around us this morning were quiet. Not a whiff of wind. All the second-growth pines had stopped swaying, all holding their breath, all waiting for one of us to speak. Max dropped his head and I saw a couple of tears fall onto his shoelaces. He lifted his eyes and looked at me, from the dried drool on my cheek to my tumbled mess of hair, like he was memorizing my face. And then he wrinkled his nose and smiled a big, goofy smile. I laughed at him again, but this time he joined me. We stood there, bouncing laughs off of one another like only best friends can do, volleying them back and forth, our voices rising until both of us fell to the ground in hysterics. We roared like dumbasses, waking up the whole camp, laughing until every tent was emptied. No one around us knew what we were on about, and maybe that’s why we found it so funny. Besides us and the pines, no one else really knew.

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Peaks Island Retreat by Dana McGahey

The House Poetry

Tom Driscoll

I found it walking the woods near my home,

ruin rather than a house. Trees had taken root

close by, one just in front of the door

or where the door had been. Fragments of glass

crusted the steel window sash that remained, wood

gone black and soft with years open to weather at the sills.

There was no sign of access or even a path to the road

maybe a quarter mile in. They’d built with what could be carried

there, the roof form poorly matched to New England’s

climate and the scale of the place, all bat wing and shoulder

—a butterfly roof— I think that’s the architectural term.

Trapped water pooled. Rafters rotted through.

It felt dangerous, stepping inside. The walls defaced with

spray-painted names, lewd drawings, empty bottles

scattered about signaled trespass had become common.

There was a small space open to the sky in the center of this house.

It wasn’t much larger than my arms outstretched. The splay

of low bending rooves all sloped toward this tiny atrium

from where the house seemed to push the surrounding woods

away from itself, from this place at its center.

Several pine seedlings sprouting there from the mulch

of fallen flattened leaves and black earth. Their tender

barky shoots curving close to the ground, the slight spray

of needles —luminous, blue green. I wondered then

which of them, if any, would survive.

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My favorite small mountain epitaphs Fiction

Nathan Greene

Decide to climb Klickitat mid-week. Plan poorly. Or better yet, do not plan at all.  Prioritize Seattle spreadsheets over calling the ranger. No avalanches periodically obliterate the south climb. No glacial crevasses have ever swallowed a whole rope team. Nod thoughtfully at this explanation. ‘Koko if you don’t believe me,’ says your roommate Moira. ‘Fuck you.’

You’ll want a technical meal for your last big dinner. But Moira’s prize candy bowl is the only food in sight. Devour it. Time to forget some gear. Arrange your tech like a loose raccoon in the pantry, scattering useful steel around your bed. Gaze intently at it all. Best to stuff your sleeping bag first. But you grow weak as synthetic presses back against you. Elect to finish packing tomorrow. A topographical map and tire chains remain in your closet. Also mountaineering boots. Surely you’ll remember them. For now, crawl into bed. Silence your blabbering brain with trip reports. The descriptions of mountains and snapped wrists seem to flail in pale hallucinations behind the page. This is unusual. Not since freshman bong rips have you felt such a vast, mind-opening… Ah right. The dinner gummies. Thank you, Moira.

Begin your drive in the afternoon. Late afternoon. Moira needs the morning to approve expense reports and butt chug coffee. Or so she claims. Such activities ensure a certain mindset for departing from Green Lake. It lies somewhere between the manic thrill of escaping work early and the schizoid fear of losing key items in the rush. Fortunately, the most important gear can’t be forgotten on the sidewalk. Because it’s still in your closet. Don’t remember yet. Grasp the wheel of your 04 truck with confidence. Hit I-5 at a devil’s pace, spilling Moira’s chili. She wails from shotgun. Tip your cowboy hat to the new boy snagged in Cap Hill. Moira told you Abhay eats box well. Devours the clit, from her description. This spanks of confidence and skill on the mountain, to you. Bolster the man with physical complements. Offer him key decisions, like, ‘highway route or mountain route?’ Mountain route! It’s early May. You planned to hike to Lunch Counter this evening. And yet away to the West, the sun already dips towards the free-swinging Olympics. Cheer the cunnilinguist and his mountain route bravado.

Meet the first snow many hours from Seattle. It lurks under a cliff. Sunset has begun. Thrill in the soft backlit trees, a passing sign for Mount Adams. Sober at the widening ice gutters that border the track. Someone jokes about spring closures. But surely not this road! Brake before a huge barricade of slush. Attempt to ford it without chains. Swerve lazily into the ditch, with the whole cab cheering. Dedicate your remaining sunlight to coax the rubber back to gravel. Where to next? The Mount Adams drive turns off in another half mile. That half mile is impassible. To go around would take the full evening backtracking and looping down along I-5 through Portland. Abhay suggests installing chains on the tires. This reminds you he's a man. Also of the chains, the map, and the boots in your closet. Definitely Abhay’s fault. Waste a long discussion about cancelling the trip. Abhay insists he must attend a baby shower Sunday.

“But we told you that we might still be gone Sunday,” Moira says.

“I didn’t realize that I had to go.”

“To your sister’s baby shower?”

“I thought it was just girls.”

“You will also need a present,” I suggest.

“Shut your stupid mouth,” Moira says. “We are climbing Mount Adams tomorrow.”

Agree to the highway route. This also swerves you into a gear distributor in Portland. Buy mid-mountain boots, you wasteful, capitalist hoe. And mid tacos from a truck outside. Feast in the car. Stuff the rest in your pack, no napkins. You’re storing grease for sunrise.

Arrive at the Mount Adams ranger station at midnight. It’s very dark. They’re missing the weird little pencils and envelopes. The forecast lists bad wind. Pay with a note made from your driving manual. Load it with smiley faces and apologies. You forget them immediately on the gravel drive, missing a few turns, bumbling through the woods. Meet the snow again. It blocks you just past the Morrison Creek Campground. Park on a sketchy shoulder. No time for a tent. Sleeping bags in seats. Abhay farts often. Forgive him. You only have time for one REM cycle, anyways. And you interrupt that to pee. Through the trees, a towering whiteness rises from the gloom. It nearly freezes the urine inside you. Wipe in shivering awe. What a place to vacation.  

Begin the climb in darkness. The closed road weaves between stumps and fallen branches. Curse your dim headlamp. Fall through icy tree holes and puddles. Moira establishes such a lung-dumping pace that Abhay must clip a bag of gummies to his chest strap. These are for his diabetes. Abhay assures you someone with diabetes once climbed K2. Shrug. Attempt to drink water. It’s very chilly. Turn off the road just before first light. Meander up banks and between gray trunks. Ask about being lost. Moira’s cellphone instructions say nope not lost. The device will soon die from the cold. It’s great to be not lost. You’re only delayed in the forest. Pause on a snowy promontory because breath. Also because Abhay just confirmed a dangerously low blood sugar test. He’s not walked straight in miles. Pump the man with candy while admiring the glowing blue plains below. Wyeast pricks the south horizon. Pink rays all in the snow. Purple taco shreds for breakfast. Moira tells you your headlamp got all the cheese. Damn.

Hit Lunch Counter by sunrise. Well, you think it’s Lunch Counter. It’s flat and counters are flat. Moira yawns at this logic. You hate that you agree. Above you, a faster group stumbles on steep snow fields. So you strap on crampons and practice self-arrests. Abhay could not arrest a squirrel. Not with that axe swing. So, climbing again, you recall to all a time when Moira fell on her axe and punched a lung and slid 1000 feet into a birch tree. The others just grunt. But at least Abhay steps deeper. His blood sugar is stable, he says. Stuff more power bars down his throat just in case. You are ascending. Toe steps into the crunchy, rising snow. The sky is very near now, the glare. You need your glacier goggles. Suffer on each switchback. Endure ecstasy between sucking inhalations. Suck on this, mountain! Rest on a rocky outcrop. Or on your knees. Moira will tell the same joke that you were thinking, only better. That bitch. On the next rim, the wind grips your air. Struggle to stand against it. Another pinnacle towers ahead.

You have either reached Pikers Peak or Lunch Counter. If, as you thought, the previous flat counter was Lunch Counter, then the vast white shoulder ahead is the summit. But many tents billow on this horizontal plain. So it’s probably the actual counter of lunch. Meaning the flat space below was Raven Ridge. Either way, Abhay must rest. He crumples beside some rocks to escape the wind. Burn yourself lighting a small stove. Boil water. Or at least get it hot enough to dump into a vacuum-sealed Pad Thai meal. Pray some of the noodles cook. Discuss the mound ahead with Moira. Out loud, she says it’s the summit. Privately, she explains it’s not. You’re impassive about the possibilities. Understand that, right or wrong, neither option prevents more climbing. The great cape of snow and rock must be ascended. Drink water and test the Pad Thai. It cooked little. Share your feast, anyways. Abhay devours 89% of it without complaint. Moira whispers about the fiberglass texture. Smile horribly at the two of them.

With some hunger, forge across the plains. Attack the face. You’re sure words like forge and attack were invented for your hard body. Until you slip. Which you do often. Everything here feels very high and steep. It isn’t. Well, it’s about 10,000 feet and a 40-degree slope, or something. Stop midway up the mildly long, crampon-ripping, ice-axe-dragging, sun-hammering your loose legs, climb. Dig a seat from the snow face. Plop in butt-first and drink around your psychotic breathing. Abhay has barely started the zig zags below. His body language reads illiterate. Moira stomps closer. When she reaches you, scoop a second hole. Give her yours.

“He’s a shit climber.”

She hammers a few wild exhalations before speaking.

“We haven’t fucked in weeks.”

“I thought he sucked your clit?”

“So?”

“That’s a good reason to do it.”

“Last weekend he asked me to watch him dry hump the couch.”

“Did you?”

Her face, blotchy beneath the glacier goggles, gapes.

“Of course not.”

“And why not?”

“Fuck, Koko,” she says. “Why would I? It’s fucking windy up here.”

“I would have.”

“You’re a slut. For exhibition and mountains. For both.”

Leave her before Abhay arrives.

Cross the high cheek of Adams to avoid the brow. It’s too steep to go direct. Even the traverse is hard, the snow brittle. Skitter across in ginger lunges. Punch your axe deep. You’re not even very high. Blue air around you; blue sky on the plains. This must be what the Himalayas look like. Quiet your unhinged ego. Feel the slope cant upward. Above, is… Something tall. Something cold. Something old? Maybe not. ‘The stratovolcanoes formed as a result of cone-building eruptions less than a million years ago,’ says a guide voice in your head. You dislike that it is male instead of your own. Surely this is Abhay’s fault. You have not stepped in an age. Force a foot upwards. Watch ice hunks roll down, down, past you, past Moira, lost on the convex snow below. Keep moving. You are on the final rise. What a vacation. Pull on metal tips with anything you can. Crunch, crunch, right, right, almost to the top.

But it’s not the top. The globed summit of Mount Adams rises again, ahead, the bastard. Look back. Moira is making a snow angel. Abhay cannot be seen. Swirl some water in your mouth. Trickle your eyes down the ridges and snowfields. Realistically, theoretically, at this point you would rather fall to the bottom than descend responsibly. Imagine a great leap outward on the South Chutes, tumbling, tomahawking, through the golden snow. This is not feasible. Too many camp dad witnesses. Resign yourself to a worried, suffering retreat. Every year climbers disappear in snow rivers. Every year a glissading arrest fails. On the way down, Moira will terrorize Abhay with these images. She subsists on power and fear. But for now, she simply arrives. Slogs, gasping over the lip. Points at the summit and slams her fist, laughing.

“How far down is Abhay?” you ask.

“Abhay? Fuck Abhay!”

“Is he lost?”

“How the hell would he get lost? We’re on a damn field of snow.”

“I can’t see him.”

“Halfway up I told him this was Pikers Peak. Not the summit. That finished him.”

She mimes a samurai chop.

“So we should go back? Now?”

“Of course.”

Nod and fill a final breath, high, higher than you were this morning.

Moira just laughs.

“I should have fucked him last night, too,” she says, turning to glissade.

It is time to slide. So remove your crampons. Tighten every pack strap. Nudge forward on the icy edge… Just… Closer… Slip. And scrape down the powder. Good. Your ass cheeks have earned this bludgeoning. Who needs an axe to control speed? You do. Slow down, snow-cunt. Or don’t. Sometimes whumping at great pace down a steepening snowfield is all the soul requires. Whoop past Moira. Also, Abhay. Abhay! Flip and gouge. Arrest successfully. Above, the man looks better. The sun helps. Abhay gnaws on jerky, relaxed. He points the shriveled meat down the slope and asks how. Moira has almost hit the bottom. What a pal. Turn back and beckon Abhay. The fact that he has never glissaded pleases you. What is the summit when you are with a helpless man? Direct your friend to squat. Watch him ease painfully down the first incline.

“You can flip over and dry hump if you like,” you offer.

He doesn’t hear. But he soon passes to the left, screeching and paddling his axe. Follow.

All of the day is beneath you on the plains.

The tumble never ends. It speeds and slows. Pass Lunch Counter. Pass tents folding all around. The mountaineers are cheering. Even Abhay grins. Even he can lead this part. Snow slushes in the spring heat. It trickles through the rocks beneath you. Which black points are starting to show. Your energy droops when you walk. Your joints stiffen. Each rise after sliding is a slog. Fight to catch Moira. Find her at the last ridgeline, at the forest edge. Lose yourself in the tree shadows. Moira is the path. Her footsteps guide. Poorly, of course. Lose yourself for real, all three of you. One shadowy cliff looks bad. No other climbers show. See Klickitat, lounging massive above. Understand the vastness of the land. You need to find a single road in this forest. Backtrack with exhaustion. Worry about the setting sun. Abhay is a shade again, weaker than before. Pile-drive one final granola bar through his dainty lips. Come to a place where all the trees are burned. It feels wrong. Fear the rising twilight. Then there’s a trail. And a river and a road, and you are here, suddenly, at your truck and the end.

That is, if there is an end.

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Eureka Nonfiction

Josie Hughes

Mama protected the innocence of childhood.  I saw my innocence as clueless, a point of view shared by my peers.  Looking back through the lens of now diagnosed conditions in our family of five savants, seven overachievers and one underachiever (me), we all noticed and commented that I had more social emotional skills than the five savants. 

“We celebrate strengths,” Mama insisted. I fielded questions at home to help the others understand outsiders.  In that house, I was the most normal.  In the outside world, I had a bit of the same autistic genes as the rest of them.  I have a son like me.  He has savant skills and other symptoms that put him on the spectrum.  Savant skills balance brain anomalies, with the strength in one area offset by deficits in another.

1963

My youngest sister Sheila was born right after my eighth birthday. Mama went to the hospital, leaving the five of us with Daddy. As always, I asked endless questions.

"How does the baby get out of Mama's stomach?"

"She stretches open where she goes to the bathroom," said Daddy.

I thought about that, embarrassed to ask which hole the baby came out of--the pee hole or the poop hole. 

"How did the baby get in there?". 

Daddy hesitated before he answered, trying to be true to his unstated dilemma of both telling us the truth while not telling us a single thing about sexuality. He had religion to fall back on. "By God's gift of LOVE, " he told 8-year-old me, and any sibling involved in the discussion.

 I knew what my two holes looked like. My friend Laura and I showed each other ours on a dare. When I reached the age of reason, age seven in the Catholic faith, the nuns explained what sin was. Sister explained adultery as taking off your clothes in front of "not your husband". That made what Laura and I did a mortal sin in the Catholic church, which meant straight to hell unless I confessed. I confessed after worrying for months and months, after I found out during Lent, the four weeks leading up to Easter, mortal sins gained severity, a double-whammy mortal sin, which had to be removed before communion at Easter. Under that dark cloud, I confessed. The priest asked me questions about my sin--adultery.  He sounded confused.

"Me and my friend showed each other our butts" I explained, sorry, contrite, but mostly afraid of going straight to hell.

"And you thought that was adultery?" he asked.

"Yes", I mumbled.

He dealt out my penance. "Ten Our Fathers and Ten Hail Marys".  Usually, I got one of each for my rote recitation of lying and dishonoring my parents, mixed up for variety.

I returned to my pew, pretending to pray while daydreaming, relieved that my mortal sin was gone. I daydreamed until the nuns gathered us up for the walk to the next-door school.

