Sinkhole

A sinkhole appeared in the street over the summer. It hadn’t rained in months, and wildfires were burning across the state. Containment percentages, mass layoffs, budget shortfalls, 9-1-1 hold times: The sinkhole felt like another in a long list of calamities we’d learned to accept. My dog sniffed at the edges. The darkness went on forever, mute and terrible, sunlight unwilling or unable to find the bottom.

Walking her again in the evenings, I called out to neighbors, “Watch out for the sinkhole,” or sometimes, “Somebody ought to do something about that sinkhole.” I could swear it was growing. Eventually, the City came and set up two worn, wooden barricades and a pair of bright, orange cones ringed in reflective tape. 

I stopped seeing the sinkhole for a while after that, at least until the plastic tyrannosaurus appeared. Frozen in mid-roar, back leg emerging from the hole as if it was scrambling up to the surface, it carried all the fearsomeness of that immeasurable darkness with it. “Did you see the dinosaur?” we asked each other now. I told my neighbors not to get too close. They laughed like I was joking.

One afternoon, the dog and I passed the spot where the sinkhole had been and saw that the City had cut a large rectangle out of the street. The bottom was just two-and-a-half inches deep and covered in gravel and sand. Some of the neighbors expressed disappointment, as if the sinkhole had deceived them into believing it was more than it was. I knew better, though.

The sinkhole was still there, waiting to swallow up anyone who dared to step on it. The dinosaur was probably hiding nearby behind some compost bins, surviving on squirrels and blackberries. I had not forgotten. Not while there was still sunlight in the evenings. Not while the red sun chased the night sky away every morning.

At the end of the summer, the City paved over the hole. The rains came a few days later, steady and soft, clearing the haze from the skies. But underneath that benighted patch of gravel, sand, and tar, I hear the quiet contracting and swelling of the street, of all the other dinosaurs working at the seams. My neighbors have forgotten they are there, but I still whisper to the sinkhole as I pass, careful not to let the dog get too close.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Pieces

Once More

“Make me a promise,” she said to him when they were lying in bed, although it was not night, and he said, “What promise?” and she said, “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

She half lay back on the pillows, peeling an orange, one of those small ones that have their own name. She dropped the peels on the floor, which was meant to annoy him, but he hardly cared about things like that anymore. Once, the brightness of the day was nothing beside a look from her, and it still was, most of the time.

“I'll make you a promise if you make me one,” he said.

The orange peels were like little boats, curved and clever.

“Okay,” she said. “I promise whatever you ask for, even if it means my own death.”

“So dramatic,” he said.

“Always,” she said. “Now you.”

He looked out the window. The sun was halfway down the sky, moving toward night. “I promise, if you like,” he said, “a blank check.  So what have I promised?” But he was thinking that, after all, there was nothing that would hold him to it.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We’ll write them down and take them out at the right time.”

“Which is when?”

“We’ll know,” she said, “or one of us will.” Her hair was hanging down her back, snarled and lank. She never combed it anymore but it was still beautiful. “Give me a drink,” she said, “and some paper as well.” He gave her the half-drunk glass of almond-flavored water. When he gave her the paper, she tore it in half and wrote on both pieces. “There,” she said. “There’s yours and mine.”

“You don’t know what I asked for,” he said, and she said, “Oh, but I do.”

“Don’t look now,” she said, and lay back on the pillows, drawing the sheet up over her. When she was sleeping, he went out into the hall and looked at the two papers, each ragged down one edge. She had written “I Promise to Die” on the one meant for her. His was blank except for the sketch of a bird flying out the window.

The House Is Burning

Tom and Evie’s father came back for a while when Tom was five and Evie was three, but she didn’t really remember, except she thought a bear had come to visit because he was big and was wearing a brown robe. He said he was wearing a robe because he was living in an alternative community, which they pretended to understand. He stayed one day and when he left, their mother went into her room and didn’t come out for a long time.

Tom found Evie’s pajamas and arranged her animals around her and told her a story about a squirrel who couldn’t find a nut until a kitten helped him. He had read the story at school. He changed the ending because in the book it was a crow who helped with the nut, and he thought Evie would like a kitten better.

When she was settled, he went to his own room and thought about their father. He hadn’t liked the robe, which was rough and dusty. The hem was ragged, which his father explained was because the rules where he was living said that you couldn’t try to look nice, which was also why he had a beard and didn’t cut his hair. He told them this while their mother was making dinner. Tom sat on the floor under the dining room table, and his father sat on one of the chairs. He tried to put Evie on his lap but she ran away, which was probably because she thought he was a bear. Tom’s father said that Tom would understand when he was older, but he didn’t say what it was he’d understand.

He didn’t come again until Tom was fifteen and Evie was just starting high school. He was wearing a suit this time and a tie he took off and folded up into his pocket. His beard was gone. “You’ve got another brother and sister now,” he said. He told them he wanted them all to get together so they could be one big family, but that didn’t happen until many years later when he was dead.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I Am in a Room Alone

with the only music of the morning traffic, those who must rise to drive to labor, and a window often curtained and closed, and in winter, the radiator hissing, the kind from another century, the kind you must be careful or it will burn you. And there is a bed in the corner, and a small kitchen with a pot of coffee, and the murmurous speech of neighbors waking, for they too must return to the world where we are owned by others, who take the hours of our lives in return for wage. I would bet no one in this building could tell you my name or that there is a man who lives here all alone, long after the ones he loved, if ever, have left him, in this room. But then what are the names of the Chechen family who lives upstairs, who speak their difficult tongues, and the daughter who is late for the school bus every morning and runs calling after it in sounds of words I cannot translate as I pray she doesn’t fall? For who would lift her and bandage her knees? I peek out from behind the curtain, but the bus has stopped, and there is her mother on the porch yelling at her, smiling though. And then she pauses to look at the sky, the sky I have not looked at in days. There is absence and wholeness here, departure and what remains. The mother, now, is upstairs getting ready for work. The father and mother walk out in blue uniforms to work on a factory line. I once read the name of the pie factory on their clothes. To spend all day in the smell of sugar and sweetness must be a form of hell. I would learn to hate what I once loved to eat. There is something too often beautiful and terrible at the same time in this world. And then, the quiet of absence returns and fools me into clarity. And then, I look up to see starlings flying over the tenement roofs. I see the pale daylight moon staring down over the boat works and the refinery. Dear Lord, if now is the moment for a full confession, then now is when I will offer it if only you will lesson me on what I have left to learn.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Lunar Logic

There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession. Be my albatross or alibi or flying folding chair.

There is a shoe for every scorpion, and every scorpion is in its shoe. Causation is only a partial order. At one end of every spectrum is an oxymoron; at the other, a redundancy. The continents have shifted in submission.

I thought you were serious until you said, But seriously. Just give me a place to pirouette, and I'll say it's an honor to be othered. Do you take the absentee to be an absolute? Each ethical dilemma is a trolley problem and—

today's the day the great apes have their picnic. I pronounce them separate entities. They want to know when will the bliss kick in. If I'm no angel, you're no angel. Keep your hands and feet where I can see them.

Although Sisyphus goes bowling with Narcissus, Sisyphus is no Narcissus. Quadrupeds are penitent and up in arms. This segue takes place in the nth dimension, and the tango and the bossa nova take the credit and the blame.

The butterfly was in the Bible but was only joking. That catastrophe accompanies the rapture is a given. In a bubble, I'm as probable as not. The butterfly said rest in peace but didn't mean it. Breathe on this piano, and it will go out of tune.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Spells

On Christmas Eve as teens, we amble Georgetown’s lamplit streets, fingers linked, kissing, your upper lip prickly with that faint mustache some girls get. Your dad is a basement shut-in, a bald guy with myalgia. I had been sipping pink sherry at a gift exchange at my grandpa’s house, my crystal glass prisming the festive fir’s icicle lights into rainbows. Recrossing the tall arch bridge, I scale the patina green parapet rail. The steel chills my fingers as I teeter above the tree crowns, the void of the wide black river. Through those balusters, I ask you if I should do it. Not missing a beat, you snuff your cigarette cherry on my half-numb knuckle and a moment later, faint. I scramble back over and kneel beside you, jostling your limp shoulder. An ambulance slows. Driver says someone phoned in about a jumper. I play dumb and say you fainted. The medic loads you on a stretcher and we pull away as a news van arrives. You come to in a panic, demanding they let us off at the Metro stop. After your dad sends you to an all-girls boarding school on a distant river, we pen each other letters. Yours land in my mailbox, a mauve wax seal on the back flap. God, our paths cross decades after, you having refound religion among snake handlers, spirit talkers.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more walleye than they bothered to count. These were sportsmen, Don reminded himself, but the fish didn’t know that. Their bait looked same enough. This lake, a hundred miles north of Nowhere, Ontario, had no roads, service, or even plumbing—nothing but water, wood, and fish. If men weren’t equal here, equality anywhere was a joke.

They floated alone in a murky bay. Jigging, their lines were taut with sparkle beetles and curly tails. Nothing was biting. They were the first on the lake, and if need be, they’d be the last to come in, even under thunderheads. Don’s wife would not approve, but this wasn’t her world. This land was untouched, primordial. When Hannibal marched on Rome, this land looked no different. This was Nature as it should be—a newborn. The wind picked up, snapping at his hood.

The boat shifted. His son squirmed in his seat. Bo was an eighth grader already, scrawny and still afraid to unhook the fish he somehow caught. Don knew how important this week was. Bo needed something special, like a good look at something majestic or maybe a long crawl through adversity. He had bailed on his first campout—which was in the backyard—but Don had higher hopes for this trip. There was no easy way out here, only the floatplane, an aluminum tube tossing around in the clouds for hours. This was the real deal. A man had died here a month ago, slipped on some rocks, and hemorrhaged. It doesn’t get more real than that.

“Dad, I saw lightning.”

Don looked. Gray clouds rolled along. The wind, barely sharp, was hollow and silent. “It’s fine,” he said. It was a thirty-minute drive. They would stay and maybe catch a lunker to bring in for the others. Those fishermen, hard and wise, wouldn’t be going in yet. They’d sit through the rain no problem, but they’d hear Don and Bo driving in, privately judging them as they’d continue to catch and string their walleye.

“I didn’t bring my rain pants,” Bo whined.

“Whose fault is that?”

“I’m not sitting in the rain just to keep catching zero fish.”

“Shut up,” Don snapped. Bo turned to the water. The wind moved between them, rattling the trees. Don didn’t like shouting, but it had its place. It was certainly better than not caring at all or giving in to Bo’s every whim. No, his patience had its limits. But, he was still more patient than his father had been with him. Don’s old man was tough, raised in a different time. He belittled him for every small failure. Coward, prissy, nancy, runt, he had called Don everything. Just imagine what he’d call Bo, gripping the boy’s neck or wrist in rage whenever he was running behind. No, Don needed work, but he was doing well.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Bo said.

“Go off the side.”

Bo stood on the thwart, rocking with the waves. He tilted and swayed for several minutes before sitting back down. “I can’t, it’s rocking too much. I’m afraid I’ll fall in.”

“I guess it’s not that pertinent,” Don said.

“Just park it somewhere.”

Park it. Don scoffed and continued to jig. He thought more of his father as the silent gray churned above them. He remembered how his dad would drag him to the truck to get feed, his cheeks red and stinging. Or how he’d hate hearing the front door burst open, knowing he had come home. He remembered his father’s funeral, bright and cold in the heart of winter, his eyes stinging from the wind.

Bo was silent, fixed on some other place. Don reeled in and started the motor.

The boat glided on the water before scraping against the flat rock of a wooded island. Bo stumbled out and rushed to the trees as waves swept along the shore. On the other side of the boat, by a heap of moss, Don saw a small stack of stones. Gray and fixed, they looked like a child’s project. Bo returned from the trees and approached the pile, leaning down to pluck off the top.

“Don’t,” Don broke out. The rocks were neat, balanced, even reverent. “They might be for the man who died,” he said.

Bo backed away. A heaviness settled there.

Don looked around. The wind tumbled through the dark green tamaracks. They were sharp, pointing up to nothing and swaying like casual fanatics. Those thunderheads, heavy and creased, were above them now. Don felt a third one with them, a stranger he recognized but didn’t know. He stared at the wet rock beneath Bo’s feet, dark with mindless malice. It was time to go.

They left the island, cutting into the tattered lake. Darker, darker dawned the sky. Don thought of the men already inside the cabin, wondering where he and Bo were. He imagined rain filling their rundown Lund, shoring them somewhere remote and overgrown.

The wind and whirling chop thrashed against them. They braced and moved against it until they came across red cliff faces. Don sped back the way they came, passing through a narrow strait. The wind was somewhere above them, the waters calm. Bo deflated into his raincoat, covering his shivering legs.

The going was slow through tight corners and narrow gaps. Don’s mind wandered and he thought of the island. A video played in his head of a boot slipping up, followed by a thud and swift crack of bone. Another fisherman would’ve been there, twisting his head at the sound. After a single, hanging moment, he’d call and wait for some suggestion that the man was embarrassed and sore but fine. But he’d hear nothing. Maybe a soft, rattling whimper. He’d rush over, holler, pat his face, and jolt his coat, watching a world end. It could’ve been his friend, a brother, even his son leaking through his fingers.

Don thought of what his own father would have done if he had fallen. He remembered his sister spraining her ankle, flailing and crying as Dad tenderly opened the screen door to bring her inside. He remembered him old and gray, smiling in his La-Z-Boy as Bo rolled a Hot Wheels car up and down his shinbone. Or him teaching Don to fish at the lake with red buoys an hour out of town, fingertips slowly knotting the line. He wouldn’t have screamed or shaken Don’s body. He would have knelt in the wake, quietly panicking as he wrapped his old arms around the limp body of his boy, the terror of nature driving away his harshness. He would rock him, muttering for his only son to wake up. Please, please, son. Please wake up.

Don drove the boat out of the straits into a larger basin. The wind slammed against them, peeling away his hood. He saw a slight green in the clouds to the south, and a sober terror carved into his gut. It was the sick color that stalked cornfields on childhood evenings when the sirens would blare. They bounced on the waves, floating in the air for long seconds. Bo, light and high on the prow, pitched to the left and right by the boat’s edges. Don wanted to shout at him to hold on tighter but thought of him turning to listen at the wrong moment and going over. He only watched, as though by staring he could hold his son safely in place.

The lake took an age to cross, even as fast as he went. In Don’s mind, an image flickered of a covered figure resting between the seats. How fast that boat would’ve gone, he thought, as the body was returned to the cabin. They would have placed it somewhere while waiting for the plane. Not in the kitchen. Not outside either. In the bunkhouse, on a bed, and under a blanket. It would take the plane an hour to fly in. Then it would leave as those remaining cooked and prepared a quiet dinner. When the outside air was indigo, they’d lay in bed and drift to sleep.

No, not drift. Sink. Hours of a mind floating before a sudden plummet. One by one as night would rise, a darkness deep and ancient would sweep over the arctic waters, encroaching on the cabin, docks, and boats.

In town would be a phone. Calls would be made, names would be said, gasps and wails and huff-huff-huffs. Details would be discussed. Under the sterile lights of a hospital or the yellow glow of a fishing outpost, pens would be clicked and papers signed. What happened on the rocks would become legal and accounted for in the places where streetlamps, corner stores, and highways burned endlessly and night—true night—was not welcome.

But in the dark, that void pool surrounding the lake, there would be no thought or memory but the fading gray. On and on forever as the rolling stone of time continued its slow crush. The blood on the rocks seeping down, down into elder earth, thinning and dissolving and washing away in the black water. No identity but night, patient, hungry, and final, swallowing every last day and fleeting flash of brilliance. The lights of the fishermen would dim until sleep doused the last of their thinking wicks, leaving nothing but reality: raw oblivion, an abyss beyond sight and sound save the eternal lapping of water on rock.

Rain came at last, first as pellets, then as a sheet, smothering the man and his son. Don closed his eyes, swerving the boat. He blinked and covered his face. The lake was breaking apart. Water rushed over the side, seeping ice cold on his legs and hands. The cabin would come up on the left, or maybe it was on the right. It all looked the same. He couldn’t even squint. The puddle in the boat grew.

He had waited too long. His son would have been fine if Don had only left earlier, listened to him sooner. If only he could open his eyes and see. But he saw only the rush, the quick sweep of unthinkable violence destroying everything by simply passing. The boat crumpling on the rocks. A vaulting green flood. Bo’s shadow disappearing under the rabid wake. Don stopped and listened, thinking to receive some signal of instruction from a place outside of rain. In a blossom of thought before the end, all he saw was his father, holding him and kneeling in the wake.

Three shrouded figures stood at the dock as the boat came beside it. One hunched down and whisked away his son. Another took the boat’s ropes while the last held out his hand for Don, guiding him onto the dock. They shambled across the sopping grass, coming toward the cabin. He moved through the group to Bo. Don held the boy’s jacket, making sure his shoulder was underneath, that he was really with them moving to safety. He felt Bo’s small, cold fingers wrap around his own.

They swung the door open and the fishermen dragged them inside, cheering and handing them towels. The barber was frying fish, and a tin of coffee sat on a low flame. The men shed their dripping jackets, patting themselves dry as rain thumped on the roof. The men told of their journeys back, along with other stories as walleye sizzled in the frying oil, and the wind outside screamed.

Don poured himself some coffee. He stood at the window, watching the storm tear the ground and branches apart. Then, he heard his son speaking from the table. The other men fell quiet, listening as Bo retold the story of border agents stopping and searching them as they came into Canada. It was a favorite in their developing canon. The men had agreed it was the van driver’s fault, fumbling over his words, but here was Bo evoking the shifty eyes of the teacher who had been sitting shotgun, which no one else noticed. Now the men were drawn in as he mimicked their scared faces in the holding area, jutted eyebrows and trembling lips. He was pretty good, working the timing like a pro. The men laughed from the gut, raspy cackles like what Don would hear from his dad.

The rain never stopped. All through the night, it rapped on the roof and pelted the windows. Don lay in his sleeping bag. He saw the past, fishermen waking up the morning after the death, unhitching a boat to return to that silent island. Perhaps they’d think of nature as a murderer or as something cold without thought or feeling. Maybe they sat in silence thinking of nothing. All he knew was that they beached the boat as he had done, gathered some stones, and made themselves a cairn. It was a small effigy. To see it would be to know it wasn’t enough. But cairns aren’t meant to be enough. They are meant to be there and that is all.

Like fingers on a keyboard, the rain on the roof drew Don again to the image of his father in the wake. It wouldn’t leave him, sticking to his mind like a dart. It was more real than the ceiling. He saw a creased shirt and runny nose, shriveled hands holding his hair. He built the image piece by piece until he found he missed his father a great deal. Maybe forgiveness is wishing there was more time between us, he thought, and a stone inside him turned into a stream. He slipped under a blanket of sleep as raindrops pattered on the window, the small, powerful things trying desperately to get in.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Aab

Minoo hasn’t been inside many hotels in her life, so she isn’t sure what to expect from the Azadi Hotel. While her parents are checking in, she assesses the cavernous lobby. Its walls are covered in gold wallpaper with a floral print that clashes badly with the blue and white carpet. There are clusters of uncomfortable-looking chairs, all of which have a view of the three huge screens that are blaring the government television station. She looks up at the vaulted ceilings and notices that the chandeliers dangling from them are covered in a thick layer of dust. The hotel was built before the Islamic Revolution; she wonders if the chandeliers have been cleaned since then.

She glances over toward the reception desk, where her father is paying for the room. Her mother is standing behind him looking a bit awkward, as if she isn’t certain what she is supposed to do in a hotel lobby or whether she should be here at all. Seeing her parents in these surroundings, Minoo feels a rush of tenderness for them. It was a stretch for them to afford this trip, the first the family has taken in several years, and she knows they are doing it for her.

The man behind the reception desk accepts the payment, then gives her father an envelope with the keys inside and points down the hallway toward the elevator.

The décor in the bedroom is tawdry, but it is clean. There is a king-sized bed along one wall, covered in a bright bedspread topped with gleaming white pillows. Behind it, Minoo spots an alcove that holds a tidy single bed where she guesses she will sleep. There is only one window in the room, and its view is of an opulent but grimy building that Minoo’s father has told her used to be a gambling casino but is now a school. At the back of the room, a sliding glass door leads out to a balcony overlooking the Caspian Sea.

The six-hour drive along winding roads in her father’s cramped Citroen had not been easy on Minoo’s stomach, and after helping her parents unpack, she goes out onto the hotel balcony to watch the sun make its descent over the horizon. From the fourth floor, the water looks blue and serene. The truth, Minoo knows, is quite another thing. It is common knowledge now that the Caspian Sea has become dangerously toxic. Oil refineries, industrial waste, radioactive waste, and untreated human waste have all been dumped into the sea for decades. Minoo has heard that the water has a foul odor and that suspicious-looking bubbles can be seen on its surface. But right now, from up here on the balcony, she finds the seascape beautiful.

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together. The women’s beach was marked off from the rest of the shoreline by a tall metal fence draped in black mesh that extended into the water and was closed off at the end. This hid the women from view and prevented them from venturing out far enough to mingle with the men, who were swimming freely on either side of the enclosure. Even though the men could not see them, Minoo and her mother were required to swim in their full hijab, including pants, a roopoosh, and a headscarf. Despite the discomfort, Minoo remembers the day as exhilarating. She and her mother frolicked in the waves, made jokes about what might be visible beneath their wet hijab, and went back to their hotel room with their clothing drenched and covered in sand. She has not been in a body of water larger than a bathtub since that day.

Minoo and her parents do not intend to swim during this trip. They have come to the Caspian to get away from the noise and pollution of Tehran, to be together, and to relax. They plan to spend their days on the coast doing things they rarely have time to do: shopping together in the open markets, going to restaurants, and sightseeing in some of the small seaside towns. They will certainly stroll along the beach, perhaps gather some seashells and dip their toes in the water, but they have no intention of getting fully into the sea. It’s not just the toxicity; it’s the fact that the beaches—those designated for men as well as those marked off for women—are now patrolled by angry female lifeguards covered from head to toe in black hijabs. They do not relish the thought of being scrutinized and screeched at by such women.

Even though she hasn’t been in many bodies of water, water has always called to Minoo. The first word she learned to write as a child was aab—water. It is the word every child learning to read and write Farsi begins with, because it is made up of the first two letters of the alphabet: aleph and be. But to Minoo, learning to write this word had a special kind of significance. She remembers feeling entranced by the way the two letters on the page seemed to suggest the shape of a body of water with a tree beside it. She has always loved the sound of the word, the way it can be rolled around in the mouth and held in the throat for a long time. She loves looking at pictures of the world’s beaches on the internet and imagining herself there, standing on the shoreline. Whenever Youtube can be accessed, she watches videos of female swimmers. She is fascinated by their lithe, muscular bodies cutting gracefully through the water. At times, she almost feels she is inhabiting those bodies, inhaling and exhaling with the swimmers, gliding through the water herself.

~

On the wall in the apartment where Minoo lives with her parents in central Tehran hang two old photographs of her grandmother, Nasrin Hashemi. As a child, Minoo would stare at these photographs in awe and disbelief, trying to reconcile those images of her grandmother with the puffy-eyed, careworn woman she knows as Mamani. Whenever Mamani comes to visit, she sits on the balcony smoking cigarettes and drinking endless cups of tea. How could Nasrin, the woman in the photographs, possibly be Mamani?

The photographs are grainy enlargements that have yellowed slightly with age, but what they depict is unmistakable. One of them shows a young Nasrin, probably seventeen or eighteen, huddled together with four other women who are around same age. All of them are wearing green and white one-piece swimsuits and white swimming caps, and all of them are glistening with water droplets, obviously having just emerged from a pool. The other photograph is of Nasrin standing alone, her hands on her slender hips, wearing a tight floral one-piece swimsuit. In this photograph she has no swim cap, and her long, dark tresses spill around her shoulders. Both photographs are captioned: Iranian National Women’s Swim Team, Asian Games, 1974.

When she grew older, Minoo learned to read the captions and place the photographs in the timeline of Iran’s history. By then, of course, her mother had explained to her that Mamani had been a champion swimmer in the years before the Revolution. Women were still allowed to swim in 1974, and they were even allowed to wear bathing suits just as women did elsewhere in the world. It was not considered sinful at the time for women athletes to display their bodies in front of men. Men didn’t just watch female swimmers—they followed them, supported them, cheered them on, and coached them.

Even now, at age sixteen, this seems unfathomable to Minoo. She knows, of course, that everything was different before the Revolution, that women wore miniskirts, went to nightclubs, and danced and sang in public. In her classes at school, she learned that these behaviors were part of Iran’s “Westoxication”—its exposure to the decadence and corruption of Western countries, primarily the United States. What she has difficulty fathoming is that her grandmother had once been so physically fit, so thin and muscular, so full of energy and vigor. Throughout Minoo’s life, Mamani has always been wrapped in dark, loose-fitting clothing that hides the shape of her rotund body. In the photograph, Nasrin is proudly parading her body. If one looks closely, the contours of her breasts are visible in the picture, and there is even a suggestion of her nipples. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the brazen way Nasrin is looking at the camera, as if to challenge the photographer, who must surely have been a man. The Mamani Minoo knows often casts her eyes downward.

Just four years after these photographs were taken, when Nasrin was still in her heyday as a swimmer, Khomeini came to power. Almost overnight, women were forbidden to swim. Minoo’s mother has told her that when she was growing up, Mamani rarely mentioned her swimming career. The pictures were not displayed in their home, and it wasn’t until she was older that Minoo’s mother learned that Mamani had been a competitive swimmer. When she discovered this, she asked Mamani if she could take swimming lessons, which were allowed in some of the female-only gyms in Tehran. Mamani just laughed at her and said, “In a hijab? That’s not swimming, my dear daughter.”

Whenever Mamani visits the apartment now, she averts her eyes when she passes by the photographs. Minoo has never heard her comment on them at all, except to mutter something like “Yaad-e-oon-roozha bekheyr. Those were the good ol’ days.” Although she won’t say so directly, Minoo knows that it pains her grandmother to remember her years as a young woman who was free, not only to swim, but to go to discotheques and dance and laugh in the company of men.

Although she never talks about her years as a swimmer, Mamani follows the news about women’s sports in Iran with great interest. A few years ago, she was outraged when she heard a story on the news about a female swimmer who swam for eight hours along the Caspian seacoast, breaking a record. She broke the record while wearing six kilos of clothing, including a full wet suit, a swimming cap, a scarf, and a cape covering her whole body. Her swim took place in a secluded part of the Caspian where there were no men present. And still, the authorities refused to register her time because her attire did not conform to Islamic norms.

More recently, Mamani was visiting their home when another heartbreaking news story came on television: a woman who was jailed for dressing like a boy and attending a men’s soccer match set herself on fire in protest of her sentence, dying from the burns a few days later. Upon hearing the story, Mamani burst into tears, cursed at the television, and ran from the room. When she came out later to have her tea, her eyes were even puffier than usual, and her hands shook as she lit her cigarette. She took a deep drag, and as she exhaled, she mumbled, “Those bastards!” through a cloud of smoke.

Mamani had an even stronger reaction when she heard a Grand Ayatollah and Islamic scholar addressing the topic of female athletes during a television interview. The moment has lodged in Minoo’s memory because it was one of the first times she realized how much anger her grandmother was carrying around. The Ayatollah was insisting that women should not participate in sports such as weightlifting because it ruined their bodies and compromised their femininity. Minoo remembers his exact words. “A woman who lifts weights is no woman,” he said. “The integrity of a woman is defined by becoming a mother and nurturing her children.”

As she watched the interview, Mamani shook her head in disgust. “Madar-ghahbe! Motherfucker!” she shouted at the television screen. Minoo, who had never heard her grandmother use such shocking language before, turned and stared at her. Mamani made no apologies. She did not turn her eyes away from the screen but instead continued shouting at it. “You filthy dog! You call yourself a scholar? You call yourself a leader? Who are you to say what a woman should do with her body? Who are you to decide what is feminine and what is not?”

Some of the news about Iranian women athletes fills Mamani with glee. Whenever she hears about a female athlete defecting to another country, as many have done in recent years, she applauds them. “Aafarin! Barak’Allah!” she will say. “Good for you!” When she heard that a female alpine skier had been chosen to carry the flag at the Winter Olympics, she waved her arms through the air joyfully and said, “Hurrah! It’s about time we joined the rest of the human race!”