I had neighborhood friends apart from school, a half-dozen girls I called my best friends. We played girl games of the sixties and seventies, one of our favorites being Truth or Dare. We changed the rules to TRUTH only, to a default question, "What really embarrassing thing have you told no one?" I told the story of committing adultery and going to confession.  As the story got retold at parties throughout our teens, my reputation as clueless became cemented.

1967

When I started my period at age 11, I had no idea what to do.  Lucky for me, my big sister Teri, worldly age 12 and savant, provided me with guidance and information as she gained it. Nobody mentioned sex in our home except Teri. She knew everything, we both agreed.  I remember one class with a film strip on puberty, with girls and boys separated. My expectation from that told me I'd get a pin-prick amount of blood with the need for a band-aid-sized covering. Much to my surprise and horror, this blood looked like an emergency. I needed help.  I heard my sister Teri rummaging around in her room next door.

"Hey, Teri.  Can I talk to you now?"

Teri stopped what she was doing from her area on the far side of her room.  She sat on the edge of her bed.  I stayed over by the door, nervous about what I might find out.

I described the bleeding to my big sister, expecting to be told I had cancer, which I knew all about because Mama prayed to her sister, Aunt Patricia, who died young from cancer. Teri relaxed at once launching into instructive mode, laughing with affection.  We commiserated and agreed I should always come to her for these rites of passage. She told me what to ask Mama.

"I started my period I need a Kotex".   My parents, who ran the PTA at our catholic school, objected to children learning more than the biological functions of puberty. They won that battle, being east coast intellectuals in a working-class midwestern small-town church. My parents taught at the local Catholic colleges, Daddy full time, Mama for extra money and self-esteem. Because of this status, my parents influenced what happened at our school.

"That is the job of parents", they insisted to the nuns, resulting in the modern nuns aborting teaching us science facts that may have filled in the blanks in my head. My parents taught us nothing. 

"Children need to be protected, childhood is a short sacred time"  Mama exclaimed.

Mortified, I later spewed out the script Teri helped me practice. Mama showed me where the Kotex were in the bathroom cabinet, giving me some elastic thing to go along with them. That was the only conversation about menstruation or reproduction with any adult during my growing up years.

I couldn’t have imagined how much blood would flow out of me, nor for how long. I had crippling cramps and massive bleeding. I had no idea what to do with bloody underwear. I didn’t know what to do with bloody Kotex. I wrapped them up in huge amounts of toilet paper, then carried them around in my pocket until I found a full trash can at school to hide them in. I tried to flush them down the toilet, scared to death since sometimes the toilet overflowed. Sometimes I wore one Kotex over and over while wrapping it with fresh toilet paper. The entire puberty change horrified me. I spent several years in a fog trying to navigate it. I believe I failed, based on the negative feedback on my hygiene I got from peers, like the note that suggested "smelling" stuck on my locker once I got to high school.

1971

My best friends in my neighborhood understood me. We girls discussed our periods,  noticing that we synced up on the timing. We gave each other advice on menstruation and its complications. My early years, blood overflowed the giant Kotex, not yet designed to be functional. Then tampons came out. My friends extolled the virtues of not using giant wads of cotton in our crotches. I listened with my usual pretense, not wanting to give away my naivete and constant confusion. By then they declared me smart with no common sense. I knew it was not common sense I lacked, but knowledge and experience, resulting from the rich internal life that had me often withdrawing and missing important factors. The talk of tampons intrigued me enough to ask and reveal my ignorance. I remember the later problem which I parlayed into another embarrassing TRUTH to be told ad nauseam at drunken teenage parties for years to come.

One of my friends told me how to put a tampon into myself.

"Find the hole and push it in.", said the girl who was already pregnant. 

I didn’t know of a third hole, but the thing did go up somewhere. I imagined it to be part of the butt crack I’d observed, where the Kotex sat. When I pulled the tampon out, I noticed a problem. The cardboard didn’t come out. Apparently, when inserting, I was supposed to intricately push the absorbent cotton part in, while discarding the applicator made of cardboard. I went to Teri once again.

"Um . . . I have a problem . . . I used a tampon.  When I took it out, some of it stayed inside.  Is that supposed to happen?  The white cardboard part didn’t come back out."

"Did it melt?  Does that part melt?"

"No Josie, it doesn’t melt."  Teri showed me how to hold onto the cardboard, telling me I had to get that part out of myself.

That was enough sharing for me.  I laughed, feigning disdain for the whole puberty thing.  Terrified, certain that if I failed, I’d need an adult to help me with something I could not speak about, I took a bath, trying to solve this on my own. While feeling around for where the massive amounts of blood came out, I found a giant cavern. EUREKA! That answered many questions, at once. That was how a baby got out.

I remembered and understood the things Teri had shared from a teenage babysitter and library books. I dug around for the parts of the cardboard that had disintegrated inside my vagina. It was nice to have answers to fill in some of the many blanks I went through life with, afraid to ask because I never knew if it was something I got wrong or something I hadn’t yet learned. I told the entire saga in a TRUTH game, to unload whatever shame I had. I laughed along with everyone else when the story got repeated ad nauseam.

1989

Looking back through the eyes of a mother, I understand my family.  Genetics determined my choice of mates. Mama came to help me with my son right after his birth, bringing along my brother.  As I studied for a vocabulary test to get into graduate school, I threw out ridiculously hard words I’d never heard.  My husband, brother, and mother knew every word listed in the practice booklet.

“HOW?” I asked incredulously. 

“We read the dictionary.” They all declared matter-of-factly. 

That’s one type of savant, recalling everything read, which both my parents and two siblings have.  Mama could play piano by ear, blindfolded; my dad and three siblings knew all math without learning it; my schizophrenic dad and brother could get 100% on any test without taking classes; my husband knew the latitude and longitude of every spot on earth; my son can tell you when he got a haircut twenty years ago by a football game he watched; and his dad could recite the release dates of every album for a thirty-year span. 

I was the most normal at home, while the weirdest at school, and considered myself the luckiest girl in the world.

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Beth’s Ghost Fiction

R.W. Owen

My shitbox Ford Pinto jerked to a stop on Ebb Tide Way, with Sadie in my headlights, ocean winds whipping her hair into some frenzied thing—fully alive with ferocity, seeking escape, her eyes uncertain that I was going to stop.

I wasn’t sure either.

Sadie clenched a paper-plate taco brimming with beach pizza that she’d bought at Fia’s on the Boardwalk, probably with her last dollar bill.

Thin, crispy crust like a communion wafer, worshipped as devoutly, a conduit for delivering a holy cesspool of cheese and grease straight to our thighs. Its sweet, red sauce kept it honest, covering a teepee of salt, smashed flat like Wiley E. Coyote himself, pancaked under some immense weight from the Acme Corporation.

“Open the fucking door, Charlene,” Sadie snapped and pulled up on the door handle so hard that she rocked that tiny shitbox. “We got to go.” 

I wanted to keep it locked and peel away.

But I leaned into the passenger’s seat until I could see my grandmother’s pearl necklace swinging inside the wide neck of Sadie’s peasant blouse. Beth had given her that necklace.

The knob came up with a thunk. Sadie had become that last link to Beth, a lost cause my big sister had adopted before she herself ultimately became the lost cause. Overdose. Sadie had been there that night.

I hadn’t. Sadie called me from a payphone. I didn’t pick up. Beth died.   

Now I picked up every call.

Sadie held one slice of pepperoni pizza between her teeth and spun the other frisbee-style onto my denim skirt, burnt cornmeal gritty like beach sand against my skin. She slid into the car, casting the spent paper plates to the night’s sea breeze. Like seagulls, they floated away in my rearview, vanishing into the ghostly black and white swirls of mayflies that drifted through a flickering streetlight struggling to stay lit.

She was wearing Beth’s blue flip-flops too, with the scrut of the two years since “the overdose.” It happened at Ferreira’s Funpark, in the shadow of the broken-down Ferris wheel, a hulking corpse that rose above the salt marshes that lined Route 1.

“It’s good, right?” Sadie asked—more said—catching a trickle of tomato sauce with her finger before it could drop from her chin and soak into the denim of her cut-offs, bleached white by summers of seawater. “What?” she asked when I didn’t answer.

I wasn’t eating my pizza.

“Where’d you get the money for this pizza?” I asked. Sadie was nineteen, but she’d never held down a job.  

She shrugged and adjusted the side mirror. She was checking her thick lashes and the even thicker lines of her eyeliner in the moonlight. Channeling Farrah Fawcett, Charlie’s Angels. Beth’s favorite show.      

“Friendly guys.”

 “Sadie, stop it with the guys already.”

She dangled an arm outside the open window, her fingers tracing the wind as it picked up with speed. She had polished her nails the same color as the Pinto’s cheap, wine-red vinyl seats.

“They’re going to think you’re loose,” I said.

“You sound just like Beth,” Sadie snarled, the beach-at-night whirling by in flurries of sounds and lights.  

She’d said her name. Neither of us knew what to say next.  

When the silence finally burst under its own weight, Beth’s ghost had receded to the still depths of our thoughts.

“What kind of guy this time?” I asked.

I eyed the rearview, watching for the blue flashers of the Seaborough Police Department, the wideset headlights of their Plymouth Fury cruisers. Sadie came to the beach to cocktease guys, but she targeted cops. She reveled in the challenge—the danger of those powerful men who demanded obedience.  

With a sharp finger, Sadie poked me out of my thoughts. “You don’t want to know,” she said to my question and all the other questions I didn’t ask.

She turned away and flung open the door. Wind, wet with seawater, swirled in. My stew of receipts and parking tickets—prayer cards from Beth’s wake—rose to form small tempests, writhing, grasping at our hair.

“Sadie!”

She slammed the door shut, too hard, and the whole car shook.

“Relax, Charlene. I wasn’t going to jump. Door didn’t shut all the way.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter and turned to me. “This guy had ten bucks,” she said. “Enough for the pizza and to fill Beth’s gas tank.”

Every fucking chance she had, she reminded me that I got Beth’s car. And she hadn’t. 

I didn’t take the bait. She just rolled her eyes and grabbed a ‘Gansett from the cooler. Beth’s ghost grew quiet again.

“What happened to your shirt?” I asked.

The royal blue linen had been ripped so high that the white lacy cup of her bra poked out.

“What happened to your shirt?” she moaned and then ripped away the tab on the beer, tossing it to the night air outside where it flew away on the wind like a firefly flickering red in my taillights. She’d mocked my voice since I was little. They both had. “You still miss all the details,” she added.

“What details?” I asked.

She picked at the torn front of her shirt with a nail that wore its history in a rainbow of old polishes. “This,” she said, “for starters. And with Beth too,” she added, with her trailing-off voice. “We both missed the details … when the end started coming.”

The smell of drying seaweed assaulted my nose. Somewhere in the darkness, waves crashed against the shore. Sadie held the cigarette lighter, fidgeting, red-hot circles floating amidst the twilight hues of blues and greens cast by the dashboard’s lights.

“No.”

“Charlene … you’re even still driving her car.”

“You’re wearing her necklace, her clothes.”  

“Fucking stop, Charlene,” she said. “Alright?” She ripped a Sears catalog from the backseat, Beth’s name typed across its yellowed mailing label.

She opened to the section with bathing suits and slid her last dollar bill along the page as if she were trying to keep her place in an early reader book.

Under her fingers, women lolled on fake sand in bikinis the color of bluebells. Did they have pasts? Like we did? Or had they written simpler once-upon-a-times, like we had, when we were three little girls, making first communions in tissue-paper dresses, racing back from church to build sandcastles on the beach, our only worry when the high tide would come to obliterate them?

“Did you try yours on yet?” Sadie looked up and ran her finger along the binding between the pages.

I nodded, but I was lying. We had bought two bathing suits the week before, with a twenty-dollar bill we got from Sadie’s last time ripping off cops. “They could have done more to save her, Charlene,” she’d say, if I asked, so I didn’t anymore. We both knew she was right.

“Bette Davis Eyes” came on ‘RKO. Beth’s favorite song.

At the morgue, after the overdose, after the cops didn’t do enough to save her, after she was gone, her eyes were still open, staring blindly out into the world she had just left.

After there was nothing else we could do for her, she was just lying there, under a cheap white sheet, unseeing in the absolute silence of death. After she had been waiting for me. After I hadn’t come.

I came, but I was too late.

I twisted the volume knob until Kim Carnes’ voice filled the car. 

But Sadie spoke over it. “Pull over here,” she said, shoving aside Beth’s ghost, who stared into the ocean of my grief, with the same glazed, dead eyes I couldn’t unsee from the night of the overdose.

“Get out,” Sadie said as she flung the catalog into the back seat. Like a dead bird, its pages fluttered like feathers against the cheap vinyl.

“Come on, Charlene.”

I stepped out into the tall grass on the side of Route 1. A catamaran’s lights cut across the calm waters far out on the ocean. I squinted into the canopy of stars overhead, searching, and not finding—not knowing what I was even looking for.

“Charlene,” Sadie said. Her stare was going to burn holes into me.

I looked at her.

“Come on,” she beckoned again.

She led me away from the surf and into a wall of salt-sick evergreens that some gardener had tried to shape into a privacy hedge.

“I’m not sure we’re supposed to go in ….”

“Come on, Charlene…” she nudged me in the small of the back. “Don’t say anything, ok? It’s important.”

And I didn’t.

The sticky needles of stunted evergreens pricked my arms.

The light was dim, and I just had Sadie pushing at my back to lead me forward.

My feet swept easily over the scrub, tan grass. Five steps in and then ten.

Somewhere, beyond the ring of hedges that defined that awful place, the shrill mew of a sick cat broke the silence; a machine clicked on. I jumped.

But Sadie pushed me on.

Then she tugged the waist of my skirt. I stopped.

“Are you ready to talk about the night it happened?” she asked.

I looked at her, comprehension waking in my thoughts, unease flaring inside me. Sadie had brought me to the threshold of hell, Ferreira’s Funpark, where a hundred demons hid in the shadows of the Ferris Wheel, raining flakes of rust into our hair.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“To face it, Charlene. Beth’s not coming back.”

My hands clenched, my nails digging half-moon welts into my palms.

“I should’ve been there, Sadie.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she said, voice breaking, using the name Beth called me, they both had called me, when we were little. “I was there. There was nothing you could’ve done.” 

“I should’ve picked up the phone when you called.”

“We can’t hold onto the past if we want to keep living, Charlene. That’s what death is.  Staying in the past.” Sadie kicked at a chain link fence that once kept people away from the moving Ferris Wheel. Moonlight illuminated the specks of chrome that hadn’t been lost to time.  “If we keep holding onto the past, we’re trapped with her, and she wouldn’t want that.”

“I can’t leave her behind, Sadie, I leave her. Beth doesn’t exist here.”

My eyes adjusted to the clearing. I searched all its dark forms, trees, hills, grasses for Beth, but she wasn’t there. I always thought she would be, if I came, that somehow, she’d be alive again. We’d have some serendipitous meeting. She’d be young, beaming, happy—like she was before the drugs—restored like Jesus rising from the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Sunday morning, ready to hand out endless, everlasting I-forgive-yous like the miracle with the fishes and loaves of bread.

“Do you know what she was thinking about, Charlie, at the end?” Sadie asked. Her hair smelled of seawater and cigarettes and baby oil when she hugged me. My cheek pressed against the sunglasses she was using as a hairband. She smelled like Beth.

“The beach,” Sadie said, in the hushed tones of whispers struggling against sobs. “She was remembering coming here, the three of us, building sandcastles, you with your little pink bucket. Carrying the seawater up to wet the sand, asking if the sandcastles would stand for a thousand years if we never left. If we stopped the waves from coming to wash them away. Do you remember, Charlie?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“We couldn’t stay forever, any more than we could stop the waves, but, you know what we do have, Charlie?”

“The memories,” I answered.

“Fucking right. Memories,” Sadie said, waving an arm at the ghosts of the Funpark surrounding us, “This happened. She happened. Memories don’t die.”

We held each other, until a cloud crossed through the moon, crying away all the bad, but grasping like hell at all the good.

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George Poetry

John Wertam

Australian Shepards are known for having eyes of different colors, a blue one often called the "ghost eye." 

Right between the eyes

one blue, one brown

it is the softest.

But lately those eyes

have lost focus.

And in the black of night

a warm wind blowing from the South,

he snapped.

Both his eyes turned red

in the porch light.

His curled lip exposing menacing teeth to me

the same ones that cut my wife's lip,

nicked my daughter's brow 

showed to me there was now a different master

one calling to him from beyond

this patch of lawn in the North.

So later, as I draw my face toward his,

toward those eyes

toward the soft spot between them where I will comb

his soft fur with my bristly beard,

his eyes focus on mine.

He knows

as I know

we all take a chance on love.

Yet we dive in

and feel the terror -

and the softness.

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Harry's Glide Fiction

Rick Henry

Harry likes to make plans. At forty-eight, he doesn't need to and he knows it, but he enjoys thinking about processes, thinking them through. Usually, Harry reflects upon the small and mundane, creating, adapting, adopting benign models for confronting the world. The amount (and denominations) of change needed for a successful encounter at the post office, for instance, or the number of minutes to allot to the cleaning of this room or that. He doesn't need these plans because he has internalized them all, from the optimal route to work, to the number of scoops of ice cream he can have per evening between shopping days.

Harry delights most in assessing small variations and in incorporating his analyses into his life work, his schema, a model dynamic in conception and execution. These assessments are barely conscious and thoroughly pleasurable. Artificial intelligence be damned. Here is the real thing.

If pressed, Harry might admit to his plans and brush away the question. Didn't everyone have plans? If pressed further, he might consider the possibility of some life form that simply reacted to stimuli without forethought, conditioned responses, or biological imperatives. I say he might consider such a possibility. More than likely, however, he would quickly assess the time, thought, and energy such a consideration would deserve relative to its return. In this case, Harry would find such speculation of little consequence, except insofar as such speculation itself affects the speed at which he is currently dialing the phone or changing a razor blade.

Small variations are easily assessed and integrated into his plan and are met with little or no outward expression. An accident blocking traffic for miles might result in a twitch or two as he considers alternate routes. Larger variations can manifest themselves to a considerable degree before they are integrated properly. Consider the opening of a new bridge/road perpendicular to his normal driving route. In and of themselves, neither the bridge nor the intersection would have been enough to raise a twitch. But the design of the intersection, with its lack of lanes for turns, revealed a complete disregard for the intersection's impact on the standard flow of traffic and for the general stupidity of a population that finds no compelling reason against swerving around cars waiting their turn at the intersection. It was not only asinine but criminally negligent on the part of the designers. As for the general population, it quickly forgot the death of an eight-year-old girl who was following traffic regulations as she approached the intersection.

Perhaps it is best that Harry never knew of the little girl. He was upset enough over the sheer mass of negligence and stupidity (yes, these states have mass, volume, and duration Harry has argued) that he made phone calls and wrote letters to the city, the county, and the state. He considered adding his voice to the clamorous murmur heard by the Feds but rejected that course after considering that the government, at the federal level, was designed to reward citizen input with a barrage of responses, solicitations, promises, and calls for action issued by both parties and the members of the bureaucracy at a ratio approximating twenty to one. Calls to the Department of Transportation, both illustrious senators, and the upstart representative would have resulted in eighty or so federally supported, federally created, and federally delivered bits of mail having little or nothing to do with his complaint. An accident involving the mail truck would have had a greater impact on the problem at hand.

As it was, the city, the country, and the state did absolutely nothing. A few weeks passed and the intersection became integrated into the grand order of the world.

So. It is Saturday. Harry needs gasoline and a spark plug for his lawn mower, five simple items from the grocery store, and to return a movie to the newly-opened video store (quickly accessed by the new intersection). He has wasted almost no energy on the calculation of the number of stops he has to make, nor of the money he needs to spend. Hoping to dispense a few pennies here and there, he counts out a handful from a clay dish exclusively dedicated to pennies but actually holding pennies, paper clips, the odd button or two, and a variety of slips of paper waiting to be thrown away. He has the movie in hand, the empty gasoline can, the old spark plug, and the barest of intentions regarding the route he will take, intentions informed by the proportion of left to right-hand turns, the presence of the aforementioned intersection, and the (again barest) notion that the grocery store should be stop number three or four owing to the relative ill effects of a hot day on a gallon of milk sitting in a car.

So. It is Saturday. Harry is pulling out of his driveway en route to his first stop: the hardware store for a spark plug. Harry is smiling as he sets out. If you pressed him about the spark plug, you might ruin his day. The lawn mower repair shop neglected to change the plug (as well as the air filter and who knows what else) when they performed their overhaul one week ago. But such aggravations are a week old. Harry is admiring his neighbor's lawn and the effort it represents. A true Yard Master, his neighbor owns no less than five lawnmowers, three weed wackers, and assorted spreaders, sprayers, and seeders. A true juggler, his neighbor can keep any three of these lovelies darting about his yard at the same time. Harry, on the other hand, is testing his limits with the spark plug and a twenty-five-year-old machine.

At least a new spark plug won't hurt. The old one has to be bad, charred and black as it is. He's brought it along so he can match the new to old and is proud of his foresight. Harry is humming along. The world is humming. Even Harry's car is humming, having undergone a recent tune-up of its own.

If Harry's foresight is truly as deserving of his pride as he thinks it is, he might turn around in the hardware store parking lot, go home, and wait for a more auspicious day. But, as has been already mentioned, Harry can easily accommodate minor variations into his plans.

The variations begin at the parking lot. Upon initiating his turn, he sees one car—parked. This leads to an immediate inference: he will be in and out the hardware store in moments. Upon completing the turn, he sees no less than four cars careening about the parking lot in an apparent sudden and inexplicable collapse of matter—as if the whole world was meant to occupy but one parking space, the space he himself selected as he began his turn. From a distance, such a sight would elicit scarcely a snort. Harry is not far enough away, however, to merely integrate this aberrant pattern of events. Far more than a snort or a twitch, he is required to immediately and purposively act.

Car doors swing open. People spill out, rush into the store, out of the store. Car doors swing shut. An unexpected reversal of gravity flings them from the parking lot. All this as Harry collects himself behind his steering wheel, spark plug in hand, the gap visibly too close under the chars and pits from thousands of ill-timed explosions. Harry eases off the brake and allows himself to exhale.

Exiting the parking lot is easier. The acceleration is normal, expected, a hic and another before smoothing out. The wheel has its customary play. The brakes go quietly about their business as he approaches the stop sign. His heart and lungs perform regularly under an ever-so-slightly heightened focus in his attention. He is not surprised as a woman in a red pickup nearly scrapes his headlights in a foreshortened left turn. Surprised? Hardly. He saw it before he braked and stopped well before the intersection. The pickup passes. Harry takes his right.

So. It is Saturday. It is summer. Fresh-cut grass. The muck and coolness of the marshes as the road dips. The road itself has a clarity as if he were walking, the reds and grays of the aggregate, the sparkles. His tires click along. Summer. He tops a rise and slows. Another pickup, coincidentally red, coincidentally driven by a woman, a different red pickup driven by a different woman is moving much too quickly toward the intersection ahead. Barely a moment's attention followed by a brief relaxation of his foot on the accelerator makes a collision impossible. She throws gravel as she comes to a stop. Harry speeds on, pleased with his minor adjustments. Red pickups fall securely into their allotted spots in his mind, soon to be forgotten unless they became part of some larger pattern not his own. Surprised? Hardly. If pressed, he might admit to a tiny curiosity over his initial slowing as he topped the rise. If pressed further, he might have connected that with the early braking at the previous intersection. He might then have shown some sign of surprise. But it is summer. Nothing is pressing. He has all day.

Harry negotiates a left to the new bridge. To the right is a new park on the river bank. Ahead, a traffic light turning yellow. He slows again, the sound of his tires changing from the concrete hum and click of the bridge to a slower, steadier whirring over the macadam. The road shimmers again with the summer smells. Ahead, beyond the traffic light, stretches his morning plan—his first glimmer of its definite and luminous essence. Another intersection, a right, a left, and a left coming slowly into focus.

By the time he reaches the video store, the morning's route stands out vividly as a yellow-on-black diagram. Details, individual points, are indiscernible in the distance, but the luminosity of his morning, of this fragment of his schemata, of the black background between and around these lines are positively enhanced by the faint pastels with their promise of a neon-like clarity. The plan itself, the diagram, is familiar, comfortable, comforting. Harry is beginning to glow.

On entering the video store, the plan, comfort, sight, and insight turn to static as quickly and surely as pulling a cable from the back of a television. All is chaos. Spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, siblings, and parents hold up boxes and shout at one another across the aisles. Six children practice their screaming in the corner of the building designed expressly for them. A plastic play house, a slide, several dolls, and assorted blocks provide the initial impetus for the outcry, but the noise itself quickly becomes a plaything. Three shrieks collide and break into pure static.

Four televisions, contrapuntal, decibels throbbing, lay a largely ignored soundtrack to a different drama, one enacted on the screens. Though ignored and overdubbed with the static outcries, the subliminal soundtrack fills the cracks of those minds foolish enough to enter the store. Rent me. Rent me. Rent me.

Harry scans the two walls devoted to recent releases, calculating the number of copies the store has. In some cases, more than fifty. All out. All rented. He can't remember which he's seen, or which he's wanted to see. He jostles, is jostled, in the crowd standing before the new releases, all studying the empty boxes of movies, movies they can't see. Harry looks for an escape. Comedy, too frantic. Drama, too tense. He walks along the Wall of Classics. Casablanca. Citizen Kane. Has he seen these movies? He can't recall. Shrieks increase. A parent joins the game. Static. Rent me.

So. It is Saturday. Outside it is summer. A breeze. Harry catches the scent of a deep fryer as he surveys the fifteen acres of macadam separating him from the low L-shaped complex—department, drug, and grocery stores inconveniently interspersed with a variety of specialty shops. The static dissipates with the smell of French fries. Harry shakes his head and discovers the beginnings of a headache, a subliminal headache. Without thinking, he adds aspirin to the grocery list.

The yellow on black begins to resurface, not, however, with the intensity or certainty of its previous incarnation. The store offers its own flow of traffic, arguably alien to the path his five, now six, items prescribe. Usually conforming to the general flux of fits and starts, carts inching down the aisles, nudging and encouraging one another through the canyons of food, Harry finds himself out of phase, the carts as impenetrable as log jams, the aisles themselves as eddies and backwaters. The aspirin is easy to find. Milk, bread, and cheese will come as he makes his sweep through the other half of the store. But, for now, he is lost. Olives? He looks to the ceiling. A canned vegetable? Ordinarily, he would come to them as a matter of course, but his course, his plan, his design, though returning after his bout with the video store, is jumping about in his head; his horizontal hold on the world requires fine-tuning. He returns to the fresh vegetable section in search of burrito skins but finds only egg rolls. The kid stacking lettuce speaks a truncated English that only occasionally matches his own. A computer guide to the store takes thirty, forty, fifty seconds to scroll from potato chips to burritos before listing them as frozen foods. He scans to taco shells, with the hope that tacos and burritos might be shelved together. He finds the tacos in the ethnic aisle with the spaghetti sauces. No skins.

He bangs against the carts in the dairy section. He steps in a puddle of cream. He plucks a white cheese from the deep bin and a gallon of milk from the shelf. By sheer surprise and luck, in a fortuitous moment of overlapping design, Harry finds the burrito (tortilla) skins he has been seeking. Ecstatic, if such a state can be aptly applied to a man who has seized one package of burrito (tortilla) skins, Harry experiences a moment of utter quietude. He doesn't even notice the rising static of a child crying in a cart, nor her sister dancing along the bin slapping each and every carton of eggs with an open palm.

The irritation preceding his lucky moment, however, returns full force when, advancing upon the bread of his choice, he finds a woman reviewing her shopping list blocking his way. He hems. He haws. He hurrums. She checks one item after another. Item by item. Line by line. Harry has a momentary glimpse of a future that gives line vetoes to presidents and governors: bread lines running a moldy green-gray weave counter to his fading yellow line. He haws. He hems. He hurrums an excuse me and reaches for a loaf.

"Masher!" she shouts, slapping his hand away. Silence descends. Twenty-five heads, or more, swing to Harry, his hand stinging and red. The PA goes quiet. Checkers check out Harry, his face pinched and red. The store is deathly still. Harry watches the woman huff away, the horizontal lines on her dress flip and blur with her attitude. Harry grabs his loaf and makes for the express lane.

In the relative safety of his car, Harry pauses to consider the life forms he has just encountered. Resting comfortably on the seat beside him are the milk jug, tagged with a piece of plastic tape that indicates its legal procurement, and the bag of groceries—sans olives. It hasn't occurred to him yet that he has forgotten them. The milk jug is already sweating. On the floor sits the empty gasoline container that represents his last stop, his last encounter with the world at large on this, a Saturday, in summer.

His deliberations don't take long. There is really nothing to think about. The video store and the grocery, he recalls, have served only to cloud his thinking. It isn't so much the stores, but Harry himself. He is overexposed, is out of sync, has lost something. . . . Karma? He can't remember the name of the person at work who would have used that term. Karma? He'll have to look it up.

Even as his mind drifts to faces at work, to company picnics, to this evening's dinner, he feels his attention narrowing, focusing again. There is the now familiar yellow on black, yellow lines in a twisted curving loop. Pastel lines inside becoming neon, sharper, clearer.

One is precisely the color of the gasoline he is pumping, the pink/red of the premium. One? A host of red/pink lines, of swirls, of small wispy curls. Dizzying paths leading to a series of rich blue circles. Circles? Ponds? Eyes? Blinking to the attending click click click and summer sparkle of the road. Liquid life.

It takes no effort to let go of everything for a moment, for a sidelong view of this plan, this pattern, this dynamism. Breeze through his hair. Hands through his hair. He recognizes its form as something seen before. On the tip of his tongue, unfolding to confirm a butterfly wing in flight, flapping, two wings, four wings, two butterflies atumble through the air half a dozen feet from his windshield. His plan, two butterflies in synchrony.

He is almost too late in his reflexive swerve, and almost successful in keeping his car on the road. But the front tire only kisses the lip of the macadam and he takes flight, gliding down the embankment.

Atop the rise, two butterflies in the neon sun of a Saturday morning. Two butterflies afluttering.

At the bottom, Harry, standing, scratching his head at this new variation. A swirl of milk and gasoline on the front seat. An explosion of grasses from the grill. The smell of the freshly scarred marsh. Everywhere and all about Harry, hundreds of butterflies winking.

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May 1986: Mattapoisett Nonfiction

Stacie Charbonneau Hess

In the dark living room with the yellowed, tearing wallpaper and dingy yellow curtains, I sat on the loveseat, a burgundy velvet, and tried not to look at my mother. My mother was at her most peaceful and happy while staring at the television. This was before the distractions of cell phones and computers, 1984. I was the oldest and allowed to stay up later than my sisters Kellie and Nichole, who were ten and six. I was twelve, in eighth grade, and my parents were going through an ugly divorce. There were fights in plain view in the driveway, things hurled from one person to another in bedrooms, words meant to wound spat through clenched jaws. As my mother and I sat in the living room, then, the reverberations of earlier in the day prickled in the house, an unsettling quiet after the swirling energies of violence, destruction, anger.

My dad had come to pick up me and my sisters in his little Nissan stick shift, to spend the weekend with him and his new girlfriend in Marshfield, about an hour away. Tina was red-headed and eager to please, buoyed by the good fortune of not only having a new man in her life but his three girls, too. She had had miscarriage after miscarriage and the void followed her around from job to job, car to car, marriage to marriage—she wanted to be a mother.

My dad arrived and after kissing my sisters and me on the forehead and giving us hugs, he opened a bag and gave each of us a present. My mom was still inside, seething. My mother didn’t know about the gifts yet, but she felt the raw rage of injustice and hurt at having sacrificed so much—her youth—from age 18 to 32, to a man who would betray her so many times. She was undereducated, not un-pretty but not confident, and besides she had let herself go a bit in the demands of caring for the well-being of three girls and their alcoholic father—at turns charming and romantic and then infuriating and impulsive. He left her with no money, a crooked, skeleton house she had secured with the help of her family, and these three girls—each with potential, wit, and kindness, who bore witness again and again to fights that ended or started with broken glass, pee-stained mattresses, locked doors, incessant words that rang in the ear: good for nothing, piece of shit, son of a bitch, selfish, bastard, louse—over and over words spoken from a heart trampled on by love, and sullied by unforgiveness. Truth was my mother did not ever learn how to love herself first, at least when we girls were young.