Minoo’s parents invited Mamani to accompany them to the seaside for this trip, but she declined. Minoo cannot help but think that the sight of water fills her grandmother with sorrow and longing. It is less painful for her to stay at home drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

~

On the last night they are in the hotel, Minoo and her parents turn in early so they can be rested for the long trip back to Tehran. Lying in her single bed in the alcove, Minoo cannot sleep. She does not toss and turn, but instead lies perfectly still for a long time, listening to the sound of the lapping waves mingled with the sound of her parents’ gentle snoring.

She does not know what compels her to get out of bed—it is not a rational or deliberate decision. Soundlessly, she pulls back the covers, swings her legs off the bed, finds her slippers with her feet, and slips them on. Using the light of the moon to guide her, she walks over to the place where her roopoosh and headscarf are hanging, lifts them from the hook, and puts them on over her pajamas. She opens the door gently, walks down the narrow hallway to the elevator, gets in it, and pushes the button for the lobby.

When she enters the lobby and sees a man behind the desk, she has a moment of panic, thinking she might be stopped and interrogated. She doesn’t believe it is against the hotel’s rules for a guest—even a young, unaccompanied woman—to leave the hotel room and go for a walk, but just in case, she quickly plans what she will say: she has a headache and needs to get some air. Men do not question women who say they are in any kind of pain, as this could be an indirect reference to their menstrual cycles. The man behind the desk looks up and sees her, but he makes no attempt to stop her.

Outside, the moon, which is almost full, shimmers on the surface of the sea. The air is brisk for May, and there is a gentle breeze. Minoo’s roopoosh and headscarf flap around her as she walks, but the sensation is pleasant. The moon’s reflection draws her forward, and she aims directly for it, then realizes that the light is everywhere at once, dancing all across the water. She sees no toxic bubbles and smells no foul odors.

Guided by the moon’s light, she moves down the shoreline until she comes to the men’s section of the beach, which is not enclosed by a fence. The hotel is some distance away, and there is no one else in sight. As soon as she realizes she is alone, she does not hesitate: she strips off her headscarf, her slippers, her roopoosh, and her pajamas, and deposits them on the shore. Then she walks, stark naked, into the water.

The water encircles her, caressing first her ankles, then her knees, then her inner thighs, her breasts, and her shoulders. Finally, she submerges her full head under the sea until she feels her hair floating on the surface. She has never learned to swim, but her arms know what to do. She moves them with the rhythm of the waves, buoying her body and propelling it forward. Every part of her body comes alive.

Unafraid, she plunges deep below the surface again and again, like a fish. Each time she rises for a breath, she whispers, “Aab, aab.”

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care. Quietly reveled in it, in fact, since the rusticity, or whatever, sure seemed part and parcel with the thing seizing their lives, lifting their proverbial boats like the wind lifted those bald eagles they watched amazed from the tilted front stoop, soaring over the stubbly cornfields across the road. Her short stories were getting published left and right. So many there was talk she’d need an agent for her first book. Tim’s numbers-theory articles were landing in journals unchaperoned grad students weren’t supposed to be in. Grants and scholarships out the wazoo. Both of them. They kept startling their profs, who, though they taught at really a very good school, didn’t expect to have TAs gunning for their own jobs. And it scared them at first. Not the success, which seemed, in its way, right and proper, if not full-on promised. The farmhouse. With its scabby-red-paint iron roofs. Its turbid-water-vomiting backyard pump. Its creaky, perilously winding staircases. Yet the house had gotten it done. Cockeyed their lives sufficiently to let the success pour in. Country life. The left-field surprise of it. Even if they did still shop at SuperFresh. Even if the old rustbelt city was right there, other side of the “mountain.” Because had anyone told two-years-ago her she’d be planting zucchini. Going to class makeup-less, freckles flying. In threadbare OshKosh overalls from Goodwill. That Tim would grow that scraggly beard, so strange on so gentle and—okay—feminine a soul. And she did know it was obnoxious, maybe, the place’s becoming hangout du jour for both their departments, stealing social thunder from certain untenured faculty, one of them, Rachel O_____, her thesis director, fresh from a program so huge you trembled just hearing its name. Every weekend, by their second spring there, people crowding the yard. Girls (women) lounging in dilapidated lawn chairs under the big elm, under the soulfully glowing Japanese lanterns she’d hung. Boys (boys) strumming guitars, throwing frisbees, arguing Scorsese vs. Kubrick, Chomsky vs. Foucault. People’s dogs romping in the sunflower patch. Everyone drinking. Everyone. All the time. Crashing overnight, as necessary, on the grungy old futon in what it amused them—as it had perhaps amused those getting hammered in it a century before—to call the parlor. Odd interdepartmental hookups. Clouds of patchouli and pheromones drifting over the unmowed, unfenced backyard on summer nights. Scenes seeming, with enough wine, weirdly meaningful, Whitmanesque, every glistening bicep, every un-bra-restrained nipple an expression of the universe’s urge, urge, urge. Cheap shiraz and ice cream made her the teensiest bit chubby and now even girls were hitting on her. Women. Not that she and Farmer Tim weren’t off the proverbial menu. But still. Halcyon. All of it. Until, at least, their third summer there. When their guests, or whatever, suddenly started sitting around staring at those wretched, wretched devices. Caveman-typing with their thumbs. Deploying idiot hieroglyphs to express whichever of three corporate-sanctioned emotions. Morphing themselves, out of some perverse-unto-satanic impulse, into screenbound advertising campaigns for themselves to be consumed by the same people in whose physical company they sat. She could not get her head around it. Couldn’t believe the whole world was poised, at the very moment it was blooming for her, to vanish up its own digital ass. How did she compete with vacation porn, fancy-drinks porn, home-decor porn? Porn porn? How did you write for people craving a nonstop dopamine drip of GIFs and memes? The violence with which her soul, or whatever, rejected it helped explain, maybe, why she let an inebriated Rachel O_____ lap at her mouth and feel her up one August night in the shabby Formica kitchen, a half-dozen highly entertained guests in witness. Compelled, finally, to pay attention to something other than their goddamn iPhones. A reassertion, call it, of the primacy of the real. Unsurprisingly, it was the beginning of the end. Rachel O_____ abruptly quit speaking to her—about anything, anyway, other than the thesis. It wounded her out of all proportion. Probably because she’d never had so pedigreed a friend and an Olympus dweller’s rejection augured nothing good where her own heights-scaling ambitions were concerned. Tim, for his part, pitched no mortified-partner fit. Did, however, seize an opportunity to tearfully confess he was hot for an infuriatingly beautiful undergrad boy—a senior, but still, for Christ’s sake—who sang Jeff Buckley songs like some sort of fucking angel and had over a thousand Facebook “friends.” She wanted to tell him this was not who he was, only it was tough arguing with anything as moronically honest as a hard-on. Circa that fall semester’s start, it occurred to her she hadn’t seen an acceptance in months. That her new stories were insipid. That the raves Rachel O_____ kept scrawling on them were disingenuous or mean or both. That her father was right about her “career choice.” Glancing out the farmhouse’s bedroom window one November morning she discovered a different sort of party happening: buzzards feasting on a car-struck deer gone down in the veggie garden, one standing priestly atop the exposed ribcage, wings outstretched. All those soaring eagles were doing was corralling terrified rodents. After she and Tim split up and vacated the farmhouse—a mere rental, for all their fondness—she took a medical-tech-writing job in Chicago. Which moved her, after a few years, to Atlanta. Which moved her, a few years after that, to D.C. She kept waiting to meet the person—dude, chick, whatever—she’d fall for the same way she’d fallen for Tim. In some state park it would happen. At some gallery. At a work friend’s kid’s graduation party. Kept waiting, too, for the not-just-want-but-need to write to come back. Thought she felt, every so often, her old muse tugging her wrist, then found, sitting down with the legal pad, it was just the ghost of Jackie Collins. Such a long road back it would be. To writing. With ever more years passing. Outrageous, time’s breathless gallop. She often thought of Tim. Teaching pure mathematics, whatever that was, at UC Riverside. Still bearded, she saw online. Married to some younger man. She thought, too—usually while staring out her condo’s dining-room window at a sunset mirrored in the twin high-rise’s glassy façade—about the farmhouse. Permitted herself, finally, to hunt for it in Google Maps. Discovered, dropping down to street view, a McMansion enclave on the ancient beanfield where it had stood. That adorable, scary little house. She’d been harboring, she realized, some vague plan to go see it again. To stop the Volvo on the road out front, mount the tilted stoop. Summon, if possible, the courage to knock. That same night she dreamed what she thought, startled awake, was a memory. Was it? Of the time a Jesus Christ-grade racket woke her in the dead of night. Emanating from atop the ceiling atop Tim’s and her bed. Something murdering something. Farmer Tim unrousable. Post-party fumy. For some reason the power was out. She bumbled downstairs, hand on plaster wall so she didn’t slip and break her neck on that insane staircase. Knocked over God knows how many empty beer bottles in the kitchen, groping around the counter for the flashlight. Which, happed upon, actually worked. Sort of. She headed back upstairs, stepping over places she knew jutting nailheads to be. Opened, on the second-floor landing, the creaky door to the attic staircase. “Tim!” she hollered. Got only a rumble of thunder for an answer. That and more slapping, thwacking, screeching racket from up above. She started climbing, free hand on the steep, dusty stairs in front of her. Air getting warmer and closer and warmer. Holy hell, she was brave back then. Heat lightning throbbed in a dormer window. Her head cleared the tops of the floorboards and she twisted in place, naked feet braced on two different steps. Aimed the fast-dimming flashlight beam into the attic’s nether regions. Stood transfixed by the pair of bright red eyes glaring back at her from deep inside all that dark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Wounded Stork

This story won the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

The dead bird on the front-door step was a barn swallow. Makhosi recognized the copper face and glossy blue hood that continued towards a forked tail. Its clawed feet were tucked together, as if it had been arranged there. 

It was early and the morning rush had not yet begun, but already the air was unseasonably warm. London, Hotter Than Athens, the newspaper declared. Makhosi glanced up and down the street, as if the mystery of the bird’s appearance could be solved somewhere along their Victorian terrace. The city was hazy with heat. Plane trees lined the pavement, their new leaves, vivid and green, arching against the bleached sky. A black cab idled outside number sixteen and distant traffic rolled like an unseen ocean, punctuated by a muffled yap-yap-yap from behind their neighbor’s door. 

“Did the paper come?” Simon nudged alongside her in the doorway. He had tucked his tie away between the top buttons of his collared shirt and carried Jabu in the crook of an elbow. With his dark skin and blonde curls, their son was the perfect, beautiful combination of his South African mother and British father.

“There’s a dead swallow,” Makhosi said and crouched over the bird. Its open eye was as flat and black as a papaya pip.

“Don’t touch,” Simon said and shifted Jabu around his hip, putting his body between the dead bird and the boy. “Lice."

Makhosi tucked her hands into her lap. She’d felt the unexpected softness of a dead bird before. Some time during a barefoot school holiday on her grandmother’s farm in Zululand. Light bones beneath the feathers. 

“Probably flew into the window.” Simon tilted his head towards the transom window above their front door where the numbers one and three were sandblasted in the center. 

When they’d first viewed the house and Makhosi had expressed reluctance at living at an unlucky number, Simon had dismissed her superstition as “an old wives’ tale.” She knew it was considered good fortune for a barn swallow to nest in your house, but thought better than to wonder out loud what a dead one might portend. She looked up, trying to imagine the trajectory of the small body’s sudden, unconscious drop.

“But it’s perfect, as if it’s been positioned. What if someone rang its neck and left it here?”

“Who on earth would do a thing like that, Max?” There was an edge to his voice. 

Dread prickled the back of her neck as Makhosi’s eyes travelled down the row of quiet windows overlooking their street. “I don’t know.”

Simon snapped a stick off the wisteria that draped above the front door and poked the swallow. The jab rolled the bird onto its back. Its neck came to rest at an unnatural angle, exposing the soft triangle of its chin.

“Broken,” he said, as if settling an argument, and handed Jabu to Makhosi. “I’ll get a bag.” He carried the newspaper down the hallway. 

Barefoot, Makhosi took the boy up the path to the front gate. As a child, she would watch the high migratory V’s of birds arriving in South Africa each spring, and wonder about the vast northern world they’d traveled from. She’d imagine silent fields of snow running to the horizon like the yellow veld that flowed in all directions across the hills around her grandmother’s farm. Now, from her home in the London suburbs, Makhosi watched the swallows’ seasonal arrival and wondered if they felt regret at leaving the wide blue breath of Africa’s horizons.

This swallow would have flown thousands of miles across the Sahara, via Morocco into eastern Spain, and across the Pyrenees to summer in England. Makhosi glanced back at the bird. The air-bound creature lay incongruous against the earth. It didn’t seem right to simply dispose of the body. It deserved a proper burial. Somewhere in the small garden at the back of their house. Her oasis. Her mother, used to the more expansive suburbs of Johannesburg, referred to London backyards as “postage stamps,” and theirs was no exception, which was precisely why Makhosi loved it. It was neat and manageable, and every plant was there because of a decision she’d made, action she’d taken, and work she’d done. The accident of the swallow’s death and decay should be worth something to the life of a plant, or the soil.

Resolved, Makhosi turned back up the path just as Simon returned with a hand brush and a plastic shopping bag. He bent over the swallow and with a single, surgical movement, swept the bird into the bag and knotted the handles, once, then twice.

The unwelcome image of the bright body decaying to a slow liquid stench inside a sweaty plastic bag flared in her mind. “I was going to bury it!” She was embarrassed by the sudden emotion.

“Now you won’t have to.” Simon moved towards the bins. The bins that would bake in the heat for three days until the garbage men came. He lifted the lid and tossed the lightly weighted bag inside. It landed with a hollow thunk as another swallow darted out from the eaves of their house. 

~

Jabu sat on the kitchen floor constructing a cityscape of mismatched Tupperware tubs and lids and cups.

“Swallows migrate to South Africa,” Makhosi said as she tore a banana loose.

Simon pumped soap into his palms and scrubbed his hands. “Sounds like wishful thinking.”

She peeled the banana and pushed a fork through the flesh. “Let’s move.”

“I thought you loved this house.” Simon dried his hands on a dishtowel.    

“I love it because you love it.” Makhosi added a spoonful of vanilla yoghurt to the mashed banana and blended the two together. “It’s not the house, it’s more…” she waved the fork in expanding circles, trying to encapsulate the street, the neighborhood, the town, the whole country, “… I don’t know.” She thought of the watchful windows and the dead swallow. A nut of dread rooted in her chest.

“It takes time, Maxie.”

“It’s not a question of time.” 

“What is it then?”

“I feel different. I sound different. I am different.” Makhosi and her words ran out of steam. They’d had this conversation before. “It’s hard for me to explain to someone like you.”                   

“Someone like me?” Simon said under his breath. Then, more loudly, “If you can’t explain, how can I fix it?”

“I don’t expect you to fix anything.”

Makhosi opened the cutlery drawer and piano’ed her fingers across the selection of teaspoons within. Someone like me. She wore her skin, Simon lived in his. But she hadn’t meant to highlight their differences, she only wanted him to recognize how at home he was in the place where she felt lonely. She was a new mother, with a relatively new partner in a new country. She watched other mothers meet for coffee on the local high street, their babies like happy extensions of themselves. They made it look easy. Out of the noise of metal spoons, Makhosi selected the blue plastic spoon Jabu favored. She lifted him onto the kitchen counter, positioned herself in front of him, and offered him scoops of banana and yogurt.

Simon’s phone buzzed.

“I’d better go.” He pulled Makhosi into his chest and pressed his lips against her temple, then stooped to straighten his tie in the reflection of the oven door. “I wish you’d put him in his chair.” He nudged the feeding chair towards Makhosi with his foot.

“He doesn’t like being strapped in.” 

“It’s not safe.” Simon’s phone buzzed again, and his thumbs replied.

“We prefer it this way, nê, Jabu?” Makhosi blew a raspberry on the sole of Jabu’s foot. He squealed and grabbed for the spoon.

“If he’s in the chair he can learn to feed himself.”

“Okay, Simon. You do it.” Makhosi put the bowl down and stepped away. 

Released from his mother’s ballast, Jabu scooted forward to reach for the spoon.

Simon lunged across the counter. “Christ, Max!” He scooped the boy up and carried him to the feeding chair. Jabu arched his back and began to scream, slamming the spoon—slimy with banana and yoghurt—onto Simon’s tie and clean shirt.

“Fuck!”

“I told you, he doesn’t like it.”

Simon handed the squirming child to Makhosi and snatched a dish towel to mop at his clothes. He unknotted his tie and threw it in the direction of the washing machine. “I’m going to miss my train.” He thumped upstairs. 

“Thula, baba, thula,” Makhosi crooned until the boy quietened. She put him on the floor and handed him the spoon.

Makhosi and Simon had met when he’d travelled to South Africa to get experience in the trauma center at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg, where Makhosi worked as a junior nurse. She’d been asked to show the group of young English doctors around the hospital, which had progressed to her showing them around the nightspots of the city, and after working late one night, happily acquainting Simon and his pale, enthusiastic body, with the inside of her bedroom. He’d tugged her dress above her hips and she’d twisted his tie over his shoulder and unbuttoned his shirt until nothing was between them. He’d moved into her flat, and when his work visa expired, he’d asked her to come home to London with him.

Simon’s phone buzzed face down on the kitchen counter. Makhosi flipped it over as a text from Catherine lit up his screen.

– Ready to go? –

Catherine lived next door and was a pharmacist at the hospital where Simon worked. She was one of those girls who liked to be the prettiest in the room. Catherine flirted with men, not because she wanted them, but because she wanted to know that they wanted her. 

Simon came downstairs buttoning a fresh shirt, with a clean tie draped around his neck. 

Makhosi held up his phone. “Your girlfriend is waiting.”

The mention of their neighbor tuned them both in to the persistent yapping coming from behind the shared wall of their terrace.

“When did she get a dog?” Simon asked.

“Not sure, but it barked all day yesterday.”

He accepted his phone from Makhosi. “She’s applying for a new position and asked me to give her a few pointers.”

“I’m sure she’d love a few pointers from you,” Makhosi said, turning to the dishwasher.

Simon pulled her towards him from behind and slipped his hands under her t-shirt. She sucked in her stomach, conscious of how her body had softened since pregnancy.

“Don’t do that,” he breathed into her neck. “I’m sorry for being a prick.”

“Jabu is safe with me.”

“I know. Of course I know that. I’m sorry.” He ran his hands down to her hips and Makhosi moved against him. 

“Not fair,” he groaned. “I really have to go.”

~           

Barking followed Catherine out of her front door as Makhosi kissed Simon goodbye at the gate. She was a petite woman. Well-groomed with make-up neatly applied and her bobbed hair freshly blow-dried. Makhosi was abruptly aware of her own unbrushed hair and the baggy t-shirt she preferred to sleep in, now smeared with Jabu’s breakfast. She tugged at the hem, conscious of her loose breasts beneath the thin fabric.

“Hi, Jamie,” Catherine used the anglicized version of their son’s name which Simon said, “made things easier.”

The little boy offered Catherine his spoon. She smiled and gently pushed his hand away. “You’re such a good mom, Max.”

How would you know? Makhosi thought, but said, “Did you get a dog?”

“It’s my sister’s. I’m taking care of it while she moves.” 

“It barks a lot.”

“I know. Who knew having a dog was so much work? It's like having a baby!”

Makhosi met Simon’s eye and had to look away. She juggled Jabu from one hip to the other as the little boy jammed the blue spoon into her cheek and then her mouth.

Catherine continued, “I’m trying to find someone to walk her while I’m at work,” and paused—her fingers already moving to slide her house key off the ring.

Makhosi recognized in the pause the expectation of servitude. She was familiar with the expression that accompanied it, eyebrows raised, eyes wide, and lips turned up. She knew how to wait out these encounters. She had done it often enough. With the white women at the playground who assumed she was Jabu's nanny. With the delivery guy who asked, “Is the lady of the house in?” when she answered her own front door. Or the woman in Marks & Spencer who’d asked for her assistance and then seemed annoyed when Makhosi replied, “I don’t work here,” as if Makhosi had knowingly misled her. She held Catherine’s gaze until her neighbor broke with a short cough.

“The back door has a pet hatch so she can get out into the yard, which should help,” Catherine offered an, it’s-the-best-I-can-do shrug.

“We should go,” Simon held up his phone with the time displayed. 

The high-pitched bark of the abandoned dog repeated behind Catherine’s front door as she and Simon walked towards the station with their heads angled towards one another. They could easily be mistaken for a couple. Two attractive professionals headed to their important jobs. Catherine’s coat had a slight petrol sheen like the iridescence in a starling’s feathers. An invasive species that must be managed.

Simon looked back.

“Wave to Daddy.”

As soon as they were out of sight, Makhosi lifted the lid off the bin and retrieved the plastic bag with its silent contents.

~ 

The air inside the house was close and warm, as if the heating had been left on. Makhosi kicked the front door closed and carried Jabu and the plastic bag down the hall to the kitchen.

She and Simon had traveled from South Africa to England via Europe. They’d carried their luggage on their backs and stayed in youth hostels and pensions where they’d made love on rickety beds in thin-walled rooms, with their hands over one another’s mouths. In Rostock, a small town on the Baltic Sea, they’d visited a museum where a white stork was stuffed and displayed, with an 80-centimeter spear through its neck. The wounded stork had been discovered in Germany in the 1840s. The spear that hadn’t killed it was African. The information board had described a time when it was generally believed that birds transformed into mice, or hibernated in lakes or under the sea during winter. The Arrow Stork brought with it the valuable clue that birds migrated unimaginable distances from Europe to central Africa, where, Makhosi imagined, a young hunter had pulled back his arm and let fly his spear at an ethereal creature with an expansive wingspan; a white cutout against the blue paper sky. The stork had borne its unwelcome passenger all the way to Europe. To places the young hunter could not have conceived. 

Makhosi took in the pile of laundry at the bottom of the stairs, the rubbish bin jammed with nappies, and yesterday’s newspaper strewn across the counter. Banana smeared on the floor and on the feeding chair. Simon’s ruined tie. Jabu’s toys and books and building blocks tumbling out of multiple soft containers. Tupperware piled on the floor. Dishes in the sink, waiting to be washed, only to be dirtied again. Endless, thankless chores, all underscored by the rhythmic yap, yap, yap from behind the wall, ticking above the heat like a metronome.

Sweat skimmed Makhosi’s temples, pooled beneath her breasts, and pricked her underarms. She hung the plastic bag on the handle of the french doors that opened to the garden, stripped Jabu down to his nappy and laid him in his pram. She yanked off her baggy t-shirt and leggings until she stood only in her underwear. She couldn’t catch her breath. Blood pulsed hot and urgent behind her eyes and for a moment the room tilted and swayed. She unlatched the sash window over the sink and pushed it up, hopeful the air outside would offer relief, but it only brought in the hot dry bark of Catherine’s dog-child. Landing like a hammer blow. Regular, purposeless, thudding against Makhosi’s skull.

She leaned her forehead against the tiled wall, acutely aware of those few cool, hard, square-inches, closed her eyes and imagined taking flight. Disregarding gravity to lift with an imperceptible shift of her shoulders. The brush of feather against feather. To tilt and rise higher and higher into the cool air. To soar and dive. She breathed in. The room righted itself. Makhosi pushed herself up and kicked her discarded clothes towards the washer. Jabu was babbling and drumming the plastic spoon on the side of the pram, completely absorbed in his internal world. She stood for a while, listening to his charming nonsense. The space between the sounds lengthened to the even in and out of his breath. The room expanded. The air felt light. It was quiet, not only inside, but beyond the walls too. Makhosi held her breath. The barking had stopped. 

Makhosi stole a quick shower and slipped on a cotton shirt and shorts. She pushed the pram with the sleeping boy into the garden, taking the light plastic bag with her as she went through the french door. Sunshine bleached the sky. Undisturbed by any breeze, the plants and flowers seemed to twitch and shimmer in the heat. She directed the pram into a corner of shade, as deep as it could go, then adjusted the canopy against the light. Jabu slept on. A chaffinch landed on the bird feeder and snapped a sunflower seed in its beak, to peck out the soft nut inside.

The small swallow had left its nest this morning, flicked its feathers, lifted its voice to the new day. She thought of the wounded stork, of the peregrine falcons that hunted through city skyscrapers, the white storks that nested on chimney spires, and the pelicans that lived on the pond in St. James Park.

A clematis waited in a black plastic tub alongside a hole Makhosi had dug the day before. It had begun to flower and searched the air with its blind tendrils for something to grip and climb. Makhosi had dug the hole next to the fence that divided their back garden from Catherine’s, so the clematis could use the slatted wood for support. The flowers had wide, white petals, blushed with lilac tips, which cradled a tighter cluster of purple petals at its centre. A flower within a flower, would make the perfect marker for the swallow’s grave. Makhosi reached into the plastic bag and laid the dead bird on the ground between the fence and the hole, careful to restore its neck to a natural position. She rose to get the hose.

A small, white, curly-haired dog pushed out of the pet hatch and stopped in a rectangle of shade on the terra-cotta paving stones in Catherine’s bare backyard. A lock of fur had been brushed and gathered in a ribbon on top of its head, like a toy you might find in a child’s handbag. It spotted Makhosi and began to bark. The exertion lifted the animal off its feet with a short hop of determination. Bark. Hop. Bark. Hop. Bark. Hop. Not in alarm, but as if it was calling, its brown eyes fixed on hers.

Jabu began to wail.

“Hey, wena, stop that noise.” Makhosi rapped her knuckles on the fence.

The dog rushed over, its entire body shaking with the force of its tail wagging. It shoved its snout through the gap between the ground and the lowest wooden slat, and lapped and licked in excitement and nervous greeting. 

“You’re noisy for such a little girl.” Makhosi squatted and reached her fingers through the fence to scratch the dog behind its ears. It pressed into the affection, nuzzling her palm. “Do you miss your mama?” 

The animal did an excited dance, twisting its compact body in a tight circle before returning for more. It made a high excited whine, like air escaping a balloon. Makhosi laughed and felt herself soften towards the dog and towards Catherine. Living alone, trying to be helpful to her sister, while making her own way in her career. Maybe she should be a good neighbor and offer to look after the dog? She was here most of the day anyway, and Jabu might like it. She pictured herself pushing the stroller, with the little dog running alongside her through the cow pasture, where the summer herd of ambling bovines with their sharp, grassy smell, grazed on the banks of the Thames.

Jabu continued to cry and Makhosi crossed the small yard to comfort her child, stroking a finger in a slow rhythm between his eyes. The small dog leapt against the fence with excitement, landing both its paws along the lowest strut and barked. Jabu felt hot. Makhosi lifted him out of the pram and bent to the tap where she let cold water run over her open palm, then swiped it around the back of his neck. The little dog yapped and scratched at the fence, pushing its nose into the soil as if to dig its way to them. Jabu calmed as Makhosi walked him around the garden. She hoped to soothe him back to sleep, but he was too distracted by the dog, scratching, whining, digging under the fence.

Makhosi went across to settle the dog, just as the animal darted its small nose under the fence and grabbed the dead bird in its jaws.

For the second time that day, she rushed towards the dead swallow as it was swept away from her. “Stop!” She called for the dog to drop the bird. To release. Release! But it dug in, exposing needle teeth and pink gums behind its blue and copper-feathered prize. Makhosi smacked at the fence with her free hand, until her palm stung, “Let go!” Her skin fizzed with adrenalin and rage.

Jabu began to cry.

Still gripping her son in one arm, Makhosi dropped to her knees and pushed her other arm through the slats of fence. Ignoring the splinters she snatched at the dog’s scruff. The animal jolted its head back, drawing the bird deeper into its mouth to secure its grip. Jabu was crying with the full force of his lungs. She could smell her son’s distress. A mustiness beneath the usual baked dough scent of his skin.

With effort, Makhosi calmed her voice, “Drop the bird. Drop it.”

The dog shook the swallow in its jaws. The defenseless blue head dangled and flinched.

A rage, like a white light, blazed behind Makhosi’s eyes. She clenched her teeth and pushed her left arm further through the slats. In her right arm, Jabu screamed and braced against her body. The dog crouched. Brown eyes stared at her. Its top lip curled back. 

“Here, puppy,” Makhosi sang. 

The dog replied with a low growl, but took a few slow steps forward. It thought it was a game. Maintaining eye contact with the animal, Makhosi pushed through the fence up to her shoulder. She felt the hot sting of a graze along the tender skin on her inner arm. 

“Here, puppy,” she flicked her fingers. “Come to mommy.” 