Each of us sisters took our present and opened it and found inside a jewelry box. Each played a song that was supposed to fit our personalities. To the oldest, me, he gave a small, round box with a tiny piano on it. When I turned the key at the bottom, it played the song, “The Entertainer.” I was in theatre and sang all the time. It was a lovely, extravagant thing, that jewelry box. I never received gifts of things of impractical use. Such was the legacy of poverty—clothes showed up in bags on our doorstep from well-meaning neighbors; I ducked my head at lunch and tried like mad to catch the eye of the lunch lady so I would not have to show her my Free Lunch card, and worst of all—cruel family members would make promises and not keep them. My uncle, never convicted for having an affair with a fourteen-year-old student in his art class, promised me horseback riding lessons one summer. The door to hope opened in my ten-year-old heart, and remained bruised by his unfulfilled promise. I was not so much jaded as pitying the men in my life who seemed disgusting in so many ways. I could not trust them and had to compensate for what they forgot or neglected. I didn’t understand how my mother or aunt could stand them. We sisters, despite a few close friends, lived an isolated life, stymied by poverty in a town of relative affluence and success and nuclear families. The shame draped over us like a heavy garment we could not shake loose.

The middle child, my sister Kellie, received a different music box which played a circus theme, for she was the lively, social, wise-cracking one. The youngest received an elegant box that played a piece of classical music we had never heard before, but later discovered was Chopin’s Nocturne No. 4 in F Major. The girls never figured out the connection, or what that particular piece of music might be saying about Nichole. But at six years old, she was overjoyed to receive such a beautiful, special present.

All us girls were still in the driveway in the late morning sun, the kind that is so filled with hope in New England, when the ground is still frozen deep down yet the warmth of spring has begun to release beauty once again into the haze and mist of winter. We were going to bring our boxes inside and leave them there before we left for the weekend to stay with my dad and Tina in Marshfield.

Our mother came outside after standing at the doorway, curious and still seething underneath her crossed arms. Her anger mangled her features and drew away whatever prettiness was left on her face. She saw that each of her girls was holding gifts, inspecting them up close and smiling, and filled with a momentary glee, a reprieve from their lives of want. It was too much that he was the cause of their joy. It was immediately apparent, too, that “she” had something to do with these presents. Their father was far too self-absorbed to give such a thoughtful gift as these music boxes. Tina must have picked them out.

My mother uncrossed her arms and marched forward, unafraid of a confrontation. “What are these?” she spat, as her husband backed away and put his hands up as if he were being arrested.

“What do you think you’re doing? Trying to buy your way into their lives? Why don’t you go back to that fucking whore and she can clean your sheets and take care of your…I mean, what fucking nerve. Do you really think I want anything in my house from you and that…bitch you are sleeping with?”

The girls held their music boxes closer to their bodies. Is loving this thing betraying their mother? Is this what dad’s doing, trying to buy us?

“Susan,” he said, in that deep baritone DJ voice of his, “Enough.”

He knew, at least, that this kind of talk was not for children’s ears.

“It’s just a present, he said. “We just wanted to do something nice for the girls.”

We. He said we. The lid came off whatever control my mother had been exercising.

“Don’t you think I want to buy them presents?” said our mother, suddenly crying. “I have no money, Stephen. You left me with no money.”

This much was true. She was working full-time for eight dollars an hour at the town insurance agency. She chose that job to be near us girls even though she had to leave us alone anyway every afternoon until five o’clock after school. It was fine for the older ones, who had homework to do, but not for the youngest, who just wanted to play outside in the woods but was not old enough to go alone.

At this moment, I made the mistake of turning the key on my music box, and as the notes of the song rang out, my mother’s arm, seemingly entirely of its own volition, reached for the box as if were a bomb and hurled it fast and far, into the stone wall. There, the pieces of the box became unrecognizable and the sounds of the song played in an eerie dissonance as the broken family looked on in shock.

My mother, always a believer in fairness, grabbed the boxes from the other two as the sisters all started wailing, our gifts now littering the lawn. Cars sped by, unaware of the wreckage taking place in the scene—five sets of eyes staring at the wall, faces with distorted features caught between horror and hope.

My father stood open-mouthed, grabbed his keys, and muttered “You’re fucking nuts, Susan,” under his breath. He said, “Really sick. You need help. Girls, I guess it’s not a good idea to pick you up today. I’ll come back next weekend. I will call you.”

With that, he backed out of the driveway, the two youngest girls holding hands and crying, me just staring, trying to disappear in plain sight. Our mother cleared her throat, hoarse from yelling and crying, and went inside to grab the basket of laundry that took her an hour to hang, just so, on the clothesline.

It was a Saturday in May, and the girls suddenly had nothing to do, nowhere to be, no one expecting them.

That night, during Magnum P.I., while my mother and I, her oldest daughter, sat in front of the TV with our buttered popcorn fresh off the stove, the energy shifted in the room. She grabbed the remote and turned down the TV and leaned back in her recliner.

“I hope you understand why I did that today,” she said.

I wriggled uncomfortably in my seat, looking askance and forcing the traces of a smile to my lips. “Yeah,” I muttered, almost inaudibly. How could I say I didn’t understand it, but only felt it? The hate. The rage. The shock. The sadness. Not being able to see my dad. Sitting here at twelve years old in this depressing house in the dark with my mother. If I knew I was going to be home I would have slept at Casey’s—her parents were together and stable and kind, and, though not rich, there was always ice cream in the fridge and no one counted how many bowls I ate.

After she spoke, after I said, “Yeah, I guess so…,” my mother reached down into her popcorn bowl and turned the TV up. Then, as if speaking to the room instead of to her daughter, my mother said, hand suspended in her popcorn bowl, “It’s the guilt, you know?”

My mother’s voice, so full of life and energy earlier in the day, seemed a thread unable to string together the thinnest cloth, though it stitched the hole in her daughter’s heart and stunned her with the gift of vulnerability, but I did not recognize it as such as the time. I did not know how to hug and comfort my mother, as she only touched me to check for ticks or occasionally slap me. I did know about guilt, and felt the weight of my mother’s, even as I wished I could turn the key and play the song, the ones whose notes fell clumsily on the rocks, where they would be buried over in moss and provide soft padding for the girls’ feet come summer.

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Group Project Fiction

Joe Baumann

When Nathan Hughes and three other boys decided they were ready to fuse, he leaned in toward me and asked, in the middle of sixth-period English, if I would be their fifth.  We were meant to be discussing Lord of the Flies; Mrs. Kelley had just given us a crash course in the basics of Freudian psychology, and our task was to decide which characters represented each of the id, ego, and super ego.  Nathan looked at me with expectation, and despite the way I was always having to hide my glances at his body and the others’—Nathan was the shortstop on the baseball team; two of the other boys were JV wide receivers, and the last played soccer—I shook my head no.  Before he could say anything, Mrs. Kelley approached, and Nathan said, “Obviously Piggy is the super ego.”  The others nodded.  She cracked a small smile and moved on to the next group.  I felt my face go red.

Nathan tilted forward in his desk, eyes on me.  They were almond-shaped, perfect on his swarthy face, tanned by hours on the baseball field.

“Oink oink,” he said, and I could do nothing but look away.

—

I told my brother Reggie about Nathan’s offer.  He was sitting at his desk in our shared bedroom, hunched over a textbook.  Unlike most students at our school, who spent classes pretending to listen to teachers and then scrambled to take photos of whatever was written on the board, Reggie liked taking notes, writing in his tiny script with an old-fashioned pencil in notebooks that became smeary with graphite as the side of his hand slid across the page.  We had shared a bedroom since I was seven and he nine and our younger brother was born and needed his own space to cry and be fed throughout the night.  Our parents bought us bunk beds, and Reggie suggested one of us choose who got which bed while the other controlled the decoration of the walls.  He let me pick, and I chose the walls.  He nodded and said, “Probably the better choice.  Nothing has to be permanent.”  Then he claimed the lower bunk.

He pulled off his glasses, thick black things that no one ever made fun of him for.  Everyone in school loved my brother, even though they found him odd.  Because he was smart and attractive—square-jawed, perfect complexion never barraged by teenage acne, athletic (he had run track until this year when he decided to focus on school work), nice—he’d been invited by any number of his classmates to fuse, but for whatever reason he always said no, shaking his head, pursing his lips in a mysterious smile, a glimmer in his eyes like he knew something no one else did, and thanked them for their consideration, as though he was a job applicant finishing an interview.

“Do you think you’re ready?” Reggie said.  He had a way of looking at me that made it clear he wasn’t casting any judgment.

“Not really,” I said.

“Well.  There you go.”

It couldn’t be that simple, I wanted to say.  Why did Nathan Hughes and the other athletes want me, I wanted to say.  Why would those four boys fuse together without even one girl in the mix, I wanted to say.

But Reggie was already paying attention to his notes—physics if the heavy tome next to him was to be believed—and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt.  Instead, I climbed the creaky ladder up to my bed and stared at the popcorn ceiling, as if its pebbly surface might reveal the solutions to all of life’s mysteries.

—

Our younger brother, Nicholas, was born with Progeria, a rare genetic disorder that causes children to age rapidly within the first two years of their lives.  He, like other children born with the disease, looked healthy and normal at first, and it wasn’t until his weight gain slowed but his head kept growing, his jaw and chin proportionally too small and his lips thin as matchsticks, that his pediatrician became concerned.  No amount of heavy-fat formula or putting him on solid foods earlier than usually advised would make his weight go up, and finally, the doctor asked my parents if they would mind genetic testing.  The gene that causes the Progeria mutation was discovered, and my parents were devastated.  They couldn’t explain anything to me or Reggie without bursting into horrible tears, their voices going scratchy.  My mother’s howling sobs carried into my dreams for months; I would wake, startled by the horrible noise as it echoed in my head.  My father could only shake us off when we tried to ask a question, puzzled as we were by the notion that our brother would age with stunning, startling speed, that this was a problem that could not be fixed.  Once, when Reggie, simply curious, said, “Will he, like, be able to drive before me?” our father whacked him, not on the face but on the arm, not hard enough to do any real damage or send Reggie flying, but enough to startle my brother, who was practically immune to fear or surprise.  The look on his face, a kind of broken certainty, made me nauseous, and I decided never to ask questions about Nicholas ever again.

—

As Reggie pulled his car into its assigned spot at school the next day, he reached out and touched my wrist.

“Just be ready,” he said.  “People will have questions.”  Sunlight slanted through trees in a grid of spiky lines that lanced the windshield.  Reggie squinted.  “They’ll want to know why you said no.”
I nodded.  Reggie had been the one to explain fusion to me, how it sounded so final and permanent, and in a way it was.  How it wasn’t sexual, exactly—I’d learned about sex from a ramshackle health class in seventh grade, augmented by Reggie’s more useful know-how, practical info—but intimate, a no-turning-back moment where you learned all there was to know about the people you blended with.  How your bodies would become porous, able to be joined at any moment from then on. 

I also knew that whispers followed Reggie for weeks when a pair of girls from his biology class asked him to fuse with them and two good-looking theatre guys.  And the whispers only became worse the next time Reggie declined, this time to a request from the star left fielder, his girlfriend, and two kids from a private school a few blocks away. 

All day I was nervy, waiting for something to come crashing down.  Through homeroom and biology and Spanish, everything was, to my surprise, fine.  Kids jawed and ignored our teachers as usual.  I stared at quiz questions and took notes, feeling no heavy stares or the powerful mist of nearby whispering; my name never slithered from a foreign mouth, and no fingers were pointed my way.  Eyes didn’t flick in my direction.  By lunch, my stomach had settled enough for me to eat my turkey and cheese sandwich.  I didn’t have a ton of friends—not nearly enough to be on Nathan Hughes’ radar, that was for sure—but the handful I possessed sat with me and talked about the usual: video games, the St. Louis Cardinals, which movie they might go see over the upcoming weekend.

An anxious choke started in my gut as sixth period loomed.  Mrs. Kelley kept her classroom half-dark, the side nearest the door doused in gloom while the window side was bathed in fluorescence and sunshine.  I usually sat on that side, preferring the brightness.  But Nathan Hughes and his athlete friends sat in a cluster by her desk on the bright side, too.  I slipped in as fast as I could into a desk in the dark.  Because it was Honors English and there were way more seats than students, I didn’t displace anyone, didn’t create a domino of disruption to the usual order of things.

Nathan was the first of his group to arrive.  They had not fused yet; Nathan didn’t have the giveaway connective glow.  He slid into his seat on the bright side and looked across the room at me, the smile on his face a combination of amusement and pity.  I immediately regretted my choice, and that regret only grew as the other athletes joined him, sitting in a phalanx as if Nathan was a precious commodity buttressed by Mrs. Kelley’s desk.

I couldn’t pick up on anything she said during the hour, which focused on the scene in which Piggy is crushed by the boulder.  She asked questions about the symbolism of his glasses, and what we thought it meant that the super ego character had been killed, and what we thought might happen next.  Mrs. Kelley liked these kinds of discussions, asking us to predict what we thought might occur next before we got there.  I hated them: why not simply wait to see what was to come?  What value, I wondered, was there in trying to anticipate rather than just turning the page and finding out?

—

Some doctor, my parents said, had come up with an experimental treatment.

“Treatment?” I said.

We were eating dinner.  At least, Reggie, my father, and I were.  My mother was trying to help Nicholas, who had grown weak, unable to hold up a fork, so she spooned food into his mouth after cutting up bits of whatever flank steak or pork chop my father had prepared.  He loved cooking.

“For your brother,” our mother said, nodding toward Nicholas.  His Progeria was aging him rapidly; he resembled one of those old men who plays a kindly accountant in a movie, or maybe a tiny Santa Claus.  I cringed at the associations I made in my head, but I didn’t seem able to stop. 

I looked at Reggie, who was staring down at his chicken cutlet.  My father had drizzled a dark gravy full of chopped mushrooms over them, forgetting that neither Reggie nor I liked mushrooms, possibly because he had discovered that Nicholas loved them.  I scraped my gravy into a coagulating pool next to my baked potato, which my father had piled with chives, something else I didn’t love.  Neither I nor Reggie said anything, unsure of what would be acceptable.  Finally, Reggie said, “What’s the treatment?  I didn’t think there was anything.”

Our father cleared his throat.  He said it wasn’t FDA-approved yet, but that they’d applied to have Nicholas participate in a study. 

I thought but didn’t say, An experiment.  I could see the same thought in Reggie’s eyes as he nodded but couldn’t look at our parents.  They didn’t seem to notice.  My father kept eating, my mother kept spooning, and Nicholas kept chewing.  We made it through dinner, plates deposited in the dishwasher, cutlery soaking with the cast-iron skillet in which my father had cooked the chicken, Nicholas whisked off for a bath.  Reggie and I retreated to our room, where I finished reading Lord of the Flies and he worked on calculus homework.  He was done before me, but instead of saying anything, he went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and lay down.  When he turned from one side to the other, I was jostled just-so, like a little dinghy on a lake being swayed by the breeze.

—

Mrs. Kelley told us we were going to do group projects.

We were leaving Lord of the Flies behind; our papers were turned in.  Reggie had looked mine over and said it was good.  I’d traced how the slow breakage of Piggy’s glasses parallels the breakdown of the boys’ group as a functional society.  We were turning, now, to Hamlet.

“Shakespeare’s most famous play,” Mrs. Kelley said.  “Perhaps his best.  But often misunderstood.”

Mrs. Kelley drew four names out of a coffee can filled with slips of paper.  These would be the group leaders, and they would choose their groups.  Unsurprisingly, she called Nathan Hughes’s name first.  After she selected the other three names, she prompted him to pick his first group mate and he pointed across the room at me.  I was still sitting on the dark side, the back of a row in the deepest shadow so that, for a second, I wondered if maybe people wouldn’t know who he was looking at.  But everyone saw, and although no one spoke aside from Mrs. Kelley saying, “Good choice,” and jotting my name down on a piece of paper where she was keeping the group lists, I could hear the buzz in the room: Nathan Hughes still wanted something from me.  He wanted more. 

—

My brother would be frozen in time.

“Those weren’t the doctor’s exact words,” our mother said, turning from our father to Reggie, who already had a question pursed on his lips.  The look on our mother’s face, of utter tiredness undergirded by a tiny hopefulness that glowed in her eyes, made him keep his inquiry to himself.  If I understood that this was not the time to be combative, so did Reggie.

“Basically,” our father said, “Nicholas will stop aging altogether.”

“Sounds experimental,” Reggie said. 

We were seated at the dining room table, just the four of us.  Nicholas was in his room, being quiet.  He was always quiet for an eight-year-old, never acting like the rambunctious boys I know Reggie and I had been.  I wasn’t sure if this was because of his Progeria or not, and if it was, whether it had to do with him being too physically frail for rowdiness or if his mind, too, had blasted past that age of untrammeled wonder at rushing through the world, settling into the slower pace of middle and now old age.  Sometimes—and I felt bad about this—I would forget about him if he wasn’t in my immediate vicinity, or if, on rare occasion, my parents weren’t talking about him.  He just slithered out of my head as though all memory of him was being sucked from my brain through a straw, his existence obliterated in both past and present.

My teeth ached as my father talked.  What he said was incomprehensible to me, something about genetic freezing, severance of neural pathways, micro-cellular invasion.  All of the words sounded violent and unpleasant, permanent.  I imagined an invasive force marching through Nicholas’s body, wrenching him this way and that, totally transforming him from the inside out.  I understood my parents’ desire to do whatever they could, to keep my brother alive and happy and well for as long as possible, but I wondered how and whether those things could all remain mutually inclusive of one another.

“What if something goes wrong?” I said.

My father, whom I’d interrupted mid-sentence, looked at me like I’d slapped him.  My mother’s eyes widened.  Reggie raised an eyebrow in my direction and smiled just so.

“That won’t happen.”
“But,” I said, “how can you know that?”

All my father seemed able to do was shake his head.  He sighed, planted his hands on the table, and pushed back his chair, which squealed against the hardwood.  Then he was up and gone, my mother trailing in his wake.  As happened often enough, Reggie and I were left alone, and neither of us could muster a thing to say.

—

Nathan had, of course, also picked the wide receivers and soccer player.  After Mrs. Kelley gave us our instructions (step one was to take an assigned section of speech from the play and rewrite it in “contemporary” language), we sat together in a small circle.  I could tell immediately that the boys hadn’t fused, had not chosen a fifth: nothing was different about them.  Their skin was tan and taut from sun and exercise, from their jostling on various athletic fields and lifting weights in the school gym, but they did not buzz with the vibrational desire of fusion.  When they slapped at one another, their bodies didn’t sink together.  I wondered why they hadn’t just found someone else; they were all popular and good-looking, and most of the other girls and boys in our various classes wouldn’t reject them like I had.  Surely, their placid lack of upset was some kind of trick, and a hammer would fall on me sooner than later.

But Nathan simply opened his copy of Hamlet to the relevant page and started reading aloud, his voice carrying throughout the room as he boomed:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

When Nathan paused, one of the football players said, “Sounds like a run-on sentence to me.”

“Nah,” the other said.  “It’s grammatically sound.  Just complex.”

“Well, rhetorically, it’s a bit dense.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.”

“I’m not saying Shakespeare didn’t know grammar.”

“You called it a run-on sentence.”

Nathan looked at me as they quibbled.  “What do you think?” he said.

The others stopped arguing.  I felt like I was under several heat lamps.  “Well,” I said.  “I think Hamlet’s father is talking about being stuck.”

“Like in purgatory?” the soccer player said.

“As a ghost.  He’s haunted by what happened to him, and so he’s haunting his son.”
“Dick move, right?” one of the wide receivers said.  The others, except Nathan, laughed.

“I think he’s right,” Nathan said.  “But what about this ‘certain term’ stuff?”  He was speaking directly to me, and for a second I felt like I was a character in a movie, during one of those scenes where all of the lighting fades away except a spotlight while I was stared at by the attractive, popular protagonist.

“I think that means that he can’t be at rest until Hamlet does something.  The term is however long it takes Hamlet to do something.”

“Seems uncertain to me,” Nathan said. 

When the bell rang, Nathan hardly moved.  I knew that he and the football players had a study hall during last period and had a tendency to skip out, helped by the fact that their classroom monitor was the football coach, who didn’t care what anyone who was on any athletic team did so long as it didn’t get them kicked off the field.  While I packed my book and shouldered my bag to head to math, Nathan leaned back, watching.  I felt his stare in my periphery.  He didn’t say anything.  I wished he would, that he would crack open whatever he was thinking.  Instead, I left, not even turning to say goodbye, something burning at my center.

—

“It’s going to be a team effort,” my father said.  He was talking about caring for Nicholas, adjusting to his new, frozen life.  My parents had just brought him home from his first treatment.  Five more, one every week for the remainder of February and the entirety of March, would take place at his doctor’s facility—that’s what my parents called it, rather than an office, the word facility sounding to me like the gnashing of teeth—and then, when Nicholas was no longer mobile, his doctor would come to our home.  I bit my tongue, wondering why no one had asked me or Reggie if this was a commitment we were willing to make, but I didn’t want to be a total asshole.

My brother still looked like himself.  Whatever it was they’d done to him at the appointment had no overt, obvious effects, at least not yet.  Unlike the public afterimage of fusion, whatever was happening to Nicholas was entirely interior.  He ambled inside the house with his hitchy, not-quite-right gait as always, plopped down at his chosen spot at the end of the couch nearest the television as always, and waited for someone else to turn it on, as always.  Reggie, as usual, was the one to do so, whispering to Nicholas, asking him what he wanted to watch, obliging his interests, which rotated between sports highlights, the local news, random cartoons on Nickelodeon, or, weirdly, C-SPAN; he stared at coverage of Congress like he was under a spell.

We left him to the television.  Reggie, I’d noticed, was starting to have a hard time being in the same room as Nicholas, which made me feel better about my own discomfort.  His waning, wrinkling body was difficult to look at; my brain couldn’t compute that this was my little brother rather than some character out of a fantasy novel.  I’d looked up Progeria when I was old enough to understand—and spell—what it was, at least the basics that my parents shared.  That Google search had sent me down a rabbit hole of the many ways that the human body can go wrong.  Or maybe be different was the better way to think of it.  My brother wasn’t wrong, I had to tell myself all the time.  His body just grew and changed—and deteriorated—differently than other peoples’.  The trajectory of his life was simply arranged at a different angle.  At least, that’s what I told myself.

—

“We could pick other people if you want.”

Nathan Hughes had appeared at my locker after English class.  We’d spent the entire time working on our group project, the second phase of which was to craft the thesis paragraph for a group essay analyzing our assigned section of text. 

I thought he was talking about that, so I said, “I think everyone’s pulling their weight.”

He frowned.  “No.  I mean the other thing.”

I shut my locker. 

“What other thing?” I said.  Around us, students were floating toward their final classes of the day.  Nathan didn’t seem in a hurry, thanks to what was basically his free period.  In fact, he seemed set on leaning there against the wall until I gave him whatever he wanted. 

“Oh, come on.”  He crossed his arms, little mountains of muscle bulging between the bones.  “You know what I mean.”

I took a deep breath.  “You could ask anyone you want.”

“I know I could.  I did.”

I leaned against my locker, the door shutting beneath my weight.  I crossed my arms, math book in hand.  Nathan’s lips curled at the ends but he said nothing. 

“Why me?” I said.

“Why not you?”

“You could have anyone.”  I felt the book slipping and adjusted my grip.  “Just look around.” 

“You’re smart.  You’re funnier than you think.”  He leaned in close so I could smell his breath, pleasant and minty.  Nathan’s teeth were perfectly straight.  “You’re a mystery, like your brother.”

Something in the way he said brother, and then, straightening up, adding, “Reggie,” as if I didn’t know which of my brothers he was talking about, made me realize: he’d asked my brother.  At some point, he had floated the same prospect to Reggie, who had not told me.

“Let me think about it,” I said, and the way Nathan Hughes smiled you’d have thought I had accepted a proposal of marriage.

On my way out of the building that afternoon, I kept seeing clusters of kids who had clearly fused.  I saw it in their inability to keep their hands off one another, fingers trickling into chests or shoulder blades or palms, the way they stood in tight circles that clogged the hallways and doorways and stairwells, how they gave off that coppery sheen, an internal glow that made their fingers look like lit matches.  Their cheeks were flush with energy, as though they’d hit a runner’s high on a long jog through the pungent afternoon and every muscle was screaming with pain that was also joyful.  I couldn’t look at them.  I couldn’t let myself think about what they must know about one another, these things that would never leave their memories, these leaden, permanent fixtures.  The idea of peeling so many parts of oneself back, letting other slip in so fully, made me shiver.  Even—maybe especially—the prospect of someone like Nathan Hughes.

I found Reggie waiting in the car.  He didn’t like listening to music, so the car was silent minus the whine of the heater.  He had nothing to say on the drive home, and I was convinced that he knew that I knew about Nathan’s proposal to him.  The silence was taut, thick, a viscosity that I could have clawed lines through in the air if I’d wanted to.  At home, he cut the engine and then sighed and looked at me.  “Ready?”

“For what?” I said.

“For whatever’s next.”

—

Next was a series of things, not that day but spread throughout a week, though they seemed to happen so quickly that, in memory, I can hardly remember their order. 

First, our group project collapsed.  We’d made good headway on our essay, selecting relevant passages, arranging the basic shape of our analysis, outlining the sequence of our argument with no problem.  But then when we sat hunched over a shared computer in the school lab during class, we couldn’t put words to the page.  Endless bickering between the football players and soccer player about verbiage, about how to structure our sentences, consumed our time.  “You’re arguing about semantics!” one of them half-howled, and another said, “Semantics are actually important to an essay!” and the third said, “I think we’re actually talking about syntax.”  Nathan simply sat with his hands curved like talons over the keys, ready to type but making no moves. 

The second thing was that something went wrong with Nicholas’s treatment.  This would have been his second or third, maybe fourth, round of whatever was being done to him, and Reggie and I both knew something was wrong when we arrived home and my parents were already there, upstairs in our brother’s bedroom, talking behind the closed door.  Reggie, when he knocked and asked what was going on, received no reply.  When he knocked a second time, the door flew open and our father said, “Will you cut that the fuck out?”

Reggie looked like he’d been punched in the face.  He stepped back, nearly barreling into me, and pivoted, stomping to our bedroom and slamming the door.  Our father stared at me, one eyebrow arched in a combination of appraisal and challenge.  I backed away.  Neither of our parents appeared that evening, and Reggie remained holed up.  I heated up a can of soup and ate by myself, letting the laugh track of a bad sitcom wash over me.

And third, Nathan appeared at my locker, again, and said, “What about just you and me?”

I thought, at first, that he was referring to our paper, which was still stalled out, the deadline looming, Mrs. Kelley tsking at everyone to remember her policy on late work.  But then he said, with a shrug, “I think fusing is a little overrated.  Don’t you?”

“So we’d do what, instead?” I said, even though I had plenty of ideas.  A tang of saliva filled my throat and mouth.

Nathan looked at me with hunger in his eyes.  But it wasn’t predatorial, wolfish, demanding.  It was desperate, yearning.  I’d seen that look before: in my parents’ eyes when they talked about Nicholas and his illness, and then when they talked about his treatment, the idea that the unknowable failings of the body could, in fact, be known and thus corrected.  An appetizing notion on the heels of starvation.

“Think about it,” Nathan said.  He laid a hand on my forearm.  We both looked down at his fingers, stuck there on the surface, unable to wriggle down deep into the space between my bones, his cells unable to truly plant themselves among mine.

“Why would you want that?” I said.

Nathan looked like I’d recited an unfamiliar passage from Shakespeare, one too dense even for him and his athlete friends.  He tilted his head, as if looking at me from a different angle would give him a better understanding of what he was seeing.  Behind him, students sparkled with connectivity, and I saw how hollow he was by comparison, how his wet eyes were filled with yearning, how his skin was tanned and beautiful but untouched.  Nathan was desperate.  Everyone around me was desperate.  I thought of Hamlet’s own terrible longing, his father’s tormenting limbo.  My parents.  Nicholas, how despite the techno-tinkerings of a doctor thirsty for glory—or whatever—his body would progress the way it was designed to, whether we liked it or not.  How the only person I knew that seemed nonplussed about his solitude was Reggie.  How he and I would never quite be the same, that something permanent, unchanging, stood inside each of us that made us different.

I reached out and took my turn to touch Nathan, trying to grab at his arm in the same place he’d touched me.  I was about to say, “I will think about it,” but then I changed my mind at the last minute and found myself saying something else, something without translation, something that slipped away into the noise of the glittering, gorgeous hallway as soon as I said it.  The words came out so fast, flung from some instinctive part of me, that I didn’t even process what they were.  But whatever I said made Nathan smile, and for a moment, I thought everything would be fine.  All of the pieces would fall into place.  Everything would be as one, connected and clear and a single, defined picture, stroked into the world by my own hand.

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Sweet Destruction Poetry

John Wertam

Beyond all hope 

she returned

and, one by one,

the black bear dismantled

the honeybee hives.

White pine boxes stacked

not for fate of

death by leathery paw

and pink mouth

but for the sweetness

of giving and taking

collecting bottled sunshine,

the gentle craft.

Three nights the shadow visited

and each morning

through tears and anger

then determination and despair

I set upright white pine boxes.

The Queen, with a painted bright green dot

just above her egg-swollen abdomen

was found clustered and protected

on comb flung far from the destroyed hive.

No more to do but let bear finish.

Be fattened on sweetness for winter's sleep

stings on nose and eyes

tongue and cheek.

Can you not look at the wreckage?

Do you really think

she will not come back

while you dream?

Do you think the shadow of your own life

will not search for sweetness

and destroy it?

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The Golden Feather Nonfiction

Rebecca Rush

“I never rat out my friends,” said Dan, the new camp director. Under the previous directors’ watch, or lack of,  everything went. Dan and his wife Marcy were young and had something to prove. In this moment, it was that they could kick me out.

Mataponi was a traditional Jew-ish sleepaway camp. Every Friday, we blew a fuse as my entire cabin straightened their hair before dinner. We played tennis and broke into the arts and crafts cabin to cover ourselves in glitter. We had color war and begged our counselors to buy us cigarettes. We sang around the campfire and once smoked a joint full of pine needles because we heard that Billy Joel did. That summer was our last. We were heading into high school. The girls who lived in wealthy Jewish enclaves near big cities — Bryn Mawr, PA & Cherry Hill, NJ were growing up faster than the rest of us. The previous summer they’d introduced us to R. Kelly. This summer, we learnt they don’t see nothing wrong with a little shop & lift.

It took me years to realize that he couldn’t have sent home the entire senior group. I stole — on a camp outing to Old Orchard Beach I’d waited all summer for — from a store where they followed you around, waiting for you to steal. I stole something hideous —black satin board shorts with an orange stripe down the side—that I had enough money to pay for in my pocket. They weren’t just hideous in retrospect. It was the nineties & I didn’t even like them then. But I shoved them under my jean jacket anyway. As I stepped on the street fear gripped my tummy. I ran to Starbucks & stuffed them in a garbage can.

“Michelle is looking for you!” two cabin mates chirped as I turned around. Michelle was our unit head. A sales associate found the empty hanger I left in the dressing room, like an idiot or a girl who wanted to get in trouble. Every thing that had gone wrong that summer was attributed to me now as I sat in Dan’s office. What a relief! The pot smoking that happened in lower camp, the soda tabs in the soda machine, the late-night mess hall raids. I wish Dan hadn’t told me that not even they believed it. Because my parents certainly did.

My mother’s station wagon pulled away with me crying inside as the production of Wizard of Oz began in which I was to play Uncle Henry. There was no place I wanted to be less than home.

The next summer, my mother sent me to Outward Bound, hoping it would make me into a different person.

Outward Bound was further into Maine than camp. I was to spend twenty-eight days canoeing, rock climbing, and hiking in the Northern Woods.

My mother drove me to base, where I met the rest of the group. I had a crush on John; Maeve became my best friend; and Michael knew everything about camping, so I named him Tough Guy and let him put up my tent all summer. The two guides were both strawberry blond, one tall and thin and one short and fat. They are peripheral to the story because I didn’t respect them. I am peripheral to the story because I didn’t respect myself.