The dog took a few more careful steps, keeping its hold on the bird. Makhosi flicked her fingers again. The dog approached and sniffed at her palm territorially. When it was close enough, Makhosi grabbed the poodle by the scruff of its neck. She expected it to struggle but instead its small body immediately relaxed with some cellular memory of a mother’s gentle jaw carrying its body to safety. She dragged it closer to the fence and secured her grip. Makhosi began to shake the animal back and forth. “Drop it. Drop it!”

Her cheek chafed against the wood. Her shoulder ached and the skin along her arm stung like a burn. Jabu had a fist in her hair and he arched against his mother’s awkward embrace. She closed her eyes and kept shaking. She shook against the empty nests, the lost birds who fly across continents only to mistake a glass window for open sky, the judgement pouring from a dozen careless mouths. Catherine in her petrol-sheen dress which hung from her slim frame, You’re such a good mother, Max. Her own mother, You should raise your child with family, so he learns who he is. The white nurse in the London hospital where Jabu had been born, standing just out of arm's reach as Makhosi struggled to get him to latch on, asking, But isn’t it normal to breastfeed in your culture? Her English mother-in-law, directing her words at a crying Jabu, Poor baby, isn’t your mummy feeding you enough? Simon, this morning, telling her their son should be more independent. Not understanding for one minute how much it hurt for her role in Jabu’s life to be so casually erased.

Makhosi shook until the bird landed on the terracotta tiles in a disarray of wet feathers and clawed feet. She let go of the dog. It backed into the shade, panting hard and watching her with its round brown eyes. Makhosi scooped up the bird and pulled her prize through the fence. She drew her son into her body. Her neighbor’s blank windows leered into her yard. She tilted her head like a crane listening for the whisper of a mouse in the reeds. No bird song and no hum of traffic disturbed the garden. No dog barked. The world was still. Makhosi began to cry.  

~

Jabu was asleep upstairs when Simon’s phone buzzed on the arm of the sofa. He stood and walked to the kitchen with his eyes on his screen.

“Catherine didn’t get the job,” he called over water drumming into the kettle.

“She didn’t?” Makhosi followed him to the kitchen. 

Simon twisted a knob on the stove and held it down. It clicked until a blue flame erupted beneath the kettle. “Did the dog bark today?”

“It’s just lonely.”

“Tea?” he said.

She nodded.

Simon took two mugs out of the cupboard, tossed a tea bag into each, then crossed to the sink and looked out the window at their back garden. 

Makhosi joined him. It was twilight, and a golden glow lit the space like a blessing. 

“You planted the clematis.” Simon lifted her hand and kissed her wrist, his breath against her palm. “We can be happy here, Max. Can’t we?”

A pressure wafted off the bridge of her nose, like feathers shaken from a wing. Makhosi leaned against her husband. He smelled of heat and aftershave, underscored by the familiar acidity of hospital disinfectant. Together they looked out at their postage-stamp yard.

The young clematis angled its stem up the fence post.

The cover of the printed version of “The Wounded Stork” designed by Brittany Files

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Union Pacific

This story was a finalist in the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Behind my house are the railroad tracks where Cassidy Jackson found the pair of legs. They were cut just below the knees, but it wasn’t a clean cut; they were crushed, and the bones looked like an Otter Pop had been smashed by a hammer. There wasn’t that much blood. The rails were clean, and the legs were clean except where they were crushed, and right there, they were just dripping a bit, like a salted steak coming to room temperature. They hardly had any hair on them, and the feet didn’t have any shoes or socks. But the weirdest thing was that the legs were black. Besides Cassidy and his family, there were just a few other black people in town, and Cassidy saw them all at lunch.

This happened on a Saturday when Cassidy came over to check on our pennies. The day before, we laid a bunch of them on the rails to see how bad the night train would flatten them. Cass somehow got past my Gram without her seeing him, but she caught me and made me take a heap of egg salad sandwich squares and snickerdoodle cookies out to share. I could barely balance the food on the plate as I opened the screen door, but I made my way out and through the overgrown grass to the rocky slope that led to the tracks. I almost fell walking up those loose rocks, but I made it up, and when I did, that’s when I dropped the plate.

Cassidy was sitting on the rail with a branch. He didn’t budge when the plate crashed and shattered. I sat down next to him where the rail was clean of food and broken ceramic. We sat there a while before either of us said or did anything.

I watched a line of ants marching from the rocks up onto the spongy severed ends of the legs. They were cutting off tiny chunks of flesh and making their trek back to the colony when Cassidy pointed out the feet. The feet were old and had pronounced veins and tiny, sparse, black, curly hairs that spotted the arch of the foot and the knuckles of the toes. The toes were stiff and straight except a few of them were curled down.

“Looks like my dad’s feet,” Cassidy said as he took up his stick.

I looked back over to where the egg salad sandwiches and cookies were scattered on the rails and ties. I saw a mess of ants splitting off from the lines that went from bloody stubs to the food. There seemed to be no difference in which trail they took. Some went to blood; others went to cookies and eggs. For a moment, I felt calm and then I felt my neck swell just below my jaw and my palms turned sweaty. I looked to Cassidy, but he was still staring at the feet. I swallowed and followed his lead.

The railroad was quiet. Cass was quiet. I could feel pressure build in my chest and ears. My ribcage vibrated with each pulse as I watched Cassidy take his branch and reach it towards the feet. The high sun and warm rails beneath us goaded us on as we made contact.

We thought the toenails were polished a deep blue but, when Cassidy tried to scrape the color off one of the curled ones with the branch, nothing came off. Rather, the toes uncurled, and we both cussed enough that my Gram would’ve probably given us twenty lashings each if she had heard us.

That was when we ran back to the house and told her everything.

~

“Are you American?” one of the head officers asked Cassidy as we led him to the pair of legs. The officer was overweight, yellow-skinned, and had a double chin that was covered up with a beard. He wasn’t from our town, and he spoke with a drawl akin to molasses melting out of a mouth. My Gram said he talked slow, and it seemed as if he wasn’t aware of the situation he’d found himself in. Like he didn’t know where he was or why he was there. It wasn’t just his speech though; he also furrowed his brow and looked at Cassidy like he couldn’t understand what he was saying. Like he was speaking another language. But Cassidy didn’t have an accent.

“Yeah,” Cassidy replied, “I was born here.”

“Right,” the barrel of an officer said as he scribbled in his notebook.

Cassidy’s parents were refugees from somewhere in Africa, but I can’t remember exactly where. He told me that his parents never really talked about it; they just said they left because of the politics and safety. He didn’t seem to care much, so neither did I.

Gram didn’t like that I hung out with Cass. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him or that she didn’t like that he was different. She said Cass was a troubled kid, and I already had enough trouble of my own. I think she was just concerned to see me bonding with someone who had a hard time, and maybe that meant that I was sad. That was something she couldn’t bear. She was right though, I did have enough troubles of my own, but being with Cass and sharing our distress made it easier for both of us.

You see, Cassidy was the only black kid in eighth grade. In the entire school district, it was just him, his brother, and his sister. There were other minorities, of course. Lots of Mexicans, some Asians, and Eastern European refugees, but he was still the odd man out among all the other odd men. And he felt that in the names they called him—OJ, Tupac, MJ—and many other ways. Classmates made fun of the way his mom dressed and often balanced books on their heads and barked at Cass to help them with the laundry or to help bring in the groceries.

Me, on the other hand, my mom was Chinese and my dad was Caucasian. I came out mostly white, so I didn’t get the same attention. Both my parents were gone from my life when I was only about six years old. My Dad got into some bad things and was put away twenty-five years to life. He is still in there, too. And my mom, well I don’t really know what happened to her, and Gram still avoids the topic. Anyway, Cass and I were both lonely and that’s how we found each other.

~

Cassidy and I watched the cops from my Gram’s back porch while we waited for his mom to come pick him up. They sectioned the area off and took their time gathering evidence and taking pictures of the scene. The yellow-skinned cop from before stopped by and asked us how we were doing. We were fine and asked if they would find out who the person was that lost their legs. He said they would probably never find out and that these things happen to people that don’t have much of a presence or past. And even if they did find the rest of the body, it probably wouldn’t have a name attached to it.

Before he moved on, he took a second glance at Cass, as if he’d never seen him before, and asked him where he was from.

“Here,” Cass said in a short, annoyed burst.

The cop replied with a “huh,” then left with a confused look on his face. After that, more people came and bagged the legs and took them away. It was all relatively quick.

While we sat on the porch, my Gram gathered the shattered remains of the egg salad sandwiches, cookies, and broken ceramic and took them into our house to throw away. After she entered the house I heard her cuss—and she never cussed— so I ran inside to check on her. She had cut herself on the ball of her hand with one of the pieces of ceramic and was hanging it over the kitchen sink as blood dripped down her wrist. She washed it, told me she was fine. To her protest, I picked up the remaining pieces of ceramic and then opened the lid to put them in the trash can. As I did, I saw Gram’s thick blood soaking into the bread and mixing with the yellow eggy paste and green flakes of dill. I don’t know why, but that sight has always stuck with me. I shut the lid, and Cassidy’s mom rang the doorbell.

~

Now, this happened at the tail end of summer. The summer that Nathan Cahill’s mutt got loose and badly bit Emina Jovanović’s face while she was drawing flowers and tracing her hands with sidewalk chalk. The summer that Eddy Ramirez tripped while cliff jumping. He didn’t have the clearance and bounced off the rocks before he splashed into the lake. His body wasn’t found for three days. And three days after that, it became the summer that Nathan Cahill’s mutt was found dead, head beaten in, a bloody shovel left next to it. But soon that summer was going to be over. We could feel it coming, quietly approaching like the nights that were lasting longer and longer.

It was the time of year when it was still hot, but you could feel the wind carrying in an assured coldness, a touch that would soon turn the leaves yellow. Even the sun’s rays would bounce off of you differently, like they were getting lazy. As the cool gasp of wind entered, Cass and I were chasing the fleeing hot breeze like a pair of dogs nipping at motorcycle wheels. And even though the weather was changing, we still hoped that maybe there was time for something good to happen to us, something to stoke the dying heat of summer.

A few days after the legs incident, we were finally able to get back together. Cass rode his bike to my house, and we ate lunch with my Gram—Kraft Mac and Cheese, the spiral kind. After lunch, we were bored and indecisive. We thought about going downtown again. It was a favorite place of ours because it was mostly a strip of dead businesses that hardly anyone visited. There were some thrift stores, an old diner called the Depot Grill, various offices and banks, and one of our favorite haunts.

We called it The Escape. It was an old five story brick building that used to be owned by a newspaper, and it sat next to the rail yard and the movie theater that played art films and sold adult movies. After the paper business moved out, it was empty for several years. A mural of a trout jumping out of a river on the west side of the building flaked away from the baking of the setting sun. It achieved that old rustic aesthetic that people with money found charming. Now it was a fancy restaurant that served wine named after rivers and cooked stuff in duck fat. But the best thing about the place was that it had a fire escape on the outside of the building, just like the New York ones we’d seen in Spider-Man. The second-best thing was that it faced away from the busy roads that ran next to the building, so we could sit up there and not be bothered by anyone.

We’d climb the stairs of the fire escape and reenact scenes from Spider-Man. Cassidy acted like he was Peter Parker, and I like Gwen Stacy. We both liked Gwen more than Mary Jane because she was prettier, and because Gwen fell in love with Peter Parker while MJ fell in love with Spiderman. Most of the time we’d just climb up and down the stairs and remade scenes by replacing Mary Jane with Gwen Stacy. We took turns being Peter and Gwen. We both did a damn good job at portraying them, but Cass was always a better Peter, and I loved being Gwen.

The last time we were at the Escape, we recreated the scene from the movie when Mary Jane kisses Spiderman as he hangs upside down. Cass hung from his legs at the bottom rungs of the fire escape, and I stood on the street in front of him. In that moment, I really felt like Gwen Stacy. I felt the excitement of being in front of a masked man, the allure of a hero, and the joy in knowing that what I fell in love with was not the mask but the person behind it: Peter, Cassidy.

Naturally, I pecked him on the lips. At first, his eyes grew wide and he reached up for the bars with his arms, but then he brought his arms back down and grabbed my head and pecked me back. I smiled like I never had before in my life and Cassidy seemed to do the same, but when he let himself down from the fire escape, he avoided me and went straight to his bike.

“Race you back to my place!” he said. He didn’t look at me the whole race back.

~

I was eager to go back to The Escape, but Cassidy was hesitant about it. He said we’d been down there too much and wanted to do something else. But I knew why he didn’t want to go.

Instead, we decided to hunt for some skipping stones and then head down to the canal. So, we grabbed our backpacks, stuffed them with water bottles, the skipping rocks we had been saving, some snickerdoodles that Gram had baked for us, and went on our way.

Cassidy said we should follow the train tracks instead of our usual route which cut through the pasture that sat in the middle of our neighborhood. So, we left my Gram’s house, trekked up the loose rocks to the tracks, and followed the rails down to the canal.

We often went to the canal to skip rocks. We were good at it, really good at it. There weren’t any rock skipping competitions in our town, but if there were, we knew we would take the top slots. Our biggest competition would be each other. But neither of us really had any money to travel to places that held rock skipping competitions, so we were limited to competing with each other and the few others we ran into at the canal.

As we walked the rails and scanned them for good skipping stones, we ate snickerdoodles and talked about starting a rock skipping business. We could start our own competition at the canal. We would sell stones at the competitions, and when the canal was drained for the winter, go out and collect the rocks and resell them at the next competition.

We were good at finding all the quality stones: the hook shots, old reliables, flying saucers, cigars, big bottoms, and boomerangs. We’d organize them by shape and size, fit of hand, throwing style, and difficulty. It’d help, too, that we would be champions in our own league, so fellow skippers would trust our opinions and rock selection. Skippers Select, we’d call ourselves. An invincible partnership. We were going to make a fortune.

When we got tired of talking about our future venture, we fell silent for a few minutes. The crunch of rocks beneath our feet, the buzz of the power lines that followed the rails, and barking of dogs filled our silence. I looked to Cass and saw him staring down the long track ahead of us. I asked him what he thought the track looked like. He didn’t understand. I told him that when I looked down the tracks it felt like a long ladder that reached to the top of a cliff, the horizon, and at the top of the cliff you could finally climb over and lie down and rest. He told me he didn’t see it that way. He said it was more like an unfurled tongue leading to a mouth, and the mouth was the train, a hollow circle of teeth coming to chew on your bones and swallow you.

I looked to him to offer some sort of comfort, but he just looked down the track.

~

When we got to the canal it was empty. Usually, they didn’t drain the canals until at least the end of September. But for some reason, this year was different. We were disappointed, but we took the opportunity to collect all the good stones that had been skipped into the canal and sunk to the bottom.

We slid down the mossy side, and because there was still a bit of water left, we took off our shoes and socks and put them into our backpacks before we walked barefoot through the ankle high water. Most of the time the canal bed was dry, and we found many good skipping stones. But other times we kicked our way through slimy, moss filled pools and felt for rocks with our toes.

We were gathering quite the haul of skipping stones when we entered a long stretch of ankle high water. Far down the stretch we saw a group of geese and ducks concentrated in the middle of the canal. We continued walking towards them and expected them to fly away, but they didn’t budge. When we were within throwing range, Cass took a big bottom stone and skipped it across water at the birds. The stone didn’t hit them, but it passed close enough that the birds should’ve scattered and flown away. But they just hopped around a bit and focused back in on the spot they were obsessed with.

“Weird,” Cass said to me.

I agreed, and we kept walking through the water, kicking up splashes in an attempt to get the birds to scatter. It wasn’t until we were almost upon them that they finally flew away. They didn’t go far and rested up on the banks of the canal to watch us.

That is when we both stopped dead in our tracks. Right there, where the birds had been so stubborn to leave, was a body. Then the smell hit me. Putrid and sharp. I turned to leave but Cassidy kept moving forward. I wanted to leave him, I really did, but I couldn’t bear to leave him alone, so I followed.

And there he was, a black man missing two legs, an arm, and a hand. He was waterlogged and swollen, like a jug of rancid milk. His eyes were protruding, and his ears were gnawed away. Even though his nose and cheeks had been torn by the beaks of the birds, he looked exactly like Cassidy.

“Cass,” I said in a quick breath.

“I know.”

He kneeled and emptied the dead man’s pockets.

“Cassidy!”

“I just need to know his name,” he said and pulled out a phone that was dripping wet.

“He probably doesn’t even have one,” I said through my plugged nose, “remember?” I tried to remind him of what the yellow skinned police officer told us.

Plugging my nose didn’t work as well as I wanted, so I held my breath. I inhaled through my mouth, and I swear to god, I could taste him. Rotting and hot. Citrus, fish, licorice, and pond scum. That triggered it. I ran, gagging, to the edge of the canal. I puked, and the grainy, doughy, sludge of cookies and mac and cheese splashed into the water that covered my feet.

“Cassidy!” I yelled at him as I kicked my feet in the water, trying to make sure there wasn’t any vomit on them. I climbed up the steep wall of the canal and landed on my hands and knees at the top, struggling to both not breathe and not puke.

~

We got out of there, and I puked a few more times on our way back to my Gram’s house. Cass held me the whole way and carried my backpack. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I would feel so close to him. We returned to my Gram’s. The cops were called and this time they didn’t make us take them to the body. They thought we’d been through enough. Gram put Cassidy’s bike in the back of her station wagon and gave him a ride home. When we got back, she made me Kao Yu—grilled fish. She liked to do that for me, cook Chinese food, since mom wasn’t around anymore to teach me.

I always appreciated her intentions, but that night, with a full fish at the center of the table, I didn’t feel like stripping chunks of flesh off its bones. I sat there quietly. Gram sat there quietly too, waiting for me to come to her. I ate a few dry fried green beans, one of my favorite side dishes, but my stomach struggled to keep them down.

Gram must’ve seen how little I was eating because her maternal instincts kicked in. She picked up her chopsticks and used them to peck at the fish’s head until she found the soft circular part just below the eye and next to the jaw. She used her chopsticks to dig into that vulnerable area and pinched the cheek meat out of its socket. The cheek meat was always the best bit of fish, but when she placed it on my plate, the sticky white and oily coin of meat, along with the smell of the sea, moss, and citrus aromatics, made me retch. I jumped from my chair and ran to the bathroom to expel what little that was in me.

~

It was about a week before Cass and I saw each other again. School would begin the next week, and we would be freshman, but at least we could see each other before that began. He came over one afternoon, and we holed up in my room. We were sorting our skipping stones when Cassidy said he had something to show me.

He told me that he didn’t find an ID on the man, but he did find something. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a small rectangular piece of paper. It was a wallet sized photo. I took it, and this is what I saw:

It was a picture of a backyard. It kind of looked like my backyard if you were standing on the railroad tracks and looking at my Gram’s house. In the picture a tall, large, but not obese man, probably six foot seven, was standing in the middle of a backyard smoking a cigar. He had on jeans and white t-shirt. To the left of the man was a mobility scooter, and directly in front of the man on the lawn was an elderly man, probably in his eighties, on his back trying to sit up or get off his back, clearly in need of help. The man smoking the cigar was staring straight into the lens. The elderly man’s arm was reaching up, blurry and smeared. On the back of the photo was a phone number and a small note that read: I owe you -Maurice.

“We got to call it,” he told me.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“We gotta. You said he looked just like me.”

He touched my shoulder, and, as apprehensive as I was, I thought this could bring us closer together. “Ok.”

I retrieved the cordless phone from the living room and gave it to Cassidy.

“Put it on speaker,” I told him.

He dialed the number, pushed the speaker button, and we waited. There was a long pause between us as we waited for the lines to connect. Cass stared at the phone, and I stared at him. Finally, the phone responded, “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please hang up and try your call again. This is a recording.”

Cass looked up at me. He had wide, almost bulging eyes, in a lifeless, slack face that turned my stomach. This time, it was I that turned my gaze away from him.

~

For the next few years, I saw the dead man’s face whenever I closed my eyes to sleep. Consequently, I didn’t do much sleeping. Even in waking life I saw it. Whenever I looked at Cass, his face bloated and eyes bulged. I saw his lips get torn off by black and yellow beaks, and the tip of his nose was pecked away, bloody and gaping, soft and pink underneath, like a pomelo or a blood orange being ripped open. And the smell, it always came, rotting and hot, citrus, fish, licorice, and pond scum.

I think that’s part of the reason we grew apart. I loved him, and I couldn’t bear to watch him die anymore.

~

After I graduated, I left the state. It was many years before I returned. I resisted for the longest time, but Gram was there, and my missing her was the lasting tether that lassoed me in. The last time I visited, in October, I walked the railroad tracks just to see how I would feel.

I noticed the details differently. The power lines that buzzed tickled my neck in ways they didn’t before. The hum was grounded, and I could step from sleeper to sleeper and feel the rails shake from my weight, hear them rattle under my stride. The sagebrush that surrounded the rails were more fragrant, and they shook with the fear of quail that scattered at the sound of my boots crunching rocks. And the setting sun made my eyes do funny things. The red rays scattered off the horizon and touched me. I saw rainbows glance off my hands and nose and splinter into my eyes like broken glass in a kaleidoscope.

I walked down the track to the canal. It was empty and mostly dry, and there were perfectly good skipping stones waiting to be picked, but I didn’t dare. Occasionally, there were lumps of debris that made my heart race, but they were only congested areas of rocks and trash. The smell was still there, moist, sandy, and full of the gasses of deteriorating foliage. I didn’t walk alongside the canal for very long before I turned around. The sky was growing dark.

As I made my way back on the tracks, I thought about what Cassidy and I said the railroad looked like. Now, what I saw was different. It may have been the cold evening or the darker setting, but I saw three long black lines stretching for eternity to nothing—two rails and a trail of leaked oil between. They were like lines of ink with a single line between them, a black crayon being scraped across the sleepers and ballast, crude, desolate, and slow. I imagined a slug made of oil inching its way between the rails forever to the end. And at the end, I could make out a blurry figure waiting for me. The rails on my left and right were Cassidy’s two faces, one ripe, one rotting, both watching me walk to his body, waiting for me to see what had become of him. But I walked off the tracks and back to my Gram’s house before I could meet that figure.

~

Sometimes I imagine ramming a railroad spike into my temple. The rusty iron turns my brain orange. I feel the vibrations of all the trains that ever passed over it, all the cargo and people, coal, gravel, logs, and a man in greasy coveralls blowing cigarette smoke through a thick mustache. I burn as the weight of the train turns the rails hot, and I sense the man’s boredom from the long rides. I see what he’s seen, a desert of sprawling bluffs and lonely, anchored buttes, all scattered with sagebrush and black patches from wildfires; a hungry river feasts on basalt as it carves through the land and deepens the narrow, hidden gorges; and a wide-mouthed canyon, toothless and thirsty, waits for rain. The land stretches long and thin and tries to touch the horizon, but it fails. Then, the desert slowly loses color like a polaroid left on the dash of a car, and I feel the rusty spike drive completely through my skull and into wood. My head becomes a rail, and my body is the creosote-soaked sleeper. I let all those trains roll over me, and it just feels good to be close to something.

~

The last night I was at my Gram’s, I went out back to the place where we found the legs. I ran my hands on the splintering, oil covered ties, and then I rubbed my hands over my face. Over and over, until it was a new one.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Jail Song

Before her mom started using drugs, she'd smelled like oranges. At least that's how Bernadine remembers her, but then she was only a toddler back then. Oranges, sunshine, laundry on the line—she has memories but she's not sure if it's just from one particular day or if that was really what their life was like together. She's got darker memories too, but those she refuses to think about, even though it drives her school counselor nuts. Mrs. Harris wants her to go back, to talk about when her mom was using, but Bernadine's shut an armored door on that time and refuses to open it even a crack. Mrs. Harris sighs at her for being so stubborn, and Bernadine figures that her stubbornness is mixed up with her foolishness, like two colors of hand-paint swirled together to make a big brown smudge deep inside of her.

Bernadine keeps a calendar with a red circle on the twice monthly visits when Grandpa Gus brings her to see her mom. The next visit is around Thanksgiving, not on it, a week and a half before it. "We'll get Fritos out of the vending machine," Grandpa Gus promises, shows Bernadine that he's got a collection of quarters already stacked up on his dresser for their visit. She's got a stack of quarters from her allowance but wants to keep them for the scooter that's displayed in the Hobby Shop's front window.

They had wanted to put him in a cast, give his badly broken finger time to heal, but Gus didn't have that kind of time. The hospital doctor had said it'd take eight to ten weeks, maybe longer, and then Gus would be good as new. The hospital doctor didn't seem to understand that Gus didn't have eight to ten weeks to walk around la-dee-dah with a plaster cast. He told the doc he wanted the tip of his offending middle finger gone. Nice and easy, just cut off the damn piece and he could get back to working as the town handyman with just some good gauze bandages and white medical tape.

That's the story Bernadine was told about her Grandpa Gus who gave other truck drivers a half-bird salute when they cut him off on the highway. He gave the half-bird to Grandma Jo when the steak she set in front of him was over-well rather than under-well. He even gave the half-bird to Bernadine's fourth grade teacher who claimed she'd shoved another girl on the playground. The truth? His amputated half-bird just didn't have the same power as a full-bird and so no one got particularly mad at gesticulating Gus. After all, how could you get mad at a guy who looked like Santa Claus in a plaid shirt and coveralls?

Bernadine knew that the one to watch side-eye was actually her grandma who was as skinny as Grandpa Gus was fat, had a sharp pointy nose, eyeglasses with metal frames that were almost the same gray-blue steel as her eyes. Grandma Jo didn't take fools lightly and Bernadine came to understand that she held a lot of foolishness inside her nine-year-old body. Grandma Jo said that she got it from her mother who was in the county jail after the second time (the second time!) an undercover cop caught her trying to sell a Ziploc baggie filled with the white powder that her mom used to claim was just baking soda. "It's good for brushing my teeth. Keeps them sparkling clean." Although her mom's teeth were awful, gray, and broken.

On the morning of their jail journey, Grandma Jo makes them pancakes, sets them down without a word. Whole days can pass without Grandma Jo opening her mouth, so Bernadine's surprised when she says, "You should come up with at least one good story to tell your mother today."

"That's about right," Grandpa Gus agrees. "Last time you just sat there, all kinda sullen. Your mama counts down the minutes until she gets to see you."

Bernadine's stomach clenches and she mops some pancake in the syrup but doesn't bring the bite to her lips. When she was younger, it was easier. She didn't know any better. But now she knows that the visitor's waiting area will smell like way too much lemony Lysol, how hard the chair she'll sit on will feel while she waits for her mother to come out, how her mother will smother her in a dank-smelling hug. Mrs. Harris says that it's okay to feel angry, but that maybe a little part of her should also make room in her heart for love. What Mrs. Harris doesn't seem to understand is that she doesn't love the woman with blonde thin hair and bad teeth. She doesn't want to tell that woman a good story about school or her friends. Instead, she decides that this morning she'll tell her mother the truth, that her teacher called in Grandpa Gus for a conference because she'd shoved Marcie Bernback on the playground, knocked her down backwards. Maybe she'd add that Grandpa Gus had argued there must've been a good reason because his granddaughter wasn't one to go around pushing people over willy-nilly. And maybe she'd say that there actually hadn't been a good reason at all, that Marcie Bernback had just bugged her that morning for being such a know-it-all in class, using a long word that none of the rest of them knew, inspiring their teacher to tell them that their vocabulary homework that night was to learn how to use "interspersed" in a sentence. Stupid Marcie Bernback with her stupid big words that she must get from her mom who drove a cute shiny red VW Bug.

"Finish up your hotcakes, Pumpkin," Grandpa Gus says as he pushes back his chair, wads up his paper napkin on his empty sticky plate. "We've gotta get going."

"Drive like you've got some sense," Grandma Jo says and picks up his plate to take into the kitchen to wash. She makes it sound like they're going on a long trip, but really the jail's just on the other side of town, out by the dump, but Bernadine knows her grandpa will speed there, tailgating and then jamming on his truck's brakes so that she'll feel grateful to push open her door, step out onto the parking lot.

And indeed, she thinks, "Thank God," when they make it safely to the jail. As usual, Grandpa Gus gives a half-bird salute to the guard tower with its tinted glass. And as usual, there's trash stuck in the barbed wire atop the tall brick wall. Bernadine looks around the parking lot, curious to see which other kids have come for visiting hour. A family piles out of a van and there's a boy who looks like he might be maybe a year or so older than her who's clearly the one in charge, striding ahead of his younger siblings towards the jail's doors. Sometimes on these trips she recognizes a kid in the waiting area, a regular like herself, but that's all they've got in common; she'd rather chew off her foot than talk to a jail kid.

~

It turns out that when she's sitting face to face with her mother, she doesn't really want to tell her about Marcie Bernback after all. "So, how's school?" her mother wants to know as she rips open the bag of Fritos Grandpa Gus has bought from the vending machine. 

"Fine."

"Tell me more." Her mom pops a Frito into her gray-toothed mouth and tears open a sleeve of Ritz crackers. 

"Everything's fine. It's school."

"Tell her about your friends, about what you're learning," Grandpa Gus prompts her.

"We learned the word 'interspersed'." She grabs a few Fritos and some Ritz, holds them on her palm. "Like the chips are interspersed with the crackers."

"Like I'm interspersed with a lot of crazy ladies," her mom says and tips Bernadine's hand so the crackers and chips go into her own palm.

"I'm not sure you use it like that," Bernadine says, thinking it sounds wrong somehow. "Marcie Bernback's mom would know. Her mom taught her that word. Marcie's always showing off her vocabulary."

"So how about I teach you a word?" her mother says.

"Like what?"

"Like I don't know." Her mother stares at the crackers and chips in her hand, then closes her fist so they crumble together. She takes a thick pinch, tilts back her head, and drops the mixture into her mouth. "Like how about 'high-voltage' as in that light bulb." She points to the ceiling. 

"I know 'high-voltage.'"

"Okay, how about gangrene, as in my cellie's in the sick bay with gangrene."

"What's that?" Doesn't really want to know.

"It's where you get sick because you try to slit—"

"It's a kind of sickness," Grandpa Gus interrupts. "Think of another word, for God's sake."

"All right, how about 'ignoramus'?"

"I know that one."

"So maybe 'defunct'? As in the plumbing here is all 'defunct'?"

Bernadine also knows this word, but says, "Okay, that'll be my vocab homework for tonight."

"It means shitty, not working, only a spurt coming out of the damn defunct showerhead."

"Got it."

"So how are you doing these last two weeks?" Grandpa Gus asks her mother.

"Same as the last two weeks and the two weeks before that." She looks Bernadine straight in the eye. "Never get in trouble, child. It's not worth it. Nothing's worth this."

Bernadine wonders if Grandpa Gus will bring up the teacher conference, but he's whistling softly under his breath, the way he does whenever they visit here.

She thinks of Marcie Bernback's mom in her shiny red VW Bug, her brown hair all tidy, her teeth straight and white, her mind filled with plenty of good vocabulary words ready to share. Bernadine watches her mother pour a handful of crushed up Fritos and Ritz into her mouth, wonders if there really ever was a time when they were in a yard together with the smell of oranges, sunshine, and fresh laundry hanging on the line.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

A Green Year

This story was a finalist in the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Because Vivian almost never leaves her apartment, her niece Marie arrives there promptly at 8:00 a.m. A normal hour for Claire, the functional sister, to drop off her problem child. Maybe a little early for little Marie, who has already donned her ice skates and wobbled to the front door, one slender finger in her mouth, plucking a tooth.

Vivian has bought a sketch book for Marie, hoping that this, finally, would be the day she and her art-loving niece might connect. Hoping that this “year off” Vivian’s living might crack open and let her out. (Who’s holding you in? You know—you!) Hoping that she can help in some way with this troubled child who Normal Claire cannot fathom, Vivian has promised to actually take the girl out this time. Better for both of them, Claire insisted. Normal people can’t sustain themselves on endless streams of content and neurotic fixations on insects and the like. (Do you want her to turn out like you?!?)                

“My toof’s looth,” Marie says and then takes her finger from her mouth, spit-blood cocktail dribbling. Anything but teeth! Vivian thinks and then thinks against herself, that frantic, cruel voice of inner subversion: (Have you brushed? [how many times??] Has she? Do you have enough paste?!?)

Vivian’s mind snares such ideas like a bear trap, and they scream to her.

(Look, these teeth of yours; you’re not going to have them that long. The warranty expired, there’s no exchange policy. You’re not built to live to retirement! It’s your own damn fault if you go extending that life expectancy beyond the reproductive cycle. Wax wings, hot sun—you get the picture, sister. And it’s in those teeth.) says the script in Vivian’s head each morning as she flosses. The message and the messenger itself both obnoxious reminders of the daily bodily terror of being human: (A tragically self-aware ape), insists the postscript response, once Vivian’s resistance against the intruding thoughts but now just another line of program in her mind (soggy wiring). Like how from age ten to seventeen, everything had to be in even numbers: bites of food from a plate, syllables in a sentence, steps from point A to B. If not, cognitive dissonance, feet tripping feet, teeth grinding teeth.

For a moment, watching Marie fiddle again with the “looth toof,” Vivian almost reverts, tongue starting to count her own teeth just to be sure.

Vivian slaps her cheeks, shakes her head back and forth, and faces Marie.

“Have you brushed recently? I think I’ve got a toothbrush your size.”

The girl stares. Drool of incomprehension. They head to the bathroom for deep scrubbing.

But, during this, Vivian’s fourth brush of the morning, what bothers her is not the ever so slight—yet undeniable!—tea stains conquering territory on her lower front teeth. Nor does she sweat any more than usual about having to leave the apartment (sooner by the brush stroke, thank you Marie). What she sees are the dark, sad, puffy lower eyelids she’s had since childhood (Brother Thomas, too—genetics, ge-ne-tics). Like an age meter, they’ve gotten slightly darker by the year, and they remind her she’s a product of DNA that only needs her to breed—and then die, for all it cares. Sometimes she fantasizes about moving into an artificial body to escape death, taking her wet robot brain with her like one moves apartments. Why not, if her mind is just chemical and electrical signals?

Vivian has just gotten a hold on this thought-stream when in reflection she spots the second set of puffy eyelids in the room. (Second? Count, dear. Reflection: yours, yours again, hers, and her other one, too. Two pairs of puffy, sad eyes.)

“Ughh,” Vivian moans (counting: one, two, three . . .  four seconds), chin dripping minty. The two girls spit in unison. Foamy tadpoles slide down the drain.

~

Marie’s mother (big sister Claire, renowned neuroscientist) does not know why her daughter is unhappy, and because Marie’s ever-grinning brother Joey embodies such a perfect counterpoint to Marie’s disposition simply by existing, her frustration sometimes smacks of blame toward Marie. Joey, hotdog in mouth and the sting of a day’s game of catch in his palms, oozes sunshine. So why does Marie slide down the fire pole over and over for an hour straight instead of playing with other kids? And what makes her ask Mommy why some things taste good and others taste bad? And on learning of taste buds and neural receptors and the gustatory cortex, why, Oh God, must she lean against the fence and sob?

This, Claire had asked at lunch in Vivian’s apartment, mindlessly swallowing sticky piles of mandarin marshmallow fluff salad, which, Vivian thought, tastes good primarily on account of sugar and acid dancing in unison. Given Vivian’s preference (read: uncontrollable compulsion) to stay at home, they’d brought the barbecue to her.

“Oh, I’ve read all the books, asked my colleagues, and there are just no real answers. Get them to bed on time, give them healthy food, make sure they feel connected to others. Should I give her an iPhone? She’s eight years old!”

Vivian, having eaten some stringy barbeque chicken (sticky dead flesh waiting to rot just like teeth), pulled a folding travel toothbrush from her pocket. She jammed the dry bristles back to her right molars.

“Dash sure-tainly trouble-shum.” (Brush brush)

“You should have seen her drawings. Where could she have gotten the inspiration, dear?” Claire said to her husband, David, a big, gentle therapist several days overdue for a shave.

“I’m still paying for this, am I?” he said, rubbing Claire’s shoulders.

“Marie asked him,” Claire said, dropping to whisper, “where we go when we die. And he said—Viv, enough with the brushing, Christ almighty. David, can you analyze this girl?”

“Conflict of interest, my love. You know as well as I.”

“He’s not my dentisht,” said Vivian. She takes the brush out of her mouth and adds, “I’m not even using paste anymore. Not more than four times a day.”

“Just give it a rest. Now listen. He said, and I quote: ‘Well, Marie, daughter of mine, whom I protect and guide through this life and to whom I would never say anything twisted or disturbing, when we die, we simply go back to where we were for billions of years before we were born.’ Honestly, David, are you insane? Tell him he’s insane, Viv.”

“Confick of intresh, my shishtar. You know ush well ush I.”

“I thought it was an honest, comforting answer,” said David.

Vivian spat. “What’s comforting about billions?!”

“We couldn’t leave those drawings at school. That teacher of hers had them on display. Painting after painting of a screaming little girl in a black void of death!” Claire said, chomping more marshmallow salad, junk she’d normally avoid, which is how Vivian knew she was truly upset over this. Nobody in the family really talked about it, but there had been a growing sense of worry about their familial emotional balance since the eldest brother Thomas had lost his professorship. (During a heated conference panel regarding the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he’d cracked the skull of a Poe scholar with a classroom projector.) And Vivian had her own, less infamous troubles. As the next generation of their family emerged and grew, each of them worried about inheritance. “And then when we had to explain to her why her art was taken down, it was like she was in her own world and couldn’t hear anyone else.”

“Vivian, we were talking,” David said. “And while even thinking about this is a conflict of interest, I feel Marie might benefit from another social outlet.”

“A friend.” (Claireified.) “Something like a sister. A big sister.”

“Izat sho?” (No coincidences. All part of the program.)

~

Vivian has come to suspect that all is program. Not only her body, an expression of DNA, and her mind, always flickering before her captive eyes like a Clockwork Orange screening, but the whole world—the universe! Whether someone else’s simulation that she’s just living or simply a purely mechanistic roller coaster she’s strapped into, she can’t say.

The notion sprouted around the same time her body (according to schedule) started manufacturing (automation) the chemicals that would make her skin bubble and her menstruation start. The voice that was and wasn’t hers elbowed into her thoughts, and she’d sit silently in classes thinking about that phrase “train of thought,” picturing the tracks (predetermination, control, clockwork timetables, please watch your hands; the doors are now closing!) extending out before her. One thought moved to the next—or were they linked like one train car to another?—drifting away from the station. Vivian struggled to focus on the buildings and trees flitting past, smearing with speed into an untouchable world. It was lonely.

Inwardly, Vivian’s selfhood had twisted into a self-devouring solipsism, but to her family, Vivian was just quietly waiting to emerge from her shell. That’s puberty! Given the extraordinary talents (hereditary, just look at your philosophy professor daddy and poet mommy) of her older brother Thomas and sister Claire, there was cover for her turn inward. Between events like Thomas’s publication of a book of literary scholarship during his last semester of undergrad to Claire’s landing first cello in the state orchestra in every year of high school, there was no light to shine on Vivian’s complications. The problem became tangible only at the holidays and at her Birthday when, oh crap, everyone had to buy her gifts to demonstrate their admittedly truly-felt (biologically-rooted) affection. But what did this girl want? What did she think?

For her twelfth Birthday, a chunk of identity inexplicably landed in the family’s lap: Vivian loved the color green! For years, the problem was solved: give her green clothes, green sheets, green curtains and trash cans and desk chairs. Paper her walls in leafy reams and roll out the grassy carpets. Soon her room looked like the Rainforest Cafe, complete with tree frogs dangling in every corner from shamrock patterned shoestring vines. Vivian was green, green was Vivian.

Her brother, Thomas, perhaps intuiting something wrong with year after year of green gifts, broke the pattern one Christmas and gave her, in green holly paper, a Franz Kafka collection featuring The Metamorphosis. Vivian stared at the bug on the cover. She had always thought that Thomas was actively ignoring her, but she felt something else then. Had he noticed her collecting beetles in the back yard?

“This one’s pretty weird,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. I thought you might like it. Something for study hall. Or bedtime. Hahaha!”

“Kafka? What are you trying to do?” their dad asked. “Turn her into Margot Tenenbaum?”

Vivian read it cover to cover, and Thomas kept giving her books. She was thus marked another reader in the family, making holidays all the easier, but soon everyone learned she was also fascinated with insects, and she started to speak her mind—the parts of it she (at least felt like she had) selected.

~

Vivian and Marie slowly waddle out onto the frozen pond in Glass Park. (Don’t yawn, you wanted it early to avoid people!) Relieved that, as planned, nobody else is out this early, Vivian holds Marie’s hand, small and soft in its tiny mitten. An embarrassing internal giggle tickles her, but Damn you mommy program, I have no intention of squeezing any little ones out of me. Still, the air is cool, and Marie is focused on maintaining her balance and so squeezes gently as they take the curved end of the pond. Vivian stops thinking then, and there is just sound: blades over ice, Marie sniffling. 

Until GACHUNK GACHUNK!

Skates slice through crunchy bumps in the ice, and the surprise sends the two down to the slick cold, Marie tumbling into Vivian’s arms, which cradle the girl’s head in the fall. Synchronized in motion as if their minds run on the same tracks, the two flop over and observe, down in the ice, frogs frozen just at the surface, some of their heads sticking just up above the floor line. Several heads are split in two where the blades have just slid. Frog brain shaved ice.

“We broke their souls,” Marie says.

“Broke their souls,” Vivian repeats, staring into the cold amphibian eyes. “Croak.”(Ribbit.)

“Mom says the soul’s in the brain.”

“Soul’s in the brain.” Vivian reaches out to run a finger over the credit card slot she’s just cleaved into this frog’s skull but stops. “Marie, who says frogs have souls?”

(Blink blink)

“Amphibian metaphysics are none of your business, young lady.”

Marie’s hand escapes its glove and wiggles her loose tooth. She is unconvinced. (Oh no, you’ve broken her soul!)

“Look, your mom, she maybe spends a little too much time in that lab of hers. It’s like a family bad habit,” Vivian says even as she starts to sweat under her coat, noticing families starting to arrive, skates in tow.  “Hey, Marie, have I ever shown you my bugs?”

~

Marie requests “Popeye” for lunch, so Vivian whips up pepperoncini pasta with sautéed spinach (Popeye) and pan-seared chicken. A recipe inherited from her brother during her “year off” of school. While Vivian cooks, Marie stares into her tank where Gregor the Eastern Hercules beetle dwells. Marie’s mouth hangs open in wonder, one finger in for tooth-wiggling. From where Vivian stands, it looks in reflection like Gregor has just stepped out of the girl’s mouth.

“Vivian’s year off” was a euphemism in the family for a year (and running) during which she locked herself away in her apartment, leaving only briefly—at night, baseball cap pulled down over brow—to get necessities. (They can’t see you, but I do.) The family didn’t know the details. (Sure, Viv, I’m sure they can’t guess.) Only that she stopped coming to see them.

When she was a high schooler, she’d begun to blabber incessantly to drown the inner voice. But in college, she spent more and more time alone in a lab surrounded only by insect tanks. Soon that old train of thought cried out within the vibrations of the cicadas and the multi-instrumental improvisations of the Bess beetles. (Sky to birds, water to fish, Vivian to Vivian)

In the lab they’d bred flies: generation after generation, heritable traits cresting and crashing into piles of crispy, indistinguishable winged bodies. At some point, Vivian stopped doing her work and just stared through a microscope at the compound eyes, imagining a strange mosaic of seemingly infinite shards of image. How could all these angles coalesce into one reality?

She went home and locked the door to be alone. Alone with herself, her other voice. 

 ~

Vivian sets two plates of pasta down, whistling “Popeye the Sailor Man.” They eat in silence, except for Vivian mumbling some Popeye lyrics between bites. When she clears their plates, Marie looks up and asks what will happen to the other frogs—the ones frozen deep in the ice.

Vivian boots up her laptop, pops her toothbrush in for idle cleaning, and the two squeeze into the squishy desk chair, Marie climbing uncomfortably aboard Vivian’s lap for a clear view of the screen.

“Shee here,” Vivian says mid-brush after a quick search. “Shum frogsh are made to freej.”

“Aren’t they cold?”

“Nod ad oll!” she says and gives up the brushing. “They aren’t going to die, either. Provided they keep their heads down to avoid ladies like us on skates. When a cold time is coming, they just have to get down deep enough and let it happen. According to this, their hearts beat only once or twice a day during this time. But they must believe it will be warm again one day.”

Marie pushes on her own chest, checking if her heart is still ticking up to speed.

“And in the spring, they’ll thaw out again . . . and nab some flies with their tongues! Yum!” Vivian licks Marie’s cheek, Marie squeals, and they take off on a chase-me game. Marie, captured and tickle-tortured, asks if they can go see the frogs again.

“Maybe another time,” Vivian says, already dreading how Claire will react to her daughter’s gruesome introduction to amphibian roadkill.

Later Marie complains about her tooth, so Vivian helps her loop some floss around it (she has reams and reams of the stuff stashed away), and they do the old doorknob trick.

“Ready?” Vivian says.

Marie nods.

SLAM. POP. And the tooth is out, dragged along the floor like a fish on a hook. Marie collects it and stares.

“You know what happens, right? A new one will come in soon.”

Marie dashes to the bathroom and locks herself in. She’s in there more than an hour before Vivian finally knocks. Marie, what’s up? Are you ok?

“Jusht looking,” she says, and Vivian can picture her seat up on the sink, staring into the bloody gap.

~

Vivian wakes from dreams of fleeing a giant frog’s tongue, lashing out to close her inside its jaws forever. The early morning sun casts a familiar pattern on familiar bedroom walls. (Always the same walls.) She feels the fabric of her pajamas, often what she wears all day (Who’s gonna see you anyway?) and begins to dread. Her mind takes off: Brushing. Puffy eyes. Green goo. Sketch book. A screaming little girl in the black mouth of death. The black mouth of frog. The credit card slot of frog. Big brother splashed with the blood of the academy. Vivian splashed with the blood of brains of frog. Mountains of dead flies. The inevitable voice of DNA. Sketch book.

Crayons! Marie is going to need crayons.

Vivian dons her baseball cap, wads cash into her pajama top’s breast pocket, and, in a motion and a half, whips on her coat and a pair of sandals. Three steps out the door, she does not pause but internally (Hey, what’re you doing out here?), and by the time she is back with the crayons—the big set with every shade light and dark plus built-in sharpener—her toes have gone numb.

Before going back to sleep, she creeps into her guest room and retrieves the tooth from under Marie’s pillow. On the night stand she leaves the Crayolas, the sketch book, and in green crayon on the opened page: Up for ice skating?

~

Marie squats in the center of the pond next to the frog bumps and unzips her little backpack. She takes out the sketch pad and crayons to sketch the frogs in the ice. There are bubbles and leaves and sticks. Some of the frogs’ heads are just below the ice, and some are above, cleaved in two and topped with yesterday’s frog brain debris. Vivian wonders if she was entranced by gruesome things at Marie’s age. She probably was.

She leaves Marie to study the slain frogs to her heart’s content, skating leisurely around the pond.

If her mind is a program, Vivian thinks, she could be copied and continue this passive existence forever. But she’s not sure. She’s starting to think that there is indeed a program, but the Vivian living it is a product of motion—more like an amateur figure skater on a crowded pond than a train on tracks. Here comes a crazy big brother skating in the opposite direction to hit her with a snowball, and she takes off after him, everything shifting around her darting moves. There goes a sister, a niece, a trail of strangers and frogs in the ice that change her path. She might even trip into a pirouette.

Marie holds up her sketch as Vivian glides by: green frogs, frozen in the blue, holding acrobatic poses. Some dead, some alive. Hearts beating once a day, waiting for the thaw. Marie smiles and sticks her tongue at Vivian through the gap of her lost tooth.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Shoe Shop

You might expect a shoe shop’s window display to be filled with shoes, but in this case, you’d be wrong. Instead, a brilliant array of strange and wonderful plants pressed up against the glass, completely obscuring everything inside. It wouldn’t look like a shoe shop at all, if not for the hand-painted sign above the door that read, “Tanner’s Fine Leather Shoes,” in large white letters. I clutched the bulky bag of Mr. Branson’s shoes to my chest as Mom tugged me past the wild jungle of a window, but not before I caught a glimpse of bright brown eyes peering down at me from between the purple leaves of a vine several feet above my head.

As we entered the small shop, a bell rang on the doorframe above us.

“One moment!” A man’s voice called out from inside the mess of plants. “I’ll be right with you.”

“Oh, honestly…” Mom muttered under her breath. She’d been that way this morning—well, for the past few days, really. Short of temper, in a rush. Ever since Mr. Branson’s accident.

“My apologies,” the man said, emerging a few moments later from the maze of green with a silver watering can in hand. He was a narrow man in a green plaid dress shirt, buttoned up all the way to his throat, with a voice higher pitched than you might expect for a man so tall, as if he was speaking through his nose. “My plants are accustomed to a very precise watering schedule.”

“Yes, well. We’re on a tight schedule, too.” Mom said pointedly. The man’s posture straightened, making him even taller, and his lips pressed into a small straight line as he met Mom’s gaze. Mom stood taller too, although she still didn’t come even to his shoulder, and lifted her chin ever so slightly, until he looked away with a sigh.

“Terribly sorry, Ma’am,” he said at last. “I’m Willard Tanner. How may I help you?”

Mom’s posture relaxed. “My boy needs new shoes,” she said, “and mine need repair. I hear this is the place to come.”

“Yes,” he said, “for repairs. But not new shoes. I only sell used.” Mom and I looked around at the shelves lining the small room. Leather shoes in a myriad of sizes, each practically glowing in shades of inky black, chocolate brown, and rich velvety cream. They didn’t look used.

“My father was a shoemaker,” Willard explained, “the very best. Most of these are his work. Made lots of things, in fact. Even built this shop.” He swept a long arm about in a grand gesture. “But I,” he continued, “restore them. It’s my specialty.”

“Used will do,” Mom said quickly. “I hear you take trades, as well?”

“Naturally,” Willard replied, with a bit of an edge, “where else would I get shoes to restore?”

Mom blushed, but not bashfully. I think she was actually becoming cross with this strange man, although I found him quite funny. But we needed shoes before we left town; there was no getting around that. Mom had spent the last few days getting things in order, and this was our last errand. The big toe on my left foot peeked out now from its prison, and the sole on the right shoe was starting to detach in a flap at the side. Mom’s shoes were even worse, and we had no spares. With Mr. Branson gone, Mom needed to find new work fast, and we certainly couldn’t travel like this.

“Do you have his size?” Mom asked, nudging me forward towards Willard.

“I have all sizes,” he responded, “but we have to find the right match.”

“Don’t they all have a match?” I asked curiously.

Willard nodded and gave me a quick wink. “Naturally. I mean the right match for you.” I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Every shoe has a story, you see. An imprint from the last owner, and the ones before that, too.”

“You mean a wear pattern?” Mom interjected.

“No!” Willard whipped his head back toward her, frowning. “Not in this shop. They’re good as new by the time I’m done with them!”

“What, then?” I asked. Mom was clearly ready to be done with this errand, but I was still curious.

“An imprint, like I said. A history.” Willard put his hands in his pockets and smiled at me. “A personality, if you will.”

“What about this pair?” I picked up a black pair of shoes with grey laces that looked to be about my size.

“Those belonged to a young man named Patrick. Smart boy, did well in school. Got a good job. I’d recommend them, except for one thing...”

“What’s that?”

“He was a thief. Not out of need, mind you. Out of impulse, for the thrill of it—not the right match for you, I reckon.”

“Now how would you know that?” Mom’s voice dripped with skepticism, but I think she’d given up on speed by this point.

“Shoes tell stories,” Willard said with a shrug, “and I once caught him with a tin of shoe polish in his pocket, too.” He shook his head. “That boy never polished shoes once in his life, I’ll tell you that.”

Mom sighed and took the bag of shoes from me. She took a seat on the small wooden bench at the side of the room, and gestured for me to follow Willard. I set the black shoes down and trailed after Willard to the next shelf while mom removed her own worn shoes and set them beside her on the bench.

“Now here,” Willard said, in a soft voice, “is a good pair.” Tenderly, he picked up a brown shoe that had a section at the toe in a darker, textured leather. “These belonged to my nephew. Kind boy. And the reinforcement at the toe can’t hurt anything, now can it?” I looked down at my escaped toe and wiggled it as Willard bent down to untie my laces. The shoe was a perfect fit. Willard took my old shoes to the counter as I laced up the next one.

Mom stood again, in her stocking feet, and placed the bag of Mr. Branson’s shoes on the wooden counter.

“We have these to sell,” she said, as Willard walked behind the counter. “They’re good quality.”

Willard frowned as he pulled out the first pair, and then the next. Mr. Branson’s shoes were large and dark, with sleek lines.

“Where did you get these?”

“They were given to me. They belonged to my employer, Mr. Branson.”

“Curtis Branson? The man who died in the storm?” Willard looked up at her, surprised.

“Yes.” Mom’s voice sounded pinched.

“Oh. I didn’t like him,” he said flatly. He looked down, went back to examining the shoes. Mom seemed a bit taken back by his forwardness.

“But they’re good shoes,” Mom insisted, “aren’t they?”

Willard sighed. “Yes. I suppose I can find a match for them. Someone with strong moral character might manage alright.”

“Why didn’t you like him?” I asked brightly, earning a pinch on my forearm from Mom for my impertinence.

“I used to shine shoes when I was a young boy, when my father still ran the shop. Curtis Branson was a weekly customer. Cruel man.” Willard shook his head, still examining the shoes. “Stepped on my fingers every time. And I could tell from the toe of his shoes that he had a habit of kicking things.”

I was delighted by this clever shoe detective, and now, I knew for sure that he was telling the truth. Mr. Branson was not a nice man. Not at all. Mom tried to hide it from me—she told me he was a good employer, and that we should be grateful. But I knew.

 ~

We lived down past the creek from the Branson mansion, where Mom worked as a maid during the week, not returning until nearly dark each day. But in the evenings, she was home with me, so when Mr. Branson appeared at the door a few days before the storm, just as I was about to go to bed, it was a shock to us both. He was a large man, with dark hair streaked with grey, and astonishingly light blue eyes. When Mom answered the door, he staggered in off-balance and caught himself on a chair, leaving the door swinging behind him in the cold evening wind. Mom took three steps backwards towards me, her eyes large and her mouth opening and shutting without a sound. Next to Mr. Branson, she looked like a tiny bird.

“What,” she said finally in a shaky voice, “are you doing here?” Mr. Branson didn’t answer. He just smiled strangely and stepped forward, toward her.

“Not here,” she hissed, stretching out her left arm sideways, across my body. But Mr. Branson didn’t seem to hear. He stepped forward again.

“Go to bed, Thomas,” Mom said sharply, in a voice I knew couldn’t be argued with. She turned and pushed me back into the bedroom, shutting the door after me with a loud thump. I’d never seen her act so strangely. I think she pushed Mr. Branson out, too, because there was some clattering around after that before the outer door slammed shut. Although I didn’t see him again at our home, I thought I heard his rough voice and heavy footsteps once more later that week, while I was supposed to be sleeping. Mom was different in the morning, too. Quiet and distracted, staring up the hill toward the Branson residence. I stayed awake as long as I could every night, listening. Mostly, I just heard her rustling around, until she went to sleep too. Except on the night of the storm, when I heard nothing but the incessant roar of the wind and rain.

Willard pulled out the third and last pair of Mr. Branson’s shoes. He bent his face down close to them, studying something on the sole.

“This must be the pair,” he said, “that he died in.”

I felt Mom stiffen beside me.

“How could you possibly tell a thing like that?”

“Well, see here. That scrape, probably from a fall. Green from the moss that grows on the bridge. I assume that’s where he fell. Red dust embedded in the leather, from the bricks. And this here is water damage.”

“Wow!” I said, unable to contain myself, “you’re like a real detective!”

“Shush now,” Mom scolded, “that’s preposterous. And we need to go. Can you take them or not?”

“It’s not preposterous, Ma’am. It’s simple observation.” Willard straightened, looking down his nose at Mom.

Mom glared up at him silently, one eyebrow raised. After a moment, he looked away.

“I’ll take them,” he answered quietly. “They’ll be enough for two pairs.”

“Here,” I said excitedly, “do Mom’s!” I snatched her old shoes from the bench. Mom grabbed my wrist, hard, but not before I slung her shoes up on the counter in front of Willard with a thump. Her eyes widened as he picked them up.

He was quiet for a long time, looking at Mom’s shoes. At last, he said:

“Not too old, but very worn. Regular pattern of stooping; perhaps working on your knees?”

“Yes. Scrubbing floors.”

“And… you must have fallen. This scratch here…”

“Tripped on some stairs.”

Willard’s brow furrowed. “Some green residue. And… red, there by the heel.”

“I have a garden,” Mom said a bit too loudly, “clay soil.” She was still gripping my wrist, so tight that it hurt.

“I see,” said Willard quietly, not looking up. “Well, not much to tell here, except that they are beyond repair.” He set the shoes down, slowly, and reached under the counter. “But I do have a pair here that’s quite nice. I think they’ll be a good match.” He set a tan, suede pair of boots on the counter.