They charted a course they called Thoreau’s Playground. Sometimes we canoed 20 miles a day. There is one more group member whose name I can’t remember. She floats outside the focus of my memory like a shadow. Some days we portaged, carrying packs on our backs and our fronts, like I do now when I travel the world alone. The canoes sat heavy on our heads.

I loved Maeve instantly. I found her on Facebook drafting this, hoping to rekindle the friendship, knowing that you can’t ever reclaim anything. The Maeve I wrote to responded saying, “Yes, I went to Outward Bound, like 22 years ago!” I asked her what she remembered, and she didn’t respond to that. Most people treat the past like they owe it money. They say, Oh, that was a long time ago, and put their hands in their pocket. Yeah, they mumble. You aren’t getting it back.

At night John & I laid under bright stars, talking.

He was the first person to say that I was pretty without makeup. I drew thick circles around my eyes the moment I turned twelve. I looked like a raccoon who would suck your dick for garbage.

We were supposed to switch our tent and canoe mates every few days.  But we didn’t. One day, they insisted, “Today you have to switch canoes!”

Maeve and I sat on the beach in our canoe, half in the water, arms folded. “If we don’t leave, which we won’t if we don’t switch, we won’t get to where we need to be tonight, which means we’re off schedule for our next food drop. So is switching more important than our next food drop?”

It was the closest I could get to standing up to my father, the litigator. We sat and sat. A maxi pad floated by. No one would claim it. The boys yelled. Amanda, a sheltered Jew from Jersey (the girl previously only in the shadows of my memory emerges as I pull this thread, this being where my memory stored her, what it attached her to), shrieked.

It was hers. Obviously. I rested my case.

We set off, a brutal sixteen miles to the next campsite. We flew that day, clean air, open water & victory. Arms burning, we arrived at camp fifteen minutes ahead. I had matches from the kitchen pack that I’d volunteered our canoe to haul. I rooted around in the fire pits for cigarette butts. I found a few decent ones, sat down, lit one up, and inhaled.

 I paddled like an Olympian after that.

As part of the TTI curriculum, we went solo for three days, sleeping at individual campsites a half mile from each other.

Noel was just across the stream. He’d last been to Utah after being kidnapped in the middle of the night, a state used to abusing people with domination and terrain. I could see him. It’s weird how adult we look in memories, as adult as we thought we were at the time. I wandered around in a pair of stringy black panties. Noel could see me and later said he thought the panties were a very large bush. I didn’t mind. He saw. He thought. I continued to exist.

The second day, I made friends with a squirrel by giving him my Newtons. I ate every peanut and chocolate chip in the small bag of GORP I’d been abandoned with. I hate raisins, and as a baby, I would shove them up my nose the minute you turned your back if you tried to make me eat them. They were all I had left now. It didn’t occur to me the squirrel might want them.

By late afternoon, I was over it. I started crying, my wails echoing across the river/stream like Hylas. I was loud enough that the guides heard me and canoed over, giving me extra raisins & possibly a few pretzels. I journaled or slept the final day.

 We had a big dinner that night, after a mail & food drop. I got a letter. My boyfriend had a new girlfriend. I walked away from the group into the sun, found someone’s camper van & popped zits in the side mirror. With every explosion, he got further away. Maeve reported being given a book when checked on. I told her about the pretzels. We agreed that we both needed books & pretzels from the outset & shouldn’t have had to scream for them. But it was the nineties. You were still allowed to be mean to kids then.

The next day, portaging over ruts, rock and sand, I slipped. One moment I was there, the next, all Maeve could see was a canoe on the ground.

Halfway through, it was time for the guides to let us navigate. We were reluctant to attempt to understand it and therefore were terrible at it. It took me decades to accept that allowing yourself to be terrible is how you learn.

 They warned us the first day that the biodegradable soap we had would cause diarrhea if it got in your mouth, setting it up so that it could be my fault the day I shit seventeen times. Sure, Molly, I didn’t rinse my hands well enough in the river. That’ll fix it!  I sat on a pack in the middle of a canoe while two others rowed that day. Every time I needed to go, I had to ask them to pull over, then scramble deep enough into the woods so they couldn’t hear my ass sploding.

Back in my canoe with Maeve, we sang about it. “Every tan, soft poo, makes me think of you, every wet shoe, every heavy canoe I’m at Outward Bound.” Biggie Smalls had just died and Puff Daddy was on top of the world with grief.

A few days later, we portaged through moss-covered boulders in a noon-dark forest. I slipped again, my leg shooting between two rocks. Briefly, I was stuck. Forever, I was done with the fucking canoes. Everyone else was sick of them too. Molly went to a radio tower for the signal that would allow her to ask someone from base camp to come pick them up. That pissed us off more. All the days spent carrying canoes on adolescent heads, across chunky sand in August sun,  and you could always just walk to a radio tower and get RID OF THEM?! It had been days since our course charted through an unavoidable waterway.

Before she walked off, she asked what if we hit water that was too deep to wade through? What if, Molly? Like you don’t know? The next thing I remember was walking through chest-deep water with a garbage bag over my pack, which worked. Throwing things in the garbage usually works.

I saw the Northern Lights on a tiny island crisscrossed with tree roots. The roots held the land in place and wooden platforms provided a smooth spot for Tough Guy to set up Maeve & I’s tent. That’s how my entire adolescence was. All this shame, fear, circumstance, and dragging things around, opening into liminal moments of peace and beauty.

We arrived at the base camp for Katahdin. There was a caravan of people following Phish in the parking lot for our campsite.

 Every day before this, one thing moved me forward: if I didn’t row, portage, or hike, I wouldn’t make it to the next camp. This was our last camp.

“Fuck this,” I said. “I’m not climbing Katahdin.” I would sunbathe nude and without supervision and get beers from the hippies. I would smoke cigarettes in the open and relax. I did not have to climb Katahdin—and nobody could make me.

For what? A whole day up and a whole day back? The air would thin and we would sleep in the coffin of a bug bivy. So that one day adult me could say that I did?

Fuck her.

Earlier in the trip, we climbed Jockey’s Cap, Maine’s biggest boulder. I forgot to secure my carabiner when I climbed the rock face, and at the top, I realized that if I had slipped once, I would have fallen all the way down. So much of what I would do after was just like that. We slept that night in the open air on top of the boulder. I slept next to John and had trouble falling asleep and worried about rolling off the mountain or onto him, but when I woke up in the morning, it was beautiful.

I grab onto the thread of the memory, and more and more and more comes, like when I sit down to journal my dreams remembering only one thing and the unspooling from that fills a page.

My friends didn’t want to hike Katahdin either, and in the end, one guide took two girls, and the other stayed back with the rest of us, and I didn’t get drunk and I didn’t get naked. I don’t think Tough Guy went with them. I wish I remembered his real name. I would add him on Facebook right now and ask him.

 I guess it doesn’t really matter. I don’t remember much else from those few days. Had I hiked Katahdin? That I would remember.

The van came for us, and we went back to our promised shower, which turned out to be an icy garden hose and a large garbage can. At the farewell dinner, the guides made speeches and introduced the golden feather, a tiny charm that they would or would not be offering to us based on how much we embodied the spirit of Outward Bound, or whatever. Two people had left in the first week, and everyone thought I would be one of them, but I wasn’t. Someone brought that up. We made speeches to each other about how much we had grown and learnt. I counted and saw that there were enough feathers on the table for everyone.

When it was my turn to hear about me they said, “Your energy drove the group, but you complained a lot. What’s the point of complaining if you’re going to do it anyway? For this reason, we are not offering you a feather.”

Every other person was offered a feather.

“I did not do it anyway,” I said. “I did not hike Katahdin, and I was done with the canoes when I was done with them. And I am never going to see either of you again.”

I reached across the table and took the feather, holding onto it for so long it surprised me.

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Finding Fiction

Kelly Clendenin

There’s a certain kind of sadness that comes out in night-time car rides.

It’s 2am and you’re exhausted from the entire repetitiveness of school, homework, and contemplating whether or not you are doing what you love or just what you were told you were good at so you stuck with it because your self-worth comes from praise. You’re going through a Mcdonald’s drive-thru because it’s the only thing open and you want some shitty food because it matches your mood. The lights from the menu blind your eyes because they’re accustomed to the dark roads but you need to read the menu to make a decision. Do you get the Buy one Get one for $1? The Fish-filet? The 10 pc chicken nugget meal? Which one will make you feel the most and least shitty without absolutely breaking your account?

You don’t decide fast enough and get what you always order instead: 2 cheeseburgers and a medium fry. You pull up to the second window because no one is working the first one because it’s 2am and the McDonald’s employees are exhausted from having to deal with customers like yourself coming in at 2am. Why are you coming in at 2am in the first place?

So you pay the $7.67 which you’ll later regret because maybe your mom will need the money for the bills or perhaps you’ll need it for a rare tornado despite the fact that there hasn’t been a tornado in your area in God knows how long.

You’re given your card back along with a greasy brown bag that contains the equally greasy food. You pull into a parking space in the nearly empty lot (there’s a 2002 Nissan Xterra a few spaces to your right) and sit there. Your cheeseburger is cold and the bread is stale and the cheese isn’t even melted so now you’re eating a cold, stale burger with a slab of American cheese which is all you taste. Then you take one particular bite and realize you forgot to ask for no pickles. You hate pickles. The fries are just as cold and instead of being warm and feeling like a nice hug you taste only cardboard and it hurts going down your throat. You didn’t buy a drink because you got scared you’d need the extra $1.62 in case you got hit by a bus and needed to pay off the medical bill, even though you know that realistically $1.62 would do next to nothing. So now you’re sitting in your busted 1999 Honda Civic at 2am in a McDonald's Parking lot with a scratchy, dry throat from cold fries, a shitty cheeseburger with pickles, and a pending $7.67 in your bank account. Fuck.

-E-

There’s a certain kind of rage that comes with realizing at 1pm on a Tuesday that the Catholic Church is shit.
The question “would you want to be a saint” was staring at you on a lined piece of paper that the 40-year-old religion teacher handed out. Years of Catholic education have prepared you for this question time and time again. She’s assuming you’ll say yes.

You did too.

You’d heard the stories of the people who died rather than give up Jesus’ name. Lawrence who was roasted alive. Peter who was crucified upside-down because he couldn’t die the same way as the Man himself. So on and so forth we were told from the ripe age of five that we would have to die just like them or else we would burn in the fiery pits of hell with no family or comfort whatsoever. Because at five we were old enough to be killed off for the sake of a Man whose name we couldn’t even spell.

You had wanted to be like them. You would fantasize about standing before a crowd and being asked by a powerful leader to renounce your faith. You can hear your family's sobs if you focus hard enough. They're begging you to comply, not wanting to see their own blood be spilt upon the ground. If you looked back, you'd see them reaching their hands out to you in a feeble attempt to drag you away from it all. But the soldiers would stand their ground and shove them into the horde of people, drowning out their cries. You’d stand up as tall as you could, and despite the outcry of "yes," you'd stare into the eyes of your persecutor and say “no.”
And then you would be mauled to death by a lion. Or even better, crucified! And then you’d become a saint and would perform miracles in Heaven, which in your head is clouds and a nice white guy that talks a lot and Elizabeth Swann from Pirates of the Caribbean because she was so pretty and cool so why wouldn’t she be there? And of course, let’s not forget the entire wardrobe from that Wizards of Waverly Place DS Game that you love.
Because again

You were five.

So now you’re sitting in a cramped classroom with the temperature at 50 because the school is too cheap to spare $100 a month to turn it up a couple degrees. You have in your power a chance to live up to everything that your teachers taught. Seal your fate with a #2 pencil you found on the floor and this 10-point essay that you’ll throw away as soon as you get your grade back. And so, with one word, it is at that moment where you became anew.

No.

-D-

There’s something therapeutic about driving 80mph down I-275 with Holy Ground by Taylor Swift blasting in the background. On any other day, you would be holding onto the grab handle saying the “Our Father” despite having not prayed in years because you remember that crash in the Silver Hyundai that resulted in your family having to get that cheap ass 1999 Honda Civic. Or perhaps you’d be asking your friend to turn down the music because those talks your father had about ear-drum safety after a big 6-wheeler truck would blast its music so loud you could feel the bass vibrations through your entire 10-year-old body really stuck with you.

Fuck that.

You can barely hear anything between the song, you and your friend screaming the lyrics, and the wind clawing its way in the car and through your hair. You’re cold since you didn’t bring your black denim jacket because it’s always hot and you’ve never needed it before. But you don't care because the cold isn't on your mind right now since it'll distract you from the fun that you're having. Besides, it’s not like you planned for this to happen. You both were only going to go thrifting. But it’s never only something.  Instead, it was only thrifting, Target, grabbing your friend who lives 40 minutes away because 40 minutes isn’t really that far and they’re basically on the way (they are most definitely not on the way), stopping by a gas station and everyone pitching in for gas because holy shit when did your friend’s White Kia Soul (A.K.A. the Toaster) have only 30 miles of gas left? Then you went to get boba tea using money that you all would regret spending later because you don’t really have the money for a Thai Tea with Golden Boba but it’s a reward for getting out of the house that week so really this money was saved up and you deserve it.  Then, the mall close by that you all have been to 100 times but you might as well make it 101 because just maybe they'll have something different this time (they don't). Now it's somehow 11pm but how is that even possible because you guys had only gone thrifting?
The concept of time is something no one on a friend-high can ever grasp.

Your other friend went home, so it’s just the two of you left in the car and you’re having the time of your lives. Your words are drowned out by all the noises overlapping in the Kia, but yet you both answer each other perfectly as if you were having a conversation at a Sunday afternoon picnic. You’re talking about how rebellious you are and that this is the best night of your lives and that you need to do this more often.

And then your friend turns down the song and points to a house that’s coming up as you exit the highway.

It’s a large two-story house that takes up an entire plot of land and then some. The outside of it is decorated for Christmas. And not just some white lights and a cute little wooden sign that says “Happy Holidays.” There’s a giant set on the roof that consists of a light-up Santa in a sleigh with 8 reindeer and Rudolph pulling him as he waves back and forth to onlookers down below. The house is lined head-to-toe in multicolored lights that flick on and off in a certain pattern as if it were a giant airport tower that was directing planes on where to go. Each window (there are 8 of them) has a giant wreath hanging from it with what seems to be pinecones and mistletoe. The giant white double doors consist of their own separate ones that are twice the size of those on the window.

And then there’s the lawn.

Think of every single Christmas decoration that you see at Target, not Walmart, Target. It’s as if the people living there bought out the entire stock and placed it in their front lawn.

To say the least, if the house wasn’t a dead giveaway that the people were rich, the decorations certainly were.

You and your friend are both stopped in front of the house staring at it in silence.
And it’s then that you realize that no, you won’t do this more often. In reality, you both have been branded as a pleasure to have in class. You work hard trying to keep good grades because you both thrive off of academic excellence. Anything less than an A and you both are freaking out and thinking what you did to be smited in such a way.

Neither of you have a home to go back to.

Instead, your friend has a one story house where anger resides dormant, ready to awaken at any moment just as the roof that is teetering on its last few hinges before it caves in.

You have an apartment on 8th that currently has mold festering along the walls that you know is affecting your health, but can’t be helped besides some DampRid and bleach.

On top of that, as older siblings, you both have jobs to do. Laundry at 1am in the room where anal beads and weed linger, watching your siblings whilst making Tostino’s Pepperoni Pizza Rolls, and trying to maintain the peace between your parents who really should get a divorce, but stay together because its healthier for kids to have both parents. You simply just don’t have the time.
There’s a nostalgic look in both of your eyes for something that never was but could have been in another life.

Your friend starts driving again, this time a respectable 35 mph because you both silently agree that you need to soak up these last 12 minutes together.

The windows are still rolled down. The wind hits your body once more.

You're cold.

-E-

There’s something both enchanting and devastating about being a hopeless romantic. Because there you are watching the Me Before You scene where Will gives Emilia the bumblebee tights and you’re sobbing. But you aren’t sad because you’re upset.
Well, you are.

At 18, your only romantic experience is the time you realized you were bisexual at the Captain Marvel premiere because holy shit Brie Larson is super pretty and you realized that wasn’t a straight thought. But when have you ever had a straight thought?