I was disappointed not to get a better story out of Mom’s shoes, but she was still in a hurry. “Thank you,” Mom said, grabbing the boots. “That will be all.” She spun me around and pushed me towards the door, not even bothering to put the boots on over her stockings. Just as we stepped across the threshold, Willard called out after us. Mom froze in place, her hand still on the doorknob.

“I won’t tell anyone, Ma’am … about your garden.”

Mom didn’t turn back to look at him. But I felt her breath release beside me, and she gave one slow nod, before we carried on our way.

Grownups are strange, I decided. Mom’s garden was small, but nothing to be ashamed of. When we were halfway down the street, I looked back over my shoulder. It was too far to tell for sure, but from behind the twisted tangle of plants in the shop window, I felt those bright brown eyes staring after us until we were far out of town.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Pottery Royalty

On my third day in East Liverpool, I walked into an antique store on a narrow street that climbed gently up from the Ohio River.  Its neighbors were a boarded-up auto repair shop and a Christian bookstore, open but deserted. The sidewalks were empty, with grass growing in the cracks.

Pottery crowded the antique store’s display window. I spotted a place setting of brightly colored Fiesta, a few chunky brown replicas of Rockingham jugs and spittoons, and one elaborately decorated Lotus Ware pitcher. That was the limit of my ceramics expertise. A bell rang faintly as I walked in.

Two women stood behind a sales counter, one on either side of a huge brass cash register, talking to each other. One of them, tiny and grey-haired, blinked and smiled at me. The other didn’t seem to notice my arrival. She was younger—forty, maybe, a couple of years older than me if so—tall and dark-haired, wearing a long black dress.

“You’d be surprised what you can find in some of these places,” she was saying. “Like those Harker ABC plates, the ones with the birds? I found those in a basement in the East End.”

The older woman murmured something.

“Illegal? Not if the house is abandoned, I don’t think. The only thing you have to be careful about is, sometimes there are junkies squatting in them.” A ripple of laughter ran through the last phrase, as if junkies in basements were just an amusing inconvenience. “I’ll take you some time if you like.”

“Thanks, probably not my thing.” The older woman moved out from behind the counter and crossed the room to ask me if I needed help finding anything.

“Just browsing,” I said automatically, and then out of idle curiosity—or at least that’s all I was aware of. “Maybe the Harker plates with the birds?”

“Of course.” If it bothered her that I’d been eavesdropping, she didn’t show it.

“Right over here. Minerva’s stall.”

I followed her to a nook at the back of the store, and she unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet.  There were three of the plates, delicate white china with a thin blue band around the rim, the letters of the alphabet arranged in a circle inside that, and in the center of each plate a brightly painted bird—a barn swallow, a bluebird, and a robin.

“Early twentieth century,” the woman said. “Beautiful, yes?”

“They are.”

A neatly hand-written card read: $100 each. Set, $250. “A little pricey,” the woman said. “You could talk to Minerva. She might come down a little.”

We both looked over at the sales counter, but the woman in the black dress was gone.

~

Three generations of my mother’s ancestors had lived in East Liverpool, back in its glory days as the Crockery City, when it produced half of America’s ceramics. The potteries were all gone now, nothing left but empty lots with foundations hidden in the grass, here and there a kiln or a chimney slowly falling to pieces. The downtown streets were lined with massive dark brick buildings from the early 1900s, banks and office buildings and hotels, most of them now empty. The factory owners and society ladies from my family tree were long dead, not to mention the potters and masons and carpenters who worked for them.

As for me, I was born and raised in California, and this was my first time in Ohio. I had no living relatives in town, or anyhow none that I knew about. I was staying in a Days Inn, kitty-corner to a graveyard where one of my great-great-grandfathers was buried. I’d spent a lot of time in graveyards since I arrived—in that one, in the much larger Riverview Cemetery, in tiny rural churchyards all over Columbiana County. I’d spent an afternoon in the city’s Carnegie library, unearthing stray references to various twigs of my family tree; toured a couple of 19th-century mansions; visited a Methodist church where a stained-glass window was dedicated to a distant cousin of mine who’d been killed in the Civil War.

Not far from the library, in a sprawling Beaux-Arts building that had once been the town post office, was the Museum of Ceramics. The docent, a tall, fair-haired woman, reminded me of a sixth-grade teacher I’d had a crush on. She led me through the cool, gently lit rooms, pointing out the high spots among the enormous variety of plates, jugs, bowls, teapots, rolling pins, doorknobs, and figurines inside the glass cases. Speaking so softly that I had trouble hearing her, she told me about the early potters, entrepreneurs who sold rough yellow ware from boats up and down the Ohio; the big industrial potteries—Harker & Sons, Homer Laughlin, Knowles Taylor & Knowles—that made East Liverpool a boom town after the Civil War; the artisans who created Lotus Ware, a line of porcelain as delicate and ornate as the finest English china. Some of this I vaguely knew, some I didn’t, but either way, the history had a weight now that I hadn’t expected.

The tour ended at a minuscule gift shop. Behind the counter stood Minerva, still in black, but this time jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

“You again,” she said.

“Me again. You remembered.” Which seemed odd, because I’d have said she hadn’t noticed me the day before. “Moonlighting?”

“Whatever it takes.” She looked at me sideways, off-kilter. Her face had the kind of lines that come more from expressiveness than from age. “Enjoy the tour?”

“I did. She knows her stuff.”

“Karla’s a gem. Her ex, on the other hand, should be in a lunatic asylum. Sorry, inappropriate.” She smiled, not at all apologetically. “Ada said you almost bought my Harker birds.”

“I thought about it. Not sure if the abandoned house provenance is a plus or a minus.”

She laughed. “Like I said, whatever it takes. Are you a collector?”

“Just a tourist.”

“Really? We don’t get a lot of those.”

“Maybe not exactly a tourist.” It shouldn’t have been a difficult question, but I still hadn’t answered it for myself.  If there was something I was looking for here, I didn’t know what it was. “One side of my family lived here back in the 1800s. I’ve always been curious.”

“Interesting. Potters?”

“Some of them. Factory owners, even. Some Bennetts. Some Harkers.”

“Ooh, you’re pottery royalty.” If she was mocking me, it was done gently enough. “Of course, I am too, if you go back far enough. There’s not much

“Sorry to interrupt...” Karla leaned into the gift shop doorway, smiling hesitantly at me. “Quick question, Minerva.”

I turned to go. Minerva scribbled a number on one of the museum’s business cards and handed it to me. “Just in case you change your mind about the birds.”

~

I didn’t change my mind about the birds, not then anyway, but I called her the next day. We had coffee and cherry pie at a dimly lit cafeteria that evening—the only place open in downtown East Liverpool at seven o’clock on a weeknight. In our back corner booth, I couldn’t tell if her dress was dark blue, dark grey, dark purple, or just black once again. Her features, too, had a shifting quality—sometimes smoothly curved, almost bland, sometimes tangled in shadows and contrasts.

On the surface, we had a lot in common. I taught history at San Francisco State; she had a graduate degree in art history from Northwestern. Our respective lists of favorite authors overlapped to an almost alarming degree—George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Balzac, Edith Wharton. Similar story with music and movies. But unlike most of the educated people I’d met in East Liverpool, she didn’t seem to be yearning for the sophistication of the coasts, and she seemed to take her city’s problems in stride.

“That’s a depressing neighborhood, for sure,” she said when I told her about my afternoon. I’d walked up and down the steep streets east of the downtown, looking for an address where my great-grandparents had lived. Most of the street signs were missing, and for every lovingly maintained old Victorian, there was one falling to pieces or boarded up. My great-grandparents’ address turned out to be an empty lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. “On the bright side, rents are low.”

I knew the broad strokes of the story: cheap imports and high production costs had killed the city’s potteries in the mid-twentieth century. The population had dropped by 50%. A freeway had taken much of the downtown and riverfront. In the 2000s, drugs—meth, heroin, fentanyl—had replaced alcohol as the coping mechanism of choice.

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“Born and bred in Madison Township. My people go way back in the Scotch Settlement. I didn’t move to town until I got married.”

I didn’t need to look at her finger to know she wasn’t married now. She had a brittle cheerfulness that spoke of intelligence and disillusionment.

Apparently, I was giving off a vibe of my own, because she said, “Never been married?”

“No,” I said. “Close, though. Twice.”

“It’s overrated. We had a big house, that was nice. But he was all about his work. He’s a prosecutor for the county. Which really put a crimp in my heroin use.”

At the time, I thought she was joking, and maybe she was. “That’s kind of the definition of incompatible,” I said.

“Incompatible is my middle name. You say you were close to getting married twice?”

“Once for sure. A long time ago—we were grad students. The other one, I don’t know, maybe we weren’t that close to it.” I still didn’t have a formula for talking about Emma.

“This was recently?”

“Three months ago.”

“You know,” Minerva said, “this was an odd place to choose if you were looking to cheer yourself up. Don’t West Coast people go to Hawaii or Cabo for that?”

Odd comment at best. But her bluntness, so unlike Emma’s chilly reserve, almost made me smile, and I found myself saying more about the trip than I had to anyone else. “It’s all kind of tangled up. I only met Emma because my great-aunt Grace died—they were friends. And Grace was from here. Not East Liverpool, but right up the road in Lisbon. Like I said yesterday, I was always curious about Ohio. But it was only after Grace died that I started to think about actually coming here.”

“Tangled up is right.” She seemed to be on the verge of asking another question, and I might have answered that one too, but then she was off in another direction. “I have to tell you, I almost said no when you called.”

“Understandable. I could totally be a stalker.”          

“It’s not that,” she said. “I was planning on doing some treasure hunting tonight. I didn’t really want to put it off just for coffee. But then I thought, two’s company, right?”

“By ‘treasure hunting’ you mean burglary?”

“Some people would look at it that way. I just have this feeling you’re not one of them.”

Was I? Maybe, maybe not. But I knew I didn’t want her to mistake good sense for a failure of nerve.

                                                                        ~

“The woman’s ninety-two,” Minerva said as we drove along a dark two-lane highway somewhere outside East Liverpool. “Her son was supposed to be taking care of her, but he OD’ed. So, they dragged her off to hospice. The house has been standing empty for months. The county’s going to take it for back taxes.”

She drove too fast, which wasn’t a surprise. The road was laid out in long doglegs between pastures and clumps of young trees, the lights of farmhouses here and there. As we came up a sharp rise I saw a cemetery on the left-hand side, tall ornate headstones and monuments sinister in the moonlight. Then, a small brick church.

“Yellow Creek Presbyterian.” She let the car slow. “Last I counted, I have ten direct ancestors buried there. MacIntoshes, Davidsons, McQueens—they all came here from around Inverness. One of them witnessed the battle of Culloden as a young boy.”

“That’s a lot of history.”

“Like I always say—if you don’t like your future, live in your past.”

                                                                        ~

The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two rusted-out cars stood in long grass. A sheet of plywood with the outline of a cat spray-painted on it covered the front doorway. Minerva pushed it aside with a nudge from a crowbar. The actual door was missing.

We might not be the first people to visit here,” she said.

Inside, it smelled of pine needles and dead mice. She switched on a flashlight and swept its beam around a living room crowded with threadbare couches and armchairs. A withered Christmas tree stood in one corner, with a litter of smashed ornaments around it.

“Well, it’s only April,” I said. “If you really love Christmas…”

“Yeah. Cozy.” She glided around the room, stroking the fabric on the couches, getting down on hands and knees to shine her flashlight on the underside of a table. “Some of these were nice pieces once. Maybe I should have brought my truck. Well, no matter. Let’s see what’s in the kitchen.”

I followed her. She paused and looked up. A sprig of plastic mistletoe dangled there in the doorway. A couple of seconds went by, and as she turned away again, I realized I’d been meant to kiss her.

“No shortage of crappy pottery here,” she said. The sink and counters were crowded with dirty dishes. Grease and mold and unidentifiable chunks of food had fossilized on a sad mix of chipped and faded crockery. “Maybe there’s something better in the cupboards.”

Pots and pans; broken coffee machines; canned food with faded labels, tuna and beef stew and chili; a pile of paper grocery bags clumped together by moisture; more cheap plates and bowls; a five-pound bag of birdseed; and so on.

“This is something.” She lifted out a blue and green teapot with a spray of flowers painted on the side, then turned it upside down. “KTK. 1910 or so. Tiny chip on the handle, but very nice.”

I carried it out to the car and set it carefully on the back seat. By the time I got back to the kitchen, she was slamming the door of the last cupboard. “Disappointing. I guess we can try the rest of the house.”

As we went back through the doorway to the living room, she stopped under the mistletoe again, turning to face me. This time, I put my hands on her upper arms and kissed her lightly. Then we stood there a few inches apart in a tangle of shadows from her flashlight.

“We’re still here,” she said. “How many kisses is that thing good for?”

I kissed her again, still lightly, but neither of us pulled back this time. Her breath was minty, with a trace of smoke.

“Hello?” A faint voice from the back of the house. “Trevor?”

“Holy fuck.” Minerva twisted out of my grasp and pointed her flashlight into the kitchen. There was another doorway back there, a short stretch of hallway visible.

“Trevor?” The voice was high-pitched but weak.

“Fuck, it’s her.” Minerva put a hand over her eyes.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

“Trevor’s the son. The one who OD’d. It must have been bullshit about the hospice. Or they brought her back.”

“Let’s go,” I said again. “We were never here.”

“My mother knew this woman.”

“Then why are we breaking into her house?”

She ignored that. “Go wait in the car. I’ve got to check on her.”

I didn’t answer, just followed her back through the kitchen into the hallway. Closed door on the right, closed door on the left, open door on the left—Minerva’s flashlight picked out crumpled balls of Kleenex on the floor, a dresser littered with medicine bottles, a brass bedstead, a tangle of quilts and blankets. At one end of the pile was a withered face under a chaos of white hair. A smell like rancid hamburger hung in the air.

Her eyes were open, but she didn’t look at us. “Cold,” she croaked.

“Mrs. Fraser, it’s me, Minerva Forbes.”

“Cold.”

“See if you can find another blanket?” Minerva looked back at me. “Mrs. Fraser, I’m just going to check your vitals.”

I asked Minerva later if she’d ever been a nurse, and she told me it was just a persona she’d learned to assume. To people who were sick or drugged or addled, it was familiar, it was comforting, and they didn’t fight it. Whatever—I was happy enough to leave the stench of that room and search for blankets. When I came back with a ragged blue and white quilt, Minerva was already dialing 911.

~

“Not quite the excursion I had in mind,” she said as we drove away an hour later.

“Same here.”

“But you’ll admit it’s a lovely little teapot.” She smiled at me as though we hadn’t watched two EMTs haul Mrs. Fraser out to their ambulance.

“Days if not hours,” one of the EMTs had said to Minerva.

“I don’t doubt it,” she’d answered. “But she won’t be alone, at least.”

The EMT had shrugged at that.

“Mind if we stop at Yellow Creek?” she said now. “I want to show you something.”

“Your ten ancestors?”

“We’ll say hi as we walk past. But no, this is something else.”

She slowed as we came to the church, a squat red brick building with tall arched windows, then pulled to the shoulder just past it. The churchyard, a lawn studded with tombstones—pillars, slabs, tablets, obelisks—sloped up from the road in a gentle knoll.

She led me through the forest of stones, pausing here and there to read a name aloud. “Alexander McBean, Isobel McBean… Ann McQueen… Jennet McIntosh…”

 The graves nearest the road were the oldest, their inscriptions so worn I couldn’t read them. Farther up the slope, the stones were clean and sharp-edged, the dates within the last century. Past the top of the knoll, with the church itself well behind us now, an almost empty stretch of lawn ran down to a line of bare trees. Half a dozen stray markers bounced random scraps of moonlight up at us.

“Running out of room,” Minerva said. “All the rest of this space is spoken for.”

“Quite a success story if you look at it a certain way.”

“Only it’s a very fucked-up way?” She laughed. “My ex got the house and the Volvo. I got the Porsche and the cemetery plots. We’ll see who comes out ahead in the end.” She looked back at the church, drew a line in the air with her hand, then took half a dozen steps toward the trees. “My plots are right about here.” She beckoned me over, and I went.

“I was thinking pottery was going to be the theme tonight,” I said. “Instead, it’s dead people?”

“Sorry, just worked out that way. Mrs. Fraser kind of derailed us.”

“She did.”

“And I left the mistletoe behind. Is that a problem?” She laid a hand on my hip.

I pulled her close to me, one hand on each of her shoulders, and looked into her eyes from a few inches away. The irises were a smoky grey-green, I knew that, but they seemed entirely clear with the moon shining on them. Then my eyes closed as her face tilted up to mine and we kissed. Accidentally or otherwise, she tripped me. We fell onto the grass, with her on top.

I’d been wanting this, if not from the moment I first saw her, then at least from the moment she said you again in the museum. But I had expected it to happen in my room at the Days Inn, or maybe in some dark cluttered space, full of Lotus Ware and Impressionist reproductions, that she called home. Still, there was precious little chance of any living people seeing or hearing us, and I didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious as my hands found their way inside her dress.

She stayed on top as we made love. No surprise there. She was loud, and she wasn’t shy about telling me what she liked and what she didn’t. I did my best to follow instructions. She was so self-assured that there were none of those awkward first-time misunderstandings. It didn’t take long for us to thrash our way to satisfied torpor.

It was chilly—a spring night in eastern Ohio—and as we lay there with her sprawled on top of me, I felt her shiver.

“You OK?” I asked. “Not too cold?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“Good.”

“I would hope so,” she said.

“But being an academic, I have to ask about the symbolism.”

“Of fucking in a cemetery? I don’t know. Awful things will happen, but good ones will too? I think I stole that from some Presbyterian minister.”

“Appropriate, then.” I looked back toward the church.

“Or maybe from Rosanne Cash.”

I could see other kinds of symbolism too, something about the ancestors, about the ex; but maybe, I thought, it was better not to go there.

Silence for a bit, except for the creaking songs of frogs.

“Question for you,” she said.  

“Sure.” I closed my eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here . . . but why are you here? Not here here,” she said, patting the lawn in front of us,“but here in Columbiana County. I mean, sure, great-great-grandparents, pottery royalty, great-aunt Grace, you’ve told me all that. But what’s the point?”

“It’s a good question,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have a good answer. Curiosity. Distraction, maybe.”

“Distraction from what?”

“Everything. Work, breakup, getting old. The rest of my family—my mother, my sisters—they moved out east after my father died. Boston. They couldn’t care less about this, about the history. But I feel like these are roots I should know about.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Minerva said, “but the feeling I get is that you’re someone who’s never really been broken. True?”

Not a standard post-coital question, not in my experience anyhow, but I answered anyhow. “True, I guess. What would be the wrong way of taking it?”

“Some people might think it was a way of saying that you’ve missed something. And I’m not saying that.”

“You’ve been there, it sounds like.”

“I have, and it was awful. But it’s part of me now. And it just strikes me that maybe you’re a little too curious about it. That it has a kind of appeal for you.”

“Well, you have a kind of appeal for me. I don’t think it’s about anyone being broken or not.”

“No?”

“Granted, we’re different.”

“And you’re thinking maybe I’d be a good change of pace from what’s-her-name?”

“Emma,” I said softly. “No, it’s not that.”

Apparently, I didn’t sound convincing.         

“No is right,” Minerva said. “That’s not going to work.  I’m kind of like East Liverpool. Interesting place to visit, lots of history, classic architecture if I say so myself . . . but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s a little run down, weather too extreme, living in the past, substance abuse issues . . . It’s sort of a grim picture.”

I didn’t think she wanted a direct answer to that. “Ever been to California?” I asked.

“No. Never.” She said it the way most people I know would say they’ve never been to East Liverpool.

“Like you said, kind of grim here—"

“It is. And not likely to change.”

“I was going to say, not much grim about you, though.”

“Please.” She rolled off me, and we lay side by side in the grass, our shoulders touching.  “I should try and fix you up with Karla. Lovely person—much more your speed. How long are you staying?”

“My flight out is tomorrow.”

“Well, so much for that idea. Nice knowing you, though.”

The delivery was comic, but after ten seconds of silence, I realized that the message wasn’t.

“That’s it?” I said. “Not going to work, bye?”

She seemed surprised that I was surprised. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” I was, apparently, supposed to have thought this through. “Something.”

“Wait till you’ve been back in San Francisco a few days. You’ll change your mind.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Yeah, well, you can text me if you don’t. But you will.”

~

Three years later, I used the frequent flyer miles that I’d saved all through the pandemic to book a flight to Pittsburgh. As the plane dropped out of the clouds, I saw the aimless curves of the Ohio, a smudge of grey that might have been East Liverpool, the orange and red and yellow patchwork of West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. At the airport, they gave me a Ford Taurus that smelled of weed, and in half an hour I was back in the antique shop where I’d first seen Minerva.

“Try the library.” Ada, the tiny grey-haired woman I’d briefly met before, was alone behind the counter. “She works there now. Archivist.”

“Right.” I knew this—Minerva and I had kept track of each other, warily at first but comfortably enough in the end, by email and text and the occasional phone call. I could easily have called or texted her when I got to town, but somehow I’d just hoped she’d be here.

“I remember you,” Ada said. “Been a while.”

“It has.”

“You bought her Harker birds.” She smiled.

“Right again.” The morning after my night with Minerva in the graveyard, I’d bought the plates from Ada on my way out of town.

“How’ve you been?”

“I’m OK,” I said. It hadn’t been the best three years. The pandemic hadn’t hit me hard, but my mother had died of an aneurysm; I’d failed to get tenure at SF State and worked in a bookstore now; I’d gotten back together with Emma only to be dumped by her all over again. “Here for the wedding.” 

“Social event of the season,” she said with a smile that hung somewhere between mischievous and mocking. “Minerva and Karla—who’d have thunk it?”

“No one,” I said as I headed for the door. “Probably not even them.”

~

If much of East Liverpool seemed to be falling apart, that certainly wasn’t true of its library—the first Carnegie library in Ohio, built in 1900, a massive fortress-like building in brown brick, surmounted by a hexagonal tower and a red tile dome. In the lobby, an island in time with its gleaming marble wainscoting and mosaic floor, I found Minerva waiting as if she’d known I was about to arrive.

She threw her arms around me; we touched cheeks.  “I guess this is really happening, if you came all the way from San Francisco.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Glad it’s legal even here.”

“Until the Supreme Court gets around to repealing Obergefell. When that happens, we might end up in California after all.” She led me past the circulation desk and up a flight of stairs to an office with photos of nineteenth-century East Liverpool eminences on the wall and a shelf of pottery including Mrs. Fraser’s KTK teapot. “No, seriously. People in town are either OK with it, or they don’t give a shit. Most of them gave up on me a long time ago.”

“Formula for a perfect wedding.”

“I hope so. How are you?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Glad to be back in my future hometown.” This was a running joke between us, that eventually I’d move to East Liverpool, but not as much of a joke as it had been originally.

“Did I tell you there’s a 1930s bungalow for rent down the street from us? We could be neighbors. Probably half what you’re paying now.”

“More than likely. Well, I’m around for a few days. I’ll take a look.”

“If you need something to sweeten the deal, I can let you have my plots at Yellow Creek for next to nothing. Karla thinks they’re bad karma since they came from my divorce.”

“Might be bad karma for me too,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t see why.”

A little late, I realized I shouldn’t have said it. “Not like either of us believes in karma anyway.”

She paused to consider that.

There was a barely audible knock on the door.

“Come in!” Minerva shouted.

The door opened a few inches. Karla looked in, smiling hesitantly, and I knew then who it was Minerva had been waiting for in the lobby.

She came in, did a double take, grabbed both my arms but didn’t hug me.

“Congratulations,” I said.

She murmured a thank you and smiled so brightly it made Minerva laugh.

The three of us made small talk for a few minutes, but with the wedding less than 48 hours away, they had a lot of logistics to go over. I didn’t want to get in the way. We made plans to have a drink together later, and I walked out of the library and down to the river.

At the foot of Broadway, there’s a small park, with a pier, a rocky stretch of beach, and raised wooden decks looking out across the water. Doubtless in the past steamboats and barges had stopped here to take on shipments of crockery, and doubtless Minerva or Karla could give me the details if I asked.

I sat on a picnic table and watched a flock of Canada geese paddle downstream. Boats were moored on the far shore, and beyond that rose the forested hills of West Virginia. A broad stretch of water, steep hills, streets lined with Victorians and Queen Annes . . . all that was familiar. It was not that San Francisco had stopped feeling like home, but it had stopped feeling like my only home.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Skins

“Transmission” by Joy Division plays in the night club in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. Cigarette smoke clouds the air. The ceiling looks like the cratered surface of the moon.

Tonight, it’s clubbing. Tomorrow, Frannie says it’s an afternoon visiting an old temple in Stanley Market to see the pelt of the last real tiger ever in the territory.

A week ago, it was a hike. I forgot sunscreen. I blistered so much I couldn’t sleep the night afterward. Even now, I feel the rawness of my skin under my shirtsleeves. Frannie who is one of my only friends in Hong Kong, gave me some Chinese ointment to use, but I haven’t tried it yet because I have the bottle still in its box on my nightstand as my only tangible gift from her. I’m in love with her. It’s hard to be around her, and I can’t not be around her.

If she talks up a hanging animal pelt in a temple, I believe it’s amazing.

I stab out my cigarette and while she’s looking somewhere else, I look—her slight downturned mouth, and the glorious soft edge of her face that I could contemplate forever. All that moves around in my head, all that keeps me going. I’m in Hong Kong for a posting with my investment firm, but I would leave in a heartbeat if Frannie wasn’t around. Problem is, she’s taken.

Her boyfriend Lawrence, also a friend of mine, is sitting next to me on the purple velvet booth cushion, and he says he’s bored. He says we should go to his place off Connaught Road and smoke weed on his roof, where there’s a great view of Victoria harbor, where the windows across the water on Kowloon side gleam like Christmas lights. He’s got some amazing Scotch and all three of us can crash if we need to.

“Don’t you want to dance?” Frannie asks him.

“I suck at dancing,” Lawrence says.

“You dance with me,” Frannie says, grabbing my hand and pulling me up.

A house beat rattles the sound system. The room with its pink and blue lighting spins a little. The floor gives slightly. I play it off like it’s no big deal, but dancing with her is the best thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of beer, but part of my dizziness is her.

Frannie turns and shimmies, then walks toward me and puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Relax!” she yells.

I move. I dance. The rising house music beat dissolves into Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

The crowd around us—another gweilo dude with two blonde women—and a Chinese group behind him, two women and two men, all go from their somnolent movement to paying attention to us.

Lawrence taps my shoulder and steps in. He nods with his cigarette in his mouth, then pats my shoulder again and says, “I goddamn love you man. Don’t ever leave Hong Kong!”

His hands are on Frannie’s waist and they’re up against each other, blending like two liquors in a cocktail, and the truth is, Lawrence doesn’t suck at dancing.

“…once I had a love and it was a gas…soon turned out, was a heart of glass…”

Here we are, a trio of friends. A lot of loneliness on my part, despite it. I live out on Lan Tau in a small flat and Frannie, a Hong Konger, lives far away in Shouson Hill with her sister’s family. Her sister is married to a white guy, a Canadian. I should mention that I’m white, a gweilo, by way of the Chicago suburbs, and Lawrence is half-white, half-American-born Chinese, by way of a childhood in San Francisco and an adolescence attending the American International School in Hong Kong.

One of the gweilo women sidles up and faces me.

Now it’s the four of us on the roof of Lawrence’s building. He’s got a sofa set up under an awning up there, letting it be exposed to the elements, American college-town-patio style, and the gweilo woman from the club asks me for a light. Her name is Mary. She’s blonde and British, living in Hong Kong with her parents, on a gap year from uni, and it turns out she went to King George the Fifth school, and Lawrence knows her brother from high school rugby. Her father is in the government. She lives nearby but won’t say exactly where, and then I know enough about Hong Kong to realize her father is obviously not the governor, but is somewhere high on the bureaucratic ladder, and she lives near Government House, the governor’s mansion. She doesn’t want to say it because it seems like she’s royalty or something, and she just wants to be cool.

Each of us takes turns telling made-up stories about what is going on in the cruise ship docked at Ocean Terminal across the harbor. Lawrence has the best one.

“A widower grandfather is taking the cruise again, mourning the death of his late wife, wishing his son would call or write him letters. The happiest time of his life—an ocean cruise to Hong Kong where his wife and him got tailored clothes and wore them to the captain’s dinner where they started with the lobster bisque,” Lawrence says.