Because you realized you always had an obsession with Elizabeth Swann since you were five. You thought you just liked her because she was a powerful female character in your favorite pirate film series. It was straight to constantly talk about her and think about how pretty she was and want to be her.

No, you wanted to be with her.

And then there was intentionally turning your entire focus away from the Victoria’s Secret store in the mall because of all the ladies on the boards. It was indecent and scandalous you had told yourself at 13.

It turns out, it’s not straight to get nervous and flustered around pretty women in lingerie.

So to fix your lonely heart, you’ve put on one of your favorite comfort movies. And now you’re sobbing while holding your giant cow squishmallow as Me Before You continues to play on your Motorola with an annoying crack on the screen dividing the characters and making the entire situation worse. Snot and tissues cover your poorly made bed because you just haven’t been able to bring yourself to fix it the past week after dealing with your mother passively saying in that southern way that you looked fat in the outfit that you mistakenly had shown her out of excitement.

You want to just reach in and shake some sense into Will because he can’t just leave Louisa. He loves her. But you know that there’s nothing you can do from your curled-up fetal position. And so you’re going to have to watch Will decide his fate. And you’re going to have to watch Louisa cope with his death. And that breaks you.

But you're also happy. You’re happy for Louisa even though you already know that they won’t be together in the end. Because at that moment she has love. Will isn’t dead yet. He’s there, right by her side, celebrating her birthday. She has someone who shows how much he cares by remembering the fact she loved those tights when she was little and pulled some strings for her to get an exact pair made despite the fact that they were discontinued. And you think that they are ugly with what she's wearing and will clash with most of the outfits she’ll wear throughout the movie. And you tell yourself that the bumblebee tights wouldn’t go with any of the unfolded clothes in your drawers or the ones hanging by a sleeve on the rack. Who would even want to own a pair of tights like those? What about pink? Or black? Those go with a ton of different colors you tell yourself as you wipe your runny nose with one of the used-up tissues next to your head and squeeze your cow a little tighter.

You would give anything for bumblebee tights.

-N-

There’s something about sitting on a torn-up green couch with three roommates while cheering on a bearded dragon that feels like home.

You never thought you’d like bearded dragons. But Ralphie has just made his way into your heart as he scurries his way over to your fourth roommate, who has placed a worm by himself to have Ralphie come to him. You still don’t like worms, of course. You’ll never touch one of those for as long as you live. But you love the way Ralphie perks up and slides across the tile to chomp down on the little beast. So, you suppose you’ll put up with them for his sake.

Because, how could you not, for little Ralphie?

Plants of all different shapes and sizes decorate the living room that for the past 3 years of different roommates had remained barren and old. The smell of Patchouli and basil linger in the room, dispersing the dust smell that used to fill your nostrils whenever you stepped into the dorm after walking up five flights of stairs because the elevators were broken again.

There’s something about the way your laughter echoes throughout the entire living room of the dorm, with squishmallows taking up most of the couch to the point you have to strategically move them around to make room for all three of you. But you don’t mind the mound of them because being squished by both them and the left side of one of your roommates is comforting. And you don’t mind the shouts from all of you, which you otherwise would find overwhelming and scary if you were back with your family. But instead, the noises are more than welcome, because it isn’t like a commander shouting orders to his subordinates as they prepare for war. It’s like when there’s 10 seconds left in the World Cup and the star player for the underdogs makes the winning shot that has everyone jumping out of their seats and hugging the stranger next to them. It’s standing in the pit at your favorite singer’s concert when you are shouting out the lyrics that you know by heart and they look at you and smile. It’s meeting for coffee with a friend that you haven’t seen in years, but are able to easily go back in time to when you both were 15 as soon as you catch a glimpse of each other.

There’s something about the way in which the room brightens with the shitty fluorescent lights that the school provides that reminds you of bumblebee tights. Because there’s a smile on everyone’s face as “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure plays on the TV in the background while Ralphie is held up by your roommate like Simba in The Lion King. There’s your other roommate’s Strawberry Ouioui from ItemLabel named Razputin sitting on the ledge of the TV stand perhaps judging you with its beady little eyes that have fallen out more than once. Soon, your own Ouioui collectible will be arriving, and it can join Razputin on the ledge of the TV and judge you all as your mental health relies on this animal that probably doesn’t even know its own name. But it’s too late in the evening to be thinking like college students. Right now, all of you are 20-year-olds who don’t know exactly what you want to do with your lives. But you’ve at least got each other.

So you may not have the perfect family life. You may still be single and haven’t had the hopeless romantic relationship that your 12-year-old self dreamed about happening in college. You may have a beaten-up 1999 Honda Civic that is on its last legs. And dammit, you still have a hard time asking for no pickles on your McDonald’s cheeseburger.

 But you’re here tonight, learning to love bearded dragons and laughing with the newfound family that you’ve made.

 There’s something about now that's good enough for you.

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Scary Monsters Nonfiction

Thomas Page

The face paint stings a bit. The faint smell of aerosol and chlorine clings to my clothes. Our backstage area is in the waterpark’s changing rooms. During the summer, park guests fought over expensive cabanas while the same ten songs blared over the speakers. This time of year, it is the home base for about fifty scare actors waiting to be unleashed onto the excited public just outside the waterpark. I got dressed in the men’s locker room cluttered with an array of fake blood, plastic masks, and prosthetics. I’ve been in the makeup chair for about twenty minutes. My eyes sting the most. I can feel the aqua paint crust on my skin. The effect is supposed to make my face pop with 3D glasses on. The makeup artist looks over my face. She then decides to put some aqua paint in my beard.

“Okay, you’re ready, Captain Hook. Send in the next ghoul,” she says.

I stumble out of the chair. As a “ghoul,” the park’s name for a scare actor, I was told to wear all-black shoes. I only have an old pair of Van Slip-Ons with a wide white band. My shoes are covered in black electrical tape which has peeled off already. I was also told to wear black pants. My only pair are frumpy black sweatpants. Flecks of sticky aqua paint stain my red puffy pirate shirt. The hook has a handle I hold on to, which causes my hand to cramp. I catch a glimpse of myself in the dressing room’s mirror. I look like a grimy, smoke-stained pirate who works at a discount rate for birthday parties. How am I going to be scary? I think to myself.      

John is waiting for me outside. His costume is a bloodied neon-painted jumpsuit. He’s supposed to be a post-nuclear disaster survivor or a cannibal. I can’t remember what he told me when we both got hired a couple of weeks ago. His face has been spraypainted blue. He’s eating a granola bar.

“Cool makeup,” he says through a layer of granola and chocolate chips.

“Thanks,” I say.

He offers me a granola bar. I’m too nervous to eat so I shake my head. I don’t want to throw up in front of the guests. We’re going to march from the waterpark to the backstage area behind the Entertainment building in less than an hour. I try to remember our stage directions for the opening show, but they get murky as I get more nervous. I believe that once we see the cherry-picker lift our local demon-king above the trees, we are supposed to run out and start scaring park guests, or something like that. It feels too late to ask my manager if that’s correct.

I look over to John, who doesn’t seem fazed at all. John is my opposite: friendly, talkative, and confident. He’s been speaking for both of us for as long as I can remember. We’re a good team. He does all the talking. I just stand behind him while sometimes nodding my head at what he says. It’s a classic pairing for a reason.  

I’m about to ask him if he’s nervous when he suddenly takes my hand, “We got to say hi to everyone before it’s showtime!”

I don’t get in a word edgewise as he drags me to the rest of the group. They’re all standing under awnings, trying to protect themselves from the heat of the late September afternoon sun. We make a tour of all the other ghouls. It’s a flurry of names as John introduces us in a rushed “I’m John and this is my little big bro, Tommy,” before he bounces off to the next person. I caught a few things on this whirlwind tour: veteran actors make their own characters and the newbies like me are also nervous. Anything else, like what their names are, is lost in the rush to meet the other fifty-ish ghouls standing outside.

“All right, ghouls. Line up!” one of the managers shouts.

It is time. I have to face the fact that I must be scary now despite how unscary I feel.

I sort of black out during the walk from the waterpark to the main park. John is growling and screaming at guests. I don’t remember doing much of anything as we walked to the area just outside of the stage where the opening show takes place. Guests tried to entice me to scare them, but I froze. Once we’re backstage, John turns to me and asks, “Are you okay, bro?”

“Yeah,” I lie. “I’m great.”

“Good. I think I like scaring people.”

“Awesome,” I give a thumbs up and a smile.

The opening show goes on for about twenty minutes. The backstage area behind the Entertainment Building is small for fifty ghouls pressing up against the fence. It’s hard to follow the show with all the screaming going on both sides of the fence. Most of the ghouls are reacting wildly to the show. I get a few glimpses of figures enrobed in red velvet and dead colonial-era girls but not much of the show’s plot. The speakers are blaring 2000s alt-rock so I can’t get much of the dialogue. I then hear my manager shout, “Go, go, go.”

The door flies open. A mass of bodies pushes me out of the way. John grabs me and drags me onto the midway. Ghouls are running everywhere. Some have climbed onto the stands scaring guests out of their seats. There is a major traffic jam of people blocking both paths out of the stage. I forget that I’m being paid to do something in the chaos. I am dragged by John towards my house, where I’ll be spending the rest of my night. I suddenly remember I’m dressed as Captain Hook and try to scare people. It doesn’t look that impressive being dragged by a radium-soaked mechanic even with a plastic hook for a hand. Once he releases me, John gives me a big hug, then leaps screaming towards some guests.

My house is themed to fairy tales. The room I’m assigned looks like a pirate ship decorated to look like a discotheque. Neon pink skeletons and lime green cannons flanked the treasure chest filled with gold. It’s supposed to look scarier when the blacklights are on. I get into position behind a wall. The lights go down. After a moment of silence, the house comes alive. The sound of an air cannon fires up. Ambient howls fill the air. One of my coworkers cackles in the dark. It’s now or never.

It’s hard to know when to pop out. The wall blocks my view. I am also not wearing my glasses, so I have the vision of a bat. I have my hooked hand peering out just in case. I hear someone coming. I try to lunge out but only emerge when the guests are on their way out. I try this again and again. I have missed three scares already trying to squeeze myself between the walls. I think this is stupid and position myself right next to the room’s opening. I lean all my weight on one of the posts and wait. There are some bottlenecks in the beginning, but guests generally come about five minutes apart.

As the night continues, there is one guest who really stands out to me. He poked his head into my room, looked at me, and then turned to his friend, “Where do they find these people? That guy is huge!” I did my scare routine, and they got out of my room quickly. I thought about that comment throughout the rest of the night. To me, all the people I worked with were just people. A lot of them were students who did algebra homework on their breaks, played Cards Against Humanity, and preferred eating cheese puffs and drinking soda. They talked about their dream jobs after working this one. They talked about where they wanted to go to college. They talked about who their crushes were and if anyone was going to rat them out.

I see a mother and child come into my room. I begin my spiel, “What are you doing on me ship? Get—”

“Why are you scaring my son?” she says.

Excuse me? I think

“Get out of me—”

“I paid 17 dollars for his ticket and now he’s scared.”

I think about the message blaring over the speakers of the park during that last hour of waiting Fright Fest is a +13 event. Please take this into consideration when bringing young children to the event.

“I figured that Fairy Tales would be an easy house to start with now he says he doesn’t want to do any more of them. I want my money back.”

I am speechless. What am I supposed to say here? We’ve only been open for thirty minutes and I already have someone complaining. Who complains to a pirate? I do the only thing that makes sense in the situation: talk.

“Get out!” I shout.

“Excuse me—”

“I don’t care! You’re trespassing on my ship.” I push my shoulders up and wave my hook. She gets the hint and leaves. I return to my post to get ready to scare the next guests.

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redacted Fiction

Alexandra Persad

The first thing Sarah noticed about the men was their sameness. Their artificial smiles and moussed hair above the neck, their unbuttoned polos and severely white shoes below.

Even their positioning, leaning back in chairs and interlocking fingers behind their heads, mirrored each other as if they were more accustomed to being in close proximity than not. They shared a large stretch of life, potentially the turning points of adolescenthood. All of it brimmed with privilege — rectangled pools divided by volleyball nets, imprints of condom rings in the leather of wallets, blinkered romances with girlfriends that were tall and anorexic, not in an unattractive way. Were they nice to them? Erring on the side of generosity, Sarah decided that half were and half were not.

She could hear their conversation from across the room, all of it loud and inflated. They weren’t out of place, no one’s voices competed to overtake theirs. Rich people antics overheard by other rich people — comments about the last hole of their game, how one of them had left their driver on the green. It was a joke to them, the disposability of things.

How do you just lose a club?

Clubs aren’t even easy to lose. They’re not small, y’know.

How many is that? What’s the count?

Dunno. Maybe three?

It’s definitely more than three.

So what if it is?

Christ.

Oh, you’re one to talk.

Last I checked all my clubs are accounted for. The man pointed to the leather bag resting against the wall, shiny rods stuck out from the top like trophies. Only one showed any indication of use, bits of sediment and blades of grass caked on the end.

So I’m not Tiger Woods, is that a crime?

One of the men in the center patted the other on the chest for comedic effect, and they laughed, some of them slapping their napkinned knees or the table.

Sarah shifted her gaze to the rest of the bodies in the room, scanning for some sort of female acknowledgment, a shared recognition of the boyhood that had spilled into grown-up realities.

There was no one. No one to share her observations or take interest in her thoughts at all. It was unsurprising, her expression unchanged. If Sarah were to assign any weight to the moment, she would be struck with a crash of loneliness. She chose to ignore it.

—

The men at the table liked her. They would’ve liked any female under the age of thirty. It didn’t require much effort on Sarah’s part to please them. She performed the motions that had become second nature, sucking in her stomach and smiling without her teeth. She introduced the drink menu before mentioning any of the specials.

Now you’re talking. The man who first accepted the sliver of paper had an artificially full head of hair shellacked against his scalp.

Whaddawe got? Their bodies all bent toward him, encircling the menu like crows to a carcass.

The drinks they ordered were topped with sprigs of greenery and dried fruit. Their appetizers were oysters resting on a bed of ice and lemons. They hardly touched them, requesting another round of drinks and a spontaneous plate of fries.

Oh just what I was hoping to see. Sarah unloaded the glasses, a circle of crystal already sweating on the white cloth. All my drinks.

Sarah laughed politely. She didn’t mind granting them the small gesture. There were no remarks expressed about her, nothing that would leave her feeling deflated now or even after they were gone.

The man on the perimeter picked up the tab. He was quieter, joining in on the winds of laughter, rather than causing them. His shirt was patterned with vertical lines, a glint of a gold chain when he turned his head.

He handed Sarah his card, his fingers grazing hers. She looked at him to murmur an unnecessary apology but stopped as she noticed his eyes. She expected them to be swimmy and thoughtless. Instead, they were the opposite. A kaleidoscopic spiral of moments, shards of life refracting her own gaze. 

She cleared her throat. I’ll be right back with this.

No rush. He smiled politely, also without his teeth.

What a class act.

A true gentlemen.

We should tell Janine about this, tell her what a standup guy she raised.

Sarah shuffled away, leaving the clammy dampness of the table and entering a cool pocket of air conditioning behind the counter. Still, she felt warm and hyperaware. The pull under the arms of her collared shirt, the calcium in the grooves of her teeth, the loudness of their laughter.

She tried to assign value to each fragmented thought as if it could be quantified, reconsidering her assessment of the group, the man in the striped shirt. The possibility of her own incorrectness. How improbable it all seemed at first, but, somehow, more likely now.

—

The clientele was starkly worse at Sarah’s last job. Exclusively men, bitching about wives they did or didn’t have. The gravity of each conversation was cemented in anger. Some regulars neutered it with a lower voice, a softer expression. Each was as effective as spraying a gardening hose on a forest fire, flames still ablaze, but the danger dampened and less imminent.

They patted the buckled leather beside them, asking her to sit, which Sarah did. Complacency was key. It was Her against Them, even when it seemed like it wasn’t.

Her thighs stuck to the leather-like glue, spreading out and looking much larger than they were when she stood. The spandex uniforms seemed to universally be a size too small, leaving mangled marks on her stomach when she removed it at the end of the night, wreaking of fried food and beer.

Drinks were purchased for her every night. It was better for everyone if she accepted. She could tolerate listening to them, allowing the alcohol to cloud her thoughts as she stared silently at a plate of congealed, unnaturally orange wings.

She’s just a fucking bitch when she wants to be. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I’m just telling you how it is. How it really is. I already work seven days a week. Seven days! Even God rested on the seventh day, didn’t he? Now, I’m not a church-going man, but I’m still a man of God. You don’t have to go to church to know that. It’s a fact. A fact!

Mmm. Sarah nodded along, sometimes making passing eye contact with one of her own, spandex shorts riding up their ass cheeks unavoidably as they passed by, shiny red baskets of food in tow.

They were unspokenly united. Their breed of intelligence wasn’t acknowledged by the outside world. More often than not, people seemed to think the lives they led were small and decided as if their existence was so compact it could fit on the head of a pin.

Your eyes. The man breathed on her. He wreaked of whiskey. Bottom shelf, the only thing they poured shouts of. They’re such a pretty blue.

Thank you. Sarah took a sip of her own drink, a vodka soda. Water gone sick.

Why do you work here and not down the block, sweetheart?

Men coined different terms to avoid referring to the Purple Parrot by name, although Sarah never understood why. Disguising something so intentionally only drew more attention.

Sarah had never been inside, but imagined it drenched in darkness, only the shiver of stage lights through the haze of cigar smoke. Were the women even visible through it? Or were there just clouds of pollution and bare bodies behind?

Any man who went there as his first stop was off the Richter scale. Sarah learned the term from Wray during her first week. Wray tattooed her own forearms and claimed to have only ever cried once in her adult life, which was at her mother’s funeral. And even then, it was only a single tear.

And I liked my mother, too. Wray pointed a finger of chipped polish at her. We actually got along. Even when I was sixteen and kind of a bitch. You know.

Sarah nodded, pretending to understand. There wasn’t a single part of her that did, but it was best to avoid the introduction of any differing perspectives before they knew each other. It was only their second conversation.

The first, Sarah had initiated. It was unbearably beige. Something about the inserts they had to stuff inside their bra. She pointed to her chest, how cartoonishly large it looked, stretching her shirt to unbearable lengths. Wray shrugged.

At least we get to cover ‘em – would be worse if we were at a titty bar. Although, I would work in one of those. Wray gnawed on the inside of her cheek, exacerbating its concavity. Would you?

Sarah considered what it would feel like to be that on display, that much of a spectacle. Once, she sat as a nude model for the local college’s drawing class. It paid fifty dollars an hour and lasted for two. The entire experience was cold and uncomfortable. All those eyes on her. The scratch of graphite against parchment. Stodgy, amateur artist fingers smearing blackness onto a white notebook. Her, bare. Them, not.

When it was over, Sarah was handed a scratchy robe that she threw over her body. A gangly man in open-toe sandals and a ponytail asked if she wanted to see the sketches. Sarah could only manage to rush past him, leaving her clothes behind and gulping in the outside air.

Cars sat in traffic, a line of red brake lights. Couples walked by, arms lazily interlinked. The world was unaffected by the most recent moments of her life, everything around her just as mundane as she had left it. Nothing about her experience mattered in the scheme of anything.

I don’t know? Maybe, Sarah answered.

Wray nodded and fiddled with her vape, a lopsided arrow inked on the side of her wrist. She stored it inside the pocket of her shorts when she worked, its blockish shape jutting out from her thigh even when she was still.

Maybe? Wray asked. ’What’re you? Rich or something?  

There was a small silence before Wray grinned, emphasizing that it was a joke. They were the same, Sarah understood, testing the lengths they were willing to go, how much they were willing to give. Sarah realized that Wray would go much further, giving more of herself and feeling fine about it. As if the roles they fulfilled were all just droplets of existence that would eventually runoff and soak into the ground.

—

The man in the striped polo returned. This time, he was not in a polo at all, but a t-shirt made of a thick material that refused to wrinkle, regardless of how he sat. He was alone, but still at a table with multiple chairs, exacerbating his aloness. He seemed unbothered.

The negative space between Sarah’s body and his was much smaller this time than it was when she first saw him, not granting her the freedom to pause and absorb the scene as she had the urge to.

Hello again. His tone was jovial, smiling as if they were old friends who happened to run into each other.

Sarah ran her tongue along her teeth.

Hello. How’re you?

She spoke too quickly, presenting the words in an uncharacteristic slurry. Her neck splotched with redness and warmth. They expressed standard niceties, dialogue that would look bland on paper.

After he ordered, his face changed, the prescribed current of their conversation shifting.

Listen, I just wanted to make sure I came back here without the goon squad to let you know I’m sorry.

Sarah tilted her head as if she were oblivious of the groundwork being laid. What? 

I know we’re obnoxious, he said. We’ve just known each other too long.

Oh, that’s okay. She waved a hand in a no-nonsense way as if she hadn’t given their presence a second thought, their anorexic high school girlfriends.

We also had too much to drink before we even came in here.

Did you? Sarah raised her eyebrows. Could’ve fooled me.

Listen, I’m willing to admit my flaws. I have quite a few. I can’t swim in water over five feet deep, I don’t understand how to use a charcoal grill. Even with lighter fluid. I don’t get it. He looked around for dramatic effect, lowering his voice. I honestly think they just fill up those containers with water and sell ‘em.

She laughed without meaning to, then reoriented herself. I appreciate the tip.

Would you like to admit any flaws?

I’ll pass.

Because you don’t have any?

He smiled. His canines were sharp. Like a dog who lurched excitedly when his owners returned home, but was still hardwired with a biological evil if placed in a specific situation.

Sarah began to back away. Exactly.

—-

It was a trailer park that Sarah grew up in. She didn’t not enjoy it. There were neighbors that let her splash in their kiddie pool. It was a light blue color with a faint pattern of fish on the bottom, faded from sunlight and children’s grubby feet.

There was a group of them who sat in it, sometimes in regular clothes. Faded denim darkening with each splash, tie-dye t-shirts becoming uncharacteristically heavy. They brought Barbie dolls in with them, brushing their hair and dipping them under. When they got out, they unscrewed their heads, flinging out any droplets that were stuck rattling around the hollow of their bodies.

They had one brother, who was smarter than all of them combined, books splayed out on the floor, detailing the geography of Africa, the different types of clouds, the history of the Slinky.

When they were hungry, they ate Eggos that were still frozen or microwaved pizza rolls that burned the roofs of their mouths.

Fuck it’s hot. The girl spat into the sink and ran cold water over her tongue. Strands of her hair fell into the stream, darkening and clumping together like overcooked spaghetti.

Sarah didn’t curse. She made an effort to avoid it, not even letting herself write it in her journal. Once, she used an asterisk to substitute the a in damn but quickly smudged over it in a rectangle of graphite that nearly tore the page.

If her mother were to hear her curse, she would slap her across the face, a volcano of a wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. It was just the two of them in the trailer. The floor was littered with boxes of cheap hair dye and oversized trash bags of clothes that Sarah had outgrown. They never used real plates — only the disposable kind —  but still threw them in the sink, caked with sludge and inevitably swarmed with gnats.

Her mother never cleaned, not even for the men who visited. Men with sideways cigarettes and long cargo pants and gruff voices and dirtied fingernails. Sarah only caught glimpses of them, her mother shutting the door of her bedroom as soon as they arrived, leaving Sarah with a cloud of body spray and marijuana that remained after they had disappeared. She imagined them as cumulonimbus, large and angry.

Sarah collected what the men left behind. She often found them on kitchen counters or between couch cushions  — needles, change, cigarettes, foreign wads of lint. The objects felt like they had the potential to become important. 

She scotched taped them to pages of her journal, inked arrows with question marks and timestamps as if the items were part of a case that needed solving. As if Sarah didn’t already know what it all meant.

More frequently than not, she could hear muffled moans coming from behind her mother’s locked door or find a deflated condom bobbing along the still of the toilet water the next day. She stared at it for a moment, then shut the lid and flushed. A furious rush of water, and then, when the water resettled, nothing, as if there had never been anything there at all.

—- 

By the time Sarah’s shift ended, it was already dark. Her eyes didn’t have to adjust. The lights inside dimmed to match the outside world.

There was a film that clung to every part of her exposed body, which was most of it. She could feel it goosebump when she stepped outside, wind billowing through the neighboring alleys.

The employee parking spots were placed in the back, beside the dumpster. There was a silhouette of a man pissing on the bricked wall. His hand was pressed against it, hands splayed to steady himself. Sarah was surprised by how quickly she recognized him as one of her regulars. His large stature had never been part of the equation when he was seated. But now — even from afar — he was large in a way that was impossible not to notice.

Ironic, considering how small he was as a person, his biological makeup. All of him, overweight and underwhelming. He used to be in a band, but their lead singer dropped out right when they were about to make it big.

Sweetheart, you have no idea. We had a record deal and everything. Then this guy — this fucking guy — just decides to stop because his wife’s knocked up. I swear to you, I’m not makin’ this up. The whole thing was so fucked. Can you imagine? I started this whole band from the ground up. Just me, letting everyone get a slice of the pie. And whaddayou think I get? A big fuck-you-I’m-out. Does that make any goddamn sense? Does it? Does it?
On Saturdays, he went to the Purple Parrot, but he wasn’t off the Richter Scale, always stopping in to see Sarah first and telling her where he was headed next. His grubby fingers touched her thigh as soon as she sat down. A strip of cold from his wedding band. He asked her to join him, and she took a gulp of her watered-down vodka, excusing herself to scrub his touch off in the bathroom. She didn’t stop until her skin was pink and raw.

Is this your car?

Sarah felt very small, like an ant. She gazed up at the sky. There was no moon, only cirrus clouds, a slate of black behind them. The street light buzzed above her, a curl of gnats swarming it.

Her against Them.

If she were to say no, it left space for him to disagree, escalating the scene into a situation that felt more severe, difficult to compact. 

The spandex of her shorts had already worked its way into her crotch. She could feel it dampening with sweat. All of her was sweating, a bead running down her chest and absorbing in the stretched fabric of her shirt.

Sarah thought about Wray, what she would do. Wray, who started selling her underwear to customers, carrying used panties in her apron during her shift, then handing them off at the very end, wrapped in a brown bag. It was so indiscreet it almost drew attention.

Don’t you get worried? Sarah asked.

Worried? About what?

I don’t know, what if one of them starts stalking you?

For a couple hundred, they can stalk me all they want.

Sarah already knew Wray would let this man get in the car with her, allowing him to do anything he wanted. Wray would visualize the profit in the future, outweighing the pros with the cons.

Sarah tried to play the scenario out in her head, but couldn’t think clearly, flashes of fear muddying it. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar, but she couldn’t place her finger on a time when she had experienced it before. There was a blockage that felt physical as if parts of her mind were completely inaccessible.

The journals she had edited, blacking out text in storm clouds of ink. Sometimes small blocks, and sometimes entire pages. She had no memory of it. But that was the point, wasn’t it? 

The man walked closer to her, closer to the car that belonged to Sarah.

If she were to write down this moment, she would redact it immediately.

’This your car? He asked again.

Her hand closed around the handle. She was careful to not break eye contact. In a single motion, Sarah jumped into the driver's seat and peeled away without her headlights. She couldn’t see, adrenaline filling her ears, burnt rubber stinging her nose.

Her hands shook even after he disappeared from view. She escaped from something that had never become anything. It was silly to be so frightened. She went over the moment once more in her mind, a short conversation with a customer she knew. That’s all it was.

Sarah felt instantly better, unsure why she skipped her shift the next day. And then the day after that, and the day after that. She ignored her manager’s texts and calls until she eventually blocked the number. It felt illegal, how easy it was to avoid people if you put your mind to it.

The only thing Sarah awaited was a text from Wray, keeping her phone face up on different surfaces, checking it repeatedly after random spurts of time had passed. It never came. It was as if Wray had known all along that Sarah’s presence was temporary, aware of an inevitable ending before it began.

—

When Wray’s name appeared in the paper, just below the fold, Sarah had already stopped thinking of her. She even blocked her number to eliminate the possibility of any future contact. The action came with an instant sense of relief, transforming the situation into a decision that Sarah had made rather than something that just happened to happen.

But as Sarah first read Wray’s name, she devoured it with hungry eyes, a swarm of sentences that she didn’t process until after it was over.

Wray had been arrested. Not for anything that she had done, but for her position around people who had done something. Two men, each with illegal firearms. They stormed a gas station, holding up a woman at the register. There was a grainy security camera photo next to the story, their stances mirroring each other almost exactly.

Wray wasn’t pictured. She had been in the car, which also held cocaine and heroin and a jumble of pills Sarah didn’t recognize the names of. Sarah had always assumed Wray was addicted to something, it seemed like a foundational part of her personhood, but she had never considered what it was she had been addicted to.

Wray had met the photographed men at the Purple Parrot, where she started working. Even through the faded image of the paper, it was palpable how off the Richter Scale they were. Did Wray not see how it would end with these men? Couldn’t she visualize their demise? Why had she allowed it to play out? Or was it something else? Was she scared for the first time in her life?

They were questions Sarah would never receive answers to, only guessing blindly at the negative space between their lives, the parts Sarah purposefully thought around.

— 

He returned for a third time. Sarah looked at the name on his credit card after his last visit, but she had forgotten what it was. It was a detail she pretended to know, standing under the gently tornadoed air from the fan above her.

I’m practically a regular now, he said.

You’d be my first.

He looked doubtful, squinting at her. The beginnings of wrinkles appeared in the corners of his eyes. No Botox. I doubt that.

I’ve only worked here a week.

Oh. He paused. Then I’m honored to be your first.

Sarah swallowed and wrote down his order, a formality that they were both aware was arbitrary. Privately, she wondered if he could tell she didn’t belong in a place of this caliber, if he had seen her enough to know her existence was that of an outlier.

— 

When Sarah gave him the check, she could tell he was gearing up to address her in a way he hadn’t before. His posture was straighter, the flyaways in his hair had been tamed as if he splashed sink water in the bathroom during the intermission of Sarah tending to surrounding tables.

Here you go. Sarah slid it across the table, purposefully releasing the silver tray lined with the receipt just as he began to grasp it.

Oh, thanks. He dropped his card in the center. Hey, before you go.

Sarah had already started turning away but stopped. She raised her eyebrows, another polite smile on her face. It wasn’t unfriendly, but didn’t welcome any statement that he had planned.

I feel like this might sound weird, and if it does, you can tell me to fuck off.

Sarah stiffened, her tongue pressing to the roof of her mouth. She felt sorry for this man, who didn’t know the world like she did. He thought he could act in a certain way and achieve a desired result.

If I gave you my number, would you use it? He laughed, running his hand along the beginnings of stubble. Like, if I wrote it down, that wouldn’t be presumptuous? I don’t want you to think I’m like that. You know.

Presumptuous. The word was large in the small space between them.

Sarah never broke her polite smile, one hand tucked neatly into her front pocket. Presumptuous? That was all she said.

Yeah, like, he trailed off. There was no plan for this sentence, for their interaction at all. I would like to take you out, but I don’t know if it’s really something you would be interested in.

When she looked at him — really let her eyes meet his — she could see the shards of life again. He was a stranger, someone she didn’t know and had no intention of knowing. But something had occurred in his own life, fragmenting it in a way that could unite them in a different lifetime if she were anyone but herself.

I don’t really know you at all. Sarah gave him a forgiving smile, a polite exit to the conversation that never should have begun.

But you could, he looked overly enthusiastic now. His canines were hidden, his eyes puppy-like and eager to please.

Sarah purposefully looked out the windows, passed the squared shrubbery and onto the greenery of the golf course. The sun was too bright. She stared into it, letting it burn a hole into her vision that remained even when she closed her eyes.

A sodium flash of her mother. The curdled air of the trailer. Strangers' hands on her thigh. Her pinkened skin in the bathroom. The text from Wray that never came.

Without thinking, Sarah spoke. Depends if the price is right.

His reaction was visceral, his eyes suddenly distant and his smile erased as if it had never been there at all. She wasn’t serious. Was she? Sarah searched her mind, what was left of it.

Out of habit, she winked, trying to make a joke out of something they both knew she meant. Suddenly, she felt the urge to apologize. She was sorry, but for what?

Sarah wasn’t sure.

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