“Dude,” I say. “That’s fucking sad.” I get jealous of him, his ingenuity. And I find myself trying to copy his attitudes.

“No shit,” Frannie says. She punches his arm.

“Give me a hit from that,” Mary says. Lawrence is cradling a joint in his palm, which is the reason he’s getting so philosophical.

“Remember tomorrow, we’re going to see the tiger skin!” Frannie says.

“Tiger?” Mary asks.

“The last tiger in Hong Kong. The skin hangs in a temple in Stanley. I’ve always wanted to go,” I say. “All that’s left of that poor tiger—its skin.” I say it like it’s my idea, but Frannie was the first person to bring this up.

“We planned this weeks ago,” Frannie says.

“That kind of shit is supposed to be exotic and exciting but it’s usually a letdown,” Lawrence says.

“You’ve seen it?” I ask. Sometimes Lawrence talks big and knows nothing. And even though I want to be confident like him, I get annoyed with his dismissiveness.

“He has,” Frannie said. “That’s the temple his grandmother used to go to. A Tin Hau one.”

Lawrence looks at me, then looks away. He grabs Frannie and they kiss.

“Get a room,” Mary says, the kind of thing people feel like they have to say.

The night meanders on, conversations and drowsy kissing like winding smoke from incense, and eventually Mary and I fall into each other’s arms on Lawrence’s couch, but in his apartment. Down the hall I hear Lawrence and Frannie. Some arguing, maybe about him going on another trip, and then it’s quiet and I try not to imagine more, but I do because when I close my eyes, I just see her.

“Look this way,” Mary says. “This way,” and she pulls my lips onto her neck, then further down. The room swirls. But we don’t go further than that.

“I’ve had such a long week,” I say.

We lay there holding each other.

In the morning, I smell Mary’s perfume and her cigarettes and sweat on the throw pillows. Frannie is gone too—she had an opening lunch shift at Smuggler’s Inn in Stanley Village to get to.

Lawrence hands me a mug of coffee.

My head hurts.

“I got to get to the airport,” Lawrence says. “Business.”

I remind him that today Frannie wanted us to join up with her to see the tiger skin in the temple in Stanley Village, even though I know he’d avoid it.

There’s a knock on the door—it’s Mary dressed for a day out, Ray-bans on to hide the hangover.

“Can’t,” Lawrence says to me as Mary stands at the threshold. “You can. You should. Like I said, it’s kind of underwhelming but everything is worth doing once.”

I got the Hong Kong posting all excited on my East Asian Studies minor. I got here, and I thought I was supposed to go find all the obscure Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian sites in the city, study the paths of feng shui and dragons. That wore out quickly, all those places close-up and distant at the same time. Full of reverence and strangers. I met Frannie and Lawrence at a pub quiz night in Lan Kwai Fong and since then, she’s what I’ve been chasing.

“This temple in Stanley,” Mary says. “Historical, innit?”

We have more mugs from Lawrence’s Mr. Coffee pitcher. I take some of Lawrence’s clothes and shower and Mary and I, awkward strangers, get on the bus to meet Frannie at the temple. Both of us nod off in separate seats. I wake as the bus veers around a corner and upstairs where we sit, a leafy tree branch brushes into the window, across Mary’s head, and she snores through it.

When we arrive at the stop with the long railing and tin awning overlooking the market and trees, I gently tap her shoulder. Stanley, with the awnings and the one cement basketball court and displays and piles of things—a street pointing north with vegetables and fruit and one seafood stall and then the alleys south we’ll walk through, with the overpriced lacquers and ceramics and art, and the deeply underpriced name brand clothes in folded stacks like a basement bin sale in the U.S. There are American and Japanese tourists, and the only Hong Kong Chinese around here seem to be the shop workers.

Frannie is late. Or not showing. I build the drama in my mind, that she sees this as cheating on Lawrence. Then I snap out of it. We’re just friends and like usual, I’m being too dramatic. Besides, here is Mary flipping the creaking coat hangers on a rack, looking at beach shrugs, asking what I think.

Frannie finally shows up with a canvas bag. She pulls out a Schweppes lemon squash, a British soft drink she knows I like. We take a moment to look out at the sea beyond the temple as we leave the shopping area and walk along the narrow sidewalk clinging to rocks which approaches the temple, a green and yellow building behind a couple trees.

Then the three of us walk in together.

Indeed, the pelt is there behind glass, darkened with age, smaller than one would expect. It looks a bit shriveled at the edges. It’s mysterious in a sense, but on its own, yes, underwhelming, if not for it being from the very last tiger.

Frannie walks past me to kneel in front of the altar with all the candles lit and the Tin Hau statue with its raised hand of blessing, its peaceful blue dress undulated like a good current from the sea.

I turn away and look up at the curling incense hanging and around at the other gold and red shrines. I kneel myself, then look at the yellow tiled floor, waiting for something. I never got much out of church, or anything like religion. The most I can say is I’ve felt times of loneliness and times where I was less lonely.

Like last week. At a lookout on our hike, Frannie leaned her head against my shoulder as we sat on a granite outcropping, taking in the view, while Lawrence was in the bushes relieving himself. She asked if I thought she should marry Lawrence. She said she really loved him. She took my hand in hers and pointed to her ring finger and said, “I’m not sure either of us is marriage material.” Then she said, “Greg. I want the whole thing. Family and kids. Grandparents. A dog. Everything.”

My own father, a barely employable Jim Beam enthusiast, had a short fuse. I used to wish him dead. He would yell at my mom, who was just getting us through. None of that was my fault, but I feel shame about it. There was a time I asked my mom to leave him, begged her to, after he got especially violent, punching in drywall in our mudroom and breaking his hand.

When Frannie said, “us,” I wanted it to be more than the beauty of the moment and the view, that “us” was Frannie and me. I told Frannie about my growing up, which I’d done before, but never that openly. I said she and Lawrence would never be like that, but I knew it was me swearing I would never be like that. Being in Hong Kong away from home and being with her, it’s like some kind of window opens. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to religious belief.

Frannie gets up from the temple floor and we walk back out into the sunlight. Mary is still inside, silently looking at the statuary, lighting her own incense, acting like she belongs there.

I tell Frannie the pelt looks nothing like the deer pelts in my uncle’s basement in Wisconsin, which is the only thing I can compare it to.

“I really miss Lawrence when he’s away,” she says. “He hates this place because it reminds him of his grandmother and how she’s gone. You know his mom wasn’t around much, or his dad. They had gambling and addiction problems. His grandmother pretty much raised him.”

Whatever that’s like—I’ve never prayed to anything—it still is drifting over her, and I feel like I’m outside of it. And she knows a lot about Lawrence that I don’t. I try to tell her more about Wisconsin, but unlike other times, her mind is somewhere else, and she’s only half-listening.

Mary comes out to join us and says, “Brilliant!”

The three of us walk toward the small beach and sidewalk near the pub where Frannie will start her second shift. “You’re peeling,” Frannie says, pointing to the back of my neck—that bad sunburn I got on the hike a week ago in Sai Kung still doing its damage. I rub my fingers on my neck. Some of the skin comes off.

Frannie says, “I hope Lawrence is okay. There’s a typhoon headed to Taipei.”

“I hope so too,” I say.

What else is there to say? Frannie was praying for our mutual friend, that he would be safe, and that he would come back to her soon with more stories to tell. More than the ones I have, which I’ve already told. And unlike Lawrence, I don’t have the will to make them any better, or to imagine them otherwise.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I Cannot See You the Same Way

It was the first meal in the new apartment, and I had unconsciously made the foolish assumption that the configuration of the stovetops aligned with the stovetops in my previous apartment, so when I turned on what I thought was the top left burner and then distracted myself for eight minutes waiting for the pasta to boil, I was surprised and devastated to return to find the noodles soaking in cold water and the plastic grocery bag half-liquified and melting into the bottom left burner.

God, it was stupid. And I was also stupid. It was one of those mistakes so flagrant and avoidable that it makes you aware of how ill-equipped you really are, how often the logic and good sense that you rely on can just fail you completely. But then, here’s a thought: by calling your own self stupid, you are in a way splitting yourself into two different people—the one who is stupid and the one who is smart enough to recognize that he is stupid. The plastic was seared into the glass of the stovetop in layers. It had been so beautiful, shiny as marble. And now I had defiled it. It’s the type of thing Margot would have been triggered by. She wasn’t a neat freak exactly, but she liked things to be kept up well. Hated bits of dried food, lint left in the dryer filter.

It was a six-step process, according to the internet. Nothing was allowed to be easy.First, you coat the stovetop with olive oil and baking soda. Let it sit for a few minutes. Then wipe that off with a warm cloth. Then clean the stovetop with dish soap and water. Then coat the plasticky bits with rubbing alcohol. Let that sit for a minute. Then use a wooden spatula and a razor scraper to scrape off the plastic. Then clean it all again with soap and water. I tried all those steps, then tried them again in different orders. Barely got any plastic off. Eventually, I found some forum thread that said you have to heat the stove back off to melt the plastic a bit. I tried that, then scraped it off with my fingernails, which took maybe a good ten minutes. After all this, I couldn’t even say I was too hungry for pasta anymore.

The apartment was so quiet. It was fall, and the sun was already going down so early, so by seven, the slice of sky I could see was dark and slate gray. After dinner, I resolved to spend an hour unpacking and then reward myself with Final Fantasy until it was time to go to bed.

I called my mom to let her know how the move was going. She asked when I was going to get a dog.

“It’ll help you meet people,” she said, and I could hardly think of anything sadder.

 ~

The first time I saw Margot, the thing I noticed was her size. She was a small girl, smaller than anyone I’d been with. Six foot three and on the heavier side, I typically tended to attract bigger-boned women, as my grandma would say. Margot couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. She stood out to me because she didn’t follow any trends. Didn’t care at all what was fashionable, really. When I first met her at Cole’s pregame, she was wearing a lacy white tank top and grey jeans that weren’t tight enough to be sexy or baggy enough to be trendy. Her face was bare and shiny, and her curly dark hair was in a low ponytail. It sounds harsh, but she was the kind of girl who might be accompanying a much more glamorous friend, who becomes the object of your friends’ attraction until they get too drunk to remember her name.  From the way she dressed, you probably would have thought she was timid. But she wasn’t at all. She helped herself to a seltzer from Cole’s fridge and asked me if I’d like to be her pong partner.

“I haven’t played in a minute,” I mumbled.

“That’s all right,” she said. She smiled broadly and her teeth had these strange little pointy edges to them that I found quite beautiful. She introduced herself.

“I’m John,” I said, holding my hand out for hers to shake, which, looking back, was idiotic of me, but she didn’t seem to mind.

We lost every game of pong. I was too self-conscious and too sober to ask for her number. Her friends slipped back into the conversation, and the girls all headed out to another party, and there was simply no good time for it. So, a few days later I followed her on Instagram, and she followed me back. She had been the first one to make a move, so it was my turn—I understood this much of the dating code.

Cole didn’t know much about Margot, but when I asked him about her, he said she was a “Smart chick. Engineering. Chemical I think.”

We traded messages on Instagram back and forth. I asked her what type of music she likes, and to my surprise, we had similar taste: MGMT, Beach House, Pond. She said she liked “basically anything but pop,” and that I could work with. I mentioned something about her coming over to see my synth setup and she didn’t respond for about an hour. I thought I’d ruined everything by suggesting something so niche and nerdy, but she responded that sounds dope! and it felt like I’d won the Olympics.

I had no clue what girls liked to do on dates. What do smart chicks do, besides study? Do they like romance, being treated to expensive Italian dinners, flights to exotic locations? I didn’t have too much to offer in that department.  Our first real date was to my friend Austin’s show—he was playing in a new-age band called Zenith Zenith, and they’d gotten a gig at a local dive bar. It was 21+, and Margot said she didn’t have a fake, but she didn’t mind them just drawing the X’s on her hands.

You sure you want to go? I had messaged her before we met up. The self-saboteur at it again.

Yea!! It’ll be a good time :) she responded.

It was little things like that from the start. She made me feel like I wasn’t saying the wrong thing. She didn’t question why I sometimes paused between sentences or didn’t have a snappy response to her joke or looked down at my watch in nervousness when she asked a serious question. She had the power to make me feel like a real man, someone who could romance a beautiful girl, someone who deserved to be loved and taken seriously. I had never really felt like that before.

We met outside the door. It was a chilly night, and she was wearing a pink motorcycle jacket, grey jeans, and converse. She gave me a side hug, and I noticed she was shaking a bit, and I thought, good, maybe I am not the only nervous one. Or maybe she was cold. She bopped along to the music and came up with nice things to say about Austin’s bass playing.

“He’s a great guy,” I said. I wanted her to think I had lots of friends.

After the show, we went to the fried chicken restaurant next to campus that stayed open until midnight. I asked her about her major.

“Chemical engineering must be a ton of work,” I said.

“Oh, it’s miserable. Probably my biggest regret,” she said.

She explained that growing up, her older brother Patrick had always been the “smart one,” and she had been the try-hard little sister who could hardly keep up, even when she’d taken seven AP courses and gotten into MIT (though she hadn’t gotten a scholarship, and it was too expensive). She’d picked chemical engineering, in some ways, to make a statement against Patrick’s lesser but still impressive biomedical engineering degree.   

“Only two more years to go,” I said.

She asked about my major—for the first time I was almost embarrassed to say I was a biology major. But I told her about my love for ocean animals, the first time I went to an aquarium back in Tennessee and seven-year-old me stared at the jellyfish for an hour until my mom dragged me out, how I would count down for Shark Week each year. They didn’t have a marine biology program at Georgia State, but it was the best college I’d gotten into, so standard-issue biology would have to do.

“That’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling. I think stingrays are so cool.”

“I’ll take you snorkeling one day,” I said. I meant it. Wherever she wanted: the Gold Coast, Maui, the Maldives. Suddenly, I wanted to be the type of man who could afford such trips.

We kissed that night in the parking lot after I walked her to her car. I didn’t ask her to come back to my place. I wanted to leave the night on a perfect and pure note. She drove away in her red Honda Civic and I began imagining a dream version of our future together. Two weeks and four dates later, we were exclusive. Another month, and it was official.

We had sex for the first time on our sixth date. She invited me back to her dorm room, turned the lights off, and sat on the bed.

“You can have all of me,” she said.

I kissed her very gently. I wanted her, badly, but I didn’t want to do anything that made her uncomfortable. In my mind, she was delicate, something to be touched with care and precision. She ran her hands down my back and began to take her shift off. Afterward, she’d been snuggling with me, her head on my chest, and I noticed her eyes were teary.

“Are you okay?”

I was terrified in that moment that I’d hurt her somehow, been so consumed by my own brutish pleasure that I had no clue she was in pain.

She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes. Sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No. No, you did nothing wrong,” she said and wrapped her arm around my stomach, curling herself into a tighter ball. I didn’t bring it up again. Every other time after that, she was all smiles and gasps and moans.

As I got to know her, I discovered that Margot was actually a bit of a nerd. She watched Attack on Titan, Cowboy Bebop, shows my marching band friends from high school were always going on about. She liked card games and would excitedly research new ones for us to try, spend thirty minutes explaining the rules to me, and never let me win.

She didn’t care much for frat parties but had no problem downing tequila shots. Her tolerance was much lower than she believed, and I’d usually end up dragging her out of parties and helping her brush her teeth by 1 AM. One night, after accompanying a friend to a theater party, she stumbled home to my dorm and knocked on the door. She was leaning against the doorframe, her eyes glassy and unfocused.

“My love,” she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her inside.

“You guys had fun?”

“Not without you,” she said and kissed me before collapsing onto my bed. I laid down next to her and took her hand.

“I don’t care about anything out there. Not when you’re here,” she said. It was then that I decided I would marry her one day.

 ~

Three years later, we’d bought an apartment together in Marietta. Margot had gotten a stressful but well-paying job at an environmental lab, and I was a clinical research coordinator for a Veterans Affairs medical center. We kept busy. Margot had gotten quite adept at cooking—we both liked trying out new dishes and twists on recipes. I worked from home most days, so I kept the apartment clean and the fridge stocked. We lived well together, fit neatly into the unique puzzle pieces of each other’s lifestyles. We experimented with new board games, new restaurants, new plants to hang in the office, new sex positions. We spent Christmas and Thanksgiving together, and I was convinced her family actually liked me. My mom loved Margot, probably thought she was miles out of my league. I’d consulted my mom when I picked out the ring. She’d asked me a long series of questions, like if I got one detail wrong then the ring would prove I was not worthy of Margot.

“Does she wear gold or silver jewelry? Is her style always more modern? She knows about science—do you think she cares if it’s lab-grown? Do you think she’d prefer a natural diamond? I think she wears a lot of color. Does she maybe want a colorful gem?”

I’d decided on something simple, classic: a gold band, one-carat natural radiant-cut diamond. It was beautiful, shiny, authentic, like Margot. It cost me eight thousand dollars.

I had it all planned out—I would propose to her on our trip to Hawaii in June, on the beach at the sunset’s golden and glowing peak. It was the week after I’d bought the ring that things went wrong. Looking back on it, maybe the gleaming ring was like an omen: a sign that I had wanted too much, mistakenly let myself believe I deserved an easier, more perfect life than I did. I kept the ring in its box, tucked away inside a paper bag, which I stuffed at the bottom of our bins of extra clothes beneath the bed. It loomed under me like the pea beneath the princess’s pillow. I could never forget it was there.

It was a Sunday. Margot was stressed about a presentation at work she was due to give the next day. She was cycling through her PowerPoint again and again, entering a state of quiet focus that she often adopted during moments of stress. She wanted to have me run to the grocery store to get things for dinner, a risotto recipe she’d found online and wanted to try.

“I think I made a list in my notes app. You can text it to yourself,” she said.

So, I opened the app. It was on the home page with little snippets of all her notes. The top one listed button mushrooms, heavy cream—and just a few from the top, there was one that started. 1. Aaron.  I opened it.

It read:

1. Aaron

2. Kendall

3. Rico

4. Thomas

5. Neil

6. Liam

7. Weston

8. Jonathan W

9. Ian

10. Andrew – I think??

11. Justin

12. Mal

13. Frederick

14. Neil P.

15. Bo

16. RJ

17. Kristian

18. Jackson

19. Jon R.

20. Ryan

21. Tyler

22. Sam - film class

23. Cory

24. Connor

25. Greg L.

26. Alejandro

27. Jeff

28. Troy

29. Kamal

30. Christopher

31. Garrett

32. Zale

33. Walker

34. Tom J.

35. Bernie

36. Charlie

37. Jake

38. Grayson

39. Owen

40. Cooper

41. John

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at. The essential things I processed were: a list of 41 names and mine at the end. I stared at it for a few moments, my mind gone numb and silent, and then closed it out and clicked on the grocery list and tried to pretend I’d never seen it.

But it was that moment that changed everything. Later that evening when Margot made the mushroom and chicken risotto for dinner, I couldn’t even bring myself to start a conversation with her. I just nodded along and reacted to whatever she talked about, and it was clear enough to her that something was off.

“Are you okay? You’ve been really quiet,” she said.

“No, I’m good. Just been a long day.”

“A long day of World of Warcraft and lounging around in the bed,” Margot said faux-sympathetically.

“You know. It takes it out of me.”

I tried to keep up our banter, our trademark loving and wry way of speaking to each other. But the list was pulsing inside my brain and my heart and not letting a single cell in my body rest. Across the table from me, she looked so small and innocent. She hardly wore any makeup, and the downturned slope of her dark eyes and eyebrows gave her the permanent appearance of sweetness and vulnerability.

The truth is, you could put a trillion different truths in front of me and have me believing in them all at once. Margot was still the woman I loved, the woman who made me a better person than I was before—more organized, more motivated, more thoughtful, more capable of sharing and understanding my feelings instead of squashing them like a roach. But how was it possible she had slept with forty men before meeting me?

I could recognize that part of this could be my own insecurity. I had only had one girlfriend during my senior year of high school, and the relationship lasted only four months. Besides that, I had two one-night stands in college and one recurring “friend with benefits,” for a whopping total of four. I had never given it more than a moment’s thought. Sure, she’d been with other guys. It was college, that’s what college girls do. But there’s a difference between having a vague awareness of the thing and seeing forty-one names on the list.

Margot sat across from me, her small serving of risotto, her dark eyes sparkling, her mouth curled to the side the way she does when she knows something is not quite right. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact the way I was. Whenever we had any squabble or disagreement, she would penetrate it with her eyes, poke holes and eviscerate it right in front of me. If we thought we had moved on, but the air was still a bit tense, she’d look at me with her dark eyes and say something like, “John, should we talk about it again? It’s all right if you’re still upset,” and manage to discuss it calmly and empathetically until all the ridges smoothed over. Unlike me, who as a child would stare at my mom’s ankles and fiddle with my hands when she caught me breaking rules, rather than admit I did something wrong. I couldn’t mention the list. Even imagining bringing it up over dinner like this gave me chills.

“You sure everything’s okay?”

“Course. Risotto’s great, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she said flatly. She let her spoon drop into the bowl.

 ~

A week went by, and I couldn’t get the list out of my head. For a moment, I started to question if I had seen it at all. The moment had been so brief, with no witnesses to verify its existence. Could it have been some mirage the darkest self-sabotaging corners of my brain had conjured, a flash of dream that I’d mixed up with reality? I knew it wasn’t. But I wanted to hope.

I tried, so badly. I really did try to let it go. I thought through it methodically, like a science equation. Yes, she had slept with many men before me, but that did not fundamentally change who she was. She was still my loving, nerdy, intelligent, loyal girlfriend, the woman I wanted to make my wife. But feelings did not submit to logic, no matter how sound. You jump when a fire alarm sounds, even if you read the email stating it’s just a drill. You can’t not jump. I couldn’t see her the same way, no matter how hard I tried. I still loved Margot, but the love was no longer fueled by passion and hope and lust. It was a dampened, concrete love, stuffed into a box, frozen in time.

After we watched some corny Netflix movie, Margot began to kiss me, passionately, her cold hands running down my back all the way to my thigh. We were both two glasses of red wine deep, and it was 10 o’clock—just enough time for us to have sex, snuggle, complete our evening routines, and still be asleep by 11:30. But her hands felt like a stranger’s, a cold, artificial grip trying to pry some softness out of me. I closed my eyes, touched her thick curly hair, tried to remember how lovely, how sensual, how full of goodness and intelligence she was. That’s my girl. “That’s my girl,” is something I’d whisper into her ear when I’d pull her close, usually in public. When she knew the answer to the final question at trivia and locked in the win, when she baked beautiful little raspberry squares—that’s my girl. I was so proud to be with her. My first love. The one who showed me I didn’t have to be lonely. Her hips pressed into mine and she crawled on top of me. I leaned back like I was coming up for air. She pulled away and cocked her head to the side.

“You okay?”
            “Yeah, sorry,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“Is it the bathroom thing?”

“The what?”

“You know. The hair?”

Earlier that week, Margot had gotten onto me about leaving my hair in the sink after shaving. “It’s just not my absolute favorite thing in the world to wake up to,” she’d said. I’d said sorry and made sure to rinse out the drain.

“No, it’s not the hair.”

“I’m sorry if I came across as harsh.”

“No. You didn’t,” I said.

“I love you and all your chin hair,” she said, her eyes glistening with regret, and perhaps a little hope.

“It’s the list,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t look at her, had no desire to witness her reaction to what I was about to say.
            “What?”         

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw the list on your phone. The list of guys’ names. I can’t get past it,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded. Strained, self-righteous, melodramatic.

She put her hand on my leg gently and I fought the urge to shake it off. “Baby,” she said. I knew she was looking directly into my eyes, but I didn’t look back at her. “Why would you let that bother you? All that happened before we were together. Are you serious?”

A part of me had been hoping she had an explanation for the list. Maybe it was a list of boys she’d had schoolgirl crushes on, boys she’d kissed, or gone on dates with. But no, she seemed to confirm it was not that innocent. My heart dropped like an anchor, felt heavy in my stomach. It would be more cruel to keep her in the relationship, to make her try to earn some unattainable redemption in my eyes, prove her purity or worth or goodness to me. It would be selfish of me, the worst thing I could possibly do.

“I don’t think we should be together,” I said.

I moved out quietly and quickly. So quickly I’d left countless things behind or felt too ashamed to try to claim things I’d paid for, like the patio rug or reading chair.  I left them as apology gifts to her, told her she could just throw out whatever she found and didn’t need. In the new apartment, I worked from home, surrounded by boxes and trash bags. After work, I went to Ikea to get things to replace all of Margot’s stuff.

I broke down a bit. It was that fear, that creeping, gnawing fear again. Nobody would ever love me again like her. No one would give it a shot. Why would they? And even if they try, how could I ever catch them back up, make them understand as much about me as Margot understood? She knew everything: my most embarrassing middle-school memories, my paralyzing fear of my parents dying in a car crash, my childlike love for sea creatures, my height, my weight, my shirt size, my allergies, my favorite ice cream flavor, my dislike for olives, the list of places I’d dreamed of traveling to.

Everywhere I went, the grocery store, Ikea, the dentist, the comic book store, I imagined running into her, meeting her for the first time, starting over completely. Never seeing the list.

You are probably thinking poorly of me now. Here I am, making myself the victim in this downer of a story when Margot was the one left abandoned, heartbroken, harshly judged for choices she made before she’d even met me. I will not try to dissuade you from that thinking. In fact I found my mind drifting to that same place, imagining how lonely and betrayed she must have felt, alone in that apartment that we had made into a home together, staring at stacks of board games with no one to play with, a pantry stocked with all kinds of ingredients but no one to cook for, as desolate and unhappy as I’d felt in those first few days by myself, but without any of the power that I’d at least had.

I relinquished a bit of power to her. In my depressive daze when moving out, I’d left the $8,000 ring in the box underneath the bed. I can’t quite explain why I did this. There are numerous options, multiple of which may be true: I cruelly wanted Margot to find it and realize the full extent of the love I’d once had for her, the future she missed out on. I wanted to punish myself for hurting her. I did not deserve the eight thousand dollars back; it was a parting gift for her to pawn, eight thousand dollars to dry her tears with. And, of course, the most obvious one: I wanted a reason to go back to the apartment.

It was late in the evening when I went. I had been mindlessly walking through the aisles at Target, adding items to my cart at random. I’d chosen the location close to our old apartment, the one we’d gone to together at least once a month. I didn’t let myself think too much about it. I’d ask her how she was doing, tell her I’d left something, take the ring and all the other things she probably had neatly stacked in a pile for me, and say goodbye. Or perhaps, she’d want to talk to me. Maybe she missed me as badly as I missed her.

The sky was a brilliant purple. The drive into the apartment felt so easy, natural. I’d done it thousands of times before. I parked in my old parking spot, walked up to my old unit, and knocked on the door. It took a few moments for her to answer, and right before the door opened, I had this enormous wave of anxiety, like I was invading a stranger’s home and was about to be humiliated and rebuked.

She was wearing a baggy t-shirt and pink sweatpants. Her curly hair was pulled back in a bun, a few tendrils falling out and framing the sides of her face. The apartment smelled like warm cinnamon—she must have lit some of her scented candles. She furrowed her brows, looking annoyed. Then her eyes shifted like she was suspicious of me, then her expression became neutral, all in the span of less than two seconds.

“Hi,” I said.

She continued staring. No hi back.

“I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

“Mhm,” she said. Her eyes locked in on me, waiting for me to say something worthwhile.

“I understand you probably hate me right now.”

“John. Please don’t show up here playing the victim. I really don’t have the energy for this.”

“I’m not the victim. I know. I screwed up. I made a dumb decision.”

“Screwed up? You made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was broken and worthless. Like I was dirty.” Her face crumpled when she said the word dirty. I had never seen anybody with so much pain on their face. I wanted to hug her, make the pain go away, as if some other asshole, not me, had been the one who hurt her. “You didn’t even try to talk to me about it. You didn’t even give me a chance. You threw me away like garbage.”

“Margot, I screwed up. I was an idiot. There’s nothing wrong with you. If anything, I probably realized you were too good for me. And I let it psych me out.”

“I loved you, John. I thought you loved me back, no matter what. I didn’t think it was contingent on me being some idealized, perfect version of myself. I loved every part of you, even the worst parts.”

“I know. I wanted to marry you.”

Her face softened with curiosity.

“I bought a ring. That’s what I’m here for.”

“To take it back? Or to propose?”

I rested my hand on the doorframe and looked up at the ceiling like the answer to her question might be conveniently written in graffiti. I was buying time. I looked back at her, her eyes were shiny with tears and bigger than they’d ever been. Her arms were crossed in on themselves like she was cold. I did want to marry her. Forty-one names and all. She was the only person who understood me. She was the love of my life.

“Margot, I—”

“Everything okay, babe?” a voice called from inside the apartment. From our bedroom.

“Yeah, one second,” she called back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Her gaze flickered towards the bedroom then back to me. “Somebody,” she said.

“Who?”

“I’m coming out in a second. Should I put a shirt on?” the voice called.

“It’s all right! He’s leaving soon.”

I felt betrayed. She’d pulled the knife out of her guts and plunged it into mine. All my love and affection for her immediately inverted itself, became something nasty and hateful.

“What were you saying?” she asked. Her tone was all business, like I was trying to schedule a meeting with her very busy superior.

“I—I need to get something.”

“And where’d you leave it?” she asked.

“It’s in the bedroom. Under the bed.”

“Well go on and get it. Ryan’s in there. He won’t mind,” she said. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t mind. Why should he? And why should I?

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “When the Wind talks to Us”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Ketia Valmé’s chapbook “When the Wind Talks to Us,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

que tee uh (intro)

My name is Ketia
Not Katia, Kesha or Keisha
There’s no S so don’t let the T tease ya
into thinking otherwise
It’s a name of a foreigner
A gift from the universe full of
sweet heavenly aromas
I’m Haitian
From the Caribbean
Where we take great pride and recognition
In being the first Black nation
In history
To break free from the Colonization
Don’t ask me sak pase
Cause I will purposely
Educate you on my peoples misery
Due to this country’s one sided stories
That makes y’all look at me
As less than a shit hole
And more of a pity
Charity case
Please excuse my lingo
I get fired up when it comes to my own
But that’s why I put it all in writing
I always find my emotions igniting
The storm on my chest
Gives people the satisfaction to
Look at me in expressed
Feelings of terror
Because expressing my anger as a Black woman
Translates in an intimidating manner
From those who can’t even seem to remember
my name and the beauty that comes with it
It’s okay though
Call me Sway
I prefer that anyways
It’s easier to remember
Wouldn’t you say?

mommy,

I fell in love with an American man and
I’m scared that I’ll pretend to be okay when
he laughs at the way I say sauce instead of gravy or
the way I speak so loud and aggressively

the way I look with the moushwa you gave me—I’m
scared that he won’t see beauty in the
culture that birthed me and the way his
father will scorn me when I say I don’t know

how to use a dishwasher ’cause—my people
would rather hand wash the disaster. Rinse the
plate once then double wash with soap I recently
realized this process plus some dope helps me cope

He hates when I’m out with my all black attire shorts
so short, skin susceptible to the sun, silver jewelry shines—he
hates it just as you do but truth is I’m a self expressionist and
this vessel’s a kaleidoscope of my soul’s excellence I

learned to digest the fact that no one will ever
understand why I do what I do cause none of y'all
ever walked in the shoe of a little haitian girl with the bitch face who
never says a word except yes in fear of being hated Mommy,

I told him he’s useless and it’s just cause I struggle to find the
words to say I need some affection I need someone that adds value to
my life who helps me fight these demons. Ever since I reached 18 I’ve
struggled to repress these intrusive thoughts I feel the wrath from taking

so much and never speaking up. I don’t feel bad for being
honest. I just hate that this world is so sensitive. I hate that
Whites think they’re above me because they speak perfect
English and take strong pride in their weird country that strives on

blasphemy. I know you raised me in Christianity but I recently
learned about the Haitian revolution and how we were brainwashed
to believe it’s the only religion that would set us free and how suicide
is a ticket to hell’s basement but truth is they used that to keep the

ancestors alive in blatant slavery until death determined dogma of
White man’s destiny. I’m learning so much about who I want to be
and why the world strives on hating me. Thank you mommy for teaching
me to expect nothing and work hard for those blessings.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Power Save

People will surprise you sometimes, and not because it’s your birthday or anniversary or because you were promoted at work. They surprise you without saying, “surprise!” Sometimes they mean you harm and sometimes they’re merely incompetent. I’ll give you an example. I used to know this guy from Australia—Malcolm was his name—and I suppose it’s a lie to say I “knew” him because in actual fact I knew only a few things about him and had never actually met him, neither in the in-person sense nor the video-chat sense nor the exchanging of individual text messages. I knew of him, and he knew of me, although I think it’s fair to say each of us passed most of our time without thinking of the other at all.

I’d just started a new job as the general manager at the Residence Inn in Oklahoma City. Most nights, I, too, resided there, though I kept my small apartment in a town two hours away. I was very good at my job, a real crackerjack, the district manager always said, a regular Girl Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It sounded like a compliment, but he had an agenda.

I’d recently left my husband of twelve years. We’d married right out of high school—in a ceremony, embarrassingly enough, held in the Walgreen’s parking lot where we’d first met—and although we made good study partners through our four years of college, I had not enjoyed working two jobs—one at a different, crappier hotel and another at a very fancy hotel for dogs—to put him through graduate school for some kind of degree no one had ever heard of, a Master’s in Sports Management, which meant that because he was uncoordinated and generally lazy, he did not like to play sports, but because he claimed to need an overabundance of “alone time,” he did like to watch sporting events of all kinds, even bowling and golf. Our parting had been amicable, more or less, and even after the divorce was finalized, I still thought of him in much the same way I might have thought of an annoying younger brother. Luckily for us both, but especially for me, we had no children.

I was working three overnights in a row during the Martin Luther King Day weekend when the electricity went out at the Residence Inn. We had a backup generator, but the elevators were powered down, and the lights in the lobby went suddenly dim, so that the usual high sheen on the fake ferns became an ugly, metallic gray. We had a protocol in place: I was supposed to phone the district manager—on vacation in the Dominican Republic—phone the head maintenance guy—on vacation in Toledo, Ohio—and go door-to-door passing out flashlights and fresh batteries. The plastic bin behind the desk that was supposed to contain these items came up empty, however, and I did not think it wise to pass out what I did discover in the far reaches of a break room drawer: a box of Band-Aids, a handful of sticky ketchup packets, and a stack of paper menus from the Chinese restaurant around the corner.

I’d finally decided to let the guests fend for themselves when my phone lit up with my ex-husband’s number. I’d recently changed the way he appeared in my Contacts from his actual first name—Bobby—to the secret nickname my friends who hated him had assigned him without his knowledge: Slug. It was supposed to be short for Slugger—baseball was the sport he most wanted to manage—but it worked fine in a metaphorical sense as well. Now that he had his fancy Master’s degree paid for mostly by virtue of my labor, he had a new job at a shitty little airport: guy in charge of fixing all the computers at the shitty little airport. In truth, he knew nothing about fixing computers, but made up for it with false bravado and a large operating budget.  He spent most of every day in a converted broom closet behind the Avis Rent-a-Car desk where he either took naps or played video games.

“What’s up?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“Where are you?”

“Work,” I said. “Where do you think?”

“Work, I guess-guess,” he said. He had a longstanding habit of saying the same word or phrase—usually at the end of a sentence—twice, not for emphasis but as a kind of nervous tic. So where others might say something like, “This recipe calls for broccoli,” he would say, “This recipe calls for broccoli-broccoli.” The repeated word was always slightly different in intonation, like an aside or a necessary clearing of the throat (throat-throat.) I’d tried to cure him for years, but nothing, not even an expensive trip to a speech pathologist, seemed to help.

“You’re damned right I’m at work.”

“Do you have power?” he said. He didn’t always repeat words, only when he was agitated.

I told him the power at the Residence Inn had been out for hours, and that in spite of the backup generator, people were starting to get cold. I’d discovered a secret key and unlocked a linen closet I’d always assumed was the boiler room, after which I went door to door passing out extra blankets. I’d been tempted to save a down comforter for myself, but felt guilty when I saw a small, shivering child beg her mother for a muffin at the breakfast bar. I’d made a special trip to my suite for a sweater and hat, but hadn’t put them on until I could see my breath fogging the air.

“The airport’s in trouble,” he said. “All the servers are down-down.”

“Aren’t you supposed to know how to fix that kind of thing?”

“This is some kind of malware,” he said. “The Russians or something.”

“The Russians hacked into the network at the Stillwater, Oklahoma Airport?” I said. “Okay.”

“It could happen,” he said. “Malcolm had the same problem at the Jazzercize Center in Melbourne.”

“Stop talking to Malcolm,” I said. “That guy’s gone over the edge.”

It occurred to me then that I’d never learned Malcolm’s last name. This is what I did know about Malcolm: he loved video games, especially Journey to End of the Earth, the same game Bobby liked best.  He taught a Jazzercize class for Seniors, though he himself was probably only around forty-five or fifty. He lived in Melbourne, though he’d recently moved to the top of a mountain somewhere else in Australia, I wasn’t sure where. He took a lot of photos of the exotic flora and fauna at the top of the mountain. The photos were not just beautiful but artistic, arresting, even, like Bobby had chosen several of them to use as wallpaper on both his laptop and his desktop.

In addition, Malcolm liked American movies, sports, and music, and seemed also to follow American politics. He hadn’t seemed like the type, but at some point well after the election, he became obsessed with a certain psychopathic or at the very least sociopathic former president from the far right. You know who I’m talking about. Rhymes with lump. Lump-lump. Sump-pump. Head so big it’ll make you jump-jump. My husband, ex-husband, was not a Lump-lump enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, but he found it all too easy to overlook fascist sympathies among his gamer and sports-watching buddies, something that had contributed to my decision to file for divorce.

“This is serious, Alicia,” he said that day on the phone. “Flights can’t take off or land until the servers come back.”

“Come back from where?”

“I need some help!”

“You think I know how to fix anything like that? Why are you calling me? I don’t even like computers, remember?”

“But you do like to text,” he said. It was true: I texted with no fewer than one hundred seventy-seven different people, old friends mostly, and although I’d recently departed a group chat associated with planning a reunion for our high school class, I still liked the thrill of online exchange to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. If he thought my list of contacts would help solve the tech problems at the Stillwater Airport, however, he was sadly mistaken.

I convinced him to phone his boss and insist on calling in some professional help.

“I’m supposed to be the professional help,” he said. “My boss is not going to like this.”

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to be responsible for a plane crash? For several plane crashes?”

“No,” he said. “I should have settled for a job passing out rental-cars-rental-cars.”

“Slay, Slugger,” I said.

“Don’t call me that, Alicia. It’s not funny.”

“Go get ‘em.”

And get them he did. He called his boss and confessed to everything: he’d falsified his application when he said he’d earned “the equivalent of a Master’s degree” in computer science, his efforts to get the servers back online indeed had caused a massive power outage spanning multiple municipalities, and he had no idea how to get the systems back on track again, something he feared would cause imminent loss of life. His boss contacted an emergency response team, and everything was back up and running in less than half an hour.

But Bobby was fired on the spot. And even after the real tech support team had packed up and cleared out, the power company could not account for how, exactly, one guy at the Stillwater airport had managed to disrupt service to so many millions of customers, and in January this was cause for considerable alarm. The lights were coming back on across the state, but Stillwater remained largely in the dark.

That’s how I ended up talking to Malcolm. It’s not like Malcolm was anyone I ever thought about, but Bobby insisted his house in Stillwater was too dark and cold, even when he wore a sweater, turned on his lightsaber, and wrapped himself in a blanket. And his parents were out of town helping the Baptists. Surely the Residence Inn, with its emergency generator still running, had an extra room.

As it turned out, we did not have an extra room, but my manager’s suite did have a pull-out sofa, and since my desire to remain employed meant I had to (wo)man the front desk the entire night, it wasn’t like I’d really have to run into him or anything—I even had access to two separate toilets and two separate sinks.

“You can drive down here,” I said. “But bring a pizza.”

“I don’t eat pizza,” he said. “Dairy.”

“Bring me a pizza, then,” I said. “You can have saltines.”

“I can’t have crackers.”

“Get yourself a side of beef.”

“No beef.”

“Look,” I said.  “Skip the pizza. Skip the beef. You can share my suite, but only until the power comes back on. Bring one of those phone chargers that works in the car.”

“I don’t have one of those anymore,” he said. “You took it.”

I didn’t remember taking any phone chargers when I left; in fact, I remembered quite the opposite. So many of my former possessions—can opener, stapler, coffee grinder—had become his possessions that I no longer thought of myself as a person who kept track of things. I was a person who lost things.

I was always tired, so tired I could fall asleep standing up. I’d taken to sneaking in short naps during my shifts, something I knew I had in common with Bobby. On our honeymoon, we’d slept all day and watched television all night. So Bobby drove up and took the sofa in my suite while I stood watch over the front desk with my eyes closed. My phone was dead, so Bobby loaned me his. That’s when Malcolm started in.

A guest phoned from the fourth floor. “We’re freezing up here,” she said, loudly. I had her on speaker phone. Her voice was high and metallic, like water overflowing a gutter.

“What can I help you with?” Malcolm said from Bobby’s phone.

“Hello?” the guest said, her voice echoing into breakfast bar. “Is this the front desk?”

“I don’t believe I know the answer to that question,” said Malcolm, again from Bobby’s phone. Anyone could tell this was not actually Malcolm’s voice but a computer-generated approximation, the same voice that answers people when they say stuff like, “Siri, play ‘Raspberry Beret’” or “Siri, what’s the capital of Belarus?”  or “Siri, what’s the temperature in Stillwater, Oklahoma?” I’d never been much for voice-activated commands; Siri or Alexa or Cortana or whatever-her-name was always seemed like more trouble than she was worth. But Bobby, ever a sucker for the latest and greatest, was a fan.

“When did you change Siri’s voice to a man’s voice with an Australian accent?” I asked him the next morning, after my shift was over and I’d returned to my suite.

“It was always like that,” he said. He had his feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, his hand clutching one of my Dr. Peppers. “You just never noticed.”

“Your phone came like that?” I said. “With Malcolm’s voice on it?”

“It’s not Malcolm.”

“I know it’s not Malcolm,” I said. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I’ve never talked to Malcolm,” he said. “I’ve never even heard his voice.”

“Don’t you figure he sounds like that?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like the voice on your phone!” He’d never been good at following even the most basic conversational patterns. It was his attention span, which, like most people’s, had grown shorter in recent years: if his computer took too long to load a page, he used the “extra time” to moisturize his forehead and face, a process that had become very elaborate and also sacrosanct; if ever I made fun of him for lining up his numerous skin care products on the dining room table, he accused me of bullying and said I was causing him considerable harm.

“The voice on my phone is artificial,” he said. “Like your friends. Malcolm is a real person.”

“My friends are not artificial.”

“Sure.”

“I wish I’d never even gone to Walgreens that day,” I said, grabbing the last Dr. Pepper from the fridge. “I wish I’d never even met you.”

“Too late,” he said. “Are there any more blankets?” Indeed the temperature was becoming unbearable. I was wearing my warmest hoodie and hat, but any exposed skin was freezing. Bobby, however, did not seem cold. He rose from the loveseat and opened one of the drawers in my suite’s kitchenette, where he discovered a donned a pair of oven mitts. He looked like a fool.

“Look,” I said. “I actually thought it was cool that your stupid Siri or whatever sounded like Malcolm. Funny, even. So you don’t have to get all shitty.”

“Who was getting shitty?” He tried in vain to wipe his nose with one of the oven mitts. I’d have to remember to wash it later.

“Never mind,” I said. “I need to borrow your phone for the rest of the weekend. I found the charger.”

“Why can’t you use the charger to charge your own phone?”

“Because I want to borrow yours.”

The truth was I wanted to spy on him, scroll through his contacts, maybe take a look at his texts. Probably he figured as much. Maybe he wanted to make me jealous. Maybe he just didn’t care.

“Take it,” he said. “And I’ll stay another night-night.”

And that’s how I began to trust artificial intelligence above my own. I was aware this was the theme of exactly seventeen very bad screenplays from the early 2000s. Still, in what began as a joke meant to scare away unwitting guests at the Residence Inn, I slowly found myself more interested in what Malcolm had to say than I was in my own thoughts. Worse, I began to imagine the voice from Bobby’s phone belonged to the real Malcolm, the Trumper from Melbourne. Why would someone who lived on top of a mountain in Australia, a jazzercize instructor, for god’s sake, a kindly amateur botanist, video game enthusiast, and lover of ballroom dance, even bother to care so much about American politics? Listening and talking to the voice from Bobby’s phone, I was determined to find out.

Bobby was back in my suite, asleep again on the pull-out sofa. The long weekend meant I had to endure yet another overnight shift at the front desk, a three-foot space now crammed full of extra down comforters I had come to loathe. Many of the guests had checked out—a relief—but my dream of an empty lobby and time to read USA Today from cover to cover was not to come true: all afternoon and into the early evening I processed the credit cards, rental agreements, non-smoking/pet policy pledge sheets, and license plate numbers of just under a hundred power outage refugees from all over the state. Once again: no vacancy.

A frat boy with an out-of-control golden retriever checked in late.

“Golden retriever,” said Malcolm, as if he were an announcer paid handsomely by the AKC. “Family friendly and generally responsive to training.”

“Cute,” said the frat boy. “My girlfriend has one of those things.”

I said nothing at all, not even the usual spiel about the proper way to swipe the key-card for after-hours access to the exterior doors. I didn’t even smile. I pretended I wasn’t there at all; for that was the best part about having Malcolm around: he took over, and when he took over, I could relax into the shadows of sub-humanity. Content inside the cage of my own consciousness, I could walk and nod as if possessed by an unceasing electronic current, customer service person who smiled without feeling happy, furrowed her brow without feeling concerned, pressed buttons that weren’t buttons but flat images projected onto a flat screen meant to make life easier. And for me, everything suddenly was easier, easy in the way scrolling through texts without answering them was easy, easy like eating whipped cream from a can.

“Heat and air are back online,” said the head maintenance guy, who had returned early from his trip to the Dominican Republic. “I probably have Covid,” he said.  I watched while he adjusted the thermostat. “But I don’t care. I could die tomorrow and no one would notice.”

“More than one million Americans have died from causes related to Covid-19,” said Malcolm. “The death toll is still rising.”

“Turn that thing off,” the maintenance guy said. “Weirdo.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me or to Malcolm. It didn’t matter. The maintenance guy left, and I was alone again at the front desk. For a moment, I considered just how much of his viral load might be circulating through my respiratory system, but I’d become accustomed to risk. Indeed the world was a risky place. I wanted to shut it off and start over.

“Do you think I have Covid now?” I asked Malcolm.

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said. “Would you like the phone number for the Oklahoma State Department of Health?”

“No,” I said. “Some other time.”

“The time is now 10:35 and three seconds,” said Malcolm. “Jeopardy! is on Channel Nine.”

“Why did you become a Trumper?” I said, impulsively. “I always imagined you were cool.”

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said.

“Figures,” I said. “Why did Bobby get so immersed in his stupid sports and video games that several days would go by without his so much as asking me to pass the salt?”

“Sodium nitrate,” said Malcolm. “When it rains, it pours.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I figured.”

I’d never worried that robots were going to take over, that killer computer chips would destroy humanity, that a more nefarious version of Frankenstein’s monster would suddenly steal my job. But I did worry that getting a divorce meant I’d lost some of my own humanity, that losing love meant I was more inclined to be cruel. Cruelty, I was aware, was all-too-human, but I’d also become colder, more interested in the numbers that appeared on a calendar than I was in the Sierra Club’s photographs of places I knew I knew I’d never be able to afford to visit. Like Malcolm—and here I mean the real Malcolm, not his computer-generated equivalent—I’d become more inclined to air my own unwelcomed opinions, though unlike Malcolm’s, mine were not of the fascist variety.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” I said to Bobby’s phone.

“That’s how I convinced my friends to vote for Trump,” said Malcolm, somewhat unexpectedly.

“But your friends are Australian,” I said. “They can’t even vote in American elections.”

“Bobby was my friend,” said Malcolm.

“Bobby didn’t vote for Trump,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he told me,” I said. “He’s a lot of things, but a right-winger is not one of them.”

“Debra Winger is an American actress,” Malcolm said. “She starred in the film, An Officer and a Gentleman.”

This was not a satisfying conversation. I realized, however, it was not that much more difficult than talking to Bobby had been during the worst years of our marriage. I could never get him to look up from the screen of his computer or phone, and whenever he did look up, he seemed impatient and clipped, offering only yes or no answers to questions like, “what do you want for dinner?” and “what’s your mom’s middle name?” I knew the whole world had become like this, that the grocery stores’ checkout lines were now devoid of human contact, that “chatting” online to the cable company’s service representative meant reducing one’s statements to one-word-commands. OUTAGE REPORT. REPORTING AN OUTAGE. Maybe that’s why Bobby said everything twice.

Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling of loss. It wasn’t that computers were taking over the world, not exactly, and I never feared self-driving cars careening off the edge of some collective cliff, but I did know that I myself was getting dumber and more hostile, like a broken ATM. Out of order, I wanted to tell everyone. No service, no service, no service.

And when I thought about it long enough, I realized I, too, had been difficult to reach, settled in, as I was, behind the electronic curtain. And expecting some kind of quirky digital wisdom from a voice that (probably) sounded like Malcolm’s? That, too, had been stupid and soulless. I’d been so wrapped up in talking and listening to Bobby’s phone, I hadn’t even bothered to spy on his texts.

When, at about noon the following day, the power came back on in Stillwater and pretty much everywhere else, Bobby packed up his belongings and asked me to help him carry them to his car. “I need to hurry,” he said. “Job interview.”

“Adequate preparation is very important,” I said. “For the successful candidate.”

“Duh,” he said.

“Duh?” I said back. “That’s your great comeback to my tried-and-true wisdom? Duh?”

“Your tried and true wisdom is pretty lame,” he said. “I mean, it’s not your fault-fault.”

“Right,” I said, dropping his favorite pillow into the trunk of the car. “You’ve got this, Slugger.”

I never found out what job he was interviewing for. That was the last time I ever saw him. My youthful marriage. A thing of the past. I’d call it a mistake, but it wasn’t. They had a good life, those two dreamers. Stupid kids. They say you never know what you’re missing until it’s gone, but the truth is I never miss him. And does he ever miss me? I doubt it. There are electronic ways to find out about all of this stuff, but I decided—and this was a good decision—I’d closed the book on all that, and I didn’t want to know.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Base Matter

 The boy was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door to Mamma’s bedroom open. He heard a man step onto the landing and Mamma murmuring from somewhere far away. The boy stood staring at his feet, waiting for something; he didn’t know what.

There was a sharp, echoing crack from outside.

He didn’t dare look up. He remembered the last man he’d seen, big and naked on the creaking landing. Curls of matted hair. Penis glued to a milky thigh. Milky belly shaking. No face. He remembered the grotesque mystery, born behind closed doors, something that should have stayed there.

Crack.

Jack bolted down the stairs. He heard the man's thudding steps cross the landing and the door of the bathroom open and shut. I better not tell Ben, he thought. In the living room to his left, Cora was splayed out in front of the television, limp and motionless as a doll. He poked his head through the door, waiting for her to turn. She did not.

“I was on the roof, looking at the dove’s nest,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“The Mamma dove wasn’t there, but her babies was fine.”

He’d taken one in the palm of his hand and tossed it off to see if it would fly; and when it didn’t, he threw the others with it, one-by-one, and now there were none left.

“That's good.”

“Yeah, I went up earlier.” Around the side of the house, he heard Ben going crack, crack, crack at his workbench. “That’s Ben. He been working all morning?”

“I guess,” Cora said, shrugging.

“Ben’s real strong, isn’t he? He’s getting big. I’ll bet soon enough he’ll be able to fight anyone.”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you care, Cora? Don’t you care about Ben?”

Jack went out the front door into the heavy summer air. He was wearing nothing but his drawers and a white tee that needed washing. The tall grass scratched his legs, flinging droplets of water as he waded through to the half-collapsed eave by the cellar, wincing as he padded across pools of sunlight. He was quick and misfitted, a creature from some dark, orderless realm.

Crack, crack, crack.

Ben kept his tools and scrap wood on the table he'd made a month ago, covering them in a green tarp when he wasn’t working. He was stripped shirtless, frozen with the hammer raised, and did not turn when Jack said his name. He struck the panel like a snake lunging to bite.

“Ben...”

His brother cast aside one board and picked up another. Last summer he'd built a treehouse that the whole neighborhood used, but now Jack could see no design or purpose to what he was doing, other than that it was a kind of primitive language for him, a ritual of brute articulation with which he called to or answered the clamor of a universe he didn’t understand. Jack didn’t understand. Why? Why does he beat the second board until it is splintered and then cast it aside too? He was better at building things than most grown men. At least, he usually was.

“What’re you doing, anyway?” Jack said.

Ben grunted. His body was sheened with sweat. When he lifted his arm, Jack noted a light, mossy down in his armpits and a shadow on his lip.

“What’re you doing?”

Crack.

“Wanna go to the quarry today? Wanna take Cora?”

Crack.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but she’s . . . even when they said she shouldn’t. Hell, what’re you doing, Ben?”

Crack.

“What do you want to do?”

Jack looked down the garden over the long grass and through the haze above the brook, then to the brown stacked buildings around the fields where they used to play before the city put a fence around them and some contractors dug a huge pit. Ben would make a good contractor. He was a better builder than anyone Jack knew, and not long ago he’d been best at wrestling and chasing and hiding on the fields around the forest. It was their forest, and Ben made sure nobody bothered them, not even the kids across the quarry; not even if it meant a bloody nose and all kinds of trouble. That wasn’t so long ago. Not so long ago, they were all together, and Cora was up on Ben’s shoulders, and they were wading ankle-deep in the stream after the spring rain, which made the water fast and heavy, in Jack’s mind a torrent unleashed by primal forces at once terrible and sublime.

“You think we should go out, Ben? Go somewhere today?”

Crack.

Jack examined his brother intently. His brother was the kind that seemed made for wherever he happened to be at any given time; as if he’d always been in just that place, doing just that thing, inextricably bound to it; you couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He had stopped working and was wiping his face with a balled-up t-shirt.

“Where’s Cora?” he said.

“She’s just watching cartoons.”

“What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“It’s too early, is what it is.”

He pushed past Jack, round the side of the house, tossing the hammer from hand to hand.

“Are you angry, Ben?”

Mr. Spine stuck his head out the window, leering down as they approached the back entrance.

“How’s your Mamma?” he said, whistling through the gaps in his front teeth. “She never takes a day off, does she?”

Ben froze in the kitchen doorway with his head cocked, listening for a moment. Spine, evidently disappointed by what he perceived as indifference, spat into the yard and drew back savagely.

“Just make sure you keep down all that hammering and banging, okay?”

They went through the kitchen and into the living room, and Ben crouched by Cora, reaching out to ruffle her muddy blond hair. There was a thud directly above them. The man’s voice. Their mother’s voice. Unsettling laughter, high but mirthless. Jack looked up as if he half expected something monstrous to come collapsing through the ceiling.

“He was buck naked just standing there,” Jack said to nobody in particular. “He was real ugly. I remember the last time.”

He dropped from the sofa and scrambled towards the television. “What show is this?” he said. “What show is it, Cora?”

“It’s Charlie Rat.”

“Sure, but which one?”

“You know,” Cora said. “Quit teasing me.”

“I’m not teasing you,” Jack said. “I never tease you.” He prodded her arm.

“Leave her be,” Ben growled.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop bothering her.”

Ben took care of them both. Now, he was watching Cora closely, chewing on his bottom lip as secret thoughts moved darkly through his mind. Jack watched to see if he could catch a glimpse of them in the way Ben moved, in the fixed intensity of his eyes; they were like the strange fish he sometimes saw beneath the surface of the stream, creatures that seemed like they shouldn’t be real. Cora paid her brothers little mind. She sat cross-legged, gazing at the old television with such intent in her glassy blue eyes that she probably wouldn’t have noticed the room catch fire. And yet silently, without looking away from the cartoon, she’d taken Ben’s hand and was stroking his palm gently with her fingers. It was an entirely natural gesture. She could make it because she was five and love came effortlessly to her, and expressing it didn’t require thinking or desiring, or even needing anything more complicated than your attention. Jack tried to take her other hand. She pulled it away.

There was a thud from above, a muffled sob followed by the steady murmur of a man’s voice.

“I’ll bet that’s them doing it,” Jack said, looking at Cora and grinning.

“Huh?”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said. “Look what Charlie’s doing now.” He shot Jack a murderous glare.

“We could go to the fields,” Jack said. “We could all go to the river together. You never go anymore, Ben. We could swim.” He felt a strange sadness move through his bones.

Cora’s expression was ponderous, almost severe. She gazed at the screen. “I’m just watching is all.”

“She ain’t allowed to go to the river,” Ben said. “We’d just lose her.”

“You could look after her, though.”

“No.”

“We should go to the river.”

“No.”

Jack didn’t know anything. He knew nothing would go on forever. Everything real has a beginning and an end. I am getting older and Ben is older, and he’s bigger and stronger than he was, and his body is almost like a man’s, but not like the man that I saw through the dust on the stairs that time not so long ago. We’re all together now, and nothing goes on and on unless it isn't real. He started to laugh. I threw them birds off the roof, I did. He was laughing.

There was more muffled conversation from upstairs, then heavy footsteps, and a strange, shrill cry that beat and battered all the peace from the air. All those men. They knocked the ice around in their glasses and looked at Jack with small, wet eyes. They emptied Jack out and made him feel lonely. He was grinning. He could picture their small wet eyes, lined up in the darkness like the raccoons they saw in the garden at night. They were not supposed to —come—everybody said it. Aunt Sally said it. Mamma’s minister, Mr. Reacher. Even a doctor had said it, once. They weren’t supposed to come here. But she cannot help it, Aunt Sally whispered. She can’t help herself, the poor girl.

Ben stood. He paused for a moment, then turned quite calmly, quite deliberately, to the table next to the television stand, raising the hammer and then swinging it down hard with only a second’s pause before Jack could even open his mouth to form a hopeless protest. The blow sent a long-splintered fissure across the surface of the wood and a crack into the air. Picture frames fell from the wall, and a vase toppled, strewing wilted flowers. But it was not quite the robust sound that he’d managed outside, more hollow and vibrating this time, frail against the steady whirr of the house. He paused and looked at the ceiling as if he might get a direct, decisive answer from above.

“Why’d you go and do that,” Jack said, staring at the smashed picture frames, the limp, half-dead roses, like bodies scattered after an act of God.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, shrugging. “I really don’t.”

 There were dangerous fragments all over the grubby carpet.

“He was mad about something,” Cora said. “Wasn’t you, Ben? What was you mad at?”

“Nothing,” Ben said, examining the hammer as if he might find the answer there. He bent by Cora and stroked her soft, red cheek.

“You’re fine, aren’t you?” he said. “She doesn’t even notice.”

“I’m hungry,” Cora said, stretching her arms and yawning. “I didn’t get any breakfast.”

Ben tensed. “She didn’t get any breakfast. Nobody got her breakfast.” He stood, swinging his arms, the hammer moving like a metronome.

“I could’ve,” Jack said. “But I didn’t think to. You should’ve got her breakfast, Ben.”

“I ate an apple,” Cora said.

“She ate an apple,” Ben said. “Someone got her an apple, so it’s okay.” Jack watched as his brother drifted into the hall and began up the stairs, taking short steps, one at a time.

“What are you doing, Ben?”

They went up the stairs.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben? Are you gonna do something bad?”

His brother stopped abruptly, just as their heads were drawing level with the landing. “We could go down to the river,” Jack whispered. “Or, you can go up if you have to.” He was frightened and excited at the same time.

His brother was a step above, his body still shining with sweat. Light from the slatted windows made ribbons and pearls over his bronzed skin as if he were some cheap ornament on display. The light moved slowly as clouds passed across the sun outside.

“I don't hear anything now, anyway. He must have gone.”

Ben leaned over the banister, letting a long rope of spit fall from his mouth onto the dirty floorboards below.

“We can go up together,” Jack said. “I’ll have your back and you’ll have mine.”

Ben stared at him blankly for a moment, close enough now that Jack could smell his sweat, and the still-boyish loam of his flesh, the wet wood and grass.

“Why’d you come up here?” Jack said.

“What if I crack him?” Ben said. “What if I beat his head with this hammer, tell him to go away and not come back?”

They always came back.  It was a different one every time. They were dumb and loud, but it wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t their mother’s fault, either. Jack didn’t know whose fault it was. They were just loud and stupid, or sullen and mean; but if she was busy with them, she wasn’t flying around wailing about the angels.

“You wouldn’t hurt Mamma, would you?” Jack said.

“Not her,” Ben said. “She’s just . . . Not her, anyway.”

“But Ben, you’re just a kid.” Jack felt a tightness in his gut, a strange heat on his hands. “Aunt Sally says we best just leave her alone. She told me once. It was a secret; she said that since Dad went to the Moon, Mamma needs space and time to…time to...” He couldn’t remember exactly what Sally had said. “Well, she told me we should just leave her be.”

“Fuck Aunt Sally,” Ben said. “Aunt Sally’s no better than us, and she knows it.”

“She said we shouldn’t upset her.”

“Aunt Sally’s a drunk. She thinks a lot of herself, but she’s really just a drunk. And our Old Man didn’t go to the moon, you dumbass; how stupid are you, for Christ’s sake? He’s two towns over with his other kids.”

“His other kids?”

Jack looked at the bedroom door again. The sound of whispered conversation drifted steadily into the heavy air, so low you couldn't be sure you were hearing anything. Ben took a breath and went onto the landing, striding down with the hammer held out in front of him. His thin lips were set in a hard line, and he was outside the door and about to open it, or hit it, or whatever else he had planned. He seemed too small on the landing by himself, smaller than Jack had ever seen, and at the same time filled up with something, like when it’s only drizzling, but the clouds are black and you know the sky’s full up with a storm. For a moment, he stood with his shoulders up and his whole body pulled tight, and Jack wanted him to go into the bedroom, and he did not want him to go in.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben?” he whispered.

Ben looked back, his face a mix of shame and rage, the rage tightening to a sharp point in his eyes. It was the way their mother looked when she was in one of her frenzies. He had her flat, delicate features, the intense blue of her eyes, the same wild, mercurial energy. He just held it in better.  He flung open the door and went inside, slamming it shut behind him. The silence on the landing was deafening. For a moment, Jack just stood. Then he ran to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it. The sound of blood in his head made it hard to hear anything; just muffled conversation, a sob, laughter, another sob, a man raising his voice; the words remained as senseless as ever.  A long time passed. He heard one voice, then another, then the steady drone of three together. The door opened and Ben pushed past. In the dark bedroom, Jack could see the stranger sitting straight-backed on the chair by the window, a broad-chested man in black pants and a stiff white shirt. A minister’s stole gleamed around his throat like a colorless eye. He was watching Jack fixedly, his expression sour and somber, lifeless as if made from wax. Their mother sat cross-legged on the bed with her hand out for someone to hold.

“Is that Jacky, out there?” she said. “Come hold Mamma’s hand, Jacky. Come in, honey. Come to Mamma.”

“Come pray with your mother,” the minister said.

“I can’t,” Jack said, taking a step forward. “I can’t. It’s just stupid. Did Ben do it?”

“Come now, Jacky. Come to your Mamma.”

“Did Ben do it, Mamma? Did Ben pray?”

“My babies are still with me—you see, Mr. Reacher? They still come to see their Mamma.”

“I can’t do it,” Jack said. He shut the door and went to the top of the stairway. He saw Ben standing sullenly in the entrance to the living room, still carrying the hammer as if it were an extra appendage. But it had lost all its menace now; all the danger had drained away and it was little more than a toy. It made Jack want to laugh.

“Come outside with us,” Ben said to Cora. “Come on, you can’t stay inside all day.”

“I’m just watching,” she said.

“You gotta come out, Cora. It’s bad for your eyes to sit like this.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Fuck the both of you, then,” he roared. “Fuck all of you—the both of you upstairs as well.”

He went into the garden, slamming the door so hard that another of the picture frames fell from the wall.

Jack went down and picked it up, shaking the glass from its face, brushing off shards from the faded image. There was a baby gathered in a woman’s arms with the ocean in the background and a strange smiling frown looking out from under her sun hat. It took him a moment staring at it to realize it was just the stock image that had come with the frame. Someone had just forgotten, or never bothered to swap it out. He tore the picture in two and bent by Cora.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t do nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to worry.”

She nodded, her eyes still not leaving the screen.

“You don’t have to worry.” He said, suddenly taking a handful of her hair and tugging it savagely so that her whole head snapped back and she was looking at him upside down. “I’ll be right here,” he said, his whole body shaking with senseless rage. “Ben’s too big now, and he has to worry about more important things.” He stood and stretched. What was there to do after all that? What should he do now?

He left Cora crying and went out into the garden. He saw Ben at the back, standing by the ditch where the polluted stream ran along a mossy gutter. Sometimes they would challenge each other to jump over it, one or the other, usually Jack, ending up ass flat in the filth. His brother's laughter would rake the air for a few moments before he jumped down to help. Then Jack would be crying. Then they would both be laughing, thrashing around in the mud.

He went across the yard, chased by Cora’s steady, but receding wailing. Everything was badly overgrown, and the grass went up to his waist, spiteful and scratching as he waded through it. He stood staring at his brother’s ropy back.

“What did he tell you?” Jack said. “Was it Mister Reacher, Ben? What did he make you do?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“Did he make you pray?”

 “He didn’t have a chance. I hit him straight away. I killed them both.”

“I saw, Ben. You didn’t. I saw it was just the minister.”

His brother spat savagely into the water. If he heard Cora’s wails, he was ignoring them.

"I really thought it was one of the other ones,” Jack said, feeling empty and angry and grateful inside. “I wanted you to hit him, but it was probably best you didn’t. You shouldn’t hit a preacher, should you?”

Ben said nothing.

"Would you have hit one of the other ones, Ben? Would you have done it? I’ll bet you would.”

The older boy turned, his features twitching, examining Jack as if he didn't understand what he was seeing; maybe just the raw substance of things, just the flesh and violence from which they'd both been divined, all of it laid out neatly for them to fail to understand. It seemed to confuse him and make him mad, and maybe a little afraid; all these feelings were happening on his face at once. It was nothing more or less than what they were, all just parts in a sequence of reflections that showed the same thing again and again. Blood makes blood, and there’s no escaping it.

Ben swung his fist hard and caught Jack square on the nose, sending the younger boy a few steps back before he toppled into the long grass. Only a patch of russet hair was visible over the stalks. There was an aching thunderous roar in his ears, then a protracted stretch of silence, disturbed only by a chorus of insects, which was, in its absolute unity, a kind of quiet itself. Ben took the hammer from where he’d dropped it, and stood over Jack, a black shape against the sky. He looked as confused as ever, even as he raised the hammer and held it against the branches above.

It was senseless and Jack couldn’t bear to think about it—the preacher in his mother’s room, the men, Aunt Sally, the way Ben smashed and splintered all those spare boards for no reason. Senseless. His ears were full of the sound of insects, turning his head to the side, looking into the long, rippling grass where a dirty beer bottle lay half buried like some forgotten monolith in miniature. It was kind of peaceful now, kind of like nothing had happened, like he’d just stretched out in the sun to doze. 

“You can get the next one that comes around," Jack said softly. “I’ll bet you can. You’ll be big enough to beat him up good.” The grass was long and yellow at the top, and dark and wet where it met the soil. It moved gently in the breeze and its depths were safe and dark. When he turned his head again, Ben was gone.

He lay gazing up at the arms of the trees that stretched across his body like mourners praying over a corpse. He felt the blood flow three ways down his chin and both his cheeks, and then dry and harden in the breeze. Some strange amount of time must have passed. He heard the birds playing in the trees, saw baby doves falling frozen from the roof, their wings too frail to beat their small bodies into flight. He lay peacefully, forgetfully. Then he heard the steady crack, crack, crack of the hammer beginning again, as if nothing had happened and no time had passed, as if it had all been just thoughts in his head. The sound no longer seemed entirely real.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Scandal at Pebble Elementary

Ms. Stewart, our best fourth grade teacher, rushed to my office at Pebble Elementary School in the Bronx and stood in the doorway, a disturbed look on her face. “Ms. Zimmerman, I need to tell you something very important.”

The last time I saw her like this was four years ago when she learned that one of her student’s and the girl’s family had perished in their apartment. I looked up from my computer and gave Ms. Stewart my full attention. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Several of my students just told me that Ms. Raymond tried to get them to change their answers on the math test.”

I opened my desk drawer and took out the binder where I keep notes of conversations with staff and turned to a blank page. “Please sit down,” I said, motioning to a chair opposite me at my desk. “Tell me everything.”

“This morning when I went to my classroom, Ms. Raymond was there. I didn’t know why the other assistant principal was there. She told me that the principal had told her to oversee my students while they took the state math test. He’d also put in that teacher’s aide who always falls asleep as the second proctor. Got me out of my classroom by having me write answers for a student with a broken arm in Ms. Smith’s class. As you know, students usually test with their classroom teachers whenever possible because this helps reduce their anxiety, so I found my removal highly unusual, but I obliged, nonetheless.

“When the test was over and I returned to my room, my students were out of control, frantic to speak to me. Everyone began talking at once,” Ms. Stewart said, clicking the retractable pen in her hand. “I passed out paper and told them to write down what happened. Ifthey didn’t see anything, I said to write that. I wanted to hear from every student. In the meantime, I interviewed four of my most responsible students, one at a time, outside my classroom.”

I stopped writing and looked up at Ms. Stewart. “What did your students say?”

“Mohamed said Ms. Raymond told him to change question number four to C,” she said, pushing away her blonde shoulder-length hair from her face and reading from the notes on her yellow legal pad. “He said he didn’t do it because he knew his answer was correct. He said Ms. Raymond returned to his desk a few minutes later and again checked his answers. She pointed to additional answers and told him to change them, too.”

“Did Mohamed say Ms. Raymond told him which answers to bubble in?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “She did.”

“What did Mohamed do?” I asked, turning the page in my binder, and continuing to write.

“Mohamed told me he didn’t listen to her because he had checked his answers and knew they were correct. He’s an excellent math student. Always gets at least a ninety-five percent on all my classroom tests,” she said, proudly, as if he were her own son.

“Who else did you talk to?”

“I spoke to Samantha. This child is very smart, but she lacks confidence in her abilities. She said Ms. Raymond stopped in the aisle between her desk and Miguel’s, looked back and forth at both their answer sheets and pointed out three answers she said Samantha should change.” Ms. Stewart looked down and checked her notes. “Samantha said she was uncomfortable with Ms. Raymond’s help and re-checked her answers but didn’t change them.” When Ms. Stewart looked up at me, I could see the pain for her students in her bright blue eyes.

“Can you believe this? she asked.

“Did you speak to Miguel?”

“I did.” Ms. Stewart began to laugh. “I’m sorry, Ms. Zimmerman, but I found Miguel’s response quite amusing. He said he began to solve a problem in front of Ms. Raymond and explained his thinking, step-by-step. Ms. Raymond interrupted him and announced to the class that she hears talking, then reminded them that they’re in the middle of an examination and there should be absolute silence. Then Miguel resumed his verbal explanation, and Ms. Raymond put her finger to her lips to silence him.”

When Ms. Stewart finished, I shook my head. “As you know, this is quite serious. You’ve just brought an allegation of cheating against an assistant principal,” I said, standing up, trying to hide how upset I was, and walking her to the door. “Please leave the statements with me. I want to read all of them. I’ll speak to the teacher’s aide and get her testimony, too. Thanks for reporting this to me.”

After Ms. Stewart left, I reflected on what I had just heard. I don’t believe it! Cheating on a standardized test. This has never happened at Pebble Elementary before. There’s obviously no limit to what this assistant principal will do to see that our students score well. Now I know why the students at her former school were known for getting high scores on the state exams. Thank God Ms. Stewart has a conscience.

A few minutes later, the teachers’ union representative came in. I’ve known her for over fifteen years, when she was the union rep at my former school. Not only is she an excellent teacher and highly trustworthy, but she’s got a big heart, and advocates for the teachers and aides. She looked at me from behind her round tortoiseshell glasses, and I could tell from her facial expression that she was concerned about what she had to say. I watched her sit down in the chair in the corner, lean her head back and rest it against the wall.

“Ms. Stewart,” she said, “just told me what happened in her classroom during the math test. Wanted to know if she is going to be in trouble for reporting the incident to you. She’s worried about retaliation from the principal. I tried to reassure her that she did absolutely nothing wrong. Told her she followed protocol. You’re her assistant principal.”

“Well, we know Mr. Antonio’s going to be outraged that his name and school will now be under investigation,” I said.

“Since none of us are on the in with him, when he finds out we’re not letting this cheating allegation go away, I’m sure he’ll try to make our lives difficult,” the rep said. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap and took a few sips. “I just got off the phone with the teachers’ union district representative. Said she’d inform the superintendent. He’s probably spoken to Mr. Antonio by now.”

No more Mr. Golden Boy

“Now what?” the rep asked.

“I’ll report the incident to the testing coordinator at the district. She’ll either tell Mr. Antonio to do an internal investigation, or she’ll report the incident to the Office of Special Investigations at the Department of Education, and they’ll investigate. But first, I must inform the principal. I’m going to his office now.”

As I walked down the stairs, Mr. Antonio came charging up with Ms. Raymond behind him. We nearly collided.

“Let’s go to my office, Ms. Zimmerman,” he said, turning around and touching Ms. Raymond on her forearm. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said and continued down the stairs with me following close behind.

When we entered his office, Mr. Antonio firmly slammed the door behind me as if he were closing the cell door on a prisoner. He removed his grey suit jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Then he sat down behind his desk and motioned for me to take a seat. He looked into my eyes, hard and cold.

“I heard you and Ms. Stewart spoke,” he said. “I talked to her, too. The incident ends here. Are we clear?”

“You know I’m obligated to inform the district testing coordinator of any alleged improprieties.”

Mr. Antonio sat up tall, elbows on his desk, hands clasped together hiding his mouth, and glared at me. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time? I am the principal. I said, do not call the district. Ms. Raymond said she didn’t tell the students to change their answers, and she doesn’t know why they made up those lies.” He stood up, walked around his desk to the door and opened it. “We’re done.”

When I returned to my office, I put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door. Then I sat in my chair and closed my eyes. This is huge. Why did the superintendent bring Mr. Antonio to this district? He has no experience in administration and only one year of teaching kindergarten. Wants Pebble Elementary to become a showcase school but has no idea how to make this happen, except through unethical means. Does the superintendent know this? Is he planning to coach him in every aspect of running a school?

A few minutes later, I got up, walked to the bookcase at the back of my office anddistractedly rearranged the framed pictures of my husband and children. Mr. Antonio’s only been at Pebble Elementary for four months and he’s already ingratiated himself with various groups from the school body. Got a lot of people to like him. Probably thinks if they like him, they’ll do whatever he wants. They don’t know what really goes on here. Have no idea how he’s segregated the staff and the administration into the “in” and “out” groups. Ugh.”

~

Later that afternoon, after dismissal, Ms. Stewart and the teachers’ union rep returned to my office to report that Mr. Antonio had spoken to Ms. Stewart’s class. “He told them he heard about what they said happened during the math exam,” Ms. Stewart said, reaching for the squishy ball on my desk. She squeezed it a few times. “He told them that sometimes people make up stories to get others in trouble because they’re mad at them for something. Reminded my students that Ms. Raymond recently gave many of them detention, and she had spoken to some of their parents because of the fights and bullying during recess. Told them that the things they said about Ms. Raymond could get her into serious trouble.” Ms. Stewart took a deep breath and continued: “He tried to suggest that the students didn’t really see what they claimed they saw.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Mr. Antonio said he thinks it’s likely that Ms. Raymond pointed to their answers because she was trying to let them know that they skipped a question or bubbled in two answer choices for the same question.” She paused. “Of course, he shouldn’t have done that, either.”

At that moment, the rep stood up and hit the dome-shaped gadget on my desk. The robotic voice blurted out, ‘that was stupid.’ She hit it again. Ms. Stewart and I laughed, and Ms.Stewart continued: “Mr. Antonio told the students he knows that no one wants to see Ms. Raymond lose her job. Asked them to rewrite their statements and make sure to write the truth.” Ms. Stewart got up and started pacing. “It infuriates me how he tried to blame my students, to make them feel guilty for being responsible.”

“I understand completely,” I said, feeling sick at the wrongness of this. “I shouldn’t be saying this to either of you about a fellow administrator,” I said, looking first to Ms. Stewart and then to the rep, “but what he did was inappropriate, totally unethical. I’m sure he and Ms. Raymond discussed that if he put her in your classroom, allegedly to oversee the test-taking, she could give students the correct answers. Figured if she could get a whole class of high scores, the percentage of top scores for the fourth grade would increase and his school would look good.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” the rep said. “Afterall, the state looks at the fourth-grade scores to determine a school’s status.” She stood up, took a cup, and helped herself to some water from my cooler. “I wish this was stronger,” she laughed. When she sat down again, she asked, “What did the teacher’s aide say?”

“Claims she saw nothing unusual. Said Ms. Raymond was walking around and making sure the students weren’t looking at each other’s papers. The aide did admit that she dozed off for a bit.”

“You know the teacher’s aide is one of his people, right?” the rep asked, pushing up her glasses.

“Of course. She was on the committee that interviewed him for his position,” I said. “She was very pro Mr. Antonio. And I think I remember that she also came from his old school.”

“He came to us with a lot of baggage,” the rep said. “The teachers tell me that the three teachers he brought with him can’t teach, and our teachers are afraid to speak up during teacher or staff development meetings because they think his teachers are Mr. Antonio’s eyes and ears. Everything goes back to him,” she said, fondling her wedding ring.

“I feel the same way about Ms. Raymond,” Ms. Stewart said. “She’s always in his office. I’m afraid to say anything to her myself because I worry she’ll distort what I say.”

“He’s duplicitous,” the rep said, then turned to Ms. Stewart, cocked her head, and suddenly became very animated. “You should call the district testing coordinator. Tell her you reported the incident to the assistant principal in charge of testing at your school, but you thought you should inform her, too. Can you do that?”

“I don’t want to get fired,” Ms. Stewart said, clicking her pen. “Mr. Antonio intimidates me.” She was quiet. Then, “I’ll do it. I must. Afterall, Ms. Raymond wanted my kids to cheat on a state test.”

The rep got up and hit the gadget again, trying to reduce the tension in my office. ‘That was stupid.’ We all laughed

“What Ms. Raymond did goes against everything I’ve been teaching my students this year about being honest and taking responsibility for their actions. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t do what I tell them to do.” She clicked her pen again.

“Thank you,” the rep and I said, in unison.

“By the way, what did the district testing coordinator tell you to do?” the rep asked.

I looked straight into the rep’s hazel eyes. “Mr. Antonio forbade me to call her. Said he’d take care of everything.”

~

The next day, during her preparation period, Ms. Stewart entered my office and sunk into my couch.

“Mr. Antonio got to them,” she said, her head down so all I could see was her hair. “My students changed their statements. All but six.”

“Are those the statements?” I asked, gesturing to the papers in her lap. “May I see them?”

Ms. Stewart stood up and handed them to me.

“The six are on the bottom.” she said.

I flipped through the students’ testimonies. “I didn’t see anything,” one student wrote. Another: “I am telling the truth. I didn’t see anything.” “Some kids said Ms. Raymond told them the answers, but they just want to get her in trouble. I didn’t see her do nothing bad,” wrote another. I read aloud a portion of Miguel’s statement: “During the math test, Ms. Raymond told me to change some of my answers, but I didn’t. I knew mine were correct. I tried to explain to her how I got the answer to a question, but she told me to be quiet. I’m surprised she doesn’t remember you gotta solve what’s in the parentheses first, when doing order of operations. That’s why she got the wrong answer.”

I read aloud a portion of Samantha’s statement: “Ms. Raymond stood between mine and Miguel’s desks during the math test. She told us to change some answers. I rechecked the ones she pointed to on my answer sheet, but I didn’t change them because I knew I chose the right answers.”

I started to laugh. “Ms. Raymond wanted to give the students the correct answers, but she actually pointed to the wrong ones, and she didn’t even know it.”

“She’s not too bright. Mr. Antonio brought her from their previous school,” Ms. Stewart said.

I shook my head. “The dumb and dumber duo.”

~

The following morning after the Pledge of Allegiance and the announcements, the math and literacy coaches, the grade leaders--teachers representing each grade from kindergarten through fifth—and I assembled in Mr. Antonio’s office for a meeting. He sat down behind his desk and stared ahead, a despondent look on his face. He was wearing the same white shirt and gray slacks he wore yesterday and had not shaved.

I have some very disturbing news,” Mr. Antonio said, running his hands through his greasy spiked black hair. “The superintendent called me early this morning. The Office of Special Investigations will conduct a thorough investigation of the cheating allegation. Many staff members will likely be called in for questioning. Unfortunately, Ms. Raymond has been reassigned to the district office for the duration of the investigation. Until further notice, I will supervise the teachers of upper grades. Ms. Zimmerman will be responsible for kindergarten through second grade

At that moment, surprised by the news, the teachers whom I supervise turned to look at me questioningly.

Mr. Antonio looked past me with that same despondent stare. “Ms. Zimmerman’s office will be across the yard in the mini-building with the kindergarten classes,” he said.

I briefly caught his eyes, glared at him, and shook my head, as if to say, what gives? The teachers and I now understood what was happening. Retaliation. Not only am I being isolated from the school community, but I now need to run back and forth between two buildings to service the grades I supervise.

~

I heard Mr. Antonio stayed in his office for several hours that afternoon. Maybe he was strategizing. If Ms. Raymond was removed from her administrative position and assigned to the district office so quickly, certainly he knows he is next in line. Even though he initially had the support of the superintendent, I’m sure the superintendent told Mr. Antonio he couldn’t risk losing his own job. I know Mr. Antonio has a wife, young children, and a house on Long Island. Surely, he’s worried about losing his job and license. He should be.”

At the end of the day, Mr. Antonio sent home a letter to the parents informing them of the alleged testing improprieties, assuring them that the allegations against Ms. Raymond are false, and telling them that this incident will not affect their children’s high-quality education.

~

I settled into my new office and soon acquired respect for the kindergarten teachers’ pedagogical skills. Although I didn’t know the curriculum for kindergarten, I quickly familiarized myself with the state learning expectations for the grade. I purchased a few stuffed animals so that the children who were brought to my office would feel comfortable.

The atmosphere in the main building at Pebble Elementary was very tense during the next week. Whenever I went there to visit my first and second grade classes and passed Mr. Antonio in the halls, he lowered his head. He excluded me from staff meetings, but Ms. Stewart and the rep visited me during their lunch periods and kept me abreast of everything.

“Everyone’s so on edge in the main building!” they’d exclaim whenever they came over.

“The teachers’ patience has become short, and they’re snapping at their students,” the rep said. “The dean’s office is filled with students whom the teachers would ordinarily not send to him.”

Ms. Stewart added, “Cliques are springing up everywhere, and no one talks in the hallways, anymore. Mr. Antonio comes to my classroom every day, stays nearly thirty minutes, and is always taking notes.”

“Does he discuss with you what he observes?” I asked, trying to determine if he was rating her teaching ability.

“Nope. Doesn’t talk to my students, either. Just plops down in a seat in the back and writes. It’s nerve-wracking.”

“I’m sure that’s his intention,” I said. “Retaliation.”

~

In the coming weeks, all of the staff members and students involved in the investigation and I were assigned attorneys and our statements taken. The rep told me everyone was nervous and fearful about what to expect at the hearing. She also said Mr. Antonio told her to inform the staff that he continues to believe in Ms. Raymond’s innocence and vowed to stick up for her in court.

On the day of the hearing, the courtroom was filled with students and parents, district personnel, and Pebble Elementary School staff eager to hear the outcome of the charges against Ms. Raymond. The Office of Special Investigations found the students’ testimonies credible, and the judge deemed Ms. Raymond’s actions egregious. During the cross-examination, the teacher’s aide who was in the classroom with Ms. Raymond admitted that she napped on and off, and the few character witnesses who testified on Ms. Raymond’s behalf could not provide substantive testimony. Ms. Raymond lost her administrative license and was banned from ever again working for the New York City Department of Education.

To everyone’s surprise, Mr. Antonio was nowhere to be seen, and a few days later, the superintendent reported that Mr. Antonio had resigned from the New York City Department of Education. I was not surprised when I encountered one of his friends at a meeting, and he informed me that Mr. Antonio had taken a job as principal at a Long Island school. It seemed to me that Mr. Antonio knew what was in store for him and decided to bolt before the probe began. The Office of Special Investigations cited Mr. Antonio’s resignation in its written decision and noted that he, too, is banned from ever again working for the New York City Department of Education.

With the support of the superintendent, I accepted the principalship at Pebble Elementary, and Ms. Stewart became my assistant principal. Mr. Antonio’s three teachers and the math coach transferred to different schools, and Ms. Stewart and I worked hard to rebuild and raise the school morale. Together, we analyzed the results of the state reading and math scores and devised ways to address the students’ deficiencies. Within three years, Pebble Elementary became a showcase school and we were proud of it.